Patter may simply serve to explain otherwise obscure references; poets sometimes use it for a different type of explanation, filling in autobiographical details of events behind the poem. In this second function, the comments are frequently attempts to gain the audience’s attention and sympathy (much as opening a lecture on a personal anecdote can counter the anonymity of a large classroom and engage students who may be thinking about the previous lecture or about the previous night’s party). In the instance of the poetry reading, to reduce that aim to commercialism would be to oversimplify, but to deny that poets at these readings, which so often literally end in attempts to sell the poet’s books, implicitly incorporate that agenda into the patter would be an equal misrepresentation. One technique through which the poet may seek sympathy is to anticipate, incorporate, and defuse the audience’s possible negative responses—“this is an early poem,” “this is work in progress which I’m including because it relates to the previous poem,” and so on.
Although one has no way of being sure, it is likely that some version of this sort of patter accompanied the voicing or singing of early modern lyrics as well. A bridge, for example, would have been necessary when reading aloud sonnets like those composed in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in which tones can change abruptly; the contrast between Spenser’s laudatory and accusatory sonnets is so intense that readers have even improbably speculated that the latter were written earlier, perhaps for an entirely different relationship, and were simply slotted into the sequence. Sonnets might also encourage disclaimers about or confessions of their autobiographical resonances.
In any event, the versions of patter practiced in our own and probably the early modern era suggest both some functions and some likely origins of the mediatory devices explored in this chapter. Like patter, many of these techniques are attempts to win over readers or to distance the author from guilt that could be engendered by writing the text, a response not unique to early modern England but very characteristic of it for the reasons traced in Chapter 1 and elsewhere. In fact, when written transmission became increasingly common, mediating devices developed in part as surrogates for patter, responding to the diminution of opportunities for this and other types of oral paratext. (Diminution, not destruction, however: a copy of a book could still be handed to someone with comments, whether oral or written.)
A preliminary catalogue of mediating devices prepares us to analyze their shared functions in more detail. Some of these instruments are paratexts that precede the text in close conjunction with it; they generally provide information about the lyric, variously focusing on its literary sources, its meanings, or its biographical significance. The right to name, as narratives of the Garden of Eden tell us, is the right to reign. Most obviously, titles and subtitles may assume these and many other functions, as Anne Ferry has acutely shown in The Title to the Poem. The poem generally known to us as “Break of day,” appears in one manuscript identified as “Dr Donne. / To his Love, who was too hasty to / rise from him.in ye Morning.”50 If this title, unlike the more familiar one, identifies the author and the obvious meaning of the lyric, in so doing it also demonstrates the ability of whoever assigned it to assume significant power over the text and its readers. Witness the consequences of referring to the poet, who attributed such secular works to “Jack Donne,” as “Dr. Donne” and of gendering as male a speaker who many later critics have thought might have been a woman.
An intriguing analogue to how literary titles, as well as the authorial identification often associated with them, may both activate and complicate meanings latent in the text is the decision of the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum to label her outsized kitchen grater “Grater Divide”; the effects of that title are telling enough to inspire juxtaposing it with the early modern ones I am examining, despite the evident difference in their eras and their media. Had Claes Oldenburg been the artist, the assumption one might well make before reading the placard, one would have interpreted the object as another instance of his practice of defa-miliarization, on one level a playful and unthreatening act but on the other a demonstration of how a change in size can make a well-known object from our homes unheimlich. These interpretations are localized and reconfigured by Hatoum’s title, which interacts with her Lebanese nationality and her involvement in politics to suggest Middle Eastern divisions. From this perspective the potential playfulness of the object itself is lessened and in a sense transferred to the pun in the title—and the violence in the serrations, which now come to resemble weapons, is emphasized. Like much of Hatoum’s other work, the object juxtaposes the comfortably familiar and the dangerous, and her title indubitably establishes political interpretations of those dangers.
But recall, too, Hatoum’s own complaint that “most people look for a very specific meaning, mostly wanting to explain [a work of art] specifically in relation to my background. I find it more exciting when a work reverberates with several meanings and paradoxes and contradictions.”51 Alerted by this comment, one may respond more fully to the puckishness one would have seen had Oldenburg created the grater, as well as noting more formal achievements, such as the interplay of shapes on the object. Sometimes a grater is partly, if not only, a grater. This one divides and cuts but is also itself divided into many units and patterns. In short, titles, like other mediating devices, often participate in a kind of teamwork with other signals; and they, like other mediating devices, often themselves give mixed signals, sometimes by highlighting certain possibilities without discounting others.
Headnotes provide another type of mediation that precedes the text proper and in this way can substitute for what might have been covered during an interval of patter. Defining space as amorphous and place as defined and bounded, not least by the boundaries that are social rules, many students of space theory have variously offered paradigms for how space is turned into place.52 As Thomas Watson’s identification of his sources demonstrates, headnotes, like other forms of mediation, often transform space into place in that they give both the material white space and the ensuing text a local habitation and a name. And, much as the transformation of space into place is often an assertion of power, so too head-notes substitute several interrelated forms of power for many authors’ inability to attach titles: like patter, they may establish authority, even while they sometimes acknowledge its limits.
In their studies of marginalia, William W. E. Slights and Evelyn B. Tribble demonstrate how those devices can control and educate the audience.53 Similarly, the long paratextual commentaries that accompany Watson’s sonnets, possibly the most extensive and intriguing instances of headnotes in the early modern lyric, typically instruct the reader on how to approach a given text, encompassing background information (in his ninety-seventh poem, for instance, the fable behind the poem is identified), advice about the attitude to adopt towards the text (“the contrarietie ought not to offend,” we are told in the paratext for the first sonnet), and information that encourages the “academic” readings for which I argue in Chapter 2.54
Headnotes can also negotiate a relationship with an author whose work is being borrowed. When such a prefatory passage attributes the succeeding poem to the writer who is being translated or otherwise incorporated, it defines the text as what Dickens’s Wemmick so intensely advocates, portable property. In one sense it belongs to, say, Ronsard, and Watson is merely borrowing, or appropriating, it, a process that, as many critics have demonstrated, often delimited authorship in the early modern period. Yet in another and not coincidental sense, through the act of writing the headnote, Watson is asserting a kind of authority and ownership. Particularly interesting in that and other respects are the many headnotes that not only identify a source but quote part of it; when, as is often the case, the lines in question are translated at the beginning of the text proper, the boundary between text and paratext blurs. The book thus enacts visually another type of power play—the appropriation of someone else’s words—while at the same time acknow
ledging the status of the original author. In other words, such headnotes establish not absolute ownership or freehold but rather a kind of leasehold; they effect the types of partial and limited ownership discussed in more detail in my chapters on audiences and on the size and shape of lyric.
If they thus gloss contemporary critical debates about authorship and authority, headnotes have wider implications for many debates surrounding lyric. Pursuing his valuable revisionist agenda of relocating lyric poetry from ahistorical literary contexts to social ones, Arthur F. Marotti demonstrates that by evoking a social world, headnotes and titles create a situation like that of manuscript circulation. Sometimes, notably in George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, they function in just the way he describes.55 But Marotti’s reading is limited by his long-standing rejection of aesthetic analysis as a distortion of and distraction from the cultural and material. In fact, in this case as in many others, all those realms can profitably be studied together. Watson’s headnotes, like the paratextual materials in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, more often instead evoke a literary context, even on occasion implying that the poem is an exercise, and thus yet again encourage us to revise the revisionists by linking the current focus on the social to a historicized formalism. Dead writers, especially those who experimented with the same form, are members of the poet’s social circle and no less important than the coteries about whom Marotti and others write. Indeed, one might profitably think more about the interaction between these groups.56
Sometimes an introductory poem assumes certain though not all functions of a headnote: it situates the reader and the other texts, in so doing qualifying or in some instances complicating their immediacy. The opening lyric in Petrarch’s Rime sparse, discussed at the beginning of Chapter 1, is a textbook example of this, as it is of so many other lyric predilections. Numerous English sonneteers follow suit in introducing their own cycles. Giles Fletcher the Elder begins Licia with a text that is entitled “To Licia the Wise, Kinde, Vertuous, and Fayre” and not numbered in the way the ensuing sonnets are: it establishes and announces a respectful relationship to the eponymous character who may or may not also be his patroness. When one contrasts Fletcher’s “I send these Poems to your grace-full eye:” (3–4) with, say, the opening of the Keats poem quoted above (“This living hand, now warm and capable / Of earnest grasping”), the primary impression is that the early modern poet holds readers at bay while his Romantic counterpart insistently, even alarmingly, reaches towards them. Fletcher’s lines separate the text from its audience through the reminder that it is precisely that, a literary representation, and through the suggestion that the principal addressee is not present but rather engaged in an act of reading at some remove from the lyrics (“send” [3]).57 A related difference, whose relevance to this chapter is pursued below, is that Fletcher’s version stresses the materiality of the book, not of a part of his own body. At the same time, when one compares the succeeding line in Fletcher, “Doe you but take them” (4) with Keats’s “I hold it towards you” (8) affinities are as apparent as contrasts; indeed, Fletcher’s direct appeal for participation may make the poem even more immediate in some senses. Thus his lyric recalls the pressing of hands so relevant to the immediacy of lyric, demonstrating again the interaction between distance and contiguity and among various versions of each that is so common in that mode.
Similarly, the first sonnet in Daniel’s Delia performs a range of mediatory functions. Explicitly inviting the lady to peruse the text (“Reade it sweet maide” [13]), it offers a similar invitation to the reader as well.58 Like the instance from Fletcher, it at once distances us from this and the ensuing lyrics by emphasizing their status as representations, while at the same time insisting on the material presence of the poem as a physical object, an assertion buttressed by the insistent repetitions, often in the form of anaphora, of “heere”: “which heeere my love” (4), “Heere I unclaspe the booke” (5), “Heere have I summ’d my sighes, heere I enroule / How they were spent” (7–8). That type of opening poem is analogous in some respects to a strategy to which I will turn later: the introduction of a voice apparently, though in fact not invariably, separate from that of the speaker that comments directly on the text.
The introductory poem that, like patter, provides additional information, and the introduction of a second voice are both related in some important ways to the strikingly common practice of embedding a lyric within another text, frequently of a different genre, that frames and comments on it. Dante’s Vita nuova and Machaut’s Remedy of Fortune exemplified and encouraged this predilection. Although prose romances and drama offer a wealth of examples, discussed from different perspectives elsewhere in this study, among the most intriguing instances is George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. The lengthy prose narrative in this extraordinary bouquet, “The Adventures of Master F.J.,” interjects a number of lyrics relevant to F.J.’s courtship. They are often preceded by a commentary positioning them in relation to a particular time, place, and mood through a phrase that complicates the subsequent immediacy of the text, such as “walkinge abrode devised immediatly these fewe verses followinge” (146). Notice as well how “devised” also draws attention to the craft and planning involved in the poem, as does the use of the word “devises” for the title of the collection of poems that follows this work. At the end of Gascoigne’s poems commonly appear informative comments like the headnotes and footnotes examined above (“This is the translation of Ariosto his .xxxi. song” [189]). Also common in these conclusions are evaluative comments—“This Sonet was highly commended, and in my judgment it de-serveth no lesse” (156)—that prompt readers to assess the texts aesthetically, thus distancing themselves. Sometimes, too, such observations have, again like patter, a type of apotropaic magic in their agenda, the warding off of criticism: “This is but a rough meter, and reason, for it was devised in great disquiet of mynd, and written in rage, yet I have seene much worse passé the musters …the truth is that F.J. himselfe had so slender liking thereof” (162). Also similar are the paratexts in Gascoigne’s “Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen,” the group of poems that follows “The Adventures of Master F.J.” and is presented in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres as primarily the work of other poets but acknowledged as Gascoigne’s own in the subsequent edition. Many of these commentaries within “The Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen” emphasize that Gascoigne is putatively the compiler but not the author of the poem. Others serve the deictic function so common in mediatory paratexts or their analogues within a poem: “Now I must desire you with patience to hearken unto the works of another writer” (245).
Among the numerous examples of a lyric embedded within another poem are the songs sung by the nymphs in Spenser’s “Prothalamion” and by Alcyon in his “Daphnaïda.” Less familiar but equally intriguing as an instance of the relationship between distance and immediacy is the eclogue that provides a setting for the epithalamium proper in the poem Donne wrote for the notorious Somerset-Howard nuptials. In it, a figure called Idios, clearly identified with the author, claims that he wrote a poem but does not wish to send it to court; if, as is likely, the figure Allophanes represents not only or primarily a friend but rather another side of Idios and of Donne, his insistence that the poem be delivered to court enacts the poet’s internal conflict about participating in the games of patronage. Idios’s reference to the poem as a “sacrifice” (104) for the event at once extends the religious language that attempts to lend dignity to this singularly sordid match while on the other hand hinting at the sacrifice of principle in the service of patronage that is an undertow to the disagreement between Idios and Allophanes.59 Recalling the reference to Venus in Donne’s “Indifferent,” the outer, enveloping poem qualifies the presentness of the framed one by positioning it within an event and hence at a particular time and place. Such framings, an analogue to a play-within-a-play, distance the poem-within-a-poem; Donne’s desire to separate himself from the sycophancy of patronage is thus enacted formally.
Like such poems-within-a-poem, metapoetic devices, notably an allusion to a musical instrument or to the acts of writing, singing, or reading, draw attention to the ontological status of the text as a whole. This practice, like others catalogued in this chapter, is not unique to Renaissance poetry; witness, among so many other examples, the pastoral poems “Virgil: Eclogue IX,” “Glanmore Eclogue” in Seamus Heaney’s collection Electric Light, and William Carlos Williams’s “To a Young Housewife.” But this version of metapoetry frequently assumes certain distinctive (though again not unique) forms in the period, such as the address to the lute and the reflexive introductory poem in a sonnet cycle. Often, as in the introductory poems by Daniel and by Giles Fletcher the Elder examined above and the twentieth poem in the anonymous collection Zepheria, these allusions occur at the beginning of a poem or a cycle; but in certain instances, such as Wyatt’s two famous addresses to his lute and the fourth sonnet in Daniel’s Delia, they are interspersed throughout.
Such references may serve a range of divergent functions, some of which I will explore in more detail later in this chapter. Though they share the agenda of abruptly distancing the reader from what has come before and what ensues by the reminder that the text was a performance, the conclusions of “Lycidas” and the Eighth Song in Astrophil and Stella (“that therwith my song is broken” [104]) intriguingly differ in that the first poem distances the speaker and his actions, while the second insists on the presentness of an event and the presence of the poet who had hidden behind a persona.60 There is no better example in the language of how a metapoetic device may intensify certain types of immediacy and limit others than Philip Sidney’s use of it in the latter work. In some cases, notably Gascoigne’s “Lullabie” and Donne’s “Hymne to God my God, in my Sick-nessse,” the text’s status as a representation and literary creation is thematized. Similarly, in his twenty-second sonnet, Robert Sidney declares that he “read[s] the story” of his “wrack of rest” (4).61 Although the line does not refer primarily to the poem, it does serve to unite its speaker’s experience with that of his audience (and thus, incidentally, to connect the lyric’s present and the present in which the reader peruses the text). In any event, he is creating distance by telling a story about himself telling a story. The poem thus offers a particularly clear and explicit example of an observation developed by John Shawcross, among other critics: lyric is often not about an experience but about the reporting of it, locating the poem at two removes from the experience.62
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 19