The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  12. Carla Zecher, “The Gendering of the Lute in Sixteenth-Century French Love Poetry,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 771.

  13. Readers, if any, who have not thrown down the book in response to that pun may wish to consult the development of the argument about coteries in two studies by Arthur F. Marotti: John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Among the many other important discussions of the effects of circulation within a coterie is Wall, Imprint of Gender, esp. 34–50.

  14. I am indebted to Ernest Gilman for drawing this figure and its relevance to Spenser to my attention and to Kimberly Huth for a number of useful observations.

  15. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 78.

  16. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 71–81.

  17. On this dilemma within narrative, see, e.g., Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 228–231.

  18. Marotti, Manuscript, esp. 141–142, 159–171. Also see Cristina Malcolmson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 114–119, on Herbert’s unusual approach to answer poems; her argument that many of these texts in fact eschew responses is cognate to my suggestion below about blocked direction of address in “Windows.”

  19. Throughout this chapter, citations of Ben Jonson are to Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952).

  20. All citations are to The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

  21. George T. Wright, Hearing the Measures: Shakespearean and Other Inflections (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 267.

  22. Committed to maintaining the solitude of the lyric speaker, Helen Vendler instead maintains that these poems by Herbert introduce God’s voice through the assumption that the Lord is omnipresent (The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], 19).

  23. Gémino H. Abad, A Formal Approach to Lyric Poetry (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1978), esp. Chapter 4.

  24. See the discussions of repetition and reenactment in my book Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. 35–39.

  25. Pamela S. Hammons, Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002), esp. 168. As noted later in the paragraph, however, the primacy she and many other critics attribute to the social is problematical.

  26. David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14.

  27. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, eds., A New Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1907), s.v. “meditor.”

  28. The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), Vol. 12, 26–27; Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1953), Vol. 1, 327.

  29. I cite The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), Vol. I, 138. Frye refers to a chorus in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 249. All subsequent references to both books appear in parentheses within my text.

  30. Textual problems potentially complicate the discussion of this and other issues. Initially planned as a preface to Mill’s work on Tennyson, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” appeared first in the Monthly Repository and subsequently in his collection Dissertations and Discussions, sustaining a number of revisions in the process, including the addition of some qualifications. I rely on the latest version, and none of my principal points is significantly altered by the changes. On the versions of this and related essays, see Introduction in John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (1981), esp. xxx–xxxvi, which is Volume 1 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson et al., 33 vols. (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963–1991). All citations of Mill are to this edition and appear in parentheses within my text.

  31. After completing this chapter, I read the section on Mill in Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, esp. 130–133, and discovered that we had arrived independently at a couple of similar observations. Jackson acutely traces contradictions in Mill’s distinction between lyric and eloquence, and she relates them to his insistence on the significance of address.

  32. See Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, 130–133, for a different but compatible discussion of that figure.

  33. I am indebted to the revisionist reading of Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetry and Society” in a number of essays by Robert Kaufman and to the author’s willingness to share his work prior to publication. See, e.g., “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and “Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001), 354–384.

  34. T. S. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), 102–103.

  35. W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 1.

  36. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” 111.

  37. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” 112.

  38. Northrop Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

  39. On Frye’s relationship to history, see Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (Routledge: London, 1994), esp. 90–95.

  40. For the argument that Frye is merely adapting Mill, see, e.g., Allen Grossman with Mark Halliday, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 212.

  41. See esp. Don H. Bialostosky, Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Michael Macovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); also cf. Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance.

  42. I cite M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 280.

  43. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 285, 286.

  44. V. N. Voloshinov, “Literary Stylistics,” trans. Noel Owen and Joe Andrew, in Bakhtin School Papers, ed. Ann Shukman, Russian Poetics in Translation 1983, No. 10. (Oxford: RPT Publications and Holdan Books, 1983), 112.

  45. V. N. Voloshinov [M. M. Bakhtin?] “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry: Questions of Sociological Poetics,” trans. John Richmond, in Bakhtin School Papers, esp. 25.

  46. Marianne Shapiro and Michael Shapiro, “Dialogism and the Addressee in Lyric Poetry,” University of Toronto Quarterly 61 (1992), 392–413.

  47. Sara Guyer, “Wordsworthian Wakefulness,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003), 93–111.

  48. On the “what-sayer,” see Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 15–18.

  49. Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), Chapter 3.

  50. I cite The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow and London: Pearson Education, 2003).

  51. Throughout this chapter I cite The Riverside
Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

  52. On the concept of side participants see Herbert H. Clark and Thomas B. Carlson, “Hearers and Speech Acts,” Language 58 (1982), 332–373.

  53. Clark and Carlson, “Hearers and Speech Acts.”

  54. William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Compare, from Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations, “overhearing is not only an illusion, it is also a relation” (4). Another useful perspective on shifts in audiences appears in an as yet unpublished text by Elizabeth Sagaser, “Elegaic Intimacy”; I thank the author for sharing it prior to publication.

  55. Bell, Elizabethan Women.

  56. Revisionist studies have challenged earlier assertions that Jonson pioneered a radically new conception of authorship. See, e.g., Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); James Mardock, “Spatial Practice and the Theatrical Authoring of Jacobean London” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, August 2004).

  57. For an overview of the roles of the psalms in England, see Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). I thank the author for making his work available to me before publication; although he does not address the impact of the psalms on secular lyric from my perspectives, I gratefully draw on other aspects of his research throughout the ensuing argument.

  58. One of the few exceptions to this point about the neglected influence of the psalms on secular poetry is Roland Greene, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Psalms, the Sixteenth-Century Psalter, and the Nature of Lyric,” SEL 30 (1990), 19–40; his approach is very different from mine, however, focusing as it does on the psalms in relation to Greene’s divide between fictional and ritualistic potentialities for lyric. Among the numerous other studies of versions of the psalms by and the influence of the psalms on particular poets are Carol Kaske, “Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Psalter of Love,” in Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way, ed. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004); Annabel Patterson, “Bermudas and The Coronet: Marvell’s Protestant Poetics,” ELH 44 (1977), 478–499; Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1669 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 260–276. Extensive discussions of the psalms also appear throughout Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); see esp. 39–53 on the psalms as a compendium.

  59. Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 38.

  60. On these and other debates about polyphony, see esp. John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (1961; rpt., New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), esp.186–191.

  61. The Psalmes of David and Others With M. John Calvins Commentaries (London, 1571), 158. Also see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), Vol. 2, 894–896. For a useful summary of Luther’s attitudes to the psalms, see Lily B. Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 29–30.

  62. Miles Coverdale, Goostly Psalmes (London, 1539?), sig. iii–iiiv.

  63. On this anxiety, compare Patterson, “Bermudas.”

  64. Miles Coverdale, The Order that the Churche in Denmarke doth Use (London, 1550?).

  65. The Psalter or Psalmes of David (London, 1566), title page.

  66. This rubric appears repeatedly. See, e.g., the title page of The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London, 1576).

  67. On the meditative elements in the psalms, see James Limburg, “Psalms,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), Vol.5, 525, 526.

  68. Hammons, Poetic Resistance, 1–2, Chapter 3.

  69. See, e.g., the title page of The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London, 1576).

  70. Limburg, “Psalms,” 525.

  71. For a different but not incompatible interpretation of such titles, see Anne Ferry, The Title to the Poem (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 258–259.

  72. Kenneth M. Kensinger, How Real People Ought to Live: The Cashinahua of Eastern Peru (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1995), Chapter 4.

  73. That coerciveness is a central thesis of Ramie Targoff’s important revisionist study, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For Roland Greene’s argument about the interplay between “fictive” and “ritualistic” elements in psalm-singing, see his essay, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Psalms”; although he does not discuss the issue of multiple audiences, his model has many implications for it.

  74. Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises, Containing Such Direction as is Gathered out of the Holie Scriptures (London, 1603), 224.

  75. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 32–43.

  76. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 147–149.

  77. A. D. Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John (London: Methuen, 1980), esp. 1–21.

  78. John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (London, 1651), 110–111.

  79. I cite Complete Prose Works of John Milton (ed. Wolfe et al.), Vol. III, 1648–1649, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (1962). For a useful commentary on this and related passages, see Achsah Guibbory, “Charles’s Prayers, Idolatrous Images, and True Creation in Milton’s Eikonoklastes,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), esp. 286–292.

  80. Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest (London, 1650), 750.

  81. On connections between preaching and meditation, see, e.g., Walter R. Davis, “Meditation, Typology, and the Structure of John Donne’s Sermons,” in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), esp. 167–168, 183–188. The subtitles I cite occur in two books by Thomas Gataker: A Mariage Praier, or Succinct Meditations (London, 1624) and Abrahams Decease; A Meditation on Genesis 25.8 (London, 1627).

  82. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 188; because of the conditional, however, I find the relationship of the poem to mortal readers less “coercive” than Schoenfeldt does in this analysis. On how this lyric relates to its divine audience, also see Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91–96.

  83. The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941); I cite this edition throughout the chapter.

  84. For an overview of these architectural changes, see William Alexander Mc-Clung, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 46–61; Patricia Fumerton traces how the development of the banqueting house permitted increased privacy for the aristocracy (Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991]), 113–128. The broader issue of secrecy is discussed in John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961), esp. 190–192.

  85. George Wright, Hearing the Measures, Chapter 13.

  86. Wendy Wall, Imprint of Gender, 38–50, argues for that encoding, a move that not coincidentally establishes the primacy of the materialist implications of a text at the expense of other valences rather than focusing on their coexistence. As influential as it is problematical, Arthur F. M
arotti’s “‘Love is not love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” ELH 49 (1982), 396–428, makes the same move.

  87. Malcolmson, Heart-Work, 56–59.

  88. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 4 vols., trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920–1924), Vol. 3, Books VII–IX (1921), IX.ii.38–39. I replicate the italics from the translation in this edition.

  89. Christina Luckyj, “A moving Rhetoricke”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

  90. On the pairing of lute poems, see Carla Zecher, Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments, Poetry, and Art in Renaissance France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 136–138. Approaching polyphony from a different but compatible perspective, Diane Kelsey McColley relates the preservation of individual voices in polyphony to the individuation of seventeenth-century poetic speakers (Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 77–78).

  91. James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 174.

  92. Raymond Williams, “Monologue in Macbeth,” in Teaching the Text, ed. Susanne Kappeler and Norman Bryson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). The critical literature on soliloquy and the specific issue of to whom it is addressed is of course vast. In addition to the Williams essay cited here, see, e.g., Wolfgang Clemen’s emphasis on the frequency of direct address to an audience (Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. Charity Scott Stokes [London: Methuen, 1987], esp. 4–5); in contrast, James Hirsch distinguishes soliloquies addressed to the audience, spoken ones addressed to the self, and internalized ones, arguing that the first category essentially disappeared after the sixteenth century (Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies [Madison, NJ, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2003]). A transhistorical discussion appears in Ken Frieden, Genius and Monologue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); his argument in Chapter 5 about the introjection of divine or demonic interlocutors exaggerates an occasional occurrence into a norm but does indicate one way soliloquies sometimes evoke an audience (see esp. 130).