Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Early Modern Literature in History)

Reading Sensations in Early Modern England Katharine A. Craik

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Unbridled Speech Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England Katharine A. Craik READING SENSATIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 John Dolan POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH Tobias Döring PERFORMANCES OF MOURNING IN SHAKESPEAREAN THEATRE AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI

Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors) THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE Claire Jowitt (editor) PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650 Pauline Kiernan STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE Arthur F. Marotti (editor) CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS Jean-Christopher Mayer SHAKESPEARE’S HYBRID FAITH History, Religion and the Stage Jennifer Richards (editor) EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Sasha Roberts READING SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Rosalind Smith SONNETS AND THE ENGLISH WOMAN WRITER, 1560–1621 The Politics of Absence

The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading. Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71472–5 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Reading Sensations in Early Modern England Katharine A. Craik

© Katharine A. Craik 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. 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 W1T 4LP. 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 her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–2192–5 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–2192–X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of orgin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Craik, Katharine A. Reading sensations in early modern England / Katharine A. Craik. p. cm. – (Early modern literature in history) This study examines the power of literature to affect readers’ minds, bodies and souls, the theory of reading, and of mind and body. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-2192-5 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-4039-2192-X (cloth) 1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 2. English literature – Psychological aspects. 3. Reading – Psychological aspects. 4. Reading – Psychological aspects. 5. Literature and morals. 6. Mind and body. 7. Reader-response criticism. I. Title. PR428.P76C73 2007 820.9′353–dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

2006051588 1 07

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

Dedicated with love to my parents, Elizabeth and Alexander Craik

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Contents Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

1. The Word and the Flesh in Early Modern England

11

2. Beneath the Skin: George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney and the Experience of English Poetry

35

3. Arming the Reader: Sir Philip Sidney and the Literature of Choler

52

4. ‘These Spots are but the Letters’: John Donne and the Medicaments of Elegy

73

5. Eating His Words: Thomas Coryat and the Art of Indigestion

93

6. Touching Stories: Richard Braithwait, Thomas Cranley and the Origins of English Pornography

115

Afterword

135

Notes

139

Select Bibliography

179

Index

193

vii

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‘the use of certain phrases and modes of expression can stir the very pulse of passion, can send the red blood coursing through the veins, and can transform into a strange sensuous energy what in its origin had been mere aesthetic impulse and desire of art.’ Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

‘books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them’ Milton, Areopagitica

‘Do I speak feelingly now?’ Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

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Acknowledgements This book has benefited from the generous support of family, friends and colleagues. Grateful thanks are due in particular to members of the Department of English at University College London and the School of English at the University of Leeds, particularly Bridget Bennett, Martin Butler, Marilyn Corrie, Paul Davis, Helen Hackett, Alison Light, Sarah Wintle and Henry Woudhuysen. For their warm collegiality, expertise and conversation, I thank Rebecca Beasley, Georgia Brown, Ewan Fernie, Bill Kerwin, Neel Mukherjee and Eve Poole. My doctoral supervisor at the University of Cambridge, Juliet Fleming, assisted with the planning of this book and provided direction at crucial moments. David Knotts has been a constant source of inspiration and has provided some wonderful operatic distractions. Tanya Pollard has shaped this book at every stage, her unflagging good spirits, intellectual generosity and talent for friendship sustaining both it and me on both sides of the Atlantic. Earlier versions of Chapters 2, 3 and 5 profited from the thoughtful responses of seminar participants at the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2001 (Miami), 2002 (Minneapolis) and 2004 (New Orleans). Grants from the British Academy made possible my attendance at these conferences. I am indebted also to those who responded to portions of this work at research seminars and conferences organised at the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University, the University of Hull, Queens University Belfast and Roehampton University. Part of Chapter 5 appeared in Studies in English Literature, 44, 1 (2004): 77–96. I would like to thank the editors for their permission to reprint this material here. Our beautiful daughter Heather was born while this book was nearing completion. Grateful thanks are extended to all four of her grandparents for cheerfully undertaking babysitting duties, and to Elizabeth Craik in particular for help during the fi nal stages of writing. This book could not have been written without my husband, Steve Chapman, whose training in medicine has enlivened my thinking about sensation in countless ways and who has supported this project with patience, love and good humour. xi

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Introduction

The opening essays of Plutarch’s Moralia, as translated by Philemon Holland in 1603, describe how young men ‘may take profit by reading poemes’. Plutarch argues that the acquisition of sober habits of reading was one skill among many which kept men’s minds and bodies neat and clean, and advises students to commit themselves to a period of solitary self-examination after reading or listening to lectures: he must enter into his owne heart and examine himselfe when he is alone, how he was mooved and affected . . . whether he fi nd any turbulent passions of his minde thereby dulced and appeased; whether any griefe or heavinese that trouble him be mitigated and asswaged. Attentive acts of reading change dramatically a young man’s private state of mind and, in so doing, alter his conduct in society at large. By a process of moving or affecting him, books tranquillise overwhelming emotions, kindle an ‘instinct unto vertue and honestie’, and shore up his honour, authority and reputation in the world.1 But Plutarch regards this process as a risky one, especially for young men who are fond of literature. ‘Poësie hath I wot not what Sympathie with the first heats of this age’, he warns in the second essay, ‘How a yoong man ought to heare poets’, for it can leave young men dangerously unprotected: The straunge fables and Theatricall fictions therein, by reason of the exceeding pleasure and singular delight that they yeeld in 1

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reading them, do spred and swell unmeasurably, readie to enter forcibly into our conceit so farre as to imprint therin some corrupt opinions: then let us beware, put foorth our hands before us, keepe them back and staie their course.2 If the student reads poetry combining sweetness and utility, in accordance with the familiar Horatian dictum, he is nourished by way of wisdom, reason and understanding. If on the other hand he unguardedly encounters poetry solely ‘devised for delight’ the consequences are disastrous. Fables and fictions do not stay settled on the page but seem instead to morph unpredictably in the process of being read, spreading, swelling and imprinting themselves upon the imagination. Poems are as malleable as the young men they influence, acting like independent agents rather than passive objects, and Plutarch describes in startlingly material terms how such poems can enter a young man so forcefully that he is obliged to ‘put foorth [his] hands’ in order physically to defend himself. Since the passionate words which make up poetry ‘touch us . . . neerely’, they must be handled wisely and used with discretion. Poems ‘worke strange events’ in the imagination, exercising a form of conjuring which catches inexperienced readers off-guard, and constant vigilance is necessary to circumvent their dangerous tendency to stimulate, agitate or intoxicate young men from the outside in.3 Many early modern thinkers were preoccupied with what Plutarch called literature’s ability to ‘come nere unto us, and touch the quicke’. They regarded reading as an active, invigorating process capable of encouraging both private sobriety and public virtue.4 The essays in Moralia were familiar to literary theorists including George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir John Harington, all of whom wrote about poetry’s ability to arouse feeling among readers and to ‘imprint in them presently a fervent zeale and hartie desire to chuse better things’.5 Reading gave rise to intense emotions, or passions, affecting the imagination, intellect and disposition, and signalling the wellbeing or otherwise of the entire psychophysical subject. Such passions impacted upon the body as well as the mind for, as the moral philosopher and physician Thomas Wright pointed out, ‘all passions cause some sense or feeling, more or lesse in the body’.6 It is argued in what follows that in the earliest phase of modernity, increasing attention was paid to the ways writers and readers were literally and

Introduction

3

physically moved – whether aroused or disturbed – by the books they produced and consumed. The feelings of anger, grief, pleasure and shame ignited by passionate experiences of literature inscribed themselves upon men’s facial expressions, posture, carriage, gestures and general deportment, as well as the colour, temperature and texture of their skin.7 Conduct books often offered instructions for how best to receive the written word, and distinguished carefully between profitable and unprofitable reading matter. Theories of reading in early modern England therefore overlapped in important ways with notions of gentlemanly conduct, and this book considers these interlocking theories side by side.8 Reading Sensations in Early Modern England contributes to the ongoing interest in early modern studies with the contours of the material body. Different from many recent works, however, it does not aim to shift attention ‘from the word to the flesh, from the semantic to the somatic’.9 Instead its subject is the relationship between the word and the flesh – and, more specifically, the relationship between literary texts and the bodies of English gentlemen.10 Scholars have until recently tended to regard early modern bodies and selves as internally regulated and essentially separate from the world they inhabited. The body in particular has often appeared an enclosed container, more readily defi ned by its internal fluctuations of temperature, density and viscosity than by the environment outside.11 We are now starting to understand the ways in which the world shaped and directed the psychophysical self, however, and to appreciate that the early modern subject was not only comprised of hidden, inward phenomena but also formed in relation to its surroundings. Scholars have described the sensitivity of bodies and selves to their environs, charting the ways in which landscape, climate, air, colour, smells, diet and music might have acted as affective agents. The present discussion builds on this work by considering how immersion in a literary environment might have shaped, and sometimes imperilled, masculine subjectivity. Most straightforwardly, a literary environment may be understood to comprise the material books which writers and readers touched, held, read and bought. In the following chapters, however, the literary environment of English poetry appears neither static nor separate from the minds and bodies of those who encountered it, emerging instead as a series of transactions between material language and the material bodies of readers and writers.12

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Poetry has perhaps always striven to enable readers to experience themselves more meaningfully as embodied subjects, its cadences capturing the subtle movements and stirrings of living utterance. Line lengths indicate how a poem is to be breathed, and the meter of a poem beats regularly, skips, or halts in order to capture the fury, blissful calm, terror, desire or ecstasy we experience when we live life most intensely. The language of corporeal experience used to describe authorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests that books were quite literally regarded, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, as ‘a prolongation of the body’.13 Descriptions of composition and literary refinement as processes of conception, gestation or parturition suggest that writing was – at least in theory – a physically immediate, intuitive and spontaneous process. This is the spontaneity that shamefully eludes Astrophil (‘great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes’) in the opening sonnet of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. (Sidney’s sixteenth-century editor, Henry Olney, later described himself as a ‘poore Midwife’ charged with delivering An Apology for Poetry ‘from Obliuions wombe’.)14 The greatest works were ‘seminal’, as though intellectual and creative activity were inseparable from virility, and writers compared their books to children, orphans or foundlings in prefatory letters, dedications and captatio benevolentiae – an analogy found already in Plato’s Theaetetus.15 Edmund Spenser famously referred to The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) as a ‘little Booke . . . begot with blame’ like a ‘child whose parent is unkent’. In a gift-copy of Cynthia’s Revels addressed in 1601 to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, Ben Jonson sent off his book-child (‘Go, little book’), advising it to greet the countess ‘with a kiss (if thou canst dare it)’.16 Montaigne memorably overturned this vocabulary, describing his writings as ‘essays in flesh and bone . . . grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of diverse members’, perhaps in wry response to the debate about whether eloquence was, as Puttenham put it, a ‘naturall . . . or artificiall’ attribute. With varying degrees of seriousness, these writers confirm that the best texts are made up of ‘penbreathing words’. Writers demonstrated their skill by bringing words to life in the process of writing them down.17 A rich aesthetic vocabulary also existed to describe the ways that literature affected the material body. Satires bit, cut and stung their targets. Elegies mollified, soothed and healed the bereaved. Tragedies stirred up feeling in their readers in order finally to purge them.18

Introduction

5

The process of assimilating the written word was one of textual digestio, the mind processing and absorbing matter like a filtering stomach; and the practice of arranging thought was one of dispositio, the various parts of an argument mirroring the complexional or somatic schema of body and self. The most moving passages in literature and rhetoric were those marked by energeia, or energy, a textual property connected to kinesis or movement.19 This physiological vocabulary at first looks merely metaphorical, a convenient way of articulating the abstract and intangible phenomenon of affect. Once contextualised within early modern theories of passionate cognition, however, it is not so readily dismissed.20 One of the six ‘non-naturals’ comprising the constitutional make-up of every individual, the passions were psychological events prompted by stimuli from the outside world. They remained unsequestered from the fleshy matter of the body, for, as Gail Kern Paster explains, the body was the stuff of emotions. Since ‘the passions or perturbations of mind were fully embedded in the order of nature and were part of material being itself’, it is impossible to describe an emotional response not attended by, imbricated in, and conditional upon embodiment.21 A sophisticated theory of emotions and their relation to the body was already in place at the turn of the seventeenth century, and this theory encompassed the sometimes inflammatory effects of experiencing literature. The etymology of the word ‘emotion’ comes from the Latin emovere, to move out or stir up, and neurobiologists, neuroanatomists and neurophysiologists have recently investigated the clinical phenomenon of affect from the perspective of the brain’s ‘somatosensing regions’. Antonio Damasio has described how emotions are actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviors.22 The inseparability of affect from its display is pertinent to our understanding of the emotions arising from early modern encounters with the written word. Books designed to fire the imagination affected not only men’s internal poise but also their habits, manners and behaviour. To be moved or touched by literature gave rise to the drives and motivations central to human experience, and these

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shaped men’s ability to live meaningfully among others. 23 Manipulating one’s own passions while reading presented the possibility for self-advancement, for when the passions were temperate – or ‘dulced and appeased’, in Plutarch’s words – one achieved the emotional equilibrium necessary to achieve respect in public life. As Jonson put it succinctly, ‘exactness of study and multiplicity of reading . . . maketh a full man.’24 Katherine Rowe has described how early modern subjects were compiling ‘social scripts for emotion’ as they managed, displayed and emulated passionate feeling; and the selfknowledge Renaissance readers were urged to pursue was indeed less a matter of developing private preference than of conforming to the shared, reiterable protocols of gender, profession or class. By witnessing their own and others’ affective states, including those aroused by books, men calibrated the extent to which they had achieved balance in their private lives, and whether they were thriving in the world.25 It is argued here that gentlemen were performing such outward signs with particular attentiveness. 26 Since gender difference was constructed humorally and thermally, the affective and somatic changes occasioned by literature could either shore up or erode markers of masculine perfectibility such as bodily strength and impregnability, the tempering of extreme emotion, and the regulation of the appetite. The passions aroused by reading, like any other exogenous encounter, entered the body through the operation of the ‘feminine’, intuitive, and inevitably wayward senses. Excessively ornamented words were liable ‘to tickle women and gallants eares’, and women and womanish men reputedly read with their bodies instead of their minds.27 Women were believed especially susceptible to the corrosive effects of reading for pleasure, and consequently suffered from shameful states of arousal, promiscuity and even literal blindness. Pregnant women who indulged themselves with ‘lamentable and fearefull tales and storyes’ left their unborn children dangerously impressionable to their ‘imprint’.28 The humoral belief that women’s cool, wet bodies inclined them towards strong emotion, and made them less capable than men of exercising reason and restraint, lay behind the development of sentimental literature in the eighteenth century.29 From an initial emphasis upon moral reflection, sentimental literature grew to privilege both men and women’s ‘sensibility’ or keen sensitivity towards anything affecting in life or art – an ideal central to English literature and culture until

Introduction

7

the 1790s. When men read fiction or poetry in the late 1600s and early 1700s, however, they were advised to patrol mindfully the porous boundaries of their bodies and selves.30 Reading Sensations in Early Modern England begins by exploring the overlapping histories of reading and masculine self-government. Chapter 1 considers Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601) alongside Henry Crosse’s treatise on gentlemanly conduct, Vertues Commonwealth, published in 1603. Both Crosse and Wright explore the ways in which passionate practices of reading and writing unpredictably altered homeostasis, the delicate system of internal regulation which facilitated a properly regulated life. Even as they acknowledge the unknowability of affect, they describe books visibly blemishing and tainting – or sometimes fortifying, refreshing and nourishing – the bodies of English gentlemen. Still committed to the idea that books could animate readers by kindling faith, energy and insight, Wright and Crosse nevertheless argued that the effects of reading were impossible to control. Immoderate exposure to certain secular books incited dangerous passions such as delight, admiration and curiosity, but the habitual absorption of scripture was understood to enhance corporeal as well as spiritual health so that even when God’s word hurt sinners by chastising them, it did so in order finally to encourage healing. The experience of passionate feeling therefore confirms the worshippers’ sincerity, especially their willingness to repent, and permits reintegration into a Christian community. Chapter 2 turns to the work of two literary theorists, George Puttenham and Philip Sidney, both of whom set out to defend English poetry by describing the ways in which it stimulated readers’ minds and bodies. If reading was, at best, an experience of connecting meaningfully with the world, it also involved a heightened awareness and involvement of the embodied self. Sidney and Puttenham reconceptualised literary experience as a resourceful, dynamic exchange between readers and writers in which emotional and physiological feelings, including those associated with pleasure, played an important part. Whereas Wright and Crosse regarded with suspicion the vehement passions aroused by literature, Puttenham and Sidney argued that emotions, and the bodily sensations they gave rise to, improved readers’ manners and integrity. Both Puttenham and Sidney had immersed themselves in ancient rhetorical theory, including the notion of furor or ‘diuine instinct’ and Aristotle’s idea

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that oratory worked affectively and somatically through energeia.31 Drawing from these ideas, they explored the possibility that poetry may be lived as fully and as well as life. Literature’s singularity is theorised in Puttenham’s The Arte of Englishe Poesie and Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry through the sensations books give rise to – and, more unfamiliarly, through the corporeality of words themselves. For Sidney and Puttenham reconceived language as a material system which could literally touch readers – and be touched by them in return. Their treatises describe literary language as densely embodied, its ‘figures’ and ‘forms’ carrying, wrapping, containing or weighing the matter they describe. Early modern thinkers singled out the ability of certain kinds of poetry, particularly epics and histories, to provoke passionate anger. Returning in Chapter 3 to Sidney’s work, I explore the consequences of this theory. Anger, one of the strongest and most overwhelming of the passions of the sensitive soul, inscribed itself starkly on young men’s bodies, heating their blood, swelling their veins, causing their faces to flush crimson and putting fire in their eyes. Literary and military theorists who described the inflammatory effects of reading fiction warned that it sometimes aroused madness and unchristian wrath. Histories were thought to spark more commendable warlike fury, inspiring men to emulate the heroic action they read about. In An Apology, however, Sidney jettisoned history’s ‘old mouse-eaten records’.32 He argued that only poetry appealed directly to the passions, and that romances in particular enkindled virtuous anger among soldiers even as they delighted them. Many readers confirmed that the combats vividly described in Sidney’s own romance, The Arcadia, ignited righteous fury among aristocratic gentleman soldiers. But Sidney himself points out in Book III of the revised Arcadia that such descriptions depended for their affective impact on delightfully deceiving their readers. The Arcadia reveals Sidney’s doubts about the fortificatory effects of reading which he had himself theorised in An Apology – doubts which were central to his own professional life as a soldier-poet. Literature was also thought capable of healing and appeasing readers, and Chapter 4 turns to John Donne’s The Anniversaries in order to consider whether elegies could mend the distressing symptoms of despair. Despair occasioned the cold, dry humours associated with black bile, affecting men’s appetites and energy and giving

Introduction

9

rise to a host of vitiating disorders associated with weeping. Prolonged feelings of grief and despondency also suggested a crisis of faith in the immortal soul, and demonstrated a shameful disrespect for the deceased. Literary theorists such as Puttenham suggested that the sympathetic medicaments of verse could act therapeutically on such symptoms, but Donne’s discovery in The Anniversaries that he is writing with and from a dying body makes impossible the task of composing consolatory elegy. Reading and writing about despair only further exacerbates it, and Donne exposes the poignant impossibility of what Lynn Enterline has called ‘rhetoric’s most seductive fantasy – that one might give life to death by means of the voice’.33 Writing about the death of Elizabeth Drury involves Donne in a concentrated effort of imagining his own death, and a corresponding search for an appropriately confessional voice. To write with the body is to stake a claim to sincerity, perhaps because most bodily processes are difficult to hide, counterfeit or simulate. But embodied voices may fictionalise, encode or even travesty genuine feeling, raising pressing questions about truth-telling and confessional sincerity.34 It was not until he came to write Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions more than ten years later, while he was gravely ill, that Donne fully realised the resources of an embodied voice to speak sincerely. The remaining two chapters consider the sensations aroused by pleasurable experiences of reading. Chapter 5 considers Thomas Coryat’s account of his five-month tour of Europe, Coryats Crudities, published in 1611. Humanist thinkers often deployed the vocabulary of tasting, eating and assimilating to describe practices of reading and writing, and regarded the temperate, judicious assimilation of knowledge as a form of rhetorical digestio. Coryat artfully literalises this vocabulary, undoing ideals of both rigorous scholarship and appetitive self-government by describing Crudities as delightfully indigestible. Crudities is introduced by fifty-nine mock-panegyric verses written by contemporary literary celebrities and gentleman courtiers who collude with Coryat’s metaphor of ‘crudity’ by describing the painful and shameful effects on their bodies of reading his book. Coryat also raises new questions about the pedagogic aims of the Renaissance travelogue by charting his truant enjoyment of his experiences overseas, especially in Venice, revealing that sweet Italian pleasures, like sweet Italian books, are consumed for

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recreation – whatever others may pretend. His witty (and very serious) joke explores the effects of delightful experiences of both travelling and reading on the integrity of aristocratic men, and confronts the unavoidable and sometimes embarrassing fact that such experiences involved bodily processes. The increasing availability of ‘love books’ in the early seventeenth century gave rise to new concerns about the ways in which reading affected men’s minds and bodies. It is argued in Chapter 6 that the debate surrounding early English pornography grew out of the larger cultural problem of literature’s ability to seduce men into shameful states of physical and emotional arousal. The mid-century moralist and polemicist Richard Braithwait addressed this problem in his conduct books for young noblemen, The English Gentleman and A Nursery for Gentry. Braithwait was scandalised less by immodest literary content than by the devastating impact such content had on the impressionable minds and pliable bodies of England’s aristocracy-in-waiting. He warned young men against ill-judged love affairs at the same time as he warned them against encounters with unprofitable books, describing both as experiences of passionate involvement which made irresistible demands upon the imagination. The complexional disturbance involved in reading such books collapses the difference between fiction and reality, he argued, causing men to lose themselves in stories. Braithwait’s work is here considered alongside one early example of English pornography, Thomas Cranley’s Amanda: Or, the Reformed Whore (1638), a story of a prostitute’s reformation told largely in verse epistles. Cranley courts the eager involvement of his readers, inviting them to become ardently caught up in his story in precisely the ways Braithwait deplored. Fully cognisant of imaginative literature’s dangerous ability to undermine bodily and somatic integrity, Cranley was nevertheless fascinated by the lively patterns of readerly involvement which the affective realm of sensation allowed. It is argued that ‘pornography’ emerged for the first time in the mid-seventeenth century as a way of reading involving a loss of reason and self-control. It was made possible by writers like Cranley who staged scenes of self-exposure involving disorders of the passions, blurring the lines between fiction and reality and between acceptable and forbidden literary practice.

1 The Word and the Flesh in Early Modern England

I In 1601, two years before the appearance of Holland’s translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, the English Jesuit Thomas Wright’s treatise The Passions of the Minde in Generall was published. Already an encyclopaedic work of psychology, physiology and moral philosophy, The Passions had nearly doubled in length by the time of the second edition of 1604 and appeared in a further two editions before 1630.1 One of the richest and most cogent reworkings of classical and scholastic opinion, The Passions is perhaps best described as a manual of private and public ethics. Drawing on the vast corpus of treatises and tracts by Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Wright argues that the first step towards achieving a well-led life involved moderating extreme emotions, or perturbations, using reason and the will.2 Men may learn to regulate their internal lives by handling responsibly the sensory impressions gathered from the outside world as well as those generated internally by the imagination and the memory. The affective impact of written and spoken words is central to Wright’s principles of self-government. He was familiar not only with theories of the emotions but also with ancient theories of literature and rhetoric, including Plutarch’s, and believed that reading sacred and secular books, and listening to speeches and sermons, always involved active and passionate cognition.3 Like Plutarch, Wright describes the ways in which the sometimes overwhelming experience of being moved by poetry affects men’s psychological and physiological selves. His discussion is naturally different, however, by virtue of its close 11

12 Reading Sensations in Early Modern England

engagement with peculiarly early modern preoccupations. The following discussion focuses on those aspects of Wright’s theory of the passions which deal with the feelings men experienced in their minds and bodies when they encountered words and texts. Acts of reading and listening, during which men visibly displayed affective states of composure or restlessness, emerge in Wright’s analysis as reliable indicators of social, moral and civil standing. The close relationship Wright sketches between passions and protocols of self-government is echoed by contemporary polemicists and the authors of courtly conduct books. Their work addressed every aspect of life: how to pray, conduct friendships, handle money, eat, sleep, shave, dress one’s hair, pare one’s nails, relate to one’s parents, play cards or chess, exercise, and make music. Good habits of reading, characterised by the careful management of emotion, were an important aspect of their recommendations. Drawing from classical and medieval commentaries, Henry Crosse, Stephen Gosson, Philip Stubbes, Thomas Beard and John Northbrooke all debated the sorts of books young men should read and how they should go about reading them. Acknowledging the dramatic changes occurring in the nature, quantity and quality of printed books available at the turn of the seventeenth century, they lamented readers’ neglect of the Bible and devotional treatises in favour of trifling books designed to be read for pleasure. The title page of Crosse’s Vertues Common-wealth: Or The High-way to Honour (1603) states its intention to be ‘profitable to youth’ in their efforts to acquire corporeal, intellectual and civic virtue. Less familiar than Gosson and Stubbes’s polemics, Vertues Common-wealth is an important landmark in the overlapping histories of reading, bodily sensation and gentlemanly conduct explored in this book. Crosse considers poetry’s disturbing ability to touch the bodies of those who consumed it, and explains how scripture produces correspondingly ameliorative affects among Christians. Experiences of reading score, bruise and stain the material body, and, like Wright, Crosse regards these physical signs as indisputable markers of masculine well-being and frailty. Reading affects the integrity of men’s bodies, and, in turn, their relationships with one other and with God. The passions were as central to early modern selfhood as the humours, and theories of passionate cognition informed the connec-

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tions men and women forged with each other and the phenomenological world at large. Emotions such as sadness, love, courage and compassion contributed in important ways to early modern systems of ethics, morals and religious belief. We now know that Western thought has not always privileged reason and self-control, and that the powerful strand of neo-Stoicism in Renaissance culture was countered by an equally strong current of anti-Stoicism which emphasised the importance of affect.4 The role played by the passions in the production and reception of literature is however not yet well understood. Although it is common knowledge that late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century poetry often aspired to teach readers how to live better lives, the role played by sensation in this aspiration, especially sensations involving a shameful (and shamefully visible) loss of composure in the material body, is less familiar. This chapter explores the ways in which assimilating sacred and secular words may have altered men, and concentrates on the place of physical feeling in early modern theories of affect. It is argued that the feelings aroused by reading were not only private experiences but also performative activities which allowed men to assess the state of one another’s physical, moral and spiritual health and to estimate their position in civil society.

II In the dedication of The Passions of the Minde in Generall to the Earl of Southampton, Wright remarks that the passions are ‘much talkt of, and as yet never well taught’. His treatise is addressed to scholars and ‘subtill wits’, but also reveals to a more general readership the nature of the passions, their relationship to the body, and the reasons why they become turbulent or inflamed.5 The twenty-one chapters which made up the first edition of The Passions were divided into six books in 1604, the first of which is devoted to the properties of the passions as functions of the immortal soul. While the precise nature of these functions remained a subject of debate, it was generally agreed that the soul mediated between man’s immaterial and material selves and that it existed over and above his perishable physical frame: ‘A soule is a bodilesse substance ruling a bodie.’6 Without the immortal soul, created by God, the mortal body would decay and die. Drawing from

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Plato, Wright describes the soul’s three indivisible parts. Its first ‘naturall inclination’, sometimes called the vegetative or insensate element, is common to all living things and enables growth and generation. The second part, belonging only to animals and men, is the sensitive or sensory soul where passions are experienced, for ‘that which is called passion . . . is no other thing, but a motion of the sensitiue appetite’. To achieve a blameless Christian life, one must first become acquainted with the inclinations of one’s passions towards virtue or vice, and then learn how to control them by way of the soul’s third and immortal part, the reason or intellect.7 Like many other authors of treatises on self-government, Wright exhorts his readers ‘Nosce teipsum, Know thy selfe’.8 If the passions are allowed to run out of control they impede progress towards righteousness, but if the individual masters, intercepts and redirects them, they may be brought to work productively in the service of Christian temperance. Impressions from the outside world are received in the second, sensitive part of the soul for it is here that experience is processed by the five outward senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. These ‘messengers carry to the Interior powers . . . whatsoeuer we can comprehend and desire’, allowing us to perceive ‘Colours, the Sounds, the Smelles, the Sauors, the Cold, the Heat, and the other naturall qualities.’9 The information gathered is then filtered by the various faculties of inward apprehension which Wright, following Aquinas, identifies as the sensus communis or common sense, the imagination and the memory.10 Impressions from the senses press upon the soul like a seal in soft wax, or else make a permanent and indelible mark ‘as the sparrowes are attached to birdlime, or the fl ies sticke in honnie’.11 It is these subtle movements of the sensitive soul which are the driving force behind emotional experience, and which give rise in turn to passions or perturbations. Cicero had identified four primary emotions: distress or sorrow (aegritudo), pleasure (laetitia), fear (metus) and desire (libido). The Thomist theory of the emotions informing Wright’s discussion is more complicated. Here the sensitive soul possesses two contrary appetites which attract or repel whatever they encounter, enabling the soul to desire whatever it perceives as good and to reject whatever it perceives as evil. The passions experienced by each individual constantly change and mutate as they are pushed and pulled by the concupiscible and irascible appe-

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tites, and selfhood therefore emerges as a restless activity rather than a static state of being.12 To know oneself is to become aware of the soul’s habitual movements of drawing towards and pulling away, approaching and withdrawing, hearkening and spurning; and achieving a properly regulated life involves modifying these movements according to certain culturally agreed conventions. The nature and quality of one’s experiences of the outside world therefore seem less important to Wright than the emotional responses one fashions to them, and, we will see, this principle is pivotal to both The Passions of the Minde and Vertues Common-wealth, especially when Wright and Crosse deliberate the affective impact of books on masculine bodies and selves. While both writers advise men to vet carefully the books they encounter, they devote more attention to the ways in which they should dispose themselves towards receiving them. Wright regards reason’s restraining influence over the passions as crucial to the inward sobriety and outward civility of every feeling subject. Through reason alone a man achieves ‘quietnesse of minde . . . a gratious carriage of himselfe, and . . . conuersation most gratefull to men’. The swift deployment of reason enables the soul to defend itself against menaces to its integrity presented by misleading sensory impressions gathered from the outside world, including the temptations offered by books. Just as ‘while the sore is greene, seldome Surgeons despaire, but festered once, they hardly cure it’, vehement passions may be brought under control while they are still fresh but become unstoppable if left unchecked.13 Men must maintain their passions as far as possible in a state of equilibrium in order to achieve spiritual cleanliness, for only he who learns to ‘rule his passions, ouercommeth the diuell’.14 Wright therefore recommends a rigorous programme of prayer, complemented with fasting, ‘coorse shirts, pinching cold, [and] much study’.15 Men achieve perfect self-knowledge by living a meticulously regulated internal life in which disciplined habits of reading play an important part. Wright describes passions as ‘naughty seruants’ reluctant to serve their masters, but emphasises at the same time that they are an inevitable and indeed desirable aspect of human experience. Without the sensitive soul, after all, man would be interested only in the basic bodily functions which allow him to stay alive. Sensory impressions

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(sensibilia) gathered from the material world are not necessarily at odds with a state of grace, and do not inevitably hinder the intellect. Even Christ was subject to ‘feare and heauinesse’, Wright recalls, and appropriately managed feelings of shame, ambition and grief are important features of Christian virtue.16 Properly understood and deployed, the passions spur sluggish souls towards goodness and enrich the fabric of everyday life. Man’s nature is so perverse, however, that he exists on an internal precipice, his passions constantly threatening to spill over in a devastating subversion of the self. Wright describes poignantly the ways in which indulging the passions occasions delight in the short term, but finally brings about man’s withdrawal from the outside world. The passionate mind is ‘gun-powdred’, liable to explode catastrophically without warning. Rashness, inconstancy and craftiness are among the most dangerous passions for they are as ugly, noisy and insatiable as a nest of ‘young Crowes halfe starued gaping and crying for food’, or like rebels in a nation-state against reason, their ‘Lord and King’. The soul is constantly shaken and disturbed as though ‘winds doe buz about it, or raines alter it, or earthquake shake it, or stormes tyrannize ouer it’.17 As the inner life becomes more agitated, the individual loses the ability properly to perceive the world for ‘vehement passion . . . peruerteth the iudgement’. Incitements to passionate feeling are moreover impossible to avoid for they crop up in the most seemingly innocuous encounters. Seeing or (worse) acquiring money kindles covetousness while playing games with dice, cards or bowls ignites pride and choler. The temptation to overweening pleasure, ‘the pole starre of all inordinate passions’, is found in sumptuous cooking, luxurious clothes, stately palaces, beautiful gardens, rich canopies and embroidered beds. Listening to music can be therapeutic since it ‘causeth mirth, ioy, and delight . . . and bring[s] the body into a good temper’, but ‘a certaine sort of lasciuious musicke . . . causeth wantonnesse’.18 Even catching sight of a red wall hanging or blanket may prove dangerous to the infirm because ‘red colours moued and inflamed the blood’ towards anger. The knack of discerning the difference between seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or touching things which nourished the soul and things which imperilled it must have seemed dauntingly difficult to acquire. Unless they exercised unassailable vigilance at every moment, men were likely to encounter ‘an excellent stir-passion’ wherever they least expected it.19

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Wright’s theory of passionate cognition is also a theory of reading, for some of the most problematic negotiations between the passions and the imagination are sparked off by encounters with books. Of the three faculties of inward apprehension in the sensitive soul, the imagination was most closely allied to sensory appetite and least compliant with the tempering effects of reason. Error and misapprehension thrive here as, like a ‘deceitfull Counsellor’, the imagination presents to the faculty of reason seemingly convincing grounds for favouring particular passions.20 Aristotle had proposed that a man may experience in his imagination a mental picture so strongly present that the soul is moved as though the actual object were present to the senses.21 Wright follows this line of thought, arguing that the most vivid imaginative experiences ignite the strongest passions. The imagination presents things to the understanding ‘very intensiuely, with more shew and apparance than they are indeed’, and, by a process of cunning distortion, ‘putteth greene spectacles before the eyes of our wit, to make it see nothing but greene’. 22 The imagination is particularly vulnerable to ‘corrupted Bookes’ which invariably breed false conceits in the mind.23 Such books, themselves the ‘off-springs of vngodly affections’, in turn corrupt extremly all good manners, and with a silent perswasion insinuate their matter vnto the chiefe affection and highest part of the Soule, and in all good Common-weales, are either wholy prohibited, or so circumcised, that no such hurt followeth . . . against these Pamphlets, I oppose thousands of spirituall Volumes, the holy Scriptures, sermons, exhortations, homilies, meditations, prayer-bookes . . . If ‘naughty Bookes’ harm the sensitive soul and even impair the precious discriminatory faculty of reason, then holy books work like a refreshing antidote.24 Wright makes clear that the powerful affective states induced by reading extend far beyond the parameters of individual souls. The health of the whole Christian commonwealth depends on ensuring improper books are judiciously ‘circumcised’, and their corrupting influence accordingly curtailed. Wright’s vocabulary suggests that he deplored obscene material, but he objected also to books about guileful statecraft (‘Machiuellian

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policies’) and the supernatural (‘the Art of Coniuring’), as well as the excessively decorative writings of those inclined to hunt after metaphors, coyne phrases, and labour extremly that their words may smell of subtilitie, elegancy and neat delivery.25 Writers should above all strive to be clear – ‘we write to declare our minds’ – and an ornamental style prevents them from communicating candidly and wisely. Fancy phrases never compensate for damaging content: it is not enough for writers to ‘temper the gall of their pernicious obiects . . . with a few sugred words’, for this in no way curbs their hazardous effects. Wright advises rhetors and poets to bear in mind the powerful affective impact of their words, advising them to imitate herein the common practice of prudent Physitians, who apply their medicine to the same maladies with particular respect and consideration of the patients temper . . . An author’s sensitivity to the disposition of his readership is a marker of his prudence, for not all readers are equally ‘stellie stomackt’. 26 At the same time as Wright describes in material terms the effects books have on men, he envisages an ideally co-operative exchange between them. But in order for books productively to nourish bodies and souls, and work beneficially in society at large, writers must first exercise control over their own passions and then attend judiciously to those of their readers. Wright’s medical metaphor is carefully chosen. The Passions is as much a work of medicine as moral philosophy for passions give rise to a variety of physical symptoms, and, in a reciprocal process, bodily sensations translate into altered mental states. Drawing from the Hippocratic insight that physical health was achieved by the careful balancing of opposites, Wright argues that men must first quarry peccant material from the ‘very poyson of passions’ in order to cure them. This same notion underpinned the theory of the humours where disease caused by an imbalance of blood, phlegm or black bile was remedied by administering substances with the oppo-

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site effect.27 Synthesising ancient medical thought with ideas borrowed from Plutarch’s essay on moral virtue in Moralia and Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, Wright describes how strong emotions cause involuntary movements or stirrings in the body. Whether the trigger is actually present before the senses or exists only in the memory or imagination, the body is the vulnerable agent of the passions and undergoes a literal, physical transformation.28 Anger stimulates flushing, trembling and breathlessness, pleasure warms and dilates the arteries, fear occasions paleness, sweatiness and pounding of the heart, and grief makes ‘our teeth ake, our fingers, toes, or legges paine vs’. Moderate mirth moistens the brain and modest pleasure improves digestion, but too much delight dangerously inflames the heart while excessive despair ‘dryeth the whole body, and maketh it wither away’.29 The seat of the sensitive soul, the heart, was most profoundly affected: love makes it leap, joy dilates it, anxiety causes it to shrink, anger makes it burn, and fear drains it of blood. 30 Passions are literally as well as figuratively felt in the material body, and if emotion causes physical feeling then overwhelming emotion occasions overwhelming physical feeling. When books arouse vehement passions, then, they literally burn, break and poison (or heal, soothe and temper) readers’ bodies. The fact that passions are felt (and seen to be felt) in men’s material bodies underpins Wright’s moral and ethical advice. If a man’s desire to achieve good and repel evil is calibrated according to the degree of success he achieves in bestilling his ‘hare-braine affections’, any changes in his physical appearance and deportment while reading betray incontrovertibly his state of mind.31 Men’s bodies and souls were also susceptible to the affective appeal of orators, ambassadors, lawyers, magistrates, captains ‘and whosoeuer would perswade a multitude’. Wright was fascinated by the rhetorical principle of energeia, or supreme animation in language, which persuaded listeners by eliciting passionate feeling in them.32 But because of his commitment to the moderating force of reason, he deplored the tactics of the crooked ‘passion mouer’ whose appeal was grounded solely in the affections. ‘Wordes represent most exactly the very image of the minde and soule’, and unskilful speakers arouse inappropriately strong feelings in others partly because they themselves suffer from them. Such men

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beare words in their mouthes, as dogs arrowes shot in their thighes, the which so trouble, tosse and turmoile them, that they neuer can bee quiet till they bee drawne forth: euen so rash men in speech, haue an arrow in their tongues, they neuer rest till they haue uttered their mindes. Such commonly are with childe with their owne conceits, and either they must bee delivered of them, or they must dye in childe-bed.33 Embroiled in a passionate exchange at court, a lively political debate or a heated personal altercation, a man’s true feelings make themselves known in his body and behaviour no matter how hard he tries to suppress them. It is precisely the most shameful, embarrassing and secret feelings which are the noisiest, most fiercely articulate and most insistently present.34 Whether or not they want to utter them, words burst out of impassioned speakers as spontaneously and unthinkingly as cries of pain. It is no more possible to conceal vehement passions and the painful bodily sensations they ignite than it is to hide a deep flesh-wound or the experience of labour. It is because vehement passions are ‘drowned in corporeall organs’ that they become visible to others in the form of embarrassing, unpredictable pathological symptoms, and Wright regards such symptoms as an affront against civil decorum.35 Like Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, Wright uses the word for ‘habit’ (ethos) to imply ‘good habits’ or ‘ethics’ (ethika). If men cultivate good habits of passion-management in affect-laden encounters, including run-ins with certain sorts of books, their lives are enriched as Christians, Englishmen, citizens, courtiers, fathers and husbands.36 So although the passions arise from tiny movements in the hidden, intimate folds of the self, they not only influence private desires and aversions but also fashion men’s relationships with those around them. Since the shameful pathological symptoms caused by uncontrolled feeling are witnessed and judged by society at large, Wright advises his readers continually to police the parameters of their bodies and selves in order to keep them secret. At the same time, he advises them to become shrewd readers of others’ passions. Wright warns his readers frankly that they are unlikely ever to achieve unassailable control over their emotions whilst in company, and suggests that the best course of action is to compensate as best they can for inevitable failure. ‘Conceale, as much as thou

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canst,’ he suggests, ‘that passion thou knowest thy selfe most prone to.’ One method is publicly to deplore that same passion, thereby convincing others one is unlikely ever to fall foul of it. Wright’s other recommendations – perhaps less risky than the fi rst – are to avoid ‘superfluous speaking’, suppress wild hand gestures, walk carefully, keep their heads still, avoid admiring their own ‘neat and proportioned legs’ and refrain from absent-mindedly fiddling with their garments.37 The surest strategy to secure the good opinion of others is to hold scrupulously in check the visible and audible signs of vehement passions – a skill which Wright reckons the Italians (unlike the English) to have mastered perfectly.38 Encountering books was one experience among many in which reason struggled to maintain control. While men were reading, their inclinations towards overweening passion should remain indecipherable, undisclosed by the involuntary movements, gestures or mannerisms which we now call body language. The successful management of the passions therefore involved monitoring how one felt, but also how one seemed to others to be feeling, and Wright thus counsels every reader not simply to know himself but also – crucially – to hide himself.39

III Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the notion that assimilating words could both dangerously excite and usefully temper the passions of young men was debated by polemicists, cultural commentators and the authors of courtly conduct books as well as by physicians and moral philosophers like Wright. Many considered the importance of well-governed passions in exemplary men’s lives, and emphasised the particular dangers posed to emotional and bodily equilibrium by what Wright called ‘light and wanton Poets’. Young men could now find ‘shoppes stuffed’ full of ‘infinite fardles of printed pamphlets’, many of which were ‘meere Poeticall, or which tende in some respecte (as either in matter or forme) to Poetry’.40 Philip Stubbes complained that readers were neglecting the Bible and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in favour of ‘toyes, fantasies and bableries’ designed to incite blasphemy and godlessness, and deplored in particular the ready availability of ballads, songs and ‘hethnical pamphlets’.41 Such anti-poetical sentiment was linked to

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the contemporary debate about the moral depravity of theatres which led to the 1642 ordinance of Parliament forbidding the public performance of stage plays. Like ignorant playgoers, the readers of trifling poetry absorbed all too eagerly the amoral landscape of fiction. Sonnets, romances, popular histories, jest books, satires and ballads were counted among the most disgraceful sorts of printed material, especially if they had been imported from the continent. Thomas Beard singled out for censure the works of Giovanni Boccaccio as well as ‘Amadis, Tristram, Launcelot due Lake, [and] Melusine’, while Henry Crosse disapproved of ‘leaud bookes, vaine pamphlets, and scurrillous ditties’ such as ‘the Court of Venus, the Pallace of Pleasure, [and] Guy of Warwicke’.42 Many condemned the rhymes and running metres favoured by the ‘rabble of ryming Ballet makers’ while others objected to poetry which failed to display a proper allegiance to England by importing too many foreign words and inkhorn terms.43 While polemicists disagreed about the genre, form and content of objectionable writing, they all agreed that ‘good bookes lye dead’.44 These criticisms have a long history in ancient thought. Plato’s expulsion of poets from his ideal state in The Republic is acknowledged by almost every Renaissance writer who objected to poetry’s vanitas, many of whom deployed other well-worn anecdotes from classical literature and history to suggest that the authorities have always found it necessary to keep poets in check. Augustus banished Ovid from Rome to the Black Sea ‘for making Bookes of loue’; Juvenal was exiled as a punishment for his ‘obscenitie and bawdery’; Lycurgus attempted to forbid players and musicians; Nero commanded that Lucan stop writing; Cicero condemned youthful poems as ‘the fathers of lyes, Pipers of vanitie, & Schooles of Abuse’; and Cato disapproved of Marcus’s decision to welcome the poet Ennius into his province. In ‘A Briefe Apologie of Poetrie’ (1591), Sir John Harington summed up and then refuted the principal objections to poetry inherited from classical literature and history: ‘it is a nurse of lies, a pleaser of fooles, a breeder of dangerous errors, and an inticer to wantonnes.’45 Distrust of material which Plutarch called ‘lying fables’ acquired fresh urgency at the turn of the seventeenth century when the marketplace of print was undergoing radical and rapid change. As literacy increased, the readership franchise altered rapidly in size and character and so did the demand for printed books.46 The

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perceived decline in literary standards which accompanied these changes was attributed to authors’ willingness to satisfy the demands of new readers whom Crosse described wearily as ‘the witlesse and braine-sicke multitude’. To Ben Jonson and many others, the new affordability of books seemed particularly dangerous – as if price were a reliable indicator of literary worth – and anxieties about the book market became inseparable from broader concerns about deteriorating moral standards and the erosion of social responsibility.47 The hawking of cheap reading material at fairs and taverns was considered to encourage social ills such as drunkenness, blasphemy and whoredom, and women’s fondness for popular romances was believed to distract them from domestic duty. Reading fiction was leading men shamefully to waste their time and energy, while those responsible for the bulk production of unnecessary books were squandering precious resources of paper and ink.48 Some of the most forceful arguments about the hazards of reading poetry were put forward by those who addressed the pressing problem of affect. In Vertues Common-wealth, Crosse describes in detail the worrying tendency of words to ignite sensation in those who produced and consumed them. Vertues Common-wealth is partly a devotional work dedicated to explaining the difference between virtue and vice, and partly a complaint against the disintegration of decency in every aspect of English life. Crosse was particularly concerned about young men’s increasing fondness for reading poetry, and, allied with this, their disinclination to engage properly with the Bible and other scriptural works. Familiar with the theory of the passions, especially the ways in which the sensitive soul was moved by reading, Crosse was convinced that men would participate more meaningfully in a Christian commonwealth if their passions were aroused moderately by God’s Word, and that they were ‘greatly endamaged . . . through the abundance of naughtie bookes’. Some of the remarks about poetry in Vertues Common-wealth are drawn from Moralia, but Crosse tackles urgent early modern questions about reading using the sophisticated theory of emotional intelligence formulated by Wright and others which depends, as we have seen, on men scrutinising one another’s bodies for the shameful signs of passionate arousal. To Crosse, virtue is synonymous with being a man – ‘in respect of Vertue, a man is said to be a man, which is the Etymologie of the word’ – and manliness is achieved partly through

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passionate encounters with the Word of God.49 In Vertues Commonwealth, the fortificatory passions involved in reading scripture and the shameful passions aroused by reading poetry both inscribe themselves – and are seen by others to inscribe themselves – on the material bodies of men. Although Crosse complains that new literary toys are continually available at every stationer’s shop, he identifies the root of the problem in the green and tender wits of young men. The content of idle pamphlets is not hazardous on its own terms, in other words, but becomes so only when it ‘intercepts the vertuous disposition of a willing buyer’. Excepting only Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, together with ‘our honourable moderne Poets’, Crosse deplores all poetry which presents misleading impressions to the heart, the organ of the sensitive soul. Trifling books full of ‘glosing words tickle and stirre vp the affections to be conceited of some fond passion’, and young men are powerless to resist because they are so ‘delicate’.50 Imaginative fiction feels so silken, and its stories are so smoothly limned out, that the young reader’s attention glides effortlessly over them without engaging the discriminating faculty of reason. There is no doubt in Crosse’s mind that such books dangerously transform young men, for ‘the internall powers must be moued’. But such is ‘the diuersitie of mens minds, and how diuersly they are disposed’, that the effects of reading literature are difficult accurately to anticipate. The commonwealth in Crosse’s title refers here to the volatile microcosmic realm of every man’s soul, for some books are charged with enough explosives to ‘kindle flambes of contentions in a peaceable state’.51 Poetry transforms the inner lives of young men in spontaneous, unpredictable ways – especially when it is consumed privately or in secret. Just as Wright had argued that passionate cognition involved embarrassing bodily sensation, Crosse emphasises that literature not only bends the mind and inflames the soul but also induces a variety of troublesome physical symptoms. Sometimes he uses epidemiology as a metaphor, as when he compares the seemingly endless supply of worthless books to ‘a sore that must be healed, least it fester and run’. But Crosse’s medical vocabulary is more insistent and ubiquitous than that, and the illnesses he associates with reading extend far beyond the melancholy humour often said to be endured by scholars.52 Careless habits of reading cause disease, oozing skin

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rashes, plague, leprosy, infection, maceration or softening of the flesh, cankers, biliousness, belching, buzzing in the ears and drowsiness.53 Secondary symptoms related to the sedentary lifestyles of over-zealous readers include lesions, cracked bones and impotence which together presage early death. Crosse imagines the ‘imbossed words’ of poetry literally putting pressure upon young bodies which are so pliable that they ‘easily take the impression’. And like Plutarch, he describes reading as a form of hazardous ingestion: immodest books ‘poyson good wits, and corrupt young people’.54 Although their enticing covers and pretty titles promise delight, they are nevertheless ‘within, full of strong venome’, and it is the smoothest, most palatable words which prove most dangerous to apprentice readers: ‘fluant termes . . . goe downe without chewing, which as poyson doth by litle and litle, disperse it selfe into euery part of the body’. The aftermath of this creeping dispersal is starkly apparent to onlookers: when as young folkes haue licked in the sweete iuice of these stinking bookes, their conuersation and manners are so tainted and spotted with Vice, that they can neuer be so cleane washed, but some filthy dregges will remaine behind.55 The body’s internal commonwealth ideally remains tranquil, but, once disturbed by the intrusion of overweening passion, it experiences a painful and painfully visible ‘naturall rebellion’. When young men greedily lap up sweet-tasting books into their private selves, the shameful symptoms of their incontinence are blazoned forth on the outside like taints or spots, making their demeanour and conversation as filthy as the poems they have swallowed.56 Registering the temperature and cleanliness of men’s tender young bodies allows Crosse to identify which books they must scrupulously avoid. More significantly, such detectable pathological signs reveal incontrovertibly the state of each man’s internal equilibrium, disclosing in particular whether or not he has successfully governed his passions while reading. Crosse applies strictly his criteria of masculine virtue to young readers: those whose internal selves remain inscrutable have achieved a state of temperance, whereas those who exhibit embarrassing symptoms in company are guilty of indulging

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passionate feeling. Read in the light of Wright’s The Passions, Vertues Common-wealth illuminates one paradox at the centre of many polemics like Crosse’s against literature: how can poetry be both trifling and insignificant and, at the same time, devastating to those who consumed it? Vertues Common-wealth makes clear that the harmful substance of poetry resides not simply on the page but rather in the hazardous exchanges which take place between contagious books and the pliable minds, bodies and souls of those who consume them. Young men who read vain books subject themselves moreover to a kind of enchantment involving their mental and physical selves: some are so charmed, as they spend their whole life in vaine reading, because they see in them as in a glasse, their owne conditions: now such vaine fragments as fit their humors, they sucke in, and squeese out againe ‘Pedling bookes’ practise a form of conjuring on the unwary reader by presenting him with a version of himself which is impossible to resist.57 Cunning writers attend to precisely those fragments of the reader’s condition which are most amenable to flattery, namely his susceptibility to vanity, idleness, sloth and profanity. A young man’s disposition looks disturbingly vulnerable to separation into its constituent parts, his most shameful humours threatening to detach themselves from the whole in the same way that the most appealing ‘Metaphors, Allegories, and such figuratiue and suparlative termes’ can be cherry-picked from the text of a story. Those who treat themselves to fragments of books find themselves repeatedly and compulsively engaged in the activity, tempted even to ‘spend their whole life’ doing it.58 Such habits of reading involve mental and physical addiction, for, in Crosse’s words, whatever one takes by a ‘voluntary admittance at the first becommeth habituall’. The most hazardous, seductive literary encounters involve an intimate transaction between unscrupulous authors and suggestible readers: immodest books are written by those who themselves suffer from vehement affections, and, by devoting attention to them, young men permit such affections to invade their own soft imaginations. Reading emerges as a dynamic, reciprocal exchange involving the changeable

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feelings of both readers and authors, and Crosse’s understanding of affect finally rests on the assumption that books are themselves ‘diuersly affected’, or humored.59 Books appear to have interior lives, and contact with them alters the equilibrium of the readers’ own: ‘they see in them as in a glasse, their owne conditions’. Young men’s flaws are reflected in books like a mirror, but the mirror is a curiously porous one. Its reflection is experienced rather than passively regarded, and Crosse’s notion of young men sucking out or squeezing in fragments of text to match their humoral dispositions sounds more like a description of breathing or drinking than reading. This passage of Vertues Common-wealth recalls Plutarch’s account (discussed above) of poems not only causing swelling but also themselves swelling up: here, the boundaries of books look as perilously open and vulnerable as the boundaries of young men. The most hazardous textual experiences involve transactions between unscrupulous books and suggestible readers which work both ways. Books have thermal or humoral properties, and that is what makes them perilously sympathetic with the mental and physical changes in young men. As Crosse explains, the damaging consequences are not limited to the internal commonwealth of each individual. The apprentice reader whose regulatory wits remain underdeveloped hungrily sucks up dangerous passages into his mind, body and soul and then squeezes them out while engaged in ‘publique affaires’. The commonwealth in Crosse’s title refers to the private body politic, then, but also to a group of men bound together by virtue – and by watchfulness over one another’s virtue. Poems and fictions spread through this shared community as quickly and invisibly as ‘an infectious aire that brings a generall plague’. Their contamination of society is as difficult to contain as ‘contagion’ or ‘pestilence’, and indicates godlessness as surely.60 Crosse is outraged that so many readers treasure ‘stinking infectious writings’ while bookes of Christianitie, of modest argument, that tend to rectifie the iudgment, lieth stil in the Stationers hand as waste paper.61 To be integrated into Christian fellowship, men must choose the correct reading material and, more importantly, exercise proper

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control over the passions while reading it. Faith and well-being are closely connected since members of the Church are bound together by doctrine and belief but also by the robust health earned by collectively resisting the passions of the mind.62 Crosse knew that the Latin word poena meant ‘punishment’ as well as ‘pain’, and, like many other writers who objected to poetry and play-going, he linked the bodily afflictions attendant on aesthetic pleasure-taking with Christian wrongdoing. A thriving spiritual brotherhood emerges only when every believer cultivates a sober habit of mind, learning habitually to overcome strong passions and the bodily sensations they ignite and abstaining in particular from reading idle books which ‘disquiet and trouble the estate’. One man’s peaceful internal commonwealth does not simply confirm his uniqueness or autonomy, but allows him also to participate fully as one member of a godly community. Harmony in the internal commonwealth is therefore valuable insofar as it facilitates harmony in the commonwealth of Christ: For as there is a diuine coherence between the members of the bodie, though they haue all a distinct and peculiar office, yet they all minister to the common societie: so in like manner we being members of that bodie, whereof Christ is the head, ought to bend our actiuitie for the health & welfare of the same. Individual men may be the church’s ‘feeling members’, but must study together as Christians to control such feelings for ‘this onely is Vertues Common-wealth’.63 Drawing on both Augustinian psychology and Erasmian and Lutheran traditions of scriptural exegesis, Crosse emphasises the powerful affective benefits to Christians of reading. The Bible and certain selected devotional works impress upon the emotions of the believer, helping to ‘relieue the debilitie of nature, and quicken the dull spirits’.64 God’s Word was neither absolutely fi xed and exhaustible nor straightforwardly referential, for meaning was created in a lively exchange with the faithful during which scripture worked by changing minds, moving wills, and, above all, converting souls. Christians were transformed by reading the Bible, experiencing a kind of spiritual energeia as powerful and effective as the earnestness of their spiritual commitment. Directed more by intuitive faith and

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love than intellect, they absorbed the Word of God, found themselves healed and revived by it, and were further strengthened in their faith by observing the same ameliorative effects in the hearts of others.65 The believer experienced certain familiar feelings every time he encountered the Bible, and these gradually strengthened both his own faith and the integrity of the Christian community. Preachers such as Richard Baxter, William Perkins, Andreas Hyperius and Niels Hemmingsen all agreed with Crosse that scripture touched feelingly the minds and bodies of believers, and, in so doing, made them better Christians. Pastors worked to arouse certain emotions in their flock such as patience, love, fear of God, hope, contempt for worldly vanity and longing for grace – many of which were connected more closely with reason and the will than the sensitive soul.66 Ideally a dialogue existed between sermonist and listener, characterised by mutual humility, during which God’s impassionating Word was transmitted and intuitively absorbed. As Hyperius put it, sermons ‘worketh in you that beleue’.67 The rehearsed, repeatable experience of passionate feeling both confi rmed the enduring force of the Word and affirmed the sincerity of the worshipper, creating kinship between Christians. Or to put it differently: devotional practices of reading were a powerful means of discriminating between the godly and the ungodly because their effects were so clearly visible among men. Crosse was fascinated by the idea that Christians were literally touched by scripture, allowing them to feel heavenly love and grace ‘powring in’.68 God’s Word was felt not only in the invisible inner world of the faithful, then, but also in the material body. The notion that the Word was infused into or palpably scored onto Christians would have been familiar to Crosse’s readers from II Corinthians 3:3 where Christ’s epistle is written ‘not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart’. The believer desires fervently to feel the Word’s imprint or impression, and the able sermonist ensures that it sinks into his willing heart ‘swiftely and deepely’.69 It is this feeling which painfully eludes Claudius as he prays in Act 3 Scene 3 of Hamlet: ‘heart with strings of steel/ Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.’70 Believers know they are attending properly to scripture when they are stirred, pricked or burned by it; and since only virtuous men feel moved by God’s Word, the experience of physical sensation suggests the sincerity of their spiritual commitment:

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Now my Word is like fire, sayes God: fire is the stirringest element of all elements, and therefore if there be any feeling at all in you, the Word is able to stir you, even as if ye had a fire in your bowels. Worshippers therefore read or listen to scripture partly in order to feel their faith more fully, like David in the 119th Psalm: ‘Quicken me, O Lord, according to thy Word.’71 Linked to the idea of scripture’s quickening properties is the commonplace, drawn from Hebrews 4:12, that God’s Word is itself alive: ‘The worde of God is liuelie, and mightie in operation: being liuelie, if it doe not quicken and stirre vs vp to a newenesse of life, it is a token that we haue no life, but are alreadie stone deade.’72 Crosse describes the minister of the Word as ‘the Phisition of the soule’ since holy books revive, soothe and heal those who are properly disposed to receive them. As Richard Greenham put it in a consolatory treatise designed to be read by those sick in mind or body: We must vse the Word in troubles & temptations, as a sicke man doth his meate, which though he eate against the stomacke, and presently feeleth no benefite of it, yet we know by experience, it doth him good, and himselfe afterwards shall perceiue it.73 Since preachers are like doctors dispensing medicine to their flock, they must cleanse their own bodies of scabs and boils before they attempt to treat the bodies of others.74 The Word is bread which the preacher breaks and distributes, and hearing it is like taking ‘a littel wine for thy stomacke’.75 I Peter 2:2 mentions ‘the sincere milk of the word’, and preachers imagine it nourishing believers like ‘the Cordiall water, the Methridate’.76 The diligent pastor works as ‘if he had the charge of an Hospital’, for it is his responsibility to attend to the infirm even when they are ‘Sermon-sicke’.77 His ministrations resemble those which Surgeons are woont to doe with a tumour, or swelling in the bodie, whose manner is, first to applie drawing and ripening plaisters to the place affected, to bring the sore to an head, that the corruption may issue out at some one place: and then afterward healing plaisters which are of great vse to cure the same

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Parishioners who are as unfeeling as ‘stones in the quarry’, insentient to the putrefaction remaining within, are the furthest from salvation.78 To be healed by scripture, sinners must both feel their sins and reveal them to others in the form of physical or spiritual taints, sores, tumours and swellings. By feeling God’s Word and displaying to others the painful consequences, men assimilate themselves into a Christian commonwealth. Like Wright’s account of the effects of listening to passionate discourse, Crosse’s description of the ways in which good preaching (like good books) affected Christian bodies and souls is shaped by ancient oratory.79 The notion that orators must first feel the emotions they are trying to inspire in others was put forward by Cicero, Quintilian and Horace and subsequently became a mainstay of rhetorical and literary theory.80 Words and gestures are inseparable in Quintilian’s account: pronuntiatio (delivery) is a physical act involving the eyes, the limbs, the head and the torso, the whole body transforming the orator’s emotions into visible spectacle. Performed by the body, passions thus irradiate from the orator’s heart to the hearts of those listening, transforming their moral fabric. Ancient rhetorical theories expressed in terms of action and motion (epitomised in such repeated vocabulary as movere and energeia) appealed to preachers whose vocation was the ‘moouing and drawing of mindes’, but the authors of early modern sacred rhetorics struggled to reconcile classical theories of passionate eloquence with reformed theology. Now rhetorical feeling was a divine gift rather than an acquired skill: ‘he must first be godly affected himselfe, who would stirre vp godly affections in other men.’81 Drawing on this Christianised version of the effects of classical rhetoric, Crosse describes the healing properties of God’s Word as the antidote to poetry’s enervating ones. He shared Wright’s distrust of sophistry, and condemned any hint of delectatio (playfulness) which betrayed a preacher’s hankering after applause: many that hold places in sacred assemblies, become affected to their phrases, Metaphors, Allegories, and such figuratiue and suparlative termes, and so much vaine eloquence, as they yeeld no fruite at all to their auditors, but driue them in to amazement. The excessive decoration of poetry appealed to the feigning capacity of the imagination whereas the plain text of scripture fostered peace

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of mind, enlightenment and understanding. To mix up the sacred Word of God with the ‘swelling wordes’ of poetry was therefore an act of profanity: sugared rhetoric merely tickles listeners with ‘velvetlike passages’, flattering and entertaining them instead of instilling an appropriate sense of awe.82 To approach the Bible as though it were mere ‘brabbles in print’ is to miss its affective usefulness for although the listener may equip himself thereby with decorative fragments to redeploy in conversation, his soul is neither healed nor properly chastised.83 But distinguishing between the deplorable effects of literature and the edifying effects of scripture was not always straightforward. Which emotions should preachers aim to stir up, and how vehement or moderate should they be? How exactly could preachers arouse listeners’ affections without improperly stimulating their ‘vehement imagination or fantasy’? Sacred rhetoricians were divided over the rhetorical strategy of hypotyposis or vividness. Describing dramatic scenes from the Bible brought scripture vividly to life for the listener who experienced God’s truth before his eyes (ante oculos) and also received it into his heart (in pectore).84 But although hypotyposis stirs ardour effectively, it works by creating the potentially misleading and morally suspect illusion that the things spoken about are really present. Nor did scripture always heal and soothe Christian bodies and souls. Since the precise sensations felt depended on the state of the believer’s conscience, God’s Word could either assuage painful feeling or exacerbate it further. The preacher’s first task was to decide ‘whether men are to be lifted vp, and comforted with the swete promises of God, or els to be beaten, and cast downe, with his dreadfull minaces, and threatninges’.85 Sermons work best when they make men feel their sins intensely, and it is perhaps for this reason that vocabulary of violence associated with the grand style in classical rhetoric (impellere, trahere, concitare, pugnare, permovere) was so appealing to early modern sermonists.86 Christian rhetoric was urgent and involving or, as the clergyman William Fenner put it, both ‘moving and forceable’. Recalling Hebrews 4:12, many writers compared its operation to that of a two-edged sword ‘penetrating bone and marrow, and . . . like a hammer, breaking stone and the adamantine hearts of men’. Donne famously elaborated in his Sermons and Holy Sonnets on the sinner’s longing for painful and violent

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encounters with God’s Word.87 A preacher fails in his duty when he ‘takes off the edge of the Word’, for he ‘ought not with filed phrases, and mellow mouthed words tickle their eares, but with terrors and feares pierce their hearts’. His sermon painfully ‘prickes’ listeners, for if words are ‘not sharpened, and pierce not as nails, they will hardly be felt by stony hearts’. Only in this way is the sinner truly ‘touched with the feeling of his synnes’ and made contrite, for repentance is not cheaply bought with ‘a little chafing, and a little rubbing, and a little Aqua-vitæ’.88 The believer’s ability repeatedly and habitually to feel pain in response to God’s Word binds him fi rmly to the Christian community, for the visible signs of these afflictions are witnessed by other Christians who assess thereby the sincerity of each other’s faith. Experiencing scripture among other believers in public devotional spaces indeed surely remained as crucial to the liturgy of the reformed Church as private acts of reading.89 In Vertues Common-wealth, Crosse describes poetry and the sacred word inscribing themselves on the body in remarkably similar ways. Both involve an engagement of men’s passions, appealing not so much to reason and the will but rather to intuitive feeling. Literary and scriptural meaning both emerge in a dynamic exchange between those who produce words and those who consume them, and both secular and sacred texts become vivid, present and credible once they are received into men’s soft imaginations. Both poetry and scripture impress themselves painfully upon the material fabric of the body, burning, marking and scoring the skin, penetrating beneath it, piercing hearts and breaking bones. But whereas the sensations aroused by scripture are habitual and rehearsed, those ignited by literature are radically unpredictable. When the believer experiences God’s Word, the sensations he feels, performed repeatedly during common prayer, integrate him into the Church. Those aroused by guilty, passionate practices of reading, on the other hand, arise unbidden. Embarrassing symptoms erupt onto the surface of the body, tarnishing manners and conversation and signifying to others men’s offences against civil decorum. In both Christian and secular contexts, then, men observed each others’ bodies for the signs of passionate arousal which betokened compliance with (or infringement of) the behavioural rules which bound together a community of men. Painful afflictions could not easily be hidden, faked

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or transferred between bodies, and it is perhaps for this reason that both Wright and Crosse regarded the painful feelings men experienced while reading as reliable indicators of their moral perfections or imperfections. By theorising the transformative properties of sacred and secular words, they were also raising difficult questions about masculine identity and Christian morality. The next chapter considers the ways in which the physical sensations triggered by imaginative writing which so worried Wright and Crosse became a creative resource for two late sixteenth-century theorists of poetry, Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham, both of whom were interested in the interlocking theories of rhetoric and the passions.

2 Beneath the Skin: George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney and the Experience of English Poetry

I George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) was the first English literary-critical treatise fully to articulate the relationship between poetry and feeling. The Arte is at once an appraisal of the present state of English versification, an encyclopaedia of literary techniques, and a defence of poetry written in English. It is also a conduct book, for Puttenham was committed to the idea that good habits of reading fostered self-mastery among aristocratic gentlemen and believed firmly in the transformative power of literature, especially its facility to stimulate the minds and bodies of those who produced and encountered it. Like other Renaissance literary theorists, Puttenham drew from classical writers, including Plutarch, a belief that poetry could change people for the better.1 But whereas Thomas Wright and Henry Crosse followed Plutarch in deploring the pleasure (he–done–, volputas) associated with reading poetry, Puttenham explored the possibility that the sensations involved in reading and writing, including delight, could contribute in important ways to a distinctively English poetics. I argue here that Puttenham formulated a new aesthetic vocabulary in The Arte in order to describe the experience of being moved, stirred or enraptured by poetry; and that such experience was linked to the integrity, honour and self-government of English gentlemen. Puttenham may have encountered in manuscript Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, composed between 1581 and 1583 and published for the first time in 1595. An Apology was written partly 35

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because, in Sidney’s words, ‘we miss the right use of the material point of Poesy’. Without the ‘forcibleness’ of genuine feeling, Sidney argued, poems were both unappealing and unpersuasive.2 For him as well as Puttenham, poetry’s ‘material point’ was crucial to both its aesthetic appeal and rhetorical effect, and this materiality was most clearly visible when poetry involved readers’ bodies. Many early modern thinkers found disquieting the propensity of poems to ‘come nere unto us, and touch the quicke’, but Sidney thought afresh about the ways in which poetry moved Englishmen. Both An Apology and The Arte focus upon the vocabulary of everyday bodily experience including processes of digestion, concoction and excretion; the drawing and stopping of breath; lesions and abrasions of the skin; and the beating or skipping of the pulse. In both apologiae, reading involves an exchange between material language and the material bodies of readers. For as we will see, the sympathetic transactions Sidney and Puttenham describe involve not only the soft bodies of men, but also, more unexpectedly, the malleable bodies of poems themselves. Both theorists attend to the thick materiality of literary language as words and sentences acquire physical attributes such as weight and texture.3 Puttenham and Sidney inherited from classical rhetoric and poiesis a conviction that the consequences of reading and writing poetry extended beyond the boundaries of the individual subject. By the mid-sixteenth century, the judicious assimilation of good poetry, redeployed in informed practices of speaking and writing, was understood profoundly to affect not only the moral and spiritual self but also the intellectual, cultural and political life of the nation. Reading may often have been undertaken silently and in private, but Puttenham in particular imagines literary encounters affecting men’s relationships in society at large. ‘Proportion’ therefore emerges in his discussion not only as a literary principle describing the ‘number, measure and weight’ of poetry, but also as a social or civic ideal.4 Building on the rhetorical principle of movere, Puttenham argues that the sensations poetry inspires, including properly tempered feelings of pleasure, enrich private reading experiences, and, at the same time, enable men to contribute more meaningfully to the public world. Although achieving excellence as a reader (or a writer) involves moderating the passions and the bodily sensations they ignite, mental or physical rapture are not described in The Arte as a

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threat to either self-government or civil decorum. Whereas Crosse and many others regarded with suspicion the intense feelings inspired by poetry, scrutinising readers’ bodies in order to diagnose their moral or spiritual shortcomings, Puttenham considers properly tempered bodily sensations as evidence of both literary and moral dignity. The more direct and palpable men’s relationships with poems, the clearer and more vivid their literary experiences were likely to be – and the better prepared they were to achieve right relationships with one another.

II If readers remember liking anything about The Arte, it is perhaps Puttenham’s description of literary figures as real and vibrant: ‘the Trespasser’, ‘the Moderatour’, ‘the Ouer reacher, otherwise called the loud lyer’, ‘the speedie dispatcher’, ‘the Wondrer’, ‘the Stragler’, ‘the Ringleader’, ‘the Vncouthe’.5 Puttenham presents literary language as brightly and newly alive, arguing in his third book, ‘Of Ornament’, that the creation of poetic style involves distinguishing language ‘no litle from the ordinary and accustomed’. Just as ‘great Madames of honour . . . would be halfe ashamed’ to show their naked bodies, literary flourishes and figurative speeches adorn the ‘body’ of the poem. Judiciously handled ornaments adorn every ‘lymme’ of excellent poetry in the same way as ‘crimson tainte’, applied with skill and restraint, brightens ladies’ lips and cheeks. Like rouge on a dull complexion, then, rhetorical flourishes revivify language ‘with a certaine noueltie’. Improperly applied, however, the effect in both cases is to ‘disfigure the stuffe’.6 Although Puttenham is defining the nature of literary appeal (ornament works to ‘delight and allure’) he is also defining the nature of literary quality. Ornament serves to increase not only poetry’s beauty but also its substance for, at its best, poetry has both ‘skin as it were and beauty’ and a sturdy ‘inside and strength’.7 Recalling the Neoplatonic theory that artists were capable miraculously of breathing life into art, Puttenham describes the enlivening of literary subject matter through near-divine creative process. If poets are ‘able to deuise and make all these things of them selues’, they are properly understood ‘(by maner of speech) as creating gods’.8

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Although Puttenham argues that the craft of the poet is to express truthfully and forcefully whatever he sees before him, literary imitation is less central to The Arte than one might expect. Poetry’s palpability involves more than the affective realism of its content, for it is the formal, stylistic and metrical features of poetry which look as though they are alive. In Book II, ‘Of Proportion’, Puttenham explains that stanzas support ballads ‘not vnlike the old weake bodie, that is stayed vp by his staffe’, and describes how poems’ feet may be made to go, to runne, & to stand still: so as he must be sometimes swift, sometimes slow, sometime vnegally marching, or peraduenture steddy. Lines with an extra syllable, or half-foot, are described as ‘catalectik or maymed’, recalling the Greek verb katalegein, literally meaning to stop short.9 To illustrate the dynamics of poetic metre, Puttenham draws an elaborate analogy between the feet of Greek dactyls and ‘runners at common games . . . sometimes swift sometimes slow as his breath or forces serue him’. Punctuation and caesurae in speech and writing carry out amputations: The shortest pause or intermission they called comma as who would say a peece of a speach cut of. The second they called colon, not a peece but as it were a member for his larger length, because it occupied twise as much time as the comma.10 Full stops (the ‘periodus . . . or full pause’) are compared to the bodily ‘staies or easements’ of travellers. Literary styles have their own tempers, humors and complexions which are, like their authors, hot or cold ‘according to the mettal of their minds’.11 Poetry succeeds not by beautifully describing something (or someone) beautiful in order to persuade the reader that it (or she) lives and breathes. It is not so much literary content that looks vital, in other words, but poetry’s very medium and mechanics. As Sidney puts it in An Apology, the best verse is graced with ‘poetical sinews’ while the worst is marred by ‘swelling phrases’.12 The achievement of literary proportion fi nally involves exercising control over poetry’s figures, which here look strikingly sensitive, by heating, cooling, exercising, manipulating,

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cutting and soothing them. Like books, poems ‘are not absolutely dead things’ (to borrow John Milton’s phrase) for their words and phrases come organically alive under scrutiny.13 Puttenham’s living, breathing figures may at first appear eccentric, but are working to support one of his central suppositions in The Arte: that the parts of poetry not only move or arouse the sensitive bodies of readers, but are also themselves characterised by changeable bodily attributes such as heat, colour, size and texture. In order properly to understand The Arte, then, one must come to terms with the dense materiality which characterises Puttenham’s understanding of literary language and, relatedly, his fascination with the points of exchange between poetry and the physical body. Perhaps he drew directly from Aristotle, ‘the Prince of Philosophers’, the assumption that the same procedures could be used to describe the constituent parts of both poetry and the body.14 Sidney remarked of the poet that ‘all his kinds are not only in their united forms but in their severed dissections fully commendable’, and analysed the features of verse in the same way as one might analyse a man’s ‘parts, kinds, or species’.15 Puttenham likewise proceeds by methodically probing poetry’s parts, limbs and members. He was familiar with the Politics and Ethics and seems to have absorbed much material from the Poetics, especially his belief in the ethical value of poetry. The same basic classificatory terminology appears across the Aristotelian corpus in works of philosophy, aesthetics, science and biology where the terms physis (nature), moria or mere (parts), and systema, synthesis and systasis (structure) are applied without difficulty to the analysis of art and poetry as well as the body and soul. Like The Arte, especially Book III, Aristotle’s analysis of poiesis is quasi-anatomical in character. Tragedy has six parts: plot, character, thought, speech, song and spectacle. The most important part, plot, has three elements: peripeteia (reversal) in which anagnorisis (recognition) is important, metabole (change) and pathos (suffering). Aristotle describes the plot of tragedy as a ‘living organism’ with a beginning, a middle and an end. The methodical treatment of poiesis in the Poetics is similar to the orderly classification of the body in The History of Animals where Aristotle begins by dividing animals’ bodies into segments. Puttenham’s methodical arrangement of poetry into ‘lymmes’ and ‘members’ indeed perhaps recalls the common etymological confusion between mere (parts) and mele (limbs).16

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The anatomical method of analysing poetry is connected in The Arte to poetry’s designs on the bodies and selves of those who produced and consumed it. Puttenham inventories the architecture of the body in terms of its facility to transmit literary expression, describing the convenience of ‘a broad and voluble tong, thinne and mouable lippes, teeth euen and not shagged, thick ranged, a round vaulted pallate, and a long throte’.17 His description of the long and short syllables which make up metrical feet is informed by the mechanics of speech: long sounds arise ‘by the infirmitie of the toung, because the word or sillable is of such letters as hangs long in the palate or lippes ere he will come forth’. Short sounds, on the other hand, are ‘made of such letters as be by nature slipper & voluble and smoothly passe from the mouth’. Puttenham’s elision of words with the parts of the body which fashion them lies behind his description of a rude, barking lawyer as ‘a mouthy Aduocate’.18 Literary figures and bodily gestures seem inseparable, as though poetry becomes describable at the points at which it enters into, or emerges from, the physical body. The application of one figure, the scornful ‘Micterismus. or the Fleering frumpe’, for example, is best accompanied by ‘drawing the lippe awry, or shrinking vp the nose’.19 It was conventionally agreed that poetry stimulated the eyes and ears; in The Arte, it also brushes, tickles, impresses, grazes and skims the nose, tongue, lips, teeth, throat and palate. The parts of poetry are accordingly recognised not only by how short or long they look or sound, but also by the way they feel. Their measures are ‘thicker or thinner’, their forms ‘euen & smooth’, or distinguished by virtue of their ‘solliditie and stedfastnesse’.20 Consonants and vowels are identified by their ‘hardnesse or softnesse’, letters of the alphabet can be ‘tossed’ around, sentences can undergo ‘alterations in shape’ as well as sound and sense, and the matter of speech can become altogether ‘too full’. 21 Poetic accents can be heavy enough to ‘fall downe’, or light enough to ‘rise vp’, like as one or two drops of water perce not the flint stone, but many and often droppings doo: so cannot a few words (be they neuer so pithie and sententious) in all cases and to all manner of mindes, make so deepe an impression, as a more multitude of words to the purpose discreetely, and without superfluitie vttered:

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the minde being no lesse vanquished with large loade of speech, than the limmes are with heauie burden.22 Properly pitched and appropriately measured out, poetry makes a tangible impression on those who hear it. Puttenham’s vocabulary calls to mind Sidney’s remarks in An Apology about literary ‘stuff’ and ‘matter’; here and in The Arte, poetry has both material substance and material effects.23 Words do not simply share characteristics with bodies in Puttenham’s discussion, nor are they simply discharged from or received into bodies in ways that make the sensory organs look vulnerable or strange. Instead he describes a vigorous, energetic and powerfully creative exchange between the substance of poetry and the minds and bodies of those who encounter it. An improvisatory dynamic emerges between readers and the literary environment they inhabit, and it is perhaps for this reason that Puttenham emphasises the twofold properties of energeia – a feature of literary style identifiable on the page in a ‘goodly outward shew’ of words and, at the same time, an affective property of poetry ‘inwardly working a stirre to the mynde’: that first qualitie the Greeks called Enargia, of this word argos, because it geueth a glorious lustre and light. This latter they called Energia of ergon, because it wrought with a strong and vertuous operation24 The liveliest features of style are thus inseparable from the liveliest experiences of emotion. Puttenham describes each literary figure as a ‘stirre or motion in wordes’, determining at the same time whether it ‘vrges affection’ or appeases the passions. In The Arte the experience of reading lively poetry sounds as absorbing as an intensely lived life: the reader is drawn imaginatively beyond the confines of isolated subjectivity as the body remaps its boundaries according to its affective relationship with the poetry it encounters outside. 25 Puttenham is describing something close to the sensation Plutarch called synenthousion, the precious, sympathetic enthusiasm or elation which makes readers respond positively to the heroic examples they find on the page.26 Sidney agrees with Puttenham’s proposition that poetry should be ‘passionate to the eare and hart of the hearer’,

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succinctly describing good poetry as ‘passionate describing of passions’. He deplores songs and sonnets written by those claiming to be ‘under the banner of irresistible love’ but which if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love: so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings (and so caught up certain swelling phrases which hang together like a man which once told me the wind was at north-west and by south, because he would be sure to name winds enough) than that in truth they feel those passions, which easily (as I think) may be bewrayed by that same forcibleness or energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer.27 Writing which stems from genuine feeling fosters reciprocal feelings in the reader. A passionate love poem ignites the physical sensation of heat, for example, as it powerfully ‘stirreth and . . . inflameth the mind’. Energeia is both unmistakable and impossible to hide: if the sonneteer feels ‘passions . . . in truth’, then such feelings are ‘easily . . . bewrayed’. For Sidney as well as Puttenham, energeia functions as a sure marker of both literary excellence and emotional authenticity.28 This dynamic reciprocity between poems and readers contributes in important ways to Puttenham’s central preoccupation in The Arte: the facility of poetry to inspire virtue among Englishmen. Like other contemporary apologists such as William Webbe, who argued that poetry encouraged ‘ciuility and gentlenes’, Puttenham regarded proper practices of reading and writing as an effective spur to a better life.29 Both Puttenham and Sidney invoke from Horace’s Ars Poetica the stories of Orpheus and Amphion in order to describe how music and poems bring about ‘the mollifying of hard and stonie hearts’, civilising those without natural feeling. Even ‘the most barbarous and simple Indians’, Sidney suggests, may have ‘their hard dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delights of Poetry’.30 Again following Horace, Sidney argues that poetry’s sweetness and usefulness are inseparable, for delightful poetry works by ‘moving to well-doing’. The ethically enriching experience of being moved by poetry involves the body as well as the mind and soul: watching a tragedy, for example, is like undergoing surgery, for ‘tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours’ when confronted by drama which ‘openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are

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covered with tissue’. According to Plutarch, Sidney remarks, the hardened heart of Alexander Pheraeus was softened in this way by tragedy’s ‘sweet violence’.31 Sidney confounds the familiar distinction between thought and feeling: it is precisely by combining sensation with the capacity to reason that writers and readers achieve judgement and understanding. The reasoning of philosophers is ‘so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived’ that it leaves readers cold; the poet, on the other hand, yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth. Only when philosophers and historians gather ‘some feeling of Poetry’, redeploying its unique facility to strike, pierce, soften and sharpen readers, will they succeed in moving others towards virtue.32 Puttenham emphasises that the feelings aroused by poetry must be as carefully regulated, and as evenly proportioned, as the regular numbers, measure and weight of poetry. He consistently links literary propriety with corporeal sobriety: properly assembled syllables are slippery, smooth and delicate; we know they are so because we feel them ‘smoothly proceeding from the mouth’ or because the rhythm they make up agreeably ‘shapes . . . to’ the ear. Imperfect rhymes, on the other hand, tend to ‘annoy & as it were glut the eare’.33 Inkhorns and other ‘sodaine innouations’ in speech are also objectionable. Literary proportion is connected in The Arte with specifically English ideals of ethical or moral excellence. Writing about Richard Stanyhurst’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, Puttenham remarks that ‘my stomacke can hardly digest . . . his words’, especially his ‘copulation of monosillables supplying the quantitie of an trissillable to his intent’.34 Puttenham’s name (like Stanyhurst’s) is often associated with the quantitative movement in verse whose supporters were committed to adopting the principles of ancient metre as the basis for English prosody. If poetry was an art ‘of al antiquitie . . . among the Greeks and Latines’, Puttenham argues, so English verse has now reached sufficient maturity that it too can be ‘fashioned and reduced into a method of rules & precepts’. In his

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technical discussion of literary proportion in Book II, Puttenham maps the rhythm of native words and phrases onto classical measures, retaining the vocabulary of iambs, trochees and dactyls to describe ‘the pleasant melody of our English meeter’.35 Dedicated at the same time to fashioning a new, specifically vernacular poetics, however, he argues that clear, strong rhymes compensate the English language for its lack of classical ‘numerosity’. He finally prefers to scan verse by syllables rather than ancient ‘mincing measures’, and coins new English names for each literary figure he describes, thus ‘satisfying aswel the vulgar as the learned learner’.36 The Arte thus contributes to the debate about quantitative verse and rhyme which flourished from the 1570s to the early 1600s. As Richard Helgerson has argued, this debate was fraught with issues of national self-definition: to manipulate a linguistic system was to manipulate a cultural system where English identity was at stake. The art of poetry indeed resembles an art of living in Puttenham’s discussion where the achievement of proportion in verse involves the achievement of balance, wholeness and integrity in everyday life. Cultivating literary propriety is like nurturing English civility, and involves eliminating rhyming inkhorn polysyllables which ‘smatch more the schoole of common players than of any delicate Poet Lyricke or Elegiacke’.37 Poetry’s facility to move private bodies and selves played an important part in the creation of a public, imperial ‘kingdom of our own language’.38 Aesthetics and self-scrutiny are inseparable in The Arte: the ordered, masculine, temperate body signifies excellence in verse, whereas the curious, effeminate, asymmetrical body betokens literary indecorum. Properly constructed utterances resemble ‘the vertues of a well constitute body and minde’, whereas ‘rude and vnciuill speaches’ are offensive like ‘the shape of a membred body without his due measures and simmetry’. Puttenham notes approvingly Emperor Marcus’s reprimand to one ‘fine, foolish, curious, sawcie’ ambassador whom he accused of being more likely ‘to combe & cury thy haire, to pare thy nailes, to pick thy teeth, and to perfume thy selfe with sweet oyles’ than to concentrate on speaking with dignity.39 Both bodily and literary curiosity, or preciousness, ‘carry a marueilous great indecencie’ and no affectation is more uncivil than if one seems by one’s ‘voice a woman’.40 The bodies of English poems and the bodies of English aristocrats should ideally resemble and complement one another, and, in the

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exchanges Puttenham imagines, the best-proportioned minds and bodies sympathetically resemble the most generous, capacious – and most pleasurable – aspects of literary experience. For although Puttenham emphasises temperance, he also negotiates a place for pleasure in his new English poetics. It has often been assumed that the mastery of passion by reason is a primary Western ethical or psychological ideal, and that knowledge derived from or located in the body is imperfect and improvisatory compared to the civilised, measured workings of the mind. Contrary to these expectations, however, Puttenham sees sensation, especially pleasurable bodily sensation, contributing in important ways to virtuous acts of reading. Literary ‘volubilitie’, a form of delight located firmly in the body, features prominently in his innovative theory of affect. The best poems are made up of slipper words and sillables, such as the toung easily vtters, and the eare with pleasure receiueth, and which flowing of wordes with much volubilitie smoothly proceeding from the mouth is in some sort harmonicall and breedeth to th’eare a great compassion.41 Feelings of pleasure accompany the experience of reading poetry, and Puttenham describes the exchange which takes place between good poems and good listeners as a form of delightful sympathy. To Puttenham’s mind, there is no contradiction involved in achieving dignity through somatic and physical feeling. Reading involves a powerful engagement of the passions, and poems become vivid, present and credible when they reach through men’s ears into their imaginations.42 Men are not advised to deny themselves the sensory pleasures of reading, but to temper such pleasures judiciously and allow them to work on the body and soul in an ethically transformative fashion. The bodies of Puttenham’s imagined readers are therefore sensitive and malleable (or ‘tender and quesie’) enough to experience the intense feelings necessary in order fi nally to nurture masculine sobriety.43 The pleasurable sensations involved in reading poetry are also central to Sidney’s An Apology. Drawing from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, he famously describes poetry as ‘medicine of cherries’ and the poet himself as ‘food for the tenderest stomachs’.44 Poetry’s pleasures are ‘sweet’ and ‘sugared’ with a ‘pleasant taste’ as the poet takes

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the reader on a journey through a fair vineyard, offering ‘a cluster of grapes . . . that full of that taste, you may long to pass further’.45 As we will see in Chapter 5, Renaissance ideas of literary imitation are heavily indebted to notions of textual digestio; and Sidney draws from this tradition when he describes how inexperienced writers hastily ‘devour’ Cicero and Demosthenes instead of drawing selectively from their pages. Their own writing suffers as a consequence from over-adornment: ‘now they cast sugar and spice upon every dish that is served to the table’, their writing offering only an indigestible ‘surfeit to the ears’.46 Well-regulated digestion here stands for literary excellence, whereas disordered or excessive consumption suggests textual imperfection. Sidney describes in An Apology a kind of literary katharsis: even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste: which, if one should begin to tell them the nature of aloes or rhubarb they should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth. Here, ‘aloes or rhubarb’ work as a purgative, just as ‘rhubarb words’ do in Astrophil and Stella.47 This passage recalls Aristotle’s tantalisingly brief note on katharsis in The Poetics where it is argued that tragic plots evoke pity and fear in the audience, enabling the purging of particular emotions in those who are susceptible to them. Although Aristotle does not elaborate on this theory in the Poetics, passages in some of his other writings, especially Politics, suggest that katharsis is primarily a medical metaphor.48 In both medical and ethical contexts, the state of being katharos is one of harmony or natural balance. Given Aristotle’s interest in medical katharsis, or the purging of peccant matter by the application of drugs, it seems that he imagined in the Poetics an equilibrium which was not only metaphysical and moral in nature, but also medical or pathological. Aristotelian katharsis can be seen as a precursor of the early modern development of humoral theory; and with the related theory of the passions where emotional and hence physiological equilibrium could be maintained by habitual vigilance and self-discipline. Sidney’s description of poetry’s medicinal effects, secretly administered through its sweet-

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nesses, therefore draws from both classical and early modern allopathy. Sidney’s An Apology and Puttenham’s The Arte both suggest that poetry involves the whole mental and physical self. Marriage songs work ‘to refresh the faint and weried bodies and spirits’; and dirae, poems designed to reproach enemies, counterbalance men’s ‘canker’ or ‘gall’ thus providing ‘great easement to the boiling stomacke’.49 If predictable, well-regulated bodily sensations accompany encounters with well-directed, commendable poetry, painful bodily disorders are linked with less decorous literary kinds. In his chapter on ‘witty scoffes and other merry conceits’, Puttenham remarks that all the world could not keepe, nor any ciuill ordinance to the contrary so preuaile, but that men would and must needs vtter their splenes in all ordinarie matters also: or else it seemed their bowels would burst.50 The body’s unstoppable production of waste describes the follies of speaking too much, or speaking out of turn. The act of writing satires and epigrams is as intuitive as relieving an overflowing spleen or emptying the bowels, and Puttenham goes on to describe the sharp, irritating nip such poems are intended to deliver to friends and foes alike. Satirical verse issues from the writer’s afflicted body and, in turn, stimulates discomfort in the reader. Sidney similarly describes in An Apology how mysomousoi, or poet-haters, work ‘by stirring the spleen’, and how a lampooning ‘Iambic . . . rubs the galled mind’. Bodily discomfort stimulates indecorous writing: ‘there is nothing of so sacred a majesty but that an itching tongue may rub itself upon it’. Like an overwhelming urge to scratch or defecate, the impetus to compose satires looks both spontaneous and irresistible. Unlike more familiar metaphors comparing the act of writing poetry with conception or parturition, the body’s baser functions suggest the indignity of satire as a literary occupation. As Sidney sees it, bodily urgency overwhelms rational thought: stirring the spleen ‘may stay the brain’.51

III Sidney and Puttenham found support for their theory of sympathetic transactions between dignified poetry and bodily decorum

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(or disreputable poetry and bodily immodesty) in the writings of Roman rhetoricians. Renaissance poetics were heavily indebted to both ancient and contemporary theories of rhetorical performance: Puttenham argues that the poet is ‘the most auncient Orator’, and although Sidney acknowledges that some readers might object to his ‘straying from Poetry to Oratory,’ he finally argues that the two disciplines are inseparable.52 In the first book of De Inventione, Cicero names the five parts of rhetoric as inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and pronuntiatio (invention, arrangement, expression, memory and delivery). His comments on the fifth part, pronuntiatio, confirm that the rhetor’s management of his body contributed in important ways to his effectiveness as a speaker: ‘pronuntiatio est ex rerum et verborum dignitate vocis et corporis moderatio’ (‘Delivery is the control of voice and body in a manner suitable to the dignity of the subject matter and the style’).53 Puttenham recalls Cicero’s remark that Roscius’s efficiency as an orator was impeded because ‘he was squint eyed and had a very vnpleasant countenance . . . which made him ridiculous or rather odious to the presence.’54 The close connection between bodily self-control and effective rhetorical communication is confirmed in De Senectute where Cicero observes that despite the many graces of seniority, ‘The orator, I fear, does lose in efficiency on account of old age, because his success depends not only upon his intellect, but also upon his lungs and bodily strength.’55 For Puttenham, as for Cicero, bodily sobriety is a useful gauge of literary quality. Poetry begins in the body – or, more accurately, in the brain: ‘the very Poet makes and contriues out of his owne braine, both the verse and matter of his poeme’. Puttenham offers several explanations: this science in his perfection, can not grow, but by some diuine instinct, the Platonicks call it furor: or by excellencie of nature and complexion: or by great subtiltie of the spirits & wit, or by much experience and obseruation of the world, and course of kinde, or peraduenture by all or most part of them.56 Like many early modern theorists of authorship, Puttenham conflates several different accounts of artistic creativity. In Plato’s Ion, literary invention has a non-rational, extra-human genesis: as

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Socrates explains, lyricists and the writers of epic are able to create beautiful poems because they are ‘inspired and possessed’.57 Puttenham may also have known Book 30 of Aristotle’s Problems which offers a physiological explanation for literary creativity: men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile. Other outstanding individuals such as Empedocles, Plato and Socrates were similarly afflicted, and, according to Aristotle, ‘the same is true of most of those who have handled poetry’. Secular theories of inspiration in the Renaissance often emphasised the connection between artistic creativity and black bile, and this idea was as familiar as notions of Platonic furor. Artistically gifted men were commonly described as suffering from humoral imbalance, so that illness and impairment emerged as affirmative tokens of both blessedness and genius.58 Those afflicted by fevers sometimes unexpectedly turn poet, astonishing bystanders by uttering ‘couplements of verses very well composed’. The ability spontaneously to speak poetry is conferred by a change in bodily temperature, for ‘the imagination, to which Poetrie belongeth, is that which requireth three degrees of heat’.59 Early modern theorists regarded with some suspicion the link between artistic creativity and experiences of bodily or emotional imbalance, perhaps because illness was so difficult to separate from the shameful states of despair and self-pity. In his dedication of his translation of The Odyssey to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, George Chapman took care to describe the ‘twofold rapture’ of literary inspiration, explaining that while some poets are afflicted by ‘Insania, a disease of the mind, and a meere madnesse, by which the infected is thrust beneath all the degrees of humanitie’, others are blessed with a ‘sound and diuinely healthfull . . . Diuinus furor’ infused from God.60 The suspicion that poetic inspiration may be nothing more than an infection ‘degenerately proceeding from man’ was already present, indeed, in Horace’s Ars Poetica – commonly regarded in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the best available authority on the craft of writing and quoted twice in Puttenham’s The Arte. Horace connects literary inventiveness with contagion:

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Ut mala quem scabies aut morbus regius urget aut fanaticus error et iracunda Diana, vesanum tetigisse timent fugientque poëtam qui sapiunt; agitant pueri incautique sequuntur. hic, dum sublimis versus ructatur et errat As when the accursed itch plagues a man, or the disease of kings, or a fit of frenzy and Diana’s wrath, so men of sense fear to touch a crazy poet and run away; children tease and pursue him rashly. He, with head upraised, splutters verses and off he strays.61 Unlike Aristotle, who regards bodily suffering as an enabling stimulus to artistic creativity, Horace describes the afflicted body as a terrifying and unpredictable affront to civility. Here verse resembles the troubling and embarrassing symptoms of illness: an itch, a disease, a fit, or a splutter. Both ideas are present in The Arte where Puttenham struggles to reconcile ideas of inspiration – ascribed to both Platonic furor and the poet’s own ‘nature and complexion’ – with available criteria of literary decorum. The poet must be in good health, otherwise ‘the euill and vicious disposition of the braine hinders the sounde iudgement and discourse of man’, giving rise to monstrous conceits.62 Properly conceived and understood, however, poetry provides ‘an ayde and coadiutor to nature . . . as doth the arte of phisicke, by helping the naturall concoction, retention, distribution, expulsion, and other vertues, in a weake and vnhealthie body’. Like an invigorating cordial, poetry enables man to function ‘ouer and aboue the stint of his first and naturall constitution’.63 Puttenham is seldom credited with Sidney’s ironic, self-deprecatory wit, but his defence of poetry is perhaps even more resourceful than Sidney’s An Apology. Both writers were committed to drafting a fiercely topical defence of poetry, and literary excellence emerges most clearly in both treatises at the point at which it touches or anticipates touching those who produce or consume it. Puttenham’s account of affect in particular rests on the assumption, now lost to us, that poems (like other objects in the phenomenological world at large) had humours, temperaments and complexions; and the assumption is disconcerting because it collapses the seemingly secure boundary between subjects and the world they inhabited. Puttenham takes for granted the early modern body’s involvement in a

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dynamic, reciprocal relationship with the environment which surrounded it, allowing him to conceptualise lively, sympathetic exchanges between books and readers. For many of his contemporaries, the pleasurable bodily sensations experienced by impressionable male readers were a source of anxiety and impediment. While Puttenham occasionally shares these anxieties, The Arte is clearly informed by his initial supposition that poets were ‘the first Philosophers Ethick’, committed to teaching men ‘the first differences between vertue and vice’ by delighting them. This supposition enables Puttenham to envisage the reformative effects of carefully moderated literary pleasure on men’s passions, and to assert poetry’s nobility and dignity by way of its facility to inspire bodily sensation. Poetry’s effects on the material body are indeed presented in The Arte and An Apology as the very qualities which mark out literary language as different and precious. It matters deeply what poetry feels like; and such feeling involves not only the imagination, variously conceived, but also the entire psychophysical self. Good poetry stimulates not only the mind but also the body of the writer and reader, and sensation is the place where fresh, energetic encounters with literature begin.

3 Arming the Reader: Sir Philip Sidney and the Literature of Choler

I This chapter returns to Sir Philip Sidney’s work in order to explore one particular strand of the history of the connection between reading and bodily sensation: poetry’s ability to inflame passionate anger among soldiers. Remembered as the archetypal soldier-poet, Sidney was immersed in classical and early modern theories about poetry’s effects on the minds and bodies of servicemen. He explores the affective impact of literature in both An Apology for Poetry and The Arcadia, suggesting that reading could change men in fortificatory and prejudicial ways by stimulating sensations associated with choler. The capacity to feel virtuous anger, and to act upon it, was regarded in the late sixteenth century as an essential and indeed civilising trait among soldiers. At the same time, however, neo-Stoic thought viewed excessive or uncontrolled anger as shameful. The following discussion places Sidney’s writings alongside treatises dealing with military discipline and emotional self-government in order to explore the place of poetry in the history of military masculinity. Sidney considers the degree to which men should exercise control over their minds and bodies, and deliberates whether abandoning oneself to sensation – especially the anger aroused by certain forms of fiction – may reinforce men’s active commitment to country and commonwealth. Sidney begins An Apology by recalling his conversation in Vienna with John Pietro Pugliano, Esquire of the Stable at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, who proposes that ‘soldiers were the 52

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noblest estate of mankind’. Sidney is ‘provoked to say something’ about poetry in return, and undertakes an apology of his ‘unelected vocation’.1 An Apology had the more combative title The Defence of Poesie in William Ponsonby’s 1595 edition, and Sidney’s insistence on the close relationship between poetry and military service has often been counted among his own martial credentials. 2 But while he seems committed in An Apology to the view that poetry plays an important role in the education of soldiers, it is difficult to reconcile this commitment with the crux of his argument: that poetry is uniquely valuable because it gives pleasure. It was precisely the facility of poetry to delight soldiers which Stephen Gosson objected to in The School of Abuse (1579), the treatise Sidney’s An Apology was probably designed to rebut. In his encomium on ‘Olde Poets’, Gosson explained that epic poetry once inspired men to undertake heroic deeds by chronicling ‘the notable exploytes of worthy Captaines’. Such poems were inspirational precisely because they eschewed sensory pleasure: they were written ‘not to tickle the eare, but to teach euery souldier when to strike and when to stay, when to flye, and when to follow’. Before they became softened and corrupted by reading the wrong sorts of poetry, Englishmen were properly trained in ‘martial discipline’ – and reading the right sorts of poetry formed an important part of their regimen.3 Sidney agrees with Gosson about the special affinity between soldiers and epics, but departs radically from him in arguing that poetry fortifies soldiers by delighting them. The pleasures Sidney imagines, however, are not only the straightforwardly sensory or erotic ones which bothered Gosson. It is argued here that Sidney’s defence of poetry’s pleasures draws from Aristotle’s discussion of the psychology of emotion in On Rhetoric, a text Sidney translated and frequently referred to in his correspondence. Reading An Apology in this context illuminates Sidney’s spirited account of literary invention, which, I argue, identifies the angriest poems as the most delightful ones.4 Sidney’s own disposition was seemingly ‘not over cheerful by nature’ and he may have been prone in particular to outbursts of rage.5 His tutor Hubert Languet warned him against flying into a fury with his friends for no good reason. ‘I see . . . by your last letter that you have digested your wrath’, he remarked on one occasion,

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advising Sidney to avoid becoming habitually angered by the ungracious behaviour of others.6 Even Sidney’s most fervent admirers, including those who eulogised his martial heroism after his death, disapproved of his tendencies towards impetuous outbursts and rash decisions. Thomas Moffat praised his extraordinary battle-courage in Nobilis or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney, but nevertheless ascribed to rashness Sidney’s decision not to wear the thigh-guards which might have saved his life at Zutphen in 1586.7 Languet was already concerned about Sidney’s ‘ardour of youth’ in 1578 when he tried to check his excited reaction to the news that English troops were to be sent to Belgium under the command of the Earl of Leicester.8 Languet implores Sidney to remember Cato’s advice to his son to exercise caution before resorting to the sword, lamenting the impetuousness of most noblemen destined for a career at arms who are ‘possessed with this madness, that they long after a reputation founded on bloodshed’.9 There is little evidence in The Arcadia that Sidney absorbed Languet’s advice. The very name of his principal hero, Pyrocles, suggests that he regarded an irascible, fiery temperament (or ‘Pyroclean nature’) as one important qualification for military excellence, the mark of a man ‘fuller of bravery in the midst than in the beginning of danger’.10 Some readers regarded The Arcadia – especially the revised version – as indispensable reading material for apprentice soldiers, comparing favourably its descriptions of military tactics with Homer’s Iliad. Concentrating on one of the angriest characters, Amphialus, and considering the remarks of Sidney’s contemporaries alongside his own theories about reading, I explore in this chapter the ways in which The Arcadia inflamed the minds and bodies of those who encountered it. Sidney tested in the revised version of The Arcadia his theory, formulated in An Apology, that the pleasures associated with reading fiction caused the blood to move in favourable ways, giving rise to virtuous anger and facilitating soldierly vigour. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who advised soldiers to avoid the distractions of poetry in favour of military history, Sidney regarded imaginative writing as a uniquely effective stimulus to choleric bravery. Scholars have argued that Sidney remained uncertain about the worth of The Arcadia because of the apparent frivolousness of prose romance as a literary genre. But Sidney’s misgivings about his own romance derived from his residual uncertainty about whether it

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was right to impel young men into military service by delightfully and irresistibly deceiving them.11

II Poetry was prized in antiquity for its ability to ignite fervour in men’s minds and bodies, enabling them to face combat without fear. In Ars Poetica, Horace describes how epics and martial elegies sharpen the minds of soldiers ready for engagement: ‘Tyrtaeus with his verses fired manly hearts for battles of Mars’. Pricked by the heroic examples they encounter on the page, young men experience a sympathetic enthusiasm powerful enough to spur them into action.12 Alexander the Great relied on poetry to stir up his troops who were reported as often as they entended to ioyne battaile with their enimies, to haue enflamed themselues by the readinge of certayne verses, wherein some horrible confl icte committed, was of some Poete described & set forth.13 By hearing about fierce conflict, men are inspired fiercely to emulate it. In Book 3 of the Republic Plato considers whether stories might have beneficial effects on men’s courage: What about if they are to be brave? Won’t they also need stories which are designed to make them fear death as little as possible? Poets must speak ‘in a way that is conducive to courage in battle’, encouraging citizens to face death fearlessly. Certain passages from the works of Homer and others must therefore be struck out, especially those which make listeners shudder and shiver, because they represent death as terrible (deinon). Since such passages imperil both the inward commonwealth of the mind and the community at large, they should be replaced with ‘hymns to the gods and eulogies of virtuous men’.14 These ideas filtered into early modern discussions of the effects on soldiers of reading, many of which concentrated on poetry’s ability to move and inspire (movere) as well as teach (docere). Good poetry may contain useful advice about military tactics, but its more

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immediate, affective properties could profitably be harnessed to inspire aggression among men of arms. Although Gosson regretfully regarded such heroic emulation as a thing of the past, others argued that sympathetic experiences of reading and listening retained a privileged place in military education. In The Governour, Sir Thomas Elyot recommended the final books of The Aeneid to every young recruit who would there finde matter to ministre to hym audacite, valiaunt courage, and policie to take and susteyne noble enterprises, if any shall be nedefull for the assailynge of his enemies.15 Thomas Heywood described how the ‘liuely portrature’ of valour on stage touched soldiers more profoundly than description alone: to see a souldier shap’d like a souldier, walke, speake, act like a souldier: to see a Hector all besmered in blood, trampling vpon the bulkes of Kinges. A Troylus returning from the field in the sight of his father Priam . . . Oh these were sights to make an Alexander. So powerful is the ‘bewitching’ effect of theatre, indeed, that Heywood imagines a straightforwardly symbiotic relationship between watching a warrior on stage and becoming one in real life. History plays, especially those dealing with the life of Caesar, are guaranteed to stir up valour among soldiers by working to ‘new mold the harts . . . and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt’. Heywood promises his readers that such theatrical experiences will end up ‘animating thee with courage, deterring thee from cowardise’.16 Philip Massinger similarly exalted the facility of actors ‘to inflame/The noble youth with an ambitious heat’, for certain plays ‘fire/The blood, or swell the veins with emulation’.17 The right sorts of plays and poems, seen or read in the right ways, act powerfully on the bodies and selves of soldiers, heating their blood and animating their souls. As Jeremy Collier would later remark, Greek tragedy was originally written by men who were ‘Martial, and Enterprizing. There is Drum and Trumpet in [their] Verse. ‘Tis apt to excite an Heroick Ardour, to awaken, warm, and push forward to Action’.18 Early modern theorists of the emotions nevertheless struggled to jettison the Stoic conviction that anger was a bodily infirmity rather

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than a marker of masculine strength. Following Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics, a text Sidney particularly admired, they distinguished between different sorts of anger (knotty, burning, fretful, cowardly, grave and impatient) as well as the ‘Anger of Emulation’ which men felt when they perceived themselves to have fallen shamefully short of the achievements of others.19 Perhaps the least governable of the irascible emotions of the sensual appetite, anger was thought to arise from the insupportable feeling of being condemned, despised or neglected by others, and to lead inexorably to the painful desire for revenge.20 Choler’s hot, dry, bitter properties were ascribed to the motions of the heart: ‘in anger, the hart (as rising to reuendge himselfe) labours and beates, & then the spirits beeing chafed, doe heat the blood’. This hot blood circulated to every member of the body, and the overheated spirits it generated affected in turn the brain and imagination.21 Perhaps recalling Seneca’s De Ira, Robert Burton explained how the natural heat of young men drew them towards bloody thoughts. Such men were apt to be bold and impudent, and of a more hairbrain disposition, apt to quarrel and think of such things, battles, combats and their manhood.22 Theorists such as Pierre de La Primaudie and John Downame agreed that anger was a turbulent, violent and pernicious passion which arose from the weakest parts of the soul: ‘other affections lead a man, but this drawes him, others intice him, but this compels him’.23 Unlike most other emotions, anger had nothing ‘pliant and pleasing’ about it. Boiling blood was no more a sign of strength and integrity than the swellings or ‘pestilent plentie’ caused by other humoral excess. Unbridled anger was particularly disadvantageous to soldiers, for it might fail at crucial moments to ‘whet the courage in warlike exploits’.24 Often dubbed a brevis furor, or short madness, anger drew heat away from the heart to those parts of the body furthest from the centre of life. Its natural lightness then ascended towards the brain, depriving men of reason and plunging them into insanity.25 Its visibly deforming symptoms were particularly disquieting. Anger was always clearly and embarrassingly detectable to others, and ‘the greater it is, the more manifestly discouereth she her

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impatience’.26 Part of the process of overcoming fury therefore involved learning to conceal its signs: ‘let vs hide her in the lowest retreat of our breasts, and let her there be concealed, but so, as she transport vs not’.27 In his essays ‘Of Moral Virtue’ and ‘Of Refraining Anger’, both of which Sidney knew and recommended in a letter to the apprentice soldier Edward Denny, Plutarch (as translated by Holland) describes how anger is accompanied by ‘a sympathie and fellow mooving of the body’ including ‘red flushing of the face, the trembling of the joints, and panting and leaping of the heart’. Angry men bear scowling countenances, ruddy or sometimes startlingly pale complexions, bulging veins, puffed-up necks, unusually bright eyes and quivering lips.28 The hair of an angry man stands on end, his gait is fast and irregular, and his hands appear restless as he fretfully cracks the joints in his fingers. He stammers, gnashes his teeth ‘like a furious Bore’, sighs, mutters and wheezes. Those worst afflicted burst their veins, vomit blood and damage their eye-sight. 29 Terrible feelings of self-detachment may follow: It doth make a man (quasi ex se ire) as it were to goe out of himselfe, and in this respect he who was angry was said by an vsuall Latin phrase non est apud se, not to be with himselfe, and ad se redisse, to haue returned to himselfe, when his anger was passed ouer. If ‘anger is a kind of dis-joyning or Divulsion of things before joyned’, its deforming effects ‘from the hayre of the head to the soale of the foote’ are starkly apparent to onlookers.30 At the same time, however, theorists of the emotions found themselves obliged to admit that those with furious dispositions made better soldiers. Even Thomas Wright regarded feelings of anger as crucially important in wartime for ‘they appertayne to souldiours to stirre them vp to courage, and magnanimitie’. Choler enables ‘noble spirits to attempt most dangerous exploits for the benefit of their countries’, the associated sensations functioning like ‘spurres to stirre vp sluggish and idle soules, from sloathfulnesse to diligence’.31 Aristotle had argued that nothing great could be achieved unless the spirit was appropriately kindled by keenly felt emotion: The man who gets angry at the right things and with the right people, and also in the right way at the right time and for the

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right length of time, is commended . . . those who do not get angry at things that ought to make them angry are considered to be foolish.32 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers adapted this advice in a Christian context. Citing Romans 1 : 18 (‘the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men’) and John 3 : 36 (‘he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him’), Downame concludes that anger is admirable so long as it is employed in holy causes. 33 Anthony Munday and Nicolas Coeffeteau similarly suggest that properly directed anger ultimately serves reason rather than overruling it. Especially useful to those defending Christian causes, it persuades them ‘that God assists them that are wronged and vniustly persecuted’. Men who experience the heat of righteous, godly fury are ‘commonly hardy’ for although some blood is pulled towards the heart, the seat of courage, the rest of the body remains firm and constant.34 It is this virtuous, godly anger that Sidney describes in those passages of An Apology dealing with the benefits to soldiers of reading poetry. The Spartans sang about their past military successes and listened to the verses of the Athenian poet Tyrtaeus of Aphidnae in order to kindle courage in the spirits of their young men. In ancient Greece ‘active men received their first motions of courage’ from Homer, while Alexander, ‘the phoenix of warlike princes’, kept a copy of the Iliad under his pillow beside his sword for he ‘found he received more bravery of mind by the pattern of Achilles than by hearing the definition of fortitude’. The famously fierce Turks and Tartars retained a keen respect for poetry, and songs of ancestral valour, ‘the chiefest kindlers of brave courage’, were still sung in ‘that right soldierlike nation’ of Hungary.35 Since English poetry flowers ‘when the trumpet of Mars’ sounds loudly, worthy poets ought to be honoured with the laurel crown originally offered to triumphant captains, as Petrarch was on the Capitoline Hill.36 Poetry’s inflammatory effects are inseparable in Sidney’s mind from the pleasure men derived from reading. He negotiates a place for pleasure within the vita activa, arguing that the delightful stimulation poems offer the imagination, and the sensations men feel subsequently in their minds and bodies, encourage them to aspire

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towards excellence: ‘Poesy is full of virtue-breeding delightfulness’.37 The reader not only witnesses the valour of Achilles when he reads about it, but feels the same passion pleasurably ‘strike, pierce, [and] possess’ him. For when reading about passions so in their natural seats laid to the view . . . we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them.38 Aristotle had recommended in the Poetics that poets proceed by ‘envisaging things very vividly . . . as if one were actually present at the events themselves’, for those who are actually experiencing the emotions are the most convincing; someone who is distressed or angry acts out distress and irritation most authentically. 39 The lawyer and writer John Hoskyns confirms that Sidney bore these instructions in mind, always endeavouring ‘to imagine the thing present in his own brain that his pen might the better present it’.40 Like other poets, Sidney’s principal aim was ‘to make their picture the more lively’, providing spirited examples to be mirrored in the reader’s pliant imagination. Borrowing a word from Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Sidney describes this as a form of ‘forcibleness or energia’ which persuades the reader not only that poets ‘in truth . . . feel those passions’ they describe, but also enables him sympathetically to feel those same passions in return.41 ‘Lively’ forms of poetry are therefore described in An Apology as having a profound and profoundly beneficial effect on soldiers’ resources of courage. Alert readers experience a form of inflammation which is both pleasurable and militarily useful: For as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy. Such writings appeal irresistibly to soldiers who feel the emotion Edward Reynolds called ‘Anger of Emulation’ as they compare themselves to others. To borrow Sidney’s words, descriptions of action are ‘gallantly to be marked’ and imitated – even (or especially) when the

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example described so exceeds nature as to be inimitable.42 Sidney dismisses the familiar criticism that men were courageous before poems softened them up, arguing on the contrary that it is those who recognise, assimilate and then emulate the passions represented in poetry who are tougher and more militarily resolute. It is thanks to the decline in poetry’s cultural kudos, indeed, that soldiers are enfeebled: whereas poets used to make men sturdy, now ‘idle England . . . can scarce endure the pain of a pen’. Plato had objected to the unruly passions stirred up by reading, but Sidney’s defence rests precisely on poetry’s facility to capture strong emotion and, in so doing, to provoke it in others: ‘I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet’. Poetry is an art ‘not of effeminateness, but of notable stirring of courage’, for although its ‘sweet charming force . . . can do more hurt than any other army of words’, a delightful poem fortifies the company like an excellent ‘companion of the camps’.43 Sidney’s now-lost translation of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric may have enabled him to formulate these connections between soldierly feeling and the pleasure aroused in the imagination by reading. A manual dealing with the foundations of persuasion in emotional psychology, On Rhetoric was regarded in the Renaissance as the most important ancient authority on the art of evoking and subduing passions in others. According to Hoskyns, indeed, Sidney was able vividly to describe ‘personages and affections’ in the Arcadia thanks to his familiarity with On Rhetoric: the understanding of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the directest means of skill to describe, to move, to appease, or to prevent any emotion whatsoever; whereunto whosoever can fit his speech shall be truly eloquent. This was my opinion ever; and Sir Philip Sidney betrayed his knowledge in this book of Aristotle to me before ever I knew that he had translated any part of it.44 In On Rhetoric Aristotle describes speech working powerfully and sometimes unpredictably on the mind, inducing particular moods or emotional states. In the section dealing with those who are ‘irrascible and easily stirred to anger’, he explains how fury is always accompanied by the pleasurable fantasy of retribution:

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a kind of pleasure follows all experience of anger from the hope of getting retaliation. It is pleasant for him to think he will get what he wants . . . Thus, it has been well said of rage [thymos]. A thing much sweeter than honey in the throat, it grows in the breast of men. A kind of pleasure follows from this and also because people dwell in their minds on retaliating; then the image [phantasia] that occurs creates pleasure, as in the case of dreams.45 Aristotle again defines retaliation in The Nicomachean Ethics as a form of delight ‘for revenge provides release from anger by substituting pleasure for pain’.46 Anger may involve sensations of mental or physical distress, but these are accompanied – or even replaced – by feelings of pleasure. Anger pricks the imagination, producing fantasies in the mind’s eye which are delightful partly because they have no basis in reality. Sidney sketches in An Apology a similar relationship between anger and delightful fantasy. Poems inflame the reader’s imagination precisely because they are licensed to depart from the truth, and Sidney answers the charge that poetry is ‘the mother of lies’ with his famous defence: I answer paradoxically, but truly, I think truly, that of all writers under the sun the poet is the least liar, and, though he would, as a poet can scarcely be a liar . . . for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. Poets cannot be liars because their lies are not presented as truths: ‘The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes’.47 Poetry’s singularity resides in its capacity delightfully to mislead readers, and stories which stir up anger in the imagination are particularly powerful in this regard. They provide what Sidney calls an ‘imaginative groundplot’, inspiring men to mark, assimilate and then emulate the heroic action they encounter on the page. The close connection between irascibility and such pleasurable fantasy, secured by Aristotle, enabled Sidney to argue in The Apology that reading for pleasure makes men more ‘commonly hardy’.

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III While Sidney was composing An Apology, advice books directed at ‘younge Souldiours not yet fully perfected in Militarie Practise’ were flourishing.48 Such books deplored precisely those aspects of poetry that Sidney praised, especially its ability to inspire pleasurable anger among servicemen by drawing their imagination into fictional scenarios. Their authors lamented the present decayed state of English military discipline, remembering with nostalgia the martial heroism of preceding decades and stressing the importance of peacetime training for the maintenance of national security. Bitterly criticising existing systems of recruitment, they complained that soldiers were poorly esteemed and miserably recompensed, and argued that England remained perpetually vulnerable to attack thanks to the lack of a permanent standing army and the fact that English soldiers were legally permitted to serve on overseas campaigns. Sidney himself remarked that other countries gained advantage by ensuring they always had soldiers at their disposal, France in particular practising ‘the continual keeping of paid soldiers’.49 In England, however, as Barnabe Rich put it, ‘when seruice happeneth we disburthen the prisons of Theeues, wee robbe the Tauernes and Alehouses of Tospottes, and Ruffines, wee scoure bothe Towne & Cuntrie of Rogges and vagabons’. The practice of recruiting senior officers ‘more for f[r]eendshippe then for experience’ made matters worse. 50 Thomas Digges agreed that the soldier’s ‘profession is now . . . much contemned’, and wished that Sidney had ‘left the patronage of Poetrie . . . and saued me a labor by bestowing his much better witte on some requisite Apologie for souldiers’.51 The authors of military conduct books were particularly concerned about English soldiers’ lack of peacetime discipline. A soldier’s ‘mortal enimies’ emerge in their writings not only as Spanish, Italian, French and Irish troops, but also as the disorientations caused by delight. In The Pathwaie to Martiall Discipline (1581), Thomas Styward warns captains not to allow their soldiers ‘to liue in too much liberty’ for this will encourage drunkenness, swearing and quarrelling. In The Castle, or Picture of Pollicy (1581), dedicated to Sidney, William Blandie insists that soldiers must avoid ‘deynty dyet, womanlyke wantonnes, and vayne pleasures’, and Thomas Trussell agrees in The Souldier Pleading his Owne Cause (1619) that ‘he lesse feareth death

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which hath tasted lest pleasure’.52 Sensory pleasure was regarded with suspicion partly because it encouraged ‘uniust anger’. Some men fly into a rage when their food is not cooked daintily, when they find a spot or a wrinkle on their clothing, or when they hear an unexpected or unpleasant noise, because such men are most Tender to feele an injury, most Suspitious to feare it, and most Interpreting to over-Judge it.53 Pampering themselves with luxuries (women, wine, fine clothes, games) makes such men fuller than ever of deplorable anger. They forget that ‘to subdue passion is to be truely a man’ and that the best soldiers’ ‘affections are as hard to be moved as any’.54 Whereas Sidney extolled poetry’s ability to arouse virtuous anger among soldiers by pleasuring them, then, most military theorists insisted that delightful experiences of reading fostered only tenderness and peevishness. Recalling the passage in Tusculan Disputations where Cicero approves Plato’s decision to turn poets out of his ideal state, they argued that poetry representing ‘brave men wailing’ enervates the soul until ‘the strength of manliness is completely sapped’.55 In The Approved Order of Martiall Discipline (1591), Gyles Clayton warned that the Greeks were vanquished by Philip of Macedon after they, thinking themselues to be in peace and secure, applied themselues in tryfling matters, taking pleasure in Comædies, and such like toyes, altogether laying aside Martiall discipline and the exercise of warlike weapons. Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville remembered that excessive attention to book-learning subdued the Spartans’ inclination to fight, and criticised certain books as ‘idle, vaine, effeminate, and lame:/Engins that did vn-man the mindes of men’.56 Love poems in particular wreak instant havoc upon soldiers’ bodies and souls, leaving them open to charges of moral incontinence. Poetry’s apparent harmlessness ambushes inattentive soldiers, for, as Gosson puts it, ‘the Souldier is sooner killed with a little Bullet, then a longe Swoorde . . . And the weakest Waspe, stingeth the stoutest manne of warre’. 57 Indeed it was poetry’s fictions, or its ‘shadowes and apparances’, which

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made it likely to ignite overwhelming anger. As Proverbs 26:20–2 confirmed: Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out: so where there is no tale-bearer, there strife ceaseth . . . The words of a tale-bearer are as wounds, and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly. Quoting the above passage, John Downame warns that angry men ‘haue open eare to euery tale-bearer, and a credulous hart to beleeue them’, and Reynolds agrees that stories nourish anger in those who are willing to listen to them: ‘Give not an easie Eare to Reports . . . That which wee are desirous to know, or apt to beleeve, wee shall be the more ready to revenge’.58 Ignoble anger ‘proceedeth not from any thing that is permanent and durable, but is windy and vaine’ and may therefore be easily aroused by fiction. Choler is often ‘inkindled by beholding other mens fight’ – especially if the fighting exists only as a fictional representation on paper or canvas.59 It derives from a sense of approaching evil but ‘the causes of this griefe, are not alwayes solid nor true . . . our minds do frame false imaginations, and vaine feares, which many times are the causes of our ruine’. Anger inspired by the imagination is neither righteous nor godly – ‘the cause of our anger is vniust, when it is only imaginarie’ – and the chief means ‘whereby anger is nourished and increased, is multiplying of words’ together with an over-credulous willingness to give ear to them.60 Far from praising poetry’s ability to stir up courage by creating pleasurable fantasies in the imagination, most military men continued to regard fiction as ‘the mother of lies’.61 If poems and plays stirred up petulant fury, histories inflamed judicious, temperate indignation. Soldiers’ spirits (Horace’s animi) were regarded as particularly suggestible to histories which, properly read and assimilated, inspired them towards valiant action.62 Styward advises soldiers to read histories in order to familiarise themselves with stratagems, and Richard Braithwait recommends Livy, Sallust and Tacitus since ‘there is no passage to enliven the Spirit of a Souldier, which these omit’. A carefully executed plan of reading may indeed radically improve the calibre of apprentice soldiers: some, whose remisse spirits durst never enter . . . with any common danger, by being frequently vers’d in Relations of this kinde, became valiant Commanders.63

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Robert Barret agrees in The Theorike and Pratike of Moderne Warres (1598) that soldiers should absorb history since ‘nothing doth more reuiue the spirits, and sharpen the perfectionate wits of man’. The particular experience which Reynolds calls ‘Anger of Emulation’ was usefully pricked by history: Caesar wept when he read the achievements of Alexander, as having not at his age done any memorable thing. And Thucydides hearing Heroditus recite a History which he had written, brake forth into a strange passion of weeping.64 The essayist Sir William Cornwallis, knighted in 1599 in recognition of his service during the Earl of Essex’s Irish campaign, argued in his Essayes published the following year that ‘the most leaden spirit that euer was, at the hearing a Relation of an vnusuall excellency . . . feeles Emulation tickle him’. In his account of reading the life of Caesar, he describes an intense experience of the battle-hunger aroused by bookish absorption: ‘Reading these liues I am inflamed, my thoughts soare high, and I am sorry I cannot carry my Body to that pitch’.65 Reading no longer resembles a dereliction of duty; rather, the experience of being moved, touched and absorbed by history becomes an ennobling form of action. Cornwallis and his contemporaries inherited from classical sources their appreciation of history’s fortificatory effects on men’s minds, bodies and spirits. In his essay ‘Whether the Athenians were more renowmed for martiall Armes, or good Letters’, Plutarch had argued that they who devise and feigne fabulous deeds of armes, are so much inferiour to historiographers that make true reports, as historiographers who relate onely such deeds come behinde the actours and authours themselves. Poetry offers only ‘the pleasure and delight of words’ which make good ear-sport but finally deceive the affections.66 Reading the ‘poeticall fictions and inventions’ of Euripides and Aeschylus comes a poor second to reading about the prudent martial policy of Themistocles or the valour of Miltiades, and the effects on soldiers can be calibrated in corresponding terms. In the works of excellent historians such as Thucydides,

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there is a certaine image of glorie, which by a kinde of reflexion, as in a mirrour, doth rebound from those who have atchieved noble acts, even unto them that commit the same to writing, when as the actions of other men are represented by their reports and records.67 Seneca also praised the facility of histories to whet men’s moral indignation, and, especially, to kindle feelings of righteous fury: vpon the reading of Ancient Histories . . . We seeme oftentimes to bee angrie, for banishing Cicero, and with Anthonie for killing him. Who is not angrie at Marius Armes, and Syllaes proscriptions? Who is not displeased with Theodotus and Achillas, and that boy Ptolemy, for doing a hainous murther vnfitting for his yong yeares?68 Young readers absorb, reflect and then emulate the exemplary actions they see reported, becoming so actively involved in historical narrative that they respond with warm feeling, their anger whetted as though they had witnessed atrocity in real time. Sidney was familiar with these ancient and contemporary ideas. In a letter of advice written in 1580 to his brother Robert, another young nobleman with military aspirations, he suggests combining practical horsemanship with the study of Greek and Roman historians including Melanchthon, Xenophon, Thucydides and Heroditus who deal with ‘the entrings, and endings of warrs’. Perhaps recalling Languet’s belief that history shapes men’s judgements, Sidney proposes that soldiers (as well as philosophers and astronomers) may make profitable use of history.69 In An Apology, however, he argues that only poetry inspires men by moving them deeply. Since ‘moving is of a higher degree than teaching’, poetry is more likely than history to incline men to perfect their degenerate souls, at the same time encouraging them towards ‘the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only’. A historian is ‘bound to tell things as things were’, but an excellent poet, lifted up with his own invention, embellishes the bare bones of what can be unconditionally affi rmed, ‘making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature’.70 Since poets are unencumbered with the responsibility to adhere rigidly to the facts as

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they are known, they may imaginatively reconstruct events in order to bring them more vividly to life. The best historians are therefore those with ‘some feeling of Poetry’. Indeed Sidney recommends ancient historians to his brother not because they contain accurate descriptions of battles but because the attentive reader discerns there a dash of literary inventio. Even when dealing with wearisome precepts of war, poetical history remains compelling ‘because it carrieth the life of lively example . . . so as the great civilians help themselves with the discourses of historians, so do soldiers’.71 Histories impact forcefully and profoundly upon the imagination only when they make a direct appeal to the passions, imparting ‘true lively knowledge’ rather than wordish description. Sidney’s theory draws from Horace’s account in Ars Poetica of poetry’s inspirational impact upon servicemen, but differs radically from the opinion of most of his contemporaries. While military theorists insisted that delightful poetry provided only an irritating distraction, and advised servicemen to whet their anger by reading histories, Sidney argues on the contrary that history is only useful to men of arms when it offers the pleasures of poetry. For only those histories which ‘taste of a poetical vein’ capture anger feelingly enough to inspire it among others.72

IV Sidney described his own major literary accomplishment, The Arcadia, as an ‘idle work’, and it is tempting to regard it as the product of his temporary dereliction of active duty.73 But prose romance appealed to Sidney partly because of its unique ability to inflame intense and intensely pleasurable feeling among soldiers, spurring them towards virtuous action. ‘Orlando Furioso, or honest King Arthur, will never displease a soldier’, he pointed out in An Apology, for both deal with matters which ‘agree with a corslet’. Even readers of Amadis de Gaul ‘have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage’.74 The first readers of Sidney’s own romance, The Arcadia, argued that it, too, was capable of inflaming heroic, judicious anger. According to Hoskyns, The Arcadia resembles a series of case studies in exemplary bravery: ‘unfortunate valor in Plangus; courteous valor in Amphialus; proud valor in Anaxius’.75 Drawing on the customary defence of poetry, namely its ability to fashion the manners and conduct of English gentlemen,

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Gabriel Harvey praised The Arcadia as a fitting memorial to ‘the golden Pillar of [Sidney’s] noble courage’ and an indispensable manual of swordsmanship for anyone that would ‘skillfully, and brauely manage his weapon with a cunning Fury’. The Arcadia qualifies in Harvey’s account as both a military history comparable to Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, and a good substitute for Homer: Gallant Gentlemen, you that honor vertue, and would enkindle a noble courage in your mindes to euery excellent purpose; if Homer be not at hand . . . you may read his furious Iliads and cunning Odysses in the braue aduentures of Pyrocles, and Musidorus76 As George Chapman would later note in his epistle dedicatory to The Odyssey (1614), ‘the first word of his Iliads is menin, wrath . . . the Bodies feruour and fashion of outward Fortitude, to all possible height of Heroicall Action’.77 To Harvey’s mind, the experience of reading The Arcadia ignites soldiers’ fury by a spontaneous process of recognition, sympathy and emulation. By reading about the valour of Sidney’s soldiers, men experience choleric feeling themselves. Sidney created his angriest warrior, Amphialus, when he came to revise The Arcadia.78 In Book 3, Chapter 4, as Amphialus prepares his forces for the attack he expects imminently from the troops of Basilius, Sidney sketches a system of soldierly virtue where the body’s thermal properties are mapped onto the personal attributes of courage and cowardice. Clinias and Amphialus are humoral opposites, ‘the one in his natural coldness of cowardice, the other in heat of courage’. Clinias ‘for very fear would have hid his fear’ but Amphialus’s fear only diminishes as danger draws closer, the enemy functioning like a ‘magnes-stone’, or magnet, to his valour: ‘now his courage began to boil in choler and with such impatience to desire to pour out both upon the enemy’.79 Furious like a tiger assailed by a company of wolves, Amphialus labours ‘to make valour, strength, choler and hatred to answer the proportion of his love’ for Philoclea. Even when he faces hand-to-hand combat with the Black Knight, his courage remains undaunted for he is ‘rather inflamed than troubled with the increase of dangers’.80 To fight resolutely requires hot humours, whereas to undertake battles ‘excercising more melancholy than choler’ is disastrous. When Sidney calls

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Amphialus ‘truly-affected’, he refers not only to his unwavering love for Philoclea but also to his heroic anger. Amphialus knows that ‘courage without discipline is nearer beastliness than manhood’, and, when he feels disdainful choler rising in his breast, makes sure ‘the remembrance of Philoclea served for forcible barriers between anger and angry effects’.81 If Hoskyns was correct to suggest that The Arcadia is full of exemplars of valour designed to prick readers’ emulation, Sidney seems particularly keen that readers attend to the example of Amphialus. He emphasises his fame and ‘the reputation he had to be one of the best knights in the world’, remarking that his feats on the battlefield deserve even ‘more quiet beholders’ than they already have. Amphialus is famous not only for his bravery, military genius and courtesy, then, but also for being famous. According to Helen, Amphialus is notable chiefly for being noted: What ear is so barbarous but hath heard of Amphialus? Who follows deeds of arms, but everywhere finds monuments of Amphialus? Who is courteous, noble, liberal, but he that hath the example before his eyes of Amphialus? Where are all heroical parts but in Amphialus? 82 He is ‘the famous Amphialus’ whose exemplary ‘story’ precedes him, and it is this story which Helen falls in love with: ‘no man was in our parts spoken of but he for his manhood’. Amphialus’s furious deeds may be beautiful and heroic on their own terms, but they also demand to be witnessed and replicated. His primary aim in fighting the Forsaken Knight is therefore to make himself ‘notable in the notableness of this combat’.83 In the account of the ‘furious meeting’ between the troops of Amphialus and Basilius, Sidney again concentrates on how the scene is to be read and received: The clashing of armour, the crushing of staves, the jostling of bodies, the resounding of blows, was the fi rst part of that illagreeing music which was beautified with the grisliness of wounds, the rising of dust, the hideous falls and groans of the dying. The very horses, angry in their masters’ anger, with love and obedience brought forth the effects of hate and resistance, and with minds of servitude did as if they affected glory . . . though it were

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terrible, yet terror was decked so bravely with rich furniture, gilt swords, shining armours, pleasant pencels that the eye with delight had scarce leisure to be afraid.84 Here the rich colours, frantic movements and jarring noises of war, ornamented with dust and blood, combine to create a scene of sublime beauty. Its very terribleness inspires pleasure in the minds of beholders: this is ‘a delectable sight in a dangerous effect’ with a ‘perfect agreement in so mortal disagreement’. The scene indeed resembles a case study of Sidney’s remark in An Apology, borrowed from Aristotle, that even ‘those things which in themselves are horrible, as cruel battles . . . are made in poetical imitation delightful’.85 At the same time, however, Sidney draws attention to the effort involved in capturing this tableau of anger on the page. The battle is only made beautiful by poetry, for its appeal dissolves when often-changing fortune began also to change the hue of the battles . . . took away the mask, and set forth horror in his own horrible manner. The encounter becomes visible for what it is: ‘universally defiled with dust, blood, broken armours, mangled bodies’.86 The ornaments of poetry may give readers pleasure by glossing over the grim realities of combat, but, Sidney insists, the impression is deceptive. He forbids readers to lose themselves in the fiction by exposing it as a lie. Although he had argued in An Apology that poetry inflames soldiers towards virtuous anger by immersing them in fictional scenarios, he seems determined in the revised Arcadia to undermine any such absorption. He forbids readers to take pleasure in the angry scene, exposing instead the horror of battle and, in so doing, forbidding the pleasurable involvement that might encourage anger of emulation. Sidney was well-versed in the theory of the passions, and the applications of this theory to both reading and the psychology of war. His revisions of The Arcadia suggest his keen awareness of the powerful impact of poetry, especially prose romance, on soldiers’ minds and bodies. As his own readers Hoskyns and Harvey confirm, The Arcadia inspired virtuous choler by encouraging men sympathetically to emulate the heroic valour it described. Whereas physicians and

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military theorists warned that anger could be shameful and dangerous, arguing that stories – unlike histories – ignited only peevishness and irritation among those undisciplined enough to indulge in them, Sidney proposed in An Apology that fictional scenarios which ‘tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be’ are uniquely valuable for their ability to inspire pleasurable sensation in the imagination.87 But the revised Arcadia saw Sidney exploring the disquieting consequences of the insight that sweet poetry stirs up virtuous anger among soldiers by irresistibly misleading them. Sidney’s angriest warrior, Amphialus, is also the character most worthy of emulation. But at the most passionately involving moment in Amphialus’s story, Sidney takes care to point out that he has been deceiving his readers. Sweet poetry may arouse overwhelming feelings of fury among servicemen, stirring up the ardour necessary for military engagement, but it does so by beguiling them – for the poet ‘giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it’.88 If Sidney struggled all his life to reconcile the professions of poetry and soldiery, this struggle was at its most pressing in his ethically nuanced understanding of poetry’s powerful and powerfully misleading ability to make men angry.

4 ‘These Spots are but the Letters’: John Donne and the Medicaments of Elegy

I In the chapter of The Arte of English Poesie devoted to ‘the forme of Poeticall lamentations’, George Puttenham distinguishes between funeral songs (epicedia and monodia), laments sung monthly or annually to commemorate the dead (obsequies), and love-laments (elegies) whose meter proceeds ‘dolourously’. In every case, Lamenting is altogether contrary to reioising, euery man saith so, and yet is it a peece of ioy to be able to lament with ease, and freely to poure forth a mans inward sorrowes and the greefs wherewith his minde is surcharged. This was a very necessary deuise of the Poet and a fine, besides his poetrie to play also the Phisitian, and not onely by applying a medicine to the ordinary sicknes of mankind, but by making the greef it self (in part) cure of the disease . . . not with any medicament of a contrary temper, as the Galenistes vse to cure [contraria contrarijs] but as the Paracelsians, who cure [similia similibus] making one dolour to expell another, and in this case, one short sorrowing the remedie of a long and grieuous sorrow.1 Of funeral elegy’s three traditional functions, lament, eulogy and consolation, Puttenham emphasises the third. An elegist supplies an inventory of the public achievements of the deceased but attends at the same time to inward sorrow, tempering the distress of the bereaved and countering timor mortis with appeals to reason and 73

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acceptance. Like a physician, he applies cathartic medicine in the form of sorrowful words which lessen the afflictions of grief. Christian poets have a particular responsibility to offer spiritual counsel, assisting the bereaved to cope with despair and confront wisely the transition of their loved ones from life to the hereafter. As we saw in Chapter 2, Puttenham was fascinated by poetry’s facility to register the contours of the material body and, in turn, to act upon and alter the bodies of readers. The above description of the affective properties of lament is particularly striking, for behind Puttenham’s comparison of an elegist to the sixteenth-century doctor Paracelsus, who offered remedies to match rather than counter the symptoms they were designed to relieve, lies the assumption that despair was a physical as well as a spiritual and emotional experience – and that sorrowful poetry could mitigate both sorts of pain.2 The present chapter considers the resources of poetry to act therapeutically on despair, concentrating on John Donne’s The Anniversaries. Like Puttenham, Donne explored in these poems the transformative power of literature, especially the ways in which words were absorbed by, impressed onto or reflected in the bodies of those who produced and consumed them. 3 The Anniversaries were addressed to Sir Robert Drury, later Donne’s patron, whose daughter Elizabeth had died aged fourteen in December 1610.4 While some of Donne’s earlier verses fulfil the familiar cultural functions of elegy, working to heal the minds and bodies of the bereaved by sympathetically ventriloquising their grief, The Anniversaries depart radically from these conventions.5 Donne knew that grief could work like ‘proper and peculiar physick’ but seldom imagined a straightforwardly collaborative relationship with his readers.6 For while The Anniversaries sometimes aspire to comfort and cure, Donne repeatedly rebukes himself for failing to effect any such productive catharsis. Indeed one of his most startling accomplishments is his disclosure that despair is inexpressible and consolation always incomplete. Donne also considers in The Anniversaries how writing affects his own body, and forges new connections between literary voice and the frailties associated with despair. He often wrote about his dispositional inclination towards melancholia, and was familiar with the view that excessive or prolonged mourning exacerbated the dangerous symptoms of grief.7 The loss of Elizabeth Drury becomes an opportunity to confront his own mortality and the perishability

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of mankind in general, which Donne links in surprising ways to the process of verse composition.8 Like many early modern elegies The Anniversaries resemble an ars moriendi, reminding readers that mortality is man’s punishment for original sin and that the death of any individual calls to mind the wrongdoings of all mankind. Donne’s discovery that he is writing with and from a dying body makes more difficult the task of writing consolatory elegy as his own infi rmities become a source of anxiety and shame. I argue here that Donne found the consolation which defeated him in The Anniversaries only when he was writing Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions more than a decade later. Suffering from a serious illness, possibly typhus, he found himself confronting death’s imminence in Devotions with new urgency. Here the awareness of his own mortality enabled Donne to achieve a powerfully restorative, confessional voice. Although much admired and imitated in the seventeenth century, The Anniversaries were poorly received by some of their first readers who were unsettled by Donne’s refusal of the familiar form and function of elegy. The Countess of Bedford found the poems indecorous, and Ben Jonson famously objected to Donne’s extravagant praise for an insignificant young woman whom he had never met nor even seen.9 These criticisms still resonate in recent responses to The Anniversaries. Readers continue to worry over the problem of emotional sincerity raised by Donne’s apparent intimacy with Elizabeth Drury, or neglect The Anniversaries altogether in favour of his secular and sacred lyrics.10 Early modern elegists wrote as occasion demanded and were often involved in a commercial relationship with the bereaved. But although they employed artificial literary ‘devises’, to borrow Puttenham’s word, they were nevertheless expected to speak others’ grief ‘with ease’ and apparent sincerity. Donne however acknowledged that he had not written the ‘just truth’ in The Anniversaries, and questions of truth-telling seem central to these poems – especially insofar as they deliberate the relationship between embodiment and sincerity.11 Since grief is a physical as well as an emotional experience, the elegist must himself feel, or appear to feel, its complexional processes. In The Anniversaries, however, Donne takes a sceptical view of the privileged connection between elegy and candour, dramatising the difficulty of speaking sincerely.12

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II Patterns of mourning were changing rapidly in the early seventeenth century. Pre-Reformation Europe has famously been described as ‘a cult of the living in the service of the dead’ where death was regarded as an integral part of everyday life and the prayers of the living affected the outcome of the deceased’s soul.13 In Protestant England, however, the dividing line between the living and the dead assumed greater clarity as the fate of the soul came to be regarded as immutable. The revised 1552 version of the Book of Common Prayer simplified funeral rites by shortening the burial service and omitting prayers for the dead. Now mourners were expected to remain composed, embracing the will of God and grieving for their own sins rather than for their loss. Although new, more tolerant attitudes towards mourning were emerging at the turn of the seventeenth century in conduct manuals, artes moriendi and sermons, this transition was far from straightforward and the problem of how best to mourn remained a topic of intense debate.14 Physicians agreed that grief was among the most dangerous passions, and that the cold, dry humours caused by an excess of black bile were the most difficult ones to purge. Sir Thomas Elyot remarked that There is nothynge more ennemye to lyfe, than sorowe, callyd also heauynes, for it exhausteth bothe naturall heate and moysture of the bodye, and dothe extenuate or make the body leane, dulleth the wytte, and darkeneth the spirites, letteth the vse and iudgement of reason, and oppresseth memorye.15 Sorrow gave rise to a variety of clinical disorders including loss of appetite, poor digestion, sleeplessness, weak pulse, watery urine, ulcers, tumours and paralysis. Continually vexed in both mind and body, those suffering from heaviness of mind were identifiable at a glance by their leanness, thin hair and poor colour. Thomas Wright remarked that very few men escape altogether the assaults of sadness which, like the symptoms of fear and despair, ‘coarct the heart’. The causes of sadness were two-fold: ‘thynges Naturall’ or the disturbance of humoral balance, and ‘thynges not naturall’ such as ill fortune, the ingratitude of others, unfortunate marriage, excessive

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study – and, most hurtful of all, the loss or death of friends.16 Bereavement was a grievous torment capable of extinguishing ‘desire of life . . . [and] all delights’. Even those that are most staid and patient are so furiously carried headlong by the passion of sorrow in this case, that brave discreet men otherwise oftentimes forget themselves, and weep like children many months together. The ensuing grief disturbs the concord between the brain and the heart, or the processes of rational thought and the affections, leaving the imagination vulnerable to hallucinations, suspicion and sleeplessness.17 Despair was regarded not only as a physiological condition but also as a spiritual ailment irreconcilable with Christian faith.18 Churchmen described mourning as the process which began with bereavement, or sometimes the anticipation of bereavement, and warned the faithful against abandoning themselves to overwhelming sorrow. Devotional literature and prayer books considered immoderate grief offensive to God, shameful to the bereaved and injurious to the memory of the deceased. To grieve excessively was to betray one’s own fear of death, a fear properly countered with confidence in the immortal soul. Faithful Christians welcomed rather than feared their own deaths since a longer life would only increase their sins on earth. The sermonist Thomas Playfere, whom Donne may have known, wrote in The Meane in Mourning (1597) that the dead are assuredly happier in heaven: we must sing and reioyce for the godly, not only when they are aliue, but euen when they are dead. And why? Because they being aliue are dead; but these beeing dead are aliue. Despite man’s fallen state, God has provided him with precious comforts foolishly neglected by those who relinquish themselves to grief. Playfere reminds his readers that Christ counselled bereaved parents in Luke 7:13 and 8:52 not to weep for their children whose souls were saved, ‘forbidding thereby immoderate weeping, which is condemned, in Nature: in reason: in religion’.19 Despair posed particular dangers to masculine equilibrium, and many early modern writers were familiar with Plato’s disapproval in

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The Republic of the passages in prose and poetry ‘where eminent men weep and wail in mourning’. It is foolish to grieve for departed friends, Plato argued, because they have suffered nothing terrible. A wise man will be ‘the last person to mourn’ when he loses a son or brother, leaving lamentations to women or the baser sorts of men.20 Plato’s advice lies behind many early modern descriptions of intemperate mourning. In A Garden of Grave and Godlie Flowers . . . Elegies and Epitaphs (1609), Alexander Garden deplored the fact that so many men ‘consume, and spend their spirit’ by writing ‘lynes lugubrious and sad’. Expressing inordinate grief only vitiates men’s strength and offers no succour to the dead.21 Claudius regards Hamlet’s display of ‘unmanly grief’ for his father as foolish, impious and stubborn; and, in All’s Well That Ends Well, Laffew calls ‘excessive grief the enemy to the living’.22 Sir William Cornwallis wondered why ‘wee esteeme it the best assistance of our friend to weepe?’ and Stephen Gosson despised ‘dumpes, and lamentation, both enemies to fortitude’.23 Thomas Rogers agreed that dolour and weeping endanger masculine self-government, for by these shall we get nothing but this therby, that we afterward shall seeme in behauiour light, and in habite vnseemely . . . This owfull Sorrow is a Perturbation which ought not to be in a descreete and wise man. For it is a manifest signe and token of an effeminate & womanlike person. Psychological feeling inevitably manifests itself in observable behaviour, and Rogers argues that those who fail to temper their grief humiliate themselves with womanish displays of feeling. Overwhelming grief is thus not only an affront to the memory of the deceased, but also jeopardises men’s ability to participate meaningfully in society ‘for it weakeneth the string or vaines of vertue, and maketh them in al theyr doing negligent’.24 The tough rationality of Puttenham’s theory of the poet-physician reflects the cultural imperative to mourn in moderation. As grieving to excess undermines the equilibrium of the psychophysical self, inappropriately baleful elegies only cause further pain to the bereaved. Mourning must take place if the dead are to be properly memorialised, but mourning too much, or at the wrong time, offends a sophisticated set of literary, gendered and cultural decorums. Such

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decorums are especially important, according to Julius Caesar Scaliger, in anniversary poems written on the yearly observance of a death since ‘no one continues to lament a man who has been dead for one or two years’.25 Donne demonstrates his familiarity in The Anniversaries with these complex and sometimes self-contradictory attitudes. He was particularly interested in the physiology of despair which, as we will see, provided him with a rich resource to explore the body’s role in self-expression. The sequence of poems which makes up The Anniversaries begins with a commendatory poem, probably by Joseph Hall, entitled ‘To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy’. 26 In Hall’s remarkably pragmatic assessment, Drury died at the right time because Donne, a uniquely accomplished elegist, was alive to write about her. Despite this confident introduction, however, the next two poems in The Anniversaries stage Donne’s struggle with his own ability to write consolatory elegy. ‘A Funeral Elegy’ begins with an elaborate recusatio on its own failures and elegy’s insufficiency as a medium to confront the catastrophe of Drury’s death: Yet she’s demolished: can we keep her then In works of hands, or of the wits of men? Can these memorials, rags of paper, give Life to that name, by which name they must live?

(9–12)

The very process of elegising her looks futile: verse cannot itself confer life, and pen and paper can never properly encompass such an exalted subject who could never in any case ‘stoop to be/In paper wrapped’ (16–17). Drury’s death stands for the sins of mankind, and the opening lines of ‘An Anatomy of the World’ elaborate on the commonplace that ‘Man is called a Microcosme’ by tracing the effects of sorrow on the health of the world at large. 27 The whole world reexperiences the tragic consequences of the Fall, bleeding ‘in a common bath of tears’ (12). The world has ‘speechless grown’ (30), unable to acknowledge Drury’s death even months after the event. It resorts to silence, believing it . . . some blasphemy to say she’was dead; Or that our weakness was discovered

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In that confession; therefore spoke no more Than tongues, the soul being gone, the loss deplore. (51–4) To acknowledge the loss would make public the world’s shame, and, for that reason, the loss becomes unspeakable. Tongues may unfeelingly deplore Drury’s parting, but their empty words fall painfully short of a true confession of the scale of the loss.28 The world is therefore disgraced both by the sickness which confirms its overwhelming sin and, relatedly, by its own silence. In the opening couplet of another poem, ‘An Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred’, Donne describes the same problem of silence: ‘Language thou art too narrow, and too weak/To ease us now; great sorrow cannot speak’. But whereas that poem works towards giving sorrow a voice, the inexpressibility of grief in ‘An Anatomy’ seems as irremediable as the death of Drury herself. Puttenham had praised in The Arte the skill of elegists who lament ‘with ease’, assuming the grief of others in order freely to pour it out again. But ‘An Anatomy’ dramatises Donne’s struggle to express adequately, within the medium of elegy, the sorrow which accompanies another person’s death, and, with it, the painful awareness of one’s own mortality. The grief of bereavement stands for every shameful misdemeanour of mankind, and the catastrophic effects on the body of overwhelming despair hinder any attempt to speak sincerely. 29 Donne describes the world’s failure properly to confront Drury’s death as a failure to make an adequate ‘confession’. Scholars have often remarked upon Donne’s continuing interest in, and reliance upon, the practice of confession, especially his belief in the importance of voicing repentance in public within a community of sanctified believers.30 As Donne saw it, to feel remorse was to acknowledge one’s spiritual sickness and to anticipate being healed by ‘Gods physick’. As the medium of repentance, confession provides ease to the patient because it ‘works as a vomit’.31 Just as elegies comfort the bereaved with the promise of spiritual redemption, so confessions allow men to share their sorrowful sins, express remorse and, finally, seek expiation. Donne raises in ‘An Anatomy’ the possibility that elegiac confession might heal the sickness of despair, but any such therapeutic benefits remain inaccessible. Addressing the world, Donne instead abandons elegy in favour of a literary compromise:

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I (since no man can make thee live) will try, What we may gain by thy anatomy. (59–60) Donne pushes to its logical conclusion the notion of elegy as a ‘devise’ which makes ingenious use of literary resources. He will try writing an anatomy, for the world’s putrefied carcass still contains some residual goodness worth scrutinising. The metaphor of the sick, decayed world is literalised, its ‘matter and stuff’ newly and dramatically visible.32 ‘An Anatomy’ does not aspire, as Puttenham suggested an elegy should, to cure the afflicted in mind and body. It offers no comforting confession to mark the transition from life to death. Instead Donne exposes the whole world’s corrupted corpse by way of a dissection, and withholds the promise of consolation: ‘our anatomy/ . . . should more affright, than pleasure thee’ (371–2). The genre of the anatomy was well-established as a distinct category of early modern written culture, and anatomies existed in every branch of enquiry including science, psychology and theology. Their authors share a methodical approach to their subjects, often describing themselves cutting, flaying or dissecting a tangible ‘body’ of knowledge with the eventual aim of curing errors and cleansing vices.33 But Donne resists any such appeasement. Men’s infirmities are irreparable, their sinfulness matched by their pitifully short lifeexpectancy and stature. Before God made woman, man’s ‘size was great’ (121). Now ‘Contracted to an inch’ (136), he struggles even to overcome fairies and pygmies. These days indeed ‘we are not men’ (111). But it is not loss of manhood which matters most: But this were light, did our less volume hold All the old text (147–8) Donne elaborated in his sermons the idea that the faithful embodied God’s Word and, in so doing, fulfilled its teachings. As a figura of Christ, every believer studied to make his life the incarnation of scripture.34 Faithful Christians not only read but actually became God’s Word, holding scripture in their hearts and reading therein the text of their virtues and frailties. The act of self-scrutiny therefore becomes an act of reading ‘the bosome books of our own Consciences’.35 Men’s loss of stature would be tolerable, Donne suggests,

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if they could still, in this way, ‘hold/All the old text’. But pitifully weak and hastening towards death, their bodies now comprise only a slim book, or lesser volume. Only Elizabeth Drury was the perfect embodiment of printed virtue while she was alive. Her youth and unspoiled beauty were a miraculous ‘composition’ (365), and her virtue was of an exemplary ‘type’ (319), the ‘best, and first original/ Of all fair copies’ (227–8). ‘An Anatomy’ is partly a lament about the ruination of the world and of men’s shameful diminishment through sin. But it is also, and more importantly, a lament about the impossibility of accessing one’s conscience while trammelled with mortal flesh subject to the disabling symptoms of despair. What is really at stake in ‘An Anatomy’, then, is how men in such an ignominiously diminished state – including Donne himself – may express genuine repentance. Donne knew that there could be nothing comforting about watching an elegist reperforming the shameful spectacle of grief. But his forfeiture in ‘The Anatomy’ of elegy’s conventional decorums is an important part of his achievement, for it enables him to lament the impossibility of healing grief with the sympathetic medicaments of verse. He carefully distorts the form and function of elegy, dramatising the shortfall between readers’ expectations of consolatory lament and the discomforting effects of reading an anatomy of their worst faults. The poem remains tentative about its own elegiac achievements in its closing lines where Donne raises the possibility that poetry is insufficient as a means of praising Drury: ‘no one should her praises thus rehearse’ (459). Perhaps the most profound loss lamented in ‘An Anatomy’, indeed, is that ‘art is lost’ (396). Instead of healing its readers by teaching them how to negotiate with faith and humility the transition from life to death, ‘An Anatomy’ continues to deny its own occasion: Perchance the world might have recovered, If she whom we lament had not been dead.

(359–60)

III The Second Anniversary, ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’, was written to commemorate the anniversary of Drury’s death in December 1611. It begins with another conditional, unrewarded confession:

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Nothing could make me sooner to confess That this world had an everlastingness, Than to consider, that a year is run, Since both this lower world’s and the sun’s sun, The lustre, and the vigour of this all, Did set; ‘twere blasphemy to say, did fall. (1–6) The fear of blasphemous utterance again attends the idea of confessing, as it did in ‘An Anatomy’ where the world thought it ‘some blasphemy to say she was dead’ (51). ‘The Progress’ thus begins where ‘An Anatomy’ left off, searching for a confessional voice to come to terms with the transition from life to death. Donne makes the unsettling (and strikingly unelegiac) observation that material bodies behave as though they were still alive even after a devastating event, the involuntary convulsions of a ‘beheaded man’ (9) making it impossible to determine the point at which his soul leaves his body. Donne’s unwillingness in ‘An Anatomy’ to let Drury die suggested his preoccupation with precisely this question.36 But in ‘The Progress’ it is not so much the world in general, nor Elizabeth Drury, who remains poised between life and death. Instead it is Donne himself: Thou seest me strive for life; my life shall be, To be hereafter praised, for praising thee. (31–2) After lamenting in ‘An Anatomy’ the close connection between men’s shameful, diminished bodies and their failure to speak sincerely, Donne explores in ‘The Progress’ the possibility that elegies are best written while the elegist himself strives for life. Although literary production may involve painful and sometimes humiliating bodily process, death’s imminence now provides a valuable literary opportunity. Donne devotes over thirty lines of ‘The Progress’ to an elaborate description of his soul’s release from his body. The soul clings to his flesh like a ‘stubborn sullen anchorite’ (169), but he exhorts himself to Think thyself labouring now with broken breath, And think those broken and soft notes to be Division, and thy happiest harmony.

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Think thee laid on thy death-bed, loose and slack; And think that, but unbinding of a pack, To take one precious thing, thy soul, from thence. Think thyself parched with fever’s violence, Anger thine ague more, by calling it Thy physic; chide the slackness of the fit (90–8) Welcoming every new symptom, Donne determinedly aestheticises the dying body’s slackness so that even broken breath is a harmonious melody. Donne eventually describes the scene of his own death, complete with bells and weeping friends, and followed by a series of imperatives: ‘Think that they shroud thee up’ (113), ‘Think that thy body rots’ (115) and, finally, ‘Think that they bury thee’ (119). The process of jettisoning the body is one of purification: Donne leaves behind his pride and lust with the fetters of sickness, for his shroud represents the reinvestiture of ‘white innocence’ (114). Imagining his soul’s liberation gives Donne a new literary confidence. The liberty he imagines from his own ‘lump of flesh’ (164) is also the liberty to tackle afresh the challenges of elegy because, as we shall see, the promise of bodilessness in ‘The Progress’ is the promise of textual perfection. Donne now seems equipped to confront with new directness the ostensible subject of The Anniversaries, Elizabeth Drury. He eulogises not only her youth and beauty but also – perhaps more unexpectedly – her rude health. Drury’s properly balanced humours and ‘even constitution’ (137) repel all disease so that only pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks (244–5) Donne emphasises the unique orderliness of Drury’s body. Like everyone else’s, hers was comprised of ‘quantities/ . . . made of lines, and lines from points’ (131–2), but so remarkably even was her constitution that these all existed in perfect equilibrium. So effectively has Drury subordinated her material body to the higher faculties of reason, indeed, that she all libraries had throughly read At home, in her own thoughts, and practised So much good as would make as many more (303–5)

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Whatever the achievements of those who survive her, these are merely ‘a new, and worse edition’ (309) of hers. Her life in the world was so heavenly That she hath, ever since to heaven she came, (In a far fairer print), but read the same . . . And calls us after her, in that she took, (Taking herself) our best, and worthiest book.

(313–14; 319–20)

Drury’s virtuous life was like a flawless practice of reading, or like the pages of the finest book imaginable. Donne had described Drury in ‘An Anatomy’ in bibliographical terms as the ‘best, and first original/ Of all fair copies’ (227–8) and, in ‘A Funeral Elegy’, as a tragically curtailed story with ‘some leaves . . . torn out’ (90). Here in ‘The Progress’ he goes one step further. Drury’s ability to master the body with the higher facilities of the mind meant that her interior and exterior selves coalesced into the perfect document: . . . she rather was two souls, Or like to full, on both sides written rolls, Where eyes might read upon the outward skin, As strong records for God, as minds within (503–6) Drury’s skin was covered like double-sided parchment with God’s ‘handwriting’, her physical body as holy as her spotless interior. The flawless material text replaces the flawed material body: Drury was so pure that the fabric of her person comprised a page of God’s holy Word. When Donne was criticised by Jonson and others for his hyperbolic praise of Drury, he reportedly replied that ‘he described the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was’.37 The Anniversaries were designed not so much as an accurate sketch of Drury’s life, in other words, as a description of ideal beauty, virtue and chastity. Perhaps ‘The Progress’ also describes the idea of godly selfexpression. Drury is presented as a holy, truthful, sincere piece of writing – and Donne tries to replicate in his poem this aspect of her perfection. Towards the end of ‘The Progress’, he imagines her receiving his tribute:

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. . . nor wouldst thou be content, To take this, for my second year’s true rent, Did this coin bear any other stamp, than his, That gave thee power to do, me, to say this. (519–22) If the poem succeeds (and the conditional clause suggests Donne’s residual doubt) it succeeds because its pages, like Drury’s, are stamped by the hand of God. Earlier in the poem Donne described his Muse’s ‘chaste ambition’ Yearly to bring forth such a child as this . . . These hymns thy issue, may increase so long, As till God’s great Venite change the song. (36; 43–4) 38 Donne hopes ‘The Progress’ may be Drury’s textual issue, a chaste reproduction of her written perfection in paper and print. In ‘An Anatomy,’ Donne had connected the world’s failure to speak spontaneously – and his own failure to write satisfactorily – with corrupt mortal flesh, the repository for the symptoms of sin and despair. Jettisoning his own body in ‘The Progress’, Donne is able to conceive the perfect elegy for Elizabeth Drury. Donne both describes Drury’s bodily perfection as the perfect text, and imagines his own text as a perfect and perfectly chaste body. ‘The Progress’ aspires to be an ideal elegy in one further respect: These hymns may work on future wits, and so May great grandchildren of thy praises grow. And so, though not revive, embalm and spice The world, which else would putrefy with vice.

(37–40)

Like a comforting cordial, an elegy may cure the world’s disorders – or at least staunch the progress of decay. Like Drury herself, whom Donne calls the world’s remedial ‘mithridate’ (127) or ‘antidote’ (378), ‘The Progress’ tries – as Puttenham suggested elegies ideally should – to heal those who read it. It does so by imagining a confession sincere enough to confront the despair which seemed so intractable in ‘An Anatomy’. In Donne’s assessment, however, the writer may never ‘freely . . . poure forth a mans inward sorrowes and the greefs wherewith his minde is surcharged’ while he inhabits a mortal body. His own fervent desire to eclipse his corrupt body with God’s

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holy Word remains an aspiration or imaginative ecstasy subject to the ‘laws of poetry’ (514) – which, as he points out towards the end of ‘The Progress’, need not respect the truth. It was about twelve years before Donne tried once more to write a text designed to work therapeutically on despair, exploring again the resources of the dying body to speak sincerely.

IV Donne began his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions while he was convalescing from the grave illness he suffered in November and December 1623.39 Each of the volume’s twenty-three parts comprises a Meditation, an Expostulation and a Prayer which together vividly describe the progress of Donne’s disease beginning with an account of ‘the first grudging of the sicknesse’, working through its diagnosis, treatment with cordials and purges, and gradual abatement. The Devotions are above all an account of Donne’s own slow, often faltering progress towards self-knowledge and spiritual self-improvement, achieved through the comprehension of suffering. Donne surely hoped that the process of writing might have some therapeutic benefit, strengthening his soul to face up to death. He attended at the same time to the spiritual health of his readers, for the Devotions are meant ‘to condole, and commiserate’ those who encounter them and to ‘minister some holy delight’ to the comfortless.40 Donne here reworks the theory he explored in The Anniversaries: that anticipating death might facilitate confessional sincerity. But whereas he could only imagine the liberating effects on his voice of his body’s imminent extinction in ‘The Progress’, he was able in 1623 to describe these effects with new forcefulness and insight. Like The Anniversaries, the Devotions include frank descriptions of the body in pain, and Donne spares nothing in his account of the indignities imposed by illness. As he confirms in the Epistle Dedicatory to Prince Charles, the Devotions comprise the ‘Image of my Humiliation’. His ‘decaied flesh’ noisily and messily blazons forth his lust, pride, deceit and laziness and becomes a source of shame. Donne confirms in an humble confession . . . that there is no Artery in me, that hath not the spirit of error, the spirit of lust, the spirit of giddines in it; no

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bone in me that is not hardned with the custome of sin, and nourished, and soupled with the marrow of sinn; no sinews, no ligaments, that do not tie, & chain sin and sin together.41 His physical complaints include loss of appetite, diminished clarity of the senses, fevers, night sweats, skin lesions, sleeplessness, breathing difficulties and ‘sodaine red waters’, as well as the loss of pleasure in everyday life, the tiresome introspection brought about by enforced solitude, the claustrophobia of being confined to a bed which resembles a closed grave with sheets like ‘yron doors’, and the frustrated desire to ascertain the gravity of his condition.42 Much of Donne’s anguish in the Devotions stems from his struggle to understand why he is suffering: he is baffled at first by his sudden ‘alteration to the worse’ for he can ‘impute it to no cause, not call it by any name’. He concludes that his arteries, bones, marrow, sinews and ligaments not only exhibit his sins, but actually embody and enclose them. To acknowledge the symptoms of disease is like making ‘an humble confession’, for, as he states bluntly in the First Expostulation, ‘I fall sick of Sin’.43 Many devotional treatises besides Donne’s, especially the artes moriendi which were flourishing in England at this time, considered why certain people were struck down by sickness. Often their authors offered a series of prayers and appropriate passages from scripture, together with assurances that ‘affliction in one kind or other, must befall vnto us all’.44 Illnesses were understood as justly deserved chastisements for men’s trespasses, and Deuteronomy 28:21–22 and Leviticus 26:15–16 were sometimes cited to confirm that plagues, consumption and fever were sent to punish ‘neglect of Gods seruice . . . abuse of the sacramentes . . . Disobedience to Gouernours . . . [and] Murmuring against God’.45 At the same time, however, sickness was also regarded as a spur towards spiritual recovery: ‘our visitation must make vs better: namely, it must make vs more penitent for our Sinnes’.46 The Order for the Visitation of the Sick in the Book of Common Prayer points out that Christians should take comfort from adversities which enable them to suffer like Christ. Cheerful submission to illness was among the tribulations men endured to enter the kingdom of God: ‘For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.’47 Donne agreed in the sermon he preached at St Paul’s on 29 January 1626: ‘our

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afflictions are but light, because there is an exceeding, and an eternall waight of glory attending them.’48 Donne’s illness therefore occasions a spiritual crisis as well as a physical one, and he examines his body for clues about the condition of his soul. The frailties of the mortal body present an opportunity to speak candidly about sin, and Donne mixes diagnostic pathology with the vocabulary of legal and spiritual confession in the 13th Meditation: voluntary Confessions doe more good, then confessions upon the Rack; In these Infections, when Nature her selfe confesses, and cries out by these outward declarations, which she is able to put forth of her selfe, they minister comfort; but when all is by the strength of Cordials, it is but a Confession upon the Racke, by which though wee come to knowe the malice of that man, yet wee doe not knowe, whether there bee not as much malice in his heart then, as before his confession; we are sure of his Treason, but not of his Repentance. If symptoms declare themselves naturally, physicians may safely administer a cure. Similarly, freely admitting transgressions against God is the only way to begin atoning for them: ‘till we shew our spotts, thou appliest no medicine’.49 If Donne can bring himself to declare his spiritual infirmities, he may feelingly repent and seek forgiveness. But if such infirmities are declared unwillingly or by force, they may never be atoned for – leaving Donne wondering in the 20th Expostulation ‘whether we should take this Physicke, use this confession, or no’.50 Confession may work therapeutically: As Phisicke works so, it drawes the peccant humour to it selfe, that when it is gathered together, the weight of it selfe may carry that humour away, so thy Spirit returns to my Memory my former sinnes, that being so recollected, they may powre out themselves by Confession. But confession only confirms a sinner’s repentance if it is voluntarily offered, and is useless if made forcibly ‘upon the Racke’.51 To blazon forth one’s spots does not necessarily mean that they will be remedied or forgiven, for only sincere confessions have a beneficial effect on the body and soul.

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It is perhaps because Donne wants his stricken body to facilitate confession of the truthful, sincere and voluntary sort that he chronicles it so scrupulously in the Devotions. The process of monitoring his own symptoms becomes a textual one as Donne compares his illness to a literary fragment, and its symptoms to the instruments of writing and print. Convalescence is a ‘parenthesis’ in a life made up of ‘sentences within sentences’. If man is ‘of one Author, and is one volume’, his body and soul ‘imprinted’ by God, then the disease’s ‘spots are . . . letters’ on which God’s own name is written, and the heat of a fever is His method of ‘chafing . . . the wax’ seal of a document.52 In the 11th Expostulation, where Donne writes about the hearts of men, his words mirror a regular heartbeat: ‘This is a melting heart, and a troubled heart; and a wounded heart, and a broken heart.’53 Here the body is carried into language, Donne’s prose not simply describing but actually incorporating its symptoms. In the most familiar passage of the Devotions (‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls’), Donne imagines another’s man’s deathbed and funeral. Here the book of life becomes vibrant and animate: when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated; God emploies severall translators; some peeces are translated by Age, some by sicknesse, some by warre, some by justice; but Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie open to one another.54 Bodily dissolution is a literary event: its agents (age, sickness, war) are translators working under God’s hand, the dead are loose leaves in a book, and salvation resembles a bibliographic process of amendment and repair. To experience one’s material body as a material text is to achieve a state of spiritual exemplarity, for, as Donne wrote elsewhere, ‘He that desires to Print a book, should more desire, to be a book; to do some such exemplar things, as men might read, and relate, and profit by.’55 Twelve years previously, Donne had described in The Anniversaries how men’s pitifully compromised bodies (unlike the perfect and perfectly articulate body of Elizabeth Drury) were unable to contain the Word of God, leaving them silent and inconsolable. The same vocabulary of volumes, originals and copies is

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employed in the Devotions to radically different effect. Here Donne’s holy text not only reflects but also literally contains the body it describes – and, in so doing, makes a heartfelt confession. In an essay exploring the body’s relation to the voice, Elaine Scarry describes the two linked assumptions on which ‘a materialist conception of language’ is based: first, that language is capable of registering in its own contours the contours and weight of the material world; second, that language itself may enter, act on, and alter the material world.56 Both assumptions hold true in the Devotions which both works therapeutically upon the pathology of despair, and registers in its very structure and syntax the stages of Donne’s sickness. Words acquire physical attributes such as mass, weight and substance, touching, containing or wrapping themselves around people and things. Language seems literally and physically embodied as lines are made animate, books self-generate, and writing and print become flesh. Donne moreover realises the literary opportunity provided by death’s proximity – an opportunity which seemed unavailable in ‘An Anatomy’ and which existed only as an aspiration in ‘The Progress’. For Donne now treats his imagined death as a chance to tally up his sins and confess to them frankly: the voice belongs to me; I am dead, I was borne dead, and from the first laying of these mud-walls in my conception, they have moldred away, and the whole course of life is but an active death. In his certain and startling realisation that ‘I have been a dead man all this while’, Donne recognises that his spiritual frailties are and have always been confi rmed in his bodily frailties – and finds a voice to speak about both.57 At the very moment when utterance usually stops for good, Donne finds himself able to utter the impossible phrase ‘I am dead.’ Far from inhibiting self-expression, then, death’s proximity makes him newly articulate and, at the same time, makes newly urgent the imperative to confess. Contrary to Puttenham’s suggestion that elegists should freely and sympathetically ventriloquise the grief of the bereaved, and that elegies should work therapeutically like a consoling physic, The

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Anniversaries lament that the sorrows of mankind are too overwhelming to be healed by books. Men’s manifold sins, visible in the wretched states of their bodies, are reflected in their impoverished attempts to speak and write sincerely. Whereas many early modern elegies functioned like memento mori, reminding readers to accept gracefully their own mortality and acknowledge their imperfections, squaring up to death in The Anniversaries leaves Donne sorrowfully unable to confess his misdemeanours or to achieve the promise of salvation. He casts into doubt the privileged connection between corporeality and emotional candour, regretfully concluding that embodiment prohibits truthful, authentic expression. In the Devotions, on the other hand, death’s proximity provides Donne with a unique literary and spiritual opportunity. His illness both articulates wrongdoing and betokens God’s grace, and Donne captures its symptoms in the fabric of his confessional text.

5 Eating His Words: Thomas Coryat and the Art of Indigestion

I Plutarch’s essay advising ‘How a yoong man ought to heare poets’ compares an appetite for books with an appetite for food, and suggests that young men should learn to exercise habitual restraint over both: Youthes ought not onely to keepe their bodies sober and temperate in the pleasures of meate and drinke, but also much more to accustome their minds to a moderate delight in those things which they heare and read, using the same temperately as a pleasant and delectable sauce to give a better and more savorie taste to that which is healthfull, holsome and profitable therein. Like eating and drinking, reading or listening to poetry involves assimilating matter from the outside world into the interior self. Just as students must train themselves to partake of fi ne meat and drink only in moderation, so they must accustom themselves to receiving with caution the delights of poetry. Such pleasures are best enjoyed not for their own sake but rather as a condiment which makes more enticing books’ more wholesome, profitable qualities. As Plutarch goes on to explain, it may be said not onely of the land of Aegypt, but also of Poetrie; Mixed drugs plentie, as well good as bad, Med’cines and poisons are there to be had, 93

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which it bringeth foorth and yeeldeth to as many as converse therein. Likewise: Therein sweet loue and wantonnesse, with dalliance, you shall finde; And sugred words, which do beguile the best and wisest minde.1 Even the most sober, mature and self-disciplined young men are likely to find themselves tempted by poetry’s sugared words which are blended so seamlessly into the fabric of texts that their most poisonous properties may be mistaken for remedies. Unless they exercise scrupulous judgement, young men may find themselves relishing the sweetness of books, assimilating their hazardous matter into their private bodies and selves. Plutarch’s metaphor of ‘bibliophagia’, or the consumption of books, was familiar to many early modern authors who described the benefits of tasting, eating, swallowing or digesting knowledge, and the dangers of ingesting the wrong sorts of reading material. This chapter considers one of the most elaborate explorations of this metaphor: Coryats Crudities (1611), Thomas Coryat’s account of his five-month walking tour of Europe undertaken in 1608. To suffer from a ‘crudity’ was to experience an imperfect concoction of the humours leading to indigestion, and the word ‘crudities’ described undigested or indigestible matter left over in the stomach. Coryat uses the vocabulary of crudity and crudities as a way of describing both his imperfect process of writing and his imperfect text. For although he claims that his ‘hastily gobled vp’ observations were ‘newly digested’ with hindsight on his return, Crudities is, as its title suggests, self-consciously provisional and rough. The main text comprises Coryat’s observations of European towns and cities, chronicling local history, architectural features, and the lives of illustrious residents. But the simultaneous investment of Crudities in delight, leisure and pleasure suggests a reading experience at odds with prudentia peregrinandi, or advice books for apprentice travellers. Through an examination of literary crudeness, perhaps most succinctly defined as a resistance to assimilation or refi nement, this chapter considers the ways in which Crudities declines to instruct its readers even as Coryat encounters pressures to write a profitable account of

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his journey. Coryat coins a new generic position for Crudities, combining features of the conventionally didactic Renaissance travelogue with the resources of imaginative genres including prose romance and Menippean satire. He artfully literalises the rich vocabulary of bibliophagia in order to explore the dangers posed to men’s minds and bodies by reading for pleasure. Coryat’s account of the painful experience of writing Crudities, together with his panegyrists’ descriptions of the troublesome effects of reading it, confront the moral, intellectual and literary problems raised by delightful books in the early seventeenth century. Thomas Fuller conceded in 1662 that ‘Coriat’s Crudities, nauceous to nice Readers, for the rawnesse thereof, is not altogether useless.’ His description is the source of Coryat’s reputation as a ‘privileged buffoon’ and the butt of early seventeenth-century court wit: The shape of his head had no promising form, being like a Sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before, as composed of fancy and memory without any common sense.2 Despite Ben Jonson’s assertion that Coryat ‘hath euer since the first designe of printing, bene à Delicijs to the Court; but serued there in his owne cloathes, and at his owne costs’, Fuller reports that ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his Servant.’ Indeed, the 1610–12 accounts of Sir David Murray, Keeper of Henry’s Privy Purse, confirm payment of £10 to Coryat ‘by the comanndement of the late Priynce’.3 Coryat nevertheless struggled to bring Crudities to print. In a letter dated 15 November 1610 to Sir Michael Hicks, secretary to Lord Salisbury, he complains he has already ‘laboured very much about the licencing of my booke’, and requests that Hicks intercede on his behalf with the Lord Treasurer. Prince Henry had undertaken to entertain a dedication and, as Coryat notes, the courtiers and literati who had contributed panegyric verses were now ‘earnestly expecting’ their appearance in print. Coryat resolved to raise the necessary funds to see Crudities through the press, although the charges at the printing house could not have been insubstantial.4 Defending its length against one detractor, he insisted ‘that of the sixe hundred fi ftie and foure pages (for indeede so many are in the booke) he shall find at the least five hundred

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worthy the reading.’ Coryat’s description of his book as indigestible, and of composition as a process of indigestion, enables him to propose that travel and reading are really for pleasure rather than education – whatever others may pretend. By describing the literal effects of reading and writing on men’s minds and bodies, including his own, he also raises important new questions about literary worth. The main text of Crudities is preceded by fifty-nine critical and occasionally savage mock-panegyric verses. Written by contemporary literary celebrities and courtiers, these poems stage with unusual candour the acts of reading which took place in 1610 and 1611. Although Coryat claims he ‘sollicited not halfe those worthy Wights for these verses’, their appearance in Crudities was not inadvertent. Coryat declared his fury in print when the mock-panegyrics were reprinted without his permission in 1611, probably by Thomas Thorpe, in ‘a Booke lately Printed in huggermugger, entituled The Odcombian Banquet’. Coryat himself subsequently took the opportunity to publish seven further verses as a ‘second course’ to Crudities, in Coryats Crambe, or His Colwort Twise Sodden.5 The mock-panegyrics became a fertile resource for Coryat’s own wit: they are framed in Crudities with his marginal notes which mischievously misread and deflect their criticisms. The mock-panegyrics, and Coryat’s running commentary on them, put up some muscular resistance to the relationship normally established between panegyrist and writer – but that resistance is an important part of Coryat’s design since the mock-panegyrists collude with his metaphor of crudity by recording their responses to the text in startlingly corporeal terms.6 The crudeness of Crudities provides Coryat and his contemporaries with a vocabulary to trace connections between desire and intemperance, and to explore the painful effects of pleasurable reading experiences on the bodies of aristocratic men.

II Sixteenth-century medical treatises and works on dietetics and nutrition warn readers against foodstuffs which are resistant to digestion by virtue of their raw or unrefi ned nature. Following the ancient medical view that coction (a digestive process akin to ‘cooking’) was a process essential for the preservation of good health, Sir Thomas

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Elyot describes ‘crudyte’ in the fourth book of The Castel of Helth (c. 1537) as a ‘vycious concoction of thynges receyued, they not beyng hollye or perfyttely altered’.7 This in turn leads to an imperfect distribution of the humours and a ‘loathing and abhoring of meat’. The physician Thomas Moffat proposes bread as a safeguard ‘without which all other meats would either quickly putrifie in our stomachs, or sooner pass thorough them then they should, whereupon crudities, belly-worms and fluxes do arise’, whereas in Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny, herbs are ‘drunke in warme water, to quiet the gnawings in the stomacke, and to concoct the crudities there’.8 If such safeguards are missing, or if insufficient time is left between meals for the stomach to complete the digestive process, any ‘matter which remayneth ouer-rawe or cruded’ in the stomach gives rise to palsies, premature ageing, blisters, dropsy and gout.9 The Hippocratic principles of balancing substances ingested, and of curing illnesses by manipulating or purging troublesome material from the digestive system, form the basis of the theory of the humours in early modern England. While eating well was understood as a form of preventative medicine crucial to the maintenance of good health, the disorders associated with ‘filthy surfets’ were reputed to be potentially fatal.10 The close connection between early modern theories of physiology and conceptions of selfhood has recently been established by Michael C. Schoenfeldt, who has argued that to exercise restraint over the body’s pleasures was simultaneously to scrutinise and regulate the psychological self. Since ‘the consuming subject was pressured . . . to conceive all acts of ingestion and excretion as very literal acts of self-fashioning’, close regulation of one’s inward materiality becomes an enabling kind of agency.11 A sober diet encouraged a healthy intellectual and spiritual appetite, while overeating and stupidity were proverbially linked: ‘big stomach, lean mind’.12 Robert Burton dedicated a section of The Anatomy of Melancholy to dietary temperance, suggesting ‘there is not so much harme proceeding from the substance it selfe of meat . . . as there is from the quantitie’, and warning that ‘an insatiable paunch is a pernitious sinke, & the fountaine of all diseases both of body and minde’. Henry Crosse put it simply in Vertues Common-wealth (1603): ‘much meate much maladie’.13 Thomas Wright wrote that feasting inevitably caused men to betray their shameful passions, for ‘gluttony

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causeth, not onely lechery, but also blockishnesse, and dulnesse of wit’ so that ‘the tongue breaketh forth into indiscreet words’. Men who eat too much, or eat too wide a variety of different foodstuffs, find themselves plagued by an ‘abundance of fi lthy thoughts, & pernicious maladies’.14 Eating and intellectual endeavour are simply incompatible: we see hourly by experience that because the liuer and the stomack are so far from the brain, presently vpon meat, and some space thereafter, there is no man can giue himselfe to studie. Even thinking too often about food is shameful and ungodly: The lyfe is more than meate, and the bodye is more than the raiment . . . aske not what you shall eate, nor what you shall drinke, neyther lette your mindes wander about these speculations.15 As the sense of sight was regarded as superior to touch, and the senses of hearing and smell to taste, so the body’s irrational appetites were understood to hinder the purer workings of the mind and intellect. Over-preoccupation with eating, or over-indulgence in food, offered a profound handicap to the acquisition of knowledge, grace and virtue.16 Food and drink have been associated with desire since Ovid, and probably long before: ‘Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus’ (love freezes without food and drink).17 The biblical association of corporeal appetite with sexual culpability was however more prominent in the early modern imagination, and overeating is often linked in early seventeenth-century drama with women’s ‘belly sports’.18 In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (pub. 1623), the duchess brings on labour by the excessive consumption of apricots (‘do I not grow fat? . . . How they swell me!’). In John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (pub. 1633), Giovanni remarks that Annabella ‘took too much of the flesh’, suggesting she has over-indulged in both meat and sex. Her morning sickness is blamed on an ‘ill diet’ of melons; the physician prescribes ‘surfeit water’ for the indistinguishable symptoms of indigestion and ‘fulness of her blood’, or sexual frustration.19 Falstaff’s

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corpulence in Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 functions not only as a marker of his wit and hedonism, but also of his gluttony and sexual importunity, while Shakespeare’s Antony ‘revels long a-nights’ in Julius Caesar, recalling Sir Thomas North’s account of his embarrassing appearance in council ‘queasy-stomached with his surfeit’.20 Making clear the connections between temperance and masculinity, and overeating and effeminacy, Burton denied that a man who exercises restraint when drinking is ‘a very milke-sop’, insisting on the contrary that Carpet Knights who drink to excess ‘stifle their wits, strangle nature, and degenerate into beasts’. In his handbook for apprentice courtiers, The Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607), James Cleland advises men not to partake ‘like a dainty Dame, but eate in a manly, round, and honest fashion’. 21 Thomas Salter argues explicitly that ‘delicious and sweete meates . . . effeminate the myndes of men and women’, while Crosse proposes that a glutton ‘cannot be saide to be a man, but the trunke or carkasse of a man, wherein an infernall spirit in stead of a soule doth inhabite’.22 If a moderate diet secured manliness, an excessive or diminished appetite threatened it. As we will see, Coryats Crudities engages closely with these contemporary associations between dietary intemperance and patterns of corporeal, moral and intellectual feminisation. Humanists and rhetoricians employed the physiological vocabulary of appetite, digestion and assimilation in order to describe the best practices of reading. In humanist pedagogy, to digest subject matter in rhetorical terms was to perform its orderly breakdown into adjuncts, similar to enumeratio or divisio. In a more complex use of the term, digestio turned wisdom gathered from texts or experience during the process of imitatio into the good blood of knowledge. According to Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, erudition gleaned from the writings of ancient authors should be reconsidered, ‘just as we do not swallow our food till we have chewed it and reduced it almost to a state of liquefaction’. Erasmus’s Ciceronianus (1528) describes the process of reading and writing in similar terms, suggesting that all that you have devoured in a long course of varied reading must be thoroughly digested and by the action of thought incorporated into your deepest mental processes, not your memory or word-list.23

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Sir William Cornwallis, Francis Bacon and Richard Braithwait all compare reading to a banquet, and the process of literary discernment to the workings of an ‘obseruing stomacke’, noting that ‘some books are to bee tasted, others to bee swallowed, and some few to bee chewed and disgested’.24 In his extended comparison of reading and digestion in Areopagitica, John Milton suggests that ‘books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evill substance’. The substance of books is less important than the proficiency with which they are received, assessed and assimilated. Jonson compares poetic composition to a process of digestion in Discoveries: The third requisite in our Poet, or Maker, is Imitation, to bee able to convert the substance, or Riches of an other Poet, to his owne use . . . Not, as a Creature, that swallowes, what it takes in, crude, raw, or indigested; but, that feedes with an Appetite, and hath a Stomacke to concoct, divide, and turne all into nourishment.25 Here digestion is the full assimilation of the principal literary model, while crudities are textual leftovers which have been improperly absorbed. Similarly, Roger Ascham condemned rote learning for children because ‘their whole knowledge, by learning without the booke, was tied onely to their tong & lips, and neuer ascended vp to the braine & head, and therefore was sone spitte out of the mouth againe’.26 One of Coryat’s panegyrists, John Jackson, describes Crudities as an ‘Italian banquet’ and the metaphor of crudity elaborates in various ways the familiar vocabulary of tasting, eating and assimilating. The last prefatory verse, written by Coryat himself, suggests that writing Crudities gave him indigestion – and is likely to do the same to his readers: . . . crudos boccones ore momordi: Pectoreque euomui, quos nunc submittere stampae Allubuit: tu lector aue, nostraeque Cucinae Cruda, tui stomachi foculo, benè digere frusta 27 I chewed uncooked morsels in my mouth and vomited them up from my chest: these are the things it has now pleased me to

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submit to the press. Hail reader, and digest well in the brazier of your stomach the raw bits from our kitchen. The final couplet announces that the text is half-baked (cruda), but nevertheless invites the reader to digest it. Several panegyrists contributed verses in keeping with this notion, describing Crudities as bodily excreta and Coryat’s act of writing as a form of sickness. Perhaps recalling the final scene of Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) in which Crispinus vomits neologisms into a basin, George Sydenham describes ‘the cloying Crudities chewed in the braines of the Author, and cast vp in the presse of the Printer’.28 John Sanford notes that Coryat ‘Hath spu’d a booke of Crudities,/Which Vulcans forge will not concoct’; Henry Poole invites Coryat to ‘deuoure’ foreign observations until ‘thou saturitie shalt gaine/. . . then disgorge thy selfe againe’; and William Baker imagines England’s travellers seeking Coryat’s ‘stomacks forc’t eiection . . . So they by thy disgorgement’ will gain ‘an itch of trauell’.29 Coryat’s fanciful superimposition in the above passage of Latin endings onto words borrowed from Italian (stampae, Cucinae) highlights the indigestibility of Crudities by artfully pointing up his kitchen Latin.30 The first panegyrist, probably Edward Phillips, notes how Coryat ‘ouer-speakes the English tongue’ by heaping up foreign imports. According to Jonson, Coryat ‘will buy his Egges, his Puddings, his Ginger-bread, yea cobble his shoes in the Atticke dialect’; and John Donne describes Coryat as a ‘macaron’. The term referred not only to barbarolexis, or the practice of mixing up languages, but also to thick pasta (macaroni) and, by extension, to a simpleton or noodle.31 These remarks recall the frequent early modern criticism against the excessively ornamental speech of returned travellers while registering Coryat’s failure to observe proper assimilation as a precursor to inventio. The idea of textual indigestion, which suggests Coryat’s inability or refusal to refine his material for publication, is elaborated by other panegyrists who compare Crudities to literary confectionery. John Hoskyns calls Coryat ‘equinoctiall pasticrust’, and Sanford addresses him as the March-pane of mirth, the Genoua past of loue, The Graces gallipot, Musicks fiddle-sticke, The spout of sport, and follies turtle Doue.

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Author and ‘sporting’ text are conflated as Coryat is brought to resemble marzipan and Genoa pastry, a dessert made with fruit pulp and caramelised sugar. Sanford thus identifies Crudities as a literary ‘fiddle-sticke’, or nullity, concluding that Coryat ‘warbleth sweet as a stewd prune’ – a popular snack in brothels. Donne imagines Crudities torn in pieces, wrapping currants, figs and ‘Home-manufactures’ or sweets; Thomas Farnaby compares Coryat himself to ‘hony and hony-combe’; and John Gifford imagines ‘filling mens mouthes, and eyes with Coryate’.32 Fuller recalls that ‘Sweet-meats and Coriat made up the last course at all Court-entertainments’, and Christopher Brooks suggests that Coryat regularly performed as a postprandial entertainer: thy braue Precedent Great Cæsar is, who penned his owne gestes, And (as some write) recited them at feastes. Again, Jonson notes that although Coryat ‘might sit as a Guest, hee will rather be serued in as a Dish, and is loth to haue any thing of himselfe kept cold against the next day.’33 The metaphor of crudity is thus indebted to familiar principles of digestio, but Coryat and his panegyrists invoke such principles partly in order to experiment with their unsettling opposites. Coryat’s wit functioned as both an accompaniment to the dessert course at the end of the literal banquet and as the unscholarly, trifling condiment to intellectually or spiritually nourishing textual matter.34 Since sugary foods were understood to cloy the appetite rather than satisfy it, references to the sweetness of Crudities draw attention to its excesses rather than its fineness.35 Perhaps recalling Proverbs 25 : 16 (‘Have thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it’), William Fenner warned that sweetmeats were poor in nutritional value and only slowly concocted: ‘the sweetest meats under heaven, if ye burden your stomack therewith, they will cloy it’.36 It is indeed tempting to dismiss Crudities as a form of textual waste, since Coryat’s admission of his ‘insatiable greediness’ for experiences which he calls ‘sweet iunkats’ seems to send up his claim on the title page that his observations are ‘dispersed to the nourishment’ of his readers. But the frequency of

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references to the connection in the early modern period between indigestible confectionery and trifling reading matter suggest a more important textual function, which sheds light on both the developing relationship between reading and bodily sensation, and contemporary debates surrounding the effects on men of reading for pleasure. The 1580s and 1590s witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of prose romances written by men ostensibly for women, and an accompanying outpouring of admonitions about the effects of reading them. In the popular male imagination, women read romances voraciously and excessively, and the literary form became anxiously associated with female pleasure. The prefaces to early modern romantic fictions often discussed reading in terms of nutrition, describing sweet books to be sampled or tasted. Robert Greene’s Mamillia (1583), for example, advertises its ‘sugred happie style’, while Emmanuel Forde acknowledges that The Most Pleasant History of Ornatus and Artesia (c. 1599) ‘sauoureth more of pleasure then Eloquence . . . As at a Banquet there are seuerall kinds of meates, some pleasant, other sharpe.’ John Lyly’s ‘Epistle to the gentlewomen readers’ at the beginning of Euphues and his England (1580) advises ladies to handle him [Euphues] as you do your junkets, that when you eat no more you tie some in your napkin for children; for if you be filled with the first part, put the second in your pocket for your wayting maydes . . . Yet after dinner, you may ouerlooke him to keepe you from sleepe, or if you be heauie, to bring you a sleepe, for to worke vpon a full stomacke is against Phisicke.37 Lyly describes Euphues as excessive in textual terms (‘tie some in your napkin’), and suggests its suitability for apprentice readers (‘wayting maydes’ and children). Romance is here defined antithetically to work: far from offering the reader intellectual nourishment, Euphues is light enough to be read on a full stomach as an incentive to sleep. As these prefaces deliberate the connection between reading and desire through the metaphor of the literary sweetmeat, they acknowledge the private and implicitly culpable pleasures associated with the consumption of romance. It is this vocabulary, associated above all with prose romances, that Coryat and his panegyrists have in mind when they describe

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Crudities as sweetly pleasurable to the palate. Robert Phillips suggests that Crudities was written ‘to delight and recreate thy friends’ while Robert Yaxley confirms that both Coryat and Crudities ‘Were made to shew you pleasure’. John Chapman discusses Crudities as A volume which though t’will not in thy pocket, Yet in thy chest thou maist for euer locke it38 Although its vast dimensions contrast to the usual formats of early modern romances, namely octavo or slim quarto, Crudities nevertheless belongs about the private body. As Chapman ironically notes the value of Crudities, his poem recalls contemporary descriptions, such as Lyly’s, of women who furtively consumed romances in private. Gifford’s panegyric goes further, slyly comparing Crudities to the copy of the Iliad Alexander reputedly kept at his bedside: as great Alexander, Homer making His pillowes bolster (for his pleasure waking) Made sport with him: so, let our Coryats worke Vnder your bolster or your buttons lurke To sport, and pleasure you by night and day (sigs. f4r–f4v) Mocking the ‘epic’ length of Crudities, Gifford describes an ero ticised reading experience where Crudities, hidden about the body ‘vnder . . . your buttons’ or under the bedclothes, will sport with and ‘pleasure you’. Importantly, this illicit textual pleasure is imagined to take place in a gentleman’s private bedchamber, not a lady’s; and, moreover, in the bedchambers of ‘Gallants of the English Court’. The panegyrists’ comparisons of reading Crudities with eating (and hoarding) sweetmeats demonstrate Coryat’s departure from, and literalisation of, conventional principles of textual digestio, thus confirming both the text’s pleasurable excesses and the opprobrium involved in readers’ enjoyment of it. Such comparisons also affirm Crudities’ second and more radical achievement, which lies in its experimentation with the imagined gender of its readership. Since George Pettie’s Petite Pallace of Pleasure (1576), Renaissance romances had usually appeared with addresses or epistolary dedications to women. These addresses served, back-

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handedly, to legitimise the investment of romances in trivial themes by claiming that they had been written to please the tastes of a foolish, credulous readership. But as recent scholarship has shown, these prefaces were themselves part of the romantic fiction, and are not accurately understood as evidence for the literal presence of a female reader. The address to the ladies could function instead as a self-authorising foil for the gentlemen readers whom the text often simultaneously acknowledged, exempting them from the feminising effects of reading a trifling text.39 In Crudities, on the other hand, the imagined female reader is textually invisible. Coryat addresses an exclusively male audience, whose readerly interpolations indeed comprise approximately one-fifth of his work. So the scandal of Crudities in its time was not only that Coryat raised the possibility that romantic ‘fiddle-sticks’ might have been read and enjoyed by men, as many authors had already acknowledged, but that a delightful, and implicitly culpable reading experience could be devised for them without the legible intercession of imagined female readers.40 Although the metaphor of crudity suggests this possibility could be raised only ironically, the text’s crudeness nevertheless is both highly conscious and carefully designed. For by theorising the injurious effects on the body of shameful reading experiences, Coryat wittily explores – and finally defends – the possibility that reading and writing could bring men pleasure.

III Coryat’s metaphor of crudity is judiciously chosen, for the art of good digestion is often emphasised in writings of and about travellers at the turn of the seventeenth century. Travel writers quoted Horace’s warning in the Epistles, ‘caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt’ (they change their clime, not their mind, who rush across the sea) in order to emphasise the educative value of travel over its distracting pleasures, and to admonish travellers against assimilating pernicious manners or habits from abroad.41 Just as the best scholars read selectively and attentively, so wise travellers (and travel writers) digest carefully the experiences they gather overseas. Coryat registers his debt to a variety of travellers including Sebastian Münster, Gasparo Contarini, Drake and Frobisher, but flags up his departure from conventional travel writing when he

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calls Crudities ‘the greene fruits of my short trauels’. Despite his declared interest in pursuing ‘true wisedome . . . for the benefite and prosperous estate of the Common-weale’, Coryat simultaneously claims that ‘because I am a priuate man and no statist, matters of policie are impertinent vnto me’. The idea of travelling as a private man was not necessarily at odds with the public responsibilities of travel writers, namely the description and analysis of overseas affairs for the benefit of the home country.42 Matters of policy are nevertheless few and far between in Crudities. Coryat’s notes on France refer to the recent religious conflict there, but he fails to mention the tense political situation in the Low Countries and the imminent outbreak of hostilities between the Dutch and the Spanish. The folk entertainment Boote and Spurre, probably written between 1622 and 1625, comments on his fondness for recording trivia: ‘He cannot passe by so much as a wallnutt tree but he needs must have a flinge at it.’43 As we will see, Coryat’s wit flourishes on his willingness to experiment with the generic conventions of the Renaissance travelogue which was generally assumed to educate rather than amuse its readers. His claim to be travelling as a private man refers to his lack of official business, but also to his interest in chronicling the pleasurable effects of travel on the hidden folds of the body – and, perhaps more importantly, the bodily sensations involved in reading or writing about these effects. Coryat’s mock-penitential voice in both the prefatory matter and the main text imply that Crudities was written during a period of truancy from serious affairs. He notoriously recorded in Crudities his encounter with the Venetian courtesan, Margarita Emiliana, insisting its relevance to Crudities’ pedagogical purpose since ‘Cognitio mali non est mala, the knowledge of euill is not euill, but the practise and execution thereof.’ The episode shows Crudities strikingly at odds with the contemporary ars apodemica, however, which admits the possibility of Italian pleasures only in order to warn readers against them: you seeme to enter into the Paradise of Venus . . . shee comes to thee decked like the Queene and Goddesse of loue . . . Her petticoate of red chamlet edged with rich gold fringe, stockings of carnasion silke, her breath and her whole body, the more to enamour thee, most fragrantly perfumed.

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An engraving by William Hole representing Coryat and Margarita Emiliana ‘in that forme as we saluted each other’ accompanies the description, and is clearly designed to lend erotic appeal to the episode.44 The intimate, second-person address suggests Coryat’s intention to seduce the reader into the text, just as ‘amorous Calypsoes’ seduce their clients into their ‘chamber of recreation’ – although he goes on to acknowledge the riskiness of this textual manoeuvre: I feare least I shall expose my selfe to the seuere censure and scandalous imputations of many carping Criticks, who I thinke will taxe me for luxury and wantonnesse to inserte so lasciuious a matter into this Treatise of Venice . . . I instantly request thee (most candid reader) to be as charitably conceited of me, though I haue at large deciphered and as it were anatomized a Venetian Cortezan vnto thee, as thou wouldest haue me of thy selfe vpon the like request.45 Coryat does not precisely exonerate himself from the charge of indiscretion, but rather requests his implicitly male reader to exercise the same charity that he would himself choose to receive in like circumstances. Coryat’s assumed anxiety about the ‘lasciuious’ material in Crudities acknowledges forceful contemporary strictures against Italian vices, such as those found in Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570). In Ascham’s account, the traveller to Italy laid himself open to becoming an ‘Englishman Italianated’, guilty of both amatory and linguistic transgression: ‘they be, the greatest makers of loue, [and] the daylie daliers, with. . . pleasant wordes’. The reader who purchased ‘fonde bookes, of late translated out of Italian’, was liable, in the same way as such travellers, to ‘inglutte him selfe with vanitie’. Italianised Englishmen, like the authors of Italian romance, revealed themselves ‘ouer full of words, sentences, & matter . . . & stuffed with full arguments’. Like Coryat’s panegyrists, Ascham describes in corporeal terms the effects on writers of excessive assimilation of ‘pleasant wordes’, suggesting soch a rancke and full writer, must . . . do, as certaine wise men do, that be ouer fat and fleshie: who leauing their owne full and plentiful table, go to soiorne abrode from home for a while, at the

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temperate diet of some sober man: and so by litle and litle, cut away the grosnesse that is in them. He goes on to recommend a ‘purgation’ to temper both verbal excess and lasciviousness. The Scholemaster thus makes clear the association of Italy and Italian books with both verbosity and unruly sexuality, describing their consequences in terms of bodily ‘grosnesse’.46 Fancy words and too much sex were both popularly supposed to compromise the male subject, laying him open to ‘certaine effeminate affections’.47 Falstaff links what Hal calls his ‘huge hill of flesh’ with garrulousness in Henry IV Parts 1 & 2: ‘I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine.’48 Valerie Traub notes that Falstaff’s corpulence invokes ‘in the emphasis on a swollen and distended belly, associations of pregnancy’, while Patricia Parker has suggested that the Lord Chief Justice’s remark to Falstaff in Henry IV Part 2 that ‘your waste is great’ refers both to Falstaff’s distended waist and his propensity to bombast. ‘Fat-guts’ Falstaff is trebly feminised, then, through garrulousness, an excessive interest in sex, and the marked association in the Henriad of corpulence with female swelling.49 In keeping with these cultural associations, Coryat’s panegyrists take to task not only his shameful encounter in the brothel but also his prolixity, tediousness and embarrassing fondness for importing scraps of foreign languages. Coryat concedes that he has supplemented his poor skill with ‘the discourse of learned men, and certaine Latin bookes that I found’, and Crudities is indeed punctuated with copies of letters and verses, transcriptions of epitaphs, rhetorically complex speeches, and so many proverbs and sententiae that it occasionally resembles a repository for memorable phrases. Coryat’s prodigality emerges through his own profligate reading habits, and in this respect Crudities resembles Menippean satire, a genre with much in common with the fragmented narratives of prose romance. The term is used to describe texts, especially accounts of voyages, which are encyclopaedic in scale, combine high and low material, and mix fact with fantasy.50 Crudities was surely influenced by Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists, a fictional and encyclopaedic work featuring cooks, curious dishes, wines, gluttony and dietetics now usually classified as Menippean satire; he was certainly familiar with Isaac Casaubon’s edition of ‘Athenaeus illustrated with a learned Commentary’ published at Heidelberg in 1597.51 Importantly, Menip-

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pean satire tends to parody civilised discourse, thus permitting new reflections on literary authorship. Both the main text of Crudities, which resists the educative goals of travel writing with its ‘Hochepot’ of miscellaneous observations and fragments of reading, and the prefatory verses, where Coryat’s talkative margins knowingly misread the mock-panegyrics, are examples of exuberant pseudo-erudition in which, to borrow Northrop Frye’s description of Menippean satire, Coryat sets about ‘overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon’.52 The collection and application of sententiae shared a conceptual vocabulary with the physiological processes of ingestion, and Coryat’s own dedicatory epistle to the king advertises the book’s ‘sentences sundry and dyuers, whiche I do applye vnto bankettyng dishes . . . al shalbe holsome, if they be wel masticate, and not hastily deuoured’. Sir Thomas Elyot’s manual of eloquence, The Bankette of Sapience (1539), is an extended exploration of the metaphor of food (sapor) in relation to wisdom (sapiens); Erasmus, too, advises in Adagia the temperate application of commonplaces urging that ‘we should treat them not as food but as condiments’.53 What Coryat calls the ‘holsome’ nature of commonplaces, or their capacity to nourish the understanding, is nevertheless difficult to reconcile with his subject matter. His habit of referencing his book in the plural suggests his familiarity with the theory and praxis of Renaissance notebook culture, but his sententiae neither function as a bid for social kudos nor affirm an established cultural code, appearing instead at moments when Crudities most closely resembles the mockpenitential narrative of (in his words) ‘a priuate man’. Discussing the beauty of Jewish women, for example, Coryat makes recourse to ‘that excellent verse of the Poet . . . Gratior est pulchro veniens è corpore virtus’ (‘Goodness coming from a lovely body is more pleasing’). Describing Venetian prostitutes, Coryat quotes Lipsius’s phrase ‘callidam et calidam Solis filiam, that is, the crafty and hot daughters of the Sunne’; their chambers are full of ‘illecebrè et lenocinia amoris’ (‘allurements and ornaments of love’) and they ‘seeme ebur atramento candefacere, according to that excellent Prouerbe of Plautus: that is, to make iuorie white with inke’. Courtesans are tolerated by the authorities ‘ad vitanda maiora mala [to avoid greater misfortune]. For they thinke that the chastity of their wiues would be the sooner assaulted . . . were it not for these places of euacuation.’54 Although

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these markers of antique authority seem designed to proclaim against luxury, they nevertheless contribute to a narrative designed, via literary crudity, to transgress codes of humanist education. Given Coryat’s insistence on his paucity of learning, they are perhaps best understood as markers of a new kind of literary prodigality realised through the physiology of reading and writing. It seems likely, in other words, that Coryat’s metaphor of crudity, as it applies to the redeployment of aphorism, refers not only to imperfect scholarly praxis but also to the intemperate self – understood in moral, social or rational terms. The episodes in Crudities describing Coryat’s various overindulgences shed further light on the association of both overeaters and ‘inameld speakers’ with compromised masculinity.55 Coryat records that he had ‘superfluously stuffed my selfe’ before crossing the channel, and Sanford’s macaronic panegyric glances as his resulting sea-sickness: Αρµα virumque cano, nostris qui raptus ab oris Armoricosque; sinus rostratis nauibus intrans, Multa tulit fecitque miser [I sing the man and his burden, who was carried violently from our country to Northern France, where entering the bays in beaked ships he did much and endured many things, the wretch.] In a pastiche of the opening lines of The Aeneid, Sanford puns on αρµα, the Greek homophone to arma, which can mean both ‘burden’ and ‘food’; the joke continues in the margin where the hemistich is glossed by Coryat himself: ‘I sing the harmelesse man.’ Sanford collapses the etymological parallels of eros and heros: not only is Coryat more preoccupied with his appetite than his quest, he is also an ‘unarmed’ epic hero.56 Later, as part of his observations on Venice, Coryat reports that Emperor Frederick III of Germany died of ‘the bloudy fluxe’ as a result of the ‘intemperate eating’ of musk-melons which are ‘sweete in the palate, but sowre in the stomacke’. Venetian fruit, like Venetian sex, is described as a pleasure freely available: ‘all the market places of the citie were superabundantly furnished with them’.57 While Coryat’s admonitions resemble an attempt to control

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the reader’s responses, he nevertheless inflects these warnings with humour by himself tasting the pleasures he seemingly forbids, thus bearing testament to the difficulty of regulation. Ann Rosalind Jones has suggested that Coryat’s notes on Venice transform ‘a survey of states into a grotesque spectacle of eros’, and indeed it seems plausible to suggest that Coryat’s self-fiction involves imagining the effects on his own body of both verbal and corporeal excess.58 Crudities’ interest in grotesque corporeality is surely behind the panegyrists’ frequent comparisons of Coryat to Rabelais. Banqueting is connected to fertility, procreation and festive comedy in Gargantua and Pantagruel; according to Michail Bakhtin, ‘man’s encounter with the world in the act of eating is joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured himself.’ Recent interpretations of carvnivalesque have acknowledged, however, that while the grotesque body appears, as Bakhtin puts it, to stand ‘over against the serious and oppressive languages of the official culture’, it is nevertheless accurately understood as emerging from that same official culture.59 This corrective is pertinent to our reading of Crudities, where a place for the grotesque body in Jacobean court culture is imagined by the panegyrists who collude in Coryat’s metaphor of crudity even as they seem to resist it. Crudities represents corporeal appetite as simultaneously desirable and repellent; for the traveller, and hence for the reader, Coryat proposes both the indulgence of the senses and the intervention of reason. And according to his panegyrists, there are important consequences for masculine identity. Ben Jonson addresses in gendered terms the staged debate in Crudities between the higher and lower faculties, suggesting that Crudities was borne out of his trauelling thigh As well as from his braines, and claimest thereby To be his Bacchus as his Pallas: bee Euer his thighes Male then, and his braines Shee.60 Zeus was said to have given birth to Bacchus from his thigh, and to Pallas from his head; Jonson imagines Crudities as a literary androgyne, both ‘sonne’ and ‘daughter’ to its author. The troubling consequence on Coryat’s intellect of writing a cross-gendered book is to turn ‘his braines shee’. The comparison of writing with parturition

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here functions to suggest not only the irrationality of Crudities but also the feminisation of Coryat’s own brains. Other panegyrics elaborate on Coryat’s unstable masculinity, describing the composition of Crudities as ‘labour’ enacted when he was ‘brought abed’, and the appearance of Crudities (Coryat’s ‘issue’ in print) as a form of ‘abortiue birth’. Sanford acknowledges Coryat’s femininity more explicitly, calling him ‘the Graces gallipot’ or ‘a vessell into which womens teares blended with loues sighes are distilled’; and Roland Cotton supposes ‘a foole might get as wife a child as you’.61 Working up the text’s affinity with the feminine by working up Coryat’s interest in amorousness and transgressive corporeality, the panegyrists imagine the emasculation of both the writing subject and, strikingly, the text itself. Coryat’s translation as a preface to Crudities of an oration on travel by Herman Kirchner, professor of history and rhetoric at Marburg, begins with a description of those who have never been overseas: surely we shall finde those people to be rude, slouthfull, inciuill, rough, outragious, foolish, barbarous, voyde of all humanity, ciuility, and courteous entertainment, proude, arrogant, puffed vp with a self loue, and admiration of themselues; also effeminate, wanton, giuen to sleepe, banquetings, dice and idlenes, corrupted with the allurements of all pleasures.62 Reversing the usual criticisms levelled against travelers, and recalling contemporary descriptions such as Ascham’s of readers of Italian romance who were associated with a similar set of vices (effeminacy, idleness, immorality), Kirchner offers a commentary on the degeneracy of those who ‘have vsed no iourneys’. Coryat had made clear in the dedicatory epistle that Crudities is directed towards aristocrats who have not yet travelled, but it is curious to fi nd him, through Kirchner, describing his untravelled gentlemen readers as idle, effeminate stay-at-homes. And since Crudities surely counts among homebred delights, Coryat implicitly suggests the experience of reading it carries the risk (or opportunity) of exposing oneself to literal corporeal frailty. The panegyrists indeed describe their experience of reading Crudities as a pleasure which leads to forms of illness. According to Sanford, ‘London her selfe fell sicke abed / Surfetted on a iole of laughing.’ Robert Phillips notes Coryat’s ‘painefull wit’, and Chris-

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topher Brooks describes Coryat as simultaneously ‘the delight of a world of noble wits’ and ‘the Gout and Quartan Feauer’, a paroxysmal ague which recurred every four days. Jonson remarks that Coryat ‘glutteth . . . the world with his writing’, and describes the ‘Tumors, Carnosities, or difficult Pimples full of matter appearing in the Authors Front, conflated of Stiptike and Glutinous Vapours arising out of the Crudities’; the author’s ‘front’ refers both to Coryat’s forehead, and the frontispiece of Crudities. For Thomas Bastard, Coryat records more things than appear ‘in the wisest sickmens dreames’. Donne, having read Crudities, confesses his ‘impotency’: The healths which my braine beares, must be farre lesse; Thy Gyant-wit o’rethrowes me, I am gone.63 The panegyrists thus implicate themselves in a curious form of textual exchange: even as they willingly take in the reading matter they have described as superfluous, they imagine themselves experiencing both delight and affl iction. The early modern reading experience could, it seems, be imagined by men to work profound and potentially harmful effects on their own material bodies. Through their determined associations with sensual pleasure, corporeal appetite and superfluity, ‘crudities’ look merely excessive. But Coryat’s metaphor applies to an informed method of literary composition which resists both linguistic refinement and uncomplicated generic classification. It also contributes to Coryat’s sketch of the Renaissance anti-traveller, familiar from anxious descriptions such as Ascham’s. Perhaps most importantly, however, ‘crudity’ describes an effect of reading. For just as Coryat discusses the body’s appetites abroad as simultaneously delightful and dangerous, so the panegyrists imagine the culpable pleasures of reading Crudities to incite illness and bodily impotence. Whereas the prefaces of prose romances at the turn of the century excused the trifling subject matter of romance by referencing the notionally foolish tastes of female readers, Crudities poses a different question: what happens to masculine bodies and selves when they read for pleasure? Coryat and his panegyrists address this question by collapsing the imagined boundaries between ‘male’ and ‘female’ texts, describing both Coryat and Crudities as androgynous or effeminate, and registering their reading experiences in terms of affliction and impotence. As Donne puts it

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‘thy booke doth halfe make man’.64 Manipulating connections between reading, writing and sensory indulgence, and exploring their consequences for aristocratic masculinity, Coryat coins a new generic position for Crudities as a travelogue which resists truthtelling, but is nevertheless not quite a traveller’s tall-tale.

6 Touching Stories: Richard Braithwait, Thomas Cranley and the Origins of English Pornography

I Literary theorists and the authors of conduct books began writing with new urgency in the 1630s about the impact on men’s bodies and selves of ‘wanton discourse, or Lascivious Bookes’. Richard Braithwait issued a stark warning in his advice book A Nursery for Gentry (1638). Describing the fortificatory benefits to young noblemen of reading well, and the hazards of reading irresponsibly, Braithwait explains that impressionable boys inevitably fi nd themselves drawn to unprofitable books and, when they fall upon any passage that complies with the lightnesse of their fancy, so highly affect it, as nothing more delights them, than to discourse of such ayry pleasures, as present themselves in a cursorie manner to their deluded conceits. These are altogether for Stories of Love; where every line workes such moving impressions in their unsteady fancies: as they reduce every period of Loves discourse, to a Sceane of Action; wherein they wish themselves Prime-actors, to close in a personall re-greet, with so light and sensuall a Relation.1 Books which Braithwait calls ‘wanton workes’ not only incite emotional giddiness, legible in the body as a set of irritating or embarrassing symptoms, but also engage the imaginations of apprentice readers in more subtle, disturbing ways. 2 Love stories work such moving impressions in young men’s already unsteady fancies that 115

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they feel as though they are participating in them as central protagonists. They find themselves experiencing a strong sense of sympathy, longing to ‘close in a personall re-greet’, or embrace, securing an intimate form of exchange with the book. The substance of such stories is readily absorbed by their willing imaginations, its light and sensual nature matching the lightness and sensuality of their characters. If serious, mature readers consume books in order to make themselves more morally and physically robust, the introspection of ‘uselesse Readers’ exposes them to shame and infi rmity. Reading the wrong books, or reading them rashly, not only imperils the spiritual cores of young Englishmen, but also quite literally shortens their lives: such ‘ambitious Fire-flies . . . seldome goe gray-headed to their Graves’.3 This chapter explores the assumptions behind Braithwait’s warning that books dealing with the subject of love involve, absorb or transport pliable young men, and, in so doing, aims to contextualise the emergence of English pornography in new ways by situating it within the history of reading, writing and bodily sensation. Most scholars agree that although continental pornography was widely available in translation by the mid-1600s, home-grown English pornography did not emerge until the Restoration. Its appearance has therefore often been connected to the unprecedented changes brought about by the civil war including disintegrating structures of ecclesiastical and political authority, a newly buoyant marketplace of print, and an increasingly libertine society. Such explanations draw useful links between sexually explicit material, topical satire and political discontent, but have tended to focus on one particular kind of postRestoration printed text whose tropes were, by and large, anti-Catholic.4 In what follows, I suggest that these familiar explanations are inadequate fully to accommodate the complex responses in men’s bodies and selves described by writers like Braithwait. Pornography is not accurately described as a scandalous new category of literature whose emergence in the seventeenth century was sudden or unexpected. Rather it is best understood as a passionate transaction between books, writers and readers made possible by earlier discussions of the stimulating effects of literature on the body. The debates surrounding early English pornography address the larger cultural problem of literature inspiring physical and emotional feeling, and

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pornography emerges in what follows as a matter not so much of textual content but readerly approach.5 The problem of readers’ involvement was explored on the one hand by polemicists such as Braithwait who were scandalised by the proliferation of immodest material, and, on the other, by writers such as Thomas Cranley who experimented in his book Amanda: Or, the Reformed Whore (1635) with the boundaries of what was permissible in print. Exploring both sides of the debate in this final chapter, I argue that one important strand of the history of pornography has been overlooked, namely its origins in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century theories about the ways in which books changed men. Pornography is notoriously difficult to define. Some suggest the word was not coined until 1857 when it was used in a medical dictionary detailing the health hazards posed by prostitution, while others suggest that Athenaeus first invented the term in the second century AD in Deipnosophists.6 The word literally means writing of, on, about or for prostitutes (from ‘porne’ and ‘graphos’) and many texts classified as early pornography, such as Joachim Du Bellay’s La Vieille Courtisanne and the pseudo-Aretine instructional dialogue for courtesans, La Puttana Errante, indeed fit this working definition.7 Although pornography is often described as material sexually explicit in character, the term ‘explicit’ is of limited use since it is contingent upon the imaginative and moral thresholds of each reader. At what point does a book become sexually explicit, and according to whose moral parameters can such a definition be policed? To describe pornography as writing ‘intended to arouse lust’, in Roger Thompson’s words, is scarcely preferable. Arousal is similarly ephemeral and contingent, and to categorise a text by way of its author’s purpose is in any case fraught with difficulty.8 The present chapter suggests that the history of pornography is best approached through an analysis of neither sexually explicit content nor bluntly libidinal impact. Accounts by early modern writers suggest that pornography affected men in more complicated and disturbing ways, occasioning feelings of sympathy, disorientating the faculty of reason, and giving rise to a set of shameful bodily symptoms. Ian Frederick Moulton’s thoughtprovoking suggestion that in order properly to theorise pornography one must first ‘desexualise the concept’ deserves to be taken seriously.9 For if pornography is conceived as a way of writing and

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reading, then pornographic affect resides not only in erotic feeling but in other kinds of deracinated sensation as well.

II Braithwait’s works on aristocratic self-government provide a unique insight into the early reception of pornography in England at a time when the literary landscape was undergoing exceptionally rapid change. Born in Kendal, probably in 1588, Braithwait had intended whilst at Cambridge to practise law. By his mid-twenties, he had instead written a book of pastorals, a defence of poetry (now lost), and a collection of verse entitled The Golden Fleece (1611).10 Braithwait’s treatises on good conduct, A Nursery for Gentry, first printed in 1614 and expanded in 1638 and 1651, and The English Gentleman (1630), are both practical handbooks of manners. Braithwait provides detailed advice for ‘every Gentlemen, of selecter ranke and qualitie’, explaining how he should best ‘demeane or accommodate himselfe in the manage of publike or private affaires’ such as diet, exercise, sleep, financial dealings, friendship and travel.11 Both handbooks also contain rousing polemics about the benefits to health and general well-being of fostering good habits of reading. Like earlier theorists, including Henry Crosse, Braithwait argued that books played a central part in a life well led. He connected noble practices of reading with the careful management of the passions and highlighted the hazards posed by ‘wanton words’.12 Braithwait’s lively essays have now lapsed almost entirely into obscurity but remain a rich source of information about seventeenth-century aristocratic masculinity. A Nursery for Gentry centres around Braithwait’s belief that ‘History directs Man in the progresse of this Life’. Properly read and assimilated, he argues, history ‘inflames the minde of man . . . unto valour and resolution’, obliging men rigorously to interrogate their moral and spiritual selves and prompting them to make a meaningful contribution to public life. ‘So strong and sinewey is the conceipt of him who understands what he reads’, Braithwait argues, that reading and understanding history is like having the mind’s muscles stretched.13 He divides histories into four branches: ‘Feigned Relations or Poëticall Histories’, moral history, natural history, and ‘Mixt Histories’ – a combination of all three.14 Every branch should be read with care

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and discrimination, and if the young nobleman should ever fi nd himself experiencing strong emotion while reading, he must acknowledge, temper and then put such emotion productively to use. The ‘attentive Reader’ of the ancient historian Appian of Alexandria, for example, feels surprise, compassion, sorrow and admiration; and it is these very feelings, properly controlled, which serve to enliven the text. Braithwait describes via the regulation of the passions ‘the perfect and exact use of Historicall narrations’, and provides his readers with some special caveats about the abuse or misuse of histories – especially ‘Poëticall’ ones.15 For whereas moral and natural histories inspire readers to improve themselves, Braithwait is suspicious of any form of history which looks ‘adulterate’.16 Lamenting that ‘every lascivious Measure now becomes a Historian’, he insists that history proper should never ‘aime at lascivious stories, amorous subjects . . . frivolous Ambages, or impertinent circumstances’ and warns judicious readers against books which, in his words, are ‘obscene’, ‘light’, ‘wanton’, ‘luxurious’, ‘licentious’ ‘immodest’, ‘filthy’ or ‘wicked’.17 The ‘Brothell-Authours’ of such ‘libidinous writings’, he warns, ‘prostitute . . . their Labours’ in the service of a ‘promiscuous subject’.18 Braithwait’s vocabulary makes clear the link in his imagination between dissolute practices of reading and failure to control sexual appetite.19 But he seems curiously reluctant to identify the precise nature of unsuitable literary content. The authors and texts he reproaches belong to a bewildering range of epochs and genres including Ovid’s ‘depraved workes’, presumably the Amores; Plutarch’s description of ‘Alcibiades wantoning in Timandra’s lappe’; and Suetonius’s account of ‘uncomely lascivious presentments before Nero’. Certain pages of the Greek lyric poets Alcaeus and Rheginus are forbidden, along with all the writings of Anacreon.20 More recent examples include ‘Aretines Tables’, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and the outpourings of ‘prophane Pamphleteers’, especially libels. 21 Drawing from Matthew 12:36, Braithwait succinctly defines objectionable books at one point as those containing ‘idle words’. But even here his definition of idleness slips between that offered by Tertullian (‘whatsoever is vaine and superfluous’); by Theophylact (‘lyes, calumnies, all inordinate and ridiculous speeches’); by Chrysostome (‘such as move uncomely and immodest laughter’); and by Gregory (‘things frivolous, fables, oldwives tales’).22 Nor is the literary feature of immodesty seemingly

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confined to erotic content, for Braithwait objects equally to textual ambiguities which might ‘beget a misconstruction, and consequently some occasion of corruption’, the stylistic shortcomings of stories ‘freighted with continuall Hyperbolees’, and the ‘immodest measures’ of love poetry. Immodesty even blights texts which fail properly to dovetail form and content, when the ‘proportion’ or ‘weight’ of written lines fails to ‘sort with the quality of that Subject wherof they treate’.23 More perplexingly still, immodesty occasionally seems connected in Braithwait’s imagination to the locations in which books are read: he proposes, for example, that obscene texts are the ones which green youths persist in ‘reading in publike places’. The diffuseness of Braithwait’s discussion suggests his reluctance to delimit ‘promiscuous’ enounters with literature simply by censoring erotica.24 His priority was not to offer watertight definitions of pornographic subject matter in order to forbid gentlemen to indulge in it, for it was not so much the reprehensible nature of pornographic content which worried him but, rather, its seismic effects on men’s minds and bodies. If ‘histories, are and were ever highly commended, by reason of their effects’ rather than by their contents, they are made unprofitable by the same token.25 In Braithwait’s analysis, a book only becomes immodest when some shameful readerly humour gets in the way of its proper assimilation or dismissal. Books are not made corrupt by virtue of what they contain, but by virtue of their application – an argument strikingly similar to John Milton’s in Areopagitica six years later.26 Braithwait’s particular anxieties are spelt out in one passage of A Nursery for Gentry which describes ‘The Voluptuous mans Object in his Reading’. Unlike ‘continent and well-composed’ readers, voluptuous men only ‘take notice of such things as are most frivolous; or which is worse, vicious’.27 Braithwait describes this branch of historical enquiry as ‘poëticall’, frankly deploring books written by ‘lightfancied Amorists’ interested in corrupting youth, nourishing vice, and introducing sensual liberty into the lives of vulnerable men: These, who stand thus affected, and whose Readings are soly fi xt upon sensuall delights; it were fitting for them to weane their affections, at least, to divert their eyes from those sensible Objects, which ingage reason to the servile Obedience of appetite; and to re-collect their Diviner parts, to patternes of continence.28

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Whenever books begin to ‘breed these effects’, young readers must steel themselves to intervene in the most direct fashion – by removing themselves from the book. For as Braithwait warns darkly, ‘Lascivious lines produce vicious lives’.29 The reader knows when he is handling ‘froathy and licentious obscenities’ when he feels something stirring in his body. The tumultuous affections excited by reading negligently give rise in turn to a set of bodily sensations which are both troublesome to the reader and embarrassingly evident to everyone around him. To read without due attention is to experience ‘a body pestred with corrupt humours’, and one of the commonest tell-tale signs is ‘a Vermillionblush, a glowing shame’.30 Using an explicitly pathological vocabulary, Braithwait condemns authors who try to disturb the equilibrium of readers’ inner lives as ‘Humour-mongers’. The symptoms associated with reading such books spread like ‘infection’, corrupting the body in the same way as ‘bane and canker’, ‘contagious Ulcers’, ‘greene . . . Disease’ or ‘Gangrene’.31 As immodest books work their way insidiously into the body, the experience of reading is like feeling ‘pricks or goads’ on the skin, or like the sensation of burning as one’s flesh ‘singe[s] . . . in the flames’, or even like the ‘vaporous’ effects on the brain when one ‘takes in snuffe’.32 Braithwait also deploys the familiar metaphor of reading and eating, advising young men that wanton words should be hastily swallowed, if at all, rather than slowly ‘chewed and digested’. Apprentice readers are characteristically ‘apt to be nibling’ at every book they stumble across, but they can tell if they have found an unsuitable one if it ‘leaves the Stomacke craving and unsatisfide’.33 In every case, the unruly passions caused by improper habits of reading wreak havoc in the body, for young men’s flesh, like their dispositions, is easy and pliable. Braithwait’s proposed cure is simple: if poetical history tarnishes the bodies of fledgling scholars, moral history heals them as effectively as ‘an expert Physitian’. If reading the wrong sort of histories imposes a humiliating sterility by ‘depraving the prime seeds’ of England, then reading the right sort of histories ‘sweeten[s] the Seed-pod of their Youth’, shoring up the virility and future fecundity of the gentry.34 In his discussion of the ways in which history transforms tender young men, Braithwait often describes books as though they were themselves alive. He cautions authors to be as vigilant about what

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they write ‘as the Father over his child’, for ‘Libri are our Liberi, our children’. He likens the process of bringing a good book to press to a ‘burdenous labour’, and the practice of writing a shameful one to an ‘unnatural birth’.35 Books should have well-proportioned, sturdy physiques: if ‘the Body of the History being solid, should not depend of weake and infirme members’, then neither, on the contrary, should histories be so over-written that they resemble ‘huge Colossian Bulkes’. Whereas ‘an Airy Author . . . decks his Workes merely with an outward lustre’, a responsible author moulds ‘materiall words’ with circumspection.36 When Braithwait describes a book’s ‘substance’, then, he is not merely referring to wholesome subject matter. His understanding of literary value itself is strikingly material, as he confirms with a ‘sententious saying’: Words follow matter of their owne accord, Matter gives life and essence to the Word. Braithwait accordingly approves of one ancient method of censorship which measures a book’s useful pages against its ‘noxious’ ones by weighing them on a pair of scales. If the left-hand pile is outweighed by the right-hand one whose contents ‘ever conduced to the improvement of the State’, then the book is fit for circulation.37 Braithwait’s materialist understanding of literary matter, and his comparisons between wholesome books and sturdy bodies, are familiar from our reading of literary treatises of the 1580s including Puttenham’s Arte and Sidney’s Apology. But there are important differences between these earlier accounts and Braithwait’s, for, in A Nursery for Gentry, the material bodies of books make new and increasingly insistent demands on the material bodies of their readers. Braithwait describes the experience of reading unsuitable books giving rise to the same ‘love-sicke passions’ as those aroused by illjudged love affairs: For as the Lover is ever blinded with affection towards his beloved: so it fareth with these, who [are] affected to light passages.38 Like the ‘whorish woman’ whose entrancements Braithwait sternly warns his charges against in The English Gentleman, licentious books are ‘trimly decked . . . artfully polished . . . neatly varnished . . . [and]

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cunningly palliated’. Indeed the textual property of lightness is often gendered feminine in Braithwait’s discussion: like ‘some light affected Curtizan’, literary lightness should not be allowed to ‘keepe her Vizard still on’, but should be ruthlessly exposed by readers’ ‘piercing judgement’.39 Books therefore perform something resembling a seduction on unwary young men, making them feel ‘transported’, ‘besotted’, ‘apishly addicted’, ‘beleagred’ and ‘tormented’.40 Since to fall victim to such books is to be ‘(as it were) sold under the gage of prostitution’, Braithwait advises the reader guardedly to ‘prepare himselfe in the perusall of such Discourses, as Calipso instructed Vlysses against the Sirens Inchantments’.41 The acquisition of sexual continence and the fostering of good habits of reading are indistinguishable in Braithwait’s imagination. Sexual temptation and the temptation to read pornographically are one and the same, for in both cases an unregulated appetite is pathologically devastating to the desiring subject. The ability to read attentively, constantly reflecting upon and actively developing one’s own tastes and judgements, had for centuries been regarded as essential to the achievement of private integrity and civic virtue. But in A Nursery for Gentry it is precisely the involvement of readers – which Braithwait calls their tendency to assume that books have a ‘personall application’ to themselves – that looks morally suspect. Only foolish boys of ‘unmellow yeeres’ read histories ‘as if they were the men which the History aym’d at’. Sooner or later, Braithwait warns, such an inexperienced reader shall upon reading of History, meete with some One or Other, so nearely resembling him, and inwardly like him; as he cannot chuse but hugge the Story for the Statue sake. Seeing himselfe so nearely moulded, as himselfe cannot be more like himselfe, then he finds his mentall part resembled. So as, he might well avouch, upon the presentment of an other so like himselfe: Vel meipsum nescio, vel in alio meipsum Sentio: I eyther know not my selfe, or in another I see my selfe.42 To encounter on paper ‘some One . . . nearely resembling him’ no longer presents the reader with an opportunity for self-perfection. Instead the experience of regarding one’s own inward self or ‘mentall part’ now looks thoroughly disconcerting. Losing a sense

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of free will (‘he cannot chuse but hugge the story’), the reader experiences the disorienting feeling of having to choose between the self personated on paper and the self he thought he securely was: ‘Vel meipsum nescio, vel in alio meipsum Sentio’. (Although Braithwait later describes this interpretive problem as one of readerly ‘feeling’, he here loosely translates the Latin meipsum Sentio as ‘I see my selfe’ instead of ‘I feel myself’.) 43 To make the mistake of believing one’s own ‘mentall part’ has been accurately moulded in print is one of the gravest errors an immature reader can possibly make. Particular challenges arise when young men read ‘feigned Histories’ dealing with ‘obscene subjects’. Braithwait singles out as particularly dangerous the genre of prose romance including the ‘unprofitable Stories of Primalion, Palmerin de Oliva, The Knight of the Sunne, Gerilion, with many other fictive Discourses’, reporting that Many of these Relations have strangely transported divers wellpromising Wits into strange amazements . . . Some wee have heard, that in reading the strange adventures of Orlando Furioso, and conveying the very impression of his amorous passion to themselves, would presently imitate his distraction, run starke naked, make Love-songs in commendation of their Angelica, put themselves to intollerable torments to gaine the affection of their supposed Mistresses.44 The danger lies not so much in the unprofitable stories themselves, then, as in the ‘strange amazements’ such stories channel into the bodies and selves of those who encounter them. As Braithwait remarks crisply, ‘the Imagination workes more to life than the line’.45 Experiencing a form of transportation, by which the ‘amorous passion’ of heroes such as Orlando Furioso are grafted into their own imaginations, men find themselves subject to the same torments as those described. The reader’s folly lies in his desire ‘to personage that Knight more lively’, or to become the book’s hero by experiencing or even surpassing his inordinate affections. Braithwait takes seriously the inclinations of young men to make texts too ‘personall’, exhorting them above all ‘whilst reading Idle Pamphlets’ to avoid thinking about their own mistresses: ‘Let no such conceits transport you, lest repentance find you.’46

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In order properly to account for the invention of pornography, and fully to comprehend the attendant controversies, one must first come to terms with the questions of readerly involvement which so preoccupied Braithwait. As Moulton has observed, ‘it might make more sense to see pornography as a way of reading rather than a mode of representation.’47 With whom does one identify when one reads pornographically? In what ways do pornographic practices of reading involve a separation from, or suspension of, masculine selfhood; or an intensification of emotional or bodily experience? In what ways are authors complicit in scenes of pornographic reading? Such questions were addressed for the first time by writers like Braithwait who probed the ways in which ‘unprofitable Stories’ caused complexional, appetitive or somatic disturbance by eroding the boundaries between fiction and reality.48 Imaginary scenarios become brilliantly and devastatingly real to apprentice readers who find themselves sharing the tumultuous inner lives of the men they read about in a process of sympathy involving both the mind and the body. The most reprehensible experiences of reading are those which involve intimate, passionate exchanges between readers and texts, but although Braithwait flags up the particular perils of ‘light and wanton workes’ it is not erotic content which really bothers him.49 Nor does he have much to say about the dangers of young men feeling sexually aroused after reading erotic books. Pornographic affect involves a more wide-reaching, subtle and unsettling set of responses located in young noblemen’s bodies, intellects, emotional topographies and moral constitutions which Braithwait organises as experiences of transport. Mindful that to allow ourselves to be transported is always easier and more amusing than entertaining a more measured, sober response, Braithwait describes imaginative transportation as a nursery apprenticeship for more serious, gentlemanly practices of reading which blissfully absolves us of the responsibility ‘to bee Masters over our selves’.50

III It is perhaps unsurprising that Braithwait compared the temptation to read immodest books with the temptation to consort with immodest women. After all, prostitutes and courtesans occupied a central

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place in the continental erotica which was already available in English bookshops by the 1630s and 1640s. Thomas Cranley’s Amanda: Or, The Reformed Whore, published in quarto in 1635, and reissued in 1639 with the title The Converted Courtesan, was one of the first examples of native English pornography. Like many of its French and Italian precursors, Amanda purportedly chronicled the moral education of a prostitute. Several books with similarly seductive titles appeared in the decades which followed, including John Garfield’s The Wandring Whore (1660), The Wandring-Whore’s Complaint for Want of Trading (1663) containing selections from Aretine’s Ragionamenti, and The Whores Rhetorick (1683) adapted from Ferrante Pallavicino’s Retorica delle puttane (1642). On the title page of Amanda Cranley declares that he writes as a prisoner in the King’s Bench of events which ‘though strange, are true’ – two assertions surely designed to intrigue prospective readers. Like Braithwait, he claims to be writing in order to highlight the moral and physical dangers of consorting with prostitutes, and, relatedly, of reading promiscuously. At the same time, however, he seems determined to provoke in his male readers precisely those physical and emotional responses Braithwait censured so unsparingly. Often implausible and sometimes disquieting, Amanda is a key text in the history of pornography. From the top of a high tower overlooking Fleet Lane, Cranley claims one day to have espied ‘a yoong gentlewoman, of a comely feature’. After having observed several gentlemen visiting her in her chamber, he comes to suspect that ‘she was no better then a whore’. In order to ascertain the truth, he determines to write to her ‘in the nature of a Lover’ to see how she responds, and much of the text which follows comprises his epistles and Amanda’s replies.51 Cranley’s rhyming verse-letters are case studies in moral double-speak. Admiring her beauty, he exhorts her to show it off freely even as he chastises her for giving men free access to it. Begging her to indulge his ‘naked Inke, and Paper’, he simultaneously deplores her willingness to read his letters without first modestly checking who has sent them. Amanda concedes in due course that she takes ‘delight in reading’ them, and invites him to visit her chamber. Cranley reports that he is succeeding in his notional aim to ‘purge the drosse out of her’, but later finds Amanda consorting with ‘divers gallants’ in a London tavern.52 He writes to her again, this time condemning her

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lust and moral bankruptcy using ‘the strongest arguments . . . for her reformation’. After having considered the contents of this letter, Amanda falls sick with a fever for a week before finally writing an abjectly ‘penitentiall answer’ in verse.53 Resolving henceforth to make space in her heart for religious books alone, Amanda profusely thanks Cranley for chastising her, lives a reformed life for two years, then dies of grief. Cranley’s alertness to the eager involvement of his readers suggests his familiarity with the contemporary debate about the dangers attendant on immoderate practices of reading. In the opening address ‘to his Booke’, Cranley describes Amanda in conventional terms as his child: ‘Goe little Booke, the issue of my braine’.54 But this is no orphan or foundling. If Amanda falls into Braithwait’s category of ‘Feigned Relations or Poëticall Histories’, then this story is not reassuringly sinewy, sturdy nor muscle-bound. Neither does it modestly faint, sigh or look pale in its margins.55 Instead the title page bluntly reminds the reader that he holds in his hands ‘Amanda: Or, The Reformed Whore’. Part of Cranley’s purpose in personifying Amanda as a book with flesh and blood is pseudo-didactic for, as he insists, he writes for the benefit of ‘the female sexe’ wherever they may be: Goe to the Country, City, and the Court: They all yeeld matter for to worke upon.56 The precise nature of the ‘worke’ which Amanda was designed to perform upon its readers is, however, not straightforward. When Cranley records in his epistle dedicatory that he was encouraged by a close friend to make his story public, and that he has dedicated Amanda to his brother-in-law Thomas Gilbourne to whom he feels an ‘in violable obligation’, the text already looks designed to consolidate relationships between men. Given what we know of Braithwait’s repeated admonishments to young noblemen in A Nursery for Gentry to beware the enticements of books with ‘lascivious measures’, it seems certain that Amanda was one such book designed to appeal primarily to a male audience.57 Despite its seeming designs on an audience of loose women, Cranley in fact invites a readers’ fraternity to involve themselves in his narrative.58

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Braithwait had warned readers to avoid losing themselves in stories, but Cranley repeatedly describes scenes of looking which demand the reader’s collusion. The first time he catches sight of Amanda, he ‘could easily discerne her, without being seene my selfe’; later, after he has delivered his second letter, he watches Amanda embroidering at her window, supposing ‘that she came thither, as well to give an occasion to be seene as for the eagernesse of the worke’. In the tavern, Cranley and a male friend secure themselves ‘a secret place’ from where they can spy on Amanda and her company without discovering themselves.59 And Cranley’s third verse-letter, purportedly intended to reform Amanda’s conduct for good, includes a lingering description of her preparatory toilette and encounter with an ‘unbutton’d’ client. Here Cranley positions himself alongside the reader as hidden, omniscient narrator as he inventories the soft furnishings in Amanda’s bedchamber, her ‘seam’d Gloves of Kid’, ‘sweete perfume’, ‘dainty powders’, flawless ‘milk-white skin’ and ‘soft . . . brests’. Describing Amanda as ‘of a comely feature, and sweete grace, apparelled very richly, and attired according to the fashion then most in use’, he seems deliberately to court objections like Braithwait’s to the seductive beauty of immodest books. Cranley implicates his reader in his story, inviting him to assume his own passionately involving role.60 Cranley’s letters also seek to involve the reader in more subtle, unexpected ways. His intimate, second-person mode of address is designed in particular to inflame, and then to voice, the reader’s own improper curiosity. When he asks Amanda in a series of imperatives to ‘let me see that face’, ‘raise your window higher’ and, finally, ‘make me reader of your writing’, Cranley makes his reader complicit in his longing to bear witness to Amanda’s beauty, to be granted intimate access to her chamber, and – most appealingly of all – to read in writing her compliant reply.61 The access the reader is granted to this epistolary courtship pre sumes that he is as intrigued by Amanda’s letters as Cranley is himself. Cranley’s verse even occasionally seems to address his readers as well as Amanda. He coyly debates whether or not the substance of his letters will meet with their approval, adopting the self-deprecating manoeuvres familiarly deployed in prefatory epistles:

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When I first did write, my pen Fearing your displeasure fainted . . . If you had not come so nigh me, I had kept my papers by me. Cranley is begging the reader, as well as Amanda, to let his ‘lines acceptance have’, and later makes his request more pressing: ‘I doe not know your name . . . let me know you better . . . grant me my desire’.62 At the same time as Cranley’s letters seduce the fictional Amanda, they backhandedly work a seduction on the reader, petitioning him to allow the text to ‘worke upon’ his imagination. In this way Cranley carefully erodes the boundaries between a fantasised scenario of reading on the one hand and actual readerly experience on the other, so that the process of imagining Amanda being enticed by Cranley’s cajoling letter makes the reader intensely involved himself.63 Cranley’s opening invitation to his brother-inlaw, Thomas Gilbourne, looked entirely conventional when it invited him to immerse himself in the story in order to mend its shortcomings: ‘let my well-meaning endeavours be supplied out of the treasure of your more judicious apprehension’.64 But in fact Cranley imagines a different, more ardent complicity. His most startling accomplishment in Amanda is the provision of an involving experience for an audience of men. Cranley’s third and last verse-letter of 190 rhyme royal stanzas comprises almost half of the entire text of Amanda. Unlike his first two epistles, this final one contains no ‘oyly words’ of flattery nor any further ‘pleasant tales of love’, for Cranley’s sole purpose towards Amanda now is ‘to call thee to account’. The letter opens by deploring her godlessness, the bad company she has kept, and her various ‘sinnes abominate’.65 Cranley describes Amanda’s disgraceful practice of soliciting at playhouses, the unseemly richness of her wardrobe and her ignomious dependence on surgeons and apothecaries to keep her ‘polluted corps’ in working order. He warns Amanda that she will come to a shameful end, abandoned by her family and friends and obliged continually to flit between Westminster, Clerkenwell, Shoreditch, Lambeth and Hackney in order to avoid exposure. To illustrate the transient nature of erotic pleasure, Cranley then inventories from history and literature the names of notorious courtesans, together with the names of women who have famously

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embraced ‘unstain’d virginity’.66 The letter builds up to an outline of Amanda’s arraignment at a court in Bridewell, and an unsparing description of the spectacle of her imagined punishment. In the last epistle, then, Cranley squares himself to the problem of how to reconcile the passionate involvement of his readers with the pedagogical impulse suggested in his sub-title, ‘The reformed Whore’. The primary textual work of the third epistle is to teach Amanda a lesson, and it is perhaps for this reason that Cranley adopts a quasilegal vocabulary. ‘I durst not thee condemne without a tryall’, he assures Amanda, but not before he has registered that she is ‘arrayned, and indicted here’ of ‘vile offences’ of which he is plenteously furnished with ‘direct proofes’.67 Although the imagined trial is undertaken with the purpose of making Amanda ‘a reformed convertite’, it is peppered with provocative descriptions of her services to men.68 Cranley again deplores the ways in which Amanda makes herself shamefully accessible to strangers but, at the same time, once more takes pains to display her. When he accuses Amanda of flinging open her window in order to allure passers-by, for example, his reprimand looks more like an invitation: ‘Thy swelling brests are not display’d enough, /Pull them up higher, set thy dressing lower’. And when he condemns Amanda’s habit of seeking out ‘amorous spectators’ at the play-house, he admits that he is himself one such spectator who received no repulse when he approached her, gathering instead ‘fire/Vnto the fuell of a hot desire’.69 So although Cranley superficially condemns the ‘rough roaring roysters’ who frequent Amanda’s chamber, he nevertheless hankers after the very same pleasures they procure: ‘Of such men I have reason to be jealous./To thy bed chamber they have free accesse’.70 Cranley’s ‘proofes’ against Amanda repeatedly confirm his own prurient interest in her, and the trial of her virtue therefore seems decisively linked to the pleasurable involvement of Cranley’s imagination and, indeed, the imagination of his readers. Among the pleasures Amanda offers are the pleasures of reading fiction. Cranley admits that Amanda’s arraignment is a ‘legend’ originating in the vivid workings of his fancy, and he has already confessed himself a resourceful inventor: I have Riddles to content yee, Purposes, and Sonnets plenty . . .

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I can tell you tales of Kings, And of Noble Princes loves. Monsters of the Earth or Sea, Best to passe the time away.71 His fondness for the pastime of story-making is confirmed by the motto on the title page which underscores the text’s basis in fiction by over-asserting its factuality: Admiranda canunt, credenda aliquando Poetæ. Poets doe tell of strange things not a few, Yet often times those things, though strange, are true. By Cranley’s own admission, Amanda’s trial is a crafted invention as full of ‘apparent inferences’ as ‘direct proofes’.72 Cranley’s fiction has a pragmatic function, however, for even as he courts his readers’ pleasurable involvement in the story, he is exonerating them for their imagined part in Amanda’s ‘loose behaviour’. He supplies a checklist of her putative crimes against men: Thou ruinst heires, and mak’st them sell their lands, To beggery thou bringest men of wealth. Thou mak’st good husbands for to forfeit bands, And younger brothers for to live by stealth, Thou mak’st a man diseas’d that was in health. And those that ne’r intended wicked course, Thou mak’st them daily to grow worse, and worse.73 Cranley’s most bitter accusations are thus reserved not for the crimes Amanda perpetrates against God, her family or her modesty but rather for those committed against male clients who ‘ne’r intended’ wrong. She disrupts the system of inheritance by bringing financial ruin to elder brothers and moral ruin to younger ones; she encourages profligate spending, causing rich men to descend into poverty; she imperils the institution of matrimony by forcing faithful husbands to forfeit their vows; and introduces physical disease – notably syphilis, the ‘Morbus Gallicus’ – into a previously healthy community.74 In short, Amanda is responsible for eroding society’s every fiscal, legal, moral and sexual lynchpin. A pleasurable

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experience of reading now looks inseparable from – or even necessary for – the curtailment of the moral, financial and pathological risks posed to society by a ‘bold-fac’d Whore’.75 Walter Kendrick has suggested that ‘ “pornography” names an imaginary scenario of danger and rescue; a perennial little melodrama’.76 To imagine how Amanda might have been read in 1635 confirms this suggestion, for Cranley first invites and then slickly excuses the pleasures men might have taken in reading pornographically. Whereas moralists like Braithwait worried over the feminising, enervating effects on gentlemen of reading love books, Cranley argues on the contrary that reading such books for pleasure enabled men to perform the culturally useful work of disciplining wayward women. Cranley makes clear that such pleasures were available only to men. When Amanda receives his last verse epistle, he advises her methodically to ‘peruse each line, and letter’ and promises that she will bring about her own cure by reading: And when thou hast this little Pamphlet read, And seene the scope whereto these lines doe tend; Let them not passe an hower out of thy head, Vntill thy sorrow make thy life amend77 Indeed part of Cranley’s strategy for mending Amanda involves reforming the undisciplined habits of reading he imagines her indulging in her bedchamber. On her bottom shelf, underneath her breath fresheners, Amanda keeps a secret ‘heape of bookes’ including . . . amorous Pamphlets, that best likes thine eyes, And Songs of love, and Sonets exquisit. Amongst these Venus, and Adonis lies, With Salmacis, and her Hermaphrodite: Pigmalion’s there, with his transform’d delight. And many merry Comedies, with this, Where the Athenian Phryne acted it.78 Only by reading Cranley’s letter, and bidding it ‘kinde welcome,’ will Amanda learn to suppress her insatiable lust – which looks indistinguishable from her penchant for reading promiscuously. Ten

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days after delivering the letter, Cranley accordingly learns that Amanda . . . had lately beene very sicke, and was not then recovered. Of which her sicknes, when I understood, I was in some hope that she had considered seriously on the contents of the booke, and that it had wrought so farre with her, that she had layd the same to her heart, and was thereby drawne to a strict examination of her owne life, which might be the meanes of troubling her conscience, so farre, as that it might breede a distemper in her body, and so be the cause of impayring her health.79 Sure enough, the epistle has had such a dramatic effect on Amanda’s conscience that she has fallen into a dangerous fever. She offers Cranley one final meeting in her chamber, declaring herself a soft audience for his reprimands: ‘Let it not enter once into thy thought/ That thou hast heare an Adamantine rocke’. Now that Amanda’s confession is complete, Cranley concludes her story abruptly: ‘& so she di’d’.80 If Cranley works up the pleasurable involvement of his male readers, such involvement was clearly unavailable to women. Men’s pleasure in reading the story indeed seems conditional upon Amanda’s abandonment of her own ‘amorous Pamphlets’ and her self-extinguishing response to Cranley’s epistle. We recall that Braithwait’s young nobleman who ‘finds his mentall part resembled’ on paper loses the ability to discriminate between fact and fiction, allowing himself instead to be ‘strangely transported’ into the fabric of a literary adventure with catastrophic consequences for his bodily and emotional integrity. Braithwait therefore regards the temptation to indulge ‘amorous passion’ while reading as a nursery error impossible to reconcile with mature civic duty.81 Cranley’s tough-minded reply to the culturally orthodox position represented by Braithwait both allows and justifies precisely such involvement. He shores up the reader’s complicit involvement in the story, making the act of reading Amanda resemble an ardent encounter with her. He wilfully collapses in his readers’ minds the distinction between literary and lived experience – precisely the distinction which Braithwait had warned apprentice readers to safeguard at all costs. Given the salacious bent of Amanda, Cranley’s remark that its

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‘meaning’s good, how ere it take effect’ looks like chopped logic.82 But although Amanda is clearly designed to give pleasure to men, it also performs ‘good’ cultural work: the punishment of sexually wayward women on behalf of men. Writing about seventeenth-century libertine literature, James Grantham Turner has described how its ‘language is not merely discursive but performative and gestural, calling into play the body it recounts’.83 Both Cranley and Braithwait, for different reasons, were alive to this new, unsettling literary phenomenon. Part of the appeal (and scandal) of Amanda was its frank description of the desiring and desired body. Perhaps more significant, however, was the fact that immodest books like this one were capable of affecting in unpredictable ways the bodies and imaginative selves of their readers, invoking the very sensations they described. Although we cannot know for certain that Braithwait had read Amanda, published three years before the expanded edition of A Nursery for Gentry, we can safely assume that he was familiar with some of the continental harlot literature which had inspired Cranley. And it is clear from the fauxpedagogical bent of Amanda that Cranley was well-versed in the intellectual design of conduct books like Braithwait’s. Cranley and Braithwait’s theories of pornographic affect are indeed strikingly similar. Both writers invest in ideas of literary transport, a powerful moment of sympathetic engagement shared between a reader and a writer. Both are preoccupied with ‘materiall words’, and both describe in cupidinous terms the fleshiness of literature. Braithwait disapproves not only of erotic content but also of ‘libidinous writings’ and ‘Lascivious lines’ which themselves look capable of erotic feeling. Such ‘lively’ books pose keen challenges to apprentice readers: the most passionate books are those which demand the most passionately engaged responses. The title of Amanda seems carefully chosen to elaborate on precisely these anxieties: ‘amanda’, the gerundive of ‘amare’, literally means ‘a woman to be loved’. The experience of reading Cranley’s book comes perilously close to allowing oneself to be seduced by the whore who is here personated ‘as in a mirrour’.84

Afterword

The writers considered in Reading Sensations in Early Modern England all explore the power of literature to affect, for better or worse, the bodies as well as the minds of readers, especially the aristocratic English gentlemen readers of their day. Drawing from ancient literary and rhetorical theory, including Quintilian and Aristotelian ideas of oratorical effectiveness, they consider how feeling may be captured in the fabric of literary texts, and how thereby the reader may be captivated, both mentally and physically. Although such ideas originate in antiquity, the writings explored here are firmly rooted in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century intellectual culture. The authors are immersed in theories of the passions and humours, and subscribe especially to the idea that psychological and physiological feeling are inseparable. When reading stirs up anger, grief, shame, embarrassment, fear or pleasure in men’s imaginations, then, it also impacts upon their physical selves with corollary sensations, for books transform not only the immaterial mind and soul but also the material body. Charting the signs of passionate arousal on the tempers of young readers, early modern polemicists, physicians and writers of conduct books all argued that the cultivation of good habits of reading was an important aspect of gentlemanly integrity. Particularly vexed about the pleasurable effects of reading, they warned young men to exercise vigilance over the boundaries of their own minds and bodies – and those of others. For reading affected not only men’s private, internal wellbeing, but also affected their ability to function as members of a fellowship of Englishmen, Christians, citizens or courtiers. 135

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Early modern literary theorists were familiar with such warnings, but regarded intuitive feeling as an important resource for both writers and readers. In George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie and Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, meaningful encounters with literature indeed seem conditional upon readers’ willingness to engage passionately with words on the page. Literature’s singularity depends upon its ability to elicit a response from men’s minds and bodies, and reading poetry becomes a restorative experience thanks to the rhetorical principle of energeia, or supreme animation in language, which persuades listeners by evoking passionate feeling in them. Puttenham defends poetry by way of its propensity to move readers, and regards energeia as a mark of literary excellence. The bodily sensations associated with pleasure play an important role in his apologia where the moderate feelings involved in judicious practices of reading are described as both delightful and ennobling. The most powerful poems elicit correspondingly elevated feelings among English male readers, and reading involves a sympathetic exchange between men’s bodies and the material substance of poems themselves. Excellent poems have orderly complexions, humours and temperaments, and reading them permits the early modern subject to achieve an orderly relationship to the world. If the body’s involvement in reading was inevitable, questions arose about the nature of the passions aroused, potentially harmful rather than beneficial, and so in need of governance. Philip Sidney, John Donne and Thomas Coryat found that the powerful sensations ignited by literature presented a pressing and ineluctable problem. Sidney argued that reading poetry inflamed virtuous fury among servicemen, inspiring them to emulate the heroic action they encountered on the page. Literature works better than history in this regard, for the pleasurable feelings it ignites are uniquely vivid, compelling and irresistible. At the same time, however, soldiers risked exposing themselves to opprobrium when they abandoned themselves to the delightful deceptions of story-tellers. Sidney therefore tackles one important question raised by poetry’s affective properties: do the passions aroused by reading transform men in fortificatory or prejudicial ways? John Donne deliberates this same problem from a different perspective in The Anniversaries and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Elegies notionally encourage men to temper feelings of overwhelming despair, working therapeutically on their

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sorrows. But Donne shows how reading and writing may instead intensify grief, making bereavement more unbearable by bringing to mind recollections of the mortality of all men. Only when he confronted directly the shameful conditions of disease and despair in Devotions did writing emerge for Donne as a remedy for physical and spiritual infirmity. Thomas Coryat’s exploration in Crudities of the humanist vocabulary of tasting, eating and digesting books reconsiders the problem of appetitive self-government among English gentlemen. Coryat’s novel deployment of the familiar vocabulary of ‘bibliophagia’ (consumption of books) enables him to imagine a new reading experience for a group of men at the centre of early modern court culture where pleasure is central. Coryat’s wit depends on the ironic affectation that his own book deliberately fails to nourish its readers’ intellects, causing injury and discomfort even as it delights. It can be seen then that Sidney, Donne and Coryat all debate in their writings questions central to the development of early modern culture. To what extent should gentlemen exercise control over their bodies and minds? To what degree does management of the private passions impact upon their relationships with one other? If immersion in literary fiction always affects physical and mental equilibrium, does such immersion hinder or help their capacity to function in public life? Each of our writers makes bold new constructions about the ability of literature to influence the complexional, appetitive and humoral make-up of gentlemen, and all are animated by the notion that sensation is a vital force in literary reception and the world at large. Reading with the body emerges in the above chapters not only as an emotionally and physically transformative experience, but as an ethically and morally nuanced one as well. The invention of English pornography becomes an important turning point in the interlocking theories of reading, embodied emotion and masculine self-government explored in this book. If pornography is best understood as a way of reading rather than a category of writing, as I have suggested, then its origins may be traced in discussions of the affective impact of literature on physical, mental and emotional identity in the period of some fifty years before Cranley’s Amanda was published in 1635. Certainly, new forms of pornographic material were appearing in the 1630s, reaching an apogee in the 1650s and 1660s, but this study demonstrates that the impulse to read or write such material can be traced earlier,

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and did not emerge only in response to a supply of books to satisfy it. Rather, the specific turn taken by this impulse in the Restoration needs to be differentiated from its pre-history. The pre-history of pornography is revealed in earlier descriptions of literature’s ability to unsettle the delicate equilibrium of the passions, and particularly in the accounts of polemicists of the early 1600s of the shameful and embarrassing effects literature might have on men’s bodies and selves. Both Henry Crosse and Richard Braithwait were concerned about the pleasure men took in reading fictional matter, but the delights they imagined had less to do with erotic feeling than with other deracinated sensations such rapture, transport, and the disorientation caused by losing oneself in fiction. Books damaged readers less because they contained unsuitable subject matter than because men failed properly to dispose themselves towards receiving them. Braithwait and Crosse argued that complicitous involvement in fiction eroded men’s virtue, but Cranley designed Amanda to engage the imagination in precisely these ways. He insisted indeed on the cultural usefulness of such engagement, for the male reader’s relinquishment of control over his own mind and body seems a requirement in Amanda for the disciplining of promiscuous women. By suggesting that a pornographic experience of reading enables men to carry out a civic ‘duty’, Cranley makes allowable the very same sensations as those deplored by polemicists such as Crosse and Braithwait. Pornography emerges not as a scandalous new genre of writing, but as a passionate exchange between readers and writers, facilitated and validated by earlier demonstrations that literature might affect the body in pleasurable and provocative ways.

Notes

Introduction 1. Plutarch, trans. Philemon Holland, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals (1603), sig. E4v. 2. Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, sigs. B3r and B4r. 3. Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, sigs. B4v, B4r, B5v and C5r. 4. Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, sig. D1r. The present discussion is indebted to Stanley E. Fish’s description of reading as ‘an activity, something you do’. See ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, New Literary History, 2 (1970), 123–62; repr. in Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth-century Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1972), p. 383. ‘Reader response’ criticism continues to generate powerful readings of Renaissance texts. A survey of recent work is included in William H. Sherman, ‘Reading: Modern Theory and Early Modern Practice’ in John Dee: the Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 53–78; and James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein’s ‘Theoretical Accounts of Reception’ in their edited collection, Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–6. Two new studies illuminate particular aspects of early modern practices of reading. Heidi Brayman Hackel’s Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) focuses on the material traces left in books by actual readers. Stephen B. Dobranski’s Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) concentrates on the role of readers in literary works which appear unfi nished. 5. Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, sig. C6v. Puttenham may have been introduced to Plutarch’s writings by his mother, Margery, to whom Sir Thomas Elyot dedicated his treatise The Education or Bringing up of Children, Translated out of Plutarche (c. 1533) urging her to refer to it when bringing up her sons. Sidney refers to Plutarch’s essay in An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965; rev. 1973), p. 130; and Harington mentions it in ‘A Briefe Apologie of Poetrie’, prefi xed to Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591), sig. ¶3v. On the importance of Plutarch’s essay to Renaissance literary critics, see Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999; repr. 2003), pp. 12, 47 and 190. 139

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6. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), sig. E3r. 7. My argument is here informed by Michel Foucault’s analysis of ‘the political technology of the body’, especially the idea that acquiring and exercising social power depends on managing, controlling and exhibiting the body. See Discipline and Punish in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 173. I am also indebted to Norbert Elias’s exploration of the importance of bodily process to the formation of the subject in Western society. Early modern manners and other bodily protocols are described in The Civilizing Process: Socio genetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 60–70. 8. Several recent studies have explored the impact of spoken and written words on early modern bodies and selves. In a chapter on ‘The Physiology of Reading’, Adrian Johns explores the anatomy of the eye, brain and nervous system, and argues that ‘reading exercised a remarkable power over body and mind alike’. See The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 380–443 (p. 382). Drawing from applied stylistics, Robert Cockroft has explored literature and rhetoric’s ability to move the passions, giving rise to ‘the physical sensation of emotional arousal’. See Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). The quotation appears on p. 9. 9. This phrase is Kier Elam’s, from his essay ‘ “In What Chapter of His Bosom”: Reading Shakespeare’s Bodies’ in Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 143. Among the landmark studies of early modern corporeality are Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995; repr. 1996); and the essays in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio’s collection The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). Dympna Callaghan offers a polemical response to ‘the current vogue for bodies’ in ‘Body Problems’ in Shakespeare Studies, 29 (2001), 68–71 (p. 69). Caroline Bynum discusses various interpretations of ‘the body’ in different academic disciplines in ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’ in Critical Inquiry, 22, 1 (Autumn 1995), 1–33. 10. This study is therefore confi ned to tracing the effects of reading on men. Several recent studies have explored the reading habits of women, and the cultural reputation of female readers. Jacqueline Pearson provides a useful introduction in ‘Women Reading, Reading Women’ in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge:

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

Cambridge University Press, 1996). The female readers of romance are uncovered in Helen Hackett’s Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 4–19; and Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). See also Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900: an Anthology of Criticism, ed. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). For a survey of these trends in the history of the early modern subject, see the introduction to Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. pp. 13–18. The body’s multiple engagements with its environments are explored in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Garrett Sullivan and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2007). Mary Thomas Crane has pointed out the importance of acknowledging ‘the presence of a material human body as a central participant in the “complex social practices” shaping the text’. See Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman, introd. Wallace Fowlie (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 7; quoted by Elaine Scarry in her introduction to Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Scarry (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. xiv. See Olney’s address ‘To the reader’ which opens his 1595 edition of An Apology for Poetry (1595), sig. II4r. For more detailed discussions of ‘the analogy between poetic creation and childbirth’ see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 182–209 (p. 183); and Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘Matrix as Metaphor: Midwifery and the Conception of Voice’ in Ventriloguized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 76–115. In Theaetetus 150, 161 and 209, men give birth to a child of the brain (an idea) which may be kept or discarded, just as an infant might be kept or exposed as not worth bringing up. On the connection between genius and virility, see Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), p. 120. Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 479. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 640 and 135; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 140. Olney praises Sidney’s ‘pen-breathing words’ in An Apology for Poetry

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(1595), sig. II4r. Wendy Wall explores the reasons why love lyricists sometimes presented their work as ‘the writer’s surrogate body’ in The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 45–9 (p. 45). 18. Several recent studies have explored the ways in which theatrical audiences responded to plays with their bodies as well as their minds. Tanya Pollard discusses the ‘pharmacy-steeped vocabulary’ of anti-theatricalists, arguing that ‘this language attributes to the theater the power to harm, heal, and otherwise transform spectators in immediate, forceful, and physical ways.’ See Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 3. Carla Mazzio considers the history of the sense of touch ‘as a sensitive and affective form of response’, particularly in relation to anti-theatrical writings, in ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance’ in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 159–86 (p. 178). Laura Levine provides a discussion of the particular vulnerabilities of male spectators in Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–25 passim. See also the essays dealing with ‘the rehearsal of emotion on the Renaissance stage’ in Renaissance Drama, n.s. 31 (2002), arranged under the title ‘Performing Affect’ and edited by Jeffrey Masten and Wendy Wall (p. vii). Any discussion of the ability of utterances to perform actions is indebted to J. L. Austin’s description of ‘performatives’, or speech acts, in How to Do Things With Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (1962; 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 6. 19. Joseph R. Roach has traced the classical history of the idea that rhetoric alters materially the bodies of listeners by stirring their passions, and has shown its influence on seventeenth-century theories of acting and theatrical affect. See The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 23–57. Douglas Trevor discusses literary and bodily ‘dispositions’ in The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 26–7. 20. Michael C. Schoenfeldt describes how Galenic medical theory provided early modern thinkers with ‘a particularly organic account of inwardness and individuality’ whose language looks metaphorical only to the post-Cartesian imagination. See Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 8. ‘The relationship between the body and metaphorical language’ is also explored in the introduction to Reading the Early Modern Passions, pp. 16–17. Compare Jonathan Gil Harris’s account of early modern mercantilism’s deployment of a metaphorical language drawn from contemporary epidemiology and pathology in Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

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21. Gail Kern Paster describes pre-Cartesian emotion in ‘The Body and its Passions’, Shakespeare Studies, 29 (2001), 44–50 (p. 45). The five other ‘non-natural’ factors were diet, sleep, rest or exercise, air, and fullness or emptiness. 22. Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (London: William Heinemann, 2003), pp. 102 and 28. Juliana Schiesari remarks in her discussion of Hamlet that ‘the cultural category of melancholia cannot separate the affect from its display.’ See The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 238. 23. For a longer discussion of the importance of the passions in sixteenthcentury theories of rhetoric and poetry, see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1988), p. 281. 24. Timber: Or, Discoveries in Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, p. 586; Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, sig. E4v. 25. Katherine Rowe, ‘Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’ in Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Paster et al., pp. 169– 91 (p. 177). In The Language of Puritan Feeling: an Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), David Leverenz remarks that ‘self-knowledge was really an anxious and incessant effort to make all one’s experiences fit the proper pattern’ (p. 4). Anna Bryson has also described how concepts of ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ suggested not only patterns of manners and behaviour, but also ‘ways of understanding and interpreting the social world’. See From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 20. 26. Mark Breitenburg defines masculinity as the anxious performance of the visible signs of being a man. See Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 11. 27. As the clergyman William Fenner put it in A Treatise Of the Affections, or The Souls Pulse (1651), ‘Affectus sunt fæmineus animæ partus, sayes the Philosopher, they are the feminine and softly brood of the heart’ which make men ‘sensible of every vain pleasure’ (sig. 2A4r). The quotation, from Wright’s The Passions, appears on sig. H8v. 28. Sasha Roberts has questioned ‘the assumptions of male commentators about women readers . . . above all, that women read with their bodies not their minds’. See Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 20–61 (p. 23). Women were regarded as particularly ‘susceptible to the pathologies of reading’ according to Adrian Johns in The Nature of the Book, p. 413. Jacques Guillemeau warned expectant mothers of their vulnerability to ‘lamentable and fearefull tales’ in Childe-Birth or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (1612), p. 26; quoted in Maurizio Calbi, Approximate Bodies: Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 72.

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29. See Ian Maclean, Renaissance Nature of Women: a Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 34–7; and Gail Kern Paster, ‘The Unbearable Coldness of the Female Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy’, English Literary Renaissance, 28, 3 (1998), 416–40. 30. For a discussion of how novels of sentiment invited readers to involve themselves feelingly in narrative, see Todd, The Sign of Angellica p. 167. 31. The quotation is from Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 3. 32. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 105. 33. Lynn Enterline, ‘Touching Rhetoric’ in Sensible Flesh, ed. Harvey, pp. 243–53 (p. 249). Enterline again considers ‘language not merely as a mode of representation but as a (deeply unreliable) mode of action’ in The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The quotation appears on p. 12. 34. Elizabeth D. Harvey has argued that ‘voice is, first, a construction that takes place within a cultural and historical matrix’. See Ventriloquized Voices, p. 78. Jacqueline T. Miller has argued along similar lines that the expression of genuine feeling need not be preceded by genuine feeling itself, for ‘simulating a passion can produce the passion’. See ‘The Passion Signified: Imitation and the Construction of Emotions in Sidney and Wroth’, Criticism, 43, 4 (2001), 407–21 (p. 415).

1. The Word and the Flesh in Early Modern England 1. On the extent to which the heritage of literature on the passions was shared by Catholic and Protestant theorists, see Susan James, Passion and Action: the Emotions in Seventeenth-century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 24–5. Wright argued in the 1590s for greater toleration of Catholics in English public life and may have been the priest responsible for Ben Jonson’s conversion in 1598. Jonson’s panegyric verse appears in the second edition of The Passions, sig. A6v. 2. Among the most important ancient sources were Aristotle’s De Anima and The Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Augustine’s De Anima et Spiritu and Confessions. Wright’s main source was Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, especially the section entitled ‘De passionibus animae’ (questions 22–48 of Part I of the Second Part). Other near-contemporary English treatises on the passions included Thomas Rogers, A Philosophicall Discourse, Entituled, The Anatomie of the Minde (1576), Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586) and Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1640); among the most important continental theorists were Pierre Charron, Nicolas Coeffeteau, Levinus Lemnius and Juan de Huarte Navarro.

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3. William Webster Newbold describes Wright’s familiarity with Plutarch in the introduction to his edition of The Passions of the Mind in Generall (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986), p. 48. For further discussion of Wright’s treatise as a ‘manual for a rhetorical practice of the passions’, including its particular usefulness to preachers, see John Staines, ‘Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and King Charles’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 89–110 (pp. 94–5). 4. Richard Strier traces this counter-current in ‘Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions, pp. 23–42. 5. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. liv and sig. D2v. All further citations refer to this edition unless otherwise indicated. 6. This quotation is found in Stephen Bateman’s translation of the medieval treatise by Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew de Glanville), Batman Vppon Bartholome, his Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum (1582), sig. C6v. 7. For a discussion of the architecture of the Renaissance soul, see Katharine Park and Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Concept of Psychology’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 455–63. See also Park’s essay on ‘The Organic Soul’ in the same volume, pp. 464–84 (p. 466). The quotation is from Nicolas Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions With their Causes and Effects, trans. Edward Grimeston (1621), sig. B1v. 8. Wright, The Passions, sig. B3v. 9. Wright relied heavily upon Aquinas’s theory of the senses, in turn a reworking of Aristotle. See Ralph McInerny’s introduction to his edition of Aquinas’s Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 1998), p. xviii. The quotations are found in Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, sigs. A12r–12v. 10. The phrase ‘common sense’ had not yet acquired its meaning of practical intelligence but referred instead to a receiving centre for sensory information. Coeffeteau calls it ‘the Center, to which doe flow the formes which are sent vnto it from the other sences’ in A Table of Humane Passions, sig. A12v. According to Anthony Munday, the location of the common sense could be pinpointed to the ‘two ventricles at the doore or entrance of the braine’. See his translation of Philippe de Mornay’s treatise on the passions, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe (1602), sig. F10r. Ruth Harvey discusses imaginatio and the sensus communis in The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975), pp. 43–4.

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11. The quotation is from Richard Carew’s translation from the Italian of Camillo Camilli (itself a translation from the Spanish of Juan de Huarte), The Examination of Mens Wits (1594), sig. G2v. 12. Drawing from Aristotle and Aquinas, Wright identifies eleven basic emotions. The paired concupiscible passions are love and hatred, desire and aversion, joy and sadness. The irascible ones are hope and despair, fear and boldness, and anger – the only passion with no opposite. See Wright, The Passions, p. xxix. Aristotle set out his less formal theory of the emotions in On Rhetoric, Book II and The Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter 5. 13. Wright, The Passions, sigs. B3v–B3r and G3v. As Stephen Gosson remarks in his anti-theatrical treatise The Schoole of Abuse (1579), ‘I can not liken our affection better then to an Arrowe, which getting libertie, with winges is carryed beyonde our reach; kepte in the Quiuer it is still at commaundement’ (sig. D2v). 14. This quotation is from Crosse’s Vertues Common-wealth, sig. V1v. 15. Wright, The Passions, sig. G4r. 16. Wright, The Passions, sigs. B4v and B8r. As William Fenner puts it, ‘if we had no affections at all, we should be like stocks and like senseless stones’. See A Treatise Of the Affections, or The Souls Pulse (1651), sig. I1r. In his translation of Marcello Palingenio Stellato’s The Zodiake of Life (1560), Barnabe Googe argues along similar lines that the mind ‘would no worthy thing perfourme’ without the spur of the passions. The quotation appears in the extended edition of 1576 (sig. C2r). Wright may be drawing here from Plato’s theory in The Laws that one may only achieve temperance by constantly fighting pleasure and desire. See Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 32–3. 17. Wright, The Passions, sigs. B3v, F5r, F3r and Y7v. James notes that theoreticians of the passions often employed images of civil strife and natural disorder. See Passion and Action, p. 12. 18. Wright, The Passions, sigs. E3v, L2r, L8v and M3r. 19. Wright, The Passions, sigs. E8v and N4v. 20. Wright, The Passions, sig. E3r. Two memorable literary explorations of the misleading operations of the imagination are found in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), 2.9.50–52, where Guyon encounters the figure of Phantastes in the Castle of Alma in a chamber full of buzzing flies representing ‘idle thoughts and fantasies’; and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Book 5, lines 100–13, where ‘mimic fancy’ forms ‘airy shapes’ in Eve’s imagination as she dreams of tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. 21. On Aristotelian phantasia and the physiological responses it occasions, see Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures, pp. 181–3; and Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 24–5 and 40–1. 22. Wright, The Passions, sigs. E2r and E2v.

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23. Wright, The Passions, sigs. E2r, E2v and Y7r. 24. Wright, The Passions, sig. Y7r. In A Touchestone for this Time Present (1574), a polemic dealing with abuses against the Church, Edward Hake similarly advises readers that one way of protecting the Christian commonwealth is to ‘auoyde all bawdie rimes/And wanton iestes of Poets vayne’ in favour of ‘Good stories from the Bible’ (sig. G5r). The anti-theatricalist William Rankins notes in A Mirrour of Monsters (1587) that some who ‘feeleth thys passion of melancholy’ try to revive themselves by seeing plays, but would be better employed in ‘reading of the Scriptures . . . whose worde (sweeter then the hony of the hony combe) calleth vs that are greeued’ (sigs. G4r–G4v). 25. Wright, The Passions, sigs. Y7r and H8r. 26. Wright, The Passions, sigs. K7r, H2r, N4r and N4v. 27. On the ancient belief that ‘disease can be treated by the allopathic principle of opposites’, retained in early modern theories of the passions, see Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures, p. 35. On Wright’s indebtedness to Hippocrates and Galen, among other physicians, see The Passions, ed. Newbold, p. 25. 28. See Plutarch’s ‘Of Morall Vertue’ in The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals (1603), trans. Philemon Holland, sigs. G2v–G3r: ‘in man there is a sympathie and fellow mooving of the body, together with the motions of the passions.’ 29. Wright, The Passions, sigs. D1v and E6v. 30. Aristotle and the Stoic philosophers believed that the heart was the seat of all passions; Plato and some Hippocratic authors argued that bodily consciousness and sensation originated in the brain. See Harvey, The Inward Wits, p. 6. 31. Wright, The Passions, sig. G8r. 32. Wright, The Passions, sig. B2r. On the ‘supreme animation in language’ characteristic of rhetorical energeia, see Roach, The Player’s Passion, p. 25. 33. Wright, The Passions, sigs. N4r, H5r and H7v. 34. Barnabe Googe describes in The Zodiake of Life how uneven affections are ‘spred abrode in euery parte, and so thrust out to light . . . by member, bloud, or other humours’ (sig. H6v). Thomas Rogers blames social errors such as boasting, prodigality, ambition, neediness and covetousness on agitated emotions in The Anatomie of the Minde, sigs. B8v–C5v. Sir Thomas Elyot affirms in The Castel of Helth (1539; rev. 1541) that vehement passions and the anti-social behaviour they give rise to ‘do appaire, and somtyme lose vtterly a mans estimation’ (sig. R4r). 35. Wright, The Passions, sig. B4v. 36. On the importance of this aspect of Aristotle’s ‘behaviorist philosophy’ in early modern culture, especially Protestant spirituality, see Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: the Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 4. 37. Wright, The Passions, sigs. G5v, K1r and K3v.

148

Notes

38. In her essay ‘English Mettle’, Mary Floyd-Wilson discusses Wright’s thesis that ‘environment determines temperament’. See Reading the Early Modern Passions, pp. 132–4. These questions are pursued at greater length in Floyd-Wilson’s English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 136–7. 39. Compare the inscription Descartes prepared for his own tombstone, ‘He who hid well, lived well’, mentioned in Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (London: William Heinemann, 2003), p. 21. 40. Wright, The Passions, sig. Y7r; William Webbe, ‘A Preface to the noble Poets of Englande’, in A Discourse of English Poetrie. Together, with the Authors Iudgment, Touching the Reformation of our English Verse (1586), sig. A4r. 41. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), sig. P7v. Russell Fraser discusses early modern anti-poetic sentiment in The War Against Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 42. See Thomas Beard’s translation of Jean de Chassanion, A Theatre of Gods Iudgements (1597; rev. 1631), sig. 2F3v. The Spanish romance Amadis de Gaul was available in multiple versions by the 1590s. The thirteenth-century French romance Launcelot du Lake and the early sixteenth-century The Tale of Melusine also remained popular. The quotations from Henry Crosse’s Vertues Common-wealth appear on sigs. V3r and O1v. The Court of Venus, a collection of ballads often attributed to Chaucer, was first printed in the 1530s. William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566) is described on its title page as a collection of ‘pleasaunt histories and excellent nouelles’ extracted from various authors. Guy of Warwick was a Middle English romance known in ballad form by the 1590s. 43. Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie, sig. D1r. The debate over the relative merits of rhyme and quantitative metre flourished from the 1570s onwards. George Gascoigne regarded the overuse of polysyllabic words as un-English: ‘the more monasyllables that you vse, the truer Englishman you shall séeme.’ See ‘Certayne notes of instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English’, in The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (1575), sig. T4r. 44. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. P1r. Robert Matz provides an extended discussion of the ambivalent reputation of poetry in the English Renaissance, especially among those interested in aristocratic gentlemanly conduct. See Defending Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3. 45. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, sig. L7r; Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. P2v; Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, sigs. A5v and A3r; Harington, ‘A Briefe Apologie of Poetrie’ prefi xed to Orlando Furioso (1591), sig. ¶3v. 46. Holland, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, sig. B4v. On the changing habits of book-buyers, see Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of

Notes 149

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–13. David Cressy traces patterns of early modern literacy in Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. Q1r. Jonson deplored in Timber, or Discoveries the ‘Prerogative the vulgar have, to lose their judgments, and like that which is naught.’ Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, Clarendon, 1925-52), VIII, 582. On Jonson’s blacklist of poets, see Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 3. On early modern female readers’ notional fondness for literary toys and trifles, see Juliet Fleming, ‘The Ladies’ Man and the Age of Elizabeth’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Granthan Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 158–81; Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 4–5 and 10–16; Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 37–47; and Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 20–30. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. V3r and B1r. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. O4v, P1r, N4v and N4v. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. P2v, O1v and N3v. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. N3r. The connections between reading, melancholy and despair are discussed in Chapter 4 below. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. N3v–N4v, O3r–O3v, Q1r–Q2v, Q3v and V3r. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. R1r–R1v, O2r, O1v and P1v. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. N4r, O2r, N4r. Gosson compares unsuitable books to ‘an Apothecaries shop, of pestilent drugges’ in The Schoole of Abuse, sig. E4r. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. V3r. Jonathan Gil Harris discusses the emergence in the early modern period of the idea of disease as an invasive, foreign agent rather than an imbalance within the body in Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. O2r and O1v. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. O2v and O2r. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. O2r and N2v. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. V2v, O3v and O4r. Gosson agrees in The Schoole of Abuse that reprehensible books ‘disperse their poison through al the world’ (sig. A1v); and Stubbes warns in The Anatomie of Abuses that they work towards ‘ye poysning of the whole world’ (sig. P7v). Webbe concurs in A Discourse of English Poetrie that ‘brutish Poetrie’ has spread like an unstoppable ‘infection’ (sig. C2v).

150

Notes

61. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. P1v and O4r. 62. On the spiritual importance of the ‘collective self’, see David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling: an Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), pp. 162–3; Targoff, Common Prayer; and Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: the Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 232–4. 63. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. N3v and N2r. 64. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. P2v. 65. On the emergence of a new kind of biblical exegesis ‘in which semantics is not representational, but affective and performative’, see Richard Waswo’s essay on ‘Theories of Language’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 25–35 (p. 35). Erasmus’s theory of ‘affective preaching’, inherited from Augustine, is discussed by Shuger in Sacred Rhetoric, pp. 63–4. 66. In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine described love not as an irrational perturbation but as a crucial and productive aspect of spiritual life. For a discussion of the association of certain emotions with the heart and will (voluntas) in Renaissance rhetoric, see Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, pp. 134–6. 67. Andreas Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching, Otherwise called the Pathway to the Pulpet, trans. John Ludham (1577), sig. B8r. 68. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. P2r. 69. Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching, sig. G4v. See also John Norden’s prayer in A Pensiue Mans Practise (1584) that he and other Christians might with ‘all diligence imprint within the closet of our heartes’ what they have heard of God’s Word. The quotation appears on sig. G3v of the 1598 edition. The heart must not only be receptive to the Word, but must also sustain a healthy appetite for it. According to Richard Baxter in Gildas Salvianus, the Reformed Pastor (1656), ‘Its a sign of a distempered heart that looseth the relish of Scripture’ (sigs. K1r–K1v). Before the Fall, on the other hand, ‘Every creature had the Name of God so legibly engraven on it, that man might run and read it’ (sig. S5v). William Fenner also describes God’s Word literally touching believers: ‘their affections are not only allured, but receive a touch from the Word’. See A Treatise Of the Affections, sig. C3v. 70. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.3.70–71. 71. Quoted by Fenner in A Treatise Of the Affections, sig. X4v. On the passionate faith inspired by the Psalms in particular, see Strier, ‘Against the Rule of Reason’, pp. 31–2. The longer quotation is also from Fenner, sigs. N2v–N3r. 72. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), sig. B3r. 73. ‘Short Rules sent by M. Rich. Green-ham, to a Gentlewoman troubled in minde’ in Thomas Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers (1609), sig. D7v; Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. V3v. See also ‘Rules as concern-

Notes 151

74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

80.

81.

82.

ing Reading’ offered in Rules for the Behauing of thy Selfe Christian-like, published anonymously in Rogers, sigs. G6r–G6v. On the undesirability of pastors who are literally or metaphorically ‘scabbye and full of byles’, see Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching, sig. B5r; and Wright, The Passions, sig. G3r. The quotation is from Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching, sig. C1v. Niels Hemmingsen hoped his treatise might enable ministers ‘to breake and distribute the worde of God vnto the people’. See The Preacher, or Methode of Preachinge (1574), trans. John Horsfall, sig. A3v. Fenner makes a similar point when he quotes from Job 23:12 in A Treatise Of the Affections: ‘I have esteemed the words of his mouth more than my necessary food’ (sig. R1v). Thomas Hooker, Foure Learned and Godly Treatises (1638), sig. K9r; quoted in Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling, p. 167. On the milk of the Word, see also Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, sig. T1v. Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, sig. 2C2v; and Thomas Hooker, The Christian’s Two Chiefe Lessons (1640), sig. S4v; quoted in Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling, p. 167. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606), sig. F7r; and Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, sig. d4v. Many sermons were published to be read as well as heard, as Hugh Martin points out in Puritanism and Richard Baxter (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1954), p. 152. As Quintilian notes, ‘we should ourselves be moved before we try to move others.’ Institutio Oratoria, 6.2.28, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), vol. 3, pp. 58–9. Wright quotes from Cicero to make the same point in The Passions, sig. M6v. Aristotle argued that the same was true of the tragedian: ‘those who are actually experiencing the emotions are the most convincing’. See The Poetics, 8.3, section 55a; trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 27–8. The implications for early modern theories of acting and impersonation are explored by Roach in The Player’s Passion, pp. 24–7. William Perkins, Prophetica (1592), translated by Thomas Tuke as The Art of Prophesying (1606), sig. K3v; see also Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching, sig. B5v. Preachers were entreated to remember Paul’s words in I Corinthians 2:4: ‘my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.’ Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sigs. O2v and P2v; Fenner, A Treatise Of the Affections, sig. N4v. Hemmingsen recommends in The Preacher that Christian orators communicate in ‘plaine and common speache’ (sig. D2v); and, in The Reformed Pastor, Baxter repeats the imperative ‘to speak so plain, that the ignorant may understand us’, deploring the efforts of preachers who try ‘to move their minds with tickling levity’ (sigs. F7v and L8v). On the characteristic early modern ‘abhorrence of words as words’, see Fraser, The War Against Poetry, p. 11.

152

Notes

83. Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, sig. N3v. 84. Christian preachers borrowed rhetorical ideals of loftiness, grandeur and sublimity from the classical grand style and adapted them to their own purposes. See Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, pp. 108–18. François Rigolot discusses ‘the transformative power of the Word of God’, focusing on the influence of Erasmus on Reformation Evangelical thinkers, in ‘The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion’ in Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, pp. 161–7 (pp. 166). These questions were explored by Hyperius in The Practise of Preaching; the quotation appears on sig. G3r. Fenner warns that even scripture works to deleterious effect in irresponsible hands: ‘a wicked mans affections . . . may be touched by the Word’ (A Treatise Of the Affections, sig. C3v). 85. Hemmingsen, The Preacher, sig. A5r. 86. Shuger discusses this vocabulary in Sacred Rhetoric, p. 124. 87. Fenner, A Treatise Of the Affections, sig. N1v; Mattias Flacius Illyricus, Clavis Scripturae Sacrae [1562] (1695), 2:461; quoted in Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, p. 131. Hyperius mentions the same passage from Hebrews in The Practise of Preaching, sig. H1r. Donne’s relationship with the material Word of God is explored in Chapter 4 below. 88. The above quotations appear in Fenner, A Treatise Of the Affections, sig. O3r; Wright, The Passions, sig. N4v; Hemmingsen, The Preacher, sig. H7r; Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, sig. I8r; Hemmingsen, The Preacher, sig. I4v; and Fenner, A Treatise Of the Affections, sig. S1r. 89. For further discussion of ‘the relations between the individual worshipper and the public devotional sphere’, see Targoff, Common Prayer, p. 5 et passim.

2. Beneath the Skin: George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney and the Experience of English Poetry 1. For a survey of Renaissance writers’ commitment to ‘the civilizing force of rhetoric’, see Brian Vickers, ‘ “The Power of Persuasion”: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare’, in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphey (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 411–35 (p. 414). 2. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965; rev. 1973), p. 138. 3. Elaine Scarry has revealed the ‘mimesis of materiality’ in early modern literary language, focusing on the poetry and prose of John Donne. See her introduction to Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. vii–xxvii (p. xv); and her own essay in the same volume, ‘Donne: “But yet the body is his book” ’, pp. 70–105. Murray Cohen approaches this same phenomenon from a different angle, tracing how mid- to late seventeenth-century grammarians assume ‘that words are analogous to matter’ and that ‘the physical materials of language are the elements out

Notes 153

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

of which meanings are made.’ See Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 1–42 (p. 9). The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 64. On the personification of the figures, see Willcock and Walker’s introduction to The Arte of English Poesie, p. lxxxii. The figures mentioned above appear on pp. 168, 184, 191, 233, 226, 233, 164 and 255. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 137–8. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 137. The fi nal two phrases come from Sidney’s description of Plato’s work in An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 97. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 4. For the history of this theory, see François Rigolot, ‘The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 161–7, esp. p. 161. The notion that artists not only imitated life but also actually created it can be traced back to the Pygmalion story in Book 10 of Metamorphoses. Puttenham was familiar with Arthur Golding’s translation; see The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 61; and Metamorphoses, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 302. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 65, 67 and 130. The term ‘catalectic’ was probably first used by the metrical theorist Hephaestion. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 68–9 and 74. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 74 and 149. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 133 and 137. Milton, Areopagitica (1644) in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1998), p. 999. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 19. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 120 and 116. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), 59a, p. 38; Aristotle later describes plots which have ‘a single action of many parts’ (59b, p. 39). The History of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, 3 vols (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), vol. I, 491a–493a, pp. 34–49. For a discussion of Aristotle’s ideas about uniform and non-uniform parts, see Peck’s introduction, p. lxii. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 143. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 121, 121–2 and 178. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 191. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 85, 98 and 100. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 118, 111, 159 and 257. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 78 and 197–8. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 120. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 142–3. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 78 and 202. For an extended discussion of how early modern bodies felt a sympathetic sameness with

154 Notes

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

the sensible world, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The present work builds on Paster’s discussion of the reciprocal transactions (or ecologies) which existed between early modern humoral subjects and the natural or topographical worlds they inhabited. To the physical, elemental environments Paster discusses (air, fire, earth, water), a discussion of the affective environment of poetry is here added. Plutarch, ‘How a Young Man Should Study Poetry’, in Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, 15 vols (London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), 26a–b, pp. 136–7. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 84, 97 and 137–8. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 119. Shepherd discusses Sidney’s understanding of ‘forcibleness or energia’ on p. 226. William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie. Together with the Authors Iudgment, Touching the Reformation of our English Verse (1586) in Ancient Critical Essays Upon Poets and Poësy, ed. Joseph Haslewood, 2 vols (London: Robert Triphook, 1815), vol. 2, pp. 15–95 (p. 24). The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 6; An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 96 and 98. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 112, 117 and 118. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 107 and 97. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 77, 132 and 83. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 112 and 117–18. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 5 and 129. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 124, 129 and 158. Puttenham’s sometimes self-contradictory remarks about classical and vernacular prosody, especially English and Latin polysyllables, are discussed in detail in the introduction to this edition, pp. lxiv–lxxiii. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 25–40. Willcock and Walker discuss Puttenham’s overlapping categories of aesthetic, social and moral civility in their introduction to The Arte, p. lv. The quotation appears on p. 127. Edmund Spenser coined this memorable phrase in a letter to Gabriel Harvey. See The Works of Edmund Spenser: a Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 11 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), vol. 10, p. 16; and Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, p. 25. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 305, 272, 261 and 266. Puttenham’s precious ambassador recalls Thomas Nashe’s description in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) of an incompetent rhetorician who, having ‘cast a figure so curiously’ for his audience, ‘would take occasion to stroke up his haire, and twine up his mustachios twice or thrice over while they might have leisure to applaud him’. Quoted in Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1988), p. 264.

Notes 155

40. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 272 and 265. 41. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 77. 42. For a longer discussion of the ‘vitalistic experience’ of reading, see Rigolot, ‘The Rhetoric of Presence’, esp. p. 167. 43. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 250. Here I am indebted to Mary Floyd-Wilson’s discussion of English literary theorists such as Sidney and Webbe who described the civilising force of rhetoric and poetry as ‘a kind of physical erosion – or a softening of barbaric traits’. See English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 89–110 (p. 98). My argument also builds on Michael C. Schoenfeldt’s discussion of pleasure in the writings of George Herbert: ‘Senseexperience is not absolutely negated, but it is kept tightly controlled, and always pointing at a higher good.’ See Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 119. 44. Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, I.936–50 and IV, 11–25; cited in An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 182. The quotations appear on pp. 114 and 109. 45. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 113, 103 and 113. 46. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 138-9. 47. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 113; Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 14. 48. Aristotle, Poetics, 4.1, section 49b; trans. Heath, p. 10. Elizabeth S. Belfiore discusses Aristotle’s ‘frequent biological analogies’ in the Poetics in Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 53 and 57. 49. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 52 and 57. 50. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 53–4. 51. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 121, 116 and 121. Mary Claire Randolph discusses exhaustively ‘the omnipresent medical metaphor in English satire of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’ in ‘The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory: Its Possible Relationships and Implications’, Studies in Philology, 38 (1941), 125–57 (p. 135). 52. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 139. The vast quantity of rhetorical treatises which appeared between 1400 and 1700, and the increasing importance afforded to rhetoric in early modern pedagogy, inevitably overlapped with theories developed in contemporary works of literary criticism. See Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, pp. 255 and 278. 53. Cicero, De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), I.VII.9, pp. 20–1. 54. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 33.

156

Notes

55. Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1923; repr. 1996), pp. 36–7. 56. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 3. 57. Plato, Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches, Protagoras, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 534a, p. 13. For a discussion of rhetorical composition, including ‘vocal delivery and gesture’ in Roman oratory, see Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, pp. 62–7 (p. 66); and J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: the Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1947), pp. 108–11. 58. Aristotle, Problems, trans. W. S. Hett, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), 953a, vol. 2, pp. 154–7. Thomas Wright links genius with emotional and humoral imbalance: ‘If many rare wits had not beene pressed with the same affections, we should neuer haue seene Homers Poetry, nor Platoes Diuinitie, nor Aristotles Philosophie, nor Plinies Historie, nor Tullies Eloquence’. See The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), sig. C1v. For an extended discussion of melancholia as both a clinical condition and a source of literary inspiration, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). 59. Juan de Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits (1594), sig. D5v. 60. George Chapman, trans., Homers Odysses (1614), sig. A4v. 61. Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 453–7; in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1926), pp. 486–7. 62. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 3 and 18. 63. The Arte, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 303.

3. Arming the Reader: Sir Philip Sidney and the Literature of Choler 1. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 95. 2. Richard C. McCoy and Blair Worden have suggested that Sidney’s literary accomplishments contributed to his role within Elizabethan political culture, and, in particular, to the emergence of his reputation as a Protestant aristocratic warrior. See McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979); and Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). F. J. Levy considers the relationship between Sidney’s active and contemplative careers in ‘Philip Sidney Reconsidered’, ELR, 2, 1 (1972), 5–18 (p. 18). Ian Frederick Moulton goes further, arguing that Sidney negotiated a place for erotic poetry in the lives of noblemen with military ambitions. See ‘The Defense of Eroticism: Sir Philip Sidney’, in Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England

Notes 157

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 89–90. Richard Helgerson has suggested on the contrary that Sidney’s career as a soldier was reconcilable with his literary aspirations in terms only of resignation and recantation. See The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 4–5. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (1579), sigs. A7v and B8v. In A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), William Webbe described in similar terms ‘that princelie part of Poetrie, wherein are displaied the noble actes and valiant exploits of puissaunt Captaines, [and] expert souldiers’. See Ancient Critical Essays Upon Poets and Poësy, ed. Joseph Haslewood, 2 vols (London: Robert Triphook, 1815), vol. 2, pp. 15–95 (p. 45). George Puttenham also described the historically ‘martiall’ function of poetry in The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 17–18. Mary Floyd-Wilson discusses ‘the relationship between English poetry and civility’, and Marlowe’s dramatisation of its implications for soldiers, in English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 104–5. The quotation is from a letter from Hubert Languet to Sidney dated 22 January 1574. See The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Stuart A. Pears (London: William Pickering, 1845), p. 25. Katherine Duncan-Jones describes Sidney’s ‘fiery temper’ in Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 41. As Languet warned Sidney, ‘Unless you alter your opinion you will be always meeting with persons who will excite your wrath and give you cause for complaining’. Languet’s letter is dated 24 July 1574. See The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Pears, p. 88. See Moffat’s discussion of the ‘Martial Life of Philip Sidney’ in Nobilis or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney and Lessus Lugubris, ed. B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1940), p. 86. The quotation is from Languet’s letter to Sidney dated 16 July 1578. His advice regarding Leicester’s campaign is found in his letter dated 15 February. See The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Pears, pp. 137–8 and 150. See Languet’s letter to Sidney dated 2 May 1578 in The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Pears, p. 147. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 594. Quoted by Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, p. 22. My argument builds on Robert Matz’s exploration of Sidney’s An Apology in Defending Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The discussion of The Arcadia in the present chapter departs from Matz’s conclusion, however, that ‘Sidney attempts

158 Notes

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

to defend the courtly pleasures of poetry by claiming that such pleasure promotes warrior service’ (p. 21). Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1026; repr. 1991), pp. 482– 3. A lame Attic schoolmaster, Tyrtaeus of Aphidnae (fl. 670 BC) composed marching songs for the Spartans. Milton remarked in Areopagitica (1644) that the Spartans were ‘muselesse and unbookish . . . minding nought but the feats of Warre’, preferring ‘soldierly ballats and roundels’ to higher strains of poetry. See The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1998), p. 1000. Andreas Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching, Otherwise called the Pathway to the Pulpet, trans. John Ludham (1577), sig. G3r. Plato, The Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford World’s Classics: Oxford University Press, 1993; repr. 1998), pp. 80–1 and 361–2. Plato and Aristotle’s discussion of the phobos (fear) aroused by poetry is discussed by Elizabeth S. Belfiore in Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 227. The Boke Named the Governour (1531), sigs. E1v–E2r. An Apology for Actors (1612), sigs. B3v–B4r and G1r. Laura Levine discusses the ways in which Shakespearean theatre, especially Troilus and Cressida, acted as ‘an instrument of rage’ in Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 26–43 (p. 26). This speech belongs to Paris in Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1629), Act 1, Scene 3, lines 70–1 and 80–1. See The Selected Plays of Philip Massinger, ed. Colin Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 113. Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), p. 26. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 100–2. Sidney recommended Aristotle’s Ethics to his brother Robert as ‘the begyning, and foundacion of all his workes, the good ende to which everie man doth & ought to bend his greatest actions’. See The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), vol. 3, p. 124. Thomas Moffat confirms that Sidney drew often from the Ethics in order to cultivate ‘proper care of his morals’. See Nobilis or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney and Lessus Lugubris, ed. Heltzel and Hudson, p. 77. Thomas Wright counts anger as one of the irascible emotions of the sensual appetite. Triggered by an excess of hot blood, it ‘causeth fighting, blood, and wounds’. See The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), sigs. C2r and F1r. John Downame’s treatise on anger, Spiritual Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, Arising from Superfluitie of Choller (1600), describes it as ‘an affection, wherby the bloud about the hart being heated by the appre-

Notes 159

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

hension of some iniury offered to a mans selfe or his friends . . . the appetite is stirred vp to take reuenge’ (p. 2). See also Thomas Rogers, A Philosophicall Discourse, Entituled, The Anatomie of the Minde (1576), p. 14: ‘Anger is a lust or desire to punishe, or to be reuenged on him, which seemeth to haue hurt vs’. Pierre de La Primaudie describes how the feeling of ‘being contemned and despised’ results in anger. See The French Academie, wherin is Discoursed the Institution of Maners (1586), p. 313. Philippe de Mornay Munday, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe, trans. Anthony Munday (1602), p. 122. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), p. 401. Seneca describes anger in De Ira as ‘the most cruell and enraged’ of all the affections, ‘alwayes violent and full of immoderate sorrow, of armes, of bloud, or punishments’. See Thomas Lodge’s translation in The Workes Both Morall and Natural (1614), sig. 2V4v. For a description in verse of how an angry man’s ‘hande for wepon calles’, see Marcello Palingenio Stellato, The Zodiake of Life, trans. Barnabe Googe (1576 edn), sig. H6r. Downame, Spiritual Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, sig. D4r. Seneca, De Ira, trans. Lodge, sigs. 2V4v, 2X5v and 2X1r. Downame, Spiritual Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, sig. H3r. La Primaudie describes anger as ‘nothing else but a short furie’ in The French Academie, p. 312; and Thomas Rogers agrees that ‘an angrie man, when he is in his heate, differeth not from a madd man’. See A Philosophicall Discourse, Entituled, The Anatomie of the Mind, p. 16. Seneca, De Ira, trans. Lodge, sig. 2V5r. The quotation is found in Seneca’s De Ira, trans. Lodge, sig. 3A6v. For an extended discussion of the personification of anger as female in Renaissance literature and culture, see Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Holland, sig. G2v. Sidney’s letter, written in 1580, praises Denny who ‘with good reason bend yourself to soldiery’. See Sir Philip Sidney: a Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 289. For descriptions of anger’s symptoms, see Seneca, De Ira, trans. Lodge, sigs. 2Z1r, 2V5r and 2Z6v. The quotation is found in Downame, Spiritual Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, sig. H2r. The symptoms of anger are also described by Plutarch in The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Holland, sigs. L1r and G2v; and Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, sigs. 2D1v–2D2r. The quotations are found in Downame, Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, sigs. A6v and H2r; and Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions, sig. 2V4v. Plutarch also describes how anger ‘soone transporteth us beside our

160 Notes

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

selves’. See The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Holland, sig. L6v. Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Sloan, p. lv, sigs. C1r and C1v. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Thomson, p. 101. Seneca recalls this passage in De Ira: ‘Anger saith Aristotle is necessarie, nor can any thing be achieved without her, except she encourage the minde, and enkindleth the spirit’. See Lodge’s translation, sig. 2X2r. Downame, Spiritual Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, pp. 4–5. Mornay, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe, trans. Munday, sig. G2v; Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, sigs. 2B3v and T7v. Mornay and Coeffeteau are probably recalling Aristotle’s Ethics: ‘everyone who acts in anger does so from a sense of grievance’. See The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Thomson, p. 182. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 97, 127 and 118–19. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 131 and 194 n. 34. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 141. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 107–8. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 27–8 The quotation is taken from Hoskyns’s treatise on speech and writing which survives in manuscript (British Library Harleian MS 4604). See the modern edition of Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), p. 41. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 124 and 138. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 119. The second quotation appears in Sidney’s letter to his brother Robert, dated 18 October 1580, in Sir Philip Sidney: a Critical Edition, ed. Duncan-Jones, p. 292. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 132, 118, 130, 125 and 127. Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hudson, p. 41. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, trans. George A. Kennedy (Oxford University Press: Oxford and London, 1991), pp. 127 and 125. Aristotle quotes from The Iliad, 18.109. The physical signs and symptoms of anger are again described in De Anima, 403a31. See W.S. Hett’s translation (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), pp. 16–17. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Thomson, p. 102. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 123 and 124. This phrase is found in the second dedicatory epistle of Barnabe Rich’s military handbook, A Path-way to Military Practice (1587), sig. A6r. The quotation appears in a letter Sidney wrote to his brother Robert around 1578. See Sir Philip Sidney: a Critical Edition, ed. Duncan-Jones, p. 286. A Path-way to Military Practice (1589), sigs. G3r–G3v and sig. C2r.

Notes 161

51. Thomas Digges, Four Paradoxes, or Politique Discourses Concerning Militarie Discourses (1604), sigs. K1v–K2r. 52. Styward, The Pathwaie to Martiall Discipline (1581), sig. F2r; Blandie, The Castle, or Picture of Pollicy (1581), sig. F2v; and Trussell, The Souldier Pleading his owne Cause (1619), sig. D3r. 53. Downame, Spiritual Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, sig. D8r; Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions, sig. 2V1r. 54. The first quotation appears in the unsigned epistle ‘To the courteous Reader’ which prefaces Lodge’s translation of Seneca’s De Ira. The second is from William Fenner’s A Treatise Of the Affections, or The Souls Pulse (1651), sig. N2r. 55. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, II.xi.27 in Cicero, In Twenty-Eight Volumes, ed. and trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1971), vol. 18, pp. 174–5. 56. Clayton, The Approved Order of Martiall Discipline (1591), sig. A3v; Greville, ‘A Treatise of Humane Learning’, in Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633), sig. E1r. Sasha Roberts explores at greater length the feminising effects of poetry, especially love poetry, in Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 62–101 (esp. p. 76). 57. Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, sigs. C4r–C4v. 58. Downame, Spiritual Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, sigs. D8r and E2r; Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions, sig. 2Y1r. 59. Seneca, De Ira, trans. Lodge, sigs. 2X6r and 2Y2r. 60. These quotations are found in Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, sigs. T12r–T12v; and Downame, Spiritual Physicke to Cure the Diseases of the Soule, sigs. E4r and K4r. 61. The phrase is Sidney’s, from An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 123. 62. Anna R. Beer argues that ‘history was seen as the best reading for a politician or soldier’ in ‘ “Left to the world without a Maister”: Sir Walter Ralegh’s The History of the World as a Public Text’, Studies in Philology, 91, 4 (1994), 432–63 (p. 446). On active reading more generally, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’, “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–78. Jardine and Grafton argue that ‘Renaissance readers . . . persistently envisage action as the outcome of reading – not simply reading as active, but reading as trigger for action’ (p. 40). 63. Styward, The Pathwaie to Martiall Discipline (1581), sig. C2r; Braithwait, A Svrvey of History (1638), sigs. 2Z3v and P4r. 64. Barret, The Theorike and Pratike of Moderne Warres (1598), sig. B1r; Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions, sig. 2X2v. 65. The quotations appear in the essays ‘Of Aduise’ and ‘Of Life, and the Fashions of Life’. See Cornwallis, Essayes (1600), sigs. C3r and L7r. 66. Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Holland, sigs. 4N6v–4O1r and 4O1r.

162

Notes

67. Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Holland, sigs. 4O1r and 4N5v. 68. Seneca, De Ira, trans. Lodge, sig. 2Y2r. 69. In a letter to Sidney dated 22 January 1574, Languet had recommended ‘reading history, by which more than anything else men’s judgments are shaped’. See The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Pears, p. 26. Sidney’s letter to Robert is found in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, vol. 3, pp. 130–3 (p. 131). 70. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 112, 104, 110 and 100. Sidney made use of these ideas in the revised Arcadia. As the clown Dametas prepares himself for battle with the cowardly Clinias, he chooses for his device ‘a great army of pen and ink-horns and books’ in order to suggest to onlookers that he plans to accomplish ‘such bloody deed with his sword as many ink-horns and books should be employed about the historifying of them’. Contrary to his intentions, however, the bookish paraphernalia in Dametas’s device suggests not the grandeur of his aspirations but, rather, their ordinariness – for they are worthy only of historification. See The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, p. 511. 71. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 97. The second quotation is found in Sidney’s letter to his brother Robert, dated 18 October 1580. See Sir Philip Sidney: a Critical Edition, ed. Duncan-Jones, p. 292. 72. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 107. The second quotation appears in the same letter to Robert Sidney, in Sir Philip Sidney: a Critical Edition, ed. Duncan-Jones, p. 292. Here Sidney argues that poetical histories are worth reading ‘for though perchance they were not so, yet it is enough they might be so’. Francis Bacon argued along similar lines that poetry is ‘but fained history’. See The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human (1605), sig. 2E1v. 73. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, p. 57. 74. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, pp. 115, 127 and 114. 75. Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hudson, p. 41. 76. Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation or a New Prayse of the Old Asse (1593), sig. G3v. 77. Chapman’s dedication to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, is found in Homer’s Odysses (1614), sig. A4r. 78. On the centrality of Amphialus in the revised Arcadia, see John Carey, ‘Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Dennis Kay (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: an Anthology of Modern Criticism (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1987), p. 252. 79. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, pp. 466 and 467. 80. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, pp. 469 and 473. 81. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, pp. 493, 473, 525 and 482. 82. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, pp. 320, 474 and 122. 83. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, pp. 294, 123 and 537.

Notes 163

84. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, pp. 468, 469 and 473. 85. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, p. 497. War also appeals aesthetically to the proud, furious Anaxius: ‘for his part he liked no music but the neighing of horses, the sound of trumpets, and the cries of yielding persons’ (p. 524). The quotation from Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry is found in Shepherd’s edition, p. 114. 86. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans, p. 473. 87. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 124. 88. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, p. 113.

4. ‘These Spots are but the Letters’: John Donne and the Medicaments of Elegy 1. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poetry, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 47–8. 2. Sir Philip Sidney, Julius Caesar Scaliger and Thomas Wilson agreed that the purpose of lament was to replace despair with constancy, resolution and humility. See An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), p. 116; Scaliger’s Poetices Libri Septem (5th edn, 1617), III, cxxi; quoted and translated in O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: a Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp. 113–14 and p. 226, n. 7; and Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), pp. 65 and 66. David Harley explores the role of speech and writing in the general process of healing from the Renaissance onwards in his essay ‘Rhetoric and the Social Construction of Healing’, The Society for the History of Medicine, 12, 3 (1999), 407–35, esp. 427–32. 3. Donne’s commitment to the transformative effects of reading and listening is apparent in his sermons where he describes scripture as the best ‘Cordials’ and the prophets as his trusted ‘Physitians’. The Psalms in particular are ‘an Oyntment powred out upon all sorts of sores, A Searcloth that souples all bruises, A Balme that searches all wounds’. See The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1953–62), vol. 8, p. 74 and vol. 7, p. 51. 4. Donne’s connections with the Drury family, including his travels on the continent with Sir Robert in 1611 and 1612, are discussed in R. C. Bald, Donne and the Drurys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 5. Funeral elegies were a major occupation for Donne between 1609 and 1614. He composed verses on the death of Lady Markham (fi rst cousin to Lucy, Countess of Bedford), two poems for Celia Bulstrode, and an ‘Elegy on the L.C.’ possibly for Thomas Egerton the Lord Chancellor or for Henry Cary the Lord Chamberlain. Elegies on Prince Henry, Lord Harrington and Marquis Hamilton followed. W. M. Lebans remarks that the

164

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Notes

three basic elements of funeral elegies, lament, eulogy and consolation, are found in all of Donne’s elegies except The Anniversaries. See ‘Donne’s Anniversaries and the Tradition of Funeral Elegy’, English Literary History, 39 (1972), 545–59 (p. 546). On the importance of Donne’s funeral poems in the development of early modern elegy, see Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: the English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 91–123. The quotation is found in one of the sermons Donne preached at Lincoln’s Inn between 1617 and 1622. See Sermons, ed. Potter and Simpson, vol. 3, p. 341. For an extended discussion of medical imagery in Donne’s sermons, see Winfried Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), pp. 68–85. Donne’s knowledge of Hippocrates, Galen and Paracelsus, and his deployment of this knowledge in The Anniversaries, is discussed by Don Cameron Allen in ‘John Donne’s Knowledge of Renaissance Medicine’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 42 (1943), 322–41. Donne may have strongly disagreed with Puttenham’s view of Paracelsus whom he ridiculed in Ignatius His Conclave (1611). See Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 88–9. For a discussion of Donne’s scholarly melancholia, and its links to his faith, see Trevor’s The Poetics of Melancholy, pp. 87–115. Trevor argues that Donne’s sidenotes in Biathanatos served a therapeutic function, countering his melancholia and isolation (pp. 105–15). Here my argument builds on the work of Robert N. Watson who suggests that Donne explored ‘strategies for combatting mortality’ in his secular lyrics. Watson comes to a different conclusion about the Anniversaries, however, arguing that Donne regards Elizabeth Drury as ‘meaningfully preserved’ in ‘An Anatomy of the World’. See The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 250 and 237. Jonson’s response to The Anniversaries was recorded by William Drummond; see Conversations with Drummond, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. 1, p. 133. The Countess’s displeasure is discussed in Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 103. In a discussion of Donne’s private and public audiences, for example, Arthur F. Marotti calls The Anniversaries ‘eccentric’, marked by ‘coarse, prosaic features and comical and satirical deformities’. See John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 242. Readers’ suspicion of The Anniversaries is discussed by Louis L. Martz in John Donne in Meditation: the Anniversaries (New York: Haskell House, 1970, p. 1; and by Frank Manley in John Donne, The Anniversaries, ed. Manley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), pp. 5–6. Matthew Greenfield has perceptively addressed the tension between the public and private roles of early modern elegists, including Donne, con-

Notes 165

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

centrating on the problem of sincerity. See ‘The Cultural Functions of Renaissance Elegy’, English Literary Renaissance, 28, 1 (1998), 75–94. Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651), p. 65; quoted in Hardison, The Enduring Monument, p. 165. This chapter is indebted to Elizabeth D. Harvey’s description of Donne’s voice in The Anniversaries as ‘a construction that takes place within a cultural and historical matrix’. Harvey questions whether authorial voice is ever securely linked to physiology, especially the gendered body. See Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992; repr. 1995), pp. 76–115 (p. 78). It also builds on Lynn Enterline’s work on writing and melancholia in The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Enterline considers descriptions of melancholia in works by Tasso, Marvell, Shakespeare and Webster and argues that irreparable sadness is ‘inextricably tied up with the text’s implicit or explicit commentary on its own poetic and rhetorical problems’ (p. 5). A. N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Historical Studies, 1976), p. 20; quoted in Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 2. The ‘violent scenes of despair’ that sometimes accompanied death in the Middle Ages are discussed by Philippe Ariès in The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981), pp. 142–5. Reformed practices of mourning are described by Claire Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984; repr. Routledge, 1988), pp. 39–59. On the emergence of ‘compassionate moderation’ in mourning in the Renaissance, see G. W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 27–39. For a discussion of the ‘ambivalence of early modern regulation of grief’, see Andrea Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 43. The Castel of Helth (1541), sigs. S2r–S2v and B3r. Thomas Rogers also describes the symptoms of sadness in A Philosophicall discourse, Entituled, The Anatomie of the Minde (1576), sigs. H3v–H6r. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, sig. E6v. On the natural and unnatural causes of grief, see Elyot, The Castel of Helth, sig. B1r. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), pp. 358–9. As Juliana Schiesari and others have noted, however, the Galenic theory of ignominious melancholia was mixed with the Aristotelian tradition which associated it with wisdom and nobility. See The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 6. The physiology and psychology of melancholia are outlined in Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: a Study of Melancholia in English Literature

166

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

Notes

from 1580–1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), pp. 1–20. Thomas Playfere, The Meane in Mourning (1597), sigs. F8v and B3r. Playfere preached a large number of sermons in front of James I and his court, and may have been made chaplain-in-ordinary after 1603. His The Whole Sermons were printed in 1623. Plato, The Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford World’s Classics: Oxford University Press, 1993; repr. 1998), pp. 81–2. For a fuller discussion of Greek and Roman attitudes towards death, and Donne’s responses to them, see Bettie Anne Doebler, The Quickening Seed: Death in the Sermons of John Donne (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974), pp. 27–60. Alexander Garden, A Garden of Grave and Godlie Flowers: Sonets, Elegies, and Epitaphs (1609), ed. John Lundie (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1845), sig. F2v. Hamlet, 1.2.94; All’s Well That Ends Well, 1.1.51. Cornwallis, ‘Of Discontentments’, in Essayes (1600), sig. K6r; Gosson, Plays Confuted in Fiue Actions (1582), sig. C5v. Rogers, The Anatomie of the Minde, sigs. H8v and H6v. Thomas Wright argues similarly in The Passions of the Minde that ‘wise men . . . endeauour with reasons to diminish the cause of their griefe’ (sig. E2v). Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (5th edn, 1617), III, cxxi; quoted and translated in Hardison, The Enduring Monument, p. 113 and p. 226, n. 7. The order in which the poems in The Anniversaries were composed, and their unity or disunity as a sequence, has often been debated. W. Milgate outlines the textual history in his edition of The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. lvii–lxi. James Andrew Clark describes the ‘narrative wholeness’ of the sequence in ‘The Plot of Donne’s Anniversaries’, Studies in English Literature, 30 (1990), 63– 77 (64). Don Cameron Allen suggests that Donne’s philosophy of the ‘sympathies and antipathies existing between the microcosm and the macrocosm’ may have been drawn from Paracelsus. See ‘John Donne’s Knowledge of Renaissance Medicine’, p. 325. Thomas Docherty explores confession as a ‘talking cure’ which is also an act of self-wounding because it involves self-criticism. See John Donne Undone (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 217. Docherty is drawing here on Michel Foucault’s discussion of confession in The History of Sexuality (1976), trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), vol. 1, p. 20. Anne Cotterill has argued on the contrary that Donne attempts to forestall speechlessness in ‘An Anatomy’ through ‘the literary movement of digression – of stepping aside, around, away’. See Digressive Voices in Early Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 60.

Notes 167

30. As Donne wrote in an undated sermon upon the 32nd Psalm, ‘onely the Declaring, the Publishing, the Notifying, and Confessing of my sins, possesses me of the Kingdome of heaven.’ See Sermons, ed. Potter and Simpson, vol. 9, p. 296. For a fuller discussion of Donne’s interest in confession, see Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 92–8 (p. 96). 31. Sermons, ed. Potter and Simpson, vol. 2, p. 94 and vol. 9, p. 304. Quoted by Stephen Pender in ‘Essaying the Body: Donne, Affl iction and Medicine’, in John Donne’s Professional Lives, ed. David Colclough (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 215–48 (p. 215, n. 3). 32. Rosalie Colie discusses in more detail Donne’s ‘unmetaphorical use of . . . the notion of the world-as-carcass’. See ‘ “All in Peeces”: Problems of Interpretation in Donne’s Anniversary Poems’, in Just So Much Honour: Essays Commemorating the 400th Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne, ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore (University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1972), 189–218 (p. 201). Don Cameron Allen explores Donne’s knowledge of Renaissance anatomy in ‘John Donne’s Knowledge of Renaissance Medicine’, pp. 328–9. 33. For an extended discussion of early modern anatomies, see Devon L. Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985): ‘By cutting apart vice, the anatomist cleanses a diseased body and discovers the cause of its sickness for our edification’ (p. 6). Jonathan Sawday describes anatomists’ preoccupation with ‘bodies’ of knowledge in The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995; repr. 1996), p. 2. 34. See Ernst Robert Curtius’s discussion of ‘the religious metaphorics of the book’ in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. 310–11. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski discusses the connections Donne drew between scripture and the Christian body, especially the heart, in Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: the Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 167–71 and 292–3. See also the sermon Donne delivered at Denmark House on 26 April 1625: ‘All this life is but a Preface, or but an Index or Repertory to the book of life; There, at that book beginnes thy study’. Sermons, ed. Potter and Simpson, vol. 6, p. 280. 35. Anthony Raspa (ed), Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1975; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 49. All page numbers refer to this edition. 36. Susan Zimmerman has argued that Protestant reformers found unsettling Catholic speculation about the ‘liminal properties of the corpse’. See ‘Animating Matter: the Corpse as Idol in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy’, Renaissance Drama, NS, 21 (2002), 215–43 (p. 217). According to David Cressy, many people in mid-Tudor England believed the soul lingered near the body for thirty days after burial. See Birth, Marriage and Death:

168

37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

Notes

Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; repr. 1999), pp. 398–9. See Conversations with Drummond, ed. Herford and Simpson, vol. 1, p. 133. Lewalski discusses Donne’s ‘Idea of mankind’ as the image of God in Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise, pp. 111–14. Harvey describes how Elizabeth Drury’s virginity paradoxically signals ‘her ability to propagate texts’ in Ventriloquized Voices, p. 112. Elizabeth M. A. Hodgson argues along similar lines that Donne emphasises Drury’s unfulfilled capacity to bear children, and that she gives birth in The Anniversaries to ‘Donne’s brain children’ instead of her own. See Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999), pp. 162–87 (p. 164). Clara Lander discusses Donne’s condition in ‘A Dangerous Sickness which Turned to a Spotted Fever’, Studies in English Literature, 11, 1 (1971), 89–108. The quotations appear in Devotions, ed. Raspa, p. 36; and Donne’s undated letter to Sir Robert Carr in Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, sig. 2K1r. Arnold Stein discusses the Devotions within the tradition of artes moriendi, describing them as ‘turned finally towards the goals of justified consolation and hope’. See The House of Death: Messages from the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 49–66 (p. 49). Devotions, ed. Raspa, pp. 3, 114 and 48 Devotions, ed. Raspa, pp. 8 and 16. Devotions, ed. Raspa, pp. 7 and 9. John Mabb, The Afflected Mans Vow: with his Meditations, and Prayers (1609), sig. B1v. According to the 1559 Prayer Book, ‘whatsoever your syckenesse is, know you certainlye, that it is Goddes visitacion.’ For a longer discussion of the relationship between physical affl iction and spiritual rectitude, see Stephen Pender, ‘Essaying the Body’, pp. 222–9. ‘M.M.’, ‘That Man may thankefully receiue’, sigs. E4v and E7v. Hebrews 12:6. Donne’s use of scripture in The Devotions is discussed at greater length in Jonathan Goldberg, ‘The Understanding of Sickness in Donne’s Devotions’, Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (1971), 507–17. Sermons, ed. Potter and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 53. See also Goldberg, ‘The Understanding of Sickness’, p. 511. Devotions, ed. Raspa, pp. 67–8 and 69. Devotions, ed. Raspa, p. 108. Don Cameron Allen calls Devotions a ‘treatise on the futility of medicine’. See ‘John Donne’s Knowledge of Renaissance Medicine’, p. 336. Devotions, ed. Raspa, pp. 54 and 67. Confessions upon the rack were sometimes ordered by royal prerogative, with the purpose of gathering information from criminals. Such confessions were however invalid in a superior court of law. See Raspa’s note on the 14th Meditation (p. 163). Devotions, ed. Raspa, pp. 71, 39 and 70.

Notes 169

53. See Devotions, ed. Raspa, p. 59. This passage is noted in Joan Webber, Contrary Music: the Prose Style of John Donne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), p. 183. 54. Devotions, ed. Raspa, p. 86. 55. Sermons, ed. Potter and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 410; quoted in Stephen Pender, ‘Essaying the Body’, p. 244, n. 124. 56. The quotation is from Scarry’s introduction to Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. vii–xxvii (p. xi). See also Scarry’s essay in the same volume, ‘Donne: But yet the body is his booke’, pp. 70–105. 57. Devotions, ed. Raspa, p. 96.

5. Eating His Words: Thomas Coryat and the Art of Indigestion 1. Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals (1603), trans. Philemon Holland, sigs. B3v–B4r. Sir John Harington refers to this passage in ‘A Preface, or Rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetrie’ prefi xed to Orlando Furioso (1591), sig. ¶3v. 2. Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), sig. 3D4r. 3. See Jonson’s ‘A Character of the Authour’ in Crudities, sig. b1v. Henry’s accounts are preserved in the Public Records Office, AO 1/2021/2, fols. 5–5v. 4. The autograph manuscript of Coryat’s letter to Hicks is preserved in the British Library copy of Crudities presented to Prince Henry (BL G6750); it is reprinted in Censura Literaria: Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, 10 vols (London: Longman, 1805–9), vol. 8, p. 73. On Coryat’s contribution to the press charges, see the mock-panegyrics in Crudities, sigs. d3v and e5v. For the history of the licensing of Crudities, see Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 127–9. 5. For Coryat’s criticism of Thorpe, see Coryats Crambe, sig. H1r. 6. Compare recent scholarship on the talkative margins of early modern texts: Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: the Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 57 and 100; and Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. xi et passim. 7. Elyot, The Castel of Helth, sig. K3v. 8. Moffat, Healths Improvement (pub. 1655), sig. 2H2r; Holland, The Historie of the World, 2 vols (1601), vol. 2, p. 64, sig. G2v. 9. This quotation is from Anthony Munday’s description of the hazards of poor digestion in his translation of Philippe de Mornay’s The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe (1602), sigs. B7v–B8r. 10. Edward Hake, A Touchestone for this Time Present (1574), sig. F1r. Drawing from humoral theory, Gail Kern Paster has demonstrated that the early modern body was experienced as dangerously porous, and that the

170

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19

20.

21.

Notes

‘exceptional evacuations or perilous invasions’ implicit in everyday corporeal events (such as the consumption of food) could unexpectedly undermine corporeal integrity. See The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 12. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 11. Schoenfeldt discusses Spenser’s Castle of Alma as an illustration of ‘the ethical and physiological importance of digestion’ on pp. 40–73. Erasmus, Adagia (1500), trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, in The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982–92), vol. 24, p. 80. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 220–1; Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth: Or The High-way to Honour, sig. T3v. Compare the descriptions of the discomforts and embarrassments caused by a ‘stomacke ouerchargde’ in Hake’s A Touchestone for this Time Present, sig. F1r; and Marcello Palingenio Stellato’s The Zodiake of Life, trans. Barnabe Googe (1576), sig. A7v. Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, sigs. K1r–K1v. Juan Huarte, trans. Richard Carew, The Examination of Mens Wits (1594), sigs. E3r–E3v; Hake, A Touchestone for this Time Present, sigs. A3r–A3v. Stephen Gosson makes a similar point in The School of Abuse: ‘I may well liken Homer to Mithecus, & Poets to Cookes, the pleasures of the one winnes the body from labour, & conquereth the sense: the allurement of the other drawes the minde from vertue, & confoundeth wit’ (sigs. A4r–A4v). The hierarchy of the senses is Aristotelian in origin: ‘Sight is superior to touch, and hearing and smell to taste, in purity, so their pleasures differ similarly. Also intellectual pleasures are superior to sensuous ones, and both kinds differ among themselves.’ See The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 266. Terence, Eunuchus, IV.v.6; Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II.xxiii.60. See for example John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, IV.iii.238; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, II.i.112; II.i.158–9. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, I.iii.59; IV.iii.242; IV.i.1–7. The Duchess of Malfi, II.i.111; II.i.159. Henry Buttes confirms that apricots were reputed to ‘inflate the stomache’ in his work of dietetics, Dyets Dry Dinner. Consisting of Eight Seuerall Courses (1599), sig. C1v. Julius Caesar, II.ii.116. Thomas North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), in Shakespeare’s Plutarch, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 183. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, pp. 220–4; Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man, sig. 2D1v.

Notes 171

22. Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor Mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie (1574), sig. C6v; Crosse, Vertues Commonwealth, sig. T4r. 23. Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (London: Heinemann, 1922), vol. 4, pp. 12–13; Ciceronianus (1528), trans. Betty I. Knott, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 28, p. 402. 24. See Cornwallis, Essayes (1600), sig. K2v; Bacon’s essay ‘Of Studies’ in Essaies. Religious Meditations. Places of perswasion and disswasion. Seene and allowed (1598), sig. A4r; and Braithwait, A Svrvey of History: Or, A Nursery for Gentry (1638), sig. 3B4v. 25. Milton, Areopagitica (1644) in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1998), p. 1005. Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. 8, p. 638. Jonson’s comparison is drawn from Seneca, who argues in Epistle 84 that an imitator should ‘assimilate earlier writers as bees doe honey’. Colin Burrow discusses Jonson’s ‘biological metaphors’ in ‘Combative Criticism: Jonson, Milton, and Classical Literary Criticism in England’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 487–99 (p. 492). 26. Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570), sig. K3v. On the alimentary metaphor in Renaissance literary imitation, see also Bruce Thomas Boehrer, The Fury of Men’s Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Terrance Dunford, ‘Consumption of the World: Reading, Eating and Imitation in Every Man Out of His Humor’, English Literary Renaissance, 14, 2 (Spring 1984): 131–47. On rhetorical digestio, see Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist for Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 55–6. 27. Crudities, sigs. H3v and l4r. 28. Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), V.iii.522; Crudities, sig. f2r. Thomas Nashe’s drunken parasite-poets similarly ‘vomited in verse all that they knew’ in Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592–3). See R. B. McKerrow (ed.), The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols (London, 1904–10; rev. 1958), vol. 3, p. 273. 29. Crudities, sigs. H2r, C7r and G3r. The poet, chaplain and linguist John Sanford appears in Crudities under a pseudonym; see Brandon S. Centerwall, ‘Identifying “Glareanus Vadianus” as John Sanford’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 55 (April 1999), 35–7. 30. For a discussion of ‘kitchen stuff’ as the detritus from cooking, see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 74. On the ‘ridiculous linguistic juxtapositions’ characteristic of kitchen Latin, see Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 212.

172 Notes

31. Teofi lo Folengo, Liber Macaronices (1517), ed. A. Luzio, 2 vols (Bari: Scrittori d’Italia, 1911), vol. 2, p. 284: ‘This ars poetica is called macaronic after macaroni, which is a thick and unrefi ned rustic dish made up of a mixture of flour, cheese and butter. For this reason, macaronic verses should only contain that which is coarse and crude, along with vulgar words.’ Quoted in Jeanneret, A Feast of Words, p. 218. 32. Crudities, sigs. E6r, l1v, l2v, D3v, H3r, G4v, G3v and F3v. 33. Fuller, Worthies, sig. 3D4r; Crudities, sigs. E5v and B3v. 34. The unsatisfactory nature of literary and rhetorical confectionery is echoed in complaints such as Jonson’s in Discoveries against poets who are merely ‘cream-bowl, or but puddle-deep’, and Ralph Lever’s in The Arte of Reason (1573) against ‘sugar-tongued fellows which labour more for fi nes of speech than for knowledge of good matter’. Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 541; Lever, The Arte of Reason (1573), sig. Iv. 35. The vocabulary of sugar and sweetness was nevertheless a staple of Pléiade and Elizabethan sonnet discourse, and Francis Meres famously referred to Shakespeare’s ‘sugred Sonnets’. See Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth (1598), fol. 201v. Many early modern authors mentioned the sweetness of poetry, and its capacity to appease the reader. Edmund Spenser describes Sir Walter Ralegh’s Ocean to Cynthia as ‘sweet verse, with Nectar sprinckeled’, for example, in the proem to Book 3 of The Faerie Queene (1590). See A. C. Hamilton’s edition (London and New York: Longman, 1977), p. 304. 36. Fenner, A Treatise Of the Affections, or The Souls Pulse (1651), sig. 2B4r. 37. See Robert Stapleton’s prefatory verse epistle to Greene’s Mamillia, sig. A4v; Forde, Ornatus and Artesia, sigs. A4r–A4v; The Complete Works of John Lyly, 3 vols, ed. R.W. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), vol. 2, p. 9. 38. Crudities, sigs. C7v, D1v and F6r. 39. Juliet Fleming, ‘The Ladies’ Man and the Age of Elizabeth’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 158–81; Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 12. 40. Joan Pong Linton has suggested that the male author of Elizabethan romance worked hard at ‘maintaining his bond with male readers and his implied superiority within the gender hierarchy’. Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 18. Coryat and his panegyrists work hard, on the contrary, to destabilise this bond. 41. Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926; repr. 1991), pp. 324–5. 42. Crudities, sig. b5v. On Coryat’s neglect of affairs of state, see William M. Schutte’s introduction to the facsimile edition of Crudities (London:

Notes 173

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

Scolar Press, 1978), p. viii. Anthony Parr discusses the legitimate purposes of early modern travel in ‘Thomas Coryat and the Discovery of Europe’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 55, 4 (Fall 1992), 579–602 (584). The entertainment is printed in R. S. Thomson, ‘Boote and Spurre: a Jacobean Quête from Folger MS J.a. I’, English Literary Renaissance, 18, 2 (1988), 275–93 (286). Crudities, sigs. X1r, V6r–V7r. For another reading of this episode, see Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Italians and Others: The White Devil’, in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. Peter Stallybrass and David Scott Kastan (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 251–62 (p. 253). Crudities, sig. X1r. The Scholemaster, sigs. I1r, I2v, K1v, N3v and O1r. Thomas Wright describes the link between ‘affectation in speech’ and effeminacy in The Passions of the Minde in Generall, sig. H8v. The above quotation is found here. I Henry IV, II.v.247; 2 Henry IV, IV.ii.17–20. 2 Henry IV, I.ii.141. See Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 56; Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 20. Rhodes describes Falstaff as an example of ‘Shakespearean grotesque’ in Elizabethan Grotesque, pp. 89–130. For a discussion of Crudities as Menippean satire, see Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 72–3. Northrop Frye considers the similarities between Menippean satire and romance in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 309–10. Crudities, sigs. F1r–F1v. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 311. For some examples of Coryat’s pseudo-erudition, see Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 27. The Bankette of Sapience, sig. A2v; Adagia, trans. Phillips, vol. 31, p. 19. On Renaissance notebook culture, see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Crudities, sigs. S5v, V6v–7r, V5v–6r. The phrase is Wright’s in The Passions of the Minde in Generall, sig. H8v. Crudities, sigs. D2r and G6v. The hemistich is quoted and translated in Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (Newark: University Delaware Press, 1994), p. 122. On the subordination of ‘eros’ in epic, see Gordon Teskey’s introduction to Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance,

174

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Notes

ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 6. Crudities, sigs. V2r–V2v. Jones, ‘Italians and Others’, p. 253. Michail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968), p. 281. For an exploration of ‘carnival’s complicit place in dominant culture’, see Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 318–36 and p. 320. Crudities, sig. B4r. Crudities, sigs. C8r, C6v, l1v and C8v. Crudities, sig. B6v. Crudities, sigs. H2r, C7r, A1r, G2r and D4r. Crudities, sig. D3r.

6. Touching Stories: Richard Braithwait, Thomas Cranley and the Origins of English Pornography 1. The quotations are found in Richard Braithwait’s The English Gentleman: Containing Sundry Excellent Rules or Exquisite Observations (1630), sig. E2v; and A Survey of History: Or, A Nursery for Gentry (1638), sigs. R3v and T2r– T2v. A Nursery for Gentry was first published under the title The Schollers Medley in 1614. 2. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. R2r. 3. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. T1v and T2r. 4. See for example Peter Wagner’s Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988). Wagner argues that pornography functioned as a form of topical dissent against religious and state orthodoxy, as well as middle-class morality more generally. Lynn Hunt also links the invention of pornography to major cultural shifts between 1500 and 1800 which heralded the beginnings of modernity such as the scientific revolution, advances in natural philosophy and the emergence of a newly buoyant marketplace of ideas. See The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), especially Hunt’s introduction, pp. 9–45. James Grantham Turner’s more recent Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) explores the entire canon of Italian, French and English erotica from 1534 to 1685, focusing on ‘eroticization of the intellect’. For Turner, the faux-pedagogical bent of libertine texts capitalised on the privileged place of Eros in contemporary education, allowing them to function as ‘ideological weapons in the conflict over gender and social decorum’ (p. viii). 5. This chapter therefore builds on Ian Frederick Moulton’s discussion of the contribution made by pornography to the formation of the early

Notes 175

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

modern subject. See Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Negotiating differences between pre-modern erotic writing and modern pornography, Moulton argues that erotic representation contributed in important ways to the shaping of national and gendered identity in the pre-Enlightenment period. On the etymology of ‘pornography’, see Wagner, Eros Revived, p. 5. The seventeenth-century canon, delineated by David Foxon in Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745 (London: The Book Collector, 1964) also includes ars amatoria, pseudo-medical treatises dealing with sexual therapeutics, and chroniques scandaleuses – many of which were published for the first time in France or Italy and appeared swiftly in translation. Pietro Aretine’s Sonetti Lussuriosi, published in 1527 with the infamous designs by Giulio Romano which became known as ‘Aretine’s Postures’, is often considered the founding pornographic text. Aretine’s Ragionamenti, a dialogue between an older and a younger woman, followed in 1534, together with Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo d’amore (1537) and Tullia D’Aragona’s Della Infinità d’amore (1547). The range and sophistication of pornography developed in the seventeenth century with the appearance of L’Ecole des Filles, ou La Philosophie des Dames, an anonymous erotic dialogue published in 1655 and translated into English as The School of Venus around 1676; Nicolas Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica, first published in 1660 and translated into English as A Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid in 1688; and Vénus dans le cloïtre, sometimes ascribed to Jean Barrin, a group of three dialogues set in a convent and published in English as Venus in the Cloyster, or the Nun in her Smock (1683). Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. ix. In Eros Revived, Wagner suggests insightfully that ‘pornography generally aims at disorientation and dislocation’ rather than sexual stimulation alone (p. 5). Susan Sontag points out that other writings besides ‘pornographic’ ones may inspire a response of sexual stimulation among readers. See ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, in Douglas A. Hughes (ed)., Perspectives on Pornography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), pp. 131–69 (esp. p. 135). Moulton, Before Pornography, p. 11. Braithwait’s life is outlined in more detail in Julie Sanders’s essay in The New Dictionary of National Biography. These phrases appear on the title page of Braithwait’s The English Gentleman (1630). Braithwait, The English Gentleman, sig. 3A2r. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. 3H3r, E3v and P3r. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. R1v and 2F4r. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. P3r and O4r.

176

Notes

16. Braithwait discusses ‘adulterate’ (or overly ornamental) words in The English Gentleman, sig. C4r. 17. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. A1r, D2v, T1r, 2O1r, 2O1r, 2P1r and N1r; Braithwait, The English Gentleman, sigs. 2B4v, 3A2r and 3A2r. 18. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. 2N4v, L1r, L4r and L1r. 19. Compare Stephen Gosson’s description of poets as ‘common Curtesans’ in The Schoole of Abuse, sig. A2v. Moulton discusses this passage in Before Pornography, p. 83. 20. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. 2O1r, 2Q2r and 2Q2r; The English Gentleman, sig. E2v. 21. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. 2P1r; The English Gentleman, sig. E2v; A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. L1r and 2P1r. 22. Braithwait, The English Gentleman, sig. 2B1v. Theophylact, Chrysostome and Gregory were saintly figures of early Christendom. 23. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. R3r and 2S2v; The English Gentleman, sig. E2v; and A Nursery for Gentry, sig. R3r. 24. Braithwait, The English Gentleman, sig. E3v; A Nursery for Gentry, sig. L1r. 25. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. V1v. 26. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. M2v. In Areopagitica (1644), Milton recalls Dionysius Alexandrinus’s vision of God instructing him to ‘Read any books what ever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter.’ The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1998), p. 1005. 27. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. T2r, T2v and T4r. 28. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. R1v, T2v and T3r. 29. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. T2v and R2v. 30. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. 2N3v, 3C2r and 2Q2r. 31. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. N3r, T3v, 2Y1v and V3v. 32. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. O4r, T2r and 3D2v. 33. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. 2S2r, 2P4v and 2Z3v. 34. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. V3v, T3r and V2r. 35. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. N1r, N1v and N2r. 36. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. 2Q3v, 2P1v, 2R1r and L3v. 37. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. R3r, 2R1v and 2O1v. Sidney also suggests that literary worth may be gauged by way of a book’s ‘stuff’ and ‘matter’. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 120. 38. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. R3v. 39. Braithwait, The English Gentleman, sig. D4v; A Nursery for Gentry, sig. 2O2r; The English Gentleman, sig. 3D2v; and A Nursery for Gentry, sig. 2O2r. 40. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. N2r, R2v and 2Y2r. 41. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. 2X1v and R4r. 42. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. T2r; The English Gentleman, sig. E4v; A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. T2r and 3H2r.

Notes 177

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. 3H3r. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. T1r. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. P3r. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. T2r and 2Y1v; The English Gentleman, sig. F3v. Moulton, Before Pornography, p. 11. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. T1r. Perhaps Braithwait had in mind Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, whose hero is foolishly inspired to imitate the events he reads about in popular romance. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. 2O1r. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. 2X2v. Walter Kendrick discusses the ways in which early pornographers declared the sobriety of their intentions even as they aimed to amuse or intoxicate their readers. See The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 29. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. B1r and B2r. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. B2v, C4v, C4r and D2r. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. D3r and K1r. Cranley, Amanda, sig. A3r. The line is borrowed from Edmund Spenser’s address ‘To his Booke’ at the beginning of The Shepheardes Calender (1579). See Edmund Spenser: the Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 24. In his epistle ‘To the understanding reader’ which introduces The Second and Last Part of the First Book of the English Arcadia (1613), Gervase Markham describes how his book blanches in anticipation of readers’ disapproval: ‘O how lamentably pale the poore booke lookt in the Margent’ (sig. A5). Cranley, Amanda, sigs. A3r and A3v. My argument is here indebted to Wendy Wall’s exploration of early modern prefaces which describe texts as coy virgins or wanton women ready to undergo a ‘pressing’. See The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 182–8. Cranley, Amanda, sig. A2r; Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sig. N1r. On pornography’s tendency to involve men in a readers’ ‘fraternity’, see Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography, p. 44. Douglas A. Hughes also describes readers’ ‘vicarious excitement’ in Perspectives on Pornography (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. xiii. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. B1v, C3v and D2r. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. F2v, E4r, F3r, F2v and B1r. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. B3r, B3v and B4r. Cranley, Amanda, sig. B2v, B4r, B3r and C2v. Cranley, Amanda, sig. A3v. Cranley, Amanda, sig. A2v. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. D3v, D3r, D3v and D4v. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. F1v and H2r.

178

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

Notes

Cranley, Amanda, sigs. E1r and D3v. Cranley, Amanda, sig. E1v. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. F1r, F2r and E1r. Cranley, Amanda, sig. D4r. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. D3v, E3r and B3v. Cranley, Amanda, sig. D3v. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. G4v and H3v. Cranley, Amanda, sig. G4v. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. D4v and E1r. Kendrick, The Secret Museum, p. xiii. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. I4r, I3r and I3v. Cranley, Amanda, sig. E4v. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis was published in 1593. The story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis appears in Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 4; and the story of Pygmalion appears in Book 10. See Metamorphoses, ed. Mary M. Innes (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1955), pp. 110–13 and 252–3. The Athenian comic writer Phrynichus lived between c. 430–400 BC and is often confused (as by Cranley) with the actor of the same name. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. I4r and I4v. Cranley, Amanda, sigs. M4r, M4v, M4r and M4v. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. 3H2r and T1r. Cranley, Amanda, sig. A3r. Turner, Schooling Sex, p. vii. Frederick Burwick also describes the ‘conjuring presence of language’ in pornography as ‘words evoke the immediate sensations that they describe, and description sustains sensation’. See Burwick’s essay in Wagner (ed.), Erotica and the Enlightenment, p. 68. Braithwait, A Nursery for Gentry, sigs. L3v, L1r, R2v and T1r; Cranley, Amanda, sig. G2r.

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Fenner, William, A Treatise Of the Affections, or The Souls Pulse (1651) Folengo, Teofilo, Liber Macaronices (1517), ed. A. Luzio, 2 vols (Bari: Scrittori d’Italia, 1911) Ford, John,’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Simon Barker (London: Routledge, 1997) Forde, Emmanuel, The Most Pleasant History of Ornatus and Artesia (c. 1599) Fuller, Thomas, The History of the Worthies of England (1662) Garden, Alexander, A Garden of Grave and Godlie Flowers: Sonets, Elegies, and Epitaphs (1609), ed. John Lundie (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1845) Gascoigne, George, The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (1575) Gosson, Stephen, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582) Gosson, Stephen, The Schoole of Abuse (1579) Greene, Robert, Mamillia. A Mirrour or Looking-glasse for the Ladies of Englande (1583) Greville, Fulke, Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633) Guillemeau, Jacques, Childe-Birth or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (1612) Hake, Edward, A Touchestone for this Time Present (1574) Harington, Sir John, ‘A Briefe Apologie of Poetrie’, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591) Harvey, Gabriel, Pierces Supererogation or a New Prayse of the Old Asse (1593) Hemmingsen, Niels, The Preacher, or Methode of Preachinge, trans. John Horsfall (1574) Heywood, Thomas, An Apology for Actors (1612) Hooker, Thomas, Foure Learned and Godly Treatises (1638) Hooker, Thomas, The Christian’s Two Chiefe Lessons (1640) Horace, Ars Poetica in Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1926) Hoskyns, John, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935) Huarte, Juan de, The Examination of Mens Wits, trans. Richard Carew (1594) Hyperius, Andreas, The Practise of Preaching, Otherwise called the Pathway to the Pulpet, trans. John Ludham (1577) Illyricus, Mattias Flacius, Clavis Scripturae Sacrae [1562] Jonson, Ben, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52) Lemnius, Levinus, The Touchstone of Complexions (1581) Lever, Ralph, The Arte of Reason (1573) Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse; rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press; Heinemann, 1982) Lyly, John, The Complete Works, ed. R. W. Bond, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902) Mabb, John, The Afflected Mans Vow: with his Meditations, and Prayers (1609) Massinger, Philip, Selected Plays, ed. Colin Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)

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Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth (1598) Milton, John, The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1998) Moffat, Thomas, Healths Improvement (1655) Moffat, Thomas, Nobilis or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney and Lessus Lugubris, ed. B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1940) Montaigne, Michel de, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957) Mornay, Philippe de, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe, trans. Anthony Munday (1602) Nashe, Thomas, The Works, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (1910; rev. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) Norden, John, A Pensiue Mans Practise (1584) North, Thomas, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), in Shakespeare’s Plutarch, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Madeleine Forey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002) Perkins, William, The Art of Prophesying, trans. Thomas Tuke (1606) Perkins, William, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606) Plato, Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches, Protagoras, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996) Plato, The Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford World’s Classics: Oxford University Press, 1993; repr. 1998) Playfere, Thomas, The Meane in Mourning (1597) Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (1603) Primaudie, Pierre de la, The French Academie, wherin is Discoursed the Institution of Maners (1586) Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936) Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) Rankins, William, A Mirrour of Monsters (1587) Reynolds, Edward, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1640) Rich, Barnabe, A Path-way to Military Practice (1587) Rogers, Thomas, A Philosophicall Discourse, Entituled, The Anatomie of the Minde (1576) Salter, Thomas, A Mirrhor Mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, Intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie (1574) Scaliger, Julius Caesar, Poetices Libri Septem (5th edn, 1617) Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1997)

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Sidney, Sir Philip, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965; rev. 1973) Sidney, Sir Philip, The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Stuart A. Pears (London: William Pickering, 1845) Sidney, Sir Philip, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) Sidney, Sir Philip, The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923) Sidney, Sir Philip, Sir Philip Sidney: a Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596), ed. A. C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977) Spenser, Edmund, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999) Stellato, Marcello Palingenio, The Zodiake of Life, trans. Barnabe Googe (1560) Stubbes, Phillip, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) Styward, Thomas, The Pathwaie to Martiall Discipline (1581) Trussell, Thomas, The Souldier Pleading his Owne Cause (1619) Vaughan, William, Approved Directions for Health, Both Naturall and Artificiall (1612) Venner, Tobias, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, Or a Plaine Philosophical Discovrse . . . for the Preseruation of Health (1620) Webbe, William, A Discourse of English Poetrie. Together with the Authors Iudgment, Touching the Reformation of our English Verse (1586) in Ancient Critical Essays Upon Poets and Poeësy, ed. Joseph Haslewood, 2 vols (London: Robert Triphook, 1815), vol. 2 pp. 15–95 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1964) Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909) Wright, Thomas, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971)

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Austin, J. L., How to Do Things With Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (1962; 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) Babb, Lawrence, The Elizabethan Malady: a Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580–1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951) Bakhtin, Michail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968) Bald, R. C., Donne and the Drurys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959) Barkan, Leonard, Nature’s Work of Art: the Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) Barker, Francis, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984) Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Dennis Walder (eds.), Literature and the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 259–63 Barton, Anne, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984) Beer, Anna R., ‘ “Left to the world without a Maister”: Sir Walter Ralegh’s The History of the World as a Public Text’, Studies in Philology, 91, 4 (1994), 432–63 Belfiore, Elizabeth S., Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, The Fury of Men’s Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) Brady, Andrea, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Breitenburg, Mark, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Brydges, Sir Samuel Egerton, Censura Literaria: Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, 10 vols (London: Longman, 1805–9) Bryson, Anna, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Burrow, Colin, ‘Combative Criticism: Jonson, Milton, and Classical Literary Criticism in England’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 487–99 Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993) Bynum, Caroline, ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry, 22, 1 (Autumn 1995), 1–33 Calbi, Maurizio, Approximate Bodies: Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) Callaghan, Dympna, ‘Body Problems’, Shakespeare Studies, 29 (2001), 68–71 Carey, John, ‘Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Dennis Kay (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: an Anthology of Modern Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)

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Carré, Jacques, The Crisis of Courtesy: Studies in the Conduct-Book in Britain, 1600–1900 (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1994) Centerwall, Brandon S., ‘Identifying “Glareanus Vadianus” as John Sanford’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 55 (April 1999), 35–7 Clark, James Andrew, ‘The Plot of Donne’s Anniversaries’, Studies in English Literature, 30 (1990), 63–77 Cockroft, Robert, Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Cohen, Murray, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) Colie, Rosalie, ‘ “All in Peeces”: Problems of Interpretation in Donne’s Anniversary Poems’, in Just So Much Honour: Essays Commemorating the 400th Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne, ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore (University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1972), 189– 218 Cotterill, Anne, Digressive Voices in Early Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Crane, Mary Thomas, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenthcentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) Crane, Mary Thomas, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001) Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; repr. 1999) Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953) Damasio, Antonio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (London: William Heinemann, 2003) Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997) Dobranski, Stephen B., Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Docherty, Thomas, John Donne Undone (London and New York: Methuen, 1986) Doebler, Bettie Anne, The Quickening Seed: Death in the Sermons of John Donne (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974) Donaldson, Ian (ed.), Ben Jonson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; repr. London: Ark, 1984) Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991) Dunford, Terrance, ‘Consumption of the World: Reading, Eating and Imitation in Every Man Out of His Humor’, English Literary Renaissance, 14, 2 (Spring 1984), 131–47

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Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979) Elam, Kier, ‘ “In What Chapter of His Bosom”: Reading Shakespeare’s Bodies’, in Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) Enterline, Lynn, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Enterline, Lynn, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) Ferry, Anne, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983) Fish, Stanley E., Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1980) Fish, Stanley E, ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, New Literary History, 2 (1970), 123–62; repr. in Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth-century Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1972) Fleming, Juliet, ‘The Ladies’ Man and the Age of Elizabeth’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Floyd-Wilson, Mary, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Foucault, Michel, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality (1976), trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) Foxon, David, Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745 (London: The Book Collector, 1964) Fraser, Russell, The War Against Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957) Galpern, A. N., The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Historical Studies, 1976) Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Gittings, Claire, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984; repr. Routledge, 1988) Goldberg, Jonathan, ‘The Understanding of Sickness in Donne’s Devotions’, Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (1971), 507–17 Greenfield, Matthew, ‘The Cultural Functions of Renaissance Elegy’, English Literary Renaissance, 28, 1 (1998), 75–94

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Hackel, Heidi Brayman, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Hackett, Helen, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Halasz, Alexandra, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Hardison, O. B., Jr., The Enduring Monument: a Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962) Harley, David, ‘Rhetoric and the Social Construction of Healing’, The Society for the History of Medicine, 12, 3 (1999), 407–35 Harris, Jonathan Gil, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Harvey, Elizabeth D., Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) Harvey, Elizabeth D. (ed.), Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) Harvey, Ruth, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975) Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991) Helgerson, Richard, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) Hillman, David and Carla Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) Hodges, Devon L., Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985) Hodgson, Elizabeth M. A., Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne (Newark University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999) Hughes, Douglas A., Perspectives on Pornography (New York: Macmillan, 1970) Hunt, Lynn (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993) Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) James, Susan, Passion and Action: the Emotions in Seventeenth-century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) Jardine, Lisa and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–78 Jeanneret, Michel, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)

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Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Johnson, Jeffrey, The Theology of John Donne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991) Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘Italians and Others: The White Devil’, in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. Peter Stallybrass and David Scott Kastan (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 251–62 Kay, Dennis, Melodious Tears: the English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) Kendrick, Walter, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987) Kennedy, Gwynne, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) Lander, Clara, ‘A Dangerous Sickness which Turned to a Spotted Fever’, Studies in English Literature, 11, 1 (1971), 89–108 Lanham, Richard A., A Handlist for Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990) Lawrence, Christopher and Steven Shapin, Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Lebans, W. M., ‘Donne’s Anniversaries and the Tradition of Funeral Elegy’, English Literary History, 39 (1972), 545–59 Leverenz, David, The Language of Puritan Feeling: an Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980) Levine, Laura, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Levy, F. J., ‘Philip Sidney Reconsidered’, English Literary Renaissance, 2, 1 (1972), 5–18 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: the Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) Linton, Joan Pong, The Romance of the New World: Gender and Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Machor, James L. and Philip Goldstein (eds), Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2001) Maclean, Ian, Renaissance Nature of Women: a Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) Marotti, Arthur F., John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) Marshall, Cynthia, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)

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Martin, Hugh, Puritanism and Richard Baxter (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1954) Martz, Louis L., John Donne in Meditation: the Anniversaries (New York: Haskell House, 1970) Masten, Jeffrey and Wendy Wall (eds), Renaissance Drama, NS 31 (2002): ‘Performing Affect’ Matz, Robert, Defending Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Maus, Katharine Eisaman, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995) McCoy, Richard C., Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979) McEachern, Claire and Debora Shuger, Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Miller, Jacqueline T., ‘The Passion Signified: Imitation and the Construction of Emotions in Sidney and Wroth’, Criticism, 43, 4 (2001), 407–21 Moulton, Ian Frederick, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) Noyes, Gertrude E., A Bibliography of Courtesy and Conduct Books in Seventeenthcentury England (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1937) Oesterreich, Peter L. and Thomas O Sloane (eds), Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden, Boston, Köln: E. J. Brill 1999) Park, Katharine and Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Concept of Psychology’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Parker, Patricia, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987) Parr, Anthony, ‘Thomas Coryat and the Discovery of Europe’, Huntington Library Quarterly 55, 4 (Fall 1992): 579–602 Paster, Gail Kern, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Paster, Gail Kern, ‘The Body and its Passions’, Shakespeare Studies, 29 (2001), 44–50 Paster, Gail Kern, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) Paster, Gail Kern, ‘The Unbearable Coldness of the Female Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy’, English Literary Renaissance, 28, 3 (1998), 416–40 Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Pearson, Jacqueline, ‘Women Reading, Reading Women’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

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Pender, Stephen, ‘Essaying the Body: Donne, Affl iction and Medicine’, in John Donne’s Professional Lives, ed. David Colclough (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 215–48 Pigman, G. W., Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Pollard, Tanya, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Prescott, Anne Lake, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) Prescott, Anne Lake, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) Randolph, Mary Claire, ‘The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory: Its Possible Relationships and Implications’, Studies in Philology, 38 (1941), 125–57 Raylor, Timothy, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (Newark: University Delaware Press, 1994) Rhodes, Neil, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) Rigolot, François, ‘The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 161–7 Roach, Joseph R., The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) Roberts, Sasha, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Russo, Mary, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 318–36 Sanders, Julie, ‘Richard Braithwait’, The New Dictionary of National Biography Sartre, Jean-Paul, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman, introd. Wallace Fowlie (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995; repr. 1996) Scarry, Elaine (ed.), Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) Schiesari, Juliana, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992) Schleiner, Winfried, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970) Schoenfeldt, Michael C., Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Schoenfeldt, Michael C., ‘ “Commotion Strange”: Passion in Paradise Lost’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion,

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ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 43–67 Sherman, William H., John Dee: the Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) Shuger, Debora K., Sacred Rhetoric: the Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) Siraisi, Nancy G., Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: an Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) Sontag, Susan, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, in Perspectives on Pornography, ed. Douglas A. Hughes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), pp. 131–69 Stein, Arnold, The House of Death: Messages from the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) Strachan, Michael, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) Strier, Richard, ‘Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 23–42 Sullivan, Garrett and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2007) Talvacchia, Bette, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) Targoff, Ramie, Common Prayer: the Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001) Teskey, Gordon, Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) Thompson, Ann and Sasha Roberts (eds), Women Reading Shakespeare 1660– 1900: an Anthology of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) Thompson, Roger, Unfit for Modest Ears: a Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1979) Thomson, R. S., ‘Boote and Spurre: a Jacobean Quête from Folger MS J.a. I’, English Literary Renaissance, 18, 2 (1988), 275–93 Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989) Traub, Valerie, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992) Trevor, Douglas, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Tribble, Evelyn B., Margins and Marginality: the Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993)

192

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Turner, James Grantham, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) Vickers, Brian, In Defence of Rhetoric (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1988) Vickers, Brian, ‘ “The Power of Persuasion”: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare’, in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphey (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 411–35 Vickers, Brian (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999; repr. 2003) Wagner, Peter, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988) Wall, Wendy, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993) Waswo, Richard, ‘Theories of Language’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 25–35 Watson, Robert N., The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994) Webber, Joan, Contrary Music: the Prose S tyle of John Donne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963) Worden, Blair, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996) Zimmerman, Susan, ‘Animating Matter: the Corpse as Idol in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy’, Renaissance Drama, NS, 21 (2002), 215–43

Index

Adagia (Erasmus), 109 Aeneid (Virgil), 43, 56, 110 Aeschylus, 66 Alcaeus, 119 Alexander the Great, 55, 56, 59, 66, 104 Allen, Don Cameron, 164 n. 6, 166 n. 27, 167 n. 32, 168 n. 50 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 78 ambition, 16 Amphion, 42 Anacreon, 119 anatomy, 81, 167 nn. 32 & 33 anger see choler The Anniversaries (Donne), 8–9, 73–92, 136–7 anxiety, 19 Apology for Poetry (Sidney), 4, 7–8, 35–6, 38, 39, 41, 45–7, 52–4, 59–62, 67–8, 71–2, 122, 136, 139 n. 5, 176 n. 37 Appian of Alexandria, 119 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 11, 14–15, 144 n. 2, 145 nn. 9 & 12, 146 n. 12 The Arcadia (Sidney), 8, 54, 61, 68–72, 162 n. 70, 177 n. 55 Areopagitica (Milton), 39, 100, 120, 158 n. 12, 176 n. 26 Aretine, Pietro, 117, 119, 126, 175 n. 7 Ariès, Philippe, 165 n. 14 Aristotle, 7–8, 11, 17, 39, 135, 146 n. 12, 146 n. 21, 147 nn. 30 & 36, 165 n. 17, 170 n. 16; see also specific works Ars Poetica (Horace), 42, 49, 55, 65, 68

The Arte of Englishe Poesie (Puttenham), 7–8, 9, 35–51, 73–4, 75, 80, 122, 136, 157 n. 3 Ascham, Roger, 100, 107–8, 112, 113 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney), 4, 46 Athenaeus, 108, 117 Augustine, Saint, 11, 146 n. 12, 150 n. 66 Austin, J. L., 142 n. 18 Babb, Lawrence, 165 n. 18 Bacon, Francis, 100, 162 n. 72 Baker, William, 101 Bakhtin, Michail, 111 Bald, R. C., 163 n. 4 Barret, Robert, 66 Barrin, Jean, 175 n. 7 Barton, Anne, 149 n. 47 Bastard, Thomas, 113 Baxter, Richard, 29, 150 n. 69, 151 nn. 76 & 82 Beard, Thomas, 12, 22 Bedford, Countess of, 75, 163 n. 5 Beer, Anna R., 161 n. 62 Belfiore, Elizabeth S., 146 n. 16, 146 n. 21, 147 n. 27, 155 n. 48, 158 n. 14 Bible, 7, 12, 17, 21, 23–4, 28–33, 59, 65, 77, 81, 85, 88, 98, 102, 119, 151 n. 81, 167 n. 34, 168 n. 47 Blandie, William, 63 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 22 body(ies), masculine, 3, 6–7, 12, 15, 19, 24–5, 44, 45, 52, 55–62, 70, 78, 81–2, 93–7, 99, 103–5, 107–8, 110–14, 115–16, 118–25, 135–8, 142 n. 18, 173 n. 47; transformation of, 6, 19, 24–5, 193

194

Index

body(ies), masculine – continued 42–3, 45–7, 49–50, 55–9, 64, 74–5, 78, 81–2, 83–5, 87–91, 93–114, 115–16, 117, 118, 120–3, 133–4, 135–6 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 171 n. 26 Boote and Spurre, 106 Brady, Andrea, 165 n. 14 Braithwait, Richard, 10, 65, 100, 115–16, 118–25, 126, 128, 133–4, 138 Breitenburg, Mark, 143 n. 26 Brooks, Christopher, 102, 112–13 Bryson, Anna, 143 n. 25 Bulstrode, Celia, 163 n. 5 Burrow, Colin, 171 n. 25 Burton, Robert, 57, 97, 99 Burwick, Frederick, 178 n. 83 Buttes, Henry, 170 n. 19 Bynum, Caroline, 140 n. 9 Caesar, Julius, 56, 66, 102 Callaghan, Dympna, 140 n. 9 Carr, Robert see Somerset, Earl of Cary, Henry, 163 n. 5 Casaubon, Isaac, 108 Cato, 54 Cecil, Robert see Salisbury, Earl of Cervantes, Miguel de, 177 n. 48 Chapman, George, 49, 69 Chapman, John, 104 Charles, Prince (later Charles I, king of England), 87 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 24, 148 n. 42 choler, 8, 16, 19, 52–72, 135 Chorier, Nicolas, 175 n. 7 Cicero, 14, 22, 31, 46, 67, 146 n. 12, 151 n. 80; see also specific works Ciceronianus (Erasmus), 99 Clark, James Andrew, 166 n. 26 Clayton, Giles, 64 Cleland, James, 99 Cockroft, Robert, 140 n. 8 Coeffeteau, Nicolas, 59, 145 n. 10 Cohen, Murray, 152 n. 3 Colie, Rosalie, 167 n. 32

Collier, Jeremy, 56 comedy, 64, 132 compassion, 13, 119, 45, 165 n. 14 conduct books, 3, 10, 12, 21, 35, 63–6, 76, 99, 115, 118–25, 134, 135 confession, 75, 80–3, 86, 87–92, 133, 166 n. 28, 167 n. 30, 168 n. 51 Contarini, Gasparo, 105 Cornwallis, Sir William, 66, 78, 100 Coryat, Thomas, 93–114, 136–7; see also specific works Coryats Crambe (Coryat), 96 Coryats Crudities, 9–10, 93–114 Cotterill, Anne, 166 n. 29 Cotton, Roland, 112 courage, 13, 54, 55–6, 57, 58, 59–61, 65, 68–70 covetousness, 16 Crane, Mary Thomas, 141 n. 12, 173 n. 53 Cranley, Thomas, 10, 117, 126–34 Cressy, David, 149 n. 46, 167 n. 36 Crosse, Henry, 7, 12, 22, 23–34, 35, 97, 99, 118, 138 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 167 n. 34 Cynthia’s Revels (Jonson), 4 D’Aragona, Tullia, 175 n. 7 Damasio, Antonio, 5 De Inventione (Cicero), 48 De Ira (Seneca), 57, 67, 159 n. 22, 160 n. 32 De Motu Animalium (Aristotle), 19 De Senectute (Cicero), 48 delight see pleasure Demosthenes, 46 Denny, Edward, 58 Descartes, René, 148 n. 39 despair, 8–9, 19, 49, 74, 76–9, 80, 82, 86, 87, 88, 91, 136 Devereux, Robert see Essex, Earl of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Donne), 9, 75, 87–92, 136–7 digestio, 5, 9, 46, 93–114, 121, 137, 171 n. 26

Index

Digges, Thomas, 63 Discoveries (Jonson), 100, 149 n. 47, 172 n. 34 distress, 14, 62 Dobranski, Stephen B., 139 n. 4 Docherty, Thomas, 166 n. 28 Doebler, Bettie Anne, 166 n. 20 Donne, John, 73–92, 101, 113, 136–7; see also specific works Downame, John, 57, 59, 65, 158 n. 20 Drake, Sir Francis, 105 Drummond, William, 164 n. 9 Drury, Elizabeth, 74, 75, 79–80, 82, 83, 84–6, 164 n. 8, 168 n. 38 Drury, Sir Robert, 74 Du Bellay, Joachim, 117 The Duchess of Malfi (Webster), 98 Dudley, Robert see Leicester, Earl of Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 157 n. 5 Dunford, Terrance, 171 n. 26 Egerton, Thomas, 163 n. 5 Elam, Kier, 140 n. 98 elegy, 4, 8, 55, 73–92, 136 ‘An Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred’ (Donne), 80 Elias, Norbert, 140 n. 7 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 56, 76, 96–7, 109, 139 n. 5, 147 n. 34, 165 n. 16 Emiliana, Margarita, 106–7 emotion see passions Empedocles, 49 energeia, 8, 19, 28, 31, 41, 42, 60, 136 Enterline, Lynn, 9, 144 n. 33, 165 n. 12 epic, 8, 53, 55, 173 n. 56 epigram, 47 Epistles (Horace), 105 Epistles (Seneca), 171 n. 25 Erasmus, Desiderius, 150 n. 65; see also specific works Essex, Earl of, 66 Euripides, 66 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 146 n. 20, 170 n. 11, 172 n. 35

195

Farnaby, Thomas, 102 fear, 14, 19, 29, 46, 77, 135 Fenner, William, 32, 102, 143 n. 27, 146 n. 16, 150 n. 69, 151 n. 75, 152 n. 84 Fish, Stanley E., 139 n. 4 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 148 n. 38, 155 n. 43, 157 n. 4 Folengo, Teofilo, 172 n. 31 Ford, John, 98 Forde, Emmanuel, 103 Foucault, Michel, 140 n. 7, 166 n. 28 Foxe, John, 21 Foxon, David, 175 n. 7 Fraser, Russell, 148 n. 41, 151 n. 82 Frederick III, Emperor of Germany, 110 Frobisher, Martin, 105 Frye, Northrop, 109, 173 n. 50 Fuller, Thomas, 95, 102 furor, 7, 49, 50 Galen, 73, 142 n. 20, 147 n. 27, 164 n. 6, 165 n. 17 Garden, Alexander, 78 Garfield, John, 126 Gascoigne, George, 148 n. 43 gender difference, 6 Genette, Gérard, 169 n. 6 Gifford, John, 102, 104 Gilbourne, Thomas, 127, 129 Gittings, Claire, 165 n. 14 Goldberg, Jonathan, 168 n. 47 Googe, Barnabe, 146 n. 16, 147 n. 34 Gosson, Stephen, 12, 53, 56, 64, 78, 146 n. 14, 149 nn. 55 & 60, 170 n. 15, 176 n. 19 Gower, John, 24 Grafton, Anthony, 161 n. 62 Greene, Robert, 103 Greenfield, Matthew, 164 n. 10 Greenham, Richard, 30 Greville, Fulke, 64

196

Index

grief, 9, 16, 19, 73–92, 127, 135, 137 Guillemeau, Jacques, 143 n. 28 Hackel, Heidi Brayman, 139 n. 4 Hake, Edward, 147 n. 24, 170 n. 13 Halasz, Alexandra, 148 n. 46 Hall, Joseph, 79 Hamilton, James, 2nd Marquis of, 163 n. 5 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 29, 78 happiness, 19 Harington, Sir John, 2, 22, 139 n. 5, 169 n. 1; see also specific works Harington, Lord, 163 n. 5 Harington, Lucy see Bedford, Countess of Harley, David, 163 n. 2 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 142 n. 20, 149 n. 56 Harvey, Elizabeth D., 141 n. 15, 144 n. 34, 165 n. 12, 168 n. 38 Harvey, Gabriel, 69, 71 Harvey, Ruth, 145 n. 10 Helgerson, Richard, 44, 157 n. 2 Hemmingsen, Niels, 29, 151 n. 75, 151 n. 82 Henry, Prince, 95, 163 n. 5 Henry IV, Parts I & 2 (Shakespeare), 99, 108 Herbert, George, 170 n. 16 Heroditus, 66, 67 Heywood, Thomas, 56 Hicks, Sir Michael, 95 Hippocrates, 18, 97, 147 nn. 27 & 30, 164 n. 6 history, 8, 56, 65–8, 72, 118–22, 129, 162 n. 72 The History of Animals (Aristotle), 39, 153 n. 16 Hodges, Devon L., 167 n. 33 Hodgson, Elizabeth M. A., 168 n. 38 Hole, William, 107 Holland, Philemon, 1, 11, 58, 97 Holy Sonnets (Donne), 32

Homer, 55, 59, 69, 104, 170 n. 15; see also specific works hope, 29 Horace, 2, 31; see also specific works Hoskyns, John, 60, 61, 68, 70, 71, 101 Hughes, Douglas A., 177 n. 58 humours, 12, 18, 26–7, 46, 49, 50, 57, 76, 84, 89, 120, 121, 135 Hunt, Lynn, 174 n. 4 Hyperius, Andreas, 29, 151 n. 74 The Iliad (Homer), 54, 59, 69, 104 Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian), 99, 151 n. 80 Ion (Plato), 48 Jackson, John, 100 James (King James I of England, VI of Scotland), 109, 166 n. 19 James, Susan, 144 n. 1, 146 n. 17 Jardine, Lisa, 161 n. 62 Jeanneret, Michel, 171 n. 30 Johns, Adrian, 140 n. 8, 143 n. 28 Johnson, Jeffrey, 167 n. 30 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 111, 173 n. 44 Jonson, Ben, 6, 23, 75, 95, 100, 102, 111, 113, 144 n. 1, 171 n. 25; see also specific works Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 99 Juvenal, 22 katharsis, 46, 74 Kay, Dennis, 164 n. 5 Kendrick, Walter, 132, 177 n. 50 Kennedy, Gwynne, 159 n. 27 Kirchner, Herman, 112 Lander, Clara, 168 n. 39 Languet, Hubert, 53, 54, 67 Lanham, Richard A., 171 n. 26 The Laws (Plato), 146 n. 16 Lebans, W. M., 163 n. 5 Leicester, Earl of, 54

Index

Lever, Ralph, 172 n. 34 Leverenz, David, 142 n. 25, 150 n. 62 Levine, Laura, 142 n. 18, 158 n. 16 Levy, F. J., 156 n. 2 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 167 n. 34, 168 n. 37 Linton, Joan Pong, 172 n. 40 Lipsius, Justus, 109 Livy, 65, 69 love, 13, 19, 29, 42, 69–70, 98, 109, 115–16, 122–3, 129 love poetry, 42, 64, 73, 120, 124, 132 Lucan, 22 Lucretius, 45, 155 n. 44 Lydgate, John, 24 Lyly, John, 103, 104 Macedon, Philip of, 64 Manley, Frank, 164 n. 10 Markham, Gervase, 177 n. 55 Markham, Lady, 163 n. 5 Marlowe, Christopher, 157 n. 4 Marotti, Arthur F., 164 n. 10 Martin, Hugh, 151 n. 79 Martz, Louis L., 164 n. 10 Marvell, Andrew, 165 n. 12 masculinity see body, masculine Massinger, Philip, 56, 158 n. 17 Matz, Robert, 148 n. 44, 157 n. 11 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 141 n. 14 Mazzio, Carla, 142 n. 18 McCoy, Richard C., 156 n. 2 melancholia, 24, 49, 69, 74, 76–7, 147 n. 24, 149 n. 52, 156 n. 59 Melanchthon, 67 Menippean satire, 95, 108–9, 173 n. 50 Meres, Francis, 172 n. 35 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 132, 153 n. 8, 178 n. 78 Milgate, W., 166 n. 26 Miller, Jacqueline T., 144 n. 34

197

Miltiades, 66 Milton, John, 39; see also specific works Moffat, Thomas, 54, 97, 158 n. 19 Montaigne, Michel de, 4 Mornay, Philippe de, 145 n. 10 Moulton, Ian Frederick, 117, 125, 156 n. 2, 174 n. 5 Munday, Anthony, 59, 145 n. 10, 169 n. 9 Münster, Sebastian, 105 Murray, Sir David, 95 Nashe, Thomas, 154 n. 39, 171 n. 28 Newbold, William Webster, 145 n. 3 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 39, 57, 58–9, 62, 146 n. 12, 158 n. 19, 160 n. 34 Norden, John, 150 n. 69 North, Sir Thomas, 99 Northbrooke, John, 12 The Odcombian Banquet (Coryat), 96 The Odyssey (Homer), 69 Olney, Henry, 4, 141 n. 17 On Rhetoric (Aristotle), 53, 60, 61–2, 146 n. 12 Orlando Furioso (Harington), 68, 124 Orpheus, 42 Ovid, 22, 98, 119; see also specific works Painter, William, 148 n. 42 Pallavicino, Ferrante, 126 Paracelsus, 73, 164 n. 6 Paradise Lost (Milton), 146 n. 20 Parker, Patricia, 108 Parr, Anthony, 173 n. 42 passions, 1, 2, 3, 5–6, 7, 8, 10 et passim; dangerous, 16, 20, 23–5, 57–8, 62, 64–5, 71–2, 76–8, 115– 17, 121–5, 133, 136; self-control and, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 25, 27, 45, 46, 59, 78–9, 85–6, 93–4, 118–19, 136–7

198 Index

Paster, Gail Kern, 5, 143 n. 21, 154 n. 25, 169 n. 10 patience, 29 Pearson, Jacqueline, 140 n. 10 Pender, Stephen, 168 n. 45 Perkins, William, 29 Petrarch, Francesco, 59 Pettie, George, 104 Phillips, Edward, 101 Phillips, Robert, 104, 112 Phrynichus, 132, 178 n. 78 physiology, vocabulary of, 4, 5, 8, 18, 24–7, 29–31, 38–39, 42–3, 46–7, 49–50, 57–8, 73–4, 80–1, 84–6, 87–9, 91–2, 93–5, 99–101, 102–4, 107–8, 109, 121, 142 n. 20, 149 nn. 55, 56 & 60, 163 n. 3, 171 n. 25 Pigman, G. W., 165 n. 14 pity, 46 Plato, 14, 49, 147 n. 30; see also specific works Plautus, 109 Playfere, Thomas, 77, 166 n. 19 pleasure, 9, 14, 16, 19, 63–4, 88, 93, 97, 112, 129, 130, 135, 136, 170 nn. 15 & 16; see also reading and pleasure Pliny, 97 Plutarch, Moralia, 1–2, 11, 19, 22, 23, 25, 27, 35, 41, 43, 58, 66–7, 93–4, 119, 147 n. 28, 159 n. 30 Poetaster (Jonson), 101 The Poetics (Aristotle), 39, 46, 60, 71, 151 n. 80 The Politics (Aristotle), 39, 46 Pollard, Tanya, 142 n. 18 Ponsonby, William, 53 Poole, Henry, 101 pornography, 10, 115–34, 137–8, 174 n. 4, 174 n. 5, 175 nn. 7 & 8, 177 nn. 50 & 58, 178 n. 83 Prescott, Anne Lake, 173 nn. 50 & 52 La Primaudie, Pierre de, 57, 159 nn. 20 & 25

pride, 16 Problems (Aristotle), 49–50 Pugliano, John Pietro, 52 Puttenham, George, 2, 139 n. 5; see also The Arte of Englishe Poesie Quintilian, 31, 135; see also specific works Rabelais, François, 111 Randolph, Mary Claire, 155 n. 51 Rankins, William, 147 n. 24 Raylor, Timothy, 173 n. 56 reading, habits of, 1–2, 12, 15, 20, 24–8, 36, 42, 55–6, 59–61, 64–8, 71–2, 93–4, 99–100, 115–16, 118–25, 132–3, 135–6; passions and, 2–3, 5–7, 11, 13, 17–18, 19, 21, 33, 36–7, 41–2, 45, 51, 52, 55–6, 59–62, 64–72, 73–4, 82, 116, 128, 130, 134, 135–8; pleasure and, 2, 6, 9–10, 12, 24–5, 28, 32, 35, 36, 42, 45–6, 51, 53–4, 59–62, 63, 64–6, 68, 71–2, 93–4, 96, 101–5, 110, 113, 115–16, 119–21, 130–4, 135–6, 137–8, 155 n. 44; youth and, 1–2, 10, 21, 23–7, 67, 93–4, 115–16, 118–25; women and, 140 n. 10; see also physiology, vocabulary of The Republic (Plato), 22, 55, 61, 64, 78 Reynolds, Edward, 60, 65, 66 Rheginus, 119 rhetoric, theory of, 7–8, 9, 19, 31–3, 36, 48, 99, 135, 156 n. 58, 171 n. 26 Rhodes, Neil, 171 n. 30, 173 n. 49 Rich, Barnabe, 63 Rigolot, François, 152 n. 84, 155 n. 42 Roach, Joseph R., 142 n. 19, 146 n. 21, 147 n. 32 Roberts, Sasha, 143 n. 28, 161 n. 56 Rogers, Thomas, 78, 147 n. 34, 159 nn. 20 & 25, 165 n. 15

Index

romance, 8, 54, 71, 95, 103–5, 108, 113, 124, 140 n. 10, 173 n. 50 Rowe, Katherine, 6 Russo, Mary, 174 n. 59 sadness, 13 Salisbury, Earl of, 95 Sallust, 65, 69 Salter, Thomas, 99 Sanders, Julie, 175 n. 10 Sanford, John, 101–2, 110, 112, 171 n. 29 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4 satire, 4, 47, 116; see also Menippean satire Sawday, Jonathan, 167 n. 33 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 79 Scarry, Elaine, 91, 152 n. 3, 169 n. 56 Schiesari, Juliana, 143 n. 22, 156 n. 58, 165 n. 17 Schoenfeldt, Michael C., 97, 142 n. 20, 155 n. 43, 170 nn. 11 & 16 Schutte, William M., 172 n. 42 Seneca see specific works sentiment, literature of, 6 Sermons (Donne), 32, 88–9, 163 n. 3, 164 n. 6, 167 nn. 30 & 34 Shakespeare, William, 165 n. 12; see also specific works shame, 13, 16, 25, 33, 52, 75, 80, 82, 97, 98, 105, 108, 116, 120, 121, 122, 129, 130, 135, 137, 138 The Shepheardes Calendar (Spenser), 4, 177 n. 54 Shuger, Debora K., 150 nn. 65 & 66 Sidney, Philip, 2, 52–72, 136–7; see also specific works Sidney, Robert, 67 Socrates, 49 soldiers, 52–72, 136 Somerset, Earl of (Carr, Robert), 49 Sontag, Susan, 175 n. 8 soul, 13–15, 16–17, 29, 39, 43, 45, 56, 57, 64, 67, 76, 77, 80, 83–4, 85, 87, 89, 90, 99

199

Southampton, Earl of, 13 Spenser, Edmund, 154 n. 38; see also specific works Speroni, Sperone, 175 n. 7 Staines, John, 145 n. 3 Stanyhurst, Richard, 43 Stapleton, Robert, 172 n. 37 Stein, Arnold, 168 n. 40 Stellato, Marcello Palingenio, 146 n. 16, 159 n. 22, 170 n. 13 Strachan, Michael, 169 n. 4 Strier, Richard, 145 n. 4, 150 n. 71 Stubbes, Philip, 12, 21, 149 n. 60 Styward, Thomas, 63, 65 Suetonius, 119 Sydenham, George, 101 Tacitus, 65, 69 Targoff, Ramie, 147 n. 36, 152 n. 89 Tasso, Torquato, 165 n. 12 Tertullian, 119 Teskey, Gordon, 173 n. 56 Theaetetus (Plato), 4, 141 n. 15 Themistocles, 66 Thompson, Roger, 117, 175 n. 8 Thorpe, Thomas, 96 Thucydides, 66, 67 Todd, Janet, 141 n. 15, 144 n. 30 tragedy, 4, 39, 42–3, 46, 56 Traub, Valerie, 108 travel writing, 94–5, 105–8, 110–12 Trevor, Douglas, 142 n. 19, 164 nn. 6 & 7 Tribble, Evelyn B., 169 n. 6 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 158 n. 16 Trussell, Thomas, 63 Turner, James Grantham, 134, 174 n. 4 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 64 Tyrtaeus (of Aphidnae), 55, 59 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare), 119, 132

200 Index

Vickers, Brian, 139 n. 5, 143 n. 23, 152 n. 1, 155 n. 52, 156 n. 57 Wagner, Peter, 174 n. 4, 175 n. 8 Wall, Wendy, 142 n. 17, 177 n. 56 Waswo, Richard, 150 n. 65 Watson, Robert N., 164 n. 8 Webbe, William, 42, 149 n. 60, 157 n. 3 Webster, John, 165 n. 12; see also specific works Worden, Blair, 156 n. 2 Wright, Thomas, 2, 7, 11–21, 26, 31, 35, 58, 76–7, 97–8, 144 n. 1,

145 n. 3, 147 n. 27, 151 n. 80, 156 n. 58, 158 n. 20, 166 n. 24, 173 n. 47 Wriothesley, Henry see Southampton, Earl of Xenophon, 67 Yaxley, Robert, 104 Zimmerman, Susan, 167 n. 36