The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Petrarch’s Rime sparse is prototypical even of English Renaissance poetry in more senses than one, as I suggested in Chapter 1, and many literary techniques popular during the period may be interpreted as defensive responses to the perceived scattering of manuscripts. Early modern poets and their readers surely saw lyric in terms of a dynamic interplay between scattering and gathering in their many forms, an interplay expressed on a range of levels, from the workings of particular prosodic forms and other poetic practices to the mythological narratives studied in Chapter 1 to the structure of particular texts and collections. Acutely traced to gendered antagonisms by many critics, the scattering of the female body in many love poems may also be glossed as a response to the poet’s fears of being scattered: they do unto others what they fear will be done to their texts.21 Exhaustive and incisive, Mary Thomas Crane’s Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England cogently traces an apparently opposite activity, the humanist practice of gathering fragments of text, which she relates to one strain in the lyric poetry of that period.22 Studying the size and structure of lyric, however, fruitfully extends Crane’s argument by positioning the scattering and gathering that she primarily attributes to humanism in multiple other contexts.

  In the English Renaissance, both mythology and diction, identified above as arenas for implicit discussions of lyric, offer decisive evidence of those preoccupations with the interaction between gathering and scattering in their many forms. In her acute study of Victorian lyric, Yopie Prins maintains that, in part because of her association with fragmentariness, Sappho in her many avatars was one of its principal exemplars.23 In early modern England, as Chapter 1 demonstrated, Orpheus served cognate functions. The dismemberment of his body is not sui generis but rather the climax to the many types of dispersal associated with his death; in Ovid’s version, the departure of Hymen foreshadows the tragic murder initiated by a woman whose hair is flying in the breeze, a crime that involves the fleeing of peasants and the scattering of their agricultural implements, often symbols of civilization (“vacuosque iacent dispersa per agros / sarculaque” [“Scattered through the deserted fields lay hoes”] XI.35–36), a crime that is mourned by trees shedding their leaves.24 Yet Orpheus is also associated with types of gathering; as Chapter 1 indicates, he draws together listeners, even beasts, and political readings of the myth emphasize his drawing together and confining people in towns.

  Individual lyrics often thematize the interplay between scattering and gathering enacted in their genre, with the latter typically serving as a preemptive strike against the possibility that the text will be scattered. “Lycidas” literally embodies scattering through the fate of Orpheus and King and enacts it formally through the irregular rhyme scheme of the canzone form and thematically through the ubi sunt tradition; but the end of the poem involves many forms of binding and reintegration, especially when Lycidas is gathered in by dolphins and the song that advertises itself as a monody concludes on the communal singing of choirs of angels. A lyric whose images focus on types of dispersal, George Herbert’s “Collar,” ends when its speaker is not poured out like water but rather gathered in, or at least apparently gathered in, by God. George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres purports to gather the work of other authors, but it actually scatters Gascoigne’s work among multiple fictive poets; not the least of the many valences of the title of the second edition, The Posies of George Gascoigne, is a reactive tying together.

  A Claes Oldenburg sculpture on the campus of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln represents notebooks whose pages are blowing apart. Separated completely from the original binding, some of these leaves suggest uncontrolled dispersal; others, half torn, form graceful, avian patterns with other leaves in the same book. These images aptly represent the energetic and often unpredictable spread of knowledge that is the mission of the sculpture’s setting—and they resemble as well the structural propensities that, I argue, characterize the early modern lyric. The best approach to those propensities is to turn now to two arenas where the principal foci of this chapter, attempts at stabilizing the text and asserting authorial agency, are played out in particularly intriguing forms: the micro-level of stanzas and the macro-level of collections of lyrics.

  Often though not unproblematically considered characteristic of lyric, stanzas are common in early modern English poetry, with many writers clearly delighting in crafting a range of them; and a fascination with especially challenging strophic patterns marks the period. Nonetheless, systematic discussions of stanzas, as of so many other issues about lyric, are rare, the principal ones occurring in brief passages within treatises by Gascoigne and George Puttenham, while suggestive though even shorter remarks appear in the note to the reader that precedes Michael Drayton’s Barrons Wars. But these limited treatments fruitfully gloss the workings of early modern stanzas, and their multiple implications for the size and structure of the lyric enlarge when such passages are read in light of the reliance on metaphor noted in Chapter 1 and in collaboration with the literary texts that practice what the treatises preach. In particular, stanzas typically provide the solidity associated with “posy” in the sense of an inscription in metal or stone, assert the masculinity variously celebrated and threatened in other representations of lyric, and imply the holy harmony of certain types of music. At the same time, the movements from success to loss in Orpheus’s story may alert us to how the potency of strophes may on occasion be undermined.

  Yet another reason for looking closely at stanzas is that they demonstrate the interaction among textual practices too often treated separately by critics. As we will see, the effect of the stability and stasis that stanzas generally give is the product of a dynamic involving theoretical conceptions of stanzas, the aesthetic impact of components like couplets, and the visual presence of strophes on the page, which is often related to material practices such as the use of catch-words. Chartier’s insistence on studying authorship in terms of the interaction among quite varied mechanisms, including but not unduly privileging print, is thus also a useful approach to many issues connected with stanzas.25

  Particularly striking for my purposes is how intensely Drayton, Gascoigne, and Puttenham respond to that interaction by associating the stanza form with a cohesiveness and restraint that are antidote and antithesis to scattering. Or, to return to the framework introduced above, these three early modern writers insistently redefine malleability as modularity, thus rendering it a source of, not a threat to, the unity of the text. That insistence is probably a response to not only the general dangers of fragmentation but also a more local and reflexive peril: lyrics in general were prone to be reconstructed, even cannibalized, and rearranging stanzas was, as Marotti has shown, one particularly common type of scribal change.26 Arguably these reactive efforts to assert the unity of a stanza also emphasize, even figure, that of its maker: authority over the text, potentially scattered among readers, printers, and copyists, is thus located in its builder. As Ernst Häublein suggests in his study of the stanza, the very term gestures towards unification—“The Italian etymology (a room of a house) implies that stanzas are subordinate units within the more comprehensive unity of the whole poem”—and in the rhetorical treatises in question and the poems themselves, this implication is crystallized and substantiated, often through architectural tropes that recall that etymology.27 This is not to say that the fluidity of early modern lyric is absent from its stanzaic structure; rather, this prosodic unit often encompasses both protean shape-shifting and its reactive restraint, but with the latter typically dominating in both theory and practice.

  “There is a band to be given every verse in a staffe,” Puttenham writes, and by choosing “band” for rhyme in this context emphasizes not rime sparse but rather rime raccolte.28 The anxieties behind this emphasis on collection and tying together, yet another instance of the dynamic of gathering versus scattering catalogued above, emerge explicity in the succeeding part of the sentence: “so as
none fall out alone or vncoupled, and this band maketh that the staffe is sayd [stayed?] fast and not loose” (102). Later in the same section he further emphasizes the danger countered by these banding and binding rhymes: “Sometime also ye are driven of necessitie to close and make band more then ye would, lest otherwise the staffe should fall asunder and seeme two staves” (102). Keenly conscious of courtly hierarchy, Puttenham reveals his cognate consciousness of class when he suggests in passing that poetry written for the “rude and popular” ear needs more obvious rhyme (100), not a system where the rhyming words are distant from each other. Behind this comment may lie not only the assumption that the vulgar are not attune to subtlety but also a transfer of the fear of unruly mobs onto the fear that the poetry they favor will also be unruly if not carefully contained. Puttenham focuses here on audiences, but the association of the makers of lyric with artisans, traced in my first chapter and developed below in this one, may well have intensified such anxieties. A similar concern for unifying what might otherwise be scattered emerges in Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction when he describes the scheme of rhyme royal in terms of dialogue, a telling instance of the dialogic propensities discussed from another perspective in my examination of lyric audiences: “the first and thirde lines do aunswer (acrosse) in like terminations and rime, the second, fourth, and fifth, do likewise answere eche other in terminations, and the two last do combine and shut up the Sentence.”29 Later he again deploys that revealing verb “aunswere” (461), thus again drawing attention to the dialogic propensities of lyric. He also uses “crosse meetre” (460) for the abab stanza, while other early modern writers label that form “cross couplet”; these usages render the couplet form, that exemplar of unity, normative and pervasive. In short, the emphasis on restraint that glosses the versions of the Orpheus myth that stress his role as civilizer is apparent in these discussions of stanzas crafted by his heirs and assigns in the English Renaissance.

  Also recurrent in the treatises in question is vocabulary that stresses the solidity of stanzas, thus again shoring them against the ruins of fragmentation: lyric is represented in terms of orderly and firm units, not ones that can fracture and splinter. Moreover, that solidity is seen as an implicit antidote to the anxieties about the evanescence of voice apparent in the usages of “air” discussed above: lyric is represented as not a breeze but a brick. The implications of these usages are literalized in the type of text known as a pillar poem. Drayton compares the eight-line stanza he uses in The Barrons Wars to a column—“this sort of stanza hath in it maiestie, perfection, and solidite, resembling the piller which in Architecture is called the Tuscan”—and he describes the couplet as its base. Puttenham establishes a similar point by presenting a poem in the shape of a pillar, which he terms the “most beawtifull” geometrical form (100), and a few pages later referring to the construction of a stanza in terms of masonry.30 (The indentation of the couplets in several editions of Drayton’s work published during his lifetime makes them appear an unreliable base at best, probably because the printer determined the layout of the poems. To this, too, this chapter will return.)

  If such metaphors establish the strength of stanzas directly by connecting them to an icon of solidity, they accomplish the same end through implicit gendering, thus continuing the reactive interplay between masculine and feminine that, as we saw earlier, characterizes representations of early modern lyric. Masonry is evidently man’s work, not the preserve of the women and children with whom lyric is sometimes associated. This vocabulary also protects and distinguishes the stanzas to which it is applied not only from the female and feminine but also from the accusation of effeminizing: columns suggest not the physical swaying and immoral suasion often attributed to lyric but rather rootedness, not the ravishment or seduction that, as we saw earlier, was associated with turning men into women but rather a type of solidity generally gendered male. Much as the massiveness associated with stanzas counters the evanescence of air, so the masculinity of their mason contravenes the femininity and emasculation that, as Chapter 1 demonstrated, were often though not always linked to lyric in general and the expression of voice in song, so often seen as female, in particular.

  Although he does not refer explicitly to stanzas as columns, Gascoigne, in repeatedly deploying the cognate terms “staff” and “stave,” raises many similar issues. Whereas “stave” referred to an individual piece of wood, the word was also frequently used in the period for the components of a barrel and the rungs of a ladder, as well as other kinds of sticks; thus some of its meanings draw attention again to construction based on the processes of gathering and binding together potentially disparate parts.31 Literally denoting a stick, “staff” was also used in the early modern period to mean a support, the very role I am arguing stanzas served. More specifically, the term was applied in that era to certain kinds of material supports in particular—the bar between the handles of a plough, a part of a chair, something used in making a grid or case, a rung of a ladder, or, as in the case of “stave,” part of a barrel—in other words, material objects that tie together otherwise separate parts. Since the association with a musical staff was already present in the early modern period, the term also adduces that symbol of unity in music, thus itself tying together artisanal production and aesthetic endeavors.32 The references to pillars and barrels carry with them implications about not only the poem but also the poet. He is an artisanal maker, and, like the references to columns and the obvious phallic resonances of “staff,” these allusions to the labor of artisans serve further to counter the conception of poesy as effeminate, effeminizing, and childish. Real men may not make sestinas, but they do make ploughs.

  The resonances of this artisanal vocabulary are further emphasized by Gascoigne’s orthography in the phrase “at the end of every staffe when you wright staves” (461; italics added). “Wright” was, to be sure, a variant spelling for “write” that did not necessarily carry associations of creating an artifact, as numerous instances of its usage insist, but the combination of the word with “staves” activates those punning associations. Their presence is also supported by the linkage of making stanzas to making artisanal products in the passages examined above, as well as in Puttenham’s comparison between crafting a stanza and crafting a building: “even as ye see in buildings of stone or bricke the mason giveth a band” (102). (It may be argued that the connections between writing and manual construction also occurred in the next century; an English translation of the French author Paul Scarron includes the phrase “no higher a Rank than that of a Verse-Wright,” where the reference to rank emphasizes the association with lowly manual work.)33 Behind allusions like these lie a widespread association between manual crafts and literary endeavors of many types, not just the writing of lyric, brilliantly traced by Henry Turner.34 More to my immediate purposes, the connection between the poet and the artisanal maker may reflect anxieties related to those that motivate the act of countering the scattering of verse with forms of gathering: in many arenas in addition to genre, definitions often function via making distinctions, and in this instance the definition of the poet as maker implies a rejection of the alternative Platonic model and hence of a kind of uncontrolled frenzy not unlike that of the Maenads and the many types of scattering that may be laid at their door. Techne replaces furor. Above all, this parallel between constructing stanzas and constructing useful and durable objects suggests that the poet orders and ties together.

  The etymology of “stanza” evokes different but related resonances of the language of tying. Rooms can contain, confine, control. In describing the achievements of Orpheus, the verse attached to Emblem 81, “The force of eloquence,” in Thomas Palmer’s Two Hundred Poosees declares that the singer “Broughte those dispersed soules in one, / and walde them in a towne” (11–12).35 That sorcerer Orpheus performs his apotropaic magic against the bestial by gathering in, tying together, much as stanzas might be said to do; the walling at once hints at protection and g
overnment. In other words, the act of making stanzas asserts dominion and mastery.

  Stanzas can imply the author’s power in other ways as well. If on one level the association of stanzas with binding and connecting linked the poet to lower social strata, these implications were effectively countered by contemporary theories of harmony as the fundamental principle of the universe, theories that are triggered by explicit references to harmony and music in the passage from Drayton we are examining, as well as in many other venues. The model of the world in Plato’s Timaeus repeatedly stresses binding and coherence. Similarly, the emphasis on pairings and opposites in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy conveniently encapsulates widespread assumptions that the universe joins together disparates, so that unity and goodness are one and the same. If the disparates fail to be one, he writes, things will perish and dissolve. Thus the vocabulary of constructing binding units aggrandizes the writer even as it associates him with manual labor; some mundane forms of earthly making are linked to the First Maker. And thus, too, the couplet and its abab cousin, tellingly described as “cross coupling,” represent heavenly harmony. Moreover, while elevating the poet, these associations do the same for lyric, implicitly offering yet another rejoinder to the notion of that mode as childish toy or lubricious pandar. The frequency with which poems were set to music in the period fostered the linkage between stanzaic form and harmony in more ways than one. As Häublein points out, because such stanzas had to have the same melody, writers were encouraged to use similar syntactical units in them.36 And, lacking the visual evidence of stanzaic form, the audience would have been alerted to it by those aural repetitions.

  The association of celestial harmony with stanzas should prompt us to consider aspects of their more earthly potentialities. In practice, lyric poets frequently achieve what the theorists of the stanza preach. The often lengthy process of crafting a complex stanza form in particular counterbalances threats to authorial identity in two respects. Pragmatically, while printers, readers, and copyists may indeed, as students of early modern literature have emphasized of late, appropriate and modify texts, complicated prosodic structures do resist certain types of tampering. Although it remains possible to insert or delete words, it is much harder to switch or add lines to a sestina or sonnet. As noted above, Marotti has demonstrated how often scribes move stanzas;37 but rhyme schemes like that of the sestina discourage deleting or appending stanzas, and in general the most complex stanzaic arrangements could prove daunting to those amateur poets among the readers wanting to dabble as Third Makers. And, whereas the widespread claim that authors took little pride in and felt little ownership over their work in the sixteenth century and even the early seventeenth may be easier to justify in relation to texts that were rapidly and easily produced, the labor of creating one of these complicated strophes is likely to produce a sense of pride and possession. Techne and title are related by more than alliteration: compare the masons’ marks in cathedrals and in particularly impressive houses, such as that of the ill-fated Thomas Arden. To these points too I will return later in this chapter.