Abstract
In this chapter I begin with some poetic genres that have clear political aims, but then move to some consideration of forms of poetry that have traditionally been seen as more removed from the political scene. Here I am concerned to avoid forcing a political context onto works that might seem resistant, and hope to demonstrate such tact in my consideration of lyric poetry in the last section of the chapter.
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Notes
Andrew McRae, ‘Reading Libels: An Introduction’, HLQ 69 (2006), pp. 3–11.
On this point see also James Knowles’s searching analysis of the complex responses to sodomy as a marker of sexual and political corruption that could be, in a sense, hidden in plain sight: ‘To “scourge the arse/Jove’s marrow so had wasted”: Scurrility and the Subversion of Sodomy’, in Dermot Cavanagh and Tim Kirk, eds, Subversion and Scurrility: Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 74–92; for the place of libels within manuscript poetry miscellanies in general see David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 4.
See the general discussion in Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 4;
and specifically on its circulation, see Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Performing Politics: The Circulation of the “Parliament Fart”’, HLQ 69 (2006), pp. 121–38.
David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 9.
The Workes of Master George Wither (1620); O’Callaghan (The ‘Shepheards Nation’, p. 211) points out though that this volume pairs two key examples of Spenserian pastoral, critical of the Jacobean court: Wither’s The Shepherd’s Hunting (first published 1615) and William Browne’s The Shepheards Pipe (first published 1614). This volume was published by Thomas Walkley, who, as noted above in the discussion of his edition of the 1622 quarto of Othello, specialized in oppositional literature. For a fascinating account of Walkley’s involvement in 1627 in printing a series of newsbooks almost certainly under Buckingham’s auspices, supporting Buckingham’s Ile de Ré expedition, see Thomas Cogswell, ‘“Published by Authoritie”: Newsbooks and the Duke of Buckingham’s Expedition to the Ile de Ré’, HLQ 67 (2004), pp. 1–26.
Thomas Cogswell, ‘The Path to Elizium “Lately Discovered”: Drayton and the Early Stuart Court’, HLQ 54 (1991), pp. 207–33.
Martin Butler, ‘The Dates of Three Poems by Ben Jonson’, HLQ 55 (1992), pp. 279–94.
For a good summing up see William E. Cain, ‘Self and Others in Two Poems by Ben Jonson’, SP 80 (1983), pp. 163–82.
George Parfitt, ‘History and Ambiguity: Jonson’s “A Speech According to Horace”’, SEL 19 (1979), pp. 85–92.
Andrew McRae, ‘Satire and Sycophancy: Richard Corbett and Early Stuart Royalism’, RES 54 (2003), p. 340.
Ian Donaldson, ‘Perishing and Surviving: The Poetry of Donne and Jonson’, Essays in Criticism 51 (2001), pp. 68–85 and see also Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 151–2. Mark Bland explores their associations in a fascinating article concentrating on their collaboration on a 1609 manuscript of Donne’s Biathanatos in ‘Jonson, Biathanatos and the Interpretation of Manuscript Evidence’, SB 51 (1998), pp. 154–83.
For a general account see Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992);
Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995);
Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993);
and Adam Smyth, Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England 1640–1682 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004).
Gary Stringer, ‘Introduction to the Donne Variorum’, Anglistik 10 (1999), p. 85.
Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2009).
See Paul Salzman, ‘Mary Wroth and Hermaphroditic Circulation’, in Susan Wiseman, ed., Early Modern Women and the Poem (Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 117–30;
while this identification is made in C. M. Armitage, ‘Donne’s Poems in Huntington Manuscript 198: New Light on “The Funerall”’, SP 63 (1966), pp. 697–707, Peter Beal, and following him Joshua Eckhardt, discount Denny’s ownership, see Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, I.i.253; Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors, p. 88; Beal offers no explanation for his decision that the manuscript is signed by a different Edward Denny; Armitage feels that Denny is a likely candidate, p. 698. It is possible that there has been some confusion between Denny and his uncle, also Edward Denny, who died in 1600 and has a monument in Waltham Abbey, where the Edward Denny under discussion here was also buried. Armitage and some other sources give 1630 as the year of Denny’s death, which would make it unlikely that he had an association with Huntington 198, but he definitely died in 1637, which makes such an association at least possible.
See The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Gary Stringer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), vol. 2, p. 165; quotations and textual information from this volume.
See Scott Nixon, ‘Carew’s Response to Jonson and Donne’, SEL 39 (1999), pp. 89–109.
David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 117.
For information about Wroth’s poetry see The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); see also my online edition of the poetry: http://wroth.latrobe.edu.au/. Margaret P. Hannay’s authoritative biography contains the most up-to-date information about the manuscript and its provenance, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 183–8.
See for example Jeff Masten, ‘“Shall I Turn Blabb?”: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonets’, in Naomi Miller and Gary Waller, eds, Reading Mary Wroth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 67–87.
Rosalind Smith, Sonnets and the English Woman Writer: The Politics of Absence 1560–1621 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 95.
Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink, ‘Introduction: The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England’, HLQ 73 (2010), pp. 345–61.
Fred Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and Reading in Early Modern England’, HLQ 73 (2010), pp. 453–69.
Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 6.
See ibid., pp. 113–20, and see also Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Ravished and Revised: The 1616 Lucrece’, RES 52 (2001), pp. 516–23.
Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 80–4; see also ODNB article on Herbert by Helen Wilcox.
See Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘George Herbert’s Poems to the Queen of Bohemia’, ELR 9 (1979), pp. 108–20.
For a succinct and authoritative account see The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. xxxvii–xl,
the invaluable online edition providing facsimiles of all three texts edited by Robert Whalen and Christopher Hodgkins, The Digital Temple, http://digitaltemple.ei.virginia.edu/home.html, and see also Richard Todd and Helen Wilcox ‘The Challenge of Editing Donne and Herbert’, SEL 52 (2012), pp. 187–206.
See ibid., pp. 672–3, I quote directly from the Williams manuscript (Dr Williams Library, MS Jones B 62), fol. 88r–v; the objection from the Cambridge University printers of the 1633 Temple to the verses on America is quoted from John Ferrar in Greg Miller, ‘Scribal and Print Publication: The Case of George Herbert’s English Poems’, George Herbert Journal 23 (1999/2000), p. 19 and n. 38.
See Helen Wilcox, ‘In The Temple Precincts: George Herbert and Seventeenth-Century Community Making’, in Roger Sell and Anthony Johnson, eds, Writing and Religion in England 1558–1689 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 260.
See Raymond Anselment, ‘“The Church Militant”: George Herbert and the Metamorphoses of Christian History’, HLQ 41 (1978), p. 300.
Sidney Gottlieb, ‘The Social and Political Backgrounds of George Herbert’s Poetry’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds, ‘The Muses Commonweal’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), pp. 107–18.
Ruth Connolly, ‘Editing Intention in the Manuscript Poetry of Robert Herrick’, SEL 52 (2012), pp. 69–84.
John Creaser, ‘“Times trans-shifting”: Chronology and the Misshaping of Herrick’, ELR 39 (2009), pp. 163–96.
For a fuller discussion of this see Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain, eds, ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 8–13.
For the political interpretation of Herrick’s poetry, though as Creaser points out this is largely within a 1640s context, see especially Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (University of Chicago Press, 1989);
and Syrithe Pugh, ‘“Cleanly wanton-nesse” and Puritan Legislation: The Politics of Herrick’s Amatory Ovidianism’, The Seventeenth Century 21 (2006), pp. 249–69; Creaser expands his argument in ‘“Jocund his Muse was”: Celebration and Virtuosity in Herrick’, in Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain, eds, ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 39–64.
R.S., A Description of the King and Queen of Fairies (1635), sig. A8r–v; this chapbook includes a fairy poem by Herrick’s friend Simeon Steward, dated 1626, which might be the date of Herrick’s poem; for a discussion of the fairy poems as a connected group see Daniel H. Woodward, ‘Herrick’s Oberon Poems’, JEGP 64 (1965), pp. 270–84.
See, for example, Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000),
and especially Mary Ellen Lamb, The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson (London: Routledge, 2006).
Marjorie Swann, ‘The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature’, RQ 53 (2000), pp. 461–2; see also O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’, pp. 221–30.
Pamela S. Hammons, Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), chap. 2.
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© 2014 Paul Salzman
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Salzman, P. (2014). Poetry. In: Literature and Politics in the 1620s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305985_3
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