The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Uri Margolin’s recent discussions of prospective narrative, one stage in his provocative and often convincing attempts to replace structuralist models of narrative with newer conceptions, could also usefully gloss anticipatory amalgams. My argument differs from his in enough respects, however, to justify, even mandate, a separate category. Above all, many texts about the future should not merely be classified as narrative but rather should be seen as modal hybrids.50 For example, as the selections from Wyatt and Herbert discussed above suggest, this type of poem obviously involves a story of events, but much of the emphasis is on the mind experiencing them. Because of the emotions and the situations generating them, such poems are generally electrified by the emotive intensity often, though not unproblematically, associated with lyric. And they straddle temporalities.

  How, then, do anticipatory amalgams function in practice? Whereas they can serve many purposes, as the instances from Wyatt and Herbert suggest, they often grant power and authority to those whose purchase on those attributes is limited or blocked. If, as Michael Riffaterre notes in passing about a related phenomenon, the use of conditionals directs one’s attention to the speaker’s voice, one might add that our anticipatory amalgams as it were magnify that voice.51 The ability to foresee the future is indeed a power, though, as Cassandra learns to her cost, it can be intertwined with the tragic lack of the ability to forestall the events or even to be believed. In many instances, however, the direct speech act of threatening or promising or foreseeing embeds an indirect speech act of commanding; Wyatt’s stanza, for example, has as its subtext, “Yield to me.”

  Through anticipatory amalgams, lyric poems can offer a type of power analogous to that of the signature verbal tense of lyric, the so-called lyric present. Associating the “sense of enchantment” of lyric with the lyric present, George T. Wright observes of its special type of present tense: “Deliberately bypassing all the modifiers that normal speech requires, the lyric present appears to offer as actual, conditions that we normally accept only as possible, special, figurative, provisional.”52 In other words, the approach to narrativity in many anticipatory amalgams tropes their approach to social interaction: they project an event from mental interiority onto an external space in the future, much as they aim to bring to pass certain types of desired behavior.

  Donne’s “Apparition,” a poem similar in many respects to our stanza from Wyatt, opens on the speaker’s apparent powerlessness: literalizing Petrarchan metaphor, as Donne so often does, his speaker assumes he has been killed by his unresponsive mistress.53 In so doing, he establishes as a literal fact in the future an event metaphorically occurring in the present, her destruction of him, much as he projects onto the future a destructive fantasy of revenge currently in his own mind. Anticipatory amalgams, like lyric, are associated primarily with one temporality but often allude to others. As this narrative, a ghost of future events, progresses, the speaker’s ghost attains power over the lady in the events that purportedly will occur in the future—an attempt to regain the power compromised if not lost by her scorn in the present.

  The instance from Donne suggests that these amalgams are revealing in their effects not only on the speaker but also on the diegetic listener. Emphasizing the communicative processes of ethics, James Phelan’s analyses of twentieth-century lyric narratives can gloss that impact on the audience.54 Although, as Chapter 2 implies, his endorsement of the commonplace assumption of voiceability is problematical, his focus on interchange and communicative purposes draws attention to further functions of our anticipatory amalgams, and his systems of classification can be usefully deployed. For the story in question often has a rhetorical agenda more pronounced than that of the rest of the poem; in particular, borrowing Phelan’s categories, we may observe that the purpose of these inserted narratives is frequently to deliver a threat in the hope that the listener will change, will, as it were, write or allow to be written an alternative story. In other words, when one again adduces Phelan’s formulations, it is clear that these speech acts, unlike normative versions of narrativity, tell someone not that something has happened but that it will happen; similarly, in so doing, rather than demonstrating the change that he and many others associate with narrative, they attempt to make that shift occur. Or, to put it in a way that returns to the agency of the speaker, they project what purportedly will happen as a way of willing something else to happen.

  In short, while remembering the dangers of painting with Kline’s broad strokes, one can now locate the anticipatory amalgam in relation to other modes. If narrative generally, though of course not always, involves a story that is set in the past (which differs of course from the time of discourse) and located in a mimesis of physical space (“it happened in this place”) and lyric is generally the mode that focuses on the lyric present or overlapping time schemes and a mimesis of mental space (“it is happening in my mind”), the hybrids in question are typically optatives located both in the mind in the present and in a physical space that may exist in the future. They are thus an extreme but revealing case of the admixtures of lyric and narrative exemplified by our two opening texts—and of an interaction between them very different from a winner-take-all contest.

  As noted above, the patterns traced thus far occur transhistorically: although my examples have been culled from early modern texts, analogues from other periods can readily be found. Variously characteristic of and specific to the early modern period, however, are the ways its literary heritage, its generic template, and its conditions of production shape the relationship between lyric and narrative, and on those effects the rest of this chapter concentrates. This section offers an overview of how all those factors inflect the modal interplay in question; each of the succeeding two sections focuses on an instance in which lyric interacts with another member of the generic template: the lyrics that appear within prose romances and the songs in Shakespeare’s plays.

  To begin with, the era had many influential models for locating a lyric poem within a narrative situation, notably the prose links in Dante’s Vita nuova, the ones Thomas Wyatt borrows for his version of the penitential psalms, the head-notes and margin notes of a number of psalms, and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Arcadia. Theatrical practices also alerted early modern lyric poets and their readers to the potentialities for combining lyric and narrative, and especially to the cooperative interactions that this chapter reactively emphasizes. Devoted theater-goers, the Londoners in an early modern reading audience would have been especially conscious of the ways lyric heightening can lead to action. Songs in plays, such as the hunting song in Act IV of As You Like It, often work in that manner. And the praxis of the Senecan monologue is frequently reflection that culminates in a decision and its consequences. Indeed, not only the Senecan monologue but also the many other types of dramatic soliloquies, discussed in Chapter 2, offer enlightening counterparts and perhaps inspirations for the sort of lyric whose intensification generates a story or the action associated with narrativity or both. In Act II, scene ii of Hamlet, for example, the preceding meditations clearly lead to the action that is a plot for further action, and the speech culminates on “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (II.ii.604–605).

  The social and cultural circumstances under which lyrics were produced activated interest in such models and provided many opportunities to deploy them. Whereas critics studying periods other than the Renaissance often contrast the occasional genesis of Greek lyrics, which were typically written for particular situations like a military triumph, with the subsequent separation of the mode from particular events,55 numerous early modern lyrics were in fact composed at least in part for and in relation to occasions and situations, which might appear within the resulting poem as a narrative episode. The imperatives of a patronage culture encouraged this type of writing: weddings, funerals, and visits to country houses all generated poems that can be classified as lyric according to many definitions but include stories
about the events in question. In the decades towards the end of the period being studied, tumultuous political events similarly encouraged an amalgam of narratives about them and lyric reflections on them; Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and Milton’s sonnets “To the Lord General Cromwell, May 1652” and “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” are a few examples from among many. In addition, as observed in previous chapters, demonstrated by Catherine Bates, Ilona Bell, and others, and exemplified by Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, such texts could be deployed as one stage in the events of a courtship. Thus they offer another instance of a narrative that is very relevant to but not necessarily fully expressed within the diegetic world of the text.56 Prudence warns that Gascoigne and Whythorne no doubt fictionalized events, a hypothesis supported in the former case by the differences between Gascoigne’s versions of his text, but we can also safely assume that lovers and would-be lovers exchanged poems in the ways those two writers chronicle. Indeed, given how many readers apparently also turned out poems themselves, they may well have experienced at first hand the exchange of lyrics as an incident in an ongoing relationship.

  The English Renaissance also favored a number of genres that encourage the interplay of lyric and narrative elements, with an interest in that interplay no doubt contributing to the popularity of the literary forms in question, and vice versa. These types often involve not a simple triumph of one mode over the other but rather a continuing dialogue between them or overlapping of them or both. On occasion, too, they cast that dialogue in a form that plays up lyric elements even within narrative passages, thus creating further overlapping.

  First of all, sonnets and sonnet cycles, as we have seen, evidently permit the interplay of lyric and narrative: storytelling is not in fact very important in some cycles, as Chapter 4 indicated, but certain foundational stories (the first sight of the beloved, some incident showing her disdain, and so on) do recur, whether as the overt focus of a poem or as a subtext. Another popular genre, the psalm, often compromises the distinction between the two modes in question by emphasizing the events that lie behind and can be impelled by reflection: thus again the psalms provide a model for even secular lyric. Many of them, including ones that appear to meditate on a given event, were read as episodes in biblical stories, or even, as Mary Ann Radzinowicz has suggested, as points in a continuing journey, a metaphor that obviously draws on the linearity of narrative.57 This interpretation is fostered by paratextual material; Henry Ainsworth’s Annotations Upon the Book of Psalmes, published in 1617, precedes its version of the texts with a summary of David’s life that implicitly provides stories for many of the ensuing poems, while many other editions include headnotes or annotations referring to specific events, such as a particular battle.58 Commentaries like these establish the poem at hand as a product of and participant in narrative, not an interruption to or rival of it.

  When early modern lyrics of these types do include narrative, however, they often favor a truncated version of it that veers back towards lyric, that is, a story that focuses on two points, then and now, and plays down or omits entirely the intermediary stage of further complications traced by many narratologists. Robert Scholes, for example, posits the triad of situation/transformation/situation.59 The effect of a story or an adumbrated story that omits the middle is to pull us back and forth between the emphasis on change and the events that create it, often associated with narrative, and a focus on a moment and on reactions to the changed state it involves, often characteristics of lyric. That then/now structure is central to the Petrarchan tradition, as Roland Greene has incisively shown:60 many poems contrast the period before the poet saw Laura and the interval after that cataclysmic event, or her life and her death, and so on. Refining and expanding Greene’s analysis, one might add that if, as Claudine Raynaud has observed in her analyses of Donne, seduction clearly demarcates before and after, unfilled desire anticipates but does not achieve that demarcation, so the temporality of the static present is played against a kind of conditional or optative then/now.61 And much as the structure of pastoral often turns on the contrast between the daytime of the poem and the night in which it ends, so too may its temporal underpinning also involve this sort of binary contrast—witness the garden of Eden versus the fallen garden, the experience or illusion of happy love versus its loss, the unviolated landscape versus its invasion.

  The separation between lyric and narrative is further confounded in many texts of the period by poets’ predilection for writing about love and loss, subject matter that encourages such erosions of modal classification, though that predilection obviously is not unique to this era. As the lyric by Wyatt on which this chapter opened and many other love poems demonstrate, when an event is repeated often enough in the mind, it becomes at once a narrative about past events and a moment in the lyric present. Notice that in another meditation on lost love, “They Flee From Me,” he does not cast the first line as “The deer used to seek me and take bread from my hands; then they stopped doing so; now they are fleeing from me” but rather as “They fle from me that sometyme did me seke” (1). Witness a temporal inversion of the pattern in Donne’s “Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,” which is on the cusp (that edgy territory Donne’s work so often occupies) between a present of preparing for death and that future event.

  Although I have thus far been looking at literary forms that flourished for much or all of the period in question, historicizing lyric, as this study has repeatedly insisted, involves inflecting generalizations about the early modern period with attention to its subdivisions. The masques that flourished at the end of the sixteenth and first part of the seventeenth centuries offered, at least for their relatively small audience, additional instances of and inspirations for modal interplay. These texts encouraged a tendency to meld lyric and narrative modes, a process that, as we have seen, is one of the many ways they can interact. And masques provided prototypical instances of lyric and narrative as cooperating partners, not rivals; notably, they offered examples of lyric’s encouraging, not impeding, linear events. The masque as a whole, of course, typically juxtaposes narrative, especially the expository passages on which these texts so frequently begin, and the lyric commentary on it; and often, as in the instances from prose romances to which I will turn shortly, a song leads to narrative action. For example, at the end of Jonson’s Irish Masque, it is partly in response to a song that the masquers drop their mantles, a garment stereotypically associated with the Irish. Similarly, in George Chapman’s Memorable Masque the earth obediently opens in response to a song that commands that action. Finally, the ability of lyric to engender action is nowhere better demonstrated than in the charms that are so prevalent in masques.

  If writers and readers in the early modern period were intrigued by the relationship between narrative and lyric, so too were the characters in romances. In As You Like It, only Orlando puts stiletto to bark; but in its source, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, Montanus also cannot resist carving poems on trees, a method of transmission favored by many characters in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania as well. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, even Basilius delivers poems and even Mopsa is the subject, or rather the target, of a parodic love lyric. Poems of many types, but especially lyrics, variously festoon, advance, and complicate many of the prose romances of the early modern period. Their versions of the relationship of narrative and lyric deserve attention in part because romances were so popular in the period and in part because examining them in detail substantiates and extends analyses elsewhere in this study while also opening some new avenues.

  Thus the lyrics in these texts offer useful examples of the labile subject positions whose centrality to early modern lyric I emphasize elsewhere in this book. Characters are often represented as animators singing someone else’s song, as when, near the opening of Book I of Bartholomew Young’s translation of Montemayor’s Diana, Syrenus performs for Sylvanus a song he had heard Sylvanus himself sing, thus ex
emplifying the shifts between the status of poet and audience that are so common to the period.62 In Book II of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, the title character renders a song that, as she explains to her brother and Pamphilia, she and the shepherdess Liana had overheard. Urania glosses it in terms that recall the complexities of address discussed in my chapter on lyric audiences: “the song was this, speaking as if shee had been by him, and the wordes directed to her, as his thoughts were.”63 Yet another way the prose romances substantiate my earlier analyses is by gesturing towards early modern conditions of production; although one may have some doubts about how often verse was written in sand or left on altarlike stones, such episodes draw attention to how varied the actual means of production and distribution were. Elsewhere these romances more precisely replicate activities in the more quotidian worlds of their readers; when Rosader and Rosalynd sing a madrigal together, they are miming actual courtly behavior, and in Book II of the Urania, when Pamphilia adds another stanza to a poem she has previously carved on an ash tree, she conveniently buttresses my point that scribal culture often permitted continuing control over one’s text.

  More to my purposes now, the lyrics in romances also offer intriguing examples of the relationship of lyric and narrative; in particular, they indicate how often and how variously the two modes cooperate to advance the story rather than competing. Although thus far I have primarily traced that pattern in terms of lyric elements within a particular text, its analogue, common in prose romances, is how the performance of a lyric—instrumental in more senses than one—influences the rest of the plot. Most obviously, in Book II of Diana, Syranus recognizes Selvagia by hearing her voice as she sings; symmetrically, he then performs a song that leads Selvagia to approach him. In the sixth book, Diana, Sylvanus, and Selvagia recognize Syrenus in the same way. In terms of the romance tradition, such incidents indicate that one way lyric can contribute to the plot is by effecting versions of anagnorisis. But such episodes also carry with them a larger implication for early modern culture: singing must be seen as a means of transmission connected to but distinct from print and scribal replication of a text.