Eros and the Poetry At the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

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Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI Sarah M. Dunnigan

Early Modern Literature in History General Editor: Cedric C. Brown Professor of English and Head of Department, University of Reading Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: Anna R. Beer SIR WALTER RALEGH AND HIS READERS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Speaking to the people Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (editors) TEXTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Martin Butler (editor) RE-PRESENTING BEN JONSON Text, History, Performance Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Unbridled Speech Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450-1700 John Dolan POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox (editors) BETRAYING OUR SELVES Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI Pauline Kiernan STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE Ronald Knowles (editor) SHAKESPEARE AND CARNIVAL After Bakhtin James Loxley ROYALISM AND POETRY IN THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS The Drawn Sword

Anthony Miller ROMAN TRIUMPHS AND EARLY MODERN ENGLISH CULTURE Arthur F. Marotti (editor) CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE MASTER AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CULTURE Authority and Obedience

The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.

Early Modern Literature in History Series standing Order ISBN 0-333-71472-5 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI Sarah M. Dunnigan Department of English Literature University of Edinburgh

© Sarah M. Dunnigan, 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan divison of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan” is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0333 91875-4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Anthony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

for

my mother, Anna, my father, Matthew Amor ch’Ancor mi guidi … Petrarch, canzone 135

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Note on Texts and Abbreviations

x

Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to Jacobean Eros

1

Part 1 The Marian Period

13

1.

Feminine Eros: Mary Queen of Scots and the Emergence of Desire

15

2.

Demonic and Angelic Women: The Erotics of Renunciation and Mariology in the Bannatyne Manuscript

46

Part 2 The Jacobean Period

75

3.

Fables of Eros: James VI and the Revelation of Desire

77

4.

Devotional Artefacts: John Stewart and the Eroticisation of the Courtly

105

5.

Love’s Altar: Alexander Montgomerie and the Erotics of Representation

125

6.

Heretical Love-Words: The Poetry of William Fowler

149

Conclusion: Love’s End

165

Notes

171

Index

213

vii

Acknowledgements I am indebted to Professor R.D.S. Jack for his inspiration, guidance and kindness throughout the writing of this book and before. Professor Evelyn S. Newlyn has been constant in her support and friendship; I am grateful for all our conversations. Dr Gerard Carruthers generously read and commented on sections. Deepest thanks are given to Dr Emma Sutton, who compiled the index. I wish to record my gratitude to the British Academy for the award of the Postdoctoral Fellowship which enabled me to undertake much of the research and writing of this book; and to Professor Cairns Craigh, Head of the English Literature Department at Edinburgh University.

ix

Note on Texts and Abbreviations The poetry of nearly all the writers who form the subject of this book is not available in modern editions. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions of the Scottish Text Society, with few exceptions, such as David Parkinson’s edition of Alexander Montgomerie published in 2000, remain as the standard, mostly authoritative, printed texts of this corpus. The texts of the poetry reproduced here, however, are all based on the original manuscript sources. For ease of reference and accessibility, all quotations are cited by manuscript source, then by the most convenient Scottish Text Society (STS) edition so that a ‘dual’ form of referencing appears. Punctuation and orthography are almost always derived from the manuscript source with little modernisation; only the long /s/, ‘thorn’, and ‘yogh’ symbols have been modernised, as has the ‘z’, which usually represents the phoneme /y/ ; the abbreviated superscript /t/ (for example, ‘wt for ‘with’), and other contractions are mostly retained; in most instances there is no normalisation of /u/, /v/, /w/, and /i/, /j/. Omissions of words or lines are indicated in square brackets. (An explanatory note on citational procedure appears in the first endnote to each chapter.)

Abbreviations DOST ELH ELR EUL NLS PMLA SEL SHR SLJ SSL STS

Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue English Literary History English Literary Renaissance Edinburgh University Library National Library of Scotland Proceedings of the Modern Language Association Studies in English Literature Scottish Historical Review Scottish Literary Journal Studies in Scottish Literature Scottish Text Society

x

Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to Jacobean Eros

…et poi morrò, s’io non credo al desio (Petrarch, sonnet 47) [and then I shall die, unless I obey my desire] Although the articulation of royal subject positions is explored here, this is not primarily a book about Renaissance monarchy or power. It is, rather, about ‘d’amor penseri, atti et parole’; in Petrarch’s phrase, ‘the thoughts, acts, and words of love’1 associated with two Stewart sovereigns in sixteenth-century Scotland: Mary Queen of Scots (1543–87) and James VI (1567–1625). It asserts the importance of lovewords to the artistic and intellectual court culture of each monarch’s reign, and proposes that poetic eros in the Marian and Jacobean periods arises from, and is informed by, political and religious conflicts which endured beyond Mary’s reign into James’s. Marian eros defines the terms of Jacobean eros. Since eros is an important factor in sculpting the symbolic nature of the sovereign, the love poetry produced by courtier-writers responds to the symbolic ‘passional’ powers of both Mary and James. In exploring the erotic voicings of the queen and king, and the erotic dialogues which burgeon between monarchs and courtiers, the book contradicts the perception that Renaissance or early modern love poetry is constrained rhetorically or conceptually by orthodoxy and convention. In proposing that incarnations of eros in the Marian and Jacobean reigns be taken seriously, it takes issue with the influential readings of Elizabethan amatory literature which argue that love poetry is about politics, and not really about love;2 this book argues that it is about both, and that only by responding to the rhetorical and affective intricacies of erotic utterance can the nature of religious and political concerns within literary culture of the period be 1

2 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

properly understood. In that sense, this study is distanced from Renaissance New Historicism because it perceives the erotic power, or ‘genuine’ erotic energies, at the core of this body of love poetry, and argues that this is the necessary precondition for any politically embedded reading. * Because the book is underpinned by the premise that, in the wake of Mary Queen of Scots, the énonciation of poetic eros is invested with intense political and emotional import, it delineates cultural conditions which are peculiar to incarnations of eros in the Scottish Renaissance. It is underpinned by the assumption that, in intellectual and cultural terms, it is appropriate to conceive of an autonomous ‘northern’ court literature (in turn, moulded by its encounters with the literary identities of continental European culture). While this may seem self-evident or disputable, the critical fragility of ‘early modern Scottish literature’ within the present ‘British’ canon necessitates such justification. Scottish early modern literature has been served only by two single-authored book-length studies: R.D.S. Jack’s The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (1972), a scrupulous examination of the role of translation and Italianate culture on the writers of James VI’s reign; and Helena Shire’s pioneering Song, Dance and Poetry (1969), a musicological and cultural study of Scottish Jacobean and post-1603 Scottish writers.3 Such important work was augmented by distinguished articles on Jacobean literary culture by Jack, John MacQueen, Matthew McDiarmid, Richard Clewett and Ian Ross.4 The political and religious culture of Reformation and Renaissance Scotland has been expertly served in the last three decades by a number of collections,5 and outstandingly in the work of John Durkan;6 while Michael Lynch has analysed the royal entries and pageants of Mary and James.7 In the last five years attention to late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature has markedly increased. Essay collections, The Rose and the Thistle, and The Palace in the Wild, offer valuable revisionist insights.8 And yet, though writers such as Montgomerie, Fowler and Stewart have achieved ‘canonical’ status within the self-enclosed field of early modern Scottish literary studies, they remain non-canonical within ‘English’ or ‘British’ early modern literature. It seems obvious that understanding of aesthetic and cultural practices at the English Jacobean court is deepened by an awareness of the early Scottish court. Despite gestures towards fractured, fissiparous boundaries in poststruc-

Introduction 3

turalist Renaissance studies, the potential for devolving the Renaissance remains great.9 The desire to participate in that process underpins this book in its quest to counter or restore what R.D.S. Jack has eloquently mourned as ‘the lost Scottish Renaissance’.10

Eros and vulnerability Stewart erotic literature is written against a background of four decades of considerable political instability. From the poetry of the Marian writer Alexander Scott (c1515–c1582) to that of the Jacobean writer Alexander Montgomerie (c1550–1598), it is an implicit witness to three sovereign ‘anointments’ (Mary; Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband; and James), a king’s murder, the dethronement of a queen and the incarceration of both sovereigns (one temporary, the other prolonged until death). Only two of the courtier writers discussed here, William Fowler (1560–1612) and possibly John Stewart (c1545–c1605), witness the absorption of Scottish sovereignty into a greater monarchical centre, on the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Just as sovereignty was violently wrested from Mary, so its preservation and endorsement was James’s desire. It occasioned the assertion of the Jacobean divine right of monarchy, philosophically seeded in the 1580s and 1590s.11 The realm of literature also necessitated James’s need to authenticate the image of his power. The embodiment of the Jamesian Renaissance is frequently seen to be his earliest prose work: Ane Schort Treatise, conteining some Reulis and Cautelis to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie. It appeared in his first printed work, The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie, published in 1584 by Thomas Vautroullier. …[Z]e may maruell parauenture, quhairfore I sould haue writtin in that mater, sen sa mony learnit men, baith of auld and of late hes already written thairof in dyuers and sindry languages: I answer, That nochtwithstanding, I haue lykewayis writtin of it, for twa caussis: The ane is, As for the[m] that wrait of auld, lyke as the tyme is changeit sensyne, sa is the ordour of Poesie changeit. […] quhat I speik of Poesie now, I speik of it, as being come to mannis age and perfectioun, quhair as then, it was bot in the infancie and chyldheid. The vther cause is, That as for thame that hes written in it of late, there hes neuer ane of thame written in our language. For albeit sindrie hes written of it in English, quhilk is lykest to our language, yit we differ from thame in sindrie reulis of Poesie, as ye will find be experience.12


Although in many ways a flawed and immature work, written as an act of cultural and political consolidation by the eighteen-year old king, it stands as the aesthetic incarnation of a newly strengthened monarchy: the sovereign’s blessing towards the creation of a national Renaissance culture. Ever the paradoxical rhetorician, James admits a degree of humility in the prefatory material to this thirteen-page treatise (‘… of Rhetorique and Dialectique, quhilkis airtis I professe nocht’13). The treatise is shaped by existing treatises: not only by those which he openly acknowledges (Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française of 1549)14 but by those he does not such as George Gascoigne’s. It is a work of technical precision, prescribing metrical rules (Chapters 1 and 2), generic decorum (Chapters 3 and 8) and appropriate figurative expansion (Chapter 4). The treatise, for a text intent on renewal, conveys little sense of a humanistic disinterring of the aesthetic past. Overt desire is expressed for the values of wit and ingenium, the kind of syllogistic beauty which his own two sonnets prefacing the treatise extol and exemplify.15 Philosophically underpinning it is the desire for literary statehood based on the assumption, stated only once, of linguistic, therefore literary difference: ‘For albeit sindrie hes written of it in English, quhilk is lykest to our language, zit we differ from thame in sindrie reulis of Poesie’. Language is an identity in itself, and part of a greater political, cultural, and aesthetic identity. Yet, though it clearly demonstrates, in Homi Bhaba’s words, ‘the image of cultural authority caught in the act of composing itself’,16 James’s words are not merely an image or enactment of power, newly secured after the Ruthven Raid débâcle. Instead, the king’s treatise can be construed as an act of desire: the yearning for the realisation of a nascent ideal. This is crystallised in its concepts of imitatio and inventio: ‘Bot sen Inuention, is ane of the chief vertewis in a Poete, it is best that ye inuent your awin subiect, your self, and not to compose of sene subiectis […]’.17 The concept of invention as difference, or dissent from what ‘hes bene ower oft vsit of before’,18 is commonly expressed in mid-sixteenth-century French treatises. Yet the desire to assert difference from the aesthetic past is, significantly, most acutely felt in James’s prescriptions for erotic poetry. The sovereign desire for a national poetics means that love poetry, perceived as inherently derivative (how can one speak newly about love?), must strive towards innovation: Ye man also be warre with composing ony thing in the same maner, as hes bene ower oft vsit of before. As in speciall, gif ye speik of loue, be warre ye descryue your Loues makdome, or her fairnes […] for thir

Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to Jacobean Eros 5

thingis are sa oft and dyuerslie writtin vpon be Poëtis already, that gif ye do the lyke, it will appeare, ye bot imitate, and that it cummis not of your awin Inuentioun, quhilk is ane of the chief properteis of ane Poete’.19 Eros must discover a new language under the pressure of the desired Jamesian source of emulation: contemporary French Protestant literature. The emergent Jacobean poetic vision shuns eros in favour of the new philosophical orientations of epic, and the subjects of moral and religious devotion.20 And whyles I thought to sing the fickle boy Of Cypris soft, and loues to-swete anoy, To lofty spirits that are therewith made blynd, To which discours my nature and age inclynd21 The work which most profoundly shapes the 1584 Essayes is the king’s translation of L’Vranie ou Muse Celeste by Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–90). It is Du Bartas’s Protestant epics which inspire the Jamesian literary vision. A duplicitous, ‘effeminising’ Cupid is supplanted by a heavenly muse, a beautiful virgin entitled Urania: ‘A holy beuty did to mee appeare’ (31); ‘I am said she, that learned VRANIE […]/I quint-essence the Poets soule so well’ (53; 57); ‘Take me for guyde, lyft vp to heauen thy wing/O Salust, Gods immortals honour sing:/And bending higher Dauids Lute in tone,/With courage seke yon endles crowne abone’ (65–8). Du Bartas visited James’s court at the latter’s request in 1587.22 Another symbolic commemoration of Du Bartas’s importance was the translation of La Judit, ‘le triomfi de la foi’, originally published in 1574 at Bordeaux, by Thomas Hudson, an English musician at the Scottish court.23 In 1591, James published a partial translation of Du Bartas’s La Seconde Sepmaine ou Enfance du Monde, entitled The Furies. Du Bartas was aesthetically and ideologically a role-model for James: even his concept of enargeia or ‘the power to make a vivid image’ is mirrored in the theoretical literary sonnets included in the Essayes and throughout James’s poetry which assiduously follows the goal of imitation. The Du Bartasian influence is emblematic of the direction, spiritually, philosophically and aesthetically, in which James sought to lead his imagined renaissance. This explains the particular accolade which James awards Fowler for his translation of Petrarch’s Triumphs – the ‘triumphe’ of ‘chastnes, deathe, and fame’ over earthly desire – rather than his sonnet sequence, The


Tarantula of Love (the subject of Chapter 6), even though it too ends in spiritual renunciation. James’s censure of the erotic and the profane might be claimed as perfectly orthodox, although rooted in French poetics. Yet the vehemence with which he chastises the duplicity and treachery of eros, ‘shameles god’, is persuasively rooted in a personal and political foundation of extraordinary sensitivity: in his mother, Mary, and the culminating crisis of her brief and troubled reign. Implicated in the murder of her sovereign husband, Darnley, indicted on a charge of adultery and guilty of a third marriage procured with apparently indecent haste, Mary’s erotic powers were further darkened by the public revelation of the ‘casket sonnets’: a series of twelve love poems associated with the queen’s name (the subject of Chapter 1). The sonnets replete with ‘d’amor parole’ helped to procure Mary’s fall from grace: they constituted injurious evidence of excessive, indeed murderous, passion. The queen’s emotional and political vulnerability was thereby confirmed to the Scottish (and English) Protestant nobility who, by 1567, the year of their discovery, desired her deposition from the throne. Erotic power could no longer shore up the image of monarchy; rather, its vulnerability is exposed when love-words are pawned in a political power struggle. James’s desire over a decade later to expel mortal eros from his newly-established poetic empire may therefore be impelled by his wish never to repeat his mother’s grievous error, so irrevocably and damagingly linked to the sign of eros. If erotic poetry could not shed its Marian associations, then poetry itself, the realm of public or printed literature, must never be permitted to speak of the sovereign, or of similarly ‘graue materis’: Ye man also be war of wryting any thing of materis of com[m]on weill, or vther sic graue sene subiectis (except Metaphorically, of manifest treuth opinly knawin, yit nocht withstanding vsing it very seindil) because nocht onely ye essay nocht your awin Inuentioun, as I spak before, bot lykewayis they are to graue materis for a Poet to mell in.24 James’s cautionary proscription against political content (‘commoun weill’ implies the state of the nation, therefore the notion of kingship, or queenship, by extension) is most probably a veiled allusion to the Marian controversies. In his desire to quell printed, polemical debate about the monarch, James (at least in his reign as king of Scotland) was


successful, escaping the literary denunciations inflicted upon Mary. Accordingly, Sandra Bell proposes that James’s ‘renaissance’ is a direct refutation of the Marian one that failed. James desired poetry ‘to legitimate the authority of the monarch’ in the wake of Mary’s grave political fallibility; and to that end engendered the creation of a ‘supportive cultural community’ to procure ‘legitimacy in the face of a tradition of poetry which questioned the very need of monarchy’.25 It was not only the questioning of monarchy’s legitimacy which James sought to expel from debate within the public, literary realm but also the capacity for the monarch to be eroticised: to be the agent and object of desire. James’s official poetics strives to contest what Marian poetry (the sonnets ascribed to Mary) had failed to suppress: the possession of what Louise Fradenburg, in her exemplary reading of symbolic monarchy in the reigns of James III and James IV, defines as ‘the long-standing construction of powerful emotion as a threat to rule, whether self-mastery or public governance’.26 Since the intense passional or erotic power of Mary had failed her politically, the contrary must hold true of James: denigrate the passional powers of monarchy to guarantee political good fortune. But monarchical passion in Mary did not merely symbolise political fallibility: Marian desire had other associations. Her excess of passion had helped foster in 1560s Scotland the fierce ideological power of anti-Catholicism and anti-feminism. This is not a simplistic cause-and-effect relationship. The cultural and political climate was already ‘predisposed’ towards condemnation of a Catholic female ruler, only in her twenties, for whom the central political question of the opening years of her reign was that of her second marriage: was the queen’s husband and Scotland’s king to be Protestant or Catholic? The political and religious fate of Scotland lay sealed in the body of its new queen. The ‘casket-sonnets’ with their extreme adulterous passion fitted the antifeminist mould beautifully. The political and religious climate of midsixteenth-century Scotland was only too willing to perceive the very facts of Mary’s femininity and her devout Catholicism as crimes. Mary’s sexuality could be used as an additional scapegoat. She could become an erotic martyr, just as she is arguably a religious and political one also. And yet the creation of erotic poetry was not made impossible in Mary’s reign, though there is a surprising lack of love poetry about Mary, even in her early reign (explored in Chapter 1). The Bannatyne manuscript (discussed in Chapter 2), was collated and transcribed in Mary’s reign and demonstrably responds to the pressures of reformed culture, drawing together the symbolic


interrelationships between erotic desire, the feminine and the Catholic; in short, the qualities which define the symbolic power of the monarch. The manuscript’s love poetry becomes a rhetorical space in which to debate Woman, the earthly sovereign Mary, and the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. The power of the feminine both to corrupt and to redeem acquires a new polemical urgency which will haunt Jacobean love poetry. Symbolically, therefore, erotic literature possessed Marian associations of which, according to James, it had to be purged as a cause of political vulnerability and, being bound up in the Catholic figure of Mary, in need of religious reformation. Hence James eschews the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), the loyalist Catholic poet attacked by Calvinist pamphleteers in the 1560s, with whom his mother shared aesthetic and spiritual affinities. Briefly resident at the Scottish court in the reign of Mary of Guise, Ronsard was allegedly poetic tutor to Mary in France; she is the dedicatee and subject of many of his eulogies and ceremonial verse. While Mary might justly be considered the literal and symbolic embodiment of Scottish Ronsardian poetics, as Paul Laumonier suggests, her own poetry to and about the Pléiade architect is slender.27 Ronsard is too Marian a writer for James to emulate. Ironically, the honorific mythological guise of the god Apollo is adopted by the king; it is his most frequent incarnation in the poetry of Stewart and Montgomerie.28 While the mythography of Apollo is inevitable for James, the young poet-king, to adopt, it also symbolises how the ghosts of both Mary and Ronsard, dead within two years of each other, stalk the Jacobean period.29 Yet the symbolic powers of eros remain intact. While Jamesian prescriptions remain as a unifying body of legislation, implicit and explicit, the ways in which the courtier-poets of his reign respond to these are delicate and complex, and the subject of the book’s second part. The corpus of their love poetry produced under the Jamesian aegis can be read as a series of both obedient and retaliatory gestures to the literary will of the sovereign. Obeisance is found in Fowler’s reimagining of the moral and theological inheritance of Petrarch’s Rime sparse, explored in Chapter 7, so that the transfiguration of the beloved woman and her Marian associations is renounced. Celebration of ‘the sacred Muse’30 rather than the profane by James’s courtier poets was clearly expedient for any political or artistic advancement; hence, John Stewart’s anxious adoration of the divine goddess, ‘celestiall muse’, Urania, in the moral and devotional poem which concludes his secular collection, as if in a mirror image of the king’s Urania. Yet,


paradoxically, erotic verse remains popular at the Jacobean centre of power. Moreover, it is in the poetry of James himself that ‘disobedient’ acts can be witnessed. The king’s love poetry can in part be interpreted as a concerted effort to veil and manipulate sovereign identity so that the relationship between eros and the king appears uncertain. The power of sovereignty and eros is most clearly bound together in James’s erotic elegy for the death of Esmé Stewart, Seigneur d’Aubigny, Duke of Lennox (interpreted in Chapter 3), which James publishes in his first printed collection. In the end, desire is not renounced by James but embraced: erotic love becomes the means by which the sovereign’s political will is signified. Desire is not annulled by the fate of Marian eros. If anything, it is the duplicitous powers which desire confers upon poetic language that James and his courtier-poets appear to perceive as a necessary precondition for its aesthetic realisation. While Mary’s authorship of desire was maintained (the Marian name could not be removed from the sonnets for without it their political power disappeared), the love poetry of the Jacobean period seems to cherish its play on equivocal identity. In Héle`ne Cixous’s words, it remains intent upon exploiting the ‘common grammatical feature’ of a lover’s discourse: ‘the existence of a singular plural pulsional personal pronoun’.31 This body of court poetry centred on the figure of the king is rarely printed but depends upon manuscript circulation and courtly performance. Within the intimate spaces of erotic poetry, the identity of a lover is never assured but open and contestable. The erotic poem is one of the most intimate, yet openly vulnerable, acts of rhetorical inscription. Each of these writers, in particular the ‘lovers’ or desiring voices of Stewart and Montgomerie, suggest the possibility that desire can be symbolically unveiled as it is veiled; in short, that it can exist as their own confession of love for their king. The articulation of desire in court poetry need not always be a rhetorical fiction. Love, as Julia Kristeva defines it, must of necessity be ‘a crucible of contradictions and misunderstandings – at the same time infinity of meaning and occultation of meaning […]’: … in the rapture of love, the limits of one’s own identity vanish, at the same time that the precision of reference and meaning becomes blurred in love’s discourse […]. Do we speak of the same thing when we speak of love? And of which thing? The ordeal of love puts the univocity of language and its referential and communicative power to the test.32


The beauty of love’s discourse lies in its capacity both to evade and endorse the lover’s identity; the ‘genuine’ erotic energy of Jacobean love poetry is embodied in this constant play of uncertainty. While Marian eros might seem to deny the ‘openness’ of literary desire (the silver casket in which the sonnets were discovered symbolises the enclosure put upon their meaning, as Chapter 1 demonstrates), it acts as testament to the ways in which the unruly potential of desire can be unlocked. Neither the identity of the lovers nor the kind of desires portrayed in the Marian sonnets can be fixed irrevocably. If the annulment of the lover’s identity is a recurring preoccupation of this corpus of love poetry then, in symbolic terms, it is most assured at the moment of the lover’s death. These poems return almost obsessively to the topos of the martyred or dying lover (Mary, Montgomerie, Stewart) and the beloved (James, Fowler). It is for this reason that the trope of death, or of mortal love, has been singled out for special consideration in this study. Death is the moment of love’s apotheosis: an imagined martyrdom in the Marian poems; in James’s elegy, sanctioning permission to speak of love, as if death is the pretext to love; and the apogee of the sacrificial desires rooted so deeply in Montgomerie’s poetry. In Fowler’s poetry, the beloved’s mortality constitutes the moment at which desire ceases to exist, and the salvific power of love and the feminine is exposed as an heretical illusion. * The book is divided into two parts on Marian and Jacobean erotic culture respectively. The first part explores in detail the profane sonnets ascribed to Mary, exploring the ways in which eros and politics are contentiously linked both in their political fate and in the realm of the symbolic. The ‘forbidden’ desires which they represent, condemned and travestied by the Protestant anti-Marian faction, create a version of eros which ironically works to redeem the feminine, and an eroticised martyrology which transforms the fraught historical and political context of their production. The legacy of these sonnets is to feminise and politicise eros, and to forge a symbolic association between profane, corrupt desire and a ‘sinful’ Catholic monarch. Chapter 2 explores the principal literary monument of Mary’s reign known as the Bannatyne manuscript, and the association between Woman, the feminine, and Catholic devotion in its corpus of erotic lyrics. It argues that the extensive poetic representations of Woman’s fallen and redemptive status are linked to the debate about Mary


Queen of Scots and draws attention to the section’s mariological discourse, on which criticism rarely comments. This mariology presents a surprisingly unreformed iconography which demonstrates how the Virgin Mary moulds Bannatyne’s love lyrics and female debate poems in unusual ways: the earthly, but not the heavenly, queen is silenced. It constitutes an imperfect denunciation of Woman in which the possibility of man’s redemption is still granted through the intercessionary Virgin, consolidating the symbolic alliance between desire, the feminine, and the idea of the Catholic sacred. The Jacobean section begins with the erotic corpus ascribed to James himself (Chapter 3), analysing the relationship between eros and sovereignty, and the strategies of interpretative evasion which strive to deflect the revelation of desire, their ostensible subject. It contends that James’s most conservative ‘profane’ poetry occurs when the symbolic guise of monarchical selfhood is most explicit; but that the effort to conceal sovereign identity, combined with the dissolution and fragmentation of the Jamesian political self wrought by the pressure of eros, enable James to produce the most haunting and powerful erotic poem of the Jacobean reign: the homoerotic Phoenix tragedy. Chapter 4 analyses the quintessential courtly display of monarchical love in the miscellany of John Stewart. Presented to the king, this manuscript illustrates how desire can be converted into a rhetorically beautiful artefact, a textual ‘gift’ to be exchanged between monarch and courtier. This small monument raised to Jamesian power and poetics also exposes the fragility and precariousness both of the courtly enterprise, and illustrates the way in which the ‘braiding’ of gendered voices in the collection works to enable the articulation of ‘secreit’ desires. Intensifying the theme of erotic vulnerability, Chapter 5 explores the representational status of erotic desire in the poetry of Alexander Montgomerie, Jacobean courtier, exemplary lyricist, and a Catholic convert whose conversion haunts his poetry. The ‘immanence’ of the king within his sensuous, parodic and disquisitory expressions of eros is explored. It is suggested that the narrative of sovereign desire enclosed within the love poetry of enchantment and disenchantment exposes the poetics of loss, mourning and melancholia which lies at the heart of Montgomerie’s writing. The final chapter, devoted to William Fowler’s sonnet sequence, The Tarantula of Love, and another shorter sequence, argues that Fowler’s erotic corpus and its preoccupation with the concepts of penitence, renunciation and atonement, rest on the attempt to recreate the end of Petrarch’s Rime sparse. It embodies the conflict, underpinning almost


all erotic writing of the Marian and Jacobean reigns explored here, between sacred and profane, and Catholic and reformed forms of devotion. In eschewing the homoerotic impulses of other Jacobean love poetry, it returns to a Marian identification of the feminine with a state of sinfulness. The philosophically darkest sequence of the Jacobean period, it signifies a turning away from the figure of the contemporary sovereign, James, with an implicit return to the symbolic iconography of the Marian period. In so doing, it paradoxically works to fulfil the Jamesian Protestant poetic vision.

I The Marian Period

1 Feminine Eros: Mary Queen of Scots and the Emergence of Desire

il fault plus que la renomee pour dire et publier Above all, she was entering into public discourse, exposing the beauty of her language, akin to her body, to the masculine gaze1 In 1567, ‘certaine letters and writynges well knawin, and by othe[r]s to be affirmit, to haue bene written with the quene of Scotes awne hand to the Erle Bothwell…’ were discovered encased within ‘one small gilt cofer’. 2 These texts, which allegedly encompassed a series of sonnets, were subsequently taken south in 1568 by members of the Scottish Protestant nobility; they were to form part of the evidence against Mary in the English commission sanctioned by Elizabeth’s government into the murder of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. What constituted the subject of the eleven sonnets and single sestain was female erotic desire. Their discovery arguably constitutes the most significant articulation of eros and poetry in sixteenth-century Scotland for it seemed that the moment eros was feminised, and rendered explicitly monarchical, Scotland entered political turmoil. That authorship of these lyrics could be claimed of the increasingly unpopular sovereign Mary became a political imperative. Authorial attribution possessed the power to stain the queen sexually, morally and, according to the anxious responses of Ronsard and Pierre de Brantôme (c 1540–1614), aesthetically.3 Freedom from auctoritas would have granted Mary exoneration from the charges of adultery, possibly murder and, indeed, might have ensured the possibility of papal canonisation. The desire to ascribe authenticity or veritas to the sonnets was clearly part of a 15


concerted process to discredit Mary politically on the part of the Protestant nobles, and subsequently by an opportunistic English government; their injurious power to act as testimony against her was feared by La Mothe Fénelon, the French ambassador in England.4 Yet, when extricated from the defamatory interpretation imposed by the dissenting political and religious factions, these twelve short poems ‘only’ constitute a confession of feminine eros; after all, a decade earlier, the printing of Louise Labé’s Evvres (Lyons, 1555) had introduced a reading public to the ‘feminisation’ of Petrarchist desires. Yet, given the political and religious climate, the first substantial printed version of feminine desire in Scotland, made in the name of Mary, could never be proclaimed in innocence. For the eager anti-Marian factions, that the desire alone of these sonnets was ‘feminine’ provided a rich repository of personal and, according to the inferential logic of orthodox antifeminism, political critique of a queen whose longed-for deposition had finally found a means of realisation. Erotic sonnets were made to bear witness to the apparently manifold sins committed by Mary. These poems have become known as the ‘casket sonnets’, a phrase alluding to the iconic silver casket in which ostensibly they were first held. Not only does the casket represent the physical concealment and enclosure subsequently imposed upon Mary, but also the symbolic ‘enclosure’ put upon their meaning. These sonnets have been regarded as a particularly perplexing relic of the Marian controversy; the possibility of interpretations other than the one in which contemporaries encased them is rarely explored; nor is their important inaugural status as a new articulation of eros and politics with cultural and literary resonances which would endure well beyond Mary’s own reign. The dubious, as yet unresolved, question of authorship proves a substantial obstacle in developing interpretation of these texts. In short, whether Mary wrote the sonnets or not remains uncertain. They seemed swiftly to constitute a ‘ghostly’ text, caught on the threshold of two versions: one in French, and the other a translation into Anglo-Scots. The documents from the casket, ‘missive Writtingis, Contractis, Obligations, Luif-ballettis, and utheris Lettres’,5 were conveyed to Elizabeth by the Earl of Moray, James Stewart, via his secretary John Wood.6 On 9 December 1568, Moray produced the texts before the English commissioners, and on 15 December Parliament was convened. Their next ‘appearance’ was in print: the French ‘originals’ with the Anglo-Scots translations were published in September 1571 in the Detectioun, to which Mary would refer as ‘Ung livre deffamatoire par ung athée Buchanan’;7 it now contained the sonnets which had not appeared in

Feminine Eros 17

George Buchanan’s Latin prose Detectio. Tutor to both sovereigns and celebrant of Stewart births and weddings, Buchanan was first Marian panegyrist, then chief polemicist: annotator of her physical and moral beauty in panegyrics such as the epithalamia (in the collection Silvae) and the epigrams, and of her transgressions in the Detectio series. Chief-architect of the texts which brought the controversial and impugning Marian sonnets to light, in short ‘his role was that of poet laureate, first for Mary Stewart, then, after her overthrow, for the ruling Protestant faction’.8 Certainly, as John Durkan has claimed, Buchanan’s anti-Marian tracts, beginning with the Admonitioun (1570), written for the late Regent Moray’s party, and culminating in the Detectioun, were ‘produced under pressure and their interest was ephemeral, hence are generally found to be economical with the truth’.9 Durkan records the testimony of a former servant of Darnley’s father, Thomas Bishop, that as early as 1569 two Latin antiMarian manuscripts were being ‘circulated’ by Buchanan while the vernacular version was available in England; the alacrity of the English printed editions attests the ‘eagerness’ of Sir William Cecil to intensify anti-Marian feeling, and further the Elizabethan Protestant cause.10 In the apparent absence of an extant and verifiable authorial manuscript text for the sonnet corpus itself, the printed versions of the Detectioun remain the primary textual source. There is, however, one manuscript text associated with a collection of papers belonging to the Earl of Lennox.11 This relatively fair text in sixteenth-century secretary hand offers predominantly orthographical rather than textual variants from the printed sources, suggesting that it is most probably a copy of, rather than an ‘original’ existing prior to, the Detectioun.12 This in itself is indicative of how powerful an indictment of Mary the sonnets were perceived to be. Its deeper significance lies in the nine marginal glosses which offer (whether spuriously or not) brief biographical and historical ‘elucidations’; as Peter Davidson has pointed out,13 the manuscript contains a conspicuously wide left-hand margin, clearly designed to accommodate the ‘pseudo-narrative’ which identifies the apostrophised beloved as ‘the erll bothwell’ (f.46r) and identifies ‘his wyfe’ (f. 46r), intent on emphasising the texts’ desire as adulterous in nature in at least four of the inscriptions. This marginal narrative is at pains to point out how Bothwell ‘abusit …[Mary’s]…bodie’ (f. 46r), and she is accused of Darnley’s murder.14 The manuscript is therefore a carefully crafted, consciously designed exercise in incriminatory marginalia; its narrative is the one accepted and propagated by the anti-Marian party,


‘the nobyllis’ whom it declares that she antagonises, as well as God Himself (f. 46v). The Earls of Moray and Lennox were particularly articulate voices within the dissident nobility. Lennox was ‘vociferous’ in demanding retribution for his son’s murder; Mary even permitted him to convene a parliamentary trial.15 There was ample political motivation for Moray to ensure that Mary was incriminated and retained in England under duress in order to secure his regency. The documents were presented by Moray to the Parliament on 10 December 1568 which attested that the ‘saidis haill missive Writings, Sonnetis, and Obligatiouns or Contracts, are undoubtedly the said Quenis proper Hand-write […]’;16 Mary herself observed that ‘there are divers in Scotland, both men and women, that write the like manner of writing as well as myself’.17 It was Moray who was particularly singled out for condemnation, ‘to charge and burden’, by John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, in his Defence.18 The margins of the CUL MS version, which securely tie each sonnet to specific historical moments in the Marian sexual controversy, present the interpretation of the anti-Marian faction; as if to constitute a short, concise exposition of how the sonnets were received from an English perspective. Paradoxically, it presents a narrative of almost flawless coherence, despite the fact that the apparent sequential unity of the twelve poems presented there and in the Detectioun itself is uncertain: whether the arrangement reflects an original totality (it is certainly conceivable that there are sonnets omitted), or a deliberately purposive sequence, possibly reassembled for publication, is difficult to verify. The Detectioun’s ‘sequential’ order does not offer the clear teleology of conventional erotic sequences (the final sublimation, or renunication, of desire); though the idea of sequential cohesion is not imperative, of course, as Ronsard’s own sonnet cycles attest.19 If the Detectioun’s arrangement is deliberate, though, the only narrative of desire which emerges is one which is essentially repetitive or ‘circuitous’. The following summary may be offered: the lover prays that she may vindicate her love, having already endured a number of sacrifices, and claims that she is willing to die for him (1); a litany of the moral and familial sacrifices she is prepared to make (including renunciation of her son and country) demonstrates her fidelity (2); in the first allusion to the beloved’s expedient and immoral wife, the lover regrets that only she, the virtuous and truly loving one, is condemned for her love (3); the beloved’s wife has made no real sacrifices to attain him (4); the sexual frigidity and hypocrisy of the wife are impugned; she loves him for his material wealth only (5); the wife embarks on a process of deceitful persuasion; the lover protests that the

Feminine Eros 19

beloved believes these false assertions and demonstrations of love more than her own which are genuine (6); the lover laments that the beloved judges her unfairly which both incenses her and yet fuels her desire more (7); since her love for him is only strengthened, the lover repeats how she will remain resolute in her obedience and loyalty (8); she recalls two incidents: the first when the beloved violated her body; the second when he was seemingly injured; her suffering has been great (9); the beloved remains the sole reason for her existence, and she repeats her willingness to obey him (10); the beloved has failed to fulfil his promise of reunion, and alone she fears his neglect of her (11); his perpetual absence compels the lover now to write, and she implicitly asserts her superior love (12). There is closure of a kind but it is partial and imperfect. Though one might justly question the prosodic elegance of the French version, it might be reasonable to suppose that Mary, if she is their author, would write in French, the language in which she was educated and which she could never, emotionally or intellectually, relinquish. Authorship, whether individual or collaborative, of the translated version also remains unknown, despite a wealth of contentious speculation which has included George Buchanan. If the texts are forgeries, they can be construed as ‘ventriloquised’ texts: utterances delivered in the persona of Mary as an amatory rhetor, or more specifically as a kind of Ovidian female plainant; after all, the voice of an abandoned lover is heard (even politically, Mary’s fate was to be ventriloquised: at the conferences in York and London in 1568, for example, Mary’s commissioners including the Bishop of Ross, John Leslie, who also acted as her poetic correspondent, pleaded that Mary be represented in propria persona rather than in absentia). One might argue that the sonnets superficially imitate the literary and rhetorical tropes of the mid-Renaissance Ovidian female voice, and that their assimilation of Petrarchistic and Neo-Platonic discourses is eclectic and insubstantial; technically, their metrical competence has been challenged and condemned as Brantôme’s courtly memoir did in declaring them ‘trop grossiers et mal polis’.20 Such implications of aesthetic and thematic incoherence may be used to substantiate the charge of forgery. Clearly, the pragmatic question of authorship, as yet unresolved, creates a number of interpretative problems: how can any reading of their political, moral or aesthetic content accommodate the dual possibilities of Mary’s authorial responsibility and their status as the product of politically intentioned (masculine) forgery? In recognition of this still intractable authorial problem, the sonnets are referred to as ‘Marian’ utterances: that is, as poetic texts or discursive


expressions associated with the name of Mary and, possibly, made in the name of Mary, when she was only twenty-four years old. Given the fundamental dilemma which underpins the poems (did Mary write them or not?), which cannot easily be dispelled by poststructuralist theorising of the subject, this reading hinges upon the theoretical position, as formulated by Shoshana Felman, that one can trace in this apparently most unyielding and recalcitrant of texts, ‘its own resistance to itself, its own specific literary, inadvertent textual transgression of its male assumptions and prescriptions […] this self-transgression of the text […] can be amplified, made patent, by the desire – and by the rhetorical interposition – of a woman reader’.21 Several qualifications might be made to this specific articulation of Felman’s theory: ‘male’ can be specifically defined as anti-Marian which evidentially took the form of misogynistic inquisition. The ‘interposition of a female reader’ might in this context be accused of a naive essentialism; it might be modified to accommodate the complexities of a feminist interpretation, alert to the contradictions of this apparently incriminatory Marian representation of the feminine. The sonnets fulfil a readerly desire for their redemption: to permit them to escape the enclosure of their contemporary interpretation and supposed fabrication. The ‘ready-made’ interpretation of the anti-Marian faction still prevails; to refuse to ‘open up’ or to ‘unravel’ the sonnets is to be complicitous with the latter’s misogyny and, above all, with its hermeneutic closure. These sonnets constitute more than a kind of perplexing political reliquary of the 1567 Marian crisis; they remain significant literary as well as cultural documents, laying bare the sexual paradoxes of feminised lyric desire; a textual bricolage which, if flawed, is still coherent.22 While their poetic articulation of female eros is inextricably linked to their immediate political and cultural circumstances, they can also be re-contextualised. Gathered together with the erotic poetry of Labé and Pernette du Guillet, Veronica Gambara and Gaspara Stampa, they arguably demonstrate, within their peculiarly fraught political context, that the énonciation of sexual desire from a feminine subject-position has the power to re-imagine and reconceive ‘the institutionalised poetic eros’ of the mid to late sixteenthcentury.23 Ironically, this is a reimagining of feminine desire which the pressure of religious and political circumstances, and the apparently sealed interpretation which Mary’s son, James, would inherit, foreclosed. *

Feminine Eros 21

It is evident that desire in the casket-sonnets is not confined to a relation between lover and beloved but is realised by a trinity of protagonists. Such an erotic configuration evokes René Girard’s classical theory of triangular desire in which desire is always conceived as an effect of rivalry; the object of desire accordingly gains from being desired by another.24 This threat of another (fundamental to the configuration of desire in Shakespeare’s sonnets but in other sequences usually only expressed as the anxiety that the beloved might hypothetically be desirable to others) is rendered with peculiar intensity in Mary’s sequence. Her lover desires what is legally and morally ‘possessed’ by another as ‘mari & seigneur’. What preoccupied Mary’s detractors, and is repeatedly emphasised in the Cambridge marginal glosses, is that the desire was also adulterous: if Bothwell is indeed the unnamed beloved he is, in James Melville’s words, ‘another wyues husband’;25 in other words, Lady Jean Gordon whom he had married on 24 February 1566 and was shortly to divorce. On the anti-Marian reading, this converts the queen into a court prostitute. The Detectioun’s prefatory title to the sonnets explicitly announces this illicit desire: ‘[…] writtin by ye Quene of Scottes to Bothwel befoir hir Mariage with him, and (as it is sayd) quhile hir Husband lyuit, bot certinly befoir his diuorce from his Wyfe…befoir quhome she here preferreth her selfe in deseruing to be beloved of Bothwell’ (my emphasis). That such desire profanes the sacrament of marriage is starkly emphasised: the queen is accused of ‘mad loue, infamous adulterie, and vile passion’.26 While the Detectioun proclaims the sanctity of marriage, the sonnets portray it as an expedient alliance which profanes the lover’s cherished amour vrai.27 It is one of the ironies of the Marian poems that they should ‘play’ upon the profanity of words and revelation. The rhetorical proclamation of desire is portrayed as a kind of blasphemous act; love’s sanctity resides in its unuttered condition. In seeking to know truly (vrai connaître) the beloved, the lover must displace the paroles fardèes of other feigning rivals. Though this echoes the critique of duplicitous discourse that is widely distilled through European love poetry, in particular, the vogue of so-called ‘anti-Petrarchism’, it has particular resonance for the casket-texts which, in many ways, inaugurate the period of Mary’s verbal and political ‘censorship’. In Mary’s lyrics, a scrupulous purity is exacted of both word and self; it is as if the corrupt nature of love discourse is intensified for the Catholic writer for whom the word per se is already fallen. Any such preoccupation with the fidelity of language is ironic since the queen functioned as a trope of duplicity in the denunciatory


writings of Buchanan and other tracts where her language, in expedient accommodation of anti-Catholic sentiment, is denounced for its profanity. Mary was acutely aware that her words, whether publicly proclaimed or privately circulated, were subject to misconstrual, the ‘lying Rhetorike’ of which John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, accused Mary’s detractors.28 She pleads against false distortions in letters to Elizabeth, even anticipating her displeasure at such ‘freedom of speech’.29 Mary’s letters to Elizabeth are almost discursive trials, played out in a rhetorical court: ‘to accuse them [“my false accusers”] before you’.30 These assertions prefigure James’s preoccupation in the Basilikon Doron and his own literary writings with the needful perspicacity of language. It is interesting to observe the rhetorical way in which the sonnets anticipate their ‘public’ status. The lover is conscious of her desire as spectacle, subject to the moral scrutiny of others, a gesture towards the classic courtly trope of anxiety; as she ‘spectates’ the rival beloved, so she herself is further ‘spectated’ or judged by the beloved in her own consciousness: the accusation, ‘Vous m’estimez…’ (7: 10), begins a litany of judgement and incrimination.

Eroticising Mary The contemporary reception of the casket-sonnets transparently reflected early modern ideologies of female cupiditas (the history of their later reception might also be said to reflect culturally relative assumptions about female sexuality). The response to the sonnets, while patently intensified by the political and religious gains to be made, seems to imply that the figure of Mary could not be eroticised, or was compelled to resist eroticisation. Was it because these sonnets implied that she was not simply an object of desire, in itself tolerable perhaps, but that she was seen in these texts to solicit, orchestrate and, perhaps most injuriously of all, to need desire? Did the apparent erotic revelation of the queen’s desiring body in these sonnets implicate, on the analogy of the two sovereign bodies literal and symbolic, not only her own specific female body but that of the symbolic Scottish state? Was supposed disorder and excess to characterise both? The casket sonnets are an important aspect of the Marian ‘history of mythification’31 or mythehistoire which Jayne Elizabeth Lewis has adroitly analysed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. But how do they relate to the ‘image of Mary’ which existed prior to the decade of their probable inception and discovery and, more urgently, was her ‘eroticisation’, or her ability to be erotically imagined in the

Feminine Eros 23

symbolic realm, impossible in the Scotland of the 1560s? Scotland inherited, and largely discarded, a Marian iconography from France which was largely that of a profane Madonna. Widowed in 1559 at the French court, Mary was apotheosised into la reine blanche, pictorially and rhetorically conceived as the epitome of marmoreally distant and virtuous beauty: a femme pudique, a divine Venus.32 Her beauty was frequently manifest as sensual blason in Ronsardian eulogy but also as the externalisation of interior moral and spiritual beauty. Such neoPlatonic correspondence cannot justly be said to characterise even the earliest part of Mary’s reception in Scotland. There is, in fact, a startling absence of Scottish Marian literary eulogy; perhaps this is a question of textual survival (perhaps a deliberate destruction of ‘evidence’). Examples do exist, principally and ironically, by Buchanan, for example, who obliged with celebratory nuptial poetry in 1565. One year later, he dedicated his Psalms to Mary, while the masques of 1564 and 1565 which he composed depict the virtue, fecundity and beauty of the queen.33 The courtier poet, Alexander Scott, partly succeeds in exemplifying in his well-known ceremonial piece on the queen’s return to Scotland in 1561 Ronsard’s assertion in the ‘Elegie à la Royne d’Escosse’ that ‘Escosse, tu auras une gloire eternelle/D’avoir conceu en toy une Roy si belle’.34 Sovereign beauty is inevitably also politicised; but in Scott’s poem Mary’s beauty requires to be ideologically attuned to the needs of a country in which parliament was opposed to the Roman Catholic Mass and papal jurisdiction. Scott’s poem is a political speculum with patent Reformist impulses, or Protestant sympathies. Mary is urged to undertake a symbolic religious cleansing (within state and self?) which in itself might also initiate a process of political purgation and renewal. After 1567, when the iconography of the queen’s beauty could only signify an ideologically inflected beauty, the celebration of her sovereign virtue would be confined to the melancholic texts of pro-Marian, Catholic writers such as Adam Blackwood. There is a clear association between the Scottish denunciation of Marian erotic passion and the ideological position of Protestantism; rooted in Buchanan’s Detectioun but also earlier in the paradigmatic excoriations of John Knox, the ‘genre’ of anti-Marian propaganda is inevitably cast in a Protestant mould. Accusations perpetrated against Mary became standard topoi of this writing. The Detectioun denounced the casket writings as the expression of inordinate female passion, and the queen’s conduct towards Bothwell as exemplary of the actions of ‘a mad woman’.35 In orthodox Aristotelian fashion, Mary incarnated emotion (thus moral and intellectual infirmitas) in implicit opposition


to reason and a doctrinal faith which was gendered masculine, tropes used by John Knox for obvious rhetorical and political gain. The confrontations recreated by in his Reforming History (inevitably) depict himself and others as embodiments of rationality, unlike their queen: ‘The said Johne [John Erskin of Dun] stood still, withouit any alteratioun of countenance for a long seasson, whill that the Quene gave place to hir inordinat passioun’ (my emphasis).36 Mary feels and speaks in, and with, excess. In symbolising and perpetuating such feminine dissipation, she implicitly forms an opposition to Elizabeth who seals off her body with representations that emphasise its inviolability, whether gendered masculine, feminine, or neither,37 and ‘a value that her contemporaries increasingly characterised as “sacred”’.38 In Marian rhetorical discourse, Mary’s body, by contrast, could not possess such miraculous intactness: ‘[Chaˆtelard] was…so familiare in the Quenis cabinett, ayre and laitt, that scarslye could any of the Nobilitie have access unto hir…’ (my emphasis).39 The highly political event into ˆ telard affair was converted became, as Parkinson notes, which the Cha ‘an early instance of the repeated breaches of proper distance between monarch and subject – or between the festive and the politic – that bedevil Mary’s efforts to be an effective patron’.40 Subsequently, the rape of Mary by Bothwell at Dunbar in 1567 (this treasonable act was publicly proclaimed but later exonerated by Mary) is the most intense betrayal of the expected inviolate sanctity of the female body in both its sovereign and sexual capacities: it was interpreted as a violation which she allowed, indeed provoked, resulting in the loss of the crown to Bothwell who, though Protestant, was increasingly unpopular and disliked. The narrative constructed by the Detectioun is similarly preoccupied by her ‘violability’, and the degree of Mary’s sexual consent: on the night of Darnley’s murder: ‘Bothwel was through the garden brought into the Quenis chamber, and there forced hir agaynst hir forsothe will. But how much agaynst hir will […] tyme the mother of truthe hath disclosed’.41 In the act of offering her body, Mary actively contravenes both the ideological patristic precept that woman ‘must seek not to be the object of desire’,42 and the ‘sacredness’ of the sovereign body. While the Detectioun provides the most obvious source of contextual anti-Marian ‘mythification’ for the casket sonnets, so too do Scottish political and literary tracts of the 1560s with which they implicitly engage. In his important Marian study, Images of a Queen, J.E. Phillips analysed some of these polemics in which the conception of Mary’s sexual and sovereign bodies has a dialectical relationship to the casket

Feminine Eros 25

sonnets.43 These constitute a crude but equivalent poetic indictment of Mary’s sexual and political culpability, attesting the existence of a politicised public literary sphere in early modern Scotland of which James would later prove implicitly aware.44 Many of these pamphlets or broadsides deploy a litigious discourse and depict resistance to the adulterous, murderous queen as a nationalistic act undertaken on behalf of the suffering Scottish nation. Mary is portrayed as an ally of an unhappily powerful Venus in a symbolic alliance which, within this new context of a poetic and public quasi-political culture, patently articulates the fear of erotic or unlicensed female sexual power; a mythic fear, one might argue, expediently dressed up in the voice of contemporary political and religious dissent. As Mary’s power became increasingly circumscribed during this period, so these poetic diatribes seek to achieve Mary’s rhetorical containment. The Marian image which they incarnate is largely parodic. In the broadside entitled the ‘Testament and tragedie of umquhile King Henrie Stewart of gude memorie’, published by the Protestant Edinburgh printer Robert Lekprevik in 1567, Mary subjects the spuriously innocent and powerless Darnley to her desire. She literally impales him and, in an ironic parallel to the textual violation of the sonnets as well as Bothwell’s literal violation of Mary, the effect of her ‘licherous lufe’ is the injury to Darnley’s body.45 In imitation of the characteristic rhetorical trope of anti-feminist debate poems, Mary is offered as an exemplar of women corrupted and made dangerous by ‘luifis rage’: the mythical and historical catalogue of men who endured death or suffering through supposed female iniquity renders insistent the anxiety of these poems about the ‘powerful’ female sexuality that found its contemporary embodiment in the queen. Incarnating the fallen morality, for example, of Delilah, Medea, Clytemnestra and Jezebel, Mary is the arch female transgressor: ‘scho wes neuuer lyke Penelopie’46 (the Detectioun sought the analogue of Medea for Mary’s murderous, adulterous excess: ‘she maketh hirselfe Medea, that is, a woman that nouther in love nor hatred can kepe any meane’47). Such poems become the textual equivalent of the placard paraded through Edinburgh which depicted Mary as a mermaid, the emblem of the prostitute.48 Mary had therefore entered the public realm of discourse as an archetype of fallen femininity even prior to the actual publication of the casket texts. As Parkinson observes, ‘No line between poetry and politics is to be absolutely maintained thereafter [1561–5], any more than Mary herself is to remain the unmoved centre of both spheres of discourse’.49


In short, by the time the casket-sonnets irrevocably establish a powerful and damning association between poetic eros and politics, Mary’s embodiment as the figure of fallen Woman was deeply entrenched within the Scottish symbolic realm. Her eventual marriage to Bothwell on 15 May 1567 compounded her symbolic trespasses onto yet another area of sanctified womanhood: ‘the chastetie and honestie of a wydowe’: For what body woulde not abhore hyr, that after the fyrst husbandes deathe, sheweth hyr selfe to longe after another, and casteth away hyr spouse Chryste and maryeth the dyuill firste.50 Vives’s denouncement echoes in the Detectioun’s: ‘in a woman, it is monstrous: in a wife not onely excessively louit, but also maist zealiusly honorit it is incredabill’.51 The marriage, which took place almost three months after Darnley’s murder and only a month after Bothwell was acquitted of responsibility in it, was generally condemned even by those sympathetic to the Marian cause as Bothwell’s motivation, ‘wise and politic’ in the Detectioun’s phrase, was largely construed as Machiavellian.52 Mary’s own defence of the marriage widely censured as ‘pretendit’,53 as recorded in her letter to the Guises, defends Bothwell’s political loyalty, though she is sensitive to the displeasures of those ‘that mycht not abyde his advancement’.54 Gratitude is expressed at the same time that both justification and apologia are offered (especially and implicitly to her Catholic support at home and abroad; John Leslie carefully justified the marriage in his Defence). But she candidly notes how Bothwell’s ‘effort’ to ‘purches oure gude will’ by ‘humble sute’ cannot disguise the ruthless ambitions of one who is, in her own words, her ‘borne subject’:55 ‘quahirin we cannot dissembill that he hes usit ws utherwayis than we wald have wyssit, or zit have deservit at his hand…’.56 Provocatively, the marriage was solemnised by Protestant rites, an act to which she anxiously alludes in her letter: ‘[not] weying quhat wes convenient for ws, that hes bene norissed in our awin religioun, and never intendis to leif the samyne for him or ony mon upoun earth.’57 In the letter sent to Elizabeth with the intention of justifying the marriage, Mary presents reasons of political fragility and the fear of ‘seditioun’; the legalistic veracity of Bothwell’s problematic divorce is anxiously set forth.58 As Michael Lynch observes, in the spring of 1567, Mary exhibited a ‘dangerous dependence on Bothwell’.59 Marriage to Bothwell was an act for which Mary atoned for the remainder of her life.

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Such ‘evidence’ of Mary’s moral and religious culpability fomented the anti-Marian cause and deepened the interpretative scope of the casket-sonnets. Ultimately, the form of ‘inverted’ or parodic eroticisation of the queen which their reception signified had linguistic or verbal connotations. Just as her physical beauty was conjured as a duplicitous artifice, as idolatrous as her Catholicism, by her textual detractors, so too was her language: accused of being ‘fenzeit fair and wylie’. 60 As Lewis observes, the casket material constructed ‘the ascendant Protestant impression that Mary was a craven dissembler of the most wanton passions’, rooted ‘in the erotically charged act of reading an emotionally invasive female author’.61 In both the Buchananite anti-Marian tracts and the broadsides, Mary tapped a vein of Protestantised rhetoric: their condemnations were made to espouse a contrasting ‘purity’ or veracity. The web of linguistic and ideological sophistry already spun could only become entangled further on the publication of the queen’s own supposed verbal embodiment of desire. Just as the figure of Mary herself is metaphorical, always symbolic, so too are the casket sonnets which expediently served as a kind of metaphorical vehicle for the contemporary political and religious anxieties which surrounded Mary in the final months of her reign. Yet the sonnets also became such a hotly contested politicised publication precisely because of the power of the erotic word itself: the fact that such a voicing of desire was taken so seriously surely attests to the erotically charged energies of the Marian text. The sonnets at once serve as a political assertion of eros, and an erotic assertion, or rather negation, of political desires; it is a complex and delicate negotiation between both which the rest of this chapter pursues in tracing representations, or allegorisations, not purely confined to the political body but one which, contrary to their sixteenth-century reception, represents a different erotic or ‘passional’ poetics.

Ironic sovereign desires As Renaissance treatises on the nature of erotic love frequently illustrated, the act of desiring (to desire rather than to be desired oneself) is necessarily one which entails surrender: a relinquishing of soul or body to the power of the desiring Other. The concepts of sexual and spiritual abnegation, at once ecstatically and agonistically rendered, underpin the Marian sonnets. Since this is sovereign eros, there is political abnegation too, voiced with an almost quasi-ingenuous candour; heart, soul and state are made sacrificial. ‘De vous seruir’: the language of erotic


duty and obeisance echoes the feudalistic ethos of the rhetoric commonly subsumed within the category of amour courtois. The sonnets boldly subvert the conventionally gendered, hierarchical relation in the European love lyric between abject male lover and aloof, socially or politically superior domna. The irony is doubly inflected as the political and social male subject (Bothwell, according to the marginal gloss of the Cambridge manuscript) is made sovereign; the sovereign places herself ‘soubz la subiection’ (10: 12), submits to the ‘volonté’ of her subject (9: 8), and pledges ‘à l’obeyr & seruir loyaument’ (8: 10). The repeated use of the appellation ‘Seigneur’, or Lord, evokes Gaspara Stampa’s apostrophe to her beloved as ‘Signor’ or ‘Lord’. A term imbued with feudal connotations (and, accordingly, with the implications of either benevolence or tyranny), it may denote simply a spouse or, as in Mary’s own later religious sonnets, represent ‘God the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit’.62 The political ironies are intensified further when such renunciatory acts are contextualised within the model of neoPlatonic love doctrine, to which the sequence demonstrably gestures; the tenet which asserts that love is always held by an inferior for a superior becomes imbued with ironic political currency. Entre ses mains & en son plein pouuoir Ie metz mon filz, mon honneur, & ma vie, Mon païs, mes subiectz, mon ame assubiectie… In his handis and in his full power, I put my sonne, my honour, and my lyif, My contry, my subiects, my soule al subdewit… (2: 1–3) Pour luy tous mes amis i’estime moins que rien, Et de mes ennemis ie veux esperer bien. For him I esteme all my fre[n]ds les the[n] nathing, And I will haue gude hope of my enemeis. (1: 10–11) Significantly made at the opening of the ‘sequence’, such apparently bold assertions could easily be construed by the anti-Marian party as the queen’s resignation of political authority; the contentious litany of sacrificed possessions, ‘pais … subiectz … fils’, is a gift to her adversaries. Here, the possibility of textual corruption or interference with the

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original sources is at its most persuasive.63 Even without the insistent identificatory manuscript gloss, the identification of a sovereign, or political self (ineluctably present, it seems, in the use of the term ‘subiectz’), is difficult to resist at certain textual moments; the dynamic between self-renunication and self-identification can certainly be perceived in the erotic writing of other early modern women poets (Pernette du Guillet’s, for example) but its intellectual and emotional associations seem to lack the apparently ‘material’ consequences which Marian eros claims to defy. This particular language of desire threaded through the sonnets, enacts a ‘sovereign love’, to use Louise Fradenburg’s phrase,64 which is contrary to, indeed contradictory of, the political eroticism of Elizabeth and, perhaps more significantly, James, the unnamed but presumed ‘filz’ of the sequence. While James would later strive to keep the expressions of eros and sovereignty apart in the Marian sonnets there are no boundaries between erotic and sovereign selves. Unlike Elizabeth’s carefully managed eroticisation (a desirability which never tolerated any breach), these sonnets seemingly enact the realisation of desire for the sovereign; the symbolic is transformed into the ‘real’. The sovereign self is made culpable of desire and error (‘i’ay mesprisé l’honneur’); in the process of disavowing her symbolic, sovereign self, the Marian lover at once admits vulnerability. Such vulnerability, both erotic and political in nature, would be inadmissible to James who sought to maintain the symbolic carapace of monarchy within his poetry.

Bodily possessions: the agony of ‘ce corps’ Pour luy aussi ie iette mainte larme. Premier quand il se fist de ce corps possesseur, Duquel alors il n’auoit pas le coeur. Puis me donna vn autre dur alarme, Quand il versa de son sang mainte dragme, Dont de grief il me vint lesser doleur, Qui m’en pensa oster la vie, & frayeur De perdre las le seul rampar qui m’arme. Pour luy depuis iay mesprisé l’honneur Ce qui nous peult seul pouruoir de bonheur. Pour luy i’ay hazardè grandeur & conscience. Pour luy tous mes parentz i’ay quité, & amis, Et tous autres respectz sont apart mis. Brief de vous seul ie cerche l’alliance. (9: 1–14)


For him also I powred out many tearis, First quhen he made himselfe possessor of thys body. Of the quhilk then he had nat the hart. Efter he did geue me one uther hard charge, Quhen he bled of his blude great quantitie, Through the great sorrow of the quhilk came to me that dolour, That almost caryit away my life, and the feire To lese the onely strength that armit me. For him since I haif despisit honour, The thing onely that bringeth felicitie. For him I have hazardit greitnes & conscience, For him I have forsaken all kin and frendes, And set aside all uther respectes, Schortly, I seke the aliance of yow onely. In the particular rhetorical context of this ninth sonnet, and in any broader interpretative sense, possession of the body sans le coeur signifies a desire realised without the sanction of emotional or spiritual consent; here a desire which has yet to be fulfilled. This act of bodily usurpation is enclosed by the rhyme larme/alarme: prefaced by tears and sealed by its status as the first alarme or ‘hard charge’ in the metrically irregular fourth line of the translation. The first three lines of the quatrain possess a simplicity which belies the reticence of the statement being made. The spiritual and the material aspects of her being are divided: there is her body and there is her heart; the beloved has laid claim without right to the former, her physical being (‘il se fist de ce corps possesseur’). Le coeur is implicitly portrayed as the locus of spiritual or emotional autonomy. The coeur and corps of the Marian lover are inextricably bound since unwarranted possession literally and figuratively violates the rightful unity of her being (in the end, he shall discover her ‘tout’ vne’, 8: 14); no longer her body but ‘this bodye/ce corps’. Such objectification evokes the fragmented corporeality of the female blason.65 Historically, this sonnet has repeatedly been interpreted as Mary’s confession that Bothwell raped her. The Cambridge manuscript glosses the text as allusion to Bothwell’s known abduction of Mary at Dunbar: ‘it declaris yt he had abusit hyr bodie…’.66 The Acts of Sederunt of 12 May 1567 record Bothwell’s imprisonment of Mary, only a week after he was legally exonerated for any complicity in the king’s murder: ‘hir Hienes was tane and holdin in Dunbar by James Erle Bothwele, Lord Hallis and Creychtoun, and certeine vtheris his Complices, contrar hir

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Majesties Will and Mynd’.67 Bothwell found mitigation for his action: ‘albeit hir Hienes was commovit for the present Tyme of his taking…sensyn, be his [Bothwell’s] good behaving towart hir Hienes, and having sur Knalege of his thankful Service in Time bygone, and for mair thankful Service in Time coming, that hir Hienes stands content with the said Erle, and hes forgiven, and forgives him […]’.68 Mary provided her own gloss on Bothwell’s alleged physical coercion at Dunbar (though here the truth may equally be veiled) in a missive written partly to placate French unease at her subsequent marriage to Bothwell, but granting him clear absolution: in oure returning he awayted ws be the way, accumpaneit with a greit force, and led ws with all diligence to Dunbar … Being thair, we reprochit him, the honour he had to be estemit of ws, his ingratitude, with all uther remonstrances quhilk mycht serve to red ws out of his handis. Albeit we fand his doingis rude, yit wer his answer and wordis bot gentill, that he wald honour and serve ws …69 The abduction, then violation, of the queen’s body proved for the anti-Marian factions evidence of the queen’s vulnerable ‘feminine’ body, physically but also politically capable of being possessed. Twentieth-century commentary upon the incident ironically reproduces the dictum that the sexually violated woman can still desire the perpetrator of that violation. Marshall, Thomson and Plaidy contrive naive justifications for Mary’s complicity in the rape, echoing the ugly assumptions of Mary’s detractors who implied that Bothwell had full consent, and of classical misogyny which conceived woman as a morally frail, sexually unbridled creature.70 Antonia Fraser offers the most sensitive, pragmatic interpretation: ‘he intended to place the queen in a situation from which she could not possibly escape marrying him.’71 Sexual possession was translated into political possession; ‘forcing a woman to submit sexually was viewed as a parallel to dominating one’s subject politically’.72 It might be argued that the material–spiritual dualism is too simplistic a dichotomy: that the body in this instance can be conceived in a more allegorical or symbolic sense. According to the analogy of ‘the queen’s two bodies’, ce corps might easily refer to her political rather than to her natural state. The lover (who is queen) is accordingly desired for the political power which she incarnates, and to which her natural body gives access. In supplicatory letters to Elizabeth, Mary makes use of this dual sense of the corporeal: ‘Do with my body at


your will, the honour or blame shall be yours.’73 However persuasive, there are arguments for retaining the sensus literalis, signifying the female sexual body, as opposed to the allegoria. First, legal definitions of rape (derived from the Latin rapere, to steal, seize or carry away) are founded on the presence or absence of the other party’s consent; this point was also crucial in the sixteenth-century juridical understanding of unlawful intercourse.74 The language of Mary’s sonnet strongly conveys the idea of coercion, ‘quhen he made himselfe possessor’, which implies verbatim the ‘abuse of a woman by force against her will’.75 The grammatical or textual enactment of the rape portrays the lover as mere (sexual) property; even if her heart remains inviolate, her body is not her own. Though she herself is the writing subject, she objectifies herself; she even weeps ‘pour lui’ (not because of him, but as if on his behalf). The stanza draws to its close with a catalogue of her sacrifices: ‘grandheur et conscience’ and the hauntingly non-explicit ‘tous autres respectes’. The violation of the sonnet’s first quatrain prefigures another in the sonnet, perpetrated this time against the body of the beloved, and for which the lover mourns: ‘Quand il versa de son sang mainte dragme/Quhen he bled of his blude great quantitie’. The original female violation is recalled in the second quatrain’s literal language of blood and sacrifice. While the sonnet itself discloses nothing else about this injury which curiously parallels the lover’s own physical and emotional injuries, the biographical-historical commentary glosses this as allusion to Bothwell’s wounding in Border skirmishes at Liddisdaill on 7 October 1566.76 According to Buchanan’s account, Mary fled ‘in haste lyke a mad woman’ to attend him;77 again, the historical consonances can be mapped. Yet how does the implied historical framework or ‘paratext’ for this sonnet impinge upon the erotic power or energy of the sequence itself which perhaps as a consequence is entirely destabilised. Wormald proposes that the sexually masochistic nature of Mary’s poetry was unusual: The woman portrayed in the letters and the sonnet [sic] is a woman utterly dominated by a man, one who would renounce everything for him, who masochistically dwells on her sacrifice – ‘my peace, my subjects, my subjected soul’ – and on the fact that he had raped her before she first loved him: the archetype, in other words, of the woman who adores the man who tramples on her […] not enough emphasis has been given to the fact that it was not a common

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theme in the sixteenth century […] it is curious that they should think up this kind of image …78 Wormald proceeds to cite Lucretia, evidence that the image of the raped woman was part of literary or mythic consciousness; but what the sonnet lacks, of course, is Lucretia’s exemplary response.79 A number of apparent ‘transgressions’ are committed in the Marian sequence, one of which seems to be the resolute persistence of desire. If the orthodox expository framework is removed, then the sonnet portrays a desire which (on both the lover and beloved’s parts) commits violence and demands sacrifice. Petrarchistic love poetry is wholly imbued with conceits which play upon the notion of the physically martyred lover, l’amant martyr. Yet, as a whole, the sequence eschews the orthodox petrarchisti language which, in itself, is interesting; the sequence is difficult to anchor in conventional languages of poetic desire. This may partly lie in its resolute and provocative ‘physicality’, a travesty or parody perhaps of the metaphorics of desire in Renaissance love poetry. In the early modern poetic discourse of feminine eros, Louise Labé’s projection of the lovers’ erotic union embodied in inordinate kisses is comparatively rare.80 Yet it can be argued that the sonnet forges a new language of the desecrated female body which enters into dialogue with the other implicit neo-Platonic desires of the sequence. If the sonnets are made to enter a different rhetorical and philosophical context of erotic discourse from that in which they have been encased, then a new morality and a new poetics of desire can emerge.

Love’s purgation: reversing the ‘fall’ of the casket sonnets Within the interpretative context of the Detectioun and the Cambridge manuscript, the sonnets are castigated for their fallen morality. Yet, ironically, the Marian lover can also be seen to desire within herself an individually scrupulous love, one defined by its own moral aspirations toward the qualities of purity and ‘foy’. She seeks to ‘mak him [the beloved] perceiue my faythfulness’ (‘Que de ma foy, luy faire apperceuoir’, 2: 8); she will ‘geif of my trueth sic profe,/That he sall know my constancie wtout fiction’ (‘Brief ie feray de ma foy telle preuue,/ Qu’il cognostra sans fainte ma constance’, 2: 11–12). Given that both Mary and her texts were castigated for duplicity, ‘truth’ becomes a word and concept almost obsessively pursued throughout the ‘sequence’. The antithesis between being and seeming, être and paraître, is largely realised through the division forged between the lover, the embodiment of true


‘foi’ or faith, and sa femme, corrupt, scheming, materially self-seeking. The Marian lover casts herself in the role of sexual and moral judge in the sequence that was itself to be legalistically and morally ‘judged’: Quant vous l’amiez elle vsoit de froideur. Sy vous souffriez pour s’amour passion Qui vient d’aymer de trop d’affection, Son doig monstroit, la tristesse de coeur N’ayant plaisir de vostre grand ardeur En sez habitz monstroit sans fiction Qu’elle n’auoit paour qu’imperfection Peust l’effacer hors de ce loyal coeur. De vostre mort ie ne vis la peaur Que meritoit tel mary & seigneur. Somme de vous elle à eu tout son bien Et n’à prisé ny iamais estimé Vn si grand heur si non puis qu’il n’est rien Et maintenant dit l’auoir tant aymé. (5: 1–14) Quhen you louit hyr sche usit coldnesse, Gif you suffrith for hir luif passioun, That cummith of to greit affectioun of luife: Hyr sadnes schew the tristesse of hyr hart, Taking na plesure of zour veheme[n]t burning, In hyr clothing she schew unfaynitly, That sche had na feir, that imperfection Could deface hyr out of that true hart. I did not see in hyr the feir of your death, That was worthy of sic husband and Lord. Schortly sche hath of you all hyr wealth. And hath neuer weyit nor estemit One so greit hap, but sins it was nat hirs, And now she saith that she loueth him so well. Sa femme even manipulates language for her own expedient purpose; if a fabrication or corruption by Mary’s ‘enemies’ (to which the first sonnet alludes), then such an admission of hermeneutic relativity in this sixth sonnet is ironic. The sonnet condemns the utterance of love which is imitated or ‘ventriloquised’ from ‘quelque autheur

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eluissant’; the beloved gives false faith to texts (escripts) which are duplicitous. Et voudroit bien mon amy deceuoir Par les escriptz tout fardez de sçauoir Qui pourtant n’est on son esprit croissant Ains emprunté de quelque autheur eluissant. A faint tresbien un enuoy sans l’auoir Et toutesfois ses parolles fardez, Ses pleurs, ses plaincts remplis de fictions, Et ses hautz cris & lamentations, Ont tant gaigné qui par vous sont gardez Ses lettres escripts ausquelz vous donnez foy Et si l’aymez & croyez plus que moy. (6: 4–14) And wald fayne deceiue my loue, By writinges and paintit learning, Quhilk nat the lesse did not breid in hir braine, Bot borrowit from sum feate authour, To fayne one sturt and haif none. And for all that hyr paintit wordis, Hyr teares, hyr plaintes full of dissimulation, And hyr hye cryes and lamentations Hath won that poynt, that you keip in store, Hir letters and writinges, to quhilk you geif trust, Ye, and louest and beleuist hyr more than me. Though this echoes the anxieties about verbal hypocrisy intrinsic to poetic love-discourses, it risks incurring the anti-feminist dictum about female verbal corruption per se. Without the gendered. implications, the good lover is one who speaks ‘truth’, offering parolles which are not idolatrous. While the sonnet discloses itself as a kind of labyrinthine meditation on the nature of ‘love words’, the division which it sets up between lover and femme represents one of the poems’ paradoxes. That they should symbolise the dualism between material and non-material is a paradox; for the lover (the rival), whose love is sanctioned. by spiritual and moral richness, is seen to make the greatest material sacrifice of her physical self. There are further paradoxes. Though the lover may offer herself as a paradigm of virtue, by her own admission, she is


condemned by the moral judgements of others: ‘I’ay hazardé pour luy & nom & conscience’ (1:11, ‘I haue put in hasard for him baith fame and conscience’; ‘Moy vous obeyssant i’en puis receuoir blasme’ (3: 2, ‘I in obeying you may receiue dishonour’). Yet perhaps the most difficult of conceptual paradoxes is that which presents the loved. one as a paradigm of neo-Platonic virtues: ‘Celuy qui n’a en sens, ny en vaillance,/En beauté, en bonté, ny en constance/Point de seçonde’ (4: 12–14, ‘Him that hath none in wit, in manhood/In beauty, in bounty, in truth nor in constancy/Ony second’. She calls him her ‘seul bien & mon seul esperance’ (7: 3, ‘mine onely wealth, and my onely hope’ of her life), seeking to preserve herself for him intact: ‘Pour luy ie veux garder santé & vie’ (8: 12, ‘For him I will conserve health and life’). Her greatest ‘grandheur’ is ‘d’avoir part en ce coeur’ (8: 3, ‘to haue onely pairt in that hart’): an act of union, or consummation, with erotic, spiritual and political resonances. Yet in his act of rape, the beloved is condemned by those very standards which render him her object of desire; he seems to perceive her only as mere matter. Matter, the form of the bodily, is frequently conceived in terms of corruption: Plotinus writes of the ‘ugliness in the soul’ derived from the ‘infection and pollution’ of matter; Bembo chastises ‘corruptible bodies’.81 Further, in identification with the impure and bodily the lover is relegated to an anti-feminist orthodoxy: the innate association of woman and mere matter. This reduction of the feminine is entirely inevitable, if seen in the context or interpretative perspective of the Marian detractors. Internally within the sequence it is also ironic, given its wish to exonerate its lover’s desire from the charge of conventional female cupiditas. She is anxious that her love may be devalued by reason of its ‘femininity’: ‘Vous estimez mes parolles du vent,/Vous depeignez de cire mon las coeur,/Vous me pensez femme sans iugement/Et tous cela augmente mon ardeur’ (7: 10–14, ‘You think my wordes be but wind:/You paint my wery hart, as it were of waxe,/You imagine me ane woma[n] without iugement./And all that encreaseth my burning’). Invoking the orthodox, semi-proverbial indictments of female desire, its ephemerality, the Marian lover still rejects its implicit identification of woman with emotion, man with rationality, by subversively laying claim to both reason and ardeur, a passion which somehow bears intellectual credence.82 An even greater paradox is found in the sequence’s discourses of selfrenunciation and self-assertion. There is a voice which proclaims willing subjugation, of ‘corps, du coeur qui ne refuse paine’ (voiced in the first sonnet, as if to anticipate the ninth), and one which hotly defends herself and her integrity: ‘il cognostra sans fainte ma constance’ (2: 12,

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‘That he sall know my constancie wtout fiction’. As if in emulation of the true neo-Platonic lover, she seeks to render herself morally worthy to receive love. Yet in dutifully assuming a quasi-neo-Platonic humility, the Marian lover is self-abnegating. This might suggest the intrinsic powerlessness of the female lover which the rape sonnet only endorses as proof: ‘Est tout à luy, & n’ay autre voulloir’ (‘To him, and has none uther will’ 2: 4, though she seeks also to reclaim ‘le but de mon desir’ 11:6). Though the sequence presents an ironic travesty of erotic convention, in the neo-Platonic metaphor of the bodily, for example, it is easy to argue that as a whole it depicts Woman as victim: in her fragile, abused corporeality and as the betrayed mourner of classical, Ovidian and neo-Petrarchistic convention?83 Given that these texts, as part of the Protestant and pro-Elizabethan enterprise to discredit Mary, are already ‘co-opted’, as it were, to an antiMarian reading, they offer the provocation of a resistant reading practice. There is little possibility of a seamless feminist ‘recuperation’ against the historical ironies of their political fate. But I would argue that intellectually, and in the philosophical framework of eros in which they can be placed, these sonnets resist a uniform, homogeneous reading. The Marian sonnets challenge the received terms or languages by which Renaissance lyric desire is conceived. The sexual contradictions and multiplicities of Mary’s sonnets – their ardent reclamation of female desire which exposes male sexual rapacity and yet also to a degree portrays the desiring woman as compliant and submissive – might easily be conceived as reworkings of Petrarchism’s quintessential trope: namely that the lover exists in and by states of contradiction. The texts’ oscillation between self-denial and selfvindication can also symbolise, on the contra-Marian reading, the queen’s political vagaries, the charges of inconsistency and incompetence. As the invention of Marian adversaries, they can be cited as evidence that Mary’s amour vrai had led her to the most politically dangerous form of selfrenunciation; a prophecy fulfilled to an extent in the Bothwell marriage. Ultimately, perhaps, the most ‘transgressive’ reading is not one which perceives political vacillation within the sequence but one which recognises, but refuses morally to judge, its confession of contradictory, violent and intense erotic desires.

The flesh and the spirit: the neo-Platonic context Despite the moral censure which the Darnley controversy and the Detectioun’s publication ensured for these sonnets, they nevertheless portray a desire which aspires, however contradictorily, towards its


own moral and spiritual fulfilment. Mary’s sequence enters into dialogue, implicitly and explicitly, with the bodily eroticisation of neoPlatonism. Several of the Florentine neo-Platonists are recorded in the catalogue of Mary’s Holyrood library.84 The erotic tropes of the body and the spirit in treatises by Ficino, Bembo, Bruno or Leone, which ultimately proclaim the God-centred divinity of eros, in part moulded the rhetorical and philosophical contours of the sixteenth-century profane lyric; but they may be used to draw out the ramifications of the Marian female body, violated and subjugated. The ninth Marian sonnet carves out a literal feminine space which, in its literary context of erotic desire, travesties neo-Platonism’s conventional ideology of the body: here, one witnesses a new conception of the body which is not figuratively or allegorically structured, and which seemingly represents nothing other than itself. In the writings of Ficino and others, the lover’s body is conceived as an absence, a site of non-being. Ficino’s indictment of ‘the shadowy attraction of the body’ harks back to the condemnations of Plotinus, for example, who relegates the beauties perceived in mortal bodies to the status of mere ‘copies, vestiges, shadows’ of the true and divine beauty.85 Contemplation of the latter is attained only by the soul purged, or ‘wholly free of body’.86 The sensual temptations of earthly beauty are chimerical, mere illusions. Pico della Mirandola condemns the sensual appetite which desires corporeal objects, confined to the vulgar love of souls. Ficino explicitly states that the object of love must be incorporeal. The body may therefore only be loved for the sake of its immanence (the divine form within it); one must love spiritually and not materially. In apparent contradiction, these sonnets seem insistently to define desire by its material realisation and to remain preoccupied with the literal signification of le corps. Predictably, this conforms to the antifeminist, anti-Marian reading which, as in the Detectioun, weaves a symbolic condemnatory web between femininity, the female body and sexual desire. Las n’est il pas ia en possession Du corps, du coeur qui ne refuse paine Ny deshonneur, en la vie incertaine… Helas, is he nat alredy in possessioun Of my bodie, of hart, that refusis na payne, Nor dishonour in the life uncertaine… (1: 5–7)

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There are other examples. The lover’s rival is shunned for her sexual frigidity (sonnet 5) and the failure to revere his sexual grace; at least here, there is no spiritual sublimation. The second sonnet’s rendering of devotion, ‘Entre ses mains & en son plein pouuoir/le metz mon filz, mon honneur, & mavie, /Mon païs, mes subiectz, mon ame assubiectie’ (‘In his handis and in his full power, /I put my sonne, my honour, and my lyif, /My contry, my subiects, my soule al subdewit…’, 2: 1–3) conceives the transference of ‘power’ in literal and metaphorical terms: erotic submission enfolds within it the political. Sexual and political subjugation coalesce in the anti-Marian interpretation as if to presage Bothwell’s ascendancy. While some of these allusions to the material fail to evoke the sensuality of Labé’s poetics but seemingly serve to endorse the ‘aberrant’ morality of the Marian lover, the violation sonnet more profoundly spurns the common neo-Platonic idiom of corporeal insubstantiality and evanescence. Its literal, rhetorically visceral conception of the body is far removed from Bembo’s transcendent notion of the body as a beautiful ‘veil’. In the proclaimed division from le coeur, le corps insists on its own irreducibility. On this level, the quatrain resists the orthodox meaning of female corporeality in Renaissance erotics as a synecdoche in a masculinised system of representation of the desired but absent female body. If wedded to the literal, the sonnet can be read as a revocation of the most fundamental of neo-Platonic tenets: the apotheosis of the erotic into the spiritual. Its depiction of coerced sexual union, and unwarranted possession of the body, therefore intensifies into a harrowing feminine rewriting of another orthodox conceit of amatory discourse: the exchange of souls and hearts, or the way in which the lover harbours an image, conventionally a mirror, of the loved one within her or his being. This conceit, at least in part, seems to derive from the neo-Platonic conception of union. Lorenzo de Medici writes, ‘Love is simply a transformation of the lover into the object of love; and when reciprocal, it necessarily gives rise to the same transformation into him who first loves, who then becomes loved, so that lovers live marvellously in each other, for this exchange of hearts means nothing else’.87 The Ficianian commentary on Plato expounds this notion of loving assimilation in detail. The lover aspires to become the loved one; in so doing s/he must yield up a part of her or himself. This is a loss which still brings joy: the self is destroyed but lives through this union to become something better, more perfect. Sperone defines ‘perfect love’ as a similar union of two lovers ‘so that, losing their individualities, they are both fused into one new being’.88 In contrast, Mary’s lover seems to suffer only loss in this sonnet; indeed the whole sequence elegises loss in a protracted act of mourning. In the


language of Ficino, Mary’s lover finds no resurrection. The nature of this ineffable loss is embodied in the limpid statements of the ninth sonnet: ‘De perdre las le seul rampar qui m’arme’(8). The noun ‘rampar’ contains both literal and symbolic associations: signifying the beloved near death, and anticipating the sacrifice of ‘honneur … grandeur … conscience’. If such readings offered here work to diminish the apparently authoritative interpretation of the anti-Marian, anti-feminist reading of these sonnets, one powerful contradiction still endures: how can the seemingly profane intensity of the sequence be reconciled with the image of a queen who professed until the end that she was faithful in her religious devotion? Such adoration of a secular beloved sits awkwardly with adoration of her heavenly Lord. The Detectioun clearly aimed to accuse Mary of the sin of profanity but the sequence itself seems to abrogate any desire to remain in a state of grace. The willing assertion of death (1: 10) might be taken as the suicide which leads to purgatory; the implication of adultery already travesties the sacrament of marriage. Although to Buchanan and the uniformly Protestant antiMarian faction, the devoutly Catholic Mary was already an apostate, these further suggestions of heresy could only be welcomed. Yet the idea of the divine cannot be so neatly expurgated from these texts. Nor is there such an irreparable breach between the sonnets and the later, authentic sonnets of expiation and penance which Mary wrote. One ironic reading may ultimately be proposed which escapes the closure of anti-Marian interpretation: namely, that the sonnets glorify, and martyr, feminine desire in their abrogation of the corrupt, earthly beloved.

‘Un corps privé de coeur’: erotic and spiritual martyrdom ‘O Dieux… ayez de moi compassion’ (1: 1, O Goddis haue of me compassioun’); ‘…de vous seul ie cerche l’alliance’ (9: 14, ‘…I seke the aliance of you onely’; ‘Dieu détourne tout malheureux augure’ (11: 14, ‘O God turne abacke all unhappy augure’): there may be a third interlocutor in Mary’s sequence, as implied by these three assertions. These may be an invocation of God whom she invokes to protect and pity herself and her beloved, and to enter into union with her. In the first sonnet, there may be textual interference or corruption: the plural ‘Dieux’/Goddis’, unless used perhaps in a trinitarian sense, evokes a more classicised, paganised quality, hence intensifying the negative

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portrait of the heretical Mary.89 If one proceeds on the assumption that it signifies God the Father, the ‘Seigneur Dieu’ or ‘Souverain Pere’ of Mary’s devotional sonnets, deeper, more contradictory resonances are sounded.90 The lover implores that God instruct her in the attainment of ‘amour & ferme affection’: O Dieux ayez de moy compassion, Et m’enseignez quelle preuue certain Ie puis donner qui ne luy semble vain… O Goddis haue of me compassioun, And schew quhat certaine profe I may geif, which shall nat seme to him vaine… (1: 1–3) As in the closing statement of the violation sonnet, it signifies a sudden change of pronoun, for the beloved has formerly been addressed as ‘il/lui’. It may be that the latter deictic confers a distance and impersonality on the beloved who perpetrated the act; that the beloved whom she desires avec le coeur can be addressed or conceived only in a separate grammatical or psychological existence. Yet the presence of the divinity, whether theocentrically or not, within this new union remains implicit. At moments throughout the sequence, her love is literally unworldly: ‘Ie veux pour luy au monde renoncer:/Ie veux mourir pour luy auancer (1: 12–13, ‘I will for his sake renounce ye world/I will die to set him forwart’). One might suggest that the ninth sonnet shelters the possibility of mystic love, redolent of the erotic martyrdom exemplified by medieval female mystics. In an act of loving adoration, the body is sacrificed to God. The anguished literal corporeality of the ‘union’ with the secular lover might end with this access to the spiritual: ‘For love’s work is this: to desire the most intimate union, the closest adhesion to that state in which the soul abandons herself to love … in love and affliction she is ready to endure everything’.91 Through this implicit embrace of divinely sanctioned amour vrai, the sonnets now conform to the conventional denouement of the Renaissance sonnet sequence. Yet even if one grants Mary’s sequence a divine protagonist, it still does not emulate the clear spiritual progress or teleology of the archetypal sequence, beginning in the earthly and ending in sanctification. Though the arrangement of the sonnets cannot be authorially endorsed, it is still pertinent to observe


that the first sonnet after the violation text still pledges faith in this fallen, secular beloved. A quoy i’estudiray pour tousiours vous co[m]plaire, Sans aymer rien que vous, soubz la subiection De qui je veux sans nulle fiction Viure & mourir & a ce i’obtempere. (10: 11–14) The quhilke I shall study to the fine that I may euer please you. Louying nothyng but you, in the subiectioun Of quhome I wyll without any fictioun, Liue and die, and this I consent. This litany of sacrifices strongly suggests that the lover seems to seek and demand of herself a kind of martyrdom. Martyrdom, for and on behalf of the Catholic faith, was to represent the final stage of Marian hagiography. In the 1580s, especially on the continent, the pro-Marian iconography of the martyred queen strengthened.92 The implied martyrology of these sonnets also links with her religious poetry, perhaps ironically so; she was martyred for these sonnets, the corona of thorns she had to bear throughout the last two decades of her life. While these sonnets cannot in any way contribute to this later strain of ‘canonisation’ (the Bishop of Ross in his ardent defences, for example, never attempted to ‘reclaim’ these texts; that would have been political folly), they nevertheless remain potentially ‘redemptive’ in that they can be seen to mirror several variants of feminine martyrdom in Renaissance female discourse. In their totality, the sonnets seem to exalt female love (not the rival’s, which does come perilously near to misogynistic paradigm, but the ‘true’ feminine mode of loving) as being far superior in moral terms to the male lover who fails to perceive, or emulate, love’s true foi. Female physical frailty, symbolised by the rape, is countered by the spiritual triumph of feminine loving.93 This notion of quasi-heroic sacrifice in pursuit of a spiritual ideal – whether we constitute that as divine love or as that of the perfected secular lover – is explored in Mary Wroth’s and Gaspara Stampa’s amatory sonnet sequences, which also stress the virtuous renunciations of the female lover. According to Elaine Beilin, Wroth’s ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’ ‘glorifies a love which affirms and sanctifies the primacy of woman’s virtue’.94 Stampa, in Ann Rosalind Jones’s reading,

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portrays ‘her own heroism in suffering. In this couple, constancy and strength belong to the woman’.95 Gravdal observes Hrotsvitha’s transformation of ‘the hagiographic troping of rape’ by her depiction of ‘male violence against women as a way to represent female virtue, courage and power’.96 This mirrors the female body within female saints’ lives: however violated and ‘desecrated’, it remains spiritually intact and symbolically inviolate. However suggestive these conceptual parallels might be, it could be argued that in the context of the Marian sonnets sacrifice is a reactionary rather than a radical gesture: that this affirmative martyrdom is merely the glorified endorsement of conventional female gestures of humility, suffering and sacrifice. It might at the most reductive level be held as a further accommodation of the ‘conduct-book discourses’ which, as Jones observes, are subsumed into women writers’ lyrics to pre-empt moral censure;97 and, of course, in anti-Marian discourses, perhaps superlatively in the Detectioun, sacrifice is a morally incriminatory gesture. But it is also one which ‘fits’ the context of the female complaint, the context of the Heroides, in which the female lover, as Patricia Philippy asserts, ‘insists upon the virtuous performance of their narratives as a representation of erotic martyrdom in which feminine constancy and fidelity are sacrificed to masculine heroic negotium’.98 The idea of the moral superiority of feminine sacrifice is already implicit within the classical model of female erotic martyrdom. What remains a profound, perhaps disquieting absence within these sonnets is the lack of a penitential framework. The notion of sin seems to have been expelled, contrasting with the religious poetry securely attributed to Mary in which she conceives herself as another Magdalene.99 In the latter, anticipating the concept of atonement in the next comparison with Peter, the analogue evokes the penitential typology of the Magdalene as sexual sinner as well as the melancholic concept of the beautiful penitent. Seeking grace and absolution, Mary’s penitent depicts ‘passion’, in the sense of suffering in imitation of Christ’s Passion inscribed within her, through the metaphor of the body: the body bowed down with grief, the body which she seeks to remake, create anew, as ‘chaste’. In the casket-sonnets, sin is either ‘irrelevant’, or not a term of moral currency; or sinfulness has already been expiated in God’s sight, and absolution granted. Perhaps only in the starkly announced assertion of the fourth sonnet that ‘je vis en cette foy’ is found a veiled allusion to her mother faith. *


The Marian sequence succeeds in eluding the original and enduring interpretation of the anti-Marian faction. There are certain facets of the sequence which suggest such evasion might be impossible. The strange naivete of terms such as ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ seem to militate against Mary’s authorial responsibility; the allusion to her ‘filz’, James, is strange and haunting. While the Cambridge manuscript annotates it as the symbolic transference of power from Mary to Bothwell (f. 46r), the significance is not simply political. Mary becomes at once both mother and the lover/prostitute of the anti-Marian imagination; James is the child forsaken, but Mary cannot inhabit the role of the mater dolorosa. And yet the poems resist the categorical condemnation which they elicited. Desire itself is never sacrificed whether one reads the ultimate form of desire as being for God, or for the lover whom her moral imagination still seeks to redeem. There is an implicit desire to renounce the bodily though the sequence on one level remains inextricably anchored in the material and the erotic. Elusiveness is itself a facet of the desire which the sonnets elliptically disclose. The overwhelming sense gleaned from these sonnets in Mary’s name is of a love wholly enclosed in its own intensity but also insubstantial, imperfect, incomplete. As attested by the ironic adoration of a flawed beloved, the lover’s lucidly expounded ideal of amour vrai fails to find an embodiment, at least human. This paradoxical desire for a desire in itself unattainable and impossible to realise was glossed by Leone’s account of a desire rooted only in imagination: whose object is not the particular thing that we desire, since that has no actual being, but only the idea [concetto] of this thing derived from its generic being, and the object of such love is not particular, and therefore it is not real love if a real object be lacking to it, but only a thing simulated or imagined, for desire of such a thing is devoid of real love…100 Perhaps the Marian portrait of desire is founded on a concetto, or the imaginative beatification, of desire: there are frequent allusions to its potential, and to the possibility of the eternal: ‘Mon amour croist & plus en plus croistra/Tant que ie viuray, & tiendray à grandheur,/Tant seulement d’auoir part en ce coeur…’ (8: 1–3, ‘My loue increaseth, and more and more wil increase,/So long as I shall lief, and I shall holde for ane greit felicitie/To haue onely pairt in that hart […]’. *

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Ultimately, these Marian texts resist assimilation into the conventional canon of Renaissance amatory lyric, resembling Monique Wittig’s provocative definition of the literary Trojan horse: ‘Any work with a new form … is always produced in hostile territory. And the stranger it appears, nonconforming, unassimilable, the longer it will take for [it] to be accepted’.101 The Marian lover insists upon the uniqueness of her desire: ‘Non par mes pleurs ou fainte obeyssance,/Co[m]me autres ont fait, mais par diuers espreuue’ (2: 13–14, ‘Not by my weping, or faynit obedience,/As other haue done: bot be uther experience’), suggesting that female desire has not been imagined, or confessed, in this way before is declared by the lover herself who takes ‘la main au papier’ (12: 2). Neither, perhaps, has a queen been so erotically incarnated ‘au papier’; precisely the novelty which her detractors sought as they bound the sonnets inextricably to the historical trinity of Mary–Bothwell–Bothwell’s wife. If their embodiment of both female and monarchical eros inaugurated some kind of ‘precedent’ within Scottish, indeed European, literary and political culture, it was not to be repeated; implicitly and explicitly, that was the intent of Mary’s son a decade later. For James, who had newly acceded to the crown and whose political power was at first more fragile than desired, the sorrowful exemplum of his mother could only imply that there was a dangerously short step from symbolic to literal disavowal of sovereignty. Mary’s fate, and the political destiny of these sonnets, made poetic eros dangerous. Yet, much as James arguably sought both to evade and erase Mary’s dark history, the decade which witnessed the publication of Marian eros (the casket-sonnets) was also that in which the most extensive collection of love lyrics was assembled Within the largely unsigned corpus of lyrics in the Bannatyne manucript, the terms of feminine eros are debated. The nature of desire, of the beautiful Woman both pure and corrupt, and of the Blessed Virgin, seemed to acquire a new aesthetic and political currency in the light of Mary and her reign.

2 Demonic and Angelic Women: The Erotics of Renunciation and Mariology in the Bannatyne Manuscript

Heir followis ballattis of luve Devydit in four pairtis The first Ar songis of luve The secound ar Contemptis of luve and evill wemen The thrid ar contempis of evill fals vicius men and the fourt Ar ballattis detesting of luve And lichery1 In terms of eros, the lyrics encompassed by the overarching generic title, ‘ballattis of luve’, and contained in the 375-leaf folio known as the Bannatyne manuscript, are its most substantial incarnation in the reign of Mary Queen of Scots. In a period which produced peculiarly little erotic poetry dedicated to or concerning Mary, the Bannatyne manuscript’s obsessive preoccupation with the feminine in its amatory section partially redresses this absence in its strange quartet division of erotic poems. Perhaps appositely enough for a decade that witnessed two sovereign weddings, supposed queenly adultery and the ultimate deposition of that ‘transgressive’ monarch, desire possesses many semantic forms: ‘passioun’, ‘lust’, ‘foly’, ‘game’, ‘freindschip’, ‘delyt’, ‘service’, ‘the god of Luve’, ‘sensuall affectione’ and ‘sensualitie’; ‘luve’ is also transacted morally, duplicitously, honestly, religiously, spiritually and carnally. As if to pre-empt charges of imprecision about the erotic material assembled in his generically encyclopaedic ballat buik, 46

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George Bannatyne (1545–1606), the Edinburgh burgess conventionally identified as the manuscript’s chief compiler and scribe, creates these four pairtis or ‘subdivisions’. Superficially, a clear teleology of desire is mapped out. The first songis, rhetorically and aesthetically rooted in conventions of amour courtois, are transformed into final renunciations of the cupiditas that precludes rightful obedience to God. Between these two ‘movements’ lie the second and third of Bannatyne’s ‘divisions’, the ‘contempis of […] evill wemen’ and of ‘evill […] men’. The ostensible ‘teleology’ or apotheosis of eros is embodied in the object of first ecstatic, then sinful adoration: Woman, in Bannatyne’s fourth corpus, is presented manichaeistically as virtuous and vicious, angel and diablesse. 2 The alternate degradation and glorification of the female body and spirit must be recognised as the conceptual thread which binds all four ‘subsections’ of the corpus together in a previously unrecognised ideological continuity. Since the figure of Woman is both angelic and demonic, pure and fallen, these texts gathered under the fragile rubric of amorous poetry lay bare in stark, oppositional clarity the theoretical contours of the feminine in early modern secular love poetry. Yet, while exemplary in this broad conceptual sense, they constitute a symbolic form which is realised in a precise historical, cultural and religious context of utterance. Mary defines that context; as David Parkinson asserts, ‘the querelle des femmes is apt to gain momentum as an instrument of political purpose’.3 The Bannatyne ‘philosophy’ of the feminine must be rooted in this decade of controversial female political and sexual power; its querelle des femmes is implicitly also a querelle de Marie. Yet the Bannatyne corpus also presents a complex symbolic articulation of the feminine. Its theological, moral and sexual ‘Manichaeism’ is sculpted to meet the exigencies of a politicised, Protestantised anthology of love lyrics. Yet what is rendered ‘permissible’ is the doctrinally precise female iconicity of the Virgin Mary.

The Bannatyne decade: Marian and Reformation culture Bannatyne’s ballat buik once had the reputation, endorsed by eighteenth-century Scottish cultural anthologists such as Allan Ramsay and James Watson, of being a precocious oddity; the single prodigious effort of the youthful George Bannatyne to preserve and create a national poetic heritage in a period of crisis. Divided into five sections, each generically and conceptually defined – devotional, moral, comic, erotic genres and, ultimately, a series of ‘fabillis’4 – the manuscript is a


unique witness of many medieval and early modern Scottish texts, adaptations and translations that justifies classification of its compilatory strategies as both ‘promulgation’ and ‘preservation’.5 Yet recent historiographical, cultural and ideological readings have deepened understanding of its scope and motivation. 6 The Bannatyne family, from the 1530s onwards, belonged to a rising urban and merchant elite in Edinburgh bearing professional affiliations to the Stuart monarchy. As Theo van Heijnsbergen has argued, the manuscript can be considered as a cultural ‘intermediary’ between court and urban elites. Both van Heijnsbergen and Alasdair MacDonald argue for the manuscript’s collation as a more communal enterprise, one highly attuned to the changing fragilities of Marian politics. According to the series of dates inscribed within the manuscript, the year 1568 would appear to be its terminus.7 The manuscript ‘closes’ one year after Mary’s deposition with the troubled ascendancy of the Protestant regent nobility. Yet there is also another inscribed date at the conclusion of the luve ballattis which appears to have been emended: 1565, the year of Mary’s marriage to Darnley. As MacDonald and Michael Lynch argue, the early years of Mary’s reign, culminating in the marriage, would have been the most propitious period for Marian secular poetry: The half dozen months of Mary’s infatuation with Darnley would have provided a hospitable climate for an anthology of ‘ballattis of luve’. In 1565 Mary was still maintaining the equilibrium of religious politics which she had initiated on her return to Scotland from 1561, and it would still have been possible to envisage the publication of a volume of courtly love verse, always provided that the latter was not incompatible with Protestant belief.8 The queen may have presided over a cour amoureuse, both literally and symbolically, during the Darnley courtship. For this brief period, Mary may even have assumed a symbolic incarnation comparable to that of her cousin Elizabeth: the sovereign who represents inaccessible desire but is the subject of writing that fuses erotic and political metaphors. The dominant trope of desire in these first, largely anonymous sangis is certainly modelled on the orthodox courtly paradigm of sovereign and subject: ‘I am hir s[e]ruiture // Scho is my souerane’; ‘O venus soverane haif pety on my pane’.9 Yet, if the fourth corpus is hypothetically a quasi-nuptial anthology, there are surprising omissions. Famously, there is the lyric ‘q king hary stewart’ but none by Mary herself, a curious absence given her then


securely established creativity.10 Though MacDonald notes the publication of Thomas Craig’s Latin epithalamium,11 there are no recognisable epithalamia in the manuscript itself, though the anthology as a whole includes earlier courtly ceremonial verse by William Dunbar, and includes Alexander Scott’s ‘Welcum’ to the newly arrived queen inscribed 1562. This is the only conspicuous, and suitably cautious, Marian text. No obvious covert allusions to Mary through anagrammatical or allegorical play are easily detected. Those existing sangis may be only partially representative of the original celebrations that Lynch and MacDonald postulate. Yet it seems curious that Darnley’s small poem of love service and devotion should remain, as a provocatively posthumous reminder of a once auspicious love. The absence of verse by Mary in this period may reflect the problematic nature of women’s public, poetic utterance at the court. The apparent ‘silencing’ of the earthly Marian queen, at least, begs a number of questions about the scope of female aesthetic agency in Scotland at this moment. The textual ‘invisibility’ of Mary may also reflect a Protestant, political act of censorship. Bannatyne’s other textual ‘Protestantised’ emendations have been shrewdly observed by MacDonald,12 while Evelyn S. Newlyn has recently disclosed the ideological nature of Bannatyne’s editing practices as a whole: ‘Each poem, not just its inclusion but its placement in the manuscript, is the product of Bannatyne’s careful thought and deliberate design.’13 Parkinson observes that the ‘wellplaced, well-connected, mercantile Banntyne family […] could read a wide range of political positions and affiliations into the poems they found’.14 The amatory corpus in particular exemplifies the ‘editorial’ rigour which characterises Bannatyne’s text, a carefully designed anthology rather than a miscellany. As Newlyn points out, authorial and editorial prologues, studded throughout the manuscript, impose strategies of readerly interpretation: ‘interpretative direction-moral, religious, and aesthetic’.15 Uncharacteristically, the first ‘instruction’ of the erotic section is relatively indifferent: To the reidar Heir haif ye luvaris ballattis at your will How evir your natur directit Is vntill16 Bannatyne, as assumed copyist or transcriber, seemingly resigns responsibility for these texts (ironically, authorship of two is attributed to him in this section).17 Reception of these lyrics is a question of


abnegation, dependent upon the individual’s proclivities and interpretative will (there is surely a sexual pun intended here). Yet the imagined reader is an active interpretative participant only briefly. The remaining part of the address develops into a christianised retraction of love, a recantatio well in advance of the officially designated ‘contempis’. Bot wald ye luve Eftir my counsalling Luve first your god aboif all vder thing Nixt As your self Your nichtbour beir gud will (3–5) This is dutifully pious, its didactic posture anticipating that of the subsequent and copious preceptor amoris poems. The practice of reading profane literature is categorised as a form of moral as well as erotic seduction, endorsing the sheer affective power of love rhetoric to which early modern treatises abundantly testify. Bannatyne’s moral and literary authority is thus sealed. Given the manuscript’s editorial and ‘directional’ rigour, it may have been intended for publication,18 in accordance with the growing culture of printed manuscript miscellanies in England.19 Given the contentious status of print in the period and the relative confinement of secular literature in Scotland within a manuscript culture until the end of the sixteenth century, this is not inevitable.20 As van Heijnsbergen has suggested, a literate reading ‘public’ may have been constituted from urban and courtly circles though the nature and conditions of any reception are undocumented.21 Further, the clear intertextuality of the erotic corpus strongly suggests the existence of ‘a system of exchange operating independently from print circulation’.22 The lyrics are consistently portrayed as texts in circulation, ‘billis’ passed from lover to beloved (with ‘sum gudlie ansuering’ anticipated in return23) which must act on behalf of a lover in absentia: ‘Go littill bill and be my aduocat’.24 The bill or letter of love acts as an intercessor: Beseik that schene wt hu[m]mill reuerence… Say also to that gudlie fair and fresche of all my panis scho may me weill relesche25 Desire is a purely textual transaction, dependent on the lover’s transcription of desire and the beloved’s adequate interpretation of that representation. Within the fourth amatory section appear several


poems by the earlier fifteenth-century writers William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, Walter Kennedy and Gavin Douglas.26 Alexander Scott is the most prolifically named contemporary lyricist; other writers to whom more than one lyric is assigned include ‘Mersar’, ‘Fethy’, ‘Stewart’, ‘Moffat’, ‘Clerk’, ‘Weddirburne’.27 A substantial proportion of the lyrics are unsigned and are unique witnesses. While there is a copy of the ‘Canticus Troili’ from Troilus and Criseyde, there are a number of erroneous attributions of the anti-feminist poems to Chaucer.28 As MacDonald has conjectured, it is possible that the love lyrics originally formed a separate manuscript, perhaps intended for presentation to Mary herself, but then abandoned in the light of later political exigencies. Clearly, it could only have been ‘gifted’ well before the Darnley marriage of 1565. Yet while there is scant explicit textual evidence of Mary, she is symbolically incarnate in the ‘Contempis of luve and evill wemen’. The importance of these texts in the reconstruction of the manuscript as a Marian anthology has not been considered. Of course, they are hardly appropriate for a celebratory nuptial anthology but the wider ideological implications of this palinode to the luve songis proper must have had a peculiar intensity post-1568 when Darnley was dead and Mary discredited.29 Observing the frequently ‘politically correct’ nature of the manuscript, MacDonald observes the anthology’s prioritising of religious and moral verse.30 In any neoPlatonic or broadly Petrarchistic scheme of desire, this ‘denigration’ of the secular or profane is inevitable; but, given the cultural context, any expression of eros courted deeper controversy. This chapter is predominantly concerned with the contemptis and defences of women, those poems contra and pro mulieribus. These texts arise out of an interesting ideological axis: orthodox conventions of the querelle des femmes, religious doctrine lent particular shape by nascent Protestantism, and the secular, courtly morality of female conduct. This dualistic portrait of woman as both angelic and demonic, while rooted in a complex intellectual, philosophical and religious weave, enshrines two contrasting cultural images of Mary in the decade of the 1560s: of a femininity first pure, then fallen. This may be a gesture towards the politicised, Protestantised sensibility of the manuscript’s anthologist and circle. Yet paradoxically, the salvation of fallen femininity in the poems which defend Woman is attained through the Catholic Regina Maria. The realm of the feminine in the Bannatyne fourth corpus appears both censored and unexpurgated, the site of a residual Mariology as well as its suppression. Since each text within the anthology always provides a meaningful context


for its other texts, the ‘prelude’ to the contempis and defence is explored first: this comprises the songis of luve, probably designed for (courtly) musical performance, which first illustrate the iconography of the feminine.

Beauty and the feminine ‘figour’ If the ‘contempis’ and defence of women (the second and third ‘pairtis’ of the ballattis of luve, ff. 250r–68v; 269r–80v) unequivocally represent the demonic and angelic feminine, the ‘songis of luve’ (ff. 211r–49v) mirror an eroticised version of the latter; the figour of Woman made exemplary by fixed conceptions of beauty, virtue and desire. These first lyrics bear more than a tangential relation to the fallen and virginal states of the subsequent texts. Tasso’s comment that ‘[l]ove adds perfection to a woman; yet we do not deny that per se she is a most perfect thing’,31 crystallises the way in which these lyrics present the beloved woman as untainted, if not positively transfigured, by the male erotic gaze: The grittar desyre I haif vnto your sycht The less I get your language and presens The nerrer the sycht the ferrer frome audiens32 Desire affects only the desiring subject; the beloved’s desirability is contingent upon her moral and sexual perfection. With the exception of one incomplete aubade, these lyrics portray a desire which depends on its condition of unfulfilment.33 In depicting the process as opposed to the consequence of desire, the lyrics are concerned with its potentiality. Such desire is condemned to a perpetual state of imperfection and incompletion. Although the beloved is chided for her aloofness (‘Gud ladeis lat not wilfullnes/exuperat your bewteis than’34), this very refusal to consent sanctifies the lover’s desire. If she consents, the beloved destroys the necessary ‘illusion’ of her sexual purity, depriving her of the precious possession of chastity. The poetry subsequent to these songis is concerned with the woman who has consented, and whose sexuality is not simply embodied by a beautiful rhetorical surface. The female ‘presence’ in the songis is principally mediated through the quasi-Petrarchistic idiom of female beauty. Feminine sexuality becomes aesthetically rarefied. The insistent fascination with the female ‘schap…forme…fygour’35 transforms Woman into a beautiful object, a microcosmic ‘warld of bewtie’: ‘Beauty is the proper value of


woman’.36 Through erotic iconography, she is figured as a sensual abstraction: a ‘perle’ or ‘dyama[n]t’; a ‘fragrant olif violat rubicumbent’, a sequence of epithets which combines exoticism (the olive), with an oddly beautiful Latinate variation on the red and white beauty topos.37 The erotic image has frequent symbolic import: the ‘Yung brekand blosum yit on the stalkis grene/Delytsum lilly lusty for to be sene’ suggests a virginal purity which might yet be ‘broken’.38 Sexuality is not always contained or suppressed by the metaphor that seeks to compensate for a metonymic absence. Female corporeality unites these lyrics, the ‘courtlie corss of portratour p[er]fyt’ aesthetically laid bare: Thair wes nevir day that dew // nor dyamont sa deir na stane sa haill of hew // as is ye hyd of hair hir ene as cristall cleir // wt luflie lawchand cheir hir pawpis till perle ar peir // p[er]fyt and poleist new39 The female figour is transformed into an object of poetic and erotic contemplation. Ironically, this is an artifice which does not incur the conventional censure of female artifice copiously exemplified by the later querelle texts; indeed, it is positively emphasised (‘hir portratour of most plesance/all pictour did prevene’).40 The archetypal sixteenthcentury device for the poetic display of beauty (‘the lady…corporeally scattered’, in Vickers’s phrase), the blason, is found copiously; if not as the usual catalogue or litany of bodily beauties, as the concentrated, précieux description of an object such as ‘hir Lippis’, ‘The fragra[n]t balme of odour co[m]fortatyve’.41 Beauty is therefore conveyed by procedures of hyperbole and fragmentation. Hir cristall ene all forgit wt delyt Surmonting topatioun anamalit celicall Sa fair was nevir figour // no fame on flud so quhyt So pro[per] of portratour // sa p[air]t no sa p[er]fyt Hir lyre is lilly lyk // plesand forowttin plyt In bour is no so brycht // beriall no blench flour Hir hair displayit as the goldin wyre aboif hir heid wt bemys radient Is lyk ane buss that birnys in the fire Wt flam[m]ys reid but fumys Elevant42


The female body in these lyrics can be conceived as a paradox: sexually interpretable or ‘readable’ by the male poet or voyeur but resolutely chaste. Its beauty is ideologically sound, frequently emblematic of ‘vertew, meikness, trewth’.43 The physical beauty which cannot fail to symbolise sexuality is tempered by behaviour reflecting the conventional trinity of Renaissance female conduct books, chastity, silence and obedience: moir meik wes nevir creature on life Wt hair bryt glitterand as the gold Of pulchritud the fair figour The mirror eik of all meiknes The verry stapill of steadfastness The well of vertew and flour of woman[n] heid And patrone unto patiens Lady of lawty bayt in word and deid ryt sobir sweit full meik of eloquens44 This alliance of physical and moral beauty reflects the common neoPlatonic conceit of beauty as the outer envelope of the soul, and thus the corollary between external and internal form. 45 It is comparable to the prescriptions of a Renaissance moralist such as Vives, the discourse in which ‘meik’ conduct signifies a ‘manageable’ or ‘regulated’ sexuality.46 Frequent emphasis upon the beloved’s social status, and the ubiquitous attributes of ‘nobility’ and ‘gentilness’, demarcate a particular social sphere of female virtue, not simply an obvious citation of amour courtois’s perennially ‘noble lady’.47 These supposedly abstract female paragons may be designed to engage with their audience or readership: in an aristocratic, courtly environment to hold up an idealising mirror to its gentlewomen or female courtiers, or as a model of social, moral and sexual aspiration for the urban or bourgeois woman.48 Desirability is contingent upon compliance with the prescribed moral ideal, and even the extreme of immaculate purity. Already, these luve songis venerate the Virgin Mary as the paradigm of female humility and sexual purity: To fortefie off famenene the fame Christ wes incarnat and incorporat And nureist nyn monethis in her wame


And eftir borne and bocht ws fra the blame of baliall that brint ws bitterly That onlie act saivis thame all fra schame And our allquhair th[air] fame dois fortify49 The negation of sexuality by the virginal ideal is offered at this early stage of the manuscript’s feminine ideology as women’s sole redemption: ‘[t]hat onlie act…’ by which the Christ-child was conceived in the Virgin womb (the imagery of the Virgin as vessel evoking medieval Marian hymns).50

Debating the querelle: fallen Woman The second and third sections of the ‘ballattis of luve’ entitled ‘contemptis’ were probably conceived as deliberate counterparts to one another.51 While they are named ‘contemptis’ of ‘evill wemen’ and then of ‘evill/fals vicious men’ (f. 211r), the latter ostensibly constitute a defence of women, rather than a condemnation of men, to parallel the preceding anti-feminist section. Even though an interesting gender balance is nominally set up by this editorial classification, these two sections are shaped by conventions which are persuasively those of the querelle des femmes: the philosophical, cultural and rhetorical debate about the nature of Woman in which there was a resurgence of interest in the mid sixteenth century.52 Bannatyne’s compendium is set against a European book market flooded with publications, new and reissued, which engage in various ways with the querelle debate. These lyrics are therefore assembled at an auspicious time in the history of the querelle polemic; Bannatyne may have thus ensured for his anthology a conspicuous fashionableness. Controversy arises over the kind of culture which fosters the querelle genre at any time: in particular, whether it inevitably mirrors the misogynistic, repressively patriarchal society which produced the structures of power. Evelyn S. Newlyn trenchantly argues that the Bannatyne contemptis reflect and perpetuate female political and sexual subordination, revealing unequivocally sexual and social hierarchies of power. ‘These poems treating desire and sex are thus revealed to be in service to a larger political intention; only secondarily about desire, these poems illustrate the use of sexuality in delineating, enforcing, and reinforcing power structures in a patriarchal culture […] they thus produce and reproduce the culture, they become potent statements of political power’.53


Constance Jordan argues of the European querelle tradition in general that the audience of readership for its therorically complex and diverse texts ‘are difficult to analyze precisely’.54 Other readings suggest that the ‘necessary postulate’ for such debate was ‘a free-thinking, openspeaking court dominated paradoxically by accomplished and witty women’.55 Though this rests upon an idealistic interpretation of Book 3 of Il Cortegiano, women may have been complicit participants in such literary culture (the quintessentially ludic court literature). This speculation has importance for any consideration of the Bannatyne ‘defences’ of women (in particular, for the status of Scottish women at court).56 In imitating earlier, predominantly medieval disquisitions on the ‘woman question’, the querelle text per se has been conceived as a demonstration of rhetorical skills ‘on both sides of the question’.57 Bannatyne’s texts reflect this dialectic, quasi-scholastic aspect (though Woodbridge, oddly, excludes the manuscript from the formal controversy on the grounds that it does not foster ‘a sense of genuine debate’).58 This rhetorical and ‘intellectual’ aspect, the demand for ‘at least the trappings of erudition’, has classed it as a non-popular genre.59 More persuasive is the argument that, like the luve songis which present woman as a textual and metaphorical posession, the texts reflect the homosocial literary environment (Woman as discursive commodity) that Sedgwick has analysed.60 If the impetus for the creation and circulation of this querelle literature increased as a consequence of the Marian controversies, then the question of their intent, serious or not, is weighted with political import. The continuum between the sangis and the querelle texts can be perceived in literary terms. Many of the lyrics have a similar rhetorical frame to the sangis. ‘In all this warld no man may wit’, for example, is devised as a letter of disenchantment: To yow madame this I indyte That lang yor trew lufe haif I bene Commending me Greiting I wryt…61 This reflects the empiricism of many songis in which both the beloved and the readership (or audience) witness the act of writing as a pledge of ‘authenticity’ or ‘sincerity’. None of the lyrics (with the exception of the quasi-’flyting’62) entails a high degree of verbal virtuosity or ingenuity. Their rhetorical character is generally defined by their citational ‘catalogues’ or ‘lists’ (the catalogue of authorities and allusion to proverbs), characteristic of the querelle mode in general. The proverbs,


drawn frequently from the biblical loci of Solomon, are portrayed as shared wisdom, unquestionable ‘truths’: Oft tymes hes it bene red and told Be vitty me[n] that vndirstude All glitterand thing is not of gold And ilk fair apill Is not gude Ane seik heid in a skarlet huid Oft haiss it bene this we heir say your fenyeit luve Is lyk the flud Quhat hand may hald that will away63 A series of lyrics precedes what might be termed the denunciations proper (announced by the inscription, ‘Aganis Wemen’, though generic or periodic fluidity is a characteristic of the section as a whole). These poems appear to form a ‘prologue’ which makes a seamless transition between the genre of love complaint and that of the querelle renunciation. The lover’s burden of discontent is insidiously shifted from passion per se to the object of that passion, woman, as if in extension of Alberti’s remark that ‘You can never love her [woman] without bitterness, fear, misfortune, and worry. Malevolent creature […]’.64 The lyricist’s impatience with the composition of ‘triumphand amowres balleittis’, for example, amounts to a dual renunciation: of the practice of love which means also that of loving women.65 Desire is denounced as emasculating: disdain for the contemporary practice of love writing (a familiar topos in itself) is disclosed as a conventional masculine anxiety.66 Other lyrics or complaints (for example, ‘Thir lenterne dayis’, against an obdurately deceitful mistress who makes the lover self-abasing67) propose alternatives to the love of women: either absolute renunciation; ways by which to outwit the deceitful beloved; or, as in Clerk’s poem, the transference of love to ‘god/thy prince/and freind all thre’ (33), each of which offers the possibility of ‘luve moist permanent’. On occasion, these renunciations have more generically defined contours: for example, ‘My hart is quhyt/and no delyte/I haif of ladyeis fair’, conventionally bemoans the incompatibility of sexual desire and ‘aige’ (the complaint of the senex amans).68 One anonymous lyric most aptly exemplifies the slippage between the love complaint and querelle diatribe.69 Framed as a querulous missive (‘To yow madame this I indyte’), it rehearses the conventional topoi of female flaws which are later amplified by the formal denunciations. The lover’s collated ‘Evidence’ charges the former


beloved with conventional Manichaeism: the beauty of her outer form belies her inward corruption. your gudly wordis maid me to trest that all your talking had bene trew I was dissauit sone in haist The cleth was of ane uthir hew… (25–8) In contrast to the easily decipherable female subject of the songis, this woman (and the idea of femininity she therefore embodies) can be misread by the ingenuous male lover. This is the exemplary charge of these contemptis: that the figure of the fallen woman severs the neoPlatonic correspondence between inner and outer. The beauty of the female figure (of which the young lover is to ‘haif no concupiscens’, the sin of concupiscere which the section’s final section vehemently renounces) is a duplicitous ‘sign’ which eludes interpretation: ‘Bewar hir signys and ay so amiable/Hold it for serme thay bene dissavable/Lo ane example quhat woma[n] be/In thair signis and countena[n]s schortly.’70 The systematic and reiterative nature of these detractions as a whole is best illustrated by using one or two texts as exemplars of the contentions which render the genre in Bannatyne so cohesive an entity. The rhetorical self-consciousness (or bravura) of the mode is attested by ‘This work quha sa sall sie or reid’ (one of the series of poems falsely attributed to Chaucer).71 This adopts an expository and didactic posture. ‘This work quha sall sie or reid/Of ony Inco[n]gruitie do me not Impeche’ (1–2): not only does the term, ‘Inco[n]gruitie’, gesture towards the pseudo-logical ‘deductioun’ (4) of which the writer immediately boasts, but the opening phrases depict the text as a ‘public’ work, inviting its own readers and their judgements.72 This authoritative voice is then particularised as that of the worldly and mature preceptor, dispensing ‘counsale’ to a ‘yung ma[n] prosprus…/In thy flowris of lust’ (9–10). ‘To thy confusioun a most allectiue bait’ (14), is a probable allusion to the popular scholastic dictum mulier hominis confusio.73 Authority begets authority: this preceptor cites almost verbatim the proverbial ‘wisdom’ of Solomon, a source ironically tapped by both sides of the debate. The historical ‘embeddedness’ of such allusions means that the texts’s anti-feminism is almost sheltered under the copious weight of scriptural, patristic


and philsophical traditions cited with varying degrees of explicitness.74 Confessions of textual authority (for example, in ‘The beistly lust’ to ‘clerkis awld’, 15) are a common anti-feminist device. The list of exemplars (for example, in Moffat’s ‘My luve wes fals and full of flattry’, Chaucerian archetypes and the frequently cited folly of Virgil) render the lover’s predicament entirely exemplary, and almost exonerating. The alleged iniquity of one beloved woman serves as a trope for all women. In these denunciations, the silenced woman of the songis is ironically endowed with rhetorical proficiency: My luve was fals and full of flattery Wt cullerit lesingis full of dowbilness Quhen that scho spak hir toung was wonder sle Wt fals sembla[n]ce and fenyeit humylness And inco[n]stance pay[n]tit wt steidfastness hir frane wes cwverit wt ane piteous face…75 (1–6) This suspicion of the beloved’s language here resonates with echoes of Proverbs 2.16 (‘the adventuress with her smooth words’) and Proverbs 7: 10–12 (‘With much seductive speech she persuades him….’). 76 Moffat’s stanza entwines woman’s verbal duplicity with other manifestations of her ability to separate signifier from signified. Beauty is specifically indicted as a malevolent veneer: the beautiful artifice celebrated in the sangis becomes the proverbial snare (Ecc. 9:8) which Tertullian’s polemic against female ornamentation expounds at length. Adoration of woman who is mere artifice is tantamount to idolatry. ‘Birning lust’ ensnares man in a selfdestructive ‘game’; amorous ‘play’, as in the closing metaphor of this poem, guarantees only damnation. The effort to elide the female figure – as communicant or recipient of these texts, and as an object of desire – might be considered an act of symbolic, almost retaliatory subjugation. If Woman (or the desire for Woman) ensures the selfdestruction of the male lover, then the denunciatory rhetoric of these lyrics might be conceived as an attempt to regain selfpossession or autonomy. The beistly lust the furius appetyt The haisty wo The verry grit defame


the blind discretioun the hatrent & dispyte of wemen kynd that dreidis for no schame That settis at nocht god Nor ma[n]is blame Thair lustis so hes nvreist thame but dreid That all thair trest is thair god cupeid77 Female sexuality is threatening by being insatiable.78 Woman is identified with imperfect and impure matter. This dictum is rooted in the biblical identification of femina with sensuality, and the associated flaw of irrationality which dictates that Woman be subjected to man. Reason becomes identified with exclusion of the feminine.79 Since Woman is held to lack the intellectual discipline of reason, female desire in these lyrics is designated as bestial: ‘Thow cokkatrice That with sicht of thyne yre…’; ‘Als terne as tygir of tung vntollerable’.80 Her sexuality, in essence, is devilish: woman is a ‘diuillis member’, possessed of ‘serpentis crewaltie’.81 Eve is the biblical paradigm of female cupiditas, moral transgression, and the root of man’s sinfulness: Grit was the lust that thow had for to fang the fruct vetite throw thi ill counsaling Thow gart mankynd consent to do that wrang Displeiss his god and brak his hie bidding As haly writ beiris suthfast witnessing82 The section’s anti-marriage poetry, cast mainly in the ‘comic’ medieval mould of molestiae nuptiarum, protests against wifely insubordination: the unruly order in which men are subject to women. In ‘Aganis mariage of evill wyfis’, the narrator boasts of his moral and sexual salvation in refusing wedded subordination: I can not tell the torment and the pyne of thame that puttis thair nek this yok to draw ffull oft he feilis the brod and dar not quhryne With anger smart than gan his hairt ouirthraw Lyk to ane quhelp to cowche will beir him law Than Is he baith hir s[e]rvand and hir knaif Now is it not a wicket seid to saw of quhilk no grace nor fruct a ma[n] sall haif83 (25–32)


Cumulatively, the texts perpetuate a series of (mis)conceptions about the relationship between desire and the feminine, attained by a process of reduction: as the songis reduce femininity to a set of prescribed ideals, so these texts invoke a comparable set of ‘inverted’ stereotypes. Alexander Scott’s rhetorical formulation of female dualism neatly epitomises this habit of conceptual reduction: ‘That famenene ar of this figour/quhilk clippit is antiphracis’.84 The figure of Woman, already conventionalised or reified by the earlier section, is transformed into a figure itself. As in the former songis, the feminine becomes part of a hermeneutic enterprise: how can the sign ‘Woman’ be interpreted? Such ideological and linguistic argument resembles the anti-feminist rhetoric of both the anti-Marian pamphlets and of the Detectioun. Though early modern anti-feminism might be said to have a relatively restricted rhetorical discourse and conceptual scope (hence its reiterativeness), it seems plausible to argue that Buchanan’s work, the broadside pamphlets, and the denunciatory poems of the querelle section can be considered as ‘parallel’ texts. 85 Yet, just as the songis persuasively belong to the period of the Darnley courtship and marriage, so might the querelle denunications correspond to the subsequent period of the royal nuptial crisis, and the beginning of Mary’s fall from political and moral grace. One can begin to perceive an implicit Marian narrative to Bannatyne’s erotic corpus. The overarching philosophy of Bannatyne’s amatory section is the inextricability of Woman and cupiditas: possessed of the power to inculcate ‘birna[n]d lust’.86 Yet among these vicious contra querelle poems is a sign of redemption: Cleir of corss And clenar of Intent quhilk buir the barne that coverit ws frome cair scho beand virgin clenar tha[n] scho war.87 At the conclusion of a lyric which has denounced woman’s devilish ‘lust and pryd’, the notion of Our Lady’s redemptive purity is suddenly introduced, and Woman – as if in imitatio Maria – is purged of the association with sexuality. The Manichaeism of which de Beauvoir writes is tautly illustrated by this lyric, and amplified in the manuscript’s next ‘sub-section’, the ‘contempis of evill/fals vicious men’, which extols both the Virgin and the secular ideal of the earthly ‘angelic’ woman.


The angelic woman and the place of Mariology Thairfoir I reid that to our lyvis end ffro this tyme furt quhill that we haif space quhair we haif trespassid persew to ame[n]d Praying chryst Iesu well of all grace To bring ws unto that blissfull place Quhair all gude weme[n[ salbe in feir In hevin aboif amang the angell[is] cleir88 The ‘Ballattis of the prayis of wemen and to the reproche of men’ advocate the secular and spiritual adoration of woman. The philosophical, theological and rhetorical arguments of these texts wholly conform to those of contemporary and later pro-querelle literature: for example, as in Robert Vaughan’s A Dialogue defensyve for women agayanst malycius detractors (1542), there are the claims that misogyny develops through personal experience of betrayal; that men, not women, are intrinsically duplicitous; that the detraction of women is an affront to God. These are all contentions echoed in the famous polemics of Jane Anger and others, as well as in a number of isolated poems in defence of women in other English poetic miscellanies. Yet the critical and cultural neglect of this section means that its relationship to the concepts of the ideal feminine expounded by the initial songis are obscured. Female sexuality ironically holds the key which unlocks the idea of the angelic woman in both secular and religious realms: her sexual purity is the only state which can save men from the iniquities of sexual desire, and allow women a shard of moral grace. The text which can be claimed as the section’s argumentative kernel is the ‘L[ett]re of cupeid’. It is also the longest, and in the manuscript appears wrongly attributed to Chaucer.89 The text is a copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s translation of L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399) by Christine de Pisan (1365–1436?) made three years later in 1402.90 The Bannatyne copy exists as one of eleven copies of Hoccleve’s poem; it also appears in another Scottish courtly miscellany, Oxford Bodleian MS Arch. Selden B. 24, which contains the unique copy of The Kingis Quair, ascribed to James I.91 Hoccleve’s poem has caused critical controversy. A substantially attenuated version of Christine’s poem, the latter framed as a missive from the god of love to aberrant male lovers who abuse women, innately gentle and virtuous, Hoccleve’s poem has been termed both a faithful adaptation and an anti-feminist travesty of the intellectual and aesthetic qualities of Christine’s original.92 While Diane Bornstein’s


argument for the latter is particularly persuasive, Bannatyne’s placing of the poem remains interesting, offering a new contextualisation which, in its status as an ostensible female ‘defence’, seems to gesture towards the original polemical impulse of L’Epistre. Ironically, an unacknowledged female textual authority exists in Bannatyne (as if to counter the spurious Chaucerian), which creates its own web of cultural and literary associations.93 L’Epistre and other works by Christine (1365–c1430) ensured her a canonical role in the creation and dissemination of the European querelle des femmes, or more precisely at that time the querelle de rose in allusion to the French courtly allegory, Le Roman de la Rose.94 Her powerful critiques of the courtly, literary ideologies which distortingly sacralise and desecrate the role of women and femininity engender claims that hers is the ‘first feminist voice’, creating ‘a space for women to oppose this onslaught of vilification and contempt, and the example of her defence was to serve them for centuries…’.95 The existence of Hoccleve’s version of Christine’s poem ironically renders this cogent female defence through a masculine ‘voice’ so that its act of ‘reclamation’ appears ‘ventriloquised’. Nevertheless, the version as it exists in Bannatyne is preoccupied with the gendering of desire: the procedures of a sexual courtship and morality controlled wholly by men, and the canons of male-authored secular and sacred texts. Bannatyne’s inclusion of Hoccleve’s poem allows, at least rhetorically, a feminine interpellation in the manuscript’s predominantly masculine inventions of desire. Bannatyne’s ‘recontextualisation’ of the Christine–Hoccleve poem works simultaneously as both reclamation and containment of Woman. In generall we will that ye knaw That ladyis of honour and of reuerens And uthir gentill wemen having saw Sic seid of complaynt in our audiens of men that done thame outtrage and offens That it our eiris grevith for to heir So peteus is the effect of this mateir (8–14) Woman’s traditional passivity as reader, audience or lover is subverted in this second stanza. In contrast to the preceding ‘contemptis’, the trope of verbal duplicity now changes gender:


Sa can tha men dissy[m]mill and fayne Wt standing droppis in thair ene twayne Quhen that thair hairtis feilis no distress To blindyn wemen wt thair dowbilness (18–21) The toung of ma[n] so swyft is and so wicht That quhen it is raysid vpon loft Ressone is schewin so slawly and soft That it him nevir ourtak may (143–6) This inversion of the anti-feminist charge of garrulousness is echoed in subsequent Bannatyne poems: ‘Lo how reddy thair [men’s] toungis bene and prest/To speik of harme of wemen causles…’ nor ‘list not to heir the fair wirdis ye wryte…’.96 The ‘L[ett]re’ proceeds to accuse the male lover of ‘blind affectioun’, abandoning the beloved after sexual possession (51) before boasting of his conquest and treachery (63–70). His denunciation of women as faithless and promiscuous (99ff) is exposed as the invention purely of male ‘invy’ and inadequacy. Another of Bannatyne’s ‘defence’ lyrics echoes this; the lover can never possess her because she eludes him morally: Thus may ye se that thay bene faultless And Innocent to all your werkis sle And all your craft that twich falsness Thay knaw thame not nor may thame not espy So sueir ye that ye most neid[is] de… Thus for to confort and sum quhat do yow cheir Tha[n] will thais Iangleris deme of hir full ill And say that ye hir haif fully at yor will 97 While Hoccleve’s poem is not as specific in its indictment of anti-feminist literature as Christine’s (she names Jean de Meun and Ovid), it condemns ‘scollaris’ and ‘clerkis’ who interiorise the fear of female sexuality from books ‘lernid in thair chyldheid’ (211) and produce their own intellectual form of sexual vengeance: Thot awld dottaris addressit thair delyte To dyt of ladeis the defamatioun


Na wirthy wicht suld sett his appetyte To reid sic rollis of reprobatioun98 in till all bukis yat I cowld fynd or reid The crymes of me[n] dois weme[n]is vyce exceid99 As in L’Epistre, traditional misogynistic narratives proclaiming female corruption from a conventional biblical, mythical and historical repertoire are revised: Helen’s culpability in the destruction of Troy, for example (‘L[ett]re’, 81ff). The litany of female virtues espoused by the ‘L[ett]re’ defines their redemptive difference from men: Wemen hairt vnto no crewaltie inclynid is bot thay be cheritable peteouss devout full of humylite Schamefast debonar and amiable Dreidfull and of word[is] mesurable… (344–8) Woman’s moral sanctification is partly derived from her maternal role: ‘That of a woma[n] he discendit is/Than is it schame of hir to speik a miss’ (174–5). While Christine’s poem lovingly amplifies the maternal, it also serves as an ‘exonerating’ trope in other Bannatyne poems within this section. Woman’s nurturing role exerts moral restraint: ffor we aucht to think on quhat maner Thay bring ws furth and quhat pane thay indure first in our birth and syne fro yeir to yeir how besaly thay haif done thair bussy cure To keip ws fro every misauentur In our yewth quhen we haif no micht…100 This adoration of motherhood ironically works to desexualise woman, conferring on her a kind of divinity (cf. 1 Cor 11: ‘for as woman was made from man, so man is now born from woman. And all things are from God…’). Men accordingly ought to mould themselves in women’s image: ‘Bot thay be as wemen ocht to be…’ (‘L[ett]re’, 300). The exultation of ‘earthly’ motherhood naturally culminates in Christine’s L’Epistre in reverence of the Blessed Virgin.


And god to quhome thair may no thing hid be Gife he in weme[n] had knawin suche malice As me[n] record of thame in generalte Off our Lady of lyfe reperatryce Nold haif bene borne bot that scho of vyce Was woyd / and full of vertew weill he wist Endewid of hir to be borne him list Hir he aped vertew haith sic excellence That all to leif his ma[n]is faculte To declair it/ and thairfoir in suspence hir dew preysing put neid[is] most be Bot thiss I say veraly that sche Is blissit of god to quhois sone belongith The key of m[er]cy by his girdill hongith (‘L[ett]re’, 400–13) Mary’s conception of Christ the Saviour (‘And eftir borne and bocht us fro ye blame’101) is exalted as the archetypal feminine salvation which is embodied thereafter in the types of moral and spiritual grace which earthly women confer on men: ‘Ladeis ar me[n]is parradyiss erdly’.102 The Virgin’s function is significant not only within the L’Epistre/L[ett]re’ context, but in this Bannatyne section as a whole. The apparent disparity between the earlier songis and these ‘defences’ is bridged by the mariology of both modes. In the former, allusion to the Virgin, ‘mary myld the maid Immaculat’,103 represents the apotheosis of the sexual innocence enshrined in the secular beloved. The argument of the songis has come full circle. Mary, semper virgo, emerges as the paradigm for the secular lyric beloved who symbolises grace for her lover; secular and sacred roles of womanhood are fused: ffor in reuere[n]s of the hevy[n]nis quene We awcht to wirschip all weme[n] that bene ffor of all creaturis that evir wer get and born Thus wot ye weill a woma[n] was the best By hir sone wes recouerid the bliss that we had lorne And thruch hir sone sall we come to rest And bene ysavit gife that our self lest Quhairfoir methinkis gif ye haif grace We ochtin weme[n] honor in every place104


Here, both the Marian argument and the glorification of heroic virginity (itself a significant aspect of mariological worship) are rooted in established theological and philosophical vindications of woman’s alleged sinfulness. The Virgin was conceived as a Second Eve: ‘just as the former was led astray by the word of an angel, so that she fled from God when she had transgressed His word; so did the latter, by an angelic communication, receive the glad tidings that she should be the bearer of God, being obedient to His word.’105 The name ‘Eve’ acquired a mystical mariological significance as Eve could mean vae, misfortune, but also vita, life; Eva was an anagram for Ave; to evoke Eve was to invoke Mary. Women’s presence at the Resurrection was recompense for Eve’s transgression. The rehabilitation of Eve occurred through arguments e nomine (Eve means life); ex ordine (Eve was the last created thing, thus most perfect); e materia (Eve was made of living flesh, Adam of earth); e loco (Eve was created in Paradise, Adam outside); and e conceptione (the Incarnation of the Son of God within woman). And gif it hap a man be in diseiss Scho dois hir bussines and hir full pane Wt all hir micht him to confort and eiss Gif fro his diseiss scho mycht him restrane In word nor deid ywiss scho will not fane Bot wt all hir micht scho dois hir business To bring him out of his haviness106 The Virgin’s role of pity and tenderness is emulated by the mortal woman who acts selflessly as man’s helpmate: ‘to gloir humane thay mak habilite’.107 Mary’s declaration in the Gospel of Luke that she is ‘the handmaid of the Lord’ is echoed in this final exoneration of fallen femininity. The Marian virtues of humility, patience and suffering partly render the Bannatyne ‘defences’ of woman as a glorification of obedience: not only, as the Blessed Virgin, to the Word of God, but to the will of man and, if the overarching erotic context is recalled, to the male lover also. The complexity of the arguments outlined above for Mary as the Second Eve is therefore more restricted than first appears. As Bornstein notes, Hoccleve’s poem omits two further arguments advanced by Christine about Eve which are those e materia and e loco. In addition, Bornstein observes how Hoccleve’s poem qualifies Christine’s celebration of the Virgin’s tender, maternal humanity.108 As lines 400–13 quoted above illustrate, her role as intercessor is emphasised, and it is as an intermediary fount of grace, and as a model of


virginity, that she appears in the other Bannatyne ‘defences’. Strikingly, Hoccleve’s poem introduces Saint Margaret as an exemplum of chastity: ‘Thow precious gemme/martir Margarete/Of thy blood dreddist noon effusioun/Thy martirdom/ ne may We nat foryete/O constant womman in thy passioun/Ouercam the feendes temptacioun/And many a wight/ conuerted thy doctryne/Vn to the feith of god/ holy virgyne’ (421–7).109 Quinn contends that this new praise of Margaret’s virginity makes the ‘Letter’ more ‘bourgeois’ and ‘conservative’ than Christine’s original.110 A similar process of ‘conversion’ may be observed throughout the Bannatyne series of ‘defences’. In the latter’s version of this Hoccleve stanza, however, praise of the holy Margaret is subtly altered: rather than an exemplary martyr in the third line, she is extolled as ‘Thow luvar trew thow madin mansueit’.111 Protestant sensitivities work again to expurgate, transforming hagiographical medieval female sanctity into mild, obedient womanhood. Despite this, the attempted exaltation in this penultimate ‘subsection’ of holy virginity and secular morality still recalls the didactic, exhortatory discourse of the first songis, and their quasi-conduct book precepts of female virtue. The female subject which these texts glorify is intended to be edified: I breif this bill to yow in generall ladeis and mady[n]is that yarnis fra reprufe yow to conserf and als for your behufe That ye defend and keip yow fra dissait And yow to teich all filthy lyfe to hait112 Their sexuality must be restrained (‘wit’ must discipline ‘will’, an implicitly masculine reason subdue feminine emotion) if their reputation, and their virginity, is to remain intact.113 The lyric ascribed to ‘Mersar’ prescribes the correct sexual conduct: haif mynd how gude is to haif a gude name And tha[n] na cryme sall your grit wirchep fyle haif mynd how bernis hes brocht birdis to blame And latt na grome wt gabing yow begyle (15–18) The mariological significance of the Bannatyne ‘defence’ of women is clearly centred on the concept of glorious virginity; this in turn


prefigures the ascetic renunciations of sinful cupiditas in the final fourth section of the luve ballattis. The Virgin’s obedience also becomes ‘secularised’ as a model for all women and their response to desire. Yet it is important to realise that her perfection consists not only in her ‘passive’ fidelity, but as an instrument of the divine plan, her active role in the Incarnation and Redemption.114 The complexity with which the Virgin’s role is imagined within this overlooked section of the querelle suggests that it possesses a greater intellectual sophistication than the preceding contra section. In itself, the admission of the Virgin into this clearly Protestantised text, or rather her apparent survival within it, is surprising. While the manuscript is not overtly ‘anti-Marian’, its invocations of the Virgin are found at a particular historical moment when the idea of the Catholic feminine was associated with the figure of Mary, the devout Catholic queen of a Reformed nation. Several reasons for this may be conjectured. The mariology of the Bannatyne manucript may reflect aspects of the Reformation acceptance, even ‘rehabilitation’, of Marian devotion rather than its absolute rejection. ‘Reformation’, of course, was not a sudden process.115 The Blessed Virgin remained as the supreme model of faith in the word of God (sola fide), and as the guarantor of the reality of the Incarnation and of Christ’s humanity. The Marian presence in Bannatyne’s ‘erotic’ corpus also forms a counterpart to the predominantly Christological nature of the manuscript’s religious section proper, and mirrors in a different way the latter’s doctrinally ‘sanctioned’ mariology.116 What Annabel Patterson terms ‘the hermeneutics of censorship’,117 evident in the Bannatyne context as the gradual transformation of Catholic into Reformed devotion, is peculiarly complex.

The circular feminine Bannatyne’s luve ballattis are not erotic poems, pure and simple; the intricate ideological edifice of femininity that they construct precludes such transparency. These are texts adrift from their original contexts of production; however ideological or politicised, their intellectual and cultural status remains equivocal. Were they assembled as a deliberate imitation of or contribution to the querelle des femmes tradition; or to reflect fashionable courtly preoccupations with the nature of femininity and sexual courtship? Does their assertion about women’s spiritual equality, rooted in theological models of redemptive femininity, mirror a genuine intellectual sea-change, or a fashionable hermeneutic debate? One might argue that the defenses construct a counter-stereotype of


female purity, and advocate chastity as a means of social containment. As in the anti-Marian texts, female sexuality returns to being the traditional locus of sin. The subsections or pairtis of the amatory section – the songis, the two forms of ‘Contemptis’, and the ‘ballattis detesting of luve […]’ – are not disparate but intimately bound up by the concept of female sexuality. Its unlicensed, unregulated expression is seen to threaten man’s moral integrity, an idealised, ‘prelapsarian’ vision of femininity, and the conservative social order. Though the querelle debate formally concludes before it begins, the final section, ‘ballattis detesting of luve’, extends these preoccupations. The figure of Woman still functions as a kind of symbolic scapegoat. In philosophical terms, the renunciations in this subsection (eleven lyrics, including three by William Dunbar) perpetuate the orthodox antithesis between cupiditas and caritas. The former, and rarely the latter, is emphasised; retribution for fleshly sins, rather than beatific apotheosis, recurs: Woluptuous lyfe quhy thinkis tho so sueit Knawing the deth that no ma[n] may ewaid Syne perseveiris in flesly lust and heit… Repent in tyme devoyd the of this laid And knaw in hell thair is Eternall pane118 Alexander Scott’s ‘Ye blyndit luvaris luke’ presents a vision of desire as ‘com[m]oun m[er]chandyce’, the devalued commodity of prostitutes.119 These extended renunciations perpetuate the notion of woman as the root of man’s culpability: bestiality, corrupted reason, excessive ‘affectione’ are all embodied in the querelle’s fallen woman. Again, female sexual purity is conceived as a precious ‘gift’ in this address ‘To the madin’: The noble giftis of chestitie precell Off vertewis it is Maist principall Na [per]sone can expryme defyne nor tell The godly vertew virginiall ffor the devyne theologgis uniu[er]sall And awld auttor[is] of maist excelle[n]t gre Aboif all giftis thay preffer chestetie120 Gavin Douglas’s fourth prologue to his Eneados is a complex exposition of ‘the twa luvis’, earthly and divine, an apt summation of the theological position which Bannatyne’s preface to the erotic section first


promised. Its inclusion in the last subsection (appended to the ‘formal’ conclusion, ff. 291r–297v; the erotic section accordingly ends twice), may also be significant for its inscribed apostrophe ‘To virgynis’. Possession of true ‘womanheid’ is only merited by the qualification of ‘bewtie’ and ‘honestie’: Rew on your self ladyis and madyins ying grant na sic rewith for evir ma causs yow rew ye fresche gallandis in hait desyre birni[n]g refrene your curage sic paramouris to [per]sew Ground your amouris on cheretie all new found yow on ressoun quhat neidis moir to preiche god grant yow grace in lufe as I yow teiche121 The ‘ending’ of the luve ballattis can adequately be interpreted within an intellectual and religious framework of sacred and profane love, the ‘twa luvis’ in Douglas’s terms. This confers a conceptual rigour and expositional clarity on the whole section which culminates in the love of God; except that it is not the glorified neo-Platonic love, but one which renders irreparable the breach between each. Woman cannot serve as the mediator of divine love: she is man’s diversion rather than pathway to salvation. In the poems of this final subsection, she serves as an emblem of vanitas. ‘by hir mowth dampnit’: the faithless female lover is rebuked in a phrase which recalls the vagina dentata of Kennedy’s poem, ‘Ane aigit man’.122 She deprives man of moral and physical potential to which the litany of suffering men in one anonymous poem bears witness: Palamedes, Hercules, Pyramus, Jason and other mythical and historical protagonists.123 Woman, in this final section, is ultimately transformed into a metaphor for love itself: the trope of duplicity, ‘variance…vnstabilnes…chenge’, defines both.124 While the section lies formally outside the scope of the manuscript’s querelle des femmes movement, its understanding of pernicious desire is still predominantly gendered feminine. * Ultimately, then, Bannatyne’s querelle poetry can be seen to perpetuate the manichaeistic concept of Woman and the feminine. Its inclusion within an avowedly amatory context (‘ballattis of luve’) intensifies and makes more explicit the myth of female duality: Woman as fallen and angelic, an extended exemplum of the common medieval image of the


serpent in the Garden of Eden with the face of a beautiful girl.125 This extensive collection of lyrics, varied in length and rhetorical competence, may be said to constitute a larger, single erotic text through which is woven a number of discrete cultural, religious, and political threads. All, whether indirectly or directly, return to Mary. These ballattis of luve may justly be regarded as both the origin and summation of the ways in which desire is incarnate in early modern Scottish writing. It represents a manuscript culture of textual compilation and bricolage that displays a fascination with the possibilities and limits of the rhetorical, and implies a courtly, recreational and intellectual culture in which transactions of erotic poetry take place. The texts articulate a concept of the feminine that oscillates between ideas of the fallen and the redemptive. The association of Woman with sin within a larger discursive context of erotic utterance perpetually recurs in the profane poetry of the Jacobean reign. But it is the historical consonance between Mary’s reign and the compilation of Bannatyne’s manuscript that remains provocative, if irresolvably so. The querelle poetry, and the final excoriation of women and sexuality in the fourth section, reflect the political crisis of female sovereignty in 1560s Scotland, and an attendant cultural crisis of the feminine; ‘a readership learns to abhor queenship, idolatry, and fornication’.126 And yet the model of instruction, and the object of adoration, which is offered to that readership is ‘heavinis quene’.127 Within an apparently ideologically resculpted, Protestantised text, Our Lady intercedes as a model of grace for the fallen women of the querelle (but not, one might note, for the general sinful lovers of the final section). The admission of Marian veneration may reflect Bannatyne’s ‘retrospective and moderate’ tendencies, aesthetic and doctrinal; but if the manuscript was collated, as has been persuasively argued, in a climate of Reformation censorship, why would Bannatyne solicit the accusation of idolatrousness? Clearly, any substantial process of ideological emendation or excision is complex in a decade as politically and culturally changeful as the 1560s; one might even suggest that Bannatyne neither wanted to alienate a potential Catholic or pro-Marian readership, nor to excise texts that were needed to complete the philosophical and theological patterning of the feminine in the luve ballattis corpus. The manuscript’s assemblage is demonstrably artful, at least. Yet the twin Marian presences, earthly and divine, of the erotic corpus speak ultimately of the ineradicability of the feminine. While Bannatyne’s texts are fierce expressions of early modern misogyny, the redemptive, salvific power of the Virgin seems almost an equally


powerful act of contestation. The symbolic endurance of Regina Maria and, through her, the implicit evocation of Mary Stewart, manages to evoke the power of both queens as the existence of each in different ways was becoming increasingly fragile. Neither the revocation of eros, nor Mary, nor of unreformed devotion, could yet be achieved.

Part II The Jacobean Period

3 Fables of Eros: James VI and the Revelation of Desire

‘And would God she might see the inward parts of my heart where she should see a great jewel of honesty toward her locked up in a coffer of perplexity.’1 James’s plea about Elizabeth is made in a letter which seeks repeal of the English parliament’s recent petition for Mary’s execution. The remark is interesting, not least for the way in which it echoes the conceit of interiority found in the king’s poetry and political prose of the 1580s and 1590s. It proclaims an emotional ‘authenticity’ or purity, but one that is recondite or recalcitrant, ‘locked up’ or sealed from outward representation, as if in evocation of the Marian casket emblem. This contradiction underpins the king’s amatory writing where processes of revelation, identity and disclosure gain erotic, as well as political, investment. Jamesian eros is caught on two thresholds: between public, or published, and private representations of sovereign ‘selves’ and sovereignty; and between the notion of the text as an instrument of revelation and ‘truth’, and as a vulnerable embodiment of desire requiring a ‘protective’ or evasive shell. Protection or ‘shelter’ from mendacious and expedient interpretation was precisely what Marian eros had been denied. While the name of Mary was so securely fastened to the casket-sonnets, and the concept of an incontestable sovereign self inextricable from their expression of desire, ‘self-representation’ in Jamesian love poetry, by contrast, is unstable or unfixed. This is partly a consequence of the new literary culture of Jacobean Renaissance Scotland which, by the early 1580s, was emerging as a tightly knit, self-sustaining aesthetic court culture; poetic practice, to some degree, could become a courtly recreation, an art which grew out of a collaborative, coterie culture. Yet, though its culture both cherished and cultivated the arts of poetic duplicity and ludic playfulness, ‘official’ Jamesian poetics (the 77


poetry which was printed) extols literature by virtue of its verisimilitude, proclaiming it a ‘viue mirror of this last and most decreeped age.’2 Yet James’s ‘unofficial’ poetry, ‘all the kings short poesis/that ar not printed’,3 seems to shun this ideal of mimesis. Despite Francis Bacon’s comment that James was renowned for ‘Prophane and Humane’ literature as well as ‘Divine and Sacred’,4 the profane poetry which was erotic in nature never entered the official canon of the king’s poetry, those texts published within his own lifetime, especially the collected 1616 edition. It is words of love which are rarely contained within the Jamesian ideal of representational art. Sovereign love poetry in the Jacobean period weaves its own symbolic veil and hermeneutic web so that, where the loving self is articulated, it is always in danger of its own dissolution or transformation. James’s eroticisation of the word, at the unconscious or subliminal level of the text, constantly summons up the delicate Marian question of whether desiring and sovereign selves can ever co-exist. Indeed, within the ‘official’ literary treatise of his early reign, the Reulis and Cautelis (1584), the king concentrates little upon the theoretical or technical exposition of love poetry. Rather, he seems contradictorily to assign erotic poetry a kind of rhetorical disingenuousness: as if, like the love words ascribed to his mother, Mary, they speak intimately of their author. Though erotic discourse is conceived as a rhetorical golden mean, ‘commoun language with some passionate wordis’,5 its expressive or emotive capacity stands as its most intense power of signification. Full of ‘passionate wordis’, the textual signifier of love bears the hallmark or the impresa of transparency; hence, one might have thought, fulfilment of the Jamesian representational ideal. ‘vse wilfull reasonis, proceeding rather from passioun, nor reasoun…’: the lover’s discourse is exonerated from the analytic and logical qualities extolled in the ‘Sonnet decifring the perfyte poete’ and elsewhere.6 Reason, naturally, cannot tolerate the exigencies of desire. The corollary of these precepts of profane ‘loue’ is that the ideal Jacobean text of love should be endowed with a kind of integrity or sincerity; implicitly, the erotic poem stands as a ‘glasse and picture viue’.7 In practice, though frequently sensuous and visual, the king’s own incarnations of eros revoke and render equivocal this desired art of reflection and correspondence which is held to lie in the enargeiac power of language. Rather than instituting the connection between royally and divinely authored words,8 Jamesian love poetry may be seen as the embodiment of provisionality, fragility, and paradox; the ironic vulnerability of kingly eros gives rise to playfulness but also implies that the most

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precious desire is one which is enfolded or encased by its own interpretative evasiveness.

Contexts of Jamesian eros The corpus of twenty love lyrics ascribed to James, known as the Amatoria, is principally contained in two manuscripts, BL Add. MS 24195 (‘All the kings short poesis’) and Bodley MS 165, both of which display a degree of editorial revision clearly independent of James himself.9 In Add. MS 24195, both the main title, ‘ […] the kings schort poesis’, and the majority of the prefatory titles, are considered later additions chiefly by Charles I which, in itself, deepens the problematic notion of royal ‘authenticity’.10 Curtis Perry has recently discovered a further manuscript, BL Add. MS 22601, which contains copies of the major Amatoria texts, some of which are structurally reorganised, and an attribution to Sir Thomas Erskine (‘Sr Thomas Areskine of Gogar’).11 This discovery further complicates the existing degree of textual interference in the previous two manuscripts, already implying that their extant texts are to a degree imperfect and corrupt. Perry persuasively proposes that the discovery of Add. MS 22601 points to a collaborative venture between James and Erskine (lifelong friends, as Perry notes), rather than wholly negating the king’s authorship of these texts. Consequently, the title of one sonnet, ‘To the Queene Anonimos’, may perhaps be construed as a playful acknowledgement of collaboration, a wilful evasion of kingly identity (though the corroborated title of Add. MS 24195 still implies some desire to lay sovereign authorial claim to the corpus). Accordingly, the collaborative nature of the amatory texts attributed to James can coherently be conceived as the natural product of a literary environment of exchange and intertextual allusion. A further argument for the collection’s coherence can be defended on the basis of its apparent inclusion of recurrent metaphors and symbols of Jacobean poetry.12 It is likely that the Amatoria texts found various circles of reception: within the immediate Jacobean coterie, and within more extended royal and courtly circles.13 One interesting possibility about the way in which James’s poetry belonged to coterie formations, acting as part of its social transactions as it were, is provided by a letter in 1589 from James to Lady Jean Douglas, widow of Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, concerning her prospective marriage to Alexander Lindsay who was created Lord Spynie by James in 1590.14 In assuming the roles of ‘actor, solicitor, and bestower’,15 the king overtly seeks to procure the


marriage: ‘Madame, as my sonnet says, I am and must continue best friend to you both “sen sa is”’.16 This self-referential literary gesture is suggestive: either it implies that James has sent a copy of his sonnet to her, thus rendering it almost as a textual transaction in the courtship; or the intertextual gesture simply implies the well-known existence of the sonnet in manuscript circulation. At any rate, the sonnet has to some degree become part of a social or erotic contract.17 It might be conceived as a kind of miniaturised counterpart to the ‘Epithalamion’ orchestrated by James for the wedding in 1588 of George Gordon, 6th Earl of Huntly and Henrietta Stewart, daughter of Esmé Stewart, Duke of Lennox, with whom James had been politically and erotically intimate.18 Though the inner Jacobean coterie in the 1580s and early 1590s appears to be composed of male courtier-writers, this sovereignorchestrated homosocial culture, and its attendant homoeroticism, embraces women in its literary rituals of exchange and dedication. The subject of the Jamesian lyric, ‘A dreame on his Mistris Lady Glammis’, can be identified as Anne, daughter of Sir John Murray, who became the first Earl of Tullibardine, ‘a companion of the King’s childhood and later master of his household’, who married Patrick Lyon, Lord Glamis, in 1595.19 Another lyric, inscribed ‘A complaint on his Mistres absence from court’, mourns an absent female courtier: The Court as garland lacks the cheefest floure The Court a chatton toome that lackes her stone The Court is like a volier at this houre Wherout of is her sweetest Sirene gone. Then shall we lacke our cheefest onlie one? No, pull not from ws cruell cloude I praye Our light, our rose, our gemme, our bird awaye.20 Whether written independently or even collaboratively by James, the sense of collective courtly privation seems to possess a sovereign locus; this deepens the lyric’s delicate, ironic reflection upon the subject of courtliness itself. The court is crystallised as a ‘statelie fleeting castle faire/On smoothe and glassie salt dois softlie slide/With snowie sheets all flaffing here and thaire/So deck’d and trim’d as she were Neptunes bride’ (1–4),21 and therefore as a beautiful but ultimately fragile artefact in a kind of metonymic displacement of the subject herself (imminently to be a bride?). No longer governed by Venus but by Pluto (‘Since by thy absence heauen in hell is changed/And we as Diuells in

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Plutoes court are ranged’, 41–2), evocation of the once feminine, or feminised, court is subsumed into a more philosophic reflection on worldly vicissitude, as though the standard trope of anticurial literature were being voiced by the sovereign himself. Within the immediate context, this need not constitute a critique of the poem’s female subject. It is easy to indict James of anti-feminism; granted the well-known misogyny espoused by the king in his tract of the Daemonologie (1597) and the systematic expounding of female subordination in the Basilikon Doron (1599), critical interest has fastened upon the poem inscribed a ‘Satire against Woemen’ in the Amatoria collection.22 Incarnations of the diabolic woman enter the Jamesian amatory canon on several other, far less substantial occasions. Goldberg claims that ‘James’s attacks on women explore the strategies of discursive power, the negations and disclaimers and the annihilative erasures that ensure the monarch’s freedom and truth’.23 In the present context, the ‘discursive power’ of the constellation of sonnets in the Amatoria nominally addressed to Anna is explored. But rather than perceive these lyrics to shore up monarchical power, or to place them solely within Jamesian anti-feminist discourse, the present reading contextualises them within the erotic strategies of the collection as a whole which, it is argued, rest upon a poetics of fragmentation and dissolution. The formation of a political sovereign identity is constantly annulled or rendered fragile by the poetry’s own erotic pressures, and the giving of oneself up to the Other in the act of love. The apogee of this poetics is found in Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix, a poem of death, eros and mourning, and the only love poem by the king which was ever printed.

Structures of desire: the ‘Anna sonnets’ On 5 September 1589, at the age of fourteen, the sovereign bride Anna of Denmark began a sea-voyage to Scotland that failed and postponed the nuptial union between herself and James until 23 November in Oslo.24 This historical moment seemingly underpins the eleven sonnets which begin the Amatoria, and the story of desire which these sonnets narrate, whether prophetically or retrospectively, mirror the larger stories of desire which have been told about the marriage of Anna and James.25 The colophon titles above the first four sonnets in Add. MS 24195, ‘A complaint against the contrary Wyndes that hindered the Queene to com to Scotland from Denmarke’, ‘To the Queene’, ‘To the Queene, Anonimos’,26 imply that these opening


sonnets do indeed constitute a miniature sequence to Anna. Whether as a consequence of later editorial revisions or structural reconstitution, a narrative of the marriage and courtship has been deftly imposed upon the sonnets; the result is a number of persuasive assumptions which, however, bear unwarranted certainty: ‘The opening lines of this sonnet [the third] make it certain that it was composed after James had arrived in Norway towards the end of October 1589, its closing ones suggest that it was actually written after he had met Anne of Denmark for the first time about the middle of the next month.’27 These sonnets promise the illusion of the emotional and historical veritas which James formulates in his theory of representational poetics; and they institute Anna as the subject of erotic desire when she is markedly absent as such in Scottish Jacobean poetry as a whole. Yet, given the collaborative, coterie context from which these Anna sonnets stem, it might be useful to regard these texts as the counterpart to the theatrical, staged representations of union which took place in Edinburgh.28 On the evidence of letters and documents relating to the marriage negotiations, it appears almost as though the voyage and the infamously ‘contrary windes’ (ironically, they indirectly began the Scottish witchcraft hunts of the 1590s) have become a standard topos in the marriage account which can be endlessly invoked. Numerous contemporary accounts exist of the ‘contrary’ voyage exists, such as James Melville’s: ‘His Maieste […] culd not be persuadit to retourn in Scotland that winter, be raisoun of the raging sees and storme that he had susteanit a litle of before’29. These sonnets may therefore be symptomatic of the prevalence of a conceit rather than a verifiable account of their composition30; even James’s own voyage in October 1589 to meet Anna in Norway appears to be inscribed in one sonnet: Frome natiue soil to follow on your name And Eagle like on Theatis back to flee Wher she commaunded Neptune for to be My Princely guard and Triton to attend On artificial flying tours of tree Wherein I resting ranne to journeys end31 A canon of poems to Anna can therefore wilfully be constructed were it not that such large scale ‘canonisation’ ignores the difficult rhetorical complexities of each poem. There is a sense in which Anna’s presence may be inscribed within every Jamesian expression of desire. Another lyric, not part of the opening sonnet ‘sequence’, can be converted into

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an allegory of the Anna–James relationship, a dramatisation of their separation (‘the seas ar nou the barr […]’32); except that this lover seeks reunion rather than any pristine encounter with the beloved. The body of texts to which this poem belongs invokes absence and separation, in particular the trope of the sea or water. These lyrics dramatise a larger preoccupation with absence, dissolution, even of non-existence. ‘O absence cruell foe/Why workes thou ws such woe/And gars true lovers so/Far shedd remaine’.33 The only ‘textual’ narrative of their desire is one which dramatises its end so that it becomes a rhetorical performance of insubstantiality. Such a narrative can also be perceived in the eleven sonnets. The first three sonnets resemble courtship lyrics: the Jamesian lover seeks reciprocity in love, protesting his erotic ‘wounde’ (2: 4). Anticipation of union, the erotic anxieties of that eventual union, remorse for the apparent failure or loss of desire (a shared ‘like sorrowe’: 10: 13): these ‘passions’ precede the final sonnet which accuses the beloved/Anna of infidelity, and marks the dissolution of the lover’s/James’s desire. If these ostensibly nuptial sonnets allegorise or ‘fabularise’ the sovereign voyage and memorialise desire’s decline (as if to present the marriage’s end before its later documented decline as the Catholic convert Anna formed an independent court in Jacobean England), one might question why they are preserved in the ostensibly sovereign-authored manuscript? This might be answered by Goldberg’s interpretation which invests the Amatoria’s lover with absolutist, unassailable authority,34 where lover and beloved, sovereign and sovereign, are not theoretically equal, and united in the democracy of eros. The Amatoria sonnets can always be overtly ‘politicised’, or incorporated into a larger Jamesian statement of misogyny. But the superficial structures of desire and power which the sonnets assemble are perhaps less orthodox and more interesting when conceived as a pathway into Jamesian erotics which presents only the illusion of an uncorrupted sovereign absolutism. A fable of authority is promised by the opening sonnet that devises a metaphorical chain linking the relationships between ‘power’ and poetry. The Platonic furor possessed by ‘Poets’ compels ‘all things inferiour in degrie/As vassalls unto them doe hommage showe’ (1: 3–4).35 As Jonathan Goldberg points out, the political and social language of hierarchy is here transparent.36 The authoritative divinity of poetry is distilled into the emblem of the ‘sacred throne’ (1: 1) as the images of poetry and sovereignty blend seamlessly. If poetry is divinely inspired, the poet-lover is a divine incarnation, as if an erotic echo of the later Jacobean theory of monarchical divine right. In this sonnet, poetic rule


of the ‘heauen Empyrick’ (1: 1) has the power to subvert or endorse the order of nature. There songs enchants Apollos selfe ye knowe And chaste Dianas coache can haste or staye Can change the course of planets high or lowe And make the earth obeye them euerie waye (1: 5–8) Yet the sonnet also registers the fallibility or restrictions of such power; it querulously implies the failure of ‘hommage’ or dissent in the natural world: ‘mutins the midde region of the aire […]’. Allusion is made to Aeolus’s compliance with Juno’s request that the wind-god Zephyr be aroused: ‘What hatefull Juno, Aeolus entiseth/Wherby contrarious Zephyre thus ariseth’ (1: 13–14). Goldberg wishes to interpret this ‘hatefull’ Juno, probably an allusion to Virgil’s ‘saevae […] Iunonis’ (Aeneid I.4), as Anna herself: ‘He invokes the ideal of political suppression for his conquest in the realm of love. The transformation of opposition into suppression and subjection has occurred here […].’37 Presumably, Anna’s identity here is inferred from the fourth sonnet, ‘To the Queene Anonimos’, in which the queen is explicitly made to represent the ‘earthlie Juno’. Yet this first sonnet might be absolved from the charge of irony against Anna. This was, after all, the sonnet to which Henry Constable publicly responded. Further, in the Virgilian text, Juno’s fury at the Trojan attempt to subdue Carthage compels her to seek Aeolus, who obeys her command to raise a storm. If Juno symbolises Anna, then Anna herself becomes the obstruction to the lovers’ union, somewhat improbably convicted of the ‘fury’, jealousy and resentment which Virgil imputes to Juno. Juno’s rage arises from the fear that, as ‘regina deum’, her authority no longer prevails: ‘‘et quisquam numen Iunonis adorat/praeterea aut supplex aris imponet honorem?’ (I.48–9).38 Aeolus, ‘King of the Winds’, obeys Juno by a debt of obligation: ‘tuus, o regina, quid optes,/explorare labor; mihi iussa capessere fas est.’ (I.76–7).39 In obedience to Juno, he extends his authority beyond the bounds by which the sea-god Neptune constrains him. If the king’s sovereign-bride is here allegorically veiled, the sonnet gestures towards her power, but it is a power which, according to the facetiae of the sonnet, is fallible and impolitically procured. The wholly politicised reading which seeks out the evidence of sovereign-authored absolutism and ‘suppression’ is more securely attested by the mythological incarnations of the king, almost certainly present.

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If, in the first sonnet, James is represented by the virtuous Aeneas, condemned by Juno to travail and suffering, in the fourth, entitled ‘To the Queene, Anonimos’, he becomes the ‘happie Monarch, sprung of Ferguse race’, earning the authority or self-autonomy which a tyrannical Cupid has briefly usurped: It was agreed by sacred Phoebus skill To ioyne there powers to blesse that blessed wight Then happie Monarch sprung of Ferguse race That talkes with wise Minerue when pleaseth the… (4: 7–10) The Scottish royal genealogy had, of course, been the subject of debate in historiographical texts from Boece to Buchanan, and occurs in James’s non-amatory poetry;40 his poetic authority within the Jacobean coterie is partly embodied in a claimed mythological ancestry.41 In this sonnet, the mythological ‘origin’ bestowed on Anna is more elaborately contrived than James’s. As Minerva, Diana and Venus incarnate, she embodies wisdom, chastity and love (the closing erotic embrace suggests the sensual rather than heavenly Venus). Queen Elizabeth herself was frequently eulogised by reference to the three Graces, often iconographically; and Buchanan had earlier employed this ‘trinity’ in an epigram on Elizabeth.42 If the sonnet conceivably belongs to a nuptial celebratory series, then the neo-Platonist gloss on the Graces as ‘‘unfolding the hidden enigma of Venus’ is clearly apt.43 In assuming these roles, Anna, ‘our gratious queene’, serves or obliges her ‘Monarch’ in different aspects: That talkes with wise Minerue when pleaseth the And when thou list sume Princelie sporte to see Thy chaste Diana ride with the in chase Then when to bed thou gladlie does repaire Clasps in thine armes thy Cytherea faire. (310–14) Each of Anna’s virtues is displayed as if in obedience to a desire held a priori by James (‘when pleaseth the/when thou list/when thou gladlie […]’). The typically insidious insertion of misogyny, ‘and as of female sexe like stiffe in will’ (5), with regard to the goddesses’ indecision, indicts not just the three deities but all women; even ‘Our earthlie Juno


[…] our gratious Queene’ (4: 2) is scarcely exempt. Minerva, Diana and Venus cannot agree ‘who protect her shoulde by right’ (4: 4) by reason of their equal claims to authority; a far greater authority is invoked to quell the dispute: ‘It was agreed by sacred Phoebus skill/To ioyne there powers to blesse that blessed wight’ (7–8). The identity of ‘sacred Phoebus’ is Apollo, the favoured mythological guise of James himself; kingly dispensation appears as a kind of deus ex machina to redeem the constellation of flawed feminine power. This successive chain of identities implies a utopian realm of rule: god rules goddess as the king his queen for the reason that desire is anarchic. The sonnet, as the sequence as a whole, is on the threshold of orthodox Renaissance panegyric (the courtly, mythological sovereign conceit which almost converts the sequence into a performance of nuptial king and queenship) and the more darkly coercive sequence of Goldberg’s interpretation. Neither negates the other; and both are sustained by the idea that they arise out of a collaborative coterie culture which would have been entertained (perhaps disquieted) by the poetic staging of sovereign desires. But a more interesting impulse within the twelve-sonnet sequence is embodied in the strategies used to control the implied, imagined anarchy of a universe, political and erotic, distinct from that portrayed in the opening text. As if in deliberate, quasi-logical contradiction of potential anarchy, the other sonnets are structured by the concepts of analogy and correspondence. Implying the wilful creation of a divinely ordered, Ptolemaic universe, relationships obtain between divine and earthly, inner and external states, macro and microcosm. The neo-Platonic extension of love through the natural, sublunary world is suggested in the seventh sonnet, modelled on one by Mellin de Saint-Gelais (c.1490–1558):44 For as there toppes in cloudes are mounted hie So all my thoughts in skies be higher gone There foote is fast my faithe a stedfast stone From them discends the christall fontains cleare And from mine yes butt fained force and mone Hoppes trickling teares with sadd and murnefull cheare From them great windes doe hurle with hiddeous beir from me deepe sighs, greate flockes of sheepe they feede I flockes of loue, no fruicts on them appeare My houpe to me no grace can bring or breede (7: 3–12)

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The lover’s body and physical gestures are anatomised in Petrarchistic mode by the degree to which they reflect the natural topography: tears reflect streams, sighs winds. The architecture of the universe in the Amatoria is coupled with an architecture of the body. This neither reflects sovereign infallibility, nor is structured in a politically allegorical way, but is a reflection of mutability, a self in dissolution. In the eighth sonnet, analogy is blended with metamorphosis as the lover is conceived as a microcosm of the four elements. The opening assertion, ‘As man a man am I composed alone’, resigns sovereign identity to humoral theory. My flames of love to firie heauen be past My aire in sighs euanish’d is and gone My moysture into teares distilling fast Now onlie earthe remaines with me at last That am denuded of the other three (8: 6–10) Love of her ‘onlie beautie’ transforms his corporeal self, effecting a partial physical dissolution. But the conceit does not result in complete metamorphosis. He retains his ‘earthly’ part which is, according to Elyot, ‘of substance gross and ponderous […] set of all elements most lowest’.45 Desire is portrayed as an incorruptible element of his being, rooted in the body but removed from any neo-Platonic conception of bodily matter as sensually degrading or corrupt. The primacy of ‘earth’ also suggests the lover’s mortality especially when allied to the ultimate metamorphosis. On death, the body’s earth is united with the earth of its grave: ‘Send als my earth, with earth for to remaine’ (13). The final plea, ‘restore me to my selfe againe’, is a familiar request for the beloved’s grace (consent or compliance) which will restore the lover from imminent death. Yet the phrase, ‘my selfe’, aptly corresponds to the sonnet’s intense physicality of self. The king’s literal body, in this particular Jamesian poetic corpus, is rarely mystified. Its corporeality is itself fragile, echoing the other recurrent trope of metamorphosis and its invocation of a selfhood neither unitary nor stable.46 How may a man, a floure, a corps in smart See, blossome, breathe; but eyes, but Sunne, but hart. (9: 13–14)


As the conceit is fragmented into its analogical parts, desire assumes the equivalence of death. This might be conceived as a quasiPetrarchan gesture; though the sonnets resolutely refuse either Petrarchistic rhetoric or philosophy. Such impulses towards coherence are ultimately defied: the sequence is neither nuptial nor celebratory nor ends in the apotheosis suggested by that last sonnet. Perhaps this ultimately attests the uneven quality of a sequence that was collaboratively devised by James and his courtiers, or even for the king. This, then, is the valedictory sonnet: O womans witt that wauers with the winde When none so well may warie now as I As weathercocke thy stablenes I finde And as the sea that still can neuer lie Bot since that tyme the treuth hath made me trie That in inconstance thou art constant still My courage sayes on Cupide ceasse to crie That are rewarded thus for thy goodwill For thogh Madame I failde not to fullfill All sort of seruice to a Mistres dewe Yett absence thogh bot for a space did spill The thankes deserued of all my seruice trewe What shall I saye, I neuer thought to see That out of sight, shoulde out of languor be. (12: 1–14) Such a text signals the death of desire, and the reign of misogyny. Erotic absolutism seems to triumph. But the sonnet is fruitfully compared with another Jamesian poem, the extraordinary retraction seemingly made at the expense of Anna in the lyric, placed outside the ‘Anna’ sonnet sequence, ‘if mourning micht amende my harde unhappie cace’, and later titled ‘A dier at her M:ties desyr’.47 True to its generic title, the poem is a complaint against a beloved who fails to ‘couple’ the virtues of ‘beutie’ with ‘bontie’. Condemned to death (‘syne like a suanne to sing’), the lover regrets his futile martyrdom: yett if the endles smairte & sorrou I sustaine uaire sufferid for some uorthie uicht I happie uolde remaine I uolde me happie thinke if thus I martired uaire for sum sueit sainte in sacrifice that both uaire goode & faire

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but ô alace my paine & restles griefe it grouis for her quho neuer once on me a louing thocht bestouis48 Clare McManus observes that ‘James’s performance as the romantic lover is that of the ideal Renaissance prince, the private manifestation of the public role of the monarch sacrificed to marriage’ in a narrative of romance quest.49 But as if to pre-empt judgement that Anna herself may be thus incriminated, the text of the lyric found in BL Add. 24195 offers a further interpretative sonnet: My Muse hath made a willful lye I grante, I sung of sorrows never felt by me I haue as great occasion for to wante, My loue begunne my blessing for to be How can I then excuse so lowd a lye? O yes, I did it euen at her desire, Who made me such successe in loue to see How soone her flames hade sett my heart on fire. Since for her sake I presse for to aspire, To preache of passions which I neuer prou’d What should yee doe who haue for haplesse hire The lucklesse lott, to loue and not be lou’d Your plaints I thinke should pierce the starrie skies And deaue the Gods with shrill and cairfull cries. (1–14) In one sense, this is a playfully equivocal sonnet which riddlingly answers the dilemma of whether to interpret the erotic lyrics as implicit apostrophes to Anna. It suggests that even the most wilfully contradictory love poem, such as the last sonnet in the notional Anna ‘sequence’, may be a provocatively ‘wilfull lye’. The defence of feigning occurs also in the antifeminist ‘Satire’ which is rendered characteristically Jamesian by the intrusive fictionalising: the self-referential disavowal of sovereign ‘authenticity’ in the final rhetorical manoeuvre performed by the envoi. What the copy in BL Add. 24195 terms an ‘Exposition’, addressed to ‘ye Dames of worthie fame’ (note the insinuating and implicating ‘ye’), is an excusatio (which the Bodleian Scots text blatantly calls an ‘excuise’50): expone me richt ye damis of uorthie fame since for youre honouris I employed my caire


for uemen bad heirby are lesse to blame for that they follou nature eueryquhayre & ye most uorthie prayse quhose reason dantis that nature quhilk into youre sexe so hantis. (55–60) The true meaning or ‘exposition’ of the text is dependent on the poem’s interpreter or recipient, a characteristic ‘disowning’ gesture of courtly literature, and of misogynistic literature as well. The ‘worthie […] Dames’ to whom the orator suddenly defers may be an audience or readership of female courtiers. In reality, the satire may well have found an exclusively male or homosocial circle of reception for whom the obsequious eulogy of female ‘honouris’ acts ironically, a jest gained at the expense of female absence. Significantly, the text’s ‘qualification’ is highly reminiscent of the interpretative sonnet attached to the ‘Dier’. Both are linked in their castigation of women and in the subsequent posture or pretense of feigning. Misogyny becomes a game; and sexual, rather than erotic, politics an interpretative conceit. The pietistic attitudes to the Anna-James marriage desired by earlier pseudo-biographical critics made these sonnets anomalous; the new historicist interpretation which centred on the unequivocal circulation of political energies produces an orthodox reading insensitive to the erotic power at their core. Yet what these sonnets do portray is the moment of desire’s ‘desecration’, when the apparent sanctity of the beloved is revealed as an illusion. As the ‘reality’ of the beloved image is unveiled, the focus is displaced onto the representational power of language, using the paradigm of Joel Fineman’s analysis.51 One sonnet in the putative ‘sequence’ invests desire with the capacity to delude the lover into believing it ‘sensles deade’ (11: 3): So am I forced for to confesse indeede My sponke of loue smor’d vnder coales of shame By beauties force the fosterer of that seede Now budds and bursts in an appearing flame … (11: 9–12) Illusion, duplicity and guile: not only desire but the sign of desire can deceive. As Kevin Sharpe points out, the capacity for rhetoric to act as a mode of deception informs James’s poetic ‘legislation’ for representational order and concordance.52 Sharpe incisively construes royal

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authority in James’s partial translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’s La Seconde Sepmaine ou Enfance du Monde (1584), christened The Furies and published in the Poeticall Exercises of 1591, as the reflection of the text’s divine order; the powers of the poet-king are even sufficient to reverse the Fall. Further, Sharpe argues that in the ideal Christian commonwealth of James’s epic Lepanto (1591), poetry is associated with government and is the mediator of divine order and reason. The king feared the ‘idolatry’ of the word, though his erotic poetry, as if anxiously to deflect the incriminatory certainties fixed upon Mary’s, depends upon it.

‘A dreame’ of desire and the emblematic veil James’s preoccupation with the representational power of language, the word’s impossible fidelity to desire, finds its most intellectually developed expression in an important lyric of the Amatoria collection, ‘A dreame on his Mistris my Ladie Glammis’.53 In many ways, it represents a utopia of desire in comparison with its relatively dystopian manifestations in the Amatoria collection as a whole. As the most narratologically structured of the erotic poems, it delivers an account of a dream in which a donna angelicata presents the desiring dreamer with two tokens defined as ‘A tablet and an Amethyst’. Her disappearance signifies the dream’s end, and the narrative is then devoted to reflection and elucidation of the dream. Generically, ‘A dreame’ is derived from the Petrarchan dream vision and its petrarchisti variants, and to the contemporary vogue for narrative allegory exemplified by Montgomerie’s The Cherrie and the Slae (1597). The precepts of the sovereign treatise and its espousal of a rigorously analytical and logical poetic practice appear to find fulfilment in this text. In its carefully orchestrated symbolism and intimation of a quasi-mystical love, ‘A dreame’ presents a redemptive love only paralleled within the Jamesian canon by Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Phoenix, the veiled erotic memorial to Esmé Stewart, Duke of Lennox. In ‘A dreame’, the progress of desire and intellectual comprehension compel the ‘forward’ narrative logic of the poem; symbolic meaning is perpetually dispersed and deferred. The lover’s desire to expound the dream’s arcana presents an intellectual logic in fragile tension with the alternate logic of desire and yearning. The different images and emblems of ‘A dreame’ depict a fragmentation, redolent of the earlier Anna sonnets, which the poem seeks to reconstitute into a cerebral whole. As a text which leads out of


the Amatoria sonnets and into the allegorical labyrinth of the Phoenix tragedy, it is considered in detail here. The poem’s opening visionary prologue in its evocation of night and a deathly earth made ‘colde and wacke’ (4), dispelled only by the bright entrance of Morpheus, exemplifies James’s poetic criterion of art-like fidelity, ut pictura poesis: ‘like a painter shadowing with umbers a portrait els drawn in grosse, for giuing it greter viuenes, so I eike or paire to the circumstaunces of the action […]’.54 If James’s epic Lepanto articulates the poem’s aesthetic category, it also echoes its depiction of Morpheus: ‘The God with golden wings,/Who entring at the ports of horne/So manie monstres brings,/And changing into sundrie shapes’ (10–13) as in the epic’s ‘Chorus Ventus’: ‘The God with golden wings through ports,/Of horne doth to me creepe,/Who changes ofter shapes tranformd/Then Protevs in the deepe’.55 Whether or not the printed Lepanto or the unprinted erotic text is the original model, the enchanted delusiveness of dreams in the latter is the source of miraculous metamorphoses: ‘By strange and subtle slight,/Does make ws heare without our eares/And see but eyes or light’ (14–16). Perception, the faculty of interpretation, from the outset is ‘afflicted’ by provisionality. A rare moment of Ronsardian sensuality precedes the angelic visionary’s departing ‘gifts’. The lover is compelled to fragment the vision intellectually into analogical categories; if a ‘naturall dreame’, humoral theory could explicate the vision. If bloode domin’d with bloodie iarres In spring tyme, and againe, If cholere raign’d with rauening fires In Sommers pearching heate, If phlegme did with drowning floods When Hyades holds there seate, If melancholie earth and night With heauie things and blacke, When frozen Saturne rules with snowe The place wolde suirlie take… (67–76) The influence of Du Bartas is again witnessed in the nexus drawn between the four elements, humours and seasons, a correspondence which forms an allusive, intertextual weave throughout the Jamesian canon.56 Alternatively, the dreamer reasons, the dream may have

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been occasioned by ‘the things I last hade thought/Hade done or wish’d to be…’ (77–8). The beloved has already been imagined or envisioned, an ‘Idee’ or neo-Platonic form already existing a priori in the dreamer’s erotic imagination. ‘Ravish[ment]’, a kind of sensual, intellectual violation, has already occurred. Only the ‘tokens’ or signifiers of that process remain, the ‘heauenlie gift’ which requires an intellectual gloss. In order to disclose its ‘secret vertues’, the dreamer solicits Apollo: O thou that mysteries can reueale And future things foreseis Assist my seeking out of this And open cleare mine eyes57 (105–8) Allusions to the god are threaded throughout the poem. Here, Apollo’s role as prophetic god is invoked; elsewhere, his role as inspiration, furor. The knowledge that both James himself and the court invoked the Apollonian mythology to make incarnate the sovereign self in literary terms offers the temptation of reading the king into every manifestation, as here in ‘A dreame’. Both as an articulation made by James, or on his behalf, the notions of self-legitimisation or self-authentication are richly embedded within any allusion. If lover and god are mirrorimages of the one, absolute sovereign self, then erotic power is intensified through this dispersal. Such magnification of sensual authority is playfully enacted as though the sign of ‘sovereignty’ were being offered to the court in order that its ludic, elusive meaning might be fixed just as that of the gift itself. For example, in the case of the amethyst stone, James alludes to its proverbial power as a remedy against drunkenness: ‘And can preserue ws from the harme/Of the envenomed sting/Of poysoned cuppes’ (125–7). Such ‘souereign[lie] remeade’ (122) or ‘soueraigne antidote’ (133) is mapped onto the province of his desire: ‘So shall my harte be still preserued/By vertue from aboue/From staggering like a drunken man/Or wauering into loue’ (129–32). The ‘poisonous’ allure of drink is likened to the ‘poysoned lookes/Of Dames I shall not swerue’ (135–6). The dreamer conceives other women as antagonists, as if threatening his love’s integrity, whom he can subjugate with the aid of the amethyst: ‘That with my conquering hand I may/Enforce my foes to flie…’ (139–40). ‘Sovereign’ desire is legislated as the pledge of eros is enforced:


For suire he cannot worthie be To be accompted deare By anie Dame that in his brest A womans heart dois beare. (141–4) The mark of fidelity is double-edged: being loyal he will not literally harbour another ‘womans hart’ within his own but neither will he display the qualities of ‘a womans heart’ in its ostensible weakness and vulnerability. Masculinity is shored up as ‘authentic’ desire, amour vrai to use the Marian term, and defined against feminine multiplicity. Martial imperialism is once more asserted: ‘I shall not from the enemies sight/To anie part remoue,/Vnkithing once in honour of/My mistres and my loue’ (149–52). Yet the god(s) of war cannot resist Cupid, if not Venus: this section of interwoven ‘sovereign’ self-reference unravels when finally drawn back to the underlying agency or locus of an irresistible desire. In the third, final interpretation of the stone’s threefold significance, its ‘force/A hunter for to aide,/In ende to catche his pray, the fruict/Of all his trauell made’ (157–60), desire receives its most subtle expression of subjectivity: ‘I trust by vertue of this stone/To winne and hold the pray/That prayes on me, and is of all/My passion’d thoughts the stay’ (165–8).58 Neither beloved nor lover possesses ultimate controlling agency as the lover’s will to possess redoubles on itself in a conceit of ‘self-entrapment’. Victimhood is shared, as if the implicit mythological protagonists of Diana and Actaeon, hunter and ‘prey’, are conflated: But loe I long to turne me to The tablet made of golde, And all without and in the same At length for to beholde. (169–72) The poem’s final ‘movement’ is the attempt to provide where there is none a subscriptio or gloss for the emblem image. While the tablet as a whole signifies ‘Her chastnes’ (175), in its quality of pure distilled gold, its deeper visual and symbolic import is more abstruse: The crawling scores of ameling blacke That on the golde are wrought,

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The diuers passions represents That walters in her thought. (177–80) Her ‘Siren voyce diuine’ (194) is contained in the reverse image of ‘A nacked man […] /Whome Phoebus rosts with hote reflexe/And stinging flees doe teare,/Yett sitting in the forrest greene […]’ (182–5). The figure can most probably be identified with Orpheus59 yet the beloved/Orpheus identification is strange. Is she, like Orpheus, unaware of the pain which she inflicts and to which (by analogy with the Orpheus allusion) she is herself subject? Is she made oblivious to this unidentified pain by ‘Esteeming so’ the ‘ioye’ of those whom she enchants (an unselfish beloved)? A ‘dittie’, redolent of the emblematic motto, is inscribed on the reverse leaf of the tablet: ‘To please/The rest he suffers paine’ (197–8). At this point, the beloved’s previously muted social-historical identification is strengthened, and the context of the court and ‘courtliness’ emerges. ‘And she her Princesse serues of loue/Without respect of gaine’ (199–200): is this Lady Glammis’s service to Anna allegorised; or is this written on behalf of Lady Glammis? Is the latter’s virtue being commended? Service to her ‘Princesse’ is performed not through expediency or expectation of benefit, but by honest devotion and affection. Courtly and social patronage relationships may be woven into the lyric’s abstract, symbolic language. The beloved is not purely a transparently rendered donna angelicata whose presence cannot be more tangibly defined or circumscribed. The second image or emblem ‘on the vtter side’ exemplifies the beloved’s supreme beauty. The visual tableau of the ‘Sunne […] shining bright/Into the midst, with stars about/Bot darckned by his light’ (202–4) is Petrarchistic; the dreamer apostrophises the literal sun in whom he seeks her ‘shaddowe’. The image is glossed by the ‘dittie’: ‘As Sunne/Amongst the stars does shine/So she her sexe surpasseth far/In vertues most diuine’ (205–8). The dreamer perceives ‘the inward part’, allusion to a literal facet of the tablet and to desire’s ‘secret’ nature. The emblem depicts the beloved’s heart held by ‘ane hand […]/Whill Cupide with his bended bowe/And golden arrowe aime,/To shoote his subtle firie shaft/For pearcing of the same’ (219, 221–4). The dreamer refuses to interpret this as the beloved’s unwilling submission to the Cupidian golden arrow. Rather, he ‘writes’ or annotates the inscription of her desire as that she ‘willinglie’ offers her heart to receive desire: ‘[…] she letts her hart/Be shotte into for me […]’ (227–8).


This imagined or fabricated narrative of desire has its iconographical counterpart in the other ‘emptie leafe’. An image of potentiality and immanence, the dreamer announces that it is ‘ordain’d to containe’ (232) the image of the beloved herself; a portrait, created by ‘sume Apelles fine’, lending the artistry of all the other images ‘a grace’. Implicit within this representation of the beloved is the Jamesian ideal of ut pictura poesis; but it is also the supreme ‘legislative’ act of the lover-dreamer-sovereign as the image of fidelity is ordained into creation. The Jamesian lover not only prophesises as Apollo but invents as Apelles. Imperfection remains in this incomplete representation: ‘So shoulde her selfe, though vivelie, no,/Yett best it can be there’ (239–40). The most ‘vivid’ incarnation of the beloved (James’s own aesthetic criterion in the twelve sonnets of the Essayes) would be, by implication, her actual living presence; she exists only in the metonymic image or imagination. The ‘tokens’ prophetically declare that ‘our loue’ is predestined. In the poem’s final exegesis, the union of tablet and amethyst ‘both knitt together be/Euen by a string’ (244–5) signifies the ‘threed’ which binds beloved and lover to one another, and the ‘threed’ which only fate or death in the guise of Atropos can sever. Yet though Apollo has prophesised, there remains the possibility that ‘verrie truth’ has not been revealed. In allusion to the opening discourse on the reliability of dreams, the dreamer concedes that any consolation is a fiction. Even the duplicity of a false vision is embraced as a ‘gladd deceate’ (257): ‘…so my guesse,/In gladnes doth me keepe’ (259–60). The spacious realm of imaginative desire is gladly inhabited. ‘A dreame’ is therefore a disquisition on illusion and insubstantiality, as much as it attempts to summon up the Jamesian criteria of ‘reasons fitt’ and interpretative sanction for meaning. Desire is twinned, mirrored, doubled, as the desiring subjectivities of beloved and lover blend, and each image or representation contains the potential for other imprints or inscriptions. Even the rhetoric itself seems to ‘double-back’, or be enfolded within its own dream-like structures. Uniquely within the Amatoria, desire offers the capacity of redemption. ‘A dreame’ secularises the Petrarchan visionary allegory and the female beloved who comes to the dreamer as an annunciation of divine caritas. That ‘secularisation’ of the beloved is problematic. To what extent is the courtly world enfolded beyond or within the text’s frame? To what degree is the sovereign self invested with desire? One of James’s earliest editors, Westcott, construed ‘A dreame’ as a kind of erotic sanctuary for James (‘the royal couple were at this time troubled

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by petty mutual jealousies […]’).60 And yet the lover’s sovereignty is both evaded and endorsed; identification both resisted and offered in sexual and political contradiction: ‘No wonder is, what Monarch may/resist a womans might’ (267–8). This (in)famous concluding line might stand as evidence that the entire text is a collaborative or ‘ventriloquised’ effort on behalf of James. There are also frequent gestures or self-references) ‘But loe my minde […] But looke’) which seem to signify the very transparency of the sovereign assertion. Yet it is a thoroughly Jamesian, or Jacobean, poem. Its emblematic and allegorical structures convert the text into a hermeneutic device which fulfils the analytical precept of the treatise though travesties its other desiderata. In many ways, the poem is as Platonic as its metaphors: as the form of the beloved copies the sun, and emblems function as representational icons of a greater image, so the poem itself may be a reflection of a larger sovereign and courtly ‘reality’ which exists beyond the contours of its dream world. For these reasons, it is the least orthodox and most haunting expression of desire in the Amatoria; the hermetic veiling of desire prefigures or, since the temporal sequence of the Amatoria texts is more or less unknown, echoes its deepest Jamesian expression in the Tragedie called Phoenix. It is the king’s only printed erotic utterance and was never explicitly included in the collection given the sign of eros.

Mythologising desire: ‘a Tragedie called Phoenix’ If love-words are necessarily duplicitous within the Jacobean context, and even its political discourses can rarely achieve the representational clarity which Jamesian theory seeks, the text devoted to ‘my Phoenix rare’ is a paradoxical announcement of both a private will to tenderness and a public assertion of political loyalty. With the 1584 publication of Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix, which appeared in the Essayes of a Prentise,61 eros crosses the threshold of politics in ways which travesty the king’s own literary prescriptions for a poetics immured from political intrusion or ‘contamination’. The Phoenix, a strange and beautiful transgression of Jacobean poetic policy and polity, fails to fulfil any Marian-inspired renunciation of literary polemics. It is likely that the poem was published because the young king perceived it as an important political assertion, an allegorical declaration of his unhappiness with the persecution of Esmé Stewart (c1542–83) whom he saw as a political ally and confidante. Stewart was James’s French cousin, the only son of John Stewart, who had lived in


France as the adopted heir of the Maréchal d’Aubigny. Subsequent to Esmé’s arrival in Scotland in 1579, James rapidly conferred on the courtier, who was twenty-four years his senior, a succession of titles (in 1580, he was made Earl of Lennox; a year later, Duke of Lennox). Their alliance was swiftly noted: ‘My Lord of Obeny, being maid Lord of Dalkeith and efterwart Duc of Lenox, was chieffest about his Maieste’.62 On the king’s first visit to Edinburgh in 1579, he was accompanied by Esmé.63 According to anxious contemporary accounts, the young sovereign of thirteen entered into ‘great familiareties and quyet purpoissis’ with the older French courtier, ‘in such love with him as in the open sight of the people, oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him.’64 The court witnessed a burgeoning relationship of emotional and political intimacy where even the bonds of spiritual inheritance were weakened as Esmé signed the ‘Negative Confession’ against Catholicism. The sovereign and his subject became, in the words of the Basilikon Doron, a ‘spectacle’ for the court and the nobility who accused Esmé of a dangerous and covert politicking, of being complicit in Counter-Reformation plots, and of fostering pro-Marian sympathies: ‘alleging him to be a papist, altogither at the Duc of Guise deuotion, and therfor a dangerous man to be about his Maieste. Bot his chieffest falt was, that he being trew to the King, he was thocht vnwonnable to ther behoue, as he wes indede.’65 Esmé fulfilled the role of the feared Other: a French Catholic who had the devotion of the king.66 The Ruthven Raid of 1582 ended Esmé’s political ascendancy; he returned in exile to France where he died a Protestant, after conversion three years earlier, on 26 May 1583. The pioneering work of David Bergeron, in two recent, book-length studies, has decoded James’s self-professed ‘Metaphoricall Invention’ as the poetic embodiment of the king’s love for his cousin in the context of epistolary desire: the poem is ‘a ‘familiar letter,’ written in response not only to Esmé’s death but also to his final letters’ (33). In the poem’s elaborate allegorical frames, Bergeron discloses the traces of desire and sexuality. The homoeroticism of the second Jacobean court (which was expediently used by Weldon and others as defamatory propaganda) cannot now be circumscribed as part of the king’s ‘English’ history of sexuality. James’s poem The Phoenix serves as a ‘familiar letter’, written in response not only to Esmé’s death but also to his final letters. The poem takes us into the king’s private space through allegory and gives voice to James’s desire […] The exclusionary, intimate, and

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affectionate nature of the relationship points in the direction of homoerotic desire, whatever the specific (and unknowable) quality of their sexual behaviour. […] James’s poem The Phoenix offers additional and compelling evidence of such desire.67 Bergeron’s rich, sensitive reading of the Phoenix, one text among other intimate ‘epistolary’ texts, laid a foundation which has not been built upon in the context of the Scottish period of Jacobean erotics. The representational anxieties which are a marked feature of Jamesian poetry provide a leitmotif by which the Phoenix may be read. Where Bergeron perceives an absolute assertion of the king’s desire, the poem may be construed as a significant printed exercise in the consciously duplicitous or veiling strategies which characterise erotic courtly poetry of the Jacobean period in general. Above all, it stands as a bold evasion of the Jamesian pledge against overt political topics. It is a love poem and a political text at the same time, which contravenes James’s ‘official’ derogation of the philosophical and ideological importance of literary erotics. The poem’s allegorical centrepiece narrates the destiny of the rare Arabian phoenix who takes shelter in Scotland (‘this land, ane stranger heir unkend’ (70)) before its persecution and final self-immolation in the fire which is simultaneously its rebirth. Despite the declarative naming of one line, ‘In her alone, whome I the Phoenix call’ (33), the poem partly veils itself by devices of emblematic, as well as allegorical, coding. These processes of secrecy and ‘encryption’ produce a text which, at the rhetorical level, is locked up in its own hermeticism. Both in conceptual and iconographical terms, it represents a hermeneutic puzzle; in this aspect, it has affinities with ‘A dreame’. The two anagrammatic and emblematic poems which preface the text suggest, in their invocation of Echo, that the words of the Tragedie which follows are to be magnified and recapitulated. While the trope of Echo is conventional in Renaissance amatory discourse, its occurrence in James’s preface suggests that the Phoenix is a text which refuses concealment or silence; these words are not to be guarded cautiously as James advises in the Basilikon Doron. James’s preface also enjoins ‘all that it reid’ to share in his grief so that a display of empathy might diminish its acuity. Sovereign desire is here not distanced but rather dissipated. Further, since the poem explicitly manifests hostility to the Protestant nobility who opposed Esmé, such an imperative also functions as a rhetorically imagined, collective opposition to their action.68 Published under the quasi-ingenuous auspices of


the Essayes of a Prentise, this is a polemical poem, designed to create dissent and ‘disorder’ as the opening invocation to the ‘furies’ suggests. While Esmé is transparently incarnated as the phoenix, the other ‘fowles’ appear to signify the opposition nobility and clergy. The rebuke to Esmé’s enemies is clear at the end: ‘deuills of darknes […]’.69 Though printed in an auspicious poetic collection, clearly intended to signify poetic and political renewal, the poem as a contemporary political ‘fable’ is desolate in implication. There is a clear opposition, topographically and symbolically, between Scotland and those regions in which the bird has her origin and in which she dwells. Scotia is a place of persecution and antagonism, of Machiavellian deceit (it is literally and metaphorically ‘cold’ so that the beauty of the bright bird renders her an object of desire and ‘Inuy’, 80–4, 120–35). Yet the Phoenix is a poem which contains strategies of evasion and displacement. Paradoxically, it even disclaims that it is about death (indeed Esmé’s, as stanza 3 asserts in consolation that: ‘friends can return […]’); and this, in one sense, is confirmed in the self-fulfilling prophecy of the bird which renews itself, ‘new gendered’, from the ashes. The symbol of the phoenix as Esmé incarnate has obvious allegorical purpose but is richly equivocal. The image of the phoenix was also deployed in James’s triumphal progression into London.70 Harmonising with the poem’s emblematic framework, the phoenix was itself a popular emblem device.71 Interestingly, the phoenix was the impresa of Marie de Guise.72 It was also an image by which James himself was incarnated by George Buchanan, then later by Du Bartas.73 The classical mythological history in Pliny’s Natural History is transmuted in the medieval Physiologus and in Horapollo’s Hieroglyphics into the resurrection of Christ and eternal life. The Christological consolation of death is clearly figured in the poem’s envoi where the ‘X’ of the word Lennox (‘whose name doeth end in X’, 262) is the sign of the crucifixion and of the resurrection. If the phoenix symbol fuses Christian and mythological typologies, it also possesses erotic signification. By the sixteenth century, the phoenix-like death and resurrection of the lover had become an erotic commonplace, bound up with neo-Platonic conceptualisations of love as a simultaneous form of death and rebirth in the body and spirit of the beloved.74 The gendered identity of the ‘Phoenix rare’, symbolising Esmé, intrigues Bergeron, who proposes that its ‘femininity’ reflects James’s ‘sexual confusion’ and ‘allows the poet James to hide the sexual desire embedded in the poem; that is, all desire fastens to the female gender, which immediately seems socially appropriate’.75 The phoenix, as already suggested, possesses Christological

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significance, and arguably Esmé’s allegorisation as the bird also suggests a Christ-like comparison in the text’s narratives of martyrdom and resurrection. Yet this phoenix incarnation, and its potential or imminence for a double-gendered identity (a feminine or feminised icon now signifying the masculine), is consistent with the poem’s hermeneutic strategies. The masculine subject represented by a feminine symbol most obviously evokes within the poem’s intertextual, allusive weave the context of profane lyric desire. In Petrarch’s Rime sparse, the mythical bird is portrayed as an analogue of the lover’s desire in a perpetual state of dissolution and recreation. It also signifies the beloved Laura. Sonnet 185 strongly suggests itself as a rhetorical and imaginative model for James’s poem: ‘Fama ne l’odorato et ricco grembo/d’arabi monti lei ripone et cela,/che per lo nostra ciel sì altera vola.’76 In the poem, an erotic ‘topography’ or anatomising of the bird’s ‘body whole’ resembles the blasonneur’s topoi of beauty: Whose body whole, with purpour was owercledd, Whose taill of coulour was celestiall blew, With skarlat pennis that through it mixed grew: Her craig was like the yallowe burnisht gold, And she herself thre hundreth yeare was old. (38–42) Further, the arcane and exotic beauty of the phoenix signifies escape and retreat (as an erotic symbol, she represents the melancholic desire which cannot exist); its deathly fragility suggests a preciousness which is almost illusionistic. Her immolation is conceived as a kind of beautiful desecration: she adorns her nest with ‘Titans garland’ (213). The phoenix-iconography represents the ‘tragicall’ subject of Esmé in a way which is sacred or sanctified; despite this process of ‘canonisation’, it cannot wholly elide the sense of the prescription, noli me tangere. James and Esmé, allegorist and textual ‘mater’, lover and beloved, sovereign and subject: these subtle dialogical relationships woven through the poem are most richly embodied in the overarching mythological relationship between the phoenix and the sun-god. Bergeron observes that the bird’s ‘identification with the god Apollo enhances desire’ but does not, in tracing the ‘rich mythic history’ (61) of Apollo, include an immediate Scottish contemporary resonance. In the poem’s frequent allusions to ‘Phoebus bricht’, or Apollo, the sungod, James may borrow, and accordingly subvert, the eulogistic kingly


symbol of Jacobean poetry: ‘She toke delyte (as she was wount before)/What tyme that Titan [Apollo] with his beames vpsprent,/To take her flight, amongs the skyes to soire’ (93–5). Bergeron perceives a ‘triangular’ relationship in the poem, founded on the intersecting real and mythological personae.77 The phoenix chooses to immolate herself upon ‘Apollo’s altar’. At one level, this conforms to the bird’s mythology: in the Physiologus, the phoenix burns itself on the altar of the sun at Heliopolis. But the other weave of connotation, which stems from the king’s own symbolic incarantion as the sun-god, complicates such orthodox symbolism, and suggests the notion of part, almost unwitting complicity and responsibility for the immolation of the phoenix which is also the dead, exiled Esmé: ‘Apollo then who brunt with thy reflex/Thine onely fowle, through loue that thou hir bure’ (260–1). James’s poem as a whole communicates a sense of guilt at the bird’s ‘oppression’ and that the shelter which she seeks ‘between his leggs’ is insufficient. Simultaneously, the poem projects the notion of sexual consummation as a form of resurrection: the phoenix’s rebirth is an act of regeneration as another offspring is ‘new gendred’ (259) from the ashes: allegorically, his eldest son, Ludovic.78 The sovereign identity immanent within the poem’s Apollo/sun symbolic tracery also has other political implications. The phoenix commands the other birds through its beauty and ascendance; an avian hierarchical allegory seems to mirror a courtly and political one. The ‘sovereign’ himself implicitly marvels at this visual display of superiority; the bird outshines ‘Titans self’ (112), another reference to the sun-god which inhabits the same symbolic space as the received mythology of the phoenix and James’s own (‘he abashit beholding such a light’, 63). Giordano Bruno’s exposition of the phoenix emblem is instructive in this regard: ‘by its smoke the phoenix almost obscures the splendour of the sun whose fire inflames it; and there is a motto which says “Neque simile nec par”: neither similar nor equal to it.’ Far removed from the perceived discursive inscriptions of authority in other Jamesian poems, the Phoenix constitutes the ultimate act of sovereign self-effacement. The poem stands in a strangely subversive relationship to the king’s poetic and political theory. It makes even more ingenuous the call to political, literary quiescence in the Essayes; the Phoenix is a remarkably audacious, perhaps deliberate, assertion of intransigent sovereignty in the wake of the Ruthven Raid. It is a polemical poem, as much designed to create dissent and ‘disorder’ as the invocation of the ‘furies’ suggests, a contrast to the rhetorically anxious desire to quell

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the raging seas in the notional ‘Anna sonnets’ or the frequent depictions of cosmological and political concord in other pieces. And yet any notion of monarchical intransigence or unassailibility is undercut by the poem’s erotic impulses, tender, submissive and elegiac. Importantly, the most intense expression of Jamesian eros seems to be occasioned by death. Eros can ‘shelter’ beneath the poetic gesture of mourning elegy; desire can be symbolically resurrected in and after death. The realms of ‘public’ and ‘private’, the ‘inward’ as opposed to the openly manifest, seem no longer tenable as oppositions in the context of James’s poem. It is a public call to mourn, an act of political excoriation, and a private, eroticised commemoration or elegy which seems to ‘fabularise’ the language and spaces of royal intimacy: ‘Syne she her self, perkt in my chalmer still’ (119). Its publication in 1584 is an important moment in the history of eros and politics: it marks the successful eroticisation of politics which in 1567 had grievously incriminated Mary. Uncannily, there is a Marian ‘haunting’ or resemblance to the literal textual remnants of the James–Esmé relationship. Bergeron observes that Esmé on his final return to France left behind a collection of papers, locked in a ‘coffer’ which were delivered to the Advocate; ‘but by the commandement of Lennox he hath burnt all the writings’.79 * None of the Amatoria pieces appeared in the collected Works of 1616. Inevitably perhaps, since they were the product of a ‘playful’ manuscript coterie culture, most probably collaborative in nature, which licensed remarkable erotic incarnations of the sovereign self, and because profane poetry was denounced by James as a sign of immaturity; those who blaspheme or ‘abuse’ poetry’s true didactic function are charged with the Platonic accusation of duplicity and feigning.80 But as Bergeron comments, ‘[James] might have withheld the poem [the Phoenix] from […] circulation, but he did not’. 81 The poem creates and perpetuates its own mythology of the text: the phoenix is new ‘engendered’ just as Esmé is. The affective function of the poem also conforms to James’s literary precepts, except that the representation is not based on ‘vivelines’ but rather contained beneath the protective allegorical, hermeneutic shell. The device of fabularising eros and death was, it seems, politically expedient. The poem is testament to James’s power as rhetor and sovereign, and it makes the Essayes of a Prentise an


assertion of political as much as literary will two years after Morton’s regency ended, and the Ruthven Raid of 1582. The Phoenix seemed to escape kingly self-censure, or censorship, in part due to its quasi-didactic or moralistic framework, and in part because it was an important political statement: Esmé should not have been condemned and exiled the way he was by the disaffected nobles because it contravened the king’s political will and desires. But what remains interesting is that James chose to articulate such a political ‘position’ or grievance through the medium of the erotic: for it is an erotic, as much as a political, allegory. It attests how seriously James took articulation of the erotic; how could he not, when there was the precedent of Mary. Eroticisation gives the lie to the apparent illusion of Jamesian invulnerability but, as the Phoenix poem suggests, the combination of erotic and political power can only strengthen the symbolic monarchical presence.

4 Devotional Artefacts: John Stewart and the Eroticisation of the Courtly

to reverence the prince he serveth above all other things, and in his wil, maners and facions to be altogether pliable to please him… Castiglione1 The single surviving manuscript which contains the work of John Stewart of Baldynneis (c1545–c1605), was a ‘gift’ to James VI, a literal and symbolic act of devotion. This act of piety was textually threefold: the manuscript folio consists of a translation, a body of lyrics and a moral-religious allegory gathered under the scribal rubric, ‘Ane abbregement of roland/furiovs translait ovt of/Ariost. togither vith/svm rapsodies of the authors/yovthfull braine, And/last ane schersing ovt/of trew felicitie,/composit in scotis/meitir be/J. Stewart of Baldy[n]neis.’ It therefore constitutes a triptych, a symbolic altar raised to James some time in the mid-1580s.2 Stewart’s heterogeneous miscellany of 66 poems is, in one sense, a collection of fragments, the inscription of fragmented ‘voices’. An intensely dialogic series of poems, the Rapsodies is a composite of verbal gestures to the courtly, sovereign world yet is also centred upon the courtly self (the courtliness ‘within’, as it were), and its fragile space of interiority. Stewart’s poetry can justly be said to crystallise the material culture of Jacobean poetic devotion in that the presentation manuscript appears as a ‘lovingly’ assembled textual artefact. This chapter examines the centrepiece of that devotion, the lyric interlude of the Rapsodies, and explores within that lyric corpus the eroticisation of the courtly: the desires which constitute, or are converted into, a rhetorically beautiful artefact, ‘gifted’ between courtiers and, ultimately, to the king himself. Just as Stewart’s collection may be considered an ‘icon’ or exemplar of Jacobean courtliness, so it converts the figure of the king into quasi-sacred, and quasi105


erotic, icon more than any contemporary poetic work. Within Scottish Jacobean poetry, the Rapsodies is one of the most striking exemplars of ‘courtliness’ performed, the lyric dramatisation of a putative network of correspondents and recipients. Yet ultimately it is the king who is conceived as its ideal reader and, implicitly, its ideal beloved. Stewart has remained on the edge of histories of Renaissance Scottish culture except in his role as a translator. This is perhaps because the fragmentary erotic texts of the Rapsodies do not offer a sustained sequence composed by one solipsistic lover as does Fowler’s Tarantula; nor do they display the thematic range of Montgomerie’s lyric oeuvre, albeit echoing its fusion of amatory, social, and political registers. Yet Stewart’s lyric practice is distinct. Within the Rapsodies’ discursive network of conversant lovers, women are not only conceived as the object of desire but are transformed into textual subjects, frequently as epistolary correspondents. Female lovers become the imagined projection or site of authorial erotic anxiety. Several important lyric fragments dramatise the relationship between female desire and moral agency, creating a portrait of feminine eros complicated by its presence within a text which bears a masculine signature, and a male subject or addressee, the king. These female-voiced poems, a form of rhetorical ventriloquism or ‘cross-dressing’, delineate and yet also resist the moral contours of a prescriptive society in ways that seem to mirror the anxious desires of Stewart’s own courtly voice(s). Stewart’s invocations of eros come full circle when the palinodic or recantatory writing of the final Rapsodies’ sonnets, and his religious allegory, Ane Schersing, transpose the place of desire in Stewart’s writing to its Jacobean locus.3 This displacement of erotic desire can be understood only in terms of Stewart’s unique position and role within the Jacobean literary enterprise. The final congruence of desires signifies a particular kind of profane and devotional interplay which carefully pays obeisance to the king.

Gifts of the courtly devotee The Rapsodies is a gift offered by a subject to his sovereign, a type of courtly presentational text which, as Woudhuysen comments, constituted ‘a powerful weapon in the quest for patronage’: ‘All vorldlie velth that onie hart may wis/Helth and Renoune vith euirlasting Gloir/ Vnto your Grace I Represent vith this’.4 Its poems construct an aptly meretricious rhetoric for the sovereign patron and mentor while also

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conveying the fragile and emotional bonds of that patronage, though its exact terms have not been wholly clarified. Genealogically, John Stewart had intimate connections with the monarchy as the second son of John Stewart, the fourth Lord Innermeith (a branch of the Perthshire aristocracy) and Elizabeth Betoun, who was the mistress of James V. Despite his clear literary prominence at James’s court, Stewart’s presence there remains largely uncharted except through poetic documents and the occasional appearance of his name in the Privy Council Register, the Acts of Parliament, and the Register of the Great Seal of Scotland.5 Stewart’s public career emerges with clarity only in the late 1570s and early 1580s through his part in the litigious and remarkably violent process of the dissolution of his mother’s second marriage.6 The early part of the decade saw Stewart’s financial and material situation improve after the resolution of this domestic legal conflict. Stewart’s subsequent circumstances until his death, probably in 1605, are unknown and, unlike other Scottish Jacobean courtiers such as William Alexander and Alexander Craig, he does not appear to have relocated with the court after 1603. The main body of his writing was probably produced throughout the considerable period of domestic and political trouble caused by the legal controversies of his mother’s divorce; perhaps it is partly responsible for the markedly anxious, placatory relationship with James which his writing portrays. Based on the evidence of allusions to James’s 1584 Essayes, McDiarmid dates the manuscript, which shows virtually no revisions or emendments, to 1585–6.7 Such a dating may refer to the transcription rather than to the poems’ actual composition: the New Year poetic gifts to James are inscribed 1582 and 1583; and the acrostic lyric, ‘In Name of ane Loyale Ladie’, is addressed to Margaret Wemyss whose marriage suggests another dating (see below). A note on the flyleaf in what appears to be an eighteenth-century hand asserts that ‘King James ye first Brought this Booke with him out of Scotland’;8 Stewart may have had at least this metonymically textual presence at the English Jacobean court. The diverse nature of the Rapsodies’ lyrics (encompassing the topics of erotic desire, sexual satire, ruminations on poetic ‘science’, Jamesian panegyric, moral reflection), combined with the uncertainty whether Stewart was himself responsible for the folio’s transcription, means that it is difficult to perceive an overarching order to the collection, whether authorial or editorial. There are ‘local’ textual arrangements, however, which are thematically meaningful. The collection opens and closes on a sonnet to James; appositely the king forms its beginning


and end. Two religious complaints succeed the opening sonnet: both solicit God’s mercy for a frail and ‘vnvordie’ penitent, and ask that the king receive divine grace.9 The moral and pious consolation immediately offered to ‘Ane Honorabill And distressit ladie’ is a natural extension of this religious discourse, and of the second lyric’s closing certainty: ‘My God, gif thow for me prouyd,/I feirles am And suir sall bie’.10 Loyal friendship is next extolled in the lyric, ‘To his rycht inteirlie belowit freind’,11 the first expression of the topos of amicitia that also informs the collection; the speaker’s assurance that ‘miserie’ can be endured in the knowledge of God’s salvation prefigures the two short lyrics of ‘derection’ to the ‘amorus ladie’. Consolation and instruction are then offered to another, or perhaps the same, ‘Honorabill Ladie’, and on worldly vicissitude to ‘His familiar friend in Cowrt’.12 This coherent set of poems is concluded by the exhortation, ‘To his Maiestie in fascherie’; even the king is subject to frailty.13 What can be identified as a moral prelude does not recur again as a sustained unity but is instead echoed in individual sonnets such as ‘Of Fidelitie’ and ‘Of Trewth’.14 Given the miscellany’s disparate nature, it is likely that many were circulated individually within the courtly milieu before being assembled and presented as a ‘cohesive’ entity to the king. Written ‘in commendatione of’ or ‘at the desire of’ other, frequently not explicitly named or identified, courtly figures, its range of petitionary, dedicatory and ‘exchange’ can be harnessed to specific social occasions, or at least premised as such. There are obvious acts of social and cultural commemoration: the king’s poetic ‘Coronation Vith laurell’ is commemorated, and other lyrics offered to James as a ‘new yeirs gift’.15 Even those lyrics which cannot so unequivocally be tied to historical events often imply or posit another sense of occasion: for example, the titles ‘For Confirming of ane Faithfull Promeis’ or ‘In Going to his Luif’ create an occasion, albeit hypothetical, on which the poem rests. The miscellany is full of implied but anonymous presences: the unidentified mistresses and ‘honorabill ladies[s]’ to, about, and on behalf of whom Stewart writes.16 These lyrics addressed to a body of ‘honarabill’ women (which may in fact be a single, historically identifiable subject; her identity is not even anagramatically or cryptologically hinted at) demarcate the Rapsodies as in part a ‘feminine’ or ‘feminised’ discursive space, which has important ramifications for its exploration of desires both licit and illicit. The lyric inscribed ‘In Praise of luif at the desyre of ane Nobile ladie’17 is one exemplar of these feminine ‘commissions’:


from Secreit Seit And ceinter of my hart Pen inexpert depaint sum speitche expres In mychtie praise of that celestiall art Quhilk vordie vychts behuifs for till profes: Great Gods abowe And men below dois dres All Reuerence dew vnto thy gouldin bow O lord of luif lowing thy luiflie low: (1–7) Cupid’s effeminising power is celebrated rather than condemned (Troilus wears Venus’s myrtle rather than the laurel wreath of victory), a prelude to the reconciliation of Mars and Venus. Sexual rather than heroic ‘courage’ is lauded (14), and Cupid’s wounding, as a benevolent ‘lord of luif’, is peculiarly gentle. Eros and poetry are imagistically entwined in ‘chains of Rosis reed’ (16), evoking the sense of purely rhetorical ‘flowers’, and a poetics of desire aptly garnered from the rose, most probably an Anacreontic allusion.18 This evocation of beauty, allied to celebration of Cupid’s gentle absolutism, is concluded by a sudden sacral intrusion: ‘And to be schort scripture dois condiscend/All things in erthe Bot onlie luif hes end’ (20–1). Such piety may be to reassure the ‘nobile ladie’ that earthly love has moral sanction; or that love is infinite and therefore transcends the limitations of the earthly. It might be a wittily reverential posture rather than reflection of the moral gravitas of Stewart’s darker anticurial poetry. The ‘L’enwoy’, a veiled compliment to the courtier herself, typifies the ‘ornamentally’ faceted courtly gift of eros: L’enwoy to the foirsaid ladie Quha possessit Cupid inclosit In ane tablat of christall. fair luiflie dame In quham all bontie beine Thy proper persone dois approwe thy mycht Quhilk keips incloist in rock of christall cleine This lord of luf quho dantons euerie vycht, Thocht he be vechtie yit thow bears him lycht: Laith venus is hir bonie boy to vant Yit gifs him liwe thy vordie brest to hant. (22–33) This text also exemplifies the fascination with the ‘material surface’ characteristic of Scottish Jacobean court poetry: the microcosmic


world of artefacts and objects frequently embodied in such poetry (in the Stewartian context, the laurel tree given to James, the Cupid set in ‘cristall’, the painting of ‘Luif young’ expounded in a sonnet) which is itself an aesthetic artefact.19 The sense of display, or of conspicuous rhetorical consumption, as it were, is mirrored in the graceful ornamentations of Stewart’s manuscript itself with its insertions and embellishments in red ink and gold leaf such as the epilogue to this lyric.20 Stewart’s fascination for ‘literal’ elaboration, in the Jamesian sense, is attested not only by the Rapsodies, but in his Ariostian translation that amplifies, qualifies, and digresses, and is often perceived as a limited exercise in virtuosity.21 The rhetorical preciosité of many Rapsodies’ sonnets is fragile, as if their manneristic excesses were on the brink of implosion,22 but the Rapsodies represent the quintessence of Jacobean courtly artifice. If Stewart’s word congeries exuberantly flout linguistic decorum, they do so with what might be termed a trangressive jouissance. In lyrics such as ‘Of the Qualities of Lufe’, ‘Of the signification of colors’, ‘Of the Assaultis of Luif’, ‘Ane Literall Sonnet’, and in occasional passages of alliteration or verbal ornamentation within other texts the verbal, no less than the erotic, pleasure of the text is courted. The Cupid lyric and other such texts in the Rapsodies can be said to function as an erotic emblem, a Castiglionian signifier: ‘the way which the Courtier ought to take, to make his love knowen to the woman me thinke should be to declare them in signes and tokens more then in woordes […]’.23 But the significatory power of the collection resides also in its pervasive, indeed mandatory, ability to ‘sign’ James. Spreits of pernass than pouss my pen ane space To praise Quhair praise derseruit dois abound: O brycht Apollo vith thy schyning face, Thy harp deuyn this subject sueit sould sound24 (9–13) This characteristic poetic rescension implies that James, in his mythographic guise of Apollo and bearing the harp of David (another, less common Jamesian icon but one markedly favoured by Stewart), should himself ‘sound […]/Sutche mychtie mater’. Offered to James as a token of ‘guid vill’ (‘To his Maiestie vith Presentatioun’, 9), the Rapsodies anxiously court the sovereign presence throughout. So insistently and anxiously does the Stewartian lyric ego solicit the attentions of the


king that the manuscript can be considered as a sustained attempt at aesthetic and erotic ravîssement. Stewart’s courtly apostrophising can appear duly and conventionally reverential: ‘Long lyf and welth vith veilfair and great gloir/Be to thy Peirles Person euirmoir/Perfyt precelling puissant prudent Prence’.25 This is perhaps one reason why these reverential poems have been overlooked; but they also portray with an intensity lacking in the Jacobean coterie at large (not even in Montgomerie’s poetry) the desire to manifest fidelity to Jamesian literary precept. In Stewart’s poetry, the literary word and will of the king is sacred.26 The spectre of Du Bartas’s Uranie, James’s exemplar of the moral, religious and philosophical epic, implicitly haunts the Rapsodies, and is the guiding spirit behind Ane Schersing out of Trew Felicitie. In closing the manuscript, this moral allegory atones for the latter: ‘Beliwis thow his godlie blissit braine/Vill tak delyt of thy fantastick vaine/Quhilk hes sic fectles friuolteis don fram…’.27 In part an excusatio, this renunciation and pledged allegiance to ‘mair prudent verse’ reflects the frequent two part division of a poetic collection into secular and divine halves, with the latter presented as its moral and spiritual telos. Yet this substantial apologia is most probably a concession to Jamesian poetics: the composition of secular poetry is charged with ‘fantastick facill sayings vaine/from Sonets als, And euerie friuoll verse…’.28 The Rapsodies’ ‘merrie ryms’ are not only formally retracted in the Schersing but implicitly qualified by the former’s sonnets proclaimed in praise of James’s ‘dyt celest’: The Mychtie Muse is no Subiectit Slawe To mundan mater Bot with dyt celest The Gloir of God Immortall thow dois crawe Quho dois deteine thy Peirles spreit possest Vith heawenlie gifts of grace abowe the rest29 The poem’s prologue rehearses Stewart’s rhetoric of praise, supplication and abnegation to James while the manifestation of the goddess Urania alludes to the moral iconography of the muse in the king’s translation of Du Bartas’s Uranie. Stewart’s allegorical protagonist willingly submits to her spiritual and literary enlightenent in a way which seemingly reflects the symbolic submission of Stewart himself to James: ‘I lang reuoluit in my secret thocht/Quhow my desyre mycht till effect be brocht/Quhilk sen my pouer mycht navayis furthschaw,/I tuik conceit at leist sum lyns to draw/As I best could, that his maist sacred skill/Yit mycht consawe ane part of my guidwill.’30 The poem


concludes by blending both monarchical and divine praise as adoration of God fuses with that of Stewart’s ‘godlie king’. The Rapsodies are rarely so obviously palinodic but they enshrine and adore ‘his kinglie courtas hart’,31 as well as betray the fear of possible excommunication. The collection preempts censure by confessing itself a miscellany of literary beginnings (‘my first dyt’), as yet untutored and unrefined, a lack to be completed by James:32 […] Ay hoiping surely still Your hienes vill My minchit meiter mend. So condiscend And do the same defend, Than sall be kend Quhat vertew in yow lyis.33 Despite the apparent paucity of his ‘first dyt’, poetry appears the sole instrument by which royal favour may be procured: ‘sempill versis […] …to my end Sall ay awance your pryis’.34 The presentation of this ‘sempill gift’ is simultaneously the offering of ‘ane treuthfull luifing hart alone’;35 elsewhere the offertory heart is an icon of ‘guiltles[ness]’.36 ‘Sempill’ becomes a key term in the repertory of Stewart’s monarchical devotion, paradoxically implying a verbal and emotional purity ‘encased’ within elaborately mannerist poems. Rhetoric, and accordingly desire, is flaunted by Stewart’s poetry; an abundance of words must serve as the sign of ‘authenticity’.37 To a degree, the Rapsodies succeed in glorifying the sovereign; in Montrose’s terms ‘enhanc[ing] not only the splendour but the strength of the monarchy’.38 Stewart’s conviction of his personal unworthiness sanctifies the king but suggests that any acts of adoration or submission are almost heretical. The ineffable greatness of the king makes his eulogist a blasphemer: ‘My sclendir skill thy gloir may not defyn’;39 ‘Sum holie Angill from abowe most bring/Vith heawenlie voce to spred his praisis vyd.’40 Stewart’s adoration of James is arresting in its sheer ingenuousness: his texts lay bare their loving and fearful abnegation which can also be gentle: ‘Daylie to see your grace is my disyre’;41 ‘Remember me And do me Not foiryeit’.42 Yet the poems are consciously artful, engaging in an allusive sovereign iconography. The sonnet ‘Of Chastitie’ compares this precious commodity to the ‘vermell Rois’ (perhaps in Marian terms) and to the ‘Phenix’ which shares its rarity.43 Not that every occurrence of the phoenix emblem in Jacobean poetry is of necessity a coded reference to James’s tragedy; but it is suggestive in a text which exalts spiritual love and in a corpus of work which signals its intimate acquaintance with ‘celestial’ sover-


eign poetry.44 The Phoenix would have been an obvious Jamesian text, in its veiled and elegiac homoeroticism, for Stewart to incorporate in his allusive network. Part of the Rapsodies’ process of revering James also entails the offering of pleas and prayers for his protection, and occasional cautious advice. ‘To his Maiestie In fascherie’, which may possibly allude to the alarming Ruthven Raid of 1582, depicts the fragile and vulnerable young sovereign body, as though Stewart were briefly forfeiting his abject status and daring to counsel the king in protective fashion. The miscellany as a whole betrays deep anxiety about the duplicitous nature of the context in which homage and display occurs; it is an anticourtly as well as a courtly text: ‘Tyds hich dois flow, Bot ebs als fast,/Than Richtlie row, for courts vill cast’.45 The quatrain, ‘Of ane Certane Courteour’, evokes Puttenham’s assimilation of the courtier to the figure of Allegoria: Vit but veals vith vertew but vyce He doith posses now all may persawe. Sit sall he still suir nocht semyng nyce Sie may ye him trew nocht leing knawe.46 ‘Courtliness’ acts as the synonym for guile. Stewart solicits James to ‘flie Sir’ from such dissemblers, vexed that his own reputation might be tarnished by ‘vthers of dispyt/[who] Vill me Bakbyt’.47 Within this milieu, characterised by an ever-illusory sense of order and the threat of duplicity and dissent, Stewart’s literary erotics are enacted and transacted. ‘Yea godis vorks decay sall euerie one,/Befoir that I the sacred oth repent’: the faithful lover or courtly subject vows never to betray an ‘Inwart treuth’.48 While the locus of the court lies behind these texts by Stewart and other members of the Jacobean coterie, their erotic transactions neither simplistically nor reductively veil those of courtly or political power. Rather it is the act of withholding from the external courtly world, and of withdrawal to a sanctified symbolic realm, inhabited only by the sovereign and his most loyal subject, which characterises the poetics of erotic courtliness in the Rapsodies.

The allegorical secrecy of desire ‘[I]f oure Courtier would folowe my counsell, I would exhort him to kepe his loves secrete’:49 Stewart’s sonnet, ‘In Going to his Luif’,50 modelled on Desportes’ ‘Contre Une Nuict Trop Claire’, is an erotic confes-


sion invested with greater transgressive power by being ‘voiced’ within the discursive and rhetorical context that cherishes and exploits the expedient sins of dissembling. O siluer hornit Diane nychtis queine, Quha for to kis Endimeon did discend, Gif flam[m]e of luif thow haid don than susteine As I do now that instant dois pretend T’embrasse my luif, Not villing to be kend, Vith mistie vaill thow vold obscuir thy face for reuth of me that dois sic trauell spend, And finding now this vissit grant of grace, Bot lett it be thy borrowit lycht alace I staying stand in feir for to be seine Sen yndling eine Inwirons all this place Quhois cursit mouths ay to defame dois meine. Bot nether thay Nor yit thy schyning cleir May cause appeir my secret luif synceir. (1–14) Transmuting the rituals and codes of courtly society into allegorical conceit, this sonnet is concerned with the impossible existence of an inviolable sanctuary in which to love. The lover, in seeking to evade being seen, must act duplicitously; desire only exists, or possesses integrity, in so far as it remains unknown. The text recreates the moment at which the lover prepares ‘T’embrasse … [her/his] love’, and the brief consummation which fulfils the longed for ‘grant of grace’. The framing analogy of Diana and Endymion carries the conceit of secrecy; Diana, in her power as moon goddess, can envelop the lover in darkness; he solicits her aid since she too has loved illicitly. She may withdraw or soften her light through the ‘reuth’ [pity] of mutual understanding. So far the lover’s secrecy is a virtue in the sense that Bacon portrays ‘this hiding and veiling of […] self’: ‘an habit of secrecy is both politic and moral’.51 Yet Diana’s love for Endymion was condemned to secrecy, or ‘obscuir[ed]’ in Stewart’s sense, for Endymion, in perpetual sleep, did not know of her embraces.52 This other implied aspect of secret love imbues the sonnet’s love with pathos: this ‘pretend[ed]’ embrace may be as unfulfilled or imperfect as Diana’s. The fear of revelation imposes temporal limits: ‘Bot let it be thy borrowit light allace […]’; the verbs ‘pretend’ and ‘borrow’ emphasise the


illusoriness or impermanence of this desire. Even if the condition of its secrecy ensures its virtue (‘secret luif synceir’), this love is fragile in other ways. Diana’s protection is not assured but hypothetical: ‘Vith mistie vaill thow vold obscuir thy face…’ (my emphasis). Grammatically, the sonnet is bound to the present: the title communicates the present immediacy which is emphasised by other temporal reminders (‘As I do now[…]/I staying stand’). The colophon implies a sense of stasis as well as movement; the present participle suggests eternal deferral with his desire immured in a state of imperfect fulfilment. The literal opacity by which this love is consummated suggests opacity of other kinds: must it be covert in fidelity to a notion of amour courtois, or is it adulterous and of necessity ‘secret’? The lover is protective not only of ‘luif synceir’ but of the beloved too whose presence is almost wholly effaced. This is a hauntingly elusive love which, as the couplet asserts, evades even the moon’s ‘schyning cleir’. The act of erotic devotion is therefore implicitly conceived as a fragile courtly transaction, vulnerable to the perils of revelation and condemned, as it were, to the sanctity of its irremediably ‘secreit’ state. The sonnet accordingly can be conceived as a miniature meditation, or metacommentary, on the compulsion to veil desire, or to render it invisible. Within the Rapsodies’ elaborate metaphorical entrelacements and complex framework of dedications, desire is strongly compelled to find a new means of signification in the figure of Woman. The perilous erotics of consummation are expressed through the desiring subjectposition of the Other.

Impossible erotics and desiring women The feminine is an important rhetorical space within Stewart’s lyric collection, not merely in terms of conjectured social exchanges, but conceptually and ideologically. In addition to the poems addressed ostensibly to women, either historically identifiable or textually incarnated, are several poems about women that are articulated in the name of woman. The most important of these are entitled ‘In Name of ane Amorus ladie’, and ‘In Name of ane Loyale ladie’ which hauntingly explore the question of the permissible voicing of desire. Such poems are concerned with the enunciation of desire from a feminine subjectposition by a male writer. The impersonated female voice need not produce a reading which perceives the figure of woman to be silenced or marginalised within a masculine discourse. Stewart’s ‘transvestite ventriloquism’, to use Elizabeth Harvey’s phrase,53 can be wholly


orthodox as in the twinned sonnets which form a dialogue between the ‘hostes’ and ‘host’ (prostitute and client).54 Unlike the cultivated and socially acceptable courtesan of sixteenth-century Venetian society, the prostitute in Protestant Britain possessed less cultural sanction; yet as the archetypal courtly, presentational text, gifted to the sovereign, Stewart’s inclusion of facetiae on the prostitute’s art may have consciously mirrored the anti-courtesan jests of Italian courtly ‘dialogues’ such as Aretino’s.55 But the pre-eminence of the feminine erotic subject-position in Stewart’s collection, more markedly present here than in other texts by Scottish Jacobean writers (only Alexander Montgomerie’s corpus is comparable) renders impossible the fixed location of sexual identity, and is analogous to the Cixousian notion of bisexual writing. The concept of literary bisexuality, ‘the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes’,56 emancipates readings of such ventriloquised texts as Stewart’s from a critique of the subjugated feminine. The presence of Cixous’s ‘decipherable libidinal femininity’57 articulates a position of the abject and the exiled, and the concept of desires which are rendered more precious by their transgressive nature. (The notion of ‘authenticity’, or the supposition that they speak of ‘genuine’ erotic impulses rooted in an attested psychosexual interiority which the concept of the ‘libidinal’ may imply, is not intended here.) The erotic energies disclosed by the ‘undoing’ of desire’s conventional gendered spaces may ultimately be contextualised within the Jamesian arc, the kingly homage of beginning and ending, by which the Rapsodies is framed. Sen I am frie to scherse my peir I knaw my friends vill so desyn, Bot than sall I vith cairfull cheir Drywe out my duilfull dayis in pyn Sen that this luifing hart of myn Hes chosin ane Inferior To quhom my nature dois Inclyn To luif as my superior: (9–16) Stewart’s ‘amorous ladie’ is caught between ‘contrarieteis’, debating whether to choose, presumably in marriage, ‘the man quhom I luif best’ (28), or to comply with the dictates of ‘freindis […] counsell’ (46).


Desire conflicts with the institution of marriage, according to doctrines which entail the suppression of female and/or erotic agency. Although Stewart’s ladie would fulfil ‘Gods law’ in taking her true beloved (27), faithful not only to her own desire but to the Christian precept of love, she fears that this would be construed as mere pursuit of her ‘vanton vill’, injurious to her ‘former famus fame’ (43–4). Stewart’s phrase, ‘playing the fuill’, implies that to act licentiously would be to assume a mere role or to act contrary to the virtuous love she inwardly bears. ‘Me to guwernne It better war’ (45): female desire must be circumscribed and disciplined by authority. ‘Ane venerian Interpryse’ (48) or profane love may reveal an unguarded and unlicensed aspect of the female self. The anxieties of social status commonly expressed by the politic courtier-lover are feminised. Mindful of her ‘nobill race’, she can act only as a familial, or more appropriately patriarchal, symbol. Yet Stewart’s female subject contradicts social hegemony by investing the terms ‘Inferior/superior’ with a moral or spiritual currency in contrast to the social or materialist values espoused by her coercive ‘friendis’. Her discourse ends on the threshold of imminent choice: Quhan sall my vofull veird compleit? Quhan I efter my constant kynd May rander vp ane faythfull spreit (70–2) The lyric becomes her own elegy: at once a revelation of, and frustration with, the impossibility of female desire finding realisation and fulfilment outwith the public, social realm. Her early assertion of individual agency, ‘Sen I am frie’, is denied; in loving according to a prescriptive ideal ‘it becommeth not a mayde to talke […]’.58 In Stewart’s other lyric, ‘In name of ane Loyale Ladie’, female sexuality and the constraints of morality appear reconciled; loving under the auspices of ‘prudent Pallas queine’ (20), her […] trustie hart is setlit firme and suir As diamant dour Or lyk the stabile steill, Rather to die than ons my fayth abIuir (1–3)


Her love achieves the paradox of being both divinely sanctioned (‘God hes contentit my desyr so weill’, 4), and yet fulfilling spiritually and sexually. Ewen as lord Phebus lyks the lawrell greine Contentit so for euir I Remaine, He for his daintie dame yit suffers teine Trewth of my luif Reconforts me againe (21–4) Unlike Apollo’s desire for chaste Daphne, the ladie is assured of reciprocity, her beloved no less than an embodiment of ‘Trewth’. This is an interesting mythic analogue: she identifies herself with the desiring Apollo rather than the pursued and passive Daphne, frequently allegorised as female virtue; this implies a consenting rather than reluctant or fearful beloved. The ladie is permitted – she permits herself – to contemplate in erotically suggestive terms his ‘face formois’: ‘My senses all in solas sueit dois suell […]’ (11). This act of ‘beholding’ most obviously and strikingly inverts the common gender of the sexual gaze; the beauty which is adored is also male. ‘Vith suggurit sop as Recent Rois dois smell/Ewen so resemblith my maist comelie chois’ (9–10): the male beloved is imaged by the highly sensual and conventionally feminine conceit of the moist or dewy rose. Female eroticism is metaphorically replete throughout: he is a sun to her marigold; she opens as the flower. She desires sexually but like a ‘trew Penelope’ or Pallas: female wisdom and female love are mutual. The strength of this alliance between purity and erotic desire presents a new, almost redeemed, embodiment of feminine sexuality. It is probable that this lyric was a ‘gift’, as indicated by the anagram formed by the initial letter of each line, to Margaret Wemyss, ‘Ladie Crevcht’ (d.1636). She may be identified as the daughter of Lady Cecilia (d. 1589) and Sir David Wemyss of Weymss (c1535–91), the latter a prominent member of the Jacobean court. She married James Beaton of Creich as his second wife; thus the poem’s address to ‘Margaret Vemis Ladie Crecht’ implies that it was intended either to commemorate or announce her marriage (though its date has been claimed as both 1578 and 1598).59 Unlike Montgomerie’s commemorative or ‘gifted’ nuptial poems,60 Stewart’s does not espouse a single, crystalline ideology of the virgin bride; impulses of the pure and ‘impure’ are fused in a version of the eroticised, and eroticising, virgin.


Yet this ‘missexual’ text offers a further complication of gendered voice through the two short poems immediately subsequent to it. In ‘The Author vith derection heirof to the foirsaid ladie’ and ‘The Authors adwyce to the foirsaid ladie’,61 the verbal travesty or illusionism is broken as Stewart ‘impersonates’ a male voice offered as his own. In the first lyric, the ‘happie man’ of whom the female lover speaks is addressed. He is fortunate to be loved or ‘elect[ed]’ by her. Though ‘the author’ grants the ladie free choice or ‘election’, he advises that she should love ‘ane vther maik’ (8); in desiring him she degrades herself (‘ourfar she dois abuiss/Hir freindlie fauor for thy saik’ (5–6)). In the eight line envoi, he excuses himself (his audacity?), and courteously defers to her: ‘Your hand I kis/And so I end’ (15–16). The second lyric (termed ‘adwyce’ rather than the more direct ‘derection’) is a brief exemplum on the folly of aspiring to the impossible or unattainable. Althocht the fruite dois fairest spring That hichest on the trie dois grow In greatest dainger dois it hing Quhan Boreas begins to blow; The hicher set, The sooner low As be experience ve sie: The faster knet, the harder throw, Heirfoir vith the myd meine aggrie. Through proverbial sententia, the poem articulates the moral that desire should be restrained. There are conscious echoes of the amorous ladie’s own cautionary maxims: the example of Icarus, the ‘prowerbe plain’ of lines (37–40). Her desire to love unreasonably (in her own phrase not to be ‘content’), symbolised as the ‘fruite […]/That hichest on the trie dois grow’, resonates with that archetypal paradigm of illicit and covetous feminine desire, Eve and the tree of knowledge. As these male-voiced poems seal her utterance (vis-à-vis their actual textual position in the manuscript), so they may represent the cautionary instructions of the companions to which she alludes. As if in a further act of ventriloquism, her unfinished and questioning poem is ‘answered’ by words of social propriety and censure; her desire, that she may desire as she wishes, is symbolically ‘finished’. The female subject, in the end, is silenced: the first of these ‘answer’ lyrics is a communication between men (one prospective, jealous lover to another?), contesting the emotional agency of the absent female subject (depicted in the ‘third person’ in the first eight lines though the


poem is ostensibly addressed ‘to the foirsaid ladie’). Female eroticism is invested with a trangressive beauty which, albeit differently in each lyric instance, is ultimately forbidden. The veiled allusion to Margaret Wemyss, Lady Creich, invests the lyric series with the ‘ghost’ of a historical narrative: did this erotic chastisement, the imperative to love prudently, have roots in a courtly succès de scandale? Did Wemyss herself author the lyric(s); or did she ‘authorise’ by proxy this exchange of desire and admonishment? These lyrics are also haunted by another erotic narrative: desire for the king. While none of the female-voiced texts allude explicitly or implicitly to James, their incarnations of eros, and the processes of authority and chastisement which they invoke, unravel threads of continuity with Stewart’s own professed desires for the sovereign. There are several reasons, already explored, why sexual desire should here be ‘feminised’. It is not embodied in any position which perceives the female desiring subject as being de facto powerless. But this erotic act of projection and identification on Stewart’s part is resonant with implications for Jacobean and Stewartian erotics as a whole: in the ambiguously ‘unsigned’ or unauthorised signature of desires, and in the ‘bisexuality’ which serves to signify the possibility of male–male erotics. This is sublimated in the collection’s final transposition of the profane into the realm of the sacred and the pure.

Love, faith and chastity: Jamesian prescriptions In praising love ‘at the desyre of ane Nobile ladie’, Stewart celebrates its eternity and its sole exemption among ‘[a]ll things in erthe’ (21) from religious censure. This can hardly be said to prefigure the closing vision of eros in the Rapsodies, and Stewart’s manuscript as a whole. In the context of the manuscript’s triptych-structure, the lyric section is philosophically and theologically subordinate to the overarching moral sublimation of Ane Schersing. An elaborately tissued allegory, it culminates in a vision of the New Jerusalem after the apocalyptic expulsion of all temporal sins, the expurgation of mortal and political temptations, and the establishment of the ‘firm trew Religion’ (102). These symbolic acts of moral and civic purgation are carried out by a panoply of allegorical protagonists that, in their image and rhetoric of exemplarity, owe much to David Lyndsay’s 1540s drama, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis. The latter’s part-status as an allegorical performance in the ‘advice to princes’ tradition also informs Stewart’s poem. This offers moral and spiritual ‘derection’ to a later Stewart sovereign


beneath the veil of personification. As such, it may belong to the mid1580s with its relative political stability; at the same time, it echoes the rhetoric of auspiciousness and premonition, and the iconography of kingship, which belongs to the sovereign poetry of 1579. Subsumed within this monarchical, political and religious vision is the pilgrim journey of an individual soul. The Stewartian poet renounces his former iniquitous devotion to Venus (the sins of luxuria and vanitas), and redirects his love to God, ‘the onlie fontane fair/Of euerie grace’ (75–6). While Stewart’s self-protagonist is guided by Charity and others, his deliverance out of a Venusian purgatory is implicitly orchestrated by James himself. To the goddess Urania, spiritual muse of Du Bartas’s Uranie and its Jamesian translation, Stewart laments the folly of presenting his former profane ‘buik’ to the king. She replies that James will ‘correct’ its flaws (‘correctioun’, 91, being both textual and moral), and that ‘be inspectioun of his luifing luik/In euerie blob sall beautifeit appeir’. In the ‘Mateir’ of Ane Schersing, Charity appears as a ‘chast virgin’, a ‘heawenlie dam’ (the image of the Petrarchan donna angelicata rather than the Virgin herself). He offers his devotions to caritas: ‘Your luif is courtas godlie and synceir/Your luf from all Inwy is purgit cleir/Your luif is not prouockit to desdaine/Your luif in suffering long dois perseweir […]’.62 Submission to Urania and Caritas implicitly becomes submission to James through the ideals, literary and moral, which both female personifications incarnate. Ironically, the female muse replaces Apollo, and the conventional Jacobean poetic genealogy, the source of all auctoritas, is feminised. The word of God, and the words of James, constitute the true texts of Ane Schersing; the ‘blissit buik’ finally revealed to its poet contains the ‘gouldin letters’ ‘IACOBUS SEXTVS HIC SCOTORUM REX’ (261). Yet the Rapsodies is not wholly its moral opposition: it contains anticipatory moments of its recantation of the profane. The sonnet on ‘Chastetie’ is placed before the prostitute’s ‘Salutation’ and ‘Ansuir’; the latter are suggestively succeeded by ‘Of the Assaultis of Luif’ and ‘Of Deth’ in which the body is shown to suffer agonistically.63 ‘Chastetie’ neither offers an exposition of caritas nor of the renunciation necessary in order to attain this divine ‘vertew great’. The sonnet was earlier discussed as a veiled allusion to James’s spiritually unique love for the phoenix which is Lennox. In this sense, it offers a masculine version of the normally feminised phoenix emblem which contrasts with the feminine associations of the ‘vermell Rois’. The phoenix, as a symbol of Christian resurrection, may inform Stewart’s concept of chastity as an implicit kind of ‘resurrection’ of the spiritual over the bodily. The


rose (perhaps in deliberate contrast to the Anacreontic associations of the rose in the earlier sonnet ‘In Prais of Luif at the Desyre of ane Nobile Ladie’) evokes the ‘paine’ by which the ‘blis’ of chastity is attained: for as the Rois of flouris all the chois Maist semlie sproutith from the scharpest thorne So thow (I dout not) dois vith paine Inclois All sort of thois be quhom thy blis is borne64 Purity is also a crown of thorns. There are other invocations of ‘redeemed’ eroticism. The sonnet, ‘For Confirming Of Ane Faithfull Promeis’, illuminates a concept of love which refutes the courtly machinations of ‘In Going to his Luif’.65 A ‘sacred oth’, never defined or ‘explaine[d], (13), is made to ‘yow my luif alone/Vith fixit faith’ (7–8). The secrecies of ‘In Going to his Luif’ are not wholly renounced; this is a confession or vow whose sanctity must be taken on trust: ‘Och vold to god I mycht be pruif explaine/My Inwart treuth quhilk constant sall remaine’ (13–17). Faith in the beloved is so assured that suspicion of the ‘sacred oth’ is sacrilege: The suelling sie sall first rewert in fire; And mollifeit salbie ilk dourest stone; The erth abowe the heawenis sall Impyre: Of sone And mone the lycht sall als be gone, Yea godis vorks decay sall euerie one (1–5) The sanctified virtue of ‘firm faith’ is extolled in a number of other Rapsodies poems which resolutely celebrate amicitia, and not amor. Quhat solas is so sound sinceir and sueit? As freindschip flowing from effection frie? Quhat mundan myrth may man obtein so meit As sutche guid hap to find for his supplie? for freindis tuo, quhois nature dois aggrie Ar lyk vyn branchis linkit growand greine About the stoupis of that kyndlie trie Quhilk luifinglie againe dois tham susteine66 The ‘faithfull band’ (‘Amitie’) which binds true friends is, as attested by its classical exposition in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s


De Amicitia, and their neo-Platonic transmissions, based on virtue, the recognition of equality, and inexpedient motives.67 Their mutual devotion contrasts with the Rapsodies’ other denunciations of earthly vicissitudes, particularly the anti-curial poems. Their larger socio-cultural status suggests interesting, if ultimately irresolvable, issues. Do they simply reflect the ‘conversational’, dialogic qualities of the collection, poems given as gifts to ‘friends’ as to mistresses; Castiglione’s manual of good courtiership advises how one should enter into friendship.68 R.D.S. Jack perceptively proposes that the moral ethos of the Rapsodies’ love poetry is influenced by the popularity of Petrarch’s Trionfi at the Scottish Jacobean court: In the four chapters of the first triumph of Love, Stewart would find love in all its varities from lust to the highest aspirations. Love is then conquered by Chastity and we find the Castalian composing a sonnet called ‘Of Chastetie’, using the conventional Petrarchan parallels with ‘phoenix’ and ‘vermell rois’, while stressing its superiority to earthly pleasures […]69 The Rapsodies’ friendship poems, none of which makes explicit the speaker’s gender, may seek to exploit that same affinity between amor and amicitia so that, ultimately, the ideal love founded on faith is same-sex love. As such, the labyrinthine traces of desire may lead back to the king, who espouses the aesthetic and philosophical ideals of moral purity. Stewart, ever fearful ‘to displeis’ the king, may have created the Rapsodies in deference to James’s ‘Sacred Sang’, as an avowedly conscientious reader of his ‘maist prudent/Precepts in the deuyn art of poesie’. 70 Given the way in which Stewart presents himself as such an assiduous sovereign interpreter, it is surprising that his work exists only within this single manuscript; there are no extant copies of his poems, a fact which places Stewart oddly in the margins of the Jacobean coterie. It is interesting to conjecture whether this lack of textual survival is mere chance or perhaps deliberate? Stewart’s allegorical protagonist in Ane Schersing willingly submits to the divine muse’s spiritual and literary enlightenment in a way that parallels the symbolic submission of Stewart himself to James. The conversion of the erotic into the spiritual within Stewart’s manuscript is, of course, shaped by wider palinodic conventions of amatory writing. Yet the earliest poems of the Rapsodies raise the spectres of mortality and sinfulness, concepts refracted in the female-voiced poems which introduce the secular


morality of ideal feminine conduct and, by virtue of its ‘missexual’ context of articulation, ideas of the transgressive and the forbidden. The erotic world of Stewart’s presentation ‘buik’ is circumscribed by secular and religious moralities, by the duplicities of courtiership and ultimately by the sovereign himself. Stewart’s writing bears the closest affinities to Montgomerie’s above all other Scottish Jacobean poetic courtiers. Yet Stewart remains the most extreme Jamesian devotee; the sense of both erotic and literary piety and fidelity runs deep within his writing. The individually beautiful textual artefacts of the collection constitute an elaborate verbal homage to James. Yet while Stewart’s poetry depends upon the duplicitous courtly context (how else is desire for the sovereign mediated?), it is deeply critical of it, partly because it discloses the vulnerabilities, political and emotional in nature, of both himself, the courtly subject and the sovereign. In Stewart’s poetry, the sheer need for sovereign attention, approbation and, ultimately, desire is felt acutely; the subject is incomplete and imperfect without the plenitude, as it were, which only the king can offer. The erotic renunciation of Ane Schersing is Stewart’s philosophical homage to his ‘prince’ where the representation of James is a remarkable synthesis of mythography (‘phebus brycht’), christology, and divine kingship. At least on earth, James is Stewart’s redeemer. The Rapsodies, perhaps an isolated remnant of Stewart’s literary production, remain as an erotic and worshipful ‘gift’.

5 Love’s Altar: Alexander Montgomerie and the Erotics of Representation

Alexander Montgomerie (c1550–1598) is both the Jacobean paragon and the Jacobean excommunicate. As a convert suspected of covert Catholic counter-plotting, Montgomerie’s political, courtly and literary communion with James had dissolved by the end of the 1580s. Erotic love seems to have entered into that communion, according to the testimony of the poetic dialogue of desire between Montgomerie and his king. Just as Stewart’s poetry invests the constellation of Jamesian sovereign mythologies with affective, and seductive, power, so does Montgomerie’s, but with a greater and more sustained intensity. This chapter explores the erotics of representation in those lyrics whose portrait of desire delineates the king. Sensitivity to the ‘immanence’ of James within certain profane poems provides a further point of symbolic departure into the ‘passional’ narrative of other lyrics, those which do not apostrophise or imagine the king, but stage their own dramas of erotic desecration and redemption. Desire is frequently ensnared by mortality in Montgomerie’s love poetry; love, fortune and death unite to form a trinity of adversaries. While mortal love is not the explicit subject of Montgomerie’s sovereign erotic verse, its manifestation in other lyrics extends and amplifies the dark provisionality of sovereign desire. Erotic and political subjectivities ultimately blend in their shared fragility. Love, above all for the king, entails sacrifice, and Montgomerie is the most willing and poignant of love’s martyrs.1

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Catholic desires Montgomerie’s copious and diverse writing belongs to a number of histories: those of political and religious literature in late sixteenthcentury Scotland; of early modern rhetoric and the poetics of translation; of a Counter-Reformation pietistic sensibility; and of the cultural fusion of music and literature in its creation of a performative and popular art in courtly and elite Scotland.2 Montgomerie was the most prolific amatory lyricist of the Jacobean coterie, awarded the sobriquet ‘Pindarus Scoticus’ by Thomas Dempster, and allegedly the author of ‘cantiones amatorie’.3 While his poetry remains inextricable from the contexts of the inner Jacobean coterie, it also embodies the social and familial ‘transactions’ of the Montgomerie circles.4 The lyric texts of the Ker manuscript have many identifiable recipients, dedicatees and interlocutors, which embed them within contemporary cultural and social dialogues or ‘transitions’; frequently, the transfer through marriage and between families of the aristocratic daughter.5 Montgomerie himself belonged to the powerful Eglinton branch of the family in southwest Scotland, and he had familial links with the king himself. Uniquely, his literary production crosses political and cultural thresholds in spanning both the Marian and Jacobean decades. He contributed prominently to the cultural inauguration of James’s reign through allegorical, masque-like narrative which celebrates the iconicity of James’s new kingship.6 The Marian ‘inheritance’ had pragmatic manifestation in his probable proCatholic agitation in Reformed Scotland, 7 and, by extension, in the fact of his conversion which conjecturally occurred during a probable visit to Spain in the 1580s.8 R.J. Lyall points out the intriguing disparities between the official Jacobean records of Montgomerie’s continual imprisonment in ‘the pairtis of Flanderis, Spane and utheris beyond sey’,9 and the lack of Dutch archival evidence to corroborate this imprisonment. Lyall suggests that a significant simultaneity of events – James’s confirmation of the pension of his ‘Catholic courtier-poet’ and his public statement of Montgomerie’s ‘inexplicable’ presence in Spain when pro-Catholic sympathies among the Scottish nobility were being treated leniently by James – may imply that the allegations of imprisonment are a ‘cover-story to disguise the true nature of Montgomerie’s activities’.10 Montgomerie’s political, no less than aesthetic, career at the Jacobean court had a dramatic and changeful trajectory. His most injurious act was his support for the Catholic Hugh Barclay of Ladyland’s

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plot to capture the island of Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde in support of the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland. He was summoned to answer the treasonable charges but, having failed to appear at court, he was officially outlawed on 14 July 1597.11 This grievously compounded Montgomerie’s earlier litigious and political offence. Montgomerie had drawn an annual income or pension since 1583 from the revenues of Glasgow Cathedral which entailed the endorsement of the Catholic James Beaton as Archbishop of Glasgow; the Protestant claimant, William Erskine, subsequently asserted his right to the archbishopric revenues which affected Montgomerie’s own dispensation. Erskine’s incumbency was endorsed in 1593 by the Crown.12 Politically and financially, Montgomerie was affected; an apparently irrevocable breach had occurred between sovereign and subject. According to the testimony of Father Thomas Duff, a Benedictine monk of the Scottish abbey of St James in Würzburg, Montgomerie sought sanctuary there. He seems to have returned to Ayrshire, though, where his political commitment to the Catholic cause was renewed. As John Durkan recently attested, although declared by the Edinburgh presbytery a ‘poet papist’ and officially an outlaw, Montgomerie was given burial on Protestant ground.13 In a series of Latin poems discovered by Mark Dilworth, Father Duff vehemently endorses Montgomerie’s spiritual and literary fidelity to the faith in 1616: Dum moritur fidei vates Montgomrius ardens Romanae et sanctae Relligionis Amor… Hostis eram gravis haereseon semperque perodi Falsa, Picarditas carmine Marte premens.14 Such impassioned religious polemic cannot be entirely substantiated from Montgomerie’s poetic relics.15 His longest work, a complex visionary allegory entitled The Cherrie and the Slae, first published in 1597 by Robert Waldegrave and reprinted throughout the next century in Scotland, has been interpreted by Helena Shire as the poetic inscription of ‘Catholic militancy’.16 The spiritual succour of the cherry is sweet temptation compared to the bitter gall of the Reformed slae. The allegory evinces Montgomerie’s propensity for iconographic and emblematic symbolism. In other ways, Montgomerie’s conversion ‘haunts’ his extant poetry: in the sonnet, ‘Myne ee the glasse’, derived from Henry Constable, also a convert;17 in the sonnet to James Lauder, Catholic court musician, which may allude in ‘ghostly’ acrostic form to Mary


Queen of Scots;18 in rhetorical and imagistic echoes of CounterReformation baroque piety and sensuality; and in the series, ‘A Ladyis Lamentatione’. This tripartite sonnet sequence can be used as a summation of Montgomerie’s political and spiritual faiths, and as a suggestive prologue to his writing of eros: LORD, for my missis micht I mak a mends, By putting me to Penance as thou pleasd? Good God forgive offenders that offends And heall the hurt of sik as are diseasde.19 A female plainant seeks remission for her sin, implicitly a sexual transgression on the evidence of the separate but related typologies of the Magdalene and Cresseid upon which she draws. Her ‘fall’ is also translated into social terms: ‘I wes accountit Countes but compair/Quhill fickle fortun vhirld me from her vheell./Rank and Renoun in lytill Roum sho rang’d’ (1: 11–13). This is a haunting, melancholic text which elegises the spiritual end and exile of a ‘worldly woman’ (1: 10) turned ‘Bysin’ (2: 14; ‘harlot’). A number of speculations can be brought to this text. The first, in pursuit of historical veracity, might suggest that it dramatises a specific incident in the life of a female subject at the Jacobean court or within the Montgomerie circle.20 Second, it may represent Montgomerie’s excursion into the popular Renaissance genre of female complaint. Alternatively, that the poem’s plainant may not be ‘ventriloquised’ but authored, anonymously of course, by a woman; whether she herself is the historical representative of the spiritual crisis or its fabulator. Finally, given Montgomerie’s religious and, by implication, political sympathies, and the text’s persona of the beautiful, penitent ‘whore’, this might be Montgomerie’s act of writing in propria persona Mary Stewart.21 The queen’s situation can be mapped seamlessly onto the sequence; the term ‘Countess’ may mask the more transparent term of sovereign. Its vocabulary of penitence and atonement is Catholic (‘So with Peccavi Pater I conclude’, 3: 14), liturgically the source from which Montgomerie, the exiled convert, creates his own devotional poetry.22 ‘A Ladyis Lamentatione’ may therefore be a politically suggestive act of Marian sympathy. The religious and political ‘faultlines’ of this sequence, its powers of ellipsis and evocation, suggest the cultural complexities of Montgomerie’s position: a devoted and disaffected writer to James with the spiritual faith of the king’s mother.

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In ‘Cupid’s court’: writing eros, reading James While Stewart’s relationship with the king is overwhelmingly manifest in the Rapsodies’ postures of adoration, humility and abjection, sovereign desire in the context of Montgomerie’s poetry is not singly possessed by the courtly subject but ‘shared’ between sovereign and subject. James’s Essayes may announce the forms of ideal sovereign-legislated poetics but it is mostly Montgomerie’s lyrics which exemplify its desired principles such as the song-lyric, ‘Before the Greeks durst enterpryse’, offered as the exemplary love poem of the new Jamesian renaissance, though explicit authorial identification is not made.23 Further, there are possible correspondences between the erotic texts of both James and Montgomerie. The Jamesian mythological web of symbolism – light, sun, ascendance, Apollo – is promulgated by Montgomerie in erotic poems such as ‘The Solsequium’ and ‘Before the Greeks’, printed in extract in the Essayes.24 Either as deliberate emulation, uncanny resemblance, or as inspiration for kingly poetics, Montgomerie’s profane poems reflect Jamesian desiderata: scepticism, wit and philosophical impulses. What R.J. Lyall has classified as the ideological mannerism of Montgomerie, founded on ‘shifting uncertainties’,25 is echoed in the rhetorical manierismo of many lyrics, replete with meretricious alliteration, embellishment and a deep absorption with their own qualities of beautiful difficultà. These endeavours to manifest the ‘fullness’, the absolute presence, of love conform to the Jamesian desire for ‘literall’ verse.26 The courtly maniera aesthetic of which Montgomerie is the supreme, Jamesian-endorsed exemplar, contrasts with the earlier mid-sixteenth-century, Protestant-influenced ‘plain-style’ rhetoric in which anti-sacramental theology is translated into the ‘doctrine’ of the unmediated purity of the word. Montgomerie’s mannerism is not only a reflected practice of ‘secularised’, courtly preciosity but the counterpart, conscious or otherwise, of Protestant poetics. Montgomerie’s erotic mannerism is the outward and visible sign of love’s ‘secreit’ mysteries, known by its excess and the proliferation and extravagance of its textual signs. Montgomerie is not such an obvious Jamesian devotee as Stewart; his devotion to James is more irresolute and more concessive to irony. As if in obeisance to the king’s precept that politics should be expelled from poetry, Montgomerie offers several disavowals in one lyric: With mightie maters mynd I not to mell As copping Courts or Comonwelthis or Kings.


Quhais Craig yoiks fastest let them sey thame sell. My thoght culd nevir think upon sik things. I wantonly wryt vnder Venus wings. In Cupids Court ye knau I haif bene kend…27 Here, eros is portrayed as a cloistered and innocent realm, an alternative ‘commonwealth’, in which Montgomerie can shelter with due dispensation to write in excess (‘wantonly’). ‘Kings’ are significantly dissociated from Venus’s empire. Elsewhere Montgomerie comments on the duplicitous, and morally incriminating, art of princepleasing: First thou mon preis thy Prince to pleis (Thoght contrare Conscience he commands) With Mercuris mouth and Argo’s eis And with Briarius hundreth hands And seme vhatsoevir he sayis to seill So Court and Conscience wallis not weill.28 This might be taken as a conventional piece of ‘anti-courtliness’ or anti-curial satire, except that it indicts the figure of the king rather than the courtier with the charge of verbal corruption, and with the power to make his courtier commit perjury. Ironically, perjury is the sin of which Montgomerie’s famous series of sonnets on the revocation of his pension accuses James.29 In another valedictory sonnet series to the court musician, Robert Hudson, Montgomerie assumes a position of abjectness in relation to the king which is invested with quasi-erotic power, mirroring the rhetorical and psychological state of a lover. As they condemn the wilful, unjust arbitrariness of James, so they reiterate the terms of an original and enduring adoration: I feid Affectione when I sie his grace To look on that vhairin I most delyte. I am a lizard fainest of his face And not a snaik with poyson him to byte […] So stands with me vho loues wt all my [hairt] My Maister best, some taks it in ill pairt30 Its language demarcates a former space of devotion upon which others, from the larger, all-enveloping political world, have trespassed. Montgomerie has no guilt to expiate; nor does he accuse the king of

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any other sin but that of betrayal. It is a passionate sequence, constructing the illusion of confession, but one where the passions are so dispersed that they emerge as fragments of a sundered devotion which is difficult to reconstitute into a meaningful whole. It is not known whether James directly received these extraordinary poems. Obliquely dramatising the political and erotic power of the sovereign, they invest it with a menacing capacity for retribution. The poetic and erotic exchanges of desire within the Jacobean coterie play upon the arbitrariness of the royal will. Jamesian approval of, and pleasure at, obeisance can be withdrawn; Montgomerie illustrates that vagary in several ways. James’s poem, ‘Ane admonition to the maister poete to leaue of greit crakking quhi[lk]/deid shau leist he not onely sklander him self but alsua the haill/professours of the airt’ can be construed as the jesting literary prologue to Montgomerie’s later, ‘real’ excommunication in which the sovereign withholds or revokes the seal of desire or approval:31 geif patient eire to sumthing i man say Belouit sandirs maister of oure airt the mous did help the lyon one a day sa i protest ye tak it in guid pairt my admonition cumming from a hairt that uishes ueill to you & all youre craft quha uald be sory for to see you smairt thocht uther poetes trouis ye be gain daft.32 There is an implicit joke here: the king audaciously offers the ‘maister poete’ advice (‘the mous […] help the lyon one day’ becomes a fable of their poetic inversion). It is witty and rebarbative in its depiction of Montgomerie’s apparent ‘exile’ or exclusion from the coterie. James attempts to explain the reasons for Montgomerie’s seeming ‘failure’ and subjection to ‘bakbit[ing]’ (22), offering himself as both ‘freind’ and ‘chirurgian’ (9, 17). Both gently and abrasively, he rebukes Montgomerie for the sins of hubris and presumption ‘all youre crakkis & bargane […]’ (66), likening him to Dares who pleaded in Aeneas’ court for the ‘reuairde’ owed to the victor: ‘ […] sen thair is nane that dou or can/be matche to me quhat langer sall i stand’ (39–40). For Helena Shire, this poem exemplifies the competitive poetic culture of the Jacobean court and its propensity for ‘role-playing’ though the pseudonymous guises of the king and his courtiers.33 Yet its language of reward, aspiration and desire is nuanced in other ways too. James’s


‘Admonitoun’ dramatises in its end the failure of Montgomerie’s own contrived rivalry: ‘ye sta auay and durst na maire be sene […].’ (96). The poem certainly enacts kingly authority, but it is fictionalised, even in the prophetic arrival of ‘apollo […] in his glistering throne’ (83) at the poem’s beautiful pastoral epilogue. The ‘Admonitioun’ is enclosed by another text, the ‘Sonnett’ which ‘protests’ that the warning and rebuke stemmed purely from ‘loue’ (98). Humility is assumed: ‘fullis counsall quhiles uill help uise men i trou […]’ (99). The sonnet is recapitulatory in part, suddenly confessing the futility of its Dares analogy: ‘Cracke not againe no forer then the creede’. These ‘remissions’ or retractions may demonstrate the habitual fictionalising of the sovereign self at this time, and the socially inventive and imaginative miseen-scène of literary and cultural collaboration; but they also convey the strange, emotive parity which can be sensed between the king and Montgomerie in the writing of both. In the text of Bodley 165, the third line is deleted: ‘heir patiently quhat loue moues me to say’ (f. 47r). While clearly this poem is a jeu d’esprit of sorts, it suggests the ways in which a language of desire could ‘contour’ the language of political and literary devotion. This in itself does not make Montgomerie’s poetry unique; eros and politics are nearly always entwined in the literary discourses of Renaissance courts. But in the context of British Renaissance political Petrarchism, in which the circulation of political and social anxieties is contained within the vessel of love poetry, the creation of what Javitch termed an ‘impure’ poetry has remained inextricable from the figure of Elizabeth, and the subtle configurations of gender which surrounded her. While the homoeroticism of James’s English political and courtly practices have been recognised, the delicate eroticisation of James within the Scottish Jacobean context has not. Within certain contexts, the potential for erotic language to fold in on itself in an everregressive structure towards a centre or origin which is always political may be inevitable. Yet it is difficult to ignore the fascination within Montgomerie’s profane love poetry for the topoi of sovereignty. His political and amatory poems have been conventionally kept apart when there is a borderland of verbal equivalence between them. The sovereign self is enclosed in their structures of allusion and metaphor. Such ‘impure’ poems of love are haunted by the spectrally erotic presence of James. Cupid stalks Montgomerie’s love poetry to a greater degree than that of his Jacobean contemporaries. The power of Amor or Eros, when embodied in the little love-god, offspring of Venus, usually signifies an

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unruly authority; Petrarch’s Rime sparse declares Cupid the lover’s nemico. In his illuminating survey of Cupidian allegory, Thomas A. Hyde comments on the irony or satire arising ‘when a poem lends its readers to understand Cupid differently than do its speaker or characters’.34 Helena Shire attributed precisely such irony to Montgomerie’s Cupidian poetry in interpreting Cupid as the perennial representation of James himself. Cupid, according to Shire, is an early mythological representation of royal authority succeeded by that of Apollo,35 though R.D.S. Jack is unconvinced by Shire’s hypothesis.36 While Shire’s hypothesis rules out more equivocal manifestations of Cupid, the evocation of erotic and political power through the love-god remains suggestive. In The Cherrie and the Slae (1597), Montgomerie’s complex allegory of the spiritual, possibly apostolic life, Cupid appears to the poem’s dreamer as a deceptively ‘coy’ emblem of sensuality.37 The lover’s experiential awakening occurs after s/he usurps the ‘wingis’ and ‘bow’ of the little ‘Sant’ (112): ‘Quhairwith I hurt my wanton heart/In hope to hurt ane vther:/It hurt me it burt me/The ofter I it handill./Cum se now, in me now,/The butter-flie and candill’ (163–8). This Narcissuslike self-martyrdom makes for a miniature fable of idolatrous desire to precede the lover’s ‘ascension’ to a spiritual and selfless caritas. In general, the ‘little God of love’ (107), appearing in the guises of a mischievous Anacreontic Cupid and as a fully-fledged adversary, may offer Montgomerie a point of characteristic pictorial elaboration. Similar to Stewart’s descriptive, explicitly painterly incarnation of Cupid, Montgomerie’s Cupid mirrors the later artistic depictions of eros. The familiar iconography of the ‘winged boy’ is allegorised by Montgomerie in conventional ways, reflecting, if not consciously derived from, the exegeses of some Italian neo-Platonic treatises.38 Cupid’s iconography, the traditional armoury of devices bestowed on the ‘winged god’, invests desire with literal force: ‘for lurking Love…/took a shaft and suddently me shot/Quhais fyrie heid brint in my harte so hot’.39 In ‘The sacrifice of Cupid’,40 Montgomerie pursues the concept of erotic martyrdom to mannerist extremes. Its chief conceit is the sacrificial relation between lover and love-god, transacted through the lover’s veneration at the altar of ‘Cupido’ where the liturgical text is French: ‘vive vive l’amour’.41 Cupid, the god of love, is depicted as omnipresent and omniscient: ‘Hou oft haif I (thou knauis hou, vhen, and vhair)/Caus’d my complante ascend into thy eirs?’ (7–8). Though the lover resigns himself to Cupid’s kingly power, he achieves a surrogate


conquest over his beloved by commanding Cupid to ‘Anis burne hir breist’ (47). He desires her to suffer likewise: ‘That sho may sey vhat sicknes me possest’ (48). Though expressed in conventional metaphorical terms (the flame of desire), his imperative is at root violent. Impotence compels the lover to inflict suffering upon the intransigent woman. Cupid becomes a figure onto which frustrated desire is displaced, a process mirrored in other Cupidian texts of Montgomerie’s. Many of these lyrics querulously depict the paradoxical nature of Cupid’s power. As a mere ‘Boy’ (‘suckling’ or ‘bearne’ in Montgomerie’s terms), he is attacked for the unwarranted, unmerited usurpation of authority and for lacking wisdom in neo-Platonic and other philosophical treatises on love. One sonnet, ‘Against the God of Love’ (significantly the last sonnet in the series in the Ker manuscript which begins with one on the Holy Trinity) vehemently denounces this false ‘god’: Blind brutal Boy that wt thy bou abuses Leill leisome Love by Lechery and Lust, Judge Jakanapis and Jougler maist vnj[ust], If in thy rageing RESONE thou refusis To be thy Chiftanes changers ay thou chuisis To beir thy baner, so they be robust42 Cupid’s travesty of justice and the secular law of ‘leill, leisome love’implicates his loyal subjects (figured as standard bearers, evoking Petrarch’s Trionfo d’amore) in similar corruption. The sestet parodies the conventional iconographic features of Cupid; his ‘staitly styl[e]’ (13) is systematically reduced to the trappings of mere disguise. This reductive metamorphosis divests Cupid of his supposed divinity: Art thou a God, no, bot a Gok disguysit A bluiter buskit lyk a belly blind With wings and quaver waving with the Wi[nd] A plane Playmear for Vanitie devysit. Thou art a stirk for all thy staitly stylis And these good Geese vhom sik a god begylis (9–14) Though this sonnet has been interpreted as an assertion of ‘spiritual truth in the low style’,43 it arguably remains a conventional denunci-

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ation of Cupid’s profanity, echoing earlier conservative moralisations of the love-god. The charge of duplicity, for example, is derived from emphasis upon Cupid’s blindness, an iconographical feature that associated him with Fortune and Death. 44 Rather than being a playful little amorous divinity Cupid is a vicissitudinal, thus dangerous ruler, and therefore scarcely the ideal mythological incarnation of James; especially as Shire assumes that these Cupid poems belong to an early phase of Montgomerie’s writing when relations between subject and monarch were supposedly harmonious. The relationship between sovereign and subject is always already written into Cupidian mythologies. No real ‘metamorphosis’ of James into Cupid can occur since the conceit of ruler exists a priori. There is always a potential ‘sovereign’ reading of such Renaissance love texts premissed on the lover’s submission and rebellion to ruling authority: ‘Go, sonet, soon, unto my Soveran say,/Redeme your man, or dam him but delay’. 45 Montgomerie’s vein of Cupid poetry is still a suggestive ‘translation’ of James, and the power of eros and politics when combined. In Montgomerie’s Ronsardian translation, ‘Vha wald behold him vhom a God so grievis?’,46 the lover offers himself as the supreme victim or exemplar of Cupid’s grievous power: ‘Behold bot me persaiv my painfull pairt […]’. This rebellious lover promises that (his) reason will overcome (Cupid’s) passion: ‘Thair sall he sie vhat Resone then c[an do]/Against his bou if once he mint bot, to/Compell our hairts in bondage basse to be[ir]’ (9–11). Montgomerie’s final three lines richly draw out the eroticism of the Ronsardian resolution: Yit sall he se me happiest appeir That in my hairt the Amorous heid dois [lie] Vith poyson’d poynt, vhairof I glore t[o die] (12–14) Proposed rebellion becomes joyful submission. Cupid’s ubiquitous arrow is here not an instrument of suffering (the metaphor of ‘poysond’ now bears different implications) but inculcates a seemingly ecstatic sexual surrender. Another lyric, ‘The well of Love’, imparts a similarly sexual gloss to desire engendered by Cupid’s dart: Fra tym that winged God did sie That I did Love disdane


He took a shaft and shot at me And peirsit evirie vane. The head so deeply in me sank That al my body brist. Then of the well of Love I drank To quench my birning thrist.47 The resonance of ‘brist’ seems provocatively erotic (as opposed to the more conventional ‘wound[ing]’, 51). This surrender to desire forms an introductory prologue to the vision of a palace which harbours ‘Nymphs mony one’ (34). This allegorical, visionary lyric thus opens with a mythologised or deified depiction of love. The device performs the characteristic psychological twist of absolving the lover of responsibility for his desire. ‘The well of Love’ from which the lover is compelled to drink in the second stanza is not a conventional aspect of the Cupid mythology but here seems to symbolise either consummation or at least some kind of fulfilment of desire. The poem’s final two lines, ‘God give hir grace to reu on me/And meit me at the well’, seem to intimate the resolution of the lover’s desire, and the beloved’s pity or ‘reu’ is often synonymous in the love lyric per se with sexual consent. In the companion or twin piece immediately subsequent to this lyric, ‘To the o Cupid king of love’, the well is explicitly identified as a province of Cupid’s rule: ‘We pray vhair thou dois duell/That but respect thou wold remove/All rebells from thy well’.48 To drink from Cupid’s well is to taste of ‘desyre’ (12). Let not thy Lau be lichtleit at the leist Bot tak revenge vhen Rebels thee reboots. If thou be he of vhom so many moots Quha maks the hardiest flintie harts to melt And beirs thame ay about the lyk a belt, Or if thou be that Archer so renound That vhair thou mints thou missis not the mark Bot lyk a king is for thy Conqueis cround To vhom all stoupis thoght they war neuer so s[tark]…49 If this is Montgomerie’s brief lyric exercise in the advice to princes tradition, then the counsel offered to James seems to concur with his use of power but to imply that it is not exercised either enough or sufficiently: ‘If thou be […]’.50 The obdurate female beloved, one of

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Cupid’s ‘rebels’, may represent an insubordinate political subject. ‘To the o Cupid king of Love’ may be construed as a pledge of loyalty on behalf of the love deity’s faithful ‘subjects’ (13) and a warning to ‘All rebells’ (4) intent on insurrection. If Cupid is James (Apollo is alluded to in line 9, James’s favoured mythographic guise), and Montgomerie writes as a loyal political subject, then the last stanza transparently expresses the latter’s desire for princely beneficence: As we do serve thy Celsitude In hope to haif reuaird, Let thame vhom we haif so long lude Our service once regaird. (17–20) ‘Service’ is especially resonant, evoking several alliances: between lovers; poet and patron; sovereign and subject. In ‘The sacrifice of Cupid’, a contract is established between lover and Cupid: ‘Releiv my breist that sik a burthen beirs/And thou sall be my Maister evermair’ (11–12). This mutually enabling contract also rests on the lover’s poetic glorification of his ruler: ‘My pen thy princely pussance sall report’ (15). As well as this writing contract, the lover implies that he will act as the exemplary subject: ‘Quhat wald a Maister wish mair of his man/Then till obey his thoght in evry thing?’ (35–6). Shire’s hypothesis gains credence by a conceit such as this which transparently renders the erotic sublimation of political appeal. Yet veneration of the authority which is the Jacobean Cupid entails risk and sacrifice even if obedience is given which the lyric, ‘The sacrifice of Cupid’, best illustrates. Though the offerings made at Cupid’s altar are resolutely profane, the ‘oblatione’, not of bread and wine, but of ‘Tua Turtle Douis’ (17) and the blood ‘of sparouis’ (20; conventionally birds of Venus) parodies the devotion of the Eucharist. The lover himself becomes part of this sacramental offering: the ‘harte of wax’ is the lover’s own, necessarily in danger of dissolution. The lover’s heart becomes a kind of relic, hung ‘In signe’ upon Cupid’s ‘Trophee’ (25), conceived as a precious and rare offering (‘buitings’) of ‘A rubie rich within a Royal ring’ (31). The intensely literal quality of Montgomerie’s visual conceit is further brought out by the lover’s inscription: ‘Behold the spoills of him/Quha for his Conqueis may be calde a King’ (32) as the emblematic image finds its motto.51 This, the most resonant of Montgomerie’s Cupidian lyrics, can be conceived as the allegorical counterpart of Montgomerie’s literal


‘sacrifice’ in the 1590s at the altar of James’s political ruling on the archbishopric pension. Montgomerie’s lover, in seeking the sacrament of penance, makes James assume his ultimate incarnation as confessor, no longer simply sovereign or lover, but endowed with the gift of absolution: So do I nou, mair painfully opprest, Hope help at him vhais help culd nevir heall Bot be the contrair martyr and molest. Forgive me Cupid, I confess I faill, To crave the thing that may me not availl, Yit to the end I may my grief digest […] (41–6) The persuasive crux of Shire’s hypothesis, that Cupid is always and inevitably James, rests on an uncertainty: the compositional and performative circumstances of these lyrics. It seems unlikely that those that mock and provoke the love god would be performed in James’s presence, if the latter’s identity as a Cupidian fiction was a publicly recognised trope of Montgomerie’s. Improbably, they seem to risk censure or repudiation, although Shire explicitly claims that the sonnet ‘Against the God of Love’ communicates ‘rage and bitterness of affection’ towards the king.52 Lacking irrefutable evidence that would identify a performative context, the rhetorical language of these poems inevitably courts a political reading. The paradoxes of authority are already rooted in traditions of Cupid lyric; the figures of the lover and the political subject are already bound by a shared abjectness. And though the idea of eroticism is implicit within the Cupid mythology, the sensuality remains muted compared to the other pervasive mythological incarnation of James as Apollo on which Montgomerie’s poetry also draws. Bruce Smith posited that poetic discourse is condemned to an ‘indeterminacy that keeps homosexuality hidden and elusive but at the same time makes it provocative to the literary imagination’.53 In one sense, this is paradoxical: who formulates this injunction to elusiveness or silence? Is there conscious transgression, an implied jouissance, to the desire that is resigned to ‘provocation’ and suggestion only? In the richly symbolic context of the mannerist Jacobean court where language is defined by its excess, its verbal and semantic copia, are we ourselves ‘seduced’ into reading excessively? On a psychoanalytic model

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of reading, one cannot evade the symbolic ‘unconscious’ of certain Montgomerie texts which project onto the king, such as the song-lyric, ‘Before the Greeks durst enterpryse’,54 offered by James in his treatise as a paradigm of love poetry. Despite this royal endorsement, subsequent critics perceived its metaphor as a virtual negation of this generic status. 55 Before the Greeks durst enterpryse In Armes to Troy toun to go Thay set a Counsell sage and wyse Apollo’s Ansueir for to kno How thay suld speid and haif succes In that so grit a busines. Then did thay send the wysest Grekis To Delphos vhare Apollo stode Quha with the tearis vpon thair Cheeks And with the fyrie flammis of wod And all such rites as wes the guyse Thay made that grit God sacrifyce. Quhen thay had endit thair Requests And solmnely thair service done And drunke the vyne and kild the beists Apollo made them Ansueir soon Hou Troy and Trojans haiv they suld To use them hailly as they wold, Quhilk Ansueir maid thame not so glad That thus the Victors they suld be As evin the Ansuer that I had Did gritly joy and comfort me Quhen lo thus spak Apollo myne, All that thou seeks it shall be thyne. Erotic disclosure is gradual. The mythological analogue of desire, the resolution of the Trojan war, is not as recondite as it might seem; the Greeks pray to Apollo that he might prophesy the war’s end56 as the lover implores the beloved to deliver an answer of refusal or compliance. The utterance of Apollo, ‘All that, seeks it sall be thyne’, is enigmatic and provocative if interpreted as the response of the lover.


The female beloved is often conceived as a goddess at whose altar the lover sacrifices himself. The lyric conveys pursuit of the beloved as a long period of endurance (the Trojan war lasted ten years), and renders it in ritualistic, ceremonial terms. ‘Hailly’ implies complete possession or surrender. The simile is postponed until the authorial revelation of line 20, ‘As evin the Ansuer that I had […]’, just as desire itself is deferred. Yet Shire proposed that the poem can be divested of its amatory content and replaced by political or courtly terms of aspiration, suggesting that the lyric records Montgomerie’s gratitude for receiving his pension.57 Appositely, then, the king as Apollo (‘Apollo myne’) is portrayed as a prophet or instrument of oracular truth. The assurance delivered by the god suggests that the lover- courtier may profit or gain from sovereign beneficence. Yet a degree of uncertainty and risk is implicit within the mythographical trope (the prophetic ‘sacrifyce’ of erotic martyrdom). In commemorating the king’s reward of political favour, material benefit, or reciprocal desire, Montgomerie ensures that the myth of sovereign inviolability remains intact. The Jamesian presence haunts another Apollonian hymn, the celebrated song-lyric, ‘Lyk as the dum Solsequium’:58 Lyk as the dum Solsequium With cair ou’rcum And sorou vhen the sun goes out of sight Hings doun his head And droups as dead And will not spread Bot louks his leavis throu langour of the nicht Till folish Phaeton ryse With whip in hand […] (1–10) In comparing the lover to the flower in constant need of the beloved’s sun and her power of replenishment, the lyric deploys a common emblem image. Scève’s emblematic sonnet sequence Délie (1544) pursues the same imagistic conceit, apparently beginning a vogue for this popular emblem device.59 Montgomerie’s lyric may primarily draw on the Ovidian source of the Metamorphoses, Book IV, and its poignant narrative of Clytia’s faithful, unrequited love of the sun. Given the Jacobean vogue for emblematics, it is interesting to note the image’s

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currency as an impresa amorosa in contemporary French and Italian works. In Ruscelli’s 1566 Imprese Illustri (its motto mens eadem), the Ovidian source is related to the neo-Platonic concept of the sun as the source of virtue and light.60 Though the analogue between lover and flower is explicitly announced by the opening line of the second stanza, much remains for the listener/reader to ‘decipher’ (in the mode of accretive allegory) beneath the surface rhetorical form: for example, the beloved is Aurora, evoking neo-Platonic resonances, but also possessed of the power to ‘awaken’ the lover/sunflower sexually (48–54). The intimation of natural, cyclical and thus eternal rejuvenation wholly dispels the pathos of the Ovidian text, and is more resonant of the emblem’s motto of fidelity; certainly it evokes the prerequisite of ‘sondrie interpretations’.61 Yet there are curious oscillations and shifts in the poem’s metaphorical structure which confuse the identity or function of the kingly presence. An analogy is drawn clearly enough between the sun, ‘My lamp of licht’, and the female beloved; and in the final stanza, Apollo returns in his incarnation as the sun who has the power to prolong the lovers’ joy. Thy presence me restores To lyfe from death Thy Absence also shores To cut my brea[th]. I wish in vane Thee to remane Sen Primum mobile sayis aluayis nay. At leist thy wane Turn soon agane. (63–71) This implicates both the beloved and the sun in its metaphorical scope. ‘to behold vhom I love best’: the object of the lover’s contemplative ‘plesur’ is uncertain.62 It is an apposite metaphor for the sovereign relationship: eternally, inevitably, and securely changeful. The aptness of Apollo as a Jamesian incarnation is self-evident. In these poems which forge a web of connections between this god, eros and the sovereign, Apollo’s ‘threshold’ status as the emblem of both heterosexual (Apollo and Daphne) and homoerotic desire (Apollo and Ganymede) are evoked.63


Such texts are testament to the ambiguously representational power of erotic language within the intimate courtly context of Jacobean poetry, as well as corroborating the impulses of epistemological questioning in Montgomerie’s other poems.64 Hence the declaration, ‘for me I love the king’, is not erotically innocent.65 Such intimacy is also intertextual where a symbolic or mythographic core of sovereignty extends tendrils of meaning into other poems of Montgomerie’s. In mourning a lover’s martyred heart, one text alludes to the mythology of the phoenix: Then freshest Phoenix, freind and fo Both fremmd and friendly nou fair weill Quhen I sall be full far the fro, My Verse before thy feet sall kneill To caus thee tak this hairt to thee Quhilk wald no more remane wt me.66 Given the publication in 1584 of James’s Phoenix tragedy (which, prior to this, may have been in circulation at the court), might the phoenix here not merely symbolise a female beloved but also allude to either James himself or Esmé Stewart whom the king’s own poem allegorically incarnated (an allusion which John Stewart may have used)? Montgomerie’s known associations with the Lennox family may endorse this ‘double’ meaning.67 Certainly the poem’s valedictory posture of absence, the metaphor of obedience and worship, and the closing evocation of exile or expulsion are all ‘pinpoints’ within James’s tragedy, within the historical narrative of the Duke’s fate, and prophetically, of Montgomerie’s own. The delicate metaphorical textures of these poems give only the illusion of transparency to their symbolic meaning.68 In literary terms, Montgomerie already ‘transgresses’ against James in writing overtly political complaint. The king’s role as ‘poetic legislator’ cannot be reduced to a simple act of literary absolutism, as the poetry ascribed to himself exemplifies. The effort of the treatise to prescribe meaning is subverted by Montgomerie’s poems and by the ways in which meaning ‘spills across’ the symbolic frames of these texts. These are, and are not, love poems from Montgomerie to the king. To read in this way might be an instance of ‘purloining’ the metaphor(s) in Lacan’s terms: illustrating the continual appropriation and reinvestment of the symbols of Cupid, Apollo and the phoenix. Homoeroticism is evoked by the metaphorical traces of desire rather

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than causally inferred from any known or established Jacobean homosocial network. Still there is a certain uniqueness to the relationship between ‘I/thou’ in Montgomerie’s notionally and directly ‘sovereign’ poems. In a different context, Anthony Low asserts that the intimacy fostered with the beloved ‘becomes in a determinate way an analogue for another brand of intimacy altogether, one that [the courtier] paradoxically court[s] with the public who will grant or deny their long-term fame’.69 For Montgomerie, that latter memorialising relationship is founded on the increasingly estranged ‘intimacy’ between himself and the king: ‘Quhy did Apollo Poet me proclame?/To cleith my heid with his grene laurell Cap/Since that the Hevins are hinderers of my hap’.70 This estrangement from James, the attested historical narrative of Montgomerie as the exiled and dishonoured subject, becomes a ‘fable’ within the canon of Montgomerie’s poetry, enacted endlessly in its mythographical mise-en-scènes. ‘Compelling me to play Actaons pairt / And be transfformd into a bloody hairt’:71 such mythographical ‘pairts’ are illustrated in the dismemberment of Diana’s antagonist; in the figure of Icarus who mirrors the lover, endowed with ‘wings of hope and high desyre’ (1) who strayed too near ‘the sun, that sacred thing of things’;72 and in the tale of Psyche and Cupid. Two of these fables depict an illicit love which ends in punishment, the other hubristic aspiration. ‘That sho foryet to close the lamp till he/In wrath auok and fleu she wist not vhair/And left his deing lover in dispair’ (12–14): Montgomerie invokes the moment at which Psyche takes a light to ‘him vho sho lovd’, disobeying Cupid’s imperative that they love each other in darkness. The darkly beautiful and melancholic renderings of these tales of love may constitute a larger tale about Jamesian desire, and love for the king which ends in punishment. To enfold Montgomerie’s erotic canon within this narrative is not meant as a fanciful circumscription of the contextual abundance of these poems. Rather it is a response to the enactment of loss which is peculiarly intense in Montgomerie’s profane poetry. Of course, early modern philosophical theories of desire, no less than more recent psychoanalytic ones, proclaim that the act of desiring is in part a renunciation. The lover’s identity is constantly imperilled for s/he is in danger of her/his own dissolution or of annulment in the beloved as souls and bodies are exchanged.73 In Lacanian terms, lack or absence is the quintessence of desire, ‘an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued’.74 Further, the beloved is eternally caught in a double bind: through the state of being desired, refashioned or recon-


ceived in the lover’s imagination, s/he ultimately frustrates the ideal of sublimation. If, according to Lacan, desire can attain its one fulfilled state only in the ‘unbroken metaphorical parallel between inner and outer’,75 then Montgomerie’s erotic poetry frequently records the moment of its separation in the representation of the beloved. The ‘Medusa’ sonnet which records the perceptual desecration of a malevolent female beauty76 dramatises the symbolic ‘fall’ of the female beloved: a ‘demythologising’ of the feminine paragon which other women represent in the Montgomerie canon. Even if desire is overtly associated with the realm of the feminine, this concept of an ‘unfallen’ or ‘prelapsarian’, then desecrated, object of desire is mirrored in the lyrics explored here which constitute a provisional Jamesian erotic canon. Just as Montgomerie was expelled from the realm of sovereign blessedness, so his poetry works to memorialise in shards and fragments the king’s own ‘fall’ from the location of desire.

Love’s mourning and martyrdom In medieval paintings of the love-god, Cupid is frequently depicted as an angelic messenger of death; eros becomes one with thanatos.77 Just as the concept of the fall underpins many of Montgomerie’s ‘transformations’ of eros – the demythologising of female beauty, sorrowful devotions to the king – so too is love often expelled from the realm of eternity. In many of Montgomerie’s lyrics, death imposes its finitude; and the spirit relinquishes itself from the corporeal. It is a significant feature of Montgomerie’s erotic practice toward which the other lyrics gesture or in which they culminate: the ultimate act of mourning or memorialising. Ressave this harte vhois Constancie wes sik Quhill it wes quick, I wot ye never kneu A harte more treu within a stomok stik Till tym the prik of Jelousie it sleu, Lyk as my heu (by deidly signis) furthsheu, Suppose that feu persav’d my secreit smart. Lo heir the hairt that ye your self ou’rthreu. Fairweill, adeu, sen death mon us depart.78 (1–8)

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In this lyric, words seek less to console the beloved, imminently to be bereaved by the testamentary lover, than to prolong and dispel death. The act of offering and sacrifice recurs again, as does the emblem of the martyred heart, mirrored in the conceit of flagellatory piercing. The supposedly agonised or agonistic heart is to serve as a kind of iconographical trophy for the beloved, memorialising his ‘constancie’: I leiv to thee the hairt wes nevir fals About thy hals to hing vhare thou may sie. Let thyn to me then be so constant als. (14–16) Desire is vindicated. by its materiality, as here in the relic of the heart; death’s ‘darte’ is ironically the transfiguration of love. This testament makes other offerings, not merely to the apostrophised beloved, but to the king himself: To God I give my Spirit in heuin so hie. My Poesie I leave my Prince to preiv (No richt can reiv him of my Rhetorie). My bains to be bot bureit vhair I die. (10–13) First the spirit, then words, then the body, are surrendered: the poems become a reliquary as bone, heart, and text constitute martyrdom. This is a typically ‘passional’ poem of Montgomerie’s, baroque in its evocation of erotic death. In the final stanza, Montgomerie renders the image of bodily putrefaction into one of sensual embrace. Decay and beauty are disconcertingly, even macabrely, blended in imagistic and tactile terms: ‘ […] I am bot a carioun of clay/Quha quhylome lay about thy snauie throt,/Nou I must rot vha some tym stoud so stay’ (34–6). Bodily frailty is here also depicted in sexual terms: the lover can no longer remain ‘stay’ or erect in his caress. Bodily dissolution contrasts with the endurance of love’s spirit. The lyric is full of different temporal references: human life is finite, conceived in the penultimate stanza’s quasi-proverbial tone as ‘the race that every man must rin’; the lover even prophesises his untimely death (‘I sie ouer soon my Prophesie compleit’, 20). Its strange fatalism – ‘Adeu for ay, this is a lang guid nicht’ (40) – suggests that the poem might occupy an inter-


esting place in the history of Montgomerie, the exiled sovereign subject. If this poem conceives death as desire’s simultaneous end and vindication, other lyrics render mutual the states of death and love; desire is intensely physical, often bizarrely literal, in tropes which interweave Montgomerie’s conception of love as martyrdom, and erotic bliss as le petit mort. My vexit ghost, quhilk rageing Love dois roste Is brint almost, thrugh heit of my desyr Then quench this fyre quhilk runneth ay the poste Out thou my cost, consuming bain and lyre.79 ‘Rageing love’ exacts a kind of physical desecration: desire takes complete possession of the body while ‘almost’ obliterating the spirit (the ‘vexit ghost’ which punningly secularises the Holy Spirit).80 The final stanza posits the ‘humor’ of love within the ‘levir’. Evoking conceits of love as both illness and poison, the lover commands the beloved to ‘gar the bealing brek/For fra it lek I hald the danger done’. This particularly tactile, semi-grotesque image substantiates R.J. Lyall’s observation on Montgomerie’s insistent literalism and physicality.81 Montgomerie here intensifies in mannerist vein existing Renaissance concepts of corporeality: physiological treatises proposed. that the infection of love enters via the eyes and ‘through the veines vnto the liuer [to] imprint a burning desire’. Elsewhere, the lover’s martyrdom is portrayed. as a sensual violence: ‘Come gentill Death and that with suddentie/And mak dispatch of this puir hairt of myne./Thy sterving straik, with force thou let outflie/ […] Come gentle Death and let me die thairfor’.82 Persuasively, then, Montgomerie is a poetic materialist of desire. Yet the recurring oscillation between the corporeal and spiritual in his erotic poetry is also bound up with its desire to invest the lover’s frequently martyred or deathless body with a kind of real presence. The possibility of ‘a purifying mystic love’83 can indeed be admitted, perhaps a facet of his Catholic poetics. Even if Montgomerie’s baroque testament lyric concedes that even the most faithful love ends with, rather than transcends, bodily dissolution, his Ronsardian sonnet, ‘So suete a kis yistrene fra thee I reft’, invests the materiality of desire with an erotic neo-Platonism.84 So suete a Kis yistrene fra thee I reft In bouing doun thy body on the bed

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That evin my lyfe within thy lippis I left. Sensyne from thee my spirits wald never shed. To folou thee it from my body fled. And left my Corps als cold as ony Kie Bot vhen the Danger of my Death I dred. To seik my spreit I sent my harte to thee Bot it wes so inamored with thyn ee With thee it myndit lykuyse to remane. So thou hes keepit Captive all the thrie More glaid to byde then to returne agane Except thy breath thare places had suppleit Even in thyn Armes thair doutles had I deit. (1–14) Just as Ronsard’s ‘Hyer au soir que je pris maugre toy’, Montgomerie’s sonnet portrays love as a union embracing more than the purely physical; the ‘spirits’ and ‘hart’ which seek to join the beloved evoke the neoPlatonic union of souls. The poem is a disavowal of the worth of the body: the ‘Corps’ remains ‘als cold as ony Kie’. There is a curiously erotic yet threatening deathliness about this neo-Platonic apotheosis. It describes the lifeless moment after consummation (le petit mort), a helpless surrender of the body so ‘inamored’ with the beauty of the other body in which it seeks sublimation. Yet this apparent sexual and spiritual death is precluded by the revivifying power of the beloved’s ‘breath’. The tender intimacy of the exchange recalls and metaphorically reinvests the kiss of the first three lines with Bemboist significance. Wherupon a kisse may be said to be rather a cooplinge together of the soule, then of the bodye, bicause it hathe such force in her, that it draweth her unto it, and (as it were) seperateth her from the bodye. For this do all chast lovers covett a kisse, as a cooplinge of soules together.85 The resonant spiritual implications of ‘lyfe’ are bound to the delicate erotic beauty of ‘lippis’. The sonnet draws on the Ficinian conceit of the lovers’ exchange of souls which joins together their bodies in one unity, unveiling the spiritual and sexual potential of the orthodox paradox that desire is life-in-death, death-in-life.86 It represents an eroticisation of the soul, and not the body, making manifest the inward bliss of love in the sign of the kiss.


* In many ways, Montgomerie’s poetry represents the apogee of Jacobean erotic writing. The impulses of Petrarchism and Neoplatonism always appear more jaggedly manneristic, ebulliently subversive; the baroque copia of many is at once a kind of idolatrousness, contravening any Jamesian ideal of perspicacious representation. Combined with a frequently dense symbolic or mythographical language, it means that the king’s presence as an object of desire can be both strongly identified and yet elusively deferred. The suggestion of Jamesian ‘immanence’ is not an argument for the demystification of Montgomerie’s poetry as always and inevitably political, nor for a quasi-Foucauldian position that somehow power relationships in this milieu are always eroticised. This monolithic position is betrayed by the delicate, shifting metaphorical textures of Montgomerie’s lyrics. James is not the beginning and end of all desiring exchanges since many of the Ker manuscript ‘coterie’ poems clearly act as an erotic seal to transactions between female and male subjects, and between the subject and his sovereign. In spite or because of the potential for uncertainty and equivocation which haunts erotic representation in Montgomerie’s lyrics, the ‘sovereign’ poetry serves to construct narratives or fables of desire which illuminate his other erotic texts, preoccupied with disenchantment, loss and sacrifice; and the quest for elusive forms of erotic and spiritual transfiguration. It is unsurprising, then, that another sacred poem of Montgomerie’s should depict the ‘dream’ of a bride of Christ: ‘God give me grace for to begin/My spousing garment for to spin/And to be one till enter in/With the brydgrome in blisse’.87 The typically baroque excesses of Montgomerie’s poetry bring erotic pleasure and the sacramental together, a fusion witnessed in the haunting presences and representations of the erotic poems.

6 Heretical Love-Words: The Poetry of William Fowler

The love poetry of William Fowler (1560–1612) closes this book’s exploration of Jacobean erotic poetics for several reasons. His amatory corpus contains the only example1 of a substantial sonnet sequence written within the Scottish Jacobean period. This is a more ‘monumental’ lyric exploration of desire than has been considered so far. In differing ways, the erotic writing of Stewart and Montgomerie engaged with the Jamesian project of eros, but Fowler’s poetry, in its dark investigation of sacred and profane desires, is in precise negotiation with the king’s vision of an ideal Protestant poetics. There, a duplicitous and corrupt eros is shunned, ‘that insolent archer quyte’,2 and the moral and philosophical vision of the Du Bartesian epic emulated instead. Fowler’s unpublished sequence, The Tarantula of Love, and a shorter sequence, ‘Of De[a]th’, can be conceived to re-imagine desire in accordance with the sanctioned vision of Jacobean eros.3 Fowler’s writing does not portray an intimately dialogic relationship with James, as do Stewart’s and Montgomerie’s in varying degrees of anxiety and dissent. Fowler is associated in his later career with Anna’s, rather than James’s, court. In 1589, he was appointed Master of Requests and ‘Secretdepute’ to Anna, a position retained until 1608 when Fowler’s position as the Queen’s Secretary (a post in which John Donne showed interest) could no longer be sustained.4 Fowler, who embarked on a translation of Machiavelli’s Il principe, courted controversy; he was employed as a spy in the service of Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Elizabeth. By 1584, he was still in contact with Walsingham and English agents, but that year also marked his formal and literary entry into the inner Jacobean circle. Francis, Earl of Bothwell, and nephew of James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell who married Mary Queen of Scots in 1567, acted as Fowler’s literary patron; this patronage continued 149


throughout Fowler’s writing life with the exception of the dedication of the Trionfi translation in 1587 to Lady Jean Fleming, wife of Sir John Maitland, Chancellor and Secretary to James and allegedly an enemy of Bothwell.5 After 1603, Fowler was an established member of the Jacobean English court. Consequently, the relationship between king and subject is not dramatised with the affective intensity which has marked Jacobean courtier-writing thus far. Fowler’s poetry is still obsessed with the object of its desire, but now the moral and spiritual status of the beloved woman. Fowler’s lovers are haunted by the fear of her power to corrupt and desecrate. It is interesting to speculate whether Fowler’s love poetry had an identifiable recipient. The beloved’s name in the Tarantula sequence, Bellisa, is an obvious verbal play upon beauty (bella/belle), but may also invoke the name ‘Arbella’. Surviving documents and letters attest his acquaintance with Arbella Stuart (1575–1615), a relationship which acquired some notoriety on the basis of a number of playful, anagrammatic love poems which Fowler devised, some of which were sent to Arbella. 6 One ‘dedication’ seemingly alludes to Arbella’s rejection of the political power which James, as her cousin, was always conscious she potentially possessed: ‘whose chastfull hands disdayned for to sweye/both sceptars crovnes wt all imperial rod’.7 The Tarantula sequence persuasively belongs to the 1580s and 1590s, coinciding with Arbella’s presence at court but there is no record of it having been presented to her, and it does not contain any explicitly allusive biographical or coded dedication.8 The degree to which Fowler’s writing is enmeshed in courtly and erotic politicking with Arbella remains speculative, but it is perhaps improbable that such a dark sequence as the Tarantula would have been offered as a sweetly erotic ‘gift’. In it the feminine is identified as the Iocus of sin and an idolatrous object of abject adoration. This specifically evokes the idea of the Catholic feminine which had earlier been articulated within the Marian period so that Fowler’s erotic poetry is laced with the religious and cultural associations which desire has accrued throughout this period. Fowler’s attempts to advocate religious reform attest a brief pragmatic ‘intervention’ in religious politics. While continuing his education in Europe, possibly studying civil law at the College of Navarre in Paris, he became embroiled in a theological controversy which endorses his religious allegiances and formed an early venture into print. An Answer to the Calumnious Letter and Erroneous propositiouns of an apostat named M. Io. Hammiltoun, a prose

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work published by John Leprevik in 1581, records a violent dispute between the staunchly Protestant Fowler and the Scottish Jesuit John Hamilton. Fowler’s Defence, partly a personal account of what Fowler terms religious persecution and partly theological polemic, is an interesting rhetorical and public contribution to the early decades of postReformation Scotland when Marian political sensitivities and the threat of Catholic insurgency were intensified. As a counterblast to the charge of being a ‘Huguenot, Heretique, contemnar of ye Saints’, Fowler proclaims that he ‘sal be the last Protestant, that euer sal lycht a candil in Paris’.9 There is, of course, no simple inference to be drawn between Fowler’s reformist sympathy and the theological anxieties of his love poetry. Yet an implicit impulse of the sequence is its effort to ‘protestantise’ desire. It is precisely the fear of idolatry which haunts the Tarantula through the identification of the beloved woman with the state of mortal sin, until she becomes as idolatrous as the erotic language and image in which she is enshrined. Further, it is only through the drama of death that the nature of the idolatrous feminine is made apparent. Fowler’s entire erotic corpus can be conceived as a sustained meditation upon death; this chapter explores the evocation of mortal love in Fowler’s poetry, proposing that this is mediated through Fowler’s version of what is recognisably a petrarchan eros. Just as Fowler translated Petrarch’s Trionfi as part of the Jacobean enterprise of vernacular imitation, his own erotic corpus may be seen as a re-enactment and rewriting of the Rime sparse’s errore.10 Fowler’s reimagining of Petrarch’s sin and redemption, ultimately through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, is here first traced through the alternative ‘closures’ of the Tarantula of Love.

Impossible grace: atoning for desire The Rime sparse ends with an invocation to the Virgin Mary. In the adoration of ‘del Ciel regina’, Petrarch transmutes the sequence’s mortal ‘Vergine bella’ into the ‘Vergine benedetta’, the mother of Christ who, by contrast, dispenses grace and mercy (‘che ben sempre rispose/chi la chiamò con fede’).11 A confessional liturgy, this last canzone is both renunciation and affirmation: the effort to annul both the past (‘i miei passati tempi’, sonnet 365), and Laura, and to anticipate the salvation regained by the ‘sante lagrime’ of the penitent heart. The canzone is dedicated to the consecration and articulation of a new name: ‘Vergine unica et sola’ (133). It offers closure of a kind. Death is


imminent: the lover writes ‘a l’ultimo anno’ (88), and nears the heavenly ‘port’, guided by the Virgin as mare stella. The Tarantula’s ending, in contrast, remains unwritten. Closure is evaded because it survives in two different manuscripts, Hawthornden and Drummond, which make available two different narratives. The Drummond manuscript offers the most authoritative ending: it contains the greatest number of poems, and appears to be a presentation copy. In its closure, it rejects the adoration of Bellisa as a form of false idolatry. But rather than imitate the Marian adoration or sublimation of Petrarch’s final text, Fowler’s closure ends emphatically on penitential and abject submission to God. In the Hawthornden manuscript, the final Tarantula sonnet (the last text inserted within the same manuscript binding) is entitled ‘Contrair’.12 It works as a paradoxical celebration of Bellisa’s beauties, conventional cruelty and occasional grace indiscriminately fused. With incantatory repetition, Bellisa’s paradoxical nature and the lover’s state merge in a series of ‘contrairs’: this humeur her that humeur me dois move this is her state and that is myne agayne now louting lowe now monting high above so none of vs can tell quho feils more pane (9–12) Such an ending, as if to amplify the sequence’s rhetorical imitation of Petrarchism, does not signify closure but rather the ‘suspension’ of the lover in a predictably paradoxical state. The ending of the Drummond manuscript offers a deeper attempt at closure. In its final two sonnets (found below), the ‘contrair’ dilemma of the last Hawthornden sonnet assumes theological import. Lord quha redemes the deid and doth reviue and stumbling things preservs fra farder fall quha mercyeis maks the sinfull saul to liue and dothe to mynde na mair there guylt re[call] aboliss lord my faults baith great and smal and my contempt and my offence efface by thy sweit meiknes and thy mercye thral my stubborne thoughts proud rebells to thy grace In thy sones bloode my sinns great god displace and giue me words to cal vpon thy name


Lord in thy wonted kyndnes me embrace that to this age I my these word p[ro]cla[m]e AS I IN ONE GOD EUER AY HAITH TRUST SO AR HIS PROMEIS STEADFAST TREWE AND IUST13 (1–14) More suddenly than the Petrarchan ‘substitution’ of the divine for the mortal vergine this, the very last, sonnet exiles Bellisa; she fails to offer the consolatory and redemptive role of Petrarch’s earthly beloved. This is a devotional supplication, structured by a series of three apostrophes in each of the three quatrains before the final couplet assertion. The first quatrain is an expiation: ‘na mair’ emphasises the prayerful longing for self-forgetfulness and annulment; ‘my faults’ are a plural version of Petrarch’s singular and overarching errore. God here is gentle, defined by a ‘wonted kyndnes’ and made manifest in the promise of an ‘embrace’. Subjugation to Bellisa is transformed into the willing subjugation of the penitent which partly consists of atonement through language: instructed by God, he will enunciate ‘thy name’ and proclaim the true spiritual text in opposition to the text celebrating Bellisa which profaned true, or rightful love. His desire to become an instrument of oracular truth, ‘that to this age I must these words p[ro]clai[m]e […]’, ironically recollects the sequence’s earlier sonnet, ‘Muse yow fair dame […]’ in which he sought to ‘proclame’ love for Bellisa ‘to this age’.14 The couplet of this ultimate sonnet represents the true, divine ‘text of love’. The process of ‘rewriting’ which this sonnet exemplifies (the lover appeals, ‘giue me words’) is also one of imagistic reclarification: Christ’s sacrifice (‘In thy sones bloode […]’), for example, recalls the earlier portraits of the martyred lover.15 Spiritually, it must be a process of effacement and wilful forgetfulness. The sonnet preceding this last text in the Drummond manuscript (in other words, the penultimate) meditates upon the lover’s sinful self: Eternal lord God of immortal glore though I in love my self and sense have lost by vainlie vowing quhome now I do abhor, with sighs and teares causd baithe by flams and frost though soverene prence I have in playning most bewaild my panis bot not bewaild my sinn and so maid sad in me thy holie ghost yet drawe my saule from hell that thense doth rin


this O Sueit lord to grant I will begin, that I have blaikned beutyes lovd and servd and hethe adord bot outward bark and skin and earthlie things to heu[n]lye hes preferd yet let thy mercie the to mercie move, and off my mortal mak immortal love16 (1–14) In Petrarch’s sense, the lover desires ‘a più beata spene/mirando ‘l ciel’.17 Reflection is passed upon the text of love, and the profanity (or vanity) of the lover’s preceding secular hymn of love. The lover’s forgetfulness of God is imbued with the implication of original sin. Inattentive to words, concentrating upon the externals of language rather than their meaning, the object of his prayer, and the sacramental meaning of language, has been lost. While the other sonnet briefly permitted the alliance of secular and sacred language, love words are here exposed for their hollowness and near absurdity. Such a concept of vanitas, as Giuzeppe Mazzotta argues, is intrinsic to the Rime, itself a ‘narcissistic, idolatrous construct’.18 As the rhetoric of desire is condemned for its duplicity, so is its object, Bellisa, similarly indicted. Fowler’s lover has sacriligously adored beauty which is merely external. ‘I haif blaikned beutyes love […]’ (10): glorification of an idolatrous image is denounced; true beauty is ‘blaikned’, tainted by corruption, and stripped bare to ‘bark and skin’. Fowler’s opposition between external and internal has been compared to the neo-Platonic theory of divine beauty: ‘He turns within himself, as Bembo advised the courtier, and suffers a period of doubt […] The outcome, however, is that transference of love from lady to God promised in The Courtier […]’.19 Yet in this renunciation of external beauty, of the body’s outer vestment, Fowler precludes the neoPlatonic resolution which assigns divinity to the material beauty of the female beloved. Sensual love is condemned per se by the failure ‘to see beauty imaginatively in the light of its ascendant possibilities’.20 Desire for divine reconciliation is not, as partly conveyed in Petrarch’s text, impelled by the desire either to purge that desire and so render it apposite for a morally sanctified beloved, or to be spiritually united with Bellisa (for in the Tarantula the beloved does not die) and God, as in the Rime: ‘vol.ando tanto su nel bel sereno/ch’ i’ veggia il mio Signore et la mia donna!’21 Rather than anticipating salvation, in the penultimate Drummond sonnet, Fowler’s lover fears imminent


damnation: ‘drawe my soul from hell that thense doth rin’ (8). Earthly love is not granted transfiguring power. Fowler’s penitent confesses to God that his ‘sinn’ has ‘maid sad in me thy holie ghost’ (6–7). God is now internalised (echoing the familiar conceit of the beloved inscribed on the heart within), addressed as if He were a lover betrayed. Salvation only remains imminent in the final sonnet of the Drummond manuscript, contingent upon the lover’s articulation, and anticipated revelation, of the ‘correct’ words of love. Idolatrous desire is, however, the sin of which Petrarch accuses himself: ‘Questi m’à fatto men amare Dio / ch’ i’ non deveva, et men curar me stesso;/per una donna ò messo /egualmente in non cale ogni pensero’.22 Like Petrarch, Fowler’s lover seeks the spiritual absolution that will enable him to receive God’s grace: ‘soccorri a l’alma disviata et frale/e ‘l suo defetto di tua grazia adempi’.23 Both Fowler and Petrarch’s lovers have sinned in loving ‘the created more than the Creator’.24 Yet the Tarantula, and not the Rime though still imbued with the doctrinal and moral rigour of Augustine’s counsel in the Secretum, forbids Bellisa any mitigating or intercessionary role. The text’s final refusal to grant Bellisa a spiritual and moral apotheosis has, however, been anticipated by its earlier stages, and its accretive ironies and recapitulations. Fowler’s lover, as Montgomerie’s, frequently assumes the role of l’ amant martyr, crucified by a god of love who ‘saws his breirs and thornes within my hart’, and in whom is inscribed in blood ‘her fatal name’.25 The lover possesses life as long as Bellisa has ‘fairnes’, the ‘heuenlye coleur’ of her ‘angel face’ (2); but her beauty endures while he is subject to ‘chainge […] of haire and hew’ (5),26 as in Petrarch, a visible sign of his mortality. Throughout eros is charged with a quasi-religious resonance that culminates in the ending of the Drummond manuscript. Desire is treated as a lapse of ‘faithe’; the lover’s confession of a fallen ‘empyre’ of faith and reason implies the desire to make reparation. Yet it is Bellisa, and not God, who is sought: …all is fallen that I buildt by faithe quho then sall drye my tearis quhairin I bathe quho shal my harte deburden of his greif and tak from senses the empyre they hathe quho to my schaking feares sal giue releife quho quho but shee to whome the gods hes geven to be the pryde of earthe as pompe of heaven (8–14)


In this appeal, sacred and profane senses are held in conflict: ‘faithe’ may signify the lover’s belief in Bellisa’s underlying mitigant grace as much as religious devotion.27 Her apparent divinity in the final line is undercut by the terms ‘pryde’ and ‘pompe’ which suggest ‘gaudiness’ or insubstantiality.28 She is proclaimed as the ‘heaven’ in which he may anchor,29 even apostrophised as ‘Deare Sant on earthe and yet of heavenly race’. Yet, in the final two renunciatory sonnets, Bellisa is wholly acquitted of any redemptive grace. As the final sonnets denounce the hollowness of love words, so such eulogies of Bellisa are offered in ironic retrospect as mere words. Her spurious divinity is epitomised in a sonnet, not incorporated in the sequence itself, but possibly intended as a later addition, in which her ‘godlines’ appears as an eroticised posture; she is as idolatrous as profane language itself. Bellisa pansiue satt and in her hands more whyte then snaw, did hald the holye booke, and reiding that which shee weill vnderstands devoltlye wt her eyes did thairin looke and quhils her heide was boued her brest shee strooke and with a godlye and a gudlye zeale pourd furth her sighs of vapours ful and smoke30 (1–7) At the heart of Fowler’s sequence lies the illusory fiction of the feminine. The Tarantula, for all its supposed evocations of classical Petrarchistic motif and neo-Platonic transmutation, is a dark sequence. Fowler’s title condemns desire from the outset; not only does the Tarantula serve as the source of metaphorical and imagistic entrelacement, but implies that desire is yoked to the idea of a maniacal and fearful deathliness.31 Eros and death are inseparable, bound together in the ‘flight’ of the heart and soul: I equal absence loss[e]s with deaths agayne for quhen by her we mortallye lye slayne to the immortall thrones our soule dois flie euen so my harte in this impatient payne abandons this my corss and fleyes to thee deathe maks vs leave the derest things we see this pest depryvs me of your heunlye face32 (4–10)


Love is already overshadowed by mortality in the Tarantula before the renunciation per se begins. Death pervades all of Fowler’s erotic writing. Conventionally, of course, eros is an affliction which brings the lover to the brink of death; in the archetypal association of death and the feminine, the female beloved may herself be conceived as a quasipersonified death-figure. In the sonnet alluded to above, the identity of death and Bellisa are fused by the personifying pronoun, ‘she’. The soul seeks refuge in ‘the immortall throne’ (God the Father symbolised in regal eternity) as the lover’s heart deserts ‘this my corss’. The beloved’s encounter with mortality in the Tarantula works to negate the redemptive power of the feminine which both the Petrarchan Rime and Trionfi subsume into part of the divine consolation. Bellisa does not die but rather serves as a kind of memento mori incarnate: she represents the spiritual death which awaits the lover if he cannot renounce her. Only in another of Fowler’s sonnet sequences, far briefer, can transformation of the relationship between death, eros and the feminine occur. Not only does this endorse the perception of Fowler’s entire erotic corpus as a hermeneutic engagement with Petrarchan endings but the perception of love words as the ultimate form of idolatry: the heretical act against which authoritative Jamesian poetics cautioned.

Mortal desires: ‘bellezza … chiuso in poca fossa’33 The series of sonnets which share the drama of the beloved’s mortal frailty, entitled ‘of Death’ according to the ‘the tabill’ of contents in the Hawthornden manuscript,34 reimagine the Petrarchan consolation for the beloved’s death (as crystallised in the Rime 359, and the third Trionfo). Fowler’s ‘sequence’35 recreates Petrarch’s narrative at the moment of Laura’s death, sustained until her visionary return and their colloquy. The baroquely macabre ‘Elagie’ (the first text in this provisional sequence) and the succeeding sonnet rehearse a familiar trope: the lover endures a living death but the actual, or literal, death of the beloved irreparably diminishes such figurative assertions. This works to expose the ironically prophetic quality of love words: for love by cairs my youtheid hes defaitt and maed me oft for death to call and crye preserving it before that rage and hate by w[hi]ch my hairt in burning fyre did frye…’ (5–8) (my emphasis)36


In an echo of Rime 338, ‘Pianger l’aer et la terra e ‘l mar devrebbe/l’uman legnaggio, che senz’ ella è quasi/senza fior prato […]’37 and its notion of desuetude, the beloved’s death bereaves ‘this lothsome earth [of] hir grace and glore heirbye’ (11). By the sonnet’s close, the beloved’s death has conferred a kind of infamy on him: ‘more than love death hes me wrought disgrace’. Might ‘disgrace’ allude to the lover’s once resolute, now fallible, ‘faith’ in pure love? The third sonnet, ‘a dreame’, embodying the Petrarchan consolation en miniature, may answer this. Bellisa, as Laura in the Rime, speaks directly: ‘Can these availl …[the lover’s ‘sobbs’]/ […] to rander me my lyfe?’ (5–6). The beloved urges that he should celebrate her release from an earthly condition marked only by ‘stryfe’: I ioy my ioyes wt the celestiall troupe wtin my grave then troubill me na more raise vpp thy spreits, and longer do not droupe thy faithfull hairt dois weill my death decore38 (9–12) ‘Che val,’ dice, ‘a saver chi si sconforta? Non pianger più, non m’ ài tu pianto assai? ch’ or fostu vivo com’ io non son morta!’39 The sequence’s ultimate poem refuses to accommodate the Petrarchan desire to be ‘troubill[d] […] na more’. Her death is ‘decored’ by poetry which gifts to her what she here judges impossible: ‘to rander my lyfe’. The ultimate consolation, or reparation, offered by this sequence is contained within writing which, in contrast to the Tarantula, is not convicted of profanity. Poetry becomes an act of eternal repetition: to inscribe the beloved perpetually in writing is to summon her presence. Textual transcendence, the redemptive power of love words, becomes the means to endure ‘love and death’.40 The subsequent two poems constitute a ‘dialogue with death’, just as the preceding sonnet was a colloquy with eros incarnated in Bellisa. Thow Cruall death thow noysome plage and pest quhilk wt thy dairt my derest hairt hes slaine quhy spairs thow me quhase bodye is adrest to tak thy straiks to frie me of my paine41 (1–4)


Heart/body, sense/spirit; mutuality is expressed as the lovers’ inseparable unity. Yet this intimation of quasi-Neo-Platonic oneness is confronted by death’s own ‘Ansuer’: ‘thought hairts were one yet bodyis war disjoyn [de…]’ (8, my emphasis). In the companion sonnet, the act of mourning, the cleansing of tears, effaces the ‘cruelty’ of her loss: ‘quhair I have plast a flood out from myne [ene]/to drowne the death that hes so cruell bene’.42 The power of elegy is rendered tangibly. Such writerly transcendence is diminished by the next sonnet depicting the grieving lover in danger of his own dissolution: ‘my daisled eyes by sorrow ar o[u]rsyld […]’.43 Faith is lost in the beloved’s consolatory immortality: ‘quhen as I thought the graces of my dame/and heuinly port might served for releif […]’ (10–11). The knowledge of mutability forms part of the lover’s spiritual ‘education’: ‘bot now I see the errour of my mynde / sen farest things to wrak ar maist inclynde’ (13–14), echoing the Petrarchan sorrow that ‘cosa bella mortal passa et non dura’.44 The conventional Petrarchan text has been learnt. O blissed luk my spreit no mair in trance nor into dumps contenew sal thairfore GOD HES HER TAINE IN MERCYE NOT IN YRE THAT VNTO HIM MY THOUGHTS MAY ALL ASPYRE45

(11–14) Yet the sequence refuses to end on this transformative moment of Christian Neoplatonism as attested by the final two poems, the ‘Complaint’ and ‘Fantasie’, which fasten upon the sign or ‘ruit’ (55) of eros. althocht hir corpss interred be in clay and I wt sobbs the echo off her name sal still resond till death my lyfe assay (‘Complaint’, 70–2) It is the power of eternal signification which is affirmed by the ultimate sonnet, envisaging the beloved’s angelic return. Thus as I wrett wt full Intent to end these doolfull songs which dois hir death deplore me thought I saw down from the heavens discend that peirles perle quhome I in hairt adore


In courtlye grace in semlye schaw and glore In heuinlye [fr]ame, and beauty wtout blame with all these g[i]fts which she posest before most lovingly[e] to call me be my name46 (‘A Fantaisie’, 1–8) Bellisa is essentially untransformed, her beauty neither beatified or altered but simply as ‘she posest before’. Fowler’s donna angelicata therefore retains vestiges of her earthliness, unlike Laura who returns in canzone 359 of the Rime as a spirito ignudo who assures Petrarch that she will appear immeasurably beautiful through offering him the possibility of their mutual ‘salute’.47 Fowler’s manifestation of the beloved certainly fulfils Petrarch’s yearning to contemplate the dead Laura’s beauty: her ‘forma miglior che vive ancora/et vivrà sempre su ne l’alto cielo,/di sue bellezze ogni or piu m’innamora […]’.48 Fowler’s beloved offers another consolation: not that he must patiently wait for the death which will return him to herself and God (as in canzone 366, by the Virgin’s grace), but that she can ‘name’ (8) the lover as poet: O FOULER o immortall be thy fame Lat never dame thy honest suit disdaine thy machth[l]es faith of trewth deservs the same though thow my loue by death did not obtea[ne] thow death hes kild thy verse dois mak me liue and wt thy name my fame sal ay reviue (‘A Fantaisie’, 9–14) Poetry promises the memoria eterna of which Petrarch assures Laura;49 there is no sense of the profanity of love words which ends the Tarantula. These lovers are reunited by, and enshrined in, language, a poetic communion desired but unattained by Petrarch.50 Since Fowler’s ‘death’ sequence is another rewriting of the Petrarchan end, one might argue that this loving, textual reunion after the beloved’s death invokes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as in canzone 332 of the Rime. There, as in Fowler’s sonnet, the affective power of language reclaims the beloved from death: ‘Or avess’ io un sì pietoso stile/che Laura mia potesse torre a Morte/come Euridice Orfeo…’.51 Fowler’s beloved grants her lover the recognition which Petrarch seeks from Laura: ‘Se sì alto pon gir mie stanche rime/ch’ agiungan lei ch’ è fuor dira et di pianto/et fa ‘l Ciel or di sue bellezze lieto,/ben riconoscerà ‘l mutato stile’.52


If these ‘death’ sonnets redeem love-words from the heretical profanity with which they are charged in the Tarantula, not least Jamesian poetics, the female beloved remains exiled from the realm of the spiritual, and the idea of the feminine is not expiated from its association with sin. Unlike Laura, Fowler’s beloved does not look back to see if her lover follows her ascent ‘al Ciel’.53 That eros and poetry might work to ameliorate death remains ‘a fantesie’. Though dreams may possess prophetic truth, these love-words embody only an imagined power. The beloved returns but her beauty is reimagined; beauty, as in Petrarch, becomes ‘the measure of the transience of all mortal life’.54 As a ‘fantesie’, it may conceal how irrevocably the dead beloved remains (in the sense of Rime 335 and 336) ‘out of sight’, within the lover’s memory alone.55 Fowler’s most typical ‘rewriting’ or transformation of the Petrarchan consolation (that feminine eros possesses salvific power) denies that both lover and beloved can attain a state of grace; in Fowler, eros is irredeemably fallen. Another, more disparate sonnet sequence within the Hawthornden papers56 mirrors the Tarantula’s ‘dialogue’ with Petrarchan penitential love: In by way roadds I ran a restles race as best besemd my vaine vnlauful lust, quhair I haue found long pains with cares unIust and feading ioyes my pleasours to displace But nou the glass of sin before my face presents my eyes the schaps of uorldly trust that trusting to the same confes I must that verteu vyce and errour reuth doth chase57 As if apocalyptically, the lover’s demise is envisaged (‘my yeres sall showe the horrour of my sin/and dayes that rests the errour of my hart’, implicitly alluding to Petrarchan errore); he will make atonement, or ‘washe his wounds’, in teares that inscribe his ‘Smartt’. Fowler’s selfreflections in the ‘glass of sin’ occur in texts ostensibly devoted to erotic desire which refuse absolutely the sublimation or apotheosis of profane into sacred love. My winding scheits my steidfast love sal end my heid sal tend vnto his buriall toume to tak that rowme, this bodye sal be bend or I make end of love, al this sal cume.


then sen my dome and death I wiss, respect my faith, suspect no chainge for to insew na vncouth hew sall hinder thy aspect Let prove detect and furyis all persew and yeild thair dew to my deserved hyre gif I desyre in vthers to mak chose or in thame Ioyse quha would my lovlye fyre Quensche through impyre of faucos wanto[n] toyes fame schame may noyse and foull be my report and all my deids to seve fro skorne and sport58 This is Fowler’s most beautiful, and seemingly unequivocal, assertion of absolute faith in the beloved Yet death, so sepulchrally embodied in the first quatrain, cannot be effaced by the subsequent intimations of eternity. Against this opening retraction or rescension, the assertion of love’s perpetuity is measured. Despite the promise, ‘or I make end of love’, the finitude of death is implied, if only by its denial. As in William Drummond’s love poetry, which Fowler’s so strongly anticipates, a division, inevitably and insurmountably, exists between beloved and lover; here, and in Drummond’s Poems (1616), it is death. Despite allusion to neo-Platonic doctrine, the Ficinian assimilation of lover into beloved is never achieved. Fowler’s is an uncertain spiritual love that wholly renounces rather than assimilates the earthly and, most deeply of all, the feminine. * Collectively, Fowler’s erotic poems constitute a work of melancholia and mourning. Fowler is a loyally Petrarchist poet who nevertheless fails to endow love with Petrarch’s theological and spiritual transcendence. Grace is absent. Yet Fowler’s work should not be termed simply ‘anti-Petrarchist’ since his is not a categorical rejection of Petrarchan philosophy but rather a ‘transfiguration’ of its secular and sacral contrasts. Fowler’s Tarantula and the series of sonnets which are its extension belong to the history of the early modern reception of Petrarch. As William J. Kennedy has shown, each new translation, commentary or Petrarchist sequence invents an ideologically different Petrarch, a new paradigm of the Rime or Trionfi.59 Within these hermeneutic traditions, Fowler may be located within that of Protestant or Protestantised revisionism.60 The intercession of the Virgin Mary in Petrarch’s canzone 366 is doctrinally fallacious for the Reformed poet since God alone dis-


penses grace. In this theological vein, Fowler’s writing has obvious parallels with the English Protestant love poetics of Sidney and Spenser. Yet the Tarantula and the Amoretti are different: the devotional ethics of the latter still allow the beloved to act as a mediator of divine beauty and wisdom; she is not an idolatrous image as is Fowler’s Bellisa. Fowler ‘inherits’ from Petrarch the theological concept of human love as sinful, an aberration or diversion from devotion to God, the creator rather than the created as expounded in the dialogue of Petrarch’s Secretum. Yet the full religious transfiguration of Petrarch’s Rime, contained in adoration of the Virgin, is rejected by Fowler’s text that ends in the lover’s penitent abjection before God. Even in the miniature sequence, ‘Of death’, the beloved’s death is not apotheosised as in the Rime where Laura arrives among the angels (sonnet 346), or as in the Trionfo della morte. Fowler’s erotic poetry can be conceived as a mirror image of his 1581 polemical Epistle where he answers the charge of being ‘a blasphemer of ye virgin marie’61 by excoriating the idolatrous practices of the church and the perniciousness of false ‘Images’.62 Eros is ultimately heretical: love-words cannot be redeemed, nor can the beloved be spiritually transfigured. He is the Scottish Jacobean writer who fulfils the Jamesian dictate against perpetuating the delusional capacity of lovewords, and the desire for a philosophical vision shaped by Protestantism. If eros requires reformation, then Fowler’s writing complies. While his love sequences are faithful to the notional vision of Jacobean eros (also representing its most esoteric engagement with Petrarchan and neo-Platonic thought), they are also haunted by the religious and cultural burden of eros in the earlier Marian decade, and the evocation of its sovereign, Mary, as a troubling embodiment of rhetoric and the feminine. The corrupt beauty of her form, faith and language fuelled Protestant suspicion of the idolatrous image and the idolatrous feminine. Whether impelled by quasi-Reforming revisionism or not, Fowler’s sequence cannot admit the feminine to redemption when Woman is irredeemably sinful, and the the lover’s own soul imperilled by both her and death. Fowler is Petrarch’s celebrant and apostate. His erotic writing is defined by the effort to articulate God’s words, and not Petrarch’s. This is, perhaps, what his king ultimately desired.

Conclusion

Love’s End

On 8 February 1587, Mary was executed. The writers of the inner Jacobean circle, the subject of this book, met the queen’s death with silence. That there are no extant funeral elegies or allusive poetic commemorations is perhaps unsurprising, for Mary’s name could not have been invoked without incurring the anger or unease of the sovereign to whom alone loyalty was owed. Just as Fowler’s poetry refuses the Marian transfiguration of the beloved, so Mary is refused any redemptive incarnation by the Jacobean coterie. By the year of her death, almost all the erotic poetry considered here (with the probable exception of James’s ‘nuptial’ sonnets which persuasively belong to 1589 and after) had been produced. There is no obvious causal connection between the end of the major corpus of Jacobean love poetry and the queen’s own end. But 1587, rather than 1603, more persuasively marks the dissolution of the courtly love poetry resting upon the intimate links between the monarch, the courtly environment and literary culture, which this book has explored. Erotic literature was still created by Scottish writers in subsequent decades. The sonnet sequence Aurora. Containing the first fancies of the Authors youth, by William Alexander (1567–1640), belongs to the later years of the Scottish Jacobean coterie. Composed in the 1590s, it was published in London in 1604. The entry of Aurora into the public book market may reflect the exigencies of being a Scottish writer following the court’s transposition to London in 1603.1 Post-Union, there is the substantial erotic writing of Alexander Craig (c1567–1627) and William Drummond (1585–1649): the former’s complex, labyrinthine sequence to no less than eight female ‘beloveds’ pursues the consequences of desire which ends after sexual possession; the latter, composed of two parts in imitation of Petrarch’s Rime, is an intellectual and imaginative 167


meditation on the beloved’s death, and the fragile consolation of her existence in divine eternity.2 Yet these erotic texts lack an explicit monarchical focus, or the mediation of the political, religious and symbolic concerns of sovereign, courtly culture. Marian and above all Jacobean erotic poetry is fostered by what Seth Lerer, in writing of Henrician court poetry, called ‘the theatricalization of the intimate’.3 The idea of passion as literary spectacle, or of the court as a literal and symbolic chamber of the inward and interior, is entwined throughout this Scottish Stewart corpus. It is as much an incarnation of courtly ritual and practice as is its better known theatrical counterparts of masque, pageant and royal entry. The poetry of Stewart, Montgomerie and Fowler is an emblem of courtly expression; in part, also of royal devotion but, as witnessed in Montgomerie, of the fragility of such devotion. The extravagantly adulatory poetry of Stewart and, to a lesser degree, of his Jacobean contemporaries, may represent a collective shrine to James but one where chastisement as well as veneration is enacted. In Mary’s case, the ‘passional’ display of the monarch contributed to her own political tragedy; the casket that contained the fragments of ‘letters and writynges’ was a Pandora’s box which, once opened, led to the standard litany of anti-Marian imprecations. Yet James’s erotic elegy, although ‘protected’ by a carefully worked allegorical shell, raised a memorial to desire, which was not erased even from the 1616 edition of the king’s collected works. Erotic literature, though putatively ‘censored’ by Jamesian apologiae for its ‘immaturity’, frivolity and blasphemy, the ‘shameles rymes’ of ‘Scrybes prophane’ and the Cupid ‘Who in Idolatrous breasts his darts hath pight’,4 articulates the courtly ‘unconscious’. Desire inhabits the realms of the symbolic and the imaginary, unveiled and unbound on the threshold of the poetic. The metaphors of veiling, secrecy and encasement which the Marian texts and the erotic poetry of Stewart, Montgomerie and James espouse, draw us to the symbolic desires at their heart where the supposedly ‘unspeakable’ is spoken. The erotic poetry remains, no matter how much subsequent pro-Stewart historiography sought to absolve the Marian and Jacobean reigns from any controversial ‘excess’ (Mary’s sexual trangressions, or the decadence of the English Jacobean court alleged by Jamesian detractors). In relation to this ideological ‘war’ of possession for the Stewart monarchy David Allan cites the example of Drummond’s seventeenth-century History which sought to assign the king ‘a good command over his Passions, his desires never being above his reason’.5

Love’s End 169

The machinations of poetic eros are an emblem of the issues of political and religious significance which link the reigns of Mary and James. These texts are united by the tension between the Catholic and reformed faiths. By elision, expurgation and substitution, the new devotion gradually usurps the old as these erotic texts, variously preoccupied from Mary to Fowler with the ‘profane’ and the ‘idolatrous’, disclose. What underlies the relationships between the sacred and profane in these poems (Bannatyne and Fowler in particular) is the presence of ‘the feminine’: embodied in the figures of the beloved woman and of two queens, earthly and heavenly, Mary Stewart and the Virgin Mary. This trinity, productive of such moral and theological anxiety, and, in the case of the twin Marian representations, of attempted repression and silencing, points to the enduring symbolic power of the feminine throughout the Marian and Jacobean periods. The connection, secured in flesh only between Mary and her son, baptised by Catholic rites but compelled to abjure the maternal faith, is embodied with pathos in the book which Mary wrote for James: ‘Tetrasticha ou Quatrains a Son fils’. It is recorded, undated, in William Drummond of Hawthornden’s library but no copy survives.6 It is ghostly as is the portrait of the adult king James and Mary, side by side, together in imagined unity.7 ‘Of one thing only I am astonished; that he has never asked anything about the Queen […] and yet, notwithstanding this, I know that he loves and honours her much in his heart.’8 If this represents another kind of unspoken love, then there can be consolation in the fact that in their association with the erotic word Mary and James are bound together.

Notes

Introduction 1 Petrarch, Rime sparse, sonnet 9: 12; trans. Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976), 44–5. 2 The exemplary article in this respect is Arthur F. Marotti’s ‘“Love is not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences’, ELH, 49 (1982), 396–428. See also Louis Montrose, ‘Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship’, Renaissance Drama, 8 (1977), 3–35, ‘“Eliza, Queene of shepheardes”’, and the Pastoral of Power’, ELR, 10 (1980), 153–82, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: the Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, ELH, 50 (1983), 415–59, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers eds, Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 65–87, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint eds, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 303–40. See also Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s influential ‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella’, SEL 24 (1984), 53–68. Other analyses of coded political poetry include Rosemary Kegl, ‘“Those Terrible Aproches”: Sexuality, Social Mobility, and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie’, ELR, 20 (1990), 179–205; Stephen W. May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets. The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991); Achsah Guibbory, ‘“Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So”: the Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies’, ELH, 57 (1990), 811–33; Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); ‘The Impure Motives of Elizabethan Poetry’, Genre, 15 (1982), 225–38; Phillippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power. Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989). For a critique of this critical mode in its earliest stages, see Jonathan Crewe, Hidden Designs. The critical profession and Renaissance literature (London: Methuen, 1986). 171

172 Notes 3 R.D.S. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972); Helena Mennie Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 4 See, for example, R.D.S. Jack, ‘Scottish Literature: the English and European Dimensions’, in Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup eds, Renaissance Culture in Contact. Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 9–17; Richard M. Clewett, ‘James VI of Scotland and his Literary Circle’, Aevum, 47 (1988–9), 445–6; Ian Ross, ‘Verse Translation at the Court of King James VI of Scotland’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 4 (1962), 252–67 and ‘Sonneteering in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 6 (1964), 255–68; Matthew McDiarmid, ‘Some Aspects of the Early Renaissance in Scotland’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 3 (1967), 201–35. 5 Edited collections which stem from the triennial international conferences on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature and Language; see most recently Graham Caie et al. eds, The European Sun (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001). 6 See David MacRoberts ed., Essays on the Scottish Reformation (Glasgow: J.S. Burns, 1962); Michael Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh: Donald, 1981). On sixteenth-century Scottish political culture, see Roger A. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998); John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch eds, New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Donald, 1982). On early modern Scottish culture in general, see John MacQueen ed., Humanism in Renaissance Scotland (1990), and A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan eds, The Renaissance in Scotland. Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994). Two outstanding essays by Durkan are ‘The Beginnings of Humanism in Scotland’, Innes Review, 4 (1953), 5–24, and ‘The Cultural Background in Sixteenth-century Scotland’, in MacRoberts ed., 274–331. 7 Michael Lynch, ‘Queen Mary’s Triumph: the Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in December 1566’, SHR, 69 (1990), 1–21, and ‘Court Ceremony and Ritual during the Personal Reign of James VI’, in Lynch and Julian Goodare eds, The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 71–92; also Douglas Gray, ‘The Royal Entry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in Sally Mapstone and Juliette Woods eds, The Rose and the Thistle. Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998);10–37. 8 L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone eds, The Palace in the Wild. Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000). 9 See, for example, Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity. Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Thomas Healy, New Latitudes. Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1992); David

Notes 173

10 11

12

13

14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22

Norbrook, The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (London: Penguin Books, 1992), ‘Preface’, xxxi. R.D.S. Jack, ‘“Translating” the Lost Scottish Renaissance’, Translation and Literature, 6 (1997), 66–80. Since the bibliography on Marian and Jacobean rule is extensive, only book-length publications of the last two decades are listed here: Gordon Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men. Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd, 1983); Michael Lynch ed., Mary Stewart. Queen in Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London: George Philip, 1988). On James, see Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990) and Government by Pen: Scotland under James VI and I (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Bryan Bevan, King James VI and I of England (London: Rubicon, 1996); W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Irene Carrier, James VI and I: King of Great Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lynch and Goodare eds, The Reign of James VI and the newly published collection edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier eds, Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Wayne State University Press, 2002). Essayes of a Prentise, sig. Kijr–Kijv; James Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols STS (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1955), vol. 1, 67. Sig. Kiv. STS vol. 1, 68 See also James’s sonnet to Chancellor Maitland: ‘For what in barbarous leide I block and frames/Thou learnedlie in Mineru’s tongue proclames’ (STS, vol. 2, 107, 13–14). See R.D.S. Jack, ‘James VI and Renaissance Poetic Theory’, English, 16 (1967), 208–11, and Clewett, 445–6. ‘Sonnet Decifring the Perfyte Poete’, sig. Kiiijr (1–6); STS, vol. 1, 69. The treatise might be appropriately conceived as a kind of Renaissance conduct book, prescribing desirable rules and techniques to fashion the most covetable aesthetic image. Homi Bhaba ed., Narrating the Nation (London: Routledge, 1990), 250. Essayes, sig. Mijv, STS 79. Essayes, sig. Mijv, STS 78. Essayes, sig. Mijr; STS, 78. The beloved’s beauty (descriptio pulchritudinis) is singled out as a topic which requires invention, sig. Mijv, 78. Ironically, this is slightly derivative in itself; other poetic treatises comment on the relationship between female beauty and rhetoric in similar terms: Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction (avoiding what is trita et obuia…’) and Sidney’s Apology. ‘I lofty Virgill shall to life restoir/My subiects all shalbe of heauenly thing’: ‘Sonnet 12’ (10–11), Essayes, sig. Cr, STS vol. 1,14. ‘The Vranie translated’ (25–29), in Essayes, sig. Dijr, STS, vol. 1, 19. The visit is recorded by James Melville in his Memoirs; Du Bartas reciprocated the artistic compliment in kind by translating James’s own epic Lepanto into French.

174 Notes 23 See James Craigie, ed., Thomas Hudson’s Historie of Judith (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1941); Ross, ‘Verse Translation’, 257–8. 24 Reulis, sig. Mijv–r, STS vol. 1, 79. 25 Sandra M. Bell, ‘Poetry and Politics in the Scottish Renaissance’, unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), 9, 13. 26 Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage Tournament. Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 27 Paul Laumonier, ‘Ronsard et L’Écosse’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 4 (1924), 408–28 (425). Only two quatrains in alexandrine metre survive, clearly intended for Ronsard; instead she sent ‘un buffet de 2,000 ecus, surmonte d’un vase “elaboure en forme de rocher, representant le Parnasse” et portant cette inscription: “A Ronsard, L’Apollon de la Source des Muses”’ (Bodleian MS Add.C.92, f. 22v). 28 Shire overemphasises the playfully fictional quality of literary practice at the Jacobean court though it may still be considered, in Manfred Windfuhr’s phrase, a ‘tropical court-society’, and as glossed by Heinrich F. Plett: ‘all courtly manifestations are to be taken sub specie allegorica’: ‘Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England’, New Literary History, 14 (1983), 597–621 (607). 29 Ironically, Ronsard was eulogised by the sobriquet of ‘Apollo’, hailed as ‘mon Apollo’ by the poet Olivier de Magny (1529–61) in Les Soupirs (XLI). 30 ‘The Translators Invocation’ (7) to ‘The Furies’ in Poeticall Exercises, sig. 7v, STS, vol. 1, 112. 31 Susan Sellers, Héle` ne Cixous, Authorship, Autobiography and Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 71. 32 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 2.

Chapter 1 1

2

Fragment inscribed. in Mary’s Book of Hours: facsimile NLS Adv. 81.5.8, f. 81v; Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28, on the voyeuristic exposure of the Renaissance woman writer per se. Detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scotts, touchand the murder of her Husband, and hir Conspiracie, Adulterie, and pretensit Mariage with the Erle Bothwell. Translatit out of the latine, quhilk was written be M.G.B. (n.p, n.d. but believed to be in London by the printer John Day in 1571), sig. Oijr. The sonnets are found in sigs, Qiiijr-Sir. This text was based on George Buchanan’s earlier anti-Marian Latin tract denouncing Mary for her part in Darnley’s murder, De Maria Scotorum Regina, which appeared in 1571 together with the Actio contra Mariam by Thomas Wilson, and two poems by ‘G.M.’ and ‘P.R. Scotus’; see John Durkan, Bibliography of George Buchanan (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1994). Another vernacular Detectioun was printed at St Andrews by Robert Lekprevik in 1572. A French edition entitled Histoire de Marie, Royne d’Escosse also appeared in 1572, allegedly printed in Edinburgh by ‘Th.Vwaltem’, but actually in La Rochelle, as an expression of French Protestant sympathy for the antiMarian movement. The moment of the casket’s discovery became a topos

Notes 175

3

4

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

of anti-Marian writing; the incriminatory casket was in fact produced by the Earl of Moray on 7 December 1568 at the first of the trials instigated by the Elizabethan government at Westminster; see Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (1969; London: Mandarin, 1993), 460–1. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, ‘Discours Troisième sur la Reyne D’Escosse’, Receuil des Dames ed. Roger Gaucheron (Paris, 1926), 44–5; Brantôme’s work was originally published posthumously in 1665 at Leyden. The testimony of Ronsard was particularly injurious. Cited in Andrew Lang, The Mystery of Mary Stewart (New York: AMS Press, 1901), 344. For a representative range of literature on the authenticity debate, see Samuel Cowan, Mary Queen of Scots and Who Wrote the Casket Letters? (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co, 1901); T.F. Henderson, The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889); John Hosack, Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1869); Walter Goodall, An Examination of the Letters said to be by Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1824); John Kerr, The Casket Letters and the Keys (Robert Maclehose and Co, n.d.); John Skelton, Maitland of Lethington and the Scotland of Mary Stuart: a History, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1894); Fraser, 379ff; Jenny Wormald Mary Queen of Scots. A Study in Failure (London: George Philip, 1988), 178. Records of the Privy Council, Edinburgh, 16 September 1568, in James Anderson ed., Collections Relating to the history of Mary Queen of Scots, 4 vols (London: 1727–8), vol. 2, 258. Anderson ed., 257. R.H. Mahon, The Indictment of Mary Queen of Scots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 25; the letter to La Mothe Fénelon is printed in Alexander Labanoff ed., Lettres, Instructions et Memoires de Marie Stuart Reine d’Escosse, 8 vols (London: Dolman, 1844), vol. 4, dated 22 November 1571, desiring that the tracts in her defence be published as freely as the denunciations against her (the Medicis were particularly anxious to ensure the destruction of the Detectioun and other anti-Marian treatises). Philip J. Ford, George Buchanan. Prince of Poets (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1982), 108. John Durkan, Bibliography, xiv. Ibid., xiv. CUL MS Oo. 7.47: ‘An Elegy on the Murder of Lord Darnley’ (ff. 32–7); ‘certane French sonnettis…’ (ff. 46-8). This manuscript copy is infrequently commented upon: Lang reproduces in facsimile the folio containing the first two sonnets (stating that ‘the copyist is unknown’, 345); Mahon, Indictment, commented on what he termed ‘the Lennox manuscripts’ (1): CUL Oo.7.47/8: a rough draft by Lennox of the Bill of Supplication; CUL Dd.3.66: ‘A brief discourse of the usage of umqle [formerly] the King of Scottis, sone to me the Earle of Lennox, be the Quene his wyff’; CUL Oo. 7. 47/11: ‘A Remembrance after what sorte the late Kynge of Scottis Sonne to me the Earle of Lennoxe, was used by the Quene his wieffe’. In Mary Queen of Scots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), Mahon transcribes from CUL MS Oo.7.47/8 what he terms ‘the Lennox narrative’, a contemporary prose account of the Darnley controversy believed to be written by the Earl of Lennox himself (78). The Indictment is closely based on

176 Notes

12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

22

Buchanan’s Latin De Maria Scotorum, found among the same collection of papers in CUL MS Dd.3.66, entitled ‘Ane informatioun of probable and infallable conjecteuris and presumptiounis quhairbe it appeiris evidentlie yt ye Quene, moder to our soverane Lord, not onlie wes previe of ye horrible and unworthie morthour, perpetrat in ye persoun of ye King of guid memorie, his hienes fader, but als wes ye verray instrument, chieff organe and causer of ye Vnnaturall crueltie’. Another anti-Marian document by Buchanan, known as The Book of Articles, was written as ‘an accusatory brief at the time of her trial in England’ (Fraser, 324), commissioned by Moray, and first produced at the Westminster trial of 15 December 1568. Often blatantly fallacious, it has direct verbal echoes in the document ‘Ane informatioun’, and in the printed version of the vernacular Detectioun. The CUL manuscript also provides two missing lines from the third and eighth French sonnets in the 1571 Detectioun. Between lines 12 and 13 of the Detectioun’s third sonnet is inserted the line ‘et toutesfois mon coeur vous doutez ma constance’; between lines 5 and 6 of the Detectioun, eighth sonnet is the line ‘pour luy ie veux faire teste au malheure’. At a seminar given to the Department of English Studies, University of Strathclyde, November 2000. There are altogether fourteen annotations, numbered alphabetically. Fraser, 373. Anderson, 259. Labanoff, vol. 2, 202. For conjectures on the identity of the forgerers see (for example) Lang, 345; Goodall, 127. Mary refers here to the letters, and not the sonnets; neither she, nor her apologists such as John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, referred directly to the evidence of the sonnets. John Leslie, A Defence of the Honour of Marie Quene of Scotlande (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), 300; the text was originally published in 1569. The sonnets also bear an interesting, tangential relationship to the letters which makes the priority of each text uncertain. The mise-en-scène of the letters, of course, remains close (the adulterous relationship), but there are also several striking verbal echoes. Brantôme, 44. Shoshana Felman, ‘What Does A Woman Want? The Question of Autobiography and the Bond of Reading (Postface)’, in What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 6. Readings of the sonnets vary in length and detail, often inhibited by the crisis of authorship. See Betty S. Travitsky ed., The Paradise of Women. Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Helen Hackett, ‘Courtly Writing by Women’, in Helen Wilcox ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169–89 (173–4); Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Rewriting the Renaissance language of love and desire: the “bodily burdein” in the poetry of Mary, Queen of Scots’, Gramma, 4 (1996), 181–95; ‘Scottish Women Writers c1560–c1650’, in Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan eds, A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 15–43 (17–26); ‘The cre-

Notes 177

23

24

25 26 27

28 29

30 31

32

33

34

ation and self-creation of Mary Queen of Scots: rhetoric, sovereignty, and female controversies in sixteenth century Scottish poetry’, Scotlands, 5.2 (1998), 65–88; Peter C. Herman, ‘Mary Queen of Scots’, in Reading Royal Subjects (forthcoming; I am most grateful to Professor Herman for allowing me to read the essay in advance of publication); Mary E. Burke, ‘Queen, Lover, Poet: a question of balance in the sonnets of Mary, Queen of Scots’, in Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda E. Dove, and Karen Nelson eds, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 101-18. There is an interesting early account in David Dalrymple, ‘Of the Sonnets attributed to Mary Queen of Scots’, Remarks on the History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1773); Dr Sally Mapstone drew my attention to this piece. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 168, 189. Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); see also Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s reading of triangulation in Shakespeare’s sonnets in Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), which begins with Girard. James Melville, Memoirs of his own life (Edinburgh, 1827), 176. Detectioun, f. 195r. Her later marriage to Bothwell was construed as ‘a mokking of God’: Mahon ed., Indictment, 47. The phrase is drawn from Mary’s elegy upon François II’s death: the idea of an almost sacramentally perfect love recurs throughout Mary’s secular and religious poetry. Leslie, Treatise, 263. Agnes Strickland ed., Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, and documents connected with her personal history, 3 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1842–3), vol. 1, 305, undated, but probably 1568; see also the letter to Elizabeth, vol. 1, 72. In the context of Mary’s self-defence in the later Babington controversy, Lewis notes that ‘Mary […] cast the written word as itself a traitor of sorts because it deprived her of her rightful sovereignty’ (47). Strickland ed., vol. 1, 51 (undated, probably May or June, 1568). The phrase is borrowed from Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Zone Books, 1999). See the portrait of Mary attributed to François Clouet, ‘The Bath of Diana’, and the anonymous portrait of the semi-nude yet chastely beautiful ‘Lady at her toilet’, believed to be Mary: Helen Smailes and Duncan Thomas eds, The Queen’s Image (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1987), 13–14. Two Shrovetide masques were devised by George Buchanan for performance at Holyrood Palace in 1564, ‘In Castitatem’ and ‘Mutuus Amor’. For Mary’s marriage to Darnley a year later, three masques were devised by Buchanan: ‘Pompa Deorum in nuptiis Mariae’; ‘Pompae equestres’; and an address by the four ‘Maries’ to the goddesss of Health. The baptism of James VI was also commemorated by a Buchanan masque. See R.D.S. Jack, ‘Mary and the Poetic Vision’, Scotia, 3 (1979), 35–40.

178 Notes 35

36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48

Detectioun (1571), sig. Biijv, with regard to Bothwell’s injury at Liddesdale; but see Donaldson, First Trial, 156, for this as an instance of polemical fabrication. Knox, History of the Reformation, Book IV, in David Laing ed., Works, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1848), vol.2, 388. Susan Frye, Elizabeth I. The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12–13. For revisionist readings of the Elizabethan image or icon, see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen. Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) and Julia M. Walker ed., Dissing Elizabeth. Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Frye, 105. See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed’, Rewriting the Renaissance. The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42, and Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), 197–8, for analysis of Elizabeth’s corporeal presence. Knox, 368. David Parkinson, The Poems of Alexander Montgomery, STS, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 2000), vol. 1, 147. Detectioun, sig. Bijr–v; it continues with the assertion that Mary desired to ‘rauish hym agayne’ (sig. Bijv). Tertullian, cited in Alcuin Blamires et al. eds, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 51. J.E. Phillips, Images of a Queen. Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca: University of California Press, 1964). See Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print. Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); on the Scottish pamphlets, see Phillips, 41–2. Sandra M. Bell, ‘“The Throne of Trial”: Reformation Satire and the Scottish Monarchy’, unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), 36–43, contends that the anti-Marian satires were a profound questioning of monarchy to which James’s later legitimisation of political and cultural autonomy was a deliberate response. Satirical Poems, vol. 1, 39–45 (15, 30). In ‘Ane Ballat declaring the Nobill and Gude inclination of our King’, published by Robert Lekprevik in Edinburgh in 1567, the narrator caustically asserts that the exemplum of Mary would subvert the Boccacian catalogue of mulieribus nobilis, and challenge the power of Ovidian (presumably Heroidian) representation. On Lekprevik, Protestant printer, see Satirical Poems, vol. 1, liv–ix. In Mary Queen of Scots, Donaldson cites a play presented at the English court ‘late in 1567’, Horestes, by the antiMarian English parliamentarian John Pikeryng which constructs Mary as Clytemnestra (161); see further Lewis, 44–5. Detectioun, sig. Giir. Visual emblems also served to remind the populace of Mary’s corrupt sexuality: for example, her representation on a 1567 placard as a mermaid (icon of the prostitute): see Rosalind K. Marshall, Queen of Scots (Edinburgh, 1986), 140.

Notes 179 49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

66

67 68

Parkinson, 142. Joannes L. Vives, De institutio foeminae christianae (1524), trans. Richard Hyrde, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Booke called the Instruction of a christen woman, made firste in latyne, by the right famous clerke maystr Lewis Vives, and tourned out of latyne into Englishe (London, 1557), Book III.i, sig. Kkiiir. (first translated 1529). Detectioun, f. 194r. Detectioun, sig. Giir. Robert Gore-Brown, Lord Bothwell (London, 1937), proposes that Anna Throndssön, with whom Bothwell had an affair before his marriage to Lady Jean Gordon, wrote the sonnets attributed to Mary, and tailors the sonnets to fit a new biographical narrative (106–9, 412–415). Acts of Parliament December 1567, extracted in Anderson ed., vol. 3, 206. Labanoff, vol. 2, 34, 36. In a defence of Bothwell’s ‘faythfull and uprycht service’ in letter to Melvil, May 1567, Labanoff, vol. 2, 15. Labanoff, 41. Labanoff, 41. See Fraser, 388, on Mary’s justifications of the Bothwell marriage. Labanoff, 45. Lynch, 217. ‘Testament and tragedie of umquhile King Henrie Stewart of gude memorie’ (63): Satirical Poems, vol. 1, 39–45. Lewis, 31. William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 138. ‘mon filz’ in the CUL MS is glossed as ‘the king his sone, for it apperit she menit th’erll bothwell …’ (f. 46r). Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament. Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): ‘sovereignty promises a fantastic, a perfect but imaginary closure to the very yearning it brings into being’ (71). One could also cite in parallel the aestheticistion of sexual assault in pastourelle; see Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘The Political Dimensions of Desire and Sexuality in Poems of the Bannatyne Manuscript’, in Stephen R. McKenna ed., Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature. A Festschrift in Honour of Allan H. MacLaine (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 75–96. On the dark erotic corporeality of the female blason, see Sawday, 197–212. CUL MS, f. 34r. Dalrymple offers a substantially different ‘and very harmless’ interpretation of the sonnet: ‘the Queen felt displeasure at his [Bothwell’s] alliance with the family of Huntly [ce corps refers to Lady Jean Gordon, his first wife]’, and that the phrase ‘ie iette mainte larme’ refers to his marriage with Gordon ‘whose affections he did not possess’ (213–15). Records of Session, Edinburgh 12 May 1567, extracted in Anderson ed., vol. 1, 88. Ibid.

180 Notes 69 70

71 72

73 74

75

76

77

78 79

80

Edinburgh, May 1567, in Labanoff, vol. 2, 37–8. See Luce Irigaray, citing Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look’, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977), trans. C. Porter, This Sex which is not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 66. Fraser, 379; Bothwell persuasively demonstrated by the Ainslie bond that he had the support of the majority of the nobility. Margaret Caroll, The Erotics of Absolution’, The Expanding Discourse. Feminism and Art History ed. Mary Garrard (1992), 138–58, cited in Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23. Strickland, Letters, 60. Roy Porter and Sylvana Tomaselli eds, Rape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 10. Rape as an historical, social and cultural phenomenon pre-1600 is addressed in Angelike E. Laiou ed., Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies (Washington, D.C: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993); Nazife Bashar, ‘Rape in England between 1500 and 1700’, in The Sexual Dynamics of History. Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 28–42, offers a cogent account of legalistic conceptions of rape in the period. Phrase taken from ‘The Trial and Condemnation of Merwin Lord Audley Earl of Castle-Haven at Westminster, April the 5th 1631’, extracted in Charlotte F. Otten ed., English Women’s Voices 1540–1700 (Florida: Florida International University Press, 1992), 33–40 (34). ‘My Lord Bothwell was hurt in Lyddisdaill, and the Quene raid to Bothwick’ (October 7, 1566): A paper containing a short recital of some material Passages concerning Mary Queen of Scots by way of Diary from the Birth of her Son to his going into England’, in Anderson ed., vol. 2, 269; it was also caustically observed in the Detectioun that: ‘she flyith away in haste lyke a mad woman…’ (f. 161v). Donaldson, 96, explains why this is ‘the best known of Buchanan’s fabrications’; but that the CUL MS should replicate what might justly be termed a topos illustrates the close interrelationship between it and the Buchanan anti-Marian tracts. Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots, 178. See Wolfthal, 183–4, for analysis of the Lucretia myth. Machiavelli in the Discorsi cites it ‘among many examples to be found in the ancient histories of rape leading to legal and political change’: Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking. The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 3. ‘Baise m’encore, rebaise moy et baise: / Donne m’en un de tes plus savoureus’ (sonnet 18: 1–2) in Françoise Charpentier ed., Oeuvres poétiques avec Pernette du Guillet Rymes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). Labé’s lover conceives herself as the spiritually inferior but sensual ‘corps’, lacking the completion of ‘âme bien aymee’ (7: 3–4). As in the Marian sequence, desire can also be self-annihilating in its intensity (cf. 13: 9–11). See Deborah Lesko Baker, The Subject of Desire. Petrarchan poetics and the female voice in Louise Labé (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1997).

Notes 181 81 82

83

84

85

86 87 88 89 90

91

92 93 94

95

As in Gli Asolani: ‘this earthly burden…will turn to dust…’: trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1934), 71. For a comprehensive survey of the Renaissance identification of woman with sensuality, infirmitas, and weakened rationality from a variety of sources, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16–17. What Jensen terms ‘the insistent trope of female suffering’: Katharine A. Jensen, ‘Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or, How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France’, in Goldsmith ed., Writing The Female Voice. Essays on Epistolary Literature (London: Pinter, 1989), 25–45 (33). The Platonic works in Mary’s library as recorded in the standard inventory are the Symposium translated by Louis de Roy (Paris, 1559); the works of Plato (‘Platonis opera omnia’); ‘Leon the Hebrew of Luif’; the neo-Platonic poetry of du Bellay’s Olive, of Heröet, Scéve, and de Tyard. It is interesting to note that Heröet (and also Dolet) translated the Symposium, Ion and Crito c1530–40; and that Pontus de Tyard translated Leone’s Dialoghi d’Amore. See Durkan, ‘Library’, for further detailed exposition. Ficino, The Philosophy of Love trans. F. Freidelberg Seeley, 198; in the original text see the Second Oration, cap. iii, ‘Quo Pacto Divina pulchritudo amorem parit’, and the Fifth, cap. iv, ‘Pulchritudo est aliquid incorporeum’, Commentarium Marsilij Ficini Florentine in conviuium Platonis de amore, Divini Platonis Opera Omnia quae extant Marsilio Ficino interprete (Lugdini, 1590), 775 and 780–1; Plotinus, The Enneads trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 63. Plotinus, 61. Cited in Nesca A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934), 51. Donald L. Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist. Italianate conceits and love theory in the Songs and Sonets (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 160. Though Huguet, vol. 3, 173, notes that ‘On trouve Dieu pour les dieux, et les dieux pour Dieu’. ‘O Signeur Dieu resceuez ma priere’: Bodleian Library MS Add C.92, f. 22r; ‘Donnes Siegneur don[n]es moy pasciance’: Bodleian Library MS Add C.92, ff. 22r-v; ‘Que suis ie helas et de quoy sert ma vie’: Bodleian Library MS Add C.92, f. 24r; ‘Méditation sur l’inconstance et vanité du monde’ and ‘L’ire de Dieu par le sang ne s’apaise’ in Bishop John Leslie, Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes Divinaeque Remedia (Paris, 1574). Beatrice of Nazareth, The Seven Manners of Love, in Amy Oden ed., In Her Words. Women’s Writings in the History of Christian Thought (London: Abingdon Press, 1994), 125. Mary’s serene preparation for martyrdom is recounted in the standard hagiographies such as Adam Blackwood’s (see Phillips, 165). There is Petrarchan resonance here too given the spiritual ‘assumption’, as it were, of Laura into the Virgin Mary in canzone 366. Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve. Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 242; endorsed by Jones, 141–7. Jones, 135–6.

182 Notes 96

97 98

99 100 101

Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: writing rape in medieval French literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 41: in her Praefatio she proclaims ‘cum femina fragilitas vinceret et virilis robur confusionis subiaceret’ (27). Jones, 34. Patricia Berrahou Philippy, Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 128–9. ‘Méditation’ (57–60). Robb, 209. Monique Wittig, ‘The Trojan Horse’, in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 69.

Chapter 2 1

2 3

4 5

6

NLS Adv. 1.1.6, f. 211r. The text of the poems in this chapter is based on the manuscript; there is an excellent facsimile edited by Denton Fox and William Ringler, The Bannatyne Manuscript. National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 1.1.6 (London: Scolar Press, 1980). For convenience, reference will also be made to the Scottish Text Society edition, The Bannatyne Manuscript writtin in tyme of pest 1568 edited by W. Tod Ritchie, 4 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1928–34) which provides generally judicious transcriptions. For the prefatory inscription see STS vol. 3, 240. Unless otherwise stated, vol. 3 is the principal source until discussion of the querelle des femmes poems. In citations, reference is identified by MS folio, then STS reference; line references appear in brackets; poems, unless titled, are identified by their first line. The yogh and thorn symbols and long ‘s’ have been orthographically modernised. The last dualism is taken from Sara F. Matthews Greco, Ange ou diablesse. La représentation de la femme au XVIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1991). David Parkinson, ‘“A Lamentable Storie”: Mary Queen of Scots and the Inescapable Querelle des Femmes’, in L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald, and S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the Wild. Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 141–60 (144). See also Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘The Creation and Self-creation of Mary Queen of Scots: Rhetoric, Sovereignty, and Female Controversies in Sixteenth-century Scottish Poetry,’ Scotlands, 5.2 (1998): 65–88. In reference to the so-called ‘main MS’: respectively, ff. 1–42v; 43v–96v; 97r–210v; 211r–297v; 298v–370r. William Ramson’s phrase in Joan Hughes and William Ramson eds, Poetry of the Stewart Court (Canberra: Australian University Press, 1982), 25. Bannatyne’s claim that he transcribed from ‘copeis auld mankit and mutillait’ (‘The Wryttar to the Reidaris’) may well be disingenuous. For textual details, see Fox and Ringler eds, ‘A Description of the Bannatyne Manuscript’, ix-xvii; Denton Fox, ‘Some Scribal Alterations of Dates in the Bannatyne Manuscript’, Philological Quarterly, 42 (1968), 259–63 and ‘Manuscripts and Prints of Scots Poetry in the Sixteenth Century’ in Adam J. Aitken et al. eds, Bards and Makars (Glasgow:

Notes 183

7

8 9 10

11

University of Glasgow Press, 1977), 156–71 (158–62); J.T.T. Brown, ‘The Bannatyne Manuscript: a Sixteenth Century Poetical Miscellany’, SHR, 1 (1903–4), 136-58 (139); William Ramson, ‘On Bannatyne’s Editing’, Bards and Makars, 172–83 (characterising the fourth section as ‘the most tightly organised’, 174); Hughes and Ramson eds, chapter 2; Gregory Kratzmann, ‘Sixteenth Century Secular Poetry’, in Cairns Craig ed., The History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989), vol. 1, ed. R.D.S. Jack, 105–24. For the manuscript’s historical context, see John MacQueen ed., Ballattis of Luve (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), ‘Introduction’, xi-lxix; Michael Lynch, ‘Queen Mary’s Triumph: The Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in December 1566’, SHR, 69 (1990), 1–21; Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘The Bannatyne Manuscript: A Marian Anthology’, Innes Review, 37 (1986), 36–47; ‘The Printed Book that Never Was: George Bannatyne’s Poetic Anthology (1568)’, in J.M.M. Hermans and K. van der Hoek eds, Boeken in de late Middeleeuwen (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1993), 101–10; Theo van Heijnsbergen, ‘The Interaction between Literature and History in Queen Mary’s Edinburgh: the Bannatyne Manuscript and its Prosopographical Context’, in A.A. MacDonald et al. eds, The Renaissance in Scotland. Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture Offered to John Durkan (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), 183–225. Criticism of the manuscript has largely focused on the religious section (see in particular the work of Alasdair A. MacDonald), and on the number of canonical medieval and early modern Scottish works which the anthology contains (by Dunbar, Henryson, David Lyndsay, for example). For the best and most recent reading of the fourth section, see Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘The Political Dimensions of Desire and Sexuality in Poems of the Bannatyne Manuscript’, in Stephen R. McKenna ed., Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature. A Festschrift in Honour of Allan H. MacLaine (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 75–96, and see further note 13 below. For analysis of this ‘1565’ elision, see Fox, ‘Some Scribal Alterations’ and MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book’. The date of ‘1568’ appears on the first leaf of the Draft MS; on ff. 97r, 290v, 298r, 375r. On f. 290, ‘1565’ appears, then emended to ‘1568’ (similarly on f. 298 ‘1566’ is ‘overwritten’ to ‘1568’). ‘1562’ is found on f. 90; hence Fox concludes that most of the manuscript was copied in 1562–5, and that ‘1568’ denotes the year of completion, a hypothesis most recently substantiated by MacDonald. ‘A Marian Anthology’, 40. ‘My hairt is heich above’, anon., f. 231r, STS 307 (4); ‘Quhat art thow / lufe for till allow’, anon., f. 248r, STS 353 (34). ‘Gif langour makis men licht’, f. 244r, STS 338-9. See Caroline Bingham, Darnley. A Life of Henry Stuart Lord Darnley Consort of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Constable, 1995), 92–6, citing another lyric by Darnley possibly addressed to Mary from BL Add. MS 17942 (the Devonshire MS), f. 57. Fox and Ringler, xxxv, consider the attribution of this fairly conventional love lyric (which only refers to an abstract female beloved and not Mary) doubtful. MacDonald, ‘A Marian Anthology’, 40; Sir Thomas Craig, Epithalamium quo Mariae Scotorum Reginae Nuptiae Celebravit (Edinburgh, 1565).

184 Notes 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book’, discussing the probable reluctance of the printer, Thomas Bassandyne ‘who might otherwise have been interested in putting out the manuscript as a printed book’ (6); see also MacDonald’s ‘Poetry, Politics, and Reformation Censorship in Sixteenthcentury Scotland’, English Studies, 64 (1983), 410–21; ‘Censorship and the Reformation’, File. A Literary Journal, 1 (1992), 8–16; ‘Catholic Devotion into Protestant Lyric’: The Case of the Contemplacioun of Synnaris’, Innes Review, 35 (1984), 58–97. It is interesting to note the occurrences of the actual term, ‘reformation’: for example, the marginal insertion in ‘Ane uthir ballat of vnpossibiliteis co[m]paird to the trewth of wemen in luve’, anon., ff. 266r-v, STS vol. 4, 42–3: ‘quhe[n] wra[n]gus deid[is] neid[is] no reformatioun’ (24). Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘“The Wryttar to the Reidaris”: Editing Practices and Politics in the Bannatyne Manuscript’, SSL, 31 (2000), 14–30: 20. Carolyn Ives has recently offered alternative readings of Bannatyne’s motives, suggesting the conscious ideological formation of a cultural and nationalistic identity: ‘Shifting Borders and Fluctuating Margins: the Politics of Bannatyne’s Self-Representation and the Construction of Scottish National Identity’, paper presented to the Eighth International Conference of Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 17–21 August, 1996. I am most grateful to her for letting me have a copy of this yet unpublished essay. Parkinson, 151. Newlyn, 14. f. 211v, STS 241 (1-2). ‘As phebus bricht in speir meridiane’, ff. 230v–1r, STS 305–7 and ‘No woundir is althot my hairt be thrall’, ff. 234r–234v, STS (309–11). See Brown; MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book’. See MacDonald, ‘Marian Anthology’, 41, for summary. The phrase is from J.W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print. A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), 139–64. For a survey of the Bannatyne family and circle as constituing a literate reading public, see van Heijnsbergen, ‘Prosopographical’, 186 ff. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender. Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 32. That the manuscript preserves only the most popular or pre-eminent poems is implied by the existence of a folio leaf, EUL MS La.II.656, an incomplete lyric (four and a half stanzas in sixteenth-century secretary hand) which bears striking affinities to the archetypal Bannatyne lyric. ‘To yow that is ye harbre of my Hairt’, anon., f. 219r, STS 265 (36). ‘ffresche fragrent flour of bewty souerane’, anon., f. 219v, STS 267 (28). ‘ffresche fragrent flour’ (37, 46–7). ‘Sen that I am a prisoneir’ (ff. 214r–15r), anonymous but attributed to Dunbar in the Reidpeth manuscript, and ‘In may as that aurora did upspring’ (ff. 283r–4r), ‘Now culit is dame venus brand’ (ff. 284r–285v), ‘Thir ladyis fair’ (ff. 261r-v); ‘The garmont of gud ladeis’, ff. 215r-v, by Henryson; ‘Ane aigit ma[n] twys fourty yeiris’ by Kennedy; ‘The prolog of the fourtt book of Virgell’ (ff. 291r–4v) from the Eneados of Gavin Douglas.

Notes 185 27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41

‘Stewart’ (ascribed five lyrics, therefore the most prolific named lyricist after Scott) has been identified by van Heijnsbergen as William Stewart whose family had close links with the Bannatynes; Steill (ascribed two lyrics) is identified by MacQueen, Ballattis, xxxiv–v, as George Steill, a courtier of James V; ‘Fethy’ (ascribed two lyrics) has been identified as the musician John Fethy, organist and chanter of the Chapel Royal (Scott was presented with its prebend; MacQueen, xxx–xxxii but see Shire, 37–8, 260); for the unresolved identity of ‘Clerk’, see Fox and Ringler eds, xxii; the ‘Weddirburne’ attribution in four lyrics may allude to one of three brothers, James, John or Robert (Fox and Ringler eds, xxxv); ‘Mersar’ (ascribed three lyrics) may be the poet named by Dunbar in his litany of poets in memoriam, ‘That did in luf so lifly write…’ (Fox and Ringler eds, xxxii). There is also a doubtful attribution to ‘Montgomery’ (ff. 253r-v). ‘The song of troyelus’ appears on ff. 230r-v, copied from Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer (Fox and Ringler, xxxiv). For an interesting discussion of apparent Chaucerian misogyny, see David Parkinson and Carolyn Ives, ‘Scottish Chaucer, Misogynist Chaucer’, in Barbara Kline and Thomas Prendergast eds, Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text 1400–1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994). Also found on f. 220v is a copy of three stanzas from Lydgate’s Temple of Glas (Fox and Ringler, xxxiii). This raises the important question whether the fourth pairt was intended to be read in a rigorously sequential manner. MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book’. Tasso, cited in Nesca A Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London, 1935), 153. ‘The moir I luve and serf at all my mycht, anon., f. 249r, STS 356 (3–5). Cf. ‘My hairt is heich aboif’. ‘Was not gud king salamon’, ‘q ane inglisma[n]’, f. 216r, STS 255–6 (51–2). Terms drawn from ‘In to my Hairt emprentit is so soir’, anon., f. 220v, STS 270 (2); ‘fflour of all fairheid’, anon., f. 227r, STS 291 (6). ‘My Hairt is thrall’, anon., f. 223r, STS 277 (22); Annibale Romei, cited in Robb, 159. On conceptions and canons of female beauty in the period, see Naomi Yavneh, ‘The Ambiguity of Beauty in Tasso and Petrarch’, in James Grantham Turner ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Texts, Institutions, Images (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 133–57. ‘Quhen tayis bank’ anon. ff. 229r-v STS 296–300 (82, 84); ‘Maist ameyn roseir’ attributed to ‘Stewart’; f.219r STS 265 (3). ‘O lusty flour of yowt benyng and bricht’, anon., f. 238v, STS 323 (4–5). The only example of desiring or active female sexuality is the incomplete lyric ‘Lait lait on sleip as I wes laid’ (f. 233v, STS 308–9, 17–24). ‘Maist ameyn roseir’ (10); ‘fflour of all fairheid’ (16–19). ‘Quhen tayis bank’, (75–6). ‘As phebus bricht’, (20–1). Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description’, in John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols eds, Mimesis. From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1980), 100–9 (104). For a summary of the European blason, originating in the Blasons anatomiques du corps feminin (1536), see

186 Notes

42 43 44 45

46

47 48 49 50

51 52

53

54 55

Cathy Yendell, ‘A la recherche du corps perdu: a capstone of the Renaissance blasons anatomiques’, Romance Notes, 26 (1985), 135–42. ‘Maist ameyn roseir’ (8–9); ‘fflour of all fairheid’ (6–9); ‘As phebus bricht’ (8–11). ‘Na woundir is’, anon., f. 234r, STS 309 (5). ‘My Hairt is thrall’ (34–5); ‘The bewty of Hir amorus ene’, anon., f. 218r, STS 261 (11–13); ‘The well of vertew’, anon., f. 218r, STS 263 (1–4). Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, ‘The Body, Appearance, and Sexuality’, in Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot eds, A History of Women in the West (originally published as Storia delle donne in Occidente) 4 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), vol. 2, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes eds. Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge, 46–84 (58). In conventional medieval moral texts, associated with sin, but in neo-Platonist writing reflecting the beauty of the woman’s soul, or in the quintessential courtly text a mirror of her virtue. Joannes L. Vives, De institutio foeminae christianae (1524) trans. Richard Hyrde, A very Frutefull and Pleasant Booke, called the Instruction of a Christen woman (London, 1557), sig. Iiiiiv. See Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth century Women’s Lyrics’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse eds, The Ideology of Conduct. Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality (London: Methuen, 1987), 39–72. ‘O lusty flour of yowt benyng and bricht’, anon., f. 238v, STS 324 (19–20): ‘ryt nobill of blud…/honorable gentill…’. See van Heijnsbergen, ‘Prosopographical context’, 186ff, for identification of the manuscript’s urban milieu. ‘ffor to declair the high magnificens’, ascribed to Stewart, ff. 215v–16r, STS 256–8 (42–8). While the spiritual perfection of the female beloved is intrinsic to the philosophical erotic tradition (Beatrice, Laura), it might be conjectured that in Bannatyne the alliance drawn between female sexuality and morality is designed to appeal to, or be made acceptable for, for a female audience. That the same writers, notably Scott and ‘Weddirburne’, should contribute a piece to each mode itself suggests an ironic awareness of the conventions. Newlyn, ‘Political Dimensions’, first suggested the generic influence of the querelle. For a variety of literary and cultural readings of the querelle des femmes, first so-called by Abel Lefranc in Les ecrivains français de la Renaissance (1914) in an essay on Rabelais. Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib. An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1948) provides an excellent source and reference guide. In MacKenna ed., 76; see also her earlier pioneering essay, ‘Luve, Lichery and Evill Wemen: the Satiric Tradition in the Bannatyne Manuscript’, SSL, 26 (1991), 283–93. Jordan, 12. Sydney Anglo, ‘The Courtier. The Renaissance and Changing Ideals’, The Courts of Europe. Politics, Patronage and Royalty 1400–1800 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 33–54 (37).

Notes 187 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72

73

74

75 76

77

Significantly, there are no identifiable female-authored poems in the manuscript; this does not preclude female authorship of the substantial number of anonymous poems but these facts, combined with the distinct lack even of female-voiced poems, suggests a strongly masculine-gendering of the feminine in the Bannatyne manuscript and raises interesting questions about the scope for female literary utterance in the Marian period. Woodbridge, 5. Ibid., 113–17. Ibid., 17. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). ‘In all this warld no man may wit’, anon., ff. 257r–8r, STS vol. 4, 20 (9–11). ‘My hairt is quhyt…’, anon., f. 256v; STS 18–19; this lyric may partly demonstrate the quality of copia which has been identified as a characteristic of many of the pamphlets: Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus eds, Half Humankind: Texts and Contexts of the Controversy about Women in England 1540–1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 40-1. ‘In all this warld…’ (33–40). Leon Battista Alberti, cited in Kelly, ‘Early Feminist Theory’, 11. ‘ffane wald I luve bot quhair abowt’, ascribed to ‘Clerk’, f. 255r, STS 13–14 (7). See Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 4. ff. 252r-v, attributed to Stewart, STS vol. 4, 6–8. anon., ff. 257r–258r, STS vol. 4, 18–19. ‘In all this world…’, ff.257v–8v, STS 19–22. ‘This work quhe sall sie or reid’, STS 24–6, ff. 258v–259r (28–31). ff. 258v–259v; STS vol. 4, 23–5. Fox and Ringler, xxxvi, note that this is derived from ‘The Remedy of Love’ (stanzas 20-9 and 38) which exists only in Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer, and subsequent reprints. It is this ‘public’ voice (or the illusion thereof) that allows for mockretractions or excusatio (eg. Scott’s ‘I muse and m[er]vellis…’, f. 254v, STS vol. 4, 11–13: ‘I wat gud wemen will not wyt me/nor of this sedull be eschamit’, 73–4). From the late twelfth century ‘Life of Secundus’: see Carleton Brown, ‘Mulier est Hominis Confusio’, Modern Language Notes, 35 (1920), 479–82, for its history. For a succinct analysis of the principal Christian and classical Latin traditions, see Jacques Dalarun, ‘The Clerical Gaze’ and Claude Thomasset, ‘The Nature of Woman’, in Klapisch-Zuber ed., 15–42; 43–69. ff. 260r-v, STS 28–30 attributed to ‘weddirburne’. Related to the Pauline dictum, ‘but I suffer not a woman to teach…’; St John Chrysostom imputed female garrulity to Eve’s transgression (Blamires ed., 59). Anon., f. 262r, STS vol 4, 32 (1–7); there are copies of this in the Maitland folio and in the Reidpeth MS with an additional stanza, and also in the Book of the Dean of Lismore where there is a false attribution to ‘chawseir’: Fox and Ringler, xxxvii.

188 Notes 78

79 80

81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90

91

92

St Jerome writes that the love of women is always ‘insatiable’ (Blamires ed., 68); for a survey of Renaissance physiological theories of female sexuality, Aristotelian and Galenic in origin, see Fletcher, 61ff; MacLean; Renaissance Woman: a Sourcebook. Constructions of Femininity in England, ed. Kate Aughterson (London: Routledge, 1995), chapters 2 and 4. See Maclean, 16ff; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a.92.1, cited in Blamires et al., 93. ‘Devyce proves and eik humilitie’ (32), anon., f. 262v, STS 34-5 which is also found in Bod MS Arch. Selden B. 24 (Fox and Ringler, xxxvii); ‘O wicket wemen wilfull and variable’ (15), anon., f. 263r, STS 35–6. ‘Devyce proves’ (29, 3). Ibid., 36–40. For the classic argument of Eve’s temptation, conventionally cited by negative querelle polemicists, and the curse inflicted see Augustine, ‘De Genesi ad Litteram’, and Ambrose, cited in Blamires et al., 79, 61. ff. 263v–4r, STS 36–7. ‘I muse and m[er]vellis in my mynd’, ff. 254r-v, STS 13 (69–70). Even though the case for exact imitation or borrowing is difficult to substantiate given the generic nature of anti-feminist rhetoric. ‘My luve wes fals’ attributed to Weddiburne, f.260r STS 28(14). ‘Devyce proves and eik humilitie’ (47–9). ‘All tho that list of wemen evill to speik’, ff. 275r-6v, STS vol. 4, 64–70 (169–75), attributed erroneously to Chaucer; Fox and Ringler, xxxvii, suggest this may have been copied from Thynne’s 1532 Chaucer. ff. 269r–76r, STS vol. 4, 49–64. Fox and Ramson, xxxvii, where the suggestion is made that this was copied from Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer in which Hoccleve’s copy appears. There is an excellent dual edition of L’Epistre and Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid: Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter eds, Poems of Cupid: Christine de Pisan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours and Dit de la Rose, Thomas Hoccleve’s The letter of Cupid: editions and translations with George Sewell’s The proclamation of Cupid (Leiden: Brill, 1990). See J.A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot: Variorum, Ashgate, 1994), 53–4, for a complete list of manuscripts of the ‘Letter of Cupid’, predominantly ‘courtly writing’ concerning women. The copy is inscribed on ff. 211v–217. The manuscript was commissioned by Henry, third Lord Sinclair, and also contains a number of Chaucerian texts which may possibly contribute to the Bannatyne misattribution (though the ‘Letter’, Hoccleve’s earliest dateable poem, was widely misattributed to Chaucer until the end of the sixteenth century). For a full description of the manuscript, see Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, The Works of Chaucer and The Kingis Quair. A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 1–25. There are a significant number of orthographical and substantive variants between Selden B. 24 and the Bannatyne copy (including a textual rearrangement of the two stanzas in praise of St Margaret). Christine’s 822 line poem is condensed to 476 lines. For a variety of critical responses, see Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-century English Poetic (1968; Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

Notes 189

93 94

95

96 97 98 99

100

101

1981), 77–84 ; Diane Bornstein, ‘Anti-Feminism in Thomas Hoccleve’s Translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours’, English Language Notes, 19 (1981), 7–14; John F. Fleming, ‘Hoccleve’s “Letter of Cupid” and the “Quarrel” over the Roman de la Rose’, Medium Aevum, 40 (1971), 21–40; William A. Quinn, ‘Hoccleve’s “Epistle of Cupid”’, Explicator, 45 (1986), 7–10; Roger Ellis, ‘Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Hoccleve: the Letter of Cupid’, in Catherine Batt ed., Essays on Thomas Hoccleve (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 19–54; Karen A. Winstead, ‘“I am othir to yow than yee weene”: Hoccleve, Women, and the Series’, Philological Quarterly, 72 (1993), 143–55; Glenda K. McLeod, ‘A Case of faulx semblans: L’Epistre au dieu d’amours and The Letter of Cupid’, in McLeod ed., The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Centuries (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1991), 11–24, argues that Hoccleve’s poem tries to defend women but less competently because of several marked omissions and ‘reinterpretations’. Quinn interprets it as parodic and conservative; Bornstein contends that Hoccleve reduces Christine’s social and courtly exemplars, turns Cupid into a ‘jester’ (8), and alters the presentation of the Virgin. In their ‘Introduction’, Fenster and Carpenter stress the influence of Chaucer upon Hoccleve’s work, in particular The Legend of Good Women. See Eric Hicks, Le Débat sur Le Roman de la Rose; édition critique, introduction, traductions (Paris: Champion, 1977). There were no extant printed editions of Christine’s works, but many manuscripts were in circulation throughout the sixteenth-century: Jordan, 105-6. For the transmission of Hoccleve’s manuscript and wirnesses, see Fenster and Carpenter, 171–2. The poem was not assigned to Hoccleve until Thomas Speght’s edition of Chaucer in 1598. Kelly, ‘Early Feminist Theory’, 10–11; Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness from the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 144ff. The standard account of Christine’s life is Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984). Christine was well known in English court circles; her son accompanied the Earl of Salisbury to England in 1398; she presented copies of her writing to Salisbury in which Henry IV took interest. ‘All tho yat list of wemen ill to speik’ (79–80). ‘All tho yat list…’ (113–17; 75–7). ‘ffor to declair the high magnificens’, ff. 277r–8r, STS 71–3 (11–12), attributed to Stewart (the poem also appears on ff. 216r-v). ‘I think thir men ar verry fals and vane’, ff. 279r-v, STS 76–9, attributed to Wedderburn (48–9). For an identical argument, see Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano, trans. Thomas Hoby, ed. Virginia Cox (London: Everyman, 1994), against ‘Thow that hath made books’, and ‘religious men’: ‘a veile of holinesse…tourne all their thoghtes to defile the chaste mind of some woman…’ (261). ‘All tho yat list of wemen evill to speik’ (9–13). Compare also Wedderburn: ‘Ar we not maid of wemenis flesch and blude/And in thair bosom we ar bred and borne’ (94–5); Dunbar’s ‘Now of wemen this I say for me’, f. 278r, STS 75: ‘Thay ws consaif with pane and be thame fed/Wtin thair breistis thair we be boun to bed…’ (13–14). ‘ffor to declair…’ (42).

190 Notes 102

103

104

105 106 107

108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115

116

Ibid. (53). For a sensitive analysis of the Virgin’s religious and iconic status in medieval and Renaissance thought, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976). ‘ffor to declair…’ (41). For a succinct account of historical transformations of the Virgin’s doctrinal and artistic meanings see Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) and Warner. There is an extensive literature on Mariology: for more detailed accounts see, for example, Juniper Carol ed., Mariology, 3 vols (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1955–61); Carol Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, 2 vols (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963–5). ‘All tho yat list…’ (160–8). Both ‘the lettre’ and other lyrics also glorify the women who did not, unlike ‘sainct petir’, forsake Christ: ‘l[ett]re’ (428–9); ‘I think thir men…’ (29–35). Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.xix.1, cited in Pelikan, 87. ‘All tho yat list…’ (141–7). ‘ffor to declair’ (18), recalling 1 Cor.11: 7: ‘but woman is the glory of man’ (Woodbridge, 11). Jordan comments on this common strategy of the defences that ‘a deficiency of certain attributes, particularly physical strength, is the basis of great virtue’ (88). Bornstein, 12. Fenster and Carpenter, 198. Quinn, 8. There is an interesting rearrangement in the stanza’s final line: ‘the feith of god/ holy virgyne’ becomes in the Bannatyne text ‘[th]e faith of holy god thow virgyne’; while this may be an accidental transposition, it is nevertheless suggestive: St Margaret is apostrophised as a virgin only, and the sanctifying epithet qualifies God in a more liturgical phrase, as if to emphasise the process of the ‘conversion’; though where St Margaret’s was originally the power of Roman Catholic conversion, now it is imbued with the Reformed ‘doctrene’. ‘Thir billis ar brevit…’, attributed to Mersar f. 278r, STS 73 (3–7). Cancelled stanza of ‘Thir billis ar brevit…’. Pelikan, 84ff. As the Marian historian Michael Lynch and others have pointed out, such an apparent culmination of the Reformation crises of 1559 and 1560 failed to constitute the ‘religious revolution’ which it is often assumed: Michael Lynch ed., Mary Stewart. Queen in Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 8. There is only one explicit poem of Marian devotion: the ‘song of the virgin mary/callit magnificat anima mea d[omi]nu[m], Draft MS, 22–4, and Main MS, ff. 25v–6v, based on the Magnificat (Canticle of Mary), Luke 1:46–55. Marian allusions occur within the body of devotional poems per se on ff. 27r, 28v, 29v–30v; 33r, 36v, 38v, 39v–40r; these are almost exclusively concerned with the Annunciation, and Mary’s role as the Virgin Mother of God (focusing on Mary’s womb and virgin body, and her response to the angel Gabriel’s salutation in the Gospel).

Notes 191 117

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

Annabel Lee Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation. The Conditions of Reading and Writing in Early Modern England (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 8. ‘Leif luve my luve no langar thow it lyk’, anon., f. 281r, STS 82 (7–12, 15–16). ff. 289r–90r, STS 102-7 ‘O ma[n] transfformit and vnnaturall’, attributed to Wedderburn, ff. 287v–88v, STS 98–102 (113-19). f. 293v–94r, STS 114 (201–7). ‘Quhat meneth this…’ (20), wrongly attributed to Chaucer, ff. 280v–283r, STS 82–7. ‘Quhat meneth this…’ (29, 57, 65–7, 71, 78, 84, 92). Exemplified by Dunbar’s lyric, ‘Quha will behald of luve the chance’, f. 281r, STS 81. Chiara Frugoni, ‘The Imagined Woman’, in Klapisch-Zuber ed., 336–422 (360). Parkinson, 160. ‘All tho that list…’ (160), Fox, ‘Manuscripts and Prints’, notes that in this text, ‘taken from Thynne, he [Bannatyne] makes some Protestant expurgations’ (166), presumably to diminish the Mariological praise; see also Shire, 21–3. It is perhaps easier to perceive the protestantised excisions rather than to assess what remains significantly ‘Catholicised’; and in the Bannatyne fourth love corpus, Marian allusions remain unexpurgated, perhaps because of the threat posed to the conceptual and ideological coherence of the querelle poems should they be entirely removed.

Chapter 3 1 ‘Fail not to let her see all this letter’: in G.P.V. Akrigg ed., Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 75. Speculatively dated 27 November 1586; William Keith was one of James’s two London agents. 2 ‘Heere shalt thou see clearlie, as in a glasse, the miseries of this wauering world’: ‘The Avthovr to the Reader’, The Furies, printed in His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises at vacant houres (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1591), sig. 3r; James Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1955), vol. 1, 98. Citations from James’s poetry are orthographically based on the first printed edition or, in the case of unpublished poetry, the most appropriate ‘copy text’ manuscript (all relevant manuscript sources are identified; where a manuscript text exists in two orthographic versions, Scots and Anglo-Scots, the former is usually preferred as, by inference, the earliest version); in citation of texts, reference is also made to Craigie’s two volume edition, abbreviated as STS to distinguish it from Craigie’s edition of the Basilikon Doron. 3 BL Add. MS 24195, f. 2r; STS vol. 2, 69, see note 22 below for detail of manuscript context. For readings of the erotic poems to date, see Murray

192 Notes

4 5

6

7

8 9

10

11

12

F. Markland, ‘A Note on Spenser and the Scottish Sonneteers’, SSL, 1 (1966–7), 136–40 (139); Antonia Fraser, James VI of Scotland and I of England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974; 1994), 52; R.D.S. Jack, ‘Poetry under King James VI’, in Cairns Craig ed., History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), vol. 1 ed. Jack, 125–39 (128, 130); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature. Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 22–5; J. Derrick McClure, ‘‘‘O Phoenix Escossois’: James VI as Poet’, in Alisoun GardnerMedwin and Janet Hadley Williams eds, A Day Estivall (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990), 96–111 (106–7). See also the newly published collection edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, Royal Subjects. Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002). Robert Ashton ed., James I by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchison and Co., 1969), 148. ‘Ane Schort Treatise, conteining some Reulis and cautelis to be obseruit and eshewit in Scottis Poesie’ (Reulis), sig. Liiijv; STS vol. 1, 76; ‘commoun’ is most probably meant in a linguistic or stylistic sense; the term, ‘commoun verse’ which he advocates for ‘materis of love’ is probably derived from Ronsard’s Abbrège de l’Art Poétique Francois (1565). Reulis, sig. Mr STS vol. 1, 76; the sonnet is found on sig. Kiiijr, prefacing the actual text of the Reulis, and recapitulating the aesthetic of ‘ingyne’ implied in the sonnet immediately preceding, ‘Sonnet of the Avthovr to the Reader’, sig. Kiijv. Essayes of a Prentise, ‘The twelf Sonnets of Inuocations to the Goddis’, sig. Aiiijr, ‘Sonnet. 2’, line 12, STS vol. 1, 9. This theory of artful illusionism is probably influenced by Quintilian’s theory of evidentia and the translation of the verbal into the visual or perceptual. See also Roderick J. Lyall, ‘James VI and the Cultural Crisis’, in Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch eds, The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 55–70. Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), in discussion of The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (7). Each MS is described respectively in Allan F. Westcott, New Poems by James I of England (New York: AMS Press, 1966), xi–xvi and Craigie, Poems, vol. 1, lxxi–vii. Bodley, 165 contains only two of the BL Amatoria texts, ‘as falcounis ar’ (ff. 43r-44v), and ‘if mourning micht amende’, later titled ‘A Dier at her M:ties Desyr’ (ff. 46r-v). These are each written on separate manuscripts and bound together with the other works, including the Lepanto and the Furies. There are interesting linguistic differences between the texts which show the later anglified revisions of original Scots orthography, suggesting a clear pre1603 dating and the cultural sensitivity of post-Union linguistic affiliations. For further details see Westcott, New Poems, xiv–xv and STS vol. 2, 206–10. Two different hands are identifiable in the inscription of the poems between ff. 4r and 29r. Curtis Perry, ‘Royal Authorship and Problems of Manuscript Attribution in the Poems of King James VI & I’, Notes and Queries, 46.2 (1999), 243–6. I am most grateful to Professor Perry for letting me consult his article in advance of publication. There are a number of verbal similarities between James’s attributed poetry and that by Alexander Montgomerie and John Stewart; James’s adoption of such tropes becomes a public acknowledgement of reciprocity and poetic debt.

Notes 193 13 The first Amatoria sonnet occasioned a ‘reply’ from Henry Constable (STS vol. 2, 225); see Joan Grundy ed., The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960), ‘Introduction’, 28–31, and Constable’s other two sonnets to James, one of which proclaims James’s poetic separation from ‘others hooded with blind loue’ (implying that profane love is an unfit sovereign subject; 140–1). Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995),14, also cites a likely imitation of the first Amatoria sonnet by Nicholas Breton in Stephen Powle’s commonplace book: ‘A passionate Sonnet made by the Kinge of Scots uppon difficulties ariseing to crosse his proceedinge in love & marriage with his most worthie to be esteemed Queene’. 14 Akrigg, Letters, 92–3 (NLS MS 33.1.1). 15 Ibid., 92. For James’s arrangement of other noble marriages, see Mathew, James I (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 55. 16 Ibid., 92. Akrigg asserts that the poem ‘apparently has been lost’ (93). 17 In another letter published by Akrigg (93–4), James urges that the Countess consent to his request on the grounds that Lindsay is now of appropriately marriageable degree: ‘ye may be matched with that rank which ye presently possess […]’ (93). Lindsay and the Countess appear to have married in May 1590 (94). Lindsay was described as the ‘King’s only minion…his nightly bed-fellow’ in 1588 (Akrigg, 93, citing CSP Scottish 1586–88, 558). 18 This survives both in BL Add. MS 24195 and Bodley 165: see STS vol. 2, 134–47. 19 Westcott, 78–9, later endorsed by STS vol. 1, 228. 20 Add. MS 24195, ff. 14r–16r; STS vol. 2, 81–2 (50–6). 21 The later metaphorical expansion into the image of the storm-tossed ship is also an emblematic image (in Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (Lyon, 1545), for example, signifying ‘Spes proxima’), as well as a popular petrarchistic conceit for erotic suffering. The Jamesian conceit of the court as bereft of its beautiful light is interestingly paralleled by Ronsard’s valedictory poetry to Mary herself: Fleming, 68, notes the similarity to the conceit of the lost ‘perle précieuse’ in the ‘Elégie sur le départ de la Royne d’Escosse’ but there is also another resemblance in the ‘Elégie a H. L’Huillier, Seigneur de Maisonfleur’ (1564): ‘Nous perdons de la court le beau Soleil qui luit’ (3), in Paul Laumonier ed., Oeuvres complètes, 20 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1914–75), vol. 12, 189. 22 See Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Discovering Desire in the Amatoria of James VI’, for detailed analysis of this text, and speculation upon the reasons for its inclusion in an ostensibly erotic ‘anthology’. 23 Goldberg, 25. 24 There was a further ceremony by Lutheran rites on 21 January 1590 at Kronborg. Only on 21 April 1590 did the newly anointed Queen Anna and James begin a successful return voyage to Scotland; the storms were attributed to the demonic work of witches. Anna has tradictionally been referred to as Anne; however, more recently there is a tendency to refer to her by her baptismal name and I have adopted this throughout this text. 25 See David Stevenson, Scotland’s Last Royal Wedding. The Marriage of James VI and Anne of Denmark (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1997). See

194 Notes

26

27 28

29 30 31

32

33 34 35

36 37

also the official documents transcribed in J.T.G. Craig, Papers relative to the Marriage of King James the sixth of Scotland with the Princess Anna of Denmark (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1828). STS vol. 2, 68–9. Add. MS 24195, ff. 4r–5v; to avoid confusion, I number the twelve chronologically and not according to their inconsistent numbering in the manuscript; hence each quotation will be located by sonnet number and then line reference. Wilson, 89, and Bingham, 116ff. For an account of the coronation and entry of Anna into Edinburgh see Craig, 37–42; Stevenson, 57–63, 100–120; Michael Lynch, ‘Court Ceremony and Ritual during the Personal Reign of James VI’, in Lynch and Goodare eds, 71–92. The marriage constituted a poetic commission in itself (see NLS Adv. 19.3.29 by Jacob Jacobsen Wolf) but there are no surviving epithalamia by the Scottish Jacobean coterie. Sir James Melville, Memoirs of his Own Life (Edinburgh, 1827), 373. Akrigg, 95. 6: 7–12; f. 6v, STS vol. 2, 70. The conceit suggests sexual possession (prefiguring the imminent sexual union within marriage?) but is especially redolent of Jupiter’s sexual possession of Ganymede, cupbearer to Zeus, who was carried off by an eagle, possibly Zeus in disguise. For the common Renaissance homoerotic interpretation of this, see James Sazlow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: homosexuality in art and society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); for another Jamesian variation on the conceit, see the Phoenix, 56–60. ‘What mortall man may liue but hart’ (5), Add. 24195, ff. 27v–29r, Bodley ff. 52v–53v; STS vol. 2 94–8. See also the poem entitled ‘The beginning of his Mties jurnei to Denmarke; neuer ended’, Bodley 15, ff. 57r–v, BL Add 24195, ff. 56r–7r, STS vol. 2, 144–9, found under the aegis of ‘All the kings short poesis’ but suggestive of collaborative or coterie authorship. ‘What mortall man’ (29–32). ‘James imposes his power on her [Anna]’: Goldberg, 25. For James’s other references to the idea of inspired furor (expounded in the French rhetorical treatises of Sebillet and du Mans which influenced James’s own, and poetically in, for example, Ronsard’s Hymne de l’Automne, XII, 46ff) see ‘A Sonnet on du Bartas’ (Add. 24195, f. 34r, the second Du Bartasian sonnet, STS vol. 1, 102), and the series of twelve mythological sonnets printed in the Essayes. Buchanan may also have been an influence: in particular, his Ptolemaic-based, cosmographical poetry, the Sphaera, to which James’s own cosmological sonnets (‘Ad hoc creaturae destinatae sunt, vt in eis glorificetur Creator’, printed at the end of the Lepanto, and two ‘on Ticho Brahe’, Add. 24195, ff. 32r-v, STS vol. 2, 99–101), may be indebted. On the Sphaera, see Yasmin Haskell, ‘Renaissance Latin Didactic Poetry on the Stars: Wonder, Myth, and Science’, Renaissance Studies, 12.4 (1998), 495–522. Goldberg, 21. Goldberg, 25; Goldberg considers this analogous to the same process of ‘transformation’ in James’s attitude to Mary that he defines as first oppositional, then as a silencing or suppression of the queen’s ‘menacing force’ (25).

Notes 195 38 ‘And will any still worship Juno’s godhead or humbly lay sacrifice upon her altars?’ Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, Loeb, 2 vols. trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), vol. 1, 245. 39 ‘Thy task, O queen, is to search out thy desire; my duty is to do thy bidding’, ibid., 247. 40 For example, ‘Vpon occasion of some great disorders in Scotland’ (11–12), Add. MS 24195, f. 45r, STS vol. 2, 119: ‘In vaine descended I of Royal race/Which by succession made a king of me’. In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, James also identifies himself with Fergus, the Irish chieftain who subdued Scotland. For the political and constitutional uses of Scotland’s mythical sovereign past, see Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History, and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain’, in Mason ed., Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), 73–4. 41 See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1972, first pub. 1953), on the mythological genealogy of Renaissance princes celebrated in ‘art and poetry [which] joined forces to attest the divinity of the sovereign […]’ (32). 42 For discussion of the 1569 portrait of Elizabeth depicting the queen winning the prize, see Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 150–1. 43 Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power. Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), 67, citing Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. 44 Identified by Westcott, 73, ‘Voyant ces monts de veue ainsi lointaine’, but while structurally and semantically close to the original, James’s concentrates on alliterative flourish (‘et de grands vents leur cime est toute plaine’, line 8, becomes ‘From them great windes doe hurle with hiddeous beir’; ‘ma foi est certaine’, line 4, becomes ‘my faithe a steadfast stone’). 45 The Boke named The Gouernour ed. H.H.S. Croft, 2 vols (London, 1883), vol. 1, 4. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38ff, offers a gendered interpretation of humoural theory as subversive of ‘a specifically masculine vision of social order and individual rationality’ (38). 46 The conceit of death as metamorphosis is found also in James’s second sonnet on Du Bartas: ‘His soule in starre, his furie in fires most strange/His pen in Phoenix, corps in floure shall change’ (13–14, Add. 24195, f. 34r, STS vol. 2, 102). 47 Add. 24195, ff. 10v–13r; MS Bodley 165, ff. 46r–6v; STS vol. 2, 74–9. In Add. 24195, it was originally titled ‘on her M:tie’s desyr’. 48 Text based on the orthographically Scots version in Bodley (f. 46r; STS vol. 1 77); (41–5). 49 Clare McManus, ‘Marriage and the Performance of the Romance Quest: Anne of Denmark and the Stirling Baptismal Celebrations for Prince Henry’, in L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the Wild (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 177–98 (181). 50 This kind of excusatio is used, for example, by Jehan Le Fevre: ‘For if some women are evil and perverse and abnormal, it does not necessarily follow that all of them are so cruel and wicked; nor should all of them be lumped

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51 52

53 54

55

56

57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

together in this general reproach…’: Aleuin Blamires et al. eds, Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 193. See Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Kevin Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake eds, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 117–138. ‘The Auvthors Preface to the Reader’, The Lepanto, printed in Poeticall Exercises, sig. Hr, STS vol. 1, 200. ‘A dreame’ (10–13). On other similarities between Jamesian erotic and nonerotic poetry, see, for example, the echo of the phrase, ‘Dame Rheas fruictfull face’ from ‘A dreame’ in ‘Sonnet to Chancellor Maitlane [Maitland]’ (3), Add. 24195, f. 37r, STS vol. 1, 107); ‘what am I who on Pegasian backe/Does flee amongs the Nymphs immortall faire’ compared to the first Anna sonnet. On humoral imagery in James’s translation of Du Bartas’s La Premier Sepmaine, entitled the Furies, see R.D.S. Jack, ‘Imitation in the Scottish Sonnet’, Comparative Literature, 20 (1968), 313–28, and Ian Ross, ‘Verse Translation at the Court of King James VI of Scotland’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 4 (1962), 252–67. Apollo’s oracular role is the conceit of Montgomerie’s Delphic poem, ‘Before the Greeks durst enterpryse’, which James included in the Reulis and Cautelis as the exemplar of love poetry. The ‘dreame’, of course, draws on the fashionable mode of lapidary symbolism: see, for example, Remy Bealleau, Amours et nouveaux échanges des pierres précieux. Another less frequent incarnation of James’s mythological roles as well as a common emblematic figure: see Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schoene, Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1967), 1610, for a variety of Orpheus emblems to which James might be alluding. In ‘The Translators Invocation’, in Poeticall Exercises, sig. 8r, there is an allusion to Orpheus: ‘(Alluring ORPHEVS) with his songs/he sweetlie doth inchaunt/The MVSES nyne to laue their leeds/That they before did haunt/And take them to his vulgare toung’ (21–5). Essayes, sig. Gijr-Iijv; there is a manuscript copy in Bodley 165, ff. 36r–42r. Allan F. Westcott (ed.), New Poems by James I of England (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 71. Melville, Memoirs, 275. Bingham, 53. See Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, 45–6, 235–7, for another assessment of the Esmé relationship. CSP (Border), vol. 1, cited in David Moysie ed., Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland 1577–1603 (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1830), 55. Melville, Memoirs, 275. See further William Forbes-Leith, Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (Edinburgh: 1885): Esmé was favoured by John Leslie, the Bishop of Ross (chief pro-Marian reprentative), as a positive force for Catholic restoration in Scotland. David Bergeron, James I and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 33, 37.

Notes 197 67 Though the poem also explicitly indicts the twin allegorical forces of Nature and Fortune. 68 See Bergeron, 36–8, on the evolution of their love and revealing contemporary comments on Esmé’s apparent corruption of the king. Michael B. Young’s recent James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) analyses the political influence of what he argues to be the king’s incontrovertible homosexuality. 69 Ford, 106; on James’s triumphal entry into London in 1603, the phoenix iconography was deployed (‘Nova Felix Arabia Arch’); the newly created phoenix represented the new monarch succeeding Elizabeth, rising from her ashes; see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 10. 70 In Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1545), for example, of which James possessed a copy (‘Textbooks of King James’, in T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944–50), vol. 1, 535). NLS MS 2063, f. 103r, belonging to William Fowler, contains written and illustrated instructions for the phoenix emblem. 71 Margaret Swain, The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (Carlton: Ruth Bean Publishers, 1986), 63, 106; Mary adopted it as an emblem in her tapestry, perhaps ‘in memory of her beloved mother’ (63). 72 For Buchanan, see Ford, 10, based on Claudian. Du Bartas eulogised James as ‘ô phoenix escossois’ in the prefatory poem to his translation of the king’s Lepanto (see McClure, 97). Montgomerie incarnates James himself as the phoenix in a sonnet which exalts James as ‘Quintessenst of Kings’ (David Parkinson ed., The Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, 2 vols [Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2000], 67: 18 (13)). 73 Guss, 161–2. 74 Bergeron, 61. 75 ‘Fame puts her away and hides her in the fragrant rich bosom of the Arabian mountains, but she flies haughty through our own skies’ (12–14): translation from Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976) 330–1. 76 Bergeron, 58. 77 He was buried by James in King Henry’s chapel at Westminster in 1624 where Anna was also interred, and where he himself would be only one year later. See Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘Politics, Passion and Poetry in the Circle of James VI: John Burel and his Surviving Works’, in Mapstone ed., 199–248 (209ff), for a sensitive account of Ludovic’s political and cultural influence. 78 Bergeron, 52. 79 Even James’s printed poetry was frequently ushered forth with an apologia; as, for example, ‘The Authour to the Reader’ appended to the Poeticall Exercises (1591), regarding poems composed in ‘my verie young and tender yeares’. 80 Bergeron, 53.

Chapter 4 1 Il Libro del Cortegiano trans. The Book of the Courtier by Thomas Hoby, ed. Virginia Cox (London: Everyman, 1994), 120.

198 Notes 2 NLS MS Adv. 19.2.6 (ff. 7r–11r prefatory material; ff. 11v–61v the Roland Furiovs; ff. 62r–103r the Rapsodies; ff. 109r–158v the Schersing; ff. 159r-v the ‘fairweill’). See John Purves, ‘The Abbregement of Roland Furious, by John Stewart of Baldynneis, and the early knowledge of Ariosto in England’, Italian Studies, 3 (1939), 65–82, for a succinct description of the manuscript (75). All quotations from Stewart’s poetry are here based on the orthography and punctuation of the sole manuscript, NLS Adv. 19.2.6; but for convenience reference is also made to the Scottish Text Society edition, Thomas Crockett ed., The Poems of John Stewart of Baldynneis (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1913) (volume 1 of an incompleted two-volume edition), which is abbreviated in citation to STS (this edition incorrectly numbers the foliation). 3 Criticism on Stewart favours the Orlando Furioso at the expense of the lyrics. See Matthew P. McDiarmid, ‘Notes on the Poems of John Stewart of Baldynneis’, Review of English Studies, 24 (1948), 12–18, and ‘John Stewart of Baldynneis’, SHR, 29 (1950), 52–63. R.D.S. Jack, ‘Poetry under King James VI’, in Cairns Craig ed., History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), vol. 1 ed. R.D.S. Jack, 125–39, and The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979); Sandra M. Bell, ‘Poetry and Politics in the Scottish Renaissance’, unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), considers Stewart’s poetry as wholly acquiescent confirmation of James’s supremacy and his Protestant imperialism (134–48). Janet Smith, Les Sonnets elisabéthains (Paris, 1929) lists probable European Petrarchist sources for seven Rapsodies sonnets (326). McDiarmid, ‘Notes’, discusses the influence of Phillipe Desportes’ Premières Oeuvres on four sonnets (13, 15). See most recently Donna Rodger, ‘John Stewart of Baldynneis: ane maist perfyt prentes’, in Neil McMillan and Kirsten Stirling eds, Odd Alliances (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1999), 2–11, and Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Poetic Objects of Desire: rhetorical culture and seductive arts in the lyrics of John Stewart of Baldynneis’, Scottish Literary Journal 26.1 (1999), 7–28; and Donna Heddle [Rodger], ‘An edition of John Stewart’s Orlando Furioso’, unpub. PhD diss. (University of Edinburgh, 2001). 4 ‘To his Maiestie vith presentatio[n]/Of this volume./Sonnet’, (1–3), f. 103r, STS 192; H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 90–1. 5 For the fullest biographical account, see McDiarmid, ‘John Stewart’. 6 Elizabeth Stewart’s marriage to James Gray, brother of the fifth Lord Gray, was dissolved at her instigation on grounds of adultery on 10 June 1581. John Stewart, acting as one of the executors of the paternal estate, took possession of Red Castle in Perthshire in opposition to the property claims of his stepfather which led to a series of direct conflicts between Stewart, defending Red Castle and his mother’s right to it with the aid of Andrew Gray of Dunninald, and James Gray. The latter charged Stewart before the Privy Council at Stirling with unlawful seizure of Red Castle. Stewart failed to appear at trial. On 1 April 1579, he was ordered to surrender the castle to Gray. In May, Stewart sought legal redress and Robert Erskine of Dun was solicited to ensure that the castle would be defended and Stewart brought safely before the Council. Possibly in order to secure the protective alliance with Andrew Gray of Dunninald, he entered a marriage contract at Red Castle on 19 November 1579 (registered on 25 July 1580) with Catherine Gray, his daughter.

Notes 199 7 The exceptions occur on f. 72r, STS 124, ‘To His familiar freind In Cowrt’ (7) where ‘welth’ is repeated and crossed out; and on f. 97v, STS 181, ‘The answuir of the foirsaid hostes. Sonnet’ (9) where ‘for’ is inserted above the line in darker ink. On dating, see McDiarmid, ‘Notes’, 12. 8 Purves, 75, notes on f. 1v the book-plate of John, Earl of Roxburghe, 1703; see the Scots Peerage, vol. 7, 350. 9 ‘Ane Prayer in Adversitie’, ff. 63v–4v, STS 104–6; ‘Ane Prayer and Thankisgiwing’, ff. 65r–6r, STS 107–9. The suppliant language between sovereign and subject is transposed to the religious realm: ‘His guidnes yit sall ons restoir/His seruant frie of euerie smart’ (f. 66r, 81–4). 10 f. 67r, STS 109 (63–4). 11 ff. 67v–8r, STS. 122–3. 12 ff. 70v–2r, f. 72r, STS 124. 13 ff. 72r-v; STS 125–6. 14 f. 94v, STS 175; f.90r, STS 164. 15 See f. 73v, STS 127, ‘To his Maiestie the first of Ianvar. 1582’; f. 74r, STS 128, ‘To His Maiestie the first of Ianvar vith Presentation of ane lawrell trie formit of Gould. 1583’; f. 75r, STS 130, ‘To his Maiestie the day of his coronation Vith Laurell’. On the typical social and occasional circumstances of English court poetry (such as the New Year’s gift), see Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2–3. 16 For example, ‘To ane Honorabill and Distressit Ladie’, ‘To ane Honarabill Ladie’, ‘In the end of ane letter to ane Honorabill Ladie’, ‘Ane Answer to the letter of ane honorabill Ladie’ (see ff. 66v–7v, STS 110–12; ff. 70r-v, STS 120–1; f. 71v, STS 122–3; ff. 79r-v, STS 141–2). 17 f. 76v, STS 134–5. 18 See Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, The Poetics of Imitation. Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 210. See also John O’Brien, Anacreon Redivius. A Study of Anacreontic Translation in Mid-Sixteenth Century France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Stewart’s poem is probably modelled on the fragment: ‘The Muses tied Love with garlands and handed him over to Beauty. And now Cythereia brings ransom and seeks to have him released. But if he is released, he will not leave but will stay: he has learned to be her slave’. Greek Lyric trans. David A. Campbell, Loeb Classical Library, 4 vols (London: Heinemann, 1988), II, 189–91; see Henry Stephanus, Anacreontis et aliorum lyricorum aliquot poëtarum Odae (Paris, 1556), 117. 19 For amplification of ‘the material’ as concept and artefact in Renaissance texts, see Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 20 The little putto enclosed in crystal which she possesses evokes an emblematic image; Stewart’s gloss (28–32) on the crystal Cupid recalls an emblem exposition, characteristic of Scottish Jacobean court poetry. 21 Jack, Choice, 13ff, and History, 130. 22 See further Dunnigan, ‘Poetic Objects’. 23 Hoby ed., Cox, 276 (my italics).

200 Notes 24 ‘In Com[m]endation of two constant lvifers’, f. 80r, STS 143. This is clearly an allusion to James, characteristically imaged by the sun-god and the harp of David; the mythological and biblical coalesce. 25 ‘To his Maiestie the first of Ianvar: 1582’, f. 73v, STS 127 (1–3). Exemplified, for example, by the rhetoric of ‘To his Maiestie the first of ianvar’, f. 74r, STS 128; ‘At command of his Maiestie in prais of the art of poesie’, f. 74r, STS 129; ‘To his Maiestie with presentation of this volume’, f. 103r, STS 192. 26 ‘To the former effect. Ane vther sonnet’, f. 88r, STS 160 (5–9). 27 ‘The Prolog’, f. 111r, STS 196 (9–11). 28 Ane Schersing, ‘The Mateir’, f. 114r, STS 200 (11–12). 29 ‘To the former effect. Ane vther sonnet’, f. 88r, STS 160 (5–9). The sonnet, ‘In prais of his Maiesties Work’, f. 87v, STS 159, seems to allude to James’s translation of Du Bartas: ‘Sum holie Angill…’ (7–9), and in the third sonnet in this apparent series, f. 88v, STS 161, to James’s ‘Dewyise celest’ (4). This has bearings for his own poetry: ‘Muse than assist me vith sum mater meit/Meit mychtie mater As his Muse dois wse…’ (7–8). 30 ‘The Prolog’, Ane Schersing, f. 111v, STS 197 (31–6). 31 ‘The Prolog’ (39). 32 This is, of course, declared by the title; it probably alludes to Petrarch’s ‘primo giovenile errore’ in the Rime. 33 ‘To his Maiestie/Sonnet’, f. 63r, STS 103 (7–10) (though here there is also more subtly the promise of mutual reward: James will prove himself virtuous in attending to Stewart’s writing). 34 ‘To his Maiestie/Sonnet’ (11–12). 35 ‘To his Maiestie the first of Ianvar. 1582’, f. 74v, STS 127 (21). 36 ‘Ane giltles hart possessit bot vith luif/Is suir as Rock that storms may not remuif’: ‘[o]f ane Thochtles and Frie Hart from Vorldie Cair’, f. 101v, STS 187 (13–14). 37 Stewart’s theoretical advocacy of verbal purity is intensified in his Protestant visionary allegory, Ane Schersing. 38 ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: the Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, ELH, 50 (1983), 415–59 (440). 39 f. 74r, STS 129 (5). 40 f. 87v, STS 159 (7). 41 ‘Ane New sort of rymand rym’, ff. 82v–3v, STS 149–51 (73). 42 Ane New sort’, l. 65. 43 f. 96v, STS 179. 44 The phoenix allusion explicitly occurs in the series of sonnets ‘In Prais of his majesties work’, unambiguously signing its referent, James: ‘Quhat foull may matche the Phenix in the skyis?’: f. 90r, STS 162 (4) 45 ‘To His familiar friend In Court’, f. 72r, STS 124 (5–6). 46 f. 100r, STS 186; see ‘To Fame. Sonnet’, f. 102r, STS 191 also. 47 ‘Ane New sort of rymand rym’ (15); ‘To his Maiestie. Sonnet’, f. 83r, STS 148 (5–6). 48 f. 91v, STS 168 (5–6, 14). 49 Hoby ed., Cox, 279. 50 f. 101r, STS 188. 51 ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’: Francis Bacon, Essays, intro. Michael J. Hawkins (London: Everyman 1972), 17–18.

Notes 201 52 Hyginus, Fabularum Liber, Basel 1535 (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1976), 186: ‘Endymione uero pastorem amasse dicitur duplo scilicet modo, seu quod primus hominu Endymion cursum lunae inuenerit, unde & triginta annos dormisse dicitur […]’; see also Natalis Comes, Mythologiae (Venice, 1567), Book III, and Boccaccio, Genealogiae (Venice, 1494), Book V. 53 See Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquised Voices. Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992). 54 ‘Of Ane Salutation Of Ane Host to His Hostes’ and ‘The Ansuir of The Foirsaid Hostes’, ff. 97r-v; STS 180–1. 55 See Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century and their Influence on the Literatures of Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), 168–213. 56 Cixous, La Jeune Née (1976), in The Newly Born Woman with Catherine Clément, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 85. 57 Sarah Cornell, ‘Hélène Cixous and les Etudes Féminines’, in The Body and the Text. Hélène Cixous Reading and Teaching (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 36. 58 Joannes L. Vives, De Institutione foeminae Christianae (1524) trans. Richard Hyrde, A very frutefull and pleasant boke, called the instruccion of a Christen woman (London, 1545), Book I, sig. Mr. 59 Peerage of Scotland, vol. 2, claims 1598; vol. 8, 1578. The latter is perhaps the most likely date given that her parents married in 1556, and Stewart’s ‘buik’ as a whole suggests a late 1570s–1580s dating. 60 See further Dunnigan, 59–78. 61 f. 69v, STS 118; f. 70r, STS 119. 62 f. 115r, STS 202. 63 f. 98r, STS 182 ‘The deedlie dolor which I do induir/So dois combuir my bodie all in baill’ (2); f. 98r, STS 183 (1–2): ‘Sen that our saull of deuyn mater maid/is losit captiwe in our corps of cair/Quhilk formd of erth vnto the erth dois leid […]. 64 f. 96v, STS 179 (9–12). 65 f. 91v, STS 168. 66 ‘Of Amitie’, f. 95v; STS 177. See also ‘Of Fidelitie’, f. 94v; STS 175. ‘To his Darrest Freind’, f. 81v; STS 145; ‘To his Rycht inteirlie belowit Freind’, f. 67v; STS 113. 67 See Ethics, Books VIII and IX; De Amicitia, especially Books VI and VII. Stewart’s ‘amitie’ sonnet deploys the characteristic exemplariness of the friendship discourse but his example of Nisus does not seem to appear in any of the standard exempla. For the homoerotic implications of male amicitia, see Forrest Tyler Stevens, ‘Erasmus’s “Tigress”: the language of Friendship, Pleasure, and the Renaissance Letter’, in Jonathan Goldberg ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 124–40, and in the Scottish context as an exemplar of female same-sex eroticism, Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Feminising the early modern erotic: female-voiced love lyrics and Mary, Queen of Scots’ in Later SixteenthCentury Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002).

202 Notes 68 Book II, xxix; xxx. 69 Italian Influence, 72. 70 f. 111r, STS 195 (12); ‘In prais of his Maiesteis Vork’, f. 87v, STS 159 (1); f. 7r, STS 3 (1–2).

Chapter 5 1 For citation of poems, I have adopted David Parkinson’s practice in his valuable new edition: The Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, STS, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2000). Parkinson reproduces titles when assigned to poems in the manuscript witness (see note 3 below), unlike the original STS edition by James Cranstoun, The Poems of Alexander Montgomerie (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1887) which included a number of arbitrarily assigned titles. Where a title is inscribed in the manuscript source, it is always given; if not, the first line is given; where there are untitled poems in a sequence, this is numerically indicated (e.g. II, III, IV). Hence, the location of a poem is indicated first by title, folio number, in Parkinson’s edition, and number within sequence where appropriate. Orthography and punctuation are based on the original manuscript (with the exception of modernised ‘yogh’ and the expansion of ‘and’). I have followed Parkinson’s additional punctuation (line endings, mid-line comma, parenthesis). 2 For criticism of Montgomerie’s love poetry, see R.D.S. Jack, ‘The Theme of Fortune in the Verse of Alexander Montgomerie’, SLJ, 10 (1983), 25–44; ‘The Lyrics of Alexander Montgomerie’, RES, 20 (1969), 168–181; and especially Alexander Montgomerie (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985). One of the earliest, influential readings was Helena Shire’s Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of James VI of Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 82–116, 139–80. For the most recent readings of Montgomerie’s work, see the collection of essays in the special issue of SLJ, 26.2 (1999), and R.J. Lyall, ‘James VI and the Sixteenth-century Cultural Crisis’, in Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch eds, The Reign of James VI (West Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 55–70. 3 Thomas Dempster, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorumlib. XIX (1627), 496. A considerable lyric corpus survives; well over a third of the 124 lyrics (including sonnets) attributed to Montgomerie in the main manuscript source, EUL Drummond De. 3. 70 (known as the ‘Ker manuscript’, after its owner and possible scribe, Margaret Ker; see Parkinson, vol. 2, 2–6), are amatory in subject. None were printed though several are extracted in James’s Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Arte of Poesie (Edinburgh: Thomas Vautrollier, 1584); see Parkinson, vol. 1, xv–xvi for full list of prints. Dating of the manuscript itself, as well as the internal dating of the poems, is difficult to determine conclusively, though Montgomerie’s most prolific period was probably the late 1570s and especially the early to mid 1580s; Parkinson suggests an early date between 1596–1600 (3). There are certain coherent thematic and generic groupings within the lyric corpus, but overall neither authorial nor scribal intention regarding their arrangement can probably be warranted.

Notes 203

4

5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15

Evident care has been taken in the transcription and the aesthetic presentation of the manuscript. Montgomerie’s lyrics are frequently transcribed in seventeenth-century Scottish songbooks and commonplace books: for example, NLS Adv.5.2.14, f. 16v and Adv.81.9.12, f. 12r. For musicological comment see Shire; D. James Ross, Musick Fyne. Robert Carver and the Art of Music in Sixteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: The Mercat Press, 1993), 134–7; for transcription of musical texts of Montgomerie’s songs, see Shire and Kenneth Elliott eds, Music of Scotland 1500–1700, Musica Brittanica, vol. XV (London: Stainer and Bell, 1975). For the most recent general account of Montgomerie’s life, see Parkinson, 11–15. Extensive biographical information can be found in one of the earliest authoritative editions: George Stevenson ed, Poems of Alexander Montgomerie and other pieces from Laing MS No. 447, STS, Supplementary Volume, (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1910), vii–lxv, and in the genealogical and documentation appendices, 249–335. See Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Female Gifts: Rhetoric, Beauty and the Beloved in the Lyrics of Alexander Montgomerie’, SLJ, 26.2 (1999), 59-78, for an analysis of female beauty as a verbal and ideological trope. For discussion of ‘The Navigatioun’ and ‘A Cartell of the Thre Ventrous Knights’, see Jack, 17–24; Shire, 83–4; R.J. Lyall, ‘Montgomerie and the Moment of Mannerism’, SLJ, 26.2 (1999), 45–8. Montgomerie’s affiliations with prominent members of the Scottish Catholic nobility, such as the Earl of Huntly, are well attested by Stevenson (253, 269, 273) who also cites the Catholic sympathies of the Eglinton branch of the Montgomeries (269); Ludovic, second Duke of Lennox and son of Esmé Stewart, ‘acknowledg[ed] Montgomerie’s services’ (x; 270; 280); Jack perceives a possible allusion to Esmé as the king’s ‘umquhyle Maister’ in one of Montgomerie’s ‘exile’ sonnets (6). Jack, 5; Shire, 82–3. Stevenson, 272, citing Register of the Privy Seal, 1586. Lyall, ‘Netherlands’: ‘ […] whose story was it? Montgomerie’s, deceiving the King? Or one in which the King himself was a participant?’ (62). Stevenson, 284; Jack, 13. Stevenson, 270–83; for transcription of the document of 1583, see Stevenson, 301–2 and 306–8 for its ratification. John Durkan, ‘The Date of Alexander Montgomerie’s death’, Innes Review, 34 (1983), 91–2; ironically, pressure from James and the court ensured that Montgomerie’s death was somehow sanctified. Mark Dilworth, ‘New Light on Alexander Montgomerie’, The Bibliotheck, 4 (1965), 230–5: ‘Epigramma’ III (1–2); ‘Epicedion’ (13–14). Helena Shire, ‘Alexander Montgomerie: the oppositione of the court to conscience’, SSL, 3 (1966), 144–50, translates these Latin inscriptions as: ‘While the poet Montgomerie, passionate in his devotion to the Roman faith, was dying – and love of holy religion was dying [with him]…’; ‘I [Montgomerie] was a determined and vigorous enemy of heretical teachings. I always detested falsehood and strongly attacked the “Picards” [Protestants] with force of arms and with a song’. Lyall, ‘Netherlands’, 63: ‘“Picardi” seems to have been used in Catholic circles as a generic term for Protestants.’

204 Notes 16 Shire, 136. For a sensitive alternative reading, see Jack, 106–34. 17 On the Constable source, see Stevenson, xv; lvii–lix; 290; Shire, 83, 136. 18 On Lauder, servant to the imprisoned queen, see Shire, 77–8, 81; Jack, 90, endorses the resonance of the sonnet’s first line, ‘I wald see mare [Mary] nor ony thing I sie’ (‘James Lauder I wald se mare’, f. 71v–2r, Parkinson 78). 19 ‘A Ladyis Lamentatione. 3 Son.’, ff.69v–70r; Parkinson 75. III (1–4). 20 It is interesting that the sonnet preceding the sequence is addressed to Lady Lilias Ruthven, third daughter of William, first Earl of Gowrie, and the first wife of Ludovic, Duke of Lennox (see Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘Politics, Passion and Poetry in the Circle of James VI: John Burel and his surviving works’, in L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the Wild Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 199–248 (210)); this panegyric is dominated by the symbol of the lily representing the Duchess, perhaps significantly for the Catholic Lennoxes, a symbol of feminine purity with particular Marian associations. 21 Mary’s own penitential poetry draws on Magdalene iconography: see Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots’, in Mary R. Reichardt ed., A BioBibliographical Dictionary of Catholic Women Writers (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 369–74. 22 Jack, 71, traces echoes of the Catholic liturgy in the penitential poems. In ‘The Theme of Fortune in the Verse of Alexander Montgomerie’, SLJ, 10 (1983), 25–44, Jack also suggests that ‘A Ladyis Lamentatione’ might be related to the Marian cause (37). Parkinson interestingly notes how the Catholic affiliations and nature of the Ker MS (principle witness of Montgomerie’s lyrics) may have compromised potential ownership; hence its probable ‘donation’ from the Ker family to the library of the Tounis College in 1627 (Parkinson, vol. 1, 4). 23 Ane Schort Treatise conteining some Reulis and Cautelis to be eschewit in Scottis Poesie in The Essayes of a Prentise (Edinburgh, 1584), sig. Miiijv. 24 See, for example, the conceit of the ‘Solsequium’ in the final stanza of James’s ‘A complaint of his mistressis absence from Court’ which may allude to Montgomerie’s lyric, ‘Lyk as the dum Solsequium’, printed partly in the Reulis; the conceit of the lizard’s affection in sonnet nine of James’s ‘Anna’ sonnets may allude to Montgomerie’s third sonnet to Robert Hudson: see Parkinson, vol. 1, 113. The phrase, ‘foolish Phaeton’, in James’s third sonnet on the astronomer Tycho Brahe (BL Add. MS 24195, f. 32r, STS, vol. 2, 101–2) echoes Montgomerie’s ‘Solsequium’ lyric (Poems, 33-6). In James’s Phoenix poem, the Echo anagram sonnet alludes to Apollo ‘From Delphos syne […] cum with speid’ which occurs in another song-lyric of Montgomerie’s, ‘Before the Greeks durst enterpryse’ (74). 25 R.J. Lyall, ‘Moment of Mannerism’, which contains an especially fruitful discussion of Montgomerie’s mannerism in relation to the rhetoric of public, ceremonial pieces, notably ‘The Navigatioun’ (45–8); see also his ‘[C]ultural crisis’. 26 op. cit., sig. Mr. 27 ‘To Robert Hudsone. 5 Son.’, ff. 67r-8v, Parkinson 72.II: 1–6. (Unless stated otherwise, all subsequent references are to vol. 1 of Parkinson’s edition.)

Notes 205 28 ‘The Oppositione of the Court to Conscience’, ff. 9r-v, Parkinson 8: 13–18. 29 Montgomerie’s rhetoric in these sonnets (‘To his Majestie for his Pensioun’, Parkinson 68.I–IV) is skilfully redoubling and qualifying, grammatically deferring the imputation of any guilt on James’s part; see Jack, 97–9, for analysis of these texts, and more recently Gerard Carruthers, ‘Form and Substance in the Poetry of the ‘Castalian Band’, SLJ, 26.2 (1999), 7–17 (12), and Lyall, ‘Moment of Mannerism’, 55–6. 30 ‘To Robert Hudsone’, Parkinson 68.III: 1–4 and 68.IV: 13–14. 31 Bodley 165, f. 47r; in the more anglified text of Add. MS 24195, the title (crossed out) identifies Montgomerie’s sin as that of ‘great bragging’ (f. 46r); STS vol. 2, 120–1. 32 Bodley, f. 47r (1-8); STS 121. 33 Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry, 87–9. In BL Add. MS 24195, a further stanza refines the apparent persona which the king adopted: ‘I William Mow’. 34 Thomas A. Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love. Cupid in Renaissance Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 19. 35 See Song, Dance and Poetry, 90–1, 111, 123. 36 Jack, ‘The Theme of Fortune’, 32. 37 For contrasting readings of the poem, see Shire and Jack. Sandra Bell, ‘Poetry and Politics in the Scottish Renaissance’, unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), influenced by Shire’s reading, suggests that lines 161–2 where the blind Cupid ‘schot his mother’ (footnote 82: 170) is a critique of James’s quiescence in the Elizabethan treatment of Mary. Dempster, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorum lib. XIX (Bononiae: Typis Nicolai Thebaldini, 1627), 496, construes the poem as a religious allegory but of the superiority of the spiritual as opposed to profane life rather than any specifically denominational allegory. 38 See Vincenzo Cartari, Le Imagini degli Dei (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), 495, 516; Natalie Comes, Mythologiae, Venice 1567 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), 386–9, 481; Boccaccio, Book 3 xxii, xxiv; 5, xxii; 9, iv. 39 ‘Lyk as Aglauros’ ,ff. 30r–31r, Parkinson 30: 23–5. 40 ‘The sacrifice of Cupid’, ff. 31v–2r, Parkinson 31. 41 In other Cupid poems, Montgomerie plays in similar terms on the alliance of sacred and profane devotion: e.g. ‘Blind Love if ever thou made bitter sweet’ (Parkinson 15). 42 ‘Against the God of Love’, ff. 80r-v, Parkinson 97: 1–6. 43 Jack, Montgomerie, 85. 44 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Blind Cupid’, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 109ff. 45 ‘Go, Pen and Paper’, f. 75r, Parkinson 86.III: 13–14. 46 ‘Vha vald behald him a god sa grievis’, f. 76r, Parkinson 87.IV; Ronsard, ‘Qui voudra voir comme Amour me surmonte’. 47 ‘The well of Love’, ff. 18r-19r, Parkinson 17: 9–16. 48 ‘Of the same well’, ff. 19r-v, Parkinson 18: 2–4. 49 ‘Blind Love’, ff. 16v–17r, Parkinson 15: 10–18. 50 The sonnet discussed earlier, ‘Against the God of Love’, might be interpreted as a metaphor of misgovernance; such an erotic speculum principem might not have been misplaced if stemming from the early years of the relatively young sovereign’s reign.

206 Notes 51 The popularity of Cupid as an emblem or device is copiously illustrated by Alciati, for example: Emblematum Liber, VII, XXXIII, LXVI, LXXII, LXXVI. 52 Shire, 111. 53 Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 41, 73; on the problematic troping and ‘naming’ of same-sex desire, see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 11, and Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries. Renaissance Texts. Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 17; see also Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 54 ‘Before the Greeks’, ff. 43v–44r, Parkinson 43. 55 Song, Dance and Poetry, 94. Shire’s footnote is cautious: ‘This concluding stanza is cited in the King’s “Tretis” as is the stanza describing Cupido from “The Cherrie and the Slae”… because they directly figured the King himself – and the poets’s affection for him?’ In her unpublished paper, ‘The Play of the Poet and the King’, AUL MS 3407/6/3/12/1, Shire pursues the relationship between James and Montgomerie in more biographical and historical detail, drawing on The Cherrie and the Slae, yet without suggesting homoerotic implications. 56 Lyall, ‘Formalist Historicism and Older Scots Poetry’, Etudes Ecossaises, 1 (1992), 39–48 (46–8), notes the poem’s ironic exclusion of the fact that the oracle was fulfilled only after the duration of a ten-year war (46–8). 57 Shire, 94. 58 ‘Lyk as the dum Solseqium’, MS ff. 21r–22r, Parkinson 21. 59 D.C. Coleman, An Illustrated Love ‘“Canzionere”. The Délie of Maurice Scève (Genève: Slatkine, 1981), 31; she also cites its use in a sonnet by Bembo, ‘L’alta cagione…’. See also Paul Ardouin, Devises et emblèmes d’amour dans la Délie de Maurice Scève, ou, La volonté de perfection dans la création d’une oeuvre d’art (Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1987). 60 Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery (Studie sul concettismo; Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1964), 109, cites its presence as an emblem in Vaenius; Capaccio, ff. 125v–6r, declares its significations of love, friendship, spiritual affinity, citing Camillo Camilli’s motto, “Soli et Semper”, ‘significando amor dedicato ad vna Donna sol […]’ while the actual emblem illustrated bears the motto, ‘Despicis Aspicio Si’. 61 Samuel Daniel, The Worthy Tract of Paulus Iovius, contayning a discourse of rare inuention, both Militarie and Amorous called Imprese (London, 1585), sig. Biiiv. 62 The emblem of the sunflower had several different meanings: in Capaccio, for example, the heliotrope signifies friendship, secular and spiritual love, and (suggestive in the present context), the love of inferior for superior: Delle Impresa Trattato Di Giulio Cesare Capaccio. In tre libri diuiso (Naples, 1592), I, ff. 125r-v. 63 See James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 64 See further Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘“O venus soverane”: Erotic Politics and Poetic Practice at the Courts of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI’, in Susanne Hagemann ed., Terranglian Territories (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), 361–77.

Notes 207 65 f. 67r (12). 66 ‘The cruell pane and grevous smart’, ff. 35r-v, Parkinson 35: 37–42. 67 See Lyall, ‘Cultural Crisis’, 49, for a further ‘neat covert allusion’ to the Phoenix and therefore Lennox in the sonnet ‘In Prais of the Kings Vranie’which also weaves together Apollo and Titan symbolism as well as a comparison to David. 68 See the sonnet, ‘To the for me’, f. 74r, Parkinson 86.I for another Phoenix allusion: ‘I love the freshest Phoenix fair!’ (13) 69 The Reinvention of Love. Poetry, politics and culture from Sidney to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 194. 70 ‘The Poets Complaint of his Nativitie’, ff. 11v–12r, Parkinson 18: 33–5. 71 ‘Lyk as Aglauros’ (15–21). 72 ‘To the for me’, Parkinson 86.II: 1, 8. 73 Montgomerie’s sonnet based on Constable’s, ‘Thyne ee the glasse’, MS ff. 71r-v, Parkinson 77.II, punning on ‘I’ and ‘ee’ [eye], is a joyful evocation of surrendered material and spiritual identities. 74 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 103. 75 Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London: Methuen, 1984), 107. 76 ‘Had I a foe that hated me to dead’, ff. 76v–7r, Parkinson 89: 5–12. 77 See Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts. 78 ‘Ressave this harte vhois Constancie wes sik’, ff. 33r-v, Parkinson 33. 79 ‘O plesand plant’, ff. 43r-v, Parkinson 42: 12–15. 80 For a different conceit of the Holy Ghost in Montgomerie’s poetry, see ‘A godly Prayer’, Parkinson 4: 50. 81 ‘Formalist Historicism’, 84. 82 ‘The wofull working of my woundit hairt’, ff. 50r-v, Parkinson 50: 9–11, 16. 83 Jack, 56. 84 MS f. 71v, Parkinson 77. III. 85 Il Cortegiano trans. Hoby, 354. Montgomerie’s erotic kiss may also be modelled on Johannes Secundus’ Basia or Marullus’ ‘Epigrammaton’. 86 It may also allude to the neo-Platonic conceit of the ‘death’ occasioned by the departure of the lover’s soul from the body: see Donald Guss, John Donne Petrarchist. Italianate conceits and love theory in the Songs and Sonets (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), note 15, 204. 87 ‘The Poets Dreme’, ff. 3v–4r, Parkinson 3: 1–4.

Chapter 6 1 William Alexander’s Aurora is the exception: a sequence probably composed while Alexander was at the Jacobean Scottish court but not printed until 1604 in London; on that basis, it has been excluded from consideration in the present book (see ‘Conclusion: Love’s End’ for further details). 2 ‘The Vranie translated’ (25–9), in Essayes of a Prentise (Edinburgh, 1584), sig. Dijr, W.A. Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1955), vol. 1, 19.

208 Notes 3 Fowler’s love poetry, including his translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi, is inscribed in several manuscripts later associated with his uncle, William Drummond of Hawthornden, but none of it was published in his lifetime: the relevant MSS are NLS MS 2063–5 (subsequently referred to as the Hawthornden MSS); EUL MS De.368 (known as the Drummond manuscript) which contains a copy of The Tarantula, ff. 1–36v; and EUL MS De.1.10, a presentation copy of Fowler’s translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi. The excellent Scottish Text Society edition, The Works of William Fowler edited by Henry W. Meikle, James Craigie, and John Purves, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1912–39), mostly retains original orthography with some editorial punctuation; but the poems are often misleadingly numbered in the interest of presenting a poetic chronology. Reference here is accordingly made first to the relevant manuscript, then to the STS edition; line references are given in brackets; if there is no title, the first line of the relevant poem is cited where appropriate. Unless stated, the Drummond MS (here abbreviated as Dr. MS) is generally the preferred source. For his short sequence on death, see Hawthornden MS 2063, ff. 38r–49r, STS vol. 1, 233–43. 4 For an account of Fowler’s cultural role in relation to Anna, see Clare McManus, ‘Marriage and the Performance of the Romance Quest: Anne of Denmark and the Stirling Baptismal Celebrations for Prince Henry’, in L.A.J.R. Houven, A.A. MacDonald, and S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the Wild. Essays on vernacular culture and humanism in late-medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 177–98 (185–6). 5 STS vol. 3, xxi. 6 See Hawthornden MSS 2060, f. 229r and 2063, ff. 105v, 127r. The other notable female dedicatee of Fowler’s lyrics is Mary Middlemore, another gentlewoman at Anna’s court (see ‘Meditation vpon Virgin Maryes Hatt’, Hawthornden MS 2063, f. 72r, STS 268, and ‘Aetna’, f. 78r, STS 269). 7 ‘TO MY LADY ARBELLA. Extempore’, Hawthornden MS 2063, f. 247r, STS vol. 1, 262 (3–4). In the topographical poem to Arbella on f. 58r, ‘To the true, Ho:ble, most vertuous, and onlie/deseruing La: of Highest titles: The La: Arbella/Steward: vppon my passage downe the Thames to/London: Ianuarie the : 8 : 1603’, Fowler alludes to her as ‘next to our kinge as next by bloud and name’ (20), perhaps a politically sensitive comment, given James’s desire to arrange a marriage between Arbella and Ludovic Stuart, Earl of Lennox (see Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘Politics, Passion and Poetry in the Circle of James VI: John Burel and His Surviving Works’, in Mapstone ed., 199–248 (211–12)). Other lyrics to Arbella from Fowler include Hawthornden MS 2063, f. 68r, STS 319, ‘To my onely L. Arb.’. The untitled sonnet, ‘Once wandringe forth in Maye’, found in the collection of poems in NLS MS 2065, ff. 16r–35r (Fowler’s authorship of which is contested) on f. 25r, provides implicit evidence for Fowler’s authorship: the visionary beloved whose ‘name begins & endeth with an A’ is probably the ubiquitous Arbella. Recent commentators also cite Fowler’s ‘bad’ poetry among the many dedicatory and praise poems she received (Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 81).

Notes 209 8 Though there is a Latin prose dedication to Arbella in Hawthornden MS 2064, ff. 6r-v, dated 1604, in which he offers unidentified work to her. 9 An Answer to the Calumnious Letter and Erroneous propositiouns of an apostat named M. Io. Hammiltoun (John Leprevik, 1581), STS vol. 2, 25, 28. Despite such fierce allegiance to the Protestant cause, Fowler’s political gestures are occasionally contradictory: he was associated with Esmé Stewart, Duke of Lennox, who was exiled from Scotland before his death on account of his Catholic affiliations, and briefly imprisoned in England because of visits to the French ambassador, Mauvissière (Fowler was allegedly the first to report Lennox’s death to the latter). Despite Fowler’s printed polemic against the ‘whorish’ Roman church, he confesses to an association with ‘the Frenche course and the Queen of Scotts’: An Answer, STS vol. 2, 25; STS vol. 3, xvii. 10 R.D.S. Jack observes that Fowler’s ‘whole output is modelled on the Rime’ (The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972], 82). Though other vernacular Italian sources can also be traced in his writing (see Janet C. Smith, Les Sonnets elisabéthains [Paris, 1929], and Jack), Petrarch constitutes a central underlying model of philosophical and theological ‘authority’ for Fowler’s amatory writing. For a critical survey of Fowler’s work, see John Purves’s excellent survey, ‘Fowler and Scoto-Italian Cultural Relations in the Sixteenth Century’, STS vol. 3, lxxx–cl; Jack, ‘William Fowler and Italian Literature’, MLR, 65 (1970), 481–92; Jack, Scottish Literature’s Debt to Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), 9-13; Jack, ‘Poetry under King James VI’, in Cairns Craig ed., History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), vol. 1 ed. R.D.S. Jack, 125–39 (129). 11 Canzone 366 (7–8): ‘who has always replied/to whoever called on her with faith’ (Robert M. Durling trans. and ed., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976), 574). 12 ‘Sueit lovlye kis[s]s and vncontrold disdaynes’, f. 35v, STS 187; found also on f. 25r of Dr. MS, STS 186. 13 f. 36v, STS 207. 14 ‘Muse, yow fair dame, from whense doth flow this vayne’, Dr. MS, f. 27r; STS 191 (4). 15 Compare Petrarch’s allusion to Christ’s sacrifice in the Rime sparse, 357. 16 ‘Eternal lord, God of immortal glore’, Dr. MS f. 36r, STS 206. 17 Canzone 264 (48–9): ‘a more blessed hope by gazing at the heavens’ (Durling, 428). 18 See Giuzeppe Mazzotta, ‘The Canzionere and the Language of the Self’, Studies in Philology, 75 (1978), 271–96 (272). 19 Jack, Italian Influence, 85. 20 Nesca A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London, 1935), 210. 21 Cf. sonnet 349 (9–14): ‘O happy that day when, going forth from my earthly prison, may leave broken and scattered this heavy, frail, and mortal garment of mine, and may depart from such thick shadows, flying so far up into the beautiful clear sky that I may see my Lord and my lady!’ (Durling, 546). 22 Canzone 360 (31–4): ‘He [Love] has made me love God less than I ought and be less concerned for myself; for a lady I have equally disregarded all cares (Durling, 562).

210 Notes 23 Sonnet 365 (7–8): ‘help my strayed frail soul and fill out with your grace all that she lacks’ (Durling, 574). 24 Petrarch’s Secret or the Soul’s Conflict with Passion. Three dialogues between himself and S. Augustine trans. William H. Draper (Westport: Hyperion Press, 1978), 124, translated into the sins of God-forgetfulness and self-forgetfulness. In the Rime, canzone 70, Petrarch admonishes himself for being deflected from God-created beauty by the beautiful immanence of Laura within nature. 25 ‘The day is done the Sunn doth ells declyne’ (13), Dr. MS, f. 11v, STS 156; ‘Suld I not heate these harmefull hands and blame’ (4), Dr. MS f. 9r, STS 152. 26 ‘ I hope sueit saule to see at my return’ (2, 6), f. 12v, STS 158. 27 As in ‘Bellisa faire as I am bound I byde’, Dr. MS f. 26r, STS 190: ‘my faithe lyk to your hyde’ (9); see also ‘[G]if mortal prayers move immortal pouers’, f. 5r, STS 147: ‘who never in my faithe did fant or fayle’ (7). 28 Compare ‘O of my barren muse the birthfull seed’, Dr. MS f. 27v, STS 191: ‘o glore of earthe and pryde of euerye place’ (13). 29 ‘Schip brokken men whome stormye seas sore toss’ (14), Dr. MS f. 24v, STS 184; ‘Tuix heavenes and her whome onlye I adore’, Dr. MS f. 33v, STS 199; ‘Pryde of my spreits and brightnes of my eyes’ (6), Dr. MS f. 2v, STS 140 and Hawthornden f. 27r and f. 51v, STS 141 (on f. 27r, ‘holye’ is replaced by ‘heauenly’). 30 ‘Bellisa pansiue satt and in her hands’, Hawthornden MS f. 25v, STS 210 (1–6). 31 The tarantula conceit stems from Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (see Purves, cxxi, suggesting also ‘the extravagances of Marino and other Neapolitan poets of the seventeenth century’); the association between the poison of desire and of the spider may also come from the etymological association between Venus and venom. 32 ‘Newe wondar of the world, one mo than seaven’, Dr. MS f. 13r, STS 160 (4–10). 33 Rime, sonnet 326 (3–4): ‘beauty […] closed […] up in a little grave’ (Durling, 514). 34 ‘The tabill’, Hawthornden MS 2063, ff. 253r-v; STS 333–4. 35 A sequential cohesion to these nine poems is strongly implied but not necessarily endorsed by the manuscript arrangement: ‘Elagie’, f. 38r, ‘My witts and thochts’ and ‘A Dreame’, f. 38v; ff. 39r-v introduce a new manuscript binding with the text of ‘cap i’ of the ‘Triumph of Love’; ff. 40r–41v ‘Alread those’; ff. 42r-v blank; f. 43r psalm 129; ff. 43r–44r blank; 44v–45v ‘ffor his valentyne’; on a new manuscript binding, f. 46r, ‘Dial’ and ‘renponit’, and then order in STS conforms to MS until f. 48v. 36 ‘My witts and thoughts togeather ar att stryfe’, f. 38v, STS 234 (5–8). 37 ‘The air and the earth and the sea ought to weep for the lineage of man, for without her it is like a meadow without flowers […]’ (9–11; Durling, 534). 38 ‘A Dreame’, f. 38r, STS 235 (9–12). 39 Rime sonnet 342 (12–14): ‘“What good,” she says, “is knowledge to one who despairs? Weep no longer, have you not wept enough for me? For would that you were as much alive as I am not dead!”’ (Durling, 538). 40 ‘My witts and thoughts…’, f. 38v, STS 234 (3).

Notes 211 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52

53 54 55

56 57

58 59 60 61 62

‘Dial’, f. 46r, STS 236 (1–4). f. 46r, STS 237 (13–14). ‘My cheare and mirth my plesour is exyled’, f. 46r, STS 238 (3). Rime sonnet 248 (8): this beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure’ (Durling, 410). f. 46v, STS 239 (11–14). ‘A Fantasie’, f. 49r, STS 243. Cf. canzone 359 (60–6). Sonnet 319 (9–11): ‘her better form, which still lives and shall always live up in the highest heaven, makes me ever more in love with her beauties…’ (Durling, 498). Sonnet 327 (14). Sonnet 317 (9–14): ‘If only she had lived we would have come to where, speaking, I could have put down in those chaste ears the ancient burden of my sweet thoughts, and she would perhaps have answered me with some holy word, sighing, though our faces were changed, and the hair of both’ (Durling, 496). ‘Would I had so sorrowful a style that I could win my Laura back from Death as Orpheus won his Eurydice…’ (49–50; Durling, 526). ‘If they can go so high, my weary rhymes, as to reach her who is beyond sorrow and weeping and with her beauties now makes Heaven glad, she will surely recognise my changed style’ (61–4; Durling, 528). Sonnet 346 (13). Sturm-Maddox, 104. ‘ma tropp’ era alta al mio peso terrestre,/et poco poi n’uscì in tutto di vista’, sonnet 335 (9–10): ‘but she was too high for my terrestrial weight, and a little after she went entirely out of my sight’ (Durling, 532). ff. 47r-v seem to constitute a definitive sequence. ‘In by way roadds I ran a restles race’, f. 13v, STS 252; though this sonnet does not fall within this ostensible sequence, it is pertinent to include it because of its preoccupation with sin. ‘My winding scheits my steidfast love sal end’, f. 47v, STS 249. (1–14). The ‘faucos’ transcription is uncertain. See William J. Kennedy, Authorising Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). The Rime’s theological or religious ‘meaning’ could be doctrinally affected by the Catholic or Protestant persuasion of its reader; see Kennedy, 141ff. Ane Answer, STS vol. 2, 25 (1–14). Ibid., 56.

Conclusion 1 See L.E. Kastner and H.B. Charlton eds, The Poetical Works of William Alexander Earl of Stirling, STS, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1929). 2 Alexander Craig, Amorose Songes and Sonets (1608) in David Laing ed., Poetical Works (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1873); William Drummond, sonnet sequence of 1616, in L.E. Kastner, Poetical Works, STS, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1913).

212 Notes 3 Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII. Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 38. 4 The Vranie (169, 178), in Essayes of a Prentise, sig. Eijr: James Craigie, The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1958), vol. 1, 27. 5 David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment. Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 102. 6 Robert H. MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 226. 7 See Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Fatherly Authority: the politics of Stuart Family Images’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers eds, Rewriting the Renaissance. The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5; also Caroline Bingham, Relations between Mary Queen of Scots and Her Son King James VI of Scotland, Royal Stewart Papers 19 (London: Royal Stewart Society, 1982). 8 M. de Fontenay, envoy of Mary’s to James in a letter to Mary’s secretary, 15 August 1584 in Robert Ashton ed., James I by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchison, 1969), 1. On the ‘spectral’ relationship between Mary and James, see Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots. Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998), 71.

Index Acts of Sederunt, 30 Alberti, Leon Battista, 57 Alexander, William, 107 Aurora, 167 Allan, David, 168 Amor, 132 see also Cupid Anger, Jane, 62 Angus, Earl of see Archibald Douglas Anna of Denmark, 81–91, 95, 149 Anne (Lady Glammis), 80, 95 Anne of Denmark see Anna of Denmark Aretino, Pietro, 116 anti-Catholicism, 7, 9, 15–16, 22, 27 anti-feminism, 7, 51 anti-Petrarchanism, 21, 162 Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics, 122 authorship collaborative, 79, 103, 132 female poetic, 49, 63, 120 Bacon, Francis, 78 Bannatyne, George, 47, 169 Bannatyne manuscript, 7, 9, 46–73 as politicised anthology, 47–52 ‘contemptis of luve and evill wemen’, 51, 52, 55–61 Marian context of, 47–51, 61 poetic rhetoric in, 55–61 querelle des femmes poetry, 55–61 religious context of, 51–2 ‘songis of love’, 52–5, 56 authors Chaucer, Geoffrey, 51, 58, 62 ‘Clerk’, 51, 57 Douglas, Gavin, 51, 70–1 Dunbar, William, 49, 51, 70 ‘Fethy’, 51 Henryson, Robert, 51 Kennedy, Walter, 51, 71 ‘Mersar’, 51, 68

‘Moffat’, 51, 59 Scott, Alexander, 3, 23, 49, 51, 61, 70 ‘Stewart’, 51, 54–5 ‘Weddirburne’, 51 texts ‘Aganis mariage of evill wyfes’, 60 ‘All tho that list of wemen evill to speik’, 66, 67 ‘As phebus bricht in speir meridiane’, 53 ‘ffresche fragrent flour of bewty souerane’, 50 ‘fflour of all fairheid’, 53 ‘In all this warld no man may wit’, 56, 57 ‘Leif luve my luve no langar thow it lyk’, 70 ‘L[ett]re of Cupeid’, 62–6, 68 ‘Maist ameyn roseir’, 53 ‘My hairt is thrall begone me fro’, 54 ‘My luve wes fals and full of flattry’, ‘Moffat’, 59 ‘O ma[n] transformit and vnnaturall’, ‘Weddirburne’, 70 ‘The bewty of Hir amorus ene’, 54 ‘The moir I luve and serf at all my mycht’, 52 ‘The well of vertew and flour of woma[n]heid’, 54 Barclay, Hugh, of Ladyland, 126 Beaton, James, of Creich, 118, 127 Beauvoir, Simone de, 60 Beilin, Elaine, 42 Bell, Sandra, 7 Bembo, Pietro, 36, 38, 39, 154 Bergeron, David, 98–9, 100, 102, 103 Betoun, Elizabeth, 107 Bhaba, Homi, 4 Bishop, Thomas, 17 Blackwood, Adam, 23 213

214 Index body, the see coporeality Boece, Hector, 83 Bornstein, Diane, 62–3, 67 Bothwell, Francis, Earl of, 149 Bothwell, James Hepburn, Earl of, 17, 21, 23, 25, 28, 32, 37, 44 relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots, 22, 24, 26, 30–1 Brantôme, Pierre de, 15, 19 Bruno, Giordano, 38, 102 Buchanan, George, 16–17, 23, 100 Admonitioun, 17 Detectio, 17 Detectioun, 16–17, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 33, 37, 43, 61 Psalms, 23 Silvae, 17 caritas, 70, 121, 133 ‘Castalian band’ see coteries, Jacobean Castiglione, Baldassare, 56, 110, 1231 Il Cortegiano, 56, 154 Catholicism, 98 and femininity, 7–8, 9 in poetry, 126–8 see also Counter-Reformation; Mariology Cecil, Sir William, 17 Charles I, 79 Châtelard, 24 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 51, 58, 620 Troilus and Criseyde, 51 see also ‘Bannatyne manuscript’ Christianity see Catholicism; Counter-Reformation; Manichaeism; Protestantism; Reformation and erotic desire see ‘passional’ love Christine de Pisan L’Epistre au dieu d’amours, 62–6, 67z8 Cicero, Marcus Tullius De Amicitia, 122–3 Cixous, Hélène, 9, 116 ‘Clerk’, 57 Clewett, Richard, 4 Constable, Henry, 127 corporeality, 29–33, 37–40, 87, 146

coteries coterie culture, 77, 79–80, 103, 126, 131 Jacobean, 79–80, 82, 103 Counter-Reformation, 126, 128 court culture, 8, 108 anti-courtliness, 130 courtliness in poetry, 80–1, 105–6, 113 as performative culture, 9 articulation of desire in, 9 Craig, Alexander, 107, 167 Craig, Thomas, 49 Cupid, representations of, 109, 110, 132–8, 144 cupiditas, 22, 47, 61, 68–71 Darnley, Henry Stewart, Lord, 3, 6, 15, 24, 25, 26, 37, 48, 49, 51 d’Aubigny, Maréchal, 98 Davidson, Peter, 17 Dempster, Thomas, 126 desire and mourning/loss, 10, 39–41, 100–1, 103, 162 as lack or absence, 38–40, 143–4 female, 15–17, 20, 21, 559–61, 89–91, 116–18 psychoanalytic theories of, 21, 143–4, 138–9 see also eroticism; love Desportes, Philippe, 113 Dilworth, Mark, 127 Donne, John, 149 Douglas, Archibald, Earl of Angus, 79 Douglas, Gavin, 51 Eneados, 70–2 Douglas, Lady Jean, 79 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 162, 167–8 History, 168 Poems, 162 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 92, 100 Judit, La, 5 Seconde Sepmaine, ou Enfance du Monde, La, 5, 91 L’Vranie ou Muse Celeste, 5, 111, 121

Index 215 Du Bellay, Joachim Deffense et illustration de la langue francaise, 6 Duff, Thomas, 127 Dunbar, 24, 30, 31 Dunbar, William, 49, 51, 70 Durkan, John, 2, 17, 127 Edinburgh, 48, 82 Elizabeth I, 15, 22, 24, 26, 29, 31, 48, 77, 85, 149 Eros, 132 see also Cupid eroticism and abnegation, 27–9, 36–7 and masochism, 32–3 as danger, 3–8, 10, 26 and religious redemption see ‘passional’ love as reflection of the Fall see ‘passional’ love Cupid, representations of, 109, 110, 132–8, 144 erotic allegory, 92–7, 99–103, 110, 140–1 erotic death, 87, 92–4, 145–7, 156–62 erotic dreams, 91–7 erotic imagination, 92–3 erotic pleasure, 148 erotic poetry, condemnation of, 15–16, 23–7 homoeroticism, 9, 80, 98, 113, 123, 132, 142–3 le petit mort, 146, 147 see also desire; love Erskin, John, of Dun, 24 Erskine, Sir Thomas, 79 Erskine, William, 127 Eve, 67 Felman, Shoshana, 20 Fénelon, La Mothe, 16 ‘Fethy’, 51 Ficino, Marsilio, 38, 39–41, 147, 162 Fineman, Joel, 90 Fleming, Lady Jean, 150 Fowler, William, 2, 3, 8, 149–63, 167, 168, 169

Answer to the Calumnious Letter and Erroneous propositiouns of an apostat named M. Io. Hammiltoun, An, 150–2 Epistle, 163 Tarantula of Love, The, 5–6, 11, 106, 149, 150, 151–63 Triumphs (translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi), 5, 150 Fradenburg, Louise, 7, 29 Fraser, Antonia, 31 French literature Catholic poetry, 8 poetics, 6 Protestant, 5 see also du Bartas; du Bellay; de Ronsard; Labé Gambara, Veronica, 20 Gasgoigne, George, 4 gender see eroticism; homoeroticism; women Girard, René, 21 Glammis, Lady see Anne (Lady Glammis) Glammis, Lord see Patrick Lyon Glasgow Cathedral, 127 Goldberg, Jonathan, 81, 83, 86 Gordon, George, Earl of Huntly, 80 Gordon, Lady Jean, 21 Gravdal, Kathryn, 43 Guillet, Pernette de, 20, 29 Guise, Marie de, 8, 100 Hamilton, John, 151 Harvey, Elizabeth, 115 Heijnsbergen, Theo van, 48, 50 Henryson, Robert, 51 Hepburn, James see Earl of Bothwell Hoccleve, Thomas, 62–4, 67–8 Holyrood, Palace of, 38 homoeroticism, 9, 80, 98, 113, 123, 132, 142–3 Horapollo Hieroglyphics, 100 Hudson, Robert, 130 Hudson, Thomas, 5 Huntly, Earl of see George Gordon Hyde, Thomas A., 133

216 Index idolatory Mary, Queen of Scots and, 27 Protestant fear of, 163 women and, 72, 155–7 Innermeith, Lord see John Stewart, Lord Innermeith Jack, R.D.S., 2, 3, 123, 133 Jacobean culture, 77–167 Jacobean Renaissance culture, 2–3, 77 James III, 7 James IV, 7 James V, 107 James VI, 1, 7, 20, 25, 29, 44, 45, 77–104, 105–13, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125–48, 149, 169 erotic poetry, 76 see also ‘the Anna sonnets’; Amatoria; Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix Jacobean poetry about, 100, 105–13, 120–4, 129–44 literary collaboration and, 79, 103, 132 literary theory of, 4, 8, 77–9, 82, 103–4 love poetry to Anna of Denmark, 81–91 relation with Alexander Montgomerie, 125–48 relation with Elizabeth I, 77 relation with Esmé Stewart, Duke of Lennox, 80, 97–104 relation with Mary, Queen of Scots, 44, 167 representation as Apollo, 8, 86, 93, 96, 101–2, 110, 129, 137, 140–51 self-representation in poetry, 9 works ‘All the kings short poesis’ see Amatoria Amatoria, 79, 81–97 ‘Anna sonnets’, the, 81–91 Basilikon Doron, 22, 81, 98, 99 Daemonologie, 81 Essayes of a Prentise, The, 3–5, 6, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 107, 129

Furies, The (translation of Du Bartas’ La Seconde Sepmaine), 5, 91 Lepanto, 91, 92 Phoenix, Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called, 9, 81, 91, 97–104, 142 Poeticall Exercises, 91 Schort Treatise, containing Some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis poesie, Ane, 3, 78 Urania, 8, 111, 121 Works, 103 Javitch, 132 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 42, 43 Jordan, Constance, 56 Kennedy, Walter, 51 ‘Ane aigit man’, 71 Kennedy, William J., 162 Knox, John, 23, 24 History of the Reformation, 24 Kristeva, Julia, 9 Labé, Louise, 20, 33, 39 Evvres, 16 Lacan, Jacques, 143–4 Lauder, James, 127 Laumonier, Paul, 8 Lekprevik, Robert, 3, 25, 151 Lennox, Esmé Stewart, Duke/Earl of, 17, 18, 80, 91, 97–104, 121, 142 Leone, 38, 44 Lerer, Seth, 168 Leslie, John, Bishop of Ross, 19, 22, 42 Defence, 18, 26 Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth, 22, 27 Liddisdaill, 32 Lindsay, Alexander, 79 love amicitia/friendship, 108, 122 amour courtis see courtly love caritas, 70, 121, 133 courtly, 28, 47, 54 erotic see eroticism ‘mortal love’, 144–8, 157–62 Neo-platonic, 147 ‘passional’, 7, 125, 145, 168

Index 217 Petrarchan see Petrarchism redemptive see ‘passional’ love sacred and profane, 5–6, 10 ‘sovereign love’, 9–10, 48, 105–6, 110–12, 120, 129 spiritual see Neo-Platonic love; NeoPlatonism; caritas love-god see Cupid Low, Anthony, 143 Lyall, R.J., 126, 129, 146 Lynch, Michael, 2, 26, 48 Lyndsay, David Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis, 120 Lyon, Patrick, Lord Glammis, 80 MacDonald, Alasdair, 48, 49, 51 Machiavelli, Niccolò Il Principe, 149 MacQueen, John, 2 Madonna, The, 23 see also Mariology, Virgin Mary Maitland, Sir John, 150 Manichaeism, 47, 58, 61, 71 maniero, 129 mannerism, 129, 133, 146, 148 mannerismo, 129 manuscript culture, 50, 72, 103 see also coterie culture Marian culture, 15–74 Mariology, 9, 62–9 Blessed Virgin Mary, 8, 9, 47, 54, 65–9, 151, 163 Mary as the Second Eve, 67 Our Lady, 72 Regina Maria, 51 Marshall, Rosalind, 31 martyrdom, 33, 39–43, 88, 125, 133, 144–8 l’amant martyr, 155 martyrs, 125 see also martyrdom Mary, Queen of Scots, 1, 2, 3, 6–7, 8, 103, 127–8, 149, 163, 167 adultery of, 6, 21 and martyrdom, 33, 40–3 anti-feminist debate about, 7, 9, 23–7 authorship controversy about, 15–20

Catholicism of, 7, 40–3 erotic poetry of, see ‘The CasketSonnets’ execution of, 77, 167 implicated in murder of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, 6, 15, 26 marriage to Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, 48, 51 martyrdom of, 40 political controversies about, 6, 16–18, 24 rape of, 29–32, 38, 39 relationship with James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, 22, 24, 26, 30–1 relationship with James VI, 44, 167 relationship with Elizabeth I, 22, 26 religious poetry of, 40–3 works ‘Casket-Sonnets, The’, 6, 7, 15–45 marginal gloss of, 17–18, 21, 28, 30 ‘violation sonnet’, the, 29–32, 38, 39 ‘Tetrasticha ou Quatrains a son fils’, 169 Mazzotta, Giuzeppe, 154 McDiarmid, Matthew, 2, 107 McManus, Clare, 89 Medici, Lorenzo de, 39 Melville, James, 21, 82 ‘Mersar’, 51, 68 Meun, Jean de, 64 Mirandola, Pico della, 38 ‘Moffat’, 51, 59 monarchy absolutism of, 82–6 and poetic rhetoric, 8–9 divine right of, 3, 83 erotic desire of monarch, 78–9 erotic devotion to see ‘sovereign love’ self-representation of, 3–4, 9, 24 Montgomerie, Alexander, 2, 3, 8, 10, 104, 116, 118, 124, 125–48, 149, 168 The Cherrie and the Slae, 91, 127, 133

218 Index Montgomerie, Alexander con’t lyrics and sonnets, 125–48 Moray, Earl of see James Stewart Morton, James Douglas, Earl of, 104 mourning/loss, 10, 39–40, 99–100, 103, 144–8, 162 Murray, Sir John, 80 Neo-Platonism, 28, 37–40, 86, 132, 147 New Historicism, 2 Newlyn, Evelyn S., 49, 55 Oslo, 81 Ovid, 64 Metamorphoses, 140 Parkinson, David, 24, 25, 47, 49 Patterson, Annabel, 69 Perry, Curtis,79 Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca], 1, 153 representation of Laura, 101, 151, 157, 158, 160, 161 Rime sparse [Canzionere], 8, 11, 101, 133, 151, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 163 Secretum, 163 Trionfi, 5, 123, 151 Trionfo d’amore, 134 Trionfo della morte, 163 see also anti-Petrarchism; Petrarchism Petrarchism as rhetoric, 19, 91 as philosophy of love, 33 feminisation of, 15 Phillips, J.E., 24 Phillipy, Patricia, 43 Plaidy, Jean 31 Pliny the Elder Natural History, 100 Plotinus, 36, 38 poetry as ‘gift’, 9–10, 50–1, 105–7, 118, 123–4, 150 dialogic, 105 epistolary, 98, 99 epithalamia, 17, 48–9, 80 erotic poetry, condemnation of, 15–16, 22–7

erotic poetry by women see Gambara; Guillet; Labé; Mary Queen of Scots’ ‘casket–sonnets’; Stampa erotic poetry by men see Fowler; James VI; Montgomerie; John Stewart poetic rhetoric and display, 109–10 see also mannerism poetic rhetoric and truth, 22–3, 77–9 songs see Bannatyne manuscript, ‘songis of love’ sonnet sequences, 149 tragedy, 11 politics and eros, 1–2, 3–7, 15, 27, 72–3, 103–4 and erotic language, 4–5 political turmoil, 3, 15 print culture, 50 Protestantism censorship, 49 poetics, 129, 151 poetic propaganda, 23 see also anti–Catholicism; Reformation Puttenham, George, 113 querelle des femmes, 47, 51, 55–61, 62, 63, 69–73 Quinn, William A., 68 Ramsay, Allan, 47 Reformation, 69 poetic propaganda, 23 Regina Maria, 51, 73 see also Mariology, Virgin Mary Roman de la Rose, Le, 63 Renaissance, Scottish, 2–3 see also Jacobean Renaissance culture Ronsard, Pierre de, 8, 15, 18, 23, 135, 147 Elegie à la Royne d’Ecosse, 23 Ross, Ian, 2 Ruscelli, Girolamo Imprese Illustri, 141 Ruthven Raid, 4, 98, 102, 104, 113

Index 219 Saint-Gelais, Melin de, 86 Scève, Maurice Délie, 140 Scott, Alexander, 3, 23, 49, 51, 61, 70 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 56 Sharpe, Kevin, 90–1 Shire, Helena, 2, 127, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140 Sidney, Sir Philip, 163 Smith, Bruce, 138 Spenser, Edmund, 163 Amoretti, 163 Speroni, Sperone, 39 spiritual love see caritas; NeoPlatonism Spynie, Lord see Alexander Lindsay Stampa, Gaspara, 20, 28 ‘Stewart’, 51, 54–5 Stewart, Esmé see Duke/Earl of Lennox Stewart, Henrietta, 80 Stewart, Henry see Lord Darnley Stewart, James, Earl of Moray, 17, 18 Stewart, John, 2, 3, 8, 9, 97, 105–24, 142, 149, 168 Ane Schersing out of Trew Felicitie, 106, 111, 120, 121, 123, 124 Rapsodies, 105–24, 129 Stewart, John, Lord Innermeith, 107 Stewart, Mary see Mary, Queen of Scots Stuart, Arbella, 150 Tasso, Torquato, 52 Tertullian, 59 Tullibardine, Earl of see Sir John Murray Tyrone, Earl of, 127 Union of the Crowns, 3, 167 Vaughan, Robert A Dialogue defensyve for women agaynst malycius detractors, 62

Vickers, Brian, 53 Virgin Mary, 8, 54, 65–9, 151, 163 see also Mariology, Madonna (The) Vives, Joannes L., 54 De Institutione foeminiae Christianae, 26 Waldegrave, Robert, 127 Walsingham, Francis, 149 Watson, James, 47 ‘Weddirburne’, 51, 70 Weldon, Anthony, 98 Wemyss, Lady Cecilia, 118 Wemyss, Sir David, 118 Wemyss, Margaret, 107, 118–20 Westcott, Allan F., 96 Wittig, Monique, 45 women and poetic authorship, 49, 63, 120 beauty of, 23, 52–5 chastity of, 24, 26, 52, 121–2 debate about see querelle des femmes desire of, 15–16, 20, 21, 59–61, 69–71, 116–18 female-voiced poetry, 19–20, 106, 115–18, 122–4, 128 and misogyny see anti-feminism and motherhood, 65–6 rape of, 24, 25, 30–3, 42, 43 represented as Lucretia, 33 represented as Magdalene, 43 represented as Medea, 25 represented as Venus, 23, 25, 121 sexuality of see women, desire of virginity of, 52, 65–9, 118, 121 virtue of, 62–8 visual images of, 25 Wood, John, 15 Woodbridge, Linda, 56 Wormald, Jenny, 32–3, 98 Woudhuysen, H.R., 106 Wroth, Mary ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, 42 Würzburg, Abbey of, 127

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