In the case of printed collections, one encounters, as many previous critics have observed, significant but limited authorial control over connections between lyrics, with multiple implications for size and structure; since that argument has been persuasively established in numerous venues, this chapter can develop it relatively briefly. Often it is precisely by positioning a single poem within a larger unit that authors assert some of their principal preoccupations, and that drive to arrange their lyrics in a significant order has been traced in detail.50 Even lyrics whose form did not necessarily mandate or invite grouping were frequently tied together by their authors—and, indeed, at times tied in ways that intriguingly complicate one’s notion of what the unit is. As the instance of Gascoigne, discussed at length elsewhere in this study, demonstrates, authors experimented with these potentialities in the middle of the sixteenth century, earlier than some would expect a significant assertion of authorial agency. And seventeenth-century examples are, of course, legion. In rearranging the texts in Hesperides, in whose production he apparently closely participated, Herrick often creates ironic pairings, like the juxtaposition of “Delight in Disorder” and the poem that succeeds it immediately, the tribute to his muse that celebrates her bashful, virginal tastes. Here the ordering playfully connects the two poems in the service of showing how separate and separable they are.51 Jonson, having rejected other literary forms, concludes the tenth poem in Forest on a promise to deliver an epode, which is in fact the genre of the succeeding work in the volume. These two texts, then, are also separate but related. Although critics dispute the significance of how Milton ordered the lyrics in his 1645 Poems, that he did so with care is beyond dispute; most obviously, the final lines of Lycidas are appropriate to the poem’s position as the concluding text in its section.52
It is tempting to cite sonnet cycles as further evidence of authorial control, and in fact Wendy Wall has developed a powerful argument on a related subject, asserting that the very concept of an author encouraged readers to see cycles of sonnets as unified and to read them as a consecutive narrative.53 But did authors foster that response by structuring their collections as narratives? If so, we may have a textbook example of the principle, a commonplace among narratologists, that telling stories is an assertion of agency, as well as another instance of collaboration among producers of meaning. But once again the evidence is mixed; often it is through tropes and images rather than a story that the units in a sonnet collection are united. To be sure, individual sonnets frequently include narratives, as when Astrophil and Stella 41 recounts the events of a tournament and Stella’s reactions to it or Amoretti 67 famously represents a successful hunt. Etiological myths are common in the genre; the ninth sonnet in Robert Barnfield’s Cynthia attributes Ganymede’s beauty to Diana’s having created him from blood and snow (a sonnet, incidentally, that through its echoes of the creation of the snowy Florimell may implicitly tell another story, that of the author attempting to rechannel antagonisms and guilt). The frequency and the specificity of the stories within particular sonnets, however, varies considerably and tellingly from one cycle to the next. Narrative elements recur with some frequency in Sidney’s work, for example, while they are virtually absent from Lodge’s.
To what extent, then, does narrativity structure an entire group of sonnets and thus provide an arena in which its author can assert control over the story line even while cataloguing evidence of his lack of control over the lady, much as stanzas reactively announce restraint in certain arenas in response to its absence elsewhere? At one end of the spectrum, the calendrical allusions in the Amoretti certainly insist on some linearity, and the religious events behind it are often clearly and specifically portrayed; the reference to Easter, for example, is tellingly signaled with the deictic “this” in “this day” (68.1). Yet even within this instance, the arrangement of certain poems seems arbitrary: whereas Sonnets 30–32 exemplify the presence of certain types of narrative link, there is no apparent reason why, say, Sonnet 56, one of the many additional laments about the lady’s cruelty, appears where it does rather than with Sonnets 30–32. As Neil L. Rudenstine has demonstrated, Astrophil does indeed change in the course of Sidney’s sequence,54 while in certain other respects as well a linear order is apparent: the collection opens on the problems of falling in love and writing about it, the concluding poems are related, and so on. Yet even some claims like those are debatable: for example, given the other signs of disdain throughout the sequence, the linkage between 85 and 86 is at best a sensible hypothesis. David Kalstone’s warning that “we must look for shifts of viewpoint rather than for narrative progression” is characteristically shrewd.55 While some of the links within these sonnet collections seem more problematical than others, at the other end of the spectrum we encounter cycles like Robert Sidney’s, whose poems are no more connected by a linear story than those in the miscellany by the Scottish Petrarchist Alexander Craig, The Amorose Songes, Sonets, and Elegies. And, as I have argued at length elsewhere, Shakespeare’s collection has far less of a plot than many critics have assumed.56 In short, the presence of narrativity varies so much from one collection to another and often within a given collection that we should discard the term “sonnet sequence” in favor of “sonnet cycle” when generalizing about the English tradition.57
Why, then, do authors only intermittently and imperfectly use the potentialities of narrative to assert control, in effect avoiding opportunities to bind their sonnets in the way they bind lines in stanzas? The Petrarchan tradition gestures towards yet resists two qualities often associated with narrative, the expression of certainty and the exposition of events. Gérard Genette observes that narrative’s “one mood, or at least its characteristic mood, strictly speaking can be only the indicative,” while Gerald Prince insists, “Narrative, which is etymologically linked to knowledge, lives in certainty.” Although these formulations have hardly gone unchallenged, they remain widespread, as my discussion of the relationship of lyric and narrative will demonstrate.58 The Petrarchan world does rest on a few versions of certainty, such as the surpassing—though temporary—beauty of the lady and the overwhelming power of love. But the signature figure of that literary tradition is the oxymoron, that embodiment of obsessive doubting. Indeed, Helen Vendler rightly maintains that indeterminacy is “intrinsic to the sonnet sequence as a genre.”59 All this may explain why if telling a story is a method of asserting sovereignty, as so many narratologists have suggested, it is a method many early modern sonneteers eschew.
In any event, many sonnet cycles demonstrate how conditions of production could produce further limitations on that sovereignty. The printer might cooperate by publishing the poems in the order the author intended, but he also might arrange them randomly or change their order or deploy, whether wittingly or not, devices that undermine the structure the author established. Elsewhere I have argued against Katharine Duncan-Jones’s defense of Thorpe’s Shakespeare edition as a faithful rendition of the author’s intended order.60 Whereas Colin Burrow’s magisterial edition of the sonnets and other poems largely supports Duncan-Jones’s assertions about order, his commentary on the 1609 edition aptly draws attention to the types of fluidity scrutinized throughout this chapter. Hence it is worth quoting at some length:
While there are good grounds to believe that the order of poems in Q is authorial…, there are grounds for being less certain than Duncan-Jones that Q represents that ideally convenient thing for an editor, an “authorized” final version which accurately reflects its author’s intentions. “Authorized” can mean many things. At its most minimal it would mean that Shakespeare assented to publication of the volume. At its maximal it would mean that Shakespeare assented to publication of the volume and that he gave Thorpe a manuscript which accurately reflected his final intentions, and that those final intentions were completely realized in the book which resulted.…If one accepted the maximal it would still be the case that the volume which resulted would be subject to the th
ousand material uncertainties which preyed on early modern printed texts: foul case (type which had got into the wrong box), foul papers (rough working manuscript copy), shortages of type, and tired compositors.61
Witness too Spenser’s volume Amoretti and Epithalamion, published in London in 1595. No gardener has planted borders more insistently than the printer of this edition: each page is adorned with a smaller one on top and a more substantial one at the bottom, thus separating each sonnet in the sequence, each stanza of the epithalamion, and even subdividing the Anacreontic poems between them. Catchwords bridge the pages, sometimes complicating the signals of the borders. Those paratextual decorations add to the closural firmness of the final line of the first sonnet in the Amoretti—“whom if ye please, I care for other none”—visually holding the poem together and holding at bay other voices and other Elizabeths for whom the poet may care.62 Thus in some important ways the printer supports the author’s endeavors, whether or not he consciously intended to. On the other hand, the catchword “Unquiet” mimes its own semantic content, rendering unstable that closural final line. In short, if on the one hand Spenser’s allusions to the Christian calendar structure at least in part establish a linear progression—witness, for example, Anne Lake Prescott’s argument that scriptural and liturgical references link Amoretti 67–70—on the other the physical appearance of the book presents sonnets and stanzas as distinct units.63
Indeed, as I have already noted, in the case of not only sonnets but other types of collections, certain kinds of groupings were outside the agency of the author, indeed an affront to it. A printer could purloin a text for inclusion in an anthology, perhaps in so doing changing its valences, as the compilers of Englands Helicon did when they turned a song from Astrophil and Stella into a pastoral. Furthermore, the appearance of a text in print did not prevent readers from copying it and inserting it into a very different context, thus establishing connections the author might not have intended. To return to a telling instance discussed earlier in this chapter, when Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is copied together with Ralegh’s reply in a format that omits the word “finis” between them, the copyist is undercutting alternative forms in which the poems had been printed, thus denying the author the power of closure and the ability to stabilize meaning that it can on occasion entail. Similarly, adhering to the medieval practices Lerer charts, someone bound together a printed copy of Watson’s Hecatom-pathia and a number of poems by John Lilliat and other obscure authors of the period, forming a manuscript that now resides at the Bodleian, classified as Rawlinson poetry 148.
Yet one should not assume that the relationship among would-be authors and those rival poets the reader, the publisher, and the printer was inevitably or even normatively conflictual. Although Arthur F. Marotti’s influential model of coterie circulation has been qualified trenchantly by Wendy Wall and others, it still serves to remind us that the act of pairing an answer poem with the original was often performed cooperatively, not antagonistically in both scribal and print transmission.64 To emphasize the interaction among one or more playwrights, members of a company, printers, the theatrical audience, and so on, many recent students of drama have been discussing theater in terms of collaboration, a concept that, though variously interpreted, does not necessarily presume—and can even offer an alternative to—a combative relationship necessarily suppressing the agency of a particular author.65 Stephen B. Dobranski’s important study of Milton demonstrates the collaborative genealogies of his poems and prose.66 Too often critics of lyric presuppose a battle for control which the author loses; adapting studies of collaboration from other modes would be more useful in a number of these instances.
One case study provides a particularly telling example of both the presence and limitations of authorial agency in shaping lyrics into larger units—and of the resulting implications for collaboration and conflict. Whether or not one subscribes to the theory that Samuel Daniel’s juxtaposition of his sonnets, an Anacreontic ode, and “The Complaint of Rosamond” initiated a widely imitated pattern, the “Delian tradition,” the fact that he wanted to link those texts is indisputable.67 Daniel himself stresses the links at several points: Rosamond directly invokes Delia, and numerous thematic parallels further unite the volume. Yet the connections are by no means consistent: markers of the relationships among the texts, notably the use of “finis” and of half titles, differ from edition to edition, including variants published in the same year.68 In the first 1592 edition (STC 6243.2) “finis” appears between the sonnets and the ode and between the ode and the complaint; the latter texts are not, however, introduced with a half-title, and this omission encourages readers to link them to the previous poems. In the same year, though, the same printer and publisher brought out a version (STC 6243.3) that incorporates some corrections within the sonnets that had been noted on a prefatory corrigenda sheet in the previous volume. More to the purposes of this chapter, the relationship between the sonnets and “The Complaint of Rosamond” changes significantly in the later edition: although the placement of “finis” remains the same, the two texts are distinguished by the use of the half title page. Moreover, because that sheet, which displays a version of the architectural drawing on the principal title page, locates the title of the complaint in small letters within an archway, visually it enacts its effect on the relationship among the texts: that is, Rosamond’s story is distanced and enclosed, cut off. All these patterns are further complicated by the inclusion of Cleopatra in some subsequent editions; for example, in an edition from 1598, Cleopatra, unlike the complaint, acquires its own half title, and the connections among the lyric members of the volume are implicitly emphasized through the contrast.
In short, although we cannot be certain how closely aligned Daniel considered the two texts in question to be, he must have been aware of the thematic and imagistic links between them, and by referring to Delia within the complaint, he impels the reader to note connections. Hence, rather than assuming that he requested changes in this revised version that would increase the separation between the texts, it is likely that the publisher added them, quite possibly hoping that the separate half title would make readers think they were getting more for their money. (This is not to deny, of course, that in other instances, aesthetic, not pecuniary, considerations might shape the decisions of a publisher or printer; for example, italicizing a lyric within a prose text implies its special status.) In any event, these editions remind us that the semantic and the visual content of a book can give a reader mixed messages about how unified the volume is, leading her to debate that issue and uncover or suppress signs of unity or disunity. Thus author, printer, and reader all interact, sometimes cooperatively and sometimes not, in determining structure.
Although many critics would take issue with my position on the linearity of sonnet collections, in other respects I have been buttressing commonly accepted assumptions about the interaction of agents in collections of lyric—and in so doing demonstrating again how and why the presence of other agents complicates but does not preclude the workings of authorship. Can one, however, second another widespread assumption by asserting that whereas authorial agency was apparent though limited in early modern print practices, an examination of groupings of poems reveals its virtual absence, traceable in large measure to the lack of fixity, in scribal practices? Admittedly, in some respects scribal practices evidently curtail authorial control over poetic units, as many scholars have demonstrated. Harold Love has pointed out that manuscripts virtually invite interpolations by other hands, and, similarly, Marcy North has analyzed how the white space left in many manuscripts seems to facilitate the addition of further texts and hence the possibility of further combinations.69 Thus a reader could readily combine texts that had not originally been conceived as a unit or even written by the same author, or excerpt lyrics from the larger context in which the author had positioned them. For example, poems that also are printed within Sidney’s Old Arcadia, C
ertaine Sonnets, and Astrophil and Stella make cameo appearances in the scribal collection apparently compiled by Henry Stanford.70
More important and more surprising, however, are the ways scribal practice contributed to authorial agency, thus challenging widespread assumptions. Scribal culture is an obsessive-compulsive’s paradise, the world of second thoughts and second chances, and writers could and did take advantage of this opportunity to arrange and rearrange their unpublished poems, often significantly changing their impact. Not the least effect of scribal transmission, though one of the most neglected, is the author’s ability to rewrite—and, more to my purposes right now, reorder—not only individual poems but also a collection in response to changes in his or her conception of them.71 Marotti has noted the extent of Robert Sidney’s continuing revisions.72 I have emphasized how scribal transmission allows readers and publishers to rewrite at the expense of closely considering the effects of that same possibility on the author. For lyric poets the fluidity that is the central focus of this chapter can entail freedom and creative challenges rather than their destruction.
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 27