Heretical Love-Words: The Poetry of William Fowler

Abstract

The love poetry of William Fowler (1560–1612) closes this book’s exploration of Jacobean erotic poetics for several reasons. His amatory corpus contains the only example¹ of a substantial sonnet sequence written within the Scottish Jacobean period. This is a more ‘monumental’ lyric exploration of desire than has been considered so far. In differing ways, the erotic writing of Stewart and Montgomerie engaged with the Jamesian project of eros, but Fowler’s poetry, in its dark investigation of sacred and profane desires, is in precise negotiation with the king’s vision of an ideal Protestant poetics. There, a duplicitous and corrupt eros is shunned, ‘that insolent archer quyte’,² and the moral and philosophical vision of the Du Bartesian epic emulated instead. Fowler’s unpublished sequence, The Tarantula of Love, and a shorter sequence, ‘Of De[a]th’, can be conceived to re-imagine desire in accordance with the sanctioned vision of Jacobean eros.³ Fowler’s writing does not portray an intimately dialogic relationship with James, as do Stewart’s and Montgomerie’s in varying degrees of anxiety and dissent. Fowler is associated in his later career with Anna’s, rather than James’s, court. In 1589, he was appointed Master of Requests and ‘Secret-depute’ to Anna, a position retained until 1608 when Fowler’s position as the Queen’s Secretary (a post in which John Donne showed interest) could no longer be sustained.⁴