Earlier, the implicit contrast between “humble ode” (24) and “lowly” (25) on the one hand and “Have thou the honor first, thy Lord to greet” (26) on the other is another technique through which the poet’s achievements are both celebrated and interrogated. The Wife of Bath, one might remember, was eager to give her offerings first, and it is tempting to speculate how the Lady of Christ College would have responded to his proximity to this strange but enthusiastically inviting bedfellow. These reservations are intensified in the millenarian passages acutely analyzed by Quint. Song can apparently hasten events—
For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold.
(133–135)
—but “wisest Fate” (149) warns the makers of even holy songs against attempting to do so. Five years after writing this masque-like poem, I have argued elsewhere, Milton tries in his Ludlow masque to call up another type of Second Coming, the birth of a reformed masque—but finds that he cannot in fact completely do so.103 Moreover, the debates here about the extent to which a poet can make Scripture immediate and the dangers of hubris and haste he faces in doing so anticipate the concerns that were to become more prominent in Paradise Lost: the author of an “advent’rous song” (I.13) is at once celebrated and cast into dubious company by that adjective. In that instance, the adventure and the dangers revolve precisely around questions of presence and mediation, issues whose resonances for Milton and many of his readers, as suggested above, were no doubt intensified by Reformed debates about the Eucharist and about the apocalypse. To put it another way, if an ode is, as Paul H. Fry incisively maintains, “a vehicle of ontological and vocational doubt,” with the possibility of presence in many forms central to that doubt, in these Miltonic examples it is more specifically located in current theological issues.104 Once again, generic potentialities acquire a local habitation and a name.
As we have seen, whether one reads the poem as celebrating or interrogating poetic instauration, or both, it is clear that Milton is performing it in several senses of the word. And it is no less clear that the result of that performance is an entity that, like the gifts of the Magi, can be laid at the “blessed feet” (25) of the child. Thus the ode invites us to look more closely at the senses in which early modern lyric is an object resulting from a performance, an examination that will develop some issues about the physicality of lyric introduced in Chapter 1 and also encapsulate and extend this analysis of how distancing devices work in that tradition.
As I was drafting this chapter, a morning news program announced that Martha Stewart’s personal assistant had given “a teary performance on the stand,” thus demonstrating the multiple denotations and connotations of the term that has recently generated a whole new field of performance studies. In social and aesthetic situations, to what extent if at all does “performance” necessarily suggest deceit? In textual analyses, does it refer to theater in the more literal sense, the meaning often dubiously ascribed to Judith Butler’s influential work on performance, or should it be used primarily for the type of repetitive gestures on which her most influential work on the subject in fact concentrates? Different though they are, the several meanings of “performance” raise a number of broad issues relevant to lyric though not immediately relevant here, such as whether, and if so how, the presence of an audience is essential. It is more to my purposes, however, that performance in its several guises, particularly the specifically early modern one on which this section concentrates, involves a dialogue—often, indeed, stichomythy—between immediacy and mediation. I concentrate here on a meaning particularly relevant to questions of immediacy, mediation, and framing, that is, the creation of a material product or something analogous to it.
Other meanings of “performance” do need to be adduced in passing, if only to remind oneself that in the final decades of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth, when increasingly theatrical companies focused on London playhouses rather than traveling extensively, people living outside London were at least as likely to associate performance with the recitation or singing of lyrics as with the presentation of plays. When early modern lyrics were read aloud by their own author, the situation of performance would in some important ways effect both immediacy in general and presence in particular. Indeed, as David Schalkwyk has pointed out in an important study, in many circumstances the speakers of lyric were literally embodied; lyric, he acutely insists, is performed socially through linguistic performatives.105 And if the author sang them, as not only Wyatt but many of his counterparts clearly did, the special power of such music could achieve the aural equivalent of a tactile pressing of hands: the intensity associated with song and its ability to fill a room and command the attention of the inhabitants all create the kind of heightening that contributes to an impression of presence.
Importantly, it is an impression of presence, for in other respects performance in these senses could build distance. The circulation of poems in scribal culture facilitated their recitation by animators who had not written the texts (as students of discourse analysis would put it), much as Hobbinol repeats Colin’s song in the April eclogue, thus emphasizing the distance from both the original performer and the earlier performances. “When I have done so, / Some man, his art and voice to show, / Doth set and sing my paine” (12–14) Donne complains in “The Triple Foole,” reminding us that song, or verse that could readily be turned into it, was as alienable as other forms of portable property.
Many attributes of lyric’s interplay between immediacy and mediation can also be read in terms of other theories of performance. Students of Romantic and other poetry that frequently uses prosopopoeia might gloss its workings with Butler’s conception of performance as the repetition of an action that creates something that did not before have a stable existence. Reiteration is also central to the anthropological theories of performance adduced above; Herbert Blau’s assertion that rituals have no originary moment, just reproductions, is suggestively similar to Butler’s paradigm.106 Such studies, influenced by Turner’s emphasis on parallels between ritual and the stage, typically adduce drama and dance rather than lyric. In fact, as the instance of Barnes may indicate, their work, like Butler’s, is at least as useful for lyric—perhaps more so, given all the formal versions of repetition characteristic of that mode. The mode that, as Frye points out, stems from the repetitions of babble is a virtual echo chamber, and its formal repetitions, like those of refrains in particular, can function ritualistically to call up a spirit of some type. Witness the insistent rhythms through which Barnes evokes Hecate in his fifth sestina, as well as the repetition of that creature’s name and the use of anaphoric structures. Examined above, Crashaw’s “Hymn in the Holy Nativity” effects a similar process, though with antithetical moral dimensions, by repeating “Tell him, Tityrus, where th’hast been” (15, 16) in successive lines.
Although these and other theories of performance could usefully be deployed further to study lyric in both the early modern and other eras, a different sense of the term is especially germane to the subject of this chapter. In her important essay cited from a different perspective earlier in this chapter, Mary Thomas Crane teases out the shifting and varied usages of “performance” in early modern England, emphasizing in particular that the word was frequently applied to carrying through a task or exercise, especially for processes that could result in turning something immaterial into the material.107 She proceeds to demonstrate that this terminology establishes theater as being like a trade that can generate a material effect, especially something that can be “used” or “kept,” and adduces plays like Jonson’s Alchemist to trace the processes she posits. Yet again, a model previously deployed for the stage proves at least as useful in analyzing lyric.
The multiple senses in which lyric is an artifact have hardly been ignored by students of the mode. Roland Greene, for example, redefines the term in order to posit the “nominative” option,
in which the speaker is a single self, against what he terms the “artifactual” alternative of several voices.108 Moreover, as I have already observed, many early modern texts invite us to see them as physical objects in someone’s hands, “lyke captives trembling at the victors sight” (Spenser, Amoretti, 1.4), yet another sense in which lyric invokes touch. But Crane’s article urges us to consider other respects in which lyric can usefully be seen as performed in the sense of not merely representing a product but also resulting in a product that is often in some sense material. First, early modern linguistic usages demonstrate the connections between the mode and the material work of artisans: I have already explored the term “turn,” and Chapter 4 will demonstrate that by referring to stanzas as “staffs” and “staves,” as well as by deploying architectural vocabulary, early modern writers represent lyric as a physical object, thus containing in its well wrought urn anxieties about its propensity towards diffusion.
Second, and more to my purposes now, if the entire lyric may in some regards be artifactual, lyric is also performed in the sense that it may culminate on a product like a motto or couplet that, to borrow Crane’s useful categories, may be “used” or “kept.” John Shawcross hyperbolically asserts that the creation of an artifact, not the expression of emotion, is typically the principal aim of lyric (the claim is itself a problematical artifact of his otherwise fruitful emphasis on craft), but his statement prepares us to observe that often an artifact in these senses is indeed the product and goal of the emotion.109 The very process of representing an experience in ways that intensify its immediacy may result in a physical object or an analogue to one. That product may be characterized by its distance from, and often distancing of, the original experience. At the same time, the object may introduce other versions of immediacy; the inscription on a tombstone, for example, may command attention as forcefully as a singing voice, and in some senses, as many have observed, it at once makes the absent person present and reminds us of the absence. Once again, in other words, the relationship between presentness and representation can involve not conflict but cooperation.
Frequently, though not invariably, the product in question is a representation of a material object, most obviously the inscription on which a text may end. Hence we return yet again to the tensions between the ephemeral and insubstantial and apparent material solidity present in the tropes analyzed in Chapter 1. If the first song in Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus omits the introductory warm-up so common in lyric, the whole poem may be seen as building up to the inscription. Pattern poems and anagrams, both exemplified by the pillar that is the eighty-first text in Watson’s Hecatompathia, are cognate; it is no accident that Herbert, engrossed in examining the fraught relationships between devotion and the often sensual physical fabric of worship, creates pattern poems that are themselves physical objects. Analogous to that inscription, though usually not explicitly seen as physical, are mottoes and couplets, notably the “posies” at the end of the lyrics in Gascoigne’s Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen. And the very word “posy” can refer to bouquets of flowers and writings within rings as well as to a short section of verse; thus it too flags connections with materiality.
Categorizing these types of conclusion also crystallizes some of their near kin. Sometimes the second voice on which the poem concludes functions similarly, to the extent that the poem builds up to it; like the presence that may result from an operatic serenade, it can seem to be a product of the song that preceded it even while delivering its own song. The serenade in opera is often a lyric that is designed literally to call forth a presence. Witness, too, its literary analogue and precedent, the literary tradition termed paraklausithyron or “by the open door.” In texts using it, which range from ones by Propertius to the folk song “Silver Dagger,” the speaker, barred from the home of his beloved, attempts to gain entry, thus reversing the agenda of the serenade.
How and why do so many early modern poems “perform” a product in this sense? The briefer warm-up that may precede the body of a poem hints that, in these alternative instances, the bulk of the lyric may be seen as a warm-up for the final product. Yet again their authors are reacting to fears of the evanescence of their mode: these fragments they have shored against its ruins. Marvell’s grieving nymph cannot protect her faun from the troopers or her own innocence and trust from Sylvio, but she can create a memorial. Or, to put it another way, although they cannot be classified as prosopopoeia in that, with the exception of the second voice, they generally do not speak, these concluding products perform what one might think of as a type of prosopopoeia function in testifying to the generative power of the text and its speaker or author. Bereft in other ways, Wroth’s shepherdess may nonetheless inscribe. She moves from a semiotic system of branches, which will hardly be widely read (even by those who believe in supporting their local branch library) to a translucent inscription. Although they characteristically appear at the end of a lyric, these objectified sayings operate like titles in that they may announce a kind of ownership and entitlement; and they literally have the last word. In particular, if the refrain has, as it were, a roving eye, looking backwards and forwards and at itself, such artifactual assertions insistently stare straight ahead at the audience they are controlling.
The frequent result, however, is not a straightforward tribute to the agency of verse and its creator but rather a reexamination of that issue. Stone, though more stable than air, nonetheless wears away, as I suggested in Chapter 1 and as other students of lyric have noted as well.110 At the same time, representing the poem or some section of it as a material object leaves open both the potentialities and the dangers of a kind of surrogate parenthood: if the fruits of one’s conception will be, in Wroth’s own term “conseave[d]” (43) and then inscribed by others, on the one hand the shepherdess has insured that someone will care for her story but on the other she has surrendered it for adoption. The text risks becoming a trinket others can hold in their palm rather than a tornado that may envelop them. And when these codas are the detached sayings whose gathering the humanist tradition advocated, they substitute a collective wisdom for the insight of the individual author.111 Some of the closural strategies adduced in this section, like the mottos at the end of the eclogues in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, resemble the “cool-down” phrase studied by anthropologists because of their detachment from and sometimes passing relevance to the intense emotion and events that precede them.
Nor are such conclusions a straightforward demonstration of the move from immediacy to distance. Clearly many of them are textbook examples of shifting from voice to inscription; clearly, too, the sort of generalizations expressed through posies and mottos can distance the reader from the experience rendered in the text, a movement often mimed by the shift from English to Latin. Yet the deictic “here” and the direct address to the reader that so often characterize inscriptions remind us yet again that the hand that presses another one and the hand that pushes another away frequently belong to the same body.
CHAPTER 4
The Predilections of Proteus
Size and Structure
Lyric poems, unlike lyric poets, seldom wander lonely as a cloud. Typically neither solitary not unitary, they variously and sometimes simultaneously establish and resist links with other texts around them, while similarly binding and loosening subdivided units within themselves. To define lyric poetry in the early modern or any other period as short is risky, in part because that descriptor is vague and relative. For example, Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” though technically distinguished from the so-called “epic” version of its genre through its classification as a “lyric” epithalamium, is substantial enough to make that designation problematical; although William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” is a typical, indeed prototypical, example of lyric in many respects, it is 203 lines long. And even if one attempts a broad description, rather than a precise definition, of lyric in terms of brevity, trouble arises precisely beca
use of the genre’s predilection for forging and loosening links among constituent units. On occasion it is even difficult to say where a given poem begins and ends. For example, is Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender a single poem or a collection of them, and how about George Meredith’s Modern Love? Moreover, in the more common instances where lyrics seem to be separable but related, the shortness of individual poems may be far less important to their workings than the connections among the parts; the answer poems that are so common in the early modern period obviously interact with each other, as do analogous pairings in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. In other words, the brevity of lyric is not infrequently a problematical criterion, and it needs to be recast in terms of a larger perspective—the potentialities for fluidity and malleability that in effect shape and reshape the dimensions of a single lyric by breaking it into parts or inserting it into larger entities.
For many reasons, especially the influence of the conditions of production, those potentialities have been variously realized in different historical periods and subdivisions within them. Establishing the anthology as the characteristic format for medieval lyrics, Seth Lerer observes that readers typically purchased unbound sheets that they then bound themselves.1 Romantic lyrics were often packaged in volumes known as “Keepsakes,” annuals that were designed, one critic asserts, “as a status gift rather than a book to read.”2 In the early twenty-first century, numerous publishers have expressed a preference for collections of lyrics linked by a narrative structure, and, given the difficulty of getting poetry published, that preference has had a considerable impact on writers.
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 23