Narratives of experience

Abstract

In Chapter 1, I argued that the appropriation of socially elite verse by the single-author miscellanists who wished to advertise their skills in print, subtly altered the significance of the verse they imitated. Among the many contradictions implicit in their careful mixing of courtly and aphoristic verses was that between the implied writer of courtly verse, for whom insouciance and effortlessness (sprezzatura) were crucial effects, and the writer of aphoristic verse whose effort and prudence were distinguishing characteristics. In this chapter, I examine verse in which the self-production of the writer as a man of enterprise and ‘travail’ becomes central. The poets’ ‘travail’ encompasses both hard and painful labour (OED ‘travail’) and, as we shall see later in the chapter, actual travel abroad, as soldiers, factors or agents (OED ‘travel’). Through such verse the writer characteristically presents himself as both deserving and unfortunate. Like Whythorne, others found that even after the ‘first brunt, and ẹk difficulty I Of Vertewz’ all did not become easy as the precepts suggested should happen (see p. 56 above). Enterprise is often associated with failure to thrive in these verses; an ideology of effort accompanies a reiterated sense of the self as marginal to, and excluded from success, power, and privilege.