Elsewhere in Toxophilus, Ascham also tellingly genders music. “Nice, fine, minikin fingering,” he insists, is “farre more fitte for the womannishnesse of it to dwell in the courte among ladies, than …to abide in the universitie amonges scholars” (14). In linking “lutes, pipes, harpes” and other instruments requiring that fingering, he again implies the instability of divisions between wind and stringed instruments and the corresponding blurring of Good and Evil Lyric (14), an erosion familiar to students of Othering. More to my purposes here, since “minikin” could refer to both a woman and the string on an instrument, on one level “minikin fingering” effeminizes music, thus draining power from men associated with it, while on another it might gesture towards a powerful male manipulating a woman in more senses that one.84 These turns within the word again enact the paradoxical shifts between potency and its absence; although we should not unthinkingly apply Ascham’s pronouncements to poetry, his commentaries on music carry implications for the mode whose texts are so often entitled “song,” as is frequently the case with such musicological analyses.
Many valuable studies have rightly emphasized the effeminization of song, again an argument with unmistakable cognate implications for lyric.85 Although she concentrates primarily on France, Carla Zecher’s demonstration of how the lute was associated with both the male and female bodies is no less useful as a commentary on the gendering of our mode in early modern England. For in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries lyric is queered—that is, it is variously and sometimes virtually simultaneously associated with the feminine, the masculine, and with several types of cross-dressed slippages between and combinations of those apparent poles. These slippages, another source of lyric’s paradoxes, are a locus of anxiety in their own right as well as tropes for the other types of suspicion associated with lyric mentioned earlier in this chapter—and for other kinds of potency attributed to it.
I have already demonstrated that under many circumstances lyric is indeed linked to spheres and activities traditionally seen as masculine in early modern England, especially the military and civic. Its connection with Pindar, the psalmist David, and Orpheus contribute to this identification; Sidney’s Defense of Poesy insistently associates the mode with military camps; lyric is also associated with stony inscriptions. Provocative though somewhat problematical is Roland Greene’s linkage of lyric to male coercion;86 from this perspective, the reader, interpellated into the female subject position, may, like the lute, become a minikin manipulated by the masculine and masculinist lyric poet. These and other instances of the masculinizing of lyric demonstrate again how a characteristic shared by many texts in that mode may in fact function differently in different eras: the femininity of lyric, posited by poets and critics in numerous historical periods, works in distinctive ways in the early modern years, in part because it interacts with these types of assertion of masculinity.
As the legend of Orpheus’s sexual preferences after losing Eurydice reminds us, however, the very texts that insistently connect lyric with typically, even stereotypically, masculine activities may also complicate that connection by representing a blocked or atypical version of masculinity. The traditions of Petrarchan poetry, the central model for writing about love in the sixteenth century, pivot on failure and loss. Similarly, as John Donne’s “Calme” and Sonnet 7 (“The hardy captain”) by Philip Sidney’s brother Robert remind us, the military in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century was often associated with abortive endeavors.87 The entrance into masculinity, then, paradoxically involves exclusion from some of the activities sometimes—though certainly not always—associated with it. Might the very insistence on the masculinity of lyric—witness Sidney’s Apology and the many seventeenth-century texts it influences—be a reactive gesture in response to the fear that real men don’t write sestinas? Yet another complication of the linkage between lyric and the masculine stems from the psalmist David’s sexual appetites: the promiscuity of lyric is not only gendered female.
The association of lyric with blocked masculinity gestures towards the next point on the spectrum, its connection to the effeminization of men, apparent both in a lyric to which I will turn shortly and in the closely related issue of music’s propensity for ungendering and re-gendering. No less concerned with sexuality in his discussion of music than in his better-known diatribe on theater, Philip Stubbes, that prototype of the fanatical religious left, returns repeatedly, indeed obsessively, to that issue. When performed in public and especially when associated with dancing, he warns us, music “womannisheth y minde …corrupteth good minds, maketh them womanish”; fathers are warned to let their son learn music only “if you wold have [him] softe, womannish, uncleane, smoth mouthed, affected to bawdrie, scurrilitie, filthie rimes …as it weare transnatured into a woman, or worse.”88 The recurrence of the linkage of music, eloquence, and verse is telling for our purposes; so too are the final two words in the passage I quoted, which may gesture towards Orpheus’s sexual preferences after he loses Eurydice.
In “Gascoignes Lullabie,” a fascinating and neglected lyric by the sixteenth-century poet George Gascoigne, he sings “lullabie,” an action specifically glossed within the poem as what “women do” (1).89 That is, he sings goodnight to his sexual desires and, according to one interpretation of the lines, to his male member as well; the act of singing thus at once demasculinizes him while troping and performing effeminizing.90 One might perhaps be tempted to equate emasculation and effeminization in texts like Gascoigne’s, but the gendering of lyric, a process of slippages, often resists that particular slippage. One way it does so is by the association of lyric with childhood, which was sometimes narrowed to a turning back to boyhood, a linkage encouraged by the now-obsolete usage of “toy” for a light tune.91 Exemplified by the first poem of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, the association of lyric with the substitution of boyhood for adult masculinity is reflected in the frequency with which lyric poems are described as toys, a usage that recurs even in the twentieth century. If one accepts the argument of Stephen Orgel and other gender critics who have connected boys and women, seeing lyric as boyish does not preclude seeing it as womanish as well, thus uniting it with two overlapping erotic drives.92 Lyric’s predilection for circularity over linearity, manifest above all in its refrains, is, then, a formal analogue to the blocked chronological progression involved in remaining a boy or returning to boyhood. Like the association of lyric with childishness by later poets, that linkage of immaturity to lyric in the early modern period allows one both to acknowledge and to control the enchantment that drives its ability to turn and transform: to parlay such dangers, one is in effect confining its stanzas in a little room, more specifically in a nursery or other domesticated space.
While lyric is sometimes represented in relation to emasculation in these indirect ways, it is often directly described in terms of qualities stereotypically attributed to women both in early modern culture and our own. Indeed, Linda Phyllis Austern has demonstrated how often music, the sibling of lyric, is personified as a woman.93 The originary purity of lyric itself is often stressed, as my introduction indicated. Yet, paradoxically, offering a neglected analogue to the language of antitheatrical pamphlets, many texts represent lyric as indeed a siren in the negative senses—that is, a frighteningly destructive femininity that recalls sexual stereotypes of the seductive and, yes, promiscuous. These connections emerge especially though not exclusively in discussions of song, which, as John Hollander among others has shown, was often associated with irrationality, a quality traditionally gendered female, though some glosses on the Orpheus myth remind us that it is also associated with men.94 Even more revealing, however, is the role of the maenads, those revelers who tear Orpheus apart while playing their rival music. On one level, they exemplify the fear of vengeful women that Melissa F. Zeiger’s study of elegy acutely associates with the Orpheus myth.95 But in early modern versions of that narrative, anxieties about retributive women may
in part stem from and screen anxieties about creative men. That is, whereas many students of the Orpheus legend have suggested that Eurydice may be a side of him, his uncontrolled desires, it is at least as likely, I maintain, that the maenads are a side of Orpheus—they represent the dangers of lyric, which the myth deflects and, predictably, genders female.
A number of early modern texts attempt to resolve the conflict between male and female gendering of lyric in essentially the way I just suggested the Orpheus myth does. Much as theories of music repeatedly attempt to separate its beneficent and evil versions, so texts insistently distinguish various types of lyric, often through contrasts borrowed from classical literature. According to these reassuring versions of discrimination and distinction, the ode, the world of Pindar, is male, and it may be associated as well with stringed as opposed to wind instruments; love poetry, wind instruments, and so on are Othered as female. (Stubbes addresses the recurrent problem of negotiating ambivalences and contradictions not by separating wind and stringed instruments but rather by declaring that the private enjoyment of religious music is laudable while public performances or private performances connected with dancing are reprehensible.) These binaries often prove as volatile as the other binaries associated with gender. While the lute is represented as male in certain texts, notably Wyatt’s “My lute awake” and “Blame not my lute,” elsewhere it represents the female body. That pun on “minikin” may on one level reassuringly define the lute itself as female and the lyric poet as the male who controls its strings. Yet this bifurcation is compromised by the concurrent associations, noted above, of the lute with the male body, activating the homoerotic versions of Orpheus’s legend.
In short, the gendering of lyric is overdetermined in its functions: it is a source of anxieties in its own right; it figures both positive and negative associations with lyric, ranging from spiritual and military achievement to sexual temptation; and it also reactively strives to counter such concerns. This reactive anxiety is not, of course, unique to the early modern period—discussing the annual Romantic volumes for women known as Keepsakes, Peter Manning writes of men “recuperatively self-constituting themselves against the women with whom they were too closely linked”96—but resolution of the anxiety through a heroic ideal was more accessible to, though again not unique to, the English Renaissance.
Extraordinary—and extraordinarily neglected—Herrick’s “Vision” offers the best instance of all these responses to gender, as well as many other early modern approaches to lyric traced in this chapter. In particular, it recalls the implications of the tropes and myths whose centrality I have emphasized, for here lyric is associated with turning and transformation, with danger and opportunity, and with both power and impotence, including not least the physiological sense of the latter word. Herrick’s lyric reminds us, too, of the continuing significance of classical conceptions of the mode and, in particular, of the predilection for discussing it through a prototypical example from Greek or Latin poetry.
Me thoght I saw (as I did dreame in bed)
A crawling Vine about Anacreon’s head:
Flusht was his face; his haires with oyle did shine;
And as he spake, his mouth ranne ore with wine.
Tipled he was; and tipling lispt withall;
And lisping reeld, and reeling like to fall.
A young Enchantresse close by him did stand
Tapping his plump thighes with a myrtle wand:
She smil’d; he kist; and kissing, cull’d her too;
And being cup-shot, more he co’d not doe.
For which (me thought) in prittie anger she
Snatcht off his Crown, and gave the wreath to me:
Since when (me thinks) my braines about doe swim,
And I am wilde and wanton like to him.
This lyric is modeled on the rueful first poem in a collection of lyrics, including texts by Anacreon, that was very popular in the early modern period; but Herrick wears his rue with a difference. In particular, although “lispt” (5) was not associated with homoeroticism in that era, in many other respects he rewrites the original to associate instauration as a lyric poet—indeed, as a surrogate for one of the prototypical lyric poets—with genderings and re-genderings that involve rapid slides between success and loss.97
The stereotypically masculine and even masculinist behavior attributed to Anacreon in many of his lyrics—drinking and kissing in particular—in Herrick’s adaptation involves several interlocking forms of emasculation. Anacreon is rendered impotent; his lisping suggests childishness and thus sexual immaturity, while the enchantress’s wand on the thighs clearly alludes to and on some level transfers, re-gendered, Anacreon’s phallic power. By substituting this female figure for the personage of Eros in the original, Herrick also characteristically transfers blame for the emasculation to the frailty whose name is woman. Many of Herrick’s other changes in his source intensify Anacreon’s involuntary loss of his intertwined poetic and sexual prowess; in particular, in the source Anacreon embraces his successor and apparently hands over the crown, while here it is snatched from him, and his drunkenness is played up more in Herrick’s version.
In any event, poetic and sexual power are not simply transferred to Herrick’s speaker; his possession of them, like so much else in the poem, is rendered unstable, warning us yet again against a monolithic contrast between the putative impotence of female writers and the imputed agency of their male equivalents. In the source he takes up the crown; here it is placed on him by a woman, demonstrating the role of feminine power in masculine instauration and also anticipating the possibility of his later unwilling loss of this icon of achievement. As in many instances cited earlier, masculinity is associated with impotence, in this case in the literal physiological sense as well as others. And by imitating a text described as spurious in the edition he almost definitely used, Herrick tropes these uncertainties: he himself is taking up Anacreon’s crown, becoming a masculine poet, by echoing a lyric that, like Anacreon’s masculinity, is spurious, deceptive.98
In short, as Herrick’s lyric reports “reeling” (6) slips in motor functions, it not coincidentally performs a series of slippages, displacements, and replacements itself. They occur metrically: the trochaic substitutions in the opening feet of lines 3 (“Flusht”) and 5 (“Tipled”) mime the physiological unsteadiness to which they allude. Slippages occur in the poem’s allusion to and displacement of sonnet conventions and in its ontological reelings, with the dream blending into socalled reality at the end. The closural stability and objectivity often attributed to the sonnet’s closural couplet (and as often destabilized by its sixteenth-century writers in ways that anticipate this poem) are here destabilized both by the implication that this speaker is likely to replicate Anacreon’s loss of the crown and by the tension between apparently objective statement on the one hand and on the other its attribution to someone with swimming brains, and by the “me thinks” (13). Indeed, in the source, the element of fantasy is introduced at the beginning, then submerged in the vivid story; here the appearance of “Me thought” (1) and its cognates no fewer than three times calls both reality and dream into question.99 Above all, of course, the stability of gender is questioned and queered.
Herrick’s “Vision,” then, supports methodological premises central to this chapter in particular and to the larger study in which it appears: close attention to language, whether of an individual text or of a recurrent trope for lyric, is one of the best methods of understanding the cultural history that informs that mode, and vice versa. Herrick’s poem also encapsulates several issues explored throughout Chapter 1 about the workings and attributes of lyric poetry during the English Renaissance. Gender, “The Vision” reminds us, variously intensifies and suppresses the guilt and other tensions associated with that mode. More specifically, in turning back towards Anacreon’s poem, this text overturns gender categories; and the coexistence of those categories figures the recurrent representations of lyric as t
he site of both extraordinary power and of impotence, as the property of both Orpheus and the sirens, as the realm of military and spiritual achievements and of erotic failures. Would you buy a used lyric from this man?
CHAPTER 2
The Domain of Echo
Lyric Audiences
Technological advances in the use of glass have facilitated compelling architectural experiments that transform the relationship between a building and its audiences, complicating the latter’s perceptions of the edifice and representations of their own presence within it. In particular, in so-called curtain wall design, the exterior enclosure is attached like a curtain to the structural frame of concrete or steel; that enclosure’s independence from its structure enables experiments with the properties of glass. Many contemporary architects, notably Cesar Pelli, have triumphantly pursued those potentialities, but no better examples of such achievements in design—and no examples more relevant to the audiences of early modern lyric poetry—can be found than recent edifices by Renzo Piano and Jean Nouvel. Although both were previously known largely for their buildings abroad, of late they have received important commissions in the United States. Piano’s include additions to the Morgan Library in New York City, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and he is the architect for the new headquarters for the New York Times. Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater recently opened in Minneapolis.1
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