Abstract
The sub-title of this book, Chronicles of the Self, is adapted from a line in ‘Gascoignes voyage into Holland, An.1572, written to the ryghte honourable the Lorde Grey of Wilton’. The poet offers, for the entertainment of his patron, an account of his own shipwreck at sea:
But since I know the pith of my pastaunce [pastime]
Shall most consist in telling of a truth,
Vouchsafe my Lord (en bon gré) for to take
This trustie tale the storie of my youth,
This Chronicle which of my seife I make,
To shew my Lord what healplesse happe ensewth,
When heddy youth will gad without a guide,
And raunge untied in leas of libertie,
Or when bare neede a starting hole hath spide
To peepe abroade from mother Miserie. (ll. 10–19)1
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Notes
George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G.W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) no. 77, p. 319.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 181–2.
On the coinage of the term see Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 1,
and Michael Sprinker, ‘Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography’ in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 321–42 (p. 325).
see Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’ in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 209–33,
see Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
see Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’ in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 17–28.
For Gascoigne’s biography, see C.T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).
On the representation of the writer as prodigal, especially Gascoigne, see Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 227.
from Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore and London: 1968).
See the useful discussions of Benveniste’s and Lacan’s ideas in Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 43–53, and 157–84.
Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1988), pp. 197–210 (p. 202).
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1944), p. 81.
see David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’ in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 177–202.
See the essay by J. A. Bunow, ‘Hoccleve’s Series: Experience and Books’ in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. R.R Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984), pp. 259–73.
Thomas Hoccleve, Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. J. A. Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press for The Early English Text Society, 1999), pp. lvii–lxii.
Lee Patterson, ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies’, Speculum 65 (1990): 87–108 (p. 99).
See also Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. p. 213.
J. A. Bunow, ‘Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve’, Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982): 389–412 (p. 402).
James M. Osborn, ed., The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 134.
see Thomas Greene, ‘The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature’ in The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. P. Demetz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 241–64,
and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
James M. Osborn, ed., The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Modern-Spelling Edition) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. xii.
David R. Shore, ‘Whythorne’s Autobiography and the Genesis of Gascoigne’s Master F.J.’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 12 (1982): 159–78.
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© 2003 Elizabeth Heale
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Heale, E. (2003). Introduction. In: Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932693_1
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