Although illustrated by Jonson’s Charis sequence and many other poems of the English Renaissance, the characteristics I am associating with lyric audiences are by no means unique to that period: to cite just a few examples from outside it, “The Dream of the Rood,” Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” and a little-known contemporary poem that creates a dialogue with that very author, Julia Randall’s “To William Wordsworth from Virginia,” all provide intriguing examples of shifting directions of address. Nonetheless, the lability in question sometimes takes distinct forms and is deployed to distinct ends in the early modern period; for example, as I have just indicated, the guilt about lyric in general and some of its subjects in particular traced in Chapter 1 impels poets to address multiple audiences as a strategy for deflecting anxieties about the mode itself. This is not to say that such guilt about poetry is confined to the Renaissance; but poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, for example, are much more likely to worry about the irrelevance and impotence of lyric than about its immorality.
Why, then, are these proclivities for protean audiences so recurrent in early modern lyric in particular, and why do they assume the forms they do? One answer deserves particular attention initially because it is as significant as it is neglected in this context: devotional practices of the period, and particularly the congregational singing of psalms, profoundly influenced even secular lyric poetry.57 The impact of the psalms on religious verse has hardly been ignored by students of early modern literature, yet that of communal singing on secular literature, especially its formative impact on lyric audiences and other underlying paradigms for the lyric, has received far too little attention.58
Resisting another binary, one should acknowledge the psalms’ significance in Catholic religious practices (for example, the Sarum Pontifical orders the recitation of Psalm 116 after a death); but the fact remains that their presence and prominence in early modern Reformed spiritual practices is extraordinary, as signaled by the fact that over 700 editions of or including the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter appeared between 1562 and 1696.59 Considered a crucial part of the Bible, the psalms of course assumed a range of roles in both ecclesiastical and private worship: devotional manuals included excerpts from them, numerous sermons elucidated them, many poets produced metrical versions of them or included allusions to them in their verse. Polyphonic arrangements like those of Gibbons were often viewed as seductively Roman, while the Sternhold-Hopkins version was widely, though by no means universally, seen as more appropriate for Reformed congregations.60 But it is the Reformed practice of the entire congregation singing the psalms, a cultural watershed arguably as important in its way as the administrative reforms of the 1530s, that aptly signals their intensified significance in Protestant England—and their impact on conceptions of poetic audience central to the early modern lyric.
Many controversies attended the fraught question of who should sing the psalms. The congregation rather than the priest or choir as in Roman Catholicism? Was it actually perilous to sing them at all? Congregational singing was advocated by Luther and Calvin. The latter characteristically claimed, in a treatise reprinted in a 1571 edition of the psalms, that even this activity is directed by God, who “provoketh us too sing his prayses.” Luther, who delivered lengthy and detailed commentaries on the psalms, agreed, asserting that everyone should own a psalter.61 Practicing what they literally preached on the subject, Luther composed hymns and Calvin delegated first Marot and then Beze to create a series of them. Yet Zwingli at one point sedulously opposed hymnody, and even, or especially Calvin, in his lengthy discussions of the psalms, expresses some ambivalence towards it. In short, the contrast between the universality attributed to the content of the psalms and the divisiveness associated with their performance anticipates and tropes the practice of creating both a unified choral group and a series of shifting and conflicting positions for those performers, including the change from singer to audience.
As all of these debates suggest, on one level the psalms functioned as the prototypical version of the sanative lyrics that were so often contrasted with their opposite in the pairing traced throughout this study. In his Goostly Psalmes, Miles Coverdale reports that he prepared the book to supply the youth of England appropriate songs to sing, proceeding to contrast them to the “wicked frutes” of “unchristen songes.”62 Yet at the same time, doubts about the pleasure produced by singing the psalms and about the sexual proclivities of their putative author complicated the status of these texts, blurring the distinction between Good and Bad Lyric and incorporating a struggle between the two categories within the hymnal itself.63 In other words, not the least way the psalms influenced even secular lyric was by participating in recurrent debates about its worth, variously providing an exemplar of and an antidote to moral concerns about it.
Initially the Reformed Church in England followed the Roman practice of assigning psalms to the priest and choir, but the continent was witnessing many instances of congregational singing (in Holland, for example, gatherings of Calvinists in fields included communal singing). Some Englishmen were attracted to the practice; himself the author of a collection of psalms, Miles Coverdale wrote a volume approvingly describing congregational singing in Denmark.64 And when the English Marian exiles returned from Geneva, among the weightiest of their baggage was their commitment to that type of worship.
The uneasy and uneven development of the established church’s position on how the psalms should be sung, who should sing them, and if indeed they should be sung at all is repeatedly manifest in the language and layout of the psalters, demonstrating the complex tensions that accompanied the shift of authority to the laity. Early psalters not only do not advocate congregational participation but also often reactively emphasize the authority of the church. An edition of 1566 announces that its poems are “Corrected and poynted as they shall be Song in Churches … Confirmed by act of Parliament”—notice the multiple linguistic markers of authority such as “shall” and “corrected.”65 In some passages, rhetoric that ostensibly resolves doubts about communal singing merely pours psalters on open wounds.
Other psalters, however, vigorously defend communal singing, the very intensity of their argument demonstrating the extent of the opposition and perhaps on occasion hinting that they are protesting too much. A frequently repeated Sternhold-Hopkins title page includes not one or two but three biblical citations defending the psalms and the singing of them. One of these passages declares that the ensuing texts are “Set forth and allowed to be song in all Churches, of all the people together and after Morning and Evening prayer: as also before and after Sermons, and moreover in private houses, for their godly solace and comfort, laying apart all ungodly songs and balades.”66 Notice how the practice of communal singing is mimetically advocated through a rhetoric of communality—that is, through conjunctive rather than disjunctive connectives and through adjectives that similarly stress coming together. Thus the word “and” appears five times in those forty-five words, while “all” is used three times. And these terms are surrounded by similar semantic, syntactical, and grammatical markers of unity: “together,” “Morning and Evening prayer,” “as also before and after Sermons,” “and moreover.” The warning of vice at the end of the passage—“laying apart all ungodly songs and balades”—suggests that all these references to unity are again reactive, the establishment of an us-them dichotomy: the common front displayed by the godly facilitates setting aside the ungodly alternative. In short, by promoting the use of the psalter for congregational singing in the Elizabethan period, the Church of England was uneasily working out yet another via media, this one involving a spectrum running between the assertion that the laity should not sing psalms and the claim that anyone could sing any psalm, including one of his own invention.
Despite the concern for community and harmony that choral music can trope, thematized in this and other passages, the performance of the psalms in fact involved p
recisely the unstable fluidity of audiences that is so central to early modern lyric. To begin with, the audience of a psalm sung by a congregation includes God, the members of that congregation, in many cases a group of believers elsewhere who are not yet singing but are being exhorted to do so, and in a sense the internalized individual singer (indeed, the first psalm celebrates meditation, including versions connected with this group of poems).67 Many psalms address God directly; the performers of all of them surely believed that God was observing their worship. And inasmuch as the psalms were often represented as words the Lord had taught to David, this case is the first of many that merge the positions of author and auditor in the complex chain of this discourse. Similarly, early modern Protestants are represented as singing psalms David has taught to them, a shifting of the position of auditor to that of ambassador. (Hammons’s study of Anna Trapnel demonstrates how her claim to take up David’s harp figures and fortifies the agency of a female writer.68) Moreover, inculcating the Reformed focus on the laity’s role in spiritual growth, the literature attached to the psalms repeatedly positions members of the congregation as each other’s teachers as they sing—in other words, as both singer and audience at once. The excerpt from Colossians prominent on so many title pages refers to the congregation “teachyng and exhortyng one an other in Psalmes, Hymnes, and spirituall songes.”69 Given that a singer is being exhorted by another singer, she or he may be both performer and listener at once; thus the psalms also provide a pattern for divided and split subjectivity.
These patterns are further complicated by the Elizabethan figure sometimes known as the “singing man” or “singing boy,” who would perform a line that the congregation then repeated. Resembling the Strasbourg custom of a congregation echoing a line the cantor had first intoned, this practice again shifts members of the community back and forth among the roles of speaker, auditor, and animator. This type of ventriloquization may even be suggested by the language of Psalm 136.70 Furthermore, in another sense, too, the congregation is animator in that they are reading the putative words of David as they sing. The singing man becomes David’s animator and the members of the congregation both David’s animator and the animator of the singing man, who in turn becomes the audience of the singers who succeed him.
But at the same time, they are subjects assuming David’s own position in that they command others to praise. Indeed, the literature that glosses the psalms and the process of performing them repeatedly insists on that identification with the extraordinary figure whose curriculum vitae includes stints as poet, prophet, soldier, and adulterer. So, to return to the role of the singing man, he is David’s audience while also assuming the role of animator in performing David’s words for the members of the congregation, who in turn are audience to the singing man and then themselves animators of the words of David and the singing man. The relationship between psalm singer and psalmist could be further complicated by titles like “A prayer of David,” which at once encourage identification by stressing that the current singer is taking David’s place, while at the same time inviting the early modern audience to observe David singing.71 Both the role of the singing man and the coalescence of the congregation with David, then, model one of the most common theories about lyric, the argument that its reader identifies with the poet and in effect voices his words. Yet the shifting roles associated with the singing man and the invitation to watch rather than simply be David also involve multiple audiences, and in so doing they alert one to the problems in the conception of identificatory voicing that I will posit at the end of this chapter.
My argument so far assumes unified purposes and responses uniting the individual members of a given congregation, much as Wordsworth suggests that all readers of lyric will respond and participate alike. In fact, certain members may have reactions that further correspond to the shifting audiences and resulting divided subjectivities manifest in both secular and religious lyric. In the instance of the psalms, as in that of reactions to the words “under God” in the United States Pledge of Allegiance, surely in many instances a potential dissenter is temporarily carried away, or lulled into participation, only to recoil. Demonstrating that participants in a ceremony may read a text’s formulaic insults in relation to their personal histories, the anthropologist Kenneth Kensinger trenchantly warns us against assuming that all observers react in similar ways to a ritual.72 He invites us to rethink Ramie Targoff’s assumptions about the coerciveness of public devotion, as well as Roland Greene’s association of the psalms with what he terms “fictive” practices, which supply distance, and with ritualistic practices, which he maintains function coercively to produce unity: ritual, Kensinger’s analysis encourages us to realize, may under certain circumstances foment dissent precisely because it provides an authoritative Other against which to define the self.73
Psalm singing in early modern England surely provided precisely the circumstances that would encourage some form of dissent; in particular, whether defiant, ambivalent, or simply confused, those who retained sympathies for the Catholic Church would be likely to have a complex relationship to the psalms they were singing. If a member of these groups did not share the sentiments of the psalm but was mouthing them to be polite or politic, then this dissenter was, in a sense, the judge of the lyric and the one judged by its strictures, perhaps even was the enemy to whom the poem refers. Other divisions are noted in Richard Rogers’s 1603 treatise on the Scriptures, where he advises that those who cannot read and hence cannot sing the psalms should listen attentively to those who do so and attempt to participate rather than letting their minds wander.74 In short, much as critics need to supplement the conception of dialogics with reminders of how often one member in the conversation is silent yet active in it, so too the history of psalm singing reminds us to include among the discourse analysts’ classifications of audience members those who in some way resist that role.
Although the congregational performance of these songs attributed to David is the most complex and intriguing instance of these shifting roles in early modern religion, comparable transitions characterize many other devotional practices as well, thus preparing and alerting the devout, or the apparently devout, to the shifts involved in singing the psalms, and conversely such performances drew attention to similar reversals elsewhere. In private spiritual practices one might switch between internalized meditation with God conceived as bystander to direct address to the deity; John Donne divides the meditations in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions into three stages, “meditation,” “expostulation,” and “prayer.” Not coincidentally, devotion and lyric are thus both seen as processes, in part because in both instances the speaker’s relationship to hearers may shift.
Moreover, manuals on meditation often emphasize interchange with God; Louis Martz reminds us that the stages of meditation include “colloquy” and “petition,” both of which are by definition dialogic.75 If that dialogue involves listening to and speaking with God, it also involves speaking for him, assuming an animator role. Indeed, much as David was sometimes represented as singing God’s words (an analogue to the description of the Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon which Susan Stewart analyzes trenchantly), so too prayers were often described as not only addressed to but also authored by God.76 The doctrinal complexities of voicing the deity’s words have been analyzed with particular acuity by A. D. Nuttall.77 Despite the problems Nuttall documents, a number of poets celebrate that potentiality. John Donne, fascinated by communication and miscommunication in their many forms throughout his career, writes in one of his letters to Henry Goodyer, “And that advantage of nearer familiarity with God, which the act of incarnation gave us, is grounded upon Gods assuming us, not our going to him. And, our accesses to his presence are but his descents into us; and when we get any thing by prayer, he gave us before hand the thing and the petition.”78 Similarly, Milton implies that the suppliant is at once God’s animator and his interlocutor when he writes in Eikonoklastes that God “every morning raines
down new expressions into our hearts.”79 In short, like the psalms, meditation and prayer might well involve the suppliant shifting among the positions of principal speaker, animator, and audience.
In addition, the how-to devotional manuals of the period buttress my points about the problematical divide between the solitary and social by suggesting another presence besides that of God in a room where someone is apparently praying in private: another side of the believer, or even under some circumstances other believers, may in some sense be there as well. “As every good Master …is a good Preacher to his own Family; so every good Christian, is a good Preacher to his own soul,” the minister Richard Baxter writes. His immediately subsequent observation that “soliloquy is a Preaching to one self” hints at the interaction between spiritual and theatrical models of audience to which I will later turn.80 The obverse of Baxter’s suggestion that meditation is a kind of preaching is the postulation of preaching as a kind of meditation: whereas Scripture per se was often the primary source for sermons, ministers also drew heavily on meditative traditions, as many students of early modern religion have demonstrated, and the subtitles of Thomas Gataker’s published sermons include the phrases “Succinct Meditations” and “A Meditation on Genesis 25.8.”81
This chapter will demonstrate the interacting influences of devotional and many other cultural practices on early modern lyrics in some detail, and one preliminary example can aptly introduce that interplay. Devoting its first seven stanzas to addresses to God that include pleas, queries, and praise, George Herbert’s “Obedience” at first appears to have one clearly defined addressee. But as the poem progresses, Michael C. Schoenfeldt observes, its focus moves from God’s power to the potential power of its own lines over its mortal listeners.82 More to my purposes here, in so doing it radically shifts its audiences. The eighth strophe, which serves as a bridge between various types of address, generalizes about man’s promises to God and the responses of moral readers to this poem, though without explicitly addressing the deity or those readers. The final stanza then declares:
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