The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  This chapter explores the forms these issues about the dimensions of lyric assume in regard to early modern poetry in particular. It approaches the putatively characteristic brevity of the mode in terms neither of the cohesiveness of a well-wrought urn nor of the shards into which a generation of iconoclastic critics have transformed that urn but rather of the potentialities of a series of units, notably the stanza. The precept that the size of an early modern lyric should be interpreted in relation to its malleability is my underlying presupposition but not my principal thesis: the changeable and permeable dimensions of lyric in the English Renaissance have been so thoroughly demonstrated that they require only a brief overview, not lengthy documentation, here. Nor is intervening in contemporary debates about such issues as the impact of print on changing conceptions of authorship the primary agenda of this chapter—though I do engage briefly with those questions—if only because an adequate discussion of them would have required extensive commentary on more than one genre and more than one historical period. Rather, I explore two consequences of malleable size, one related to the units that comprise a given lyric and the other to its role within larger units: I argue that stanzas, as well as other devices, provide more fixity than studies of lyric often have claimed and that groupings of poems, as well as other techniques, allow a more powerful assertion of authorship than students of early modern lyric have recognized. Clearly, these two issues are potentially connected: the fixity of stanzas may on occasion contribute to authorial agency and the combining of poems may build fixity, though, as studying the interventions of printers and examining Lady Mary Wroth’s poems will demonstrate, these connections are by no means inevitable.

  Because of the contemporary interest in conditions of production and their impact on authorship, questions about the size and structure of lyric have hardly been neglected, and much of the resulting criticism is at least sound and at its best powerful. Many recent critical statements about the English Renaissance have rightly emphasized certain consequences of the malleable dimensions and structure of its lyric poems and their relationship to adjoining texts. That scribal and printing practices can shape interpretation has been demonstrated with particular acuity by one of the most influential students of the scribal and print cultures, Harold Love: “Clearly a Pindaric ode on the bible means one thing read as part of a collection of godly verse and quite another wedged between two segments of ‘Seigneur Dildoe’: equally clearly it would not be within all communities of readers that such a juxtaposition would have been possible.”3 Tracing the malleability of specifically scribal production, Arthur F. Marotti coined the apt term “social textuality.”4 Numerous examples support his influential analyses.

  Yet two common presuppositions, widespread though not universal, about the fluid size and form of early modern lyric are more dubious. First, many critics are prone to stress the instability resulting from its changeable size and structure. Fair enough. But, much as Chapter 3 maintains that, while seconding the conventional wisdom about the impression of immediacy created by lyric, one should look as well at its techniques for suggesting distance, so here I emphasize that the fluidity of lyric variously coexists and interacts with important techniques for creating stability in size and structure. As with the relationship between lyric and narrative elements, this interaction sometimes takes the form of a victory for one side or the other, sometimes of a continuing struggle, and sometimes of coexistence. My aim is not to replace an exaggerated emphasis on the protean and malleable with an equally hyperbolic model of solidity, but rather again to right some balances. Analysts of early modern texts need to devote more attention to strategies for countering instability other than that widely discussed event, the advent of print; in particular we need to look more closely at one such strategy that has been largely overlooked, the unit of the stanza itself.

  One reason the potentialities of the stanza have not received the attention they deserve is the continuing impact of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which traces the development of fixity, as well as a wide range of other changes, to print.5 Subsequent scholars have, however, challenged her on both the sources and the workings of fixity, a concept that itself paradoxically risks slipperiness when deployed in so many different ways; asserting that “fixity is in the eye of the beholder,” Adrian Johns, for example, argues that it, like other characteristics Eisenstein and her heirs and assigns attribute to print, in fact has other sources, such as perceptions of reliability.6 This chapter suggests that stanzas themselves can provide (and on occasion, though less frequently, undercut) an important and often overlooked version of fixity, one that stems from a visual impact that is in the eye of the beholder in a sense more literal than Johns’s, as well as from other sources. My first main argument, then, involves a reconsideration of how the indubitably protean size and structure of early modern lyrics relates to their putative fragmentation.

  Second, students of early modern literature and culture also need to rethink the relationship of the size of a lyric to authorial agency. Positing the stability of print as a precondition for authorship, certain discussions associate malleability with a widespread lack of any significant agency and control or transfer the possibility of agency from author to reader, printer, and publisher. This book is hardly the first study to challenge such readings; to choose one example among many, Roger Chartier famously traces many conditions contributing to authorship, including some present in the Middle Ages, even while also acknowledging the impact of print.7 Nonetheless, the linkage between the malleability of lyric and the absence of authorship is still repeated in discussions of the mode, and it remains alive and well for a number of reasons. The dubious assumption that a lack of fixity in the sense of a stable, incorruptible text necessarily issues in a lack of authorship, in several significant senses of that concept, has been buttressed by a number of other critical predilections. Although rebutted in some influential recent collections, the widespread demonizing of the aesthetic has recently discouraged analysis of how aesthetic challenges and triumphs can create an important sense of ownership.8 Also contributing to contemporary statements about authorial agency in lyrics is a model relevant to my discussion of lyric and narrative as well: that is, a winner-take-all, either/or system which assumes that the readers and the producers of the material text co-opt the role of author rather than coexisting as rivals or coauthors or even cooperating with the poet. “In a system of manuscript circulation of literature, those into whose hands texts came could, in a real sense, ‘own’ them,” one study observes; another adds that “the dedicatee (as well as the subject) can own or seem to originate the work.”9 Yet another reason many early modern poets are not seen as authors is that some recent studies have redefined the concept in question to focus on the text as commodity and authorship as proprietorship, a model that does not appear readily to fit the alienable texts of the period. In doing this, Joseph Loewenstein relates conceptions of authorship to how books were sold, especially the development of monopolies, and Mark Rose emphasizes the significance of copyright.10

  For these and other reasons, then, scribal culture still is often discussed in terms of the severe curtailment or virtual absence of authorial agency. (“The manuscript system was far less author-centered than print culture and not at all interested in correcting, perfecting, or fixing texts in authorially sanctioned forms,” as Marotti puts it in another study, tellingly ascribing agency himself to the “system” rather than any of its participants.)11 Print, in contrast, is seen in many quarters to enable and encourage authorship; but critics often interpret conceptions of the author in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century as at best rudimentary anticipations of our own category, whether because they see the impact of print as gradual or because they believe that factors that developed later contribute significantly as well.

  Although these assumptions are in certain respects justified, a blanket application of them has too often led studies of early mo
dern lyric astray. Admittedly, my discussion of that apparent breeding ground of subjectivity the sonnet will demonstrate that its authors’ agency in relation to the poems was as various and indeed in many instances delimited as the lovers’ control over their ladies. In the sonnet and many other genres, one reason writers so often glorified their role as second makers, as Sidney so memorably does in his Apology for Poetry, is their uneasy awareness that third and fourth makers were just around the corner. Numerous studies have shown that both humanist doctrine and the material conditions of production enabled, even encouraged, readers to excerpt and redeploy a section of a lyric. The circulation of manuscripts and the popularity of commonplace books further encouraged those processes. And because so many readers in the period were also occasional poets, their own breaking apart and recombining of sections of poems surely alerted them to the structural fluidity of the texts they read.

  Yet at the same time reading early modern lyrics drives one to reconsider a number of widespread presuppositions about the relationship of the malleability of their size and structure to authorship, and on this issue, too, my agenda is largely revisionist. Authors, I will demonstrate, reassert agency, even, or in some instances especially, in scribal dissemination, notably through the process of grouping their texts. That such agency is sometimes circumscribed from the perspectives traced here is not to say that it is insignificant: many instances that contemporary paradigms might tempt us to dismiss as further cases of an author virtually absent or silenced by the power of readers and publishers can better be seen in terms of an interaction among these agents. The second- and third-generation feminist work that, while still acknowledging cultural constraints on the female voice, questions earlier paradigms about the putative silencing of women would be a useful model for revisionist work on the putative silencing of the author for much of the early modern period. The malleability of texts is counterbalanced in certain important respects; so too is the curtailment of authorial control over the size and shape of lyric.

  Authorial agency, however limited, on occasion has important consequences for the aesthetic workings of the text and the development of authorial subjectivity. The malleable may become modular, the protean plastic: the very alterability of early modern poetry carries with it opportunities for semantic exploration and artistic impact that transform chaotic malleability into controlled modularity—that is, into a skillful deployment of subdivisions and other units. In particular, as I will demonstrate, in both theory and practice poets often deploy stanzas to create an impression of a stable structure. Moreover, the plasticity of texts allows not only the intervention of readers, printers, and publishers but also the continuing engagement of writers with their work, a process that contributes to a sense of power and ownership.

  In short, this chapter supports and extends a widespread consensus about the fluid size and architectonics of early modern lyric; but in focusing on stanzas and on groupings of texts it challenges two associated corollaries of fluidity: the downplaying of important structural devices and the denial or downplaying of authorial agency when it interacts with or supersedes other possible masters of the text. This is a fruitful moment to examine such questions because of their implications, though often tangential, for a field currently very much in flux, the study of the conditions of production. Earlier contrasts between scribal and print culture have been challenged by many recent studies stressing their coexistence.12 Earlier assertions about the fixity of print in contrast to the fluidity of manuscripts have been questioned through a more sophisticated interpretation of those media and, in the instance of David Kastan’s work in particular, of their relationship to electronic heirs and assigns.13 As noted above, earlier histories of the chronology of authorship have been challenged, with certain medievalists ascribing that concept to their own era.14 Despite the powerful achievements of such projects, however, the malleability of the text is still stressed far more than the potentialities for containing that flux, and in many circles the widespread commitment to linking authorship to the advancing impact of capitalism has preserved some longstanding and dubious assumptions, especially about the virtual erasure of the author for much of the sixteenth and even the early seventeenth century.

  In exploring its dual interlocking challenges to how the size and structure of the early modern lyric are often read, this chapter focuses in particular on two arenas, stanzas and groupings of poems. But because the patterns found in these two elements of structure recur in so many other venues in early modern lyric poetry, a short overview of malleable size and its implications will provide the best introduction to stanzas and clusters of texts. Admittedly, in many cases the text has no close affiliations; in many others the reader is aware of it as a separate entity engaged in a dance with another clearly separate text, distinct though intimate partners who sometimes press against each other but may at other points whirl apart: if we cannot tell the dancer from the dance, we can still tell one dancer from another. Thus, for all the connections between Samuel Daniel’s sonnets to Delia and his “Complaint of Rosamond,” most other critics would challenge reading them as a single text.15 Influenced by Pietro Aretino, Sir Thomas Wyatt forges links among the psalms he translates, yet the poems are still distinct. But, as I suggested above, even in these instances of separable but closely related poems, the interplay of texts within larger units may be no less important to their workings than the brevity that is stereotypically associated with the genre. In any event, these examples of poems that are closely related yet readily separable occupy a point on a spectrum that includes instances where the distinction between texts may blur until seeing them as fully individuated separate poems becomes trickier. This slipperiness is very common in the early modern period, in part because of a delight in rhetorical figures and other poetic practices that build links, a vogue for genres that encourage them, and a reliance on conditions of production that facilitate them. To return to Daniel, when he connects individual sonnets with concatenatio, in what senses if any is their status as single poems compromised?

  Because manuscript circulation made it especially easy to combine and recombine texts, such questions recur repeatedly concerning scribal versions. Appearing in the collection Liber Lilliati and a number of other manuscripts are a riddle attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh and its answer, attributed to Henry Noel; are these one poem or two or a hybrid that calls into question those very categories? The riddles play on the names of these two authors, thus semantically introducing the concern with identity that is involved in their pairing.16 Other types of answer poems raise similar problems. Ashmole 1486, as Marcy North points out, in effect establishes Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd to his Love” and Ralegh’s reply as a single poem: Simon Forman places the word “finis” only at the end of the second poem, not the first as he does with other lyrics.17 Similarly, whereas one manuscript omits the “finis” between Marlowe’s lyric and Ralegh’s rejoinder, that fascinating collection the Liber Lilliati does not.18 In another manuscript, apparently compiled by Henry Stanford, a series of sonnets its editor attributes to Stanford himself is linked through the repetition of the same opening words; given the many other similarities among these texts, they appear to be a cycle of sonnets more closely connected than such poems usually were, and in fact they read almost like stanzas of the same poem.19

  Whereas many of the examples I have just cited involve a stable if complicated relationship, one of the multiple ways lyric is associated with process is the lability of its units, which, as numerous recent critics have demonstrated, was encouraged by both scribal and print practices. The same lyric may enlarge or contract under different circumstances; among its characteristic turns are moving towards and away from other poems. Sir Philip Sidney’s “Fourth Song” is an intrinsic part of Astrophil and Stella in important respects, yet it appears as a separate poem at the beginning of England’s Helicon, whose compilers were evidently attempting to take advantage of the cultural capital associated with its author
; on another level, however, the title “The Sheepheard to his Chosen Nimph” encourages the reader to relate the lyric to other pastoral poems in the same volume. Also witness Sidney’s “Eighth Song” (“In a grove most rich of shade”), which is printed with a musical setting—and without the seven stanzas in which Stella responds to her lover’s entreaties—in Robert Dowland’s Musicall Banquet. Again, the conditions of production often render structure even more fluid, with manuscripts (and on occasions printed books, a point to which I will recur) combining what had previously been separate texts or truncating what had been an apparent whole. To return to the manuscript of Liber Lilliati, it also includes, as its eighty-fifth entry, three stanzas of a poem that first appeared in John Dowland’s Second Booke of Songs or Ayres, conjoined to a fourth sixain initially published in George Peele’s Polyhymnia; in it may also be found a poem by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, that is present in no fewer than thirty-one copies made during the English Renaissance, some boasting fourteen stanzas and some fifteen.20

  If size and structure are amorphous, the agents controlling them are multifarious and often ambiguous as well. A given eclogue might be circulated with a few related instances of that genre by its author, then juxtaposed with a different group of sonnets in a collection he published, then excerpted by someone else for an anthology, then copied in conjunction with a different sonnet in someone’s manuscript or commonplace book, then perhaps harvested for a nugget of epigrammatic wisdom that would be written down with one or more similar observations, and so on. The interaction—and often the tension—between linkages flagged by the author and those created or undercut by other agents is not the least source of the fluid structures we are tracing and of reactions against them as well.