The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Another challenge that a study of a topic as broad as lyric confronts is structural: how should the argument be organized, and, in particular, does the book require or profit from a single overarching thesis? I maintain that in the instance of early modern lyric, the search for a single claim that would unite the issues explored below, like the cognate search for a single defining characteristic, would be compromised by how variously that mode was written, read, and represented in the early modern period. Indeed, the variety and lability of lyric are among my principal arguments. (Of course, whereas The Challenges of Orpheus resists distillation into a single thesis, many chapters pivot on a thesis specific to their own topic, and the study as a whole does pursue interlocking methodological and substantive arguments, such as the case about myths and tropes adumbrated below.) This book further maintains that we need to reexamine fundamental assumptions about lyric that are too often treated as presuppositions behind the critical analysis of other issues rather than as problems necessitating analysis in their own right. Hence, although I do focus in detail on numerous texts, I have organized the book in terms of the workings of lyric rather than the works of specific lyric poets: instead of scrutinizing a series of writers seriatim, I devote one chapter to each of four sites of commonplaces about lyric, that is, its audiences, its putative immediacy, its length, and its relationship to narrative.

  Another methodological argument behind The Challenges of Orpheus is that to examine lyric, we need not only to round up the usual suspects—explicit statements on it by poets of the era, passages in texts, and so on—but also to examine evidence sometimes neglected, notably the witness of trope and myth. And, as I have asserted in many other venues, we need to recognize the compatibility of studying language and form and examining the workings of culture.46 The renewed interest in form in many reaches of literary and cultural studies is one of the most promising developments of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  Such approaches generate several revisionist interpretations of the mode, crystallized by in the paradoxes that Chapter 1 enumerates and subsequently traced throughout the study. For example, the story of Orpheus proves paradigmatic of lyric in its Mobius strip of turnings and re-turnings and of gendered success and failure.47 These shifts alert us as well to the many ways in which the mode associated etymologically with versus, the Latin word whose principal denotations include “turning,” involves process and lability.48 To cite just a few cases, the positionalities of both lyric speaker and audience involve many turns; rather than impeding narrative, lyric often turns to it or turns into it. I argue also that the immediacy commonly associated with lyric participates in a complex dynamic with strategies for distancing the text and that scribal culture allows certain types of authorial agency that have been neglected. As these instances suggest, each chapter challenges some widespread assumptions clinging to its subject.

  My first chapter introduces such issues by exploring how lyric is described and defined in the early modern period; in so doing, it analyzes the agendas that so often compromise pronouncements about the mode delivered then, no less than assertions about it by critics today. “The Rhetoric of Lyric,” the title of this chapter, thus refers not only to the language used in lyric poetry but also to the language chosen by both early modern poets and commentators and our own contemporaries when talking about the workings of that mode in the English Renaissance. Such commentaries are not infrequently rhetorical in that they aim to persuade—and thus to convince their readers of positions beyond those ostensibly presented.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Rhetoric of Lyric

  Definitions, Descriptions, Disputations

  Annotated exhaustively, imitated widely, disseminated in editions that not coincidentally look very like Bibles, Francesco Petrarch’s Rime sparse is prototype and progenitor of the English early modern lyric, and, indeed, it might offer a credible model for those who attempt a transhistorical definition of that mode. But the confession of transgression that is its opening poem repeatedly transgresses characteristics commonly proposed as the norms of lyric. If this literary type represents the poet talking to himself, as numerous critics have assumed, the Canzoniere, like many English sonnet cycles, nevertheless begins on a poem to and about an audience. If the mode in question comprises an immediate outpouring of emotion, this text instead scrutinizes prior outpourings. And if a lyric is a discrete, short text, how does one explicate the threads that link the putatively individual lyrics in the Rime sparse to each other, tying them in patterns as elusive yet ineluctable as the bonds between Petrarch and Laura?

  I open my analysis of the problems of defining and describing lyric in the English Renaissance with a brief reference to an Italian text in part because it offers so apt a specimen of the dilemmas about audience, immediacy, and structure discussed seriatim in the chapters following this one. More to my purposes now, given its virtually iconic status in the early modern period, the Rime sparse provided the English poets who read and re-read it with a particularly potent and memorable instance of definitional and classificatory challenges. When Petrarch bequeaths to his English progeny a paradigm for the sonnet, he leaves to them as well a model not of clearly defined lyric characteristics but of problems in studying that mode. Petrarch’s heirs and assigns in the English Renaissance, this chapter argues, address such problems in many venues, but above all in two overlapping ones, the mythological narratives and the figurative language associated with poesy in general and lyric in particular.

  This is not to say that these or other sources reveal a widely accepted definition of lyric. Many English Renaissance writers and readers were cognizant of the category, and assays at description and definition do appear; but the period in question certainly did not have an uncontroversial formula for categorizing poems as lyric, and many commentaries are inconsistent with each other or even within themselves. Such contradictions are especially evident in the myth—or, more to the point, the conflicting myths—associated with Orpheus. The aim of this chapter is not to resolve inconsistencies by attributing to the early modern era more common ground on this subject than actually existed; on the contrary, I demonstrate below that the term “lyric” was used in a range of ways in the period. Hence I will explore what the very tensions and contradictions in question reveal about early modern lyrics and the processes of writing them and writing about them.

  The alternatives to focusing on myth and figure prove limited in more senses than one. Commentaries by Michael Drayton, George Puttenham, John Milton, and above all Philip Sidney are indubitably revealing, not least because they demonstrate some ways the term “lyric” was actually used in the early modern period, but these discussions are brief. Adducing the relative paucity of analyses like these as evidence, critics in our own period sometimes claim that the problem of discussing lyric was generally handled simply by being avoided. Not so, if one examines implicit commentaries as well as explicit ones. “In many ways the most acute poetics of the early modern lyric,” Roland Greene has argued about one version of such commentaries, “is written out in poems themselves.”1 Acute, yes, and an example of the significance of implicit observations, but not necessarily the most acute poetics. In fact, it is instead the allusions embedded in myth and trope that provide the most extensive and intriguing evidence of how the early modern period saw lyric.

  Admittedly, mining those two sources is complicated inasmuch as some such allusions involve types of verse besides lyric; and Orpheus himself, the subject of the most significant myths, wears many hats besides the beret of lyric poet. The data bases of myth and figure, however, remain invaluable for analyses of early modern lyric. At the very least, when the usages in question apply to other types of poetry as well as lyric, they remain resonant as descriptions, if not as definitions. Moreover, often, especially in the case of gendered anxieties, other cultural associations with lyric activate or intensify the application of these words to that mode in particular.

  This cha
pter, then, develops two closely related lines of argument. The first is methodological: it is through the indirections of metaphoric language and of mythological narrative that readers can best understand the directions, in the several senses of the word, of early modern discussions of lyric. It is not surprising that a culture that might well join Chaucer in claiming Ovid as its “owne auctor” thinks about lyric, like so much, through myth. No less surprising, though less often recognized and analyzed, is the fact that an age that delights in troping discusses genre and so many other issues through figuration.

  And second, when one approaches early modern lyric from these and other perspectives, certain interrelated characteristics and practices clearly emerge. To begin with, one repeatedly encounters texts that represent lyric paradoxically and writers and commentators who approach it divisively. Some of these paradoxes are predictable, but others challenge the conventional wisdom about the form. In many texts from the English Renaissance, this chapter demonstrates, lyric is variously and at times simultaneously represented as source and symptom of disease and as medicinal; as masculine, feminine, and cross-dressed; as public, private, and the denizen of territories that cannot readily be classified as either. Often associated with the insubstantial and ephemeral, lyric is also seen as a material object; often considered static, it is also repeatedly described as both an embodiment of motion and an incitement to it; often read in terms of the isolation of both poet and poem, it is also represented as communal and public. Conceptions of lyric as an artisanal material product coexist with representations of it as the result of Platonic furor. Whereas lyric delights in process, typically expressed in terms of turning and twisting, it may culminate in an apparently stable kernel of truth, on occasion both expressed in and troped by a couplet. Especially central, however, are two paradoxes in particular: early modern lyric is represented as the site of both extraordinary power and helpless passivity, and as the source of both glorious achievements, especially in military and spiritual spheres, and of perilously seductive threats.

  More significant than the mere presence of these paradoxes and outright contradictions, however, is their impact on the practices of reading, writing, and representing early modern lyric. They help to explain responses that range from intense guilt to ambivalence to celebration. To express and negotiate such divergent responses, I argue, early modern texts rely on numerous strategies, traced in this chapter and throughout The Challenges of Orpheus. For example, Renaissance writers insistently distinguish Good Lyric and Evil Lyric; firm distinctions between a putatively beneficent form of lyric and its Othered twin are often posited and deployed, though sometimes subsequently undermined, in attempts to finesse apparent contradictions. Perhaps one might initially be tempted to read this divide between two versions of the mode not as a fraught and strategic response to unresolved ambivalences but rather as a dispassionate and judicious description of differences inherent in lyric. But the examples from musicology adduced below, demonstrating as they do the breakdown of such differences, encourage one to explore the more complex functions the putative distinction in fact serves. And similarly, as I will demonstrate throughout this study, even the apparently admirable versions of lyric, religious poetry and public poems of praise, are on many occasions viewed suspiciously by their writers and readers, thus suggesting that contrasts between two forms of lyric often respond not to objective classificatory data but rather to anxieties about the mode, not least the fear that its versions cannot in fact be clearly distinguished.2

  Tensions about lyric encourage many other strategies as well. At times the mode operates reactively and dialogically, a putative or realized modal characteristic generating the assertion of its antithesis. For example, if lyric blocks normative sexualities, as I will suggest it can also impel them, in part in response to previous or potential transgressions; fears that this mode is deviant in these and many other ways lead Sir Philip Sidney and many others to insist on its connections to masculinity. Early modern lyric also responds to—and intensifies—the contradictions associated with it by gendering and re-gendering texts, their authors, and their readers; those re-genderings are among the many respects in which the mode involves process and movement.

  In short, this chapter argues that in early modern England lyric is represented as Dr. Jekyll and Mr.—or, more often and more to the point, Ms.—Hyde. The valences of the form, linked to turning themselves, turn and twist paradoxically and on occasion collide, and the shifts between success and failure and power and impotency are especially telling. Many strategies, such as the imputed distinction between types of lyric and the genderings of that mode, variously and sometimes simultaneously resolve and intensify these ontological skirmishes and even battles. Examining the myths and figures through which the early modern period knows and makes known lyric can demonstrate why these are the primary arenas in which the struggles about its workings are waged and in which the treaties that sometimes ensue are signed.

  The varied representations of lyric emerge in the differences between one myth and another and in the diverse versions a given myth may assume; distinctions connected with its potency and its morality are strikingly recurrent. Often those distinctions are expressed through stories that sedulously distinguish good and bad alter egos of the lyric poet, and often, too, that contrast is expressed through contrasting musical instruments. But if studying these myths thus supports and extends the preliminary answers about defining and describing lyric adumbrated above, such an analysis also insistently poses another question. Although multiple narratives involve or gesture towards lyric poetry, Orpheus clearly has a much better press agent than either Arion or Amphion. The obvious explanations for the striking popularity of this tale, such as the prominence of Orpheus in the Metamorphoses and in medieval sources, are only part of the story. Why, then, does this particular legend become so popular a repository and source of conceptions of lyric—and of so much else—in early modern England? The answers can also explicate the attraction of cognate myths such as that of the sirens.

  Lyric can be associated with rocks and stones (as discussed later in this chapter), and it is associated as well with one of the principal legendary figure who could move them, thus again recalling the linkage between lyric and motion. The tale of Orpheus is alive and well in our own culture: witness the modern poems referring to him by John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Edward Hirsch, Muriel Rukeyser, Mark Strand and many others.3 Witness, too, the decision of the upscale S. T. Dupont company to entitle a group of pens “the Orphéo Collection,” thus presumably attempting to sell their writing instruments by connecting them with not only the singer’s liquid words but also his putative power. An advertisement tellingly heralds these pens as “a new generation of writing instruments.” Much as French architecture veers back to neoclassicism despite and even during its flirtation with Art Nouveau, so in this instance distinction is pursued by borrowing status from a classical past even while celebrating that new generation.

  In the early modern period, no mythological link is more firm and pervasive than the one between poetry and Orpheus, which encompasses but is not exclusive to lyric; he appears prominently at the beginning of Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” Shakespeare refers to him by name four times, Milton alludes to him in “Lycidas,” while “L’Allegro” culminates on a description of a song that, the reader is told, would move even Orpheus. These better-known allusions coexist with a host of others, whether they be overt, as in Herrick’s poem “Orpheus,” Jonson’s Masque of Augurs, and numerous emblems, or, alternatively, subterranean, as in the putative mention in the April eclogue posited by Spenser’s editors.4 On the one hand, these discussions share many preoccupations with those by later writers (for example, the work of our contemporary poet Edward Hirsch, like some early modern examinations of the myth, draws attention to Orpheus’s same-sex relationships); on the other hand, Renaissance poets are, predictably, more preoccupied with the spiritual dimensions of the myth than many of their successo
rs.

  The early modern preoccupation with Orpheus is notoriously difficult to explicate, for a range of narratives, often as contradictory or paradoxical as lyric itself, swirl around this figure.5 The Renaissance inherited from classical mythology and iconography, as well as from extensive medieval commentaries, a series of discordant legends, some the product of evolution and some participants in an uneasy coexistence. The paternity of the keynote speaker of Renaissance lyric is contested; in versions that claim he is the son of the wine god, the associations of abandonment and orgiastic festivity are stressed, while as the son of Apollo he is instead sired by rationality. This tension recurs in many aspects of his legends. Orpheus is variously portrayed as Apollonian and Dionysiac, as the exemplar of rationality and of its opposite, and, indeed, in some versions he abandons his earlier role as devotee of Bacchus to join the cult of Apollo. These divergences generate conflicting glosses on his relationship to Eurydice: she is variously presented as his concupiscent side, drawing him to Hell, and as the Good that he cannot achieve. In the analysis by William of Conches, for example, Orpheus represents wisdom and eloquence and Eurydice the concupiscence that tempts him. The explanations for his death similarly vary from version to version, with some claiming that he is being punished for revealing the secrets of the gods, others that Venus incited those who killed him, while Hellenic accounts often assert that those women were angry because he was not interested in any females after Eurydice died. A more thorough survey of mythological versions like these might well have encouraged the executives of S. T. Dupont to think twice.