Ebook A334 Book1 E1i1 n9781780079868 l3 2

A334
Book 1
Shakespeare and his
contemporaries
Edited by Jonathan Gibson
This publication forms part of the Open University module A334 English literature from Shakespeare to Austen.
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ISBN 978 1 7800 7986 8

1.1
Contents
Introduction: Shakespeare and his contemporaries 5
Chapter 1
As You Like It: woeful pageants and true delights 29
Chapter 2
As You Like It in pieces 65
Chapter 3
The Spanish Tragedy and the origins of the Elizabethan
revenge play 107
Chapter 4
Julius Caesar and the shape of Shakespearean tragedy 145
Chapter 5
‘Who’s there?’: Hamlet’s mysteries 179
Chapter 6
‘Words, words, words’: solving Hamlet’s mysteries 211
Chapter 7
The Renaissance epic: Spenser, The Faerie Queene 243
Chapter 8
Donne and the Petrarchists 291
Poetry for Chapter 7 335
Poetry for Chapter 8 391
Glossary 445
Acknowledgements 457
Index 459
Introduction: Shakespeare and
his contemporaries
Jonathan Gibson
Contents
Introduction 9
Religion 10
Renaissance society 15
Gender relations 18
Education and literature 20
References 24
Introduction
Introduction
The set texts in this book were written in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, a period frequently referred to by critics as the
Renaissance or early modern period (Hopkins and Steggle, 2006;
Bucholz and Key, 2004). While the phrase ‘early modern’ looks forward,
treating our period as a bridge from the Middle Ages to the modern
world, the word ‘renaissance’ (‘rebirth’ in French) looks back, referring
to the revival of interest in ancient Latin and Greek writings that
occurred in fourteenth-century Italy and spread across Europe over the
following two centuries. Both terms have their advantages, and both will
be used in this book. The origins of many aspects of modern life – the
individual sense of self; the idea of the nation-state; the development of
capitalism; the secular, or non-religious, view of the world – have been
traced, with varying degrees of controversy, to this period (Perry and
Watkins, 2009). Rather than enter these debates, in this introduction I
will try to answer a simple question: how did the experiences, priorities,
passions and anxieties of the key Renaissance writers featured in this
book differ from our own?
9
Introduction: Shakespeare and his contemporaries
Religion
At the centre of most early modern people’s lives would have been their
relationship with God. Although the Renaissance is often associated
with the rise of a secular, individualistic view of the world (and
frequently contrasted with the Middle Ages in this regard), it is hard to
over-emphasise the importance of religion in the lives of its women and
men (Cummings, 2011). Most of the period’s printed books were
religious and, far from being a private matter, religion was bound up
with the authority of the state: non-attendance at church on Sundays
was punishable by a fine. Religion was at the heart of both domestic
and international politics too. In the 1530s, England broke away from
the Roman Catholic Church (then an important power in the country)
after the pope opposed the attempt by Henry VIII (r.1509–47) to annul
his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne
Boleyn (Brigden, 2000, pp. 101–39). This dispute took place during the
Reformation (see box), a particularly turbulent period in the history of
Christianity when radical Protestant theologians such as Martin Luther
and Jean Calvin divided Europe by opposing the central Roman
Catholic emphasis on the role of priests as essential intermediaries
between the general public and God. Protestants emphasised instead the
faith of the individual believer and her or his submission to God,
stating that it was only this – not good works or any sort of ritual
observance – that could earn God’s grace and save people from
damnation. This was a belief system that exerted considerable pressure
on each Christian, stressing the importance of spiritual self-examination
and the interior life (Rivers, 1994, pp. 107–24).
The Reformation
The Reformation was a sixteenth-century religious reform
movement which led to a major split in early modern Christianity
between the Roman Catholic Church (headed by the pope) and new
‘Protestant’ churches such as the Church of England. It is usually
said to have begun in 1517, when the German friar Martin Luther
(1483–1546) pinned to the door of a church in Wittenberg 95
statements (or ‘theses’) attacking both corrupt church practices and
fundamental Catholic doctrine. While Catholicism taught that to go
to heaven it was essential to perform specific tasks (both in this life
and, after death, in purgatory), Luther argued that the route to
salvation was much simpler. All that was necessary to gain God’s
10
Religion
supernatural help (or ‘grace’) and go straight to heaven, he said,

was ‘faith alone’, which meant genuine belief in Christ. Those
sympathetic to Luther’s ideas became known as ‘Protestants’. The
nations of Europe divided, often violently, on religious grounds. After
a period of internecine conflict many German states became
Protestant; France suffered a series of nine devastating ‘wars of
religion’ between 1562 and 1598; and the northern Protestant
provinces of the Netherlands rebelled against the rule of Catholic
Spain.
The Church of England (or Anglican Church), established in 1534
by Henry VIII, was strongly influenced during the reign of Elizabeth I
by the ideas of the French theologian Jean Calvin (1509–1564),
leader of the church in Geneva (in Switzerland), who stressed the
power and knowledge of God and the corresponding impotence and
ignorance of individual believers. The Calvinist doctrine of
predestination holds that God has decided in advance which people
will go to heaven: the fate of each individual is not only foreknown
by God (the traditional belief) but foredoomed as well.
During the lengthy Council of Trent (1545–63), the Catholic Church
addressed many of the abuses which the Protestant reformers had
highlighted, though it remained hostile to the doctrinal innovations of
Luther and Calvin. This process of Catholic reform became known
as the ‘Counter-Reformation’. The Jesuits (or Society of Jesus), a
formidable new religious order, spearheaded the fight against the
Reformation, sending out numerous missionaries to try to convert
Protestants and opening many schools and colleges.
Henry VIII’s split with Rome led to the creation of a new national
church, the Church of England, headed by the monarch rather than the
pope. As the sixteenth century progressed, a huge, frequently violent
division opened up between enthusiasts for the new religion and those
remaining faithful to the old. Henry’s successors veered first one way –
towards radical Protestantism under the reign of the boy king Edward
VI (r.1547–53) – and then the other – back to traditional Catholicism
under the reign of Mary I (r.1553–58). It was only when Elizabeth I
(r.1558–1603) came to the throne that Protestantism was decisively
established as the religion of the English state.
Most of the works you will be studying in this book were written during
the later part of Elizabeth’s reign, after the queen had been
excommunicated by the pope and while England was at war with the
11
greatest Catholic power of the time, Spain (Brigden, 2000, pp. 282–94).
During this period, Elizabeth’s government clamped down hard on the
Catholic Jesuit priests who had been sent to convert England back to
the old religion (Alford, 2013). The government tended to assume, not
always correctly, that Catholic sympathisers (demonised as ‘papists’)
were plotting to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with her cousin,
the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots (r.1542–67). Traditional Catholic
practices lingered on in secret at all levels of society (Duffy, 2005); both
William Shakespeare and John Donne (see Chapter 8) came from
Catholic families. In 1588, when the Spanish Armada fleet failed in its
attempt to invade England, Elizabethans viewed the defeat as a
providential demonstration of God’s favour both towards England and
towards Protestantism.
The unmarried Elizabeth had no obvious heir. She was succeeded by
her cousin James VI of Scotland (r.1567–1625), the moderate Protestant
son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots; he became James I of
England (r.1603–25). James made peace with Spain in 1604, but
religious differences continued, particularly after the failure of the
Catholic Gunpowder Plot of 1605 led to more stringent anti-Catholic
laws.
Although many people today, including Christians, would take issue with
the harshness of Reformation Protestantism, Christianity itself is a
familiar part of twenty-first-century life. Far less familiar are other
aspects of the early modern world view. Medicine and psychology were
dominated by the ancient theory of the humours: four bodily fluids, a
balance between which was felt to be necessary to psychological and
physical health. Meanwhile, although Copernicus had argued in 1543
that the Earth moved around the Sun, most Elizabethans and Jacobeans
believed in the earlier Ptolemaic system of cosmology, imagining the
Earth to be at the centre of a series of concentric spheres. Many,
though by no means all, people also believed in astrology, alchemy and
witchcraft (Rivers, 1994, pp. 64–99; Sharpe, 2010).
12
Religion
Figure 0.1 John Gipkyn, Dr King Preaching at Old St Paul’s before James I
1616, oil on panel. Society of Antiquaries of London, acc no. LDSAL 304;
Scharf XLIII. Photo © Society of Antiquaries of London/Bridgeman Images.
This depiction of a public sermon at Paul’s Cross, outside St Paul’s
Cathedral in London, is part of a diptych by Gipkyn that belonged to John
Donne (see Chapter 8) when he was Dean of St Paul’s. Donne’s sermons at
Paul’s Cross (one of which is re-created by the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project,
n.d.) attracted audiences of thousands.
13
Figure 0.2 Daniel Mytens, King James I of England and VI of Scotland 1621,
oil on canvas, 149cm x 101cm. National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 109.
Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Compare this portrait of James sitting in front of his motto ‘Beati pacifici’
(‘Blessed are the peacemakers’) with the portrait of Elizabeth I sitting in front
of a depiction of the defeat of the Spanish Armada (Figure 7.2 in Chapter 7).
14
Renaissance society
Renaissance society
Submission to authority was not just important in early modern English
people’s relationship with God; it was a crucial element in everyday
social relations too. This was a strongly hierarchical society, where
‘knowing your place’ meant following quite specific rules. Men of lower,
or ‘baser’, social status were required to take their hats off in the
presence of their social superiors, for example, and ‘sumptuary laws’
stipulated the fabrics that different social groups could wear. In theory,
the basis for social distinctions was landownership. Most people worked
on land that belonged to a tiny minority of the population: the
aristocracy, the gentry and the smaller landowners or yeomanry. The
bigger landowners (the aristocrats and gentry) lived off their rents: their
high social status came in part from the fact that they did not need to
work themselves, in part from ‘blood’ (their descent from a ‘landed’
family) and in part from a sense of honour linked to the idea that they
were military servants of the monarch. Shakespeare aspired to gentry
status; as he became successful, he bought land in his native Stratford-
upon-Avon and obtained a coat of arms for his family (Kearney, 2011).
Much of the literature of the time picks away at this hierarchical system,
reflecting anxieties about social change. Money generated from sources
other than land – the money of rich City of London merchants, for
example – was increasingly becoming an important means of acquiring
status, as were sophisticated courtly behaviour, and education.
Economic pressures, including the decline of the crucially important
cloth industry, drove many people out of the country into the cities in
search of work. The population of London more than doubled in size
in this period (Archer, 1999, p. 43), leading to a marked increase in
vagrants, or ‘masterless men’, and a widespread fear of social
breakdown. This period also saw the European conquest and
colonisation of large parts of the world, particularly the Americas (the
‘New World’). The search for new markets (and new mineral wealth) led
to the famous Elizabethan voyages to the Americas, Asia and the
Indies, which emulated the colonialist activities of Portugal and Spain
and laid the foundation for what would become the British empire
(Brigden, 2000, pp. 274–82).
To flourish in this society, a patron was necessary. This was somebody
higher up in the social scale who would be able to help you (as her or
his ‘client’) to advance your career and fortunes, perhaps by appealing in
turn to their own patron. The patronage system was like a pyramid of
15
interlocking patron–client relationships. Unsurprisingly, patronage letters

– in effect, begging letters – are one of the commonest types of text
written in the period. At the top of the ‘system’ was the monarch.
Although she or he was believed to derive their authority from God,
the power of the queen or king of England was more circumscribed
than that of many continental monarchs. The privy council (the early
modern equivalent of the cabinet) and the most important ministers
made key decisions, and Parliament (a body elected by landowners only)
needed to be called to ratify large requests for extra income. Early
modern culture had a horror of rebellion against a divinely ordained
prince. At the same time, however, partly as a result of the toxic
religious differences of the period, some writers sought to justify the
removal of unjust monarchs or ‘tyrants’; others were attracted to the
republicanism of ancient Rome (Hadfield, 2005; Norbrook, 2002).
The monarch’s authority was most visible in the royal court, a word
used to refer both to the large group of people in attendance on the
monarch and to a set of buildings and institutions based for most of
the early modern period at the palace of Whitehall in London (Scott-
Warren, 2005, pp. 43–74). The queen or king spent much of their time
in a suite of ‘privy’ rooms, access to which was restricted to those of
highest rank and/or most in royal favour. In the outer chambers,
hangers-on would wait, hoping to make profitable contacts. The glitter
of the court repelled as many as it lured: Elizabethan and Jacobean
literature is full of attacks on the self-seeking behaviour of obsequious,
licentious and corrupt courtiers (Perry, 2010). While Henry VIII
surrounded himself with a set of male friends, most of the staff in the
privy rooms of his daughter Elizabeth were female. Elizabeth also had a
succession of male ‘favourites’, with whom she enjoyed flirtatious
relationships of varying degrees of intensity and artificiality, including
the two rivals Sir Walter Ralegh (whose poetry is quoted in Chapter 8)
and the Earl of Essex (mentioned in Chapters 2 and 6). Images of
Elizabeth are among the best known in English history, forming part of
what has been called ‘the cult of Elizabeth’: the extravagant, quasi-
romantic, quasi-religious praise of the Virgin Queen as a figure above
and beyond history (Hackett, 1995). Elizabeth deftly complemented this
transcendental image with a common touch when meeting people and a
considerable personal charm.
The court of James I was very different. A married man with three
children, hampered by a speech impediment, James had intense
relationships with male favourites, primarily Robert Carr, Earl of
16
Renaissance society
Somerset and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. To some

observers, his court, full of Scottish courtiers who had come to
England with him at his accession, seemed notably more dissolute and
corrupt than Elizabeth’s (Peck, 1991). James espoused a far more
absolutist view of royal power than Elizabeth had, but was something
of an absentee monarch, spending much of his time hunting; he had
none of Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for wooing the common people. While
Elizabeth went on progresses to different regions of England, and was
entertained by obsequious entertainments (usually on mythological
themes) at the different towns and stately homes she visited, in James
I’s reign a particularly lavish form of interior court show, the masque,
was frequently performed (Lindley, 1995).
17
Gender relations
Relationships between the sexes were also – in theory, but certainly not
always in practice – extremely hierarchical. A parallel was commonly
made between the husband as the head of a family and the monarch as
the head of state, implying the necessary subservience of a wife to her
husband. Women were advised to be ‘chaste, silent and obedient’
(Hull, 1988). The reality, however, seems to have allowed for more
leeway than such patriarchal prescriptions suggest, and some women,
particularly members of the aristocracy and rich widows, could
sometimes exercise real power over men (Scott-Warren, 2005,
pp. 182–202; Amussen, 1999). Female ‘honour’ was bound up with a
chaste reputation, and the literature of the period is marked by acute
anxiety about female licentiousness; many anxious jokes are made about
cuckolds (men with unfaithful wives). For those of higher social status,
marriage occurred earlier than it did for those lower down the social
scale and was more likely to have been arranged in advance by the
partners’ families. While ‘homosexuality’ as a legal definition did not
exist, male homosexual acts (‘sodomy’, very loosely defined in the
period) were illegal and could potentially incur the death penalty (see the
discussion of Reading 3.1 in Chapter 3). This caused problems in an
age which thought highly of intensely emotional but non-sexual male
friendship (Knowles, 2010; Bray, 1982).
18
Gender relations
Figure 0.3 Miniature portraits of two royal favourites, Essex and Somerset,
each displaying the blue ribbon of the prestigious badge of the Order of the
Garter. On the left (a) Isaac Oliver, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex after
1596, watercolour on vellum, 5cm x 4cm. National Portrait Gallery, London,
NPG 4966. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London. On the right (b)
Nicholas Hilliard, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. c.1611, watercolour on
vellum, 4cm x 4cm. National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 4260. Photo: ©
National Portrait Gallery, London.
Devereux was one of Elizabeth I’s favourites; Carr was James I’s favourite.
Miniatures were intimate objects, designed for private viewing by loved ones.
19
Education and literature

We can’t know what combination of circumstances and interests
inspired Shakespeare, or the other authors of the texts in this book, to
become writers, but the nature of the Renaissance education system –
its emphasis on the reading and writing of imaginative literature – was
surely an important factor. This emphasis was the result of a movement
now known as humanism, which involved the recovery of non-
Christian ancient Latin and Greek texts. The humanist with most
influence on early modern English education was the Dutch scholar
Erasmus (?1467–1536). The idea was that these classical texts could be
mined by students for valuable moral lessons and used as models for
their own writing. The Erasmian education system aimed to produce
responsible male citizens able to bring to bear the wisdom of the past
on the challenges of the present, to contribute to the success of the
nation and to advance their own careers. Its powerhouse, the grammar
school, was attended only by boys; very likely, Shakespeare at Stratford-
upon-Avon was such a student (Brink, 2010). Some aristocratic girls,
including Queen Elizabeth, were taught along similar lines by private
tutors. Indeed, despite the restrictions on their schooling, many women
did write literature in a range of different genres (Smith, 2010;
Knoppers, 2009; Pacheco, 2002). Having mastered the language,
grammar-school boys read extensively in Latin literature and wrote their
own Latin compositions, imitating the techniques of classical writers
(Burrow, 2013, pp. 30–50). At the heart of this process, guiding their
work, was the ancient art of rhetoric, or persuasive speech. Rhetorical
textbooks were full of tricks and devices for making speech and writing
more effective (see ‘The Forest of Rhetoric’, n.d.; Lanham, 1991). Some
of these are still familiar: metaphor, for example. You will find
discussions of some others in Chapters 3 and 7. A minority of those
educated at grammar school went on to university and/or to the legal
schools, the Inns of Court.
Writers in Shakespeare’s England were fascinated by rhetoric. As you’ll
find when you read the texts in this book, they had an almost obsessive
interest in the idea of persuasive speech and verbal artifice. But they
were also worried about it: they knew that it could become detached
from morality – that the most persuasive orators were not always the
best people – and that rhetoric often failed to persuade
(Alexander, 2010).
20
Extensively studied at grammar school, the writings of the Roman

authors Virgil (70 BCE–19 BCE) and Ovid (43 BCE–c.17 CE) were
particularly influential on early modern literature. Virgil’s Eclogues
(Virgil, 1983) are a key text in the genre of pastoral (poetical
conversations between shepherds) that is so important in As You Like
It (the genre is discussed in Chapter 1). Virgil’s major work, the Aeneid
(Virgil, 2003), is a gripping and beautifully written epic poem that traces
the origins of Rome to the flight of the hero Aeneas after the defeat of
his home city, Troy, by the Greeks. To reach Italy, Aeneas must
abandon his lover Dido, queen of Carthage, leaving her to commit
suicide in one of the passages of the Aeneid that most fascinated early
modern writers. Many writers of the period continued to cite the
ancient story that Britain was founded by another Trojan refugee,
Brutus. Ovid’s best-known work, the Metamor phoses, was a particular
favourite of Shakespeare’s (Bate, 1994; Burrow, 2013, pp. 92–132). Full
of intense emotion, sex, violence and beautiful description, it is a work,
as the title suggests, about change, consisting of a series of linked
stories from ancient mythology in which people change into other
things: a woman fleeing the sun god turns into a tree (Ovid, 1955,
pp. 41–3); a girl brought up as a boy is magically transformed into a
real boy by the goddess Isis (Ovid, 1955, pp. 221–4); a mourning
mother turns to stone (Ovid, 1955, pp. 138–42). As the Metamor phoses
lie behind many of the references to classical mythology you will find in
the works discussed in this book, when you come across a particularly
intriguing use of classical myth it’s well worth looking up the myth in
question in the index of one of the many translations of the
Metamorphoses available (such as Ovid, 2004, 1955). If there is a version
of the myth in the Metamor phoses, have a quick look at it: you can then
be pretty sure you will be reading a version that would have been
known to the early modern author concerned. An Elizabethan
translation of the Metamor phoses used by Shakespeare is also available in
a modern paperback edition (Ovid, 2002).
The works you will be reading in Book 1 of the module were written in
English, not Latin. In the Renaissance, while Latin remained the
language of international communication and scholarship, many writers
were self-consciously attempting to raise the literary prestige of English.
Many new words were introduced into the language and there was a
heated debate about the proper metre for English poets to use. A key
element of the Protestant Reformation was the availability of the Bible
in English, and it was in this period, in 1611, that perhaps the most
21
famous English Bible translation, the King James Version, was

produced.
In its origins, classical rhetoric was an oral art, rooted in legal and
political speech-making. In early modern England, its priorities also
underpinned different genres in the medium of print. While printing
had already existed for centuries in Asia, in Europe it was a relatively
new medium; having been developed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz
in 1450, the technology arrived in England in 1476. Printing grew
rapidly, alongside a boom in literacy. However, the circulation of texts in
handwritten copies, or manuscripts, continued to flourish. Literature in
manuscript could be more intimate, more politically subversive and
more obscene than printed texts (it was harder to control or prosecute).
You can find out more about the manuscript system in Chapter 8.
Much literature, in both print and manuscript, was written for patrons
(Bates, 2000). Most printed books, like The Faerie Queene (the subject of
Chapter 7), included a dedicatory letter to a patron. Patrons were a
significant source of support for writers, as publishers made only small
one-off payments for each book manuscript – thenceforth the
manuscript belonged to the publisher; authorial copyright was unknown
(O’Callaghan, 2010).
The governing idea in early modern literary culture was that literature
should be morally improving: it should convince people to be virtuous
and dissuade them from vice. Judged by these criteria, much of the
literature explored in this book fell short. Little defence could be found
for the ethical value of the love poetry described in Chapter 8 (unlike
The Faerie Queene), and authors who printed it routinely apologised in
their prefatory materials for not having produced something more
worthwhile.
Six of the chapters in this book focus on plays, and it is of course
drama – pre-eminently Shakespeare’s – that is today the best-known
literature of the period. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, drama
did not enjoy the prestige it does today, not least because its moral
value was thought to be less obvious than that of non-dramatic
literature. Theatrical companies were sponsored by aristocrats and
performed regularly at the royal court (the patron of Shakespeare’s
company was for most of his career no less a figure than the king
himself, when the company was known as the King’s Men; see
Gurr, 2004), but were otherwise forced to work in locations outside
22
London’s city walls because of the disapproval of the City of London

authorities.
All the plays studied in this book were first performed in theatres built
on Bankside, a disreputable area south of the River Thames: The
Spanish Tragedy in the Rose Theatre; As You Like It, Julius Caesar and
Hamlet in the Globe Theatre (see Figure 1.2 in Chapter 1). You can
find out more about early modern theatres (or ‘playhouses’) in the short
film entitled ‘The Playhouse’ which is available on the module website
(see also Hattaway, 2010b; Gurr, 2009). Only a small proportion of the
plays performed were printed, and there are many uncertainties about
the publication process involved (see Chapters 2 and 5) and about the
different versions of the same work that have in some cases survived
(see Chapter 5 for a discussion of this in relation to Hamlet).
Censorship operated haphazardly. For most of the period the right to
print books was restricted to publishers who were members of the
Stationers’ Company, and it was through that company that books
reached official licensers. The Master of the Revels (see Chapter 4) was
responsible for authorising plays for performance. Examples of both lax
and severe censorship can be found in the period; some, but not all,
books and plays on controversial topics were vigorously suppressed
(O’Callaghan, 2010).
I hope that this necessarily sketchy outline of life in early modern

England and its differences from life today begins to suggest how
challenging but also how exciting it is to read the literature of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. You will find that getting to grips
with the set texts in this book is a process that includes three elements:
not just yourself and the text itself, but also the ghosts of the long-dead
early modern people for whom these fascinating works were first
written. The chapters that follow will provide you with plenty of help
and information along the way. I hope you find the journey rewarding.
23
References
Alexander, G. (2010) ‘Rhetoric’ in Hattaway, 2010a, A New Companion
to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, vol. 1, pp. 38–54 (available
through the OU Library website).
Alford, S. (2013) The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of
Elizabeth I, London, Penguin.
Amussen, S.D. (1999) ‘The family and the household’ in Kastan, D.S.
(ed.) A Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 85–9
(available through the OU Library website).
Archer, I.W. (1999) ‘Shakespeare’s London’ in Kastan, D.S. (ed.) A
Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 43–56 (available
Bate, J. (1994) Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Bates, C. (2000) ‘Poets, patronage, and the court’ in Kinney, A.F. (ed.)
The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 90–103 (available through
the OU Library website).
Bray, A. (1982) Homosexuality in Renaissance England, New York,
Columbia University Press.
Brigden, S. (2000) New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors,
1485–1603, London, Allen Lane.
Brink, J.R. (2010) ‘Literacy and education’ in Hattaway, 2010a, A New
Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, vol. 1,
pp. 7–37 (available through the OU Library website).
Bucholz, R. and Key, N. (2004) Early Modern England 1485–1714: A
Narrative History, Oxford, Blackwell.
Burrow, C. (2013) Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Cartwright, K. (ed.) (2010) A Companion to Tudor Literature, Chichester,
Wiley-Blackwell (available through the OU Library website).
Cummings, B. (2011) ‘Religion’ in Kinney, A.F. (ed.) The Oxford
Handbook of Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press pp. 663–79.
24
References
Duffy, E. (2005) The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in

England 1400–1580, 2nd edn, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
‘The Forest of Rhetoric’ (n.d.) [Online] Available at http://rhetoric.byu.
edu/ (Accessed 6 October 2014).
Gurr, A. (2004) The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Gurr, A. (2009) The Shakespearean Stage, 1594–1642, 4th edn,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Hackett, H. (1995) Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the
Cult of the Virgin Mary, Basingstoke, Macmillan.
Hadfield, A. (2005) Shakespeare and Republicanism, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press (available through the OU Library website).
Hattaway, M. (ed.) (2010a) A New Companion to English Renaissance
Literature and Culture, 2 vols, Oxford, Blackwell.
Hattaway, M. (2010b) ‘Playhouses, performances, and the role of drama’
in Hattaway, 2010a, A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature
and Culture, vol. 2, pp. 42–59 (available through the OU Library
website).
Hopkins, L. and Steggle, M. (2006) Renaissance Literature and Culture,
London, Continuum.
Hull, S. (1988) Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women,
1475–1640, 2nd revised edn, San Marino, CA, Huntington Library
Press.
Kastan, D.S. (ed.) (1999) A Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford,
Blackwell (available through the OU Library website).
Kearney, J. (2011) ‘Status’ in Kinney, A.F. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of
Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 182–201.
Kinney, A.F. (ed.) (2000) The Cambridge Companion to English
Literature, 1500–1600, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Kinney, A.F. (ed.) (2011) The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
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Knoppers, L.L. (ed.) (2009) The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern

Women’s Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (available
Knowles, J. (2010) ‘Sexuality: a Renaissance category’ in Hattaway,
2010a, A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture,
vol. 2, pp. 474–91 (available through the OU Library website).
Lanham, R. (1991) A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn, Berkeley,
CA, University of California Press.
Lindley, D. (ed.) (1995) Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline
Entertainments, 1605–40, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Norbrook, D. (2002) Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance,
revised edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
O’Callaghan, M. (2010) ‘Publication: print and manuscript’ in Hattaway,
2010a, A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture,
Ovid (1955) Metamor phoses, trans. M.M. Innes, Harmondsworth,
Penguin.
Ovid (2002) Metamor phoses, trans. A. Golding, London, Penguin.
Ovid (2004) Metamor phoses, trans. D. Raeburn, London, Penguin.
Pacheco, A. (ed.) (2002) A Companion to Early Modern Women’s
Writing, Oxford, Blackwell (available through the OU Library website).
Peck, L.L. (1991) The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, Cambridge,
Perry, C. (2010) ‘Court and coterie culture’ in Hattaway, 2010a, vol. 1,
Perry, C. and Watkins, I. (2009) ‘Introduction’ in Perry, C. and Watkins,
I. (eds) Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, Oxford, Oxford University
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Scott-Warren, J. (2005) Early Modern English Literature, Cambridge,
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References
Sharpe, J. (2010) ‘The debate on witchcraft’ in Hattaway, 2010a, A New

Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, vol. 1,
Smith, H. (2010) ‘Old authors, women writers, and the new print
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Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 178–91 (available through the OU
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Virgil (1983) The Eclogues and Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis, Oxford,
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vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/ (Accessed 29 December 2014).
27
Chapter 1 As You Like It:
woeful pageants and true
delights
Richard Danson Brown
Contents
Aims 33
Materials you will need 34
Introduction: why As You Like It? 35
Reading the play 39
Genre: comedy 46
Genre: pastoral 51
Language and role play 54
Woeful pageants or true delights? 60
Conclusion 61
References 62
Aims
Aims
This chapter will:
. introduce you to the main issues of Book 1 through the study of
Shakespeare’s As You Like It
. investigate what sort of play this is, through discussion of comedy
and pastoral
. explore the importance of role play
. help you to understand the play’s language and use of dramatic
forms.
33
Chapter 1 As You Like It: woeful pageants and true delights
Materials you will need

In this chapter you will be referred to the set book:
. William Shakespeare (2009) As You Like It, ed. Michael Hattaway,
New Cambridge Shakespeare series, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
You will need to watch the following film, which you will find on the
module website:
. ‘Performing As You Like It’ (19 minutes).
You will also find the following online resources helpful:
. Early English Books Online (EEBO) (available via the OU Library
website)
. Historical Texts (HT) (available via the OU Library website)
. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online (available via the OU
Library website)
. Open Source Shakespeare (available at http://www.
opensourceshakespeare.org).
Complete facsimile images of books published in sixteenth and
seventeenth century England are available on both EEBO and HT. See
the module website for more information.
34
Introduction: why As You Like It?

The first question as we begin this module is: why start with As You
Like It? What’s so good, or significant, about this play that we should
start our study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries here? My
answers to this question will become clear as you work through the
chapter, but here are a few sound-bites from those who have
considered the play’s importance. The poet W.H. Auden declared that
‘Of all Shakespeare’s plays, As You Like It is the greatest paean to
civilization’, singling out Rosalind as ‘a triumph of civilization’, a view
which is useful to bear in mind as we consider her role later (Auden,
2002, p. 144). The Arden editor, Juliet Dusinberre, refers to the
‘phenomenal richness’ of the play’s language, theatricality, contexts and
imaginative scope (Shakespeare, 2006, p. 1). The editor of our
Cambridge set text, Michael Hattaway, stresses its complexity, arguing
that it is full of ‘paradoxes and contradictions that can be turned into a
multitude of coexistent interpretations’ (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 4).
Stephen Greenblatt describes it as ‘one of [Shakespeare’s] sunniest
comedies’ (Greenblatt, 2005, p. 290). A more elaborate statement of the
same view can be found in C.L. Barber’s influential study of
Shakespearean comedy: As You Like It is ‘the most perfect expression
Shakespeare or anyone else achieved’ of the traditional ‘rhythms of life’
contained in the antithesis between the holiday and the everyday
(Barber, 1972 [1959], p. 238).
Not everyone has been quite so positive. Frank Kermode qualified his
praise of the play ‘because more than most of Shakespeare it has
slipped over our horizon; it has too much to say about what was once
intimately interesting and now is not’ (Kermode, 2001, p. 82). Similarly,
James Shapiro in his biographical study, 1599: A Year in the Life of
William Shakespeare, notes that there is no surviving contemporary
praise for the play (as there is for Julius Caesar and Hamlet), and
speculates that this may be because it was ‘not only of its time but also
ahead of it’ in the novel demands it made of its audiences: long
conversations about the nature of love, pastoral characters, the
comparative absence of exciting plot or even drama in the conventional
sense (Shapiro, 2005, p. 229).
These are questions you will need to consider as you study the play
over the next two weeks. You don’t have to endorse any of these views.
Editors, you might reasonably say, are predisposed in favour of the texts
35
they edit, because of the amount of time they have to spend in their
company. The same goes for biographers, critics and poets: we have an
investment in Shakespeare and his plays which may blind us to their
deficiencies or eccentricities. Yet there are good reasons for beginning
this module with As You Like It. As my witnesses imply, it is widely
regarded as one of Shakespeare’s comic masterpieces. It is a work of his
maturity, probably written just after Henry V and Julius Caesar and
immediately prior to Hamlet (Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 49–54; Shapiro,
2005, p. xv). It is rich in dramatic roles and in literary and social
contexts, and is inventive in its use of genre and language. As the
quotations from Kermode and Shapiro indicate, it is a play which both
engages in the life of its time and in some way attempts to exceed those
contexts. Another way of putting this is that As You Like It tells us
much about why Shakespeare is one of the world’s most celebrated
writers, and about the culture of which he was a product and which he
helped to shape. It is therefore an ideal introduction to an important
writer, and to a vibrant yet alien culture radically different from our
own and yet which can still feel (to vary Kermode’s formulation) close
to familiar horizons.
Arising from this, As You Like It can profitably introduce the literature
of the later sixteenth century written in English. This is because the play
samples a diverse range of literary modes and genres. In what follows,
you will consider the major genres of comedy and pastoral which
connect the play with the European Renaissance. The court intrigue
which underpins the drama is surprisingly similar to the corrupt
Renaissance courts of The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet and to the
Roman drama of assassination and usurpation contained in Julius
Caesar, discussed in Chapters 3–6. As You Like It is, rather
paradoxically, a poetic drama. I say ‘paradoxically’ because much of the
text is written in an artful prose, which I discuss at the end of this
chapter. It contains elaborate song lyrics, which Jonathan Gibson
considers in Chapter 2. This small anthology of lyric writing is a useful
prelude to the Petrarchan poems and songs discussed in Chapter 8.
Texts of this kind were part of the cultural currency – the hit songs and
shared truisms – of the Elizabethan Renaissance. At the opposite end
of the poetic spectrum is Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene, a
massive and revolutionary text, from which you will study two episodes
in your work on Chapter 7. Like As You Like It, The Faerie Queene is
an assemblage of different literary modes and fashionable ideas; we
know that Shakespeare was an enthusiastic student of Spenser (see
36
Lethbridge, 2008, pp. 2–8), and Shakespeare’s version of pastoral is

significantly indebted to Spenser’s precedent.
There is a final reason why As You Like It makes a good opening. This
relates to the play’s concern with education. In the opening scene,
Orlando complains about the treatment he has received from his elder
brother, Oliver:
My brother Jacques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly

of his profit. For my part, he keeps me rustically at home or, to
speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept […] I, his
brother, gain nothing under him but growth.
(1.1.4–11)
Figure 1.1 A schoolroom scene in Elizabethan times, lithograph. Photo ©

Bridgeman Images.
Elizabethan schools were no picnic. Boys – and boys only – were educated
from 7 in the morning until 5 in the evening. Corporal punishment was
routine. Lessons consisted chiefly of the repetitive rote learning of classical
Latin alongside religious instruction. It was a rich experience for apprentice
writers like Shakespeare and Spenser, but not necessarily for young men like
Orlando (see Hadfield, 2012, pp. 28–30).
37
Though in many ways Orlando is an angry young man, the source of

his anger isn’t (as for later teenagers) having to go to school, but that
Oliver denies him the chance to do just that. Throughout this edgy
scene-setter, what frustrates Orlando is that Oliver’s unjust treatment
denies him the social opportunities he believes are his entitlement as the
younger son of Sir Rowland de Boys: ‘you have trained me like a
peasant, obscuring and hiding from me all gentleman-like qualities’
(1.1.54–6). This is not an isolated concern. At the end of the play the
misanthropic courtier Jaques, on finding that Duke Frederick has
become a hermit, resolves to join him because ‘out of these
convertites/There is much matter to be heard and learned’ (5.4.168–9).
(Confusingly, Jaques shares a name with Orlando’s brother; Hattaway
modernises the brother’s name (‘Jacques’) to minimise confusion; see
Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 86–8.) As You Like It is a play about the desire
for education – either because it’s socially appropriate and advantageous,
as Orlando insists, or because it is a good in itself, as Jaques suggests.
In turn, to study this play is in itself something of an education: in
Shakespeare, in his culture and in the play’s central concern, the ‘strange
capers’ (2.4.46) into which lovers of all kinds run.
38
Reading the play
Reading the play

Your first task is to read the play. Though As You Like It does have
many references with which you’ll need help from the set text, it is
relatively short and, in the first two acts, tells a dramatic story with pace
and excitement. Don’t get hung up on understanding every reference:
you should read initially for the gist of the plot rather than becoming
too concerned with every footnote.
Activity
When you’ve read the play through quickly, reread the following
passages more carefully:
. Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech (2.7.139–66)

. the dialogue between Corin and Touchstone (3.3.1–62)
. the entrance of Hymen in the final scene (5.4.93–134).
What do these extracts tell us about the sort of play this is? Consider
also the tone in these passages – is it consistent, or do you think there
are any differences between them? Write a few brief notes on each
extract and underline key phrases which you think are relevant.
You may wish to share your ideas about your reading with your tutor
group in the forum on the module website.
Discussion
These are necessarily complex questions which don’t admit of easy
solutions. In what follows, I’ve tried to explore some of the issues you
might have touched on in your notes, but my answers are not in any way
exhaustive.
Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech (2.7.139–66) is the play’s most
quoted moment. As Hattaway’s notes indicate (Shakespeare, 2009,
p. 139), the idea of the world being like a stage has numerous sources;
it may also be that Shakespeare is in part defending the craft of acting
against puritan objections to the theatre as a place of immorality by
asserting the universality of acting and role play as human activities
(Shakespeare, 2006, pp. 227ff.). In dramatic context, Jaques’s speech is
satirical in its presentation of the seven ages of man as a play. The
39
‘whining schoolboy’ creeps ‘Unwillingly to school’ (compare this with

Orlando at the start of the play), while the lover is almost completely
ridiculous ‘with a woeful ballad/Made to his mistress’ eyebrow’ – what
could be sillier than writing love poems to an eyebrow? (emphases
added). We find out shortly afterwards when we hear Orlando’s trite
love poems to Rosalind. The grimmest part of Jaques’s speech is the
seventh age, with its depiction of senility as a gradual withdrawal from
all the good things in human life: it is ‘second childishness and mere
oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. ‘Sans’ is the
French for ‘without’, and this tells us something important about
Jaques: he is a bit of poseur, with a penchant for using trendy
vocabulary; see his earlier ‘And I did laugh, sans intermission,/An hour
by his dial’ and Hattaway’s note (2.7.32–3). Taken in conjunction with
Orlando’s flight from Oliver and the tyrannical Duke Frederick
(1.2.239–40), and with Rosalind’s expulsion from court by the Duke
(1.3.31–79), Jaques offers a sombre, perhaps even a tragic vision, and
hints at the potential seriousness of the play we are studying. At the
same time, his register owes much to contemporary verse satire, a
genre which was so controversial that in June 1599 the Archbishop of
Canterbury ordered the burning of books by writers such as Sir John
Davies, among others (Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 15, 51). Elizabethan
society was, like Duke Frederick’s court, authoritarian. It tried to control
what people read and so what they might think; in such contexts,
writing satire could easily land the unwary writer in trouble.
The second passage, the dialogue between Corin and Touchstone
(3.3.1–62), couldn’t be more different. In essence, all Corin and
Touchstone do is to compare living in the country with living at court;
this is the first of many conversations in the second half of the play
which has no real bearing on its outcome. The dialogue is rich in
contrasts – between the courtly wit of the professional jester
Touchstone (or ‘Clowne’, as the First Folio calls him; see Shakespeare,
2009, p. 87) and the ‘natural’ philosophy of the shepherd Corin. In
performance, this scene is often very funny because of the rapid
interchange between Touchstone’s nonsensical antitheses (for example,
‘In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is
private, it is a very vile life’, ll.3–5) and Corin’s ironically basic
common sense (‘the property of rain is to wet’, l.12). Even the
apparently serious exchange about whether Corin is damned is a
further demonstration of the play’s educational theme, as Touchstone
comically riffs on the form of a classical syllogism: because Corin
hasn’t been at court, he has never seen good manners, so it follows
40
Reading the play
Figure 1.2 Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘View of London and its theatres’. 1647,
etching on paper, 47cm x 39cm. Print published by Cornelis Danckerts,
London. The British Museum, London. 1864,0611.434. Photo © The Trustees
of the British Museum.
Theatres in London were built outside of the city walls, in suburbs. This
meant that they were on the fringes of legality and morality (Greenblatt, 2005,
pp. 175–6). This engraving by Hollar shows that the Globe Theatre, where As
You Like It was probably first performed, was located by a bear-baiting arena
in Southwark, to the south of the city. (The engraving has its labels muddled:
the Globe was in fact the building on the left marked as ‘Beere bayting’.) The
theatres were also neighbours to brothels: the wastrel protagonist in an
epigram by Sir John Davies sometimes ‘sees a comedy’ and sometimes ‘falls
into a whore house by the way’ (in Marlowe, 2006, p. 152).
that ‘thy manners must be wicked, and wickedness is sin, and sin is
damnation’ (ll.26–7). It sounds plausible enough, yet as Corin puts it in
a balanced sentence of his own, ‘those that are good manners at the
41
court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is

most mockable at the court’ (ll.29–31). Though Touchstone wins the
ensuing verbal joust, his showy arguments don’t convince. Indeed,
Touchstone often cuts a ‘mockable’ figure in the theatre through accent,
costume and affectation, as productions present him as the proverbial
fish out of water in Corin’s milieu of greasy ewes (see Shakespeare,
2009, pp. 3, 64 for illustrations).
Figure 1.3 ‘Month of Julye’, from Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes

Calender. Facsimile of original published in 1579, woodcut. Private collection.
Photo © Bridgeman Images
This exchange reveals two important things about As You Like It. The
first is that it can be very funny. The play excels in comic dialogue
which is ultimately space-filling chat: exchanges which are intended to
provoke the audience to laughter. The second is that in its concern with
the relationship between town and country, the play participates in the
fashionable mode of pastoral. Pastoral often seems to modern eyes a
pre-eminently ‘mockable’ form in which educated characters pretend to
be shepherds, yet it enjoyed huge popularity in the classical period
(which inaugurated many of its characteristic gestures and settings) and
Renaissance Europe. A handy definition is: ‘pastoral is a fictionalized
imitation of rural life, usually the life of an imaginary Golden Age, in
which the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses play a prominent part’
(Congleton and Brogan, 1993, p. 885). Such a definition describes much
42
Reading the play
of the setting and action of As You Like It. Helen Cooper expands on
how pastoral was understood:
Poets of the Middle Ages and Renaissance gave a very specific

literary meaning to the word ‘pastoral’: the traditional image of the
shepherd world. […] The basic idea of the function of pastoral has
always been the same, ‘the process of putting the complex into the
simple’, as William Empson described it. This is the crucial point
that makes poetry pastoral: the term has nothing to do with the
modern tendency to make it almost a synonym for ‘idyllic’[…] It is
in the metaphorical or ironic relationship between the world
created by the poet and the real world that pastoral exists.
(Cooper, 1977, pp. 1–2)
Pastoral is a convention in which ‘the shepherd world’ is made to reflect

ironically and metaphorically ‘the real world’. As You Like It
energetically participates in a literary form which is both self-conscious
– the conversation between Corin and Touchstone replays previous
conversations in the pastoral tradition – and potentially risky in the way
it handles divisive questions (like the best way to salvation) in a comic
register. ‘Thou art in a parlous state, shepherd’, Touchstone teases, but
the audience seldom feels that the peril (‘parlous’ is an old form of
‘perilous’) is real (ll.27–8). As Hattaway puts it, the pastoral mode of the
forest in the play is ‘a condition – or a state of mind – rather than a
place’ (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 4).
The entrance of Hymen in the final scene (5.4.93–134) is different
again. This is an extraordinary moment, as the stage direction indicates:
‘Enter Hymen, Rosalind, and Celia. Still Musicke’ (Shakespeare, 1623,
p. 206). I’ve quoted here from the first printed edition (in the 1623
First Folio of Shakespeare’s works) to show how modern editors tidy up
and interpret the ambiguous evidence of performance practices in the
early printed editions. (You can read the Folio text for yourself by
logging on to Early English Books Online (EEBO) or Historical Texts
(HT) through the OU Library website.) Hattaway has the music coming
first, and explains that Rosalind and Celia must enter ‘as themselves’, as
princesses no longer in disguise; he notes that ‘It seems appropriate that
music should accompany the masque-like entrance, rather than coming
after it’ (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 208). Try to imagine an actor dressed in
the classical costume of the figure on p. 6 of our set text, while
subdued music sounds around him, ushering in the newly restored
43
princesses in the costumes they wore at the opening of the play. (Have
a look at the OED online definition of ‘still’, adj., 3b. The OED cites
this passage and similar ones from contemporary drama. ‘Still musicke’
was perhaps a little spooky in its softness.)
Hattaway refers to another genre: masques were a fashionable form at
this time. They were formal, courtly entertainments which used
elaborate costuming and stage effects; they often featured classical gods
entering to settle human squabbles – Shakespeare later incorporated a
masque in The Tempest which features classical goddesses. In As You
Like It, Hymen is literally a deus ex machina: a god who intervenes to
resolve an impasse. The Roman poet Horace provided an influential
treatment of this idea in his Ars Poetica, or ‘The Art of Poetry’. This
ancient work of literary advice was widely cited during the Renaissance
because of the enormous prestige of Roman literature generally and
Horace in particular. Shakespeare would have studied him at school;
two characters in the early tragedy Titus Andronicus refer to doing this
(Bate, 1994, p. 20). He would have realised therefore that As You Like
It lightly plays against Horace’s warning: ‘Don’t let a god intervene
unless the dénouement requires/such a solution’ (Rudd, 1979, p. 195).
Hymen comes from a different literary world from Rosalind and the
shepherds, which is precisely why Horace warns against this sort of
supernatural device. Introducing a god necessarily stretches an
audience’s credulity.
Why then did Shakespeare do it? The answer to this is contained in the
rest of the extract: As You Like It follows the ancient comic convention
of ending with the marriage of its young protagonists (see Miola, 2000,
p. 72). This is easy enough in the case of Celia and Oliver, and even in
that of Audrey and Touchstone, but requires more effort in the cases of
Rosalind and Orlando and Phoebe and Silvius because of the
confusions set in train by Rosalind’s disguise as a boy. Hymen stresses
(in the categorical way typical of gods) that it is his job to ‘make
conclusion/Of these most strange events’ and then in his song asserts
the social value of marriage: ‘’Tis Hymen peoples every town’ (ll.110–
11, 127).
The continuation of the human race demands the somewhat arbitrary
marrying off of Phoebe to Silvius as well as the love match of Rosalind
and Orlando. Note that there is no possibility of a union between
Rosalind and Phoebe: ‘You to his love must accord,/Or have a woman
to your lord ’ (ll.117–18; emphases added). Hymen is the god of
heterosexual orthodoxy. This is hardly fair on Phoebe, who nevertheless
44
Reading the play
fulfils the promise she has made: ‘I will not eat my word now thou art
mine’ (l.133). I don’t think we’re supposed to see this as a wholly
satisfactory conclusion – perhaps not even for Silvius, who must trust
that the marriage he has longed for will link Phoebe’s ‘fancy’ to his
‘faith’ as effortlessly as she does in her final line (l.134). But it is one
which is in keeping with almost all Shakespeare comedies: by the end,
the main characters tend to marry one another, more or less gladly. In
this respect, the four weddings in As You Like It are a microcosm of the
marriages which close plays as varied as The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth
Night and Measure for Measure.
This discussion of these three passages should give you some pointers
about studying the play generically. It partly substantiates Hattaway’s
view that As You Like It resists any ‘monolithic meaning’ through the
range of signals it gives its audience (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 4). Indeed,
Hattaway’s sense of the play’s complexity leads him to suggest that it is
a tragi-comedy, a fashionable genre of the time, which only just avoids a
tragic outcome (Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 2, 18, 24). Keep thinking about
this idea as we consider the play’s dominant modes of comedy and
pastoral.
45
Genre: comedy
When As You Like It was first published, in the 1623 First Folio
collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, its genre was unproblematic. It
was the tenth comedy in the first part of this volume, placed between
The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew. The Folio tells us
that the compilers of the volume, John Heminges and Henry Condell
(who were actors in Shakespeare’s company), viewed As You Like It as
a comedy. This doesn’t tell us as much as we might think – the Folio
recognises only the three genres of its full title, Mr. VVilliam
Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. It doesn’t mean that the
play is what we would think of as a comedy (apart from Touchstone, it
is remote from stand-up comedy), which raises the question of what
comedy meant to Shakespeare. In the Comedies section of the Folio,
there are plays which are difficult to see as comic, or which later editors
have redesignated as tragi-comedies and romances (see Miola, 2000,
pp. 140–3, for a reading of As You Like It as a romance). For example,
The Winter’s Tale, written towards the end of Shakespeare’s career,
experiments with convention to an unparalleled extent: the prince,
Mamillius, dies halfway through, while his mother, Hermione, is missing
presumed dead until the final scene.
Despite this elasticity in practice, Elizabethan comic theory was
relatively straightforward. There are two linked views, which I will call
‘didactic’ and ‘cultural’. The didactic view characterises comedy as an
educative art form, which, by displaying examples of human stupidity,
shows the audience behaviours that they should avoid. Sir Philip
Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, or Apology for Poetry, (written in about 1583
but not published until 1595) gives an authoritative statement of this
view:
comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which

[the writer] representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort
that may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be
content to be such a one.
(Sidney, 1973, pp. 95–6)
46
Genre: comedy
Figure 1.4 The first page of As You Like It in the 1623 First Folio: Mr.
VVilliam Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published
According to the True Originall Copies, London, Isaac Jaggard and Ed.
Blount. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, STC 22273 Fo. 1
no.09. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under the following
licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0
Sidney’s Defence
In the quotation from the Defence of Poesy on the previous page,
Sidney was probably prompted by texts like Stephen Gosson’s The
47
Schoole of Abuse (1579), which attacks play-going because it

facilitates ‘immoral’ behaviour: ‘In our assemblies at plays in
London, you shall see such heaving, and shoving, such itching and
shouldering, to sit by women […] such smiling, such winking, and
such manning them home, when the sports are ended, that it is a
right comedy, to mark their behaviour’ (Gosson, 1579, sig. C 1 [v];
modernised). This is another text you can access via EEBO or HT.
You can also read a short account of Sidney’s life in the poetry
section at the back of this book associated with Chapter 8.
Comedy educates the beholder not to want to reproduce ‘the common

errors of our life’. You see what a twit Orlando is, and resolve not to
write bad love poetry yourself; seeing Jaques persuades you not to be a
sarcastic kill-joy. As the title of Sidney’s work suggests, this view is
deliberately defensive: it defends the didactic work performed by genres
like comedy against the views of contemporary moralists that theatre
corrupted its audience (see Greenblatt, 2005, p. 186). As such, this isn’t
a theory of comedy which necessarily works well in the context of a
later play like As You Like It. Consider Jaques’s role again. The play
invites us to consider him on a number of levels. On the one hand, as a
moralist, he is a self-conscious outsider, who frequently appears
ridiculous in the theatre. His name was possibly pronounced ‘jakes’,
which would have made a pun on the Elizabethan slang for ‘toilet’
(Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 87–8). In this spirit, C.L. Barber views him as
an anti-festive figure, a character who is designed to stand outside
society: ‘Jaques’ factitious melancholy […] serves primarily to set him at
odds both with society and with Arden and so motivate contemplative
mockery’ (Barber, 1972 [1959], p. 228). He is a figure of fun because he
is an outsider. On the other hand, he has many of the best lines, like
‘All the world’s a stage’. At key moments, he offers a provocative
counterpoint to the Duke’s saccharine vision of the Forest of Arden as
a ‘sweet’ rural idyll (2.1.12–69), and to the conventions of love
(3.3.213–49). While the play as a whole is finally more on the side of
the social lives of the lovers, Jaques’s exit at the end of the play, denying
‘the dancing measures’ of erotic convention, is surely more complex
than that of a laughing stock whose actions the audience should reject
(5.4.180).
The cultural explanation of comedy is closely related to the didactic
view. This situates the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in
the light of prestigious writers from other cultures. In 1598 Francis
48
Genre: comedy
Figure 1.5 Forbes Masson as Jaques in As You Like It, The Courtyard,
Stratford-upon-Avon, 2009. This RSC production was directed by Michael
Boyd. Photo: Ellie Kurttz © Royal Shakespeare Company.
Meres used Shakespeare as an example of the value of English

literature:
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and
tragedy among the Latins: so Shakespeare among the English is
the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For Comedy,
witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Er rors, his Love ’s Labours
Lost, his Love’s Labours Won, his Midsummers Night Dream, and
his Merchant of Venice.
(G. Smith, 1904, vol. II, pp. 317–18; modernised)
Meres is important to biographers because he demonstrates that

Shakespeare was a well-known playwright by 1598 and provides a riddle
in the shape of Love’s Labours Won, which scholars have tried to
identify without success (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 50; Schoenbaum, 2006,
pp. 26–7). But Meres also tells us something important about
Shakespeare’s culture: that Elizabethans understood literature not in
terms of originality but in terms of imitation and similarity. The more
Shakespeare is like the Roman dramatists Plautus and Seneca, the more
‘excellent’ he is. And the more Shakespeare’s works can be slotted into
genres which resemble classical moulds, the larger the claims that can
49
be made about the significance of English writing. Meres’s ‘comparative

discourse’ of English poets with continental writers is a compact
illustration of how Elizabethans were taught and therefore of how they
thought (G. Smith, 1904, vol. II, p. 314). Meres points to a further
important context: when Shakespeare wrote his plays, England was
politically isolated as the only major Protestant country in a largely
Catholic Europe. English was a language spoken by a small number of
people, and its literature was the concern of an even smaller literate
minority. By presenting Shakespeare as an equal to Seneca and Plautus,
Meres reiterates the point made by many contemporary writers that the
English could be as linguistically and politically powerful as the Romans
had been (see Blank, 2012, p. 265).
There is a further dimension to the cultural account of comedy which
Meres only hints at, but which is developed by Sidney. This is the idea
that drama should conform to the three unities. Ultimately deriving
from Aristotle’s Poetics, these rules stipulate that plays should be unified
in time (the represented action should be similar to the time it takes to
perform the play), place (the represented action should take place in the
same setting) and action (the play should concentrate on a single action
and avoid subplots). As an orthodox Renaissance thinker, Sidney objects
to plays which transgress these laws: ‘where the stage should always
represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it
should be, both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason, but one day,
[in contemporary drama] there is both many days, and many places,
inartificially imagined’ (Sidney, 1973, p. 113). ‘Many days and many
places’ is a good summary of the action covered by As You Like It, and
the same objections could be made to The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet and
Julius Caesar. Shakespeare conformed to these rules only occasionally
(in The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest), which suggests not that he
couldn’t follow them but rather that he preferred not to.
Shortly after the passage I’ve just quoted, Sidney refers to contemporary
plays as ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’ (Sidney, 1973, p. 114). He objects to
hybrid genres: tragedy and comedy should be kept separate. This is
precisely what later dramatists refuse to do: elements like the
gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet, or the usurpation narrative in As You
Like It, disrupt any purist understanding of genre. As You Like It is a
deliberately hybrid play, and it’s in this spirit that we should understand
its pastoral elements.
50
Genre: pastoral
Genre: pastoral
In the earlier section ‘Reading the play’, I quoted Hattaway’s useful
perception that pastoral in As You Like It is ‘a condition – or a state of
mind – rather than a place’ (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 4). You should read
his fuller discussion of the mode later in his introduction to the set text,
which situates the play’s use of pastoral in a number of literary, political
and theoretical contexts (Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 18–26). What I want to
do here is develop his remark that pastoral ‘is a species of allegory […]
in pastoral there is always an implied comparison with another culture,
court or city’ (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 19). This approach – that pastoral
is a form of allegory which compares what seems to be described with
something else – is similar to George Puttenham’s in The Art of English
Poesy, first published in 1589. This influential text is both a history of
literature as well as a practical ‘how to write’ manual. Puttenham’s
discussion of pastoral covers the origins of the form and its contested
relationship with tragedy and comedy. Like Sidney, Puttenham makes
sure that his readers know he is familiar with Aristotle, but the crucial
point he makes is that pastoral, rather than being realistic, is a coded
form of writing. Puttenham argues that pastoral is not the oldest form
of poetry, but rather that it came into being
long after the other dramatic poems, not of purpose to counterfeit

or represent the rustical manners of loves and communication, but
under the veil of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate
and glance at greater matters, and such as perchance had not been
safe to have been disclosed in any other sort, which may be
perceived by the Eclogues of Vergil, in which are treated by figure
matters of greater importance than the loves of Tityrus and
Corydon.
(Puttenham, 2007, p. 128)
Puttenham’s prose isn’t easy (contrast it with the more elegant prose
writing of As You Like It), so it needs a little decoding. Puttenham first
claims that eclogues – pastoral poems of the kind written by Virgil in
his Eclogues – came after the development of drama. Then comes the
most important section. Rather than being a representation of ‘rustical’
life, pastoral is a form of literary veiling, through which poets ‘glance at
greater matters’. Virgil comes to Puttenham’s mind: his Eclogues are not
precisely what they seem to be, texts about ‘the loves of Tityrus and
51
Corydon’ (characters in the poems), but rather deal metaphorically (‘by

figure’) with ‘matters of greater importance’. These matters may be
subversive: ‘such as perchance had not been safe to have been disclosed
in any other sort’. Pastoral thus provides a ‘veil’ to ‘disclose’ issues you
couldn’t raise directly. (As an aside, we may note that another reason
Puttenham opts for a ‘veiled’ model of pastoral is the homoerotic
elements in Virgil’s Eclogues, a collection widely taught in schools.
Commentators on the Second Eclogue went to considerable lengths to
deny its explicit admission that ‘Corydon was hot for Alexis’. See
Wilson-Okamura, 2010, pp. 113–14.)
How does this illuminate As You Like It? The most obvious point is
that we need to treat the play’s pastoral elements cautiously. While it
remains concerned with what Puttenham calls ‘loves and
communication’ (the latter word has the connotation of ‘social
interaction’; see ‘communication’, n., 2a, in OED online), this is not the
whole story. Hattaway suggests that Corin’s economic position recalls
the effects of enclosure on sixteenth-century shepherds (Shakespeare,
2009, p. 23). As Shapiro (2005, p. 273) comments in relation to 2.4.71–
80, where Corin laments that he is ‘shepherd to another man,/And do
not shear the fleeces that I graze’, Shakespeare gives us something
‘unexpected in a comedy’: a ‘wage-earner who will be homeless and
unemployed as soon as his master can sell off the cottage and the
enclosed “bounds” for a quick profit’ (see also 3.6.106). This is a good
example of pastoral’s ‘veil of homely persons’ and ‘rude speeches’
enabling Shakespeare to register some of the ‘social dislocation’ which
was reshaping England during this period (Shapiro, 2005, p. 275).
Yet as David Scott Wilson-Okamura observes, part of the attraction of
Virgil’s pastoral was that it was ‘poetry about poetry’: this is a self-
conscious mode where topical allegory coexists with an intense
literariness (Wilson-Okamura, 2010, p. 67). Elizabethan pastoral was
assembled from clichés and sources remembered from school. The
allusive patchwork which underlies As You Like It is visible in many
places, such as the songs which are discussed here in Chapter 2. My
favourite example is where Shakespeare quotes directly from the poetry
of Christopher Marlowe as Phoebe falls desperately in love with
Ganymede/Rosalind:
52
Genre: pastoral
Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:

‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’
(3.6.80–1)
Phoebe quotes from Hero and Leander, which was first published in
1598, five years after Marlowe’s murder in 1593. Hero and Leander is
itself a highly literary poem, which parodies epic poetry in the service of
a self-conscious narrative about sexuality; as Hattaway notes, it has
‘strong homo-erotic elements’ which are relevant to the moment in the
play when Phoebe falls in love with the cross-dressed Rosalind
(Shakespeare, 2009, p. 174). Elizabethan productions were all male; this
meant that a boy actor dressed as a girl (Phoebe) falls in love with
another boy actor dressed as a girl disguised as a boy (‘Ganymede’) (see
Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 36–7). Hero and Leander is a great poem about
falling in love, and about the quality of intense adolescent desire which
also preoccupies As You Like It. Just before the line Phoebe
remembers, Marlowe’s narrator imperiously declares: ‘It lies not in our
power to love, or hate,/For will in us is overruled by fate’ (Marlowe,
2006, p. 201). This is related to the Petrarchan conventions you will
study in Chapter 8. When Phoebe cites Marlowe, the audience is left in
no doubt that it is listening to a deliberately poetic conversation. Calling
poets ‘shepherds’ is a convention Shakespeare would have known from
Virgil and Spenser (see Spenser, 1989, p. 170), while the elegant chime
of the rhyming couplet, and Phoebe’s opportune remembering of a line
from a fashionable poem, signals that we have drifted from the social
concerns of Corin to a more artificial form of pastoral. As I said earlier,
such conventions are ‘mockable’: this is nothing like real life. Yet
paradoxically Phoebe’s dumbstruck fascination with ‘Ganymede’ and her
recourse to the received ideas of literature can be intensely moving.
‘Now I find thy saw of might’ should in performance convey the sense
of an astonished realisation that what previously had been understood
only as poetry now – for Phoebe at least – has the truth of lived
experience. This is part of the illusionism which lies at the heart of
Shakespearean drama: what Sidney calls ‘an imitation of the common
errors of our life’.
53
Language and role play

Though Rosalind has no soliloquies until the epilogue (which is
discussed in Chapter 2), it is her voice, like Hamlet’s in Hamlet, which
dominates in performance. According to Open Source Shakespeare, she
has 201 speeches; the closest to this is Orlando, with 120, while Jaques
has only 57 (see Open Source Shakespeare (n.d.) As You Like It). That
Rosalind does not soliloquise tells us important things about her role
and the temperature of the play as a whole. Rosalind’s role is dialogic
and educational: she is typically talking to someone about something (or
someone), and often with an agenda. Consider the following exchange
with Jaques, where Rosalind quizzes him about his melancholy:
JAQUES Why, ’tis good to be sad and say nothing.

ROSALIND Why then, ’tis good to be a post.
JAQUES I have […] a melancholy of mine own, compounded of
many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the
sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination
wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
ROSALIND A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be
sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s. Then
to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and
poor hands.
(4.1.7–19)
This exchange again stresses Jaques’s comic self-importance as an

outsider. Rosalind punctures his conceit first by the ironic, proverbial
one-liner, ‘’tis good to be a post’. In her second speech, Rosalind offers
further ironies. Where Jaques pretentiously presents his sadness as a
product of his unique specialness, Rosalind offers the commonsensical
thought that he is miserable because he has sold his land to see other
men’s. In a resonant antithesis, she suggests that Jaques has traded ‘rich
eyes’ for ‘poor hands’: travel only denudes the pocket. In the workaday
perspective which is never far from the surface of the play, Rosalind
insists on the material value of land over the intangible benefits Jaques
attributes to his roving temperament. And she does this in the
distinctive, bantering prose style which is one of the stylistic hallmarks
of As You Like It.
54
Rosalind’s role is partly a product of this manner of speaking, this prose

idiom which has the virtue of cutting through pretension while also
suggesting that all characters, and the audience, still have much to learn.
We’re now going to take a closer look at 4.1 as a whole to develop this
sense of role and language play. As I’ve mentioned, As You Like It is
notorious for its long conversations with little plot development. This
scene extends the business of 3.2, where Orlando initially agrees to
court ‘Ganymede’ as Rosalind. Emrys Jones suggests that Shakespeare’s
‘scenic form’ – the shape, pacing and design of his scenes – is a key
part of his theatrical work (Jones, 1971, pp. 3–40). This scene gives us
three overlapping exchanges:
. the short bout between Jaques and Rosalind (ll.1–20)
. the long flirtation between Orlando and Rosalind (ll.21–161)
. the tailpiece where Celia teases Rosalind (ll.162–76).
Celia is on stage with Rosalind throughout, but Rosalind is the
dominant speaker. No single position remains unchallenged. Rosalind
mocks Jaques and Orlando in turn, but is then mocked for her
hypocrisy, while her realism about love is undone by her own admission
‘how many fathom deep I am in love!’ (l.166). The framing of the
conversation between Rosalind and Orlando by the exchanges with
Jaques and Celia helps to complicate the sense we make of the
characters within the scene and the postures which they take.
Activity
You should now watch the film ‘Performing As You Like It’ (19 minutes),
which you will find on the module website. It focuses on 4.1 and will give
you some useful perspectives on the different approaches of actors and
directors to the business of staging Shakespeare.
Then reread 4.1 and carry out the following tasks.
First, try to find examples of different uses of language in the scene –
you might look for proverbs, dirty jokes, lines of verse, elaborate
sentences, or classical allusions. Use Hattaway’s notes to help you
locate these. How would you characterise these different linguistic
registers?
55
Figure 1.6 Act 4, Scene 1 in performance: Orlando (Liam Cunningham) and

Rosalind (Niamh Cusack) watched by Celia (Rachel Joyce) in the 1996 RSC
production, directed by Stephen Pimlott. Photo: Reg Wilson © Royal
Shakespeare Company
Then think about the different roles Rosalind and Orlando adopt – where
do you think an audience’s sympathies should lie in this scene?
Discussion
My answers, in the text that follows, are not exhaustive. Even in a short
scene, Shakespeare’s theatrical and linguistic inventiveness is at times
bewildering; you should have much to chew on here.
The scene includes a great variety of different linguistic usages, such as

modified proverbs (ll.8, 116–17, 133–4); bawdy puns (ll.48, 65–9); a
mock marriage (ll.99–111); mock complaints (ll.146–9); and speeches
which are significantly indebted to rhetoric, using copious classical
exemplars (ll.75–85, 117–25). So I would choose one of Rosalind’s own
words to characterise the registers in this scene: ‘giddy’ (l.122); that is,
changeable, even skittish. Almost all of these speeches are Rosalind’s,
which suggests that she should be played as ‘giddily’ as she is
stylistically varied. The range of registers she adopts points to
56
quicksilver changes in mood, from teasing Orlando for his tardiness, to

a ‘holiday humour’ in which she is ‘like enough to consent’ (ll.55–6).
The scene includes a perfect verse line in Orlando’s initial greeting:
‘Good day, and happiness, dear Rosalind’ (l.24). This is a line of ten-
syllable iambic pentameter, the standard verse unit Shakespeare uses
elsewhere. Jaques immediately recognises this as ‘blank verse’ (l.25) and
takes it as his occasion to leave, presumably because of his allergic
reaction to Orlando’s poetry (3.3.213–49). Unlike the usual truism that
Shakespeare reserves verse for courtly characters and prose for servants
and menials, in As You Like It the courtiers prefer an elaborate prose,
while shepherds like Phoebe and Silvius tend to speak in verse. We
must be careful not to confuse verse with sophistication and prose with
naturalness. Touchstone’s warning that ‘the truest poetry is the most
feigning’ applies as much to prose as to verse, and inevitably he is
speaking prose when he says this, and trying to seduce Audrey (3.4.14).
Like Touchstone, Rosalind uses periodic sentences – long syntactic units
with balanced clauses, frequent antitheses and illustrative examples. Her
speech about not dying for love shows us an actor speaking like an
apprentice lawyer, ‘Full of wise saws and modern instances’ (2.7.156),
rather than a girl in love:
No, faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand
years old and in all this time there was not any man died in his
own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains
dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die
before, and he is one of the patterns of love; Leander, he would
have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun, if it had
not been for a hot midsummer night […] But these are all lies:
men have died from time to time – and worms have eaten them –
but not for love.
(ll.75–85)
The legal quality of Rosalind’s diction is shown by her use of the

words ‘attorney’ and ‘videlicet’, and her use of illustrative examples. (See
OED online, ‘attorney’, n.2, and ‘videlicet’, adv. and n., for the legal
connotations of these terms.) Neither Troilus nor Leander died for love;
these examples lead to the clinching antitheses of the final sentence,
where ‘men have died’ is balanced with ‘worms have eaten them’ and,
most tellingly, the mythological ‘lies’ are linked with ‘love’. At the same
57
time, as Hattaway’s note on Troilus doing ‘what he could to die before’

suggests, Rosalind glances at the Elizabethan usage, where ‘die’ also had
the connotation of ‘have an orgasm’ (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 180; OED
online, ‘die’, v.1, 7d). Rosalind both reproves Orlando’s hyperbole (‘in
mine own person, I die’, l.74) and distinguishes between sexual and
actual death. Modern performances often cut Troilus and Leander on
the grounds that these love stories aren’t as well known to modern
audiences as they were to Elizabethans. Yet the syntax of Rosalind’s
sentences – ‘these are all lies’ (emphasis added) refers back to the
examples – demonstrates the elaborate organisation of her prose.
Rosalind’s and Orlando’s roles in the scene are connected with its
changing registers. As throughout, Orlando’s is the simpler role: he is
the idealistic lover, frequently dismayed by Rosalind’s realism about love.
‘But will my Rosalind do so?’, he asks when ‘Ganymede’ has given him
a summary of the capricious behaviours Rosalind would adopt after
marriage (ll.117–26). At the same time, a good actor needs to suggest
elements of impatience with the game the characters are playing. ‘I take
some joy to say you are [Rosalind], because I would be talking of her’
(ll.71–2) injects a note of realism which by Act 5 becomes even more
pronounced when Orlando says, ‘I can live no longer by thinking’
(5.2.40). Hattaway suggests that one of the crucial decisions for
productions is whether Orlando sees through Rosalind’s disguise, and
lines like this are fertile in the kind of theatrical ambiguity on which the
play thrives (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 41).
What precisely are we seeing here? In modern productions, we usually
see an actress dressed as a boy, educating a young man in the realities
of love, which makes perfect sense of Celia’s warning to Rosalind: ‘We
must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show
the world what the bird hath done to her own nest’ (ll.162–4). In other
words: by stripping you, we’ll show that you’re really a woman,
hypocritically attacking your own sex. But in an Elizabethan
performance the complexity of the represented action was more
extreme, as the part of Rosalind was taken by a boy actor. Bruce R.
Smith clarifies the problem: ‘In the dalliance of “Orlando” and
“Rosalind” [Shakespeare’s audience] would have witnessed in literal fact
what Orlando and Rosalind were playing out in fiction: a man and boy
flirting with abandon and getting away with it’. Yet, as Smith
recognises, ‘We can never know […] what went on in the heads of
people who have been dead for four hundred years’ (B. Smith, 1994,
pp. 147, 49).
58
This is a useful reminder about the nature of the evidence we deal with
when we try to imagine early performances. It is also, by implication, a
warning about audience sympathy, which must be negotiated anew with
each new performance. Jones observes that ‘during a performance of a
play something comes into being which can be called […] an “audience
mind” – something to which actors respond as to a single entity: the
corporate presence in the auditorium’ (Jones, 1971, p. 7). Sympathy will
depend on the precise nature of a given performance, and how those
involved (actors, directors, musicians, technicians and audience) realise
and respond to the script on a given night. What we can say about 4.1
is that it is skilful in its balanced allocation of attention to different
roles and perspectives; Rosalind dominates, but she doesn’t tyrannise.
Her tutorial in love is simultaneously categorical (‘the sky changes when
they are wives’, l.119) and capricious (‘I knew what you would prove –
my friends told me as much’, ll.146–7); it is a complex act of flirtation
which aims to educate and captivate Orlando, while doing the same sort
of work on the audience. Yet the final words are Celia’s ‘I’ll sleep’,
which revert to a workaday idiom to undercut Rosalind’s own romantic
hyperbole in the penultimate speech (l.176). Loves and communication,
Shakespeare implies, never take place in a social vacuum.
59
Woeful pageants or true delights?

My final question goes back to the play’s tone and feel. Hattaway
suggests that the play’s use of different genres and social agendas is so
provocative that it is best seen as a ‘tragi-comedy’: a play where the
‘woeful pageants’ detailed by Jaques and implicit in the opening acts all
but eclipse the ‘true delights’ of love and marriage referred to in the
play’s final line (2.7.138; 5.4.182). An earlier critic, Helen Gardner,
began a lecture on the play with precisely the opposite perspective: ‘It is
the last play in the world to be solemn over’ (Gardner, 1959, p. 203).
Hattaway’s sense of complexity is more in keeping with the approaches
of twenty-first-century Shakespeareans, but I don’t think this is a simple
case of the new superseding the old, any more than Jaques is proved
right about old age by the entrance of Adam (2.7.165–70). Gardner is
as correct about the play’s literary refinement as Hattaway is in
remarking that it contains serious thinking about social change.
However, its reflection of the social realities of Elizabethan England
does not make it into a tragi-comedy; as I have tried to suggest, the
conventions which Shakespeare inherited are complex enough to mean
that a play about falling in love may at the same time contain other
resonances, both veiled and overt (1.2.20).
60
Conclusion
Conclusion
In this chapter I have stressed the play’s hybridity, and have tried to
bring out some of the elements of playing with genre, language and role
which are at its heart. The complexity of the play’s composition – the
way it is threaded through with contrasting motifs and traditions – helps
us to understand a key part of the Elizabethan Renaissance: that its best
literature is almost always an amalgam of contrasting ingredients.
Independent study
You will find suggestions for independent study on the module
website.
61
References
Auden, W.H. (2002) Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. A. Kirsch, Princeton,
NJ, Princeton University Press.
Barber, C.L. (1972 [1959]) Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of
Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom, Princeton, NJ,
Princeton University Press.
Bate, J. (1994) Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford, Clarendon.
Blank, P. (2012) ‘The Babel of Renaissance English’ in Mugglestone, L.
(ed.) The Oxford History of English, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
pp. 262–97.
Congleton, J.E. and Brogan, T.V.F. (1993) ‘Pastoral’ in Preminger, A.
and Brogan, T.V.F (eds) The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, pp. 885–8 (available
Cooper, H. (1977) Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance, Ipswich, D.S.
Brewer.
Gardner, H. (1959) ‘As You Like It’ in Gilman, A. (ed.) William
Shakespeare, As You Like It, New York, New American Library,
pp. 203–21.
Gosson, S. (1579) The Schoole of Abuse, London, T. Dawson. Available
via Early English Books Online (EEBO) at http://eebo.chadwyck.com
(Accessed 21 November 2014).
Greenblatt, S. (2005) Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare, London, Pimlico.
Hadfield, A. (2012) Edmund Spenser : A Life, Oxford, Oxford
University Press (available through the OU Library website).
Jones, E. (1971) Scenic Form in Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
Kermode, F. (2001) Shakespeare’s Language, London, Penguin.
Lethbridge, J.B. (2008) ‘Introduction: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare:
methodological investigations’ in Lethbridge, J.B. (ed.) Shakespeare and
Spenser : Attractive Opposites, Manchester, Manchester University Press,
pp. 1–53.
62
References
Marlowe, C. (2006) Collected Poems, ed. P. Cheney and B.J. Striar, New
York, Oxford University Press.
Miola, R.S. (2000) Shakespeare’s Reading, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.) [Online]. Available at http://www.oed.
com (Accessed 11 May 2015).
Open Source Shakespeare (n.d.) As You Like It [Online]. Available at
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/playmenu.php?
WorkID=asyoulikeit) (Accessed 16 December 2014).
Puttenham, G. (2007) The Art of English Poesy, ed. F. Whigham and W.
A. Rebhorn, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Rudd, N. (trans.) (1979) The Satires of Horace and Persius,
Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Schoenbaum, S. (2006) Shakespeare’s Lives, New York, Barnes & Noble.
Shakespeare, W. (1623) Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares Comedies, Histories,
& Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies, London,
Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount. Available via Early English Books Online
(EEBO) at http://eebo.chadwyck.com (Accessed 8 October 2014).
Shakespeare, W. (2006) As You Like It, ed. J. Dusinberre, Arden
Shakespeare series, London, Thomson.
Shakespeare, W. (2009) As You Like It, ed. M. Hattaway, New
Cambridge Shakespeare series, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Shapiro, J. (2005) 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare,
London, Faber & Faber.
Sidney, Sir P. (1973) Miscellaneous Prose, ed. K. Duncan-Jones and J. van
Dorsten, Oxford, Clarendon.
Smith, B.R. (1994) Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A
Cultural Poetics, Chicago, Chicago University Press.
Smith, G.G. (ed.) (1904) Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols, Oxford,
Clarendon.
Spenser, E. (1989) The Shorter Poems, ed. W.A. Oram et al., New
Haven, CN, Yale University Press.
Wilson-Okamura, D.S. (2010) Virgil in the Renaissance, Cambridge,
63
Chapter 2 As You Like It in
pieces
Jonathan Gibson
Contents
Aims 69
Introduction 71
The patchwork play 74
Parts, rolls and scrolls 80
Shakespeare and his sources: reading Rosalind 81
Rosalind and the concealed man 86
Arden and the court 91
‘“Sport”: of what colour?’: As You Like It and
Elizabethan progress entertainments 92
Conclusion 97
References 98
Reading 2.1 Rosalind 100
Aims
Aims
This chapter will:
. explore some of the processes in the putting together of early
modern plays
. introduce you to the study of Shakespeare’s sources
. develop ideas about ‘character’ in Shakespeare’s plays
. investigate some links between As You Like It and its context in
Elizabethan history.
69
Chapter 2 As You Like It in pieces

In this chapter you will need to listen to the following audio recordings,
which can be found on the module website:
. ‘It was a lover and his lass’ (for two trebles and a lute)
. ‘It was a lover and his lass’ (for tenor, lute and bass viol).
There are also transcriptions of the texts of the two versions of this
song on the module website.
. William Shakespeare (2009) As You Like It, ed. Michael Hattaway,
New Cambridge Shakespeare series, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
. Internet Shakespeare Editions (available at http://
internetshakespeare.uvic.ca)
. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online (available via the OU
Library website)
website)
70
Introduction
Introduction
Let’s start with a song – one of the best-known, quaintest, prettiest
songs in Shakespeare: ‘It was a lover and his lass’. This song is
performed in As You Like It 5.3 by two boys. They come on just after
two weddings, Celia’s and Oliver’s and Audrey’s and Touchstone’s, have
been planned for the next day, and Rosalind has made her surprising
promise that Phoebe, Silvius, Orlando and she will also all ‘be married
tomorrow’ (5.3.92–101).
Activity
There are three parts to this activity. First, reread the little scene in which
the song appears (5.3).
Second, go to the module website and listen to the first of the two audio
recordings of the song that you will find there: It was a lover and his lass:
performance 1. This performance of the song was recorded by two boys
with a lute accompaniment. It follows the version of the text that appears
in the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of As You Like It (the set
book). As you may recall from that text, at 5.2.11 the Second Page
makes a slightly cryptic reference to the performance of the song: he
says he and the First Page will sing it ‘both in a tune, like two gypsies on
a horse’.
Setting Shakespeare to music

The original musical setting for this As You Like It version of the
song does not survive, but it is likely that it was similar to a setting
by Thomas Morley for different forces (a tenor voice accompanied
by a lute and a bass viol) that you will listen to later in the chapter
(It was a lover and his lass: performance 2). A new reconstruction
of the As You Like It version has been specially made for this
module, adapting Morley’s tune for performance by two boys and a
lute accompanist.
Finally, write down answers to these questions. The answers can be as

short as you like.
1 Does this scene help advance the plot of the play in any way?
71
2 Does it give us any information we didn’t already know about

characters in the play?
3 Do its imagery and subject matter echo similar imagery and subject
matter elsewhere in the play?
4 Can you think of any reason for this scene’s presence in the play –
any other contribution it makes? Does it, for example, strikingly contrast
with or reinforce events that occur before or after it is performed?
Discussion
My first instinct was to answer ‘No’ to the first two questions. Two new
characters suddenly appear, sing the song with no ‘preamble’ (5.3.9–11),
and then vanish. We learn very little about them, and nothing about
Touchstone and Audrey that we don’t already know. The singing of the
song has no discernible effect on anything that happens afterwards in the
play. Touchstone, who’s called for music in the first place, dismisses the
song as insignificant (5.3.44–5).
I did, however, have some things to write down for question 3. I could
find echoes of imagery and subject matter from elsewhere in As You Like
It, but also some interesting contrasts. The song’s subject matter – rural
romance – very clearly echoes events in the play, although I didn’t find I
could really read one in terms of the other: the song seems much more
straightforward and celebratory than the action of the play. Hearing about
those ‘pretty country folks’ in the song certainly didn’t make me think
about any of the couples in the forest of Arden, not even Audrey and
Touchstone. Perhaps it’s significant that the singers are another couple:
two boys singing about a heterosexual romance. Might one be miming
the part of a woman as they sing? Are we tempted to compare them to
the other pair of boy-players in As You Like It, the two brilliant young
actors (‘Rosalind’ and ‘Celia’) whom Shakespeare was at the time going
‘out of his way to showcase’ (Shapiro, 2005, p. 127)?
The song’s obsession with ‘spring-time’ is inescapable, but did you notice
that it’s anomalous in the play as a whole? Earlier seasonal references
(such as ‘Blow, blow, thou Winter wind …’ at 2.7.174–97) imply a winter
setting. Maybe this is just an inconsistency. Or maybe there’s a symbolic
significance: perhaps spring has arrived in Arden with the prospect of
matrimony and the healing of the breach between Oliver and Orlando
(Seng, 1967, p. 90). The repetition of the word ‘time’ in the song might
be significant, too. The topic of time is often mentioned in As You Like It:
think, for example, about Jaques’s ‘seven ages of man’ speech, which
you read in Chapter 1.
My answer to question 4 is: yes, simply as an advance celebration of the
imminent weddings linking Rosalind’s promises to the climax of the play
72
Introduction
(see Lindley, 2006, p. 197). A thematically related possibility did also

occur to me: in the final line of the scene might not Touchstone be
summoning Audrey to come with him to a cornfield to ‘take the present
time’? The song itself, perhaps, has told him that he and Audrey are
wasting their time just listening to a song.
Overall, my conclusion is that though, yes, there are ways in which we
can relate ‘It was a lover and his lass’ to the rest of the play, we have to
strain a bit to do so. This is often the case with songs in Shakespeare
plays (for example, the other songs in As You Like It, in 2.5, 2.7 and
4.2), though ‘It was a lover and his lass’ is a particularly extreme case.
73
The patchwork play

There are other bits of As You Like It that seem rather digressive; as
Richard Danson Brown mentioned in Chapter 1, the play is ‘notorious
for its long conversations with little plot development’. ‘It was a lover
and his lass’ is thus perhaps the most digressive part of a digressive
play: an odd way, you might think, to begin a chapter. The oddity is
deliberate. We have started by looking at an obviously ‘marginal’ or
outlying part of As You Like It because in this chapter we’ll be
exploring an approach to Shakespeare, exemplified in the work of
Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey, that argues that we ought to think of
early modern plays as composed of a number of different bits and
pieces (Stern, 2009; Palfrey and Stern, 2007; Stern, 2004).
This isn’t something that comes naturally to modern readers of
Shakespeare. For the purposes of this chapter As You Like It is – or
seems to be – that book on the table in front of you, the New
Cambridge Shakespeare (NCS) text edited by Michael Hattaway. (My
copy – green with a close-up of a leaf on the cover and with ‘NCS’ in a
bigger typesize than the title of the play – looks to me, rather
dismayingly, more like a botanical report than a work of literature.) Like
Julius Caesar and unlike Hamlet, As You Like It didn’t appear in its
author’s lifetime in a medium-format (‘quarto’) single-play edition: the
only early text we have is the one in the First Folio collected works
published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and mentioned
by Richard Danson Brown in Chapter 1. What textual forms did As
You Like It take before the First Folio? First, if Stern’s view of early
modern theatrical practice is correct, there would have been a
manuscript known as a ‘plot’: a scene-by-scene outline of the story
(Stern, 2009, pp. 9–35). Sometimes a ‘plot’ of this sort would have been
written by one person and the lines of the play fleshed out by another.
Shakespeare and collaboration

The existence of the ‘plot’ would have made it easy for authors to
collaborate, as scenes could easily be allocated in advance to
different writers. Although no-one claims that any other dramatist
was involved in the writing of As You Like It, there are several plays
in the Shakespeare canon that are now, thanks to new computer-
aided authorship tests, widely thought by scholars to be
collaborations (Jackson, 2014; Vickers, 2002): two recent scholarly
74
The patchwork play
editions of Timon of Athens, for example, attribute the play to

‘William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’.
Shakespeare would presumably have written out the text of the play as
he composed it, maybe in a bound book, more likely on loose bits of
paper folded together, and at some point there would almost certainly
have been a neat copy of the whole thing made by a professional scribe.
At that early stage, As You Like It would have been, like our NCS
edition and the text in the First Folio, a single ‘unified’ text. But by the
time the play was first performed, probably at the newly built Globe
Theatre in 1599 (see Figure 1.2 in Chapter 1), its form would have
changed. It would have been, Stern argues, a ‘patchwork’ of separate
documents. Onstage action in the theatres of Shakespeare’s time was
coordinated not by a ‘director’ but by the prompter, a playhouse
employee who not only prompted actors who forgot their lines but also
worked as a sort of overseer or stage manager (Stern, 2009, p. 219). For
his work the prompter depended on a ‘prompt-book’ or ‘play-book’ (a
manuscript text of the play) and, Stern argues, a ‘backstage-plot’: a
length of card hanging up offstage that listed entrances (Stern, 2009,
pp. 201–31). But the prompt-book did not necessarily contain the full
text of the play.
Some bits of the prompt-book had a tendency to go astray. Let’s think
again about songs. Partly because they tended to be added at the last
moment (maybe borrowed from a printed or manuscript songbook, or
from a play by another writer), partly because separate manuscripts
containing words and music were needed by the composer and
performers, songs ‘did not always belong as powerfully to a single play
as did other aspects of the text’ (Stern, 2009, p. 134): they had an
inherent ‘potential to wander’ (Stern, 2009, p. 134; cf. Stern, 2004,
pp. 114–18). Song lyrics, clearly, ‘did not come with the requirement for
novelty that hung about the rest of a play: borrowing a tried and tested
“good” song might be as astute in a playwright as coming up with a
new one of his own’ (Stern, 2009, p. 131).
‘It was a lover and his lass’ is a case in point: it certainly ‘wandered’
away from As You Like It. Long before the First Folio, it appeared in
print by itself. It is found, with no mention of Shakespeare or As You
Like It, in a book published in 1600 (close to the probable first
performance date of the play): The First Book of Airs, or Little Short
Songs, to Sing and Play to the Lute, with the Bass Viol by the composer
75
Thomas Morley (c.1556–after 1602). As its title says, the book provides
music for a singer, a lute and a bass viol (an instrument rather like a
cello). Lutes were instruments associated especially with the higher end
of society, both men and women, and it is striking that in his note ‘To
the Reader’ at the beginning of the book, Morley appeals in particular
to ‘the more worthy’ – those with ‘exquisite judicial ears’ – to judge his
music (Morley, 1600, sig. A2v, modernised).
Activity
Read again the version of the song as it appears in the play (5.3.12–43).
Also read the modernised form of Morley’s version of the song that you
will find on the module website. (The website also includes reproductions
of ‘It was a lover and his lass’ in its two early printed forms, Morley’s
book and in the First Folio (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).) What differences
between the two texts can you spot? Pick one difference in particular,
and write down your reasons for choosing it.
Listen to the second audio recording of ‘It was a lover and his lass’ on
the module website (It was a lover and his lass: performance 2 ). This is
a performance that uses the forces Morley’s book was written for: voice
(a tenor, in this case), lute and bass viol. Think about the differences
between performances such as this, which would have taken place in
private homes, and performances similar to the other performance of this
song (for two trebles and a lute), which would have taken place at the
Globe.
A misplaced stanza
As you read, you might notice that, as well as the spelling, there are
some differences between the First Folio text and the text in the
NCS edition. The differences are recorded in the edition’s textual
notes (sandwiched between the text and the explanatory notes; you
don’t need to worry about them for the purpose of this activity). The
main difference between the Folio and the NCS text is stanza
arrangement: all modern editors of As You Like It follow Morley’s
rather than the Folio’s stanza order, because, in the latter, what
looks like the final stanza (‘And therefore …’) comes second.
76
The patchwork play
Figure 2.1 ‘It was a lover and his lass’ in print, in Thomas Morley (1600) The
First Booke of Ayres, VVilliam Barley, London. The Folger Shakespeare
Library, Washington, DC, STC 18115.5. By permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library under the following licence: http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
The ‘tablature’ below the words shows the lute-player where on the fretboard
to place the fingers of her or his left hand. The upside-down music is for use
by a second or third person sitting opposite the singer/lute player and playing
the bass viol.
77
Figure 2.2 A page from As You Like It, 5.3, as it appears in William
Shakespeare (1623) Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, &
Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies, London, Isaac
Jaggard and Ed. Blount, London. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Arch. G. c. 7.
Image taken from The Bodleian First Folio: digital facsimile of the First Folio
of Shakespeare's plays, Bodleian Arch. G.c.7. URL: http://firstfolio.bodleian.
ox.ac.uk/ Licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Notice the Latin in the scene numbers (‘Scaena Tertia’ means ‘third scene’),
a reflection of the period’s reverence for Roman literature.
78
The patchwork play
There are a number of interesting differences between the two texts, but
just one really substantial one, I think. It is the word used to describe
the lovers who lie between the acres of the rye: in the Folio they are
‘prettie Country folks’; for Morley, they are ‘prettie Countrie fooles’
(emphasis added). Shakespeare might just have wanted to avoid evoking
theatrical ‘fools’ like Touchstone. But it’s possible, I think, that the more
dismissive phrasing of Morley’s version reflects the distinction of the
different performance locations for the two versions: on the one hand,
a public playhouse, open to a wide range of different social strata; on
the other, elite households, perhaps readier than a playhouse audience
to look down amusedly on ‘These prettie Countrie fooles’.
What are we to make of the separate publication of ‘It was a lover and
his lass’? Did the song originally have nothing to do with Shakespeare’s
play? Did Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, just co-
opt it for their new production? Are the words by Shakespeare, by
Morley, or by someone else? Nobody knows for sure – though there are
reasons for thinking that Shakespeare and Morley might have worked
together on the song. There are, we have already seen, thematic links
between ‘It was a lover and his lass’ and the rest of the play. And at
about the time that the song was published Shakespeare and Morley
lived in the same London parish (St Helen’s, Bishopsgate) and both men
received identical tax assessments. Maybe Shakespeare wrote the words
and his neighbour wrote the music, or maybe Morley wrote both,
following directions from Shakespeare. Either way, the mystery of ‘It
was a lover and his lass’ is an intriguing little illustration of the theme
of this chapter: the idea that As You Like It is a ‘patchwork text’, a play
of bits and pieces.
79
Parts, rolls and scrolls

Today all the actors in a play will have had the opportunity to see the
whole script before learning their own lines, or ‘parts’. Elizabethan
actors (or ‘players’, as they were often called) did not each have a copy
of the script of the whole play. Instead, they used their ‘part’: a long,
pasted-together paper roll (or ‘role’) containing only the lines of the
character they were acting and one or two words signifying each of their
cues. As Palfrey and Stern point out, Shakespeare, an actor himself,
must have been acutely aware of parts (Palfrey and Stern, 2007,
pp. 2–6). He’d have known all too well that, until any rehearsals (and
they were few and hasty; Stern, 2004, pp. 62–90), As You Like It’s first
actors would perhaps not have had much idea about exactly what the
other characters in the play said.
Stern and Palfrey argue that an awareness of the use of parts has the
potential to transform our understanding of early modern drama. They
go so far as to suggest that the part ‘was actually the first (and perhaps
only) unit of text designed by Shakespeare to be examined, thought
about, learned, and “interpreted”’ (Palfrey and Stern, 2007, p. 2). Their
conclusions are exciting, but have been contested by some other critics,
who suggest that there would have been more backstage documents
available to guide actors than Stern and Palfrey assume – and also, at a
more purely human level, more collaboration, more ‘social cognition
and group dynamics’ between colleagues (Tribble, 2011, p. 66; see also
Egan, 2011). So, in using the concept of parts as a way to approach
Shakespeare’s plays – something we’ll do a little later in this chapter – a
certain amount of caution is required.
One more ‘patch’ for now: a type of text sometimes referred to as a
‘scroll’. Scrolls were ‘papers that [were] to be delivered onstage such as
letters, proclamations, bills, verses, challenges’ (Stern, 2009, p. 174). Like
songs, these tended to ‘wander’ and did not necessarily appear in the
play-book. The text of a scroll was not included in actors’ ‘parts’ either:
what was the need? The actor could just read off the scroll itself rather
than memorising what it said.
80
Shakespeare and his sources: reading Rosalind
Shakespeare and his sources: reading

Rosalind
In Chapter 1 we learned about the relationship between As You Like It
and a number of different literary genres. We will turn now to a related,
but slightly different topic: Shakespeare’s reliance on particular sources
and, especially, his main source for much of what happens in As You
Like It.
People are sometimes surprised – shocked, even – to learn that
Shakespeare’s plays are indebted for details of plot, phrasing or both to
the works of other writers. Originality has been at the heart of our idea
of literary value – and of the unique value of Shakespeare – for
centuries. In the middle of the eighteenth century, when Shakespeare
first began to be thought of as the supreme genius of literary art, he
was seen as untutored, unlearned, somebody who took his inspiration
from the life around him rather than from books (Bate, 1997).
Today, although the widespread availability of digital versions of works
of art in different media has made us familiar with the idea of reuse
(‘mash-ups’ of various kinds), we worry greatly about plagiarism and
‘piracy’. The expansion of printing and of literacy in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (discussed in the Introduction to this book) meant
that Shakespeare and his contemporaries found themselves in a
somewhat similar situation. They certainly worried about the theft of
other people’s words. Indeed, the earliest reference to Shakespeare as a
writer, in a book attributed posthumously to his fellow writer Robert
Greene (Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit for a Million of Repentance, first
printed in 1592), is an accusation of plagiarism (Duncan-Jones, 2001,
p. 27). But this was not a straightforward topic, for the imitation of
other people’s works was central to the Elizabethan educational system.
At Stratford Grammar School, Shakespeare would have spent day after
day, starting early each morning, learning Latin, reading Latin literature,
translating it into English, translating the English back into Latin and
creating ersatz pieces of Latin literature of his own composition
(Burrow, 2013). He would also have analysed the rhetorical devices used
by these classical texts (this too is discussed in the Introduction). In
writing his own texts, he would, therefore, have been acutely aware of
the importance of these classical models as exemplars and models.
81
I am always surprised when people dismiss the analysis of the sources

of Shakespeare’s plays – ‘source study’ – as dry and boring. What could
be more exciting than looking over Shakespeare’s shoulder to see how
he responded to and altered the texts he read?
Shakespeare used both contemporary books (in English, French and
Italian) and ancient Roman texts (in Latin and in translation) as sources.
In the notes to the New Cambridge As You Like It, you will notice
some references to Ovid’s Metamor phoses, a book mentioned in the
Introduction that seems to have been one of Shakespeare’s particular
favourites (Bate, 1993, p. vii). Charles’s mention of the ‘golden world’
(1.1.95), for example, recalls a passage in the first book of the
Metamor phoses that describes the period in the early mythological history
of the world when ‘men of their own accord, without threat of
punishment, without laws, maintained good faith and did what is right’
(Ovid, 1955, pp. 31–2; see Figure 2.3).
82
Figure 2.3 ‘The peoples of the world, untroubled by any fears, enjoyed a
leisurely and peaceful existence, and had no use for soldiers […] It was a
season of everlasting spring’ (Ovid, 1955, pp. 31, 32). The British Library,
London, 1068.g.4. © The British Library Board.
This depiction of the Golden Age appears in a book of illustrations of
episodes from Ovid’s poem that was printed in 1563, the year before
Shakespeare was born: Metamorphoses Illustratae, Book One, Frankfurt.
Shakespeare derived most of the plot of As You Like It, however, from
Rosalind by Thomas Lodge, a work of prose fiction first printed
in 1590. There is a modernised-spelling text of Lodge’s book on the
83
Internet Shakespeare Editions website, and selected extracts from it at

the back of your text of the play (Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 227–38). In
this section of the chapter, we will be approaching Shakespeare’s
response to Lodge by comparing parts of two scenes from As You Like
It (3.2 and 3.3) with the equivalent episodes in Rosalind. The relevant
section of Rosalind, taken from the Internet Shakespeare Editions text, is
reproduced as Reading 2.1 at the end of this chapter.
Activity
First read the material from Rosalind (Reading 2.1) and then reread As
You Like It, 3.2. Skip the start of 3.3 and pick up the play again at line
63, then read to the end of the scene.
You should find Lodge’s language rather more straightforward than
Shakespeare’s, especially as notes in square brackets have been added
to the reading to explain difficult words. If you want to find out more
about the mythological figures Lodge mentions, you can look them up in
a modern reference book or in the Metamorphoses. There is a useful
table of names in As You Like It and Rosalind in your set book
(Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 86–8); you will need to look at this because
there are some confusing differences in naming between the two texts.
As you navigate Lodge’s story, write down (a) a short summary of the
plot, and (b) short notes about anything that particularly interests or
surprises you about the differences between the two texts. Concentrate
in particular on the use that both writers make of the poems that appear
in their texts. A good way to approach this activity is to divide each page
of notes into two columns, using one column for your notes on Rosalind
and the other for your notes on As You Like It. Then you will be able to
see at a glance how the different parts of the story work differently in the
two texts.
Discussion
Despite the similarities in situation, the world of Rosalind seems to me a
very different place from the world of As You Like It. What strikes me first
(you might well disagree) about the Lodge extract is the lack, by
comparison with As You Like It, of sparkle or life. Partly, I think, this is
because of Lodge’s reliance on a third-person narrator with rather banal
things (linked to bits of general wisdom) to tell us about the characters –
for example, the comparison of Rosader to an eagle in the first
paragraph in Reading 2.1. This acceptance of predictable categories is
very different from what we find in As You Like It: there, by contrast, a
healthy scepticism about the conventional, the accepted and the
expected reigns. This distinction between Lodge and Shakespeare
84
comes across especially strongly when we look at the way each writer
treats Orlando’s (or Rosader’s) poems. Rosader’s verse is just as
hyperbolic in its praise of the beloved, just as conventional in the
comparisons it makes, as Orlando’s second and third poems are – and
sometimes it is at least as bathetic and embarrassing. But whereas
Orlando’s poems get a universal thumbs-down from the characters of As
You Like It, Rosader’s are taken seriously, and not just by ‘Ganymede’
and ‘Aliena’: Lodge’s narrator describes the first poem in the extract as a
‘pretty estimate of his mistress’ perfection’ (at the end of the first
paragraph in Reading 2.1).
85
Rosalind and the concealed man

It is on the treatment of the poems in the two texts that I now want to
concentrate. In Lodge, Rosader – of course – knows all about the
poems he’s written: we hear how his obsession with Rosalind made him
cut his ‘sonnetto’ into a myrtle tree. As soon as ‘Ganymede’ reads it,
she knows who Rosader is, and she can see him too. Without knowing
it, but nevertheless in a very straightforward way, Rosader has used
poetry to communicate love to his beloved. Lodge’s ‘Ganymede’
complacently teases out more praise for Rosalind from Rosader, and
encourages him in his obsession: ‘Fear not, forester. Faint heart never
won fair lady’. They arrange to meet next day: Rosader promises
‘Ganymede’ more of his poems.
What happens in As You Like It is completely different, and I’d like to
suggest there is a connection here with the ‘patchwork’ quality of early
modern plays. Orlando comes on (3.2) with a poem to hang up. We can
assume, I think, that the ‘scroll’ he carries would have had written on it
the rather beautiful lines he speaks, and that these lines would not
therefore be in the actor’s ‘part’. Though James Shapiro disagrees
(Shapiro, 2005, p. 230), and you may disagree too, I don’t think we’re
meant to find this first poem comically inept – just passionate, youthful,
a little over-earnest. Orlando hangs the poem on a ‘tree’ (probably a
post) and goes. He is not, as Rosader is in Lodge, covertly observed by
Rosalind and her cousin. His flyposting campaign has taken place in the
night, as his address to Cynthia, the moon-goddess, shows (3.2.2), and
there is a gap of 64 lines before Rosalind appears. When Rosalind does
enter, she is reading out one of Orlando’s poems, but it is not the one
he hung up: that is probably still on the post. Instead, this poem –
which is appallingly bad, and which Touchstone parodies – is written on
a scroll carried on by Rosalind (3.3.65–72). The actor playing Orlando
is not onstage. Until the moment of performance or rehearsal, because
of the nature of his ‘part’ he might not have known about this piece of
doggerel, nor perhaps been aware of the equally weak poem Celia
carries on (‘Enter Celia with a writing’ is a stage direction in the original
Folio text): perhaps he would have assumed right up to the first
performance that he had written only one poem – the first, rather good
one.
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The set-up means that, in contrast to the scene in Rosalind, there is no

easy communication of Orlando’s/Rosader’s poeticised love to Rosalind.
Rosalind is more interested in Orlando than in his verse:
I prithee tell me who it is – quickly, and speak apace. I would

[i.e. wish] thou couldst stammer that [i.e. so that] thou might’st
pour this concealed man out of thy mouth as wine comes out of a
narrow-mouthed bottle: either too much at once or none at all. I
prithee take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy
tidings.
(3.3.164–9)
Orlando is something of a ‘concealed man’ throughout the play. For

example, as Richard Danson Brown pointed out in Chapter 1, we don’t
know for sure exactly when Orlando realises that ‘Ganymede’ is
Rosalind: is it not till the end of the play, or did this happen earlier? In
his first meeting with Rosalind, lovestruck Orlando fails to speak not
once but twice (1.2.201, 209–10). The conversation Orlando and
Rosalind have in 3.3 is dominated at first by Rosalind’s role-playing, her
routine about how time affects different people differently (3.3.261–80).
Orlando can only interject a series of short questions; his final two –
‘Where dwell you, pretty youth?’ (3.3.281) and ‘Are you native of this
place?’ (3.3.284) – switch the conversation to the topic of ‘Ganymede’
himself. There’s little for the actor to go on here. My guess is, however,
that these lines have concentrated into them a weight of emotion that
renders ‘From the East to Western Inde’ (3.3.65–72) and ‘Why should
this a desert be?’ (3.3.100–29) utterly nugatory, and that the absence of
those poems from the scroll of the actor playing Orlando would have
strengthened his performance of lines 281 and 284.
Other moments in As You Like It derive their power from things not
being explained, not being made clear. (One of my favourites is the
completely hidden wooing of Oliver and Celia; its equivalent in Lodge is
a straightforward pastoral affair.) At such moments, Shakespeare is, as
here, more oblique about characters’ motivations than Lodge is: in As
You Like It, but not in Rosalind, it is for us – and, equally crucially, for
the characters themselves – to find out about each other (and often, in
fact, characters comment on their own lack of knowledge about the
reasons for their own actions). Orlando’s poems say little about himself,
while Rosader and his poems are, in effect, identical.
87
Is this one of the reasons that people say they find Shakespeare’s
characters ‘lifelike’? The idea that Shakespeare’s characters are like real
people in some way has been central to Shakespeare studies for a long
time. It was particularly important to nineteenth-century writers such as
A.C. Bradley (Bradley’s approach to Hamlet is summarised in
Chapter 6). From the middle of the last century onwards, however, this
view came under increasingly heavy fire. What seemed objectionable to
new generations of critics was the ‘Bradleian’ idea that the most
important thing in a Shakespeare play is its depiction of complex and
unique-seeming individuals, and the tendency to respond to these
‘characters’ as if they actually exist. The argument is succinctly put by
Terry Eagleton: fictional characters, he says, are essentially ‘text’, part of
the text in which they find themselves, and ‘A text is a pattern of
meaning, and patterns of meaning do not lead lives of their own, like
snakes or sofas’ (Eagleton, 2013, p. 46).
So far in this chapter, I have been blithely using the word ‘character’ to
refer to the people we meet in As You Like It. But what exactly does
the word mean? What would Shakespeare have made of our interest in
the ‘characters’ of Rosalind, Orlando and the rest?
The word appears once in As You Like It, but not in the now standard
meaning – ‘The sum of the moral and mental qualities which distinguish
an individual […] viewed as a homogeneous whole’ (OED online (n.d.),
‘character’, n., 9a) – nor in the literary and dramatic sense of a fictional
‘character’ in a story. Instead, it’s a verb: Orlando uses it when hanging
up his first poem in 3.2:
O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,

And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character
[So] That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.
(3.2.5–10)
The meaning here, ‘inscribe’, is related to the meaning of the Greek

word ‘character’, a device for making a mark, and thus ‘character’ came
to mean in English ‘distinctive mark’ (OED online (n.d.), ‘character’, n.,
1). It was frequently applied to writing and the letters of the alphabet;
this usage persists today to refer to, among other things, a computer-
readable symbol (OED online, ‘character’, n., 3d). The idea that
‘character’ could be used to refer to a person’s defining qualities – and
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specifically to the ‘characters’ of a play – was around at about the time

As You Like It was first performed, Ben Jonson’s play Every Man out of
His Humour was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the newly
built Globe Theatre in the autumn of 1599, close to the likely time that
As You Like It was also staged (Shapiro, 2005, pp. 244–5). As You Like
It has been read as a critique of Jonson’s play (Tiffany, 1994). In its
printed text of 1600, Jonson’s play is prefixed by what the title-page
describes as ‘the several character of every person in the play’ (Jonson,
2008, pp. 99–111): which we might call ‘verbal caricatures’ of the
dramatis personae. Following the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus
(c.371–c.287 BCE), whose collection of character sketches had appeared
in a Latin translation in 1592, Jonson is interested in creating
‘characters’ who are representative ‘types’. Fastidious Brisk, for example,
is a stereotypical ‘neat, spruce, affecting [i.e. ‘affected’] Courtier’
(Jonson, 2008, p. 104), a bit like Le Beau in As You Like It. Over the
course of the play, these monstrous beings are shaken out of their
‘humours’, a technical term from Elizabethan psychology that Jonson
adapted to refer to any ‘one peculiar quality’ that might ‘so possess a
man that it doth draw/All his […] spirits, and his powers […] to run
one way’ (Jonson, 2008, p. 118). The word appears a few times in As
You Like It, for example in what looks like a reference to Jonson’s play
when ‘Ganymede’ is telling Orlando about how ‘he’ supposedly cured a
lover by pretending to be his mistress: ‘I drave my suitor from his mad
humour of love to a living humour of madness, which was to forswear
the full stream of the world and to live in a nook, merely monastic’
(3.3.344–6). The one character in As You Like It in danger of living up
(or down) to the obsessiveness of Jonson’s grotesques is the melancholy
Jaques, a figure Shakespeare adds to Lodge’s story, so perhaps we
shouldn’t be surprised that the ‘character’ Jonson provides for one of
his main characters, Macilente, seems suitable to Jaques too:
A man well parted [i.e. ‘of many abilities’], a sufficient scholar, and
travelled; who (wanting [i.e. lacking] that place in the world’s
account which he thinks his merit capable of) falls into such an
envious apoplexy, with which his judgement is so dazzled and
distasted that he grows violently impatient of any opposite
happiness in another.
(Jonson, 2008, p. 102)
89
Jaques, whom some critics think is Shakespeare’s depiction of Jonson,

certainly tends to think of people as types, as the ‘seven ages of man’
speech shows, though in his vision of the world ‘one man in his time
plays many parts’ (2.7.142) and isn’t confined to a single ‘character’.
It is interesting to look up appearances of the word ‘character’ across
Shakespeare’s complete works. You can do this quite easily using
Internet Shakespeare Editions: there is a search box on the home-page.
If you check the results, you will notice that most of Shakespeare’s few
uses of the word refer, as in Orlando’s speech, to the process of making
a mark and are nearly always specifically related to writing; they also
usually involve an examination of the elusive relationship between what
is in the mind and what letters and words can express. The word
appears, for example, at a key point in Shakespeare’s sequence of love
poems, the Sonnets, in lines addressed to an unnamed young man:
What’s in the brain that ink may character,

Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love or thy dear merit?
(Shakespeare, 2002, p. 597: Sonnet 108)
Colin Burrow’s paraphrase is a useful way in: ‘What mental resource is

there which can be set down in writing which I have not used to
represent to you my loyal inner nature?’ (Shakespeare, 2002, p. 596).
Notice the gap this leaves: it tells us that there are mental resources that
can’t be set down in writing, that there are things in the brain that ink
can’t character. (Likewise, despite Orlando’s ‘charactering’, Rosalind is to
him ‘unexpressive’ (3.2.10) – meaning ‘inexpressible’.)
There is an important distinction between this, Shakespearean, use of
the word ‘character’ and Jonson’s. In theory (though not always in
practice), the people who appear in Every Man out of His Humour can
be summed up completely by their ‘characters’. Shakespeare, by
contrast, uses the word to point to the necessary mismatch between
what’s going on inside somebody’s head (their true ‘character’ in our
sense?) and the physical means with which this must be expressed and
understood by others (see Palfrey, 2005, pp. 171–220).
90
Arden and the court
Arden and the court

When I reread As You Like It in preparation for writing this chapter, I
was struck by how symmetrical it seemed. There are two dukes and two
courts around them, good and bad. Producers of the play have used a
range of staging devices both to distinguish between Arden and Duke
Frederick’s court and to imply their similarity (for a stage history, see
Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 54–76, 78–81). But there are many other
symmetries (or oppositions) – of plot, character, action and wording.
Activity
Make a list of as many of these symmetries as you can remember. You
may feel impelled to construct a diagram of some kind – by all means
give in to this temptation!
Discussion
I’ve ended up with several little lists, linked by arrows and brackets. I
started off with the Duke Frederick/Duke Senior opposition and tried to
align other characters with it. Celia is Duke Frederick’s daughter and
Rosalind Duke Senior’s. Of the two brothers, Oliver clearly belongs with
Duke Frederick (and marries Celia), while Orlando belongs with Duke
Senior (and marries Rosalind). The fool at Duke Frederick’s court,
Touchstone, is balanced by the fool-like character Jaques at Duke
Senior’s. What else? Two little groups enter the forest as the play begins:
Orlando with his servant, Adam; and Rosalind and Celia with their
servant, Touchstone. Each group meets people who provide them with
food (Duke Senior and Corin). Two more people enter Arden later on:
Oliver and Duke Frederick. There are two rustic couples – Silvius and
Phoebe; Touchstone and Audrey (stretching a point for Touchstone!) –
and in each case the male of the couple wins the female despite the
presence of a rather feeble ‘rival’ (William and ‘Ganymede’). At the verbal
level, meanwhile, the most obviously (even obtrusively) balanced scene
is 5.2, with those repeated ‘And I for’s that Rosalind compares to ‘the
howling of Irish wolves’ (5.2.92).
91
‘“Sport”: of what colour?’: As You Like It

and Elizabethan progress
entertainments
Partly because of these symmetrical patterns, and others perhaps in your
diagram but not mine, I think that As You Like It feels like quite a
static play. As Anne Barton says, it subordinates plot to ‘an intricate
structure of meetings between characters, a concentration upon attitudes
rather than action’ – as a result, there is ‘a curious stillness’ at its heart
(Barton, 1992, p. 94). This undynamic quality makes As You Like It
seem sometimes more like a formal entertainment for Elizabeth I’s or
James I’s court than a play for the public theatre. There is a theory, in
fact, that its first performance was at court (Shakespeare, 2009,
pp. 221–6). The New Cambridge editor, Michael Hattaway, lists ten
‘metatheatrical, set-piece performances before on-stage audiences’ in the
play (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 11): the wrestling match (1.2) and the
masque of Hymen (5.4) at the beginning and the end, respectively, are
only the most obvious.
Throughout, there are echoes of the pastoral entertainments put on for
Queen Elizabeth I by her courtiers on her ‘progresses’ around the
kingdom. In the spring and summer months Elizabeth would frequently
‘go on progress’, or travel to some part of England not too far from
London. Her court would decamp with her and the cost of the stay
would be her host’s responsibility. Deer-hunting, one of Elizabeth’s
favourite recreations, was frequently on the programme (Figure 2.4).
Often there would be an entertainment. Commonly this involved
Elizabeth encountering a scene of some kind, and sometimes she was
required to take part in the spectacle in some way. The Lady of May, for
example, an entertainment written by the courtier-poet Sir Philip Sidney
for the queen’s visit to his uncle the Earl of Leicester’s house at
Wanstead in Essex, in either 1578 or 1579, begins as follows: ‘Her most
excellent Majesty walking in Wanstead Garden, as she passed down in
the grove, there came suddenly […] one apparelled like an honest man’s
wife of the country’ (Sidney, 2002, p. 5). It turns out that this woman’s
daughter is being wooed by rival suitors, and the queen is asked to
judge between them (one is a forester, like Orlando, the other a
shepherd, like Silvius). Elizabeth’s role here, as ‘both actor and
audience’, pre-echoes, as Juliet Dusinberre points out (Shakespeare,
2006, p. 97), Rosalind’s intervention in the relationship between Silvius
92
‘“Sport”: of what colour?’: As You Like It and Elizabethan progress entertainments
and Phoebe. As You Like It is full of messengers who, like the ‘honest
man’s wife’, have important stories to tell: Le Beau with news of the
wrestling (1.2), Oliver with news of Orlando (4.3), Jacques de Boys with
news of Duke Frederick (5.4) – the list goes on.
When links are made between As You Like It and the contemporary
Elizabethan court, they tend to focus on Elizabeth’s charismatic but
unreliable favourite, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1565–1601).
Essex was a close associate of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of
Southampton (1573–1624), to whom Shakespeare had dedicated his two
long printed poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of
Lucrece (1594). At the time that As You Like It was most likely being
planned and performed, between 1598 and 1600, relations between
Essex and Elizabeth were tense (Shapiro, 2005, pp. 50–66, 89–92, 283–
317). Essex retreated periodically to his country estate at Wanstead (the
same estate where The Lady of May had been staged by Leicester, his
stepfather). In 1600 his attempt to lead an army against insurgents in
Ireland ended disastrously, and during an unauthorised return to
London he ill-advisedly burst in unannounced on Elizabeth in her
bedchamber: a period of disgrace was the result. Finally, in 1601,
following what was claimed to have been an attempt to overthrow the
queen, Essex was executed.
It is uncertain how exactly Essex, and his on-off disaffection from the
late Elizabethan court, relates – if at all – to As You Like It. There’s
certainly a strain of opposition to court values in the play that is not
present in Lodge’s version of the story. Like contemporary verse
satirists (whose books had recently been burned on the instructions of
two bishops; see Shapiro, 2005, pp. 153–5), Touchstone and Jaques,
Shakespeare’s inventions, stand somewhat apart from the action and
comment bitterly on it. Rosalind and Celia are critical of Duke
Frederick’s court (1.2.78–115), as their equivalents in Rosalind are not
of Torismond’s. It is striking, however, that As You Like It’s central
character, who orchestrates the solution to most of the play’s problems
– Rosalind – evokes the specifically feminine power of Elizabeth on
progress. Her namesake in Lodge has less power: in Rosalind there is
no masque of Hymen, and Torismond invades the forest and has to be
killed in a pitched battle before the story can conclude (Shakespeare,
2009, pp. 237–8). By contrast, Shakespeare’s play ends with the epilogue
spoken by the boy-actor playing Rosalind. Prologues and epilogues,
topping and tailing plays, were, like songs, ‘parts’ and ‘scrolls’, yet
another type of detachable element in the early modern theatre (Stern,
93
Figure 2.4 Recalling the line ‘Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table’
(As You Like It 2.7.105), this woodcut depicts ‘Elizabeth I at a picnic’, from
George Gascoigne (1575) The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting …, London.
The British Library, London G.2372.(2), 90. © The British Library Board
It illustrates a poem about how to entertain royalty at a deer-hunt: the picnic
site must be a ‘Paradise’ of shady trees and cool fountains, far from ‘those
hot perfumes whereof proud courts do smell’ (sig. F6r, modernised).
Gascoigne wrote and performed verses for the famous 1575 progress
entertainment hosted at Kenilworth for Elizabeth by the Earl of Leicester.
94
‘“Sport”: of what colour?’: As You Like It and Elizabethan progress entertainments
2009, pp. 81–119), frequently belonging to just one single performance,

particularly the all-important, make-or-break, first day. (The more
applause an epilogue received, the more likely it was that the play would
be acted again.) Most commonly, the epilogue would be spoken by an
actor in a black cloak standing in for the author (Stern, 2009,
pp. 112–14). There’s nothing so straightforward in As You Like It. The
boy-actor playing the part of Rosalind has, in the body of the play,
acted first a woman, then a woman pretending to be a boy, then a
woman pretending to be a boy pretending to be a woman, and finally, at
the climax of the play, a woman again. In the epilogue, who is he? Or
she? Rosalind, ‘Ganymede’, the boy-player, or a mixture of all three? At
first, at the line ‘It is not the fashion to see the lady the Epilogue’
(epilogue, 1), it seems to be Rosalind. The actor’s apparent femininity is
also highlighted in the reference to the ‘simpering’ of the men in the
audience: ‘I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women – as I
perceive by your simpering none of you hates them’ (epilogue, 10–12).
Immediately afterwards, the actor’s genuine maleness is asserted at the
very moment that the fiction of ‘his’ femaleness reaches its height: ‘If I
were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased
me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not’ (epilogue,
13–15), while the mention of a ‘curtsey’ (epilogue, 17) in the final line
again stresses ‘his’ status as a ‘woman’.
Rosalind’s gender-switching in Arden has seemed to many critics to
entail a liberating putting off of rigid cultural norms (one view is,
indeed, that her marriage to Orlando at the end seems a cruel
restriction of erotic and emotional possibility). For Catherine Belsey the
epilogue is at the heart of this freedom, embodying ‘a kind of
undecidability, a place […] neither masculine nor feminine but utopian,
in its glimpse of a possibility of a third space beyond either’ (in Belsey
et al., 2000, p. 35). For others, heterosexual marriage is a happy ending,
Rosalind’s ‘holiday’ wooing (4.1.55) a necessary part of the development
of her relationship with Orlando. In the introduction to your set book,
Hattaway cycles through some more of the many critical interpretations
touching on this topic (Shakespeare, 2009, pp. 35–44).
Rosalind is very unlike the Elizabeth of 1599, who was then 66 years
old, had been ruler of England for 40 years and was ‘very much the
fading Cleopatra’ (Shapiro, 2005, p. 87). But might there be some sort
of relationship between her male/female power over the other figures in
the play and the Renaissance idea of the ‘Queen’s two bodies’
(whereby Elizabeth was gendered female in her physical body but, as
95
monarch, was theoretically gendered male)? Jonson’s play Every Man out
of His Humour which, as we have seen, was performed at the Globe at
about the same time as Shakespeare’s, ended its first performance with a
transformation scene, in which a boy-player acting the part of Queen
Elizabeth magically, through ‘her’ mere presence, jostled the Jaques-like
figure of Macilente out of his bitter ‘humour’. For some reason, the
scene did not go down well at the Globe, and Jonson wrote an
alternative ending, printing both in the 1600 edition, together with a
numbered list of reasons why he brought in Elizabeth in the first place
(Jonson, 2008, pp. 367–79). In As You Like It (in which, you’ll
remember, Jaques’s ‘character’ is not transformed), might Shakespeare
be putting a more acceptable, enticing version of magical female/male
power on the stage? Something more to the taste of the play-goers of
1599, that was more as they would ‘like it’?
96
Conclusion
Conclusion
In this chapter, as I have indicated some of the things that might have
gone on as part of the composition and early performances of As You
Like It, I feel, in concluding, that I ought to add a note of caution. It is
easy to get carried away when investigating the historical contexts of
literary works and to believe that you have managed to discover ‘the’
meaning which a play or poem must have had for its Elizabethan
readers. This is, of course, impossible, for at least two reasons: the
centuries that separate us from the Elizabethans, and the variability of
the meanings of any work of art. Just as today’s different audiences have
many different ways of understanding the same work of art, so with the
play-goers of Shakespeare’s England: they would each have seen a
slightly different play and none of them would have seen quite the play
we watch today.
Independent study
website.
97
References
Barton, A. (1992 [1972]) ‘As You Like It and Twelfth Night:
Shakespeare’s ‘sense of an ending”’ in Barton, A., Essays, Mainly
Shakespearean, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 91–112.
Bate, J. (1993) Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Bate, J. (1997) The Genius of Shakespeare, London, Picador.
Belsey, C., Demoor, M. and Pieters, J. (2000) ‘Discursive desire:
Catherine Belsey’s feminism’, Feminist Review, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 23–45
Burrow, C. (2013) Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Duncan-Jones, K. (2001) Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life,
Arden Shakespeare series, London, Thomson.
Eagleton, T. (2013) How to Read Literature, New Haven, CT, Yale
University Press.
Egan, G. (2011) ‘Review of Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in
Early Modern England’, Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 15, no. 3,
p. 6; available online at http://purl.org/emls/15-3/revstern.htm
‘Internet Shakespeare Editions’, (n.d.) [Online]. Available at
internetshakespeare.uvic.ca (Accessed 29 December 2014).
Jackson, M.P. (2014) Determining the Shakespeare Canon: Arden of
Faversham and A Lover’s Complaint, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Jonson, B. (2008) Every Man out of His Humour, ed. H. Ostovich,
Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Lindley, D. (2006) Shakespeare and Music, Arden Critical Companions
series, London, Thomson.
Lodge, T. (1590) Rosalynde. Available online in a modernised text at
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Rosalind/M/default/
Morley, T. (1600) The First Book of Airs, London, JISC Historic Books
[Online]. (Available through the OU Library website.)
98
References

Ovid (1955) Metamor phoses, trans. M.M. Innes, Harmondsworth,
Penguin.
Palfrey, S. (2005) Doing Shakespeare, Arden Shakespeare series, London,
Thomson (available through the OU Library website).
Palfrey, S. and Stern, T. (2007) Shakespeare in Parts, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Seng, P.J. (1967) The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare: A Critical
History, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Shakespeare, W. (2002) The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. C. Burrow,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Shakespeare, W. (2006) As You Like It, ed. J. Dusinberre, Arden
Sidney, Sir P. (2000) The Major Works, ed. K. Duncan-Jones, Oxford
World’s Classics series, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Stern, T. (2004) Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page, Abingdon,
Routledge (available through the OU Library website).
Stern, T. (2009) Documents of Performance in Early Modern England,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (available through the OU
Library website).
Tiffany, G. (1994) ‘“That reason wonder may diminish”: As You Like
It, androgyny, and the theater wars’, Huntington Library Quarterly,
vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 213–39 (available through the OU Library website).
Tribble, E.B. (2011) Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in
Shakespeare’s Theatre, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Vickers, B. (2002) Shakespeare, Co-Author : A Study of Five Collaborative
Plays, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
99
Reading 2.1 Rosalind

Source: Thomas Lodge (1590) Rosalind: Euphues’ Golden Legacy,
London, Thomas Orwin for T.G. and John Busbie, from the Internet
Shakespeare Editions website. Available, in a modernised text with US
spelling, at http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Rosalind/
M/default/ (section 16, paragraph 189, to section 18, paragraph 226,
omitting paragraph and section numbers). (Accessed 24
November 2014). [Notes by Jonathan Gibson.]
Rosader, being thus preferred [appointed] to the place of a forester by
Gerismond, rooted out the remembrance of his brother’s unkindness by
continual exercise, traversing the groves and wild forests, partly to hear
the melody of the sweet birds which recorded [sung quietly], and partly
to show his diligent endeavor in his master’s behalf. Yet whatsoever he
did, or howsoever he walked, the lively image of Rosalind remained in
memory; on her sweet perfections he fed his thoughts, proving himself
like the eagle a true-born bird, since as the one is known by beholding
the sun, so was he by regarding excellent beauty. One day among the
rest, finding a fit [suitable] opportunity and place convenient, desirous
to discover [reveal] his woes to the woods, he engraved with his knife
on the bark of a myrtle tree this pretty estimate of his mistress’
perfection:
Sonnetto
Of all chaste birds the phoenix doth excel;
Of all strong beasts the lion bears the bell; [takes first place]
Of all sweet flowers the rose doth sweetest smell;
Of all fair maids my Rosalind is fairest.
Of all pure metals gold is only purest;
Of all high trees the pine hath highest crest;
Of all soft sweets I like my mistress’ breast;
Of all chaste thoughts my mistress’ thoughts are rarest. [most
precious]
Of all proud birds the eagle pleaseth Jove; [Jupiter, king of the
gods]
Of pretty fowls kind Venus [goddess of love] likes the dove;
Of trees Minerva [goddess of wisdom] doth the olive love;
Of all sweet nymphs I honor Rosalind.
Of all her gifts her wisdom pleaseth most;
Of all her graces virtue she doth boast.
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For all these gifts my life and joy is lost

If Rosalind prove cruel and unkind.
In these and such like passions Rosader did every day eternize the name
of his Rosalind, and this day especially when Aliena and Ganymede,
enforced by the heat of the sun to seek for shelter, by good fortune
arrived in that place where this amorous forester registered [set down]
his melancholy passions. They saw the sudden change of his looks, his
folded arms, his passionate sighs [conventional signs of melancholy];
they heard him often abruptly call on Rosalind, who, poor soul, was as
hotly burned as himself, but that she shrouded her pains in the cinders
of honorable modesty. Whereupon, guessing him to be in love, and
according to the nature of their sex being pitiful in that behalf, they
suddenly brake off his melancholy by their approach, and Ganymede
shook him out of his dumps [dazed state of mind] thus:
‘What news, forester? Hast thou wounded some deer and lost him in
the fall? Care not, man, for so small a loss; thy fees was but the skin,
the shoulder, and the horns. ’Tis hunter’s luck to aim fair and miss, and
a woodman’s fortune to strike and yet go without the game.’
‘Thou art beyond the mark [off target], Ganymede,’ quoth Aliena. ‘His
passions are greater and sighs discovers [reveals] more loss. Perhaps in
traversing these thickets he hath seen some beautiful nymph and is
grown amorous.’
‘It may be so,’ quoth Ganymede, ‘for here he hath newly engraven some
sonnet. Come and see the discourse of the forester’s poems.’
Reading the sonnet over and hearing him name Rosalind, Aliena looked
on Ganymede and laughed, and Ganymede, looking back on the
forester and seeing it was Rosader, blushed. Yet, thinking to shroud all
under her page’s apparel, she boldly returned to Rosader, and began
thus:
‘I pray thee tell me, forester, what is this Rosalind for whom thou
pinest away in such passions? Is she some nymph that waits upon
Diana’s train [retinue] whose chastity thou hast deciphered [written
down] in such epithets? Or is she some shepherdess that haunts these
plains whose beauty hath so bewitched thy fancy, whose name thou
shadowest in covert under the figure of Rosalind, as Ovid did Julia
under the name of Corinna [Corinna is a character who appears in the
Roman poet Ovid’s Amores, believed by some to be Julia, the daughter
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of the emperor Augustus.]? Or say me, forsooth, is it that Rosalind of

whom we shepherds have heard talk – she, forester, that is the daughter
of Gerismond, that once was king and now an outlaw in the forest of
Arden?’
At this Rosader fetched a deep sigh, and said:
‘It is she, O gentle swain, it is she; that saint it is whom I serve, that
goddess at whose shrine I do bend all my devotions – the most fairest
of all fairs, the phoenix of all that sex, and the purity of all earthly
perfection.’
‘And why, gentle forester, if she be so beautiful and thou so amorous, is
there such a disagreement in thy thoughts? Haply [Perhaps] she
resembleth the rose, that is sweet but full of prickles? Or the serpent
regius [‘royal serpent’, a mythical snake] that hath scales as glorious as
the sun and a breath as infectious as the aconitum is deadly? So thy
Rosalind may be most amiable and yet unkind; full of favor and yet
froward, coy without wit and disdainful without reason.’
‘O shepherd,’ quoth Rosader, ‘knewest thou her personage, graced with
the excellence of all perfection, being a harbor wherein the Graces
shroud their virtues, thou wouldest not breathe out such blasphemy
against the beauteous Rosalind. She is a diamond, bright but not hard,
yet of most chaste operation, a pearl so orient that it can be stained
with no blemish; a rose without prickles, and a princess absolute as well
in beauty as in virtue. But I, unhappy I, have let mine eye soar with the
eagle against so bright a sun [eagles often fly towards the sun] that I am
quite blind; I have with Apollo enamored myself of a Daphne [the sun
god Apollo (or Phoebus) was unable to catch the beautiful nymph,
Daphne, who turned into a laurel tree [a story in Ovid, Metamorphoses,
Book 1], not, as she, disdainful, but far more chaste than Daphne. I
have with Ixion laid my love on Juno, and shall, I fear, embrace naught
but a cloud [Ixion tried to rape Juno, the queen of the gods, but was
tricked by Juno’s husband, Jupiter, into having sex with a cloud in
Juno’s shape.]. Ah, shepherd, I have reached at a star! My desires have
mounted above my degree and my thoughts above my fortunes. I, being
a peasant, have ventured to gaze on a princess whose honors are too
high to vouchsafe such base loves.’
‘Why, forester,’ quoth Ganymede, ‘comfort thyself. Be blithe and frolic,
man. Love souseth [swoops down like a bird of prey] as low as she
soareth high; Cupid shoots at a rag as soon as at a robe; and Venus’s
eye, that was so curious, sparkled favor on polt-footed [club-footed]
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Vulcan [the god of fire and metalworking, Venus’s husband]. Fear not,
man, women’s looks are not tied to dignity’s feathers, nor make they
curious esteem where the stone is found but what is the virtue. Fear
not, forester. Faint heart never won fair lady. But where lives Rosalind
now? At the court?’
‘Oh, no,’ quoth Rosader, ‘she lives I know not where, and that is my
sorrow; banished by Torismond, and that is my hell. For, might I but
find her sacred personage and plead before the bar of her pity the
plaint of my passions, hope tells me she would grace me with some
favor, and that would suffice as a recompense of all my former
miseries.’
‘Much have I heard of thy mistress’ excellence, and I know, forester,
thou canst describe her at the full, as one that hast surveyed all her
parts with a curious eye. Then do me that favor to tell me what her
perfections be.’
‘That I will,’ quoth Rosader, ‘for I glory to make all ears wonder at my
mistress’ excellence.’
And with that he pulled a paper forth his bosom, wherein he read this:
Rosalind’s Description
Like to the clear in highest sphere
Where all imperial glory shines,
Of selfsame color is her hair,
Whether unfolded or in twines.
Heigh-ho, fair Rosalind!
Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,
Refining heaven by every wink.
The gods do fear whenas they glow,
And I do tremble when I think.
Heigh ho! Would she were mine.
Her cheeks are like the blushing cloud
That beautifies Aurora’s [the dawn’s] face,
Or like the silver crimson shroud
That Phoebus’ [the sun] smiling looks doth grace.
Her lips are like two budded roses,
Whom ranks of lilies neighbor nigh,
Within which bounds she balm encloses,
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Apt to entice a deity.

Heigh-ho! Would she were mine.
Her neck, like to a stately tower
Where Love himself imprisoned lies,
To watch for glances every hour
From her divine and sacred eyes.
Her paps [breasts] are centers of delight,
Her paps are orbs of heavenly frame,
Where nature molds the dew of light,
To feed perfection with the same.
With orient pearl, with ruby red,
With marble white, with sapphire blue,
Her body every way is fed,
Yet soft in touch, and sweet in view.
Nature herself her shape admires;
The gods are wounded in her sight,
And Love forsakes his heavenly fires
And at her eyes his brand [torch] doth light.
Then muse not, nymphs, though I bemoan
The absence of fair Rosalind,
Since for her fair [fairness] there is fairer none,
Nor for her virtues so divine.
Heigh-ho, my heart, would God that she were mine!
Periit, quia deperibat. [‘He died since he loved to distraction’.
Latin mottoes like this were sometimes added at the end of
poems.]
‘Believe me,’ quoth Ganymede, ‘either the forester is an exquisite

painter, or Rosalind far above wonder; so it makes me blush to hear
how women should be so excellent, and pages so unperfect.’
Rosader, beholding her earnestly, answered thus:
‘Truly, gentle page, thou hast cause to complain thee, wert thou the
substance [if you really were Rosalind], but, resembling the shadow,
content thyself; for it is excellence enough to be like the excellence of
nature.’
104
‘He hath answered you, Ganymede,’ quoth Aliena, ‘it is enough for
pages to wait on beautiful ladies and not to be beautiful themselves.’
‘O mistress,’ quoth Ganymede, ‘hold you your peace, for you are partial
[biased]. Who knows not but that all women have desire to tie
sovereignty to their petticoats and ascribe beauty to themselves? Where
if boys might put on their garments, perhaps they would prove as
comely [beautiful]; if not as comely, it may be, more courteous. But tell
me, forester,’ and with that she turned to Rosader, ‘under whom
maintainest thou thy walk?’
‘Gentle swain, under the king of outlaws,’ said he, ‘the unfortunate
Gerismond, who, having lost his kingdom, crowneth his thoughts with
content, accounting it better to govern among poor men in peace than
great men in danger.’
‘But hast thou not,’ said she, ‘having so melancholy opportunities as this
forest affordeth thee, written more sonnets in commendations of thy
mistress?’
‘I have, gentle swain,’ quoth he, ‘but they be not about me. Tomorrow
by dawn of day, if your flocks feed in these pastures, I will bring them
you, wherein you shall read my passions whilst I feel them. Judge my
patience when you read it. Till when I bid farewell.’ So, giving both
Ganymede and Aliena a gentle good night, he resorted to his lodge,
leaving Aliena and Ganymede to their prittle-prattle.
‘So, Ganymede,’ said Aliena, the forester being gone, ‘you are mightily
beloved! Men make ditties in your praise, spend sighs for your sake,
make an idol of your beauty. Believe me, it grieves me not a little to see
the poor man so pensive and you so pitiless.’
‘Ah, Aliena,’ quoth she, ‘be not peremptory in your judgments. I hear
Rosalind praised as I am Ganymede, but, were I Rosalind, I could
answer the forester. If he mourn for love, there are medicines for love.
Rosalind cannot be fair and unkind. And so, madam, you see it is time
to fold our flocks, or else Corydon will frown and say you will never
prove good housewife.’
With that they put their sheep into the cotes [animal shelters] and went
home to her friend Corydon’s cottage, Aliena as merry as might be that
she was thus in the company of her Rosalind. But she, poor soul, that
had love her lodestar and her thoughts set on fire with the flame of
fancy, could take no rest[.]
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Chapter 3 The Spanish
Tragedy and the origins of the
Elizabethan revenge play
Edmund G.C. King
Contents
Aims 111
Introduction 113
The Spanish Tragedy and Elizabethan violence 118
The Spanish Tragedy and revenge 126
The play-within-a-play and the playwright’s authority 131
‘Oh no, there is no end’: revision and afterlives 135
Conclusion 138
References 139
Reading 3.1 The execution and confession of
Humfrey Stafford, Gentleman, 10 June 1607 142
Aims
Aims
This chapter will:
. discuss the role and significance of violent death in The Spanish
Tragedy
. explore the operation of the play’s revenge plot
. discuss the ‘play-within-the-play’ and what it tells us about the
workings of the Elizabethan stage
. look at the 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy in the context of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
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Chapter 3 The Spanish Tragedy and the origins of the Elizabethan revenge play

. Thomas Kyd (2009) The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J.R. Mulryne and A.
Gurr, New Mermaids series, London, Methuen Drama.
website)
112
Introduction
Introduction
The Spanish Tragedy, dating from c.1587, was one of the most popular
and influential plays of the Elizabethan era, perhaps even ‘the first
early modern blockbuster’, as Clara Calvo calls it (Calvo, 2012, p. 19).
It practically invented its own genre – what we now call ‘revenge
tragedy’ – and provided a dramatic formula that other playwrights of
the period would seize on. Some of the best-known plays in the early
modern English dramatic canon – John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi;
Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy – would not have existed
without the initial inspiration of The Spanish Tragedy. Many of the
themes and plot devices that Shakespeare would explore also have their
origins in the earlier play. The stage ghost, the protagonist who feigns
madness and the play-within-a-play in Hamlet, for instance, are all
foreshadowed in The Spanish Tragedy. Although records of
performance for the period are incomplete, enough evidence remains
to suggest that the play was popular with audiences and probably
highly lucrative for the theatre business. It was acted at least 29 times
between 1592 and 1597 (Gurr, 2009, p. 188). Publishers were quick to
capitalise on the play’s popularity. A quarto edition of the play
appeared in 1592 and another ten editions followed over the next 40
years. This flurry of print made The Spanish Tragedy the second most
reprinted play-book in early modern England (Calvo and Tronch, 2013,
p. 88). If we assume that the number of editions printed roughly
represents consumer demand, then The Spanish Tragedy was much
more popular with early modern readers than any of Shakespeare’s
plays.
The surviving editions of The Spanish Tragedy tell us a good deal about
what contemporary audiences might have found most memorable
about the play. From 1615 onwards, with the publication of the
seventh edition of the play, the title-page carried a woodcut illustration
(Figure 3.1) combining two particular dramatic moments: 2.4.62–3,
where Bel-Imperia is forcibly carted off the stage by Lorenzo; and
2.5.14, where Hieronimo finds the body of his son, Horatio, hanging in
the arbour. Title-pages in the early modern period functioned much
like the covers of modern mass-market paperbacks (Berek, 2012,
p. 158). They were designed to catch the eye of potential book-buyers,
and their illustrations therefore represented a form of visual
merchandising. The booksellers who commissioned this particular
woodcut presumably judged that the discovery of Horatio’s body was
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the play’s most iconic moment. The inclusion of Hieronimo and Bel-
Imperia suggests that they too were key components of the play’s
enduring popularity. By picturing prominent characters in this way, The
Spanish Tragedy’s publishers were trying to attract sales by appealing to
the theatrical memories – perhaps even the theatrical nostalgia – of
potential readers (Jakacki, 2010, p. 17). At the same time, this image
indicates which aspects of the play might have lodged most easily in
the ‘folk memories’ of early modern audiences: the characters of
Hieronimo, Horatio and Bel-Imperia, and the scene of a bloody
murder.
What is an arbour?
An arbour was a kind of roofed trellis, the outer framework of which
would have been interwoven with leaves and branches. The image
in Figure 3.1 presumably depicts a particular theatrical prop that
would have been used in the early seventeenth century to stage the
scene of Horatio’s hanging (Stern, 2004, p. 97).
One piece of information that you might have noticed is missing from
the 1633 title-page reproduced as Figure 3.1 is the name of The Spanish
Tragedy’s author. In fact, this appears on none of the play’s 11 early
modern editions. It would not be until 1773 that a theatre historian
would connect the play with the name ‘Thomas Kyd’: an attribution
that is now universally accepted. (For details about Kyd’s life, see pages
xix–xxi of your set text.) Publishers during Kyd’s lifetime evidently did
not believe that placing an author’s name on a title-page would
encourage sales (Erne, 2013, pp. 82, 87–8). Instead, publishers listed
information such as the name of an acting company which had
performed a particular play, or a brief summary of the play’s plot and
the names of some of its prominent characters: details they hoped
would connect the play-book with the theatre. Contemporary allusions
suggest that Kyd’s fellow dramatists were well aware that he was the
author of The Spanish Tragedy, but his literary fame was ‘lost’ for over a
century after the closure of the theatres in 1642.
Activity
If you haven’t yet read The Spanish Tragedy, you should do so now.
Once you’ve finished reading it, look again at the 1633 title-page
114
Introduction
Figure 3.1 The title page of the 1633 edition of The Spanish Tragedy by
Thomas Kyd, printed by Augustine Mathewes. Photo: private collection/
Bridgeman Images.
reproduced as Figure 3.1. Armed with your knowledge of the text, I want
you to think about how well this title-page represents the work as a
whole. As a prompt for thinking about this question, I’ve used the online
content-analysis tool Wordle to create a ‘word cloud’ of the most
commonly occurring words in the play’s dialogue (Figure 3.2). (Stage
115
directions, speech prefixes and common words like ‘if’ and ‘and’ have
been stripped out.) In this Wordle, you can assume that the larger a word
is, the more times it appears in the play.
. What do you think this word cloud says about the play’s themes and
its characters’ preoccupations?
. Is this entirely a play about bloody revenge – a kind of Elizabethan
Friday the 13th? Or are there other themes and preoccupations
present besides violence?
Figure 3.2 Wordle ‘word cloud’ of the most commonly occurring words in the
dialogue within The Spanish Tragedy. Photo: via wordle.net.
Discussion
The most immediate thing you might notice in Figure 3.2 is the
prominence of names: ‘Hieronimo’, ‘Horatio’, ‘Balthazar’, ‘Bellimperia’.
The more a particular character is spoken about by other cast members,
the more important we can assume he or she is to the plot. In terms of
sheer number of mentions, though, Hieronimo wins, confirming the sense
you might have picked up from the title-page illustration that Hieronimo’s
actions and concerns are the dominating forces in this play. Formal
words like ‘lord’, ‘Don’, ‘prince’ and ‘king’, meanwhile, tell us something
about the setting these characters inhabit: this play takes place at court,
in an aristocratic milieu.
Once we examine the less commonly used words, we can get a better
sense of the play’s individual features. As you might expect, many terms
associated with violence appear repeatedly in the play: ‘murder’,
‘murder’d’, ‘slain’, ‘blood’, ‘die’. But notice how they are outnumbered by
another category of words. ‘Son’ and ‘love’ loom particularly large in this
116
Introduction
Wordle, and other words suggesting family relationships are prominent

too: ‘father’, ‘brother’. Notice also the prominence of terms associated
with law, religion and morality: ‘soul’, ‘hell’, ‘justice’, ‘honour’, ‘revenge’.
The Spanish Tragedy is unarguably a ‘blood and guts’ play, and in the
next section I’ll be discussing its violent spectacles in some detail. But it
is important to remember that the violence within the play occurs for a
reason. Violence is a means to an end for the characters that resort to it;
it emerges out of the context of broken family relationships (particularly
those between fathers and sons); and – ultimately – the play’s revenging
characters use it to seek redress for past wrongs.
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The Spanish Tragedy and Elizabethan

violence
London at the close of the sixteenth century was suffused with
spectacles of violence. Fighting and the use of weapons to resolve
disputes were commonplace aspects of social life among all social
classes across western Europe (Ruff, 2001, pp. 118–19). Even by those
standards, however, violence in late Elizabethan England had an
unusually high profile. Homicide rates in many English counties rose
precipitously in the 1580s and 1590s, with rates in the suburbs of
London being among the highest (Roth, 2001, p. 45). Unemployment,
food shortages, plague and economic depression accompanied this
outpouring of violence, ‘raising fears’, as the crime historian Randolph
Roth puts it, ‘that the social and political order had collapsed’ (Roth,
2001, p. 46). If the spike in murders during the Elizabethan period
stemmed from poverty and desperation, the violence meted out by the
Elizabethan state reflected another set of stresses. As the historian V.A.
C. Gatrell writes, ‘highly visible state violence’ occurs at moments when
the political order believes itself to be most under threat (Gatrell, 2004,
p. 15). The long series of rebellions and threats that punctuated
Elizabeth’s reign produced its own outpouring of violent spectacle.
Visiting London in 1599, the Swiss doctor Thomas Platter noted the
prominence with which the severed heads of executed rebels were
displayed within the city: ‘At the top of one tower almost in the centre
of [London] Bridge, were stuck on tall stakes more than thirty skulls of
noble men who had been executed and beheaded for treason and for
other reasons’ (Williams, 1937, p. 155). You can see a later
representation of this grisly display in the seventeenth-century
illustration of London Bridge reproduced as Figure 3.3.
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The Spanish Tragedy and Elizabethan violence
Figure 3.3 Detail from C.J. Visscher, View of London, 1616, showing London
Bridge and Traitors’ Gate (also known as Bridge Gate). Photo: private
collection/© Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection/Bridgeman Images.
These were only some of the victims of state violence during the Tudor
period. The courts sentenced no fewer than 6160 people to be hanged
in London during the reign of Elizabeth I, which lasted a little over 44
years (Smith, 1992, p. 217). Perhaps as many as 75,000 men and women
were executed by the state between 1530 and 1630 (Gatrell, 2004, p. 7).
That these deaths took place in public was no accident. Executions –
and the ritualised mutilation of criminals’ corpses that often followed –
created spectacle, and spectacle was one of the primary means by which
the Elizabethan state demonstrated its hold on power.
There was something inescapably theatrical about these spectacles of
public death. As the critic Janette Dillon writes, ‘executions were
regularly treated as performances by victims, authorities, spectators, and
119
contemporary commentators alike’ (Dillon, 2010, p. 178). They attracted

large crowds, who regarded the proceedings as a kind of gruesome
entertainment. Criminals, meanwhile, often used the scaffold as a kind
of stage on which they could perform a ‘good death’ – reciting dying
speeches, for instance, in which they begged forgiveness for their
crimes. The Spanish Tragedy was one of the first plays to comment
explicitly on the resemblance between the scaffold and the stage. By
bringing execution and torture within the bounds of the playhouse, Kyd
was capitalising on the same public fascination with violent and bloody
spectacle that drew crowds to witness real executions (Pollard, 2012,
p. 66). At the same time, however, The Spanish Tragedy can tell us a good
deal about the social meanings of violence in early modern England.
Examining what drives Kyd’s characters to kill – and why they believe
they are justified in doing so – might help us understand why staged
violence resonated so strongly with Elizabethan audiences.
Although the play’s first murder does not actually occur until Act 2,
Scene 4, images of violence suffuse much of the language in the
preceding scenes. Andrea’s remarkable opening speech (1.1.1–85)
recounts in detail the specific bodily tortures sinners are subjected to in
the underworld:
Where usurers are choked with melting gold,

And wantons are embraced with ugly snakes,
And murderers groan with never-killing wounds,
(1.1.67–9)
Revenge assures him that his own murderer, Balthazar, will soon meet a
similar punishment and that Andrea himself will have the pleasure of
witnessing the act. The Spanish General’s account of the battle where
Andrea is killed offers up a similarly sweeping and explicit set of violent
images:
Here falls a body scindered from his head,

There legs and arms lie bleeding on the grass,
Mingled with weapons and unbowelled steeds,
That scattering overspread the purple plain.
(1.2.59–62)
120
Act 2, Scene 4, however, is the pivotal scene where this linguistic

pictorialism gives way to live-action violence. As you’ll remember, this is
the scene where Bel-Imperia and Horatio slip into Horatio’s parents’
garden with the intention, perhaps, of physically consummating their
illicit love. By pursuing Bel-Imperia, Horatio is violating the rules of
authority that govern the Spanish court. As son of the Knight Marshal,
Hieronimo, he has no aristocratic rank. Throughout Acts 1 and 2, Kyd
carefully delineates the gulfs of caste that separate Horatio from the
play’s noble characters. The contrasting ease with which Balthazar
insinuates himself into the Spanish court underlines Horatio’s social
marginality. The King gives Horatio Balthazar’s armour rather than
custody of Balthazar himself, as ‘Horatio’s house were small for all
[Balthazar’s] train’ (1.2.187). In the banquet scene in 1.4, Horatio is
unable to sit with the other guests but instead acts as cupbearer for the
King. Lorenzo, son of the Duke of Castile, quickly comes to regard the
captive Balthazar, son of the Portuguese Viceroy, as more suitable
company than his countryman Horatio. For Lorenzo, the caste identity
he shares with Balthazar has more meaning than the wider national
identity for which he and Horatio fought on the battlefield (Maus, 1995,
p. xv). From Lorenzo’s and Balthazar’s perspective, Horatio’s love for
Bel-Imperia is a piece of insufferable social climbing. Balthazar clearly
wants to revenge himself on Horatio for the insult of being pre-empted
in love by a social inferior. Lorenzo sees himself as protecting both
familial and class honour by preventing his sister from becoming
sexually involved with Horatio. The revenge they devise for the
‘ambitious’ Horatio (2.2.41) violently reasserts these threatened
hierarchies.
The violence that Lorenzo’s and Balthazar’s agents inflict upon
Horatio’s body is by no means random. As with contemporary public
executions, it has intended witnesses – Bel-Imperia; Horatio and his
family – and the spectacle it creates is meant to convey a particular
social message. While from a twenty-first-century perspective early
modern execution rituals, such as drawing and quartering, might appear
to be simple catalogues of brutality, each act in the sequence had a
particular meaning that would have been implicitly understood by
onlookers. In 1606, during the trial of the Gunpowder Plot
conspirators, the British jurist Sir Edward Coke explained in detail what
the various stages of public execution were meant to symbolise. On the
day of execution, the convicted traitor was to be:
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drawn to the place of execution from his prison as not being

worthy any more to tread upon the face of the earth whereof he
was made […] And whereas God hath made the head of man the
highest and most supreme part, as being his chief grace and
ornament […] he must be drawn with his head declining
downward, and lying so near the ground as may be, being thought
unfit to take the common air. For which cause also he shall be
strangled, being hanged up by the neck between heaven and earth,
as deemed unworthy of both, or either; as likewise, that the eyes of
men may behold, and their hearts condemn him. Then is he to be
cut down alive, and to have his privy parts cut off and burnt
before his face as being unworthily begotten, and unfit to leave any
generation after him. His bowels and inlayed parts taken out and
burnt, who inwardly had conceived and harboured in his heart
such horrible treason. After, to have his head cut off, which had
imagined the mischief. And lastly, his body to be quartered, and
the quarters set up in some high and eminent place, to the view
and detestation of men, and to become a prey for the fowls of the
air.
(Emlyn, 1730–5, vol. 1, p. 235, modernised)
Of course, Horatio isn’t subjected to quite such an elaborate set of

bodily mutilations as this. But it is clear from Coke’s speech what
Lorenzo and Balthazar are aiming to convey through their deployment
of hanging as a mode of punishment. This, in turn, suggests how The
Spanish Tragedy’s first audiences might have interpreted Horatio’s
murder.
By using a quasi-judicial mode of killing like hanging, Lorenzo and
Balthazar represent Horatio’s ‘ambition’ as a crime that they have the
authority to punish. The act of hanging also had insulting symbolic
associations in the early modern period: it was the preferred mode of
execution for common criminals (Maus, 1995, p. 337). By killing their
victim in this way, Lorenzo and Balthazar aim to socially humiliate
Horatio, suggesting that he is worthy only of, as Coke puts it, the
‘detestation’ of onlookers. There is also, as there is in the traitor’s
execution described in Coke’s speech, a hint of a sexual motive in this
murder. In much the same way as the traitor’s ‘privy parts’ are to be
‘cut off and burnt before his face’, suggesting that he is ‘unworthily
begotten, and unfit to leave any generation after him’ (Emlyn, 1730–5,
vol. 1, p. 235), Horatio is interrupted in the act of embracing
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Bel-Imperia, just at the point where Lorenzo’s bloodline risks being

contaminated by a social inferior and Balthazar faces defeat by a
romantic rival.
The murder of Horatio is not, however, the only hanging in the play. In
a brutally ironic reversal, one of the hangmen – Pedringano – is himself
soon to become a victim of hanging. Double-crossed by Lorenzo,
Pedringano will unwittingly enact one of the most excruciatingly tragi
comic death scenes in early modern drama. But what is it, precisely, that
would have made Pedringano’s execution so simultaneously funny and
shocking for a contemporary audience?
Activity
. Reading 3.1, which you will find at the end of this chapter, consists of
extracts from a contemporary pamphlet describing the public
execution of Humfrey Stafford in 1607. Read this now, and compare
the victim’s behaviour with that of Pedringano in 3.6.
. How does the way Pedringano acts on the scaffold differ from
Stafford’s execution?
Discussion
One of the prime concerns of the condemned criminal in early modern
England was being seen to make a ‘good death’. This consisted of
enduring the pain and stress of the scaffold, maintaining composure, and
performing the kind of final acts that might ensure spiritual welfare.
Stafford, who had been convicted of sodomy, seems especially anxious
to follow this script. He represents his death as a communion with God,
hence his reference to going to ‘a most joyful marriage’. He accepts the
spiritual assistance of a clergyman, Mr Paget, on the scaffold. He publicly
recants his sins before the audience that has assembled to see him
hanged. He even succeeds in moderating the behaviour of the hangman,
reproving him for swearing and thus turning the gallows into a kind of
pulpit for the delivery of moral lessons. According to the pamphlet, his
performance in this regard is so successful that he wins over an initially
hostile crowd with his obvious sincerity. It is a remarkable performance,
but by no means an unstudied one. Contemporary pamphlets record
dozens of condemned criminals delivering similar confessions on the
scaffold. What Stafford is doing, in other words, is participating in a
ceremony with established rules, delivering the performance he believes
most likely to win divine forgiveness (J.A. Sharpe, 1985, pp. 150–4).
123
How does Pedringano’s performance measure up to Stafford’s? Unlike

Stafford, Pedringano feels assured of forgiveness and salvation in this
world rather than in the afterlife. He believes that his patron, Lorenzo,
has sent him a pardon hidden in the Page’s box. Instead of following the
script of the penitent criminal, as Stafford does, Pedringano uses his
appearance on the scaffold to subvert the whole occasion. Instead of
letting his hanging unfold according to the established sequence –
confession followed by death – Pedringano intends to turn the execution
ritual into farce. He decides to be comically unrepentant on the scaffold,
believing the story will end not in death but in a last-minute intervention
by Lorenzo. The whole scene unfolds as a series of comic reversals.
Pedringano defies Hieronimo’s attempt to start him off on the established
script by ‘confess[ing] thy folly and repent[ing] thy fault’ (3.6.26).
Whereas Stafford and other ‘contrite’ criminals were unfailingly respectful
of the executioner, Pedringano insults his hangman by calling him ‘sirrah’
and ‘knave’: terms of address reserved for social inferiors. Though he
suddenly veers back on to the script by asking the hangman to ‘request
this good company to pray with me’ (3.6.82), Pedringano then abruptly
changes his mind. Finally, when his pardon does not materialise,
Pedringano is unceremoniously pushed off the scaffold. To complete the
travesty, the Deputy orders Pedringano’s body to remain unburied. (Note
that Stafford’s corpse was interred in a churchyard in recognition of his
dying confessions, the final scene in his crime–contrition–forgiveness
narrative.)
Why does Kyd stage the scene in this way? The first answer is that
Pedringano’s behaviour confirms Hieronimo’s sense that the Spanish
court is a moral wasteland. Witnessing Pedringano’s ‘impudence’
ultimately reaffirms his commitment to punishing Horatio’s murderers.
It is also the first scene where Hieronimo’s grief causes him to
temporarily lose composure in public, foreshadowing his later descent
into madness. The second – and much more obvious – feature of this
scene is that Pedringano’s death is played for laughs. This is true
‘gallows humour’: death presented as entertainment. Moreover, Kyd
seems to assume that his audience is thoroughly familiar with scaffold
rituals, so completely does the scene’s humour depend on an
understanding of how Pedringano subverts the ceremony. This suggests
just how pervasive public execution was in early modern England. But
it’s clear that Kyd is doing something else here, something that perhaps
asks his audience to think about their own complicity in the spectacle.
124
As you’ll remember from reading the first lines of the play, there is a
frame surrounding the main action. The underworld figures of Don
Andrea and Revenge have sat down to watch the play, occasionally
commenting on the action as it progresses. We cannot be sure exactly
where the original actors playing Don Andrea and Revenge would have
sat – perhaps in the gallery above the stage – but the audience would
have been able to see them throughout the action (Calvo and Tronch,
2013, p. 127). As visible ‘watchers’ of the play, they would have formed
obvious surrogates for Kyd’s audience, embodying, as the critic Allison
P. Hobgood puts it, the audience’s ‘emotional participation in the
ensuing performance’ (Hobgood, 2014, p. 66).
To early modern onlookers, Pedringano’s death would have been not
only farcical but emotionally and spiritually distressing too. Convinced
that his performance is meaningless due to what he thinks is his
impending pardon, he has refused every sacramental offering designed
to save his soul. To an Elizabethan audience, this could only mean one
thing – he is going to hell – a likelihood made into a near certainty by
the Deputy’s order to leave his body unburied. Pious spectators would
no doubt have found their comic enjoyment suddenly tempered with a
frisson of spiritual shock (Erne, 2001, p. 88). As we shall see, this is not
the only time in the play that Kyd discomforts his audience by turning
an ostensibly entertaining spectacle into something more disturbing.
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The Spanish Tragedy and revenge

Pedringano’s execution, besides being a comic set-piece, also has an
important role in setting The Spanish Tragedy’s revenge plot in motion.
When, in 3.2, Hieronimo receives Bel-Imperia’s letter accusing Lorenzo
and Balthazar of Horatio’s murder, he initially thinks it might be a trap.
Now that the dead Pedringano turns out to be carrying a letter
confirming Bel-Imperia’s accusations, he has final proof against the
conspirators. Hieronimo initially tries to seek remedy for his son’s
murder through the judicial system. As Knight Marshal of Spain,
Hieronimo’s social status – indeed, his whole identity – derives from a
belief that the legal system is capable of delivering just outcomes. The
circumstances of Horatio’s murder, however, radically undermine
Hieronimo’s faith in that system. The murderers in this case are a
prince and the son of the Duke of Castile. As aristocrats, they blithely
assume that their social superiority makes them immune to the rule of
law. Hieronimo at first thinks that he can take Pedringano’s letter to the
King and prove the identity of Horatio’s killers (3.7.69–73). When, in
3.12, he finally resolves to present his suit to the King, however, he
discovers that the court is engaged in far more important matters.
There is to be a royal marriage and Balthazar – his son’s murderer – is
to receive the Portuguese crown. Attempting to intervene, Hieronimo is
arrogantly swept aside by court personnel who assume their own
dynastic interests are of paramount importance. ‘Who is he that
interrupts our business?’ demands the Spanish King (3.12.30): a stinging
demonstration of Hieronimo’s social marginality in this setting. When he
does manage to secure the King’s attention, Hieronimo produces such
an extreme display of grief that he quickly finds himself bundled
offstage.
This disastrous episode represents the lowest point in Hieronimo’s quest
for justice. His behaviour has essentially closed off any chance he had
of seeking restitution through legal channels. How does Kyd represent
Hieronimo’s response to this setback?
Activity
Carefully read Hieronimo’s ‘vindicta mihi’ (vengeance is mine) soliloquy in
3.13.1–44, paying close attention to the language.
. What role does this soliloquy perform in the play’s action?
126
. What decisions does Hieronimo reach during his speech?

. Finally, what are some of the language techniques that Kyd deploys
to illustrate Hieronimo’s train of thought?
Discussion
Soliloquies represent moments of apparent privacy, where characters can
be alone with their thoughts and plan future moves. In place of the
congested stage on which he has failed to win the King’s ear in 3.12,
Hieronimo’s lone entry at the beginning of 3.13 provides him with the
time and space he needs to recover his mental composure. Soliloquies
are traditionally defined as speeches that give the audience access to a
character’s innermost thoughts. In fact, what Hieronimo does in his
‘vindicta mihi’ speech is, quite literally, talk to himself. Critic James Hirsh
calls this form of soliloquy ‘self-addressed speech’ (Hirsh, 2003, p. 13).
This convention enables a dramatist to, as Hirsh puts it, ‘show a
character in the process of talking himself into a course of action or a
frame of mind’ (Hirsh, 2003, p. 15). Through the conceit of the soliloquy,
we as the audience get to eavesdrop on Hieronimo at the moment he
convinces himself to take personal revenge on Horatio’s killers.
But how does Hieronimo talk himself into such an extreme course of
action? He begins his soliloquy by acknowledging Christian piety. ‘Ay,
heaven will be revenged of every ill’, he announces (3.13.2), in
recognition of the traditional Christian belief that divine judgement will
eventually take care of every earthly injustice. But in 3.13.6 he changes
his mind. Quoting Seneca’s adage that ‘The safest way with crime is
more crime’, he suggests that the only way of seeking justice for an
offence like murder is to respond in kind: to take matters into his own
hands. Notice that Hieronimo has entered the stage carrying a book. The
fact that he quotes three times from Seneca in this one speech (ll.6, 12–
13 and 35) suggests that the actor playing Hieronimo may have entered
carrying a collected edition of Seneca’s works (Bowers, 1938, p. 590).
The entry of Seneca into the speech signals an abrupt shift from
Christian morality to pagan bloodthirstiness. Hieronimo starts with the
New Testament’s dictum that only God can dispense vengeance
(‘vindicta mihi’: Romans 12.19). By the end of the speech, Christianity
has been replaced by an entirely pagan world view (Bowers, 1938,
p. 591). Hieronimo will feign madness and incomprehension and wait for
an opportunity to ‘revenge [Horatio’s] death’ (3.13.20).
What are some of the distinctive features of Hieronimo’s language? How
does Kyd use them to illustrate Hieronimo’s psychology? The second half
of Hieronimo’s soliloquy is peppered with elaborate oppositions. ‘will I
rest me in unrest,/Dissembling quiet in unquietness’, Hieronimo declares
(3.13.29–30). The juxtaposition of words with their opposites – ‘rest’/
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‘unrest’, ‘quiet’/‘unquietness’ – mirrors Hieronimo’s plan of deceit. He will

hide his plan of revenge by seeming not to be planning revenge. The
words and actions Hieronimo performs in public will henceforth ‘cloak’ the
true nature of his intentions, a policy that will culminate in the play-within
a-play in Act 4, Scene 4.
Hieronimo’s position as a lone agent, seeking personal revenge outside

the legal system, evidently resonated deeply with Elizabethan audiences.
The sixteenth century was a period of transition in the way acts of
personal violence were punished. In medieval England, it was customary
for wounded parties to exact vengeance on their own terms. From the
mid-sixteenth century onwards, however, the Elizabethan state began to
actively discourage ‘blood feuds’ and vendettas in favour of state-
administered justice through the courts (Broude, 1975, pp. 42–3).
Hieronimo, as Knight Marshal, is an embodiment of this expansion of
state power. However, Hieronimo’s ironic inability to obtain private
justice for his own son underlines the limitations of this emerging
system: its susceptibility to corruption; its class bias; the chance,
inherent in every case, that there would ultimately be no justice. The
vicarious thrill that revenge-play audiences took in seeing vigilantism
represented on stage reflected, as the critic Linda Woodbridge writes, a
‘widespread resentment of systemic unfairness – economic, political,
social’ – in Elizabethan society in general (Woodbridge, 2010, p. 7).
Revengers embodied the fantasy of recovering legal authority from an
ineffective state system and returning it to the hands of the individual.
Once set in motion, however, the play’s revenge plot unfolds with its
own unstoppable logic. One death inevitably leads to another in a
radiating pattern of violence. As we saw earlier in the chapter, Balthazar
and Lorenzo conceive their murder of Horatio as a kind of ‘revenge’
for Horatio’s refusal to respect class boundaries. Once the murder is
accomplished, however, it swiftly necessitates the killings of Serberine
and Pedringano, the latter of which leads to Hieronimo’s final discovery
of the murderers’ identity. Hieronimo’s and Bel-Imperia’s decisions to
take private revenge soon set off a similarly irrevocable chain of events.
In places, Kyd encodes this logic into the fabric of the play’s verse
itself. An example of this lies in Balthazar’s rhetorically elaborate set-
piece speech in 2.1.111–33. After discovering that Bel-Imperia has
128
found ‘second love’ with Horatio, Balthazar and Lorenzo for the first
time start plotting his elimination. As Lorenzo listens, Balthazar lays out
the events that have led to this situation:
I think Horatio be my destined plague:

First, in his hand he brandished a sword,
And with that sword he fiercely waged war,
And in that war he gave me dangerous wounds,
And by those wounds he forced me to yield,
And by my yielding I became his slave.
Now in his mouth he carries pleasing words,
Which pleasing words do harbour sweet conceits,
Which sweet conceits are limed with sly deceits,
Which sly deceits smooth Bel-Imperia’s ears,
And through her ears dive down into her heart,
And in her heart set him where I should stand.
(2.1.118–29; emphases added)
Here, Kyd exploits the rhythmic qualities of Elizabethan verse to expose

the cause-and-effect relationships that underlie the plot. The speech
relies on the rhetorical device of anadiplosis for its effect. Starting
from 2.1.119, Balthazar repeats the word ending each line within the
body of the next. In the insistent, driving rhythms of iambic
pentameter, plot and rhetoric combine to convey the relentless logic of
causality. First, Horatio’s ‘sword’ allows him to wage ‘war’. In that ‘war’
he ‘wounds’ Balthazar, ‘wounds’ that incapacitate his victim and force
Balthazar to ‘yield’, that act of ‘yielding’ enabling Horatio to take
Balthazar prisoner and make him his ‘slave’. After a rhythmic halt in
2.1.123 that echoes the sense of stoppage implied by ‘yield’, the
sequence starts again in 2.1.124. Now, Horatio is no longer a warrior
but a lover speaking ‘pleasing words’, ‘words’ that carry the ‘sweet
conceits’ that delight Bel-Imperia’s ‘ears’ and enshrine Horatio in her
‘heart’, where Balthazar believes that he should rightfully ‘stand’ due to
his superior social rank. Lorenzo ends the scene by making explicit the
means by which Balthazar aims to replace Horatio in Bel-Imperia’s
affections: ‘Her favour must be won by his remove’ (2.1.136).
However, this speech does more than express the contents of
Balthazar’s thoughts. It ‘replicates’ the narrative logic of the revenge
plot itself (Kesler, 1990, p. 481). Just as each line in Balthazar’s speech
advances the sequence by one move, the elements of the revenge plot
129
are similarly recursive. Before the play begins, Balthazar kills Andrea in
battle. Balthazar then falls in love with Andrea’s former lover, Bel-
Imperia, but not before she has fallen in love with Balthazar’s captor,
Horatio. Balthazar ‘revenges’ himself on Horatio by hanging him in the
arbour, an act that eventually leads Bel-Imperia to revenge herself on him
by stabbing him in the play-within-a-play in 4.4. Each outcome, in other
words, is the logical result of an action that preceded it. As the critic R.
L. Kesler puts it:
The revenge relationship […] mimics the rhetorical structure of

Balthazar’s speech: each killing, like the first term in a poetic line,
leads directly to the next, the act of revenge, which […] becomes
in turn the first term or ‘cause’ of the next relationship.
(Kesler, 1990, p. 482)
The problem with this narrative structure is that it is potentially endless.

Each act of revenge creates new victims, who themselves have to be
avenged, and so on ad infinitum. There is ultimately no logical end to
the chain of causality that underpins the revenge plot other than the
deaths of all (or most of) the characters involved – an apocalyptic ‘fall
of Babylon’, as Hieronimo himself puts it at 4.1.195.
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The play-within-a-play and the playwright’s authority
The play-within-a-play and the

playwright’s authority
The Spanish Tragedy’s revenge plot reaches its catastrophic end-point in
4.4, when Hieronimo assembles his cast for the inset play Soliman and
Perseda. After the premature comic resolution of 3.14, where the
Portuguese Viceroy tearfully reunites with his son, Balthazar, and Castile
believes he has successfully reconciled Lorenzo and Hieronimo, the
play’s villains appear on the brink of victory. However, the very end
they are striving to bring about – the royal wedding between Bel-
Imperia and Balthazar – provides an opportunity for Hieronimo to
impose his preferred ending on proceedings. Balthazar asks Hieronimo
to devise a short play for the first night of the wedding celebrations.
With Bel-Imperia as his collaborator, Hieronimo now has the chance to
put the plot he claims is ‘already in mine head’ (4.1.51) into action.
Balthazar and Lorenzo assume Soliman and Perseda is a harmless
pageant to mark the successful culmination of the royal drama. From
their point of view, they are the heroes of the story and Hieronimo a
minor character. Following the apparent reconciliation scene in 3.14,
they expect Hieronimo to retreat into the passive role of wedding
celebrant. His obedience in agreeing to be pageant-deviser confirms –
or so Lorenzo and Balthazar believe – Hieronimo’s final submission to
the court-imposed narrative. For Hieronimo, however, Soliman and
Perseda is the chance to seize control of the plot from the aristocratic
conspirators. Each part in the play has a covert meaning that reflects
the private tragedy of Horatio’s murder. Balthazar – fittingly – is
assigned the role of the passive conspirator, Soliman. Lorenzo, in a sly
piece of class inversion, is given the part of Erasto, the play’s Horatio-
surrogate. Bel-Imperia will act the part of Perseda, giving her the
chance to revenge herself on Balthazar. Hieronimo takes the part of
Pasha, Erasto/Lorenzo’s killer. Soliman and Perseda unfolds like the
solution to a puzzle, each character (wittingly or unwittingly) working
out the causal logic of the main play’s revenge plot. Hieronimo stabs
Erasto/Lorenzo in final revenge for Horatio’s murder. Bel-Imperia kills
Soliman/Balthazar – ‘ignoble prince’ (4.4.66) in both roles – as
combined revenge for the deaths of Andrea and Horatio, before turning
the knife on herself. Finally, Hieronimo steps forward to speak the
epilogue and reveal the meaning of what has just been performed.
131
Until this point, Hieronimo has successfully misrepresented Soliman and

Perseda as ‘just a play’ by emphasising its reassuringly harmless-looking
theatricality. In 4.1 he shows Lorenzo and Balthazar the play
manuscript, giving it a plausibly innocent-sounding provenance:
When in Toledo there I studied,

It was my chance to write a tragedy –
See here, my lords – He shows them a book
(4.1.77–9)
In 4.3, he hands Castile both a copy of the play and its ‘argument’ –
that is, a sheet containing a plot summary – to pass on to the King.
The distribution of ‘arguments’ (similar to today’s theatrical
programmes) prior to a performance was customary when plays and
masques were acted at the Elizabethan court (Stern, 2009, pp. 65, 69–
70). The King later gives the plot summary to the Portuguese Viceroy,
and they both use it to follow the play’s action:
Here comes Lorenzo; look upon the plot,

And tell me, brother, what part plays he?
(4.4.33–4)
The play itself is performed in ‘sundry languages’ – ‘nonsense syllables’

that ground the play in a make-believe world and would seem at first to
deny its connection to this world, that of the main play (Kay, 1977,
p. 35). Hieronimo’s insistence that his actors perform in different
languages is part of his strategy of sowing deceit. The nonsense syllables
are deliberately confusing and the disorientation they create helps
conceal the true significance of what is taking place from both actors
and spectators (West, 2008, p. 224). By breaking out of character during
the epilogue, however, Hieronimo suspends the ‘safe’ theatricality of the
play-within-a-play:
Haply you think […]

That this is fabulously counterfeit,
And that we do as all tragedians do:
To die today […]
And, in a minute starting up again,
132
The play-within-a-play and the playwright’s authority
Revive to please to-morrow’s audience.

No […]
(4.4.76–83)
In this moment, Hieronimo disrupts his onstage audience’s

understanding of what they have been watching – the ‘safe’
interpretation – and reveals the shocking reality of the spectacle. Yet, in
this self-aware, ‘meta-theatrical’ moment it is not only the fictional
audience that has its sense of perspective disrupted. In his knowing
reference to theatrical convention – actors who ‘revive’ after their
feigned stage deaths – Kyd jolts his audience out of their comfort
zones, forcing them to share the perspective of the newly bereaved
fathers onstage: Castile and the Portuguese Viceroy. Each set of
spectators has just witnessed the same spectacle. Both know from play-
going experience that actors don’t really die onstage. But Hieronimo’s
lines suggest that they might. Just for a moment, perhaps, through the
gap in the dramatic fabric Hieronimo has created, seeps the chilling
possibility that what Kyd’s audience has just witnessed might itself have
been real.
But ‘what’, as the King asks, ‘now […] follows’ (4.4.72)? How is the
play to end? The royal narrative that was to culminate in the marriage
of Balthazar and Bel-Imperia has been obliterated. In its place,
Hieronimo is free to impose his own ending. As the critic Michael Neill
notes, the King and Viceroy have the plot summary of Soliman and
Perseda before them, but this cannot tell them how the play in which
they are performing will conclude (Neill, 1998, p. 202). They must turn
to Hieronimo to find out, effectively ceding narrative authority to him.
Hieronimo answers by whipping back the curtain to reveal the primal
scene of his revenge plot – the murdered body of Horatio – and
commencing on a lengthy exposition of events, a speech he intends to
culminate in his own final exit:
And, princes, now behold Hieronimo,

Author and actor in this tragedy,
[…] will as resolute conclude his part
As any of the actors gone before.
And, gentles, thus I end my play:
Urge no more words: I have no more to say.
133
He runs to hang himself

(4.4.146–52)
Hieronimo is intercepted before he can replicate his son’s mode of

death and complete the symmetry of the plot he has in mind. But,
befitting his role as actor/author, he completes his part with a brilliantly
stage-managed improvisation. Asked to explain himself further by
Castile and the Viceroy, who still doubt their sons’ complicity in
Horatio’s death, Hieronimo responds with the most visceral refusal
imaginable – biting out his own tongue. Given a pen to complete his
story, he requests a pen-knife to sharpen its tip before turning it on
Castile and then on himself. In this final moment, he brings his ‘tragedy
of blood’ to a fitting end by merging stage violence with its point of
creative origin: the playwright’s pen (Neill, 1998, p. 203).
134
‘Oh no, there is no end’: revision and afterlives
‘Oh no, there is no end’: revision and

afterlives
No play is ever truly over until it receives its final performance or is
read for the very last time. The Spanish Tragedy had an especially long
afterlife on the early modern stage, being regularly acted in London
right up until the closure of the playhouses in 1642 (Gurr, 2009,
p. 188). Any play popular enough to have remained in repertory that
long would have received many revisions to keep it ‘fresh’ for
audiences. We know from the financial records of the theatre
entrepreneur Philip Henslowe that the playwright Ben Jonson wrote
extensive revisions for The Spanish Tragedy between 1601 and 1602. It
was traditionally thought that the five ‘new’ additions that first appeared
in the 1602 edition of The Spanish Tragedy – at 2.5, 3.2, 3.11, 3.13 and
4.4 – relate to this set of payments. In recent years, however, this theory
has come increasingly under question. The additions don’t seem to be
written in Jonson’s style. Furthermore, one of the additions – the
‘painter’s scene’ in 3.13 – was parodied in a play by John Marston that
scholars now date to 1599. If the additions printed in the 1602 quarto
edition were new on the stage in 1599, before Jonson was paid to start
writing his additions, this would appear to eliminate Jonson as their
author (W. Sharpe, 2013, p. 676). Presumably, the 320 new lines printed
in 1602 were written by another playwright for another revival and the
additions Jonson wrote – whatever they were – are lost.
So, who was responsible for the surviving additions to The Spanish
Tragedy and what led to their writing? The poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1772–1834) was adamant that the additions were written by
William Shakespeare, arguing that while they
bear no traces of [Ben Jonson’s] style; […] they are very like
Shakespeare; and it is very remarkable that every one of them
reappears in full form and development and tempered with mature
judgment, in some of Shakespeare’s great pieces.
(Quoted in Vickers, 2012, p. 18)
Using computational linguistics to analyse the additions’ vocabulary and

style, Shakespeare scholars have recently provided some high-tech
support for Coleridge’s nineteenth-century hunch (Vickers, 2012;
135
Craig, 2009). While the case is not yet conclusive, research conducted
by the attribution scholar Hugh Craig suggests that, of the major
professional dramatists active in London at the time the additions were
probably written, Shakespeare is the most likely to have been their
author (Craig, 2009, p. 180).
Why, though, would Shakespeare have been writing new material for a
play by another dramatist, over a decade after its first performance? In
1599 Shakespeare was the principal dramatist of his theatre company,
the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. One of the tasks principal dramatists had
was to write new scenes for older ‘stock’ plays selected for revival by
their acting companies (Bentley, 1971, pp. 138–9). As the theatre
historian Roslyn Knutson writes, the choice of which old plays to revive
was not a random one. Plays were often selected for revival to act as
‘tie-ins’ to particular new plays that shared their subject or genre
(Knutson, 1988, p. 260). Towards the end of 1599 Shakespeare was
probably working on Hamlet, the last play in a burst of extraordinary
creative activity that year that had already seen him write Henry V,
Julius Caesar and As You Like It (Shapiro, 2005, p. xv). Is there
anything about the additions Shakespeare apparently wrote for The
Spanish Tragedy that might link them with what would become his most
famous tragedy?
Activity
Reread 2.5, the scene where Hieronimo and Isabella discover the
murdered body of Horatio hanging in the arbour. Now turn to the back of
your set text and read the version of this scene created by the first of the
1602 additions (Kyd, 2009, pp. 131–3). Is Hieronimo’s character
portrayed any differently in the 1602 version? If so, how? What effect
would this have had on the play?
Discussion
One of the most noticeable characteristics of Hieronimo in the 1602
version of 2.5 is that he is distracted and illogical. We see him cutting the
corpse of Horatio down from the arbour (2.5.12). Then, fewer than 50
lines later, he is calling for a servant to see if his son is still sleeping in
his bed. Notice also that he seems to have got the name of his servant
wrong – there is no-one in Hieronimo’s household called ‘Roderigo’.
Isabella cues us in to what is happening – ‘Ay me, he raves’ (first
addition, l.8), she exclaims, before attempting to reason with her
husband. The remainder of the new dialogue continues to unravel the
straightforward spectacle we witnessed in the earlier part of the scene.
136
‘Oh no, there is no end’: revision and afterlives
Isabella interrupts Hieronimo’s lamenting over Horatio’s body. Now,

apparently still carrying his son’s corpse, Hieronimo is insisting that it is
another ‘fellow’ who is somehow wearing Horatio’s clothes. The true
discovery of Horatio’s body is relegated to the status of ‘strange dreams’
(first addition, l.19), while Hieronimo persists in the delusion that Horatio
is staying at the Duke of Castile’s house and the body he has found
hanging is a doppelganger. Only after Isabella intervenes directly does
Hieronimo essentially remake the discovery he initially made in 2.5.14
that Horatio is dead.
The addition makes Hieronimo’s madness occur much earlier in the play.
Now, instead of displaying signs of madness from 3.12, Hieronimo
descends into madness almost as soon as he learns Horatio is dead.
Hieronimo’s exchange with his servant Pedro, moreover, serves to turn
his madness into simple comic spectacle. All of the additions first
published in 1602 have a similar rationale. They provide additional
opportunities for the actor playing Hieronimo to ‘run lunatic’. You might
recall the sub-title prominently displayed on the 1633 title-page
reproduced as Figure 3.1: ‘Hieronimo is mad againe’. It is likely that
these expansions of Hieronimo’s madness were brought about by the
popularity of the ‘mad’ scenes in the original play and the desire to
provide the audience with more. We may never know for certain whether
these scenes, with their emphasis on stage madness and the effects of
grief on a revenge figure, were designed to complement Hamlet,
although their closeness, in terms of both subject matter and date of
composition, is remarkable. What is clear, as Clara Calvo puts it, is that
‘around 1600 playhouse audiences paid to watch and hear lengthy
explorations of the psyche on stage and were attracted to
representations of the most extreme experiences of the human mind,
such as grief, despair, and madness’ (Calvo, 2012, pp. 27–8).
137
Conclusion
In this chapter, I’ve discussed The Spanish Tragedy as a revenge drama.
This is most assuredly a ‘blood and guts’ play, and its depiction of stage
violence was both innovative and extremely influential on succeeding
generations of dramatists. However, the play’s violence, while often
shocking, is neither meaningless nor gratuitous. As I’ve shown,
Hieronimo’s plight in seeking to avenge his son’s murder reflects a
larger set of problems in Elizabethan society. London in the 1580s and
1590s was a violent place, and the development of a legal system that
could deliver justice for individuals regardless of social status was in its
infancy. The figure of the vigilante, who seeks personal revenge outside
the confines of an often inefficient and inaccessible justice system,
would have resonated deeply with Elizabethan audiences. The Spanish
Tragedy also looks forward to the future. The 1602 additions show how
an early modern theatre company could refurbish an old ‘stock’ play
with fresh material for new generations of spectators. But they also
demonstrate The Spanish Tragedy’s importance as a dramatic template
for other playwrights and its influence on one play in particular –
Hamlet – which you will be reading in Chapter 4.
Independent study
website.
138
References
References
Anon (1607) The Arraignement, Iudgement, Confession, and Execution of
Humfrey Stafford Gentleman, Who on the tenth of this present month of
Iune, 1607, suffered, at Saint Thomas of Waterings, London.
Bentley, G.E. (1971) The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time,
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
Berek, P. (2012) ‘The market for playbooks and the development of the
reading public’, Philological Quarterly, vol. 91, no. 2, pp. 151–83
Bowers, F. (1938) ‘A note on The Spanish Tragedy’, Modern Language
Notes, vol. 53, no. 8, pp. 590–1 (available through the OU Library
website).
Broude, R. (1975) ‘Revenge and revenge tragedy in Renaissance
England’, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 38–58.
Calvo, C. (2012) ‘Thomas Kyd and the Elizabethan blockbuster’ in
Hoenselaars, T. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and
Contemporary Dramatists, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
Calvo, C. and Tronch, J. (eds) (2013) The Spanish Tragedy, Arden Early
Modern Drama series, London, Bloomsbury.
Craig, H. (2009) ‘The 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy’ in Craig,
H. and Kinney, A.F. (eds) Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of
Authorship, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 162–80.
Dillon, J. (2010) The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400–
1625, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Emlyn, S. (ed.) (1730–5) A Complete Collection of State-Trials, and
Proceedings for High-Treason, 6 vols, London.
Erne, L. (2001) Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of
Thomas Kyd, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Erne, L. (2013) Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd edn, Cambridge,
Gatrell, V.A.C. (2004) The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English
People, 1770–1868, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
139
Gurr, A. (2009) Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company 1594–

1625, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Hirsh, J. (2003) Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, Madison, NJ,
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Hobgood, A.P. (2014) Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England,
Jakacki, D.K. (2010) ‘“Canst paint a doleful cry?”: promotion and
performance in the Spanish Tragedy title-page illustration’, Early Theatre,
vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 13–36.
Kay, C.M. (1977) ‘Deception through words: a reading of The Spanish
Tragedy’, Studies in Philology, vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 20–38 (available through
Kesler, R.L. (1990) ‘Time and causality in Renaissance revenge tragedy’,
University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 474–96.
Knutson, R.L. (1988) ‘Influence of the repertory system on the revival
and revision of The Spanish Tragedy’, English Literary Renaissance,
vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 257–74 (available through the OU Library website).
Kyd, T. (2009) The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J.R. Mulryne and A. Gurr, New
Mermaids series, London, Methuen Drama.
Maus, K.E. (ed.) (1995) Four Revenge Tragedies, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Neill, M. (1998) Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English
Renaissance Tragedy, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Pollard, T. (2012) ‘Tragedy and revenge’ in Smith, E. and Sullivan Jr.,
G.A. (eds) The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 58–72; available online
through the OU Library website (available through the OU Library
website).
Roth, R. (2001) ‘Homicide in early modern England 1549–1800: the
need for a quantitative synthesis’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, vol. 5, no.
2, pp. 33–67.
Ruff, J.R. (2001) Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800,
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References
Sharpe, J.A. (1985) ‘“Last dying speeches”: religion, ideology and public
execution in seventeenth-century England’, Past and Present, no. 107,
Sharpe, W. (2013) ‘Authorship and attribution’ in Bate, J. and
Rasmussen, E. (eds) William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative
Plays, RSC Shakespeare series, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 641–745.
Smith, M. (1992) ‘The theater and the scaffold: death as spectacle in
The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 32,
no. 2, pp. 217–32.
Stern, T. (2004) Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page, London,
Routledge.
Stern, T. (2009) Documents of Performance in Early Modern England,
Vickers, B. (2012) ‘Identifying Shakespeare’s additions to The Spanish
Tragedy (1602): a new(er) approach’, Shakespeare, vol. 8, no. 1,
pp. 13–43.
West, W.N. (2008) ‘“But this will be a mere confusion”: real and
represented confusions on the Elizabethan stage’, Theatre Journal,
vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 217–33.
Williams, C. (trans. and ed.) (1937) Thomas Platter’s Travels in England,
1599, London, Jonathan Cape.
Woodbridge, L. (2010) English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance,
Equality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
141
Reading 3.1 The execution and

confession of Humfrey Stafford,
Gentleman, 10 June 1607
Source: Anon (1607) The Arraignement, Iudgement, Confession, and
Execution of Humfrey Stafford Gentleman, Who on the tenth of this present
month of Iune, 1607, suffered, at Saint Thomas of Waterings, London, E.
Alde [Online]. Available at Early English Books Online. Text below has
been modernised.
The day of his death being come, he prepared himself thereunto
cheerfully, and at his setting forwards [to the place of execution], he
called for a clean [collar], & other things, and being asked the reason
why he regarded those things […] said he, ‘I am now going to a most
joyful marriage’. […]
Ascending […] upon the ladder with a loud and audible voice, he out
of true and perfect contrition, acknowledged again that he had been a
grievous offender many and diverse ways and lifting up his voice to the
people, prayed that his death might be a warning to all others, to
beware how they gave up themselves to wine, swearing, and company
keeping with such as he termed good fellows, which from his youth he
had greatly delighted in, but especially he wished that all men would
have a care never to delight in making of men drunk, which, as it
should seem, was the sin his soul then chiefly stood guilty of […]
Then said he again with a loud voice, ‘I beseech you let me hear you
speak cheerfully that you freely forgive me’; whereat there was an
exceeding great noise with the people praying and condescending: for
this his true and unexpected contrition in his end, made amends for all
his former sins of his life, though never so loathsome & unnatural. As
he was thus preparing for death, having before unbraced his bosom,
and looking upon his own breast, ‘I think’ (said he) ‘I shall be long in
dying, because I am whole chested’, whereupon [Stafford’s friend, the
preacher and clergyman] master Paget out of a Christian love wished the
Hangman to show him as much favour as he could in his death, and
not to put him to any more torment than needs he must: whereunto
master Stafford replied that if he were two whole years in dying, he
would willingly undergo it, for his sins had deserved it […] The
executioner being some ways moved, swore a great oath, which master
142
Reading 3.1 The execution and confession of Humfrey Stafford, Gentleman, 10 June 1607
Stafford hearing, reproved him for it, telling him that such curses had
brought him to this end. […]
The halter being put about his neck, ‘Come’ (said he) ‘this halter is
more welcome unto me than ever was ruff or […] band’: whereupon
his friends looking heavily, he desired them not to be discomforted, for
they should see him die like a Christian […]
[A]nd so praying earnestly to God to receive his soul into his kingdom,
he willed the executioner to do his office, but his face being yet not
well covered, the executioner staying a little, he again added, ‘Thou hast
redeemed me oh Lord God of my salvation, into thy hands I commend
my spirit. Now, executioner, I pray thee do thy office,’ and then
immediately he was turned off the ladder, not without great lamentation
of the multitude and general praying for the happiness of his soul.
After that his body had fully satisfied the law, it had on the morrow
Christian burial in Saint George’s Church in Southwark.
143
Chapter 4 Julius Caesar and
the shape of Shakespearean
tragedy
Edmund G.C. King
Contents
Aims 7
Introduction: Julius Caesar and Renaissance tragedy 9
Shakespeare’s ‘Elizabethan Romans’ 13
Representing Caesar: propaganda and the limits of
rhetoric 17
Brutus: an ‘honourable man’? 24
After the assassination 31
Conclusion 33
References 35
Aims
Aims
This chapter will:
. introduce Julius Caesar as a tragedy
. discuss the phenomenon of the early modern ‘Roman play’
. examine the political uses of rhetoric in the play and what their
limitations are
. discuss Shakespeare’s handling of political instability – what
happens after regicide – by looking at his treatment of supernatural
themes in the play.
7
Chapter 4 Julius Caesar and the shape of Shakespearean tragedy

. William Shakespeare (1998) Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell, Arden
website)
8
Introduction: Julius Caesar and Renaissance tragedy
Introduction: Julius Caesar and

Renaissance tragedy
Figure 4.1 Title page of Julius Caesar, from the First Folio, published in
1623 as Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies:
Published According to the True Originall Copies, London, Isaac Jaggard
and Ed. Blount. Photo: © The British Library Board.
Although Julius Caesar was written in 1599, the first time a substantial
reading public would have encountered it was in the pages of the First
Folio, published seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Figure 4.1 shows
9
how those early readers would have been introduced to Julius Caesar on
the page. The Folio’s editors placed Julius Caesar squarely in the centre
of the final ‘Tragedies’ section of the Folio, between Timon of Athens
and Macbeth. This straightforward identification raises a question right
away, however. Julius Caesar narrates a story from Roman history. In
(very) bald summary, a group of senators concerned that Caesar has
acquired too much political authority conscript the idealistic Brutus to
their cause and together they assassinate Caesar. Afterwards, civil war
ensues, resulting in a military defeat for the conspirators and the
suicide of their leading members. Other than the prominence of
violent death, what is it about this story and the characters who inhabit
it that make it tragedy rather than history?
In his highly influential Arte of English Poesie, first published in 1589,
George Puttenham describes the origins of tragedy in explicitly political
terms. Tragedy, he writes, is an artistic response to the appearance of
‘kings’, ‘emperors’ and ‘princes’ into the world. A position at the top
of the political hierarchy is precarious, and the description of a prince’s
fall offers a compelling piece of narrative and an apt moral:
Whereas before, in their great prosperities, [princes] were both

feared and reverenced in the highest degree, after their deaths,
when the posterity stood no more in dread of them, their
infamous life and tyrannies were laid open to all the world, their
wickedness reproached, their follies and extreme insolencies
derided, and their miserable ends painted out in plays and
pageants to show the mutability of fortune and the just
punishment of God in revenge of a vicious and evil life.
(Puttenham, 1970, p. 33; modernised)
We cannot be sure that Shakespeare ever read Puttenham’s Arte of

English Poesie, but, considering its high profile and impact on other
contemporary writers, it would be surprising if he had not. Issues of
direct influence aside, however, there is a close agreement between
Puttenham’s definition of tragedy as the stories of fallen princes and
the subjects of Shakespeare’s tragedies. As the critic Michael Hattaway
notes, the title characters in Shakespeare’s tragic plays – Titus
Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus – are, almost
without exception, ‘what Renaissance writers called “princes”,
occupying the power centres of their realms’ (Hattaway, 2013, p. 110).
Shakespearean tragedy, then, is an inescapably political genre, as the
10
Introduction: Julius Caesar and Renaissance tragedy
story of the tragic hero’s ‘usurpation and death’ also inevitably entails
the production of a political crisis, the collapse of an order, or the end
of an age (Hattaway, 2013, p. 110). The personal, in a play featuring
the ruler of a monarchical or tyrannical regime, is always political,
because the future of the polity depends on the physical fate of the
ruler who controls it.
Puttenham’s Arte of Poesie suggests a further role for tragic drama.
‘[P]lays and pageants’, he writes, ‘show the mutability of fortune and
the just punishment of God in revenge of a vicious and evil life’, while
at the same time enabling spectators to ‘deride’ the ‘follies’ of failed
princes (Puttenham, 1970, p. 33). Tragedy, in other words, has a kind
of forensic function. It enables future ages to hold the past up to
moral judgement so that the mistakes of history will not be repeated.
These claims about the role of tragedy were by no means uncontested,
however. According to the seventeenth-century playwright Thomas
Heywood, the real subject of tragedy is the inevitable failure of any
rebellion against the monarch. The point of performing tragedies, he
argues in his 1612 treatise on the theatre, An Apology for Actors, is
rather:
to teach the subjects obedience to their King, to show the people

the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions,
and insurrections, to present them with the flourishing estate of
such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegiance, deporting
them from all traitorous and felonious stratagems […] If we
present a Tragedy, we include the fatal and abortive ends of such
as commit notorious murders […] to terrify men from the like
abhorred practices.
(Heywood, 1612, p. 50; modernised)
Despite their disagreements, Puttenham and Heywood agree in

stressing the instructive nature of tragedy. The past, as they represent
it, exists as a kind of storehouse of cautionary historical examples,
which a playwright can draw on to teach political lessons to a
contemporary audience.
The idea that public playhouses could have such a direct role in the
political education of English theatre-goers was all very well in theory.
In practice, however, it was rather more complicated. The early modern
London stage was overseen by a branch of the government called the
11
Revels Office, which employed a representative – effectively a state

censor – known as the Master of the Revels. The manuscripts of all
plays intended for public performance had to be personally inspected
by the Revels Office before they could be allowed onstage. The Master
of the Revels had sweeping powers. He could refuse to issue a play a
licence, effectively banning it from performance. He could strike out
lines within the play that seemed too politically sensitive, prohibiting
actors from speaking them. Finally, he had the authority to order the
imprisonment of any theatre personnel – actors or playwrights – who
disobeyed his orders (Clare, 1999, pp. 32–4, 64–7).
Both Shakespeare and his contemporaries felt the power of state
censorship at first hand. In 1597 the playwright Ben Jonson and at
least two actors from his theatre company were imprisoned for writing
and performing a politically inflammatory play called The Isle of Dogs.
The play was suppressed – so effectively that the text of it is now lost
– and all public theatres were shut down for a period of four months
(Clare, 1999, pp. 72–5). The deposition scene in Shakespeare’s Richard
II, where the king loses his crown, may not have been licensed for
performance and no editions of the play published in Elizabeth I’s
lifetime included that scene (Clare, 1999, p. 64). These acts of
censorship reflected the fragile nature of political authority in
Elizabethan England. Perpetually at war, drained financially by rebellion
in Ireland and with an ageing and heirless monarch on the throne,
England at the close of the sixteenth century was in a state of
profound political insecurity (MacCaffrey, 1992, pp. 526–7, 544–5, 571–
2). This was the climate into which Julius Caesar – the first English
play to directly portray the assassination of a ruler on the public stage
(Foakes, 2003, p. 160) – emerged in 1599.
12
Shakespeare’s ‘Elizabethan Romans’

The events that Shakespeare dramatises in Julius Caesar took place a
world away from late Elizabethan London. Shakespeare’s audience,
however, would not necessarily have seen the two worlds as radically
divided. Just as Virgil’s Aeneid tells the story of Rome’s founding by
refugees from ancient Troy, the twelfth-century English chronicler
Geoffrey of Monmouth gave Britain a similar foundation myth.
According to Geoffrey’s account, still widely believed in the sixteenth
century, Britain had been founded by a Trojan survivor named Brutus,
from whose name ‘Britain’ was thought to derive. Elizabethan
Londoners also believed that Julius Caesar had left his mark on their
cityscape. According to local mythology, Caesar was thought to have
built the Tower of London (Nearing, 1948, p. 228). Shakespeare, as you
will see, sought to lessen the distance between ancient Rome and early
modern London still further in Julius Caesar.
Activity
If you haven’t done so already, read the play now. As you do, see if you
can identify three or four particular scenes or objects that appear
anachronistic – that is, things more likely to have been found in
Shakespeare’s London than in ancient Rome. If, indeed, you do find any
details that strike you as ‘out of time’, think about why they are in the
play. Is it because Shakespeare was simply careless or ignorant about
detail? Or is there some other potential reason why Shakespeare might
want to make the world of the play resemble the world of his audience?
Discussion
Ever since Shakespeare started attracting large amounts of commentary
in the eighteenth century, critics have identified a number of details in
Julius Caesar that reflect the clothing, technology and customs of
Elizabethan England more than those of ancient Rome. There are many
examples, but some of those you have found may include the passage
in 2.1.190–2 where the conspirators are interrupted by the sound of a
clock striking. Mechanical clocks did not arrive in Europe until over 1000
years after Caesar’s death. The sound of clocks striking would have
been part of the everyday aural world of Shakespeare’s audience, but
they would have been completely alien to a Roman. Moreover, in the
Forum scene in 3.2 you might have noticed that Brutus and Antony
speak from ‘pulpits’, as though they were Elizabethan preachers or
politicians. Finally, there is a steady flow of references to material culture
13
in the opening scenes – chimneys, nightgowns and windows – as well

as references to early modern urban life, with its guilds, professions and
shops, which, as the critic James Shapiro observes, seem much more
sixteenth-century than ancient Roman (Shapiro, 2005, p. 179).
Some degree of anachronism in transporting events from the past into a
new language and culture is, of course, inevitable. As he did in his other
Roman plays, such as Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare relied heavily
on Thomas North’s 1579 English translation of Plutarch. Reading North’s
translation for details about the events of Caesar’s life and death,
Shakespeare would have found a version of Rome already thoroughly
acclimatised to the patterns of early modern European thought and
speech (Miles, 1989, p. 272). Despite this, however, the seal between
past and present appears particularly leaky in Julius Caesar. The
anachronisms in the play, as Shapiro argues, essentially ‘collapse the
difference between ancient Rome and Elizabethan London’ (Shapiro,
2005, p. 179). We should be careful, though, about ascribing these
anachronisms to simple carelessness on Shakespeare’s part. Early
modern writers were not interested in using classical material to
reconstruct the past as it really was. Instead, their aim was pragmatic
and practical. They turned to the classics to see what ancient authors
had to say about issues that concerned their own, Elizabethan, present
(Miola, 1983, p. 9).
We can get a sense of how the Elizabethan theatre might have

approached the staging of classical drama from the surviving
contemporary illustration of one of Shakespeare’s Roman plays in
performance (Figure 4.2). Scholars believe that this, the so-called
‘Longleat manuscript’, depicts a performance of Titus Andronicus from
some time around 1595. Looking at it, you can see how the costumes
and staging mix and meld imperial Rome and late sixteenth-century
Europe. While Titus in the foreground wears a toga and a laurel
wreath, the two soldier attendants on the left are dressed in generic
sixteenth-century military clothing, while Tamora’s sons, kneeling on
the right, wear sixteenth-century doublets and stockings. This sense of
interplay between past and present would have been present in Julius
Caesar’s original performances too. Swiss tourist Thomas Platter, who
attended a performance of Julius Caesar at the Globe Theatre on 21
September 1599, recorded that, after the tragic action of the play was
concluded, four of the actors reassembled on stage to perform a jig.
‘They danced very marvellously and gracefully together as is their
14
Figure 4.2 Detail from an illustration of a contemporary performance of Titus

Andronicus, c.1595, probably sketched by Henry Peacham. From the
Longleat Portland Papers lf.159v. Photo: Longleat. - Please note this image
has been removed for Copyright reasons. The image is available in the hard
copy of the book.
wont’, he wrote in his diary, ‘two dressed as men and two as women’
(quoted in Smith, 1999, p. 158).
In his Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood suggests something of the
interchangeable nature of Rome and England on the early modern
stage: the extent to which the Roman plays written by Shakespeare and
15
his contemporaries are really about English concerns. Plays with

foreign or classical settings, Heywood writes, are ‘so intended, that in
the lives of Romans, Grecians, or others, either the virtues of our
countrymen are extolled, or their vices reproved’ (Heywood, 1612,
p. 50). For early modern writers, Roman history represented the most
prestigious and reliable body of works in existence about history and
ethics (Spencer, 1957, p. 28). Episodes drawn from the Roman past
offered, it was believed, the best models available for dealing with
present concerns. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare applies Roman history
to one of the most pressing issues in early modern political theory.
Could rebellion ever be justified, and who succeeds to the throne when
a monarch is toppled? Above all, however, Shakespeare was interested
in the representation of ideas. The factions in Julius Caesar cloak their
actions in words, symbols and ritual performances: this is, as the critic
Rebecca Bushnell argues, a play about the uses of political propaganda
(Bushnell, 1990, p. 144). In the following section, we will examine how
the rival parties – Caesar and Antony on the one hand, the Senate
conspiracy on the other – justify their positions through public
performances of propaganda, and how the trauma of the assassination
scene stretches the conspirators’ rhetorical strategies to breaking point.
16
Representing Caesar: propaganda and the limits of rhetoric
Representing Caesar: propaganda and

the limits of rhetoric
The part of Caesar in Julius Caesar is not large. He speaks only 41
lines – placing him fourth, in terms of number of lines spoken, behind
Brutus (193 lines), Cassius (138 lines) and Antony (50 lines) – and he
dies less than halfway through the action. However, what people say
about Caesar is at the heart of the play. The competing versions of
Caesar that he and the other characters in the play offer up, and their
competing predictions of what Caesar is (or isn’t) poised to do,
generate the conflict that overwhelms the play’s plot and, with it, Rome
itself. Julius Caesar’s politicians live, perform and die in public because
that is the arena in which their actions will ultimately be judged. In
such a world, appearances are everything (Miles, 1989, pp. 259–61,
280–1). Yet, at the same time, Shakespeare also shows his Roman
characters occupying a shadow sphere of private spaces. In secluded
spots and private houses, they grapple with the contents of their
interior lives – fear, jealousy, apprehension – that Roman public life
leaves no room for.
The Roman Civil War

The political context of Caesar’s triumph in 1.1 has a long back
story. Caesar and Pompey had (along with Crassus) originally been
part of the ‘First Triumvirate’: a trio of powerful generals whose
connections and military clout enabled them to dominate Roman
politics and sideline the Senate between 60 and 53 BCE. The
Triumvirate had eventually turned on itself, however, and Caesar
and Pompey had become enemies, a falling out that led to the
Roman Civil War of 49–45 BCE. With Pompey’s death in 48 BCE and
Caesar’s victory over Pompey’s sons at the Battle of Munda in 45
BCE, Caesar effectively crushed the opposition and was free to rule
Rome as perpetual dictator. It is this victory that, in the play, Flavius
fears will lead Rome into ‘servile fearfulness’ (1.1.76).
Caesar’s grand entrance at the beginning of 1.2 introduces what we

might call the ‘imperial narrative’: Caesar’s campaign to represent
himself as the embodiment of political power in Rome – Roman
politics made flesh. The solidarity of bodies on stage suggests, we
17
Figure 4.3 Bust of Julius Caesar, marble. Vatican Museums and Galleries,
Vatican City. Photo: akg-images.
might initially think, a consensus of support for Caesar. However,

Shakespeare soon subverts expectations. Caesar’s first act is to engage
18
in an unfamiliar piece of Roman ritual. He orders Calphurnia to stand

in Antony’s way as he runs ‘for the course’ – that is, participates in the
ritual fertility race that makes up part of the festival of Lupercal. The
effect is immediately to distance us from Caesar and his world (Miola,
1983, p. 80). Who would behave in this way? What degree of agency
and control over events does Caesar really have? The fact that Caesar
defers to superstition, to what ‘our elders say’ (1.2.7), so early in the
piece might even suggest that he is in some way subject to the
ceremonies and rituals that surround him, rather than possessing
ultimate authority. Caesar’s subsequent dismissal of the soothsayer’s
warnings in 1.2.23 contrasts ironically with his unquestioning
acceptance of Roman superstitions surrounding fertility. That
Shakespeare bookends Caesar’s brief initial entrance with these two
episodes is no accident. They introduce the theme of the supernatural
into the play and suggest something of Caesar’s inability to receive
good counsel. This is a trait made concrete in Caesar’s literal deafness
in one ear which is mentioned later in the scene (1.2.212), a detail that
Shakespeare introduced into the story – there is no reference to
Caesar’s deafness in any of Shakespeare’s sources (Griffin, 2009,
p. 382).
Calphurnia’s infertility adds to our sense of a physically limited Caesar.
As Shakespeare’s audience would have been well aware, a childless
monarch raised the spectre of a future succession crisis. Caesar’s
inability to produce an heir stands out awkwardly against the
Lupercalian fertility rites going on around him. Shakespeare has shown
us enough in this brief glimpse of Caesar to suggest that his personal
dictatorship over Rome might be doomed in ways that rhetoric and
ceremonial display cannot overcome. He is, as the critic Julia Griffin
puts it, ‘vulnerable’, and his own inability to recognise this ‘increases
the audience’s awareness of it’ (Griffin, 2009, p. 382).
After Caesar’s train leaves the scene at 1.2.24, Brutus and Cassius are
left alone onstage. As they begin to talk, the apparent political solidity
suggested by the massed entrance at the beginning of the scene is
revealed as an illusion. Roman politics as Shakespeare represents them
do not present a unified face. Instead, the political realm is fragmented.
Small clutches of conspirators air their dissatisfactions while Caesar
and his supporters orchestrate public ceremonies designed to
marginalise these resistant voices. As you read 1.2, you can see how
deftly Shakespeare sets the opposition between these two competing
parties in motion. Offstage, Antony is attempting to crown Caesar sole
19
ruler of Rome. As Caska later describes it, Antony offers a coronet to

Caesar three times, with Caesar each time refusing. For Cassius and
Brutus, however, this ceremony registers only as distant shouts and
trumpet flourishes, the details of which they fill in with their own
anxieties.
Lupercalia
The festival of Lupercalia was one of the oldest in the Roman ritual
calendar, traditionally falling on 13–15 February. Held in honour of
Lupercus, the god of shepherds, it was a time when fertility rites
were practised, culminating in the sacrifice of a goat to the deity.
There are, of course, larger resonances at work here. Lupercus
was associated with the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, the
mythical founders of Rome. The festival itself, therefore, was
closely linked with Rome’s sense of its own history and identity, and
provides an intriguing ritual framework for the events of the play.
For further details, see Liebler (1981) and the discussion later in
this section.
In a regime of personal rule such as that which Cassius and Brutus

believe Caesar is about to usher in, ‘the social order’ becomes
‘embodied in a specific person’: the ruler (Frye, 1967, p. 25). Cassius
tries to resist this threat by exposing the flaws and weaknesses of the
body to which Antony has offered the crown: Caesar’s. We can read
this act of refusal as a form of iconoclasm, much like that of the
tribunes in 1.1 ‘disrobing’ the statues of Caesar. The ceremonies being
conducted offstage threaten to turn Caesar into ‘a god’, yet Cassius
remembers the personal vulnerabilities of the ‘man’ behind the
ceremonial mask:
He had a fever when he was in Spain,

And when the fit was on him I did mark
How he did shake. ’Tis true, this god did shake:
(1.2.119–21)
Throughout Cassius’s speeches, we can see this same demystifying

rhetoric at work. His memories of the sick Caesar expose the
contradictions of personal rule. The voice of political authority relies
20
on the ‘tongue’ that once cried for water like ‘a sick girl’ (1.2.128). The
figure that now ‘doth bestride the narrow world/Like a colossus’
(1.2.134–35) once nearly drowned in the Tiber after failing to match
his opponent during a swimming competition. Antony’s offstage rituals,
Cassius suggests, cannot hide the fact that Caesar’s authority rests in a
particular body with its own human history, its own record of failures
and weaknesses. Caesar’s impending transformation into ‘a god’ cannot
erase Cassius’s less than flattering memories of Caesar the man.
As impressive as the conspirators’ anti-Caesar rhetoric is in this scene,
however, Shakespeare subtly sows seeds of doubt in the audience’s
minds about which side is right. Caska’s testimony to the apparently
ludicrous nature of the rituals that Antony performs on Caesar appears
damning on first sight. But if you read them closely, Caska’s words
seem to bear an exaggerated bodily contempt for ordinary Romans,
who, in his jaundiced account, ‘hooted, and clapped their chopped
hands […] and uttered such a deal of stinking breath […] that it […]
almost choked Caesar’ (1.2.243–7). Is his scorn at the spectacle he has
witnessed simply the product of aristocratic snobbery? Similarly,
Cassius’s claim that he and Brutus are Caesar’s equals on the basis of
shared humanity initially seems reasonable. Looked at a second time,
however, there is something oddly grandiose about it. In Cassius’s
account, his rescue of the drowning Caesar becomes not simply an act
of selfless bravery, but something comparable to Aeneas (another
mythical founder of Rome) bearing his father Anchises away from the
burning Troy (1.2.112–15). By having Cassius compare himself to so
elevated a figure as Aeneas, Shakespeare has him unwittingly reveal his
own sense of aristocratic entitlement. In Virgil’s Aeneid, which Cassius
draws on to make his comparison, Aeneas is performing a selfless act
of filial duty by carrying his exhausted father on his back. In Cassius’s
deployment of the image, however, his bearing Caesar’s weight
becomes an act of ‘self-celebration’: it reflects his victory over Caesar
in the swimming match, not his obedience to the needs of a social
superior (Rebhorn, 1990, pp. 83–4). Might Cassius’s resistance to
Caesar, then, stem not from political principle, exactly, but from a
patrician’s resentment at seeing another man of similar rank assume a
position above him? Shakespeare compounds this sense that Cassius’s
motivations might reflect a simple sense of hurt pride by giving the
audience an outside perspective on Cassius. Once Caesar and his
supporters re-enter at 1.2.176, Cassius temporarily retreats into the
background, allowing Caesar to step forward and air his own doubts
21
about Cassius’s character and loyalty. Cassius has, Caesar confides in

Antony, the ‘lean and hungry look’ of a perpetual discontent.
Figure 4.4 This sixteenth-century engraving, Aeneas Carries Anchises from

the Burning City of Troy, is attributed to Giulio Bonasone, c.1545. Harvard
Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gray Collection of Engravings Fund, G9087.
Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The perpetual mobility of action that Shakespeare establishes in 1.2

provides the audience with an almost stereoscopic sense of its
characters’ points of view. The scene starts from the perspective of
22
Caesar’s supporters and their preoccupations. Once they depart the

stage, at 1.2.24, Brutus and Cassius – until that point minor
participants in the action – step forward to air their grievances, only to
retreat into the wings again when Caesar briefly returns at 1.2.176.
Then, when Caesar’s train departs once more, Caska takes centre stage,
his excoriating voice dominating proceedings until he exits at 1.2.293.
This constantly shifting focus gives the audience a cacophony of voices
to contend with, all of which seem capable of making good points.
Nowhere does Shakespeare provide spectators with an easy ‘safe
harbour’ for their sympathies.
Moreover, the characters in this drama seem to be on an inevitable
collision course. Rome, as Shakespeare represents it, is dominated by
warring aristocrats whose own ethos of perpetual competition prevents
them staying loyal to any leader other than themselves. The desire
these patricians have to out-compete each other and emulate – or
outdo – the achievements of their ancestors renders their power games
inherently destabilising (Rebhorn, 1990, p. 84). Perhaps the most
striking example of this lies in Cassius’s calculating mobilisation of
Brutus’s ancestry (1.2.157–60). Popular legend credited Brutus’s
ancestor, Lucius Junius Brutus, with overthrowing the Etruscan
monarchy that had ruled Rome from its early years and thus with
establishing the Roman republic. In these lines, Cassius dangles the
duty to emulate one’s ancestors in front of Brutus, drawing him into
the conspiracy on the basis of lineage. Cassius’s ruse works. By 2.1.53–
8, Brutus is consciously fashioning himself as an embodiment of his
illustrious ancestor (Miola, 1983, p. 90).
23
Brutus: an ‘honourable man’?

Brutus is the story’s tragic hero – the protagonist who sets events on
course for a tragic conclusion – and, as in all Shakespearean tragedies,
it is ‘the extraordinary voice’ of the tragic hero that dominates
proceedings (McDonald, 2013, p. 31). While technically impressive,
Brutus’s speeches also epitomise the weaknesses and contradictions in
the conspirators’ cause. As we read Brutus’s attempts to brief the other
conspirators in 2.1, we can see all too clearly how ill prepared they are
to deal with the consequences of an actual political murder. While he
imbues the conspirators with focus and direction, Brutus also leads
them to make basic strategic mistakes. He dissuades them from
engaging Cicero in the conspiracy. Metellus Cimber’s claim that
Cicero’s ‘silver hairs/Will purchase us a good opinion’ (2.1.143–4)
seems painfully simplistic. It is as though he is not equipped to assess
the true value of Cicero’s philosophy except as a potential tool for
conscripting further followers. Nevertheless, Cicero was one of the key
thinkers of the late Roman republic and his works had a significant
number of readers in sixteenth-century England as well. As Andrew
Hadfield writes, the better educated among Shakespeare’s audience
might have seen Cicero’s absence as a sign of the conspiracy’s lack of
intellectual seriousness (Hadfield, 2005, p. 168). More seriously,
however, Brutus discounts the threat to the conspiracy represented by
the figure of Antony.
Let’s read Brutus’s long speech at 2.1.161–82 in detail. His aim is to
justify his refusal to consider killing Antony as well as Caesar. As his
lines gather pace, however, they tell us a great deal more about the way
Brutus understands regicide: the act of killing a king. Brutus resists
Cassius’s cynical, but shrewd, suggestion that ‘Antony and Caesar fall
together’ under the conspirators’ knives (2.1.160):
Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius,

To cut the head off and then hack the limbs –
Like wrath in death and envy afterwards –
For Antony is but a limb of Caesar.
(2.1.161–4)
In medieval and early modern political thought, a ruler was thought to

have two bodies: a mortal body of flesh and a conceptual body (a
24
‘body politic’) that encompassed the state or nation. In this body

politic, the monarch formed the head and more minor officials
represented limbs or other body parts, obediently performing the
head’s wishes (Kantorowicz, 1997 [1957], pp. 7–10, 228). It is this
abstract legal concept that Shakespeare has Brutus referring to here.
Despite the graphic anatomical detail in ‘To cut the head off and then
hack the limbs’, Brutus is not talking about Caesar’s mortal body at all.
Instead, the mechanics of actual murder are put to one side, replaced
by a symbolic discussion of the relationship between ‘head’ and ‘limb’
in the body politic. According to this logic, limbs (representing
obedient political functionaries) have no agency of their own. They will
cease to have any importance once the ruler – the head – is removed
from power. This is what Brutus means when he concludes his speech
by urging that Antony ‘can do no more than Caesar’s arm/When
Caesar’s head is off ’ (2.1.181–2). By following the metaphor’s logic to
its conclusion, Brutus clearly believes that he has solved the problem
of Antony. Carried away by symbolic thinking, he seems blind to
simple human concepts – like loyalty and grief – that might cause
Antony to want to avenge Caesar’s death.
A similar tendency to think in symbolic rather than physical terms
marks Brutus’s next rhetorical gambit. The assassination, Brutus
contends, should be represented not as a simple political murder but as
a kind of sacrifice:
Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers, Caius. […]

Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully:
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.
[…] This shall make
Our purpose necessary and not envious,
Which so appearing to the common eyes,
We shall be called purgers, not murderers.
(2.1.165–79)
What is Brutus thinking here? Let’s look back to the first scene of the
play. Rome is in the midst of Lupercalia, a festival with a strong
symbolic connection to Rome’s foundation myths. Yet Caesar, with his
outsized political authority, has commandeered the festival for his own
glorification. Now, instead of representing a ritual cleansing of the city,
commoners such as the carpenter and the cobbler see it as a holiday in
25
Caesar’s honour. The tribunes regard this as a form of sacrilege

(Liebler, 1981, p. 177). They attempt to reinforce the older meaning of
the festival by suppressing plebeian gatherings and stripping all
‘ceremonies’ from Caesar’s statues. Brutus clearly has something similar
in mind as he contemplates the assassination. Just like Lupercalia,
Brutus wants the killing of Caesar to be seen as a form of ritual
‘purgation’. Like the tribunes, he aims to ‘turn back the clock’ to an
earlier period in Roman history (Liebler, 1981, p. 177). The
assassination, in his eyes, will be an act of resistance against those who,
like Caesar, want to replace the republic with their own cults of
political personality.
No matter how carefully Brutus has prepared the rhetorical ground to
make the assassination appear like a ritual sacrifice, the act itself lays
bare the stark disparity between words and action:
CASKA Speak hands for me! They stab Caesar.

CAESAR Et tu, Brute? – Then fall Caesar. Dies
CINNA Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.
(3.1.76–9)
From the moment that Caska signals the movement from words to
action (‘Speak hands for me!’), Brutus’s carefully crafted symbolic
strategy begins to collapse. The conspirators cannot be anything other
than ‘butchers’, due simply to the nature of the act they are carrying
out. The abstractions Cinna claims the murder stands for (‘Liberty!
Freedom!’) clash grotesquely with the all-too-physical corpse of the
murdered Caesar lying at his feet. Brutus’s instructions to the
conspirators after the killing compound this sense of ironic
juxtaposition between lofty rhetoric and lowdown violence:
[…] Stoop, Romans, stoop,

And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows and besmear our swords.
Then walk we forth even to the market-place,
And waving our red weapons o’er our heads
Let’s all cry, ‘Peace, freedom, and liberty.’
(3.1.105–10)
26
Brutus’s words only heighten the already glaring disparity between

word and deed implicit in Cinna’s earlier lines. The actions he demands
the conspirators now perform – smearing their arms in Caesar’s blood;
waving their ‘red weapons’ – are meant to spread a ritualistic veneer
over events by recalling the details of animal sacrifice. Instead of
sanctifying the assassination, however, they seem only to emphasise the
violence involved in the killing. The sacrifices offered at Lupercalia
were meant to protect the political status quo against external threats
(Liebler, 1995, pp. 95–6). This attempt at sacrifice, however, is about to
go badly wrong.
As the critic Richard Halpern points out, Brutus’s adversary is not
Caesar himself but what we might call ‘Caesarism’: an abstract
‘principle of tyranny’ that incidentally happens to occupy ‘Caesar’s
body’ (Halpern, 2002, p. 216). He wants to kill the ‘spirit’ of Caesar,
but seems unable to fully come to terms with the flesh and ‘blood’ that
accompanies it (2.1.166–7). When Antony enters at 3.1.146, however,
he displays a much more concrete grasp of what Caesar’s assassination
means. Brutus claims, in his characteristically abstract way, that the
conspirators killed out of ‘pity’ for Rome (3.1.169–72). Once Antony is
alone on stage, he ruthlessly pulls apart Brutus’s rhetoric, showing that
‘pity’ and murder are mutually exclusive terms. Once the ‘domestic
fury’ of civil war is unleashed, there will be no place for ‘pity’
(3.1.263–9). The way Antony is able to ‘read’ the pattern of wounds in
Caesar’s body illustrates this contrast between the two characters.
Brutus understands the abstract; Antony, on the other hand, has a
visceral attachment to the world of flesh and the emotions. Caska
wanted his hands to ‘speak’ in the act of stabbing Caesar. In
enumerating the wounds in Caesar’s corpse, Antony makes Caesar’s
murdered body ‘speak’ in a way the conspirators cannot.
Activity
Bearing in mind the contrast between Brutus’s and Antony’s rhetorical
campaigns, as outlined in the previous section, what can we say about
their confrontation in the Forum in 3.2?
. How does each speaker represent Caesar rhetorically?

. Why does Antony ultimately triumph?
. Can we say who is right? Or has Shakespeare made the political
problem at the heart of the play basically insoluble?
27
Figure 4.5 The major characters: (a) Bust of Mark Antony, marble. Vatican Museums and Galleries,
Vatican City. Photo: Alinari/Bridgeman Images. (b) Profile of Cassius Longinus on a denarius, 42 BCE,
issued by Cassius Longinus and Lentulus Spinther, from the military mint in Smyrna. Photo: Classical
Numismatic Group. (c) Bust of Marcus Junius Brutus, marble. Capitoline Museums, Rome. Photo:
Interfoto/AKG Images. (d) Bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero, marble. Capitoline Museums, Rome. Photo:
Alinari/Bridgeman Images.
Discussion
The first detail to note about the difference between the two speeches is
that Brutus’s is written in prose. This basic difference in delivery enables
Shakespeare to easily differentiate the two speakers from the outset.
Brutus’s speech is dignified and deliberate. From its opening lines, it
establishes a sense of restraint and control. Using a rhetorical device
called ‘antimetabole’, Brutus opens his speech with an elaborate set of
careful inversions:
[…] hear me for my cause and be silent, that you may hear.
Believe me for mine honour and have respect to mine honour,
that you may believe. Censure me in your wisdom and awake
your senses, that you may the better judge.
(3.2.13–17; emphases added)
In these nested pairs of inverted terms, Brutus circles back and repeats
his own words, each sentence ending more or less where it began. The
effect is one of order and control, but there is almost a sense of
obsessiveness in the way Brutus knits his thoughts together. Later lines
deploy similar rhetorical tricks. In ‘not that I loved Caesar less, but that I
loved Rome more’ (3.2.21–2; emphases added), Brutus uses antithesis
to bring together words with opposing meanings. This patterning
culminates in ‘Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves,
than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?’ (3.2.22–4; emphases
added), where Brutus’s carefully arranged oppositions place the
plebeians’ freedom in direct opposition to Caesar’s life. The two, Brutus
28
suggests, are mutually exclusive. A live Caesar means a Rome

enslaved, and a dead Caesar means freedom.
As technically impressive as Brutus’s rhetorical control is, his overall
tone is oddly bloodless, considering the occasion. At its worst, Brutus’s
speech is a catalogue of cold abstractions (‘honour’ appears no fewer
than four times) and his justification for killing Caesar hinges on a single
abstract concept: ‘ambition’. Wanting to do justice to Caesar’s virtues,
Brutus lists them in full, but the result is that the ‘fault’ for which Caesar
has died appears with an odd suddenness. ‘Love’, ‘fortune’, ‘valour’ and
‘honour’ crowd out the single word – ‘ambition’ – on which Caesar’s fate
has been decided.
From the moment Antony enters bearing Caesar’s corpse, the antithesis
between the two characters’ rhetorical approaches is palpable. Whereas
Brutus cloaks the murder in abstractions, Antony confronts the audience
with the physical reality behind the words. His use of Caesar’s body as a
theatrical prop recalls his behaviour in the previous scene, where he
forces the conspirators to acknowledge the wounds they have left on
Caesar’s body. Shakespeare may also have wanted Antony’s behaviour
to recall that of an earlier character in English Renaissance drama. You
will remember from Chapter 3 that The Spanish Tragedy culminates in
Hieronimo unveiling the corpse of his murdered son to an unsuspecting
audience. Antony, like Hieronimo, is on some level a revenge figure
(Frye, 1967, p. 17), as we have already seen in his promise to ‘let slip
the dogs of war’ on the perpetrators of ‘this foul deed’ (3.1.273–4). In
this scene, he uses Caesar’s corpse as part of his revenger’s strategy.
When Antony embarks on his ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech, he
displays a similarly confrontational approach to language. Whereas
Brutus asks the plebeians to ‘hear me for my cause’, Antony uses the
much more physical ‘lend me your ears’. His words are direct, concrete
and bodily, where Brutus’s are lofty, abstract and technical. He speaks in
verse, an appropriate medium for the linguistic ‘flamboyance’ that sets
him apart from Brutus (McDonald, 2013, p. 43). Like an actor, Antony
unashamedly delivers a passionate performance, with the intention of
passing those passions on to the audience. He consciously appropriates
Brutus’s touchstone words – ‘honour’ and ‘ambition’ – and, through ironic
repetition, reverses their meanings. This strategy pays off in his feigned
attempt to distance himself from the passionate hatred of the conspiracy
his speech has engendered in the audience:
I fear I wrong the honourable men

Whose daggers have stabbed Caesar: I do fear it.
(3.2.152–3)
29
By yoking the phrase ‘honourable men’ with the act Brutus’s rhetoric has
sought to justify, Antony lays bare the contradiction at the heart of the
conspirators’ claim to have killed ‘honourably’.
Can we say which of these two speakers is right? Shakespeare has
already shown Antony plotting to undo the conspirators through rhetoric
(3.1.292–4). His performance is unashamedly manipulative, and it
culminates in a naked appeal to individual self-interest: the revelation of
Caesar’s will. Antony has already promised to unleash vengeance on his
enemies, and the passions he arouses in the plebeians soon culminate
in mob violence. Yet Brutus also relies on his ability to sway the mob
through rhetoric. Had he not committed the fatal error of allowing Antony
to speak – and speak last – in the Forum, this ability to manipulate an
audience through words would have delivered political victory for the
republican cause. Moreover, Brutus’s speech contains logical errors and
tautologies (Vickers, 2005 [1968], p. 244). It is, in its way, as self-serving
as Caska’s claim that he did a favour to Caesar by relieving him of the
fear of death (3.1.101–2). This is particularly apparent in Brutus’s
contention that, because he has ‘offended’ no-one according to his
overly prescriptive criteria, Caesar’s death does not constitute an offence
(3.2.29–34).
You may have your own views as to which speech is more rhetorically
effective, but Shakespeare has made it hard to distinguish between them
on grounds of right or wrong. Both speakers commit the same acts of
rhetorical manipulation. The Forum scene is another in the series of
dramatic balancing acts that make it difficult for the play’s spectators to
decide where to place their allegiances.
30
After the assassination
After the assassination

Harbingers of the chaos and anarchy that mark the final part of Julius
Caesar exist in the play from the first act. Caska reports walking
‘through a tempest dropping fire’ (1.3.10) and encountering various
‘prodigies’ in the streets of Rome: ‘portentous’ signs, he believes, that
Rome is about to experience some form of divine punishment (1.3.15–
32). Cassius, with characteristic arrogance, exposes himself to the
storms and claims that he alone can explain the ‘strange eruptions’:
they are a symptom of Caesar’s growing political power (1.3.76–8).
Calphurnia, in the midst of a prophetic dream, cries out, ‘Help ho:
they murder Caesar’ (2.2.3). Trebonius claims that Roman citizens flock
the streets after the assassination, panicking ‘[a]s it were doomsday’
(3.1.98). And as we have seen, Antony, alone with Caesar’s corpse,
utters a prophecy of the destructive potential inherent in the civil
conflict he intends to wage on the conspirators.
It is not until after the Forum scene, however, that these portents gain
concrete expression in acts of physical violence. In 3.3, in a disturbing
fulfilment of Antony’s predictions about the violence of civil war, a
plebeian mob literally tears apart Cinna the poet, wilfully mistaking him
for Cinna the conspirator. The Fourth Plebeian’s mocking line, ‘Tear
him for his bad verses’ (3.3.30), makes it clear that violence for its own
sake, not justice, is the motivating force here. Throughout the play,
Brutus has viewed ‘the people’ as an abstract collective, which is
perhaps why he was so easily duped by Cassius’s forged letters in 2.1.
Antony, on the other hand, has a much darker view of human agency,
and his lines immediately after the plebeians’ exit in 3.2 indicate that
he has foreseen just this kind of anarchic potential in the Roman mob
and is willing to manipulate it for his own ends:
Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot:

Take what course thou wilt.
(3.2.251–2)
Caesar’s ghost, likewise, is the first physical manifestation of the play’s

supernatural element, previously limited to characters’ verbal reports.
But what does Caesar’s ghost mean, and why is it in the play?
Furthermore, what does Brutus’s sighting of it reveal about his
character?
31
Activity
Compare the extract from Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar in your set
book (Shakespeare, 1998, pp. 331–2) with the scene where Brutus is
first visited by Caesar’s ghost (4.3.224–end). What techniques does
Shakespeare use to translate Plutarch’s prose description into live
action?
Discussion
Plutarch reports the appearance of Caesar’s ghost as the final in a
series of ‘weird’ atmospheric phenomena that culminates in its apparition
at the tent door. Shakespeare, obviously, could not introduce Caesar’s
ghost in quite the same way. Limited by the restricted set of stage
effects available to him, he could hardly stage the appearance of a
comet or the dimming of the sun or the non-appearance of crops. How,
then, does he reproduce Plutarch’s uncanny effect? The whole of 4.3 is
an extraordinarily long and eventful scene. It includes Cassius’s and
Brutus’s reconciliation, the poet’s warning about the consequences of
their quarrel, and news of Portia’s death and the massacre of the
senators. These events occur well into the night. After the last of his
visitors departs, Brutus is finally able to relax in the familiar company of
his servant, Lucius. The gradual cessation of activity as the scene
lengthens signals a slackening of dramatic tension, crystallised in
Lucius’s falling asleep over his ‘instrument’: a dreamlike moment of
stillness that the ghost’s sudden appearance shatters. Plutarch reports
the ghost sighting in matter-of-fact terms and states outright that it
‘shewed plainly, that the goddes were offended with the murther of
Caesar’ (Shakespeare, 1998, p. 332). Shakespeare’s handling of the
scene is different, and more subtle. While Shakespeare adopts
wholesale many of Plutarch’s details, such as that the apparition was
seen in the ‘light of the lampe’, Shakespeare’s ghost seems to occupy a
more inward, psychological realm than Plutarch’s. We cannot be sure
that the ghost itself is not a product of Brutus’s exhausted mind, or
indeed of the wine he has consumed earlier in the scene. And there is
no equivalent to Plutarch’s blunt statement about what the ghost
represents. Brutus simply watches it, talks to it, and then later attaches
his own meaning to it – that it simply means ‘my hour is come’ (5.5.20).
32
Conclusion
Conclusion
Whose tragedy is The Tragedy of Julius Caesar? What do these signs and
portents say about who is ultimately responsible for the collapse of the
Roman republic and its descent into civil war? Is the tragedy Caesar’s,
and the villains Brutus and the other conspirators? Or is the villain of
the piece Caesar, for his ambition, and the play’s tragedy the death of
Brutus? There is evidence for all these interpretations in the text. Julius
Caesar is a play deeply concerned with role-playing and the main
characters seek throughout to play the parts of heroes. Their crises
come when others in the play challenge or disrupt their heroic
personae. Caesar’s carefully stage-managed entrance in 1.2 is clearly
meant to signal his heroic stature, his right to rule. However, his last
substantial speech before his murder conveys the flipside of his role
playing – his arrogance in assuming that he alone is fit to wield
supreme power:
But I am constant as the northern star,

Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
(3.1.60–2)
That Caesar utters this speech just before the daggers fall is a good
example of Shakespeare’s ability to maintain his dramatic balancing act
between the two factions’ cases. Brutality and vaulting ambition are
undeniably present here.
We have already seen how self-consciously, through rhetoric, Brutus
fashions himself as a republican hero. He retains this ability even as
the narrative tide turns against him. When relating the news of Portia’s
suicide, he is able to turn this personal tragedy into a chance to display
his stoic ability to withstand grief: ‘No man bears sorrow better. Portia
is dead’ (4.3.145). Even his own suicide becomes an opportunity for
Brutus to maintain this image of constancy, dying as he does with a
justification for Caesar’s murder on his lips (5.5.51). The final act of
heroic myth-making through rhetoric, however, falls to Antony.
Hearing the news of Brutus’s death, he delivers what seems like an
encomium full of high praise:
33
This was the noblest Roman of them all: […]

His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’
(5.5.69–76)
Whether or not Antony’s elegy is sincerely meant, it comes after

Brutus and the rest of the conspirators are safely dead. If, as John Velz
puts it, Antony ‘knows that the role of Caesar will be transferred to
the man who can play it best’ (Velz, 1968, p. 153), he is content to pay
Brutus the honour of identifying him as the play’s tragic hero. Antony’s
casting of Brutus in this role is, however, a backhanded compliment: it
confirms the ultimate failure of the conspirators’ political cause.
As the writings of Puttenham and Heywood suggest, early modern
tragedies were fundamentally concerned with the deaths of princes.
Julius Caesar therefore counts as a tragedy on several levels. Brutus’s
death is ‘tragic’ in these terms as much as Caesar’s is, something that
Antony’s final words – ‘This was a man!’ – make clear. Attributing
blame, however, is problematic in a play as packed with nuance and
conflicting details as Julius Caesar is. As Cicero says in 1.3.34, ‘men
may construe things after their fashion’. The final tragedy of the play is
more all-encompassing than just the fate of Caesar, or Brutus, or
Cassius, or Portia. It embraces, as the critic Naomi Conn Liebler
writes, ‘the end of a political (as well as a religious) order’ (Liebler,
1981, p. 182). For Rome, the deaths of Brutus and the other
conspirators meant the death of republican idealism. Read in these
terms, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is the tragedy of Roman history
itself: the tragedy of a polity torn apart by the forces of ‘civil strife’.
Independent study
website.
34
References
References
Bushnell, R.W. (1990) Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater
in the English Renaissance, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Clare, J. (1999)‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and
Jacobean Dramatic Censorship, 2nd edn, Manchester, Manchester
University Press.
Foakes, R.A. (2003) Shakespeare and Violence, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Frye, N. (1967) Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy,
Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
Griffin, J. (2009) ‘Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the dramatic
tradition’ in Griffin, M. (ed.) A Companion to Julius Caesar, Oxford,
Blackwell, pp. 371–98 (available through the OU Library website).
Cambridge University Press (available through the OU Library
website).
Halpern, R. (2002) ‘Vicissitudes of the public sphere: Julius Caesar’ in
Wilson, R. (ed.) Julius Caesar : Contemporary Critical Essays,
Basingstoke, Palgrave, pp. 210–28.
Hattaway, M. (2013) ‘Tragedy and political authority’ in McEachern, C.
(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd edn,
Heywood, T. (1612) An Apology for Actors, London. Available at Early
English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (Accessed 12
May 2015).
Kantorowicz, E.H. (1997 [1957]) The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in
Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
Liebler, N.C. (1981) ‘“Thou bleeding piece of earth”: the ritual ground
of Julius Caesar’, Shakespeare Studies, vol. 14, pp. 175–96 (available
Liebler, N.C. (1995) Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual
Foundations of Genre, London, Routledge.
35
MacCaffrey, W.T. (1992) Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603,

McDonald, R. (2013) ‘The language of tragedy’ in McEachern, C. (ed.)
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd edn,
Miles, G.B. (1989) ‘How Roman were Shakespeare’s “Romans”?’,
Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 257–83 (available through the
OU Library website).
Miola, R.S. (1983) Shakespeare’s Rome, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Nearing Jr., H. (1948) ‘Julius Caesar and the Tower of London’, Modern
Language Notes, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 228–33 (available through the OU
Library website).
Puttenham, G. (1970) The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G.D. Willcock and
A. Walker, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Rebhorn, W.A. (1990) ‘The crisis of the aristocracy in Julius Caesar’,
Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 75–111 (available through the
Shakespeare, W. (1998) Julius Caesar, ed. D. Daniell, Arden Shakespeare
series, London, Thomson.
Smith, B.R. (1999) The Acoustic World of Early Modern England,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Spencer, T.J.B. (1957) ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’,
Shakespeare Survey, vol. 10, pp. 27–38 (available through the OU
Library website).
Velz, J.W. (1968) ‘“If I were Brutus now …’: role-playing in Julius
Caesar’, Shakespeare Studies, vol. 4, pp. 149–59 (available through the
Vickers, B. (2005 [1968]) The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose, London,
Routledge.
36
Chapter 5 ‘Who’s there?’
Hamlet’s mysteries
Jonathan Gibson
Contents
Aims 183
Introduction 185
Hamlet and the skull 185
Our Hamlet 191
Three Hamlets: the good, the bad and the Folio 195
Q1: the First Quarto (1603) 196
Q2: the Second Quarto (1604) 199
F: the First Folio (1623) 199
Comparing the three texts 200
Locating ‘To be or not to be’ 203
Conclusion: Hamlet’s mysteries 205
References 208
Aims
Aims
This chapter will:
. discuss changing ways of thinking about the character of Hamlet
. introduce the three early printed texts of Hamlet
. analyse the three versions of ‘To be or not to be’ in detail
. consider some of the mysterious features of the action of Hamlet.
183
Chapter 5 ‘Who’s there?’ Hamlet’s mysteries

. William Shakespeare (2006a) Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil
Taylor, Arden Shakespeare series, London, Thomson.
You will need to look at the following document, which you will find
on the module website:
. ‘Versions of “To be or not to be”’
website)
. Historical Texts (HT) (available via the OU Library website).
184
Introduction
Introduction
There is a well-worn story about an old lady who came away
unimpressed by a performance of Hamlet because, she said, it was ‘full
of quotations’ (Chesterton, 2012, p. 92). Perhaps you sympathise with
this view. Hamlet is such a well-known work that students coming to it
for the first time certainly sometimes fear that there can be nothing new
left for them to contribute to the discussion. I hope that this chapter
and the next will show you that the opposite is the case. Hamlet, I will
be suggesting, is full of mystery and uncertainty as well as quotations:
as we read and reread it and watch different performances on stage or
screen, the play breeds more and more questions which are hard to
answer definitively, and about which it is always possible to say more.
There are many ways in to this labyrinthine world: this chapter takes
just one of many possible routes.
Like the other Shakespeare plays in this module, Hamlet belongs to an
important period in their author’s career, close in time to the crucial
move his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s
Men), made to a permanent outdoor base, the Globe Theatre. The
precise dates for its composition and first performances are unknown:
currently, the scholarly consensus is for 1600 in both cases. Hamlet
appeared in three quite different early printed editions; we will find out
about these later in the chapter.
Now, however, before you read any further, make sure you have read
the play.
Hamlet and the skull

Let’s begin by looking at one of the many thousands of visual
representations of the Prince of Denmark that have appeared since the
first performances. This image (Figure 5.1) presents us with more of a
puzzle than a mystery. In 2008 the actor David Tennant, famous for
starring in the BBC TV science-fiction series Dr Who, acted the part of
Hamlet in a critically acclaimed production. Three years later, the Royal
Mail issued a stamp featuring Tennant as Hamlet in a series published
to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Royal Shakespeare Company. On
the stamp, Tennant/Hamlet is pictured alone with a skull; around him
appear the words ‘To be or not to be – that is the question’. It’s a
twenty-first-century version of what is perhaps the best-known, most
185
‘iconic’ image of a moment from a Shakespeare play. There are,

however, a couple of things that are rather odd about it.
Figure 5.1 David Tennant as Hamlet, Royal Mail stamp, 2011. Photo: Ellie
Kurttz © Royal Shakespeare Company. Used with permission of the Royal
Mail and David Tennant.
The first oddity is the fact that this is a depiction of Hamlet and the
skull alone together. The scene that’s illustrated takes place outside, as
Tennant’s clothes – practical outdoors wear, complete with beanie hat –
imply. But Hamlet is not alone at this point in the play. He picks up the
skull – it turns out to have belonged to his father’s jester, Yorick –
during the conversation he and Horatio have with the gravedigger
beside Ophelia’s grave (5.1.170–205).
The second oddity about the stamp is the link it engineers between the
image and the celebrated words ‘To be or not to be, that is the
question’. This, Hamlet’s most famous line, is not actually spoken in
186
Introduction
5.1, the graveside scene, but comes from a completely different part of
the play: it is the third of Hamlet’s major soliloquies, and while he
speaks it (3.1.55–87) the Prince, as in 5.1, has company on stage.
Ophelia is with him throughout, while the King (whose name,
‘Claudius’, appears only in the cast list of our edition, although many
critics refer to him as such) and Polonius are eavesdropping. ‘To be or
not to be’ finds Hamlet considering the attractions of oblivion, toying
with the idea of suicide:
to sleep –
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.
(3.1.59–63)
The only thing holding us back, he says, is ‘the dread of something

after death’ (3.1.77): in other words, fear of divine judgement. This is a
frame of mind Hamlet occupies earlier in the play, in his first soliloquy,
when, wishing his flesh would ‘melt’, he regrets that suicide leads to
damnation: ‘O that […] the Everlasting had not fixed/His canon ’gainst
self-slaughter’ (1.2.129–32). But are these thoughts on Hamlet’s mind
during his conversation at the graveyard? Let’s return to Ophelia’s grave
and find out.
Activity
Reread Hamlet’s conversation with Horatio and the gravedigger (5.1.61–
205). This part of 5.1 begins as Hamlet and Horatio enter. Previously, the
gravedigger and his companion (‘two Clowns’) have been quibbling about
the legality of Ophelia’s burial, and the ‘second man’ has left to fetch the
gravedigger ‘a stoup of liquor’ (l.56), never to return. How would you
break up this part of the scene into sections? Does the way in which the
different sections treat the topic of death echo the longing in ‘To be or not
to be’ for death, or its fear of the beyond?
Discussion
The first section I noted is the passage in which Hamlet comments to
Horatio on the gravedigger’s behaviour, apparently without the
gravedigger hearing him (ll.61–110). The focus here is on the casual way
in which the gravedigger treats human remains. Hamlet interprets his
187
lackadaisical approach to the skulls in the grave as a contempt for social

status. He imagines each skull to belong to somebody higher up in the
pecking order than the gravedigger: first ‘a politician’ (l.74), then ‘a
courtier’ (l.77), then a lord (l.79), then an aristocratic lady (l.83).
Imagining the last of the skulls to be that of a lawyer, Hamlets points out
how powerless this authority figure is to resist the gravedigger’s violence:
‘Why does he suffer this mad knave to knock him about the sconce with
a dirty shovel’ (l.95–7) without using his legal expertise to do something
about it?
In my second section (l.110–73), Hamlet banters with the gravedigger.
Here again death provides the means for the gravedigger to lord it over
his social superiors, though now it’s a more self-conscious process, as
he wittily gets the better of Hamlet (both in the flesh – though without the
gravedigger knowing who he is – and as the ‘young Hamlet’ of popular
gossip; l.139–51).
In what I have taken to be the final section of this extract, the
gravedigger points out the skull of Hamlet’s father’s jester, Yorick, and
Hamlet turns to speak again to Horatio.
At the end of this section, Hamlet draws out the moral. He makes explicit
the view of death that has been underpinning everything that has gone
before: that we will all, nobles and commoners, princes and
gravediggers, Alexanders and Yoricks, come to dust. This seems to me
to be a completely different attitude to death from the one explored in ‘To
be or not to be’. Nowhere here do we have the idea of death as a restful
‘sleep’. Equally, there is no mention of what might happen after death to
the individual soul: nothing (surprisingly, since we are so close to a
church) is said about religion.
Hamlet’s appearance onstage with the skull might have brought to the
mind of some in Shakespeare’s audience images in the old medieval
tradition of memento mori (‘remember that you will die’) – images such
as Lucas van Leyden’s 1519 engraving of a young man with a skull
(Figure 5.2), the aim of which was to make its viewer think about their
life sub specie aeternitatis (‘under the aspect of eternity’, meaning in the
context of the afterlife) and therefore make better use of it (Frye, 1984,
pp. 205–43). But the effect of this part of Hamlet’s graveyard scene is a
secular one, as Michael Neill says: it does nothing to drive home the
spiritual lessons of the memento mori:
188
Introduction
Significantly the Clown’s graveyard kingdom is the only space

beyond the claustrophobic walls of Elsinore to which the stage
gives a concrete reality, establishing it as the undifferentiating
Other of the hierarchic palace world – a region where the blank
remains of politician, courtier, lawyer, peasant, prince, and fool lie
confused together in a ‘pit of clay’, a place where Alexander and
Caesar become literally indistinguishable from the dirt used to stop
a beer-barrel.
(Neill, 1997, p. 87)
Memento mori
Shakespeare would have seen images on a memento mori theme,
the ‘Danse macabre’ or ‘Dance of Death’ – in which skeletons take
away from this world people from all walks of life and all ranks – in
the guild chapel of his home town, Stratford-upon-Avon
(Davidson, 1988). Shakespeare’s father seems to have been
involved in the whitewashing of some of the paintings in the chapel,
but there is a record of the ‘Dance of Death’ painting from 1576,
when Shakespeare would have been 12 years old.
The scene we have been looking at comes after Hamlet's soliloquies –

after his hesitations and delays – and precedes the final section of the
play in which Hamlet takes his revenge on the King.
Perhaps, as Roland Mushat Frye suggests, ‘Hamlet’s reflections in the
graveyard provide the transition between his earlier uncertainties and
the settled assurance which he displays in the final scene of the play’
(Frye, 1984, p. 253).
189
Figure 5.2 Lucas van Leyden, Young Man Holding a Skull, c.1519,
engraving. Esme de Boulonois, in Bullart, Académie des Sciences volume 2,
page 399. Photo: Mary Evans Picture Library.
190
Our Hamlet
Our Hamlet
What is the reason for the anomaly in the image of David Tennant?
Why does this stamp – and many other depictions of Hamlet – conflate
two quite distinct moments in the play in this manner? And why isolate
Hamlet from the people around him? I think the answers lie in the fact
that the juxtaposition encapsulates, in the words of the editors of our
set text, Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, ‘the mental picture we all
seem to have of Hamlet’ (Shakespeare, 2006a, p. 21). By ‘we’,
Thompson and Taylor mean twentieth- and twenty-first-century people
used to Hamlet being depicted, in a whole range of media in popular
and elite culture, as primarily a solitary thinker. This depiction is related
to a Hamlet for whom some critics claim a sense of individual identity
that looks forward beyond the Renaissance to the modern world.
By speaking his thoughts in soliloquy, by reflecting on his own

penchant for thought, by giving others cause to worry about what
he is thinking, Hamlet draws attention to what is potentially going
on inside him. In recognition of this psychological depth and
complexity, Hamlet has been hailed as the inaugural figure of the
modern period.
(de Grazia, 2003, p. 485; see also Lee, 2000)
It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the
related notion of Hamlet as a deeply sympathetic and thoughtful
individual grew up. ‘It is we who are Hamlet,’ the essayist William
Hazlitt (1778–1830) claimed:
Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own

mishaps or those of others; […] he who has felt his mind sink
within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has
had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions
of strange things; who cannot well be at ease, while he sees evil
hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have
been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite,
and himself nothing; […] – this is the true Hamlet.
(Hazlitt, 1869 [1817])
191
Views such as Hazlitt’s, derived largely from Hamlet’s soliloquies, make

the Prince seem rather a detached and static figure, somebody who
comments on the action of his play rather than taking part in it. By
contrast, Margreta de Grazia argues that light-hearted early references to
the play suggest that for seventeenth-century audiences the Ghost was
the play’s chief draw, and ‘Hamlet’s signature action may have been not
paralyzing thought but frenzied motion’ (de Grazia, 2003, p. 486): the
zaniness of his ‘mad’ scenes.
So the solution to the puzzle of the image on the stamp is, I think, the
power of Hazlitt’s conception of Hamlet: the idea of the withdrawn,
pensive prince. There are moments in Hamlet when the character might
be thought to fit this description – for example, ‘To be or not to be’ in
some performances – but Hamlet has many other ways of behaving. We
have, in fact, just been exploring one: the skittishness with which he
bandies words with the gravedigger. Later on in the same scene, we
encounter another: the self-regarding violence of his reaction to the
death of Ophelia and to the despair of Laertes (5.1.235–81). But what
other things does Hamlet do?
Activity
First, make a list of as many of the things that Hamlet does in the play
(as opposed to things he says) as you can remember. Try to do this off
the top of your head, without looking back at your notes, at the play
itself, at any introductory material or online plot summaries. Just trust
your own memory. One of the results of this exercise should be to make
you think about the sort of things that most stuck in your mind after you
stopped reading. This will be an excellent starting point for your reflective
literary-critical work.
After you’ve made your list, have a quick think about the order in which
you remembered things. At this point, you might want to have a look at
your notes on Hamlet, or at a summary of the plot. What have you
forgotten about? Why do you think this slipped your mind? What does
the way in which you made your list say about your experience of, and
therefore your critical approach to, the play? Write down two or three
sentences in answer to these questions.
Discussion
The first thing I remembered was the deaths at the end of the play:
Hamlet kills the King (5.2.311) and Laertes (5.2.315). Next I remembered
the play organised by Hamlet to ‘catch the conscience of the King’
(2.2.540), and then (perhaps this is a bit of a cheat) something that
192
Our Hamlet
Hamlet does but which happens offstage: his forging of the letter which
kills Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in England (5.2.29–58). Only then did
I remember another killing – Hamlet’s inadvertent murder of Polonius in
the Queen’s ‘closet’ (3.4.21) – and his confrontation with Laertes at
Ophelia’s grave (5.1.240).
You may well have come up with these or different actions in a different
order, or, like me, you may have thought first of the mayhem in the last
scene and the abortive play-within-the-play, The Murder of Gonzago
(facetiously renamed The Mousetrap by Hamlet; 3.2.231).
What does my order highlight? It certainly registers a very different sort
of Hamlet from the figure on the stamp. Also, it points to the importance
(in my experience of Hamlet) of the play’s main, ‘revenge’ plot. Scenes
5.2 and 2.2 probably came to my mind first in part because of their brute
theatrical power. But they are also two of the scenes of Hamlet that link it
particularly strongly to the other ‘revenge play’ that you studied in
Chapter 3, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, a link that we will look at
in Chapter 6. In 5.2, killing the King, Hamlet finally obeys the command
his father’s ghost issues in Act 1: ‘If thou didst ever thy dear father love
[…] Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!’ (1.5.23). Meanwhile,
the staging of The Mousetrap is an equally crucial element in Hamlet’s
revenge plot, as it is the method Hamlet uses to find out whether or not
the Ghost’s accusation of the King is accurate, and thus whether or not
there is a murder to be avenged.
The complexities, oddities, contradictions and absences in the Prince’s

personality have been pored over at length by critics. Chapter 2 in this
book, on As You Like It, looked briefly at how Shakespeare dramatised
the mismatch between what’s inside people’s heads and the external
traces other people have to use to get at this ‘character’. We can find
the same sort of thing happening in Hamlet. When the Prince first
appears, in the second scene of the play, he points to the inability of
external things – ‘forms, moods, shapes of grief ’ – to ‘denote me truly’:
he has ‘that within which passes show’ (1.2.82, 83, 85). Later, he uses
the snooping Guildenstern’s inability to play the recorder as the
jumping-off point for a disquisition on the impossibility of one person
ever fully knowing another:
Why, look you now how unworthy a thing you make of me; you
would play upon me! You would seem to know my stops, you
193
would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me

from my lowest note to my compass. And there is much music,
excellent voice in this little organ. Yet cannot you make it speak.
’Sblood! Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
(3.2.355–62)
Early in the twentieth century the poet Robert Bridges proposed that in
Hamlet Shakespeare drew ‘a dramatic character purposely so as to elude
analysis’. Quoting Bridges’s words, John Dover Wilson argued, rather
more sentimentally, that ‘In the making of Hamlet Shakespeare’s task
was not to produce a being psychologically explicable or consistent, but
one who would evoke the affection, the wonder and the tears of his
audience, and yet be accepted as entirely human’ (Dover Wilson, 1951,
p. 220).
It’s not just the Prince himself who’s mysterious. Shakespeare makes all
sorts of things in the world of Elsinore shifty and difficult to
understand, for Hamlet, for other people at the Danish royal court and
for us. The play’s very first line –‘Who’s there?’ – puts us on the alert:
it’s spoken not by Francisco, the guard whose job it is to keep a
lookout, but by his relief, Barnardo. In Hamlet, then, the uncertainty
does not just play around Hamlet himself but seems woven into the
very structure of the play’s world.
Later in this chapter, we will look at a list of more of these mysteries,
and at shifts in the ways in which critics have, over the years,
approached the task of making sense of Hamlet. But first I want to turn
to what is arguably the greatest Hamlet mystery of all: what, exactly, are
the words that the Prince and the other people in his play speak?
194
Three Hamlets: the good, the bad and the Folio
Three Hamlets: the good, the bad and

the Folio
The text of Hamlet is notoriously unstable. If you were to go through a
couple of recent editions of it – editions that are therefore, in theory, of
the ‘same’ play – you would, like as not, find the two books differing
from each other in many details, major and minor. Why is this? The
reason is simple: there were no less than three early printed editions of
Hamlet and so modern editors have a wealth of different words to
choose from.
Along with plays such as As You Like It and Julius Caesar, Hamlet
appeared in the First Folio (‘F’), the collected works of 1623. But,
unlike them, it also appeared in two smaller-format, single-play, quarto
editions (similar in size to modern paperbacks): the ‘First Quarto’
(‘Q1’), published in 1603, and the ‘Second Quarto’ (‘Q2’), published a
year later.
Each of these versions of the play is significantly different from the
other two. Q1, the First Quarto, is particularly odd, with a bizarre
version of the ‘To be or not to be’ speech which we will look at in a
minute. It’s a complicated situation, and you can find out more details
about it in our set book (Shakespeare, 2006a, pp. 74–94 and 474–542).
Until quite recently, editors of Hamlet tended to produce what in the
jargon is called a ‘conflated text’: in other words, they combined bits of
the three early Hamlets (mainly the Folio and Second Quarto) to create,
in effect, a play different from any text known to have existed in
Shakespeare’s lifetime, but which they believed was closer than any of
those existing texts to a ‘correct’, authorised text that Shakespeare
himself would have approved of. One of the assumptions of this
approach to editing Shakespeare was that much of the variation between
the different versions of his plays did not involve Shakespeare himself –
in other words, that Shakespeare did not revise. Today, however, editors
are much more likely to be open to the idea that Shakespeare tolerated
the existence of different versions of his plays. They are also more
interested than they used to be in alterations that seem to have been
made in the playhouse.
Our set text, the Arden Hamlet edited by Thompson and Taylor,
reflects these shifts in editorial practice, and has been chosen to make it
as easy as possible for you to get to grips with the differences between
195
the three texts. But the Arden edition, in fact, comes in two volumes.
One, the volume that you have been required to buy, follows Q2 –
partly because that’s the longest version of the play. But this volume
also includes eight pages of extracts from the First Folio (Shakespeare,
2006a, pp. 465–73). (When you read these extracts (and they aren’t very
long), it might be a good idea to use the reference in each extract’s
heading (the part of the heading marked ‘Q2’) to look back at your text
of Hamlet to discover the context for the extract in the play as a whole.)
The other Arden volume (Shakespeare, 2006b), not a set text as such,
provides all of the F Hamlet. It also includes the complete text of the
First Quarto.
Some of the main differences between the three key texts are
summarised below (I’ve modernised the titles of each book).
Q1: the First Quarto (1603)

As Figure 5.3 shows, the title page of the First Quarto declares this to
be (in modernised form) The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark. By William Shakespeare. As it hath been diverse times acted by
his Highness’ servants in the City of London: as also in the two Universities
of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere. Q1 is much the shortest of the
three texts. It’s very different from both the Folio and the Second
Quarto: much more economical, more direct and more rough and ready,
much simpler throughout in its phrasing. It is one of a number of
quartos of Shakespeare plays that were long ago described by scholars
as ‘bad’, because their text seemed to be much cruder and of much
worse quality than rival texts (Marcus, 1996).
Some names are different (Polonius is here ‘Corambis’, for example),
for no known reason. Several features point to Q1 having theatrical
origins: it is perhaps significant that the title-page refers to its having
being acted (by the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company). Many of the
lines in the Q2/F play are absent – perhaps cut. Among Q1’s unique
features are some vivid stage directions: the Ghost enters the Queen’s
closet ‘in his night gown’ (11.57); the mad Ophelia (‘Ofelia’) comes in
‘playing on a Lute, and her hair down singing’ (13.14); Hamlet leaps
into Ophelia’s grave (16.146). The plot’s clearer than F/Q2 at some
points: the Queen directly conspires with Hamlet against the King
(11.85–100), for example. The unique placement of ‘To be or not to be’
is discussed below. According to Thompson and Taylor, ‘Q1 tells us
nothing reliable about Shakespeare’s contribution to the text, but it may
196
Figure 5.3 Title page of the First Quarto of Hamlet, 1603. The Huntington
Library, San Marino, shelfmark 69304, STC 22275 copy 1. This item is
reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
tell us something about theatre history – namely how the play may have
been acted’ (Shakespeare, 2006a, p. 85).
There are two kinds of ideas about Q1:
1 That it was written before the other texts. It was suggested long ago
that it was ‘the Ur-Hamlet’ (Shakespeare, 2006a, pp. 44–9), a play on
the subject of Hamlet known to have been performed in the 1580s:
a first draft presumably by Shakespeare that he went on to rewrite
very thoroughly in Q2 and F.
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Figure 5.4 Title page of the Second Quarto of Hamlet, 1604. Folger
Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, STC 22276. By permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library.
The handwritten note was added to this copy by a later owner. It quotes
some praise of Shakespeare from the poet John Dryden (1631–1700).
2 That it was produced after the other texts – for example, as a

‘memorial reconstruction’ (a text written out from memory by an
actor who had been in it), or as a bootleg version produced by
someone taking notes in the audience (Stern, 2013).
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Q2: the Second Quarto (1604)

Published as The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. By
William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much
again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy (Figure 5.4), this is a
‘good’ quarto. The longest version, it is the one we have been reading
in the set text. Editors tend to agree that it derives from an original
manuscript by Shakespeare (his ‘foul papers’), a theory reflected in the
wording of the title-page which explicitly sets it in competition with the
First Quarto. There is a rather baffling overlap between the publishers
of the two quartos, however (Shakespeare, 2006a, pp. 76–8).
Although the Second Quarto is much closer to the Folio text than to
the First Quarto, there are some striking differences. Passages in it
which don’t appear in the Folio include, at the start of the play,
Hamlet’s critique of the Danes’ drinking habits (1.4.17–38); some of
Hamlet’s haranguing of his mother the Queen in the closet scene
(3.4.69–74, 76–9, 159–63, 165–8); and, most strikingly, the soliloquy
Hamlet speaks when about to embark for England: ‘How all occasions
do inform against me’ (4.4.31–65).
Variable speech headings (perhaps reflecting changes taking place in the
author’s mind about characters’ names and roles), spellings supposedly
characteristic of Shakespeare and printing errors suggesting the book
was set up from a hard-to-read manuscript are all cited by scholars as
reasons why the printers of Q2 might have been working from pages in
Shakespeare’s own handwriting.
F: the First Folio (1623)

This version is entitled The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Part
of the large posthumous collected Shakespeare, it is very similar in
many ways (details of phrasing, shared errors and so on) to the Second
Quarto. It appears to be a more ‘theatrical’ text, however, and has some
affinities with the First Quarto (which is likely, as we have seen, to be
the record of a performance). About 230 of Q2’s lines are absent from
F (many are listed in the description of Q2 above). These might well
signify cuts made when the play came to be staged.
There are also about 70 lines not found in Q2, including the
conversation in which Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that
Denmark is a prison (31 lines between 2.2.235 and 2.2.236;
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Shakespeare, 2006a, pp. 466–7); a 25-line section after 2.2.299, during

Hamlet’s discussion with the players, referring to a dispute between
children’s companies and adult actors that took place around 1600
(Shakespeare, 2006a, pp. 468–70); and 13 poignant lines spoken by
Hamlet and Horatio as they wait for the beginning of the climactic
fencing match (just before the entry of Osric at 5.2.67). Editors more
interested in reconstructing the theatrical prompt-book than
Shakespeare’s original manuscript generally prefer F to Q2.
Comparing the three texts

To sum up, then: the editors of our set text think that the Second
Quarto was largely based on Shakespeare’s foul papers (his own rough
manuscript), that the Folio is another authorial version, and that the
First Quarto was based on an anonymous reconstruction of a
performance that was itself based on something similar to the Folio
text.
Lukas Erne (2013) has suggested that Shakespeare wrote both Q2 and
F knowing that both texts would be too long to perform complete, and
that in doing so he was deliberately, self-consciously, writing for a
literary, print readership, rather than a theatrical audience. Erne sees F
as a ‘preliminary abridgement’ of Q2 that would have to be further cut
down before it was acted. If this hypothesis is correct, then the
difference between the Q1 text and Q2/F can be read as an intriguing
insight into the sort of things that might happen to Shakespeare’s work
when staged. A very rough comparison can perhaps be made with the
distinction in present-day music recording between an album recorded
live (rough and ready, reflecting a live performance, like the First
Quarto) and an edited, elaborately produced ‘studio’ album (much more
of an ‘author’s text’, akin to the Folio or Second Quarto).
Comparing Hamlets
If you ever find yourself wanting to check what difference there is (if
any) between F and Q2 at a particular, crucial point in the play –
something you might find worth doing if you’re writing an
assessment on Hamlet – much the easiest way to do this is to use
the online Enfolded Hamlet. This is an unannotated web edition of
the play in which text that is common to F and Q2 appears in black,
text unique to F is in purple and text that appears only in Q2 is in
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green (The Enfolded Hamlet, n.d.). Choose the ‘modern enfolded’

option. (If you do use The Enfolded Hamlet, or any text of Hamlet
other than the set book, make sure you check the act, scene and
line numbers of anything you quote – these numbers vary
alarmingly from edition to edition.)
As an example of the sort of differences there are between the three

texts, let’s look briefly at the extract from the graveyard we read above
in the section ‘Hamlet and the skull’. There aren’t many obviously
significant variations between Q2 and F. In the Folio, talking about the
treatment of what he imagines as a lawyer’s skull, Hamlet calls the
gravedigger ‘rude’ (that is, ‘lower-class’) rather than ‘mad’ (that is,
‘wild’), and when he addresses the gravedigger he uses a politer, less
condescending form of address – ‘sir’ rather than ‘sirrah’ (5.1.111). The
First Quarto text is, meanwhile, more concise, with the phrasing
simplified throughout. The skulls of the politician, courtier and ‘My
Lady Worm’ are nowhere to be found; the order in which the lawyer’s
skull and the man who praises a lord’s horse appear in the text is
reversed; and the gravedigger’s memory of ‘young Hamlet’ is spliced
between the passage about the preservation of a tanner’s corpse and
Hamlet’s encounter with Yorick.
The differences between the texts of ‘To be or not to be’ are more
startling, and it is to those we turn now.
Activity
It is now time to compare the First Quarto, Second Quarto and Folio
versions of Hamlet’s most famous lines. On the module website, under
the heading ‘Versions of “To be or not to be”’, you will find the text of all
three versions of the speech arranged in a way designed to clarify
differences and similarities. The slightly varying Q2 and F texts appear
together in one column alongside the drastically different Q1 text in
another column.
Read both of these texts, first one and then the other. Then reread the
texts, this time comparing them line by line. See if you can spot the
following:
1 a line or lines where Q1 says the opposite of Q2/F
2 lines bearing on the same topic but using different examples
3 an idea that seems to be absent from Q1.
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Discussion
1 In lines 65–8 of the Q2/F text, Hamlet looks forward to death with
trepidation, worried about the afterlife. Fear of what comes after death
and of what it may bring keeps us alive, Hamlet says. Though Q1
envisages an ‘everlasting judge’ (l.119) meeting the dead, its view of
life after death is much rosier: it is ‘the joyful hope’ of salvation (l.123)
that is now the reason why people persist in living. The bleakness of
Q2/F is replaced with something more conventional.
2 Q2/F’s list of ‘whips and scorns of time’ (l.69) makes quite a contrast
with Q1’s equivalent list of ‘the scorns and flattery of the world’
(l.124). Q1’s list is perhaps a bit less abstract, a bit more tightly
focused on economical and political injustice, with its emphasis on
‘The widow being oppressed […]/The taste of hunger, or a tyrant’s
reign’ (ll.126–7).
3 At the end of the speech, Q1 omits any reference to the ideas in
lines 83–7 of Q2/F: the generalisation about how ‘conscience’ (l.82),
‘the pale cast of thought’ (l.84), disables decision and great
enterprises are not undertaken.
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Locating ‘To be or not to be’
Locating ‘To be or not to be’

There is a fundamental incoherence in the First Quarto’s text of 'To be
or not to be': its sentences don’t quite make sense, particularly perhaps
lines 118–23. Its positioning of the speech is also anomalous. In all
three versions, the speech takes place either in Ophelia’s presence or
just before Hamlet meets her. Polonius and Claudius are hidden,
eavesdropping on the Prince: Ophelia’s meeting with him is a set-up, a
plan devised by Polonius to find out if the reason for Hamlet’s
‘madness’ is a romantic one. In both the Folio and the Second Quarto
there is a long gap between Polonius’s hatching of his plan (Q2:
2.2.157–64) and its carrying out. In the First Quarto, by contrast, the
‘loosing’ of Ophelia takes place immediately after Polonius has the idea.
‘To be or not to be’, therefore, comes much earlier in the play in the
First Quarto: before Hamlet, meeting Polonius, pretends the King’s
chief minister is a fishmonger; before the arrival of Hamlet’s old friends
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (or, in the First Quarto, ‘Rossencraft and
Gilderstone’); before the ‘tragedians of the city’ (Q2: 2.2.292; Q1: 7.264)
arrive and Hamlet contrasts the emotionalism of the First Player with
his own incapacity to take revenge on the King; before Hamlet comes
up with the idea of using the players to ‘catch the conscience of the
King’ (Q2: 2.2.540); before the King quizzes Hamlet’s friends about the
Prince’s ‘lunacy’ (Q2: 3.1.4; Q1: 7.437). In Q2 and F, by contrast, ‘To
be or not to be’ comes after all these events. The clearest effect of the
difference in positioning is the difference it makes to the nature of the
plot. The soliloquy’s earlier positioning in the First Quarto means that
in that particularly ‘theatrical’ text Hamlet’s longing for death is swiftly
overcome by events: by the necessity of dealing with Polonius,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and, crucially, by the devising of the
play-within-the-play. Things have begun to go forward; with The
Mousetrap (the play devised to trap the King) to look forward to, why
would Hamlet pause to consider committing suicide? Yet just at this
point in the play, this is exactly what the Hamlet of the Folio and
Second Quarto does, embarking on a soliloquy in the third person
(never referring to himself as ‘I’ or ‘me’) on the futility of life, with no
reference to the details of the situation he finds himself in, no mention
of the King, Queen or Ghost. The placing of events in the First Quarto
also has the effect of joining together Hamlet’s demonstrations of
lunacy (the ‘fishmonger’ scene and the ‘nunnery’ scene). To push the
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narrative on faster, some productions of a ‘conflated’ Second Quarto/

Folio text use the First Quarto’s positioning of ‘To be or not to be’.
It’s useful to know about the three different versions of Hamlet. There’s
no need to try to keep the differences between the three texts at the
front of your mind at all times when thinking about the play; that
would be impossible, anyway. But you will find it well worthwhile
returning from time to time, as you think more about what exactly is
happening in Hamlet and develop your own ideas about the play, to the
intriguing Q1–Q2–F three-way split.
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Conclusion: Hamlet’s mysteries

Here is a list of some of the intriguing unanswered questions about
Hamlet that have stimulated and perplexed critics over the years. I have
gathered these together below not because I think we should ourselves
try to enter and resolve the critical debates about these points of
controversy – as the editors of our set book say, ‘part of the fascination
of this play is precisely its refusal to give us all the answers and its
resistance to yield to any “theory”’ (Shakespeare, 2006a, p. 135) – but to
suggest that we think instead about the effect they have on what we
think about the play’s events, themes and characters and to provide you
with a useful way to interrogate any performances of Hamlet you might
see. You will find that some productions will ‘solve’ some of these
‘problems’, but that others won’t and will leave certain issues in the list
below undecided. The decisions that different productions make about
these moments are some of the most important ways in which different
versions of the play diverge from each other. It wouldn’t be hard to
extend this list: if you would like to consider a few more questions,
have a look at the final section in Thompson and Taylor’s introduction
to our set book (Shakespeare, 2006a, pp. 132–7).
1 Why does Hamlet delay? Why does he not kill the King earlier in the
play? Ever since the eighteenth-century shift towards interest in the
psychology of Hamlet, Hamlet’s delay (which he comments on
himself) has been the central point of uncertainty in the play, for
critics and readers. Before then, it seems to have been a non-
problem: an aspect of the plot rather than something that needed to
be explained with reference to Hamlet’s character.
2 Is the Ghost reliable? Elizabethan audiences would perhaps have been
more likely to question the information the Ghost gives to Hamlet
in 1.2 than modern audiences are. Hamlet’s worry that the Ghost
‘May be a de’il [devil]’ and that ‘the de’il hath power/T’assume a
pleasing shape’ (2.2.533–5) echoes the belief of many Protestants
that what appeared to be the ghost of a good person was invariably
a devil in disguise, a ‘goblin damned’ (1.4.40). The ghost claims to
be in purgatory, a painful halfway house after death for souls
destined for heaven who are not yet pure enough to get there. These
souls can be helped to reach the state of holiness necessary to enter
heaven by the actions of the living, usually through prayer (1.5.10–
13). This is an odd claim, as purgatory, engineering a reassuring
connection between the living and the dead, was a Roman Catholic
205
doctrine disavowed by the Protestant religion of the Elizabethan

state (Greenblatt, 2001).
3 Is the King (Claudius) a usur per? He doesn’t behave like one at the
beginning of the play, even though it seems obvious that the rightful
ruler is Hamlet himself, son of the dead king. Although historically
sixteenth-century Denmark was an elective rather than a hereditary
monarchy, the sources for the story of Hamlet (or ‘Amleth’), the
Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus and the French translator
François de Belleforest, do highlight the fact that the King has
usurped Hamlet’s proper place. Hamlet refers just once to the King
having ‘Popped in between th’election and my hopes’ (5.2.64), but
only oddly late in the play, well after the King has publicly identified
Hamlet as his heir (1.2.109). Why does no-one else make anything of
this? Are they cowed by Claudius? De Grazia argues that the
position would have been too obvious to an early modern audience
to need much emphasis (de Grazia, 2007).
4 Why doesn’t the King take offence at the dumbshow at the beginning of
the play-within-the-play (3.2.128–9)? The dumbshow depicts the
circumstances of the King’s murder of Old Hamlet very clearly, well
before the dialogue to which he responds (3.2.258–62). Is King
Claudius simply too preoccupied with Queen Gertrude to take in the
implications of the dumbshow? And, anyway, does the device of the
play, The Mousetrap, actually work? Perhaps, as John Dover Wilson
(1951) and Steve Roth (2004) argue, Claudius just takes offence at
seeing his nephew Hamlet put on a play about a nephew killing an
uncle (3.2.235).
5 Is Hamlet really mad? Although he explicitly says that he has put on
an ‘antic disposition’ to hide his scheming (1.5.166–77), many critics
and directors have felt that the Prince’s unstable behaviour is more
than an act. In the version of the story by Saxo Grammaticus,
Amleth’s faked lunacy is much more extreme (he muddies his
clothes and appears unable to do anything rational) and the narrative
emphasises his clever use of disguise. In both sources, meanwhile,
there is far more reason for the deception, as the murder of the
Hamlet figure’s father is public knowledge and so it is essential that
the son makes his uncle believe that he isn’t planning revenge. The
‘antic disposition’ is less necessary in Hamlet than in the earlier
versions, because in Shakespeare’s text the King’s murder of Old
Hamlet is a secret.
206
6 Does Hamlet love Ophelia? Hamlet claims he does (5.1.258), and we

hear some curiously bad love poetry written by him for her
(2.2.114–7). Ophelia tells us about the Prince’s ‘tenders of […]
affection’ (1.3.98) and attempts to return his love tokens to him
(3.1.92). But our knowledge of this stage in their relationship is
indirect, and when we see them talk in the play Hamlet shifts
between disgust (3.1.102–48) and lasciviousness (3.2.106–12). The
evidence that convinces Polonius of the reality of Hamlet’s passion –
his disordered appearance at Ophelia’s closet (2.1.74–114) – looks
like part of the pretence of madness Hamlet warned his friends
about in the previous scene (1.5.168–76).
7 How does Ophelia die? Although in the Queen’s lyrical description of
Ophelia’s death (4.7.164–81), she drowns accidentally, she is buried
without full ceremony because she is suspected of having killed
herself (5.1.207–20). Who saw the accident described by Gertrude?
And why weren’t they able to save her?
There’s a lot here to think about. In the next chapter, we’ll find out
how some critics have dealt with some of these questions, and how
interpretative approaches to Hamlet have shifted over the years.
Independent study
You will find suggestions for independent study (relating to both
Chapter 5 and Chapter 6) on the module website.
207
References
Chesterton, G.K. (2012) The Soul of Wit: G. K. Chesterton on
Shakespeare, ed. D. Ahlquist, New York, Dover.
Davidson, C. (1988) The Guild Chapel Wall Paintings at Stratford-upon
Avon, New York, AMS Press.
de Grazia, M. (2003) ‘When did Hamlet become modern?’, Textual
Practice, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 485–503 (available through the OU Library
website).
de Grazia, M. (2007) Hamlet without Hamlet, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Dover Wilson, J. (1951) What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd edn, Cambridge,
‘The Enfolded Hamlet’ (n.d.) [Online]. Available at http://triggs.djvu.
org/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/enhamp.php?type=MOD
(Accessed 16 December 2014).
Erne, L. (2013) Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd edn, Cambridge,
Frye, R.M. (1984) The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600,
Greenblatt, S. (2001) Hamlet in Purgatory, Princeton, NJ, Princeton
University Press.
Hazlitt, W. (1869 [1817]) ‘Characters of Shakespear’s plays’ [Online].
Available at
http://shakespearean.org.uk/ham1-haz.htm (Accessed 10
October 2014).
Lee, J. (2000) Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self, Oxford,
Clarendon Press.
Marcus, L.S. (1996) ‘Bad taste and bad Hamlet’ in Marcus, L.S.,
Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, London,
Routledge, pp. 132–76.
Neill, M. (1997) Issues of Death: Morality and Identity in English
Renaissance Tragedy, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
208
References
Roth, S. (2004) ‘Who knows who knows who’s there? An epistemology

of Hamlet (or, what happens in the Mousetrap)’, Early Modern Literary
Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (September) [Online]. Available at
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/10-2/rothepis.htm (Accessed 1
December 2014).
Shakespeare, W. (2006a) Hamlet, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor,
Arden Shakespeare series, London, Thomson.
Shakespeare, W. (2006b) Hamlet: the Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. A.
Thompson and N. Taylor, Arden Shakespeare series, London,
Thomson.
Stern, T. (2013) ‘Sermons, plays and note-takers: Hamlet Q1 as a
“noted” text’, Shakespeare Survey, vol. 66, pp. 1–23.
209
Chapter 6 ‘Words, words,
words’: solving Hamlet’s
mysteries
Jonathan Gibson
Contents
Aims 215
Introduction 217
Character criticism 218
Themes and images: ‘new’ criticism 220
Post-structuralism, new historicism and cultural
materialism 224
From The Spanish Tragedy to Hamlet 229
Conclusion: Hamlet criticism today 234
References 235
Reading 6.1 Suffocating Mothers 237
Aims
Aims
This chapter will:
. introduce you to some different critical approaches to Hamlet
. talk you through an exploration of the complexities of the imagery
of Hamlet
. discuss some points of difference between Hamlet and The Spanish
Tragedy
. introduce you to some aspects of the historical context of Hamlet.
215
Chapter 6 ‘Words, words, words’: solving Hamlet’s mysteries

In this chapter you will be referred to the set books:
. William Shakespeare (2006) Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil
Taylor, Arden Shakespeare series, London, Thomson.
. Thomas Kyd (2009) The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J.R. Mulryne and
Andrew Gurr, New Mermaids series, London, Methuen Drama.
website)
. Internet Shakespeare Editions (available at internetshakespeare.uvic.
ca).
216
Introduction
Introduction
Over the past two centuries, many writers have tried to ‘solve’ Hamlet’s
mysteries. The range of techniques they’ve used has been very wide, and
– inevitably – we only have space here for a very swift survey, a helter
skelter ride through some of the key developments.
217
Character criticism
From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, as writers
became more interested in the character of Hamlet, it increasingly began
to be felt by critics that it was this approach that held the key to the
play and that offered the best way to solve Hamlet’s mysteries. A.C.
Bradley, for example, a leading critic of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, claimed in his influential book Shakespearean
Tragedy (first published in 1904) that ‘the whole story turns upon the
peculiar character of the hero’ (Bradley, 2007, p. 64). In this book
Bradley dismisses the character-based explanations other critics had
given for Hamlet’s delay – the idea that the Prince is inhibited by moral
scruples, that he is too sweet and sensitive, that he thinks too much –
in favour of his own suggestion that Hamlet is suffering from ‘a
profound melancholy’ brought on by the ‘violent shock of his mother’s
remarriage’ (Bradley, 2007, p. 78). Bradley uses Hamlet’s melancholy to
‘account for’ the other traits he demonstrates. Approaching Shakespeare
in this way – as if the people in his plays were real – runs the risk of
making unprovable statements, based on what look like little more than
hunches. Thus we find Bradley stating at one point that ‘most of the
reasons [Hamlet] assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the
true reasons, but unconscious excuses’ (Bradley, 2007, pp. 77); later on,
he deduces the nature of Hamlet’s love for Ophelia by working
backwards from what he has hypothesised about Hamlet’s personal
preferences: ‘He saw her innocence, simplicity and sweetness and it was
like him to ask no more’ (Bradley, 2007, p. 81).
Much of the character-based criticism that followed Bradley, particularly
in the early twentieth century, had a tendency to be more hostile to
Hamlet. His delay was attributed to less praiseworthy traits (Edwards,
1983, p. 43). At the end of the nineteenth century, the French poet
Stéphane Mallarmé vividly evoked a darker Hamlet, ‘a killer who kills
without concern’, a ‘doubter’ whose mere ‘black presence […] causes
this poison, of which all the characters die: without his even having
bothered to pierce them through the arras’ (quoted in Wofford, 1994,
p. 198). Meanwhile, the line from the early twentieth-century poet and
critic T.S. Eliot, ‘No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’ (in
the poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; Eliot, 1970, p. 17),
sounds like a riposte to William Hazlitt’s ‘It is we who are Hamlet’
(Hazlitt, 1869 [1817]). Notoriously, Eliot claimed that Hamlet was ‘most
certainly an artistic failure’ (Eliot, 1960, p. 98) because the emotion the
218
Character criticism
Prince expresses at his mother’s remarriage is ‘in excess of the facts as

they appear’ (Eliot, 1960, p. 101; original emphasis): the play is ‘full of
some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or
manipulate into art’ (Eliot, 1960, p. 104). Eliot links the play to
Shakespeare’s life, though very obliquely: ‘under compulsion of what
experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot
ever know’, he says (Eliot, 1960, p. 102). Eliot is talking here about
something ‘horrible’ in the Prince, the result of something in his
creator’s past, but he is not making detailed hypotheses about Hamlet’s
character. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and his English
disciple Ernest Jones had no such doubts: they came to the conclusion
that Hamlet had become fixated at what they called the ‘Oedipal’ stage
of life: something properly belonging to early childhood (Freud, 1999,
pp. 201–4; Jones, 1949). Hamlet had, they suggested, an ‘Oedipus
complex’, a condition named after the Greek dramatist Sophocles’ play
Oedipus Rex, dating from the fifth century BCE, in which Oedipus
inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother. The submerged
desire to do these things, Freud thought, was an important stage in
infantile psychological development. Treating Hamlet as if he were a real
person with a psychological problem to be diagnosed, Freud and Jones
argued that his delay in killing the King was due to the King’s already
having done what Hamlet had unconsciously wanted to do himself: to
kill Old Hamlet and marry Gertrude. Jones went on to speculate with
abandon about Hamlet’s childhood and Shakespeare’s early life.
219
Themes and images: ‘new’ criticism

As the early twentieth century wore on, objections to ‘Bradleyan’
character criticism grew. The so-called new critics claimed not to be
interested in questions to do with plot and character, such as those
listed at the end of Chapter 5. Focus on such matters, they felt, ignored
much more important things: the creative mind of Shakespeare, the
detailed verbal texture of his plays, and the ‘themes’ – big, general
topics – addressed in those plays. Critics such as G. Wilson Knight and
L.C. Knights chose, therefore, to read Shakespeare’s plays as, in effect,
giant poems on a range of complex subjects. By analysing the details of
the language used in the plays, they sought to find out what those
complex topics were. Knights is eloquent in his account of what he
means by the word ‘theme’:
The Shakespearean themes that […] I want to discuss can be

indicated by such words as: time and change, appearance and
reality, the fear of death and the fear of life, the meanings of
nature, the meanings of relationship. Such abstract words of course
tell us little about the plays in their rich concreteness, and we can
only justify their use if we regard them solely as pointers. What
they point towards is an organization of experience so living and
complex that when we are engaged in it, living it to the full extent
of our powers, we have no need of token definitions. It is only
later, when we wish to give others some account of the experience
to which we have responded – or, better, the experience that we
have undergone – that we say, hesitatingly, ‘It was about some
such matters as this. Look!’
(Knights, 1966, pp. 21–2)
New critics were interested in particular in ‘imagery’ – the sensory (not

just visual) experiences conjured up in the language of the plays: the
objects and sensations mentioned, the sensuous detail of metaphors and
similes, and so on. Caroline Spurgeon, the author of an influential book
on Shakespeare’s imagery, casts her net wide: she thinks of the word
‘image’ as
connoting any and every imaginative picture or other experience,

drawn in every kind of way, which may have come to the poet, not
220
only through any of his [sic] senses, but through his mind and
emotions as well, and which he uses, in the forms of simile and
metaphor in their widest sense, for purposes of analogy.
(Spurgeon, 1935, p. 5)
There is a lot of this sort of material in Hamlet, as you will notice if

you open up the play on pretty much any page:
For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour,

Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute
(1.3.5–9)
Flowers, blood, springtime, ‘fashion’ (fickleness), the act of thrusting

‘forward’, perfume, temporariness: these few lines, in which Laertes
advises his sister not to take Hamlet’s wooing seriously, are packed with
images of a type very different from the images in Hamlet’s even
shorter speech a few lines earlier, at the end of the previous scene,
involving ‘foul play’, ‘night’ and an ‘earth’ that somehow ‘o’erwhelms’
‘foul deeds’ (1.2.253–6).
Wilson Knight’s conception of a Shakespeare play is self-consciously a
rather static one. It seems as if everything is happening all at once,
details of language and imagery calling to each other across all the other
bits of language ignored by the critic: ‘A Shakespearian tragedy is set
spatially as well as temporally in the mind. By this I mean that there are
throughout the play a set of correspondences which relate to each other
independently of the time-sequence which is the story’ (Wilson Knight,
1949, p. 3).
Critics like Knights and Wilson Knight, however, did not stop writing
about ‘character’ altogether: rather, they analysed the behaviour and
personality of the people in Shakespeare’s plays as part of a larger
verbal design. Patterns of imagery could contribute to our knowledge of
character – and, for that matter, plot – as well as highlighting more
general themes. Knights, for example, finds ‘Hamlet’s state of mind’
(something that, Knights thinks, is not to be admired) revealed ‘in its
obscure depths’ in the details of the poetry he speaks (Knights, 1966,
p. 40).
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Activity
In searching for images to illustrate themes, to explore a writer’s
imagination or reach into the subconscious of a dramatic character, we in
the twenty-first century have an advantage over the new critics:
computers. We can use digital text-searching to swiftly find occurrences
of specific words in a text. In this activity, we will use an online digital
text of the Second Quarto of Hamlet to look for examples of a theme
written extensively about in relation to the play: poison and corruption.
Go to the Internet Shakespeare Editions website (internetshakespeare.
uvic.ca) and click through to the ‘Plays & Poems’ home-page. Select
Hamlet, and on the next page that opens up select ‘Hamlet (Modern,
Quarto 2)’ from the list of possible versions. Now type the word
‘corruption’ in the ‘Search this text’ box at the top left of the screen and
click the search button. A page of search results will appear. Each result
contains a few lines of the text on either side of the word ‘corruption’.
The search term (the word you’ve searched for) is easy to find: it has a
pale blue background. Clicking on it in any result and then clicking the
return key will take you to the full text of the play. You can return to the
list of results by clicking the ‘back’ button on your browser.
Explore the context in the play of each occurrence of ‘corruption’ that you
have found, and make a note of the differences between them. Then
click your browser’s ‘back’ button to return to the list of results. Choose
another word relevant to the ‘corruption’ theme (it could be a word
appearing in one of the search results, or it could be a completely
different word) and search for it by clicking ‘Refine this search’. Bear in
mind that the website uses US spellings (for example, ‘offense’ rather
than ‘offence’). If there are no results, search for a different word in the
Second Quarto (again by clicking through to ‘Refine this search’).
Discussion
The first time the word ‘corruption’ occurs is just before the second
appearance of the Ghost. Hamlet is explaining, in lines that pre-echo the
description of his father’s murder, how a single fault such as
drunkenness can ruin a person’s reputation and bring ‘corruption’
(1.4.35). Here, ‘corruption’ is inherent in the sufferer. The other two
occurrences of the word appear in the scene in Gertrude’s ‘closet’. One
is Hamlet’s lurid evocation of her ‘In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed/
Stewed in corruption’ (3.4.90–1). In the other, Hamlet tells his mother she
has ‘rank corruption, mining all within’, and that it ‘infects unseen’
(3.4.146–147). He tells her not to use the excuse of his apparent
madness to ‘skin and film’ her ‘ulcerous place’ (3.4.145). Is the Queen’s
lust like the drunkenness Hamlet spoke about in 1.4, a ‘vicious mole of
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nature […] wherein [she is] not guilty’ (1.4.24–25)? He doesn’t seem to
think it is.
I supplemented the initial trawl by searching (rather unimaginatively) for
cognates of ‘corruption’ (words, that is, with the same root): there was no
instance of ‘corrupts’, but I did find one use of ‘corrupted’, in the speech
in which the King agonises over his own guilt. Interestingly, though, the
King doesn’t use it to refer to his ‘rank’ ‘offence’ (3.3.36) but to the sinful
terrestrial world that, unlike heaven, can wink at crime (3.3.57).
What I came up with, then, was a complicated picture: there are strong,
though not one-dimensional, links between corruption, secrecy, personal
responsibility and sexuality. Clearly, something ‘is rotten in the state of
Denmark’; maybe everything is? The emerging pattern would certainly
have got more and more complicated if I’d continued to follow the trail,
picking up repetitions of other words associated with ‘corruption’, such as
the adjective ‘rank’.
You might like, now or on a later occasion, to explore this digital text a bit
further. If you do, remember to bear in mind one very obvious point: the
absence of a particular word does not signify the absence of the concept
associated with it. There are plenty of occurrences of the concept of
corruption which don’t use the word ‘corrupts’ or ‘corrupted’. Another
thing to remember is the existence of the three versions of Hamlet. As
you will have seen, the Internet Shakespeare provides searchable
modernised texts (with US spellings) of them all – First Quarto, Second
Quarto and Folio – as well as a conflated text, referred to simply as
‘Modern, Editor’s Version’ on the search page. Interestingly, the Folio
does not include the Second Quarto’s first example of ‘corruption’ (in the
passage about drunkenness), and there are no examples of the words
‘corruption’ or ‘corrupted’ in the First Quarto.
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Post-structuralism, new historicism and

cultural materialism
Reacting against the critical approaches we have just been finding out
about, in the 1970s and 1980s a fresh generation of critics began to
approach Shakespeare in a different way. The new critics, they felt, had
taken too much on trust; they had taken too many things for granted
about how literature works in the world, such as:
. the separateness of a work of literature, as a coherent, free-standing
entity, from the rest of culture and life
. the responsibility of authors for the meanings of ‘their’ texts
. the ease with which it is possible to speak about unified ‘characters’
or general, ahistorical ‘themes’ in literature.
Assembling passages from a Shakespeare play linked to a general theme
and deriving from them some kind of coherent insight into that topic
was felt to be insufficient. A major impetus came from what became
known as literary theory, and specifically from post-structuralist or
deconstructionist criticism, influenced by the ideas about the working of
language formulated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).
For such writers, the nature of language itself means that the sort of
harmonious readings produced by new criticism are insufficiently
complex. For them, words are fundamentally unstable. They have
meaning only because of their difference from other words, and this
means that certainty in meaning is inherently elusive: words are ‘the
deferred presence of the things they mean’ (Murfin and Ray, 2009,
p. 95). For this kind of critical approach, problems such as those in our
list at the end of Chapter 5 can be celebrated as pointers to the
fundamental incoherence of language. Other critics, meanwhile,
influenced by Marxism, highlighted instead the dependence of literature
on history, with particular reference to social conditions and social
conventions, and to the inequitable distribution of power both in
Shakespeare’s day and in the modern world. They were interested less in
demonstrating the harmonious structure of plays or poems than in
exploring the relationship between those plays and poems and the
cultures in which they were produced and reproduced. This tendency in
criticism is usually discussed in terms of two ‘critical schools’: new
historicism, a movement particularly associated with American critics,
and British cultural materialism. New historicists and cultural
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Post-structuralism, new historicism and cultural materialism
materialists viewed literary works as mired in oppressive cultural

practices. Notoriously, new historicism was particularly pessimistic about
the potential for literature to ‘subvert’, to threaten or to destabilise,
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century power structures. Cultural materialist
critics, meanwhile, were a bit more upbeat: they felt that analysing
literary works in sociohistorical terms could help expose the
contradictions of oppressive societies – by bringing to the surface the
silenced voices of oppressed minorities, for example. At the same time,
feminist criticism drew attention to the ways in which literary works
challenged or supported the subordinate position of women in
Renaissance society, and to the system of artificial gender distinctions
which underpinned it.
For these critics, collecting images to illustrate a particular theme and
then attempting to make a pattern out of them – as we have just done
– would not have been enough. They would have wanted to link the
images we’ve just been looking at to historical and political topics. To
explore this distinction, we will turn now to a work of feminist
criticism, Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal
Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (Adelman, 1992),
and look at some of the key features in its approach to corruption and
disease imagery in Hamlet.
Activity
Turn to Reading 6.1 at the end of this chapter, which is an extract from
the discussion of Hamlet in Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers.
Adelman ties the details of different images to something we might call a
‘story’ about gender relations in Hamlet and in the period in which it was
written. Jot down a short summary of this ‘story’ and think about how
Adelman has gone about linking the imagery to it.
Discussion
My summary of Adelman’s ‘story’ reads as follows: along with other plays
by Shakespeare, Hamlet reflects male anxiety about female (specifically
maternal) sexuality and the failure of the male psyche to escape from its
origin in and dependence on what Adelman calls ‘the contaminated
maternal body’. Hamlet’s language attempts to purify both his mother and
his father, shifting all the blame on to the King (Claudius), but this
attempt is not fully successful, and nor is his attempt to escape into ‘an
inviolable core of selfhood that cannot be known’.
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Adelman links Hamlet’s description of the world as ‘an unweeded garden’

(1.2.135) to the idea of the biblical ‘fall’ – that is, in the Christian tradition,
the succumbing to temptation (often viewed as implicitly sexual) of the
first people, Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from the garden of Eden.
The garden’s going ‘to seed’ (1.2.136) for Adelman evokes Gertrude’s
sexuality, in stark contrast to the enclosed garden often associated with
Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary. There’s some slippage here: though
Adelman points to ‘Hamlet’s initial image of his mother’s body as fallen
garden’, this is inaccurate, for it is Adelman, not Hamlet, who images
Gertrude’s body as an ‘unweeded [and not necessarily ‘fallen’] garden’.
Hamlet does indeed refer to his mother’s remarriage immediately after
mentioning the garden, but it is in fact ‘this world’ that he compares to a
garden (1.2.134).
Figure 6.1 John Barrymore and Blanche Yurka as Hamlet and

Gertrude, 1922. Photographed by Francis Bruguière. Photo: © The New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Again corralling images and words across the play to her master
narrative, Adelman goes on to argue that in The Mousetrap (which she
refers to as ‘The Murder of Gonzago’) the murderer’s use of ‘midnight
weeds’ to make the poison (echoing the ‘unweeded garden’ of 1.2),
along with the word ‘rank’, implicitly shifts the blame for the murder of
Old Hamlet on to Gertrude: for this reason, Adelman suggests, ‘the
poison […] becomes less the distillation of a usurping fratricidal rivalry
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Post-structuralism, new historicism and cultural materialism
than the distillation of the horrific female body’. She builds in a similar
way on Hamlet’s comparison of his father to the sun-god Hyperion
(1.2.140), which she sees as an attempt by Hamlet to think of his father
as separate from sexuality. Adelman argues that Hamlet undoes this
idealisation of his father when, five scenes later and in a completely
different context – pretending to be mad while speaking to Polonius – he
advises Polonius not to let his daughter Ophelia ‘walk i’ th’ sun’
(2.2.181), linking her sexuality to the belief that by shining on the body of
a dead dog the sun could engender maggots (2.2.178).
In focusing her attention on Hamlet’s relationship with his mother,
Adelman is following a path trodden before her by Eliot, Freud and
Jones. However, Adelman’s claims about Hamlet, derived from a study of
‘object relations’ psychology, are cast at a more general level, as a claim
about the patriarchal culture within which Shakespeare (and Hamlet) was
born as much as about fictional or historical individuals. In the
introduction to her book, Adelman links the mindset she goes on to
describe to the early modern practice of wet-nursing (consigning an
infant to be breast-fed by a professional nurse rather than by his or her
mother):
Wet-nursing […] gave the child two psychic sites of intense

maternal deprivation rather than one: first, the original maternal
rejection signaled by wet-nursing itself; and then the weaning
– routinely by the application of wormwood or another bitter-
tasting substance to the nipple – and abrupt separation from
the nurse-mother he or she might have known for two or three
years.
(Adelman, 1992, p. 5)
Later on, these potentially problematic ‘actual conditions of infancy’

(Adelman, 1992, p. 5) would have intersected with what Adelman claims
was a misogynistic culture – deeply suspicious of and hostile to the
female body – to create the problematic psychology of Hamlet and
Hamlet.
Criticism such as Adelman’s, which links together imagery in a literary

work to reveal some kind of broader cultural norm or norms at work –
maybe endorsed by the text, maybe undone – is often extremely
persuasive and exciting. Sometimes it can seem to ‘solve’ problems such
227
as those in our list in Chapter 5, recalibrating them as responses to (or

stagings of) problematic aspects of early modern life and ideology.
Adelman’s interpretation of Hamlet’s psychology, for example, offers a
kind of ‘solution’ to the sixth question on the list, asking if Hamlet
loves Ophelia. How might critics using a similar method address other
items on our list? Well, the ‘problem’ of Ophelia’s death (did she
commit suicide or was her death accidental?), raised by the seventh
question, might be read in relation to the lack of independent action
allowed her throughout the play: a reflection, perhaps, of early modern
social strictures on the behaviour of young women (Dane, 1998).
Ophelia is constantly bossed around – by Polonius, by Laertes, by
Hamlet – and, arguably, is able to escape such control only by going
‘mad’ (4.5.17–73) and, perhaps, by committing suicide. In this context,
the uncertainty about Ophelia’s responsibility for her own death,
reported as it is by another person (4.7.164–81), seems apt. Another
problem, meanwhile – the uncertain status of the Ghost (see question 2
at the end of Chapter 5) – can be read as a staging of the differences
between the ‘new’ (Protestant) religion and the ‘old’ Catholic one. For
‘historicist’ critics taking this approach, whether feminist, new historicist
or cultural materialist, such ‘problems’ have a tendency to
metamorphose into symptoms of broader sociopolitical or sociocultural
problems in Shakespeare’s England pushing their way willy-nilly into his
texts (usually, the implication is, without his permission), providing
insights that reveal to us the ideological fault lines of the early modern
world.
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From The Spanish Tragedy to Hamlet

In this final section of the chapter, I want to look in a bit more detail at
one particular aspect of Hamlet’s historical context that has recently
been highlighted by a number of different critics (Fitzmaurice, 2009;
Pollnitz, 2009; Hadfield, 2008): the relation between Hamlet and the so-
called new humanism of the 1590s. Let’s start by returning to the
comparison between Hamlet and Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish
Tragedy, a play probably written at least a decade earlier than Hamlet.
The Spanish Tragedy has been linked by scholars and critics to Hamlet
for many years. Partly, this is because of a few obvious similarities: both
texts feature a ghost seeking revenge, a play-within-a-play, a mad (or, in
Hamlet’s case, apparently mad) male protagonist, and a woman who
goes mad. It has also been suggested that it was Kyd, rather than
Shakespeare, who wrote the so-called Ur-Hamlet: a play on the subject
of Hamlet which does not survive but which is known to have existed
in the 1580s, before the appearance of the earliest extant texts of
Shakespeare’s play (Shakespeare, 2006, pp. 44–7).
In Chapter 3 we encountered Linda Woodbridge’s argument that the
popularity of plays with violent revenge at their heart (like The Spanish
Tragedy and Hamlet) reflected a widespread sense of unfairness in
Elizabethan society. Figures such as Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy
take retribution on a social system that offers them no justice in acts of
vigilantism that must have acted as fantasy wish-fulfilments for at least
some of the early modern theatre audience.
It’s possible to read Hamlet in this way, but there are some important
factors which make its staging of revenge different from Kyd’s. Hamlet,
more than the earlier Spanish Tragedy, reflects a cynicism about power
politics that became an increasingly important part of Elizabethan
culture in its last, rather bleak, decade: the 1590s (a period of severe
economic depression in the country and a time of high political and
personal tension at court, of foreign wars, rebellion in Ireland and
uncertainty about who would succeed the unmarried queen). This
cynicism was linked to the increasing popularity among the intelligentsia
of the ancient Latin historian Tacitus (56–c.120 CE), an acerbic analyst
of the tyrannical rule, political corruption and murderous plotting of the
Roman emperors (Dzelzainis, 1999). Writers of this new humanism
(influenced both by Tacitus and ancient Stoicism), such as Justus
Lipsius, recognised that a degree of deception was necessary to political
229
success. There was much talk of tyranny and the way to deal with
tyrants – of the tension between the duty to obey a divinely sanctioned
ruler and the duty to remove a tyrant. One of the figures most strongly
associated with this movement in England was Robert Devereux, Earl
of Essex, whom we have already met in Chapter 2: charming but
emotionally unstable, Essex was executed in 1601, in the dog days of
Elizabeth’s reign, after what was claimed to have been an attempt to
overthrow the queen.
Hamlet reflects this world more clearly than The Spanish Tragedy. In the
latter, Hieronimo’s grievance – the murder of his son – is more
personal than political, and Hieronimo himself does not move within
the charmed circle of the King. Hamlet, by contrast, with its princely
hero, takes us much more intimately into the corrupt world of the
Tacitean court, a world vividly evoked by the historian Susan Brigden in
her introduction to Tudor England, New Worlds, Lost Worlds:
Claudius’s court at Elsinore is the kind of court that the

Renaissance thought a tyrant creates and deserves. Guarded by
mercenary Switzers, admired by counsellors and flatterers who
speak to please rather than to tell the truth, Claudius is
unconstrained in his abuse of power. The mood is of distrust,
dissimulation and fear. Spies, ‘seeing unseen’, lurk behind the arras;
poison is at hand. Friendship is false.
(Brigden, 2000, p. 366)
In both Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy, the hero mounts an

investigation to seek proof that a murder has taken place. Both
Hieronimo and Hamlet learn the identity of a loved one’s murderer and
kill that murderer at the end of the play. But there are differences.
Truth is more elusive in Elsinore. In The Spanish Tragedy the audience
sees the murder of Hieronimo’s son, Horatio, onstage, shortly before
Hieronimo himself discovers the body (‘Alas, it is Horatio, my sweet
son!’: Kyd, 2009, 2.5.14); the death of Hamlet’s father, meanwhile,
which took place before the action of the play, does not in itself seem
to have been suspicious. Hieronimo discovers the identity of Horatio’s
murderers from a letter written by Bel-Imperia, Horatio’s lover, that
suddenly appears before him, just after he has begged ‘Eyes, life, world,
heavens, hell, night, and day’ (Kyd, 2009, 3.2.22) for information about
the death so that he can take his revenge. Hamlet, on the other hand,
discovers the identity of his father’s murderer – the character identified
230
simply as the ‘King’ in our set book – at the same time that he first
hears from his father’s ghost that a murder has taken place. Both
Hieronimo and Hamlet need further proof before they can take their
revenge: Hieronimo receives this from a second letter encountered by
chance (the letter to Lorenzo that comes to light after Pedringano’s
execution); Hamlet receives it (or, rather, believes he receives it) from
the King’s guilty reaction to The Mousetrap. The overall structures of
Hieronimo’s and Hamlet’s revenges are mirror-images of one another.
Both men plan a play. Having had his son’s killers’ identities confirmed
by chance, Hieronimo devises his multilingual show as a means of
exacting his revenge and murdering those killers. Hamlet, on the other
hand, uses The Mousetrap as a means of attaining certainty about the
identity of his father’s killer. The two plays, in other words, come at
different stages in the revenge sequence. In Hamlet, the show in which
the King is murdered by Hamlet is not staged by Hamlet, but by the
King himself, and Hamlet’s murder of the King is opportunistic.
Hamlet, then, sleuth-like, spends far more time than Hieronimo does in
attempting to attain certainty about the murder that concerns him. This
difference is reflected in the difference between Hieronimo’s madness
and Hamlet’s. In The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo’s unequivocally genuine
madness erupts when he learns the details of Horatio’s fate and he is
prevented from bringing this to the attention of the King of Spain. In
Hamlet, by contrast, the Prince assumes an ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.170)
in order to help him in his investigation into the case of Old Hamlet’s
murder.
Hamlet, then, focuses far more on the investigation than Hieronimo
does – though, as it turns out, he ends up investigating not just the
King but also his own potential for committing murder (‘Am I a
coward?’, he asks, adding, ‘it cannot be/But I am pigeon-livered and
lack gall’; 2.2.506, 511–12). Meanwhile, he is in turn snooped on by
Polonius and Claudius. It’s telling that two twenty-first-century stagings
of the play (the 2000 Hollywood film starring Ethan Hawke, directed by
Michael Almereyda, and Gregory Doran’s Royal Shakespeare Company
production with David Tennant, filmed by the BBC in 2009)
prominently feature surveillance technology.
It seems apt in this world of uncertainties that, although Hamlet is
plotting to overthrow a monarch, the question of whether he or
Claudius has the best claim to the throne is unclear. Even if, as
Margreta de Grazia claims (de Grazia, 2007), everyone – including the
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original audience – knows that of course Hamlet should be king, the

important point is that nobody dares to mention this.
Figure 6.2 Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, mounted on a horse, with a
plan of Cadiz, the Azores and Ireland in the background, all areas in which
he led military expeditions. c. 1599/1600, 33 x 26 cm. Engraving by Thomas
Cockson. British Museum, London, O,7.283. © The Trustees of the British
Museum.
The circulation of images such as this is evidence of Essex’s public
popularity.
Hamlet was written close in time to Julius Caesar, and the two plays
make a fascinating comparison. Its ancient Roman setting makes it
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much easier for Julius Caesar to explore the rights and wrongs of
tyrannicide; while the setting for Hamlet (nominally, medieval Denmark)
looks more like a Renaissance court: here, such topics are more
dangerous. In Julius Caesar, the crowd plays a vital role: its political
significance is never in doubt. In Hamlet, by contrast, the role of the
crowd is only briefly alluded to. Towards the end of the play, Claudius
explains to Laertes that he has not punished Hamlet for his outrageous
behaviour because of ‘the great love’ the common people have for him
(4.7.19: an echo of the Earl of Essex’s notorious popularity with the
public, which was a problem for Elizabeth; see Hammer, 2007). There’s
a hint here of an alternative Hamlet – a play in which Hamlet storms
Elsinore at the head of an army, having called on the Danish people to
overthrow a tyrant. Hamlet is sprinkled with glimpses of this alternative
drama. Most striking, I think, are a teasing succession of references to
Julius Caesar, whose death is mentioned both at the beginning of the
play (on the battlements in 1.1.111–24, a passage not in the Folio text)
and near the end, in the graveyard scene (5.1.202–5). Polonius (whom
Hamlet of course will kill) remembers playing the part of Julius Caesar
and being ‘killed i’th’ Capitol’ by Brutus (3.2.100). One of the foreign
sources for Hamlet opens with a comparison between Hamlet (or
‘Amleth’) and the ancestor of Caesar’s murderer, Lucius Junius Brutus:
both hid their plotting under a cloak of madness. (The name of this
Brutus, the legendary founder of the Roman republic who overthrew
the last of the kings of Rome, is used by Cassius as a spur to urge on
his descendant to kill Caesar in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1.2.157–60);
see Chapter 4 above.) Hamlet’s tyrant, meanwhile – his uncle – bears the
name of a corrupt Roman emperor: Claudius (Fitzmaurice, 2009,
p. 145). But all this is to no avail, for Hamlet is no Brutus. (It is
salutary to compare the speeches of the two men in Hamlet and Julius
Caesar: there are many echoes, I think, accompanied by just as many
striking contrasts.) Andrew Fitzmaurice views the prince as ‘a man who
withdraws from the corruption of political life’ (Fitzmaurice, 2009,
p. 140), while Aysha Pollnitz sees him as ‘a university-educated scholar,
whose learning [in the older, more idealistic form of humanism]
impedes him from acting or ruling (Pollnitz, 2009, p. 137).
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Conclusion: Hamlet criticism today

This story of different ways of ‘solving’ the mysteries of Hamlet has had
to be very brief – we’ve covered many years and many critics at
lightning speed. But where does it leave us now, as we turn once again,
in the first half of the twenty-first century, to the man in black at the
edge of the court and all the other people on stage: the women and
men he loves, despises, jokes with, tricks, scandalises and kills? History
and historical contexts of all kinds remain central to the work of most
Shakespearean critics, supplemented now by heightened interest in the
‘materiality’ (the ‘thingness’) both of texts (such as the three versions of
Hamlet) and of early modern theatre practices (Karim-Cooper and
Stern, 2013; Murphy, 2007). The new historicist and cultural materialist
sense that all criticism must at all times address urgent sociopolitical
injustice has waned, as has the antipathy to the idea of authorship and
the post-structuralist distrust of language. These ideas remain alive,
however, and continue to help frame the approach of many critics
whose work does not seem to employ them directly: the theatre
historian, Tiffany Stern, for example, suggests that ‘the modern
approach’ is ‘to ask theoretically inflected questions through the lens of
historical information’ (Stern, 2012, p. 155). Meanwhile, earlier
approaches, including character criticism (in a newly theorised form,
which owes much to contemporary philosophy) and the formalist
analysis characteristic of new criticism, are enjoying something of a
revival. What does all this mean for you? I would suggest that it shows
you shouldn’t look on the narrative you’ve just read as a series of
evolutionary stages, with each new development rendering each earlier
one redundant, but rather as an anthology of possible approaches to
plunder and combine, to test out and modify. There are many mysteries
in Hamlet left to solve, and many more different ways to solve them.
Independent study
You will find suggestions for independent study (relating to both
Chapter 5 and Chapter 6) on the module website.
234
References
References
Adelman, J. (1992) Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in
Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, New York, Routledge.
Bradley, A.C. (2007) Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 4th edn, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Brigden, S. (2000) New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors
1485–1603, London, Penguin.
Dane, G. (1998) ‘Reading Ophelia’s madness’, Exemplaria, vol. 10, no.
2, pp. 405–23.
de Grazia, M. (2003) ‘When did Hamlet become modern?’, Textual
Practice, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 485–503.
de Grazia, M. (2007) Hamlet without Hamlet, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Dzelzainis, M. (1999) ‘Shakespeare and political thought’ in Kastan, D.S.
(ed.) A Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 100–16
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Jones, E. (1949) Hamlet and Oedipus, London, Gollancz.
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the Effects of Performance, London, Bloomsbury.
Knights, L.C. (1966) Some Shakespearean Themes and an Approach to
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Mermaids series, London, Methuen Drama.
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Literary Terms, Boston, MA, Bedford/St Martin’s.
Murphy, A. (2007) A Concise Introduction to Shakespeare and Text,
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Condren, C. and Fitzmaurice, A. (eds) Shakespeare and Early Modern
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Shakespeare, W. (2006) Hamlet, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor, Arden
Spurgeon, C.F.E. (1935) Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us,
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Hamlet: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical
Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical
Perspectives, ed. S.L. Wofford, Boston, MA, Bedford Books,
pp. 181–207.
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Reading 6.1 Suffocating Mothers

Source: Janet Adelman (1992) Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin
in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, New York, Routledge,
pp. 16–20, 22, 24–6, 29, 31, 34–6 (notes omitted)
[Gertrude’s] frailty unleashes for Hamlet, and for Shakespeare, fantasies
of maternal malevolence, of maternal spoiling, that are compelling
exactly as they are out of proportion to the character we know, exactly
as they seem therefore to reiterate infantile fears and desires rather than
an adult apprehension of the mother as a separate person.
These fantasies begin to emerge as soon as Hamlet is left alone on
stage […]
[W]hat Hamlet tells us in his first words to us [1.2.129–59] is that he
feels his own flesh as sullied and wishes to free himself from its
contamination by death, that the world has become as stale and
unusable to him as his own body, and that he figures all this deadness
and staleness and contamination in the image of an unweeded garden
gone to seed – figures it, that is, in the familiar language of the fall.
And he further tells us that this fall has been caused not by his father’s
death, as both Claudius and Gertrude seem to assume in their
conventional consolations, but by his mother’s remarriage, the ‘this’ he
cannot specify for fourteen lines, the ‘this’ that looms over the
soliloquy, not quite nameable and yet radically present, making his own
flesh – ‘this … flesh’ – dirty, disrupting his sense of the ongoing
possibility of life even as it disrupts his syntax. […]
He tells us that the world has been transformed into an unweeded
garden, possessed by things rank and gross, because his mother has
remarried. And if the enclosed garden – the garden unpossessed –
traditionally figures the Virgin Mother, this garden, full of seed, figures
his mother’s newly contaminated body: its rank weeds localize what
Hamlet will later call the ‘rank corruption’ of her sexuality [3.4.146–7],
the ‘weeds’ that will grow ‘ranker’ if that sexuality is not curbed
[3.4.149–50]. In this highly compacted and psychologized version of the
fall, death is the sexualized mother’s legacy to her son: maternal
sexuality turns the enclosed garden into the fallen world and brings
death into that world by making flesh loathsome. If Hamlet’s father’s
death is the first sign of mortality, his mother’s remarriage records the
desire for death in his own sullied flesh. For in the world seen under
the aegis of the unweeded garden, the very corporality of flesh marks its
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contamination: Hamlet persistently associates Claudius’s fleshiness with

his bloated sexuality – transforming the generalized ‘fatness of these
pursy times’ [3.4.151] into the image of the ‘bloat king’ tempting his
mother to bed [3.4.180] – as though in its grossness flesh was always
rank, its solidness always sullied. […]
The structure of Hamlet – and, I will argue, of the plays that follow
from Hamlet – is marked by the struggle to escape from this condition,
to free the masculine identity of both father and son from its origin in
the contaminated maternal body. […] [T]he conjunction of funeral and
marriage simultaneously expresses two sentences for the son: both ‘My
idealized father’s absence leaves me subject to my mother’s
overwhelming power,’ and ‘The discovery of my mother’s sexuality kills
my idealized father for me, making him unavailable as the basis for my
identity.’ This fantasy-conjunction thus defines the double task of
Hamlet and of Shakespeare in the plays to come: […] Shakespearean
tragedy and romance will persistently work toward the de-sexualization
of the maternal body and the recreation of a bodiless father, untouched
by her contamination. […]
The identification of Old Hamlet with Hyperion [a classical sun-god
(1.2.140)] makes him benignly and divinely distant, separate from
ordinary genital sexuality and yet immensely potent, his sexual power
analogous to God’s power to impregnate the Virgin Mother (often
imaged as Spirit descending on the sun’s rays) […] Ordinary genital
sexuality then becomes the province of Claudius the satyr: below the
human, immersed in the body, he becomes everything Hyperion/Old
Hamlet is not, and the agent of all ill.
This work of splitting is already implicit in Hamlet’s initial image of his
mother’s body as fallen garden, for that image itself makes a
physiologically impossible claim: if Claudius’s rank and gross possession
now transforms the garden that is the mother’s body, then it must not
before have been possessed. Insofar as the soliloquy expresses Hamlet’s
sense of his mother’s body as an enclosed garden newly breached, it
implies the presence of a formerly unbreached garden; the alternatives
that govern Hamlet’s imagination of his mother’s body are the familiar
ones of virgin and whore, closed or open, wholly pure or wholly
corrupt. And the insistence that the garden has just been transformed
functions to exonerate his father, separating him from his mother’s
sexualized body […], legitimizing disgust at paternal sexuality without
implicating the idealized father. But thus arbitrarily separated, these
fathers are always prone to collapse back into one another. The failure
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to differentiate between Old Hamlet and Claudius is not only

Gertrude’s: the play frequently insists on their likeness even while
positing their absolute difference […] The existence of Gertrude’s
appetite itself threatens the image of the father’s godlike control; and in
his absence, Gertrude’s appetite rages, revealing what had been its
potential for voraciousness all along. Having sated herself in a celestial
bed, she now preys on garbage [1.5.55–7]; and her indifferent
voraciousness threatens to undo the gap between then and now, virgin
and whore, Hyperion and satyr, on which Hamlet’s defensive system
depends. […]
Finally, the myth of his father as Hyperion cannot be sustained; and its
collapse returns both father and son to the contaminated maternal body.
[…] ‘Let her not walk i’ th’ sun,’ Hamlet warns Polonius; and his bitter
pun locates the father-god’s contamination in his own flesh. For this
conception relocates the son in the dead matter of the unweeded
garden: the horrific image of conception as the stirring of maggots in a
corpse makes the son himself no more than one of the maggots,
simultaneously born from and feeding on death in the maternal body.
[…]
In an astonishing transfer of agency from male to female, malevolent
power and blame for the murder tend to pass from Claudius to
Gertrude in the deep fantasy of the play. […]
And the play itself is complicit with Hamlet’s shift of agency: though
the degree of her literal guilt is never specified, in the deep fantasy of
the play her sexuality itself becomes akin to murder. The second of the
Player Queen’s protestations – ‘A second time I kill my husband dead /
When second husband kisses me in bed’ – implicitly collapses the two
husbands into one and thus makes the equation neatly: when her
husband kisses her, she kills him. But this is in fact what one strain in
the imagery has been telling us all along. As Lucianus carries the poison
onstage in ‘The Murder of Gonzago,’ he addresses it in terms that
associate it unmistakably with the weeds of that first unweeded garden:
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,

With Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property
On wholesome life usurps immediately.
[3.2.250–3]
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[…]
In Lucianus’s words, the poison that kills Old Hamlet becomes less the
distillation of a usurping fratricidal rivalry than the distillation of the
horrific female body […]
[W]ithdrawing himself from the sullying maternal body of the world,
Hamlet retreats into what he imagines as an inviolable core of selfhood
that cannot be known or played upon [1.2.85; 3.2.355–63], constructing
an absolute barrier between inner and outer as though there were no
possibility of uncontaminating communication between them […] But
there is […] no pure and unmixed identity for him; like honesty
transformed into a bawd, he must eventually see the signs of her rank
mixture in himself […]
Despite his ostensible agenda of revenge, the main psychological task
that Hamlet seems to set himself is not to avenge his father’s death but
to remake his mother: to remake her in the image of the Virgin Mother
who could guarantee his father’s purity, and his own, repairing the
boundaries of his selfhood. […]
This shift – from avenging the father to saving the mother – accounts
in part for certain peculiarities about this play as a revenge play: why,
for example, the murderer is given so little attention in the device
ostensibly designed to catch his conscience, why the confrontation of
Hamlet with Gertrude in the closet scene seems much more central,
much more vivid, than any confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius.
Once we look at ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ for what it is, rather than
for what Hamlet tells us it is, it becomes clear that the playlet is in fact
designed to catch the conscience of the queen […]
In the end, we do not know whether or not Gertrude herself has been
morally reclaimed; it is the mark of the play’s investment in Hamlet’s
fantasies that, even here, we are not allowed to see her as a separate
person. […] But as usual in this play, she remains relatively opaque,
more a screen for Hamlet’s fantasies about her than a fully developed
character in her own right: whatever individuality she might have had is
sacrificed to her status as mother. Nonetheless, though we might
wonder just what his evidence is, Hamlet at least believes that she has
returned to him as the mother he can call ‘good lady’ [3.4.178]. And
after 3.4, her remaining actions are ambiguous enough to nourish his
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fantasy: though there are no obvious signs of separation from Claudius

in her exchanges with him, in her last moments she seems to become a
wonderfully homey presence for her son, newly available to him as the
loving and protective mother of childhood, worrying about his
condition, wiping his face as he fights, even perhaps intentionally
drinking the poison intended for him.
In the end, whatever her motivation, he seems securely possessed of
her as an internal good mother; and this possession gives him a new
calm about his place in the world and especially about death, that
domain of maternal dread. Trusting her, he can begin to trust in himself
and in his own capacity for action; and he can begin to rebuild the
masculine identity spoiled by her contamination. For his secure internal
possession of her idealized image permits the return of his father to
him, and in the form that he had always wanted: turning his mother
away from Claudius, Hamlet wins her not only for himself but also for
his father – for his father conceived as Hyperion, the bodiless god-like
figure he had invoked at the beginning of the play. If her sexuality had
spoiled this father, her purification brings him back […] But though we
may feel that Hamlet has achieved a new calm and self-possession, the
price is high: for the parents lost to him at the beginning of the play
can be restored only insofar as they are entirely separated from their
sexual bodies. This is a pyrrhic solution to the problems of
embodiedness and familial identity; it does not bode well for
Shakespeare’s representation of sexual union, or of the children born of
that union.
In creating for Hamlet a plot in which his mother’s sexuality is literally
the sign of her betrayal and of her husband’s death, Shakespeare
recapitulates the material of infantile fantasy, playing it out with a
compelling plot logic that allows its expression in a perfectly
rationalized, hence justified, way. Given Hamlet’s world, anyone would
feel as Hamlet does – but Shakespeare has given him this world. And
the world Shakespeare gives him sets the stage for the plays that follow:
from Hamlet on, all sexual relationships will be tinged by the threat of
the mother, all masculine identity problematically formed in relationship
to her. […]
Despite Shakespeare’s sometimes astonishing moments of sympathetic
engagement with his female characters, his ability to see the world from
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their point of view, his women will tend to be like Gertrude, more
significant as screens for male fantasy than as independent characters
making their own claim to dramatic reality […] But the problematic
maternal body can never quite be occluded or transformed: made into a
monster or a saint, killed off or banished from the stage, it remains at
the center of masculine subjectivity, marking its unstable origin. For the
contaminated flesh of the maternal body is also home: the home
Shakespeare’s protagonists long to return to, the home they can never
quite escape.
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Chapter 7 The Renaissance
epic: Spenser, The Faerie
Queene
Richard Danson Brown
Contents
Aims 247
Introduction 249
Redcrosse and Despair 253
Context: religion 259
Context: epic 263
Context: the Spenserian stanza 267
The Bower of Bliss 270
Conclusion 278
References 279
Reading 7.1 ‘Diseased sexuality in the Bower of
Bliss’ 283
Reading 7.2 ‘Poetry and repression in the Bower of
Bliss’ 286
Aims
Aims
This chapter will:
. introduce you to Edmund Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene, through
two key episodes from the poem
. give you the ability to read Spenser’s language and style with
confidence
. allow you to gain an understanding of some of the poem’s major
contexts
. give you a sense of the ongoing critical arguments over The Faerie
Queene.
247
Chapter 7 The Renaissance epic: Spenser, The Faerie Queene

You will need to read the poetry associated with this chapter, which you
will find at the back of this book.
You may wish to listen to the audio recordings of the poetry, which you
will find on the module website.
. Early English Books Online (EEBO) (available via the OU Library)
. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (available via the OU Library
website)
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Introduction
Introduction
The Faerie Queene is a huge epic poem. It has 33,876 lines in six
complete books; for comparison, the text of Hamlet on the Open
Source Shakespeare website has 4072 lines. As David Scott Wilson-
Okamura observes, The Faerie Queene is ‘a monster, more than twice as
long as [Dante’s] Divine Comedy’ (Wilson-Okamura, 2013, p. 132). It
was published in two editions in Spenser’s lifetime, in 1590 (Books I–
III) and 1596 (which added Books IV–VI as well as reprinting the first
instalment). A final posthumous edition in 1609 added two fragmentary
cantos, probably from an unfinished seventh book. (Spenser calls the
smaller units in his books ‘cantos’, the Italian word for ‘songs’, in
imitation of the practice of Italian poets like Dante, Ariosto and Tasso.)
The ‘exceeding spacious and wyde’ poem was never completed
(Hamilton et al., 2007, p. 601). The ‘Letter to Sir Walter Ralegh’
(appended to the 1590 edition) anticipates either a twelve- or even a
twenty-four-book complete poem; that is, a text of perhaps 135,000
lines (Wilson-Okamura, 2013, p. 132). You will be perhaps relieved both
that you will read only 1080 lines this week, and that Spenser died
before he could finish his gigantic poem.
Editions of The Faerie Queene

Throughout this chapter I quote from the single-volume editions of
The Faerie Queene published by Hackett (Spenser (2006a) (ed.
Kaske); Spenser (2006b) (ed. Gray)). These volumes are excellent
places to start, with good explanatory notes and some light
modernising of the text: as you can see in Figure 7.1, Spenser
typically used Latinate forms like ‘vnfitter’ rather than ‘unfitter’; the
Hackett volumes prefer the modernised forms, which we have used
in our extracts too. At the same time, A.C. Hamilton’s (2007) edition
remains the best single-volume Faerie Queene available, with
comprehensive notes.
Size alone proves nothing, but the scale of The Faerie Queene tells us
much both about Spenser’s ambitions as a poet (this is someone who
wanted to be taken seriously), and about the ambitiousness of his poem
(this is a text which aims for magnificence). It was dedicated to
Elizabeth I, and Spenser has as a result been seen as a lackey to
249
Figure 7.1 ‘Dedication to Elizabeth’ and opening of the original 1590 edition of Spenser’s Faerie
Queene, London, John Wolfe. Huntington Library, call no.56741. This item is reproduced by permission
of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
powerful leaders; for Karl Marx, he was simply ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing

poet’ (Hadfield, 2012, p. 402). As more recent scholars have pointed
out, The Faerie Queene’s attitude to Elizabeth and her government is
frequently critical and even satirical; this is relevant to the Bower of
Bliss episode you will read later. Spenser was a crown servant and
colonist in Ireland, so his poetry is always partly concerned with issues
of power and government. Yet the episodes you will study oscillate
between public issues and what might be characterised as more inward,
psychological problems. The Spenser I’m going to try to reveal is both
the epic poet of Elizabethan England, and a poet of inner turmoil and
uncertainty. (For Spenser’s biography, see the entry by Andrew Hadfield
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008), which you can access
via the OU Library.)
250
Introduction
Activity
Look again at the dedication and opening stanza in Figure 7.1. What do
these different texts tell us about the sort of poem Spenser was writing?
Don’t worry too much at this stage about Spenser’s strange spellings;
this is discussed below.
Discussion
The dedication suggests that The Faerie Queene is very much a public
poem – a text concerned with some of the big abstract nouns listed on
the page: ‘GOD’, ‘QVEENE’, ‘ENGLAND’, ‘IRELAND’, ‘FAITH’. Spenser
dedicates his poem to Elizabeth as an imperial monarch whose power is
divinely sanctioned. You might reasonably think that Marx was right: as
Elizabeth’s ‘humble/Seruant’, Spenser sounds wholly in thrall to his
‘MAGNIFICENT EMPRESSE’. The opening stanza suggests a slightly
different perspective. The focus here is on genre, as Spenser promises
to exchange ‘lowly Shephards weeds’ for the ‘trumpets sterne’ of a
different sort of poetry – one concerned with ‘Fierce warres and faithfull
loues’, which the poet promises to ‘moralize’. I return to this point later,
but what Spenser means is that his poem will provide some sort of moral
guidance to its readers. Rather than addressing Elizabeth, he writes
about his career and ambitions as a poet, charting his progress from the
pastoral of his first collection The Shepheardes Calender (1579) to the
epic we are reading. I would say these pages tell us, first, that The
Faerie Queene is associated with an ideal of Elizabeth and, second, that
this will be a poem on a grandiose scale, concerned with exciting events
and with a moral design.
Poetic modesty
The opening stanza of The Faerie Queene includes an example of
a modesty topos, where a poet pretends to humility (‘Me, all too
meane’), but is in fact advertising his or her cleverness and literary
accomplishments precisely by denying that s/he has these qualities;
see Curtius, 1990 [1955], pp. 83–5. You might compare this with
‘humble/Seruant’: was Spenser really ‘humble’?
251
Figure 7.2 George Gower (attributed), Elizabeth I, The Armada Portrait,

c.1588. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire. Photo: © akg-images. This portrait
shows a dominant Elizabeth after the destruction of the Spanish Armada,
depicted in the right-hand side of the painting.
252
Redcrosse and Despair

We begin with an adventure story. Imagine that you’re a knight on a
quest – a long and arduous mission to liberate a kingdom which is
oppressed by a terrifying dragon. So far, you’ve achieved nothing.
You’ve abandoned the princess who put her faith in you. You’ve been
misled by a different woman – one who looks stunningly beautiful, but
isn’t quite what she seems. You’ve been half-killed by an angry giant
who tossed you into a dungeon from which you thought you’d never
escape. Just at the point when you’d almost given up all hope, you are
miraculously rescued by another knight, who kills the giant and exposes
your companion for what she really is: a horrible and deformed witch,
hell-bent on your destruction. But now you’ve turned a corner: you’re
back with the original princess. After being half-starved to death, you’re
properly fed and ready to return to your mission. It’s at this point that
you meet another knight. This is a man who is literally scared out of his
wits. His hair stands on end, he seems to be riding backwards with his
eye fixed on the track behind him. Most horribly, he has a noose
around his neck, as though he’s about to hang himself. He’s in an even
worse condition than you were in the dungeon.
This is a compressed version of the story in The Faerie Queene Book I
up to the point when the hero, the Redcrosse Knight, meets the
terrified knight, Trevisan. In a moment, you will read what happens
next in Spenser’s words (I.ix.21–54). Reading Spenser for the first time
is an unusual experience. His choice of words (diction) seems to rely on
archaic and unfamiliar terms. In the first stanza you’ll read, there’s ‘lo’
(‘oh look there!’), ‘gan’ (‘began’), ‘Als’ (‘also’), and ‘brast’ (‘burst’).
Writing about The Shepheardes Calender, Sir Philip Sidney frostily noted
that ‘That same framing of his style to an old rustic language I dare not
allow’ (Sidney, 1973, p. 112). In fact Spenser was following the practice
of Virgil and continental literary theory (Wilson-Okamura, 2013,
pp. 58–62). Spenser dedicated the Calender to Sidney, so this rebuke
shows the delicate relationships which existed between the middle-
ranking author and his aristocratic patron. In fact, though Spenser
sounds ‘oldy worldy’, his diction was cutting edge and controversial. As
Lucy Munro comments, Spenser’s usage was an avant-garde gesture
which singled his poem out as experimental and new; it ‘offers an
object lesson in the ways in which the modern epic in the 1590s might
incorporate archaic style, and it was to set a potent standard for later
writers’ (Munro, 2013, p. 207). Linguists have shown that in its totality
253
Spenser’s diction is significantly less archaic than it seems on a first

reading (Zurcher, 2007, p. 8; Görlach, 1991, p. 140). The examples I
gave earlier are rhetorical distortions of word forms, a stylistic device
known as metaplasm, usually employed for technical reasons: here ‘Als’
fits the metre, and ‘brast’ completes the rhyme scheme. The effect is
certainly disorientating, but this is a deliberate effect, a texture which
Spenser wanted to give to his poetry.
Spenser’s idiosyncratic poetic language responds well to the ideas of the
twentieth century Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, who
characterised poetic language as a barrier created by the writer
deliberately to ‘impede’ and slow the reader down. For Shklovksy, the
poetic text ‘is “artificially” created by an artist in such a way that the
perceiver, pausing in his reading, dwells on the text’ (Shklovsky, 1990
[1929], p. 12). Another way of putting this would be to say that by
making his text look strange, Spenser forces his readers to work hard to
make sense of it. As Wilson-Okamura puts it in relation to the writers
Spenser was emulating, ‘The goal […] is strangeness, and through
strangeness, majesty and wonder’ (Wilson-Okamura, 2013, p. 35). While
these conventions become less obtrusive the more you read, this doesn’t
address why Spenser almost alone of Renaissance writers is reprinted in
original-spelling editions. The short answer is that Spenserians have
been successful in arguing that Spenser is a special case. Yet as Andrew
Zurcher observes, the success of this manoeuvre has made studying
Spenser an elite and implicitly elitist preoccupation: ‘Subtle academic
readers congratulate themselves not only on their initiated capacity for
understanding this spelling and this language, but on their determination
to secure and protect it’ (Zurcher, 2007, p. 7). It’s worth saying that
though I think there is value in retaining Spenser’s spelling, I don’t
believe his work should be the property of ‘subtle academics’ only.
What then is that value? It’s partly connected with that sense of
oddness mentioned above: Spenser’s ‘brast’ isn’t quite the same word as
‘burst’; as we’ve seen, this brasting of orthodox usage draws attention to
the search for rhyme words. As Zurcher notes, this is of course special
pleading, yet it is one to which most Spenserians – Zurcher included –
ultimately subscribe.
The Faerie Queene is symbolic – to use Spenser’s vocabulary, allegorical
rather than realistic. You might see this as the Elizabethan equivalent of
fantasy literature, but perhaps the easiest starting point is to say that
little in allegory is precisely what it seems to be. Objects and characters
symbolise something; Spenser gives us hints about what he means
254
through things like names. The witch who deceives Redcrosse is called
Duessa, meaning double-being, or two-faced, while the good princess is
called Una, meaning one, because truth is a single thing (Brooks-Davies,
1997, pp. 704–5). Spenser can be challenging, but you shouldn’t let this
put you off. His sentence construction is typically more straightforward
than that of Shakespeare or John Donne. His poetry is certainly
intellectual but, as you will see, it turns on key moral and political
questions about how we live.
‘Darke conceit’
In the ‘Letter to Ralegh’, Spenser describes The Faerie Queene as
‘a continued Allegory, or darke conceit’, recognising ‘how doubtfully
all Allegories may be construed’; that is, how hard it is to interpret
such poems (see Hamilton, 2007, p. 714 and Chapter 1 in this
book).
Activity
Turn to the poetry section at the back of the book, where you will find an
extract from Book I, Canto ix. I’d like you to read through the Cave of
Despair episode (stanzas 21–54) and then address the following:
1 Try to summarise in a single sentence what you think the symbolic
content of this episode is. Don’t tell the story – concentrate on the
opposition between Redcrosse and Despair in stanzas 37–52.
2 Choose a line which you think epitomises Spenser’s style. What
particular features do you note about his use of language?
(Note: on the module website, you’ll find a recording which I made of this
episode. You may find it helpful to listen to this as you read the text.)
Discussion
1 I would say that the argument between Redcrosse and Despair
embodies a conflict between different attitudes to salvation: Despair
argues that the longer you live, the greater amount of sin you will
commit, so you should kill yourself immediately (stanza 43);
Redcrosse opposes to this the idea that ‘The terme of life is limited’
by God, not the individual (stanza 41). There is much more that might
be said here, but that’s the key symbolic encounter: between a
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Figure 7.3 Benjamin West, The Cave of Despair, 1772, oil on canvas, 61cm
x 76cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Photo: ©
Bridgeman Images. West’s painting shows Redcrosse taking ‘a dagger
sharpe and keene’ just before Una intervenes (Book I, Canto ix, stanza 51).
creepily persuasive voice which advocates suicide, and one which

rather weakly defends the intrinsic value of life.
2 This is a very open question – you may have chosen any line from
this passage. I’ve chosen a line of description and a line of dialogue
to give some sense of the variety in Spenser’s style. The first is the
description of Despair’s cave: ‘Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy
grave’ (stanza 33). This gives a flavour of the grim issues which
Redcrosse encounters in the subsequent conversation: Despair’s
milieu is as moribund and corrupting as the words he speaks. I like
this line particularly because of its aggressive use of alliteration and
assonance: it begins with strongly marked ‘d’s’ (‘Darke, dolefull,
dreary’) which resolve into even stronger repetitions of the ‘gr’ prefix
in ‘greedy grave’, while the vowel sounds of ‘dreary’ assonate with
those of ‘greedy’. Alliteration and assonance – the repetition,
respectively, of the same consonant and vowel sounds – are among
the most basic poetic effects, and it’s often hard to say anything more
illuminating about them than to note their appearance; C.S. Lewis
attacked Spenser for ‘excessive alliteration’ (Lewis, 1967 [1936],
256
p. 319). In this case, Spenser expects his readers to feel the horror of
the environment we are entering in the way he describes it. Death
and decay hover through these repeated sounds. He is laying it on
thick, while enticing us to read on. What’s the secret behind this
ghastly place?
My second line is Una’s clarion call of rescue: ‘“Come, come away,
fraile, feeble, fleshly wight”’ (stanza 53). This also shows heavy use
of repetition (‘Come, come’) and alliteration (‘fraile, feeble, fleshly’).
Like the previous line, it’s direct and coercive inasmuch as Una is
desperately persuading Redcrosse not to kill himself; as she explains,
‘In heavenly mercies hast thou not a part?’. I chose this line because
it shows the way Spenser’s characters talk. There is nothing realistic
about Una’s speech – you wouldn’t say to someone contemplating
suicide, ‘Come, come away, fraile, feeble, fleshly wight’, and neither
would Spenser’s contemporaries. Rather, this is a moving line of
poetry which is aimed at the reader as much as Redcrosse. Una is
reminding us as we read that we are ‘fraile, feeble, fleshly’ creatures,
and that we – like Redcrosse – should not give in to Despair. The
poem’s narrative, according to Paul Alpers, is always a ‘rhetorical
mode’ – it’s an address from the poet to the reader rather than a
realistically imagined fictional world we might expect from a modern
novel (Alpers, 1982 [1967], pp. 3–35).
Wight
‘Wight’ is one of Spenser’s favourite words; it means a creature or a
human being (see OED online (n.d.), definition for ‘wight’, n.). He
uses it and related terms over 200 times in The Faerie Queene,
including 93 times as a rhyme word; see Brown and Lethbridge,
2013, p. 422. The association of the word with Spenser is shown in
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, which describes a Spenserian
‘chronicle of wasted time’ which contains descriptions of ‘the fairest
wights’ (Shakespeare, 2002, pp. 592–3). Shakespeare uses the
word only eight times; you can use www.opensourceshakespeare.
org to search for these.
257
Both lines I chose in the activity illustrate the metrical flexibility Spenser
can get out of the ostensibly fixed form of the ten-syllable iambic
pentameter line. It’s possible to scan both of these lines as orthodox
fulfilments of the iambic model, and Spenser will often provide lines
which are textbook examples of metrical regularity. (Here, ‘x’ marks an
unstressed syllable and ‘/’ a stressed one.)
x / x / x / x / x /
Where justice growes, there growes eke greter grace, (53)
(stanza 53)
These lines are different. In each case, the repetitions and alliterations
suggest that syllables which usually wouldn’t be stressed take an
emphasis; this is what happens with ‘Darke’ and ‘Come’ at the
beginning of each line. Similarly, ‘fraile, feeble’ produces an effect of
what George T. Wright calls ‘syllabic ambiguity’: ‘fraile’ is in the
position of an unstressed syllable, but the extreme stress (in both senses
of the word) under which Una speaks promotes ‘fraile’ from its habitual
position to something more active (Wright, 1988, p. 149). Spenser uses
the ten-syllable line to emphasise key terms, and to vary the sound of
his verse, while showing in the poem as a whole a ‘massive commitment
to iambic movement’ (Dolven, 2010, p. 389).
258
Context: religion
Context: religion
The last activity should have given you a preliminary sense of what
Spenser was writing about, and how he did this. I’m now to going place
this work in some of its broader ideological and literary contexts.
As the discussion implied, the Cave of Despair is – like Book I as a
whole – centrally concerned with questions of salvation and religious
ideology. The ‘Letter to Ralegh’ explains that each book of the poem
deals with a particular virtue; Book I addresses ‘Holinesse’ (Kaske,
2006, p. 3). This book can be seen as the epic of Elizabethan
Protestantism. Spenser uses the medieval legend of St George to outline
a renewed model of Christian identity reshaped by Protestant doctrine.
In the next canto we find out that Redcrosse is himself ‘Saint George of
mery England’ (I.x.61: Kaske, 2006, p. 171); the narrative of
Redcrosse’s flawed attempts to fulfil his mission turns out to be the
familiar story of the knight who rescues the damsel in distress from the
fire-breathing dragon.
Original sin
The Protestant understanding of original sin is summarised in the
Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1562), which formed part of the
Book of Common Prayer, a manual of religious devotion and dogma
which would have been familiar to all Elizabethans. Article 9 ‘Of
original or birth-sin’ articulates a Calvinist understanding of sin as a
basic fact of human experience which can be made good only
through divine grace: ‘Original sin […] is the fault and corruption of
the nature of every man […] in every person born into this world, it
deserveth God’s wrath and damnation’ (Articles, pp. 7–8,
modernised).
For the religious and political background to the Reformation in

England, you should consult the Introduction to this book. It is a
complicated story, but the key thing to bear in mind is that after
Elizabeth’s succession in 1558, the Protestant Church of England was
highly influenced by the thought of the French theologian Jean Calvin
(1509–1564); Spenser’s works in different ways continuously bear
witness to this revolution in ideas and devotional practice. According to
John N. King, The Faerie Queene Book I ‘considers the shifting phases
259
Figure 7.4 Paolo Uccello, St George and the Dragon, c.1470, oil on canvas,
59cm x 76cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: © Bridgeman Images.
Though Spenser would not have known this particular painting, he would
have been familiar with some of the conventions of Renaissance art and
mythological painting; see Hadfield, 2012, pp. 90–1, and Preston, 2010,
pp. 685–90.
of the English Reformation and questions concerning individual

salvation’ (King, 2001, p. 209). This is evident in the dialogue with
Despair as Redcrosse struggles to defend himself against Despair’s
assault on the bases of his thinking. When Redcrosse makes the
conventional argument, that the individual may neither ‘prolong, nor
shorten’ life (stanza 41), Despair counters with a sampler of biblical and
classical ideas to undermine Redcrosse’s confidence in his salvation (see
the footnotes which accompany the passage from Book I, Canto ix in
the poetry section at the back of this book). Spenser’s poetic point is
that Despair – ‘A man of hell’ (stanza 28) – is particularly difficult to
withstand. This is partly to do with his seductive logic, ably supported
by Spenser’s supple, incantatory rhythms (‘Sleepe after toyle, port after
stormie seas,/Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please’;
stanza 40), and partly to do with the seemingly unanswerable quality of
Despair’s arguments. Elizabethans did tend to believe that ‘The lenger
life […] the greater sin,/The greater sin, the greater punishment’ (stanza
43), because of the renewed emphasis Protestantism placed on the
260
Context: religion
doctrine of original sin (see text box). The sin of despair was one which
Protestants thought was particularly grave, because it was a despairing
of God’s mercy. At the same time, Protestant theology was almost
guaranteed to produce such emotions, because of its stress on God’s
righteous anger against human corruption. There is evidence that
because of religious despair, ‘the problem of suicide was reaching
epidemic levels’ at this period (Stachniewski, 1991, p. 46). What was the
way out of this psychological dilemma? Spenser’s text takes us back to
the Bible. Una reminds Redcrosse in stanza 53 that he has ‘a part’ in
‘heavenly mercies’ on the basis of the promises of the New Testament.
As Carol Kaske notes, Una’s line recalls the Calvinist emphasis on
predestination, the idea that the individual – in this case Redcrosse –
‘is chosen or predestinated for heaven’ (Kaske, 2006, p. 151, and
below).
At one level, then, Protestant ideas are crucial to The Faerie Queene. Yet
as recent research has emphasised, though Spenser’s works show a deep
familiarity with contemporary debates, his own faith position is difficult
to pin down, and is now seen as more ambiguous than it was 30 years
ago. (See Hadfield, 2012, pp. 47 and 116–18, for the view that Spenser’s
religious sympathies were more complex than is usually thought, and
Hume, 1984 for the older view that he was the ‘Protestant poet’ of
militant Anglicanism.) As King observes in relation to critical
commentary, ‘the puzzling religious allegories in The Faerie Queene have
elicited a wide range of conflicting interpretations’ (King, 2001, p. 208).
This points to an issue which has circulated throughout the texts
discussed in Book 1 of this module: to what extent are these works
time-bound, and to what extent can they speak to concerns beyond
their ideological contexts? The Cave of Despair is an interesting text in
such debates. Though it is marked by the imprint of the English
Reformation, it is not only of relevance to the student of Reformation
theology. This is connected with the poetic forms of the text and the
‘conflicting interpretations’ it has generated (King, 2001, p. 208). The
Faerie Queene is not an unambiguous enactment of a single ideology. It
is rather a complex and shifting text, whose uncertainty enacts the
uncertainties it discusses. What I would say is moving about the Cave of
Despair is that it shows how easy it is to slip into depressive trains of
thought, to believe you are worth nothing and that life is valueless. In a
modern context, Despair is an inward voice – a nightmare fantasy
through which the individual faces his or her darkest fears. It’s perhaps
this quality of self-questioning in Redcrosse’s encounter with Despair
which anticipates the anguished debate about the ethics of ‘self
261
slaughter’ in Hamlet (1.2.132). In his role as ‘fraile, feeble, fleshly wight’,

Redcrosse is more than just a symbol of English Protestantism. In this
episode, he is a flawed Everyman; not a rounded character so much as
a symbol of the psychological frailties we are all prone to. This
observation leads to the broader context of epic and the notion of the
epic hero.
262
Context: epic
Context: epic
According to Sidney, epic was the noblest of poetic genres. In the
Defence of Poesy (written in about 1583 but not published until 1595),
where he calls it ‘the heroical’, it forms the central plank of his defence
of the educational and moral value of poetry:
Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that

wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?
[…] the heroical […] is […] the best and most accomplished kind
of poetry. For as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth
the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the
mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to
be worthy.
(Sidney, 1973, pp. 92, 98)
Like his theory of comedy (see Chapter 1), Sidney’s view of epic is
didactic; his chief examples of the moral force of poetry come from
Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid. The first sentence in the quotation above
insists on the imitative work performed by epic. You read in Aeneid
Book II the story of Aeneas rescuing his father Anchises from the sack
of Troy by carrying him from the burning city, and you want to be
Aeneas: you want to be the superhero who performs ‘so excellent an
act’. What’s useful about this is that Sidney clearly articulates the literal
and metaphorical burdens epic places on its heroes: they have to live up
to their billing; they have to achieve on a grand scale. Aeneas was the
legendary founding father of Rome, and his particular burden isn’t just
Anchises but the patriotic task of taking the remnants of the defeated
Trojans to Italy to start what would become the Roman empire.
Unsurprisingly, Spenser says roughly the same in the ‘Letter to Ralegh’,
citing the same or similar texts in support of his position:
I have followed all the antique Poets historicall, first Homere, who in
the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good
governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his
Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was to doe in the person of
Aeneas.
(Kaske, 2006, p. 205)
263
The epic poems of the past give, in the persons of the heroes,
exemplars (‘ensample[s]’) of ‘vertuous’ men. This inevitably leads to the
question of the extent to which Spenser’s heroes live up to those of
Homer and Virgil, as well as how much The Faerie Queene resembles
these earlier epics. You might compare this model of the epic hero with
the received definition of the tragic hero: heroes in epic don’t invariably
die, and they are not necessarily flawed as the Aristotelian definition of
tragedy suggests (Aristotle, 1932, p. 47; see also Reiss, 1993,
pp. 1298–9; this was not an idea central, either, to Renaissance tragic
drama). Yet in the cases of figures like Aeneas and Redcrosse, they do
have a sense of being burdened by expectation: to achieve certain great
acts (founding cities, killing dragons) and – critically – not to be
diverted along the way.
I’m not going to discuss the heroism of Spenser’s heroes now, because
this forms the heart of the next activity, where you will read the Bower
of Bliss episode. The point I want to stress is that there is a discrepancy
between Elizabethan theory and practice. Elizabethan theories of
literature are almost always rooted in didactic notions of the salutary
effect of reading (see Chapter 1, section on ‘Genre: comedy’); Spenser
suggested that The Faerie Queene would ‘fashion a gentleman or noble
person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (Kaske, 2006, p. 205). These are
large claims, and partly respond to the contemporary perception that
literature was scandalous, satirical, pornographic or, quite simply, a bad
influence. This view underlies the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ban in
1599 on satire (see text box), which among others singled out works by
Spenser’s great friend Gabriel Harvey (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 15).
Epic, though, as Sidney repeatedly stresses, was different: it was the
most prestigious literary form, and therefore had to be the most
educational. Yet the evidence of The Faerie Queene is problematic: it
doesn’t teach in a black-and-white fashion, and it’s hard to take
unambiguous lessons in virtue from a text which is so vast and often so
contradictory (see Grogan, 2009). These contradictions are visible in the
actions of Spenser’s heroes.
The Bishops’ Ban

The Bishops’ Ban of 1599 prohibited a range of books, chiefly of a
satirical nature. It was particularly harsh on Gabriel Harvey and his
opponent, Thomas Nashe, who had been engaged in a pamphlet
war for most of the 1590s, declaring ‘that none of their books be
264
Context: epic
Figure 7.5 English school, The John Whitgift Portrait, 1602, oil on canvas,
56cm x 43cm. Lambeth Palace. By permission of the Archbishop of
Canterbury and the Church Commissioners.
ever printed hereafter’. The text of the ban doesn’t fully explain why
John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft,
Bishop of London, issued it, but they were clearly concerned by the
fashion for satires and epigrams and books with sexual content,
including one by the Italian epic poet Torquato Tasso (1544–95).
The general drift of the ban was towards a greater role for the state
in the licensing of literature: ‘That no plays be printed except they
265
be allowed by such as have authority’ (Hall, 1969 [1949], pp. 293–4;

modernised).
The question of how much The Faerie Queene resembles poems like the
Aeneid is also difficult to answer unequivocally. The opening stanza we
looked at earlier translates the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid as they
would have appeared in sixteenth-century editions (Wilson-Okamura,
2010, pp. 85–7). Though these lines have been rejected by later scholars
as spurious, by copying them Spenser aligns his poetic career with
Virgil’s.
266
Context: the Spenserian stanza

The problem is that in many respects The Faerie Queene is nothing like
the Aeneid. Where Virgil’s poem is relatively short, Spenser’s is vast.
Where Virgil concentrates on the adventures of one hero, Spenser has a
new hero for each book. This bears particularly on the forms of the
poems: where Virgil’s is written in continuous unrhymed verse in the
same metre as Homer, Spenser uses rhyming stanzas (Wilson-Okamura,
2013, pp. 41–9). How then does Spenser’s stanza work? It is a poetic
unit specially designed for his epic. While it is similar to both the Italian
form ottava rima (rhyming abababcc) and the Chaucerian rhyme royal
(rhyming ababbcc), the Spenserian stanza is significantly more intricate
and, in practice, harder to write than these. Its rhyme scheme is
ababbcbcc, with the added complication that the final line of each stanza
is an alexandrine, a twelve-syllable iambic line with six major stresses.
The following stanza comes from the next passage you will read, the
Bower of Bliss. It is the second of two stanzas which paraphrase a
passage from Tasso’s epic, Gerusalemm e Liberata (first published in
Italian in 1580–81 and translated into English in 1600 by Edward
Fairfax as Godfrey of Bulloigne; see Fairfax, 1981). This shows Spenser at
his most European: translating a sexy passage of Tasso, which in turn
derives from an ancient poetic riff known as the carpe diem motif.
I’ve marked the rhyme scheme to show you the way in which Spenser
sequences his rhymes:
‘So passeth, in the passing of a day, a

Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre, b
Ne more doth florish after first decay, a
That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre, b
Of many a Lady’, and many a Paramowre: b
Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, c
For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre: b
Gather the Rose of love, whilest yet is time, c
Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime.’ c
(II.xii.75: Gray, 2006, p. 220)
267
Compare this with Fairfax’s later translation of Tasso. What you’re

reading here is an Elizabethan version of Tasso which has already been
‘Spenserianised’ by virtue of the fact that Fairfax’s version follows The
Faerie Queene; at the same time, it exemplifies the structure of ottava
rima:
So, in the passing of a day, doth pass a

The bud and blossom of the life of man, b
Nor ere doth flourish more, but like the grass a
Cut down, becometh withered, pale and wan: b
O gather then the rose while time thou has, a
Short is the day, done when it scant began b
Gather the rose of love, while yet thou mast c
Loving, be lov’d; embracing, be embrast. c
(Fairfax, 1981, pp. 451–2; partly modernised)
Sweet words
Spenser does love words for the sound they make and because he
likes to repeat things; his work is a great challenge to the truism
that ‘poetry is largely the art of saying things once and only once’
(Paterson, 2010, p. 490). See stanza 71 in the Bower of Bliss:
Th’Angelicall soft trembling voyces made

To th’instruments divine respondence meet:
The silver sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmure of the waters fall.
A crude paraphrase might be: ‘the voices echoed the instruments

and they in turn blended with the sound of the waters’.
Ottava rima has three sets of interlaced rhymes, concluding with a

rhyming couplet; in the example above, Fairfax has a clear break
between lines 4 and 5 – the stanza reads as two sentences, in which the
first four lines tell us that human life is transitory, and the second four
268
lines urge that we should therefore gather the rose while we have the
chance. Spenser’s structure is similar, yet more elaborate. His first five
lines form a complete semantic unit, while the last four lines again state
the case for gathering the rose ‘whilest yet is time’. At one level, the
two stanzas are remarkably similar in terms of vocabulary and
perspective. But the added poetic ingenuity of the Spenserian is more
than simply another example of Spenser’s love of languorous verbosity.
Note the way that the Spenserian has two couplet climaxes: at lines 4
and 5 and at lines 8 and 9. The b-rhyme binds the first four lines with
the second half of the stanza; it’s the necessity of finding these four
rhymes which makes the Spenserian so difficult to write. William
Empson long ago noted the significance of the b-rhyme; his
appreciative commentary makes the crucial point that this is a poetic
unit which maximises flexibility: ‘Ababbcbcc is a unit which may be
broken up into a variety of metrical forms, and the ways in which it is
successively broken up are fitted into enormous patterns’ (Empson,
1984 [1930], p. 33). In this case, the first couplet, ‘That earst was
sought to deck both bed and bowre,/Of many a Lady’, and many a
Paramowre’, is more than just poetic padding, since the words Spenser
chooses imply moral evaluations – a ‘paramour’ is a love object or
sexual partner (OED (n.d.) online, definition for ‘paramour’, n., 2a).
This anticipates the more pointed language of the final rhyme: to be
loved ‘with equall crime’ (emphasis added) implies that the activities
within the Bower are morally dubious in a way that neither Fairfax’s
version nor Tasso’s original suggest (see Hamilton et al., 2007, p. 283).
The Spenserian stanza is a demanding poetic form which is
paradoxically flexible in terms of the way it organises its material.
Though it doesn’t precisely mimic Virgil’s Latin, it is an example of the
ways in which the Elizabethan Renaissance hybridises classical genres.
Although few modern poets have attempted the Spenserian stanza, it
was popular with the Romantics: Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats
used it for narrative poems of their own (Addison, 2006). Far from
being a dead-end, it remains a unique and challenging resource for
skilful poets.
269
The Bower of Bliss

We now turn to the last canto of Book II. This book is concerned with
the virtue of Temperance. Though it is more episodic than Book I, the
central action concerns a story which Spenser borrowed from a number
of sources, including Homer’s Odyssey and Tasso’s Gerusalemme
Liberata. In the opening canto, the hero, Sir Guyon, and his attendant,
a palmer, or pilgrim (an embodiment of moderation and Guyon’s tutor
in Temperance), encounter Amavia and her baby, Ruddymane. Amavia
is, along with her dead husband, Sir Mortdant, a victim of the pleasure-
loving sorceress Acrasia. Amavia kills herself after Mortdant has been
poisoned by Acrasia. As Amavia explains, ‘“Her blis is all in pleasure
and delight,/Wherewith she makes her lovers dronken mad”’ (II.i.52:
Gray, 2006, p. 20). As the Knight of Temperance, it is Guyon’s job to
destroy the Bower of Bliss and to curb Acrasia’s power; as he puts it in
the next canto, ‘“Ne ever shall I rest […] Till I that false Acrasia have
wonne”’ (II.ii.44: Gray, 2006, p. 37). We pick up the story in Canto xii,
as Guyon and the Palmer set sail towards the Bower of Bliss.
In many ways, this sounds like a straightforward moral allegory: Acrasia
is a lubricious witch, who destroys her lovers. Guyon has to restore
sexual order by restraining a figure who upsets marital harmony. Yet
when we get to the Bower of Bliss, this picture becomes more
complicated. This is also mirrored in the commentary which this
episode has prompted. The Bower is one of the key moments in The
Faerie Queene because of the divergent interpretations which it has
provoked. You will read excerpts from two of these, by C.S. Lewis and
by Stephen Greenblatt, respectively. Both of these writers have been
influential in the study of Elizabethan literature. Lewis’s Allegory of Love
(first published in 1936) rehabilitated the tradition of medieval
allegorical poetry, arguing for Spenser’s moral seriousness. Spenser was
important to Lewis in the latter’s other role as a writer of children’s
fiction, the Narnia series, and in his work as a Christian apologist;
images and narratives from The Faerie Queene permeate his writings. In
contrast, Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) reads a range of
Renaissance texts in the light of the relationship between the emerging
nation-state and the concept of the individual. For Greenblatt, Spenser
is ‘our originating and preeminent poet of empire’; his work exposes the
contradictions between Renaissance idealism and the messy politics in
which men like Spenser were complicit (Greenblatt, 1980, p. 174). As I
mentioned earlier, Spenser lived and worked in Ireland during the 1580s
270
The Bower of Bliss
and 1590s as an administrator and eventually a landowner; it was

through this political career that he made his fortune. He contributed to
the defence of English colonialism through the posthumously published
A View of the Present State of Ireland, first printed in 1633 (Spenser, 1949),
a dialogue which advocates the harsh suppression of indigenous (and
largely Catholic) Irish people by English (and largely Protestant) settlers.
The complex liaisons between Spenser’s poetry and his politics have
been the focus of much recent work (see McCabe, 2001), and
Greenblatt did much to stimulate this reappraisal of Spenser’s colonial
career. Greenblatt was in the vanguard of the movement known as New
Historicism (discussed in Chapter 6), because of its renewed emphasis
on the relationship between literary texts and their material contexts. If
Lewis is an ‘old’ historicist, for whom the literary traditions of allegory
help to uncover the complexity of Spenser’s moral vision, Greenblatt’s
‘new’ historicism relocates Spenser’s poem in the contexts of the
colonial expansion of the Elizabethan state.
Before you read this long canto (it is the longest in the poem), here’s an
outline of what happens. It divides into two halves: the first (stanzas 1–
38) describes the epic sea voyage, while the second (stanzas 39–87)
describes the Bower and its surroundings, culminating in Guyon’s
capture of Acrasia and destruction of the Bower. In each case, Guyon is
(in the words of the argument which prefaces the canto) assailed with
‘perilles great’, which he navigates ‘through Palmers governaunce’. In the
sea voyage (which mimics in miniature the journeys of Odysseus and
Aeneas), Guyon dodges such hazards as the ‘Gulfe of Greedinesse’
(stanza 3); ‘The Rock of vile Reproch’ (stanza 8), a version of the classical
Scylla and Charybdis; and the mermaids (stanzas 30–5), a version of the
Sirens. None of these temptations are particularly difficult to withstand,
but note that Guyon constantly stands in need of guidance from either
the Palmer or the Boatman. Without their ‘temperate advice’ (stanza
34), he is at the mercy of his sentimental, aesthetic and erotic impulses.
In the second half of the canto Guyon encounters wild animals (stanzas
39–41), who turn out to be Acrasia’s lovers (stanza 85). Then he comes
to the Bower itself, which is described through a series of frames:
Spenser focuses first on the intricate gates and their mythological
decoration (stanzas 43–5); and then on Guyon’s encounter with the
‘Genius’ of the place (stanzas 46–9), who is dismissed as a low-grade
conman. Next comes a more detailed description of the Bower’s
landscape and another set of ornate gates, where Guyon meets the
intoxicated personification of ‘Excesse’ (stanzas 50–7). The next section
271
(stanzas 58–69) takes us slowly into the heart of the Bower, where
Guyon comes on an artificial fountain, in which he sees ‘Two naked
Damzelles’ (stanza 63), who prove to be the hardest test of his
temperance because of their exuberant sensuality: ‘Guyon […] somewhat
gan relent his earnest pace;/His stubborne brest gan secret pleasaunce
to embrace’ (stanza 65). After another lecture from the Palmer, ‘a most
melodious sound’ of bird song and music heralds the appearance of
Acrasia and her latest lover, who are described (in lingering detail) half-
clothed and half-asleep after sex (stanzas 70–80). Finally (stanzas 81–7),
Guyon and the Palmer capture Acrasia and Verdant and transform the
animals back to men, with the exception of Gryll, who wishes to stay as
a pig (stanza 87).
Activity
Now read the whole of Book II, Canto xii, which you will find in the poetry
section at the back of this book. Do you see Guyon as ‘a vertuous man’,
or not?
(Note: on the module website, you’ll find a recording I made of this canto.
You may find it helpful to listen to this as you read the text.)
Then turn to Readings 7.1 and 7.2, which you will find at the end of this
chapter. These are excerpts from commentaries by C.S. Lewis and
Stephen Greenblatt. To what extent do these critics modify your view of
Guyon?
Discussion
The question of Guyon’s heroism is a complex one to which there is no
single answer.
In what follows, I use the work of Lewis and Greenblatt to help frame
a response to Guyon as an epic hero, alongside some reflection on his
complicated symbolic role in Book II. One of Spenser’s poetic problems
with the virtue of Temperance is that it entails negative rather than
positive action. If you think Guyon is rather prissy, that is partly
because this aspect is encoded into his symbolic role as someone who
must embody – or try to embody – restraint and moderation. In an
earlier canto, he is repeatedly tempted by the ‘Money God’ Mammon in
his subterranean cave, and must repeatedly refuse all the goods and
272
The Bower of Bliss
riches he is offered (II.vii.39: Gray, 2006, p. 110). It isn’t heroic to keep

saying no – particularly in contrast with the dragon-slaying Redcrosse –
but it is the ‘stubborne’ role Spenser has given him. This is one way of
explaining what happens in the Bower of Bliss. As the Knight of
Temperance, Guyon must resist the temptations of the mermaids and
the naked damsels in order to be able to capture Acrasia and destroy
the Bower.
Yet this is only one side of the question; the more troubling issue is
whether or not Guyon is right to destroy the Bower at all. Lewis and
Greenblatt address this question directly. Lewis’s account is the more
straightforward. Reading 7.1 begins with a paragraph which explains
Lewis’s methodology: he bypasses The Faerie Queene’s ‘political allegory’
in favour of its ‘moral or philosophical allegory’. Lewis’s approach to
the Bower is unambiguous: it represents something which is to be
rejected. He argues that the Bower’s artificiality can be read in only one
way. Lewis’s prose is mordantly sarcastic (‘Whether those who think that
Spenser is secretly on Acrasia’s side, themselves approve of metal
vegetation […] I do not know’), and that underlines the implicit
authoritarianism of his position. For Lewis it is almost unthinkable that
anyone might have the ‘abominable bad taste’ to see the destruction of
the Bower as problematic. There is a similarly jarring moment when he
suggests that the naked damsels’ names ‘are obviously Cissie and
Flossie’ and that ‘a man does not need to go to fairie land to meet
them’. This betrays both Lewis’s snobbery – the damsels are
transformed into stereotypical ‘loose’ women – and a condescending
attitude towards the temptation they embody. I’m not suggesting that
the poem isn’t sexist (see, for example, stanza 28); but rather that the
terms Spenser uses are significantly more complex than Lewis’s offhand
paraphrase implies. Judith Anderson, in an essay which considers both
the sexism and seductiveness of the Bower in a much more self-critical
way, offers the thought about the same passage that ‘the appeal of these
stanzas exceeds sharply defined barriers of gender and other rational
determinants’; that is, the reader needs to be ready to give in to what
she calls the passage’s ‘erotic appeal’, which is ‘subtle, complex,
seductive, and enveloping’ (Anderson, 2008, p. 235). Lewis, however,
remains emphatic and resistant in his approach: the Bower is ‘a picture
[…] of the whole sexual nature in disease’, in which there is ‘only male
prurience and female provocation’.
Though I have drawn your attention to some of the slippages in Lewis’s
analysis, these don’t invalidate his reading. What he does well is to
273
articulate a traditional moral reading of the Bower of Bliss, with

valuable comparisons to other sections of the poem, as Greenblatt
recognises in his brief summary of Lewis’s argument in Reading 7.2. In
place of Lewis’s emphasis on moral allegory, Greenblatt uses the tools
of close reading (and the work of Paul Alpers, cited above) to focus on
‘the Bower’s continued sensual power’, which he relates to a political
and psychological reading of Temperance as a form of repression. For
Greenblatt, the important thing about the Bower is not that it is good
or bad, but that its erotic power is continuously unsettling to Guyon
and the reader. As he puts it in relation to stanza 77, ‘“Pleasant sin” –
the moral judgment is not avoided or suspended but neither does it
establish its dominion over the stanza’. He pursues this line of thought
with reference to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1929), a work
which stresses the role played by ‘renunciation of instinct’ in the
creation of civilised societies: ‘The Bower of Bliss must be destroyed
not because its gratifications are unreal but because they threaten
“civility” – civilization – which for Spenser is achieved only through
renunciation and the constant exercise of power’.
Another way of putting this would be to say that Guyon’s quest is
political, not moral: Acrasia and her creatures represent the savage
Other which the colonial figure must repress in order to impose his
vision of ‘civility’ on the world. This can be related to the complex real-
life situation Elizabethan colonists encountered in Ireland, where ‘the
Other’ didn’t simply mean the indigenous Irish. Richard McCabe
comments:
Many of the descendants of Ireland’s first Norman colonisers, later

to be known as the ‘Old English’, had assimilated to Celtic society
to such an extent that ‘New English’ colonists such as Edmund
Spenser could scarcely distinguish them from the descendants of
indigenous Celtic stock […] Owing to this ongoing process of
cultural assimilation the polarised categories of ‘self ’ and ‘other’
(gentleman and savage) threaten to converge.
(McCabe, 2001, p. 62)
For Greenblatt, this means that Spenser’s poetry is riven by his desire to
control his environment: ‘the rich complexities of Spenser’s art […] are
not achieved in spite of what is for us a repellent political ideology –
274
The Bower of Bliss
the passionate worship of imperialism – but are inseparably linked to

that ideology’.
I asked you earlier to what extent these critics modified your view of
Guyon. Every reader will respond slightly differently to the challenges
and illuminations offered by the text and its critics, but there are some
key factors I would stress. Reading Lewis and Greenblatt emphasises
that the interpretation of The Faerie Queene rests on both how we read,
and the contexts we use to frame that reading. To illustrate the poem’s
fluctuating and elusive tone, consider the divergent ways Spenser
narrates the destruction of the Bower. This won’t provide definitive
answers to my earlier questions, but it will give more practice in making
sense of Spenser’s poem in detail.
Stanza 83 is the extraordinary account of Guyon destroying the Bower:
But all those pleasaunt bowres and Pallace brave,

Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse,
But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse:
Their groves he feld, their gardins did deface,
Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse,
Their banket houses burne, their buildings race,
And of the fayrest late, now made the fowlest place.
Though neither Lewis nor Greenblatt discusses this stanza in detail, it

gets to the nub of the differences between their readings of the passage.
Where, for Lewis, the suppression of the Bower is merited because of
the moral state it represents, Greenblatt stresses the reluctances which
underpin Guyon’s actions. There are many such in this stanza, which
juxtaposes the ‘pittilesse’ trashing of the Bower with the appreciative
enumeration of its pleasures: ‘goodly workmanship’, blissful groves,
arbours, garden bowers (‘Cabinets’) and banquet houses are destroyed in
an act which the balanced antithesis of the alexandrine seems to present
as vandalism.
As I have argued elsewhere, the difficulty which this clinical writing
presents adheres particularly to the suggestive and ambiguous rhyme
words.
Guyon
275
Figure 7.6 The Court of Diana (completed in 1599). Photographed by Paul

Barker. Photo: © Country Life. This frieze from Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire
shows a contemporaneous image of a pastoral locus amoenus, or pleasant
place, in this case illustrating an image of the classical goddess of hunting
and chastity. The frieze is probably a compliment to Elizabeth I. It shows the
vogue for imagery of this kind, which ultimately derived from the poetry of
writers like Ovid and Virgil, who were key influences on Spenser. (For more
detail, see Girouard, 1976, pp. 65–6.)
executes his task with ‘rigour pittilesse’ in a mood of tempestuous

‘wrathfulnesse’, converting the Bower of Bliss into, what from his
perspective, it really is: a Bower of Balefulnesse; that is, a place of
grief and anguish, not pleasure. His work in the Bower is
summarised by the final term in the cluster, suppresse. Yet the tone
of the rhyming terms is hard to pin down: the a-rhyme makes
available a sense that the destruction of the Bower is iconoclastic
and a matter of potential regret; the b-rhyme implies a Guyon at
once righteously remorseless and paradoxically out of control;
while the c-rhyme focuses on the effects of his attack in its
inversion of the Bower as a locus amoenus.
(Brown and Lethbridge, 2013, p. 30)
276
The Bower of Bliss
(A locus amoenus means an idealised place of peace and security; it is a

trope widely used in traditional pastoral; see Curtius, 1990 [1955],
pp. 183–202.)
The rhymes at this crucial moment give some support to Greenblatt’s
view that the moral judgements do not invariably control the
construction of the verse. Spenser does not resolve the question of
whether the destruction of the Bower should be viewed morally,
aesthetically, or politically. The hesitancies of the narrative mirror the
hesitancies of the hero. Though in this stanza he acts without remorse,
elsewhere Guyon is susceptible (perhaps like the reader) to the beauties
of the Bower and the partly veiled, partly naked attractions of Acrasia
and the damsels. By the end of the canto, Guyon’s voice becomes fused
with that of the Palmer as they join in judgement of Gryll: ‘“See the
mind of beastly man/That hath so soone forgot the excellence/Of his
creation”’, quips Guyon, to the laconic endorsement of his moral tutor:
‘“Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish minde”’ (stanza 87). What is
a virtuous man? Gryll’s refusal to rejoin the club suggests the limitations
of moral allegory (symbolised here by the Palmer’s staff) to reform
everyone it touches. This ambiguous point of closure to Book II
indicates the way in which Spenser continued to struggle with the
didactic imperatives of Elizabethan literary theory.
277
Conclusion
I hope this chapter gives you some sense of the challenges and rewards
of The Faerie Queene. Like many masterpieces, this is a poem which is
always in some way unknowable. A leading Spenserian, Harry Berger Jr.,
remarks in one of his later essays, ‘I began thinking and writing about
The Faerie Queene in the early 1950s, and that poem has never let me go
because it has never let me in, has kept me digging outside its crooked
walls for five decades in a responsive delirium of interpretation’ (Berger,
2003, p. 19). I say this not to depress you, but rather to inspire you: as
The Faerie Queene is long, so there is no end to the questions which it
stimulates in the minds of its readers. In this chapter, I have given you
tools to use in exploring two key episodes; I have stressed important
contexts (like Protestantism and the Elizabethan colonisation of
Ireland), while also exploring the poem’s literary qualities of language,
imagery and structure. Should you also find yourself responding to this
‘delirious poet’ (Berger, 2003, p. 19), I would suggest beginning the
poem at the beginning, or reading the semi-independent fragment, the
Mutabilitie Cantos, which was added to the posthumous 1609 edition of
The Faerie Queene by the publisher Matthew Lownes. The more you
read, the more you will be struck by the poem’s variety within the
repetitive constraints of its stanza form, and by the shifts of perspective
which characterise its different books. If the voice which begins ‘Lo I
the man’ is self-confident in its powers of expression and its ability to
‘fashion’ the reader ‘in virtuous and gentle discipline’, the voice we hear
in the final stanza of Mutabilitie is strikingly different, as it wearily longs
for the sight of God on the last day: ‘O that great Sabbaoth God,
graunt me that Saboaths sight’ (VII.viii.2: Hamilton et al., 2007, p. 712).
Independent study
website.
278
References
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pp. 337–51.
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Anderson, J. (2008) ‘Androcentrism and Acrasian fantasies in the Bower
of Bliss’ in Anderson, J., Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer,
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Curtius, R.E. (1990 [1955]) European Literature and the Latin Middle
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Empson, W. (1984 [1930]) Seven Types of Ambiguity, London, Hogarth.

Fairfax, E. (1981) Godfrey of Bulloigne: A Critical Edition of Edward
Fairfax’s Translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, together with
Fairfax’s Original Poems, ed. K.M. Lea and T.M. Gang, Oxford,
Clarendon.
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Görlach, M. (1991) Introduction to Early Modern English, Cambridge,
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Hadfield, A. (2012) Edmund Spenser : A Life, Oxford, Oxford
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Lewis, C.S. (1967 [1936)] The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval
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McCabe, R.A. (2001) ‘Ireland: policy, poetics and parody’ in Hadfield,
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Paterson, D. (2010) Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary,
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The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, Oxford, Oxford University
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The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton, NJ,
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Shakespeare, W. (2002) The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. C. Burrow,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
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Zurcher, A. (2007) Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early
Modern England, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer.
282
Reading 7.1 ‘Diseased sexuality in the Bower of Bliss’
Reading 7.1 ‘Diseased sexuality in the

Bower of Bliss’
Source: C.S. Lewis (1967 [1936]) ‘The Faerie Queene’, in C.S. Lewis, The
Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, pp. 321, 324–5, 331, 332–3. Note in square brackets by Jonathan
Gibson.
In considering The Faerie Queene as a consciously allegorical poem I
shall neglect entirely its political allegory. My qualifications as an
historian are not such as would enable me to unravel it; and my critical
principles hardly encourage me even to make the attempt. By his
political allegory Spenser doubtless intended to give to his poem a
certain topical attraction. Time never forgives such concessions to ‘the
glistering of this present’, and what acted as a bait to unpoetic readers
for some decades has become a stumbling-block to poetic readers ever
since. The contemporary allusions in The Faerie Queene are now of
interest to the critic chiefly in so far as they explain how some bad
passages came to be bad; but since this does not make them good –
since to explain by causes is not to justify by reasons – we shall not
lose very much by ignoring the matter. My concern is with the moral or
philosophical allegory. […]
The home of Acrasia is first shown to us in the fifth canto of Book
Two, when Atin finds Cymochles there asleep. The very first words of
the description are
And over him art, striving to compare

With nature, did an Arber greene dispred.1
This explicit statement that Acrasia’s garden is art not nature can be
paralleled in Tasso, and would be unimportant if it stood alone. But the
interesting thing is that when the Bower of Bliss reappears seven cantos
later, there again the very first stanza of description tells us that it was
goodly beautifide
With all the ornaments of Floraes pride,
Wherewith her mother Art, as halfe in scorne
1
F.Q. II. v. 29.
283
Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride

Did decke her, and too lavishly adorne.2
In order to be perfectly fair to Spenser’s hostile critics, I am prepared to

assume that this repetition of the antithesis between art and nature is
accidental. But I think the hardest sceptic will hesitate when he reads,
eight stanzas further,
And that which all faire workes doth most aggrace,

The art which all that wrought appeared in no place.3
And if this does not satisfy him let him read on to the sixty-first stanza
where we find the imitation ivy in metal which adorns Acrasia’s bathing-
pool. Whether those who think that Spenser is secretly on Acrasia’s
side, themselves approve of metal vegetation as a garden ornament, or
whether they regard this passage as a proof of Spenser’s abominable
bad taste, I do not know; but this is how the poet describes it,
And over all of purest gold was spred

A trayle of yvie in his native hew;
For the rich metall was so coloured
That wight who did not well avis’d it vew
Would surely deeme it to be yvie trew.4
Is it possible now to resist the conviction that Spenser’s hostile critics

are precisely such wights who have viewed the Bower ‘not well avis’d’
and therefore erroneously deemed it to be true? […]
Acrasia’s two young women (their names are obviously Cissie and
Flossie) are ducking and giggling in a bathing-pool for the benefit of a
passer-by: a man does not need to go to fairie land to meet them.
[Lewis now contrasts the Bower of Bliss with a later episode in Book
VI of The Faerie Queene in which a shepherd representing courtesy,
Calidore, stumbles across dancing ‘Graces’ (beautiful classical
goddesses).] The Graces are engaged in doing something worth doing, –
namely, dancing in a ring ‘in order excellent’. They are, at first, much
too busy to notice Calidore’s arrival, and when they do notice him they
2
Ibid. xii. 50.
3
F.Q. II. xii. 58.
4
Ibid. xii. 61.
284
Reading 7.1 ‘Diseased sexuality in the Bower of Bliss’
vanish. The contrast here is almost too simple to be worth mentioning;

and it is only marginal to our immediate subject, for the Graces
symbolize no sexual experience at all. […]
And when we have noticed this it ought to dawn upon us that the
Bower of Bliss is not a place even of healthy animalism, or indeed of
activity of any kind. Acrasia herself does nothing: she is merely
‘discovered’, posed on a sofa beside a sleeping young man, in suitably
semi-transparent raiment. It is hardly necessary to add that her breast is
‘bare to ready spoyle of hungry eies’,5 for eyes, greedy eyes (‘which
n’ote therewith be fild’) are the tyrants of that whole region. The Bower
of Bliss is not a picture of lawless, that is, unwedded, love as opposed
to lawful love. It is a picture, one of the most powerful ever painted, of
the whole sexual nature in disease. There is not a kiss or an embrace in
the island: only male prurience and female provocation. […] It is not to
be supposed of course that Spenser wrote as a scientific ‘sexologist’ or
consciously designed his Bower of Bliss as a picture of sexual
perversion. Acrasia indeed does not represent sexual vice in particular,
but vicious pleasure in general.6 Spenser’s conscious intention, no
doubt, was merely to produce a picture which should do justice both to
the pleasantness and to the vice. He has done this in the only way
possible – namely, by filling his Bower of Bliss with sweetness showered
upon sweetness and yet contriving that there should be something
subtly wrong throughout. But perhaps ‘contriving’ is a bad word. When
he wishes to paint disease, the exquisite health of his own imagination
shows him what images to exclude.
5
Ibid. II. xii. 78.
6
Ibid. II. xii. 1.
285
Reading 7.2 ‘Poetry and repression in

the Bower of Bliss’
Source: Stephen Greenblatt (1980) ‘To fashion a gentleman: Spenser and the
destruction of the Bower of Bliss’ in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-
Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
pp. 169–71, 171–2, 173–4 (notes omitted)
It is to a culture so engaged in the shaping of identity, in dissimulation
and the preservation of moral idealism, that Spenser addresses himself
in defining ‘the general intention and meaning’ of the entire Faerie
Queene: the end of all the book, he writes to Ralegh, ‘is to fashion a
gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.’ The poem
rests on the obvious but by no means universal assumption that a
gentleman can be so fashioned, not simply in art but in life. We will, in
the remainder of this chapter, consider the implications of one episode
in this educative discipline, the destruction of the Bower of Bliss in
book 2, canto 12. After a perilous voyage, as readers of The Faerie
Queene will recall, Guyon, the knight of Temperance, arrives with his
companion, the aged Palmer, at the realm of the beautiful and
dangerous witch Acrasia. After quelling the threats of Acrasia’s
monstrous guards, they enter the witch’s exquisite Bower where, aided
by the Palmer’s sober counsel, Guyon resists a series of sensual
temptations. At the Bower’s center they spy the witch, bending over a
young man, and, rushing in upon her, they manage to capture her in a
net. Guyon then systematically destroys the Bower and leads the tightly
bound Acrasia away.
Inevitably, we will slight other moments in Spenser’s vast work that
qualify the perspective established by this one, but we can at least be
certain that the perspective is important: like Falstaff ’s banishment,
Othello’s suicide speech, and the harsh punishment of Volpone, the
close of book 2 of The Faerie Queene has figured in criticism as one of
the great cruxes of English Renaissance literature. The destruction of
Acrasia’s Bower tests in a remarkably searching way our attitudes
toward pleasure, sexuality, the body; tests too our sense of the relation
of physical pleasure to the pleasure of aesthetic images and the relation
of both of these to what Guyon calls the ‘excellence’ of man’s creation.
By ‘tests’ I do not mean that the work examines us to see if we know
the right answer – the poetry of the Faerie Queene, as Paul Alpers has
demonstrated, continually invites us to trust our own experience of its
286
Reading 7.2 ‘Poetry and repression in the Bower of Bliss’
rich surface – rather, this experience tends to reveal or define important

aspects of ourselves. Thus when C.S. Lewis, invoking the ‘exquisite
health’ of Spenser’s imagination, characterizes the Bower as a picture of
‘the whole sexual nature in disease,’ of ‘male prurience and female
provocation,’ indeed of ‘skeptophilia,’ the reader familiar with Lewis’s
work will recognize links to his criticism of erotic passages in Hero and
Leander and Venus and Adonis, links to his conception of maturity and of
mental and moral health. This is not to deny that Lewis’s brilliant
account describes disturbing qualities that any attentive reader may
recognize in the Bower, but it may help us to understand why he writes
that ‘the Bower of Bliss is not a place even of healthy animalism, or
indeed of activity of any kind,’ whereas Spenser depicts Acrasia and her
adolescent lover reposing ‘after long wanton joys’ and even (following
Tasso) pictures droplets of sweat trilling down Acrasia’s snowy breast
‘through langor of her late sweet toil.’ What for Spenser is the place
‘Where Pleasure dwells in sensual delights’ is for Lewis the realm only
of frustration; all sexual activity is in this way reserved for the Garden
of Adonis and hence tied securely to reproduction. […]
We are told that after an initial attractiveness the Bower becomes
stultifying, perverted, and frustrating or that the reader’s task, like the
hero’s, is to interpret the images correctly, that is, to recognize the
danger of ‘lewd loves, and wasteful luxury’ embodied in the Bower. I
believe that one easily perceives that danger from the beginning and
that much of the power of the episode derives precisely from the fact
that his perception has little or no effect on the Bower’s continued
sensual power:
Upon a bed of roses she was layd,

As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin,
And was arayd, or rather disarayd,
All in a vele of silke and silver thin,
That hid no whit her alablaster skin,
But rather shewd more white if more might bee.
(2.12.77)
‘Pleasant sin’ – the moral judgment is not avoided or suspended but

neither does it establish its dominion over the stanza; rather, for a
moment it is absorbed into a world in which the normal conceptual
boundaries are blurred: languor and energy, opacity and transparency,
flesh and stone all merge. Similarly, the close of the famous rose song –
287
Gather the rose of love, whilest yet is time,

Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime –
invites us momentarily to transvalue the word ‘crime,’ reading it as the

equivalent of ‘passion’ or ‘intensity,’ even as we continue to know that
‘crime’ cannot be so transvalued. We can master the iconography, read
all the signs correctly, and still respond to the allure of the Bower. It is,
as we shall see, the threat of this absorption that triggers Guyon’s
climactic violence. Temperance – the avoidance of extremes, the ‘sober
government’ of the body, the achievement of the Golden Mean – must
be constituted paradoxically by a supreme act of destructive excess. […]
In the Bower of Bliss, Guyon’s ‘stubborne brest gan secret pleasaunce
to embrace’ (2.12.45), and he does not merely depart from the place of
temptation but reduces it to ruins. To help us understand more fully
why he must do so in order to play his part in Spenser’s fashioning of a
gentleman, we may invoke an observation made in Civilization and Its
Discontents: ‘It is impossible,’ writes Freud, ‘to overlook the extent to
which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much
it presupposes precisely the nonsatisfaction (by suppression, repression,
or some other means?) of powerful instincts […] Civilization behaves
toward sexuality as a people or a stratum of its population does which
has subjected another one to its exploitation.’ Modern criticism would
make the destruction of the Bower easy by labeling Acrasia’s realm sick,
stagnant, futile, and joyless, but Spenser, who participates with Freud in
a venerable and profoundly significant intertwining of sexual and
colonial discourse, accepts sexual colonialism only with a near-tragic
sense of the cost. If he had wished, he could have unmasked Acrasia as
a deformed hag, as he had exposed Duessa or as Ariosto had exposed
(though more ambiguously) the enchantress Alcina, but instead Acrasia
remains enticingly seductive to the end. She offers not simply sexual
pleasure – ‘long wanton joys’ – but self-abandonment, erotic
aestheticism, the melting of the will, the end of all quests; and Spenser
understands, at the deepest level of his being, the appeal of such an
end. Again and again his knights reach out longingly for resolution,
closure, or release only to have it snatched from them or deferred; the
whole of The Faerie Queene is the expression of an intense craving for
release, which is overmastered only by a still more intense fear of
release.
288
Reading 7.2 ‘Poetry and repression in the Bower of Bliss’
The Bower of Bliss must be destroyed not because its gratifications are
unreal but because they threaten ‘civility’ – civilization – which for
Spenser is achieved only through renunciation and the constant exercise
of power. If this power inevitably entails loss, it is also richly, essentially
creative; power is the guarantor of value, the shaper of all knowledge,
the pledge of human redemption. Power may, as Bacon claimed,
prohibit desire, but it is in its own way a version of the erotic: the
violence directed against Acrasia’s sensual paradise is both in itself an
equivalent of erotic excess and a pledge of loving service to the royal
mistress. Even when he most bitterly criticizes its abuses or records its
brutalities, Spenser loves power and attempts to link his own art ever
more closely with its symbolic and literal embodiment. The Faerie
Queene is, as he insists again and again, wholly wedded to the autocratic
ruler of the English state; the rich complexities of Spenser’s art, its
exquisite ethical discriminations in pursuit of the divine in man, are not
achieved in spite of what is for us a repellent political ideology – the
passionate worship of imperialism – but are inseparably linked to that
ideology.
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Chapter 8 Donne and the
Petrarchists
Jonathan Gibson
Contents
Aims 295
Introduction 297
Reading Donne 298
Petrarchan love 301
Praise of the beloved 301
The beloved’s resistance 304
Emphasis on the suffering of the male lover 304
An allegorical depiction of the love relationship 306
English Petrarchans: Wyatt and Surrey 306
Translating Petrarch 307
Whose heart? 313
Donne and the lure of biography 319
Poetry and publication 322
Conclusion: Donne among the critics 323
References 325
Reading 8.1 A new critical reading of ‘The
Canonization’ 328
Reading 8.2 A post-structuralist reading of ‘The
Canonization’ 330
Reading 8.3 A historicist reading of ‘The
Canonization’ 332
Aims
Aims
This chapter will:
. introduce you to some of the key conventions of Petrarchan love
poetry
. talk you through the reading of poems by Donne, Petrarch, Wyatt
and Surrey
. explore historical contexts for the writings of Donne and his
precursors.
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Chapter 8 Donne and the Petrarchists

You will need to read the poetry associated with this chapter, which you
will find in the poetry section at the back of the book.
You may also wish to listen to the audio recordings of the poetry, which
you will find on the module website.
. Early English Books Online (EEBO) (available via the OU Library)
296
Introduction
Introduction
In this chapter you will be reading love poetry by one of the most
famous poets in the English language, John Donne (1572–1631), and
finding out how a much earlier writer, Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch
(1304–1374), influenced the love poetry of the early modern period.
You will find the full text of the poems by Petrarch and Donne
discussed below in a short poetry anthology at the back of this book.
You will also find in this anthology the texts of other Renaissance
poems influenced by Petrarch.
Today Donne’s poems are a mainstay of anthologies and still have,
almost 400 years after his death, an enthusiastic readership: in a 2009
poll to find ‘Britain’s favourite poet’ he came second (BBC, 2009).
Donne was popular as a manuscript, rather than a print, poet in his
own time, and the author of a successful posthumous verse collection,
Poems by J.D. (1633, re-edited in 1635). His verse fell into obscurity and
out of favour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, only
winning a wide audience again in 1912 when Herbert J.C. Grierson’s
Oxford University Press edition of the poems appeared (Donne, 1912).
As you read in this chapter both Donne’s poetry and that of some of
his precursors, I’m sure you will understand why this is. There is no
getting away from the fact that Donne is odd, unlike anyone else in his
rhythms, his emotional volatility, his imagery – in, too, the extraordinary
argumentative structures he builds his poems out of. His approach to
love is clearly in dialogue with the Petrarch-influenced writing that we
will be encountering later in this chapter; it is, however, at the same
time very different from it. It’s unsurprising that his poems were sought
out in manuscript by many readers during and just after his lifetime, or
that in later ages preferring smoother and more decorous verse he
should go unread. And it makes perfect sense that the world was finally
ready for him again only when, early in the twentieth century, modernist
writers were rebelling against old literary certainties and one of the most
influential, T.S. Eliot (who pipped Donne to the post in the ‘Britain’s
favourite poet’ poll), read Donne’s poems in an anthology of
seventeenth-century verse edited by Grierson (Grierson, 1921).
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Reading Donne
It is time now to dive in and read one of Donne’s best-known pieces,
‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, a poem that is written in the voice
– not necessarily Donne’s own voice – of somebody parting,
temporarily, from their lover. It’s poetry that really bears thinking about,
so as you work your way through, pause whenever you like to replay
tricky phrases or ideas in your mind. This chapter is accompanied by
audio files of every poem discussed (available on the module website),
so you might find it useful after your first reading to go through the
poem again while listening to the recording. There may be performance
decisions in the recording that will surprise you. If so, that’ll be all to
the good, as thinking about them should enrich your awareness of the
range of the poem’s possible moods and meanings.
Activity
Read ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ through, slowly and
thoughtfully, using the explanatory notes to help clarify difficult passages.
Think about what you’ve just read.
Choose one word from the poem: a word that surprised you for some
reason, perhaps, or a word summing up a key theme. Write down a
couple of sentences explaining why you have chosen this particular
word.
Discussion
Naturally, there’s no way I could know which word you chose: there are
far too many different possibilities. My own choice, therefore, is very
unlikely to have been the same as yours, and it’s equally unlikely to
reveal exactly the same view of the poem. The point of the activity, then,
is not to harmonise our two different ways of looking at the text; it is,
rather, to highlight the role that personal choice and opinion and thought
plays in the reading of poetry.
The word that stood out for me was ‘hearkens’ (l.31). It occurs during the
comparison of the relationship of the lovers to a pair of compasses: while
one stays still, the other moves around. But as the two compass-legs are
joined at the top, when the outer leg moves away it pulls the central leg
with it. The central leg ‘leans’ and ‘hearkens after’ its counterpart: ‘when
the other far doth roam,/It leans and hearkens after it’. While ‘hearkens
after’ means here ‘has regard to, pays attention to’, its surface meaning,
‘listens to’, is also important, I think: the compass-leg leans towards its
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Reading Donne
partner like an anxious listener leaning in the direction of a speaker.

(What an interestingly oblique means for the speaker of the poem to
bring in the idea of their lover listening to them!) One of the things I love
about these words is what they do to the way that I, reading the poem,
think about the pair of compasses. This is a moment, it seems, when a
metal measuring instrument twitches into life – partly because of the
sudden focus on paying attention, partly because the word ‘hearkens’
evokes both active listening and passive hearing. A dead object
magically, in a split second, comes to consciousness.
Comparing love to a measuring instrument is a bit odd. You will

perhaps have noticed other things in ‘A Valediction Forbidding
Mourning’ that also seem rather unusual for a love poem: the
‘trepidation of the spheres’, for example. In the eighteenth century,
Samuel Johnson influentially dubbed this kind of writing ‘metaphysical’.
His view was hostile; he felt that in ‘metaphysical’ poetry ‘heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for
illustrations, comparisons and allusions; their learning instructs, and
their subtilty surprises, but the reader […] though he sometimes
admires, is seldom pleased’ (Johnson, 2009, p. 16). Writing about the
compasses comparison in particular, Johnson doubts ‘whether absurdity
or ingenuity has the better claim’ (Johnson, 2009, p. 30). In the early
twentieth century, by contrast, T.S. Eliot, reviewing Grierson’s anthology
Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century, found in Donne
a ‘direct apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into
feeling’ absent from the literature of later centuries (Eliot, 1951, p. 286).
In Eliot’s wake, many critics went on to write in glowing terms about
‘metaphysical’ poetry.
Although useful in identifying certain features linking Donne to
seventeenth-century poets influenced by him (Burrow, 2004),
‘metaphysical poetry’ is a rather slippery concept. ‘Metaphysical’, which
Johnson uses to mean something like ‘abstruse’, ‘philosophical’ or
‘learned’ but which, in its dictionary definition, refers to a specific
branch of philosophy, was not used by writers of Donne’s own time to
describe their work. Explaining in detail what exactly it could or should
mean for a poem has proved rather tortuous for critics. We won’t be
dwelling any more on it in this chapter. Instead, we will excavate some
of the roots of Donne’s love poetry by reading it alongside work on
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similar topics by other writers, mostly earlier than Donne. We will pay
particular attention to Petrarchism, a loose set of devices for writing
love poetry derived from a huge collection of sonnets and other love
poems, the Canzoniere (‘Song-book’) or Rime sparse (‘Scattered Rhymes’)
written in the fourteenth century by Petrarch. (You will find a short
account of Petrarch’s life and writing with the poems that accompany
this chapter at the back of this book.)
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Petrarchan love
Petrarchan love
These poems, addressed unrequitedly to Laura, a young woman who
dies two-thirds of the way through the book, were massively influential
across Europe. Their influence only arrived fully in England in the early
sixteenth century, long after Petrarch’s death. Donne wrote later still.
Petrarch’s Rime is a sonnet sequence (though other verse forms appear
too) that can be read as the fragmentary story of a relationship. Donne
did not write a sequence of this type, and nor did Wyatt or Surrey, the
other poets whose works are analysed in this chapter, but many English
writers did. You will find selections from sonnet sequences by Sir Philip
Sidney, Samuel Daniel and Lady Mary Wroth in the poetry section
associated with this chapter which appears at the back of the book.
The writers I’ll be discussing in this chapter were influenced not just by
Petrarch but also, at least as importantly, by Italian, French and English
‘Petrarchan’ poets who had produced works in Petrarch’s manner, which
were often simpler and easier to assimilate than Petrarch’s originals.
Donne and the others knew that the Petrarchan mode of writing
derived from Petrarch and from time to time allude to him by name.
Unlike us, though, they did not have easy access to a complete English
translation of Petrarch’s love poetry. Instead they would have read
Petrarchan verse in a wide variety of sources and languages – in both
manuscript and print, in single-author poetry collections, in sonnet
sequences, in anthologies. In sixteenth-century England, French
‘Petrarchists’ were probably more widely read than Italian ones. So even
if the basic idea of a Petrarchan poem may look as if it comes directly
from Petrarch, likely as not it’s derived at second, third or even fourth
hand from writers translating, adapting and imitating Petrarchan
approaches to love.
But what is the Petrarchan approach to love? What are the Petrarchan
love conventions? A preliminary list would include the following: praise
of the beloved; the beloved’s resistance; emphasis on the suffering of
the male lover; and an allegorical depiction of the love relationship.
We’ll look at each of these aspects in turn.
Praise of the beloved

The Petrarchan mistress is often praised in as extravagant terms as
possible. You will remember the over-the-top nature of Orlando’s praise
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Figure 8.1 Petrarch in use: Andrea del Sarto, Woman with the ‘Petrarchino’.
c.1514, oil on wood, 87cm x 69cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Photo: © Galleria
degli Uffizi/Bridgeman Images.
Among sixteenth-century Italian noblewomen, it became a status symbol to
be painted holding a ‘Petrarchino’, or pocket edition of Petrarch. In this
painting, an unknown woman’s Petrarchino is open at Rime, poems 153 (‘Go
now, my sighs of warmth, to her cold heart/and break the ice which fights
against her pity’) and 154 (‘The air that’s struck by those sweet rays of her/
burns with her chastity’). On the obscured facing page would have been 151
(‘in her fair eyes I read there word by word/all that I say of love and all I
write’) and 152, to which, tellingly, the sitter seems to be pointing (‘If she
won’t take me soon or set me free […] I feel, Love, that my life is over’).
Translations are from Petrarca [Petrarch], 1996.
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Petrarchan love
of Rosalind in As You Like It – ‘From the East to Western Inde/No

jewel is like Rosalind […] Let no fair be kept in mind/But the fair of
Rosalind’ (3.3.65–6, 71–2) – and also Rosader’s poem in As You Like
It’s source, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalind (which you encountered in Reading
2.1 as part of your work on Chapter 2):
Of all pure metals gold is only purest;

Of all high trees the pine hath highest crest;
Of all soft sweets [i.e. sweet things] I like my mistress’ breast;
Of all chaste things my mistress’ thoughts are rarest.
It is a standard device of Petrarchan poems to find many things to

compare the speaker’s mistress to, and to claim that she surpasses them all.
Equally conventional is the device known as a ‘blazon’, in which the poet
praises in succession different parts of his mistress. Lodge’s Rosader does
this in another poem you read in Reading 2.1, ‘Rosalind’s Description’,
progressing downwards from hair (compared to the heavens) to eyes,
cheeks, lips (‘two budded roses’), neck and, finally, breasts or ‘paps’
(‘centers of delight/[…] orbs of heavenly frame’). Orlando’s second poem
in As You Like It similarly praises a ‘Rosalind of many parts’ (3.3.124–5).
The blazon dismembers the woman at the same time as it praises her.
Clearly, like much else in Petrarchan writing, this is something that does
more for the (usually) male persona of the poet than for the mistress
who is the supposed focus of the poem – she exists only in bits, in and
as his voice (Vickers, 1981).
Another Petrarchan device that simultaneously praises the beloved and
elides her presence is the praise of her as a spiritualising force. For
Petrarch and other Italian humanist writers, the force of the beloved’s
beauty and virtue can sometimes lift the lover to a higher spiritual level,
and this quasi-Platonic idea appears in some English love poems. But
English Petrarchism is, by and large, strikingly unspiritual: Protestantism
was less hospitable than Roman Catholicism, with its veneration of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, to the idea that female beauty – at least female
beauty other than that of Queen Elizabeth (see Figure 7.2 in Chapter 7)
– could be a route to divine perfection. Purified love is often
juxtaposed in the English Petrarchists with physicality: there is a trivial
example at the end of the stanza I quoted from Lodge’s Rosalind above,
where Rosader simultaneously praises his mistress’s sweet ‘breast’ and
her ‘chaste […] thoughts’. For the courtier poet Sir Philip Sidney, the
303
tension between the two is a source of anguish and frustration – the

persona of his Petrarchan sonnet sequence, ‘Astrophil’ (‘star-lover’), in
love with ‘Stella’ (‘star’), knows that Stella’s ‘beauty draws the heart to
love’ and that her virtue ‘leads that love to good’, but merely Platonic
comfort is insufficient: ‘But, ah, Desire still cries: “Give me some
food!”’ (Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 71: Sidney, 2002, p. 182). You can
read other poems by Sidney, one of the most important writers in
Donne’s youth, in the poetry section associated with this chapter at the
end of the book.
The beloved’s resistance

Petrarch’s Laura was always out of reach: imperviously chaste, and then,
in the last third of the Rime, dead. English Petrarchan lovers are
sometimes too awed by the beauty of the beloved to express their love.
When they do, however, and are rebuffed, their complaints at their
mistress’s ‘cruelty’ are often hyperbolical. Think of Silvius in As You
Like It, and his claim that Phoebe is ‘sterner’ than ‘The common
executioner’ (Shakespeare, 2009, 3.6.3). There’s an odd logic here: the
argument behind this sort of complaint is that if the lady does not give
in, the man will die and she will be guilty of his death. Her pity – rather
than any other, more passionate feeling – must be the means whereby
she falls in love with him: there seems little place for active female
desire. (To find such a thing, you might like to look at Lady Mary
Wroth’s female-voiced sonnet sequence, two poems from which are
included in the selections linked to this chapter.)
Emphasis on the suffering of the male lover

The suffering of the Petrarchan lover is the major topic in most English
Petrarchism – more dominant by far than praise of the mistress. It is
often said to involve contradictions: he is happy when thinking about
the loveliness, the desirability, of his mistress, but unhappy when she
refuses his advances, perhaps behaving in a hostile way. He often
expresses his alienation from the world about him: without the
beloved’s presence, nothing has meaning. He finds happiness sometimes
when, asleep, he dreams that the beloved has come to him.
Perhaps the most extreme example of Petrarchan desperation in this
period is Sir Walter Ralegh’s Ocean to Cynthia, a meandering, almost
stream-of-consciousness complaint at his falling into disgrace with his
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Petrarchan love
erstwhile love object, Queen Elizabeth, probably as a result of his secret

marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton in 1591. The poem may not have
been intended for the queen’s eyes: it speaks of the queen in the third
person and is found, in manuscript, among the papers of Robert Cecil,
Elizabeth’s first minister, so Cecil may have been its main audience.
Here is Ralegh, or Ralegh’s persona, looking back on past sorrows, past
frustrations in Elizabeth’s service:
[…] all lifeless and all helpless bound,

My fainting spirits sunk, and heart appal’d,
My joys and hopes lay bleeding on the ground […]
I hated life and cursed destiny;

The thoughts of passed times, like flames of hell,
Kindled afresh within my memory
The many dear achievements that befell […]
Which to describe were but to die in writing;

(Ralegh, 1999, p. 22)
There are similarities here, as this example immediately makes obvious,

between the situation of a despairing Petrarchan lover and that of a
courtier (or, indeed, anyone else in a patronage-based society) out of
favour with their ‘patron’, a powerful figure able to advance their career
(Marotti, 1982; Bates, 2000). And, indeed, letters to powerful men and
women in the period share rhetorical strategies with the language of
Petrarchism – not least letters by Donne, in both prose and verse, to
crucially important patrons such as Lucy, Countess of Bedford. (There
is more about patronage in the Introduction to this book, and you can
find two other examples of Ralegh’s vivid poetry, along with a short
account of his life, in the poetry section linked to this chapter.)
Did the agonies of the Petrarchan male have a pleasing psychological
spin-off for male writers? You might like to think about this idea, from
Catherine Bates:
however passionately the speaking voice might insist that he aches

for his beloved – however urgently he might call on her name,
however devoutly he might wish for or earnestly beseech her – the
one thing he does not want, or not yet, is for her actually to
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materialize, to come down from her pedestal, or to acquiesce in

his demands. So long as she is held off at a discreet distance – as
an addressee to be importuned, a ‘You’ to be apostrophized and
invoked – she creates a situation in which there is necessarily an
addressing, importuning, apostrophizing ‘I’. And so long as she
continues to deny her lover what he says he wants, the identity of
that ‘I’ remains affirmed as that of a subject, a subject who desires.
(Bates, 2011, p. 107; original emphasis)
An allegorical depiction of the love relationship

The relationship between the lover and the beloved is often depicted in
Petrarchan poems as an allegorical story about relationships between (a)
parts of the beloved (often, her heart (resistant), her eyes (powerful) and
her tongue (eloquent)), (b) equivalent parts of the lover, and (c) ‘Love’.
Sometimes Love is a powerful adult male god, sometimes the winged
child Cupid, son of Venus, the goddess of love in classical mythology,
whose arrows have the magic power to make people fall in love. Other
characters such as ‘Reason’ occasionally also take to the stage.
The effect of these figures muscling in on the relationship between
lover and lady is often an odd one: the lover can seem at least as
interested in his relationship with Love (whom sometimes he blames for
his obsessiveness) or Reason (who advises against sensual indulgence) as
in his relationship with his beloved.
English Petrarchans: Wyatt and Surrey

Before returning to Donne, and to help us think some more about
Petrarchism, let’s now look at some poems by other writers: one of
Petrarch’s own, in translation, ‘Love, who lives and reigns within my
thought’; and two translations of it by courtier-poets writing some 40
years before Donne was born, Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1503–1542) and
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547) – Wyatt’s ‘The long
love’ and Surrey’s ‘Love that doth reign’.
Wyatt’s and Surrey’s pioneering translations of Petrarch, and their
original Petrarchan verse, were hailed by the Elizabethan literary theorist
George Puttenham, in his The Art of English Poesy, first published in
1589, as marking a new direction in English literature:
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Petrarchan love
In the latter end of [Henry VIII’s] reign sprung up a new company

of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and
Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having
traveled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures
and style of the Italian poesy […] greatly polished our rude and
homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had been before, and
for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English
meter and style.
(Puttenham, 2007, p. 148)
The lyrics of both men, including the sonnets we are about to look at,
circulated in manuscript in their lifetimes, only appearing in print after
their deaths in Songes and Sonettes, written by the right honorable Lorde
Henry Haward [i.e. 'Howard'], late Earl of Surrey, and Other (1557), a
book known now as Tottel’s Miscellany, after the name of its publisher,
Richard Tottel (Holton and MacFaul, 2011).
Translating Petrarch
The word ‘sonnet’ comes from the Italian ‘sonetto’ (‘little song’). In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the term could be used to refer to
any short lyrical poem, not just 14-line poems with a set rhyme-scheme.
Sonnet form
Italian or ‘Petrarchan’ sonnets consist of an ‘octave’ (the first eight
lines) rhyming abbaabba, followed by a ‘sestet’ (the final six lines)
which usually comprises two ‘tercets’ (groups of three lines)
rhyming cdccdc or cdcdcd or some other pattern. It generally avoids
a closing couplet. The octave of Wyatt’s ‘The long love’ follows the
Italian pattern, but his sestet does end with a couplet.
The English or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet, of which Surrey’s ‘Love
that doth reign’ is an example, rhymes ababcdcdefefgg: it consists
of three quatrains (four-line blocks) and a couplet. Invented by
Surrey rather than Shakespeare, this sonnet pattern, because of the
nature of English, has more rhyme words than its Italian equivalent.
Its closing couplet often marks a dramatic change of emphasis.
307
Activity
Now read Petrarch’s poem and Wyatt’s and Surrey’s versions of it. All
three pieces are included in the poetry section relating to this chapter at
the back of the book. Start by getting to grips with the modern line-by
line translation of the Petrarch poem. Write down a short paraphrase of
the events Petrarch describes.
It is possible to find things out about the structure of the original Italian
poem without knowing any Italian. If you look at the rhymes in the Italian
text, you will see that the poem is an Italian sonnet (see box), consisting
of an octave (two abba quatrains) and a sestet (two cdc tercets). The
four main things that happen in the poem each fit into a single section.
Then, bearing in mind your findings about Petrarch’s original, read the
translations by Wyatt and Surrey. What differences do you notice
between them? Look in particular at the way in which each poem
characterises the figures in the little story – the lover (the narrator), the
lady and ‘Love’ – and write a sentence about each.
Discussion
Petrarch first, then. The poem seems to be describing an occasion on
which the speaker has made what he feels about her obvious to his
beloved – presumably through blushing. Love, who here seems to be a
military leader rather than winged Cupid, is lodged in the speaker’s heart
and rules his thoughts: the problem occurs when he moves (as, we are
told, he does on several occasions) into the speaker’s face as well.
Disaster! The lady is not pleased, and as a result Love retreats to the
heart, where the lover will die with him, happy to expire in his mistress’s,
and Love’s, cause.
This summary of Petrarch’s poem could serve as a summary of Wyatt’s
and Surrey’s too, for the outline of all three is the same. There are some
fascinating differences in the details, however. Everything seems a bit
clearer and brighter in the Surrey poem, I think. Partly this is because of
Wyatt’s more irregular rhythms and his feminine rhymes (such as
‘appeareth’/‘feareth’: ll. 11–12) and half rhymes – something Wyatt
resorts to because he, unlike Surrey, is trying to stay close to Petrarch’s
rhyme-scheme – which make many of Wyatt’s lines seem to fade out
rather than end. Partly it’s because everything seems to happen in the
Wyatt piece all at the same time. It’s in the present tense throughout:
Love’s harbouring, pressing, camping and fleeing; the lady’s taking
displeasure. In Surrey’s poem, Love reigns in the present, having
defeated the speaker in the past, when clad in arms. When the lady was
offended, she changed her mood, in Surrey but not in Wyatt, from
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Petrarchan love
‘smiling grace’ to ‘ire’, or anger (l. 8). When he published both poems in
Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557, Tottel picked up on this difference between
the poems, on the more dynamic nature of Surrey’s, in the titles that he
gave the pieces (neither Wyatt nor Surrey would have given their poem a
title): he called Wyatt’s ‘The lover for shamefastness hideth his desire
within his faithful heart’, while Surrey’s became ‘Complaint of a lover
rebuked’ (Holton and MacFaul, 2011, pp. 51, 13).
Throughout Surrey’s poem, we are in no doubt that Love is, in the
allegory, a military commander. When we start reading Wyatt’s poem,
however, there is nothing to tell us that ‘The long love’ is personified at
all: the phrase ‘long love’ (love that has been around for a long time, in
other words) suggests not, in fact, and it is only when we get to ‘his’ in
the second line that we know that ‘love’ is a separate character in the
poem at all. What happens once Love’s banner has given offence differs
in the two poems. Wyatt’s Love retreats in agony (‘with pain and cry’: l.
10) to, in an intriguing addition to Petrarch, not just the lover’s heart, but
‘the heart’s forest’, a wild place – as Elizabeth Heale points out, the
forest is both ‘the refuge of the outlaw’ and ‘the special domain of the
monarch’, set apart for deer-hunting (Heale, 1998, p. 95; see also
Brigden, 2012). Wyatt’s final lines leave the lover in the forest, ready to
die with his master: ‘good is the life ending faithfully’. In terms of the
allegory, this means that Wyatt’s speaker is remaining true to his love for
his mistress, but it’s suggestive that, in contrast with Petrarch’s text
(which includes the word ‘amando’ – ‘loving’– in the final line), there’s no
explicit mention of it. Things are clearer in Surrey’s poem. Unlike
Petrarch or Wyatt, he is anxious to cast all the blame for the offence to
the lady on to Love, in his sestet a lying coward: ‘For my lord’s guilt […]
faultless bide I pain’, says Surrey’s narrator. He will, however, stay with
Love in ‘the heart’ (l.9), and in the last line makes it quite clear, unlike
Wyatt, that his love for his lady is at the centre of his being: ‘Sweet is the
death that taketh end by love’ (l. 14). He’s saying to his lady: ‘That
offensive behaviour of mine (that is, blushing) was not my fault, it was
Love’s – but (sorry!) I can’t get away from him: Love has complete
control over me.’
It’s not surprising that the subject matter of Petrarch’s poem –

subordination to two authority figures; punishment for causing offence
to one of them; necessary furtiveness and concealment; faithful service
– appealed to Wyatt and Surrey. They were both courtiers during the
tense and paranoid reign of Henry VIII. Wyatt was twice imprisoned
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Figure 8.2 Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas Wyatt. c.1535–37, chalk
with pen and ink on paper, 37cm x 27cm. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.
Photo: Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014/
Bridgeman Images.
for a short time in the Tower of London and both times came close to
being executed. Surrey was executed at Henry’s command – ironically
enough, for an inappropriate heraldic display not dissimilar to the
involuntary display of Love’s banner in ‘Love that doth reign’: he had
310
Petrarchan love
traitorously combined (or ‘quartered’) his arms with the royal arms,
implying that he had a claim to the throne.
Wyatt’s and Surrey’s poems are, on one level, jeux d’esprit, specimens of
courtly wit. But it’s hard not also to see darker undercurrents, as
Stephen Greenblatt, writing in particular about Wyatt, makes clear:
however much these poems impress us as entertainments,

fashioned to be read or sung in a sophisticated group of courtiers
and ladies, they convince us at the same time that the poet has a
stake in them, though the precise nature of that stake may be
obscure. Indeed it is precisely their blend of playfulness and
danger that marks them as the product of the court; we must
imagine a game in which idealism and cynicism, aggression and
vulnerability, self-revelation and hypocrisy are tensely conjoined.
The game seems often childish, the stakes are enormous and, on
occasion, fatal[.]
(Greenblatt, 1980, p. 137; original emphasis)
311
Figure 8.3 Surrey and his banners. Unknown artist, Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey. c.1546, oil on canvas, 222cm x 220cm, National Portrait Gallery,
London, NPG 5291. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Whose heart?
Whose heart?
Here’s another poem about a lover’s heart, but with a very different
feel. It’s from the first version of Sir Philip Sidney’s long piece of
pastoral prose fiction, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (c.1580), not a
million miles from Lodge’s Rosalind, but much more complicated and
subtle. Sidney has written the poem in a deliberately simple, naive way.
It is spoken in Arcadia by an imaginary shepherdess created by a
disguised prince as part of a trick.
My true love hath my heart, and I have his,

By just exchange, one for the other given.
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:
There never was a better bargain driven.
His heart in me, keeps me and him in one,

My heart in him, his thoughts and senses guides.
He loves my heart, for once it was his own:
I cherish his, because in me it bides.
His heart his wound received from my sight:

My heart was wounded, with his wounded heart,
For as from me on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss:
My true love hath my heart, and I have his.
(Sidney, 1999, p. 167)
In trying to work this out for the first time, you might sympathise with
the speaker of this contemporary rewrite by Wendy Cope, in the voice
of her fictional South London poet, Jake Strugnell:
My true love hath my heart and I have hers:

We swapped last Tuesday and felt quite elated.
But now, whenever one of us refers
To ‘my heart’, things get rather complicated.
(Baker, 1990, p. 325)
313
Notice in the Sidney poem that the situation is not one of complete
equality, but is determined by gender: as, in fact, a Petrarchan fantasy
come true. The heart of the male lover (‘he’ – not in this case the
narrator of the poem) was ‘wounded’ when he saw the poem’s speaker
(the lady). Now that the lady has his heart, she is able to appreciate the
extremity of his pain and is in turn ‘wounded’ herself (she falls in love):
‘My heart was wounded, with his wounded heart’ (line 10). The lady
only falls in love with the man because he has fallen in love with her
and is suffering. She is not attracted to her ‘true love’ just by the ‘sight’
of him, as he is attracted to her.
We are now going to look at a Donne poem, ‘The Legacy’, that is also
on the topic of hearts. Although ‘The Legacy’ might have been written
within a decade or so of ‘My true love hath my heart’, in some ways it
seems to belong to a different world. This is a difficult poem, so make
sure that you look at the explanatory notes in the poetry section as you
read. Try not to be worried if you find it hard to follow. You can – and
I know this sounds odd – actually turn the situation to your advantage,
because thinking about bits of poems you find most difficult can often
be very rewarding. Make sure, then, that you try to think a bit about
any passages that strike you as especially problematic. What is it about a
particular moment in the poem – a word, a phrase, an image, a twist in
the argument – that makes it particularly hard to get? If you can begin
to answer that question, you will have turned your difficulty into an
insight about the text. Nagging away at a tricky line can pay surprising
dividends.
One of the oddities of ‘The Legacy’ is its rhyme-scheme: three stanzas,
4 5 4 5
each rhyming abb a a bcc (the superscript numbers here indicate the
number of stressed syllables in a line: thus lines 1–3 in each stanza have
four stresses, line four has five, and so on). This stanza pattern is a bit
like the nine-line Spenserian stanza you encountered in Chapter 7, as
both have, in Richard Danson Brown’s words, ‘two couplet climaxes’. It
also resembles a truncated sonnet: an Italian-style quatrain and a half is
followed by a couplet. What makes it different from both of these
points of comparison, though – and more like a song – is the variation
4 5 4
in line-length in the middle of the stanza (b a a ). Grammatically, each
4 5
stanza tends to break into three at the same division points (abb a ;
4 5
a b; cc ), marking, roughly, three successive points in time.
Donne’s poetry is full of unusual, one-off rhyme-schemes like this.
Indeed, you will find that several of the Donne poems linked to this
314
Whose heart?
chapter feature both variation in line-length and stanzas of roughly eight

or so lines ending in couplets. As Donne didn’t use the sonnet – the
arch-Petrarchan form – for his love poetry, and as he didn’t, as far as
we know, marshal his love poems in a sequence of any kind, it’s
tempting, though a bit fanciful, to read the lyrics that use this kind of
stanza as a kind of rejoinder to Petrarchan convention: mad, jumbled-
up sonnet sequences in miniature.
Variation of this sort helps give Donne’s verse the ability to twist and
turn, to stop and start in startling and unpredictable ways, a quality that
in ‘The Legacy’ isn’t just a matter of rhyme-scheme. You’ll have noticed
that, by contrast with ‘My true love hath my heart and I have his’, the
rhythms of ‘The Legacy’ seem awkward, irregular. To make lines have
the right number of stresses we have to work quite hard. This
awkwardness, however, is an important part of the way the poem
communicates.
Our confusion, and the speaker’s, is centred in the second stanza. Here,
to make lines scan, we have to make quite a lot of decisions about
which ‘neutral’ syllables (syllables that could easily be stressed or not) to
emphasise. Look at lines 10, 11 and 12. All of these should have four
stressed syllables in them. Which syllables would you stress? Try
speaking the lines out loud and then, afterwards, listen to the audio
recording (available on the module website). You’ll find yourself having
to make decisions about whether or not to stress pronouns like
‘myself ’, ‘you’ and ‘I’. In doing so, you’ll be having to make decisions
about what exactly these words are doing in the sentence; you’ll be
forced to think more about who is who and whose heart is whose. As
John Carey says,
This is an exasperating poem […] It takes ages to sort out the

pronouns: and that’s the point. We’re made to share the speaker’s
disorientation, not just hear about it. The man’s puzzlement over
his mislaid personality is mirrored in the puzzling grammar. What
Donne calls ‘vertiginous giddiness’ [in another text, a prose
religious meditation], and Pater [Walter Pater, the Victorian writer]
referred to as ‘that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of
ourselves’ is transmitted to us syntactically as we grapple with the
sense of the lines.
(Carey, 1990, p. 175)
315
This sort of effect, very common in Donne’s poetry – forcing you to

think as you read – helps make it very immediate: the voice of the
poem’s speaker seems close to us (in our ear, as it were), and very
different from the voice of ‘My true love hath my heart’. You’ll have
noticed other things in the poem that contribute to this effect: the ‘dear’
thrown in to the first line; the ‘alas’ in line 13; the ‘oh’ in line 24; the
reference to ‘our losses sad’ in line 22; more generally, the sense we
have that the speaker is buttonholing the person he’s addressing,
insistent that they listen to what he or she has to say. He’s not, overtly
or otherwise, speaking directly to us, of course – to the reader – as the
speaker of ‘My true love hath my heart’ seems to be doing, but to a
specific person in a specific situation staged for, and in, the poem. The
tone of voice has a realistic edge. Yet, rather incongruously, the scene
we’re eavesdropping on tells a highly artificial Petrarchan story about
the exchange of hearts. The mixture of obviously fanciful argumentation
and equally obvious down-to-earth experience is something you will
repeatedly notice in Donne. In other poems – you’ll remember this
from the first piece we read in this chapter – Donne brings a mass of
incongruous elements into Petrarch’s world of flowers and roses, Venus
and Cupid: from fleas to scientific equipment. In ‘The Legacy’, he is
much closer to the imagery used by Petrarch himself, of course, but
what a difference! Donne makes us disturbingly aware of the heart as a
physical object – the terrifying shapelessness of the ‘something like a
heart’ he finds, with ‘colours’ and ‘corners’, is unforgettable – in an
extraordinary mixture of Petrarchan artfulness, physical sensation and
emotional bitterness.
316
Whose heart?
Figure 8.4 ‘Thou art not so black, as my heart’. Unknown English artist, John
Donne. c.1595, oil on panel, 77cm x 63cm, National Portrait Gallery, London,
NPG 6790. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
The folded arms, floppy hat and unlaced collar in this dark and brooding
portrait of a 23-year-old Donne establish him as an archetypical melancholy
lover. The inscription on either side of Donne’s face reads ‘Illumina tenebr[as]
nostras domina’ (‘O lady lighten our darkness’), rewriting a phrase from the
Latin ‘Vulgate’ Bible, ‘Deus meus illumina tenebreas meas’ (‘O my Lord
lighten my darkness’: Psalms 17: 29), to give it an amorous meaning. Was
the picture intended as a gift for one of the women addressed in his poetry?
If so, it must have been rejected or returned, for it was still in Donne’s
possession at his death in 1631. By then an eminent churchman, Donne
bequeathed the portrait to a patron, in whose family it remained until it was
sold in 2006. Following a fundraising campaign that confirmed Donne’s
popularity – a record-breaking number of small donations were received –
melancholy Donne was saved for the nation, and bought by the National
Portrait Gallery in London for £1.4 million.
317
Figure 8.5 Jacob Marcus after J.C. van’t Woudt, Theatrum anatomicum van
Leidse Academie. 1609, 46cm x 55cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P
1887-A-12041.
‘I, alas, could there find none/When I had ripped and searched where hearts
should lie’ (‘The Legacy’, lines 13–14). Stimulated in particular by the
discoveries of Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) at the University of Padua,
advances in anatomy led during Donne’s lifetime to new, more mechanistic
ways of seeing the human body. Jonathan Sawday links public dissections,
such as this one at the University of Leiden in 1609, to moments in Donne’s
writing such as his gruesome ‘self-dissection’ in ‘The Legacy’: ‘The anatomy
theatre […] became the perfect imaginative stage in which Donne could
perform, over and over again, the drama of his own self-presentation’
(Sawday, 1995, p. 122). The banners carried by the skeletons in this painting
contain Latin phrases reminding the viewer of the ubiquity of death; the
heading at the top, above a view of the city, reads ‘Anatomical Amphitheatre
in Leiden’
318
Donne and the lure of biography

Now is perhaps a good time to consider the relationship between
Donne’s poetry and the bumpy life you can read about in the short
biography that introduces the selection of poems by him in the section
at the back of the book. Think back to ‘A Valediction Forbidding
Mourning’. The situation of the lovers in that poem certainly seems
unlike the desperate impasse stereotypically associated with Petrarchism:
the stand-off between a cruel mistress and a despairing lover. It is one
of a number of Donne poems – ‘The Canonization’, which we will meet
later on, is another – which celebrate in extravagant terms what seem to
be happily fulfilled sexual relationships. Many critics have argued that
Donne wrote these poems after his disastrous (in career terms) secret
marriage to Ann More. (And some of Donne’s uses of the word ‘more’
in these and other poems have been argued to be puns on Ann’s
surname.) Other poems by Donne seem quite different: they are, to put
it bluntly, sexually aggressive and misogynistic, though often also ironic
and humorous. In Book 2, Chapter 1 of this module, Anita Pacheco
discusses one of these, ‘Elegy 19: To his mistress going to bed’, which
was inspired, like Donne’s other Elegies, by the erotic poetry of Ovid.
Arthur F. Marotti and others have suggested that this, more lubricious,
kind of verse was composed before Donne’s marriage, when, post-
university, he was a trainee lawyer at the Inns of Court in London,
exchanging manuscript poetry with his contemporaries. The Inns of
Court were social finishing schools for culturally, intellectually and
politically ambitious young men about town as much as educational
institutions. Marotti’s description of the intellectual environment of the
Inns, and the implications of it for Donne’s poetry, is compelling
(Marotti, 1986, pp. 25–95). At the Inns, he tells us, ambitious young
men both aped the Petrarchan conventions of court love poetry and
made fun of them. (Donne certainly spoofed Petrarchist courtiers in his
Satires, which probably belong to this early period.) Inns of Court men
also, Marotti says, compensated for their social frustrations by
composing erotic poetry fantasising about sexual success and by
showing off their intellectual mastery in writing texts of ‘magnificently
unnecessary difficulty’ (Marotti ,1986, p. 70). Think back to the high-
pressure world of Henry VIII’s court within which Wyatt and Surrey
were writing: the Inns certainly sound like a very different sort of
environment, entailing a very different sort of literature.
319
Although Marotti’s arguments are extremely convincing, you should be

aware that they remain speculative, and other approaches are possible.
Andrew Hadfield, for example, disputes the idea that Donne’s most
overtly anti-feminist lyrics were written with a male, Inns of Court,
audience predominantly in mind; as result, he argues, ‘Even the most
obvious assaults on women […] may not mean what subsequent
commentators assume they do’ (Hadfield, 2007, p. 211; see also
Bell, 2006).
Attempting to find biographical analogues for Donne’s poems is an
activity with a long history. The framework for much of the speculation
was set in place by Donne’s friend and first biographer, Izaak Walton,
who emphasised the disapproval Donne felt during the later part of his
career, as a pillar of the Church establishment, for the frivolous love
poems of his youth. Three and a half centuries later, the critic John
Carey influentially used Donne’s repudiation of the Roman Catholicism
he grew up in – a necessary step for the sake of his Church career – as
a key to anxieties in his poetry and prose about concepts such as
fidelity and infidelity, psychological instability, personal identity,
intellectual and theological certainty and changeability in the physical
world (Carey, 1990). The situations that Donne’s verse stages,
meanwhile, such as the one we’ve just been looking at in ‘The Legacy’
(and others you’ll find in the other Donne poems associated with this
chapter), are so vivid that it seems almost unreasonable not to wonder
about their real-life inspirations. Attempting to tie particular poems
down to particular occasions, however, as, for example, Marotti
repeatedly does (Marotti, 1986), is even more treacherous than it is for
most poets. Hardly any of Donne’s verse survives in his own
handwriting, and, although Donne toyed on a couple of occasions with
the idea of publishing a collection of his shorter poems, the vast
majority appeared in print only posthumously (Beal, 2014). This makes
it hard to be sure about the dates or textual histories of individual
poems – or, indeed, their titles. Apparent references to dateable events
in the poems have been tracked down by some editors, but few of these
seem to provide much in the way of definitive evidence. (To see what
the state of play is for any given poem, look it up in Donne, 2010.)
With respect to most of Donne’s love poetry, Andrew Hadfield’s
summary is bleak but accurate: ‘we do not know how or why Donne
composed his poetry, what order it was written in, and to whom he
addressed it’ (Hadfield, 2007, p. 206). Donne might not have been
unhappy at this state of affairs: one poem begins ‘Whoever guesses,
thinks, or dreams he knows/Who is my mistress, wither by this curse’
320
(Donne, 2000, p. 114). How much of a problem is it for us, though,

really? John Carey claims that ‘We cannot, even if we wished to, get
behind the writer to the “real Donne”. Nor would the attempt make
sense, since writing was part of the real him, and the only part we have’
(Donne, 2000, p. xxxii).
321
Poetry and publication

During his lifetime Donne tried to restrict the manuscript circulation of
his writings, particularly, it seems, the shorter love poems that we are
looking at in this chapter and that usually appear in editions today
under the heading Songs and Sonnets. It is possible that Donne didn’t
think of these poems (unlike his Elegies and Satires) as forming a
collection, but as individual items composed for different people on
separate occasions (Marotti, 1986, p. 16; Hadfield, 2007; for a more
sceptical view, see Beal, 2014). It is striking that he doesn’t seem, in any
case, to have kept a reference copy of his verse: in 1614, in connection
with a publication plan that came to nothing, he asked his friend Sir
Henry Goodyer (to whom he wrote a letter every Tuesday) to send back
poems that he’d sent him – ‘texts of mine own rags’ (quoted in
Beal, 2014).
Poetry in manuscript had a very different status in the early modern
period than it does today. Today we tend to assume that the best-
quality, most culturally prestigious poetry is published work. This was
not the case in Donne’s time; in fact, pretty much the reverse was the
case. The poetry thought classiest was written by the most prestigious
people – titled members of the royal court, for instance – and people
like that (Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, for example) did not tend to print their
love poems, partly because, in a society so dominated by the imperatives
of religion, doing so could be seen as ethically problematic, and partly
because of a wish to retain exclusive coterie status. Instead, in various
‘manuscript communities’ – the court, the Inns of Court, families, other
types of social network – poetry was passed around, collected, read,
copied, adapted and cannibalised, in manuscripts large and small, bound
and unbound, formal and informal, messy and neat, professionally
copied and amateurishly botched (Marotti, 1995). A lot of the poetry
collected in this way in the seventeenth century was Donne’s – his
uniqueness was as obvious to the first readers of the 1633 edition as it
is to us – but this happened mainly after he had died (Beal, 2014).
Sadly, as we’ve seen, the manuscripts Donne sent to the friends, patrons
and lovers who were the first to work their way through his poetry’s
disquieting twists and turns are lost.
322
Conclusion: Donne among the critics
Conclusion: Donne among the critics

In conclusion, let’s read one more Donne poem, ‘The Canonization’,
and compare our notes on it with the opinions of some distinguished
literary critics.
Activity
First, read ‘The Canonization’ in the section associated with this chapter
at the back of the book. Write down a short summary of its argument.
Then turn to Readings 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3, which you will find at the end of
this chapter. These are extracts from works by Cleanth Brooks, Jonathan
Culler and Arthur F. Marotti, respectively. Each of them takes a different
critical approach to the poem. Write down short answers to the following
questions:
. How do the critics differ in their views on the poem? What sort of
poem does each critic imagine it to be?
. Do you agree with any or none of these critics?
Discussion
I detected a sliding scale of reverence towards ‘The Canonization’.
Brooks, exemplifying the ‘new criticism’, is the most respectful; for him,
the poem skilfully juxtaposes contrary elements to make a subtle
statement about love, serious because paradoxical. Culler, the ‘post-
structuralist’, points out some self-contradictoriness in the poem – so you
might think he is saying it is flawed. But post-structuralism’s argument is
that all texts behave in this way, and Culler arguably reveals ‘The
Canonization’ to be more complicatedly nuanced than Brooks does. For
the historicist Marotti, meanwhile, the poem is a light-hearted complaint
at Donne’s ‘ruined fortune’ that coolly masquerades as the opposite,
roping in religious language with deliberate absurdity.
What’s your opinion about what the critics say? My immediate instinct is
to want to bring them together: to see if it’s possible to produce an
interpretation as historically aware as Marotti’s that’s also able to take
the surface meaning of the poetry as seriously as Brooks does and be as
sharp on logical analysis as Culler is. But you may feel strongly drawn
to one or other of these approaches. There are as many ways of writing
323
about Donne’s poems as there are ways of reading them, and I hope
that one thing you’ve discovered from this chapter is that there are a
very great many of those.
Independent study
website.
324
References
References
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Bates, C. (2011) ‘Desire, discontent, parody: the love sonnet in early
modern England’ in Cousins, A.D. and Howarth, P. (eds) The Cambridge
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Beal, P. (2014) ‘Introduction’, John Donne, Calendar of English Literary
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Longman.
Holton, A. and MacFaul, T. (eds) (2011) Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and
Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others,
London, Penguin.
Johnson, S. (2009) The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. R. Lonsdale,
intro. J. Mullan, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Marotti, A.F. (1982) ‘“Love is not love”: Elizabethan sonnet sequences
and the social order’, ELH, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 396–428.
Marotti, A.F. (1986) John Donne, Coterie Poet, Madison, WI, University
of Wisconsin Press.
Marotti, A.F. (1995) Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric,
Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Petrarca, F. [Petrarch] (1996) The Canzoniere or Rerum vulgarium
fragmenta, trans. and ed. M. Musa, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University
Press.
Puttenham, G. (2007) The Art of English Poesy, ed. F. Whigham and W.
A. Rebhorn, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Ralegh, W. (1999) The Poems, with other Verse from the Court of
Elizabeth I, ed. M. Dodsworth, London, Everyman.
326
References
Sawday, J. (1995) The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body
in Renaissance Culture, New York, Routledge.
Sidney, P. (1999) The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia),
ed. K. Duncan-Jones, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Sidney, P. (2002) The Major Works, ed. K. Duncan-Jones, Oxford
Vickers, N. (1981) ‘Diana described: scattered women and scattered
rhyme’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 265–79 (available through the
327
Reading 8.1 A new critical reading of

‘The Canonization’
Source: Cleanth Brooks (1975 [1942]) The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the
Structure of Poetry, Orlando, FL, Harcourt, pp. 11, 14, 15–17
The basic metaphor which underlies the poem (and which is reflected in
the title) involves a sort of paradox. […]
[A] reading of the poem will show that Donne takes both love and
religion seriously; it will show, further, that the paradox is here his
inevitable instrument. […]
The effect of the poet’s implied awareness of the lovers’ apparent
madness [in lines 10–20] is to cleanse and revivify metaphor; to indicate
the sense in which the poet accepts it, and thus to prepare us for
accepting seriously the fine and seriously intended metaphors which
dominate the last two stanzas of the poem.
The opening line of the fourth stanza,
Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,
achieves an effect of tenderness and deliberate resolution. The lovers

are ready to die to the world; they are committed; they are not callow
but confident. […]
In this last stanza, the theme receives a final complication. The lovers in
rejecting life actually win to the most intense life. This paradox has been
hinted at earlier in the phoenix metaphor. Here it receives a powerful
dramatization. The lovers in becoming hermits, find that they have not
lost the world, but have gained the world in each other, now a more
intense, more meaningful world. […] The image is that of a violent
squeezing as of a powerful hand. And what do the lovers ‘drive’ into
each other’s eyes? The ‘Countries, Townes,’ and ‘Courtes,’ which they
renounced in the first stanza of the poem. The unworldly lovers thus
become the most ‘worldly’ of all. […]
The comparison of the lovers to the phoenix is very skillfully related to
the two earlier comparisons, that in which the lovers are like burning
tapers, and that in which they are like the eagle and the dove. The
phoenix comparison gathers up both: the phoenix is a bird, and like the
328
Reading 8.1 A new critical reading of ‘The Canonization’
tapers, it burns. We have a selected series of items: the phoenix figure

seems to come in a natural stream of association. ‘Call us what you
will,’ the lover says, and rattles off in his desperation the first
comparisons that occur to him. The comparison to the phoenix seems
thus merely another outlandish one, the most outrageous of all. But it is
this most fantastic one, stumbled over apparently in his haste, that the
poet goes on to develop. It really describes the lovers best and justifies
their renunciation. For the phoenix is not two but one, ‘we two being
one, are it’; and it burns, not like the taper at its own cost, but to live
again. Its death is life: ‘Wee dye and rise the same …’ The poet literally
justifies the fantastic assertion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to ‘die’ means to experience the consummation of the act of
love. The lovers after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted
in mere lust. This is their title to canonization. Their love is like the
phoenix. […]
The word is in a crucial position. On it is pivoted the transition to the
next stanza […] Most important of all, the sexual submeaning of ‘die’
does not contradict the other meanings: the poet is saying: ‘Our death
is really a more intense life’ […] But in the total passage he is also
saying: ‘Because our love is not mundane, we can give up the world’;
[…] ‘because our love can outlast its consummation, we are a minor
miracle, we are love’s saints.’ […]
There is one more factor in developing and sustaining the final effect.
The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts; it is both the
assertion and the realization of the assertion. The poet has actually
before our eyes built within the song the ‘pretty room’ with which he
says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well-wrought urn
which can hold the lovers’ ashes and which will not suffer in
comparison with the prince’s ‘halfe-acre tomb.’
329
Reading 8.2 A post-structuralist reading

of ‘The Canonization’
Source: Jonathan Culler (1983) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after
Structuralism, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 200–5
For New Criticism an important feature of a good poem’s organic unity
was its embodiment or dramatization of the positions it asserts. By
enacting or performing what it asserts or describes, the poem becomes
complete in itself, accounts for itself, and stands free as a self-contained
fusion of being and doing. ‘The poem is an instance of the doctrine
which it asserts,’ writes Cleanth Brooks of his paradigm case, Donne’s
‘The Canonization.’ ‘[…]The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which
can hold the lover’s ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with
the prince’s “halfe-acre tomb”’ […]
[Post-structuralist] analyses […] also exploit potential self-reference […]
But the relation deconstruction reveals is […] a self-reference that
ultimately brings out the inability of any discourse to account for itself
[…]
[In] ‘The Canonization,’ […] [t]he narrator posits that the legend of his
love will be fit for verse, sonnets if not chronicles, which will function
as hymns for those who hear them. Moreover, listeners will be moved
to speech upon hearing these verses […] The speaker […] imagines that
those who have heard the verse legend of his love will invoke the lovers
in idealizing descriptions that, more powerfully than anything in his own
account, portray the lovers as triumphantly gaining the whole world’s
soul by seeking love alone. […] We have, therefore, not so much a self-
containing urn as a chain of discourses and representations: the legend
describing the lovers, the verse representation of this legend, the
celebratory portrayal of the lovers in the response of those who have
heard the legend, the request which the lovers are asked to formulate,
and the pattern from above that will generate further versions of their
love.
The chain of representations complicates the situation Brooks describes,
especially when one focuses on the question of self-reference and asks
what is the ‘pretty room,’ the ‘well wrought urn,’ or the ‘hymn’ to which
the poem refers. Brooks answers, the poem itself […] If this is so, if
the poem is the urn, then one of the principal features of this urn is
that it portrays people responding to the urn. If the urn or hymn is the
330
Reading 8.2 A post-structuralist reading of ‘The Canonization’
poem itself, then the predicted response to the hymn is a response to

the representation of a response to the hymn. […] [B]y far the most
hymnlike element of the poem is the invocation of the lovers by those
who have heard the hymn or verse legend of their love. […] [S]o if the
poem refers to itself as a hymn it is including within itself its depiction
of the hymnlike response – the response to the hymn it claims to be.
[…]
[T]his account gives us a surprisingly apt description of what has
happened. Brooks, after reading the verse legend of these lovers,
invokes them, celebrates them as saints of love […] He responds much
as the poem predicts, praising their exemplary love, and asking for a
pattern of their love, which he interprets as ‘the union which the
creative imagination itself effects’ […] His book invokes ‘The
Canonization’ as canonical example, as pattern […] The phrase ‘well
wrought urn,’ which this exemplary example, ‘The Canonization,’ applies
to poems and to itself, is taken up and applied by the book to other
poems, and also to itself. […]
In celebrating itself as urn the poem incorporates a celebration of the
urn and thus becomes something other than the urn; and if the urn is
taken to include the response to the urn, then the responses it
anticipates, such as Brooks’s, become a part of it and prevent it from
closing. Self-reference does not close it in upon itself but leads to a
proliferation of representations, a series of invocations and urns,
including Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn. […] This series of
representations, invocations, and readings which, like moments of self-
reference, are at once within the poem and outside it, can always be
continued and has no end.
331
Reading 8.3 A historicist reading of

‘The Canonization’
Source: Arthur F. Marotti (1986) John Donne, Coterie Poet, Madison, WI,
University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 157, 161–2, 163–5 (notes omitted)
‘The Canonization’ [is] an ironic love lyric almost certainly composed
fairly early in [Donne’s] married life and addressed to an audience that
would have read it in relation to its author’s own social circumstances.
This work is usually viewed as a witty and eloquent expression of the
theme that the world is well lost for love. […] In its original context,
however, ‘The Canonization’ communicated a very different message.
Donne’s readers knew that he was expressing his personal longing for
the public world he pretended to scorn in this lyric and they would
have read the poem as a more ironic, hence more aesthetically complex,
work than the one formalist critics and scholars utilizing literary and
intellectual history have interpreted. […]
[The third stanza] of the poem has presented the most interesting
interpretive challenge. Those who have written about ‘The
Canonization’ have usually focused on the metaphors of this stanza as
the key to Donne’s definition of the mystery of mutual love that is
celebrated in the poem. Despite the difficulties of doing so, critics have
attempted to fix the meanings of the perplexing symbols and conceits as
one means of articulating the total lyric statement of the work. […]
The eagle and dove may be ‘emblems of strength and gentleness,’
symbols of masculinity and femininity […], of ‘action and passion,’ or
of the ‘marriage of Voluptuousness and Sorrow.’ By itself, the eagle
symbolized resurrection […], ‘virtue tired by wandering,’ sainthood or
the Trinity, and the dove the Holy Spirit or […] ‘anything from
Christian resurrection to marital fidelity, or from contemplation to an
alchemical reaction.’ The phoenix was a symbol of resurrection, of
constancy, and of marriage. […] Religious, Neoplatonic, alchemical, as
well as Petrarchan and other literary sources are possible aids to
interpretation, but it would seem that for the coterie reader these
metaphors, finally, would have been multivalent, ambiguous, and
fundamentally resistant to interpretation. […]
Donne had every reason to use a strategy in this ironic and rhetorically
adroit poem in order to give the speaker a moral and intellectual
advantage over the antagonist and, thus, to grant himself a playful
332
Reading 8.3 A historicist reading of ‘The Canonization’
control over his readers. The very ambiguity of the images permits the
transition from the denigration of love to its idealization, from insult to
praise. Whereas the first three lines of the stanza have the feel of
continuing the self-disparagement of the previous stanzas, the fourth
line (‘And wee in us find the Eagle and the Dove’) is uncertain in tone,
potentially either complimentary or depreciatory. So too the notion of
‘dying’ in this stanza […] must ambiguously refer both to the lovers’
physical relationship and to their mysterious spiritual joining. The effect
of the whole stanza, particularly of the mystifying explanation offered in
the last six lines, is to put the listener at the mercy of the speaker and
to assert the intellectual authority of the ironic poet. Just as the
dramatic antagonist in the lyric loses the power to criticize or threaten
the speaker or the love relationship, so too the reader is aesthetically
assaulted with what must have been originally, as it is still today, a
bewildering set of conceits [i.e. ingenious comparisons].
The third stanza finally establishes a mode of hyperbolic self-praise that
is extended through the rest of the poem. Donne utilizes encomiastic
[i.e. praise] techniques with deliberate comic impropriety […]
Irony, not moral or aesthetic idealization, was Donne’s purpose. […]
The speaker finally claims that he and his beloved can ‘the whole
worlds soule extract’ (40) – that is, possess in essence everything
valuable outside of their relationship – and that they can ‘epitomize/
Countries, Townes, Courts’ (43–44), but these exaggerations reveal the
breakdown of the strategy of idealizing rather than the transcendence of
the context in which the conflicts between love and ambition are
painfully experienced. […] Though this poem is a rhetorical tour de
force that contains an attractive fantasy of love’s triumph over social
disadvantages, Donne knew and was aware his coterie readers knew that
neither poetry nor wit could solve the serious difficulties he faced in his
painful social exile. […]
[I]ntense wittiness signals, as it does in some speeches in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, that things are at the emotional breaking point.
333
Poetry for Chapter 7
Contents
Edmund Spenser 339
The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto ix,
stanzas 16–54 342
The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto xii (complete) 358
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) was one of the most important and
influential literary figures in Elizabethan England. We know little about
his family background, beyond the fact he was born in London. He was
educated at Merchant Taylors’ School in London, and at Pembroke
College, Cambridge, where he studied as a ‘sizar’. This means that he
was a poor scholar who had to do domestic chores to pay for his place
in the College. At Cambridge (between 1569 and 1576), he studied for a
BA and then an MA. He became friends with the academic Gabriel
Harvey and would have read widely in ancient and modern European
languages, as well as being close to theological controversies within
Cambridge about how English Christianity should develop. All of these
rich intellectual contexts inform his poetry.
After leaving Cambridge, Spenser sought advancement by working for
statesmen and courtiers. He worked for John Young, Bishop of
Rochester (who had been master of Pembroke College) before
becoming private secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton in 1580.
This was Spenser’s big breakthrough. Between 1580 and 1582, Grey was
lord deputy of Ireland; this meant that he was Elizabeth’s representative
in Ireland and, as such, Spenser was closely involved in all aspects of
Grey’s government. Spenser remained a staunch advocate of Grey’s
hardline policies and his brutal (but often ineffective) attempts to
subdue the resistance of the Irish to English rule. Spenser profited
enormously from his association with Grey, and by 1586 he had
acquired (alongside other property), Kilcolman Castle in County Cork.
Spenser’s first major publication was The Shepheardes Calender (1579), a
collection of pastoral verse dialogues, through which Spenser positions
himself as ‘the new poet’: a successor to both the Roman poet Virgil
and the English poet Chaucer, and as the inaugurator of a new way of
writing poetry in English. His longest work, The Faerie Queene (1590
(Books I–III), 1596 (Books IV–VI) and 1609 (the Mutability Cantos, a
fragmentary seventh book)), is an epic poem which synthesises a range
of traditions to produce something unparalleled in the English language
in its scale, ambition and variety of incident. Spenser also wrote satirical
poems, some of which almost got him into trouble with leading
courtiers like Lord Burghley, who is almost certainly the target of the
beast fable ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’, published in the Complaints volume
in 1591. Among Spenser’s other works is the sonnet sequence Amoretti
339
(1595), a fictionalised account of the courtship of his second wife,

Elizabeth Boyle. The prose dialogue A View of the Present State of Ireland
was not published until long after Spenser’s death (1633) because of its
implicit critique of Queen Elizabeth’s Irish policy.
Spenser died in London in 1599, after rebels had ransacked his castle.
According to the historian William Camden, his funeral was attended by
poets who wrote ‘mournful elegies’ which they threw into his tomb
along with ‘the pens that wrote them’.
For a fuller biography, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Edmund, (1552?
1599)’ in ODNB.
Note on the poem

In a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh printed with The Faerie Queene, Spenser
claimed that his aim in this epic poem was to illustrate the virtues
necessary for ‘a gentleman or noble person’, focusing in each of The
Faerie Queene’s books on one virtue in particular. Although according to
Spenser the original plan was for a poem of 12 (or even 24) books, only
six complete ones and a fragmentary seventh were ever published.
Books I–III, dedicated respectively to the virtues of holiness,
temperance and chastity, appeared in 1590, followed in 1596 by Books
IV-VI, on friendship, justice and courtliness. Each of these six books is
dominated by the adventures of a knight or knights exemplifying and
allegorising the virtue in question (two knights in the case of Book IV,
and a female knight, Britomart, in the case of Book III). Linking all the
books and embodying all the virtues, is the figure of Arthur (later to be
King Arthur), who is in love with Gloriana, the Queen of Fairyland, a
character who never appears in the text and who is in part, according to
Spenser, a representation of Queen Elizabeth. The fragmentary
‘Mutability Cantos’ were published in 1609, a decade after Spenser’s
death; their printer made the suggestion that this verse narrative, in
which the giantess Mutability threatens the stability of the universe,
might have been part of a lost book on the virtue of constancy.
Each book of The Faerie Queene is divided into sections called ‘cantos’,
which function in much the same way as chapters in a novel.
As is discussed in Chapter 7, Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene in
deliberately archaic language. For this reason, the following extracts
from it are the only poetry in this book reproduced in its orginal
Renaissance spelling. Some words are glossed; it is not difficult to guess
340
Edmund Spenser
at most of the others (thus, ‘gras’ is ‘grass’; ‘daunger’ is ‘danger’;

‘boteman’ is ‘boatman’; ‘ly’ is ‘lie’). Note that Spenser often uses an ‘-en’
where we would not (‘passen’ is ‘pass’). Unusual words that recur
frequently include ‘eke’ (‘also’), ‘ne’ (‘nor’), ‘gan’ (‘began’ or ‘did’),
‘wight’ (‘person’) and ‘mote’ (‘might’). A grave accent (è) appears in
some poems to indicate syllables that should be pronounced that might
otherwise not be: for example, the three-syllable pronunciation of
‘fastenèd’ (I.xii.12).
In dealing with Spenser’s poetry, you will find it helpful to read at least
some of it alongside the audio of Richard Danson Brown reading it
aloud, which you can find on the module website.
Further reading
A.C. Hamilton et al (eds) (2001, 2007), Edmund Spenser, The Faerie
Queene, revised 2nd Edition, Harlow, Longman.
Heale, E. (1999), The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide. Cambridge,
341
The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto ix,

stanzas 16–54
Source: Kaske, C.V. (ed.) (2006) Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene,
Book One, Indianapolis, IN, Hackett, pp. 140–51, 213–16.
Footnotes ascribed to (RDB) have been added by the authors of this
module.
16
1
Thus as heº spake, his visage wexèdº pale, ºArthur; ºgrew
And chaunge of hewº great passion did bewray;º ºhue; ºreveal
Yett still he strove to cloke his inward bale,2
And hide the smoke, that did his fire display,
Till gentle Una thus to him ganº say; ºbegan, did
‘O happy Queene of Faries, that hast fownd
Mongstº many, one that with his prowesse may ºAmongst
Defend thine honour, and thy foes confownd:
True Loves are often sown, but seldom grow on grownd.’
17
‘Thine,º O then,’ said the gentle Redcrosse knight, ºUna's
‘Next to that Ladies love, shalbe the place,3
O fayrest virgin, full of heavenly light,
Whose wondrous faith, exceeding earthly race,
Was firmest fixt in myne extremest case.
1
Arthur, a character who appears in all of the first six books of The Faerie Queene, has just
been talking about his visionary encounter with the object of his quest, the Queen of the
Fairies or Gloriana, to Redcrosse (Knight of Holiness and the hero of Book 1) and his
lady Una. Redcrosse says that Una is next in worthiness to the Queen (17.1-2).
2
pain, here psychological pain.
3
Stanza 17, lines 1 through 4 are difficult because they illustrate Spenser’s characteristic
indefinite pronoun reference. I.e., Una’s love will be placed in Redcrosse’s heart next to
the love of Gloriana, his current ruler, and to his love of that glory and honor which she
symbolizes. See Richard Lovelace’s lyric: ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, / Loved I
not honour more’ (‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars,’ […]).
342
The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto ix, stanzas 16–54
And you,º my Lord, the Patrone of my life, ºArthur

Of that great Queene may well gaine worthie grace:
For onely worthie you through prowes priefe4
Yf living man moteº worthie be, to be her liefe.º ºmight; ºbeloved
18
So diversly discoursing of their loves,
The golden Sunne his glistering head ganº shew, ºbegan, did
And sad remembraunce now the Prince amoves,
With fresh desire his voyage to pursew:
Als Una earndº her traveill to renew. ºAlso Una yearned
Then those two knights, fast frendship for to bynd,
And love establish each to other trew,
Gave goodly gifts, the signes of gratefull mynd,
And ekeº as pledges firme, right hands together joynd. ºalso
19
Prince Arthur gave a boxe of Diamond sure,
Embowd with gold and gorgeous ornament,
Wherein were closd few drops of liquor pure,
Of wondrous worth, and vertue excellent,
That any wownd could heale incontinent:º ºimmediately
Which to requite, the Redcrosse knight him gave
A booke, wherein his Saveours testamentº ºthe New Testament
Was writt with golden letters rich and brave;º ºbeautiful
A worke of wondrous grace, and hableº soules to save.5 ºable
4
the proof of prowess [demonstrated in action earlier in this canto].
5
The gifts symbolize the givers, not the recipients; the fanciness of the box expresses the
straightforward sense of Arthur’s virtue, magnificence, which is the ability to spend
money well. Critics debate what the ‘liquor pure’ symbolizes. Arthur keeps some liquor
for himself, for he uses this liquor to cure the wounds of Amoret in IV.viii.20. The book
Redcrosse gives is the New Testament. To judge by their gifts, Redcrosse belongs to the
spiritual world, despite his sins, whereas Arthur, by contrast, seems to belong to the
external material world in his pervasive role, despite his temporary role in Canto Eight
and II.viii of a Christ figure and a seemingly internal divine grace.
343
20
Thus beene they parted, Arthur on his way
To seeke his love, and th’other for to fight
With Unaes foe, that all her realme did pray.º ºprey on
But she now weighingº the decayèd plight, ºconsidering
And shrunken synewes of her chosen knight,
Would not a while her forward course pursew,
Neº bring him forth in face of dreadfull fight, ºNeither
Till he recovered had his former hew:
For him to be yet weake and wearie well she knew.
21
So as they traveild, lo they ganº espy ºbegan to, did
An armèd knight towards them gallop fast,
That seemèd from some fearèd foe to fly,
Or other griesly thing, that him agast.º ºthat made him aghast
Still as he fledd, his eye was backward cast,
Als if his feare still followed him behynd;
Als flew his steed, as he his bandes had brast,6
And with his wingèd heeles did tread the wynd,
As he had beene a fole of Pegasus his kynd.7
22
Nigh as he drew, they might perceive his head
To bee unarmd, and curld uncombèd hearesº ºhairs
Upstaring stiffe, dismaid with uncouthº dread; ºunknown, unfamiliar, wild
Nor drop of blood in all his face appeares
Nor life in limbe: and to increase his feares,
In fowle reproch of knighthoodes fayre degreeº ºrank, status
About his neck an hempen rope he weares,
That with his glist’ring armes does ill agree;
But he of rope or armes has now no memoree.
6
as if he had just broken free.
7
as if he had been a foal of Pegasus’ species, and so winged.
344
23
The Redcrosse knight toward him crossèd fast,
To weet,º what mister wight8 was so dismayd: ºknow
There him he findes all sencelesse and aghast,
That of him selfe he seemd to be afrayd,
Whom hardlyº he from flying forward stayd, ºwith difficulty
Till he these wordes to him deliver might;
‘Sir knight, areadº who hath ye thus araydè, ºexplain ºafflicted
And eke from whom make ye this hasty flight:
For never knight I saw in such misseemingº plight.’ ºunseemly
24
He answerd nought at all, but adding new
Feare to his first amazment, staring wyde
With stony eyes, and hartlesse hollow hew,
Astonisht stood, as one that had aspyde
Infernall furies, with their chaines untyde.
Him yett againe, and yett againe bespake
The gentle knight, who nought to him replyde,
But trembling every joynt did inly quake,
And foltringº tongue at last these words seemd forth to shake. ºfaltering
25
‘For Gods deare love, Sir knight, doe me not stay;º ºdon’t make me stop
For loe he comes, he comes fast after mee.’
Eftº looking back would faineº have runne away; ºagain; ºeagerly
But he him forst to stay, and tellenº free ºtell freely
The secrete cause of his perplexitie,
Yet nathemoreº by his bold hartie speach, ºnot for all this
Could his blood frosen hart emboldened bee,
But through his boldnes rather feare did reach,
Yett forst, at last he made through silence suddein breach.
8
what kind of a person.
345
26
‘And am I now in safetie sure’ (quoth he)
‘From him, that would have forcèd me to dye?
And is the point of death now turnd froº mee, ºremoved from
Thatº I may tell this haplesse history?’ ºSo that
‘Feare nought:’ (quoth he) ‘no daunger now is nye.’
‘Then shall I you recount a ruefull cace,’
(Said he) ‘the which with this unlucky eye
I late beheld, and had not greater grace
Me reft from it, had bene partaker of the place.9
27
‘I lately chaunst (Would I had never chaunst)
With a fayre knight to keepen companee,
Sir Terwin hight,º that well himselfe advaunst ºnamed
In all affayres, and was both bold and free,
But not so happy as moteº happy bee: ºmight
He lov’d, as was his lot, a Lady gent,º ºgentle
That him againe lov’d in the least degree:10
For she was proud, and of too high intent,
And joyd to see her lover languish and lament.
28
‘From whom retourning sad and comfortlesse,
As on the way together we did fare,
We met that villen (God from him me blesse)
That cursèd wight,º from whom I scaptº whyleare,º ºperson; ºescaped; ºearlier
A man of hell, that calls himselfe Despayre:
Who first us greets; and after fayre areedesº ºtells
9
I.e., if divine grace had not snatched me out of there, I would have shared the usual fate
of those who are in that place.
10
I.e., that reciprocated his love only a little.
346
Of tydinges straunge, and of adventures rare:

So creeping close, asº Snake in hidden weedes, ºlike a
Inquireth of our states,º and of our knightly deedes. ºwho we were
29
‘Which when he knew, and felt our feeble harts
Embost with bale,11 and bitter byting griefe,
Which love had launchèdº with his deadly darts, ºpierced
With wounding words and termes of foule repriefe,º ºreproof
He pluckt from us all hope of due reliefe,
That earstº us held in love of lingring life; ºrecently
Then hopelesse hartlesse, ganº the cunning thiefe ºbegan, did
Perswade us dye,º to stintº all further strife: ºto die ºstop
To me he lent this rope, to him a rusty knife.
30
‘With which sad instrument of hasty death,
That wofull lover, loathing lengerº light, ºlonger
A wyde way made to let forth living breath.
But I more fearefull, or more lucky wight,
Dismayd with that deformèd dismall sight,
Fledd fast away, halfe dead with dying feare;
Ne yet assur’d of life by you, Sir knight,
Whose like infirmity likeº chaunce may beare:12 ºsimilar
But God you never let his charmèd speaches heare.’13
31
‘How may a man’ (said he) ‘with idle speach
Be wonne, to spoyle the Castle of his health?’
‘I wote’º (quoth he) ‘whom tryall late did teach, ºknew
11
stricken with psychological pain. A hunting metaphor: the quarry is embossed when it is
so tired that it is flecked with foam and sweat.
12
I.e., you who have the same weaknesses that my friend and I had and so may also be
persuaded to suicide.
13
I.e., may God keep you from ever hearing his magically persuasive speeches.
347
That like would not for all this worldes wealth:14

His subtile tong, like dropping honny, mealt’thº ºmelts
Into the heart, and searcheth every vaine,
That ere one be aware, by secret stealth
His powre is reftº, and weaknes doth remaine. ºsnatched away
O never Sir desire to try his guilefull traine.’
32
‘Certes’º (sayd he) ‘hence shall I never rest, ºcertainly, indeed
Till I that treachoursº art have heard and tryde; ºtraitor’s
And you Sir knight, whose name mote I request,
Of grace do me unto his cabin guyde.’
‘I that hightº Trevisan’ (quoth he) ‘will ryde ºam called
Against my liking backe, to doe you grace:
But nor for gold nor gleeº will I abyde ºpleasure
By you, when ye arrive in that same place;
For lever had I die,º then see his deadly face.’ ºI would rather die
33
Ere long they come, where that same wicked wightº ºperson
His dwelling has, low in an hollow cave,
Far underneath a craggy clift ypight,º ºplaced
Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy grave,
That still for carrion carcases doth crave:
On top whereof ayº dwelt the ghastly Owle, ºalways
Shrieking his balefullº note, which ever draveº ºevil, woeful; ºdrove
Far from that haunt all other chearefull fowle;
And all about it wandring ghostes did wayle and howle.
34
And all about old stockesº and stubs of trees, ºstumps
Whereon nor fruite, nor leafe was ever seene,
14
I.e., I know, because recent experience has taught me, I who would not go through that
experience again for all the wealth in the world.
348
Did hang upon the ragged rocky knees;º ºcrags

On which had many wretches hangèd beene,
Whose carcases were scattred on the greene,
And throwne about the cliffs. Arrivèd there,
That bare-head knight for dread and dolefull teene,º ºsorrow
Would faine have fled, ne durst approchen neare,
But th’other forst him staye, and comforted in feare.
35
That darkesome cave they enter, where they find
That cursèd man, low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;
His griesie15 lockes, long growèn, and unbound,
Disordred hongº about his shoulders round, ºhung
And hid his face; through which his hollow eyneº ºeyes
Lookt deadly dull, and starèd as astound;º ºstunned
His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine,16
Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dyne.
36
His garment nought but many ragged clouts,º ºpatches
With thornes together pind and patchèd was,
The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts;
And him beside there lay upon the gras
A dreary corse,º whose life away did pas, ºcorpse, body
All wallowd in his own yet luke-warme blood,
That from his wound yet wellèd fresh alas;
In which a rusty knife fast fixèd stood,
And made an open passage for the gushing flood.
15
grey, filthy, hideous, or all of the above.
16
Despaire didn’t eat much because he was penurious, i.e., frugal; as a result he has pined
away, i.e., got thin.
349
37
Which piteous spectacle, approvingº trew ºproving
The wofull tale, that Trevisan had told,
When as the gentleº Redcrosse knight did vew, ºnoble, knightly
With firie zeale he burnt in courage bold,
Him to avenge, before his blood were cold,
And to the villeinº sayd, ‘Thou damnèd wight, ºvillain, rascal, peasant
The authour of this fact,º we here behold, ºdeed
What justice can but judge against thee right,
With thine owne blood to priceº his blood, ºpay for
here shed in sight.’
38
‘What franticke fit’ (quoth he) ‘hath thus distraught
Thee, foolish man, so rash a doomeº to give? ºjudgement
What justice ever other judgement taught,
Butº he should dye, who merites not to live? ºExcept
None els to death this man despayring drive,
But his owne guiltie mind deserving death.
Isº then unjust to each his dew to give?17 ºIs it
Or let him dye, that loatheth living breath?18
Or let him die at ease, that liveth here uneath?º ºill at ease, with difficulty
17
Despaire pretends that Sir Terwin committed suicide out of guilt over some past
misdeeds, because that is the motive for suicide which he plans to instill in Redcrosse.
Actually, Sir Terwin committed suicide out of despair at ever winning his lady love – as
his story shows. Despaire’s small slip betrays his dishonesty, but Redcrosse does not
seem to notice.
18
After this foretaste of a temptation yet to come, Despaire moves into his hedonistic
argument for suicide, which is aided by lulling rhetoric. The hedonistic arguments are
drawn from those of classical Stoics for accepting death and even helping it along when
it comes. Despaire assumes for the moment, and Redcrosse does not contradict him,
that death is sleep, the end of consciousness – e.g., in stanza 40. Some of Despaire’s
arguments, as well as Redcrosse’s and the ideal reader’s responses, can be found in the
treatment of despair and suicide in Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale,’ in Montaigne’s essay ‘To
Flee from Sensual Pleasures at the Price of Life,’ and in Faustus’ speeches at the end of
Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Despair and resulting suicide soon absorbed the interest of many
writers: in Shakespeare there is Lucrece’s reasoning in ‘The Rape of Lucrece’; Hamlet’s
famous soliloquy which begins, ‘To be or not to be,’ along with Horatio’s intention to
commit suicide at the end of that play; and the many suicides in his Roman plays. Other
writers on this issue include John Donne in Biathanatos, and Robert Burton in The
Anatomy of Melancholy.
350
39
‘Who travailes by the wearie wandring way,
To come unto his wishèd home in haste,
And meetes a flood, that doth his passage stay,
Isº not great grace to helpe him over past, ºIs it
Or free his feet, that in the myre sticke fast?
Most envious man, that grieves at neighbours good,
And fond,º that joyest in the woe thou hast, ºfoolish
Why wilt not let him passe, that long hath stood
Upon the bancke, yet wilt thy selfe not pas the flood?
40
‘He there does now enjoy eternall rest
And happy ease, which thou doest want and crave,
And further from it daily wanderest:
What if some little payne the passage have,
That makes frayle flesh to feare the bitter wave?
Is not short payne well borne, that bringes long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.’
41
The knight much wondred at his suddeine wit,º ºcleverness
And sayd, ‘The terme of life is limited,
Ne may a man prolong, nor shorten it;
The souldier may not move from watchfull sted,º ºplace
Nor leave his stand, untill his Captaine bed.’º19 ºbids
‘Whoº life did limit by almightie doome,’º ºHe who (God); ºjudgement
19
Redcrosse cogently fends off Despaire’s hedonistic arguments for suicide (stanzas 39–41)
by saying that God, not man, must decide when it is time for the individual to die, and
by implication that he personally has had no wound, illness, or societal verdict to
indicate that now is the time for him to die. He echoes Cicero, De Senectute, 20.73, and
perhaps Sidney, Old Arcadia, 294.
351
(Quoth he)20 ‘knowes best the termes establishèd;

And he, that pointsº the Centonellº his roome, ºappoints; ºsentinel, guard
Doth license him depart at sound of morning droome.º ºdrum
42
‘Is not hisº deed, what ever thing is donne, ºi.e. God’s
In heaven and earth? did not he all create,
To die againe? all ends that was begonne.
Their times in his eternall booke of fate
Are written sure, and have their certein date.
Who then can strive with strong necessitie,
That holds the world in his still chaunging state,
Or shunne the death ordaynd by destinie?
When houre of death is come, let none aske whence, nor
why.21
43
‘The lenger life, I woteº the greater sin,22 ºthink
The greater sin, the greater punishment:
All those great battels, which thou boasts to win,
Through strife, and blood-shed, and avengement,
Now praysd, hereafter deareº thou shalt repent: ºdearly
For life must life, and blood must blood repay.
Is not enough thy evill life forespent?º ºalready spent
For he, that once hath missèd the right way,
The further he doth goe, the further he doth stray.
20
i.e. Despaire
21
Despaire replies feebly that if you commit suicide, it will be God working through you,
since God makes everything happen, but he does not answer Redcrosse’s objection. That
they both refer to God but not the afterlife is consistent with Stoicism.
22
Without allowing Redcrosse to speak, Despaire moves into his second argument, the
argument for moral despair (stanzas 43, 45–47); and this argument finally convinces
Redcrosse.
352
44
‘Then doe no further goe, no further stray,
But here ly downe, and to thy rest betake,
Th’ill to prevent, that life ensewen may.23
For what hath life, that may it lovèd make,
And gives not rather cause it to forsake?
Feare, sicknesse, age, losse, labour, sorrow, strife,
Payne, hunger, cold, that makes the hart to quake;
And ever fickle fortune rageth rife,
All which, and thousands moº do make a loathsome life.24 ºmore
45
‘Thou wretched man, of death hast greatest need,
If in true ballaunce thou wilt weigh thy state:
For never knight, that darèd warlike deed,
More luckless dissaventures did amate:º ºfrustrate, frighten
Witnes the dungeon deepe, wherein of late
Thy life shutt up, for death so oft did call;
And though good lucke prolongèd hath thy date,25
Yet death then, would the like mishaps forestall,
Into the which hereafter thou maist happen fall.
4626
‘Why then doest thou, O man of sin, desire
To draw thy dayes forth to their last degree?
Is not the measure of thy sinfull hire
High heapèd up with huge iniquitee,
Against the day of wrath,º to burden thee? ºDoomsday
23
That may ensue in the rest of your life.
24
Despaire resumes the hedonistic argument (stanzas 44–45), this time by derogating life;
again, it would be valid if Redcrosse were already dying of some other cause and if, as is
declared in 47.9, there is no afterlife.
25
I.e., postponed your destined death-day thus far.
26
This stanza recapitulates the action prior to this canto in Book I. In particular,
Redcrosse has been parted from Una (‘this Lady mild’) and spent several cantos in the
company of the witch Duessa (RDB).
353
Is not enough, that to this Lady mild

Thou falsestº hast thy faith with perjuree, ºbetrayed
And sold thy selfe to serve Duessa vild,
With whom in al abuse thou hast thy selfe defild?
47
‘Is not heº just, that all this doth behold ºi.e. God
From highest heven, and beares an equallº eie? ºimpartial
Shall he thy sins up in his knowledge fold,
And guilty be of thine impietie?27
Is not his lawe, Let every sinner die:
Die shall all flesh? what then must needs be donne,
Is it not better to doe willinglie,
Then linger, till the glasº be all out ronne? ºhourglass
Death is the end of woes: die soone, O faries sonne.’28
48
The knight was much enmovèd with his speach,
That as a swords poynt through his hart did perse,
And in his conscience made a secrete breach,
Well knowing true all, that he did reherse,
And to his fresh remembraunce did reverse,º ºrecall
The ugly vew of his deformèd crimes,
That all his manly powres it did disperse,
As he were charmèd with inchaunted rimes,
That oftentimes he quakt, and fainted oftentimes.
27
Despaire’s rhetorical question implies the answer ‘No’ but a fully Christian answer would
be ‘Yes’ in the sense that God in Christ assumed and expiated mankind’s guilt. This
indicates that Despaire is employing half-truths; he is emphasising one side, the negative
side, of the Gospel message, God’s justice, and omitting the positive side, God’s mercy,
as Una indicates in stanza 53.
28
The moral arguments for suicide: in stanza 43, the longer you live, the more you will sin;
in stanza 46, you have sinned flagrantly already and deserve to go to hell. In stanza 46,
Despaire admits that there is an afterlife, but here he says that ‘Death is the end of
woes.’ Cf. stanza 49, which contradictorily says that the afterlife will be unpleasant for
Redcrosse given his infidelity to Una....
354
49
In which amazement, when the Miscreaunt
Perceivèd him to waver weake and fraile,
Whilesº trembling horror did his conscience daunt, ºWhile
And hellish anguish did his soule assaile,
To drive him to despaire, and quite to quaile,
He shewd him painted in a tableº plaine, ºpicture
The damnèd ghosts, that doe in torments waile,
And thousand feends that doe them endlesse paine
With fire and brimstone, which for ever shall remaine.
50
The sight whereof so throughly him dismaid,
That nought but death before his eies he saw,
And ever burning wrath before him laid,
By righteous sentence of th’Almighties law:29
Then gan the villein him to overcraw,º ºcrow over, exult over
And brought unto him swords, ropes, poison, fire,
And all that might him to perdition draw;
And badº him choose, what death he would desire: ºbade, told
For death was dew to him, that had provokt Gods ire.
51
But whenasº none of them he saw him take, ºwhen
He to him a dagger sharpe and keene,
And gave it him in hand: his hand did quake,
And tremble like a leafe of Aspinº greene, ºaspen tree
And troubled blood through his pale face was seene
To come, and goe with tidings from the heart,
As it a ronning messenger had beene.
29
Despaire manages to attract Redcrosse to the punishments of hell by the fact that
Redcrosse has deserved them and by the argument that he should cooperate with God
and become his own executioner.
355
At last resolv’d to worke his finall smart,º ºhurt

He lifted up his hand, that backe againe did start.30
52
Which whenas Una saw, through every vaine
The crudled cold ran to her well of life,31
As in a swowneº: but soone reliv’dº againe, ºswoon ºbrought back to life
Out of his hand she snatcht the cursèd knife,
And threw it to the ground, enragèd rife,
And to him said, ‘Fie fie, faint hearted knight,
What meanest thou by this reprochfull strife?
Is this the battaile, which thou vauntst to fight
With that fire-mouthèd Dragon, horrible and bright?32
53
‘Come, come away, fraile, feeble, fleshly wight,
Neº let vaine words bewitch thy manly hart, ºNor
Ne divelish thoughts dismay thy constant spright.º ºspirit
In heavenly mercies hast thou not a part?33
Why shouldst thou then despeire, that chosen art?34
30
That, out of an instinct for self-preservation, refused to make the stabbing motion
Redcrosse desired.
31
I.e., a chill of bloodcurdling horror gripped her heart.
32
With psychological insight, Una first physically grabs the dagger, then appeals to
Redcrosse’s ambition. Only then does she enter upon the theological refutation of
Despaire’s moral argument for suicide.
33
I.e., will not God have mercy on you? Christian doctrine would add, ‘provided you
repent,’ and Redcrosse has already taken the first step in that direction and admitted his
guilt (48.4–6).
34
Una invokes predestination, a doctrine common to all Christians but emphasised by
Calvinists […] Besides God, only the individual can know, and that only in some
branches of Protestantism, that he is chosen or predestinated for heaven; this suggests
that Una here represents the Holy Spirit within Redcrosse, bearing ‘witnesse with our
spirit, that we are the children of God’ (Rom. 8.16).
356
Where justice growes, there grows ekeº greter grace, ºalso

The which doth quench the brondº of hellish smart, ºfirebrand, torch, sword
And that accurst hand-writing doth deface.35
Arise, Sir knight arise, and leave this cursèd place.’
54
So up he rose, and thence amounted streight.
Which when the carleº beheld, and saw his guest ºlarge, crude, low-class fellow
Would safe depart, for all his subtile sleight,
He chose an halter from among the rest,
And with it hong him selfe, unbidº unblest. ºwithout anyone urging him to
But death he could not worke himselfe thereby;
For thousand times he so him selfe had drest,º ºprepared
Yet nathelesse it could not doe him die,
Till he should die his last, that is eternally.
35
blot, i.e., erase, the justice of the old law that Despaire invoked – a paraphrase of Paul’s
epistle to the Colossians, 2.14. It is now satisfied and made irrelevant by the mercy of
Christ.
357
The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto xii

(complete)
Source: Gray, E. (ed.) (2006) Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book
One, Indianapolis, IN, Hackett, pp. 196-224, 236-38.
Footnotes ascribed to (RDB) have been added by the authors of this
module.
Guyon through Palmers governaunce,

through passing perilles great,
Doth overthrow the Bowre of blis,
and Acrasy defeat 1
1
Now ginnesº this goodly frame2 of Temperaunce ºbegins
Fayrely to rise, and her adornèd hed
To prickeº of highest prayse forth to advaunce, ºpoint, pinnacle
Formerlyº grounded, and fast settelèd ºhaving already been
On firme foundation of true bountyhed;º ºcharity
And that brave knight, that for this vertue fightes,
Now comes to pointº of that same perilous sted,º ºthe centre; ºplace
Where Pleasure dwelles in sensuall delights,
Mongstº thousand dangers, and ten thousand Magick ºAmongst
mights.
2
Two dayes now in that sea he saylèd has,
Neº ever land beheld, ne living wight, ºNor
1
Each of the cantos in The Faerie Queene is preceded by a brief ‘argument’ like this, in
which a summary of the canto is provided (RDB).
2
structure, building. This may refer to the good ordering of Temperance itself, or it may
refer to Book Two, the well-structured ‘Legend … Of Temperaunce,’ now reaching its
climax.
358
The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto xii (complete)
Ne ought save perill, still as he did pas:

Thoº when appeared the third Morrow 3 bright, ºThen
Upon the waves to spred her trembling light,
An hideous roring far away they heard,
That all their sences fillèd with affright,
And streightº they saw the raging surges reard ºstraightaway
Up to the skyes, that them of drowning made affeard.
3
Said then the Boteman, ‘Palmer stereº aright, ºsteer
And keepe an even course; for yonder way
We needes must pas (God doe us well acquight,)º ºdeliver
That is the Gulfe of Greedinesse, they say,
That deepe engorgethº all this worldes pray: ºswallows
Which having swallowd up excessively,
He soone in vomit up againe doth lay,º ºspew, send forth
And belcheth forth his superfluity,
That all the seas for feare doe seeme away to fly.
4
‘On thother syde an hideous Rock is pight,º ºplaced
Of mightie Magnesº stone, whose craggie cliftº ºmagnet; ºcliff
Dependingº from on high, dreadfull to sight, ºoverhanging
Over the waves his rugged armes doth lift,
And threatneth downe to throw his ragged rift,º ºcrag , boulders
On whoso cometh nigh; yet nigh it drawes
All passengers, that none from it can shift:º ºescape
For whiles they fly that Gulfes devouring jawes,
They on this Rock are rent, and sunck in helples wawes.’4
3
morning, a highly symbolic period of time: compare Jonah, who spent three days floating
in the belly of the fish and is therefore invoked as a type by Jesus, who likewise rose on
the third day (Matt. 12.40).
4
waves. The ‘Rock of vile Reproch’ (named in stanza 8) and the ‘Gulfe of Greedinesse’ are
very closely based on classical accounts of Scylla and Charybdis, the monster and
whirlpool between which both Odysseus and Aeneas had to pass (‘([in Homer’s] Odyssey
.... and [Virgil’s] Aeneid....).
359
5
Forward they passe, and strongly he them rowes,
Untill they nigh unto that Gulfe arryve,
Where streameº more violent and greedy growes: ºcurrent
Then he with all his puisaunceº doth stryve ºpower
To strike his oares, and mightily doth dryve
The hollow vessell through the threatfull wave,
Which gaping wide, to swallow them alyve,
In th’huge abysse of his engulfing grave,
Doth rore at them in vaine, and with great terrour rave.
6
They passing by, that grisely mouth did see,
Sucking the seas into his entralles deepe,
That seemd more horrible thenº hell to bee, ºthan
Or that darke dreadfull hole of Tartare 5 steepe,
Through which the damned ghosts doen often creep
Backe to the world, bad livers to torment:
But nought that falles into this direfull deepe,
Neº that approcheth nigh the wyde descent, ºNor
May backe retourne, but is condemned to be drent.º ºdrowned
7
On thother side, they saw that perilous Rocke,
Threatning it selfe on them to ruinate,º ºtumble, destroy
On whose sharp cliftes the ribs of vessels broke,
And shivered ships, which had beene wreckèd late,
Yet stuck, with carcases exanimate6
Of such, as having all their substance spent
In wanton joyes, and lustes intemperate,
5
region of the underworld where malefactors are punished. Several places were reputed
sites of a ‘dreadull hole’ permitting passage between earth and Hades.
6
lacking a soul (i.e., dead, but also, allegorically, soulless).
360
Did afterwardes make shipwrack violent,

Both of their life, and fame for ever fowly blent.º ºdefrauded, sullied
8
For thyº this hightº The Rock of vile Reproch, ºtherefore; ºwas called
A daungerous and detestable place,
To which nor fish nor fowle did once approch,
But yelling Meawes,7 with Seagulles hoars and bace,º ºordinary, lowly
And Cormoyraunts,7 with birds of ravenous race,
Which still sat wayting on that wastfull clift,
For spoile of wretches, whose unhappy cace,º ºstate
After lost credit and consumèd thrift,
At last them driven hath to this despairefull drift.º ºdrifting , course
9
The Palmer seeing them in safetie past,
Thus saide, ‘Behold th’ensamplesº in our sightes, ºexamples
Of lustfull luxurie and thriftlesse wast:
What now is left of miserable wightes,
Which spent their looser daies in leudº delightes, ºlewd
But shame and sad reproch, here to be red,º ºknown, considered
By these rent reliques,º speaking their ill plightes? ºbroken remains
Let all that live, hereby be counselled,º ºadvised
To shunne Rock of Reproch and it as death to dread.’
10
So forth they rowed, and that Ferryman
With his stiffe oares did brush the sea so strong,
That the hoareº waters from his frigotº ran, ºwhite (with churning); ºboat
And the light bubles daunced all along,
Whilesº the salt brine out of the billowes sprong.º ºWhile; ºsprang
7
sea-mews, a type of gull.
7
Cormorants are traditionally voracious.
361
At last far off they many Islandes spy,

On every side floting the floodes emong:
Then said the knight, ‘Lo I the land descry,
Therefore old Syre thy course doe thereunto apply.’º ºset
11
‘That may not bee,’ said then the Ferryman
‘Least wee unweetingº hapº to be fordonne:º ºcarelessly;ºchance; ºdestroyed
For those same Islands, seemingº now and than,º ºappearing; ºthen
Are not firme land, nor any certein wonne,º ºfixed dwelling place
But stragling plots, which to and fro doe ronne
In the wide waters: therefore are they hightº ºcalled
The wandring Islands. Therefore doe them shonne;º ºshun
For they have ofte drawne many a wandring wightº ºperson
Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight.
12
‘Yet well they seeme to him, that farre doth vew,
Both faire and fruitfull, and the grownd dispred,º ºspread over
With grassy greene of delectable hew,
And the tall trees with leaves apparelèd,
Are deckt with blossoms dyde in white and red,
That moteº the passengersº thereto allure; ºmight; ºtravellers, passersby
But whosoever once hath fastenèd
His foot thereon, may never it recure,º ºrecover
But wandreth ever more uncertein and unsure.
13
‘As th’Isle of Delos whylomeº men report ºonce
Amid th’Aegaean sea long time did stray,
Ne made for shipping any certeine port,
Till that Latona traveilingº that way, ºtravelling , going into labour
362
Flying from Junoes wrath and hard assay,º ºassail, attempt, trial
Of her fayre twins was there deliverèd,
Which afterwards did rule the night and day;
Thenceforth it firmely was established,
And forº Apolloes temple highly herried.’8º ºas; ºcelebrated, praised
14
They to him hearken, as beseemeth meete,º ºseems appropriate
And passe on forward: so their way does ly,
That one of those same Islands, which doe fleetº ºfloat, flit
In the wide sea, they needes must passen by,
Which seemd so sweet and pleasaunt to the eye,
That it would tempt a man to touchenº there: ºland
Upon the banck they sitting did espy
A daintie damsell, dressing of her heare,º ºarranging her hair
By whom a little skippetº floting did appeare. ºsmall boat, skiff
15
She them espying, loud to them canº call, ºgan, did
Bidding them nigher draw unto the shore;
For she had causeº9 to busie them withall; ºsomething , a thing
And therewith lowdly laught: But nathemoreº ºno more
Would they once turne, but kept on as afore:º ºbefore
Which when she saw, she left her lockes undight,º ºhair down
And running to her boat withouten ore,
From the departing land it launchèd light,
And after them did drive with all her power and might.
8
As this stanza recounts, the island of Delos in the Aegean was floating and unfixed until
Latona, pregnant by Jupiter, gave birth there to Diana and Apollo, deities of the moon
and sun (‘night and day’); cf. Ovid, Metamor phoses, 6.185–91.
9
[It has been suggested] that the nature of this thing is evident in the pun on ‘case’ ,
Elizabethan slang for vagina.
363
16
Whom overtaking, she in merry sortº ºmanner
Them gan to bord,º and purpose diversly,10 ºaddress, joke with
Now fainingº dalliaunce and wanton sport, ºindicating , preferring
Now throwing forth lewd wordes immodestly;
Till that the Palmer gan full bitterly
Her to rebuke, for being loose and lightº ºlascivious
Which not abiding, but more scornfully
Scoffing at him, that did her justly wite,º ºblame
She turnd her bote about, and from them rowed quite.
17
That was the wanton Phaedria, which late
Did ferry him over the Idle lake:
Whom nought regarding, they kept on their gate,º ºway
And all her vaine allurements did forsake,
When them the wary Boteman thus bespake;º ºspoke to
‘Here now behoveth us well to avyse,º ºconsider
And of our safety good heede to take;
For here before a perlousº passage lyes, ºperilous
Where many Mermayds haunt, making false melodies.
18
‘But by the way, there is a great Quicksand,
And a whirlepoole of hidden jeopardy,º ºdanger
Therefore, Sir Palmer, keepe an even hand;
For twixt them both the narrow way11 doth ly.’
Scarse had he saide, when hard at hand they spy
That quicksand nigh with water coverèd;
But by the checkèdº wave they did descry ºimpeded
It plaine, and by the sea discolourèd:
It callèd was the quicksand of Unthriftyhed.º ºlack of restraint, extravagance
10
speak of various things
11
[Jesus refers in] Matt. 7. 14 [to the narrow way] that leadeth unto life.
364
19
They passing by, a goodly Ship did see,
Laden from far with precious merchandize,
And bravely furnishèd,º as ship might bee, ºwell equipped
Which through great disaventure, or mesprize,º ºmischance or mistake
Her selfe had ronne into that hazardize;º ºdifficulty, peril
Whose mariners and merchants with much toyle,
Labour’d in vaine, to have recur’d their prize,
And the rich wares to save from pitteous spoyle,
But neither toyle nor traveillº might her backe recoyle.º ºtravail, labour; ºdraw back
out
20
On th’other side they see that perilous Poole,
That callèd was the Whirlepoole of decay,
In which full many had with haplesse dooleº ºsorrow, deceit
Beene suncke, of whom no memorie did stay:
Whose circled waters raptº with whirling sway,º ºborne, wrapped; ºmotion
Like to a restlesse wheele, still ronning round,
Did covet,º as they passèd by that way, ºseek
To draw their bote within the utmost bound
Of his wide Labyrinth, and then to have them dround.
21
But th’earnest Boteman strongly forth did stretch
His brawnie armes, and all his bodie straine,
That th’utmost sandy breach12 they shortly fetch,º ºreach
Whiles the dredd daunger does behind remaine.
Suddeine they see from midst of all the Maine,º ºopen ocean
The surging waters like a mountaine rise,
And the great sea puft up with proud disdaine,º ºscorn, indignation
To swell above the measure of his guise,º ºmanner, usual way
As threatning to devoure all, that his powre despise.
12
the limit of where the waters break upon the quicksand.
365
22
The waves come rolling, and the billowes rore
Outragiously,º as they enragèd were, ºexcessively, beyond their
bounds
Or wrathfull Neptuneº did them drive before ºgod of the sea
His whirling charet,º for exceeding feare: ºchariot, cart
For not one puffe of winde there did appeare,
That all the three thereat woxeº much afrayd, ºgrew
Unweeting,º what such horrourº straunge did reare. ºNot knowing; ºfear, turmoil
Eftsoonesº they saw an hideous hoast arrayd, ºthen, forthwith, immediately
Of huge Sea monsters, such as living sence dismayd.
23
Most ugly shapes, and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe moteº feare to see, ºmight
Or shame, that ever should so fowle defects
From her most cunningº hand escapèd bee; ºskillful
All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee:
Spring-headed Hydres,13 and sea-shouldring Whales,
Great whirlpooles,14 which all fishes make to flee,
Bright Scolopendraes,15 arm’d with silver scales,
Mighty Monoceros,º with immeasured16 tayles. ºnarwhal (Greek, ‘one-horned’)
24
17
The dreadfull Fish, that hath deserv’d the name
Of Death, and like him lookes in dreadfull hew,º ºappearance
That griesly Wasserman,º that makes his game ºmerman, man-fish
The flying ships with swiftnes to pursew,
The horrible Sea-satyre,º that doth shewº ºhalf-man, half-goat; ºshow
13
The Hydra is ‘Spring-headed’ because its heads regenerate when cut off.
14
another word for whales, from their habit of spouting.
15
legendary sea creatures mentioned by Aristotle.
16
immense; but the sense ‘mis-measured’ may also be present since, as commentators have
long noted, the meter of this line is uneven.
17
The walrus, also known as a ‘morse,’ which Spenser in the next line associates with mors,
Latin for death.
366
His fearefull face in time of greatest storme

Huge Ziffius,º whom Mariners eschew ºXiphias or swordfish
No lesse, thenº rockes, (as travellers informe,) ºthan
And greedy Rosmarinesº with visages deforme. ºseahorse, perhaps another
name for walrus
25
All these, and thousand thousands many more,
And more deformèd Monsters thousand fold,
With dreadfull noise, and hollow rombling rore,
Came rushing in the fomy waves enrold,
Which seem’d to fly for feare, them to behold:
Ne wonder, if these did the knight appall;
For all that here on earth we dreadfull hold,º ºdeem, consider
Be but as bugsº to fearenº babes withall, ºbugbears, bogeymen; ºfrighten
Comparèd to the creatures in the seas entrall.º ºentrails, depths
26
‘Feare nought,’ then saide the Palmer well aviz’d;º ºhaving considered well
‘For these same Monsters are not these in deed,
But are into these fearefull shapes disguiz’d
By that same wicked witch,º to worke us dreed,º ºAcrasia; ºcause us fear
And draw from on this journey to proceed.’
Thoº lifting up his vertuous18 staffe on hye, ºThen
He smote the sea, which calmèd was with speed,
And all that dreadfull Armie fast ganº flye ºbegan to, did
Into great Tethysº bosome, where they hidden lye. ºgoddess of the sea
27
Quitº from that danger, forth their course they kept, ºfreed
And as they went, they heard a ruefull cry
Of one, that wayld and pittifully wept,
18
powerful, magical. The Palmer calms the sea like Neptune in Virgil, Aeneid, 1.142–43, or
like Jesus at Mark 4.39.
367
That through the sea the resounding plaints did fly:

At last they in an Island did espy
A seemelyº Maiden, sitting by the shore, ºcomely, seeming
That with great sorrow and sad agony,
Seemed some great misfortune to deplore,º ºbewail
And lowd to them for succour called evermore.
28
Which Guyon hearing, streightº his Palmer bad,º ºstraightaway; ºbade, ordered
To stere the bote towards that dolefull Mayd,
That he might know, and ease her sorrow sad:
Who him avizingº better, to him sayd; ºconsidering
‘Faire Sir, be not displeasd if disobayd:
For ill it were to hearken to her cry;
For she is inly nothing ill apayd,º ºnot at all displeased
But onely womanish fine forgery,º ºsubtle deception
Your stubborne hart t’affect with fraile infirmity.
29
‘To which when she your courage hath inclindº ºswayed or diverted your heart
Through foolish pitty, then her guilefull bayt
She will embosomeº deeper in your mind, ºimplant
And for your ruine at the last awayt.’
The Knight was rulèd, and the Boteman strayt
Held on his course with stayed stedfastnesse,
Ne ever shroncke, ne ever sought to baytº ºabate, rest
His tyred armes for toylesome wearinesse,
But with his oares did sweepe the watry wildernesse.
30
And now they nigh approched to the sted,º ºplace
Where asº those Mermayds dwelt:19 it was a still ºWhere
19
The mermaids are based on the Sirens who call to Odysseus in Homer, Odyssey, 12.165–200.
368
And calmy bay, on th’one side shelterèd

With the brode shadow of an hoarie hill,
On th’other side an high rocke tourèdº still, ºtowered
That twixt them both a pleasaunt port they made,
And did like an halfe Theatre fulfill:20
There those five sisters had continuall trade,21
And usd to bath themselves in that deceiptfull shade.
31
They were faire Ladies, till they fondly striv’d
With th’Heliconian 22maides for maystery;
Of whom they over-comen, were depriv’d
Of their proud beautie, and th’one moyityº ºhalf
Transform’d to fish, for their bold surquedry,º ºpresumption
But th’upper halfe their hewº retayned still, ºhue, colour
And their sweet skill in wonted melody;
Which ever after they abusd to ill,º ºto ill effect
T’allure weake traveillers, whom gotten they did kill.
32
So now to Guyon, as he passèd by,
Their pleasaunt tunes they sweetly thus applyde;
‘O thou fayre sonne of gentle Faery,
That art in mightie armes most magnifydeº ºexalted
Above all knights, that ever batteill tryde,º ºexperienced
O turne thy rudder hetherward a while:
Here may thy storme-bettº vessell safely ryde;º ºweatherbeaten; ºlie at anchor
This is the Port of rest from troublous toyle,
The worldes sweet In,º from paine and wearisome ºinn, resting place
turmoyle.’
20
I.e., and made a form like a semicircular theatre.
21
habitually led their lives, had constant occupation.
22
the Muses, who had their seat on Mt. Helicon.
369
33
With that the rolling sea resounding soft,
In his big baseº them fitlyº answerèd, ºbass; ºappropriately
And on the rocke the waves breaking aloft,
A solemne Meane23 unto them measurèd,
The whiles sweet Zephyrusº lowd whistelèd º the west wind
His treble, a straunge kinde of harmony;
Which Guyons senses softly tickelèd,
That he the boteman badº row easily,º ºbade, commanded; ºslowly
And let him heare some part of their rare melody.
34
But him the Palmer from that vanity,
With temperate advice discounsellèd,
That they it past, and shortly ganº descry ºbegan to, did
The land, to which their course they levelèd;º ºaimed
When suddeinly a grosseº fog over spred ºthick
With his dull vapour all that desertº has,24º ºthe ocean; ºhas overspread
And heavens chearefull face envelopèd,
That all things one, and one as nothing was,
And this great Universe seemd one confusèd mas.
35
Thereat they greatly were dismayd, ne wistº ºnor knew
How to direct theyr way in darkenes wide,
But feard to wander in that wastefullº mist, ºexcessive, bleak, destructive
Forº tombling into mischiefeº unespide. ºfor fear of; ºtrouble, misdeed
Worse is the daunger hidden, then descried.º ºseen
Suddeinly an innumerable flight
Of harmefull fowles about them fluttering, cride,
23
middle part of a four-part harmony, consisting of the sea (the ‘base,’ i.e., bass), the
breaking waves, the mermaids’ song, and the wind’s whistle (the treble, or soprano)
24
For the equation of the desert with the ocean, cf. ii.22.6.
370
And with their wicked wings them ofte did smight,

And sore annoyèd, groping in that griesly night.
36
Even all the nationº of unfortunate ºfamily
And fatall birds about them flocked were,
Such as by nature men abhorre and hate,
The ill-fasteº Owle, deaths dreadfull messengere,25 ºugly
The hoars Night-raven, trumpº of dolefull drere,º ºtrumpet, announcer; ºsorrow
The lether-wingèd Batt, dayes enimy,
The ruefull Strich,º still waiting on the bere,26 ºscreech-owl; ºbier
The whistler27 shrill, that who so heares, doth dy,
The hellish Harpyes28 prophets of sad destiny.
37
All those, and all that els does horror breed,
About them flew, and fild their sayles with feare:
Yet stayd they not, but forward did proceed,
Whiles th’one did row, and th’other stifly steare;
Till that at last the weather gan to cleare,
And the faire land it selfe did plainly sheow.
Said then the Palmer, ‘Lo where does appeare
The sacredº soile, where all our perills grow; ºin the rare sense of ‘accursed’
Therfore, Sir knight, your ready arms about you throw.’
38
He hearkned, and his armes about him tooke,
The whiles the nimble bote so well her sped,
25
The owl’s hooting was supposed to portend death.
26
The screech-owl was said to haunt funerals.
27
No one knows quite what Spenser had in mind with the ‘whistler’, though it may refer
to curlews, which are sometimes called whistlers. (RDB)
28
The Harpies are a group of half-women, half-birds from classical mythology whose
behaviour is typically aggressive and vengeful. They are also supposed to have prophetic
powers. (RDB)
371
That with her crookedº keele the land she strooke, ºcurved
Then forth the noble Guyon sallièd,
And his sage Palmer, that him governèd;
But th’other by his bote behind did stay.
They marchèd fayrly forth, of nought ydred,
Both firmely armd for every hard assay,
With constancy and care, gainst daunger and dismay.º ºdaunt, defeat, overcome, kill
39
Ere long they heard an hideous bellowing
Of many beasts, that roard outrageously,
As if that hungers point,º or Venus sting ºpang
Had them enraged with fellº surquedry;º ºruthless; ºpride, excess
Yet nought they feard, but past on hardily,
Untill they came in vew of those wilde beasts:
Who all attonce,º gaping full greedily, ºat once
And rearing fercely their upstaringº crests, ºbristling
Ran towards, to devoure those unexpected guests.
40
But soone as they approcht with deadly threat,
The Palmer over them his staffe upheld,
His mighty staffe, that could all charmes defeat:
Eftesoonesº their stubborne corages were queld, ºimmediately
And high advaunced crests downe meekely feld,º ºlowered, folded
Instead of fraying,º they them selves did feare, ºcausing fright
And trembled, as them passing they beheld:
Such wondrous powre did in that staffe appeare,
All monsters to subdew to him, that did it beare.
41
Of that same wood it fram’d was cunningly,
Of which Caduceus whilome was made,
372
Caduceus the rod of Mercury,29

With which he wontsº the Stygian realmes invade,º ºis accustomed to; ºenter
Through ghastly horror, and eternall shade;
Th’infernall feends with it he can asswage,
And Orcus 30 tame, whome nothing can persuade,
And rule the Furyes,31 when they most doe rage:
Such vertue in his staffe had ekeº this Palmer sage. ºalso
42
Thence passing forth, they shortly doe arryve,
Whereasº the Bowre of Blisse was situate; ºWhere
A place pickt out by choice of best alyve,
That natures worke by art can imitate:32
In which what ever in this worldly state
Is sweete, and pleasing unto living sense,
Or that may dayntest fantasy aggrate,º º please the finest fancy
Was pourèd forth with plentifull dispence,º ºbounty
And made there to abound with lavish affluence.
43
Goodly it was enclosèd rownd about,
Aswell their entred guestes to keep within,
As those unruly beasts to hold without;º ºoutside
Yet was the fence thereof but weake and thin;
Nought feard theyr force, that fortilage to win,33
But wisedomes powre, and temperaunces might,
By which the mightiest things efforcèdº bin: º forced open, gained by force
And ekeº the gate was wrought of substaunce light, ºalso
Rather for pleasure, thenº for battery or fight. ºthan
29
Among the functions of Mercury, the Roman messenger god, was that of leading dead
souls to the underworld. For this he used his Caduceus, a staff twined with serpents; see
Homer, Odyssey, 24.1–5 and Virgil, Aeneid, 4.242–44.
30
one of the names of Dis or Pluto, god of the underworld.
31
Implacable goddesses of revenge
32
I.e., a place picked out by those artisans most skilled at imitating nature.
33
I.e., there was no fear that the force (of the beasts) would conquer that fort (‘fortilage’).
373
44
Yt framèd was of precious yvory,
That seemd a worke of admirable witt;º ºskill
And therein all that famous history
Of Jason and Medaea was ywritt;º ºdepicted
Her mighty charmes, her furious loving fitt,º ºmood
His goodly conquest of the golden fleece,
His falsèdº fayth, and love too lightly flitt,º ºbroken; ºfled, shifted
The wondredº Argo, which in venturous peeceº ºwandered ºvessel
First through the Euxine seas bore all the flowr of Greece.34
45
Ye might have seen the frothy billowes fryº ºfoam
Under the ship, as thoroughº them she went, ºthrough
That seemd the waves were into yvory,
Or yvory into the waves were sent;º ºconverted
And otherwhere the snowy substaunce sprentº ºsprinkled
With vermell,º like the boyes blood therein shed, ºvermilion, a bright red dye
A piteous spectacle did represent,
And otherwhiles with gold besprinkelèd;
Yt seemed thenchaunted flame, which did Creusa wed.35
46
All this, and more might in that goodly gate foam
Be red;º that ever open stood to all, ºunderstood
Which thether came: but in the Porchº their sate ºfront portion of the gatehouse
A comely personage of stature tall,
34
This stanza runs through some of the chief events in the story of Jason and Medea.
Jason sailed with the Greek heroes (‘the flowr of Greece’) on the ship Argo to the Black
Sea (‘Euxine’) in search of the Golden Fleece. There he met Medea, who, seized with
excessive love for him, helped him steal the Fleece. Yet Jason later broke his faith to her
and tried to marry Creusa instead, upon which Medea killed both Creusa and her own
children by Jason (as mentioned in the following stanza).
35
Medea stabbed her sons (the ‘boyes’ of line 6 above), but murdered Creusa by giving her
a wedding gown that burned her when she put it on.
374
And semblaunce pleasing, more thenº naturall, ºthan

That traveilers to him seemed to entize;
His looserº garment to the ground did fall, ºvery loose, too loose
And flew about his heeles in wanton wize,º ºmanner
Not fittº for speedy pace, or manly exercize. ºsuitable
47
They in that place him Genius 36 did call:
Not that celestiall powre, to whom the care
Of life, and generation of all
That lives, perteinesº in charge particulare, ºbelongs
Who wondrous things concerning our welfare,
And straunge phantomes doth lett us ofte forsee,
And ofte of secret ill bids us beware:
That is our Selfe,37 whom though we doe not see,
Yet each doth in him selfe it well perceive to bee.
48
Therefore a God him sage Antiquity
Did wisely make, and good Agdistes 38 call:
But this same was to that quite contrary,39
The foe of life, that good envyesº to all, ºbegrudges
That secretly doth us procureº to fall, ºcause
Through guilefull semblants,º which he makes us see. ºappearances
He of this Gardin had the governall,40
36
Having named the figure, Spenser spends the next ten lines distinguishing him from the
other character of the same name. The good Genius, who appears in a parallel position
as porter of the Garden of Adonis at III.vi 31–32, serves both as the patron of birth or
generation in general, and also as a guardian or tutelary spirit to each individual. In the
latter role, he helps us in time of peril. […]
37
In his role as guardian spirit, the good Genius is essentially indistinguishable from our
own divine soul.
38
Agdistes is the name of an obscure classical deity.
39
I.e., but this figure (the porter of the Bower) was the very opposite of the figure just
described.
40
governance. This figure is thus both the genius loci, the presiding spirit of the place, and
also, allegorically, each person’s misleading ‘bad genius,’ the counterpart to one’s good
angel.
375
And Pleasures porter was devizdº to bee, ºdesignated, considered

Holding a staffe in hand for more formalitee.
49
With diverse flowres he daintily was deckt,
And strowèd rownd about, and by his side
A mighty Mazerº bowle of wine was sett, ºmaple
As if it had to him bene sacrifide;º ºconsecrated, offered up
Wherewith all new-come guests he gratyfide:º ºwelcomed, pleased
So did he ekeº Sir Guyon passing by: ºalso
But he his ydle curtesie defide,
And overthrew his bowle disdainfully;
And broke his staffe, with which he charmèd semblants sly.º ºslyly conjured false
appearances
50
Thus being entred, they behold arownd
A large and spacious plaine, on every side
Strowed with pleasauns,º whose fayre grassy grownd ºpleasure-grounds
Mantledº with greene, and goodly beautifide ºclothed, suffused
With all the ornaments of Floraes pride,41
Wherewith her mother Art,42 as halfe in scorne
Of niggardº Nature, like a pompousº bride ºstingy; ºostentatious
Did decke her, and too lavishly adorne,
When forth from virgin bowre she comes in th’early morne.
41
I.e., with flowers; Flora was the Roman goddess of flowers.
42
The Bower of Bliss is the child, not of Nature, but of Art, which decorates it lavishly.
‘Art,’ in Spenser’s work as in his time more generally, can have both positive
connotations (as representing human skill and achievement) and negative (as suggesting
artifice and deception). The relationship between art and nature forms a major subject of
this canto; see below, 58.5n.
376
51
Therewithº the Heavens alwayes Joviall,43 ºin addition, moreover
Lookte on them lovely, still in stedfast state,
Neº suffred storme nor frost on them to fall, ºNor
Their tender buds or leaves to violate,º ºinjure, ravish
Nor scorching heat, nor cold intemperate
T’afflict the creatures, which therein did dwell,
But the milde ayre with season moderate
Gently attempred,º and disposd so well, ºregulated
That still it breathèd forth sweet spirit and holesom smell.
52
More sweet and holesome, thenº the pleasaunt hill ºthan
Of Rhodope, on which the Nimphe, that bore
A gyaunt babe, her selfe for griefe did kill:44
Or the Thessalian Tempe, where of yore
Fayre Daphne Phoebus hart with love did gore;45
Or Ida, where the Gods lov’d to repayre,46º ºretire
When ever they their heavenly bowres forlore;º ºabandoned
Or sweet Parnasse,47 the haunt of Muses fayre;
Or Eden selfe,º if oughtº with Eden moteº compayre. ºitself; ºanything; ºmight
53
Much wondred Guyon at the fayre aspect
Of that sweet place, yet suffred no delight
To sincke into his sence, nor mind affect,
43
smiling, favorable; literally, under the influence of Jupiter. The description that follows,
with its negative constructions (Ne ... nor ... Nor), is based on a [rhetorical device]
deriving from Homer – e.g., Odyssey, 4.567–69, 6.43–45.
44
Mt. Rhodope was named after a nymph who was transformed into the mountain for her
presumption; see Ovid, Metamor phoses, 6.87–89.
45
Phoebus (Apollo) fell in love with the nymph Daphne in the vale of Tempe in Thessaly,
where he pursued her against her will until she was transformed into a laurel; see
Metamor phoses, 1.452–567.
46
Mt. Ida near Troy was where Paris judged the three goddesses, choosing Venus as the
fairest and thus setting in motion the Trojan War.
47
Mount Parnassus at Delphi was the seat of the Muses.
377
But passèd forth, and lookt still forward rightº ºstraight ahead
Brydling his will, and maystering his might:
Till that he came unto another gate,
No gate, but like one, being goodly dightº ºdressed, arranged
With bowes and braunches, which did broad dilateº ºspread
Their clasping armes, in wanton wreathings intricate.
54
So fashionèd a Porch with rare device,º ºdesign
Archt over head with an embracing vine,
Whose bounchesº hanging downe, seemd to entice ºclusters (of grapes)
All passers by, to taste their lushious wine,
And did them selves into their hands incline,
As freely offering to be gatherèd:
Some deepe empurpled as the Hyacint,48
Some as the Rubine,º laughing sweetely red, ºruby
Some like faire Emeraudes, not yet well ripenèd,
55
And them amongst, some were of burnisht gold,
So made by art, to beautify the rest,
Which did themselves emongst the leaves enfold,
As lurking from the vew of covetous guest,
That the weake boughes, with so rich load opprest,
Did bow adowne, as overburdenèd.
Under that Porch a comely dame did rest,
Clad in fayre weedes,º but fowle disorderèd, ºclothes
And garments loose, that seemd unmeetº for womanhed. ºunsuitable
56
In her left hand a Cup of gold she held,
And with her right the riper fruit did reach,
48
Hyacinth, both a gemstone (also called jacinth) and a flower. Some editions read
‘Hyacine’ to preserve the rhyme. […]
378
Whose sappy liquor,º that with fulnesse sweld, ºjuicy liquid

Into her cup she scruzd,º with daintie breachº ºsqueezed; ºcrushing
Of her fine fingers, without fowle empeach,49
That so faire winepresse made the wine more sweet:
Thereof she usd to give to drinke to each,
Whom passing by she happenèd to meet:
It was her guise,º all Straungers goodly so to greet. ºbehaviour
57
So she to Guyon offred it to tast,
Who taking it out of her tender hond,
The cup to ground did violently cast,
That all in peeces it was broken fond,º ºfound
And with the liquor stainèd all the lond:
Whereat Excesse 50 exceedingly was wroth,
Yet no’teº the same amend, neº yet withstond, ºwouldn’t; ºnor
But sufferedº him to passe, all were she loth;51 ºallowed
Who nought regarding her displeasure, forward goth.
58
There the most daintie Paradise on ground,
It selfe doth offer to his sober eye,
In which all pleasures plenteously abownd,
And none does others happinesse envye:
The painted52 flowres, the trees upshooting hye,
The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space,
The trembling groves, the christallº running by; ºclear streams
And that, which all faire workes doth most aggrace,º ºenhance
The art, which all that wrought, appearèd in no place.
49
detriment, sullying (of either the juice or the fingers).
50
i.e. the name of the ‘comely dame’
51
although she was unwilling.
52
colourful, variegated; but given that the garden contains grapes made of gold (above,
55.1) and that art has enhanced nature throughout (stanza 59), some of the flowers may
simply be painted. Alternately, they may be hybridized by crossbreeding, a mingling of
art and nature that was a subject of contemporary debate; see, for instance, Shakespeare,
The Winter’s Tale, 4.1.79–108.
379
59
One would have thought, (so cunningly, the rudeº ºsimple, unadorned
And scornèdº partes were mingled with the fine,) ºhumble, neglected
That nature had for wantonesse ensude53
Art, and that Art at nature did repine;º ºcomplain, chafe
So striving each th’other to undermine,
Each did the others worke more beautify;
So diff ’ring both in willes, agreed in fine:54
So all agreed through sweete diversity,
This Gardin to adorne with all variety.
60
And in the midst of all, a fountaine stood,
Of richest substance, that on earth might bee,
So pure and shiny, that the silver floodº ºriver
Through every channell running one might see;
Most goodly it with curiousº ymageree ºelaborate
Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boyes, ºwrought all over, overworked
Of which some seemd with lively jollitee,
To fly about, playing their wanton toyes,º ºgames
Whylest others did them selves embayº in liquid joyes, ºbathe, drench
61
And over all, of purest gold was spred,
A trayle of yvie in his native hew:º ºits natural colour
For the rich metall was so colourèd,
That wight, who did not well avis’dº it vew, ºhaving considered it carefully
Would surely deeme it to bee yvie trew:
Low his lascivious armes adown did creepe,
That themselves dipping in the silver dew,º ºsilvery water
53
imitated in jest or out of extravagance
54
in the end, and also perhaps ‘in finery’
380
Their fleecyº flowres they fearefullyº did steepe, ºsoft; ºtremulously

Which drops of Christall seemd for wantones to weep.
62
Infinit streames continually did well
Out of this fountaine, sweet and faire to see,
The which into an ample laverº fell, ºbasin
And shortly grew to so great quantitie,
That like a litle lake it seemd to bee;
Whose depth exceeded not three cubits55 hight,
That through the waves one might the bottom see,
All pav’d beneath with Jaspar56 shining bright,
That seemdº the fountaine in that sea did sayleº upright. ºit seemed; ºleap, dance
63
And all the margentº round about was sett, ºmargin
With shady Laurell trees, thence to defendº ºkeep off
The sunny beames, which on the billowes bett,º ºbeat
And those which therein bathed, mote offend:º ºmight harm
As Guyon hapned by the same to wend,º ºgo
Two naked Damzellesº he therein espyde, ºdamsels, girls
Which therein bathing, seemèd to contend,
And wrestle wantonly, ne car’d to hyde,
Their dainty partes from vew of any, which them eyd.º ºeyed, looked at
64
Sometimes the one would lift the other quight
Above the waters, and then downe againe
Her plong,º as over maysterèd by might, ºplunge
Where both awhile would coverèd remaine,
And each the other from to riseº restraine; ºrising
55
a measure the length of a forearm.
56
a crystal that exists in a range of different shades.
381
The whiles their snowy limbes, as through a vele,º ºveil

So through the christall waves appearèd plaine:
Then suddeinly both would themselves unhele,º ºuncover
And th’amarous57 sweet spoiles to greedy eyes revele.
65
58
As that faire Starre, the messenger of morne,
His deawy face out of the sea doth reare:
Or as the Cyprian goddesse,59 newly borne
Of th’Oceans fruitfull froth, did first appeare:
Such seemèd they, and so their yellow heareº ºhair
Christalline humorº droppèd downe apace. ºliquid
Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him neare,
And somewhat ganº relent his earnest pace; ºbegan to
His stubborne brest gan secret pleasaunceº to embrace. ºpleasure
66
The wanton Maidens him espying, stood
Gazing a while at his unwontedº guise; ºunaccustomed, unusual
Then th’one her selfe low duckèd in the flood,
Abasht, that her a straunger did avise:º ºbehold
But thother rather higher did arise,
And her two lilly papsº aloft displayd, ºbreasts
And all, that might his melting hart entyse
To her delights, she unto him bewrayd:º ºrevealed
The rest hidd underneath, him more desirous made.
67
With that, the other likewise up arose,
And her faire lockes, which formerly were bownd
57
‘amorous’, i.e. erotic, but with a hint of ‘bitter’ (Latin amarus).
58
The morning star, also called Phosphor or Lucifer.
59
Venus, who had a shrine in Cyprus and who was born out of the foam of the sea
(‘Oceans fruitfull froth’).
382
Up in one knott, she low adowne did lose:º ºloosen

Which flowing long and thick, her cloth’d arownd,
And th’yvorie in golden mantle gownd:
So that faire spectacle from him was reft,º ºtaken away
Yet that, which reft it, no lesse faire was fownd:
So hidd in lockesº and waves from lookers theft,60 ºhair
Nought but her lovely face she for his looking left.
68
Withall she laughed, and she blusht withall,
That blushing to her laughter gave more grace,
And laughter to her blushing, as did fall:º ºbefall, happen
Now when they spyde the knight to slacke his pace,
Them to behold, and in his sparkling face
The secrete signes of kindled lust appeare,
Their wanton meriments they did encreace,
And to him beckned, to approch more neare,
And shewd him many sights, that corageº cold could reare.º ºdesire; ºarouse
69
On which when gazing him the Palmer saw
He much rebukt those wandring eyes of his,
And counseld well, him forward thence did draw.
Now are they come nigh to the Bowre of blis
Of her fondº favorites so nam’d amis: ºfoolish
When thus the Palmer, ‘Now Sir, well avise;º ºconsider well
For here the endº of all our traveillº is: ºaim; ºlabour, voyage
Here wonnesº Acrasia, whom we must surprise, ºdwells
Els she will slip away, and all our driftº despise.’º ºplan; ºscorn, render
contemptible
60
I.e., from an onlooker’s stealing a glance.
383
70
Eftsoonesº they heard a most melodious sound, ºSuddenly
Of all that moteº delight a daintie eare, ºmight
Such as attonceº might not on living ground, ºall together
Save in this Paradise, be heard elswhere:
Right hard it was, for wight, which did it heare,
To read,º what manner musicke that mote bee: ºunderstand
For all that pleasing is to living eare,
Was there consortedº in one harmonee, ºarranged, combined
Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree.
71
The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempredº sweet; ºattuned
Th’Angelicall soft trembling voyces made
To th’instruments divine respondenceº meet: ºresponse
The silver sounding instruments did meetº ºjoin
With the baseº murmure of the waters fall: ºlow, bass
The waters fall with difference discreet,º ºdistinct variation
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call:
The gentle warbling wind low answerèd to all.
72
There, whence that Musick seemèd heard to bee,
Was the faire Witch her selfe now solacing,º ºtaking pleasure
With a new Lover, whom through sorceree
And witchcraft, she from farre did thether bring:
There she had him now laid a slombering,
In secret shade, after long wanton joyes:
Whilst round about them pleasauntly did sing
Many faire Ladies, and lascivious boyes,
That ever mixt their song with light licentious toyes.º ºplay
384
73
And all that while, right over him she hong,
With her false eyes fast fixèd in his sight,
As seeking medicine, whence she was stong,61
Or greedily depasturingº delight: ºfeeding on
And oft incliningº downe with kisses light, ºbending
For feare of waking him, his lips bedewd,
And through his humid eyes did sucke his spright,
Quite moltenº into lust and pleasure lewd; ºmelted
Wherewith she sighèd soft, as if his case she rewd.º ºpitied
74
The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely62 lay;
‘Ah see, who so fayre thing doest faineº to see, ºwish
In springing flowre the image of thy day;
Ah see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee
Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee,
That fairer seemes, the lesse ye see her may;
Lo see soone after, how more bold and free
Her barèd bosome she doth broad display;
Lo see soone after, how she fades, and falls away.
75
‘So passeth, in the passing of a day,
Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre,
Ne more doth florish after first decay,º ºdeath, destruction
That earstº was sought to deck both bed and bowre, ºrecently, a little while ago
Of many a Lady’, and many a Paramowre:
Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime,º ºearly, in her prime
For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre:
61
I.e., as if seeking remedy in the very thing that caused her injury (namely, the sight of his
beauty).
62
beautiful, of love. This ‘lay’ or song is an example of the theme of car pe diem (literally
‘seize the day’), introduced in Roman poetry and greatly expanded on in the Renaissance.
Spenser’s immediate model is Tasso, Ge rusalemme Liberata, 16.14–15.
385
Gather the Rose of love, whilest yet is time,

Whilest loving thou mayst lovèd be with equall crime.’63
76
He ceast, and then ganº all the quire of birdes ºbegan to, did
Their diverse notes t’attune unto his lay,
As in approvaunce of his pleasing wordes.
The constantº payre heard all, that he did say, ºsteadfast, faithful
Yet swarved not, but kept their forward way,
Through many covert groves, and thickets close,º ºhidden, secret
In which they creeping did at last displayº ºdiscover
That wanton Lady, with her lover lose,º ºloose
Whose sleepie head she in her lap did soft dispose.º ºlay, cradle
77
Upon a bed of Roses she was layd,
As faint through heat, or dightº to pleasant sin, ºarranged for
And was arayd,º or rather disarayd, ºdressed
All in a vele of silke and silver thin,
That hid no whitº her alablasterº skin, ºnot at all; ºivory-white
But rather shewd more white, if more might bee:
More subtileº web Arachne 64 cannot spin, ºfine, light
Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched deaw,65 do not in th’ayre more lightly flee.
78
Her snowy brest was bare toº readyº ºopen for; ºimmediate;
spoyleº ºravishment
Of hungry eies, which n’oteº therewith be fild, ºmight not
And yet through languourº of her late sweet toyle, ºweariness
63
guilt; the last word of the song breaks the spell cast by the rest.
64
The spider, or else the name of the girl, expert in weaving, who according to myth was
turned into a spider [see Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 6].
65
The ‘fine nets’ are also spiderwebs, pictured as being fabricated of dried dew.
386
Few drops, more cleare then Nectar, forth distild,

That like pure Orient perles adowne it trild,º ºtrickled
And her faire eyes sweet smyling in delight,
Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild
Fraile harts, yet quenchèd not; like starry light
Which sparckling on the silent waves, does seeme
more bright.
79
The young man sleeping by her, seemd to be
Some goodly swayneº of honorable place,º ºyoung man; ºrank, station
That certes it great pitty was to see
Him his nobility so fowle deface;
A sweet regard,º and amiable grace, ºaspect, look
Mixed with manly sternesseº did appeare ºfierceness
Yetº sleeping, in his well proportiond face, ºeven while
And on his tender lips the downy heareº ºhair
Did now but freshly spring, and silken blossoms beare.
80
His warlike Armes, the ydle instruments
Of sleeping praise,66 were hong upon a tree,
And his brave shield, full of old moniments,º ºsigns of former
accomplishment
Was fowly ra’st,º that none the signes might see, ºerased
Neº for them, ne for honour carèd hee, ºNor
Ne ought, that did to his advauncement tend,
But in lewd loves, and wastfull luxuree,º ºexcess, lust
His dayes, his goods, his bodie he did spend:
O horrible enchantment, that him so did blend.º ºblind
66
While he sleeps, so does the praise that he would otherwise be winning with his arms,
now ‘ydle.’ His position resembles a traditional emblem of effeminisation or
emasculation; see, for instance, Botticelli’s painting, Venus and Mars.
387
81
The noble Elfe, and carefull Palmer drew
So nigh them, minding nought,º but lustfull game, ºheedful of nothing
That suddein forth they on them rusht, and threw
A subtile net, which only for that sameº ºthat very pur pose
The skilfull Palmer formally67 did frame.º ºadjust, order, deploy,
structure
So held them under fast, the whiles the rest
Fled all away for feare of fowler shame.
The faire Enchauntresse, so unwares opprest,º ºsur prised, held down
Tryde all her arts, and all her sleights, thence out to wrest.º ºtwist
82
And ekeº her lover strove: but all in vaine; ºalso
For that same net so cunningly was wound,
That neither guile, nor force might it distraine.º ºtear off
They tooke them both, and both them strongly bound
In captive bandes,º which there they readie found: ºbonds
But her in chaines of adamant68 he tyde;
For nothing else might keepe her safe and sound;
But Verdant 69(so he hightº) he soone untyde, ºwas called
And counsellº sage in steedº thereof to him applyde. ºcounsel, advice; ºinstead
83
But all those pleasaunt bowres and Pallace brave,º ºmagnificent
Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse,
But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse:º ºgrief
Their groves he feld, their gardins did deface,
67
in good order, expressly. The Palmer’s net echoes the one used by Hephaestus to trap
Ares and Aphrodite [Mars and Venus] in Homer, Odyssey, 8.272–99.
68
the strongest or hardest substance in the world.
69
Verdant is the counterpart of Mortdant at the beginning of the book […] The word
‘verdant’ means green and flourishing, as for instance at I.ii.17.9; the name also suggests
Latin viridens, fresh, youthful, in the prime of life.
388
Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse,º ºcabins cast down

Their banket houses burne, their buildings race,º ºraze
And of the fayrest late, now made the fowlest place.
84
Then led they her away, and eke that knight ºmagnificent
They with them led, both sorrowfull and sad:
The way they came, the same retourn’d they right,
Till they arrivèd, where they lately had
Charm’d those wild-beasts, that rag’d with furie mad.
Which now awaking, fierce at them gan fly,
As in their mistresse reskew, whom they lad;º ºled
But them the Palmer soone did pacify.
Then Guyon askt, what meant those beastes, which
there did ly.
85
Sayd he, ‘These seeming beasts are men indeed,
Whom this Enchauntresse hath transformèd thus,
Whylomeº her lovers, which her lustes did feed,70 ºearlier, formerly
Now turnèd into figures hideous,
According to their mindes like monstruous.’
‘Sad end’ (quoth he) ‘of life intemperate,
And mournefull meedº of joyes delicious: ºdue reward or punishment
But Palmer, if it mote thee so aggrate,º ºplease
Let them returnèd be unto their former state.’
86
Streight way he with his vertuous71 staffe them strooke,
And streight of beastes they comely men became;
70
I.e., who satisfied her lusts. Acrasia’s transformation of men into beasts derives from
Circe’s similar treatment of Odysseus’ men in Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, to which
Virgil makes reference in Aeneid, 7.15–20.
71
Cf. above, 26.6 and n.
389
Yet being men they did unmanly looke,

And starèd ghastly, some for inward shame,
And some for wrath, to see their captive Dame:
But one above the rest in speciall,º ºespecially
That had an hog beene late, hightº Grylle 72 by name, ºcalled
Repynedº greatly, and did him miscall,º ºcomplained; ºinsult, abuse
That had from hoggish forme him brought to naturall.º ºI.e., to his original form
87
Saide Guyon, ‘See the mind of beastly man,
That hath so soone forgot the excellence
Of his creation, when he life began,
That now he chooseth, with vile difference,º ºalteration, disagreement
To be a beast, and lacke intelligence.’
To whom the Palmer thus, ‘The donghill kinde
Delightes in filth and fowle incontinence:
Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish minde;73
But let us hence depart, whilest wetherº serves and winde.’ ºweather
72
According to Plutarch, this was the name of one of Odysseus’ men who, having been
turned into a pig (Greek grullos) by Circe, refused to be turned back.
73
Cf. Rev. 22.11: ‘He that is unjust, let him be unjust stil: and he which is filthie, let him
be filthie stil.’
390
Contents
Introduction 395
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304–1374) 396
‘Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna’ 397
‘Love, who lives and reigns within my thought’ 398
Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1503–1542) 399
Sonnet: ‘The long love that in my thought doth harbour’ 400
Ballad: ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ 401
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547) 403
Sonnet: ‘Love that doth reign and live within my thought’ 404
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) 406
Sonnet: ‘When nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes’ 408
Sonnet: ‘His mother dear Cupid offended late’ 408
Sonnet: ‘Fly, fly, my friends, I have my death wound, fly’ 409
Sonnet: ‘Whether the Turkish new moon minded be’ 410
Sonnet: ‘Stella oft sees the very face of woe’ 411
Sonnet: ‘O kiss, which dost those ruddy gems impart’ 412
Sir Walter Ralegh (1554–1618) 413
‘Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light’ 414
Sonnet: ‘Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expir’d’ 415
Samuel Daniel (c.1562–1619) 417
Sonnet: ‘Fair is my love, and cruel as she is fair’ 418
Sonnet: ‘Thou poor heart, sacrificed unto the fairest’ 419
Sonnet: ‘If this be love, to draw a weary breath’ 420
Sonnet: ‘My spotless love hovers with white wings’ 421
Sonnet: ‘Whilst by her eyes pursued, my poor heart flew it’ 421
Sonnet: ‘Care-charmer sleep, son of the sable night’ 422
John Donne (1572–1631) 424
The Blossom 425
The Canonization 427
The Dream 429
A Jet Ring Sent 430
A Lecture upon the Shadow 431
The Legacy 433
The Sun Rising 434
Song: ‘Sweetest love, I do not go’ 435
Twickenham Garden 437
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning 438
Lady Mary Wroth (?1587–1651/3) 441
Sonnet: ‘You endless torments that my rest oppress’ 442
Sonnet: ‘When every one to pleasing pastime hies’ 443
Introduction
Introduction
In this section, you will find modernised texts of all the poems
discussed in detail in Chapter 8 as well as a selection of other poems
from the period, by Donne and by others, chosen to illustrate the
themes of the chapter. Italic glosses at the ends of lines explain some
words, and more detailed notes appear as footnotes.
Like Hamlet, many of these poems exist in more than one version.
Information about some of the differences between these variant texts
can be found in the ‘Note on the poems’ prefacing each set of poems
and in the ‘Textual note’ included with some of the poems’ footnotes.
You can read some of the poems in their early printed form (and thus
in unmodernised spelling) in the online databases Early English Books
Online (EEBO) and Historical Texts (HT). For more details, see the
module website.
A grave accent (è) appears in some poems to indicate syllables that
should be pronounced that might otherwise not be: for example,
‘Thankèd’ in Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ (l. 8).
Audio recordings of all the poems are also available, made in a variety
of voices and styles, from the module website.
395
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304–

1374)
Francesco Petrarca, known in English as ‘Petrarch’, was a pioneering
Italian humanist scholar and poet who lived for much of his life in
France, in Avignon and Vaucluse. Trained as a lawyer, Petrarch changed
direction in his 20s, devoting his life to literature, and played a crucial
role in the recovery of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. He
was famous in his time for his Latin poetry and prose writings, written
in emulation of classical works. By far his most influential book,
however, was the long sequence of love poems in Italian – 317 sonnets
and 49 poems in other metres – that he assembled over the course of
more than 40 years: the Canzoniere (or ‘Song Book’), also known in
Italian as Rime sparse (‘Scattered rhymes’) and in Latin as Rerum
vulgarium fragmenta (‘Fragments of vernacular poetry’). This subtle and
rich work, which survives in Petrarch’s own manuscript copy, tells the
story of its male speaker’s unconsummated love for the beautiful Laura,
first seen on Good Friday 1327 in a church in Avignon. The obsession
outlasts Laura’s death, which occurs almost 100 poems before the end
of the sequence. The Canzoniere’s ideas and metaphors, influenced by
earlier Latin, Provençal and Italian love poetry and emphasising in
particular the transcendent qualities of Laura and the fruitless despair of
her lover, had a decisive influence on the way future generations of
poets wrote about unrequited love. Whether or not Laura was a real
person, a question on which critics are still undecided, was a topic
raised during Petrarch’s lifetime: Petrarch himself insisted on Laura’s
reality. Her name, however, is conveniently close to the Italian word for
‘laurel’ (lauro), the ancient symbol of poetic excellence. Petrarch himself
was crowned with laurel in Rome in 1341, in a self-conscious revival of
ancient Roman practice.
Further reading
Petrarch, F. (2008) Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works,
trans. M. Musa, Oxford World’s Classics series, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Roche Jr, T.P. (ed.) (2005) Petrarch in English, London, Penguin.
Spiller, M.R.G. (1992) The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction,
London, Routledge.
396
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304–1374)
Note on the poem

The poem by Petrarch below is provided both in its original Italian and
in a literal translation by Mark Musa. Looking at the Italian alongside
Musa’s English, as well as the versions by Wyatt (‘The long love that in
my thought doth harbour’) and Surrey (‘Love that doth reign and live
within my thought’) in the sections on those poets, will give you some
idea of the rhyme-scheme that Petrarch was using and of the sounds of
the original poem.
Edition
Petrarch, F. (1996) The Canzoniere or Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,
trans. M. Musa, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. Text
adapted by Jonathan Gibson from Petrarch 1996; notes by Jonathan
Gibson.
‘Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna’

Poem 140 in the Canzoniere.
Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna

e ’l suo seggio maggior nel mio cor tene,
talor armato ne la fronte vène,
ivi si loca et ivi pon sua insegna.
5 Quellaº ch’ amare et sofferir ne ’nsegna ºi.e. Laura

e vòl che ’l gran desio, l’accesa spene,
ragion, vergogna, et reverenza affrene,
di nostroº ardir fra se stessa si sdegna. ºi.e. my
Onde Amor paventoso fugge al core,

10 lasciando ogni sua impresa, et piange, et trema;
ivi s’asconde et non appar più fore.
Che poss’ io far, temendo il mio signore,

se non star seco infin a l’ora estrema?
397
Ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more.
‘Love, who lives and reigns within my thought’

Modern translation by Mark Musa.
Love, who lives and reigns within my thought

and holds the highest seat inside my heart
at times appears all armed upon my face,
and there he camps, and there he sets his banner.
5 The oneº who teaches us patience and love ºi.e. Laura

and wants my great desire, my burning hope
to be controlled by reason, shame and reverence,
is angry at ourº boldness – more than she shows. ºi.e. my
And so Love full of fear flees to my heart,

10 abandoning his plans, and weeps and trembles;
and there he hides and never comes outside.
What can I do, if my own lord is frightened

except stay with him till the final hour?
Who loves well dying comes to a good end.
398
Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1503–1542)

Wyatt’s family came from Kent; his father, Sir Henry Wyatt, was a
prominent court figure. Educated at Cambridge, Wyatt married early.
Not long afterwards, however, he became estranged from his wife
Elizabeth Brooke, apparently as a result of her adultery. Wyatt
flourished at Henry VIII’s court in the 1520s, part of a glamorous
group of young courtiers close to the young king. Some of Wyatt’s love
poems probably date from this period, and some might have been
written for Anne Boleyn, a neighbour in Kent who would become
Henry’s second queen in 1533. During the 1530s Wyatt went on a
succession of foreign missions for Henry. His career was interrupted in
1536, when Queen Anne was accused of multiple adultery and
executed. Perhaps because of his earlier relationship with Anne, Wyatt
spent time in the Tower of London, where he seems to have been an
eyewitness to the queen’s beheading. Released from prison after pressure
from his patron Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, Wyatt
resumed his diplomatic work. About this time, his mistress Elizabeth
Darrell bore a child. In 1540 Cromwell fell out of favour and was
executed; the following year Wyatt was again sent to the Tower, after
old accusations of traitorous behaviour were revived. Released at the
instigation of Queen Catherine Howard on condition that he take back
his abandoned wife, Wyatt died not long afterwards of ill health.
Influenced by Italian poetry encountered on his travels, Wyatt was the
first poet to write sonnets in English. He also wrote verse satires and
paraphrases of the emotionally tortured biblical ‘penitential psalms’
(Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143). His metre is often startlingly
irregular. Much of his writing, in prose and verse, can be read as
concerned with the anxieties of court life: secrecy, dissimulation,
bitterness and broken faith are ever-present themes, as is a Stoic
aspiration for emotional stability.
Further reading
Brigden, S. (2012) Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest, London, Faber &
Faber.
Greenblatt, S. (1980) ‘Power, sexuality and inwardness in Wyatt’s poetry’
in Greenblatt, S., Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
399

Longman.
Holton, A. and McFaul, T. (eds) (2011) Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and
Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others,
London, Penguin.
Siemens, R. et al. (eds) ‘A social edition of the Devonshire MS (BL Add
17,492)’ [Online]. Available at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/
The_Devonshire_Manuscript (Accessed 20 December 2014).
Note on the poems

A manuscript of Wyatt’s verse, partly in Wyatt’s own handwriting, partly
in the handwriting of scribes working for him, survives at the British
Library (the ‘Egerton manuscript’: British Library MS Egerton 2711).
Different versions of the poetry appear in other manuscripts, perhaps
the most interesting of which is the ‘Devonshire manuscript’ (British
Library MS Additional 17492), which seems to have been compiled by a
group of male and female friends. The very influential printed poetry
anthology Songs and Sonnets, published by Richard Tottel in 1557 (more
than a decade after Wyatt’s death) and now known as Tottel’s Miscellany,
included many poems by Wyatt. Tottel provided new titles and changed
the wording of much of Wyatt’s verse, mainly, it seems, to make the
metre more regular. The most interesting of his alterations are
mentioned in the textual notes.
Edition
Wyatt, T. (1978) The Complete Poems, ed. R.A. Rebholz,
Harmondsworth, Penguin. Text adapted by Jonathan Gibson from
Wyatt 1978; notes by Jonathan Gibson.
Sonnet: ‘The long love that in my thought doth

harbour’
Textual note: Like Surrey’s ‘Love that doth reign and live within my
thought’, below, this is a translation of Petrarch’s ‘Amor, che nel penser
mio vive et regna’ (‘Love, who lives and reigns within my thought’),
above. In the version printed after Wyatt’s death in Tottel’s Miscellany
(Holton and McFaul, 2011, p. 51), this poem has the title ‘The lover for
400
shamefastness hideth his desire within his faithful heart’. The changes
Tottel made include the following: ‘doth’ (l. 1) becomes ‘I’, ‘therein’ (l.
4) ‘there’, ‘spreading’ (l. 4) ‘displaying’ and ‘Wherewithal’ (l. 9)
‘Wherewith love’.
The longº love that in my thought doth harbourº ºenduring; ºlodge

And in mine heart doth keep his residence
Into my face presseth with bold pretence
And therein campeth, spreading his banner.1
5 She that me learnethº to love and suffer ºteaches
And will that my trustº and lust’s negligence2 ºconfidence
Be reinedº by reason, shame, and reverence, ºrestrained
With his hardiness taketh displeasure.
Wherewithal unto the heart’s forest he fleeth,
10 Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry,
And there him hideth and not appeareth.
What may I do when my master feareth,
But in the field with him to live and die?
For good is the life ending faithfully.
Ballad: ‘They flee from me that sometime did me

seek’
A mysterious poem; unlike ‘The long love’, it is not a translation.
Textual note: In Tottel’s Miscellany (Holton and McFaul, 2011,
pp. 61–2), this poem has the title ‘The lover sheweth how he is
forsaken of such as he sometime enjoyed’ (‘enjoyed’ here has a sexual
meaning). Tottel’s version of the poem makes many alterations to the
wording to regularise the metre: among other changes, ‘strange’ (l. 17)
becomes ‘bitter’ and the final couplet reads: ‘But, since that I unkindly
so am served:/How like you this, what hath she now deserved?’
1
Love is imagined by the speaker as his lord and master, thrusting forward to get ready
for battle. Wooing the beloved is often compared to a battle in Petrarchan writing.
2
lust’s negligence] Lust due to neglect of something: respect for the beloved, perhaps, or
social norms, or something else.
401
They flee from me that sometimeº did me seek ºin the past
With naked foot stalkingº in my chamber. ºwalking stealthily
I have seen them gentle,1 tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
5 That sometime they put themself in dangerº ºin my power/in peril
To take bread at my hand;2 and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thankèd beº fortune it hath been otherwise ºThanks to

Twenty times better, but once in special,º ºin particular
10 In thin arrayº after a pleasant guise, ºIn a thin gown
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’
15 It was no dream: I lay broad waking.º ºwide awake

But all is turnèd through my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking.
And I have leaveº to go ofº her goodness ºpermission; ºbecause of
And she also to use newfangleness.º ºinconstancy
20 But since that I so kindly3 am served
I would fain knowº what she hath deserved. ºI’d like to know
1
As well as its modern-day meaning, ‘gentle’ could also mean ‘of respectable social status’
(i.e. like a ‘gentleman’ or ‘gentlewoman’, a member of the gentry). Cf. ‘gentleness’ (l.16).
2
The phrase ‘take bread at my hand’ confirms the metaphor in the first stanza which
identifies women with gentle animals; ‘stalking’ in its second sense establishes the unusual
relationship between these ‘animals’ and the speaker – until l. 6 they are stalking towards
him, he is not stalking towards them. The speaker’s unconventional passivity is a
dominant motif throughout the poem: in the lady’s advance to him in stanza 2; in his
‘gentleness’ (l. 16) which enables her to present her forsaking of him as a favour to him
– as if she were releasing him from an unwelcome bondage (ll. 17–18); and in his being
‘served’ by the lady (l. 20). The animal metaphor also establishes the dream-like
atmosphere which pervades the encounter in stanza 2 and is denied in l. 15.
3
The word is used bitterly. It could mean, ironically, ‘with kindness’, but also ‘according to
kind’ or ‘according to nature’ or ‘true to type’. The beloved is acting, the speaker says,
according to the nature of an unfaithful woman.
402
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547)
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–

1547)
Although Surrey was the eldest son of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of
Norfolk, he died before his father and so never acceded to the
dukedom himself. Having received a private humanist education,
learning French, Italian and Spanish as well as Latin, as a teenager he
became the companion of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the
illegitimate son of Henry VIII. It was at this time that he married Lady
Frances Vere, with whom he would have five children. The time Surrey
spent in France with Richmond in 1532–3, and his encounter there with
European literature and art, had a decisive influence on his writing.
When Richmond died in 1536 the effect on Surrey was profound.
Accused of involvement in the failed Catholic rebellion known as the
Pilgrimage of Grace, Surrey was briefly confined in Windsor Castle.
Restored to favour at court, he became notorious for his pride and
antipathy to ‘new’ families. His lucid poems, which circulated in
manuscript, adapt the devices of continental love poetry, following in
the path of his mentor Sir Thomas Wyatt. He devised the rhyme-
scheme (now rather unfairly known as the ‘Shakespearean sonnet’) that
became the norm for English sonnets, and in his translation of two
books of Virgil’s Aeneid he invented English blank verse. When Wyatt
died in 1542, Surrey took the very unusual step of publishing an
anonymous verse tribute. Not long afterwards, he was imprisoned in the
Fleet prison for running wild in London with his friends, breaking
church windows and attacking brothels. In the last few years of his life
he was sent on diplomatic and military missions abroad by Henry VIII.
A military campaign in France in 1545–46 ended in defeat and
accusations of mismanagement for which he was summoned back to
England. Charged with incorporating the royal heraldic arms into his
own – and thus threatening Henry’s claim to the throne – Surrey was
beheaded on Tower Hill in London.
Further reading
Longman.
Howard, H., Earl of Surrey (1970) Poems, ed. E. Jones, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
403
Sessions, W.A. (2003) The Poet Earl of Surrey: A L ife, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Note on the poem

Like Wyatt’s ‘The long love that in my thought doth harbour’, this is a
translation of Petrarch’s ‘Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna’ (‘Love,
who lives and reigns within my thought’), above. The text, edited by
Jonathan Gibson, is a modernised transcription of the version in a
sixteenth-century manuscript collection of poetry by Surrey and others
(British Library MS 36529, fol. 55v), written in a scribe’s neat
handwriting and attributed to ‘HS’ (‘Henry Surrey’). A different version,
with many alterations regularising the metre, was printed in Tottel’s
Miscellany after Surrey’s death (Holton and McFaul, 2011, p. 13), with
the title ‘Complaint of a lover rebuked’: just one alteration is mentioned
in the textual note.
Sonnet: ‘Love that doth reign and live within my

thought’
Textual note: A different version, with many alterations regularising
the metre, was printed in Tottel’s Miscellany after Surrey’s death (Holton
and McFaul, 2011, p. 13), with the title ‘Complaint of a lover rebuked’
and a final line which reads ‘Sweet is his death that takes his end by
love’.
Love that doth reign and live within my thought

And built his seat within my captive breast,
Clad in the arms whereinº with me he fought, ºarmour in which
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.
5 But she that taught me loveº and suffer pain, ºto love
Myº doubtfulº hope and ekeº my hot desire1 ºAnd my; ºfearful; ºalso
With shamefastº look to shadowº and refrain ºmodest; ºovershadow
Her smiling graceº converteth straight to ire,º ºfavour; ºanger
And coward love then to the heart apaceº ºquickly
10 Taketh his flight where he doth lurk and plainº ºlament
1
In the manuscript the scribe at first left out this line, later squeezing it in in the margin.
(JG)
404
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547)
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.

For my lord’s guilt thus faultless bide I pain.2
Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove:
Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.
2
‘Thus, though faultless, I suffer pain for the offence committed by my lord’
405
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)

Sidney was one of the most influential literary figures of the early
modern period, as famous for his tragic death in battle at the age of 32
as for his innovative and sophisticated writing in both prose and verse.
Much had been expected from the young Philip, the talented and
charismatic son of a senior government figure (Sir Henry Sidney, Lord
Deputy Governor of Ireland) and prospective heir to his uncle, the
queen’s childless favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. In
preparation for a career advancing the cause of international
Protestantism, Sidney, after his education at Shrewsbury School and
Oxford University, spent three years travelling the continent, favourably
impressing a string of distinguished statesmen. At Elizabeth’s court in
the late 1570s and early 1580s, however, he was perhaps less successful
than he might have expected. It was at this time that he wrote the
literary works for which he would be celebrated after his death,
including the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, the long pastoral
fiction The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (which exists in two versions)
and The Defence of Poesy (an important prose work arguing for the
ethical value of imaginative literature). Sidney married Frances, daughter
of Elizabeth’s secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1583. Two
years later, shortly after his uncle Leicester had been sent out to help
the Dutch Protestants in their revolt against Spanish rule, Sidney was
made Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands. He died of infection
following a thigh-wound suffered during an attack on a Spanish baggage
train.
In his lifetime, Sidney was not generally known to write literature; his
works circulated in manuscript only. They were printed after his death
in editions supervised by his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke and his
boyhood friend Fulke Greville. Mary also completed the translation of
the psalms that Sidney had left unfinished at his death.
Further reading
Alexander, G. (ed.) (2004) Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and Selected
Renaissance Literary Criticism, London, Penguin.
Duncan-Jones, K. (1991) Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet, New York,
Yale University Press.
406
Kay, D. (1987) Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism,

Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Note on the poems

All the poems below come from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, one of
the earliest and most sophisticated of English sonnet sequences. The
title may not have been Sidney’s own. Probably written at the beginning
of the 1580s, consisting of 108 sonnets and 11 ‘songs’ (love lyrics in
other rhyme-schemes) and full of imaginative variations on Petrarchan
ideas, the sequence is in the voice of ‘Astrophil’ (‘star-lover’), the wooer
of the married Stella (‘star’). There is, unusually for a sonnet sequence,
a very clear narrative structure. Having rejected Astrophil’s advances,
Stella is kissed by him while she is asleep. Although Stella promises him
her chaste affection, this is not enough for the lustful Astrophil, who is
tortured both by the intensity of his love and by its incompatibility with
virtue and reason. After a period when the two are apart, and after
Astrophil has offended Stella in some unspecified way, the sequence
ends with Astrophil in despair. Many details make it clear that
‘Astrophil’ is a fictionalised version of Sidney himself and that ‘Stella’
represents Penelope Devereux, whose father had wanted her to marry
Sidney but who in fact married Robert Rich, 3rd Baron Rich. The
nature of the relationship between Sidney and Devereux is unknown, as
is the intended audience for Astrophil and Stella. Sidney’s manuscript
version does not survive. The sequence first appeared in an
unauthorised printed edition in 1591, stimulating a craze for sonnet
sequences. Its first authorised text, edited by the Countess of Pembroke,
appeared in 1598 and is the basis for the text of the poems which
follows.
Edition
World’s Classics series, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Text adapted
by Jonathan Gibson from Sidney 2002; notes by Jonathan Gibson.
407
Sonnet: ‘When nature made her chief work, Stella’s

eyes’
Sonnet 7 of Astrophil and Stella. Penelope Devereux/Rich, the woman
on whom the figure of Stella was based, had black eyes. In Sidney’s
time, although black was conventionally thought to be ‘beauty’s
contrary’ (l. 10), there was also a tradition among love-poets of,
paradoxically, praising black as beautiful.
When nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes,

In colour black why wrapped she beams so bright?
Would she in beamyº black, like painter wise, ºradiant
Frameº daintiestº lustreº, mixed of shades and light?1 ºMake; ºmost excellent; ºsheen
5 Or did she elseº that sober hueº devise ºotherwise; ºserious colour
In object best to knitº and strengthº our sight, ºmake firm; ºstrengthen
Lest, if no veil those brave gleams did disguiseº, ºblock
They, sun-like, should more dazzle than delight?2
Or would sheº her miraculous power show, ºNature
10 That, whereasº black seems beauty’s contrary, ºIn the fact that, even though
Sheº even in black doth make all beauties flow? ºNature
Both so, and thus:3 she mindingº love should be ºaware that
Placed everº there, gave himº this mourning weedº ºalways; ºi.e. Love; ºgarment
To honour all their deaths, who for herº bleed.4 ºStella
Sonnet: ‘His mother dear Cupid offended late’

Sonnet 17 of Astrophil and Stella. Venus, the goddess of love in Roman
mythology and the mother of the young boy Cupid (Love), was the
lover of Mars, the god of war.
1
‘Create a shiny effect [i.e. in the appearance of Stella’s eyes] by mixing dark [the colour
black] with light [the bright beams that Stella’s eyes cast].’ Before the seventeenth century,
it was believed that eyes emit beams of light.
2
‘Or did nature make Stella’s eyes black to protect our eyes from their power (as
sunglasses protect us from the sun)?’
3
This is the answer to the question in the opening lines: i.e. in all of the ways listed above
(‘Both so’) and in this way too (‘and thus’).
4
i.e. the deaths of those who bleed (i.e. suffer) for love of her.
408
His mother dearº Cupid offended late,º ºdear mother; ºrecently

Because thatº Mars, grown slacker in her love,º ºBecause; ºi.e. love for Venus
With pricking shot he did not throughlyº move,1 ºthoroughly
To keep the pace of their first loving state.
5 The boy refused, for fear of Mars’s hate,
Who threatened stripesº if he his wrath did prove.º ºwhipping; ºprovoke
But she in chafeº him from her lap did shove. ºin rage
Brakeº bow, brake shafts, while Cupid weeping sate:º ºBroke; ºsat
Till that his grandam,º Nature, pitying it,º ºgrandmother; ºthe situation
10 Of Stella’s brows made him two better bows,
And in her eyes of arrows infinite.2
O how for joy he leaps, O how he crows,º ºtriumphs
And straightº therewith, like wags new got to play,3 ºimmediately
Falls to shrewdº turns;º and I was in his way. ºwicked; ºtricks
Sonnet: ‘Fly, fly, my friends, I have my death wound,

fly’
Sonnet 20 in Astrophil and Stella. Like the sonnet ‘His mother dear
Cupid offended late’, above, this is a poem about Cupid (Love) and his
arrows. In Petrarchan love poetry, love is often caused by the sight of
the beloved.
Fly, fly, my friends, I have my death wound, fly;

See there that boy, that murdering boy I say,
Who like a thief hid in dark bush doth lie,
Till bloody bullet get himº wrongful prey. ºget for him
5 So tyrant he no fitterº place could spy, ºmore suitable
Nor so fair levelº in so secret stayº ºgood aiming point; ºstopping
place
1
(1) Stella’s eye (2) black ring on an archery target
2
‘Made him two better bows out of Stella’s eyebrows and an infinite number of arrows out
of her eyes’. Eyes were believed to project rays of light. Compare the sonnet ‘When
nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes’, above.
3
mischievous boys starting to play [JG]
409
As that sweet black1 which veils the heavn’ly eye;º ºovershadows the sun
There himself with his shot he close doth lay.
Poor passenger,º pass now thereby I did, ºpasser-by
10 And stayed, pleased with the prospectº of the place, ºview, appearance
While that black hue from me the bad guestº hid: ºi.e. Cupid
But straightº I saw motions2 of lightning grace, ºimmediately
And then descriedº the glist’ringº of his dart: ºmade out; ºglittering
But ereº I could fly thence, it pierced my heart. ºbefore
Sonnet: ‘Whether the Turkish new moon minded be’

Sonnet 30 in Astrophil and Stella. Astrophil mentions political topics
that were current in Summer 1582. Lines 1–2 allude to the crescent (a
horned new moon) on the flag of the Turkish Ottoman empire, feared
to be about to attack Western Europe in 1582. Lines 3–4 refer to the
invasion of Muscovy (Russia) by Stephen Bathory, King of Poland.
(Muscovy is the unwilling ‘host’ of l. 3.) The ‘three parts’ of France
mentioned in l. 5 are the Catholics, the Protestants and the ‘Politiques’
or moderates, in conflict with each other during the French Wars of
Religion. The ‘Dutch’ (l. 6) are Germans (‘Deutsch’) living in the
conglomeration of central European states known as the ‘Holy Roman
Empire’, riven by tensions between Catholics and Protestants. The word
‘diet’ (l. 6) on which Sidney puns, was the name for the general
assembly of the empire, held in Summer 1582 in Augsburg. The towns
mentioned in l. 7 are Breda, Tourney, Oudenarde, Lier and Ninove,
captured by Spain in 1581–2; ‘Orange’ refers to William of Orange, also
known as William the Silent (1533–84), the leader of the Dutch revolt
against Catholic Spain. While Lord Deputy Governor of Ireland,
Sidney’s father, Sir Henry (ll. 9–10) divided Ulster into shires and
imposed a land-tax on the most powerful lords. In Scotland (l. 11),
conflict between Protestant and Catholic nobles culminated in the
kidnapping of the young King James VI (later James I of England) in
August 1582 in an episode known as the Ruthven Raid.
Textual note: In editions of Astrophil and Stella published during the
English reign of James I, ‘welt’ring’ became ‘no welt’ring’.
1
(1) Stella’s eye (2) black ring on an archery target
2
sudden movements
410
Whether the Turkish new moon minded beº ºintends to

To fill his horns this year on Christian coast; 1
How Pole’s rightº king means, without leaveº of host, ºrightful; ºpermission
To warm with ill-made fire cold Muscovy;
5 If French can yet three parts in one agree;
What now the Dutch in their full diets boast;
How Holland hearts, now so good towns be lost,
Trust in the pleasing shade of Orange tree;
How Ulster likes ofº that same golden bitº ºlikes; ºbridle
10 Wherewithº my father once made it half tame; ºWith which
If in the Scottish court be welt’ringº yet; ºdisturbance, chaos
These questions busy witsº to me do frame. ºsharp-witted people
I, cumberedº with good manners, answer do,º ºencumbered; ºanswer
But know not how, for still I think of you.
Sonnet: ‘Stella oft sees the very face of woe’

Sonnet 45 in Astrophil and Stella.
Stella oft sees the veryº face of woe ºtrue

Painted in my becloudedº stormy face; ºcloudy
But cannot skillº to pity my disgrace,º ºisn’t able; ºloss of standing
1
Not though thereof the cause herself she know;
5 Yet hearing late a fable,º which did show ºstory
Of lovers never known a grievous case,º ºexample
Pity thereof gatº in her breast such place ºgot
That, from that sea derived, tears’ spring did flow.
1
An allusion both to the ‘horns’ of a new moon and to the mythological ‘horn of plenty’,
a goat’s horn overflowing with fruit and flowers.
1
‘Even though she knows the cause of it’.
411
Alas, if fancy2 drawn by imagedº things, ºfictional

10 Though false, yet with free scopeº more graceº doth ºfreely; ºfavour (from Stella)
breed
Than servant’s wrack,º where new doubtsº honour ºinjury; ºmistrust (Stella’s)
brings;3
Then think, my dear, that you in me do read
Of lover’s ruin some sad tragedy:º ºsad story
I am not I, pity the tale of me.
Sonnet: ‘O kiss, which dost those ruddy gems

impart’
Sonnet 81 in Astrophil and Stella, one of 13 sonnets in the sequence
referring to an episode (described in Astrophil and Stella, Song 2) in
which Astrophil kisses Stella while she is asleep.
O kiss, which dost those ruddy gemsº impart,º ºi.e. lips; ºgive
Or gems, or fruits of new-found paradise,
Breathing all bliss, and sweetening to the heart,
Teaching dumb lips a nobler exercise;º ºfunctioning , practice
5 O kiss, which souls, even souls together ties
By links of love, and only nature’s art;º ºi.e. not human art
How fainº would I paintº thee to all men’s eyes, ºgladly; ºdepict
Or of thy gifts at least shadeº out some part. ºrepresent
But she forbids; with blushing words, she says
10 She builds her fame on higher seated praise;1
But my heart burns, I cannot silent be.
Then since (dear life)º you fainº would have me peace, ºi.e. Stella; ºgladly
And I, mad with delight, want witº to cease, ºlack intellectual capacity
Stop you my mouth with still stillº kissing me. ºalways
2
something imaginary
3
The ‘servant’ is Astrophil: an example of the Petrarchan convention whereby a male lover
describes himself as his beloved’s slave or servant. Women’s ‘honour’ was often felt in
Sidney’s time to be connected to their chastity. Here the word refers to Stella’s sense that
to retain her ‘honour’ she needs to be chaste and resist Astrophil’s advances.
1
Praise for something more ‘elevated’, or virtuous.
412
Sir Walter Ralegh (1554–1618)

Ralegh was a courtier, a military and naval commander, a historian, a
pioneering colonialist in Ireland and an explorer as well as a poet. He
grew up in a West Country gentry family and, it is said, spoke in a
Devon accent all his life. There is no mention before 1662 of the
famous story that he came to the attention of the queen by spreading
his cloak to cover a muddy spot in her path: it is more likely that he
first gained her favour when, serving as a captain in Ireland in 1580, he
brought back to England confidential letters he had discovered at the
massacre of Smerwick. Educated at Oxford University and the Inns of
Court, Ralegh wrote his earliest poems in the late 1570s. During his
time in Ireland he became friendly with Edmund Spenser, the author of
The Faerie Queene. A bitter rival of the 2nd Earl of Essex for
Elizabeth’s favour, Ralegh was a prominent favourite of the queen’s in
the 1580s and 1590s, exchanging poetry with her and receiving much
financial reward but no official government position. He was briefly
imprisoned in 1592 when he married Elizabeth Throckmorton, a royal
maid of honour, without the queen’s knowledge. Early in James I’s
reign, accused of treason on behalf of Catholic Spain, Ralegh was
sentenced to death. He was spared execution, however, and spent the
next 13 years in the Tower of London, writing his eloquent and
monumental History of the World (1614). Given special permission by
the king to return to Guiana (present-day Venezuela) to search for the
golden city of El Dorado, Ralegh was released from prison in 1616.
The disastrous expedition ended with a skirmish with Spanish forces.
As England was now at peace with Spain, Ralegh was beheaded after he
returned home in 1618 – ironically, on the original treason charge of
conspiracy on behalf of the Spanish.
Further reading
Armitage, C.M. (ed.) (2013) Literary and Visual Ralegh, Manchester,
Manchester University Press.
Greenblatt, S. (1973) Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and his
Roles, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
May, S.W. (1991) The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their
Contexts, Columbia, MO, University of Missouri Press.
413
Ralegh, W. (1999a) The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: An Historical

Edition, ed. M. Rudick, Tempe, AZ, Renaissance English Text Society.
Note on the poems

The textual history of Ralegh’s poems is notoriously complicated. There
are no early printed collections of his verse, and no manuscripts of it
written or supervised by Ralegh himself. Instead, individual poems,
sometimes attributed to Ralegh but often anonymous, exist in a number
of different versions probably made without Ralegh’s knowledge, in
both manuscript and print. The two poems here do not exist in
manuscript copies, but only in early printed poetry anthologies.
Edition
Ralegh, W. (1999b) The Poems, with other Verse from the Court of
Elizabeth I, ed. M. Dodsworth, London, Everyman. Text adapted by
Jonathan Gibson from Ralegh 1999; notes by Jonathan Gibson.
‘Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light’

In this poem, Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon, represents Queen
Elizabeth. In classical mythology, Diana was a huntress accompanied by
young women (‘nymphs’ (l. 5)) vowed to chastity like her; the ‘knights’
mentioned here (l. 6) are men serving Elizabeth, rather than figures
associated with the goddess.
Textual note: This poem appeared in two printed Elizabethan poetry
anthologies, The Phoenix Nest (1593) and England’s Helicon (1600),
almost certainly without Ralegh’s knowledge. In England’s Helicon, the
poem is given the title ‘The Shepherd’s Praise of his Sacred Diana’, to
fit in with the pastoral theme of the book. It is this version that is
printed here. In The Phoenix Nest, l. 10 reads ‘In ay [i.e. Forever] she
mistress-like makes all things pure’.
Prais’d be Diana’s fairº and harmless light, ºbeautiful

Prais’d be the dews wherewithº she moists the ground; ºwith which
Prais’d be her beams, the glory of the night,
Prais’d be her power, by which all powers abound.
414
5 Prais’d be her nymphs, with whom she decks the woods,

Prais’d be her knights, in whom true honour lives,
Prais’d be that force by which she moves the floods;1
Let that Diana shine which all these gives.º ºprovides
In heaven queen she is among the spheres;

10 She mistress-like makes all things to be pure.
Eternity in her oft change she bears.
She beauty is; by her the fairº endure.º ºthe beautiful; ºlast
Time wearsº her not; she doth his chariot guide. ºdecays
Mortality below her orbº is plac’d, ºsphere
15 By her the virtuesº of the stars down slide,2 ºastrological influences
In her is virtue’s perfect image cast.
A knowledge pure it is her worthº to know: ºher value

With Circes let them dwell that think not so.3
Sonnet: ‘Like truthless dreams, so are my joys

expir’d’
In Ocean to Cynthia, a long poem written long after ‘Like truthless
dreams’ (probably after his marriage had angered the queen), Ralegh
quotes the refrain of this poem – ‘Of all which past, the sorrow only
stays’ – remembering his long years of service to Queen Elizabeth:
‘Twelve years entire I wasted …/… of my most happy younger days/
But I in them, and they now wasted are,/‘Of all which past the sorrow
only stays’/So wrate [i.e. ‘wrote’] I once, and my mishap foretold …’
(Ralegh, 1999b, p. 21).
1
Water courses (alluding to the moon’s power over the tides).
2
Ralegh refers to the belief that everything above the moon was unchanging and
everything below changeable. In the Ptolemaic cosmological system, the moon, like the
planets and the sun, was carried on one of a series of nested ‘spheres’ (l. 9) or ‘orb’s (l.
14) moving around the stationary earth. Line 11’s ‘oft change’ (quality of often changing)
alludes to the idea that the moon was simultaneously eternal and changeable – eternally
changeable.
3
In the ancient Greek epic poem, Homer’s Odyssey, Circe is a witch who transforms men
into pigs.
415
Textual note: No manuscript texts of this poem, which was probably

written in the 1580s, survive. The version printed here comes from an
Elizabethan anthology, The Phoenix Nest (1593), in which the poem
almost certainly appeared without Ralegh’s knowledge. In a later printed
anthology, Le Prince d’Amour (‘The Prince of Love’), dating from 1660,
a different version of the poem has the title ‘Farewell to the Court’. The
version in in Le Prince d’Amour replaces ‘wail’ (l. 10) with ‘wait’,
‘summer well nigh done’ (l. 11) with ‘sound well nigh is’ and ‘age and
winter’ (l. 13) with ‘care or winter’.
Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expir’d.

And past return are all my dandledº days, ºpampered
My love misled,º and fancy quite retir’d;º ºis misled; ºwithdrawn
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays.
5 My lost delights, now clean from sight of land,1

Have left me all alone in unknown ways,
My mind to woe,º my life in fortune’s hand; ºleft to woe
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays.
As in a country strange without companion,

10 I only wailº the wrong of death’s delays,2 ºlament
Whose sweet spring spent,º whose summer well nigh ºis spent
done;
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays;
Whom care forewarns, ereº age and winter cold, ºbefore

To haste me hence to find my fortune’s fold.º ºshelter
1
Ralegh went to sea many times, as an explorer, a soldier, a naval commander and a
colonist. (JG)
2
‘I only complain that death hasn’t come for me quickly enough’. [JG]
416
Samuel Daniel (c.1562–1619)

Daniel, a prolific professional writer, came from a West Country family
and was educated at Oxford University. In 1591, perhaps while he was
abroad with his patron Sir Edward Dymoke, and apparently against his
will, 28 of his love sonnets appeared in print at the end of the first,
unauthorised, edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Daniel
published a fuller sonnet sequence the following year under the title of
Delia, and over the next three decades a succession of literary works
followed, including a tragedy for private performance on the subject of
Cleopatra, an incomplete verse epic on medieval English history (The
Civil Wars), serious-minded verse epistles to noble patrons, a long
discussion poem on literary and political topics (Musophilus), a prose
work on literary theory (A Defence of Rhyme) and an unfinished prose
history of England. An early patron was Sidney’s sister, Mary, Countess
of Pembroke; later patrons included Margaret, Countess of Cumberland,
whose daughter, the famous diarist Lady Anne Clifford, Daniel tutored,
and Charles Blount, Baron Mountjoy. After James I’s accession in 1603,
Daniel wrote two masques and a pastoral comedy for James’s Catholic
queen, Anne of Denmark. Philotas, a tragedy performed in 1605 by the
queen’s company of child actors, got Daniel temporarily into trouble
with the privy council, as it was felt to allude treacherously to Elizabeth
I’s execution of the Earl of Essex. Daniel died, in rural obscurity but in
high favour with his patrons, the same year as Queen Anne. Praised in
the twentieth century as a poet of ideas, Daniel excited the hostility of
his contemporary and rival masque-writer, the poet and playwright Ben
Jonson, who claimed that though Daniel was a good man, he was no
poet. Daniel himself claimed that ‘irresolution and a self-distrust’ were
‘the most apparent faults of my nature’ (Daniel 1998, p. 199).
Further reading
Daniel, S. (1998) Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme, ed. G.G.
Hiller and P.L. Groves, Asheville, NC, Pegasus Press.
Rees, J. (1964) Samuel Daniel: A Critical and Biographical Study,
Liverpool, Liverpool University Press.
417
Note on the poems

All the poems below come from Daniel’s Petrarchan sonnet sequence
Delia. The first edition officially approved by Daniel himself appeared
in 1592, a year after the unauthorised edition referred to above. Daniel
continued to tinker with the sequence, and six further, distinct, editions
were printed in his lifetime. There is no certain evidence that the
sequence, which does not have a clear narrative structure, is
autobiographical. ‘Delia’, the name of the lady fruitlessly wooed by the
sonnets’ speaker, is an alternative name for Diana, the Roman goddess
of the moon and of chastity, and an anagram of ‘ideal’. In its authorised
form, Delia appears alongside The Complaint of Rosamund, a long poem
presenting a very different depiction of love, in which the abandoned
mistress of King Henry II (r.1154–89) complains about her
mistreatment.
Edition
Daniel, S. (1998) Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme, ed. G.G. Hiller
and P.L. Groves, Asheville, NC, Pegasus Press. Text adapted by
Jonathan Gibson from Daniel 1998; notes by Jonathan Gibson.
Sonnet: ‘Fair is my love, and cruel as she is fair’

Sonnet 6 of Delia.
Textual note: ‘Oh’ (l. 13) becomes ‘For’ in editions from 1601
onwards.
Fair is my love, and cruel as she is fair:

Her brow shadesº frowns, although her eyes are sunny; ºeyebrows are
Her smiles are light’ning, though her pride despair;1
And her disdains are gall,º her favours honey. ºbile
5 A modestº maid, deckedº with a blush of honour, ºdemure; ºornamented
Whose feet do tread greenº paths of youth and love; ºyouthful
The wonder of all eyes that look upon her,
Sacred on earth, designedº a saint above. ºdesignated
Chastity and beauty, which were deadly foes,
1
‘Delia’s self-esteem (‘pride’) is despair for me.’
418
10 Live reconcilèd friends within her brow;

And had she pity to conjoin with those,
Then who hadº heard the plaintsº I utter now? ºwould have; ºcomplaints
Oh, had sheº not been fair and thusº unkind, ºif she had; ºso
My muse hadº slept, and none had known my mind. ºwould have
Sonnet: ‘Thou poor heart, sacrificed unto the fairest’

Sonnet 8 of Delia.
Textual note: The final word was omitted from both lines of the
closing couplet (ll. 13–14) in editions from 1601 onwards. Daniel was
following the advice of his friend Hugh Sanford, who claimed that
masculine rhymes (like ‘love’/‘prove’) should not be mixed with
feminine rhymes (like ‘move her’/‘love her’). In the last line, ‘cease’ is
the reading in later editions: ‘leave’ appears instead in the first
authorised edition of 1592. In this poem the speaker imagines his heart
being sacrificed to the godlike Delia, as part of a religious ritual.
Thou poor heart, sacrificed unto the fairest,º ºmost beautiful (i.e. Delia)
Hast sent the incense of thy sighs to heaven,
And still againstº her frowns fresh vows repairest,º ºanticipating; ºpresents
And made thy passions with her beauty even.º ºequal
5 And you, mine eyes, the agentsº of my heart, ºservants
Told the dumb message of my hidden grief,
And oft with careful turns,º with silent art, ºeye movements
Did ’treatº the cruel fair to yield relief. ºentreat
And you, my verse, the advocates of love,
10 Have followed hard the processº of my case,º ºproceedings; ºlaw case
And urged that titleº which doth plainly prove ºlegal right
My faith should win, if justice might have place.º ºprevail
Yet though I see that noughtº we do can move her, ºnothing
’Tis not disdain must make me cease to love her.1
1
‘Delia’s disdain for me is not enough to make me stop loving her’
419
Sonnet: ‘If this be love, to draw a weary breath’

Sonnet 9 of Delia.
Textual note: A different and earlier version of this sonnet appears as
Sonnet 22 in the unauthorised edition of 1591. 1591 replaces ‘Paint’ (l.
2) with ‘To paint’; ‘downward looks still reading’ (l. 3) with ‘prone
aspect still treading’; ‘The’ (l. 4) with ‘These’; ‘Lie down to wail, rise up
to’ (l. 6) with ‘Rise up to wail, lie down and’; l. 7 with ‘With ceaseless
toil care’s restless stones to roll’; ‘my griefs, and’ (l. 8) with ‘and moan,
whilst’; and ‘Oh’ (l. 14) with ‘Lo’. Line 4 reads ‘Sad horror, pale grief,
prostrate despair’. The whole second quatrain (ll. 9–12) is completely
different in 1591, and reads as follows:
If this be love, to languish in such care,

Loathing the light, the world, my self, and all,
With interrupted sleeps fresh griefs’ repair,
And breath out horror in perplexed thrall
The poem is an adaptation of a sonnet by the French poet Philippe

Desportes.
If this be love, to draw a weary breath,

Paint on floods,º tillº the shore, cry to the air; ºwater; ºplough
With downward looks still reading on the earth
The sad memorials of my love’s despair;
5 If this be love, to war against my soul,
Lie down to wail, rise up to sigh and grieve me;
The never-resting stone of careº to roll,1 ºsuffering
Stillº to complainº my griefs, and none relieve me; ºConstantly; ºcomplain about
If this be love, to clothe me with dark thoughts,
10 Haunting untrodden paths to wail apart;
My pleasures, horror; music, tragic notes;
1
Like Sisyphus, a figure in classical mythology, who was punished in the underworld after
his death by being made repeatedly to roll a huge stone up a hill and then to let it roll
back down again.
420
Tears in my eyes, and sorrow at my heart;

If this be love, to live a living death,
Oh, then love I, and draw this weary breath.
Sonnet: ‘My spotless love hovers with white wings’

Sonnet 12 of Delia.
In this poem, the speaker seems to be aspiring towards a Platonic form
of love.
My spotless love hovers with white wings

About the temple of the proudest frame,º ºconstruction
Where blaze those lights,º fairest of earthly things, ºi.e. Delia’s eyes
Which clear our clouded world with brightest flame.
5 My’ambitious thoughts, confinèd in her face,
Affectº no honour but what she can give me; ºAspire to
My hopes do rest in limits of her grace;º1 ºfavour
I weighº no comfort unless she relieve me. ºvalue
For she that can my heart imparadiseº ºput in paradise
10 Holds in her fairest hand what dearest is:
My fortune’s wheel, the circle of her eyes,
Whose rolling grace deignº once a turn of bliss.2 ºmay give me
All my life’s sweetº consists in her alone, ºsweetness
So much I love the most unloving one.
Sonnet: ‘Whilst by her eyes pursued, my poor heart

flew it’
Sonnet 26 of Delia.
The ancient Greek philosopher Xenocrates showed mercy to a sparrow
who, fleeing from a hawk, hid in his bosom. Daniel’s speaker implicitly
1
‘I hope only for what she’s willing to grant me’.
2
The allegorised figure of Fortune was said to have a wheel: people doing well are on the
way up, but will inevitably fall down later. In l.12, applying the image of Fortune’s wheel
to the ‘rolling grace’ of Delia’s eyes, the speaker longs for the ‘bliss’ of being at the top
of the wheel.
421
contrasts Delia’s cruelty with Xenocrates’s behaviour. Later texts of the

poem make the link with the story explicit (see Textual note). The
words ‘signed’ (l. 6) and ‘pined’ (l. 8) could be read with two syllables
each (‘signèd’, ‘pinèd’), in which case the whole poem would consist of
feminine rhymes.
Textual note: In some later editions, this poem is headed ‘Alluding to
the sparrow pursued by a hawk, that flew into the bosom of
Xenocrates’. In some later editions, ‘three’ (l. 6) becomes ‘five’.
Whilst by her eyes pursued, my poor heart flew itº ºflew

Into the sacred bosom of my dearest,
She there in that sweet sanctuary slew itº, ºi.e. the heart
Where it presumed hisº safety to be nearest. ºi.e. the heart’s
5 My privilegeº of faithº could not protect it, ºlegal protection; ºfaithful love
That was with blood and three years’ witness signed;1
In all which time she never could suspect it,º ºthink it guilty
For well she saw my love, and how I pined.
And yet no comfort would her brow reveal me,º ºto me
10 No light’ning looks, which falling hopes erecteth;º ºmight raise
What bootsº to laws of succour to appeal me? ºuse
Ladies and tyrants never laws respecteth.
Then there I die, where hoped I to have liven,º ºlived
And by that hand,º which better might have given. ºi.e. Delia’s
Sonnet: ‘Care-charmer sleep, son of the sable night’

Sonnet 45 of Delia.
In sleep, at night, the speaker can imagine that Delia loves him.
Care-charmer sleep, son of the sableº night, ºblack

Brother to death, in silent darkness born,
1
This detail, and the revision of ‘three’ to ‘five’ in later editions, has been thought by some
critics to suggest that Delia is about a real love affair.
422
Relieve my languish,º and restore the light; ºlanguishing

With dark forgetting of my cares, return;1
5 And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventuredº youth; ºunlucky
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scornº ºlament Delia’s scorn f or them
Without the torment of the night’s untruth.
Cease, dreams, the imagery of our day desires,
10 To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising sun approveº you liars, ºprove
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
Stillº let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain, ºForever
And never wake to feel the day’s disdain.
1
An alternative modernised punctuation could be ‘cares’ return’, suggesting a completely
different sense. Early printed editions do not punctuate the middle of this line.
423
John Donne (1572–1631)

Donne’s first biographer, his friend Izaak Walton (whose Life of John
Donne was first published in 1640), made a sharp distinction between
Donne’s irresponsible, versifying youth and the serious-minded clerical
career Donne later pursued. Although Donne himself refers at one
point to a similar distinction – a contrast between ‘Jack Donne’ and
‘Doctor Donne’ – more recent biographers have uncovered a more
complicated picture. One of the circumstances not mentioned by
Walton was the Donne family’s strong Catholic links: a problem for
Donne, for the state employment which he sought was barred to
Catholics. Donne must have converted to Protestantism before
becoming, in about 1598, secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord
Keeper of the Great Seal – perhaps he had converted after he had left
Oxford University and was continuing his education at the Inns of
Court in London. One of the great crises of Donne’s life occurred in
1601 when, while living at York House, Egerton’s London base, Donne
secretly married Ann More, Egerton’s 17-year-old niece. The anger of
Ann’s father, Sir George More, lost Donne his job. The newly married
couple lived with a cousin of Ann’s in Surrey before being able to
afford their own house; they would go on to have 12 children, of whom
seven survived into adulthood. Donne published prose works against
Catholicism as well as writing poetry for patrons who included Lucy,
Countess of Bedford, one of the ladies-in-waiting of Anne of Denmark,
James I’s queen. In 1615, at the urging of King James I, Donne was
ordained as a Church of England priest. A very popular preacher, in
1621 Donne became Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, which was
a senior post. His wife Ann had died in 1617. During Donne’s own
final illness, in 1631, he posed in a shroud for the funerary monument
that can still be seen at St Paul’s.
Further reading
Donne, J. (2000) The Major Works, ed. J. Carey, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Guibbory, A. (ed.) (2006) The Cambridge Companion to John Donne,
See also the Independent study options for Chapter 8 listed on the
module website.
424
Note on the poems

Most attempts to date individual poems by Donne are highly
speculative. Donne did not publish a collection of his verse in his
lifetime, and none of the many manuscript collections that survive were
prepared under his supervision. Two editions appeared shortly after his
death, in 1633 and 1635. The edition that forms the basis for this
selection of poems, unlike many twentieth-century editions, tends to
choose the wording of earlier manuscripts in preference to that of the
early printed editions. Some of the most interesting variations between
the early texts – which may reflect the first or second thoughts of
Donne himself as well as deliberate alterations made by his early readers
– are mentioned in the textual notes.
Edition
Donne, J. (2010) The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. R. Robbins,
Harlow, Longman (available through the OU Library website). Text
adapted by Jonathan Gibson from Donne 2010. Notes followed by ‘RR’
appear in Donne 2010; all other notes by Jonathan Gibson.
The Blossom
In this poem, the speaker addresses a flower in the first stanza and his
heart in the remaining stanzas, quoting a speech he imagines the heart
itself making in the third stanza, ll. 19–24. The first two stanzas (ll. 1–8)
compare a flower with the speaker’s heart: both will have to leave a
source of pleasure shortly. The phrase ‘six, or seven days’ (l. 2) perhaps
implies that the speaker has been visiting the beloved for about a week.
Textual note: In the 1635 edition, ‘my’ (l. 29) is replaced by ‘thy’. In
some early texts, ‘would’ (l.38) is replaced by ‘will’.
Little think’st thou, poor flower,

Whom I’ve watched six or seven days,
And seen thy birth, and seen what every hour
Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise,
5 And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough,
Little think’st thou
That it will freeze anon,º and that I shall ºsoon
425
Tomorrow find thee fallen, or not at all.
Little think’st thou, poor heart,

10 That labourest yet to nestle thee,º ºestablish yourself (like a
nesting bird)
And think’st, by hovering here, to get a part
In a forbidden or forbidding tree,1
And hop’st her stiffnessº by long siege to bow,º ºopposition; ºdefeat
Little think’st thou
15 That thou tomorrow, ereº that sun doth wake, ºbefore
Must with this Sun and me a journey take.2
But thou, which lov’st to be

Subtleº to plagueº thyself, wilt say, ºOver-clever; ºtrouble
‘Alas! If you must go, what’s that to me?
20 Here lies my busïness, and here I will stay.
You go to friends, whose love and means present
Various content
To your eyes, ears, and tongue and every part:
If, then, your body go, what need you a heart?’
25 Well, then, stay here; but know,

When thou hast stayed and done thy most,º ºthe best you can
A naked-thinking heart that makes no showº ºphysical demonstration
Is to a woman but a kind of ghost:3
How shall she know my heart? Or, having none,
30 Know thee for one?
Practice may make her knowº some other part,º ºknow sexually; ºthe penis
But, take my word, she doth not know a heart.
Meet me at London, then,
1
a … tree] i.e. a woman who is not interested in the speaker, whether because she is
‘forbidden’ to him in some way (because of being married, for example, or because of
hostile parents), or is just unwilling (‘forbidding’).
2
Whilst ‘that sun’ (l. 15) refers to the woman the heart has been hovering near, ‘this sun’
(l. 16) refers to the actual sun. The speaker, with his heart, will start on his journey at the
same time as the rising sun begins its journey across the sky.
3
‘Genuine feelings by themselves have no physical value for a woman.’
426
Twenty days hence, and thou shalt see

35 Me fresher and more fat by being with menº ºpeople
Than if I had stayed still with her and thee.
For God’s sake, if you can, be you so too:º ºi.e. ‘fresher and more fat’
I would give you
There to another friend,º whom we shall find ºlover
40 As glad to have my body as my mind.
The Canonization
Addressed by the speaker to a more successful, worldly person. The
opening of this poem has been linked to a letter written by a friend to
Donne criticising him for his absence from the court of the new king,
James I, who had come to the throne in 1603.
Textual note: The title is absent from an important early manuscript,
so is perhaps not Donne’s. Variant readings in early texts include the
following: ‘fine’ or ‘true’ for ‘five’ (l. 3); ‘Or’ for ‘And’ (l. 7); ‘those’ for
‘the’ (l. 14); ‘more’ for ‘man’ (l. 15); ‘and me’ for ‘me’ (l. 20); ‘we two’
for ‘we’ (l. 24); ‘tombs’ for ‘tomb’ (l. 29); ‘these’ for ‘those’ (l. 35);
‘pilgrimage’ for ‘hermitage’ (l. 38); ‘world’s’ for ‘whole world’s’ (l. 40);
‘contract’ for ‘extract’ (l. 40); ‘draw’ or ‘have’ for ‘drove’ (l. 40); ‘our’
for ‘your’ (l. 45).
For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love!

Orº chide my palsy,º ºEither; ºsenile tremor;
or my gout;º ºstiffness in joints
My five grey hairs or ruined fortune flout;º ºmock
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
5 Take you a course,º get you a place,º ºproject; ºjob
Observeº his Honourº or his Grace,º ºAttend; ºa lord; ºa bishop
And the King’s real or his stampèd faceº ºcoins
Contèmplate: what you will, approve,1
Soº you will let me love. ºSo long as
10 Alas, alas! Who’s injured by my love?

1
‘Attend the king, or focus on making money: do what you want’: ‘approve’ here means
‘prove by acting out’.
427
What merchants’ ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his groundº? ºflooded his land
When did my coldsº a forwardº spring removeº? ºlove-melancholy; ºearly; ºget
rid of
When did the heatsº which my veins fill ºlove fever
15 Add one man to the plaguy bill?2
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigiousº men which quarrels move, ºapt to take legal action
Though she and I do love.
Call us what you will, we’re made such by love;3

20 Call her one, me another fly,
We’re tapersº too, and at our own costº die,º ºcandles; ºexpense; ºdie/attain
orgasm
And we in us find the eagle and the dove;
The phoenix riddle hath more witº ºingenuity
By us: we two, being one, are it.4
25 So to one neutral thing both sexes fit,
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysteriousº by this love. ºmystically significant
We can die by it, if not live by love,

And if unfitº for tomb or hearse5 ºunsuitable
30 Our legendº be, it will be fitº for verse; ºa saint’s life; ºsuitable
And if no piece of chronicleº we prove,º ºhistorical record; ºshow
ourselves to be
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms –
As well a well-wrought urn becomesº ºgraces
The greatestº ashes as half-acre tombs – ºmost prestigious
2
The official record of plague burials.
3
Perhaps the poem’s addressee calls the speaker and his beloved an offensive name in the
gap between the stanzas.
4
The eagle and the dove were proverbial opposites: one predatory, the other peaceful. The
exact significance of line 22 has been much discussed. The phoenix was a mythical,
asexual bird – only one of which was said to exist – which lived by itself for centuries
before being consumed in fire and then being reborn from its own ashes. It was
sometimes used to symbolise Christ’s resurrection: here it stands for the lovers’ unity.
5
hearse] a framework surrounding a dead body lying in state, decorated with candles and
heraldic shields.
428
35 And by those hymns, all shall approveº ºratify

Us canonizedº for love. ºmade saints
And thus invoke us: ‘You whom reverend love

Made one another’s hermitage;
You to whom love was peace that now is rage;
40 Who did the whole world’s soul extract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors and such spies
That they did all to you epitomize)
Countries, towns, courts – beg from above
45 A pattern of your love!’6
The Dream
The speaker has just had a dream about the beloved, who wakes him at
the start of the poem – perhaps just before he has an orgasm (or ‘wet
dream’).
Textual note: Variant readings in early texts include the following:
‘true’ for ‘truth’ (l. 7); ‘act’ for ‘do’ (l. 10); ‘this’ for ‘thy’ (l. 12);
omission of ‘but’ (l. 14);‘must’ for ‘do’ (l. 19); ‘profane’ for
‘profaneness’ (l. 20); ‘when’ for ‘where’ (l. 24); ‘fears are strong’ for
‘fear’s as strong’ (l. 24); ‘then’ for ‘thus’ (l. 29).
Dear love, for nothing less than thee

Would I have broke this happy dream;
It was a theme
For reason,º much too strongº for fantasy:1 ºconscious thought; ºweighty
5 Therefore thou wak’d’st me wisely; yet
6
Catholics believe that praying to a saint can cause that saint to pray to God (or
‘intercede’) on their behalf. Becoming a Roman Catholic saint requires that the person
canonised (a) be dead and (b) have miracles associated with her or him. The speaker
imagines the lines within inverted commas (ll. 37–45) as a prayer made to him and his
lover, after their deaths and their canonisation as saints, by ‘all’ those in the previous
stanza who will ‘approve’ the speaker and his lover ‘canonized for love’, begging the
lovers to pray to God to send down for them a love patterned on the lovers’.
1
The beloved’s beauty is beyond the power of dreams and of ‘fantasy’, a less prestigious
function of the mind than ‘reason’. That beauty would perhaps have turned fantasy into
delusion, madness.
429
My dream thou brokest not, but continued’st it:

Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams truths, and fables histories.º ºtrue accounts
Enter these arms, for since thou thought’st it best
10 Not to dream all my dream, let’s do the rest.
As lightning or a taper’sº light, ºcandle’s

Thine eyes, and not thy noise, waked me;
Yet I thought thee
(For thou lov’st truth) but an angelº at first sight; ºjust an angel
15 But when I saw thou saw’st my heart
And knew’st my thoughts, beyond an angel’s art2,
When thou knewest what I dreamt, when thou knewest
when
Excess of joy would wake me, and cam’st then,
I do confess it could not chooseº but be ºcould not fail
20 Profanenessº to think thee anything but thee. ºcontempt for godliness
Coming and staying showed thee, thee,

But risingº makes me doubtº that now ºyour getting up to go; ºfear
Thou art not thou.
That love is weak where fear’s strong as he;º ºi.e. as love
25 ’Tis not all spirit, pure and brave,º ºglorious
If mixture it of fear, shame, honour, have;
Perchance, as torches which must ready be
Men light and put out, so thou deal’st with me,3
Thou cam’st to kindle, go’st to come:º thus I ºcome/attain orgasm
30 Will dream that hope again, but else would die.º ºdie/attain orgasm
A Jet Ring Sent

The poem first addresses a jet ring sent to the speaker by his beloved
(the ‘her’ of l. 2). In l. 7, ‘thy’ and ‘thou’ refers to the beloved. Line 9’s
‘thou’ addresses the ring again. Jet is a proverbially black fossil wood
2
God was thought to be able to read minds, but angels were not.
3
Torches that have been lit before are easier to light than new torches, because they are
drier.
430
from Yorkshire, cheap but notoriously fragile. Metaphorically, ‘black’

could mean ‘unchanging’ or ‘melancholy’ as well as ‘wicked’; the first
two are the more relevant meanings here. Thumb-rings like the one
described here (l. 10) were common in Donne’s time.
Textual note: Alternative titles in early texts include ‘To a Jet Ring Sent
to Me’ and ‘A Jet Ring’. Variants in early texts include the following:
‘Or’ for ‘Oh’ (l. 6); ‘proud’ for ‘justly proud’ (l. 11).
Thou art not so black as my heart,

Nor half so brittle as her heart thou art.
What wouldst thou say?
Shall both our properties by thee be spoke:
Nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke?
5 Marriage-rings are not of this stuff:

Oh, why should aughtº less precious,º or less tough, ºanything; ºi.e. than gold
Figure our loves? Except in thy name thou have bid it
say:
‘I’m cheap and naught but fashion;º fling me away.’ ºoutward appearance
Yet stay with me since thou art come:

10 Circle this finger’s tip, which didst her thumb.
Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell
with me:
She that, oh, broke her faith, would soon break thee.
A Lecture upon the Shadow

The poem is a ‘lecture’ addressed to the speaker’s beloved.
Textual note: Alternative titles in early texts include ‘Love’s Lecture
upon the Shadow’, ‘Song’ and ‘The Shadow’. Variant readings in early
texts include the following: ‘These’ for ‘Those’ (l. 3); ‘that’ for ‘which’
(l. 3); ‘Walking’ for ‘In walking’ (l. 4); ‘heads’ for ‘head’ (l. 6); ‘loves’ for
‘love’ (ll. 9, 14, 19); ‘cares’ for ‘care’ (l. 11); ‘last’ or ‘high’st’ for ‘least’ (l.
12); ‘one’ or ‘our’ for ‘once’ (l. 19); ‘short’ for ‘first’ (l. 26).
431
Stand still, and I will readº to thee ºdeliver

A lecture, love, in love’s philosophy.º ºscience
Those three hours which we’ve spent
In walking here, two shadows went
5 Along with us, which we ourselves produced;
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread,
And to brave clearnessº all things are reduced:º ºvivid clarity; ºrestored
So, while our infant love did grow,
10 Disguises did, and shadows,º flowº ºconcealments; ºresult
From us and our care;º but now ’tis not so1 ºcaution
That love hath not attained the least degree
Which is still diligent lest others see.º ºworries about others seeing
Exceptº our love at this noon stay, ºUnless

15 We shall new shadows make the other way.
As th’first were made to blind
Others2, theseº which come behind ºi.e. the new shadows
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If once love faint,º and westwardly decline, ºgrow faint
20 To me thou falsely thine,
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise:
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day.
But oh, love’s day is short if love decay!
25 Love is a growing or fullº constant light, ºcompletely

And his first minute after noon is night.
1
‘Disguises and concealments were absent from us’.
2
Before noon, the supposed ‘others’ would have been unable to see because of shadows
cast westward by the lovers walking towards the rising Sun; at its noon, their love must
remain at its apogee (i.e. highest point), or they themselves will have their vision of each
other obscured by the shadows they will cast eastward and would see if they were to
continue to walk in that direction. (RR)
432
The Legacy
Textual note: Alternative titles in early texts include ‘Elegy’ and
‘Song’. Variant readings in early texts include the following: ‘be but’ for
‘be’ (l. 3); ‘For’ for And’ (l. 4); ‘should’ for ‘might’ (l. 7); ‘that’ for ‘that
is’ (l. 10); ‘ripped me’ for ‘ripped’ (l. 14); ‘heart did’ or ‘hearts did’ for
‘hearts should’ (l. 14); ‘loss be ye’ for ‘losses’ (l. 22); ‘meant’ for
‘thought’ (l. 23); ‘this’ for ‘that’ (l. 23). As there are no inverted commas
in ll. 9–11 in the early texts, their placing here (‘Tell … kill me’) is
hypothetical.
When I died last (and, dear, I die

As often as from thee I go),
Though it be an hour ago
(And lovers’ hours be full eternity),
5 I can remember yet, that I
Something did say, and something did bestow;º ºgave something
Though I be dead which sent me, I might be
Mine own executor1 and legacy.
I heard me say, ‘Tell her anonº ºstraightaway

10 That myself (that is you, not I),
‘Did kill me’, and when I felt me die,
I bid me send my heart when I was gone;
But I, alas, could there find none
When I had rippedº and searched where hearts should ºlaid open
lie.
15 It killed me again, that I who still was true
In life, in my last will should cozenº you. ºtrick
Yet I found something like a heart,

But colours it, and corners had;
It was not good, it was not bad;
20 It was entireº to none, and few had part.º ºwholly devoted; ºa share
As good as could be made by artº ºby human skill
1
In the legal sense of somebody who distributes a dead person’s legacies according to the
terms of their will.
433
It seemed, and therefore, for our losses sad,

I thought toº send that heart instead of mine; ºthought I would
But oh, no man could hold it, for ’twas thine!
The Sun Rising

Textual note: Alternative titles in early texts include ‘To the Sun’ and
‘Ad Solem [Latin for ‘To the Sun’]: A Song’. Variant readings in early
texts include ‘Dost thou not’ for ‘Why shouldst thou’ (l. 12).
Busyº old fool, unruly Sun, ºOfficious

Why dost thou thus
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motionsº lovers’ seasons run? ºheavenly movements
5 Saucy,º pedantic2 wretch! Go chide ºinsubordinate
Late schoolboys, and sourº prentices;º ºresentful; ºapprentices
Go tell Court-huntsmen that the King will ride;1º ºie. to go stag-hunting
Call country antsº to harvest offices:º ºworkers; ºduties
Love, all alike,º no season knows nor clime, ºconsistent, unchanging
10 Nor hours, days, months, which are the ragsº of time. ºfragments
Thy beams so reverend and strong2

Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But thatº I would not lose her sight3 so long. ºExcept that
15 If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow (late) tell me,
Whether both Indias4 of spice and mineº ºmineral
Be where thou left’st them or lie here with me.
Ask for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
20 And thou shalt hear, ‘All here in one bed lay.’
2
‘Why should you think your beams so reverend and strong?’
1
James I was widely criticised for spending too much time out hunting.
2
‘Why should you think your beams so reverend and strong?’
3
wouldn't want to lose the sight of her
4
India and the East Indies
434
She’s all states, and all princes I;

Nothing else is.
Princes do but playº us: compared to this, ºact
All honour’s mimic,º all wealth alchemy. ºillusory
25 Thou, Sun, art half as happyº as we ºi.e. because single
In that the world’s contracted thus:
Thine age asksº ease, and since thy duties be ºrequires
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere:
30 This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.5
Song: ‘Sweetest love, I do not go’

Textual note: This poem appears in an early manuscript under the
heading ‘Songs which were made to certain airs [tunes] which were
made before’, suggesting that Donne wrote it to fit a pre-existing tune.
One later musical setting survives, attributed to a ‘Lady Killigrew’.
Some early texts read ‘At the last must part’ for ‘Must die at last’ (l. 6).
Sweetest love, I do not go

For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitterº love for me; ºmore suitable
5 But, since that I
Must die at last, ’tis best
To useº myself in jest: ºi.e. wear out, use up
Thus by feigned deaths to die.
Yesternight the Sun went hence,

10 And yet is here today;
He hath no desire nor sense,
Nor half so short a way:º ºway to go
Then fear not me,
5
Implying the Ptolemaic system of cosmology, in which the moving sun, along with other
heavenly bodies, was attached to one of a series of nested spheres, with the stationary
earth at the centre. In the Ptolemaic system, the sun’s movements were puzzling or
‘unruly’ (l. 1).
435
But believe that I shall make

15 Speedier journeys, since I take
More wings and spursº than he. ºMore motivations
Oh, how feeble is man’s power,

That, if good fortune fall,º ºoccur
Cannot add another hour,
20 Nor a lost hour recall!
But come bad chance,º ºif bad chance come
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,º ºskill and persistence
Itself o’er us t’advance.º ºachieve supremacy
25 When thou sigh’st thou sigh’st not wind,

But sigh’st my soul away;
When thou weep’st, unkindlyº kind, ºcruelly, unnaturally
My life’s-blood doth decay.
It cannot be
30 That thou lov’st me, as thou say’st
If in thine my life thou waste:º ºlay waste
Thou art the best of me.1
Let not thy diviningº heart ºprophetic

Forethink meº any ill: ºAnticipate for me
35 Destiny may take thy partº, ºtake your side
And may thy fears fulfil.
But think that we
Are but turned aside to sleep.
They who one another keep
40 Alive, ne’er parted be.
1
By destroying herself (through sighing and weeping) the beloved is also destroying the
speaker who is part of her. (It was long thought that sighs literally consumed blood.)
436
Twickenham Garden
Twickenham Park was the house of Donne’s patron, Lucy, Countess of
Bedford. This poem may be written for her – perhaps as a
complimentary piece rather than a serious love poem – or perhaps for
another woman at the house. The speaker is in a beautiful springtime
garden, but because he is unhappily in love everything has lost its
attractiveness. This is a conventional Petrarchan idea, though treated
here by Donne in an extremely unusual manner.
Textual note: Some early texts have no title. Variant readings in early
texts include the following: ‘grey’ for ‘grave’ (l. 12); ‘yet leave loving’ for
‘leave this garden’ (l. 15); ‘part’ for ‘piece’ (l. 16); ‘grow’ for ‘groan’ (l.
17); ‘the’ for ‘my’ (l. 18).
Blastedº with sighs, and surrounded withº tears, ºDestroyed; ºswimming in

Hither I come to seek the Spring,
And at mine eyes, and at mine ears,
Receive such balmsº as elseº ºhealing influences; ºwould
cure everything. otherwise
5 But oh, self-traitor, I do bring
The spider love, which transubstantiatesº all,1 ºchanges
And can convert mannaº to gall;º ºheaven-sent food; ºpoison
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.2
10 ’Twere wholesomerº for me that Winter did ºbetter

Benight the glory of this place,
And that a graveº frost did forbid ºheavy, austere
These trees to laugh and mock me to my face;
But thatº I may not this disgrace ºBut so that
15 Endureº nor leave this garden, Love, let me ºHave to suffer
1
‘Transubstantiation’ is the Catholic idea, opposed by Protestants, that when worshippers
eat bread and wine at the Mass or Holy Communion service it becomes the body and
blood of Christ. Spiders were believed to change what they ate into poison.
2
In the Bible the serpent tempted Eve, leading to the Fall of man and the expulsion of
Adam and Eve, the first people, from the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3). The Fall was
frequently interpreted in sexual terms, the serpent symbolising the penis.
437
Some senseless piece of this place be:

Make me a mandrake,3 so I may groan here,
Or a stone fountain weeping out my year.
Hither, with crystal vials,º lovers, come ºsmall bottles

20 And take my tears, which are love’s wine,
And tryº your mistress’ tears at home;4 ºtest
For all are false that taste not just like mine.
Alas, hearts do not in eyes shine,
Nor can you more judge women’s thoughts by tears,
25 Than by her shadow, what she wears.
O perverseº sex, where none is true but she, ºunreasonable
Who’s therefore true because her truth kills me.5
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

(‘Valediction’ means ‘farewell’.)
Textual note: Alternative titles in early texts include ‘A Valediction’ and
‘Upon the Parting from his Mistress’. Variants in early texts include the
following: ‘come’ for ‘roam’ (l. 30); ‘that’ for ‘it’ (l. 32); ‘draws’ for
‘makes’ (l. 35).
As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,
And some of their sad friends do say,
‘The breath goes now’, and some say, ‘No’,
5 So let us melt and make no noise,

No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move:
’T’were profanationº of our joys ºdesecration
To tell the laityº our love. ºpeople who aren’t priests
3
A mandrake is a poisonous plant, whose root, thought to resemble a man, was believed
to magically help women conceive, and which was said to shriek when pulled out of the
ground, killing the person who uprooted it.
4
Crystal was commonly believed to detect treachery.
5
Perhaps alluding to the fact that the Countess of Bedford is married, and that her ‘truth’
to her husband is fatal to the speaker.
438
Moving of the earthº brings harms and fears: ºAn earthquake

10 Men reckonº what it did and meant; ºtry to work out
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocentº.1 ºharmless
Dull, sublunaryº lovers’ love ºbelow the moon

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admitº ºaccommodate
15 Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented itº.2 ºmade it up
But we, by a love so much refined

That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
20 Care less eyes, lips and hands to miss.
Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yetº ºexperience nevertheless
A breach, but an expansïon,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
25 If they be two, they are two so

As stiffº twin compasses3 are two: ºunbending
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To moveº, but doth if th’other do;
And though itº in the centre sit, ºi.e. the fixed foot
30 Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens afterº it,4 ºhas regard to
1
Donne refers to ‘the oscillation of a ninth sphere’, added by the Arabs (making the
primum mobile the tenth sphere) to Ptolemaic astronomy to account for supposed
irregularity. (RR)
2
It was believed that everything below the moon (‘sublunary’) was imperfect and
changeable. Donne suggests that ‘sublunary lovers’ do not have a divine soul driven by
reason but are, like animals, motivated only by lust.
3
i.e. a ‘pair of compasses’, used to inscribe circles and arcs: two metal arms linked by a
joint.
4
‘It’ at the beginning of the line refers to the fixed foot; ‘it’ at the end of the line refers to
the moving foot. [JG].
439
And grows erect as it comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like th’other foot, obliquelyº run: ºindirectly
35 Thy firmnessº makes my circle just,º ºfidelity; ºtrue, perfect
And makes me end where I begun.
440
Lady Mary Wroth (?1587–1651/3)

For much of Wroth’s childhood, her father, Sir Robert Sidney. was
Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands, while his family lived at
Penshurst in Kent. Wroth’s uncle, Sir Philip Sidney (see above), whose
death occurred close to the date of her birth, was the author of literary
works that were to have an important influence on her. Her father also
wrote love poetry. The poet’s marriage to Sir Robert Wroth (c.1539–
1614), a keen huntsman friendly with King James I, took place in 1604;
it does not seem to have been happy. At court, Wroth took part in two
masques alongside James’s queen, Anne of Denmark. She became a
patron of the writer of one of these, Ben Jonson, as well as of other
poets. Her husband died in 1614, and her young son James two years
later, leaving Wroth in heavy financial difficulties. Wroth seems to have
had a longstanding affair with her married cousin William Herbert, 3rd
Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), which resulted in two children.
Wroth’s major work is the long prose narrative The Countess of
Montgomery’s Urania, named after the wife of Herbert’s brother and in
homage to her uncle Philip’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Urania has
a complex set of interlocking plots and features two figures, Pamphilia
and Amphilanthus, who seem to be loosely based on Wroth herself and
on Herbert. The first part of Urania was printed in 1621, possibly
without Wroth’s agreement. Its allusions to contemporary scandals
proved controversial, and its second part remained unfinished in
manuscript. Wroth also wrote the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus and an unpublished pastoral tragi-comedy for private
performance: Love’s Victory. Little is known about the later part of
Wroth’s life. She remained financially troubled, and the date, place and
cause of her death are obscure.
Further reading
Millman, J.S. and Wright, G. (eds) (2005) Early Modern Women’s
Manuscript Poetry, Manchester, Manchester University Press, section 3.
Wroth, M. (1983) The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. J. Roberts, Baton
Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press.
441
Note on the poems

The sonnets below come from Wroth’s sequence Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus. Although sonnet sequences by women writers were
relatively common in early modern Europe, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,
a late example of the genre, was the first to be written by an
Englishwoman. The title refers to two characters from Wroth’s prose
narrative The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621): Pamphilia (‘all
loving’) is the female speaker of the poems and Amphilanthus (‘lover of
two’) is her faithless lover. Many of the poems are dark and cryptic, and
there is considerable stress on Pamphilia’s constancy to Amphilanthus.
The text below, and the sonnet numbers in the notes, follow the version
printed at the end of the 1621 edition of Urania, which consists of 103
sonnets and songs. A fair copy of the manuscript in Wroth’s neatest
handwriting comprising 117 poems in a very different order also
survives.
Edition
Wroth, Lady M. (1996) Poems: A Modernized Edition, ed. R.E.
Pritchard, Keele, Keele University Press. Text adapted by Jonathan
Gibson from Wroth 1996; notes by Jonathan Gibson.
Sonnet: ‘You endless torments that my rest oppress’

Sonnet 11 of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.
Somewhat paradoxically, Pamphilia seeks ‘favour’ from her ‘torments’.
You endless torments that my rest oppress,

How long will you delight in my sad pain?
Will never love your favourº more express? ºgoodwill
Shall I stillº live, and everº feel disdain? ºcontinually; ºalways
5 Alas, now stay, and let my grief obtain

Some end; feed not my heart with sharp distress;
Let me once see my cruel fortunes gain
At least release, and long-felt woes redress.º ºgain redress
442
Let not the blame of crueltyº disgrace ºreputation for cruelty

10 The honoured title of your godhead,º Love; ºdivine nature
Give not just cause for me to say, a place
Is found for rage alone on meº to move. ºonly on me
O quickly endº, and do not long debateº ºfinish things off; ºquarrel
My needful aid, lest help do come too late.
Sonnet: ‘When every one to pleasing pastime hies’

Sonnet 23 of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.
Wroth’s husband Sir Robert Wroth was a keen huntsman; James I came
to hunt on Sir Robert’s estate.
When every one to pleasing pastime hies,º ºhurries

Some huntº, some hawk, some play,º while some delight ºgamble
In sweet discourse,º and music shows joy’s might; ºconversation
Yet I my thoughts do far above these prize.º ºvalue
5 The joy which I take is, that free from eyesº ºobservation
I sit, and wonder at this day-like night,
So to dispose themselves, as void of right,
And leaveº true pleasure for poor vanities.º1 ºspurn; ºworthless activities
When others hunt, my thoughts I have in chaseº; ºI hunt my thoughts

10 If hawkº, my mind at wishèd end doth fly;2 ºIf they hawk
Discourse,3 I with my spiritº talk, and cryº ºsoul; ºcry out
While others music choose as greatest grace.º ºexcellence
O God, say I, can these fondº pleasures move,º ºfoolish; ºaffect people
Or music be butº in sweet thoughts of love? ºexcept
1
Pamphilia wonders at the blindness of the people giving (or ‘disposing’) themselves to the
activities she has listed and says that they seem to be doing it against their will, without
having any say in the matter (‘void of right’), abandoning more worthwhile things.
2
‘When others hawk, my mind thinks about what it wants as swiftly as a hawk seizes on
its prey’.
3
If they’re talking
443
Glossary
Glossary
absolutism
A form of government in which the power of a monarch is ‘absolute’,
or unlimited. In early modern England, the monarch’s freedom of
action was limited by the powers of Parliament, a situation that proved
particularly problematic for James I (r.1603−25) and later for his son
Charles I (r.1625−49).
alexandrine
A 12-syllable iambic line with six major stresses. Spenser’s ‘To me he
lent this rope, to him a rusty knife’ is a good example, where the line
falls into two equal halves of six syllables each (The Faerie Queene I.
ix.29).
allegory
A narrative that has a sustained parallel meaning; an extended metaphor
in the form of a story, often involving personifications of abstract
qualities. Spenser described The Faerie Queene as ‘a continued Allegory
or darke conceit’.
anadiplosis
A rhetorical device involving the repetition at or near the beginning of
a sentence, line or clause of the last or most prominent word or phrase
of the previous sentence, line or clause. Balthazar uses this technique in
The Spanish Tragedy − for example, ‘First, in his hand he brandished a
sword,/And with that sword he fiercely waged war’ (2.1.119−20).
antimetabole
A rhetorical device in which words from the beginning of a sentence,
line or clause are repeated at the end, but in reverse order. In Julius
Caesar, for example, Brutus says ‘Believe me for mine honour and have
respect to mine honour, that you may believe’ (3.2.14−16).
antithesis
A rhetorical device which juxtaposes different ideas, usually through
words which are either opposites or strongly contrasted. In As You
Like It, for example, when Touchstone says ‘In respect that it is
solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very
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vile life’; (3.3.3–5), solitary is paired with private, while very well is
opposed to very vile.
blank verse
Unrhymed lines of verse, often in iambic pentameter. In English,
blank verse was pioneered by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in his
translation of Virgil’s Aeneid; by Shakespeare’s time, it was commonly
used in plays.
body politic
A metaphor representing the state as a human body, with the monarch
as its head. For a different use of the phrase, see Queen’s two bodies.
capitalism
An economic system in which the means of producing and distributing
goods are privately owned and operated for profit.
carpe diem motif
An ancient poetic riff on the transience of life and hence the need to
act immediately. The phrase is taken from a poem by the Roman writer
Horace (65 BCE−8 BCE) and means ‘seize the day’.
coterie
A small, often socially exclusive, group of people who associate with
each other because of their shared interests. Much of the manuscript
writing of poetry in early modern literature was produced and circulated
within coteries.
court
The extended household of the monarch, comprising servants and
officials as well as hangers-on hoping for royal favour. Based for most
of the early modern period at the palace of Whitehall in London, the
court travelled with the monarch and was at the centre of political life.
cultural materialism
A late-twentieth-century British school of literary theory, similar to the
school of new historicism in the USA, but more overtly committed to
using its analysis of literature from the past to engage with present-day
political issues from a left-wing perspective.
446
Glossary
diction
In written works, the style characterised by a writer’s vocabulary. The
term is also used to describe the type of language that characterises a
particular literary work.
enclosure
The enclosing by landowners of land previously held open (or held ‘in
common’) by tenant farmers, chiefly so that landowners could make
more money by grazing sheep. The practice was prevalent during the
sixteenth century and had a dramatic impact on the livelihoods of the
rural poor.
epic
A long narrative poem, usually focused on heroic deeds and often
involving warfare, supernatural events and the fate of nations. The
ancient Greek epics by Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey (c. 8th century
BCE), influenced the ancient Roman epic by Virgil, the Aeneid, which
was in turn an important influence on Renaissance literature.
feminine rhyme
A rhyme between stressed syllables each followed by one or more
unstressed syllables. An example can be found in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s
poem ‘The long love’: ‘appeareth’/‘feareth’ (ll.11 and 12).
First Folio
The first book to bring together in a single volume a collection of plays
by Shakespeare. Including 36 plays and prepared by Shakespeare’s old
King’s Men colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, it appeared
in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, under the title Mr.
VVilliam Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. The term
‘folio’ refers to the size of the book: it is a large-format volume in
which each sheet of paper is folded only once down the middle,
forming two leaves, or four pages. (See quarto.)
formalism
An approach to literary criticism which focuses on the form of a text
(details such as language, metre and structure) without taking into
account outside elements such as biographical or historical contexts.
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grammar schools
In the early modern period these were schools for boys aged between 7
and 14. Many were founded by charitable bequests or by guilds
(tradesmen’s associations). Shakespeare probably attended the grammar
school at Stratford-upon-Avon, where he would have studied a
humanist curriculum focusing heavily on the study of rhetoric and of
Latin language and literature.
half rhyme
A rhyme formed by similar but not identical sounds. An example can
be found in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem ‘The long love’: ‘harbour’/
‘banner’ (ll.1 and 4).
humanism
The term used to refer to the revival during the early modern period of
interest in the writings and civilisation of ancient Greece and Rome.
Humanism originated in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread
throughout Europe during the following 200 years, becoming important
in England in the sixteenth century. The word derives from the phrase
studia humanitatis (‘studies of humanity’), a term for the academic
subjects of grammar, rhetoric and history. Although emphasising the
importance of non-religious aspects of life, early modern humanism
(unlike the present-day philosophical orientation also called ‘humanism’)
was not incompatible with Christianity.
humours
A term referring to the belief, dating back to ancient Greece but still
prevalent in early modern England, that the human body was filled
with four basic substances or ‘humours’, each associated with a
different personality type: black bile (‘melancholy’), yellow bile
(associated with ‘choleric’ or excitable behaviour), phlegm (referring to
‘phlegmatic’ or calm behaviour) and blood (linked to ‘sanguine’ or
lively behaviour). A person’s temperament was thought to be
determined by the proportions of these humours in their body. Ben
Jonson referred to the notion in his plays Every Man in His Humour
and Every Man out of His Humour (first performed in 1598 and 1599,
respectively).
iambic pentameter
The most common metre in English. A regular line of iambic
pentameter consists of ten syllables each made up of five two-syllable
448
Glossary
sections (or ‘feet’); in each foot, an unstressed syllable is followed by a

stressed syllable (creating a ‘di-dum’ effect). In practice, however, many
poems in iambic pentameter use rhythm much more flexibly than this;
often, for example, in the first foot of a line the stressed syllable will
come first.
ideology
A set of assumptions, ideas, representations and narratives that together
promote or support a particular world view.
image
A small part of a literary work that conjures up a sense-impression of
some kind (not necessarily a solely visual one), particularly through
figurative language such as metaphor, allegory or symbol. The images
found in a literary work together make up its imagery. One of the main
concerns of new criticism was the study of a work’s themes through
analysis of its imagery.
Inns of Court
The law colleges in London (Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple, the Inner
Temple and Lincoln’s Inn). The Inns were lively social centres and well
known for putting on masques and other entertainments. Many of the
young men who attended the Inns, such as John Donne, did not go on
to become lawyers.
King’s Men
The London theatre company to which Shakespeare belonged for most
of his career. Founded in 1594 as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the
company’s first two patrons were Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon, and,
after Hunsdon’s death, his son the 2nd Lord Hunsdon. Both held the
post of Lord Chamberlain (the royal official in charge of court
entertainments). The company’s name changed to the King’s Men in
1603, when King James I (r.1603−25) gave it a royal patent. In the
company’s early years, Shakespeare and his colleagues performed at the
Theatre and Curtain playhouses in Shoreditch, moving to the new
Globe playhouse south of the Thames in 1599. They also performed at
the royal court, the Inns of Court and, from 1608, for a well-heeled
clientèle in the indoors Blackfriars Theatre. The principal actor in the
company was Richard Burbage (c.1567−1619), whose roles included
Hamlet and Julius Caesar. As well as acting in and writing plays,
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Shakespeare was a ‘sharer’: a partner who received a share of the

company profits.
masque
An indoor entertainment (often at court) involving lavish scenery and
costumes, special effects, music and dancing, often on a mythological
theme in praise of the monarch. Ben Jonson and Samuel Daniel both
wrote masques for James I (r.1603−25).
melancholy
A depressed state of mind, attributed in humours theory to the
prevalence in the body of black bile. In early modern England it became
fashionable to flaunt the conventional signs of melancholy, including
black, disordered clothing, folded arms and a floppy hat.
metaphor
A rhetorical device establishing an identity between two apparently
dissimilar things, but without explicitly comparing them. In Donne’s ‘A
Lecture upon the Shadow’, for example, the speaker claims that ‘Love
is a growing or full constant light’ (l.25); in As You Like It, when
Rosalind tells Celia to ‘unmuzzle your wisdom’, Celia’s wisdom is
identified with a fierce animal. By contrast, a simile is a device that
highlights the fact that a comparison is taking place by using words
such as ‘like’ and ‘as’. An example is Spenser’s statement that Despair’s
cave is ‘like a greedy grave’ (The Faerie Queene, Book 1, canto 16,
stanza 33, l.4).
metaplasm
A stylistic device involving the rhetorical distortions of word forms.
Spenser employs this in The Faerie Queene through his use of forms
such as ‘gan’ (‘began’), ‘als’ (‘also’) and ‘brast’ (‘burst’).
metre
The general technical term for the underlying regular rhythm or beat
that a poem may adopt. There are a number of conventional metres,
including iambic pentameter.
modesty topos
A rhetorical device whereby a writer pretends that her or his work is
not very good and/or that he or she is be less intelligent than he or she
really is.
450
Glossary
new criticism
A formalist approach to literary criticism which came to prominence in
mid-twentieth century America and which involved the ‘close reading’
of literary texts (particularly poetry) as complex and self-contained
aesthetic objects.
new historicism
A late-twentieth-century school of literary theory, originating in the
work of the American critic Stephen J. Greenblatt, which highlights
links between literary texts, political power and the ideologies of the
period in which the literary texts were produced. Unlike British cultural
materialism, new historicism tends not to use its analysis of literary
works as a means of directly addressing present-day politics.
original sin
The idea that human beings are inherently sinful, as a result of the ‘fall
of man’ (Adam’s succumbing to the temptation of the serpent, as
described in the Bible (Genesis 3)). As formulated by St. Augustine
(354-430), the doctrine of original sin was an important part of
Protestant theology. (For more on Protestantism, see the ‘Reformation’
box in the Introduction to this book.)
‘the other’
A term used in post-colonial theory (an approach to cultural study
which developed in the 1980s, focused on the complex cultural
influence of colonialism and imperialism). Through the concept of ‘the
other’, post-colonial theory addresses the problem of cultural
stereotyping. Social groups marginalise different social groups by
thinking of them as ‘other’, or radically different from themselves.
ottava rima
This term is Italian, literally meaning ‘eighth rhyme’. It signifies a stanza
of eight lines rhyming abababcc. It consists of three sets of interlaced
rhymes, concluding with a rhyming couplet.
patricians
A hereditary class of nobles in ancient Rome that traditionally enjoyed
more rights and privileges than ordinary citizens did. Patricians
dominated Roman politics during the period of the Republic.
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patron
In early modern England, a powerful person able and willing to advance
the interests of a less powerful person, or ‘client’. Many patrons were
also clients of more powerful patrons.
Petrarchism
A loose set of devices applied to the writing of love poetry, derived
from the work of the fourteenth-century Italian writer Francesco
Petrarca, or ‘Petrarch’ (1304–1374). ‘Petrarchan’ poetry, often focusing
on unrequited love, idealising the (usually female) beloved and
highlighting the suffering of the (usually male) lover, was popular across
early modern Europe.
Platonic
Related to the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (427 BCE
−347 BCE). Plato distinguished between the imperfect, physical (lower)
world we experience daily and a higher, more ‘real’ and more important
world of ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’, which provide the ideal patterns of
everything existing in the lower world and, unlike things in the lower
world, are not subject to change. The human soul, which properly
belongs to the world of the ‘forms’, is trapped in the lower world but
can, with difficulty, ascend to its home in the higher world. One
possible route back to that world, much stressed by Italian Renaissance
‘neo-Platonists’, was through love of beauty: it was held that love of
physical beauty could lead on to love of intellectual beauty and its
perfect ‘form’.
plebeians
Roman citizens of non-patrician status. The term was generally a kind
of Roman shorthand for ‘ordinary people’.
post-structuralism
An umbrella term for ideas about literary and cultural theory developed
in response to ‘structuralism’: a mid-twentieth-century European school
of thought which viewed language as a self-sufficient system. The best
known post-structuralist was Jacques Derrida (1930−2004). Derrida’s
work, for which he coined the term ‘deconstruction’, argued that texts
are inherently self-contradictory, calling into question the ability of
language to be coherent or to provide access to an external reality.
Derrida’s ideas were influential on much late-twentieth-century British
and American literary criticism.
452
Glossary
predestination
The doctrine that individual fate - whether for salvation or damnation
– is predetermined by God. In other words, the actions of the
individual have little or no effect on deciding whether or not he or she
is saved.
prompt-book
The full copy of a play used backstage by a prompter, in most cases
probably a fair-copy manuscript.
Ptolemaic system
The view of the universe prevalent from ancient times to the
seventeenth century, named after the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy
(c.90–c.168 CE). In the Ptolemaic system, the Earth was thought of as a
stationary sphere at the centre of a set of moving concentric spheres, to
which all the other heavenly bodies were fixed: the moon (on the sphere
closest to Earth), Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the
‘fixed’ stars (the ‘firmament’). An outer sphere, the primum mobile (‘first
moving thing’), was thought to set all the others in motion. Everything
above the moon was thought to be permanent and unchanging.
purgatory
In Roman Catholic doctrine, the painful halfway house after death
inhabited by souls who are not yet pure enough to reach heaven. The
intercessions (usually prayers) of the living can help these souls attain
the state of holiness necessary to enter heaven.
puritan
In the early modern period, a term of abuse for an extreme Protestant
(see Introduction, p. 8[or equivalent]), a stickler for doctrinal and moral
‘purity’ and opposed to such things as theatrical performance.
quarto
A medium-format book made up of sheets of paper each folded twice
to form four leaves (or eight pages). Both before and after the
appearance of the First Folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays, several
of his plays were printed separately, in quarto format. Some plays exist
in different quarto versions, for example the First and Second Quartos
of Hamlet.
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Queen’s two bodies

The sixteenth-century idea that while Elizabeth I’s physical body (or
‘body natural’) was female and subject to decay, her second, royal or
political, body (or body politic − her body as a monarch) was
immortal and gendered male.
register
In language, this term refers to different sorts or levels of usage.
Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech in As You Like It (2.7.139–66)
includes registers such as proverbial wisdom (2.7.165), a parody of love
poetry (2.7.147–9) and borrowed foreign loan words (‘sans’).
republicanism
A ‘republic’ (from the Latin phrase res publica, or ‘public thing’) is a
form of government which gives the people the power to choose their
rulers through an electoral process. Ancient Rome was a republic
between the overthrow of Tarquin, the last king of Rome (traditionally
dated to 509 BCE) and the coming to power in 27 BCE of the first
Roman emperor, Augustus. Shakespeare dramatised the turbulent last
years of the republic in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and
republican ideas, particularly the ancient Roman emphasis on civic duty,
were important in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England,
even though the country’s head of state was an unelected monarch.
rhetoric
The art of persuasive speech or writing, which became codified in an
influential form in ancient Greece and Rome. Three of rhetoric’s five
parts were relevant both to writing and speaking: inventio or invention
(the seeking out of arguments and ideas), dispositio or arrangement (the
structuring of texts) and elocutio or style. (The other two parts were
specific to speech: memoria (memorisation) and pronuntiatio (delivery of
speeches).) Rhetoric was central to the education system in early
modern England and would have been studied intensively by
Shakespeare at grammar school, where he would have learned about
stylistic devices such as anadiplosis, antimetabole, antithesis and
metaplasm. (You can find out more about rhetoric on The Forest of
Rhetoric website: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/.)
454
Glossary
rhyme royal
A stanza of seven lines rhyming ababbcc. The form was introduced into
English by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400).
soliloquy
A speech in a play spoken by one character when alone onstage, or
believing themselves to be alone, or in isolation in some other way from
the other characters on stage.
stanza
A ‘verse’ in a poem: a section of the poem separated from other
stanzas by gaps on either side, often consisting of fixed number of lines
in a fixed rhyme scheme. In Italian ‘stanza’ means ’a room in a house’.
Stoicism
An ancient school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Clitium (c.300
BCE), named after the porch (or ‘stoa’) in Athens under which Zeno
taught. Stoics advocated indifference to everything external, viewing
such things as pain and pleasure, poverty and wealth, and sickness and
health as equally unimportant, and believed that a wise person should
be immune to emotions such as fear or hope. ‘Neo-Stoicism’, developed
by writers such as the Dutch author Justus Lipsius, became popular in
the late sixteenth century.
symbol
Something that stands for (or ‘symbolises’) something else, often in a
particularly powerful or suggestive way; in literary works, a word or
phrase that describes a physical object or action but also points to some
extra, usually more abstract, meaning. Symbols differ from metaphor
or allegory in often leaving their precise significance open and
mysterious.
three unities
Ultimately deriving from the Poetics of the ancient Greek philosopher
Aristotle (384 BCE−322 BCE), this is the idea that all plays should be
unified in time (the represented action should be similar to the time it
takes to perform the play), place (the represented action should take
place in the same setting) and action (the play should concentrate on a
single action and avoid subplots).
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tribunes
Elected officials who represented the interests of the Roman plebeians
during the period of the Republic. Tribunes traditionally had the power
to propose new laws and could also intervene to protect plebeians
against the actions of other officials. During the last years of his life
Julius Caesar acted decisively to appropriate and extinguish tribune
power, which explains the hostility the tribunes display towards him in
Act 1, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play.
456
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources:
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have
been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make
the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
The Execution and Confession of Humphrey Stafford: Chapter 3
Reading 3.1: Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English
Books Online. www.proquest.com
Suffocating Mothers: Chapter 6 Reading 6.1: Suffocating mothers :
fantasies of maternal origin in Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet to the Tempest
by ADELMAN, JANET Reproduced with permission of
ROUTLEDGE in the format Republish in continuing education
materials via Copyright Clearance Center.
The Faerie Queene: Chapter 7 Reading 7.1: C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of
Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, Open University Press, 1936
The Faerie Queene Book I Canto xii: Poetry for Chapter 7 Copyright
(C) 2006 by Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Reprinted by permission
of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Petrarch sonnet: Poetry for Chapter 8 Courtesy of Indiana University
Press. All rights reserved.
Sir Thomas Wyatt Poems: Poetry for Chapter 8 Sir Thomas Wyatt: The
Complete Poems, edited by R.A. Rebholz (Penguin Classics, 1978),
pp. 76-1: Sonnet X; pp. 116-7: Ballade LXXX; pp. 342, 397-8: notes to
the poems.
Sir Philip Sidney: sonnets from ‘Astrophil and Stella’: Poetry for
Chapter 8 pp389-395 inc.: The Major Works - Sonnets from ‘Astrophil
and Stella’. By permission of Oxford University Press.
457
Index
Index
absolutism 17 tribunes 162
Adelman, Janet see also Julius Caesar
Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Anderson, Judith 273
Shakespeare’s Plays 225–7, 237–42 Anne of Denmark, Queen 420, 427, 444
Aeneas Carries Anchises from the Burning City of Troy antimetabole 170
(attributed to Bonasone) 164 in Julius Caesar 170
alchemy 12 antitheses 40
alexandrine rhyming stanza in As You Like It 35
and the The Faerie Queene 267 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 156
allegory arguments (of plays) 132
in The Faerie Queene 254–6 Ariosto, Ludovico 249
the Bower of Bliss episode 270–6 aristocracy 15
religion 259–62 in The Spanish Tragedy 116, 121
pastoral as a form of 51 Aristotle 51
in Petrarchan love poems 306 Poetics 50
alliteration As You Like It (Shakespeare) 33–105, 136
in The Faerie Queene 256–7, 258 artful prose 36
Almereyda, Michael 231 education in 37–8
Alpers, Paul 257, 274, 287 and the Elizabethan court 92–6
Americas (the New World) epilogue 54, 93–4
conquest and colonisation of 15 First Folio text 40, 43, 46, 47, 74, 75, 76, 78
‘Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna’ (Petrarch) genre
306–9, 405–6 comedy 36, 46–8, 60
Surrey’s translation of 306–9, 405–6 pastoral 36, 37, 42–3, 51–5
anadiplosis 129 and Hamlet 195
in The Spanish Tragedy 129 Jaques in 39–40, 48, 49, 54–5, 57, 89–90, 91, 93,
anatomy theatre 96
and Donne’s poems 318 language and role play 39, 54–9
ancient Rome 21, 82 ‘lifelike’ characters in 88–90
and early modern London 155–8 marriage in 44–5, 60, 95
establishment of the republic 165 New Cambridge Shakespeare (NCS) edition 71,
Latin texts 20, 21 74, 75, 76, 82, 92
legendary founding fathers of 162, 163, 233, 263 Orlando as a ‘concealed man’ 86–7
patricians 163 as a patchwork text 74–80
and Petrarch 398 performances
plebians 168 and audience sympathy 58–9
power politics 229–30 Globe Theatre 23, 41, 75, 76, 89
republicanism 16 RSC 49, 56
rhetoric 20 Petrarchism in 36, 53, 303–4
Roman Civil War 159 reading the play 39–46
Shakespeare and Roman literature/drama 44, reasons for studying 35–8
49–50 Rosalind’s role in 54–9
459
index
songs bodies
‘It was a lover and his lass’ 71–83 blazons in Petrarchan love poems 303
song lyrics 36, 75 the body politic 167–8
sources of 81–7 corruption and disease imagery in Hamlet 222–3,
Lodge’s Rosalind 83–7, 93, 100–5, 303–4, 315 237–42
symmetrical patterns in 91, 92 the Queen’s two bodies 95–6
textual forms of 74–5 Boleyn, Anne 10, 401
time in 72 Book of Common Prayer 259
assonance Boyle, Elizabeth 340
in The Faerie Queene 256–7 Bradley, A.C. 88
astrology 12 Shakespearean Tragedy 218, 220
Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) 408, 409–14, 420 Bridges, Robert 194
‘Fly, fly, my friends, I have my death wound, fly’ Brigden, Susan
411–12 New Worlds, Lost Worlds 230
‘His mother dear Cupid offended late’ 410–11 British empire 15
‘O kiss, which dost those ruddy gems impart’ 414 Brooke, Elizabeth 401
‘Stella oft sees the very face of woe’ 413–14 Brooks, C.
‘When nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes’ A new critical reading of ‘The Canonization’ 323,
410 328–9, 330
‘Whether the Turkish new moon minded be’ Brutus (legendary founder of Britain) 21, 155, 233
410–11 Brutus, Lucius Junius 165, 233
Auden, W.H. 35 Burrow, Colin 90
audience sympathy Bushnell, Rebecca 158
in As You Like It 58–9 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 269
Baker, K. 313 Calvin, Jean 10, 11, 259

Bancroft, Richard, Bishop of London 265 Calvinism
Barber, C.L. 35 and the The Faerie Queene 259–62
Barrymore, John 226 Calvo, Clara 113, 137
Barton, Anne 92 Camden, William 340
bass viol 71, 76, 77 ‘The Canonization’ (Donne) 319, 323, 332–3, 430–3
Bates, Catherine 305–6 critical readings of 328–9, 330–1, 332–3
Bedford, Lucy, Countess of 305, 427, 440 Canterbury, John Whitgift, Archbishop of
Belleforest, François de 206 ban on satire 265–7
Belsey, Catherine 95 capitalism 9
Berger, Harry Jr. ‘Care-charmer sleep, son of the sable night’ (Daniel)
on the The Faerie Queene 278 425–6
Bible Carey, John 315, 320, 321
English translations 21–2 car pe diem motif 267–8
and the The Faerie Queene 261 Carr, Robert, Earl of Somerset 16–7
the ‘fall’ 226 miniature portrait of 19
and the melancholy Donne 317 Catherine of Aragon 10
Bishop’s Ban on satire 264–6 Catherine Howard, Queen 401
blank verse 405 Cecil, Robert 305
in As You Like It 57 censorship 23, 154
blazons in Petrarchan love poems 303 Chaucer, Geoffrey 339
‘The Blossom’ (Donne) 428–30 Chaucerian rhyme royal 267
Blount, Charles, Baron Mountjoy 420 Christianity 12
460
Index
and revenge 125 The Complaint of Rosamund 421

see also Protestantism; religion; Roman Catholic A Defence o f Rhyme 420
Church Delia sonnet sequence 420, 421–7
Church of England 11, 259 ‘Care-charmer sleep, son of the sable night’
Cicero 426–7
in Julius Caesar 166, 170, 176 ‘Fair is my love, and cruel as she is fair’ 421–2
Cimber, Metellus 166 ‘If this be love, to draw a weary breath’ 423–4
Cleopatra (Daniel) 420 ‘My spotless love hovers with white wings’
Clifford, Lady Anne 420 424–5
Coke, Sir Edward 121–2 ‘Thou poor heart, sacrificed unto the fairest’
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 422–3
on revisions to The Spanish Tragedy 135–6 ‘Whilst by her eyes pursued, my poor heart
collaboration flew it’ 425–6
and Shakespeare 74–5 Musophilus 420
comedy Philotas 420
and As You Like It 36, 48–50, 60 Dante
compass imagery Divine Comedy 249
in Donne’s ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ Darrell, Elizabeth 401
298–9, 442 Davies, Sir John 40, 41
The Complaint of Rosamund (Daniel) 421 de Grazia, M. 191, 192, 206, 231–2
Condell, Henry 46 death
Cooper, Helen 43 in The Faerie Queene, Cave of Despair episode
Cope, Wendy 313 255–6, 257
Copernicus, Nicolaus 12 and Hamlet
corruption imagery in Hamlet 222–3, 225–6, 238–43 deaths in the play 192–3
cosmology, Ptolemaic system of 12 gravedigger’s scene 186–8
coteries 322 in Julius Caesar 156, 166–7
Counter-Reformation 11 public executions 117–18
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Wroth) 444 symbolism of 119–20
court and the monarchy 16–7 deconstructionist criticism of Hamlet 224
Craig, Hugh 136 deer hunting
Cromwell, Thomas 401 in Elizabethan England 92, 93
Culler, J. Delia sonnet sequence (Daniel) 420, 421–7
A post-structuralist reading of ‘The Canonization’ ‘Care-charmer sleep, son of the sable night’ 426–7
323, 330–1 ‘Fair is my love, and cruel as she is fair’ 421–2
cultural materialism ‘If this be love, to draw a weary breath’ 423–4
critics of Hamlet 225–6, 229, 235 ‘My spotless love hovers with white wings’ 424–5
cultural view of comedy ‘Thou poor heart, sacrificed unto the fairest’ 422–
and As You Like It 46, 48–50 3
Cumberland, Margaret, Countess of 420 ‘Whilst by her eyes pursued, my poor heart flew
Cunningham, Liam 56 it’ 425–6
Cupid Derrida, Jacques 224
in Petrarchan love poems 306, 316 deux ex machina
Cusack, Niamh 56 in As You Like It 44
Devereux, Penelope 409, 410
Daniel, Samuel 301, 420–7 Devereux, Robert see Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl
The Civil Wars 420 of
Cleopatra 420 Diana, Roman goddess of the moon 276, 416, 421
461
index
diction education 20–3

in As You Like It 57–8 in As You Like It 37–8
in the The Faerie Queene 253–4 grammar schools 20, 21, 81
didactic view of comedy and plagiarism 81
and As You Like It 46–8 Edward VI, king 11
Dillon, Janette 119–20 EEBO (Early English Books Online) 43, 48
disease imagery in Hamlet 225–6, 238–43 Egerton, Sir Thomas 427
Divine Comedy (Dante) 249 Eliot, T.S. 227
Donne, John 427–43 and Donne’s poems 297, 299
biography 319–21, 427 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 218–9
‘The Blossom’ 428–30 Elizabeth I, Queen
‘The Canonization’ 319, 323–4, 430–2 Armada portrait 14, 252
critical readings of 328–9, 330–1, 332–3 court of 16, 17
and Catholicism 12, 320, 432 and As You Like It 92–96
Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 427 cult of 16
‘The Dream’ 432–3 and Diana (virgin goddess) 276, 416
Elegies 319, 322 and the Earl of Essex 93, 230, 232
‘A Jet Ring Sent’ 433–4 education 20
‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’ 434–5 and The Faerie Queene 249–50, 251, 339
‘The Legacy’ 314–6, 318, 320, 436–7 favourites 16, 19
and ‘metaphysical’ poetry 297 and Petrarchan writing 303
oddness of poems 299 progresses 17, 92, 94
and Petrarchism 301, 305, 316, 319 and Protestantism 11–12, 259
popularity of 297 the Queen’s two bodies 95–6, 464
portrait of the melancholy Donne 317 and Ralegh 305, 415, 418
publication of poetry 320, 322, 428 and Richard II 154
rhyme-schemes 314–15 and state violence 118
Satires 319, 322 succession question 229
sermons at Paul’s Cross 13 Elizabethan state
Songs and Sonnets 322 censorship 23, 153–4
and Spenser 255 and the licensing of literature 264–6
‘The Sun Rising’ 437–8 power politics 229–30
‘Sweetest love, I do not go’ 438–9 and religion 10
‘To his mistress going to bed’ 319 violence 118–20, 128, 138
‘Twickenham Garden’ 440–1 Emlyn, S. 122
‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ 298–9, 319, Empson, William 269
441–3 enclosure
Doran, Gregory 231 and pastoral elements in As You Like It 52
‘The Dream’ (Donne) 432–3 England’s Helicon (poetry anthology) 420
Dryden, John 198 English language
The Duchess of Malfi (Webster) 113 in the Renaissance period 21–2
Dudley, Robert see Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of and Shakespeare 48
Dunisberre, Juliet 35, 92 epilogue
Dymoke, Sir Edward 420 in early modern drama 93–4
Erasmus 20
Eagleton, Terry 88 Erne, Lukas 200
early modern period 9 Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of 16, 230, 232, 233,
eclogues 51–52 420
462
Index
and As You Like It 93 First Quarto (Q1) edition of Hamlet 195, 196–8,
miniature portrait of 19 200, 201–12
and Ralegh 415 Fitzmaurice, Andrew 229
executions ‘Fly, fly, my friends, I have my death wound, fly’
as spectacles 119–20 (Sidney) 411–12
symbolism of 122–23 formalism 234
The Faerie Queene (Spenser) 22, 36–7, 249–89 critics of Hamlet 234
and As You Like It 36–7 French Wars of Religion 11, 412
Bower of Bliss episode 250, 264, 267, 269, 270, Freud, Sigmund
271–8 and the character of Hamlet 219, 227
in Greenblatt 273–4, 275–6, 287–90 Civilization and its Discontents 274, 288
in Lewis 273, 274–5, 276, 284–6, 288 Frye, Roland Mushat 189
Cave of Despair episode 259, 260–2, 265–6
dedication and opening stanza 250, 251 Gardner, Helen 60
editions of 249, 250 Gascoigne, George
and Elizabeth I 249–50, 251, 340 ‘Elizabeth I at a picnic’ 94
epic and the epic hero 262, 263–6 Gatrell, V.A.C. 118
language of 253–8, 269–70 gender relations
archaic style and strangeness of 253–4 in As You Like It 58
symbolism and allegory 254–8 and Donne’s poetry 319–20
and the ‘Letter to Ralegh’ 249, 255, 259, 263, 287, in Renaissance society 18
340 gender-switching
Mutability Cantos 279, 339, 340 in As You Like It 95–6
posthumous edition (1609) 279 gentry 15
readings Geoffrey of Monmouth 155
Book 1, Canto ix 342–57 George, Saint
Book 1, Canto xii 358–95 and the The Faerie Queene 259
religion in 259–62 German states 10
attitudes to salvation 256 Gipkyn, John
rhyming stanzas 267–9 Dr King Preaching at Old St Paul’s before James I
size of the poem 249 13
Globe Theatre
‘Fair is my love, and cruel as she is fair’ (Daniel) As You Like It 23, 41, 75, 89
421–2 Hamlet 23, 181
Fairfax, Edward Jonson’s Every Man out of His Humour 89–90, 96
translation of Tasso (Godfrey of Bulloigne) 267, Julius Caesar 23, 156–7
268–9, 270 Goodyer, Sir Henry 322
feminine rhyme 309, 422 Gosson, Stephen
feminist criticism of Hamlet The Schoole of Abuse 47–8
Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers 225–7, 237–42 Gower, George
films Elizabeth I, The Armada Portrait 252
Hamlet (2000) 231 grammar schools 20, 21
‘Performing As You Like It’ 55 Shakespeare at Stratford Grammar School 20, 81
‘The Playhouse’ 23 Greek texts 20, 21
First Folio (1623) Greenblatt, Stephen 35
As You Like It 40, 43, 46, 47, 74, 75, 76, 78 Renaissance Self-Fashioning 270–1
Hamlet 195, 196, 199–200, 201–2, 203–4, 223 ‘Poetry and repression in the Bower of Bliss’
Julius Caesar 151–2 272–3, 274–5, 286–9
463
index
on Wyatt 311 Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire

Greene, Robert The Court of Diana frieze 276
Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit for a Million of Harvey, Gabriel 264–5, 339
Repentance 81 Hattaway, Michael
Greville, Fulke 408 and As You Like It 35, 38, 39, 43, 74, 92
Grey, Arthur, Lord of Wilton 339 genres 60
Grierson, Herbert J.C. 297 masques 44
Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth on the pastoral 43
Cdntury 299 on Shakespearean tragedy 148–9
Griffin, Julia 161 Hawke, Ethan 231
Gunpowder Plot (1605) 12 Hazlitt, William
Gutenberg, Johannes 22 on Hamlet’s character 191–92, 218–19
Heale, Elizabeth 309
Hadfield, Andrew 166, 250, 320, 340 Heminges, John 46
half rhyme 309 Henry V (Shakespeare) 36, 136
Halpern, Richard 169 Henry VIII, King
Hamilton, A.C. court of 16, 319, 401
edition of the The Faerie Queene 249 and the English Petrarchans 307, 310–11, 401
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 50, 179–241 and religion 10, 11
and As You Like It 35, 36, 54, 74 and Surrey 405
character of Hamlet 189–92, 204 Henslowe, Philip 135
critics of Hero and Leander (Marlowe) 53
character-based criticism 224–5 Heywood, Thomas
cultural materialists 224–5, 228, 232 An Apology for Actors 153, 157–8, 176
new criticism and imagery 220–1, 234 Hilliard, Nicholas
new historicist 224–5, 228, 232 Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset 19
post-structuralist 224, 234 Hirsh, James 127
digital text-searching of 222–3 ‘His mother dear Cupid offended late’ (Sidney) 410–11
early printed editions of Hobgood, Allison P. 125
First Folio 195, 196, 199–200, 201–2, 203–4, Holbein, Hans the Younger
223 Sir Thomas Wyatt 310
First Quarto (Q1) (Q1) 195, 196–8, 200, Hollar, Wenceslaus
201–12 ‘View of London and its theatres’ 41
Second Quarto (Q2) 195, 196, 198, 199, Holy Roman Empire 412
200–12, 222–3 Homer 263
and the The Faerie Queene 261–2 Odyssey 270, 271
the Ghost in 205–6 homosexuality 18
and the Globe Theatre 23, 185 Horace
graveyard scene 50, 185–90, 201, 233 Arts Poetica (‘The Art of Poetry’) 44
play-within-the-play (The Mousetrap) 193, 203, Howard, Henry see Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of
206, 226, 231 humanism 18
problems of (unanswered questions) 205–7, 227–8 humours 12
prompt-book 200 hybrid genres in Shakespeare 50, 60
Royal Mail stamp of 185–7, 191, 192, 193
soliloquies 189, 192, 199 iambic pentameter
‘To be or not to be’ 186–7, 191, 192, 201–204 in As You Like It 57
and The Spanish Tragedy 111, 136, 193, 229–33 in The Faerie Queene 257–8
Ur-Hamlet 197, 229 in The Spanish Tragedy 129
464
Index
ideology busts of the major characters 160, 170

and imagery in Hamlet 228 Caesar’s ghost in 173–4
political ideology in The Faerie Queene 275–6, 290 and Elizabethan England 154, 155–8
‘If this be love, to draw a weary breath’ (Daniel) festival of Lupercalia in 161, 162, 167–8, 171
423–4 and Hamlet 195, 232–3
illusionism in Shakespearean drama 53 heroic myth-making in 175–6
individual sense of self 9 propaganda and the limits of rhetoric 158, 159–65
individuals and nation-states and Renaissance tragedy 151–54
in Renaissance texts 270 representation of ideas in 158
Inns of Court 20, 319–20, 322 rhetoric in
internet Antony’s speech 171–72
Enfolded Hamlet 200–1 Brutus’s speeches 166–70
Shakespeare Editions website 84, 100, 222–3 and the Roman Civil War 159
Ireland summary of the plot 152
Elizabethan colonisation of title page of the First Folio 151–52
and The Faerie Queene 250, 272, 275–6, 281 tribunes in 162–3
and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 412 and Virgil’s Aeneid 21, 155, 163, 164
and Spenser 339, 340 Justus Lipsius 229–30
rebellion in 229
‘It was a lover and his lass’ 71–72, 74–9 Kaske, C.V. 261, 263
Italian rhyming stanza Keats, John 269
ottava rima 267, 268–9 Kermode, Frank 35, 36
Kesler, R.L. 130
James I and VI, king 12 King, John N.
court of 16–17, 92 on The Faerie Queene 259–60
and Donne 430 King Lear (Shakespeare) 152
favourites 16–17, 19 King’s Men 22
and Lady Mary Wroth 444 and Hamlet 185, 196
and the masque 17 Knights, L.C. 220, 221
Mytens’ portrait of 14 Knutson, Roslyn 136
and Ralegh 415 Kyd, Thomas 114
and the Ruthven Raid 411 and the Ur-Hamlet 229
Jesuits (Society of Jesus) 11, 12 see also The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd)
‘A Jet Ring Sent’ (Donne) 433–4
Johnson, Samuel landownership
on ‘metaphysical’ poetry 299 and Renaissance society 15
Jones, Emrys 55 Latin 78
Jones, Ernest and education 20, 21, 81
and the character of Hamlet 219, 227 and Shakespeare’s sources 81, 82
Jonson, Ben 420 texts 20, 21
Every Man out of His Humour 89, 90, 96 Le Prince d’Amour (poetry anthology) 418
The Isle of Dogs 154 ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’ (Donne) 434–5
and revisions of The Spanish Tragedy 135 Lee, J. 191
Joyce, Rachel 56 ‘The Legacy’ (Donne) 314–16, 318, 320, 436–7
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 23, 50, 136, 145–76 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 92, 93, 94, 408
and As You Like It 35, 36, 74 Lethbridge, J.B. 276
assassination scene 154, 168–9 Lewis, C.S.
Brutus’s speeches 166–70 Allegory of Love 270
465
index
on The Faerie Queene 256 Marx, Karl

‘Diseased sexuality in the Bower of Bliss’ 273, on Spenser 250, 251
274–6, 283–4, 287 Marxist criticism of Hamlet 224
Leyden, Lucas van Mary I, Queen 11
Young Man Holding a Skull 188, 190 Mary, Queen of Scots 12
Liebler, Naomi Conn 176 masques 17, 420
‘Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expir’d’ and As You Like It 43–4
(Ralegh) 418–19 Master of the Revels 23, 154
Lipsius, Justus 229–30 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 45
locus amoenus medicine 12
in The Faerie Queene 276–7 melancholy 48, 54
Lodge, Thomas memento mori theme in Hamlet 188–97
Rosalind 83–7, 93, 100–5, 303–4, 315 men
London and gender relations 18
City of London merchants 15 see also male favourites
and Elizabethan violence 118–19 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 46, 49
Inns of Court 20, 319–20, 322 Meres, Francis 48–9
population growth 15 Metamor phoses (Ovid) 21
St Paul’s Cathedral 13, 427 and As You Like It 82, 83, 84
theatres 22–3, 39 metaphor 20
‘The long love that in my thought doth harbour’ ‘metaphysical’ poetry 299
(Wyatt) 307, 309–10, 404–6 metaplasm
Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men) 79, in The Faerie Queene 254
89, 136, 185, 196 metre in poetry 21
love poetry 22 The Faerie Queene 257–8
see also Donne, John; Petrarchism Middle Ages 10
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Eliot) Middleton, Thomas 75
218–9 Revenger’s Tragedy 113
lute-playing 71 modesty topos
Luther, Martin 10–11 in The Faerie Queene 251
lyric writing monarchy
in As You Like It 36 and gender relations 18
male favourites 16–17, 19
Macbeth (Shakespeare) 152 power and authority 16, 17
McCabe, Richard 274 and religion 11
male favourites and the royal court 16–17
and the monarchy 16–17, 19 morally improving literature 22
Mallarmé, Stéphane 218 More, Ann 319, 427
manuscripts 22 Morley, Thomas
poetry 322 ‘It was a lover and his lass’ in The First Booke of
Marlowe, Christopher Ayrs 71, 75–9
Hero and Leander 53–54 Munro, Lucy 253–4
Marotti, A.F. 319 Musophilus (Daniel) 420
A historicist reading of Donne’s ‘The ‘My spotless love hovers with white wings’ (Daniel)
Canonization’ 323, 332–3 424–5
marriage Mytens, Daniel
in As You Like It 44–5, 71, 95 King James I of England and VI of Scotland
Marston, John 135 14
466
Index
Nashe, Thomas 264–5 pastoral

nation-states 9 in As You Like It 36, 37, 42–3, 51–3
and the individual, in Renaissance texts 271 defining 42–3
National Portrait Gallery and locus amoenus 276–7
and the melancholy Donne 317 ‘veiled’ model of 51–52
Neill, Michael 133, 188–9 patricians 163
Netherlands 11 patrons 15–16, 22
new criticism Daniel’s patrons 420
Brooks on Donne’s ‘The Canonization’ 323, 328– Donne’s patrons 305, 317, 322, 428
9, 332 and The Faerie Queene 253
of Hamlet 220–3 Lady Mary Wroth 444
new historicism of Wyatt 401
critics of Hamlet 224–5, 228, 234 Pembroke, Mary, Countess of 408, 409, 420
and Greenblatt 274 Pembroke, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of 444
Marotti’s reading of Donne’s ‘The Canonization’ Petrarch (Francesco Petrarch) 300, 399–401
323, 332–3 ‘Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna’ 399–401
new humanism Surrey’s translation of 308–9, 406–7
and Hamlet 229–30 Canzoniere (‘Song Book’/Rime) 300, 301,
North, Thomas 304, 398
English translation of Plutarch 156 translating 307–11
Petrarchism 296, 300–310
‘O kiss, which dost those ruddy gems impart’ allegory of the love relationship 304
(Sidney) 414–5 in As You Like It 36, 53, 303–5
object relations psychology the beloved’s resistance 306
and Hamlet 227 and Donne’s poems 303, 307, 318, 321
Oedipus complex English Petrarchans 308–13
in Hamlet 219 praise of the beloved 303–6
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 219 and Sidney 316
Oliver, Isaac sonnets 302, 303, 309–13, 405–6
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex 19 Daniel’s Delia sequence 420, 421–7
original sin the suffering of the male lover 304–6
in the The Faerie Queene 259–62 see also Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of; Wyatt, Sir
ottava rima 267, 268–9 Thomas
Ottoman Empire 412 Philotas (Daniel) 420
Ovid 276 The Phoenix Nest (poetry anthology) 416, 428
and Donne’s poems 319 Pimlott, Stephen 56
Metamor phoses 21 plagiarism 81
and As You Like It 82, 83, 84 Platonic ideas
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 250 and Petrarchan love poems 303
Platter, Thomas 118
Pacheco, Anita 319 on a performance of Julius Caesar 156–7
Palfrey, Simon 74, 80 Plautus 49, 50
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Wroth) 444 plays 22–3
‘When every one to pleasing pastime hies’ 446–7 censorship 23, 154
‘You endless torments that my rest oppress’ 445–6 parts 80
Parliament 16 publication of 23
parts plebians
and Elizabethan players 80 in Julius Caesar 168
467
index
Plutarch Ralegh, Sir Walter 16, 415–19

Life of Julius Caesar 168, 174 History of the World 415
political propaganda ‘Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expir’d’
and Julius Caesar 158, 159–60 418–19
Pollnitz, Aysha 233 Ocean to Cynthia 305–6, 418
Portugal 15 ‘Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light’ 416–17
post-structuralism Spenser’s letter to 249, 255, 259, 263, 340
criticism of Hamlet 224, 234 Reformation 10–11
Culler’s reading of Donne’s ‘The Canonization’ and the English Bible 21–22
330–1 and the The Faerie Queene 259–62
predestination 11 register
and the The Faerie Queene 261 in As You Like It 40, 56, 58
printed books 10 religion 10–12
printing in The Faerie Queene 259–62
censorship 23 attitudes to salvation 257–8
growth of 22 see also Protestantism; Roman Catholic Church
privy council 16 Renaissance 9
prompt-books 75, 200 education system 20–23
propaganda Julius Caesar and Renaissance tragedy 151–4
in Julius Caesar 158, 159–65 and pastoral 42, 43
Protestantism 10, 11–12, 50 and religion 10
the Anglican Church 11, 261 society 15–17
and Donne 427 republicanism 16
and the English Bible 21–22 Revels Office 154
and the The Faerie Queene 259–62, 279 revenge tragedy
and the Ghost in Hamlet 205–6, 228 Hamlet as 193, 229–33
in Ireland 272 Julius Caesar as 171–2
and Petrarchan writing 303 The Spanish Tragedy as 113, 126–30, 138, 229
understanding of original sin 259 Revenger’s Tragedy (Middleton) 113
psychology12 rhetoric 20, 22
and Hamlet 205, 219, 227, 228 in As You Like It 56
in Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers 225–7, 237– in classical texts 81
42 in The Faerie Queene 257
Ptolemaic system of cosmology 12 in Julius Caesar 158, 159–65
publishers 22 Antony’s speech 171–2
purgatory 10 Brutus’s speeches 166–72
and the Ghost in Hamlet 205–6 rhyme royal 267
Puritans Rich, Robert, 3rd Baron Rich 409
and the theatre 39 Richard II (Shakespeare) 154
Puttenham, George Richmond, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of 405
Arte of English Poesie 51–2, 152, 153, 176, 307 Rochester, John Young, Bishop of 339
Roman Catholic Church 10, 11, 12
quarto 74 and Donne 12, 320, 432
editions of Hamlet and Petrarchan writing 303
First Quarto 195, 196–8, 200, 201–12 and purgatory 10, 205
Second Quarto 195, 196, 198, 199, 200–12, Virgin Mary 226, 238
222–3 Roman literature/drama
Queen’s two bodies 95–6 and Shakespeare 44, 49–50
468
Index
Romantic poets Measure for Measure 45

and the Spenserian stanza 269 The Merchant of Venice 46
Rome see ancient Rome Open Source Shakespeare 54
Rosalind (Lodge) 83–7, 93, 100–5, 303–4 and Ovid’s Metamor phoses 21
Rose Theatre 23 parts in Shakespearean plays 80
Roth, Randolph 118 and plagiarism 81
Roth, Steve 206 and revisions to the The Spanish Tragedy 135–6
RSC (Royal Shakepeare Company) Richard II 154
performance of As You Like It 49, 56 Sonnets 90, 257
production of Hamlet with David Tennant 186, and Spenser 255
191, 231 The Taming of the Shrew 45, 46
The Tempest 44
Sanford, Hugh 422 theatrical company 22
satire Timon of Athens 75, 152
and As You Like It 40 Titus Andronicus 44, 152, 156, 157
Bishop’s Ban on 264–6 tragedies 151–53
Spenser’s satirical poems 339 Twelfth Night 45
Wyatt’s verse satires 401 and the Ur-Hamlet 197, 229
Sawday, Jonathan 318 The Winter’s Tale 46
Saxo Grammaticus 206 see also As You Like It (Shakespeare); First Folio
schools, Elizabethan 20, 21, 37 (1623); Hamlet (Shakespeare); Julius Caesar
see also grammar schools (Shakespeare)
scrolls Shapiro, James
in early modern plays 80 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 35, 36,
Second Quarto (Q2) edition of Hamlet 195, 196, 86, 95, 156
198, 199, 200–12, 222–3 Shelley, Percy 269
digital text-searching of 222–3 The Shepheardes Calender (Spenser) 42, 251, 253, 339
secular world-view 9, 10 Shklovsky, Viktor 254
Seneca 49, 50, 127 Sidney, Sir Henry 408, 413
sexuality Sidney, Sir Philip 408–16
in As You Like It 53, 57–8 Astrophil and Stella 408, 409–14, 420
in Donne’s poems 319 ‘Fly, fly, my friends, I have my death wound,
in the The Faerie Queene 273–4, 278, 284–6 fly’ 411–12
in Hamlet 223 ‘His mother dear Cupid offended late’ 410–11
and Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers 225–7, 237– ‘O kiss, which dost those ruddy gems impart’
42 414
Shakespeare, William ‘Stella oft sees the very face of woe’ 413–14
Antony and Cleopatra 156 ‘When nature made her chief work, Stella’s
aspirations to gentry status 15 eyes’ 410
at Stratford Grammar School 20, 81 ‘Whether the Turkish new moon minded be’
and Catholicism 12 410–11
and collaboration 74–5 The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia 408
The Comedy of Errors 50 ‘My true love hath my heart and I have his’
Coriolanus 152 313–4, 315, 316
education 20, 81 Defence of Poetry 46, 47–8, 263, 408
Henry V 136 on epic 263
King Lear 152 on drama and the three unities 50
Macbeth 152 and Lady Mary Wroth 425
469
index
love poems 322 violence in 116, 117, 118–25, 128

sonnets 301, 304, 410–16 word cloud of 115–17
on Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender 253 Spenser, Edmund 53, 339–41
The Lady of May 92, 93 Amoretti 340
Sidney, Sir Robert 444 biography of 250, 340
Smith, Bruce R. 58 ‘Letter to Ralegh’ 249, 255, 259, 263, 340
Smith, G.G. and Ralegh 415
on Shakespeare 49 satirical poems 339
social status The Shepheardes Calender 42, 251, 253, 339
and gender relations 18 A View of the Present State of Ireland 271, 340
and the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet 188 see also The Faerie Queene (Spenser)
in Renaissance society 15 Spurgeon, Caroline 220–21
soliloquies Stafford, Humfrey
As You Like It 18593 execution and confession of 123–4, 142–3
defining 127 state authority see Elizabethan state
Hamlet 185, 186, 188, 199 Stationers’ Company 23
‘To be or not to be’ 184–5, 186, 190, 201–2 ‘Stella oft sees the very face of woe’ (Sidney) 413–14
The Spanish Tragedy 126–8 Stephen Bathory, King of Poland 412
Somerset, Robert Carr, Earl of 17, 19 Stern, Tiffany 74, 75, 80, 234
sonnets Stoicism 229
and Donne’s poems 314–15 Stratford-upon-Avon
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 444 Grammar School 20, 81
Petrarchan 300, 301, 307–11, 402–3 guild chapel 189
Daniel’s Delia sequence 420, 421–7 Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in
Shakespearean 90, 257, 307–8, 405 Shakespeare’s Plays (Adelman) 225–7, 237–42
Sidney 301, 410–14 sumptuary laws 15
Spenser’s Amoretti 340 ‘The Sun Rising’ (Donne) 437–8
Wyatt 308–9, 401–2 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of 312–14, 324, 405–7
Sophocles and Donne 319
Oedipus Rex 219 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (unknown artist)
Spain 312
colonialist activities 15 ‘Love that doth reign’ 307, 308, 311
and religion 11, 12 and Petrarchan love poems 301, 306–7
Spanish Armada 12, 14 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid 405
The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) 50, 107–41 surveillance technology
and As You Like It 36 in productions of Hamlet 231
authorship 114 ‘Sweetest love, I do not go’ (Donne) 438–9
and Hamlet 193, 229–33 symbolism
Horatio’s murder 113, 114, 115, 121–3, 126, 130, in The Faerie Queene 254–8
133–4, 136–7 the Bower of Bliss episode 272–8
and Julius Caesar 171
Pedringano’s execution 123–5, 126, 128 Tacitus 229–30
performances of 23, 113, 135 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare) 45, 46
play-within-a-play (Soliman and Perseda) 128, 130, Tasso, Torquato 249, 265
131–4 Gerusalemme Liberata (Godfrey of Bulloigne) 267,
and revenge 113, 126–30, 138 268–9, 271, 272
revision and afterlives 135–7 Taylor, Neil see Thompson, Ann, and Taylor, Neil
title-page 113–15 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 44, 50
470
Index
Tennant, David Vesalius, Andreas 318

RSC production of Hamlet 229 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham 17
Royal Mail stamp of 185–7, 189, 192, 193 violence
The Lady of May (Sidney) 92, 93 in Julius Caesar 168–9, 173
theatrical companies/theatres 22–3 and the The Spanish Tragedy 116, 117, 118–25,
and censorship 153–4 128, 138
prompt-books 75, 200 Virgil
see also Globe Theatre Aeneid 21
Theophrastus 89 and the The Faerie Queene 263, 266, 267, 272
‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ and Julius Caesar 155, 163, 164
(Wyatt) 403–5 Surrey’s translation of 405
Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion 259 Eclogues 21, 51–2, 53
Thompson, Ann, and Taylor, Neil influence on Spenser 264, 270, 279, 339
editors of the Arden Hamlet 191, 195–6, 196–7,
205 Walsingham, Sir Francis 408
‘Thou poor heart, sacrificed unto the fairest’ (Daniel) Walton, Izaak 320, 427
422–3 Webster, John
three unities of drama 50 The Duchess of Malfi 113
Throckmorton, Elizabeth 305, 415 West, Benjamin
Timon of Athens (Shakespeare and Middleton) 75, The Cave of Despair 256
152 wet-nursing
Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 44, 152, 156, 157 and Hamlet 227
Tottel’s Miscellany 307, 309, 402–3, 406 ‘When every one to pleasing pastime hies’ (Wroth)
tragedy 446
and epic heroes 264 ‘When nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes’
and Julius Caesar 151–4, 171–2, 175–6 (Sidney) 410
Wilson Knight on Shakespearean tragedy 220 ‘Whether the Turkish new moon minded be’ (Sidney)
see also revenge tragedy 410–11
tragi-comedy ‘Whilst by her eyes pursued, my poor heart flew it’
As You Like It as 50, 60 (Daniel) 425–6
Trent, Council of 11 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury 265–7
tribunes wight
in Julius Caesar 162 in The Faerie Queene 257
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 45 William of Orange (William the Silent) 412
‘Twickenham Garden’ (Donne) 440–1 Wilson, John Dover 194, 206
Wilson Knight, G. 220, 221
Uccello, Paolo Wilson-Okamura, David Scott 52, 249, 253, 254, 267
St George and the Dragon 260 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 46
universities 20 witchcraft 12
Ur-Hamlet 197, 229 women
education of 20
vagrants 15 and gender relations 18
‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ (Donne) 298–9, Woodbridge, Linda 128, 229
319, 441–3 Wordsworth, William 269
Velz, John 176 Wright, George T. 258
Venus Wroth, Lady Mary 301, 304, 444–6
in Petrarchan love poems 316 The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia 444
Vere, Lady Frances 405 Love’s Victory 452
471
index
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 452 satires 401

‘When every one to pleasing pastime hies’ Songs and Sonnets 402
446–7 and Surrey 406
‘You endless torments that my rest oppress’ ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’
445–6 403–4
sonnet sequence 304
Wyatt, Sir Thomas 310–11, 322, 401–4 yeomanry 15
Devonshire manuscript 402 ‘You endless torments that my rest oppress’ (Wroth)
and Donne 319 445–6
Egerton manuscript 402 Yurka, Blanche 226
‘The Long Love that in my thought doth harbour’
307, 308–9, 402–3 Zeno of Clitium 457
and Petrarchan love poems 301, 306–7 Zurcher, Andrew 254
472

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A334

The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA

ISBN 978 1 7800 7986 8

supernatural help (or ‘grace’) and go straight to heaven, he said,

interlocking patron–client relationships. Unsurprisingly, patronage letters

Somerset and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. To some

Education and literature

Extensively studied at grammar school, the writings of the Roman

famous English Bible translation, the King James Version, was

London’s city walls because of the disapproval of the City of London

I hope that this necessarily sketchy outline of life in early modern

Duffy, E. (2005) The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in

Knoppers, L.L. (ed.) (2009) The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern

Sharpe, J. (2010) ‘The debate on witchcraft’ in Hattaway, 2010a, A New

Materials you will need

Introduction: why As You Like It?

Lethbridge, 2008, pp. 2–8), and Shakespeare’s version of pastoral is

My brother Jacques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly

Figure 1.1 A schoolroom scene in Elizabethan times, lithograph. Photo ©

Though in many ways Orlando is an angry young man, the source of

Reading the play

. Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech (2.7.139–66)

‘whining schoolboy’ creeps ‘Unwillingly to school’ (compare this with

court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is

Figure 1.3 ‘Month of Julye’, from Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes

Poets of the Middle Ages and Renaissance gave a very speciﬁc

Pastoral is a convention in which ‘the shepherd world’ is made to reﬂect

comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which

Schoole of Abuse (1579), which attacks play-going because it

Comedy educates the beholder not to want to reproduce ‘the common

Meres used Shakespeare as an example of the value of English

Meres is important to biographers because he demonstrates that

be made about the signiﬁcance of English writing. Meres’s ‘comparative

long after the other dramatic poems, not of purpose to counterfeit

Corydon’ (characters in the poems), but rather deal metaphorically (‘by

Dead shepherd, now I ﬁnd thy saw of might:

Language and role play

JAQUES Why, ’tis good to be sad and say nothing.

This exchange again stresses Jaques’s comic self-importance as an

Rosalind’s role is partly a product of this manner of speaking, this prose

Figure 1.6 Act 4, Scene 1 in performance: Orlando (Liam Cunningham) and

The scene includes a great variety of different linguistic usages, such as

quicksilver changes in mood, from teasing Orlando for his tardiness, to

The legal quality of Rosalind’s diction is shown by her use of the

time, as Hattaway’s note on Troilus doing ‘what he could to die before’

Woeful pageants or true delights?

Materials you will need

Setting Shakespeare to music

Finally, write down answers to these questions. The answers can be as

2 Does it give us any information we didn’t already know about

(see Lindley, 2006, p. 197). A thematically related possibility did also

The patchwork play

Shakespeare and collaboration

editions of Timon of Athens, for example, attribute the play to

Parts, rolls and scrolls

Shakespeare and his sources: reading

I am always surprised when people dismiss the analysis of the sources

Internet Shakespeare Editions website, and selected extracts from it at

Rosalind and the concealed man

The set-up means that, in contrast to the scene in Rosalind, there is no

I prithee tell me who it is – quickly, and speak apace. I would

Orlando is something of a ‘concealed man’ throughout the play. For

O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,