How happie were my part,
If some kinde man would thrust his heart
Into these lines; till in heav’ns Court of Rolls
They were by winged souls
Entered for both, farre above their desert!
(41–45)83
In these concluding strophes, direction of address in the narrow sense is far less significant than the potential presence of a number of hearers. In hoping that another human being would thrust his heart, and arguably his voice, into the lines, Herbert implies the range of audiences associated with the singing of hymns and with meditation: he appears to be meditating on this hope, while at the same time indirectly addressing God as a bystander as well as potential candidates for the role of “kinde man” (42). Thus the speaker is assuming a position quite like that of the singing man in hymns, and as is so often the case in that sort of discourse, one of the primary if indirect speech acts is invitation.
Although devotional practices, especially the singing of the psalms, were a particularly potent determinant of lyric audiences, they of course interacted with many other influences, notably the conditions of production, the practices of builders, the imperatives of rhetoricians and musicians, and the potentialities of popular genres. Most obviously, scribal and print cultures were as effective as the glass of Nouvel and Piano in changing the subject positions of reader and author (observe in particular the conjunction of images of actors reproduced on the glass with the reflections there of the current spectators in Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater). To that shift in positions I will return in detail in Chapter 4. Moreover, quotidian experiences repeatedly called into question, for both author and reader, the likelihood of meditation’s remaining wholly private: the physical solitude often represented in lyrics of the Romantic period was hard to achieve in early modern culture. This is not to say that the relationship between speaker and listener in lyric necessarily represents daily life in any simple or direct way, but the assumption that privacy was at best temporary and partial surely influenced the changing subject positions in early modern lyric. Even when the central hall, so prominent in medieval and earlier sixteenth-century domestic architecture, was modified by building plans that included more private spaces, houses were not in fact private to the extent many twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers associate with that concept.84 Witness the beds, outside whose curtains others might sleep in the room, fitting poster boys, as it were, for the limitations of solitude within houses. The emphasis on court spies in Donne’s satires reminds one that true solitude was no easier to achieve in the more exalted world of the court. And while Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne found their privacy in the woods, in the early modern period that milieu was associated with threatening presences, notably robbers, as Falstaff’s labeling thieves “Diana’s foresters” suggests (1 Henry IV, I.ii.25–26). George T. Wright’s persuasive assertion that Shakespeare’s sonnets are a “silent speech” located on a border between the absence and presence of sound gestures towards a larger awareness in the culture that the silence of interiority might be compromised.85
Many literary texts enact the interruption of solitary speech that must have been common for these reasons—notice that Hamlet’s soliloquies are sometimes cut short by others or by the speaker himself because of someone’s approach, and observe how many of Shakespeare’s other plot devices turn on someone’s overhearing what is said. In prose romances, even the poems written in solitude are, like their poets, often found by other characters. All this suggests yet another reason one cannot neatly divide private meditation and social interaction: in the nondiegetic world, the former was liable to be either overheard or interrupted, a potentiality often staged within texts, famously in Sidney’s “Soft, but here she comes” (Sonnet 47.12). Once again, lyric impels its readers to think in terms of process, not stasis.
Yet the contemporary reactions against the hypostasized image of the solitary poet communing only with herself, like many critical reactions, are exaggerated. If, as I have agreed, the diegetic social interactions of lyric mime conditions of transmission, the meditative solitude that is also a significant element in early modern lyrics mimes the conditions of production in that poets often spend time alone when writing, especially if they are working with the sort of vexing metrical and stanzaic forms in which Renaissance writers delighted. And even if dialogues within poems reflect the interchanges through which coterie literature is created, that is not to say, as one otherwise valuable study suggests, that the concern for love apparent in these poems primarily serves to encode responses to coterie exchanges.86
Numerous intellectual influences also shape the multiplicity and volatility of audiences in early modern lyric. Emphasized by Orpheus’s association with both literature and eloquence—his gig in the underworld succeeds, at least temporarily, because of his powers of persuasion, musical and verbal—the connection between poesy and rhetoric was a commonplace. Training in rhetoric, a discipline as familiar and formative for Renaissance schoolchildren as video games are today, introduced those pupils at an early age to the significance of direction of address in particular. The rhetorical focus on debate, as Cristina Malcolmson points out, encouraged answer poems.87 And the emphasis on persuading a listener, reinforced by the comparable mission of love poetry, alerted readers during their formative years to the suasive agenda that can underlie even texts that seem totally devoted to internalized cogitation, such as the farewell poems discussed below. Repeatedly stressed in rhetorical treatises is the need to address different audiences in different ways—for example, in III.210–212 of Cicero’s De Oratore, a popular text in the early modern period, Crassus differentiates appropriate approaches to various listeners—and this principle also encouraged the multiple directions of address in lyric.
Especially relevant here are the rhetoricians’ statements about the issue traced above in relation to Jonson, deflecting address. Apostrophe, so central to contemporary theories of lyric, is described in many manuals as a route towards, indeed a feint for, turnings and diversions. Quintilian observes, “Apostrophe also, which consists in the diversion of our address from the judge, is wonderfully stirring.… But the term apostrophe is also applied to utterances that divert the attention of the hearer from the question before them.… We may, for instance, pretend that we expected something different.”88 Although Quintilian’s hearers are judges in the legal sense, the passage is also germane to the judges encountered throughout this chapter, those who may disapprove of the lyric poem and its author. In turning to love poetry, I will suggest that the Renaissance lyric effects through other means, including other versions of apostrophe, some of the forms of deflection achieved through prosopopoeia in eras when that trope flourishes.
Equally significant for lyric audiences were the ambivalences surrounding the practice of rhetoric in early modern England. Rhetoric’s celebration as the art distinguishing man from the beasts and its status as the indispensable tool of preachers and statesmen contributed to the respect for one of its manifestations, poesy, that no doubt fueled many readers’ drive to identify with the poet and, so to speak, voice her words. At the same time, the opening of King Lear famously reminds us of the distrust of “that glib and oily art” (I.i.224) that is apparent in so many other texts of the era. As a result of the Fall, according to widespread theories, the pure lingua Adamica was lost and man condemned to babble in his Babels. If language was corrupt and corrupting, silence was under many circumstances seen as a preferable “moving Rhetoricike,” Christina Luckyj has demonstrated in a valuable revisionist study.89 Such doubts surely encouraged the audiences of lyric poems—which often displayed their delight in rhetoric through prominent wordplay—to observe those texts with caution and even suspicion rather than simply identify with their speakers, a point to which I will return.
If rhetorical practices influenced direction of address, musical practices besides the performance of psalms surely did so as well. Music provided many analogues to and mo
dels for answer poems; as Carla Zecher points out, lute poems were often written in pairs, and in polyphonic settings, singers in effect change from auditor to animator of what has previously been sung.90 In particular, some contemporary accounts suggest that, as James Anderson Winn puts it, “madrigals seem to have been primarily intended for an audience of performers.”91 In short, many types of early modern music encouraged listeners to become performers and vice versa in ways that mime the rapid changes in positionality involved in lyric itself. In addition, the declamatory songs that flourished in England during the seventeenth century, paralleling the development of operatic recitatives on the continent, provide some intriguing analogues to lyric’s change in direction of address. For example, in Henry Lawes’s Ariadne, set to a poem by William Cartwright, the eponymous heroine starts by calling to Theseus but proceeds to incorporate appeals to gods, nymphs, death, and heaven, as well as internalized meditation, into her lament.
Probably the most important of the many literary influences on lyric direction of address is drama, again an influence that is certainly not unidirectional. The impact of theater on the changing positions of lyric audiences was arguably especially intense during the early seventeenth century because the masque—a form acted by members of the court that incorporated further members when the audience joined in the final dance—flourished then. But throughout the early modern era theater evidently provided many models for an interactive relationship between author and auditor and, in particular, for the changing and often indeterminate positions of audience that this chapter traces throughout. Famously but by no means uniquely, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Taming of the Shrew all cast their actors as audiences for part of the action.
Students of drama continue to debate a number of questions about soliloquies. Does Shakespeare’s practice differ from that of earlier playwrights? Should we envision the speeches as spoken? To what extent if at all is the audience involved? And so on. Whether or not one agrees with the workings of all of his categories, Raymond Williams’s taxonomy of the different forms a soliloquy can assume in these respects offers particularly useful solutions.92 In any event, it is clear that when and if one defines the role of theatrical audience as that of a side participant or bystander, let alone if one assumes that it may be addressed as a ratified listener, patterns very like those in lyric address can ensue in the course of soliloquies. Those auditors may, for example, become complicitous in dubious plans, as they were when Bolingbroke compellingly addressed his theatrical listeners in Steven Pimlott’s RSC production of Richard II in 2000 or when Edmund asked his theatrical auditors which of the sisters he should marry in the same company’s version of King Lear that Bill Alexander directed in 2004. Similarly, when Hal famously announces that he “will … imitate the sun” (1 Henry IV, I.ii. 197), if one envisions the theatrical audience as side participants of whom he is aware, let alone as addressees, the soliloquy changes dramatically: he is trying out on us—and, significantly, with us—the ruses he will later try on a broader public, much as some love poems implicate male hearers, realized or putative, in the strategies of seduction. In other instances, the audience assumes the role of confessor; in the production of Richard III that Libby Appel directed in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2004, Tyrrell sat on the edge of the stage and directly addressed the audience when describing his “tyrannous and bloody act” (IV.iii.1). Once again, the binary divide between the solitary and the social is troubled. One particular version of the soliloquy further troubles such distinctions: Seneca went to school at Bakhtin in that Senecan monologues often represent a divided subjectivity through the speaker’s address to a part of her body, so in this instance, too, the apparently solitary is in fact often dialogic.
Yet again demonstrating one of the methodological arguments of this book—the value of studying the interaction between formal issues demonized in many circles and more recent cultural questions—these and other influences on lyric audiences typically interact with generic ones. Four literary types that flourished in the early modern period—love poetry, devotional verse, pastoral, and the literature of patronage—encouraged addressing multiple audiences and facilitated shifts in positionality. Of course, this, like so many other questions about lyric, resists a simple cause-and-effect explanation, since a predisposition towards the types of multiplicity this chapter explores may well have heightened interest in the literary forms in question.
First, then, whereas the Renaissance is hardly the only age when love lyrics flourished in England, it is surely the preeminent arena for that type of verse; and the ways Jonson’s “Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces” deflects direction of address to negotiate gendered tensions—and to gender tensions—recur in many other poems. In particular, Petrarchism encouraged, even in lyrics that would not be classified as members of that movement, a stance towards the lady in which respect and resentment vie with each other in a constantly moving Mobius strip. By addressing a range of audiences at once, or by shifting from one listener to another, poets often finesse the resulting tension. They may praise the lady without, as it were, in the process miming the sycophancy intensified by addressing such compliments to her. More often, through a strategy that we might term “staged overhearing,” they introduce the possibility and even likelihood that the woman is a bystander and then proceed to criticize her by mimetically evoking a situation in which she is apparently not supposed to hear the criticism. That type of antagonism may also be suggested and intensified by implicitly inviting other men to overhear. Relevant in more senses than one, the adjective “staged” again alerts us to the similarity between these feints and Mill’s comparison of the poet to an actor who pretends not to see his audience.
Thus Amoretti 1, which imagines the lady as reading a book of these lyrics, ostensibly delimits the speaker’s power by rendering his property, the poems, alienable from their author, and positioning them in a subaltern status (“lyke captives trembling at the victors sight” [4]). The diminution of the power of both poet and his poems is signaled as well by denying his instruments, those lyrics, the instrumentality of verbs throughout the first eight lines: presented in such phrases as “Happy ye leaves” (1) and “happy lines” (5), they are enfolded into syntax that generally focuses instead on actions the lady performs (“those lilly hands … shall handle you” [1, 3]). Later, when the poems are granted verbs, the action in question involves worshipfully beholding the lady and trying to please her.
Yet, as is so often the case in Renaissance love poetry and in families with teenagers, respectful subservience generates a reactive surliness, and vice versa. Not the least effect of opening on this note is establishing the fiction (and quite possibly acknowledging the nondiegetic reality) that the lady is audience to all the other poems, including ones ostensibly addressed to another reader. In so doing, the opening also increases the likelihood that the nondiegetic reader, who is literally holding a book at this point, will identify with the sonnet mistress, the subject position that Wendy Wall acutely argues is characteristic of this genre.93
More to my purposes now, on the one hand the deflection of address from the lady to another addressee delimits the imputation of sycophancy. “The glorious pourtraict of that Angels face” [Sonnet 17.1] sounds less cloying than “portrait of your Angels face” or even “this Angels face” would have done. Yet on the other hand that same deflection also interpellates the Petrarchan mistress into the position of bystander when she is criticized in poems as bitter as the forty-seventh sonnet, the lyric that begins, “Trust not the treason of those smyling lookes”—and, to the extent that one imagines a male coterie audience reading such poems, the lyric also interpellates her as witness to her own humiliation.
The type of passive-aggressive staged overhearing that Spenser exemplifies recurs frequently in the love poetry of the English Renaissance and takes a range of forms. In the subgenre of meditative farewell poems, complaints and regrets are transformed into threats and a
ttacks if one assumes the lady is overhearing. Discussed elsewhere in this study, Wyatt’s “My lute, awake!” is a particularly interesting version of the pattern in which the indirect assaults implied by the possibility that the lady overhears as a bystander culminate in a more direct second person onslaught in the image of her as alone and unattractive. In a mirror version of this pattern, “Blame not my lute” addresses the lady directly but becomes a far nastier poem if one allows for the possibility of overhearers, notably the courtiers who might be side participants. Like the rhetorical orations that so deeply influence early modern poetry, such poems also implicitly placate judges, in this instance establishing their writer as immune from and critical of some of the worst follies of love poetry.
In other words, aggression may also be slyly released by allowing the possibility of a side participant other than the lady. The description of his lady’s aging in the eighth sonnet of Michael Drayton’s 1619 Idea (“There’s nothing grieves me, but that Age should haste”) is unpleasant enough to suggest that the verb “grieves” in that first line is disingenuous.94 The second person pronouns evidently establish the lady as the ratified listener, and, because she reads or hears those descriptions, this lyric seems more antagonistic than many comparable carpe diem poems. But if one supplements that model of audience with the recognition that a coterie of gallants or other women or both might overhear within the diegetic world of the poem—a possibility readers might consider because of the nondiegetic lack of privacy to which I referred—the poem, like “Blame not my lute” and many sonnets in the Amoretti, becomes even nastier. Once again, anxieties about judges shape the direction of address. (Occasionally, though rarely, the aggression in question is re-gendered; Andrew Marvell’s “Nymph Complaining of the Death of her Faun,” another arena for multiple audiences, changes if the reader acknowledges the possibility that Sylvio is meant to overhear.)
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 13