The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse, edited by Emrys Jones, was
published in the TLS of August 16, 1991.
Every now and again, an anthology is published which is also a real book. That
is, the editor’s selection shows us new ways of reading a poetry. Such a
work is The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse, edited by Emrys
Jones: it is like a first-class history, only better because it consists of
all the data, and we draw the conclusions for ourselves.
The Oxford series of books of English poetry by the century, which were always
a cut above other anthologies, are being reissued volume by volume in new
versions, re-edited and reconceived. The predecessor of this one, edited by
Sir Edmund Chambers in 1932, was not one of the most useful. I have owned a
copy since I was an undergraduate forty years ago, and I am grateful for it,
as it provided me with the texts of work by poets whose books I couldn’t
afford to buy. I first read Wyatt in it, for example, and “Orchestra” by Sir
John Davies, and a rather bland selection from Fulke Greville which was
still better than nothing. But Chambers’s taste had its limitations.
“Elizabethan poetry is characteristically a light-hearted poetry”, he stated
in his introduction, and though he was forced in all honesty to qualify his
view a little, he was obviously happiest when emphasizing the Merrie
England, or Hey nonny nonny, aspect of the century: the more shepherds,
nightingales singing jug jug, and pastoral ornamentation the better.
In a sense, Emrys Jones’s introduction to The New Oxford Book of
Sixteenth-Century Verse forestalls the reviewer, since it contains the best
description possible of both Chambers’s editorial assumptions and his own.
Pointing out that Chambers’s is a prejudice in favour of the “lyric”
(derived from Palgrave, it tends to exclude other kinds of poetry), he
wishes to be more inclusive, in particular to take notice of what he calls
“the historically circumstantiated”. The latter he defines as “poems which
enthusiastically embrace the untidy and perhaps obscure specificity of
transient historical situations”. Thus he healthily disregards both large
notions of universality and narrow ones of poetic autonomy, implicitly
recognizing that it is the very specialness of a writer’s utterance, its
enmeshment with temporal circumstances, that produces the literature and in
turn evokes the imaginative sympathy and interest of a reader (who is
usually as much attracted by unlikeness as by likeness). There is of course
more than one kind of history: there is the history of events and politics
and social conditions, and there is also the history of developing styles.
An example of the first comes early, in the inclusion of extracts from
Skelton’s “Speak, Parrot”, the satire on “the bragging butcher” Wolsey. And
stylistic history is both illustrated and clarified by the anonymous account
of the battle of Flodden Field (1515), with its still medieval
versification. Both kinds of history are relevant to George Cavendish’s
“Epitaph” on Queen Mary, not a very good poem but an interesting and
instructive one, for it demonstrates at the same time the ready
identification between the English Queen and the Virgin, and the metrical
uncertainty still obtaining in 1559 (it is written in a hybrid form of
alliterative line and rhyming stanza).
Jones presents the marvellous century in a variety so thickly packed that it
will have surprises, I imagine, even for those who think themselves well
read in it. His formula enables him not only to give us the best poems, but
to document the life out of which they came. Poems by recusants and about
their executions may serve as a check to the sentimentalized Tudor history
of novels like Fire over England. There is even one about the burning of an
admirably unrepentant atheist (so Marlowe wasn’t unique). The literature of
the streets, broadsides and ballads, is mixed in with that of the Court, the
associates of the gentry, and the university-educated, with which we are
more familiar. Among them, George Gascoigne is now represented by his
strongest poems (Chambers slighted him dreadfully), Greville by the best of
both his love poems and of his sonorous Calvinist laments, and even Sidney
more widely than ever – by a greater number of sonnets and by some of the
experiments with poetic forms. Translations are numerous, as they were in
the century itself. The long excerpt from Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses
reminds me again of how enjoyable it can be when read in selection: to
render Morpheus as “Morph” or “Morphy” is merely quaint, but you begin to
experience the engrossing power of the verse and the story as you read on,
especially if you follow Ezra Pound’s advice to read for sense and syntax
and not allow the fourteeners to degenerate into a singsong. As for
Marlowe’s translations, his Lucan is a contemporary of Tamburlaine, and his
Ovid is a dandy like the young Donne. Historical circumstantiality, in fact,
creates a network of relationships that places everyone more clearly; as we
can see with Shakespeare’s long poems, which are set firmly in a narrative
context of leisurely elaboration and ingenuity.
By avoiding a sharp distinction between the documentary and the literary,
Jones also points to some of the originating impulses of poetry.
Sixteenth-century people still considered verse a natural medium for the
recording of truths, whether practical or moral, whether in the prolixity of
Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (analogous to Works
and Days or Old Moore’s Almanac) or more impressively in poor young Chidiock
Tichborne’s one poem lamenting the pithy paradoxes of his approaching
execution. I doubt if we would consider either Tusser or Tichborne “a
serious poet” nowadays, but for each – all the more in the absence of a
succinct and workable prose – poetry was the form answering their need for
what Auden memorably called memorable speech. Like the graffiti-writer or
the composer of an obituary, they had something on their minds that had to
be put into words. The pressure to record has always been the starting-point
of poetry, now as 400 years ago, and if we disregard the primitive mnemonic
urgency that underlies all writing, we do so at our cost. It was
particularly visible in a century in which English poetry had to, if not
create itself, create itself afresh.
One of the pleasures peculiar to the study of this era is that of seeing the
ways in which the various poets made their stylistic choices. The fact that
the choices were urgent and seldom clear-cut gives some of the poetry early
in this volume its difficult and precarious life – you can still feel the
risk involved, for it was a matter of feeling alternatives out, of trying to
make the best of two sets of possibilities. For example, there was the
choice between the elementary need I’ve referred to, the desire to record
something about crops or the shortness of life, and on the other hand the
love of play for its own sake, so that decoration might fill every corner of
the poem. But how much play can you introduce without trivializing the
subject-matter? And how much statement can you insist on without banishing
all the fun? There was, of course, also a metrical choice, as the potential
of the iambic line became slowly apparent, and it was often far from obvious
for Wyatt, or even with later poets like Cavendish. There was a choice to
make between the lengthy medieval discursiveness of, say, Sir Thomas More,
and an aphoristic Roman compression. And there was a choice to make between
a native style of narration inherited in some way from the Ballads, the
material irregularly dramatized and abridged, and the sophisticated battery
of devices imported from other literatures, from (for example) Petrarch and
Ronsard and Ovid.
Wyatt, early in the century, is faced with all these choices and more. Not
only is he a symptomatic figure but he is emerging, in our own time, as a
poet of greater weight and scope than has been heretofore recognized, and so
the selection from him may be treated as a test of the editor’s method and
judgment. Jones shows us a Wyatt new to anthologies, a participant in
history and a stylistic colonist claiming land on which will be based many
of the great fortunes of the late-century. He is famous already as England’s
first Petrarchan, true, but his poetry is more varied and ambitious than
that: he is defined here not only as the unfortunate and indignant lover of
the famous poems, which are properly included, but as the author of all
three epistolary satires one of the penitential psalms, and of three poems
unknown to Chambers.
Wyatt was more than a player in the game of love, he was a successful diplomat
and a sometimes successful courtier. The activities were connected, as
Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out in his brilliant chapter on Wyatt in
Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Love was entangled with other kinds of
power-game, and Henry VIII’s court was a much more dangerous place than a
singles bar in San Francisco. Wyatt’s poetry at its best often becomes an
instrument for examining the assumptions governing conduct in these games,
perhaps more searchingly than he intends. Of his most famous poem, “They
flee from me”, Greenblatt says, one is aware ... of a painful striving
toward a perception that remains just beyond the field of vision, an
unsettling intimation that the link between male sexuality and power has
produced this mingled frustration, anxiety, and contempt Wyatt is an expert
player, but senses in his own consciousness of impoverishment that what has
brought him to this pass might not be losing the game so much as playing it
at all. The tentativeness and conditionality of the perception hardly
diminish its force: it is all the more powerful for being unwilled and
unforeseen.
Among the love poems included, there are already more notes struck than simply
that of rejection by a cruel mistress and the consequent vengeful whining.
We have a farewell to love, to compare with so many others of the century;
the conjectural “I am as I am” (talk about self-fashioning); and the poem in
which he congratulates himself on being better off with “Phyllis” than with
“Brunet that set my wealth [well-being] in such a roar”. Jones conjectures
that Brunet is Anne Boleyn, and indeed the historical Wyatt barely escaped
execution as the Queen’s putative lover. Also here, then, are two important
poems connected with that story, neither of them published until 1961. I was
familiar with one of them, “Who list his wealth and ease retain”, with its
resonant refrain from Seneca: “circa Regno tonat”, [Jove] thunders round a
throne. As in Dunbar’s most famous refrain, the authority of the Latin
suggests the monumental obduracy of an unyielding truth, that makes the
English of its application all the more vulnerable – vulnerable to the point
of poignancy in the personal instance of the third stanza. Here he refers to
what he witnessed through a grating while imprisoned in the Tower:
The bell tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate
For all favour, glory, or might
That yet circa Regna tonat.
We may assume that the sight was of Anne’s beheading. Autobiographical detail,
however discreet and allusive, is given a sudden symbolic force, as in Yeats
– though the symbol is more proportionate to reality than it ever was for
Yeats – after which the return to generalizations of caution in the
concluding stanza is all the more moving.
The other recently discovered poem I rejoice to find here, “In mourning wise”,
I had both read and not read before. That is, I had read the collected
edition that included it, but I did not remember reading it, and Jones’s
singling it out for inclusion is for me one of the great gifts of his
anthology. It is related in subject-matter to the previous poem, in that it
mourns the death of the five with whom the Queen was supposed to have
committed adultery, a death that might have been Wyatt’s too, but this is
less a poem about himself and his fortune than a memorial to them. The range
of his feeling is considerable, for he thinks as he grieves. He asserts his
right, which some would contest, to lament the deaths of traitors. And he
distinguishes between them, telling the reader how each meant something
different to him; but in these lines he weeps for all:
And thus, farewell, each one in hearty
wise.
The axe is home, your heads be in the
street.
The trickling tears doth fall so from mine
eyes,
I scarce may write, my paper is so wet.
The axe’s work is over and their heads are on display, but the phrases
employed are so mildly, almost comfortably familiar that they increase the
horror of the line, of which the implication might be that executions have
become by now an everyday and homely routine. The understated force is such
that we read the next two lines as simple truth; they might otherwise have
seemed commonplace in their overstatement.
As I have suggested, the history illustrated by this poetry is stylistic as
well as political. Wyatt, at first sight merely the Petrarchan lutenist
plaining his sorrows, thinks through his poetry. His way of making careful
discriminations, whether of emotions or of ideas, influences later poets. As
Jones points out in his introduction, he “hands on” to Gascoigne a “special
gravity and seriousness”, who then hands it on to Ralegh. In the course of
his first satire, Wyatt lists the various actions he is too scrupulous to
perform: for example, “I cannot wrest the law to fill the coffer”, and
Gascoigne echoes him in his “Woodmanship”, when he speaks of himself in the
third person as a mercenary soldier:
He cannot stoop to take a greedy prey
Upon his fellows grovelling in the streets.
And what does Ralegh’s speaker make in her answer to Marlowe’s enraptured
Shepherd but worldly-wise discriminations? Just beyond the end of the
century and this anthology another ex-mercenary, Ben Jonson, addressing Sir
Robert Wroth, will distinguish between him and the soldier who can
blow up widows, orphans, and their states,
And think his power doth equal Fate’s.
(That is what Sir Robert “cannot” do.) The style of discrimination is similar
in each case, largeness of possibility being limited by moral scruples.
Accordingly it is a historical pleasure to trace through the century a style
that is essentially one of statement, starting with a need to withdraw from
experience into a formulation about it so as not to be overwhelmed by it.
The ordering of experience, in much of Wyatt, Gascoigne and Ralegh,
therefore becomes itself the experience of the poem.
Pointing to the persistence of the discursive style is not to deny an equal
importance to that other famous style which much rather catches the eye in
the second, or Elizabethan, part of the century. In “Orchestra”, Davies
praises Homer for “his abundant verse”, and he himself celebrates abundance
in both style and subject. Abundance means literally an overflowing, and
abundant verse is generous, giving us more than is necessary, even to
excess. It takes pride in not discriminating. Speaking of rivers, Davies
says later in the same poem:
Of all their ways, I love Meander’s path,
Which, to the tunes of dying swans, doth
dance;
Such winding sleights, such turns and tricks he
hath,
Such creeks, such wrenches, and such
dalliance,
That, whether it be hap or heedless chance,
In his indented course and wriggling
play,
He seems to dance a perfect cunning
hay.
He describes here the very verse he is writing. If the discursive poet is
concerned with the serious matter of getting a weight off his chest, with
saying something, the poet of abundance is concerned rather with playing.
Leisurely and elaborate, his wriggling play often covers as much ground as
it can, winding because he enjoys covering it with intricate designs: he
includes as much of experience as he can, and I would say he embellishes it,
if the word did not imply a detachable ornamentation, whereas play is an
extension of the imaginative experience itself in such poetry as the above:
Meander is what he is only if he meanders. Spenser of course exemplifies
this style too, perhaps most perfectly in the wedding poems, in one of which
he has as refrain variations on the lines
And evermore they Hymen, Hymen, sing,
That all the woods them answer and their echo
ring.
In a poem where so much of the musical effect is created by an irregular
generosity of rhyme, no image of aural abundance could be more appropriate
than that of echo.
I have entered on a familiar precinct of literary history here, one which
Jones, probably wisely, avoids in his introduction. He glances at the two
dominant Tudor styles but does not label them. Not all critics have been so
guarded: C. S. Lewis called them Drab and Golden; Yvor Winters Plain and
Ornate; and others have given them other names. In describing them as the
poetries of discrimination and abundance I am trying to recognize that the
styles are not always or necessarily in mutual opposition. Now they may be
distinct, now they may be continuous one with the other. Wyatt’s “In
mourning wise” or
Greville’s “Down in the Depths” may define one extreme of the century’s styles
(not at all drab, and not that plain either), and Spenser’s “Epithalamion”
or Davies’s “Orchestra” the other (certainly both golden and ornate), but
they may turn out to be merely the outer edges of a single discourse, not
incompatible with one another any more than our sensations need be
incompatible with our minds. The styles are to be found together inside
single poems like Drayton’s “Since there’s no help” or Greville’s “All my
senses”. Davies is abundant in some of his poetry, discriminatory to the
point of harshness elsewhere. Both modes are available to all of the later
Elizabethans, to the song-writers as much as to the composers of longer
works. That is perhaps what makes for the largeness of scope in poetry at
the end of the century and the beginning of the next, where the poets often
move between the styles or combine them without any sense of discrepancy.
There is thus a weight to the achievement of such individual poems as
Campion’s best songs or Nashe’s plague poems that makes it difficult to call
them “minor”, even when you compare them with the best, with Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Donne or Jonson, unless by minor you are referring merely to bulk
of written work.
If all would lead their lives in love like me,
Then bloody swords and armour should not be;
No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleeps should
move,
Unless alarm came from the camp of Love.
This is, of course, merely a conceit, we may say, and one paraphrased from
Propertius at that. But to speak so is to overlook the wonderful boldness
with which Campion plunges into his wild assertion (wild, but completely
reasonable) at the same time that every detail of the sound is exquisitely
regulated. Abundance is not quenched here, nor is the power of
discrimination. Rather, in the triumph of combining the utmost polish with
the utmost exuberance, Campion has achieved a fresh synthesis of the two,
one of many that come at the end of the century.There is no question of “a
tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace” – the lyric grace
itself was tough, and reasonableness had never been alien to it. Neither the
power of thought nor the ability to enjoy the world is suspended for an
instant in the song from which these lines are taken.
In his introduction to the old anthology, apropos of The Shepheards Calender,
Chambers remarked heartily: “And thereafter, of course, there is God’s
plenty.” Nevertheless, the last phase of the century presents a problem to
the anthologist who must end his work at 1600, for that year arbitrarily
cuts in half the great period of poetry most easily defined as being between
1580 and 1620. The problem is compounded by our inability to date
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Donne’s love poems, Greville’s Caelica, or many other
works of the time, other than approximately. Both editors claim the whole of
Shakespeare, but otherwise Jones deals with the question in a completely
different way from Chambers, and I must say I prefer his solution, which
emphasizes the variety rather than the supposed unity of Elizabethan poetry.
For example, he claims all of Greville, whose religious poetry Chambers
excluded. More crucially, Chambers left Donne to the seventeenth century, as
did many other anthologists and critics: so that I grew up with the distinct
impression that Donne was a later poet than he really was, a successor to
Shakespeare and even a kind of contemporary to Marvell. Yet he seems to have
started writing at about the same time as Shakespeare, “The Storm” and “The
Calm” are clearly dated by their occasion, the Azores expedition of 1597,
and most of his Elegies relate to the same Ovidian fashion as Marlowe’s
translations of the Amores. Moreover, as Jones tells us, “the verse satire
of the 1590s which Donne pioneered and of which he was by far the most
distinguished exponent was exclusively an Elizabethan phenomenon”. So
Donne’s early poetry is restored to its rightful time, where it is
completely at home beside the satires and epigrams of the 1590s which Jones
is wise enough to include. The decade is no longer located largely in
Arcadia and the Forest of Arden; it shares them now with the Inns of Court
and the plaguey streets of London.
This Oxford Book, with its poems both historically circumstantiated and
uncircumstantiated, is more complex and varied and interesting than Chambers
ever allowed his to be. I wouldn’t consider it either easy or desirable to
read most anthologies straight through, but I did this one, with an
intensifying excitement, recognizing this and that, making constant happy
discoveries, finding certain of my assumptions confirmed and others
overturned – in fact, never bored. Jones has taken the century apart and
then, poem by poem, put it together again so that the canon is permanently
extended. It is largely a matter of accumulating detail, and would be best
summarized by the contents pages. Instead, let me give two examples of what
I called my happy discoveries, the kind of things that make this selection
so lively and fresh. Robert Southwell, in a poem about the execution of Mary
Queen of Scots, which transformed her, as he says, from Queen to Saint, from
Mary to Martyr, uses the following conceit: “The bud was opened to let out
the rose.” It is a clever, bloody and beautiful image, making me realize
that here is a poet I had too long taken on trust and ought to read in bulk.
The other example is from George Gascoigne’s lines predicting the
spendthrift’s future: thou wilt go on, he says,
Till Davy Debit in thy parlour stand,
And bids thee welcome to thine own decay.
The bailiff enters the poem with a particularly ominous energy.
Both his and Southwell’s poems are so good that they should be better known.
Perhaps they will now. And in the whole book I can think of only two poems
whose omission I regret: Boyd’s sonnet “Fra bank to bank” (perhaps because
it is Scots rather than English?) and Campion’s “Now winter nights enlarge”.
I mention these, not to carp at a great editor, but on the contrary – how
often have you come across an anthology in which you miss only two of your
favourites?
This is a volume, then, that being both inclusive and interpretive may be read
for pleasure or required as a textbook. And such are its virtues that it
might well be used as a handbook in styles by the beginning poet. It is, in
short, a necessary anthology. We must give Emrys Jones credit for it now,
because in a few years’ time the fineness of his taste, the range of his
research, and the decisiveness of his choices will have become obscured by
imitation. So many other anthologies will be influenced by this one that
eventually his achievement will seem merely obvious. But it is not, and it
is a book for which we should express gratitude.
