Abstract
Although the articulation of royal subject positions is explored here, this is not primarily a book about Renaissance monarchy or power. It is, rather, about ‘d’amor penseri, atti et parole’; in Petrarch’s phrase, ‘the thoughts, acts, and words of love’1 associated with two Stewart sovereigns in sixteenth-century Scotland: Mary Queen of Scots (1543–87) and James VI (1567–1625). It asserts the importance of love-words to the artistic and intellectual court culture of each monarch’s reign, and proposes that poetic eros in the Marian and Jacobean periods arises from, and is informed by, political and religious conflicts which endured beyond Mary’s reign into James’s. Marian eros defines the terms of Jacobean eros. Since eros is an important factor in sculpting the symbolic nature of the sovereign, the love poetry produced by courtier-writers responds to the symbolic ‘passional’ powers of both Mary and James. In exploring the erotic voicings of the queen and king, and the erotic dialogues which burgeon between monarchs and courtiers, the book contradicts the perception that Renaissance or early modern love poetry is constrained rhetorically or conceptually by orthodoxy and convention.
…et poi morrò, s’io non credo al desio
(Petrarch, sonnet 47)
[and then I shall die, unless I obey my desire]
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Notes
Petrarch, Rime sparse, sonnet 9: 12; trans. Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976), 44–5.
The exemplary article in this respect is Arthur F. Marotti’s ‘“Love is not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences’, ELH, 49 (1982), 396–428.
See also Louis Montrose, ‘Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship’, Renaissance Drama, 8 (1977), 3–35, ‘ “Eliza, Queene of shepheardes”’, and the Pastoral of Power’, ELR, 10 (1980), 153–82, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: the Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, ELH, 50 (1983), 415–59, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers eds, Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 65–87, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint eds, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 303–40. See also
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s influential ‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella’, SEL 24 (1984), 53–68.
Other analyses of coded political poetry include Rosemary Kegl, ‘“Those Terrible Aproches”: Sexuality, Social Mobility, and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie’, ELR, 20 (1990), 179–205;
Stephen W. May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets. The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991);
Achsah Guibbory, ‘“Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So”: the Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies’, ELH, 57 (1990), 811–33;
Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); ‘The Impure Motives of Elizabethan Poetry’, Genre, 15 (1982), 225–38;
Phillippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power. Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989).
For a critique of this critical mode in its earliest stages, see Jonathan Crewe, Hidden Designs. The critical profession and Renaissance literature (London: Methuen, 1986).
R.D.S. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972);
Helena Mennie Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
See, for example, R.D.S. Jack, ‘Scottish Literature: the English and European Dimensions’, in Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup eds, Renaissance Culture in Contact. Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 9–17;
Richard M. Clewett, ‘James VI of Scotland and his Literary Circle’, Aevum, 47 (1988–9), 445–6;
Ian Ross, ‘Verse Translation at the Court of King James VI of Scotland’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 4 (1962), 252–67, and ‘Sonneteering in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 6 (1964), 255–68;
Matthew McDiarmid, ‘Some Aspects of the Early Renaissance in Scotland’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 3 (1967), 201–35.
Edited collections which stem from the triennial international conferences on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature and Language; see most recently Graham Caie et al. eds, The European Sun (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001).
See David MacRoberts ed., Essays on the Scottish Reformation (Glasgow: J.S. Burns, 1962);
Michael Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh: Donald, 1981).
On sixteenth-century Scottish political culture, see Roger A. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998);
John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch eds, New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Donald, 1982).
On early modern Scottish culture in general, see John MacQueen ed., Humanism in Renaissance Scotland (1990), and
A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan eds, The Renaissance in Scotland. Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994). Two outstanding essays by Durkan are ‘The Beginnings of Humanism in Scotland’, Innes Review, 4 (1953), 5–24, and ‘The Cultural Background in Sixteenth-century Scotland’, in MacRoberts ed., 274–331.
Michael Lynch, ‘Queen Mary’s Triumph: the Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in December 1566’, SHR, 69 (1990), 1–21, and ‘Court Ceremony and Ritual during the Personal Reign of James VI’, in Lynch and Julian Goodare eds, The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 71–92; also
Douglas Gray, ‘The Royal Entry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in Sally Mapstone and Juliette Woods eds, The Rose and the Thistle. Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998); 10–37.
L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone eds, The Palace in the Wild. Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000).
See, for example, Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity. Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See also Thomas Healy, New Latitudes. Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1992);
David Norbrook, The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (London: Penguin Books, 1992), ‘Preface’, xxxi.
R.D.S. Jack, ‘“Translating” the Lost Scottish Renaissance’, Translation and Literature, 6 (1997), 66–80.
Since the bibliography on Marian and Jacobean rule is extensive, only book-length publications of the last two decades are listed here: Gordon Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men. Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd, 1983);
Michael Lynch ed., Mary Stewart. Queen in Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988);
Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London: George Philip, 1988).
On James, see Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), and Government by Pen: Scotland under James VI and I (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980);
Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981);
Bryan Bevan, King James VI and I of England (London: Rubicon, 1996);
W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Irene Carrier, James VI and I: King of Great Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lynch and Goodare eds, The Reign of James VI and the newly published collection edited by
Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier eds, Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Wayne State University Press, 2002).
Essayes of a Prentise, sig. Kijr-Kijv; James Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols STS (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1955), vol. 1, 67.
See R.D.S. Jack, ‘James VI and Renaissance Poetic Theory’, English, 16 (1967), 208–11, and Clewett, 445–6.
Homi Bhaba ed., Narrating the Nation (London: Routledge, 1990), 250.
See James Craigie, ed., Thomas Hudson’s Historie of Judith (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1941); Ross, ‘Verse Translation’, 257–8.
Sandra M. Bell, ‘Poetry and Politics in the Scottish Renaissance’, unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), 9, 13.
Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage Tournament. Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
Paul Laumonier, ‘Ronsard et L’Écosse’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 4 (1924), 408–28 (425). Only two quatrains in alexandrine metre survive, clearly intended for Ronsard; instead she sent ‘un buffet de 2,000 ecus, sur- monte d’un vase “elaboure en forme de rocher, representant le Parnasse” et portant cette inscription: “A Ronsard, L’Apollon de la Source des Muses”’ (Bodleian MS Add.C.92, f. 22v).
Susan Sellers, Hélene Cixous, Authorship, Autobiography and Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 71.
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 2.
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© 2002 Sarah M. Dunnigan
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Dunnigan, S.M. (2002). Introduction: Amorous Histories — from Marian to Jacobean Eros. In: Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932709_1
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