Abstract
In Amoretti and Epithalamion, the passionate sonnets of the poet as lover are set in a narrative of virtuous self-discipline in which the poet figures as both Orphic teacher and exemplary hero. The single dominant voice of the author guides and instructs the reader through his own account of his own courtship and marriage. Even so, I suggested in Chapter 4, that many of the courtship sonnets imply, and sometimes through the admonitory voice of the lady, supply, a double perspective in which the unschooled poet-lover has to learn the disciplines of a godly and virtuous love. In other narrative sequences of verse examined so far in this book, double or multiple authorial voices have been used to complicate the point of view of the first-person subject.1 Gascoigne and Whetstone’s uses of a ‘reporter’, for example, to comment on the verse of semi-autobiographical versions of themselves in the sequences of ‘Dan Bartholmew of Bathe’ or ‘Inventions of P. Plasmos’ (see pp. 62–3 above) problematize the first-person voice of experience. In Whythorne’s MS ‘songs and sonetts’ the relationship between Whythorne’s verse and his prose explanations becomes far from simple with the prose taking on some of the characteristics of a language of disordered passions and turbulent humours, while the patterned formality of the aphoristic verse provides a discourse of control and discipline.
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Notes
Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 162,
Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language. Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 29.
George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G.W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 251–2.
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965), pp. 137–8.
Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1928), p. 46.
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modem England (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 9.
John Donne, The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardener (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 214,
Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie. Reproduced from the 1586 Edition, ed. Hardin Craig (New York: Columbia University Press for the Facsimile Text Society, 1940), p. 92.
William Rossky, ‘Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic’, Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 49–73.
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (1601), Anglistica & Americana no. 126 (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms, 1973), p. 164.
see Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme’ in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 95–109.
Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) pp. 41–4.
Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540–1620 (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 185–9.
see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 21–3, 64–6.
see Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), ‘Explorata: or Discoveries’, p. 396.
Holger M. Klein, ed., English and Scottish Sonnet Sequences of the Renaissance, 2 vols, vol. 1 (Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Georg Olms, 1984), p. 45.
see Alice S. Miskimin, The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 81–95.
Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 267–8;
Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 20–22, 48.
Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1991), pp. 86–7, discusses the use by sonneteers of a language of secrets and privacy, and thus of exclusivity.
Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1994), II, pp. 943–4.
Susan C. Staub, ‘“A Poet with a Spear”: Writing and Sexual Power in the Elizabethan Period’, Renaissance Papers (1992): 1–15, Richard C. McCoy,
Richard C. McCoy, ‘Gascoigne’s “Poemata Castrata”: The Wages of Courtly Success’, Criticism 27 (1985): 29–55 (34, 47).
I adapt a comment by Jane Hedley, ‘Allegoria: Gascoigne’s Master Trope’, English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981): 148–64 (p. 159).
see James M. Osbom, ed., The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Modern-Spelling Edition) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 206.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1907), p. 553: Pt 3, Sec.2, mem.3.
Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 132.
M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edn (Fort Worth, NY, London: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999), p. 330, defines wit as ‘a kind of verbal expression which is brief, deft and intentionally contrived to produce a shock of comic surprise’.
Louis B. Salomon, The Devil Take Her! A Study of the Rebellious Lover in English Poetry (New York: A.S.Barnes, 1961).
Constance Relihan, Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse (Kent, OH and London: Kent State University Press, 1994), pp. 21–2 discusses the relationship between verse and prose in ‘Master F.J.’ and points out that G.T.’s knowledge gradually far exceeds his original claims.
John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’ in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 20–32 (p. 21).
Giuseppe Mazzotta, ‘The Canzoniere and the Language of the Self,’ Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 271–96 (p. 291).
Sir Philip Sidney, The Poems, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
Richard B. Young, ‘English Petrarke: A Study of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella’ in Three Studies in the Renaissance: Sidney, Jonson, and Milton (New Haven, CO: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 1–88,
James M. Osborn, ed., The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 211.
Quoted from Michael R.G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 117.
see William A. Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 435–47.
see Arthur F. Maroth, ‘“Love Is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, English Literary History 49 (1982): 396–428.
see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), Ch. 10.
see Richard F. Jones, ‘The Moral Sense of Simplicity’ in Studies in Honour of F.W. Shipley, ed. R.F. Jones, Washington University Studies, N.S. Language and Literature 14 (St Louis, MO: 1942), pp. 265–87.
Thomas Jr Roche, ‘Astrophil and Stella: A Radical Reading’ in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Dennis Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 185–226,
and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Politics of Asfrophil and Stella’, Studies in English Literature 24 (1984): 53–68,
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© 2003 Elizabeth Heale
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Heale, E. (2003). Passionate ejaculations and the poetics of presence: Gascoigne’s ‘The Adventures of Master F.J.’ and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. In: Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932693_6
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