Roman usages, which draw heavily on their Greek antecedents, are also complex and varied; and they too often involve metrical issues. At the same time, the label “carmina,” so tellingly applied to Horace’s poetry, signals the continuing link with song. Latin literature, notably the work of Catullus and Horace, of course provided its English imitators with instances of lyric poetry purporting to concern personal experiences, especially the perturbations and tribulations of love and desire. That focus could on occasion call into question the reputation of the genre; warning in his Institutio Oratoria (I.viii.6) that licentious poetry risks corrupting the young, Quintilian insists that elegiac and hendecasyllabic verse should be omitted completely from the classroom if possible, or, failing that, shared only with older students. If, however, the authors are carefully selected, he declares in the same passage, lyric can provide intellectual nourishment. Thus he anticipates both the anxieties about lyric found throughout early modern texts and the move of countering them by sharply distinguishing its various manifestations. Renaissance writers also inherited continental discussions of lyric, including the neo-Latin traditions. Roland Greene has drawn our attention to the emphasis on sound and rhythm in the fifteenth-century treatise Proemio e carta by the Marquis of Santillana.70 Particularly well known in the period was Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem, which has a chapter on lyric poetry and separate chapters on pastoral, hymns, dithyrambs, and other forms.
Traces of all of these usages survive in treatises of the early modern period, as well as in the poetry itself. In particular, the linkage to song recurs repeatedly, as does the association of lyric with public occasions and the agenda, often advanced by that association, of sharply distinguishing valuable and deletrious forms of lyric. But despite their common ground on such issues, discussions of lyric during the English Renaissance, like their antecedents, are typically inconsistent in their definitions of the mode, notably disagreeing with each other on how narrowly they restrict it and how firmly they distinguish it from other forms. And they are profoundly ambivalent in their valuations of it, some treatises privileging it over other genres, others denigrating it, and still others sliding between those positions.
Unresolved contradictions are endemic, I have maintained; to begin with, writers of the period part company on how, if at all, they use the term “lyric.” Although some critics have claimed that the word was unfamiliar in England during the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, Robert Herrick uses it repeatedly throughout Hesperides. In addition to the passage from “An Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew” discussed in the introduction, he appears to deploy the term in the loose and general way common today, as a synonym for short songlike poems, when he declares in “Lyrick for Legacies” that “each Lyrick here shall be / Of my love a Legacie” (4–5). Since the poems in question involve a range of meters, Jonson also seems to be using the word in a general sense, not a precise metrical one, when he fashions his title, “A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces.” Yet the narrower prosodic sense of lyric clearly survived as well; seventeenth-century editions of Donne, for example, acknowledge the metrical distinction between his other love poetry and his elegies by printing them separately. George Puttenham asserts that classical poets termed themselves “Heroick, Lyrick, Elegiack, Epigrammatist or otherwise” and adopts that categorization himself when he praises Elizabeth’s abilities “in Ode, Elegie, Epigram, or any other kinde of poeme Heroicke or Lyricke.”71
Although the triadic distinction among modes is often associated primarily with later periods, it is anticipated in a few important documents of the early modern period, though even here it often coexists with other types of categorization. The preface to the Second Book of Milton’s Reason of Church Government, cited later in this chapter, alludes to the categories of epic, drama, and lyric. An analogue to the triadic division of modes which, for all its fascinating implications, is far less familiar than Milton’s, appears in Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster. Stressing the importance of genera dicendi, he posits divisions among poetry, history, philosophy, and oratory. Having noted that each includes further categories, he subdivides poetry into the comic, tragic, epic, and melic. Thus melic again becomes a capacious category with a problematical relationship to song, a category presumably including epigram and elegy as well as texts more frequently classified as lyric in his period. Despite the breadth of the melic category, Ascham expresses optimism about recognizing and replicating the appropriate decorum. Predictably, the method he advocates is studying classical models, and Pindar is once again included in the list; whoever “shall diligently marke the difference they use in proprietie of wordes, in forme of sentence, in handlyng of their matter,” Ascham assures us, “shall easelie perceive, what is fitte and decorum in everie one.”72
The characteristics I am identifying in these brief early modern commentaries on lyric—diversity among texts in how broadly the category is conceived and how confidently it is defined, consciousness of classical models with particularly frequent references to Pindaric odes, and ambivalence about the potentialities and perils of the mode—are expanded and explicated in statements by Michael Drayton, John Milton, George Puttenham, and, of course, Sir Philip Sidney. Drayton prefaces the section of odes in his 1619 Poems with “To the Reader”:
Odes I have called these my few Poems; which how happie soever they prove, yet Criticisme it selfe cannot say, that the Name is wrongfully usurped: For …an Ode is knowne to have been properly a Song, moduled to the ancient Harpe, and neither too short-breathed, as hasting to the end, nor composed of the longest Verses, as unfit for the sudden Turnes and loftie Tricks with which Apollo used to manage it. They are (as the Learned say) divers: Some transcendently loftie and farre more high then the Epick …witnesse those of the inimitable Pindarus, consecrated to the glorie and renowne of such as returned in triumph from Olympus, Elis, Isthmus, or the like: Others, among the Greekes, are amorous, soft, and made for Chambers, as other for Theaters; as were Anacreon’s, the very Delicacies of the Grecian Erato, which Muse seemed to have beene the Minion of that Teian old Man, which composed them: Of a mixed kinde were Horace’s.73
Drayton echoes several characteristics that recur in other early modern discussions of lyric: it is associated with song, length is a criterion, the public celebratory odes of Pindar are a model, even perhaps the prototype, as Drayton’s adoption of the term “ode” might itself hint. His reference to theaters suggests not the triadic divide found in Ascham and Milton but rather an overlapping of modes that can compromise attempts at neat definitions. Drayton also stresses other kinds of variety that may complicate such attempts, noting in particular that lyric encompasses both praise of the great and erotic verse. Thus it encompasses as well subject matter often coded masculine (“the glorie and renowne”) and the stereotypically feminine (“soft, made for Chambers”); some anxiety about such gendering may also be present in his description of the muse Erato, where hints of an imperiled masculinity (he writes “soft” verse and is characterized as an “old Man”) are countered by hinting through the term “Minion” that he is the lover of a Muse onto whom the eroticism of lyric is deflected.74 Arguably similar concerns surface in the curious caveat against overly short lyric. Might an attempt to counterbalance the potential transgressiveness of erotic verse lie behind these comments about length, given that they associate lyric with a moderation, even a golden mean, at odds with the irrationality and immoderation of the erotic?
Puttenham provides a textbook example of some of the principal issues I have been tracing. As I pointed out earlier, he notes that classical poets termed themselves “Heroick, Lyrick, Elegiack, Epigrammatist or otherwise” (40) and uses similar terminology himself in relation to the queen’s writing. When describing lyric poetry, he explains,
Others who more delighted to write songs or ballads of pleasure, to be song with the voice, and to the harpe, lute, or citheron and such other musical, instruments, they were called melodious Poets [melici] or by a mo
re common name Lirique poets, of which sort was Pindarus, Anacreon and Callimachus with others among the Greeks: Horace and Catullus among the Latins. There were an other sort, … Elegiak: such among the Latines were Ovid, Tibullus, and Propertius.
Note the influence of classical usages in his distinguishing another type of love poetry, the elegiac, from lyric and in his category “the melodious.” And, like some of his classical sources, he emphasizes what Frye was to term the radical of presentation.
In the section of The Reason of Church Government on lyric, after discussing the possibilities for writing various forms of epic and drama, Milton emphasizes the value of scriptural song over classical lyrics:
Or if occasion shall lead to imitate those magnific odes and hymns wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy, some others in their frame judicious, in their matter most an end faulty. But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear over all the kinds of lyric poesy to be incomparable. These abilities, wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God rarely bestowed, but yet to some (though most abuse) in every nation; and are of power beside the office of a pulpit, to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind and set the affections in right tune, to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God’s almightiness …to sing the victorious agonies of martyrs and saints.…75
Note the creation of a capacious, overarching category (“all the kinds of lyric poesy”) that is clearly contrasted with the two other modes. That category, like its Greek antecedents, not only includes but is also closely associated with the celebratory public verse of Pindar, and Milton emphasizes the public responsibilities of the poet while also stressing the potential benefits for “the perturbations of the mind.” The parallel with the pulpit reminds us that a focus on the rhetorical instrumentality of lyric is not merely a product of a twentieth- and twenty-first-century reaction against the Romantic lyric, or rather the hypostatized versions of it. (Indeed, as Roland Greene reminds us, rhetorical theory and lyric were closely connected throughout the early modern period.)76
Also telling, however, is the ambivalence excited by a mode that encompasses not only hymns, implicitly presented as more worthy than epic and drama, but also odes “in their matter most an end faulty.” If, as Milton’s reference to the pulpit reminds us, linking lyric with rhetoric potentially glorifies its suasive force, the well-known early modern anxieties about the dangers of eloquence can also taint our mode. Moreover, one encounters here the first of many instances in which the strange bedfellows made by the breadth of the category “lyric” are valued in very different ways. “Though most abuse” reflects a similar anxiety; if the signature trope of lyric is catechresis, the figure of abuse, as Frye has maintained, perhaps one reason is that both writers and critics associate lyric with abuse as Milton does here, hence creating or uncovering catachresis within the text to express and deflect their anxiety about the abusive practices of lyric poets. Observing these ambivalences, the reader may wonder uneasily about the wording “may be easily made appear,” with its passing but tantalizing hint that the process of glossing even the most worthy of lyrics is itself potentially abusive.
The most famous early modern allusions to lyric are surely Sidney’s discussions in his Apology for Poetry. In tracing why and how poesy has been contemned, Sidney lists its subdivisions in terms that suggest that he, unlike Ascham and Milton, is rejecting an all-encompassing class of lyric or melic poetry in favor of subdivisions: “Is it then the Pastoral poem which is misliked? …Or is it the lamenting Elegiac? …Is it the bitter but wholesome Iambic? …Is it the Lyric that most displeaseth?” (116–118). The succeeding commentary on lyric repulses criticisms of it directly by declaring that it serves ethical and spiritual ends: “who with his tuned lyre and well-accorded voice, giveth praise, the reward of virtue, to virtuous acts; …who sometimes raiseth up his voice to the height of the heavens, in singing the lauds of the immortal God” (118).
More revealing, however, is the impact of accusations commonly leveled against lyric. Sidney, like Drayton, counters the fear that the mode is deceptive and seductive by associating it with the civilized harmony and control that were often linked to stringed instruments and denied wind ones: “who with his tuned lyre and well-accorded voice” (118; italics inserted). The gentleman doth protest too much: behind this insistent diacritical drive, like related statements in the passage from Drayton that I just examined, lie fears that all lyric is contaminated by the erotic agendas of love poetry.
Sidney and his readers knew that, as both the writings of George Gascoigne and the research of modern critics such as Ilona Bell and Arthur F. Marotti demonstrate, love poetry was actually used in courtships.77 (Revealing how criticism sometimes dismissed as traditional may in fact anticipate later insights, some thirty years before such work John Stevens established important cultural contexts for erotic poetry, demonstrating that whether or not it referred to actual romantic relationships, it was part of courtly games connected with love.78) Marotti has also shown that in manuscripts, unlike printed texts, many lyrics were not only erotic but actually obscene.79 And Sidney, who famously ends one lyric, “‘But ah,’ Desire still cries, ‘give me some food’” (Astrophil and Stella 71.14) knew that the verb “to cry” could, not coincidentally, be used both for the laments of lovers and the act of hawking wares, whether they be oranges or poems or seductive compliments and complaints.80 Arguably implicit in Sidney’s verb, and unmistakably explicit in a passage from Herodotus adduced at the end of this chapter, is a link between writing love poetry, ostensibly the preserve of gentlemen, and the commodified pursuits of social inferiors.
Sidney’s commentary, I maintain, parlays fears about both gender and social status. Tellingly deploying the masculine pronoun, Sidney proceeds to rebut the possibility that lyric is feminine or effeminizing in a number of other respects as well. It is associated with military activities, he stresses, and it is part of the discourse of “men,” a term that appears three times in the same sentence (“when the lusty men …would do” [118–119]). This determined gendering is also enacted on a generic level, for the passage describes the ends of lyric in terms that might well be used instead for the next genre to which Sidney turns, the heroical: “most fit to awake the thoughts from the sleep of idleness, to embrace honourable enterprises” (119). Notice how this claim also counteracts the potential association of lyric with the lower social orders, a linkage intensified by the tropes associated with the mode, as this chapter has demonstrated.
When Sidney returns to lyric later in the treatise, however, he deploys syntax that implicitly denigrates the form, arguably reflecting continuing anxieties about gender and indubitably demonstrating the inconsistent valuations of lyric that not only distinguish early modern commentaries on the subject from one another but are on occasions found within the same tract. “Other sorts of Poetry almost have we none, but that lyrical kind of songs and sonnets” (137; italics inserted), he tellingly writes. He then proceeds to divide the form, distinguishing poems that praise God from love poetry. His condemnation of the latter pivots not on inherent failings but on the rhetorical failings of their writers (“so coldly they apply fiery speeches” [137]), a witty attack that allows him to express disapproval that stops short of a blanket condemnation of a form in which he wants to write despite his anxieties about the potential triumph of cupiditas over caritas. Notice that even while condemning the failures of love poetry he stresses its potential rhetorical efficacy—it is capable of moving a mistress when pursued with the principles of the figure energia in mind.
In distinguishing virtuous lyric from its demonic brother, or rather sister, Sidney attempts to recuperate and protect the mode through that dichotomy that so frequently recurs in the early modern and other periods, the contr
ast between dangerous and beneficent versions of it. From one perspective, then, Sidney’s writings can stand as the locus classicus of the distinctions between Good and Evil Lyric. Yet from another perspective his texts also demonstrate the need to inflect generalizations with the particularities of historical subdivisions. Although the contrast in question is repeated throughout the early modern period, changes within that era reconfigure the pattern Sidney draws; for example, in the seventeenth century a more active tradition of spiritual poetry conveniently exemplified the defenses of virtuous lyric, while at the same time the development of Cavalier lyrics, often more openly erotic than their Petrarchan predecessors, intensified the need for such defenses. In any event, as we will see, much as Sidney blurs the edges of his contrast, so too its analogues in the work of other writers are as often undermined as they are established.
So significant are the implications about gender in Sidney’s writing and in other passages examined in this chapter that they invite further attention. Anticlosural though these resonances are, they aptly provide a type of closure here: pervasive and protean, the gendering of lyric encapsulates many problems analyzed above, as the frequency with which I have touched on the issue in passing would suggest, while at the same time it anticipates issues arising in subsequent chapters.81 Of course, the linkage of gender and lyric did not originate in the early modern era, as we are reminded by a revealing passage from the Greek historian Herodotus, who was notably popular in that period. Roger Ascham retells the story in question in Toxophilus. In it the character Croesus, concerned about repeated uprisings by enemy warriors, advises his king that their adversaries should be dressed in women’s clothes and forced to teach their children to play an instrument and sing; as a result, they will turn into women and never fight again. Or, as Barnabe Riche’s Elizabethan translation of Herodotus puts it, “injoyne them to bringe up their children in playing on the cithern, in singing …and undoubtedlye thou shalt see that of valiant men and warlike people they will shortely become effeminate and like unto women.”82 (Does Riche modify the statement in the Greek original that they will actually become women in order to modulate the threat in question?83) In any event, both the original version of the passage and the translation also indicate that the song will contribute to further Othering of the “warlike people” by transforming them into the socially inferior position of shopkeepers. If clothes unmake the man in Herodotus’s tale, so too does song: like its counterpart lyric, it performs both social and gender turnings.
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 7