The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Moreover, while acknowledging how scribal culture permitted readers to reshape texts through groupings, critics need to observe as well how fruitful those same potentialities could be for authors. It is easy to speculate that Donne, fascinated as he was with pairings and matings of all types, might have copied and circulated to friends lyrics that either supported or resonated ironically with each other, such as “Womans Constancy” and “The Good Morrow.” And he might well have shifted those groupings to fill different ends; for example, by substituting for “The Good Morrow” the epithalamium he composed for the ethically dubious wedding of Frances Howard and the Earl of Somerset, he could have introduced a similar implication but with a pointed topical reference that it would have been dangerous to express more directly. Such speculations are, admittedly, just that, but one can observe with more certainty that the poet who wishes to reorder printed texts could do so informally through correspondence with friends but that, for a larger impact, he has to hope for a selected or collected edition of his work or, even less probably, a second edition of the book. In contrast, the recent variorum edition of Donne’s Holy Sonnets persuasively documents his control over how scribal versions of these poems were grouped.73

  Although it is usually not read from this perspective, the manuscript of Lady Mary Wroth’s poetry in the Folger Library, V.a.104, further demonstrates how an author could arrange and rearrange units of her writings, hence asserting authority not despite but because of the workings of scribal culture.74 Thus this text supports my contention that, if from one perspective lack of fixity diminishes the author’s ability to, as it were, have the last word—the power to effect closure—from another perspective it offers continuing opportunities to assert authority over the text. Cognizant of Josephine A. Roberts’s deservedly high reputation as a textual editor and grateful for her many contributions to subsequent work on Lady Mary Wroth, most critics have accepted Roberts’s description of the putative manuscript of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in the Folger Library, Folger V.a.104.75 That text, according to the standard edition meticulously edited by Roberts and to an earlier article by her, comprises neither the copy-text for the 1621 edition nor a collection of discrete groups of lyrics; rather, it represents an early version of Wroth’s sonnet sequence, though some poems were excerpted from it for the Urania when it was subsequently revised.76 Recognizing that two lyrics are signed “Pamphilia” (“How like a fire doth love increase in mee” [P55] and the text she assumes terminates the sequence, “My muse now hapy, lay thy self to rest” [P103]) and that the manuscript includes blank pages, Roberts also posits subdivisions within Wroth’s sequence; P55, she asserts, concludes one of those sections, while the signature on P103 flags its status as the final poem in the sequence.

  Yet if, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, we attend to Wroth’s use of catchwords and of her distinctive closural symbol, a slashed S, as well as to how she numbers the poems, the structure of the manuscript appears quite different in several ways, and more wholly distinct groupings emerge. In particular, it is more than likely that V.a.104 comprises not simply a collection of poems originally conceived as a sonnet cycle but rather a preliminary version of that cycle, ending at P55, plus a number of other poems, some of which Wroth envisioned as separate groups. For example, P63, P17, P30, P66–67, P18, P69, P19, P71, and P25 appear consecutively in the manuscript. Each has one slashed-S closural mark and a catchword, with the exception of the final poem in the group, P25, which has two marks and no catchwords. In addition to the catchwords, these poems are linked by numbers 1–10, suggesting that they were at some point conceived as a series. Subsequently, of course, Wroth folded into the sonnet cycle that originally ended at P55 many of the poems after P55; she extracted others and positioned them in the Urania; and she changed some of her original groupings. Pamphilia could not control Amphilanthus, but she could attempt to reshape her own responses, and her alter ego, Wroth, could reshape the collection, or collections, that record them. Harold Love has demonstrated with his usual acuity how the possibilities for rewriting offer agency to scribes; for authors as well, Wroth’s collection thus suggests, agency may be expressed and realized not through fixity but rather through opportunities for revision.77 Moreover, if, as many critics have claimed, the manuscript was shared with a small circle, the renumberings were a way of directing readers’ attention to the new form it had assumed; if scribal culture under some circumstances allowed readers to become coauthors, in instances like this it allowed the author in the customary sense to guide them.78

  Whether one accepts Roberts’s analysis of the manuscript or my revisionist interpretation, the crown of poems within it unmistakably demonstrates other, often neglected, potentialities of scribal culture. Wroth deploys a range of techniques to bind together the sonnets within her crown. The lack of even a single slashed-S at the end of all but the final sonnet suggests they are virtually a single poem, an impression intensified by another scribal practice: whereas she generally starts a new page at the opening of a new text elsewhere in the sequence, she begins succeeding sonnets in the crown on the same page as the previous one if there is room for an additional text. Leaving about the same space between poems that she elsewhere leaves between sections of a single poem, she marks the end of one sonnet and the beginning of the next only with an Arabic number. (Similarly, Robert Sidney does not separate the lyrics within his crown with his customary closural marker.) Already chained by the repetition that defines a crown of sonnet, Mary Wroth’s lyrics are, then, further chained visually. Her scribal practices thus draw attention to how Wroth, and arguably her father and other poets as well, conceived a crown of sonnets: the texts within it are more tightly linked than the common habit of printing each poem on a separate page would suggest, and in the instance of Wroth’s poems, as with several other crowns, their connections trope the entrapments of and in desire. In short, in its crown as elsewhere, V.a.104 emphatically demonstrates the ways scribal culture often did not impede the poet’s agency but rather facilitated authorial workings and reworkings of the text, including, in some instances, regroupings—and facilitated as well the pleasing aesthetic effect of a union of form and content.

  If Wroth’s manuscript encourages one to question the association of scribal culture with the erasure of the author, the 1621 printed edition of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, like certain editions of Daniel’s poetry, from one perspective complicates the linkage of print with increased authorial agency, recalling my earlier observations about how the fixity of print could instantiate not the author’s intentions but some rival to them. Whereas the manuscript visually emphasizes the connections among the poems in the crown, in this edition they are printed exactly like other texts in the collection: in both instances, more than one poem appears on the same page, and they are all spaced the same way. It is surely more likely that Wroth would have preferred to retain the connections among the poems in the crown that she visually flagged in her manuscript. Thus her work is a microcosm both of the often acknowledged interaction between the author and other agents in shaping a printed text and of the often neglected potentialities open to the author in scribal transmission.

  I have argued, then, that if texts disintegrate, they are also stabilized, and students of early modern literature should not privilege one part of that process at the expense of others. If the conditions of production can interfere with aesthetic effects, as in the instance of Daniel’s title pages, they can also contribute to them. If authors lack agency under some circumstances, they reassert it at other junctures, whether in collaboration or conflict with other agents. But, as my concluding chapter will demonstrate at greater length, intellectually fuzzy consensus is neither the goal nor the necessary outcome of these and other “both/and” arguments. Rather, they may produce focused and fruitful insights in themselves; thus studying those title pages in Daniel’s texts extends our knowledge of the interaction among the agents contributing to them. Moreover, in literary criticism identifying bo
th/and structures is often not the culmination of an argument but a route towards other insights. For example, recognizing the interaction of scattering and gathering expands our interpretation of the consequences of the malleability of texts, notably the implications for authorial agency.

  Although I have developed such points in relationship to early modern lyric poetry, they do offer opportunities for future inquiry in other areas, especially the broader questions about authorship and materiality that are currently being debated. Recent studies, as I have indicated, have redefined authorship in terms of proprietorship and commodity, but further redefinitions are called for: despite or because of all the recent interest in collaborative theatrical practices, twentieth-and twenty-first-century critics of lyric have tended to impose their own concept of possession onto a period where it operated quite differently.79 “Literary property is not fixed and certain like a piece of land,” Mark Rose observes, and Chartier warns us against equating the ownership of real property and that of a text.80 But land ownership is in fact relevant in one significant respect: it can be argued that the types of partial and limited rights land ownership involved provided an applicable model of which early modern writers and readers were very aware. Hence future studies could profitably emphasize and further explore how versions of shared and partial ownership worked, concentrating particularly on how poets, like playwrights, participated in the interaction among various owners and types and degrees of ownership even very early in the period. Both the medieval and early modern period offered alternative models of property rights that could be far from binary. Inheritance practices involved limited but still significant forms of ownership, notably the medieval option of holding in fief and the leasehold practices that still survive in English law today. An early modern lyric poet, I maintain, could see himself as, so to speak, holding in leasehold a text over which he did not have total sovereignty.

  Similarly, recognizing that Shakespeare repeatedly uses “author” for “parent” reminds us that the author of a text could also have the major yet limited rights accorded fathers in early modern patriarchies. Imposing in more senses than one, the scope of those rights is expressed in Theseus’s disturbing celebration of fatherhood (“To whom you are but as a form in wax, / By him imprinted, and within his power, / To leave the figure, or disfigure it” (I.i.49–51).81 Yet the same scene recalls as well the limitations on those rights—many early modern conceptions of marriage stressed the importance of children’s assent in marriage—and in this instance happily it is Egeus’s wish, not his daughter, that is disfigured and melts away. But the point remains that parenthood, like land ownership, offered early modern poets and their readers potent models of limited but far from insignificant agency.

  The analyses above also raise another important issue. The distrust of aesthetic analyses in many quarters is one of the most profound differences between contemporary criticism, especially as practiced in the United States, and its predecessors. In a series of important articles, Robert Kaufman has trenchantly maintained the need to distinguish the aesthetic and aestheticization, and I have argued in a number of other venues that we should not evaluate formal analysis through the categories of outdated versus cutting edge or formal versus material.82 Similarly, this chapter has demonstrated that formal and other aesthetic considerations are neither ideologically nor practically inimical to the projects of many contemporary critics. Indeed, an analysis of the stability so often attributed to stanzas requires deploying intellectual history, aesthetic analysis, and materialist criticism. In this and other ways, few if any arenas better illustrate the compatibility—indeed, interdependence—of formal and material analysis than the size and structure of the early modern lyric.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Myth of Janus

  Lyric and/or Narrative

  Even when representing other issues with the precise detail and complex coloration of Mughal painting at its best, many literary studies adopt the bold gestural strokes of Franz Kline to discuss the relationship between lyric and narrative: lyric is static and narrative committed to change, lyric is internalized whereas narrative evokes an externally realized situation, lyric attempts to impede the forward thrust of narrative, and so on. Offering a more theorized but still diametrical contrast, Jonathan Culler posits the narrative and the apostrophic as the two poles for poetry, with lyric typically “the triumph of the apostrophic.”1 But the chapters preceding this one have already called some of those assertions into question. And what happens if one plays these commonplaces about the two modes against the complexities of a few texts that not only participate in but also thematize them?

  Much as the lyric by Donne examined at the beginning of Chapter 3 impelled a reexamination of the conventional wisdom about immediacy, so two very familiar poems, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “My lute, awake!” and George Herbert’s “Collar,” de-familiarize putative generic norms and thus invite a reconsideration of the relationship between lyric and narrative. In the sixth stanza of Wyatt’s lyric, the speaker is continuing to assert—or is he continuing to threaten?—the ending of his relationship with his lady, a declaration that is at once intensified and undermined by the refrain’s repetition of “I have done.” Participating in, even exemplifying, the carpe diem tradition, the passage in question anticipates the lady’s loss of beauty:

  Perchaunce the lye wethered and old,

  The wynter nyghtes that are so cold,

  Playning in vain unto the mone;

  Thy wisshes then dare not be told;

  Care then who lyst, for I have done.

  (26–30)2

  On one level this is a clear example of narrative, at once invoking and explicitly addressing the sequential temporality conventionally associated with that mode through its emphasis on the ravages of time. Repeated twice (29, 30), Wyatt’s “then” apparently exemplifies the narrative use of deictics that Roland Greene has acutely traced when distinguishing that mode from lyric.3 So one might entertain the hypothesis that here, as at a few other points in the text, a lyric encases a narrative, a reversal of but not a radical challenge to the more common models of narrative incorporating but ultimately rejecting lyric.

  Yet, as we will see throughout this chapter, even, or especially, metalyric and metanarrative do not necessarily firmly establish, let alone triumphantly celebrate, the power or even the presence of the mode they concern. In fact, by this point the poem as a whole has complicated our attempts to ascribe narrativity to it, and lines 26–30 exemplify Gerald Prince’s concept of the “disnarrated,” events to which the text refers but that do not occur, a category to which I will return.4 (Arguably, however, that categorization is further complicated. Whereas on one level the “Perchaunce” [26] certainly governs the whole stanza and the auxiliary “will” is understood, might the omission of that verb form and the enargia of the description tempt us to read “Thy wisshes then dare not be told” [29] as something more than mere possibility?)

  In any event, the repetitions of “I have done” throughout the text paradoxically imply that the speaker may be protesting too much (an implication emphasized by the possibility of a spondaic stress on both the auxiliary and final verb in “have done”). The termination of the relationship is less a story he is recounting than one he is trying to effect, or, in other words, it is a story he is telling himself he is telling. It is a story whose repetitions are mimed by internal rhyme on “Playning” and “vain” (28), a story that is blocked, at least temporarily, by a poem whose agenda is revenge as much or more than leavetaking, as is so often the case in that intriguing subgenre of lyric the farewell poem.

  Moreover, the reader is very aware of the mind that is imagining these events, a common characteristic of lyric. The refrain “I have done” slips and slides between an apparently factual narrative of an action (“I have given up the relationship”) to its counterfactual double (“I am pretending I have given it up”) to a version that involves not action but brooding and in that way veers tow
ards lyric (“I am thoroughly tired of being in this relationship”). And the refrain is but one of several junctures at which the stanza emphasizes its speaker’s internal dynamics. In the stanza I just examined, the word “Perchaunce” (26) signals the senses in which this is a vengeful fantasy from a mind whose own aggressive wishes dare not be told directly, again recalling the internalization that sometimes, though of course by no means always, characterizes lyric. One might speculate, too, that the stanza also deflects onto her his fears that rather than giving up the relationship decisively or reaching the lady with his threats, he is plaining in vain unto the moon. In short, this stanza, like the rest of the poem, includes both textbook examples of the distinctions between narrative and lyric, such as the emphasis on sequential temporality in the former and the meditative intensity of the latter, as well as usages that cannot readily be classified as one or the other. Jane Hedley has commented acutely on destabilized time sequences elsewhere in Wyatt’s work, and throughout this particular song temporalities and modalities slip and slide.5 Thus elements of narrative and of lyric participate in a relationship as entangled and unending as that of the speaker and his lady.

  No less complex is the interplay between lyric meditation and narrative action in Herbert’s “Collar.” One reason the pattern is so complicated is that the valences of both modes shift in the course of the text. In brief, the early rejection of “sigh[ing] and pin[ing]” (3), activities frequently associated with lyric, is a symptom of the speaker’s spiritual failings. The poem proceeds to display a different version of that mode: morally and logically tainted lyric reflections about the possibility of action and about the rejection of spirituality which that action represents in this instance. And its speaker’s repentance is signaled by a lyric meditation on the episode he recounts. But these variously deployed versions of lyric are only part of, as it were, the story: “recounts” is indeed an operative word, for narrativity functions here both as figure for spiritual rebellion and as an alternative to that rebellion, much as lyric both expresses and critiques it. The restlessness of the verse, whose extraordinarily varied line lengths and frequent enjambment have been glossed acutely by Achsah Guibbory, Joseph Summers, and other critics, enacts the restlessness of thought; it might also be said to mirror the process of traveling, of going abroad, and the related journeys back and forth between lyric and narrative elements.6