Lecture 3. PSALMS, SONNETS and THEORY of POETRY in the 16TH CENTURY

Lecture 3. PSALMS, SONNETS AND THEORY OF POETRY IN THE 16TH CENTURY

1.English Renaissance Music

Church Music: John Taverner (1495-1545) Thomas Tallis (1515-1585), William Byrd (1543-1623) Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656)

Secular Music:

A)Madrigals: Influence Italian madrigals (Marenzio) Thomas Morley (1557-1603), Thomas Weelkes (c1570-1623), John Wilbye (1574-1638)

B) Lute-Music: John Dowland (1563-1626) – „Shakespeare of music” (pavan, galliard), Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

On music and poetry: Shakespeare: See below: Sonnet 8.,

2.Early Tudor Poetry (Silver Poets)

Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Elder (1503-1542)

sonnet - Petrarchan convention, I find no peace

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)

alternating rhyme + couplet -- blank verse, towards Shakespeare

The soote season, that blood and bloom forth brings

Tottel’s Miscellany (1557)

Psalms and Sonnets:

Sidney’s Translation of Psalm 23

The Lord, the Lord, my Shepherd is,
And so can never I
Taste misery:
He rests me in green pastures His:
By waters still and sweet,

He guides my feet.
He me revives; leads me the way
Which righteousness doth take,
For his name's sake:
Yea, though I should through valleys stray
Of death's dark shade, I will
No whit fear ill.
For Thou, dear Lord, Thou me besettest
Thy rod and thy staff be
To comfort me:
Before me Thou a table settest,
Even when foe's envious eye
Doth it espy.
Thou oilst my head, Thou fillest my cup;
Nay more, Thou endless good,
Shalt give me food.
To Thee, I say, ascended up,
Where Thou, the Lord of all,
Dost hold thy hall

3.Elisabethan Poetry (Golden Poets)

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

the perfect courtier, Astrophel and Stella started 1581, edited 1591

108 sonnets + 11 songs

Come Sleep, O Sleep the Certain knot of peace

The outburst of Elisabethan sonnettering: 1590's

Sonnet-sequences: Samuel Daniel: Delia (1592)

Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton a's Mirror (1594)

Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595)

89 sonnets to wife Elisabeth Boyle, concluded with Epithalamion

1-62: unrequited love; 63-84: lovers’s happiness, 85-89 brief pre-marriage separation

Read: Sonnet 75, One day I wrote her name upon the strand

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

-writing and publication (Thomas Thorpe, 1609)

-order of composition (1-126: young man; 127-152: dark lady)

-autobiographical approach (Earl of Southampton?, Earl of Pembroke?)

-themes: love, time, transience

Comparing Sonnets

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

I find no peace, and all my war is done.
I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I season.
That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not--yet can I scape no wise--
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself.
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

Edmund Spenser (1552-1559)

ONE day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washèd it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide and made my pains his prey.

Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay

A mortal thing so to immortalise;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.

Not so (quod I); let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;

My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) (55).

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room,

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgment that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

Sonnet 8.

Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.
Why lovest thou that which thou receivest not gladly,
Or else receivest with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,
Resembling sire and child and happy mother
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: 'thou single wilt prove none.'

The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

1.Life and Significance

2.The Shepheardes Calendar (1579)

Protagonist: Colin Clout - 12 ecloges

April - Queen Elizabeth, May - Protestants - Catholics

October - on poetry

3. Amoretti, Epithalamion - celebration of his own wedding in 1594

4.Four Hymns

1.Love
Cupid / 2.Beauty
Venus / 3.Heavenly Love
Jesus / 4.Heavenly Beauty
Holy Ghost / invoked

5.The Faerie Queen (1590 - first three books) intention: 12 books

(6 ready) Epistle dedicatory to Sir Walter Ralegh

3aims: 1. continued allegorical tradition of dark conceit

2. ethical-didactic motif: "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtues and gentle discipline"; 3. to praise Queen Elizabeth

Sources: 1. medieval legends and romance;2. Italian romantic epic (Ariosto); 3. Italian Christian epic (Tasso);4. Elizabethan pastoral epic (Sidney)

Structure: 12 books planned; 6 + Mutability Cantos ready

Each book: 12 cantos; stanza: ababbcbcc; 1-8: iambic pentameter, 9: iambic hexameter

Una (True Church) , Duessa (False Church), Archimago (Satan, Pope)

BOOKS / VIRTUE / SOURCE / ASTROLOGICAL REF.
1. Knight of Red Cross / Holiness / Christian / Sun
2. Sir Guyon / Temperance / Aristotelean / Mars
3. Britomart / Chastity / Christian / Moon
4. Cambell Triamond / Friendship / Aristotelean / Mercury
5. Sir Artegal / Justice / Aristotelean / Saturn
6. Sir Calidore / Courtesy / Christian / Venus
7. Mutability Cantos / Constancy / Christian / Jupiter

ELISABETHAN THEORIES OF POETRY

Trends: 1. Synthesis of European pastoralism + national mythology

2. Purely mythological works

3. Popular prose genres

I. Sir Philip SIDNEY's Poetics

- Sidney's life (1554-1586) "courtier"

- Arcadia prose romance

- "Old" and "New" Arcadia + Completed by Countess of Pembroke

- main purpose: to turn chivalric romance into prose-epic pastoral-visual beauty "tapestry"

1. Theories of poetry before Sidney

(Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, Quintilian, Plato, Plutarch)

Sources of poetry - Inspiration - 9 Muses

- Holy Ghost (Milton)

- Poetic madness (frenzy, furor poeticus)

Plato: Ion - Poet: irrational; Phil.: rational

disability eg. blindness but sees (Homer, Milton)

- Poet - divine creator

- Imitation

Function of poetry

- Originally: civilizing force

Orpheus, Amphion: artists’ ability to impose harmony on chaos

- Educational instrument introducing philosophical ideas: "sugared pill” - Lucretius

- Means to Action - rhetorics, humanism, politics

- Key to secret knowledge

allegorical readings - 3 classes of readers

2. The Context of Sidney's "Defence"

- French Pleiade Academy

- Areopagus Circle (Sidney, Spencer, Harvey, Daniel, etc.)

- emergence of Puritanism: Stephen Gosson (1554-1624) The School of Abuse against poets, caterpillars of commonwealth; ded. to Sidney

3. The Defence of Poesie written: 1580, publ. 1595

1. Poetry preceded all other learnings (philosophy, history)

2. What is the poet? - prophet (vates)

- maker, creator (like God) "erected with infected will"

3. Definition of Poetry (imitation, teach, delight)

4. Divisions of Poetry (Divine, Philosophical, P. in strictly speaking)

5. Subdivisions: verse or poetry

6. The purpose of poetics learning: - enriching memory;

enabling judgement;

- enlarging conceit

7. Poetry contrasted with competitors

A/ Philosophy and Poetry

former: abstract, difficult, general, concepts, tenets

latter: sensuous, concrete, entices man by his "tasting the grapes"

B/ History and Poetry

former: particulars, concretes, "what really was", facts

latter: universal, instead of "what was” - „what could have been"

8. Examples of Poetic Invention (Agrippa: belly) (Nathan, David)

9. Kinds of Poetry (pastoral, elegiac, lyric, satiric comedy, tragedy: lower

10. Four charges against Poetry 1. Waste of time / 2. Poets are liars / "he nothing affirms ... therefore never lieth" / 3. Poems are sinful fancies / 4. Plato banished poets

End: or orator fit, poeta nascituritness of English language for poetry;

II. Contemporary Renaissance Poetics

1. George Puttenham: The Arte of Englishe Poesie (1589)

manual: mixture of poetics and rhetorics

three parts; decorum

2. Thomas Campion: Observation in the Art of English Poesie (1602)

argued for abandoning rhyme

3. Samuel Daniel: A Defence of Rhyme (1603) – reply Campion

From The Defence: The 4 Charges Agains Poetry
Philip Sidney defends poetry in his essay “Apology for Poetry” from the accusations made by Stephen Gosson in his “School of Abuse” dedicated to him. There, Gosson makes some objections against poetry. Sidney replies to the objections made by Gosson very emphatically, defending poetry in his essay. Sidney does this in a very logical and scholarly way.The major objections against poetry are: (a) “that there being many other more fruitful knowledges, a man might better spend his time in them then in this”; (b) that it is the mother of lies; (c) that it is the nurse of abuse; infecting us with many pestilent desires; and (d) that Plato had rightly banised poets from his ideal republic. Sidney’s replies to these objections:
(a) Defending poetry against the first charge, he says that man can’t employ his time more usefully than in poetry. He says that “no learning is so good as that teacheth and moveth to virtue, and that none can both teach virtue, and thereto as much as poetry”.
(b) His answer to the second objection that poets are liers is that of all writers under the sun the poet is the least liar. The poet creates something by emotion or imagination against which no charge of lying can be brought. The astronomer, the geometrician, the historian and others, all make false statements. But poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth”, his end being “to tell not what is or what is not, but what should or should not be”. The question of truth or falsehood would arise only when a person insists on telling a fact. The poet does not present fact but fiction embodying truth of an ideal kind.
(c) The third objection against poetry that it is the nurse of abuse, “infecting us with many pestilent desires or wits” may be partly justified, but for this a particular poet may be blamed but not poetry. To this charge, Sidney replies that poetry does not abuse man’s wit but it is man’s wit that abuses poetry. All arts and sciences misused had evil effects, but that did not mean that they were less valuable when rightly employed. Abuse of poetry, according to Sidney, is not the problem of poetry but of the poet.
(d) The fourth objection that Plato had rightly banished the poets from his ideal republic is also not tenable because Plato sought to banish the amoral poets of his time, and not poetry itself. Plato himself believed that poetry is divinely inspired. In “Ion”, Plato gives high and rightly divine commendation to poetry. His description of the poet as “a light-winged and sacred thing” reveals his attitude to poetry. Sidney concludes, “So as Plato banishing the abuse, not the ‘Thing’, not banishing it, but giving due honour unto it, shall be our patron and not adversary”.

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