The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  53. Wall, Imprint of Gender, 93–95.

  54. Neil L. Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), Chapters 14–16.

  55. David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 133.

  56. Dubrow, “‘Uncertainties now crown themselves assured’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996), 291–305.

  57. For brief but useful comments on the problems in the term “sonnet sequence,” also see Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry, 133.

  58. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 161; Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated,” Style 22 (1988), 4. Some critics have, of course, offered an alternative version of the relationship of narrative to certainty; see, e.g., Uri Margolin, “Of What Is Past, Is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Aspectuality, Modality, and the Nature of Literary Narrative,” in Narratolo-gies: New Pespectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999).

  59. Vendler, Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 3.

  60. Dubrow, “‘Dressing old words new’?: Shakespeare’s 1609 Volume and the ‘Delian Structure,’ “ in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

  61. Colin Burrow, Introduction, in William Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95.

  62. I cite Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

  63. Anne Lake Prescott, “The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for Amoretti 67–70,” Spenser Studies 6 (1985), 33–76.

  64. See Marotti, Manuscript; Wall, Imprint of Gender.

  65. Among the many instances of this work is Charles Cathcart, “Authorship, Indebtedness, and the Children of the King’s Revels,” Studies in English Literature 45 (2005), 357–374; Cathcart reasserts the possibility of authorship within theatrical collaboration. In her recent study Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media, Diana E. Henderson develops a model of collaboration, primarily, though not exclusively, tailored to later writers and filmmakers adapting an earlier text; throughout the book she acknowledges the complex and often negative political valences of “collaboration” but also the opportunities for resistance, ambivalence, and authorial agency (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

  66. Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  67. On the theory of a “Delian tradition,” see esp. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 13–15; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 88–95; Thomas P. Roche, Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 343–344, 440–461. I challenge many assumptions in these studies in my essay “‘Dressing old words new’?”

  68. Also see the expanded discussion of this issue about Daniel in my essay, “‘Lending soft audience to my sweet design’: Shifting Roles and Shifting Readings of Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005), 26. John Roe also draws attention to Daniel’s title page, but rather than comparing different versions of it, he focuses on the contrast between the 1592 title page and its counterpart in Thorpe’s edition of Shakespeare, arguing that Daniel’s paratextual material offers an encouragement to connect the ensuing texts that is absent in the Shakespearean edition (The Poems [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 63).

  69. Love, Scribal Publication, esp. 52–54, 180–181; North, “Finis.”

  70. Stanford’s Anthology, 269–275.

  71. Love, Scribal Publication, 52–54, also notes that scribal practices encouraged continuing editing, though Love’s argument, unlike mine, focuses on not the resulting assertion of authorial agency but rather how such revisions complicate the ideal of final intention.

  72. Marotti, Manuscript, 22–23.

  73. The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne: The Holy Sonnets, ed. Paul A. Parrish et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), lx–lxxi.

  74. For a more detailed exposition of this argument, see my essay “‘And Thus Leave Off’: Reevaluating Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript, V.a.104,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 23 (2003), 273–291.

  75. A few critics anticipated my challenge to Roberts’s reading of the manuscript, although they adduced evidence different from mine. See Gavin Alexander, “Constant Works: A Framework for Reading Mary Wroth,” Sidney Newsletter and Journal 14 (1996), 5–32; Jeff Masten, “‘Shall I turne blabb?’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); Elizabeth Hanson, “Boredom and Whoredom: Reading Renaissance Women’s Sonnet Sequences,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1997), 165–191.

  76. See The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 61–65. All citations of Wroth are from this edition. Roberts also discusses V.a.104 as a unified collection in an article anticipating many arguments in her edition, “The Biographical Problem of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1 (1982), esp. 43–44.

  77. Compare Love, Scribal Publication, 53–54, on how editing made scribes feel more attached to the text; below I will make the different but complementary argument that it had a comparable and too often neglected impact on writers.

  78. On the possibility that the manuscript was shared with others, see, e.g., Michael G. Brennan, “Creating Female Authorship in the Early Seventeenth Century: Ben Jonson and Lady Mary Wroth,” in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 75, 79–81.

  79. I am indebted to Donald Rowe for valuable observations on this subject.

  80. Rose, Authors, 8; Chartier, Order of Books, 34.

  81. Throughout this chapter, all citations from Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

  82. See, e.g., Robert Kaufman, “Aura, Still,” October 99 (Winter 2002), esp. 48–49; his essay “Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001), 354–384; and my essay “The Politics of Aesthetics: Recuperating Formalism and the Country House Poem,” in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave Press, 2002). My essay is an expanded version of one that appeared in a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000) devoted to form; that issue includes a number of valuable contributions to this debate.

  CHAPTER 5: THE MYTH OF JANUS

  1. See Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), esp. 149–152. The phrase I quote appears on 149.

  2. Throughout this chapter I cite Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969).

  3. Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), esp. 19–20, 22–62.

  4. Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated,” Style 22 (1988), 1–8.

  5. On time in Wyatt’s poetry, see Jane Hedley, Power in Verse: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Renaissance Lyric (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 37–48.

  6. On the relationship of verse forms to content in Herbert, see, e.g., Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conf
lict in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 65–67; Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), in which the discussion of the verse of “The Collar” appears on 90–92; and Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 131.

  7. The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941).

  8. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 105–106.

  9. Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 219.

  10. Alternatively, this divide can be discussed in terms of a split between speaker and author; see, e.g., A. D. Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John (London: Methuen, 1980), 3.

  11. Although the destabilizing force of the conclusion is more subterranean and delimited than Barbara Leah Harman suggests, her reading offers a useful corrective to the critical move of finding comprehensive spiritual resolution in the concluding lines (Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982], 76–88).

  12. Indeed, tracing the interplay of narrative and lyric in these and many other poems can be a particularly fruitful way of teaching students the value of both learning and challenging traditional categories of literary analysis, such as generic definitions.

  13. Heather McHugh, “Moving Means, Meaning Moves: Notes on Lyric Destination,” in Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, ed. Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 208.

  14. Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, “Philoclea Parsed: Prose, Verse, and Femininity in Sidney’s Old Arcadia,” in Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, ed. Constance C. Relihan (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), 109, 115.

  15. The several essays in which Kaufman develops his argument for distinguishing the aesthetic and aestheticization include “Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000), 682–724; and “Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001), 354–384. Many other critics have also demonstrated the relevance of formal and aesthetic issues to Marxism and other forms of materialism; see, e.g., Anthony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), esp. 22–24 and Chapter 4.

  16. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Lyric Subversions of Narrative in Women’s Writing: Virginia Woolf and the Tyranny of Plot,” in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 180.

  17. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Vol. 7 (New York: Gordion Press, 1965), 115.

  18. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 345 (Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson et al., 33 vols. [1963–1991]).

  19. Robert E. Stillman, Sidney’s Poetic Justice: “The Old Arcadia,” Its Eclogues, and Renaissance Pastoral Traditions (Lewisburg, PA, and London: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, 1986); the passages cited appear on 86, 86, 88, and 88 respectively.

  20. Jay Clayton, Romantic Vision and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  21. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 163.

  22. Timothy Bahti, Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), esp. 21–23.

  23. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Contemporary Theory and Women’s Long Poems,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 15–42.

  24. See Susan Stanford Friedman, “Lyric Subversions of Narrative,” and her more persuasive modification of that argument in “Craving Stories.” See also James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996).

  25. James Phelan, “Rhetorical Ethics and Lyric Narrative: Robert Frost’s ‘Home Burial,’” Poetics Today 25 (2004), 627–651; and “Toward a Rhetoric and Ethics of Lyric Narrative: The Case of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” Frame 17 (2004), 27–43. I thank the author for making this work available to me prior to publication.

  26. Clayton, Romantic Vision.

  27. Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” trans. Bruce Mayo, Telos 20 (1974), 56–71.

  28. The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C. H. Wilkinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).

  29. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 203–207.

  30. Northrop Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 32.

  31. John Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

  32. Jonathan F. S. Post, English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1999), 19.

  33. See, e.g., A. B. Chambers, Transfigured Rites in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 203–204.

  34. Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). I cite this edition throughout this chapter

  35. Although this potentiality has been largely neglected by critics, Earl Miner has commented briefly but cogently on it in “Why Lyric?” in Earl Miner and Amiya Dev, eds. The Renewal of Song: Renovation in Lyric Conception and Practice (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000), 13, 15; his claim that in such passages that lyric may not be interrupted by narrative or drama is, however, problematical.

  36. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Random House, 1984), Chapter 2.

  37. See, e.g., two essays by Kaufman: “Negatively Capable Dialectics,” esp. 362; and “Aura, Still,” October 99 (Winter 2002), esp. 46–52.

  38. I cite The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

  39. Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” 32–33.

  40. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, eds., A New Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1907), s.v. “meditor”; David Noel Freedman et al., eds. The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1912), 525.

  41. All citations are to The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).

  42. James Schiffer, “The Sonnets as Anti-Narrative,” paper presented at conference “The New Formalism and the Lyric in History,” University of Michigan, January 2001. I thank the author for making his work available to me prior to publication.

  43. For an intriguing analogue, compare Clayton, Romantic Vision and the Novel, 148–150. In the course of analyzing how Wordsworth moves from an emphasis on consequences to a focus on human feeling, Jay Clayton examines visionary moments and images in George Eliot’s Adam Bede. He demonstrates that, inasmuch as Dinah is part of the narrative order as well as the “higher” order, she bridges the two; but Clayton, like many other critics, primarily emphasizes instead the propensity of the modes to rupture each other.

  44. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952).

  45. Herrick, Poetical Works.

  46. The text appears in Henry Stanford’s Anthology: An Edition of Cambridge University Library Manuscript Dd.5.75, ed. Steven V.
May (New York: Garland, 1988).

  47. Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

  48. David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), Chapter 6.

  49. Prince, “The Disnarrated,” 2.

  50. Uri Margolin, “Of What Is Past, Is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Aspectuality, Modality, and the Nature of Literary Narrative,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 153–159. Structuralist narratologists have also commented on the use of the future tense, though typically in passing. See, e.g., the discussion of optatives, conditions, and predictives in Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 114–116.

  51. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 12.

  52. George T. Wright, Hearing the Measures: Shakespearean and Other Inflections (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 56.

  53. I thank Jennifer Lewin for suggesting to me the parallel between this poem and “My lute, awake!”

  54. See two essays by James Phelan, “Rhetorical Ethics and Lyric Narrative” and “Toward a Rhetoric and Ethics of Lyric Narrative.”

  55. For one version of this common position, see William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 8–9.

  56. Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).