P oe t ry a n d Pat e r n i t y i n
r e n a iss a nc e e ngl a n d
Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson
in the english renaissance, becoming a father was the main way for a man to be treated as a full member of the community. yet patri-archal identity was by no means as secure as is often assumed: when poets invoke the idea of paternity in love poetry and other forms, they are therefore invoking all the anxieties that a culture with contradictory notions of sexuality imposed. This study takes these anxieties seriously, arguing that writers such as sidney and spenser deployed images of childbirth to harmonize public and private spheres, to develop a full sense of selfhood in their verse, and even to come to new accommodations between the sexes. shakespeare, donne and Jonson, in turn, saw the appeal of the older poets’ aims, but resisted their more radical implications. The result is a fiercely personal yet publicly committed poetry that would not be seen again until the time of the romantics.
Poe t ry a n d Pat e r n i t y
i n r e n a iss a nc e
e ngl a n d
Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson
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Cambridge University Press
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First published in print format
ISBN-13 978-0-521-19110-4 ISBN-13 978-0-511-78945-8 © Tom MacFaul 2010
2010
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vii
Acknowledgements pageviii
List of abbreviations ix
1 Presumptive fathers 1
2 Uncertain paternity: the indifferent ideology of patriarchy 36
3 The childish love of Philip sidney and Fulke greville 63
4 spenser’s timely fruit: generation in The Faerie Queene 95
5 ‘We desire increase’: shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry 130
6 John donne’s rhetorical contraception 160
7 ‘to propagate their names’: Ben Jonson as poetic godfather 188
coda: sons 226
Notes 234
Bibliography 258
Index 272
viii
My first debt of gratitude in the writing of this book is to richard Mccabe, who supervised my doctoral thesis on spenser, and who has continued to offer much-valued advice on spenserian and other matters. as an under-graduate, i was introduced to many of the authors considered here by Howard erskine-Hill and gavin alexander, and for that i continue to owe them a great deal. other friends and colleagues who have helped me clarify my thinking or given valuably of their time on matters of fact and interpretation include glenn Black, guy cuthbertson, ian donaldson, Katherine duncan-Jones, Hugh gazzard, steve gunn, amanda Holton, david norbrook, emma smith, Michael Whitworth and Kieron Winn. i am also very grateful to cambridge University Press’s readers for sug-gestions as to how the book might be improved – one of whom, Patrick cheney, having removed the veil of anonymity, i am glad to be able to thank by name. Many thanks are due to sarah stanton at cambridge University Press for having faith in the project, to rebecca Jones for seeing the book through the press, and to annie Jackson for careful copy-editing, which has saved me from many infelicities.
in many ways, this book began as an attempt to answer some of the questions regularly raised by students when dealing for the first time with the poetry of the english renaissance: i’m immensely grateful to a large number of my students (too many to name here) for their enthusiasm, fresh perspectives and insight. in particular, i’d like to thank those who have taken special author papers with me on donne, spenser and Jonson.
an earlier version of chapter 3, ‘The childish love of Philip sidney and Fulke greville’ was published as an article in Sidney Journal 24 (2006); i am grateful to the editor, Mary ellen lamb, for her advice on this piece, and for permission to use this work here. a brief section of chapter 6 has appeared as donne’s ‘The sunne rising’ and spenser’s ‘epithalamion’, in Notes & Queries 54 (2007); i am grateful to the editors for allowing me to republish this here.
ix
Abbreviations
ELR English Literary Renaissance NQ Notes & Queries
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary
1
c h a p t e r 1
Presumptive fathers
between the sexes, and reflect on the different spheres into which an indi-vidual may invest himself.
‘Pater semper incertus est’, runs the roman legal proverb; ‘mater certissima’ – that is, paternity is always uncertain, but maternity is the most certain thing of all. This simple fact implies a tremendous effect on the whole of human psychology (and that of other species), as sociobiol-ogists and evolutionary psycholsociobiol-ogists have emphasized.2 if we are looking for a cross-cultural human ‘universal’, it is surely in this area that we will find it; yet it is also very much subject to cultural variation (as well as vari-ation on the basis of individual peculiarities).3 Precisely because paternity is uncertain, an element of flexibility enters into male identity: one can choose one’s allegiances and the nature of one’s investments. Freud would suggest that this involves the masculine ‘renunciation of instinct’:
an advance in intellectuality consists in deciding against direct sense-perception in favour of what are known as the higher intellectual processes – that is, memor-ies, reflections and inferences. it consists, for instance, in deciding that paternity is more important than maternity, although it cannot, like the latter, be estab-lished by the evidence of the senses, and that for that reason the child should bear his father’s name and be his heir.4
3 Presumptive fathers
anthony Fletcher’s account of renaissance notions of gender gives important reasons for masculinity being anxious and dependent:
Their belief in the mingling of [a woman’s] seed with their own in the womb made it impossible for men to think of themselves as wholly gendered male beings until they had struggled free of maternal making and maternal influence. Thus the legacy of the galenic heritage was the notion of human singleness being achieved out of inherent doubleness. Men found their manhood through their sexual potency and through the act which started the same cycle of twinship and doubleness all over again.7
We might infer from this, however, that no notion of essential masculinity was available, and that masculinity was all process with no final result. This will not quite do: a male god, the ultimate sacred Father, and His representatives on earth, particularly kings and familial fathers, but also perhaps priests and educators, constituted, at least notionally, a dwelling place for the idea of the father – the sacred name of the father is therefore not merely to be treated as an object of conventional reverence, but as a guarantee of the full masculinity which is never quite realized in an indi-vidual’s life.
nature itself (or herself) could come in for some criticism. in Fletcher and Field’s The Honest Man’s Fortune (c. 1613), lady orleans, suspected of infidelity by her paranoid husband, articulates an understandable female desire for men’s sense of feminine mystery to be dispelled:
o Heaven, how gratious had creation been to women, who are borne without defence, if to our hearts there had been doores through with our husbands might have lookt into our thoughts, and made themselves undoubtfull. (i. ii. 21–5)10
By contrast, in the anonymous Swetnam, the Woman Hater (1620), the titular misogynist (aka Misogynos) argues
Happy were man, had woman neuer bin.
Why did not nature infuse the gift of Procreation in man alone, without the helpe of woman, euen as we see one seed, produce another? (B2r)
Though this character is the play’s villain, and though his misogyny will be confuted by the play’s conclusion, his position is merely an extreme ver-sion of the anxieties expressed in more normative discourse.
it has often been noted that elizabethan poets appropriate images of pregnancy to depict their own creativity, but there has been some debate about the reasons for this.11 Katharine eisaman Maus postulates that it may simply be because ‘men envy women’s ability to give birth’, but thinks this insufficient given the renaissance tendency to denigrate maternity.12 The more profound reason, for Maus, may be that men want to appropriate some of the mysteriousness of femininity, and specifically of the womb.13 elizabeth d. Harvey similarly sees the appropriation of femininity as enab-ling writing but at the same time as making the writers appear helpless.14 Men in all cultures may envy the certainty of female creativity, and though it would be glib to suggest that this impels male artistic creation, an aware-ness of this aspect of the artist’s motivation is quite commonplace (it goes back at least as far as Plato); when such an awareness is allied with an active cultural disparagement of motherhood, the most thoughtful poets may have to respond by acknowledging the anxieties that lie behind the asser-tions of masculine primacy. When patriarchal manliness is taken as too absolute a value, the threats to it become all the more troubling, particu-larly if it is recognized as being founded on fictions; yet this frees poets up to create their own fictions – hoping to improve on the official ones.
5 Presumptive fathers
an unproblematic norm. although the patriarchal nuclear family was increasingly valorized in the elizabethan era, it was challenged by a num-ber of factors. Firstly an ideology of masculine friendship as the highest form of love made the family secondary.15 yet ‘homosocial’ attempts to exclude women from the father–son bond which is taken to be the fun-damental basis of society are even more doomed than similar attempts to exclude women from amicable male society in an exaggerated ideal of friendship.16 The patriarchal and the homosocial are bound together, but are equally unrealizable ideals. it is the fact that both are unnatural that creates a genuine sense of confusion in the renaissance period. The male line ‘ought’ to be central and primary, but many men can see that it is really secondary and culturally formed.
a second major challenge came from the anomalous position of the female monarch. The family had to be validated from on high by a woman who had no family at all.17 These factors in some ways marginalize the heterosexual, patriarchal family – and one might even argue that this mar-ginalization contributed to a developing private sphere of the nuclear fam-ily. it is important to avoid imposing a modern dichotomy of public and private onto a period in which there was no such sharp dichotomy,18 but equally it is important to be aware that there was some distinction between the spheres, and a consciousness that it was growing. The decline of larger kinship and clientage structures, along with the emergence of the machin-ery of the modern nation state, meant that people were increasingly begin-ning to see their loyalties in terms of a division between nation and family, with less intermediate institutions blurring the lines.19 it is not surprising then that ‘natural’ familial urges become confused in this period; in fact, one could argue that monogamous procreative marriage is as confused a category as Foucault famously argued that sodomy is.20
Protestant ideology also had complex effects. Mary Beth rose argues that
although Protestant sexual discourse retains much of the erotic skepticism of the dualistic sensibility, it nevertheless unites love with marriage and conceives of marriage with great respect as the foundation of an ordered society. Protestant discourse is not dualistic, but complex and multifaceted, and one of its most sig-nificant and far-reaching changes is a shift in the prestige and centrality granted to the institution of marriage.21
it may be, love, definitely, is love.’22 one of my central enquiries here is to what extent love is sex – that is, to what extent poetic discussions of love are preoccupied by sexual generation, and how far anxieties about sex and childbirth inform poets’ attitudes to their art, and their sense of its significance in the public realm. Both sex and poetry are ways of guar-anteeing the continuity of the self, preventing isolation in the here and now, and giving one an afterlife in the future, but both are also uncertain endeavours.
The major stream of paternal imagery in elizabethan verse begins with Philip sidney, whose hugely influential sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella commences with the struggles of male poetic parturition:
loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, That the deare she might take some pleasure of my paine: Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine, i sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine: oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine. But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay, invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame studie’s blowes, and others’ feete still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helplesse in my throwes, Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,
‘Fool’, said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write.’23
7 Presumptive fathers
poem that lasts. yet the idea of fruition is not only complex in its results, but problematic as a process: however much one may want it to be a mat-ter of hard work and study, it may also involve an element of passivity. Just like a fruit, one cannot force it: external influences must bring it steadily to ripeness (which is ‘all’ according to edgar in King Lear (v. ii. 11)); those influences are experienced as female – the Queen, nature, the beloved, the Muse – and they, paradoxically, make the process of masculine making feel feminine, like the apparently passive suffering of childbirth. The process of becoming fully masculine involves dealing with the femin-ine in ways that can fundamentally undermfemin-ine one’s sense of masculinity. For this reason, hermaphroditism is a powerful notion, allowing accom-modations to be made between the sexes. The common galenic model of sex-difference considered the body as flexible; able, through the influence of the humours, to acquire characteristics of either sex, femininity being the basic condition, and masculinity being something one had to strive for.24 This model sat side-by-side with an idea that masculinity and femin-inity (as abstractions, at least) were fundamentally different, but the hows and whys of that difference required much rhetorical fancy footwork, as in donne’s ‘air and angels’. in some ways, it was masculinity that was more the abstraction (being that which needed to be added), femininity being associated with nature, the body and the material world. any accommo-dation between the sexes, then, would have to be figured in a hermaph-roditic manner. if offspring were a mixture of masculine and feminine, then so might be poems; for some poets that might even be a desirable result, allowing some redemption of condemned or repressed feminine elements in themselves. Mostly, however, poems are presented as male (though romances and translations might be considered as female, for reasons of genre and reflecting a sense of secondariness respectively). The ideal essence of the original poem is conceived as primarily masculine, but sometimes with feminine characteristics (such as mutability) that may enable a redemption of both sexes, or even a redemption of the anxieties created by sex-difference and masculine secondariness. For many poets, then, one of the major points of amatory verse is to negotiate better rela-tions between the sexes and therefore between the masculine and femin-ine aspects of themselves.
Walter Burre writes, to robert Keysar, manager of the children of the Queen’s revels:
sir,
This unfortunate child, who in eight days (as lately i have learned) was begot and born, soon after was by his parents (perhaps because he was so unlike his breth-ren) exposed to the wide world, who for want of judgement, or not understand-ing the privy mark of irony about it (which showed it was no offsprunderstand-ing of any vulgar brain) utterly rejected it; so that for want of acceptance it was even ready to give up the ghost, and was in danger to have been smothered in perpetual oblivion, if you (out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude) had not been moved to relieve and cherish it, wherein i must needs commend both your judgement, understanding, and singular love to good wits. you afterwards sent it to me, yet being an infant and somewhat ragged, i have fostered it privately in my bosom these two years, and now to show my love return it to you, clad in good lasting clothes, which scarcely memory will wear out, and able to speak for itself; and withal, as it telleth me, desirous to try his fortune in the world, where if yet it be welcome, father, foster-father, nurse and child, all have their desired end. if it be slighted or traduced, it hopes his father will beget him a younger brother, who shall revenge his quarrel, and challenge the world either of fond and merely literal or illiterate misprision.25
There may be several reasons for this: the play is an exceedingly unusual one, and had been a theatrical flop, and the printing is clearly an attempt not so much to cash in on a stage reputation as to find a different kind of audience in print, so that the paternal metaphor is used to assert the play’s status as a theatrical poem; Beaumont also was a man of consider-ably higher social status than most playwrights, and the paternal meta-phor may be a way of endowing the play with some of this status. despite the play being published anonymously, as if it were a noble foundling, Beaumont, who would be buried in Westminster abbey near chaucer and spenser (in what would become Poets’ corner), is made into a theatri-cal poet by the publisher’s gesture: the paternal metaphor insists on both familial and poetic status and gives a sense of inherent social and aesthetic value to a man’s works.
a play of the same year, edward sharpham’s Cupid’s Whirligig, also has a dedication using the paternal metaphor, the author telling his ‘friend’ robert Hayman
9 Presumptive fathers
Heere lies the childe, who was borne in mirth, against the strict rules of all childe-birth: and to be quit, i gaue him to my friend,
Who laught him to death, and that was his end.26
as the play centres on a man who castrates himself in order to test his wife’s chastity, the theme of paternity is rather grotesquely appropriate. an end to paternity and therefore to masculinity may be treated comically in the play, but to be laughed to death for a failure of one’s masculine creativ-ity is a deep fear for many renaissance writers – there is a risk of humili-ation in publichumili-ation which might be considered a kind of emasculhumili-ation.
Paternal imagery is perhaps most commonly to be found in dedications and prefaces, where it frames the work and relates it to its author, often in rather ironic ways. When sidney calls the Arcadia ‘this child i am loath to father’,27 it is not just a modesty formula or an instance of a courtier’s reluc-tance to see his work in print (he was writing the dedication for a manuscript, after all), but rather a mark of the way in which fathering can mean acknow-ledging as one’s own, or even as a part of one’s self. His paternal reluctance may be as unaffectionate as the behaviour of the prime father in the text, euarchus, who sentences his son to death, but it shows how much of a com-mitment fathering a text might be. spenser’s dedication of The Shepheardes Calender (1579) to sidney is still more complex; he does not address sidney, but the book itself, presenting it as a child going out to be fostered:
to His BooKe.
The book is accorded a self and therefore an ability to act as well as speak in the world: it can move about in the world and, like Jonson’s poem on his son, it can be ‘asked’ about its origins. Those origins are ‘base’ for a num-ber of reasons: the passage reflects spenser’s sense of his own lowly status (though given his desire to be connected with the spencers of althorp this may be modesty); it is also a literary modesty formula refusing to boast of his poem’s worth; it is linked to the supposed lowness of pastoral on the hierarchy of genres, and the social lowness of the shepherds central to that genre; finally, it reflects spenser’s decision to remain anonymous, thus in a sense bastardizing his poem. His preoccupation with foundlings in the later Faerie Queene would develop from this, suggesting that one needs to form one’s own identity in a way we would call meritocratic, before one’s paternity can be acknowledged. despite later becoming a pub-licly acknowledged poet (and implicitly acknowledging The Shepheardes Calender in the opening lines of The Faerie Queene), spenser would never put his name to the Calender, even in the five later editions published in his lifetime.29 This may be because, having dedicated the work to sidney, he no longer considered it his own. Poems, considered as children, take on a life of their own, and find their own way in the world like sons; yet the father’s very anxiety about them suggests how much of themselves is at stake.
11 Presumptive fathers
The analogy between poetry and paternity is so obvious that it can seem transparent: poets and fathers are both culturally privileged makers; yet, whilst the analogy may be intended to validate both roles, the effect tends to be much more complex, as neither role has as much real power as people would like. Privileged as fathers and poets were, they also knew that their privileges depended on an uncertain system that patronized them and put them in their place. Fathers remain uncertain that they are really fathers, and can see that their power within the family is subordinated to other power structures. Poets, particularly in a culture of print-publication without authorial copyright, know that they have relatively little con-trol over the fate of their works, and are as aware of themselves as sons to a larger tradition as they are of their paternal relation to their poems. instead of providing mutual validation of two important roles, then, the analogy in fact enables the expression of anxieties about selfhood, even as the self tries to extend itself into the wider world and claim some of it for its own. The fact that such anxieties get expressed does, however, imply or even insist that the self may be transmitted into the world: some real and important part of one’s individuality is at stake in both poetry and pater-nity. However distorted – or even autonomous – the version of the self that comes out may be, some kind of organic connection with the world is established.
assumption that the poet feels himself to have some sort of self, illusory or not, and that he wants to communicate this to some degree. He may find that he can only confirm his feeling of selfhood by investing it in something he knows not to be himself, and the more sophisticated he is as an artist the more aware he may be of the paradoxical nature of this pro-ceeding. Most of the poets examined here took their investment in their works very seriously even as they played with their poetic identities. The differing degrees to which they found satisfaction in this activity and the different modes by which they attained it will be central preoccupations of this study. none of this is to say that renaissance poets really antici-pated the romantics in a preoccupation with subjectivity, or at least not in a straightforward way. They are interested in themselves, but they see themselves as divided into many spheres of interest. endowing their works with a sense of agency by regarding them as children may be an attempt to create some unity which resolves the divisions of selfhood. in that much, at least, they may have some resemblance to the coleridgean yearning for wholeness.
13 Presumptive fathers
here are powerful indicators of the desire for conception to be single, con-tained within the mind, but focussed and communicable; nonetheless, spenser’s conceit is famously a ‘darke conceit’ (letter to ralegh, 3). such a conceit is mysterious because it is concealed in the writer’s mind but nonetheless is supposed to manifest itself throughout the work. a similar sense of mystery is found in thinking about biological conception, another form of conceit, which is also considered to reveal itself, however fitfully and uncertainly, in a child. The almost arrogant hopefulness and obses-siveness of this idea (which the modern word ‘conceit’ conveys) is often recognized by writers, who know that the unity they claim is elusive and may be illusory – that it may amount to an idol of the mind. nonetheless, it provides a valuable fiction of integrity – and, yes, even of sincerity – to the process of artistic creation.
We need go no further than the works of shakespeare to demonstrate how the word ‘conceit’ is used to intimate the extraordinary and mys-terious powers – for good and ill – of the mind’s creations, and to relate these to the idea of biological generativity. seemingly simple jokes link the idea of understanding to that of procreative conception, as in the comic exchange at the end of The Taming of the Shrew:
WidoW: He that is giddy thinks the world turns round. petruchio: roundly replied.
k atherine: Mistress, how mean you by that? WidoW: Thus i conceive by him.
petruchio: conceives by me! How likes Hortensio that?
hortensio: My widow says, thus she conceives her tale. (v. ii. 20–4)36
he wanted to be ‘dress’d in an opinion / of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit’ (i. i. 91–2), making him seem like an oracle, and nicely expressing the idea that conceit is mysterious – comprehension involves something incomprehensible. such an idea is perhaps most satisfyingly found in Bottom’s discussion of his dream: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to con-ceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, iv. i. 211–14); famously a parody of 1 corinthians 2:9,37 this syn-aesthetic garbling points to the difficulty of separating inward and out-ward conception and of drawing any crisp distinction between objective reality and the imagination. to conceive, which seems to involve not just understanding, but understanding of something fresh, is to bring some-thing wholly into consciousness, but even as one does so it strikes one with a kind of unreality. Thus Macduff, having seen the murdered duncan, can only say ‘o horror, horror, horror! tongue nor heart / cannot con-ceive nor name thee!’ (Macbeth, ii. iii. 64–5); as with Bottom, conception is seen as something which might be felt inside the heart and expressible on the tongue, but which seems more often to be a matter of profound difficulty, if not error. othello, observing iago’s gnomic evasions, accuses him of having shut up in his brain ‘some horrible conceit’ (Othello, iii. iii. 115); already, we have the sense that othello understands this to be desdemona’s infidelity, but though he is right that this is what iago wants him to think, and though he is ironically right that iago has a horrible plot conceived (his ‘monstrous birth’, i. iii. 404), all this conceiving is only hor-ribly in error.
subjective, imaginative and erroneous though it may be, conceit has considerable power to impel action. This is forcefully communicated in titania’s description of the indian child’s mother:
Full often hath she gossip’d by my side. and sat with me on neptune’s yellow sands, Marking th’ embarked traders on the flood; When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive and grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait, Following (her womb then rich with my young squire) Would imitate, and sail upon the land
to fetch me trifles, and return again, as from a voyage, rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,
15 Presumptive fathers
The boy’s paternity here is strikingly ruled out: one might almost infer that she is pregnant with the winds like the sails of the ships she imitates. conception seems to come from nothing, enabling all sorts of real and imaginative movement and exchange, rather as imaginative metaphor or conceit carries things across seemingly unbridgeable distances; yet this conception is also lethal, and we cannot forget the dangers of mothers and sea-merchants; nothing is carried across without a price. The idea that such conceit involves pride before a fall is also present in Richard II where the imaginative king knows his own fate:
within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps death his court, and there the antic sits, scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, allowing him a breath, a little scene,
to monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks, infusing him with self and vain conceit, as if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable. (iii. ii. 160–8)
The idea of ‘self and vain conceit’, a willed and empty illusion of power, does not reduce the fact that it has power over others as much as it is ultim-ately fatal to the self. ophelia’s ‘conceit upon her father’ (as claudius puts it, Hamlet, iv. v. 45) is enough to drive her to madness and death; conceit here seems to imply obsession or oppression by an idea as well as mysteri-ous understanding. Hamlet had earlier warned Polonius that ‘conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to ’t’ (ii. ii. 184–6); the joke is primarily a sexual one, but the irony is that what she conceives from Hamlet is not a child but the idea of death. Juliet fears that she will go mad like ophelia if she wakes in the family tomb because of the ‘horrible conceit of death and night’ (Romeo and Juliet, iv. iii. 37); ironically, of course, she is conceiving of this in advance, anticipating and perhaps even in some sense causing her own doom.
the dishonour of his mother’ (ii. iii. 13); the irony that his conception of his parents’ misconceptions undoes his biological conception is inescap-able. leontes is projecting his feelings onto his son, obviously, but such is the emphatic likeness between them that the projection really does make Mamillius ill. When his jealousy began, leontes sought reassurance from looking at his son, presumably and inevitably seeing more difference between them the more he looks:
Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that i have to be full like me; yet they say we are
almost as like as eggs; women say so – That will say anything. (i. ii. 128–31)
of course the son does not have his father’s grizzly hair; but what are these ‘shoots’? a double sense is suggested: on the one hand they might be young branches – i.e. potential offspring; on the other, they might be the cuckold’s horns that leontes now feels emerging. in this double mean-ing leontes is intimatmean-ing that for a son to be a true copy of his father, he must be a father himself, and a cuckold and therefore uncertain father at that. Mamillius is made into a conceiving father, begetting self-destructive ideas. even more intensely than in Hamlet an imaginary hyper-identifica-tion between father and son has created tragedy. ideas, perhaps especially the idea of paternity, can destroy life.
as with iago’s monstrous birth, when male characters in drama talk about conceiving things, they tend to be conceiving evil plots. lazarotto in The First Part of Jeronimo says that he has ‘mischiefe / Within my breast more then my bulke can hold, / i want a midwife to deliver it’ (iii. 7–9) – he simply has the potential for evil which will be realized in the schemes of his master lorenzo.38 a more notable example can be found in John day’s Law Tricks (1604, pub. 1608), where the villainous Horatio says in an opening soliloquy
i turnd my thoughts into a thousand shapes: Moulded the fashion of ten thousand plots, lik’d and dislik’d so many, that my brayne The mother of invention grew barrayne,
almost past bearing, still my labouring thoughts conceiu’d a yet more strange and quaint Idea,
gaue it proportion, and i brought it forth. (lines 13–19)39
17 Presumptive fathers
against the virtuous wife of his friend). The play’s heroine emilia, by con-trast, has a more virtuous plot which is presented as a ‘huge birth of knau-erie’ (line 284), and an ‘embrion’ (lines 298–9) wittily planning to test out her brother’s virtues. such imagery is developed in Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (c. 1606), where Witgood develops his plot with his whore Jane:
What trick is not an embryo at first, Until a perfect shape come over it?
jane: come, i must help you. Whereabouts left you? i’ll proceed.
Though you beget, ’tis i must help to breed. speak, what is is? i’d fain conceive it. (i. i. 57–62)
Their plot, mischievous as it is, and deceptive to the play’s two usurers, leads ultimately to their reform, so that it can be said to make them perfect.
The heroes of Mary Wroth’s Urania overhear a damsel singing a song that gives evidence of ‘a reasonable good conceit of love’:
love peruse me, seeke, and finde How each corner of my minde is a twine
woven to shine
not a webb ill made, foule fram’d, Bastard not by Father nam’d, such in me
cannot be.
deare behold me, you shall see Faith the Hive, and love the Bee.40
The overhearing proves the woman’s honesty, laying her feminine mys-tery open in an assurance that no bastardy can come from her. The female poet-romancer seems eager in this way to dispel male doubts, but such good conceit does away with the mystery of female creativity that male poets ambivalently yearn to appropriate. Perhaps the most important sphere of authority for women – some women, at least – was the ability physically and verbally to examine pregnant women, particularly unmar-ried women;41 the appropriation of this authority – at least the verbal side – seems one of the major motivations of the poets we will consider.
presumably procreation) with rosalind, because she decides he is ‘a gentle-man of good conceit’ (lines 53–4); that she, of course, has conceived him and made him into such a good conceiver of her and of their children has been the central process of the play. Here, conception has been a bless-ing: a self and a fate have been made through the process of dramatic interaction, moving him away from writing poems to being a man. yet his earlier poems have proved something. Whilst drama can articulate and represent such processes of conception/conceit, it is only poetry that really is an instance of conceit.
The generative meaning of ‘conceit’ is surely invoked in sir John davies’s gulling sonnets, where he speaks of clothing love in various witty ways, including supplying a ‘codpeece of conceite’ (gulling sonnet 6, line 9);42 though the primary meaning here is pride in phallic power, it also sug-gests the creation of odd ideas as well as procreation. richard Barnfield, in a poem printed as shakespeare’s in The Passionate Pilgrim, says that ‘spenser [is dear] to me, whose deep conceit is such / as passing all con-ceit needs no defence’ (8. 7–8); in praising spenser, he essentially suggests that his work is incomprehensible and that it therefore needs no critical justification. The idea of conceit becomes an aesthetic category involving depth and perfection: spenser is praised in this poem alongside the com-poser dowland, implying that really perfect conceit is the attainment of the condition of music in poetry.
More thoughtful poets than Barnfield would see the real difficulty of attaining this, making great poetry out of the process of trying to convey their conceptions and imbue them with both depth and unity. edward de Vere, 17th earl of oxford’s ‘When werte thow borne, desyre?’ makes ‘good conceyte’ the father (reportedly) of the ‘sweet boy’ desire (lines 3–4).43 The poem plays very interestingly with voice, asking ques-tions which are answered in a second voice which only gradually emerges as that of desire himself. it is as if the autonomous voice of desire is grad-ually being generated by the poet’s enquiries, and by the ‘sweete speech that lykte me best’, until it obtains an ‘i’ that can say ‘in gentle hearts i rest’ (lines 14, 16). such desire ‘likes to muse alone’ (line 20), but is immortal, being born and dying ‘ten thoWsande tymes a day’ (line 28). The idea – unsurprising in the holder of england’s oldest earldom – that true desire must be of high status is undercut by its lack of perman-ent integrity. as such, this voice seems very like the voice of poetry itself, floating free of its aristocratic begetter’s conceit and gaining immortality only at the cost of stability.
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When i consider every thing that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment;
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows, Whereon the stars in secret influence comment; When i perceive that men as plants increase, cheerèd and checked even by the selfsame sky, Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, and wear their brave state out of memory; Then the conceit of this inconstant stay sets you most rich in youth before my sight, Where wasteful time debateth with decay to change your day of youth to sullied night, and, all in war with time for love of you, as he takes from you, i engraft you new.44
The octave considers and perceives the impermanence of the universe, but at the sonnet’s volta this is made to amount to one unified conceit which brings a vision of the beloved to his mind, the poet’s conception of which allows the young man’s originating sap to be memorialized for ever: in the poet’s conceit, origin and memorial are one. in sonnet 26, the poet’s sense of his inadequate expression is compensated for by hope for ‘good conceit of thine’ (line 7) which will clothe his thought; full conceit cannot be just internal, but requires someone else coming to meet one half way. Mutual friendship, based on love and understanding, enables connections to be both growing and perfect, though perhaps only for a moment, and only in the imagination.
This yearning for mutuality that will most fully express the unity of the self and that can transcend time reaches its richest expression in sonnet 108:
What’s in the brain that ink may character, Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit? What’s new to speak, what now to register, That may express my love, or thy dear merit? nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine, i must each day say o’er the very same,
counting no old thing old, thou mine, i thine, even as when first i hallowed thy fair name. so that eternal love in love’s fresh case Weighs not the dust and injury of age, nor gives to necessary wrinkles place, But makes antiquity for aye his page, Finding the first conceit of love there bred,
The theological language here reaches to the ultimate origin of love to refresh expression of self and love; the idea of making anew in the moment (‘now’) of poetic creation captures the very essence of the life-giving property of poetry, thus rivalling even god’s creation (with a mixture of extraordinary arrogance and self-deprecating modesty). This perfect con-ception, which is both origin and end of the poetic process, can be so self-sufficient only because women have been ruled out (along with necessity, mutability and the material world, all perhaps associated with femininity). it works for the moment, but the Sonnets’ ultimate failure to achieve their erasure (probably hinted at in the poem’s final word) will be the subject of chapter 5, below. The problem is that one cannot simply brush women aside, as many renaissance men seemed keen to do; men could perhaps try to be friends without mediating women, but they could hardly become fathers without them.
Men would have liked to think of the father–son line as perfect, without feminine interference, and mothers, wives and daughters were therefore continual causes of barely repressed anxieties in a number of ways: wives and mothers could, for instance, be regarded as either unreliable or effemi-nizing, daughters could compromise a man’s honour; loved as they often were, women were reckoned to be fundamentally inferior, especially in their intellects45 – an ideological position that must surely have come under some evidential pressure. as david cressy demonstrates, ‘the mys-tery of childbirth’ was an exclusively feminine sphere (perhaps really the only one), men not being allowed into the bedchamber during labour.46 This accentuated male jealousies of female reproduction; the one area in which men were explicitly disempowered may partly be appropriated in order to compensate for those jealousies, but a clear effect of that appro-priation is to reveal and even revel in disempowerment. anthony Fletcher argues that
men’s long-established and traditional conception of womankind as the weaker vessel, it seems, left them [women] in possession of sources of power which men found mysterious and threatening. Meanwhile men’s overall conceptions of gen-der, in terms of hierarchy rather than incommensurable difference, gave them an insufficiently competent means of imposing a patriarchal order rooted in nature.47
Poetic considerations of fatherhood, then, offered the opportunity to entrench paternity on a more solid basis, but only by admitting the femin-ine side of the writer himself.
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effect on masculine self-conception. eve Keller demonstrates that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women became more tightly identified with their wombs and their reproductive capacities;48 men may concomitantly have become more dissociated from reproduc-tion, thus prompting a desire to find an alternative form of paternity in poetry. certainly a woman was more likely to be reduced to a mere car-rier of a womb, which was thought to have some sort of life of its own, than a man was to be considered as a walking penis.49 as Keller observes, ‘Much of the vernacular bio-medical literature of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century england perpetuates the fundamental components of galenic anatomy and physiology but, even as it does so, it insistently rewrites their workings to support a notion of subjectivity more nearly aligned with masculinist and Humanist ideals.’50 Keller sees increasing medical efforts to deny the mother’s role in procreation and to intellec-tualize the father’s role as enabling the emergence of a modern mode of selfhood and subjectivity that is strongly gendered as male: of course, whilst this more explicitly involves children’s autonomy from the mother, it also at least implies autonomy from the father. The fact of male identity being dependent on such problematic figures as women seems to some almost intolerable,51 but it is also one of the major reasons for the brilliant complexity of elizabethan and Jacobean verse. every assertion of paternal masculinity must be accompanied by a new configuration of men’s rela-tion to women, and even to their own femininity.
dawkins would call the ‘memetic’.52 The political includes all achievement for the nation and public success for oneself – though there seem to be potential conflicts here; many authors (perhaps most notably spenser) use paternal imagery as a way of suggesting that public and personal inter-ests may harmonize; in a similar way, the use of biological imagery to represent economic success constitutes an attempt to naturalize the mak-ing of money and to distmak-inguish good thrivmak-ing from supposedly unnatural modes such as usury. although the various aspects of this paternal nexus might be conceived as mutually validating, in practice there were conflicts between the various spheres.
some thinkers of the time considered that people only had a certain quantum of fertility, that energies put into the family would reduce one’s political or poetic achievement and so on. in Marston’s Sophonisba (1606), when Masinissa is called away to war, interrupting his wedding night with the titular heroine, she tells him
Fight for our country; vent thy youthful heat in fields, not beds; the fruit of honour, fame, Be rather gotten than the oft disgrace of hapless parents, children. (i. ii. 219–22)53
The sense of children as frequently disappointing alternatives to fruits in other fields is powerfully articulated – all the more so in that it comes from a woman.
Thomas cogan concludes The Haven of Health (4th edn, 1636) with a chapter ‘of Venus’, in which he decides that sexuality is natural to man, as the production of seed (both male and female) is the natural consequence of eating:
and the commodities which come by moderate evacuation thereof are great. For it procureth appetite to meate, and helpeth concoction, it maketh the body more light and nimble, it openeth the pores and conduits, and purgeth flegme, it quickneth the mind, stirreth up the wit, reviveth the senses, driveth away sad-nesse, madsad-nesse, anger, melancholy, fury. Finally it delivereth us utterly from lecherous imaginations, and unchaste dreames. (p. 280)
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of an object. The last, however, is particularly important, as it implies that erotic energies can be diverted into such spheres as ‘earnest study’ (p. 285).
Francis Bacon has a similar sense of competition between the modes of (re)production, arguing that
The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to men. and surely a man shall see the noblest works and foun-dations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed. so the care of pos-terity is most in them that have no pospos-terity.55
More gnomically, Ben Jonson stated that ‘samuel daniel was a good hon-est Man, had no children, bot no poet’,56 rather implying that having no children ought to have helped him be a poet. Montaigne, whose own chil-dren had died in infancy, argues for the superiority of brainchilchil-dren to biological ones:
now if we shall duly consider this simple occasion of loving our children, because we have begotten them, for which we call them our other selves. it seemes there is another production comming from us, and which is of no lesse recommendation and consequence. For what we engender by the minde, the fruits of our courage, sufficiencie, or spirit, are brought forth by a far more noble part, than the corpo-rall, and are more our owne. We are both father and mother together in this gen-eration: such fruits cost us much dearer, and chiefly if they have any good or rare thing in them. For the value of our other children, is more theirs, than ours. The share we have in them is but little; but of these all the beautie, all the grace, and all the worth is ours. and therefore doe they represent, and resemble us much more lively than others.57
Montaigne’s desire to be both father and mother reflects a common envy of the one sphere belonging to women. His desire for absolute possession of value, meanwhile, hints at the totalizing but futile possessiveness of authorship. There is a yearning here for the preservation of the self in per-fect form, without the distorting interference of a mother, which is com-mon in the poets of the time, most notably in shakespeare’s Sonnets. The masculine need to distribute one’s eggs (should that be seeds?) carefully between different baskets complicates the use of imagery of biological generation for poetic and other achievement, as we shall repeatedly see.
idea of competition between various spheres of activity in a procreative metaphor:
cosmus hath more discoursing in his head, Then Jove when Pallas issued from his braine, and still he strives to be delivered,
of all his thoughtes at once, but all in vaine. For as we see at all the play house dores, When ended is the play, the daunce and song: a thousand townsemen, gentlemen, and whores, Porters and serving-men togither throng,
so thoughts of drinking, thriving, wenching, war, and borrowing money, raging in his minde, to issue all at once so forwarde are,
as none at all can perfect passage finde.
Though basically a simple satire of inarticulacy, the poem neatly expresses disorder in terms of class mixture: the separate functions of the different orders of society need to be kept separate if any is to thrive. The poem’s irony operates in a double sense: occupying oneself with so many matters is obviously very different from the wisdom Jove supposedly gave birth to with Pallas, yet we may also infer that wisdom is holistic for a god and not for a human; if man wants to gain any perfect issue, he must focus his endeavours.
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analogized but differentiated, the four main modes of personal fru-ition are in creative competfru-ition: this set of ideas and images, which we might call the procreative nexus, comes into prominence in later elizabethan verse – it is simply not present in earlier tudor poets nor, i think, in medieval or continental writing. Though there are hints of a preoccupation with patrilineal identity in latin poets of antiquity (such as statius’s ‘epicedion in patrem suum’ (Silvae, v. iii)) the roman practice of adoption made it less intense.62 The nexus is most prominent – though it is very varied – in the poets who have become the most canonical, and one might speculate that it is one reason for these poets’ canonicity. They are staking the main part of their selves in their writing, as poets had not before. in establishing a paternal relationship to their poetic works, sidney and later poets made a claim on posterity that is emotional and political as well as poetic. They are not, however, engaged in some time-less Bloomian agon:63 their desire to invest themselves in their works is persistently inflected by the circumstances in which they lived, as we will see in the next chapter.
However, the centrality of fatherhood was challenged by the emer-gent importance of education: the new learning characteristic of the renaissance shook up traditional notions of patriarchy. education ena-bled men at least to rise above their parents; whilst the contents of that education very frequently privileged filial piety – most notably Virgil’s Aeneid – other texts, such as ovid’s Metamorphoses, seemed to run against the central Virgilian model by emphasizing modes of continuity that work very differently from the dynastic. additionally, Plato’s works presented the private family as a lesser point of allegiance than the state (in the Republic) or the amicable education system (in the Symposium). cicero, the most esteemed of all classical authors, joined these views together, making the oligarchical, educated in-group the central point of allegiance, and subordinating patriarchy to meritocracy. The result of all this is that there was a considerable variety of available models to which an individual may choose to attach himself, making paternity only at best a primus inter pares of models for individuality, and allowing people to choose what kind of relation they would have to a paternalistic system.
Heather dubrow has suggested that ‘the loss, real or feared, of a school-boy’s father may help to explain the extraordinary impact of those pater-nal surrogates, the Humanist schoolmasters’;64 it may also help explain the need to make poetry, as it was a core element of the Humanist cur-riculum, into a surrogate for paternal and filial feeling. one of the central ideas derived from both cicero and Plato, and which is perhaps always implicit when education is highly valued, is the superiority of cultural to biological transmission – in dawkins’s terms, memetic rather than genetic inheritance. We have already seen this idea expressed by Francis Bacon; add to this a growing sense of a continuous poetic tradition, in which poets such as spenser can take chaucer or Virgil as their fore-bears, and poetry becomes one of the crucial means by which men can meditate their position in relation to the possible models of individuality. This meditation is further complicated, of course, by the centrality of amorous material to that poetic tradition. amorous poetry, then, both provides a sense of entering into a wider, non-familial culture, and allows writers to meditate on their own origins. This will be a central focus of this study, but a few examples here will demonstrate the complexity of feeling involved in texts with less explicit ideological agenda than we will find in prose tracts.
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to all parent–child relationships, something which is often exploited for amorous purposes. it is in texts which exploit the pathos of orphancy that we can see some of the fullest developments of poetic individuality. Michael Witmore describes renaissance children, who were regarded as in some senses not quite human (because not rational), as ‘living ambas-sadors for the realm of the imagination’ and ‘agents without interests’,65 rather as poems may be; this gives an important pair of reasons for the use of imagery of children in referring to poetic creativity, allowing the poem to be both in need of rational correction and aesthetically autonomous, whilst also investing it with pathos as needed. samuel daniel’s presen-tation of writing as masculine parthenogenesis involves a desire to find a mother for his work; indeed writing is figured as a means by which the cruel woman’s instinctive maternal pity can be evoked:
goe, wailing verse, the infants of my loue,
Minerua-like, brought foorth without a mother: Present the image of the cares i proue,
Witnesse your Father’s griefe exceedes all other. sigh out a storie of her cruell deedes,
With interrupted accents of despaire: a Monument that whosoeuer reedes,
May iustly praise, and blame my loueless Faire. say her disdaine hath dryed up my blood, and starued you, in succours still denying: Presse to her eyes, importune me some good. Waken her sleeping pitty with your crying,
Knocke at that hard hart, begge till you have mou’d her,
By contrast, robert greene’s Menaphon gives voice to an abandoned mother, sephestia, for whom her ‘poore babe was the touch-stone of his mothers passions’:
Weepe not, my wanton, smile vpon my knee, When thou art olde, there’s grief inough for thee.
Mothers wagge, pretie boy, Fathers sorrow, fathers ioy. When thy father first did see Such a boy by him and mee, He was glad, I was woe: Fortune changde made him so, When he left his pretie boy,
Last his sorowe, first his joy. (vi: 42–3)68
it is instructive that the first reaction of the father is joy (whereas the mother’s is woe, both in her labour-pains and in her sense of shame at her unauthorized marriage), but the poem gives no fuller explanation of the sorrow the father finally feels – is it sorrow at leaving, or sorrow that causes him to leave? Perhaps the point is that the mother doesn’t know which, fortune having caused Maximus to leave her. yet the turning of the verse in the lines that become the poem’s refrain results in ‘joy’ being the final word. However much pathos there may be in the reversal of fortune, there is an ultimate assertion of joy in paternity, leaving a silver lining to the poem’s clouds of misery. The mother is subsequently consoled by her attendant, and the work as a whole is presented as a consolation to the widowed dedicatee lady Hales. The use of a child as a touchstone enables hope to emerge.
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be the 21st and 22nd (or 11th and 12th – this is much debated) books of a longer work which was probably never written. it is possible that it is a deliberately fragmentary artefact whose form mimics its central idea – that after losing the Queen’s love and favour, he, like his poem, is merely the ‘withered leves left on the tree’ (line 470).69 Poetic, amorous and pol-itical fruition, then, have been thwarted, and the poem’s images of bio-logical fruition may simply be a way of focussing the feelings of the poet and his royal audience; on the other hand, we must remember that it was Bess’s pregnancy that precipitated ralegh’s marriage, so that the biological element – which naturally in any case attaches to the idea of amorous fruition – is also to be taken literally, even if ralegh may be using it for purposes we would call political.
ralegh and his wife were both sent to the tower in august 1592; the husband was released in september, but Bess stayed there until late december. Was their son damerei with her? Born in March, damerei disappears from the record during 1592; whether he died at nurse, or in the tower, it is possible that the Queen’s clemency to Bess was prompted by his death.70 of course, we are warned not to believe in very strong feelings for fragile infants in the renaissance period, but surely in the circumstances the death of a son would have affected ralegh as something of a last straw; the only fruit he had got from the whole misadventure was lost. i think that the poem’s pathos relies in part on this; in a strong sense, if the poem was written after the son’s death, ralegh is making it part of his appeal for pity to the Queen. This may strike us as cynical, but it would not be out of character, and it may well have worked, in that the Queen did at least release his wife. even if the poem was written before damerei’s death, the fear of infant mortality might well be enough to prompt morbid thoughts, and thoughts about his child are an important part of ralegh’s poetic con-struction of his feeling. in catherine Bates’s reading of the poem, the frag-mentation of an overdetermined notion of male subjecthood is the Ocean’s real focus,71 but the idea of a son allows this fragmented subject to be reunified, at least imaginatively. Perhaps the most striking feature of the poem is the sense of life persisting beyond the point of no return – ralegh/ ocean is a mill-wheel still spinning though the motive force of the stream has been taken away (lines 81–4). The Queen, who is generally presented as the moon/cynthia, is in this passage presented rather as the sun, the ultimate source of life:
douth by the poure remayninge of his rayes
produce sume green, though not as it hath dunn. (lines 77–80)
This may be an attempt to accommodate his marital fertility to the sup-posed death of all fruition in the withdrawal of the Queen’s favour; the son may be the ‘sume green’ (and is therefore not to be imagined as dead yet), and may also be punned on in the reference to the sun. The fragility of his fertility is clear, and this is emphasized in the passages where ralegh identifies himself as a son to the Queen, appealing to her maternal pity. He says that he is one
that loved her both, by fancy, and by nature that drew yeven with the milke in my first suckinge affection from the parents brest that bare mee. (lines 321–3)
This reminder that natural affection comes from being breast-fed by one’s own mother might just be an appeal to let damerei be nursed by his mother; this also, like the passage in which ralegh likens himself to a lamb, newly weaned from its mother’s (the Queen’s) affections (lines 71–2), identifies ralegh with the pathos of infancy.
The most salient characteristic of the poem is that ralegh does not fix the relationships in it, however. He calls his mind ‘widdow of the joyes it once possest’ (line 86), so that we are to imagine him, at this moment, having been once married to the Queen; this may also bring up the issue of separation from his wife. The figurations point to both the public and the private self, as if he could be married in two ways. rather as the Queen has two bodies, public and private,72 so her ‘lover’ has two too: he is lover and son, married to two different elizabeths in two different ways; and he has lost all this.
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all is desolvde, our labours cume to nought nor any marke therof ther douth indure
no more then when small dropps of rayne do fall uppon the parched grounde by heat up dried no coolinge moysture is percevd at all nor any shew or signe of weet douth byde But as the feildes clothed with leves and floures the bancks of roses smellinge pretious sweet have but ther bewties date, and tymely houres and then defast by winters cold, and sleet, so farr as neather frute nor forme of floure stayes for a wittnes what such branches bare butt as tyme gave, tyme did agayne devoure
and chandge our risinge joy to fallinge care. (lines 235–48)
The common sentiment of the transience of things, a favourite idea of ralegh’s, is here given added force if we ally feeling about his offspring to his feeling about the cancellation of his political advancement – in simple terms, there is nothing to show for all of this, nothing to show for his love of the Queen, and perhaps nothing to show now for his love of Bess. The use of ‘our rising joy’, as well as ideas of ‘labour’ and ‘fruit’, may well sug-gest this latter interpretation. The whole poem, however, contains an idea of crazy, futile persistence which may be allied with a sense of biological fruition. The most powerful instance of this gives a georgic quality to the feeling:
as a feilde wherin the stubbell stands of harvest past, the plowmans eye offends hee tills agayne or teares them up with hands and throwes to fire as foylde and frutless ends and takes delight another seed to sow (lines 275–9)
There is an implication here not only of a persistent desire to recover the Queen’s love/favour, but also of the possibility of having another child, and the two ideas are rather uncomfortably mingled; indeed, whatever happened to damerei, the raleghs had another son, Walter, in november 1593.
ralegh’s later poem to this unruly son Walter constitutes a rather grim joke about the dangers that might face a promising son:
The wood is that, which makes the gallow tree, The weed is that, which stringes the Hangman’s bagg, The wagg my pritty knave betokeneth thee.
Marke well deare boy whilest theise assemble not, green springs the tree, hempe growes, the wagg is wild, But when they meet, it makes the timber rott,
it fretts the halter, and it choakes the childe. Then bless thee, and beware, and let vs praye, We part not with the at this meeting day.
The ‘green springs’ which seem hopeful point to a terrible fate which can only be averted by the paternal blessing – yet the mood of that verb is prob-lematic; ralegh does not quite say ‘i bless you’, but suspends the words between the imperative, the optative and the performative indicative, fur-ther complicating things by introducing a first-person plural which might speak for both parents, the whole family (including the son) or the human race in general. The voice of paternal authority is thus abstracted from individual feeling and thus seems to dissipate some of its force, ending rather hopelessly.
in The Ocean to Scinthia, ralegh’s other main means to console himself is to try to feel contentment in others’ fruition:
i love the bearinge and not bearinge sprayes Which now to others do their sweetnes send th’ incarnat, snow driven white, and purest asure who from high heaven douth onn their feilds dissend
fillinge their barns with grayne, and towres with treasure. (lines 306–10) These lines assert that love is above concern with fruition – whether bio-logical or political – and at the same time insist that fruition is to be valued, unselfishly; both the bearing and not-bearing sprays seem to be filling up people’s barns. This willed turn to impersonality and altruism is founded on the idea of the persistence of the natural cycle, and it therefore relates again to the idea of having children oneself. The 22 lines of The end of the bookes, of the Oceans love to Scinthia, and the beginninge of the 12 Boock, entreatinge of Sorrow, concerned as they also are with ‘others happines’, are worth quoting in full:
My dayes delights, my springetyme ioies fordvnn, Which in the dawne, and risinge soonn of youth Had their creation, and weare first begunn, do in the yeveninge, and the winter sadd,
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My tymes that then ran ore them sealves in thes, and now runn out in others happines,
Bring vnto thos new ioyes, and new borne dayes. so could shee not, if shee weare not the soonn, Which sees the birth, and buriall, of all elce, and holds that poure, with which shee first begvnn; levinge each withered boddy to be torne
By fortune, and by tymes tempestius,
Which by her vertu, once faire frute have borne, Knowinge shee cann renew, and cann create
green from the grovnde, and floures, yeven out of stone, By vertue lastinge over tyme and date,
levinge vs only woe, which like the moss, Havinge cumpassion of vnburied bones cleaves to mischance, and vnrepayred loss. For tender stalkes –
elizabeth/cynthia is put above the economy of generation here, but that last half-line contains a hint of hope, if not for ralegh then for his off-spring. of course this final section may merely mean ‘you are Queen; you can create anyone; make me a powerful man again’; but the mention of the Queen seeing the birth of others also constitutes a reminder, if one were needed, that she is not generative and perhaps does not understand ordinary people’s needs to make these tender stalks, which need care from their father, their mother, and their Queen.
ralegh tinkered with these lines when he made a plea to the next Queen, and in doing so made these sentiments about Queen elizabeth more explicit. agnes latham describes the ‘conjectvral First draft of the Petition to Queen anne’ as ‘an intermediate stage between Cynthia and the Petition to Queen Anne’; it was written while ralegh was in the tower again (this time from 1603 to 1616, having had a death sentence for treason commuted); the version eventually sent to the Queen loses all the Scinthia material, but also loses two final stanzas from the interim version that makes a contrast between Queens elizabeth and anne:
to whom then shall i crie, to whom shall wronge cast downe her teares, or hould vp foulded handes? to her to whom remorse doth most belonge, to her that is the first and may alone Be called impresse of the Brittaines.
But you, great, godliest, powerfull princesse, Who haue brought glorie and posteritie
Vnto this widdowe land and people hopelesse? (lines 40–52)
The presentation of anne as empress remains in the final version, but ralegh thought better of emphasizing her relationship to the King and her generativity. He is still relying in the interim version on the faint idea of maternal pity, implicitly contrasted with masculine ‘powerful majesty’; this time, he thinks at first, a real mother will know what to feel. He is thinking of his own ‘posterity’, both in terms of his achievements and in his family. The fact that ralegh was tutor to anne’s eldest son Prince Henry may be in play here – they share an investment in future glory.74 in the final version he makes this appeal differently, hoping
That i and myne maye neuer murne the misse of her wee had, but praise our liuing Queene,
Who brings us equall, if not greater, Blisse. (lines 40–2)
The flattering contrast with Queen elizabeth is underpinned by a personal sentiment which replaces the amorous feeling of the poems to the earlier Queen – here it is familial feeling, ‘i and myne’, which makes the appeal. ralegh needed to use a transitional poem to move from amorous to famil-ial feeling, but the familfamil-ial, paternal feeling was already implicit in the earlier poem.
35 Presumptive fathers
father, but he did so after losing his biological sons (in all likelihood), and had to create an attenuated emotional self in order to do so.
