The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan

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THE RHETORIC OF THE CONSCIENCE IN DONNE, HERBERT AND VAUGHAN

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The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert and Vaughan C E R I S U L L I VA N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–954784–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Ian, with unwavering respect


Preface Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan see the conscience as only partly theirs, only partly under their control. Of course, as early modern theologians said, conscience ought to work as a simple but strict logical act, comparing actions to God’s law, and giving judgement, in a joint procedure between the soul and its maker. Inevitably, though, there are problems. Hearts refuse to confess, or forget the rules, or jumble them up, or refuse to come to the point when a verdict is being delivered. These three poets are beady-eyed experts on failure: after all, where subjects can only discover their authentic nature in relation to the divine, it really matters whether the dialogue works. The Rhetoric of the Conscience sets out to find out how, and why, each poet—despite their very different devotional backgrounds—uses similar sets of tropes to investigate these problems: enigma, aposiopesis (breaking off ), chiasmus, subjectio (answering your own question), and antanaclasis (repetition with a difference). It shows how, once structured as a language shared by God and the poet, the conscience can be tortured, bored, ignored, scrawled over, twisted, and broken up to engineer a proper response. It thus looks at Protestant poetics in a somatic context, in detailed readings of a wide range of poems. Ceri Sullivan


Acknowledgements Much of the research for the book was done with the efficient and courteous help of librarians at the Bodleian, the British Library, and Bangor University. Some scholars gave up their own research time to comment on my work: very many thanks to Elizabeth Barry, Katharine Craik, Peter Field, Eliane Glaser, Paul Harvey, Margaret Kean, Jessica Maynard, Clare McManus, Andrew Moor, Sharon Ruston, and Peter Stoneley. Tom Corns, Ian Gregson, Tom Healy, Barbara White, and the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press squinted at the manuscript with astringent good sense and humour, one eye on the overall argument, the other on the detail. Linda Jones proofread the text. Lucie Armitt, Danielle Clarke, Tony Claydon, Andrew Gordon, Peter Kitson, Peter Mitchell, Richard Serjeantson, Michael Whitworth, and Sue Wiseman gave me references to material I had not come across or let me read their work in progress. Tony Brown spent an afternoon squeezing hearts and oranges to take the photograph on the cover. Such help was especially generous given the time pressures on British scholars, as they meet the shifting and enigmatic demands of the Research Assessment Exercise, and double the numbers of students they teach. The team at OUP, Jacqueline Baker, Andrew McNeillie, Val Shelley, and Fiona Smith, and Elizabeth Stone of Bourchier, were encouraging and efficient. In terms of physical help, the study leave financed by Bangor University and the Arts and Humanities Research Council was appreciated—as were the spare rooms offered by Lucy Cottrell, Mavis Howell, and Andrew Moor in trips to libraries. Small portions of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 first appeared, in different form, in the George Herbert Journal, Modern Philology (copyright 2006 by The University of Chicago), and Cahiers Elisabethains. I am grateful to the editors for permission to re-use these.


Contents Illustrations Abbreviations

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Introduction

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1. The Conscience as a Syllogism

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2. Torturing the Conscience with Divine subjectio

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3. Godly Graffiti, or, the Enigma of the Conscience

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4. Bumptious Reading and Priggish antanaclasis

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5. Peevish Weariness, aposiopesis, and the Irresolute Conscience

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6. Eyes, Tears, Eyes, and the Penitential chiasmus

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Conclusion: The Engineered Conscience

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Bibliography Index

234 269


List of Illustrations All illustrations are taken from copies at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 2.1. Harvey, C., The School of the Heart; or the Heart of It Self, Gone Away from God Brought Back Again to Him (1647; London, 1674), p. 58 (Bodleian shelfmark 14770 f484). 2.2. Lithgow, W., The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles (London, 1632), p. 464 (Bodleian shelfmark 4◦ S19 (5) Art). 2.3. Allen, W., Historia del glorioso martirio di sedici sacerdoti (Macerata, 1583; a translation of A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII Reverend Priests), picture 4 after O4 v (Bodleian shelfmark Vet F1 f50). 2.4. Verstegan, R. [alias Rowlands], Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (1588; Antwerp, 1604), p. 49 (Bodleian shelfmark Antiq e B1604 1). 3.1. Bulwer, J., Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or, the Artificiall Changling (London, 1653), p. 537 (Bodleian shelfmark 4◦ B8 Art BS).

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Abbreviations ELH ELR GHJ JDJ JHI L&T MP N&Q RH SEL SP

English Literary History English Literary Renaissance George Herbert Journal John Donne Journal Journal of the History of Ideas Literature and Theology Modern Philology Notes and Queries Recusant History Studies in English Literature Studies in Philology

In quotations, long s, i/j, and u/v have been normalized, and contractions expanded.

Introduction Every murderer is cursed, saith the mind. Thou art a murderer, saith conscience assisted by memory. ergo, Thou art accursed, saith conscience, and so giveth her sentence. 1

If only it were that simple. The early modern Protestant conscience is an intriguing construction: a conglomerate, part divine, part human. Founded on the relationship with God, it is the only important and enduring element in the self. There are other elements, no doubt, but not significant ones. Individuals enthusiastically start with this first principle in understanding themselves. It encourages them to produce— with irritation, puzzlement, surprise, or elation—highly original formations. These make little or eccentric use of convention and experience as they attempt to recognize the bridge between man and God that is the conscience. The amateur self emerges as a ramshackle collection of extensions, appendages, half-regretted plans, and half-finished projects. There is a sardonic comedy to those moments in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan’s poetry when they attempt to renovate a dilapidated conscience. This book quotes the costs of such labour in metaphysical verse. I argue that Stuart theologians see the conscience as a constant syllogistic process which compares actions confessed with laws laid down in heart or scripture, to judge on them. The process fails in the poems when the soul refuses to produce the right words. Instead, poets wryly produce tropes, words twisted from their usual meanings. These appear to conform to the demands of the project but in fact escape (somewhat smugly, it must be admitted) to start the process all over again. Poets look at each element in the syllogism when it goes 1

William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (Cambridge: J. Legatt, 1596), p. 84.

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Introduction

wrong, that is, when acts are not confessed, laws not read in heart or Bible, or judgements are not passed. These are linguistic acts which work away from the truthful toward the rhetorical, as questions produce only groans, words are pointlessly repeated, and speech is broken off. They produce a similar set of images across the three poets, where torture fails to produce confession, words chipped on the heart or busily collected from books are not understood, and speakers collapse in weary boredom. In short, anything less than a feeling of absorbed union with God is considered a failure of conscience and is investigated by the three poets in similar ways. Moreover, where the culture is clear that subjects can only discover themselves in relation to the divine—and the poems show considerable uncertainty about whether this is achievable—the self is also, potentially, left as a simulacrum. Time to try, and try again. I argue that this goes some way to account for the surprising frequency with which the same types of trope appear in the same images about the same issues of conscience in verse from a wide range of devotional and doctrinal positions. For instance, the Elizabethan Catholic William Alabaster uses the same image of a heart being racked to confess its sinfulness and insignificance before God’s might as does the Caroline ceremonial Anglican Herbert, though the tone varies. Alabaster’s bold command to Christ to ‘take thy Cross and nails and therewith strain/ My heart’s desire unto his full extent’ (penitential sonnet 19) becomes a wail in Herbert’s ‘wonder tortur’d in the space/ Betwixt this world and that of grace’ (‘Affliction IV’). 2 Indeed, such situations are repeated so often that each should perhaps be seen as a sub-genre, such as an aubade or a drinking-song, where the same techniques are used about the same theme, and the reader can be expected to respond in the light of past experience. The question of why they are repeated by a number of poets is not one that is often asked. Critics have studied the use by single writers of images such as man as dust or God writing on the heart. Rarely, however, has anyone looked across all the poets to discuss their shared topoi. The notable exception is Barbara Lewalski, who exhaustively traced the biblical sources and Protestant emblem and sermon analogues 2 W. Alabaster, The Sonnets, ed. G. M. Story and H. Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); G. Herbert, The Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941). References to the verse of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan will be made within the text by poem title.

Introduction

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in metaphysical verse. 3 Lewalski’s conclusion that these were Protestant, English poets of the Word, a conclusion which opposed Louis Martz’s claim that these members of the canon could come from a Catholic or at least continental heritage, has been difficult to challenge. Her scholarship has ensured that these men were largely accepted as writing out of and into a scriptural heritage. At first this seems to explain why the images were repeated. In fact, it leaves two subsidiary problems. First, why were these particular biblical images chosen so often by different writers, and second, why did the image produce a similar type of trope each time? To the first, a hasty answer might be that Herbert had a self-confessed admiration for Donne, and Vaughan for Herbert. 4 But again, the question would have to be why they select these particular images for copying. Donne’s interest in mapping, for instance, does not reappear in Herbert’s work, nor Herbert’s knowledge of commercial debt arrangements in Vaughan’s concerns. As for the second problem, neither Lewalski’s bank of biblical precedents nor the self-referencing habits of coterie verse circles across two generations can solve it. In a visually literate culture like our own it is natural to turn first to the image and then search for the sources or theology behind it. The answer to both problems lies in reversing this. Start with the assumption that the self is dialogic, that it is constituted by acts of the conscience which gather evidence of behaviour, consult godly expectations about this, and judge in the place of God. Conscience puts acts into language to objectify them. Certain forms of linguistic activity are entailed in this, such as directly answering questions, comparing and noting texts, producing and examining witnesses. Where the correct words are not offered—in a situation where silence is not an option—tropes arise. They are the self ’s equivocations in a rhetoric that allows negotiation with God to continue in adverse conditions. Lewalski gives a picture of 3 Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954). 4 In the preface to the 1655 edition of Silex scintillans Vaughan described himself as a convert of Herbert. Donne, a close friend of Herbert’s mother, Magdalen, and his brother, Edward, collaborated with Herbert on a memorial volume for her in 1627, and they exchanged verses on the occasion of Donne’s ordination, Herbert mentioning Donne’s ‘eloquence’ and ‘kinde Expressions’. Henry Vaughan, The Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 439.

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Introduction

poets attaining the godly word after heroic efforts. If you start with the godly word, however, you can see them making efforts to wiggle off into rhetoric, to rephrase acts and laws in so many more comfortable words. Thus, ‘My . . . Life . . . Is. . . . Hid . . . In . . . Him . . . That . . . Is . . . My . . . Treasure’ is the laudable motto that runs through Herbert’s ‘Coloss 3.3’. However, even as the speaker purports to write into the Pauline epistle, he misquotes the poem’s epigraph, ‘Our life is hid with Christ in God’ (itself a misquotation of Paul’s words, ‘Your life . . . ’) by squinting at earth and heaven at the same time, so that ‘one eye/ Should aim . . . on high’ and the other with his life ‘obliquely bend’. This is a chicken-and-egg situation, however. It is easy to see why an understanding of the conscience as discursive produces tropes, but do they, in their turn, produce the images? Does, for instance, the situation of requiring a true confession, which in the case of sinful man must require a godly speaker to confess on his behalf, therefore produce the image of torture? The conclusion of this book will be not necessarily, but usually, because poets think in concrete, somatic terms. In short, the theology produces the trope, the social context produces the image. As Jacques Derrida has shown, restoring the palimpsest of activities which establish a trope exposes how a stance becomes a truth, as the circumstances producing its figures are erased. 5 Thus, focusing on the verbal detail of contemporary discourses on the conscience uncovers who owns and operates it, and how it is related to the experience of inwardness in the metaphysical poems. Of course, I am not claiming that premisses in a failing syllogism are the only way poets think about their relationship with God. Their characteristic modes contrast with each other: Donne tries to reason his way out of an assumption that he is damned, Herbert has a series of domestic arguments with God, violent disputes on the basis of undisputed affection, and Vaughan relies wholeheartedly on the transcendent beneficence of God. It is, then, all the more striking that the same topics turn up across the work of the three. Getting to this point, however, will be complicated, so I have limited the investigation to the three poets’ work, and look at just five images of the conscience in action: the tortured self, the heart as a page, the 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, Margins of Philosophy (1972), trans. A. Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 210–13.

Introduction

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collector of texts, the soul in bits, and the exchange of glances. It might help now to sketch the main argument of each chapter before returning to establish and contextualize my assertions about how the conscience is regarded in the period. Given that I am trying to do something unusual in going between poems on one trope (rather than, say, devoting a chapter to each of the poets) the method will be similar in each chapter. I will open with the poems that form a sub-genre, discuss the rhetorical formation they use, move on to the social context of this trope, then reread the poems to discover how much the poets co-operate with the demands of their consciences. The first chapter considers how past critics have related metaphysical poetry to case casuistry, where individual situations are considered in detail against a moral law by a well-meaning and well-instructed judge. Early modern theologians habitually see the conscience acting as a syllogism. In this chapter, the features of the conscience operating this syllogism are considered, including its self-reflexive qualities, its effect on the self ’s agency, its role as spy and recorder, and where the law it refers to is consulted. The three principal faults of the conscience (erring, seared, and blind) are explained from the point of view of Protestant Ramist casuistry rather than that of contemporary Catholic treatises. Judgement should be a practical method of mediating between human perceptions and divine attributes, a central subject of debate among theologians such as Thomas Jackson and William Ames. Chapter 2 looks at how God deals with uncooperative witnesses, in a repeated image of him torturing sinners until they ventriloquize his words. Poems such as Herbert’s ‘Justice II’ and Vaughan’s ‘The Stone’ are sulky about admitting that torture (especially when presented by its inflictor as neither gratuitous in motive nor freely inventive in form) is a good way to get back onto speaking terms: ‘O rack me not to such a vast extent;/ Those distances belong to thee . . . / thou dost stretch/ A crumme of dust from heav’n to hell (Herbert, ‘The Temper I’). Such specific reference to torture is a result of the trope inevitably present when God addresses man, subjectio, a monologue that presents itself as a dialogue but where, in fact, the speaker answers himself. The rhetorical implications of this practice, found in contemporary discussions of forced evidence drawn from Roman orators, continental jurists, and English practice under the royal prerogative, are based on an understanding of who has the right to hear and the duty to speak.

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Introduction

Despite coming from different legal premisses, all three systems agree that the torturer claims a sovereign right to inflict pain under defined circumstances, and that he knows in advance what must and will be said in answer to any questions. This stance has certain consequences: torture engrosses the victim’s imagination as much as his senses; he is considered to be bound rather than free (and so without the ethos of a man whose words can be believed), and any involuntary confession will convert past and future interrogation into punishment. Two contemporary models, sermons on Job’s sufferings and Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, exemplify the correct response to injury inflicted by God. In them the double part that the torturer takes up has, when God is the speaker, the theological grace of a doubly prevented speech. Here, the victim’s own words are stopped and God’s prevenient grace speaks through him. Indeed, since these reluctant witnesses are half inclined to leave the torturer to his own devices, their groans of conscience are also his sighs of frustration. Perhaps, though, the conscience—manifestly a failure as a witness to its possessor’s acts—will endorse the second term in the syllogism, and consult the written law? God’s law is written on the heart in the natural ability to recognize right and wrong which even pagans have. Chapter 3 points out that the alterity guaranteed by the enigmatic qualities of godly graffiti, in poems such as Herbert’s ‘Jesu’ and ‘H. Scriptures’, ensures that it is barely understood by its functionally illiterate bearers. ‘I tooke them up, and (much Joy’d,) went about/ T’unite these peeces, hoping to find out/ The mystery; but this neer done,/ That little light I had was gone’ (‘Vanity of Spirit’), says Vaughan with resignation. Godly carving on the tables of the heart is made lastingly impressive by being incorporated but not comprehended. Given this, the heart’s mottos cannot act to enforce the law, either as penal brands to evidence past error or as legal injunctions to regulate future conduct. The chapter investigates such pointless scratchings in terms of the period’s inscription technologies, mural decoration, and self-mutilation. In these poems, the enigma is insolently maintained to prevent the need for obedient action. Chapter 4 moves on to the heart’s reception of scripture, in poems such as Donne’s ‘La Corona’ and Vaughan’s ‘The Wreath’ that pun on ‘poesie’, which in the latter’s words weave a ‘twin’d wreath of grief and praise,/ Praise soil’d with tears, and tears again/ Shining with joy’.

Introduction

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Here, the approved secular mode of reading selectively, pen in hand, is performed with conscientious obtuseness on divine texts. These verses see themselves as florilegia, gatherings to be rewoven into other poems. Once again a rhetorical trope precedes the theological image in their antanaclasis (a repetition of words with a subtle shift in meaning). Unfortunately, though by now predictably, these three bustling poets show themselves to be more concerned with the physical practice of collection than with its effect on interpretation. Snorting with earnestness to anthologize from divine texts simply allows authors to ignore the intention of the revealed law of God. Their repetition of words culled from scriptures has a self-centredness that assassinates one proper meaning to allow another in subsequent use. Selves are woven into the wreaths presented to a justly irritated God, who must by now be wondering what it takes to get the soul to talk to him directly. Won’t speak, won’t read—will or can the conscience judge? Chapter 5 studies the frequent use of images of dust as an attack on the foundation of judicious dialogue, mutual engagement. An effective response to enforced attention is flabby uninterest. Poems such as Herbert’s ‘Dulnesse’ and Vaughan’s ‘The Evening-Watch’ break up those selves which should be focused on God, murmuring ‘Why do I languish thus, drooping and dull/ As if I were all earth? . . . / Sure thou didst put a minde there, if I could/ Finde where it lies’ (‘Dulnesse’). Both the image of distraction and its rhetorical formulation, aposiopesis (breaking off of speech), demonstrate that being lectured at results in a conscience that turns a deaf ear. Past criticism on these moments of distraction has followed the seventeenth century’s division of the medieval trespass of acedia (torpor in devotion) into either sinful distaste or melancholic illness. Such commentary on the first angle, a simple disinclination to pray, takes what is by now a familiar solafidian line, where, since faith alone merits grace, good deeds are unnecessary or even prideful. Since the possession by the poet of a ‘Protestant’ work ethic in worship is a hoped-for sign of grace (not a good work earning merit) then, conversely, distraction is a proof of innate depravity, a sign of the absence of God. The second aspect of acedia, that it is caused by the affliction of melancholia, is developed by critics who detail the shabby worldly careers and family affairs of the writers, before giving sympathetic treatment to the psychological damage caused by failure, manifested as a sick longing for a lost ideal. Yet if one looks at these

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poems on dust as records of failed conversations one finds the entirely different tone of boredom at an all-too-present divine. Not depression, here, but repression: although the fallen conscience acknowledges it goes to bits if not pulled together by God, it is irritated at the requirement to attend to him. Accordingly, a very aetiolated desire to hear God’s words comes out repeatedly in a fretful comedy of ‘peevish weariness’. These chapters emphasize the logical and reluctant nature of the conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan. They see it as a verbal, legal activity, which can break down. There were, however, other models of the conscience which could have been chosen by the three. Chapter 6 looks at Catholic and Protestant meditations whose narrators exchange glances with God or melt into tears in front of him. These are tears of penitence, but they appear to be as joyful as if no sin were involved. The looked at and the looker change places in a ceaseless chiasmus. By contrast, Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan rehearse their failure to weep and see, and so keep a space for themselves in any judgement in their actions. At this point, I am stepping again into the fraught area of doctrinal allegiance. ‘Here’s Herbert’s second, but equall’ declares the preface to the reader of Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple, but this bold, cross-faith comparison did not carry over into twentieth-century analyses. 6 The 1970s saw a magisterial encounter between Barbara Lewalski and Louis Martz, on whether Protestant or Catholic devotional writing lay behind the English seventeenth-century religious lyric. Lewalski turned to the English bible, the reformed liturgy of the Church of England, and a native appropriation of the Renaissance emblem tradition; Martz looked to the continental baroque, which manifested the revitalized Catholic Church’s devotional practices in a sense-based aesthetic. What Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan read was considered as much matter of national pride as of theology. The two scholars’ deep knowledge of the sources used by the poets may have proved too much of a good thing, however. For a quarter of a century, most revisionist critics have edged away from finding sacred analogues toward recognizing secular ones for the metaphysical poems, especially images of the sovereign, the courtier, and the subject. At 6 R. Crashaw, Poems: English, Latin, and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin (1927; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 75.

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the same time, the term ‘metaphysical poetry’ itself came under attack from post-modernists, concerned about metaphysics as an unacceptably positivist discipline, and one, moreover, that appeared unwilling to recognize the circumstantial and situated nature of thought. Only very recently have literary analyses lost an opening imprimatur that declared their sectarian allegiance, and begun to follow 1980s historians in seeing overlaps and slippages between the devotional practices of different denominations. 7 Though finding comparisons is, of course, dangerous from the point of view of politics and ecclesiology (especially in such areas as church papistry, Laudian ceremonialism, and career conversion), one can be more assured about a similar private approach to constructing a conscience among the three poets. Moreover, given that exploring their relation with God was a duty undertaken by the three as communicating members of a single church, in the normal course of their spiritual life, ‘metaphysical poetry’ seems a reasonable term to use. It is time to stop being squeamish about what was originally an insult offered to an entirely different group of poems (its author, John Dryden, considered that Donne affected ‘the Metaphysicks’ in his satires and love verse, not his divine poems). 8 The label serves well enough to indicate a group trying to reason about the actions of the conscience. The conclusion focuses on the early modern images of the constructions of self emerging from God’s relentless efforts to establish dialogue. Put schematically, each element in the syllogism of the conscience has been tested and found faulty, and each breakdown has been expressed through an alteration in flesh. As Jonathan Sawday says, what literary critics used to term metaphysical writing could also be called the writing of physicality, where the body is an ever-ready source of figures, especially of unknowability or doubt. 9 That the Renaissance thought through the body is a familiar notion in a critical tradition going back to T. S. Eliot’s wistful declaration that a thought was an experience 7 R. V. Young, in Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), and P. M. Oliver, in Donne’s Religious Writing: a Discourse of Feigned Devotion (London: Longman, 1997) point out Catholic and Protestant sources and analogues for the three poets, and note how similar Martz and Lewalski are in seeing them as poets of introspection. 8 J. Dryden, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire’ (1693), in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), ii, 19. 9 J. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 87.

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to Donne. 10 Current discussion of Renaissance bodies tends to start with the period’s art and art theory. Here, a revived interest in how classical geometry could be used to represent the human figure meets with a medieval exemplary religious tradition to create a new version of bodily perfection. 11 However, though under Christian theology an enquiry into the body is also an enquiry into the Godhead that it images, I will show that the form mirrored by the poems is not flawless. In Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan the body is forced into a grotesque shape by the divine pressure to speak. The psychological costs of maintaining a conscience are the aetiolated attitudes of boredom, irony, and opportunistic agreement. They appear in a caricatured body which is tortured, particulated, involuted, written on and wrung out. It is thus never wholly the poets’ own as it utters someone else’s intruded words. Varying Sawday’s conclusion, then, these images of the conscience are not metaphors of the body but involuntary expressions from the body, as in Herbert’s surprised ‘My heart did heave, and there came forth, O God !’ (‘Affliction III’). Though poems murmur about techniques of control, the devices of grace force disgruntled ejaculations from them. They are more than they mean to say. Such a consciously inadequate use by the poets must shake the position which metaphysical poetry has held for two decades, through Lewalski’s scholarly vigour, of being a solely and stoutly Protestant poetics of the Word. Indeed, Stuart writers show that the torques produced by enigma, aposiopesis, subjectio, antanaclasis, and chiasmus engineer the conscience—with, perhaps, a little discomfort—in a way I am tempted to call a prosthetic poetics. 10 11

T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (1932; London: Faber, 1972), pp. 281–91. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds, Renaissance Bodies: the Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London: Reaktion, 1990), p. 2.

1 The Conscience as a Syllogism Metaphysical poetry has been considered before in terms of the Stuart ethical discussion known as case casuistry. The essence of this is its individualism and pragmatism. In Stuart casuistry, specific situations are considered in detail against a general moral law, by a well-meaning and well-instructed judge, who offers definite advice on action. Early modern theologians habitually see the conscience in these terms, as a practical syllogism. This, of course, refers to a conscience in good working order. In the theology and the poetry alike, however, the terms of this syllogism are often phrased in the extreme tropes of failed communication. This is not a hotly debated area, and it has been over a decade since three studies judiciously weighed the effect of casuistical arguments in Donne and Herbert (Vaughan’s poems have never been studied in this respect). Taking Donne’s point that ‘On a huge hill,/ Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will/ Reach her, about must, and about must go’ (‘Satire III’), these critics agree that Donne is sceptical about whether one can reach truth or trust language to express it. 1 They turn their attention instead to the pragmatic shifts he requires to get any decision at all. For Meg Lota Brown, Donne’s opinion about whether any human authorities were safe to follow appears in the convoluted arguments and inability to conclude about a course of action usual in the Songs and Sonets. Meditations on ethical problems in Essays in Divinity, Biathanatos, and Pseudo-Martyr characteristically find an ambiguous relationship between law and its applications, words and their interpretation. Since case casuistry allowed, even sanctioned, anomalies within established rules, it was a method that enabled 1 John Donne, The Complete English Works, ed. A. J. Smith (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).

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The Conscience as a Syllogism

‘integration while promising integrity of conscience’. Such latitude, Brown argues, allowed Donne’s divided religious loyalties and his ambivalent politics. She disagrees with an earlier commentator, Dwight Cathcart, that casuistry in Donne is a matter of contradictory human laws that can be reconciled from a divine perspective. For Cathcart, the poems believe in a truth which is beyond our comprehension, and so must be expressed in terms of contradiction and paradox. No such thing, says Brown crisply: ‘there is no evidence of epistemological serenity in the Songs and sonets; casuistry appealed to Donne precisely because it recognizes and offers problems of uncertainty . . . methods of compromise and concession’. Donne acknowledges ‘reason’s inability to discern an absolute standard for action’, so he is ‘constantly having to determine the right response to new experience’. 2 Camille Wells Slights, however, though agreeing with Brown that Stuart casuistry is a temporary judgement on actions to be taken, not truths to be perceived, takes a subtle epistemological approach. Categorical decisions are impossible from a human point of view given the infinite variety of circumstances, but English casuists ‘saw the operation of the conscience as essentially the process of discovering proper relationships among various kinds of knowledge’: that drawn from human reason, that from revelation through history, that from natural philosophy, that from scripture, and so on, not forgetting that drawn from the voice of God heard in the individual soul. 3 Thus, both Slights and Brown think Donne’s status as a casuist is in doubt given his preference for extensively mulling over definitions rather than concluding on actions, not because he cannot see a true hierarchy between sources that inform the conscience. Herbert, however, is a different case, as he brings together scriptural direction and pragmatic pastoral experience to resolve cases with a confidence that, though the best he can do is inadequate, it is acceptable to God. Put bluntly, then, the choice the three critics offered is: trust that God knows (Cathcart), worry that no one knows (Brown), or rank how one knows (Slights), requiring, in the latter case, a recursive move 2 M. L. Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 8, 17–18, discussing D. Cathcart, Doubting Conscience: Donne and the Poetry of Moral Argument (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975). 3 C. W. Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 16.


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back to no one knowing finally how they know. All three assume the existence of a well-meaning conscience, just one which is in doubt about the rule it should follow. This does not accord with my experience of the poems, where the rules are not in doubt but there is no fervent desire to remember or read them. Of course, Brown, Cathcart, and Slights are concerned more to follow the trains of argument that lead Donne and Herbert to particular positions than to enquire into the decisionmaking faculty. Yet, in doing so they miss some of the poems’ comedy of reluctance. Purposeful high Christian earnestness is sometimes certainly present, as is outward rebellion, but so too are affectionate demurral, a sulky need to be coaxed, a vaguely irritable or bored agreement. It is a matter of tone and decorum, not one of eventual compliance with the law, of keeping the Almighty waiting for a judgement in a way that contrasts the sublime with the mulish. When Stuart casuists view the conscience as a guide to correct actions, or examine impediments to such judgement, they formally acknowledge their debt to Aquinas. 4 Only two articles in one question out of the 303 in his Summa theologica refer to the conscience itself (79Q, 12 and 13A), but the whole of its second part examines the human act in its end and principles. Aquinas’s stress on circumstance, on character that is formed and understood in action, was reinforced by a humanist interest in the virtuous life of public service, the vita activa. Thus, having face-to-face consultations with troubled souls and writing ‘comfortable letters’ on a particular problem were two of the main duties of a minister (indeed, a skill in cases of conscience was specifically required of ordinands by the Westminster Assembly). Initially, therefore, few counsellors thought it useful to go into print to provide more general advice. 5 Casuistry was a personal art of commentary 4 See, for instance, the discussions of Aquinas in Immanuel Bourne, The Anatomie of Conscience (London: G. W., 1623), pp. 6–8, and William Worship, The Christians Jewell: Or the Treasure of a Good Conscience (London: W. Stansby for J. Parker, 1617), pp. 8–10. Bourne (1590–1679) was minister at Ashhover, Derbyshire, with Presbyterian leanings; Worship was chaplain to Sir Francis Bacon in 1617. 5 John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 33–50; K. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 163. Reid Barbour finds a similar ‘circumstantial’ element to the life of holiness in the Caroline Church, including ceremonial: see his Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chs 1, 2.

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on a specific dilemma, where people turned to more experienced and learned acquaintances to give advice on moral problems. Donne, for instance, was not unusual in keeping copies of cases of conscience that had concerned his friends, with his comments on or solutions to them, ‘all particularly and methodically digested by himself ’, according to Izaak Walton. 6 Such a view, of course, reflected the reformed church’s move away from the Catholics’ professional administration of the sacrament of confession, through a priest specifically trained to listen to the penitent and relate what was confessed to the declarations of applied theology. Unlike auricular confession, a troubled person’s ethical or doctrinal problem was not seen as an individual matter but one the close community could discuss with interest and knowledge. A matter of conscience was considered to be both specific and communal; it reversed the Catholic procedure of applying universal rules in private. By the early 1600s, then, it was recognized that, since the laity had to judge their own actions, model answers on specific cases were needed to replace the Catholic manuals for confessors. The published versions could take the form of compendia of cases, or extended analyses of individual topical issues, particularly where they involved a conflict between religious and secular duties. Though the former are few, the latter are numerous. Thus, though the front line of Protestant casuists—the Puritan William Perkins and his pupil William Ames, the Presbyterian Richard Baxter, the bishops of Norwich, Down and Connor, and Lincoln (Joseph Hall, Jeremy Taylor, Robert Sanderson, and Thomas Barlow)—sigh that they are sadly limited in number and have to borrow material from Rome, modern historians see a more extensive vanguard of cases in the period’s anatomies of single situations, from the ethics of long hair on men, to those of medical intervention at a difficult birth, to the necessity of converting the Turks. For instance, Ames runs through just wars, duties in marriage, contracts, praying for others, oaths, and singing, and Perkins covers wearing velvet, eating to the glory of God, and lawful anger. The form these discussions take in casuistry manuals is invariably that of the extended syllogism since, Ames notes, the conscience ‘belongs to judgement discoursing because it cannot doe its act of Accusing, 6 I. Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (London: for R. Marriott, 1670), pp. 62–3.


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Excusing, Comforting, unlesse it be through the means of some third argument, whose force appeareth only in a Syllogisme, by that which is deduced and conducted out of it’. 7 Almost without exception, Stuart casuists describe this conscience in legal terms (paralleling the financial vocabulary they have for the ‘bond’, ‘debt’, and ‘interest’ created by Christ’s propitiatory sacrifice). They lay out the rights and duties of each party under the law, as revised and fulfilled in the New Testament, using the terminology of Roman judicial rhetoric. The intestine problems of judging the self are overcome by pointing to the othered source of that judgement, whose guidelines are drawn from the scriptures, and from the effects of a proper education. Casuists’ analyses of the faculty of conscience start by examining its quality of being aware of what it knows, seeing it as a mirror or a spy. Ephraim Huit talks of conscience as being ‘both the Agent, and the Object’ of its own regard. 8 Richard Bernard represents it successively as the power of the seeing eye (the power of understanding), the looking glass (God’s law), the reflective properties of the glass it looks into (an understanding of God’s word), the act of looking into the glass (the act of understanding), and the image of the eye produced in the glass (the conscience). 9 Immanuel Bourne talks of it as the eye and the glass of the soul, participating in the Trinity’s selfregard (‘and thus is conscience an excellent part of the Image of God in man: for as God looking into himself from all eternity seeth himself and begetteth his son’, just so the conscience sees itself ). 10 All emphasize that this is with God alone, since its records are hidden from outside inspectors. Despite the tempting proximity of our Lacanian vocabulary, the manuals’ insistence on seeing the self from another’s perspective—as 7 William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof (1639; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1975), p. 3, a translation of Ames’s De conscientia ejus jure et casibus (1630). This originated in the thirty-eight doctoral theses he proved at the University of Franeker in 1622 (it went through seven Latin and two English editions before 1650, and was included in Ames’s posthumously collected works in 1643). The Puritan Ames (1576–1633), a former pupil of William Perkins in Christ’s College Cambridge, was professor at Franeker between 1622 and 1633; the influence of his works was particularly strong in New England. 8 Ephraim Huit, The Anatomy of Conscience (London: I. D. 1626), p. 91. Huit was minister at Knoll, Warwickshire. 9 Richard Bernard, Christian See to thy Conscience (London: F. Kyngston, 1631), ch. 5, section 4. Bernard (1568–1641) was the Puritan minister at Batcombe, Somersetshire. 10 Bourne, Anatomie of Conscience, p. 8. William Ames also names the conscience as a metonym, both the mover and its motion; see Ames, Conscience, p. 2.

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‘me’ as well as ‘I’—does not establish a sense of separation. This is not a mirror-stage move into the symbolic realm where lawgiver and self are divided and individuated. Instead, producing a false etymology for the ‘con-science’, casuists point out that it shares its self-awareness with God, and in doing so becomes another’s again. Thus, for Perkins, ‘when a man knowes or thinks any thing, by meanes of Conscience, he knows what he knowes & thinks . . . [and] man knowes that thing of himselfe, which God also knowes of him’, and for Bourne, ‘God and conscience beare witnesse together’. 11 In these phrases the hybrid status of conscience, as both God’s and ours, challenges the binary underlying Calvinism. 12 It rebuts the clear divide between all that is good, which is God’s, and all that is evil, which is man’s, voiced in the eleventh of the 39 Articles: ‘we are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings’. Thus, casuistry manuals think this witness is involuntary, following Romans 2:15 (‘their conscience bearing witness at the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ’). The hearer ‘hath no rule over it, to make it speake, or bee silent when he list’. It can be a friendly aide; Bernard, for instance, says that ‘conscience is appointed by God to bee our carefull watch man, to eye us well, to record all our thoughts, sayings, and doings, & so to witnesse against or with us unto God’. 13 Manuals casually refer to banal contemporary documents that jot down the happenings of the present moment, such as diaries, accounting day books, and catalogues. 14 Richard Carpenter has some approving remarks on the conscience’s adequacy as a secretary or notary: it is never too slow or too fast to record what has been done, it never needs to strike out entries, and it is always willing to 11 William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, Distinguished into Three Bookes (London: J. Legatt, 1608), p. 44; Bourne, Anatomie of Conscience, p. 6. See also William Fenner, The Soules Looking-Glasse . . . with a Treatise of Conscience (1640), p. 32; Jeremiah Dyke, Good Conscience: or a Treatise Shewing the Nature . . . thereof (1624), pp. 17–18. Both Essex Puritans, Fenner (1600–40) was minister at Rochford and Dyke at Epping. 12 13 Bernard, Conscience, pp. 4–5. Bernard, Conscience, A3 r-v. 14 For instance, Dyke, Good Conscience, pp. 13–15, Worship, The Christians Jewell, p. 54. By contrast, at the assize sermon at Leicester on 25 July 1620 Anthony Cade described the acts of the conscience in formal dramatic terms as moving from protasis to catastrophe: A. Cade, A Sermon on the Nature of Conscience (London: B. Alsop, 1621), pp. 3–4.


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check them. 15 Yet matters also also take a more sinister turn, as Dyke calls the faculty a spy and overseer, and Worship, ‘the Lords spy’. 16 Huit’s conscience even has the necessary technical skills: ‘the Lord hath a Notary in every mans bosome’, so our acts are easily read since ‘the fire of Gods judgement (as Letters written with the juice of Oranges) will make them so perspicuous, that the most hardened and debaucht heart shall reade them plainely’. 17 Sadly, since getting at the facts is not always so painless, God’s spy turns into our traitor, judge, and tormentor. For Perkins, conscience is ‘a Judge that holdeth an assize and takes notice of inditements, and causeth the most notorious malefactour that is to hold up his hand at the barre of his judgement’. 18 Some ministers envisage a horrific time, in Worship’s words, ‘when Sci, and Con . . . have set [the sinner] upon the Racke, [and] he shall perforce spell’. 19 At worst, as Jeremy Taylor points out, there is no separation of duties in the judicial process, for God can beyond the powers of nature and the arts of concealment set up a Tribunal, and a Gibbet, and a Rack in the court of conscience . . . The fury within will compel [the sinner] to confess, and then he is prepared for the horrible sentence, as they who upon the rack accuse themselves, and then they are carried to execution. 20

Dyke agrees: ‘to be alwayes on the racke, alwayes on the Strapado, this is . . . the suburbes of Hell . . . Oh! the gripes, and girdes, the stitches, and twitches, the throws, and pangs of a galling, and a guiltie Conscience’. In hell, conscience ‘shall play the cruell hang-man and tormentor . . . day and night it shall stretch [us] there upon the racke’. 21 Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan spend much time peering curiously at their consciences, wondering who it is who is confessing to guilt. As Chapter 2 will 15 R. Carpenter, The Conscionable Christian (London: for J. Bartlett, 1623), pp. 45–6. Carpenter, minister at Sherwell in Devon, preached one of the assize sermons at Taunton in 1620. 16 Dyke, Good Conscience, p. 13; Worship, The Christians Jewell, ch. 6. 17 Huit, Anatomy of Conscience, p. 113. 18 W. Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (Cambridge: J. Legatt, 1596), p. 10. At the heart of this book is a discussion of what authority might bind the conscience. 19 Worship, The Christians Jewell, p. 30. See also Bourne, Anatomie of Conscience, pp. 10–12. 20 J. Taylor, Ductor dubitantium, or, the Rule of Conscience in all her General Measures, 2 vols (London: J. Flesher, 1660), pp. 20–1. Taylor (1613–67) largely wrote this book in the unsettled decade after his living at Uppingham, Rutland, was sequestered. 21 Dyke, Good Conscience, pp. 258, 266–7.

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show, while ‘No scrue, no piercer can/ Into a piece of timber work and winde,/ As Gods afflictions into man,/ When he a torture hath design’d’ (Herbert, ‘Confession’), this results in a strange form of selfpossession. Having got at the facts, conscience recalls the relevant law to bear on them. The knowledge of the law (what theologians call synteresis) is drawn from two primary sources: that revealed in scripture, and that on the heart, ‘a booke of law, in which are set down the penall statutes of the lande’. 22 The law is referred to pragmatically and unproblematically by case casuists. They rarely acknowledge the selection of biblical texts to be a form of interpretation, and tend to work away from or towards a verse rather than setting verses against each other to examine contradictions. The law written on the heart gets much more attention because it is unverifiable. Casuists cite Origen’s commentary on Jeremiah 17:1 (on how God writes indelibly on the soul with a pen of iron and a point of diamond). 23 Here, all the letters are so deepely graven, that no humane power or policy can ever wholly blot, or scratch, or raze them out: and so neerely annexed to thy soule, that wrestle and struggle how thou canst . . . yet thou shalt never shake it off or be separate from it. 24

The mere attempt to rub them out or write over them by the bearer causes Worship’s graphologist to ‘summons him to appeare at the great Tribunall, for attempting to deface the Characters of the Deitie, so plainely and deepely written with GODS owne hand in the heart of every man’. 25 Casuists acknowledge that the word of God spoken to us individually may be of more importance than other advices, including their own. Carpenter gives Gregory’s opinion that conscience is a book for ‘whose sake all other bookes are written: all others are but glosses upon this Text. And cursed bee that Commentary which corrupts the Text of conscience.’ 26 Bernard likewise talks of conscience as ‘it selfe 22 Perkins, Discourse of Conscience, p. 84. Casuists frequently cite Rev. 20:12 on the books which will be consulted on judgement day. 23 Carpenter, Conscionable Christian, pp. 46–8; Dyke, Good Conscience, p. 14. Belshazzar’s stunned fear at God’s handwriting is a commonplace: Carpenter, Conscionable Christian, p. 47; Cade, Nature of Conscience, p. 29. 24 Cade, Nature of Conscience, p. 25; see also Ames, Conscience, ch. 2. 25 Worship, The Christians Jewell, p. 17; see also Bernard, Conscience, A2 v. 26 Carpenter, Conscionable Christian, p. 43; see also Ames, Conscience, ch. 7.


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a Booke, whereof all other Bookes are expositions: it is as the Text, they the interpretation’. 27 Bourne solves the problem by expecting a variorum edition on judgement day, when three different books will be opened and compared: God’s fore-knowledge, the book of life (Christ himself ), and the book of our conscience. 28 One can see how much wriggle-room this gives to any clever barrack-room lawyer. Poets can claim contradictory instructions given to their consciences, they can misread what is written on them, they can write their own ideas. And they do, as Chapters 3 and 4 show, in poems such as Vaughan’s ‘H. Scriptures’, where he pleads ‘O that I had deep Cut in my hard heart/ Each line in thee! Then would I plead in groans/ Of my Lords penning’, but refuses to take responsibility for reading what is there: ‘Read here, my faults are thine’. Such special pleading leaves the form of the syllogism untouched and attacks its premisses instead. Thus, Huit and Bernard underwrite the tables of the heart with what they call the ‘moral’ conscience, which is to be developed by ‘civil’ education and ‘good literature, as ethicks, oeconomicks, and politicks’. 29 This sets up a potentially endless regression, where an absolute law is found to be textual and therefore interpretable, and therefore needs another law to support its correct reading, which in its turn . . . This third, formal source of synteresis Huit and Bernard call the ‘ingineered’, ‘acquired’, or ‘created’ conscience. 30 Huit in particular approaches the process of modelling this element with agitation and awe: there is many an Engine of great use for warre, which ill imployed, oft proves pernicious to the owners; likewise, may Conscience do us a mischiefe, while wee know not, or omit to use it aright; be studious therefore in case divinitie, get thy minde fraught with principles of right and wrong. 31

Though the natural or untrained conscience, disfigured by Adam, relies on formal social bonds such as oaths and laws to make it operate correctly, and in that sense is ‘externalized’, the acquired conscience is a part of the soul that can be trained to act as both prosecution and 27 Bernard, Conscience, A2 r. See also Dyke, Good Conscience, dedicatory epistle; Fenner, Conscience, epistle to reader. 28 Bourne, Anatomie of Conscience, pp. 3–4. 29 Bernard, Conscience, pp. 263 ff; Huit, Anatomy of Conscience, p. 93 ff. 30 31 Huit, Anatomy of Conscience, pp. 196–216. Ibid., p. 101.

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apologist. 32 Accordingly, Huit sets out a complex and strict training regime of auxiliary and essential methods, the first human, the second divine. His former ‘adjutory’ means to produce the right conscience are fourfold. The first, education, is of three types, namely the restraint of youthful desire, the liberal and mechanical arts (using secular authorities in the classics and theology and a lot of practice), and catechism, including case divinity. The second adjutory is affliction (‘hence correction is called instruction’). The third is the ‘motions of nature’, the affections and passions that help us to appreciate divine mysteries. The fourth is the gifts of prayer and faith prior to final conviction. ‘Effectual’ means include the word of God, the sacraments, and the ‘blood and spirit of Christ’ felt in the heart. These are, however, only preparations to conversion, temporary graces whose ‘application requires our industry or wee despise the grace of God’. As with the earlier question of whether the conscience is spy or traitor, the motivation for this application is alternately described as God’s and man’s. The cases given in Protestant casuistry are examples of how to select from multiple instructions to the conscience, each of which may have different emphases. Their method of dealing with any potential conflict contrasts with Catholic canon law treatises published at the same time, which dealt with hard cases before confessors. Notoriously, Jesuit theologians developed the doctrine called probabilism, where the individual could choose to follow any argument that did not run counter to the universally accepted truth of the Church, provided that the line taken was in agreement with common sense, and supported by a reputable authority. By contrast, Protestant divines dealt with the problem of heterogeneous advice offered to a layman by taking increasingly strict positions. First, the doubtful party was required to take the argument that was most probable and closest to his own understanding of scripture (known as probabiliorism); then he was required to take the strictest interpretation even if it was not the most probable, for it is better to obey doubtingly than disobey doubtingly (known as tutiorism, from in dubio pars tutior est sequenda, ‘in doubt the safer part is to be chosen’). 33 32 33

On the formal binding of the conscience see Fenner, Conscience, section 4. Thomas Wood, English Casuistical Divinity during the Seventeenth Century: With Special Reference to Jeremy Taylor (London: SPCK, 1952), ch. 2; Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience, pp. 59–61.


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Even so, the Protestant manuals endorse the importance of personal judgement, since it is the act of deciding that is the act of conscience. Thus, casuists’ advice is given tentatively: ‘the good Angels themselves may holily vary in the way, though they perfectly meet in the end. It is farre from my thoughts to obtrude these my Resolutions as peremptory, and magisteriall upon my Readers’, says Joseph Hall. 34 The comparison of texts was in any case the primary training all grammar schools offered. A recent study of seventeenth-century case books has concluded that they offer an ‘intensive and extensive moral education’ to their readers similar to the humanist comparative reading that was said to develop moral prudence. 35 Since in such a situation the individual’s decision is paramount, an erring conscience (that is, one which is sure but wrong) has to be borne with, at least in theory. Bernard remarks that while one can never be constrained to do things that are contrary to express scriptural command, with regard to indifferent things the church has the authority to decide, ‘with which a privat mans Conscience must rest satisfied; and if it be not, he must labour earnestly for resolution and perswasion: in the meane space the Church is to beare with his weaknesse’. 36 In practice, the early modern state used ordeals of conscience (such as making adults receive communion yearly or take an oath of allegiance) as instruments to sift out political dissidents. It was a practice that encouraged equivocation in the conscientious victim, and unease about hypocrisy in the person exacting the answer. 37 It took a civil war to dispense with the politically troublesome category of the erring conscience. One of Leviathan’s most radically pragmatic moves is to require the individual to conform to what was generally held. In the meantime, as Chapter 4 shows, Herbert, Donne, and Vaughan rest on their interpretation of biblical verses with self-conscious rectitude. They may come to the wrong conclusions but this, they say with smug humility, must be borne with. Vaughan, for instance, spends 34 Joseph Hall, Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practicall Cases of Conscience (London: M. F., 1649), A4 v. Hall (1574–1656) had been ejected from the see of Norwich two years before this book came out. 35 H. Braun and E. Vallance, eds, Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe 1500– 1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), xiv–xv; see Taylor, Ductor, pp. 10–11. 36 Bernard, Conscience, p. 198. See also Ames, Conscience, on an erring conscience (‘he that doth against conscience, doth against Gods will: though not materially, and truely; yet formally, and by interpretation’), and Perkins, The Whole Treatise, p. 47. 37 A. Walsham, in Braun and Vallance, Contexts of Conscience, ch. 3.

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‘all night . . . in a roving Extasie/ To find my Saviour’ through the stories of the Old and New Testaments, and is not notably abashed when he turns out to have only written ‘down/ What pleasures should my Journey crown’ (‘The Search’). The respect which the casuists show for the erring conscience in not overbearing it reinstates the self who judges. For Perkins, the greatest case of conscience is not the this or that of correct actions but ‘how a man may know, whether he be the son of God or no’ (according to the 1592 title page). Thus Richard Greenham, unto one that asked his advice in outward things, who as yet stood in greater need to be instructed in inward . . . said, ‘If you first will confer with me and establish yourself in things concerning faith and repentance, then ask me and I will advise you freely for the outward state.’ 38

In consequence, casuists see the conscience as a process rather than a thing, always in the act of comparing the law and circumstances. Jeremy Taylor calls it ‘a perpetual pulse’, and adds that ‘he does not always keep a good conscience who keeps onely the words of a Divine law, but the proportions also and the reasons of it, the similitudes and correspondencies in like instances’. 39 It creatively responds to God’s love; it does not bureaucratically categorize actions. Ames argues that the conscience is seen in the moment of choice between good and evil, not simply when one understands the situation, and is thus an act. More distantly, Huit, Bernard, and Worship see it as ‘a disposition to doe something, which yet it doth not always exercise’, and so term it a power. 40 Accordingly, Samuel Clarke notes gravely, there is ‘great latitude and infinite dispute’ about whether conscience should be defined as a trained faculty, or an innate power, or a power in action. 41 Again, the erring conscience is a 38 Quoted Thomas, in Morrill, Slack, and Woolf, Public Duty, p. 34. For the contrast with the stress on definitions of action characteristic of Roman case manuals, see Wood, English Casuistical Divinity, ch. 2. J. F. Keenan thinks the emphasis on relationships in the English manuals is in the tradition of Jesuit spiritual counselling (as offered, most influentially, by Robert Person’s The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution, 1582) rather than Catholic confessors’ manuals, Braun and Vallance, Contexts of Conscience, ch. 2. 39 Ductor dubitantium, pp. 3, 8. 40 Huit, Anatomy of Conscience, pp. 88–9; Bernard, Conscience, ch. 1; Worship, The Christians Jewell, pp. 3–6. 41 Samuel Clarke, Medulla theologiae: or the Marrow of Divinity: Contained in Sundry Questions and Cases of Conscience (London: T. Ratcliffe, 1659), ch. 43; see also Perkins,


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particular problem, as writers grope about uneasily to locate what has gone wrong with the process or event or thing that should be telling them what has gone wrong. As Ames says, ‘no Conscience while it erreth doth declare, that the error thereof is to be left’. 42 Unless every action is passed in terms of the relationship with God even a good deed can become evil. Robert Sanderson states flatly that ‘not only the settled opinion that the thing we do is unlawful, but the very suspension of our judgement and the doubtfulness of our minds whether we may lawfully do it or no, maketh it sometimes unlawfull to be done of us’. 43 Donne is equally as firm: ‘hee that does good ignorantly, stupidly, inconsiderately, implicitely . . . does that good ill’. 44 It is difficult to see what would be adiaphoric (that is, indifferent in ethical terms) under this paradigm, since even a trivial act, which does not demand prior reflection, will have been settled by social custom or personal habit, which do. Each poet’s conscience is a continual worry, a ‘prattler’ of ‘chatting fears’ Herbert calls it in ‘Conscience’, constantly going on at them to reconsider their actions. Since the poems focus on it as an expression of their relationship with God, rather than examining specific choices made, they do not reward the efforts made by Brown, Slights and Cathcart to get a sense of the poets’ opinions on social or ethical issues. Having looked at what conscience knows, the casuistry manuals move on to what it does with this knowledge. Self-reflecting, witnessing, comparing texts, relating, and concluding . . . the image most often used by the manuals, the legal syllogism, brings all these actions together. There is remarkable uniformity. Perkins, Bourne, and Bernard use the same phrase: conscience is ‘a kind of concluding science; for it Discourse of Conscience, ch. 1. Clarke (1599–1683) was celebrated as a Puritan biographer who took particular interest in the pastoral advice offered by his subjects. 42 Ames, Conscience, p. 11. 43 R. Sanderson, The Works, ed. William Jacobson, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1854), iv, 107. This visitation sermon of 22 August 1634 (preached when Sanderson was rector at Boothby Pagnell) is comparable with similar statements in Sanderson’s lectures at Oxford as Regius Professor of Divinity, Kevin Kelly, Conscience: Dictator or Guide? A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Protestant Moral Theology (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967), pp. 38–78. Sanderson was appointed Bishop of Lincoln in 1660. See also Worship, The Christians Jewell, p. 64. 44 Essays in Divinity, quoted in Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience, p. 54. The epigraph to Perkins’s The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1608) is Rom. 14:23: ‘whatsoever is not of Faith, is sinne’.

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frameth . . . syllogistically, reasons, either with or against a man’. 45 Dyke and Worship talk of it as ‘a kinde of Practicall Syllogisme, whose Maior is The Law of GOD, and the Minor, and Conclusion, the Application of it’. 46 Huit describes it as ‘a Relative power in the reasonable creature, which by reflection determines with or against it selfe through the divine light it hath’; ‘a discursive power, subverting, and applying particular Conclusions out of generall promises’. 47 Ames notes that ‘conscience in regard of the Proposition is called a Light, and a Law; in regard of the Assumption and conclusion a Witnesse; but in regard of the assumption it is mostly fitly termed an Index, or a Booke, and in regard of the conclusion, most properly a Iudge’. 48 Perkins lays an example out dialectically; it ‘proceeds in judgement by a kinde of argumentation . . . an example whereof we may take from the conscience of a murderer, thus Every murderer is cursed, saith the mind. Thou art a murderer, saith conscience assisted by memory. ergo, Thou art accursed, saith conscience, and so giveth her sentence.’ 49

Herbert himself deals with a case of conscience dialectically in a letter of advice he wrote in October 1631 to the man managing his stepfather’s affairs, Arthur Woodnoth. Woodnoth doubted that he was able to restrain the spending habits of Sir John Danvers as was needed, and thought about returning to his former occupation as goldsmith. 50 Some of the reasons Herbert gives for Woodnoth remaining as manager for Danvers are set out as enthymemes (a syllogism where one of the premisses is assumed). For instance, his first reason starts with the point that higher opportunities of doing good are to be preferred before lower (and gives the authority for this, 1 Corinthians 7). An occluded minor premiss follows (but restraining Danvers is of higher good than goldsmithing), then the conclusion (‘therfore your choice at first was good’). Reason seven uses the same form: goodness lies in acting on the 45 46 47 48 49

Bourne, Anatomie of Conscience, p. 6; Bernard, Conscience, p. 40. Dyke, Good Conscience, p. 23; Worship, The Christians Jewell, p. 9. Huit, Anatomy of Conscience, p, 87, dedicatory epistle. Ames, Conscience, p. 3; see also pp. 139, 141, 142. Perkins, Discourse of Conscience, p. 84. See also Ames, Conscience, p. 3 (‘he that lives in sinne, shall dye:/ I live in sinne,/ Therefore I shall dye’). The structure is parodied in the mutters of the second murderer of Clarence in Richard III, I.iv.105–17. 50 G. Herbert, The Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 390–3.


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desire to do good, but you have tried to restrain Danvers, therefore you have done well. As Perkins and Ames note, the use of the syllogism by the conscience is not because the premisses (either the law or the acts) are doubtful in themselves, but because fallen man is blind to their nature. This imperious technique should be able to force the truth onto an unwilling heart but often fails to finish the syllogism: ‘both propositions are granted, yet the conclusion is not made’, from fear, carelessness, or flippancy. Thus ministers are enjoined to draw out applications to those before them as directly and pertinently as possible. 51 From the early church onwards the rational basis of conscience had been recognized, but the use of techniques from classical rhetoric to prove a case is new. In universally adopting the terms of judicial inventio Protestant casuists make a surprising choice to our ears. Our own, colloquial idea of the conscience has to do with feelings and acts—a primitivism that comes from widespread secularism, lingering Romantic notions of an untutored self, and postmodernism’s joyous indolence. The casuistry manuals, however, eschew any emotional appeal to the will which would use the deliberative rhetoric characteristic of many devotional genres such as meditation. Their judicial rhetoric is one that uses the register of fact, as though its propositions are not rhetorical. It works in the mode of was or is, not the could or should be of deliberative rhetoric. The poems are particularly valuable in showing up the rhetoric implicit in the judicial proceedings of the conscience; the premisses appear factual but break down under examination. The manuals carefully name the type of syllogism as a practical one. Most obviously this is both because it is an empirical power, deciding not on general principles but on real circumstances, and because it requires action to follow. The conscience should be engaged with actions, is always in action, is aware of its own actions, results in an action; hence, it is called ‘practical’. Thus casuists consider that the experienced divine rather than the theologian will offer the better advice. 52 Yet their definitions should also be understood in the context of widespread interest in revisions to the teaching of dialectic made by the mid-seventeenth-century French writer Petrus Ramus. Perkins was well known as a supporter of Ramism, having produced a treatise in 51

Ames, Conscience, p. 30.

52

Ames, Conscience, A4 r.

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Latin on using Ramist means in preaching (published in 1592, and translated in 1606 by Thomas Tuke as The Arte of Prophecying . . . the Only True Manner and Method of Preaching). Perkins’s pupil, Ames, was also a notable Ramist, and produced two commentaries on Ramus’s dialectic (printed in 1646). 53 The important point is their stress on the word ‘practical’, a word that comes up in Ramist texts to indicate approval of methods of demonstrating truths which are short, definite, and applicable to some problem. Ramus outlines three methods to judge a statement, all of which involve reasoning from universals rather than induction from particulars: the axiom, which joins or dissociates the subject and predicate, the famous analysis by ‘method’ (the successive repeated division of statements into ever more detailed pairs, producing a ‘tree’ of dichotomies), and the syllogism, which he reserved to test more doubtful statements. As another contemporary student of Ramism, John Milton, pointed out, such a gathering up or deduction has arisen from the weakness of the human intellect, which because it is not able by the first intuition to see the truth and falsity of things in the axiom, turns to the syllogism in order to judge of their consequence and lack of consequence by its means. 54

The word ‘practical’ also has a Ramist resonance; Ramus himself successively described dialectic as natural, as an abstract art, and finally as an exercise where specific examples are subjected to the art. It is the business of this final ‘use’, as he called it, to ‘draw out into a work’ these precepts ‘in a way which will shape and express in examples the force contained within the precepts’. 55 Thinking of the conscience in Ramist rather than Thomist terms shows it as a mechanism to produce 53 Demonstratio logicae verae and Theses logicae; W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), pp. 206–19; D. K. McKim, ‘The Functions of Ramism in William Perkins’ Theology’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 16 (1985), 503–17; W. J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Decay of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 182–6. 54 The Art of Logic, Arranged after the Method of Peter Ramus, trans. A.H. Gilbert, in The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), vol. 11, xxx. (1672, though probably written as a student in the 1620s.) Milton’s tutor at Cambridge, William Chappell, had been taught by Ames. 55 Dialecticae institutiones (1543), cited in Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, p. 190. Contemporaries called Ramus himself Usuarius, where ‘usus’ is to be translated as ‘practice’ or ‘exercise’, pp. 321–2, n. 6.


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uncomfortable truths to be acted on. Perkins and Ames talk of it as deducing an undeniable conclusion which human fraility would like to ignore, by comparing a general premiss with a specific act. Yet, as rhetoricians point out, this mechanism to move from the certain to the uncertain depends on the quality of the certain facts composing it: the evidence of our senses, what is generally said, laws, moral custom, what has been previously proved, or what, at least, has not been contradicted by an opponent. They range from the almost always true to the merely compatible. 56 Poets can dislocate the dispassionate ‘engine’ of the syllogism by simply undermining its premisses or by looking to the letter rather than the spirit of its proofs. One cannot trace a direct influence by these English Ramist theologians on the three poets. Donne owned three case manuals, but they were continental Catholic works. Though he cites the opinion of ‘the Casuists’ occasionally in his sermons, he gives no names. 57 Yet, throughout his sermons, he uses phrases such as ‘the true method of this art’ and ‘a faire method leads . . . to the true end’ as he examines what he calls Christ’s unfinished syllogism (‘Why callest thou me good? There is none good but God’. Thus . . . ). 58 One sermon in particular, on how Esther disobeyed the Persian king’s command (Esther 4:16), declares itself to be a model case of conscience. This is a ‘perplexed and scrupulous case’, to be considered in terms of ‘what every Christian soul ought to do, when it is surprised and overtaken with any such scruples or difficulties to the Conscience’. 59 Anthony à Wood says that Vaughan spent ‘two Years or more in Logicals under a noted Tutor’ at Oxford (some time between 1638 and 1641), but he gives no more details. 60 There is a possible reference to Ramist techniques in Vaughan’s verse ‘To Mr. M.L. upon his reduction of the Psalms into Method’, which repeats the significant word ‘method’ twice more as he congratulates the author 56 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (1920–2; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–86), 5.10.12–16, 5.7.8. 57 G. Keynes (ed.), A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), library items L43, L88, L93; J. Donne, The Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), x, 387 ff. Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience, pp. 4–11, believes his knowledge of casuistry to be extensive, but does not comment on the Ramist angle. 58 Donne, Sermons, vi, 11, cited in Brent Nelson, Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (Tempe: MRTS, 2005), p. 4. 59 60 Donne, Sermons, v, 217. Vaughan, Works, p. xvii.

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on removing confusion from the psalms. The same terms occur when Herbert deals with ‘the parsons accessary knowledge’. 61 He advises the minister to acquire a body of divinity in youth from the fathers, schoolmen, and later writers, then reduce it by ‘method’ under the headings of the catechism. Yet, though a direct connection in the poets’ reading to the Ramists is missing, Tuve, Howell, and Ong have shown that Ramism was sufficiently widespread in English thought by the turn of the century not to make a direct source necessary. 62 Logic and Ramism were, by 1600, synonymous at the level of the grammar school, and even at university. Contemporary education theorists such as John Brinsley endorsed Ramus’s techniques. 63 Though study in scholastic logic was required by the Oxford statutes under which Donne and Vaughan were educated, this proved no bar to meeting Ramist textbooks at college level. In 1618, for instance, the future New England minister Richard Mather read Ramus on the instruction of his tutor at Brasenose College, Thomas Worrall. Herbert, at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1609 to the mid-1620s, would have had full opportunity to hear the Ramist fellows at Christ’s College preach. More particularly, his promotion to praelector in rhetoric (from 1618), then to university orator (from 1620), would have required a familiarity with Ramist works. Sermon notes abound in which preachers used Ramus’s second part of judgement, method, to order the material and prove it to the hearers, who in turn noted it using the same technique. It is not a surprise, therefore, that the same preachers used his third part, the syllogism. It is likely that the understanding of the conscience as a constantly acting practical syllogism was shared by all three poets, in preference to or at least alongside either a more general sense in scholastic works that the conscience was a reasonable faculty, or the presentation characteristic of Catholic casuistry of rules for all events. Even when, in the second half of the century, English case books tended to omit a 61 A Priest to the Temple (1652), in Herbert, Works, pp. 229–30. Though N. W. Gilbert lists a number of Renaissance tracts that use the term methodus, Ramus’s second form of judgement, analysis (which initially he called collocatio) came to be known as the ‘single method’, and Ramus himself was called ‘Methodus’: N. W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 131 ff., appendix. 62 R. Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965), ch. 12. 63 J. Brinsley, A Consolation for our Grammar Schools (1622; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1969), pp. 67–8.


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formal definition of the conscience and swelled into comprehensive and prescriptive encyclopedias of the occasions of sin, the idea of reasoning from a question to a conclusion remains paramount. For instance, in A Christian Directory: or, a Sum of Practical Theologie, and Cases of Conscience (1673), Richard Baxter stresses ‘the resolving of practical cases of conscience’, and advises his reader that he ‘will find few Directions in the Book, which may not pass for the answer of an (implyed) Question or Case of Conscience’. 64 Slights shows how this might work in an analysis of Herbert’s ‘To all Angels and Saints’, which takes up the hoary Reformation topic of whether it is lawful to invoke them. This she calls a double implicit syllogism, though she does not refer to casuists’ discussion of the form. The argument of the first fifteen lines runs ‘disrespect for holiness is sinful/ the refusal to pray to the saints shows such disrespect/ thus the refusal to pray to the saints is sinful’. The next ten lines run ‘all worship not commanded by God is sinful/ praying to the saints is not commanded by God/ thus praying to the saints is sinful’. 65 A duty neglected is transformed into a sin resisted, and doubt is transformed into the certainty possible to the individual conscience. If the idea of the syllogism is as widespread as I am arguing, this might suggest why a similar image pattern emerges across the poetry, despite the doctrinal and temperamental differences between the poets. Some of the images in the syllogism (notaries, spies, racks, trials, judges, gibbets, and so on) have informed earlier readings of metaphysical poetry as a critique of secular power, as in Michael Schoenfeldt’s influential argument that Herbert courted and resisted God by using the contemporary approach to secular kings. Schoenfeldt argues that by using forms of minimal compliance and non-confrontational resistance, Herbert is able to protect himself even when he disobeys God. This analysis brings the trial poems together in a celebration of God’s power: affliction and petition are corollary activities, and the task the sufferer has is to ‘interpret the acute agony he feels as evidence of solicitous divine love’. 66 The awed sense of God as a terrifying monarch is one which a conscience in good working order would certainly feel. I am, however, 64 66

65 Letter to the reader. Slights, The Casuistical Tradition, pp. 207–9. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), p. 15.

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interested in consciences where conviction has failed, and so I read the trial poems against those of boredom or earnest misunderstanding. Wry resignation, not terror, is the predominant tone in this context. A move into rhetoric is always a move into the sublunar place of negotiation. Here, misunderstanding and slippage are inevitable and even necessary in conversation with God. The farce of aposiopesis and the doublecrosses of enigma, the ironic mimicry of subjectio and antanaclasis, are integral to the conscience when the human mind shifts sideways in the face of absolute demands for truth—where, say, God’s earnest arts bathetically get only a lukewarm response, as in Vaughan’s weary attempt to concentrate on God: ‘bind me up, and let me lye/ A Pris’ner to my libertie’ (‘Misery’). The emotional strain of living with a constant muttering conscience, always there, always on at us, also yields a surly schadenfreude when the conscience is defeated, as in Herbert’s ‘Sinne (1)’, where the care with which God has ‘begirt us round’ with parents and schoolmasters to discipline us, pulpits to undercut our pleasant sins with sorrow, afflictions, and biblical threatenings (and a few blessings thrown in) is defeated in a single concluding couplet: ‘Yet all these fences and their whole array/ One cunning bosome-sinne blows quite away’. The tendency to think through the body, moreover, produces a comedy of rigidity, of something taking over the place of a human, organic response. In Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’, the indignant narrator complains of how one ‘seized on my heart alone,/ And threw it in a font . . . there it was dipt and di’d,/ And washt, and wrung . . . / [Then he] threw my heart into the scalding pan . . . / [Then] some had stuff ’d the bed with thoughts,/ I would say thorns’. The fact that to slippage, schadenfreude, and rigidity is added a fourth element, the same conceited wit which flashes through the secular poems, is only one part of their rueful humour. The final section of this chapter will substantiate the claim that rhetoric was habitually thought of as the proper and necessary mode of dialogue with God. Though from the early to the mid-seventeenth century mainstream linguistic theorists engaged in heroic attempts to transcribe reality, in attempting to approach God they acknowledged limits. 67 Explaining the Creed, John Boys exclaims that ‘if all the land 67 On the efforts by natural philosophers and linguists to investigate methods of acquiring and representing knowledge in language, see Robert E. Stillman, The New


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were paper, and all the water ink, every plant a pen, and every other creature a readie writer: yet they could not set downe the least piece of his great goodness’. 68 Thus, Herbert is forced to ask ‘but who hath praise enough? nay, who hath any’, and begs for ‘a root, that gives expressions’ (‘Providence’). Since the creator and the creature differ in kind, not degree, the latter’s understanding of the former is only a translation of the truth. Early modern divines expand on this. Thomas Jackson’s Treatise of the Divine Essence and Attributes (1628–9) makes such catachresis the central point in conceiving of God: ‘may his infinite and incomprehensible nature be rightly moulded within the circumference of mans shallow brain?’ The answer is obviously ‘no’, but Jackson considers it a duty to make the attempt; though we cannot in this life come to a cleare view of that nature, which we most desire to see, yet is it a worke worthy our paines, to erect our thoughts, by variety of resemblances (made with due observance of decorum) unto an horizon more ample than ordinary, in whose skirts or edges, wee may behold some scattered rayes of that glorious light.

Just as after viewing earthly objects we create a ‘symptomaticall impression’ of them, in the case of God inadequate images should be employed to produce a partially correct notion. We must ‘use fictions or suppositions of things scarce possible, to last so long till we have moulded conceipts of the essence and attributes incomprehensible’. Each image will be faulty in itself, but may be blended with others to give a ‘symptomaticall impression’ of the divine nature: though nothing can exactly resemble him, yet some things there be which better notifie how farre he is beyond all resemblance or comparison, then others can do. By variety of such resemblances as his works afford, may our admiration of his incomprehensiblenesse bee raised higher and higher. 69 Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (London: Associated University Presses, 1995). 68 An Exposition of the Principal Scriptures Used in our English Liturgy (1610), in J. Boys, The Workes (London: J. Javiland, 1622), pp. 32–3. 69 Thomas Jackson, Treatise of the Divine Essence and Attributes (London: M.F. 1628–9), 2 Parts, i, 3–7. The chief work by Jackson (1579–1640) was his Commentaries on the Apostles’ Creed, designed to fill twelve volumes. Volume six, in two parts, was the Treatise of Divine Essence and Attributes. When the latter was published Jackson had held the living of St Nicholas, Newcastle since 1623, and had been chaplain in ordinary to the king since 1625. He went on to become president of Corpus Christi College,

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Similarly, Ames considers that this unknowable aspect of God causes us to speak of him using what he calls ‘anthropopathy’, according to our own conceiving. 70 Dealing with the nature of decorum in rhetoric, Henry Peacham warns that ‘so infinite and incomprehensible is the nature of Almightie God, and mans capacity of so small compasse, that no one attribute of God can be conceived by mans weak understanding without the helpe of earthly images’. 71 Giving advice on preaching, John Prideaux thinks metaphor must be used about God’s actions, ‘in which expressions, for mans weak capacity, God is said to do such things out of passion, which from eternity he hath determined: as men do out of weakness, when they change their minds’. 72 William Perkins warns himself not to frame ‘an image of [God] in my mind (as ignorant folks do, that think him to be an old man sitting in heaven) but [to] conceive him by his properties and works’, that is, metonymically. 73 In short, the relationship between God and man is habitually described by early modern poets and theologians not just as generally verbal but specifically as a trope, where the trope is radically conceived of as a temporary but vital translation between divine and human ontologies. Seventeenth-century secular rhetoricians had followed Ramus and Oxford and Dean of Peterborough. He was listed in 1652 with Nicholas Ferrar and George Herbert by the latter’s first biographer, Barnabas Oley, as one of three ‘good men now passed away in this age of sin’ (1652): C. A. Patrides, ed., George Herbert: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 75–6. The problems of thinking about God are similarly developed over eighteen sermons by another royal chaplain and university man, John Preston, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in the second part of Life Eternall or, a Treatise of the Knowledge of the Divine Essence and Attributes (rev. edn 1634). 70 The Marrow of Theology (English edition, 1629; the original Latin version 1623, Medulla theologiae, was expanded in 1627), p. 83. The second part of this text was expanded in De conscientia. A similar discussion on ‘Anthropopathia’ is in Thomas Wilson, Theologicall Rules, to Guide us in the Understanding and Practise of Holy Scriptures (London: E. Griffin, 1615), pp. 22–3. 71 H. Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577; rev. 1593); intro. W. G. Crane (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), p. 12. 72 John Prideaux, Sacred Eloquence: or, the Art of Rhetorick, as it is Layd Down in Scripture (London: J. Wilson, 1659), p. 17. Prideaux (1578–1650), Bishop of Worcester (1641–6), and a moderate divine noted for his learning, was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford for twenty-six years. 73 Quoted Ian Green, Christian’s A.B.C. Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 305. In October 1630, the recorder of the borough of Salisbury, Henry Sherfield, smashed a stained-glass window of the creation in St Edmund’s because it represented God ‘in the form of an old man’: Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale, 1992), pp. 345–8.


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split elocutio from inventio, downgrading the former’s tropes into matter for the schoolroom. 74 Conversely, sacred rhetoricians of all shades, from the sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican Luis de Granada, whose meditations swept England, to the latitudinarian founding member of the Royal Society, Bishop John Wilkins, continue to value tropes as expressions of how to understand transcendence, not merely as affective techniques to arouse devotion. They refer approvingly to Aquinas’s prudential balancing of the benefits and dangers in using metaphor to describe God. The Summa worries that figures are infected by their use by disciplines other than theology, they can obscure more than clarify, and can be dangerous if understood literally. Yet, all things considered, Aquinas can justify their use: Christ himself employed them, man understands through his senses and God provides for everything according to its ability, divine revelation moves people from pleasure in images to knowledge of truths, scripture teaches metaphorically in some areas and plainly in others, figures are useful as an exercise of thought to ponder on, and, finally, their use defends the style of the Bible against charges of barbarity. Aquinas suggests a good safety device is to choose the lowest images, since they cannot be easily confused with the highest reality. 75 This resonates with the suggestions by rhetoricians that any poverty of vocabulary makes ‘catachresis (of which abuse is a correct translation) all the more necessary . . . adapting the nearest available term to describe something for which no actual term exists’. 76 William Kerrigan remarks of Donne’s extreme images of God that, when the metaphors turn perverse, God vacates the metaphors, so that the plea to be raped by him in ‘Batter my heart’ is not to be taken literally. 77 The tropes I study certainly turn perverse, but in form, not content. The conceits of 1580s erotic sonneteers—you 74 Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric. The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 5. 75 T. Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 22 vols (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1920–42), Q.1 Art.9. 76 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.34. Some rhetoricians think this a ‘plaine abuse’ of language (George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie [1589; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarum, 1971], p. 150) and an ‘inexact use of a like and kindred word in place of the precise and proper one’ (pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. H. Caplan [1954; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, 4.33.45]). 77 William Kerrigan, ‘The Fearful Accommodations of John Donne’, ELR 4 (1974), 337–63.

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make me dumb with love, your eyes dazzle me, you smash me to bits, you are in my heart, here’s my best posies—are taken literally by the next generation of poets. Tropes twist into shapes quite other than those intended: hyperbole declines into litotes, the silenced double voices of irony and enigma are echoed aloud, the rhetorical question is answered. There are two particular tropes which early modern divines and rhetoricians engage with when thinking about the problems of talking with God: occupatio and hyperbole. It was a commonplace that either saying nothing at all, or, alternatively, going to excess, are the appropriate modes for talking of, or to, an unknowable God. There is a long tradition of occupatio (drawing attention to the fact one is not speaking of something) on sacred subjects. The point is made in a variety of registers, from divinity thesis down to petty school catechism. Robert Hill repeats Augustine’s conclusion that the name of God is not a quality, since he is the source of all attributes (for instance, he is wisdom not simply wise). He does not exist adjectivally, so to talk about his qualities as though any quality could exist apart from him is a concession to our incapacity. Indeed, the negative names of God ‘shew that whatsoever is in God is in him after a farre more excellent sort then the like is in man’. 78 Crashaw apostrophizes ‘Mighty Nothing’ (on Matthew 27), and sardonically praises the reply to the Pharisees to Christ (since ‘while they speake nothing, they speake all’, on Matthew 22). 79 In sermon after sermon, Donne warns that ‘if you limit God with any definition, hee growes larger by that definition; for even by that definition you discerne presently that he is something else then that definition comprehends’; ‘we can express God himselfe in no clearer termes, nor in termes expressing more Dignity, then in saying we cannot expresse him’; ‘that is God, which is nothing els’. 80 This truism merits only a brisk parenthesis when Donne discusses biblical translation: 78 R. Hill, Life Everlasting: or, the True Knowledge of One Jehovah . . . Collected out of the Best Moderne Divines (Cambridge: J. Legat, 1601), p. 5, referring to De trinitate book 6, ch. 6. Hill (d. 1623) was preacher at St Andrew’s, Norwich, and later became rector of St Bartholomew Exchange, London. 79 R. Crashaw, Poems: English, Latin, and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin (1927; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 91–2. 80 Donne, Sermons, iii, 95, viii, 105, v, 322.


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Eternall God (for whom who ever dare Seeke new expressions, doe the Circle square, And thrust into strait corners of poore wit Thee, who art cornerlesse and infinite) (‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes’).

Saying nothing at all is one option, but the opposite, an attempt at excess, is another. The second negative formation which arouses particular interest is the try-and-fail exaggeration, where God is declared to be greater than the greatest image one can find. Of course, the deflationary tactic refers to the defects of human expression rather than the object described. As in occupatio, the failure is pointed out, so here the exaggeration is disclosed as understatement. Early modern rhetoricians cite Quintilian in allowing the use of hyperbole for the abnormal subject since the trope is ‘stimulating’ and ‘audacious’, part of a grand forcible style which sweeps the reader along with it. 81 Turning to its denotative inadequacy, Seneca considers that the discovery of excess is a deflationary mechanism that gains credence, since ‘hyperbole never expects to attain all that it ventures, but asserts the incredible in order to arrive at the credible’. Again, it is important to stress that this was not an esoteric point, but something discussed in petty school onwards. The seventeenth-century divine John Smith, analysing the style of scripture which ‘expresses a thing in the highest degree of possibility beyond the truth’, thought that ‘in descending thence we may finde the truth, and sometimes . . . flat impossibilities, that we may rather conceive the unspeakablenesse then the untruth of the relation’. 82 For Sir Thomas Browne, ‘Created Natures allow of swelling Hyperboles; nothing can be said Hyperbolically of God, nor will his Attributes admit of expressions above their own Exuperances’. 83 Thomas Traherne thinks that the worshipper ‘can never Exceed, nor be too High. All Hyperboles are but little Pigmies, and diminutiv Expressions, in Comparison of the Truth’. 84 George Puttenham says that ‘we can not exhibit overmuch praise, nor 81 82

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.67–70, 12.10.61–5. Quoted by Brian Vickers, in ‘The “Songs and Sonnets” and the Rhetoric of Hyperbole’, in A. J. Smith, ed., John Donne: Essays in Celebration (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 143; John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d (London: E. Cotes, 1656), pp. 54–5. 83 Quoted in Michael McCanles, ‘The Rhetoric of the Sublime in Crashaw’s Poetry’, in T. O. Sloan and R. B. Waddington, eds, The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry from Wyatt to Milton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 195. 84 Quoted by Vickers, ‘The “Songs and Sonnets” ’, p. 148.

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belye [God] any wayes, unlesse it be in abasing his excellencie by scarsitie of praise’. 85 Thus, everyone—poets, pedagogues, theologians, rhetoricians, catechists, and scholars alike—not only expected to use rhetoric when thinking about God, but expected to use the rhetoric of failure, indecorous rhetoric, catachresis. It would be impertinent not to. From the point of view of postmodernism, the inability to push through language to the real is too familiar to need comment. Less so, however, is the way early modern writers contrast this with the working or active words written by God himself. The move into language here is a move into the real, not away from it, and commentators on the poems rightly spend much time on how poets insert themselves into this Word. Yet, as Chapters 3 and 4 show, in some poems even these signs are not understood properly unless God also reads and interprets them for us. An enigma is as much a failure of communication as the addressee who looks away or will not answer. Moreover, since one half of the conscience’s syllogism is not understood (the law), and the second half produces silence or lies (the confession), the chances of getting any word working in the judgement are fairly slim. The early response to these torqued images is summed up by Samuel Johnson’s scandalized and often repeated comment that, ‘what [the poets] wanted . . . of the sublime they endeavoured to supply by hyperbole’, for ‘the good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them in passive helplessness’. 86 Centuries on, Mario Praz’s conclusion about Richard Crashaw’s work has a similar tone: ‘neither religion nor love is actually at the back of such a glitter of conceits, but only indulgence in a self-congratulatory and self-complacent play of wit’. 87 Lately, however, the conceits have been recognized in the context of negative theology and in particular theories of the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit Emanuele Tesauro, who puts marvel at the centre of the devotional aesthetic. Devotional wit, ingegno, acknowledges that its representations of the links between 85 86

Puttenham, English Poesie, p. 22. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), i, pp. 21, 182. 87 Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), p. 226.


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the divine and the human are provisional fictions, both startling and false. 88 Literary critics draw doctrinal support from arguments about the emergence of the baroque in the seventeenth century, and its classic characterization by René Wellek as extravagant, asymmetric, and synaesthetic, a form whose overwhelming emotional power points toward the transcendent. 89 They draw political support from J. A. Maravall’s suspicions of the absolutist politics of the baroque, where amazement at a technically conceited spectacle stuns the audience into compliance with the authoritarian agenda producing it (arguably, a wholly appropriate response to God). 90 Thus, for instance, Crashaw’s style is now described as ‘an effect of the inexpressible forcing its way into language and distortion accordingly’ and conceits in the poetry of the Catholic priest Robert Southwell ‘are not merely an element in a decorative rhetoric: they are a faithful translation into symbolic images of the moral reality being represented’. 91 The paradoxes characteristic of Donne and Herbert in particular are seen as a primary technique to state, and deny they can state, spiritual realities. 92 The use in metaphysical poems of self-reflexive tautology (where the godly is announced as being beyond comparison with anything except itself ) is described as similarly and proudly inconclusive. 93 So, if my point were simply that the poems use rhetoric to approach God, it has already been well made, long before. What no one yet has done is to show that the poems bring the theology of the formal 88 Discussed in Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale Aristotelico (1654), cited in P. Swenger, ‘Crashaw’s Perspectionist Metaphor’, Comparative Literature 28 (1976), 65–74; R. E. Proctor, ‘Emanuele Tesauro: a Theory of the Conceit’, Modern Language Notes 88/1 (1973), 69–94. 89 René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. S. G. Nichols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 69–127; Reid Barbour studies the Caroline Church’s emphasis on the fantastic, the sensual, and the emotive in devotion, Literature and Religious Culture, chs. 3, 4. 90 J. A. Maravall on its political uses, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (1975), trans. T. Cochran (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), chs. 1, 6, 8. 91 McCanles, ‘The Rhetoric of the Sublime’, p. 190; F. W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 91. 92 Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia epidemica: the Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 22–5, 145–218, tracing a tradition from Nicholas of Cusa and Tertullian. 93 David Reid, ‘The Reflexive Turn in Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry’, ELR 32 (2002), 408–25.

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workings of the conscience into line with the rhetoric needed to communicate with God. Moreover, since the conscience acts as a judicial syllogism it is possible to see why specific tropes are chosen above others. Finally, the rhetoric of failure comes to the forefront, as it has not done before. Grunting, pointing, scratching, groaning, Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan examine moments where one or other of the syllogism’s terms are omitted or simply break down. This effectively turns the syllogism into an enthymeme, a figure from the realm of human opinion not truth (doxa not scientia). If the depraved conscience will not understand the law or confess to its actions, it cannot judge itself. Instead, it moves ironically and on occasions uncivilly to wreck its own trial. When Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan think through the theological implications of structuring the post-lapsarian conscience in linguistic terms they emit similar and peculiar verbal formations. They dodge shiftily around the question of whether the conscience is God’s or theirs, spy or traitor, and in doing so keep their distance from the godly voice inside.

2 Torturing the Conscience with Divine subjectio ‘When wee doo bring an objection, and yeeld an aunswere unto it . . . an answering of the objection or the subjection’. 1

Even if the ‘Dear Friend’ of Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’ proves callous to the sufferings of the narrator, most readers wince sympathetically. The narrator confides that he has made three separate attempts to establish a good working relationship with his Lord. First, he brings a bowl of fruit, tastefully arranged with his heart as the centrepiece. Never mind thank you, exclamations of delight, or a piece taken from the edge—with the manners of a toddler, a servant ‘instantly/ Quitting the fruit, seiz’d on my heart alone’. It is ‘dipt and dy’d,/ And washt, and wrung: the very wringing yet/ Enforceth tears’. The heart’s owner has scarcely recovered enough to totter around when his second present, a lamb or goat this time, is as rudely received: ‘the man/ Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand,/ And threw my heart into the scalding pan’. This time, the narrator’s indignation against his Lord, and indeed against the stolid way his Friend is listening, is more vocal: ‘My heart, that brought it (do you understand?)/ The offerers heart’. It nearly breaks this heart when he creeps home to bed to recruit his strength, and finds some malicious prankster has ‘stuff ’d the bed with thoughts/ I would say thorns’. The victim pleads for sympathy from his friend; it is not just the painful 1 Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike . . . for the Resolution or Opening of Certaine Partes of Scripture (1584), in R. D. Pepper, introd., Four Tudor Books on Education (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), E1 r, who calls this trope ‘occupation’. Fenner (1558–87) was a Calvinist minister to the English merchants at Middelburg; his Ramist manual was published five times between 1584 and 1588.

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Torturing the Conscience with Divine subjectio

pricks, it is his outraged sense of betrayal, ‘For I had giv’n the key to none, but one/ It must be he’. So far, the poem takes the familiar form of a pilgrim’s progress, using the sacrament of communion, affliction, and prompts to action. What sets it apart are the dialogues which occur after each incident. The Friend laconically points out that ‘Your heart was foul, I fear’, ‘Your heart was hard, I fear’, ‘Your heart was dull, I fear’. He gets an immediate confession, in the same form each time: ‘Indeed, ’tis true’, before the narrator expands on his faults for a few lines. It is all very well for the Friend sternly to conclude that this has been ‘love unknown’, making the narrator ‘new, tender, quick’ in this best of all possible worlds. The concrete images, colloquial tone, and rueful comedy mean our sympathies stay with the poor abused heart, scrubbed, boiled, and pricked like a cooked beetroot. Prudence, however, suggests that the narrator had better do what the Friend advised, and ‘be cheer’d, and praise him to the full’, lest another round of miseries ensues. The poem shows in brief what this chapter is interested in: how the Lord tortures a conscience to get the answers his questions suggest, how conscience tries to evade compliance, how the torturing Friend supplies an answer, and how the heart must learn to respond correctly. Any reader coming across the following entries from a spiritual diary might pause before fully committing him- or herself to God: The dishes of thy ballance seem’d to gape, Like two great pits; The beam and scape Did like some torturing engine show (‘Justice II’),

or Thou turnest th’edge of all things on me still . . . To make my hopes my torture . . . These contrarieties crush me: these crosse actions Doe winde a rope about, and cut my heart (‘The Crosse’),

or, No scrue, no piercer can Into a piece of timber work and winde, As Gods afflictions into man, When he a torture hath design’d (‘Confession’).


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or Broken in pieces all asunder, Lord, hunt me not . . . A wonder tortur’d in the space Betwixt this world and that of grace (‘Affliction IV’),

or O rack me not to such a vast extent; Those distances belong to thee . . . thou dost stretch A crumme of dust from heav’n to hell (‘The Temper I’). 2

These arise from different devotional problems. In ‘Justice II’ Herbert shakily congratulates himself that the old dispensation has been replaced by the new, where the beam now lifts tears, now manacled wrists, to heaven. ‘The Crosse’ asks why, when Herbert works up the will to work for God, the ability to do so is taken away. ‘Confession’ determines an open acknowledgement of his sins as a protection against God’s enquiries. In ‘Affliction IV’ his thoughts are traitors plotting to stab him, under the control of God. ‘The Temper I’ wavers between exhilaration and despair at alternating visions of God. Worryingly, though, the poems all turn to the same image of torture as a way of ‘tuning’ (‘Temper I’) the poet into becoming an instrument, harping ‘Thy will be done’ (‘The Crosse’), just as ‘Love Unknown’ did. Moreover, their concluding agreement sounds unconvinced. ‘Take thy way, for sure thy way is best’ is scarcely the cheer-leading which the ‘Deare Friende’ was angling for. To be blunt, horror, not security, lies in a retreat to the prayer closet, as Herbert’s many emulators also quickly realized. 3 In Ralph Knevet’s ‘Sute’ the poet has to plead with God to ‘bruise mee not with an iron rodde/ Oh breake mee not’, and in ‘Despair’ he is brought before ‘a racke, or wheele,/ Or scourge of burning steele’. 4 Likewise, 2 ‘Affliction IV’ is titled ‘Tentation’ in Bodleian MS Tanner 307, allowing the pun on temptation and tenting or stretching. 3 Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 169, n. 23. 4 Ralph Knevet, The Shorter Poems, ed. A. M. Charles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), pp. 310, 315. Ralph Knevet (1600–71) was tutor or chaplain to the family of Sir William Paston at Oxnead, and possibly acted as Rector of Lyng, Norfolk (1652–71).

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the godly ‘friend’ of Cardell Goodman’s ‘The Tempest’, having taken the narrator’s heart, ‘squeez’d it till it bled:/ (I never shall forgett the smart/ Though then half dead)’. The only other way torture appears in the poems is in the recognized subgenre of dialogues between the body and soul. Even here, however, though the torturer appears to be either one or the other, God reappears as the ultimate cause. Thus, Soul, in Goodman’s ‘The Prisoner and his Keeper’, moans that ‘Fetterd in chaines of flesh I lye/ O lett me goe;/ When shall I dy?’ Yet Body claims to have taken Christ’s role of suffering for Soul, so silences the latter in God’s name, with a threatening ‘Peace mutterer; art thou not mine?/ Am I unjust? . . . I might have laid thee on the rack,/ . . . Made thy nerves crack,/ And broken all thy stubborn bones’. 5 Similarly, in Marvell’s ‘Dialogue between the Soul and Body’, while the former rails against the ‘bolts of Bones’, fetters of feet, manacles of hands, and racking chains of nerves, and the latter protests against the ‘Tyrannic Soul’ which impales, extends it upright, and cramps and shakes it, both shriek to know who screwed them into the device, and who can release them again. 6 The author of these pulp fictions is made very obvious. Most commentators on these hearts in training first look towards early modern meditation techniques to explain the poems. On the Protestant side, situations in poems by Herbert and Vaughan are frequently compared with the engravings and verses in Christopher Harvey’s English, Protestant adaptation in 1647 of a Catholic emblem book by Benedictus van Haeften, Schola cordis (1629, ‘School of the heart’). Here God uses the same methods to get admiration as does any cruel fair mistress in Petrarchan verse, whose victim is tormented, razed, shot, pierced, pricked, chafed, pressed, boiled, and burned. In Harvey, the podgy twin cherubs of divine love and the human soul gaily pitch in together to try, sound, level, wound, enlarge, bind, scourge, or hedge the heart. Like the Petrarchan lover, the soul is happy to submit to the 5 Cardell Goodman, Beawty in Raggs, or, Divine Phancies Putt into Broken Verse, ed. R. J. Roberts (Reading: Reading University Press, 1958), pp. 5, 63. Cardell Goodman (?1607–?53), BD, was elected Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1626. Goodman may have met Ferrar and Herbert through his patron, John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, according to his editor, p. ix. 6 The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the figurative use of manacles quotes Arthur Golding’s translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Christian Religion (1587): the body, originally given to the soul for an instrument, has become its ‘manacles and stocks’.


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training. Typical would be the soul’s cheerful verses accompanying the stage of Humiliation, where the heart is being squeezed in a press: Lord, I am well content, And thou shalt see The time is not mis-spent, Which thou doest then bestow, when thou dost quell And crush the heart, that pride before did swell. 7

Similarly, poets with Catholic leanings are read against the Ignatian spiritual exercises, where the meditator carefully composes a biblical scene in his imagination, perhaps inserting himself as a minor figure, then dwells intensely on the physical experience of the event, to carry affect into his heart and so sway his will. These scenes sometimes incorporate an image of the imitation of Christ, as in Alabaster’s penitential sonnet 19 (‘O take thy Cross and nails and therewith strain/ My heart’s desire unto his full extent . . . / Now stretch my heart again’), and Donne’s exhortations to ‘Spit in my face, yee Jews, and pierce my side,/ Buffet, and scoffe, scourge, and crucifie me’, or to ‘Batter my heart, threeperson’d God . . . breake, blowe, burn and make me new’. 8 In both traditions then, Reformed and Trentine, God and the soul perform equal and heavy-handed activity on the heart. It is done to, not spoken with, while the soul cheerily hums ‘Slack not thine hand,/ Lord, turne thy Screw about’. 9 There is no shirking the training of pain in either of these traditions; the heart courts affliction. 7 Christopher Harvey, Schola cordis, or the Heart of It Selfe, Gone Away from God Brought Back Againe to Him (London: for L.Ll, 1674), p. 61. Christopher Harvey (1597–1663) was Rector of Whitney, Herefordshire, then Vicar of Clifton on Dunsmore, Warwickshire. For instances of this comparison see K. S. Datta, ‘New light on Marvell’s “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body” ’, Renaissance Quarterly 22/3 (1969), 242–56, and on the schola cordis analogues of ‘Love Unknown’, Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), pp. 164–7. 8 Martz argues for such influences in Southwell, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw: Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), chs 1–3, as does Grundy on Alabaster: W. Alabaster, The Sonnets, ed. G. M. Story and H. Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1959), xxvii–xxviii, xxxi. However, Lewalski minimizes the effects of this tradition: Barbara Lewalski Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), ch. 5. 9 Harvey, Scola cordis, p. 63.

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Fig. 2.1 The heart is disciplined, in Christopher Harvey, The School of the Heart; or the Heart of It Self, Gone Away from God Brought Back Again to Him.


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Early critics seemed to turn to these analogues in part because to take the metaphor of torture seriously is ‘gravely disturbing to those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love [that is,] only those aspects of God which turn towards the world of men’. 10 Thus the first amiable commentators found ways to skirt around the thunderous God of the metaphysical poems, from the first following Izaak Walton’s deferential handling of Donne and Herbert’s sanctity, linking the ‘high, holy, and harmonious composures’ of life and poetry. 11 They notice the torture but end with a gently forgiving air, which overlooks exactly what the mechanical infliction of pain is expected to produce in favour of each poem’s final, grateful recognition of the love that has guided the rod. They point out analogues such as William Perkins’s sermons on how ‘the heart . . . must be bruised in peeces, that it may be fit to receive God’s saving grace’, following Ezekiel 11:19, ‘I will take the stonie heart out of their bodies and I will give them an heart of flesh’, and Psalm 51:16, ‘the sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise’. Thus, Barbara Lewalski chides the speaker of ‘Love Unknown’ for being a naive complainer, shocked to find that he must help in his own affliction, since God has inflicted torment on the guilty soul for ‘somehow beneficial’ purposes. 12 Though, says Richard Strier, ‘Temper I’ is ‘probably the most sustained example in Herbert of an aggressive, even militant, humility’, and ‘Justice II’ a ‘virtual transcription’ of Luther’s account of the conversion experience (one where the poet cowers under the unapproachable and convicting righteousness of God), yet God’s justice can be glimpsed through the guilt and fear of punishment, as Herbert fully ‘acknowledged’. The redemptive aspects of the cross may not be seen by the narrator, but Strier hopes they will be added later by the reader. 13 The racking of ‘The Temper I’ is like the tuning of the psalmist’s harp, according to Oliver Steele, echoing Cassiodorus’ commentary on Christ’s crucified 10 Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. J. W. Harvey (1923; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 32. 11 Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (London: for R. Marriott, 1670), pp. 53–5, 57–61. 12 Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, pp. 21, 307. 13 Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), pp. 229, 116–27.

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body ‘which with stretched sinews and counted bones . . . sounded forth his bitter suffering as in a spiritual song’. 14 In the situation of ‘The Pulley’ (the estrapade, where a suspended victim is let down with a sudden jerk), R. B. Waddington discerns ‘a complacent and condescending deity’ torturing his creature—but ‘we know better than to accept Herbert’s rebellious speakers as [in] anything other than one phase of the vacillation’. 15 Turning to other authors, the same tact about criticizing God appears. Commentary on Donne’s sufferings focuses on how erotically and dramatically he desires death in his religious writings, rather than on the institutional or theological conditions which produce suffering beforehand. Judith Dundas sees the participants in Marvell’s ‘Dialogue’ as colleagues who use ‘playful arguments against each other’ to trick sinners into agreement, no doubt sharing Marvell’s own wit. 16 However, more recent analysis has woken up to Donne’s bold statement that ‘he is least acquainted with God, who thinks that he is so familiar, that he need not stand in feare of him’. 17 Work on Herbert is particularly interested in how Protestant literature registers the theology of suffering, the justification of being made to live under the cross. 18 The critic who goes furthest in seeing pain as the ultimate evidence of divine power is Michael Schoenfeldt, who argues that torture is the endpoint of the methods of political coercion applied by the Stuart state. The effect of being under permanent surveillance by God is to produce an automatic and internalized functioning of power. Where this fails, torture is applied for power to regain its visibility by making the dissenter’s actions visible. Having met torture in the secular realm, Herbert can recognize the technique in God’s dealings with him. This is difficult for him since, unlike Donne and Crashaw who long to 14 Oliver Steele, ‘Crucifixion and the Imitation of Christ in Herbert’s “The Temper I” ’, GHJ 5 (1981–2), 71–4. 15 R. B. Waddington, ‘The Title Image of George Herbert’s “The Pulley” ’, GHJ 9 (1986), 51, 52. 16 In J. R. Roberts, ed., New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1994), p. 128. 17 John Donne, The Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), ii, 231. 18 John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 104–7.


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‘be violently seized by God, Herbert fears such abduction and detests the pain’; it is difficult for modern readers too, since ‘the punishment seems a bit extreme for the crime’. Yet Schoenfeldt, while acknowledging how hard it is for a mortal sufferer to ‘interpret the acute agony he feels as evidence of solicitous divine love’, ends by thinking it an exhilarating training. 19 Elizabeth Clarke says of Herbert’s ‘Confession’ that God goes ‘to some lengths to extract a genuine account from the speaker’ (noting in passing that ‘under these circumstances it is unlikely that Herbert will embark on the systematic campaign of subversion detailed by Schoenfeldt’), and thinks God simply wants ‘genuine selfexpression’. 20 Strier argues that when Herbert accepted the ‘capricious God’ of Augustine—one who makes the rules and so is not bound by them—then he acknowledged that ‘the norms for dealings between man and man are not relevant to divine-human interactions’. 21 Rosalie Colie sees a telling absence of enthusiasm in Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’ for helping with the torture, unlike in the schools of the heart. 22 Helen Vendler touches on the remarkable lack of censorship about God’s perceived malevolence in ‘Affliction I’. 23 Achsah Guibbory thinks that ‘Herbert’s speaker is . . . forced by God’s restless afflictions to embrace a plain devotion defined in terms of loss’. 24 These critics, who point the way in well-trodden territory, do not say why the torture occurs. Neither of the two groups, whether those who are resentful on behalf of the heart or those who forgive God (not to mention those who will not notice the pain at all), think about what this meticulously applied process is for. What is God after, and why does he keep going until he gets it? 19 Michael Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ch. 3, especially pp. 123, 131, 132. 20 Elizabeth Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: ‘divinitie, and poesie, met’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 114–15. 21 Strier, Love Known, p. 91. 22 Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-theory in the Renaissance, ed. B. K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 57. 23 Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 43–8. 24 Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 57.

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The question seems more pressing in that, unusually for devotional writing, these poems use a vocabulary of suffering which is contemporary, concrete, and focused on results. God applies up-to-date methods to get a confession. He amplifies and constricts the human soul with the rack, the manacles (the gauntlets or strappado, where the victim hangs by a limb), whipping, or some form of cramping, either in a small cell (such as that called Little Ease or Limbo in the Tower) or by using an iron hoop or band (as in the brake, the tongs, Skevington’s irons, or the scavenger’s daughter). The poems are surprising in three ways. In them, God goes well beyond the mild malice in plans to, say, refuse the gift of Rest to newly created man, and so force him to turn to the creator (Herbert, ‘The Pulley’). Moreover, self-torment is not a necessary, or even conventional, feature of dialogues between the body and soul. James Howell’s The Vision, or a Dialog Between the Soul and the Bodie (cited by Marvell’s editor as an analogue) allows only a few paragraphs to a Christian struggle between the two, before the soul courteously accepts the body as its ‘tabernacle’. 25 Similar dialogues by Vaughan show mild and comfortable concords, where the soul asks how the body will feel death, hopes with it for resurrection, and tucks it up, with a ‘sleep in peace’ (‘The Evening-Watch’, ‘Death. A Dialogue’, ‘Resurrection and Immortality’). Thomas Traherne’s loving blazons of the flesh and senses reason why body and soul care for one another: since the body’s members are ‘the pipes,/ And conduits of Thy praise’, then ‘Men’s bodies were not made for stripes,/ Nor anything but joys’ (‘The Estate’). Finally, God’s modern techniques sound oddly anachronistic. Fire is the instrument of choice in most devotional work, whether it be to cleanse dissent, as in martyrologies and church histories (such as the accounts of burning Marian heretics, in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments), or as a metaphor of burning faith. For instance, fire is prominent in seventeenth-century sacred parodies that take up the ennobling and erotic flames of love in Petrarchan sonnets, and apply them to devotion. The Seraph of Richard Crashaw’s ‘The flaming heart’ regards St Teresa as ‘the mistress-flame; and duteous he,/ Her happy fireworks here comes down to see’, and who plunges his ‘fiery dart’ into her ‘flaming heart’.

25 Howell (?1594–1666) was a prolific pamphleteer, and friend of both Ben Jonson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury.


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The absence of such heat in the dank contemporary tortures of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan is all the more striking. The recovery of the precise vocabulary of torture in the poems is worth looking at in terms of product. When the mechanics of torture are examined in other contexts, their representation is most usually explored in terms of a pornographic double substitution. Here the viewer imagines both the instruments employed and the torturer himself as acting on his forbidden interests. This line joins up nearly with the erotic charge of devotional verse whose authorial persona demands to be ravished by God or swoons in the ecstasy of a flaming heart. However, this bold approach overshadows the institutional context of torture, one which the poems’ reference to contemporary methods of torture should underscore. Here, unlike pornography, the point is not the pain, which is merely a regrettable necessity in getting at the truth a torturer wants. Thus the following argument emphasizes the structural context of the trope, that is, how torture is prescribed to get an anticipated verbal response, the ‘othered’ voice that physical violence calls out. In theological terms this is the figure always produced by any conversation with God: subjectio, a mock dialogue where both parts are taken by the most powerful speaker. Subjectio extends the operation of the familiar rhetorical question (‘when we aske many questions and looke for none answere, speaking indeed by interrogation, which we might as well say by affirmation’), to the answer as well. 26 The two purposes which Quintilian gives this form of question, of varying the speaker’s persona and of forcing a proof by induction (called by some, he says, ‘suggestion’) are both relevant here, as God speaks to himself through man, forcing a proof of guilt on his instrument. 27 The source of the victim’s words is more important than their sincerity, since in godly situations the ‘dialogue’ that any torturer has with himself is inspired by grace, as it stops a victim’s speech in favour of God’s. In arriving at this conclusion, this chapter takes three steps. The first is to examine the rhetorical angles in seventeenth-century discussions of human torture, where the practice is seen as neither gratuitous in motive nor freely inventive in expression. These debates consistently run on five 26 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1971), p. 176. 27 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (1920–2; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–86), 5.11.3–5, 9.2.15.

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themes: the torturer claims a sovereign right to inflict pain under defined circumstances (a right that the victim must acknowledge); the process is one that demands the cooperation of the victim’s imagination as much as his senses; he is considered to be bound, and so without the personal value of a free man who can tell the truth without coercion; any involuntary confession by him converts past and future interrogation into punishment; and, finally, the torturer knows in advance what must and will be said in response to his questions. The second part of the chapter takes up two contemporary models of the correct response to injury inflicted by God in Stuart sermons on Job’s sufferings and Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Finally, the argument returns with these materials to the poems to rethink what happens when God’s own words are twisted out of the poet. Are they like Job’s? Whose groans are these? Do they count as confessions? Are they a traitor’s equivocation under pressure, or a spy’s genuine account of another’s crimes? Roman oratory, continental law, and English debates on the royal prerogative were all appealed to by discussion about torture by parliamentary, judicial, and social commentators. All distinguished its penal functions from its evidential uses, and looked to the verbal product expected. Classical legal theory on the use of force to gain evidence developed from the practice of the first Greek juries. These large public bodies heard a case within a day, then voted to settle it. Parties spoke on their own behalf, and witnesses were called before a community which could judge the truth of each statement, partly because it already knew the person speaking. Slaves appeared in court solely in commercial cases; in other types their statements were read out, and could be confirmed under torture. 28 Since only a slave could be tortured, this formed part of the distinction between free and bound (St Paul pleaded his right of exemption as a Roman freeman from examination under the scourge, Acts 22: 24–6). The legal test of torturing a slave for evidence (the basanos, originally the term for a touchstone for gold, then generally applied to any trial, and finally narrowed to describe interrogation) was highly regulated in expectation of a particular outcome. Written questions were proposed in advance, the witnesses were named, and an 28 Michael Gagarin, ‘The Torture of Slaves in Athenian Law’, Classical Philology 91/1 (1996), 1–4; D. C. Mirhady, ‘Torture and Rhetoric in Athens’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 116 (1996), 119–31.


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agreement was made for recompensing the slave’s owner for any permanent damage to his property. Given this high degree of discursive policing Michael Gagarin argues that the basanos was purely a legal fiction to assert the probability of one’s argument. It was threatened, but not used, by a court system which was more a staged competition than an investigation into a set of facts and their consequences. 29 Nonetheless, the practice was codified in the Roman legal and rhetorical manuals, which were later to become central to early modern pedagogy. In his advice to advocates, Cicero extols the value of ‘extrinsic’ proofs gathered from outside the case, particularly from witnesses. These win conviction either by their own known virtue or by their circumstances in life, since jurors assume that talent, wealth, age, luck, skill, and experience are possessed by the worthy. Such witnesses are especially persuasive when it is believed that they are constrained to speak the truth. This necessity can be mental, where men are or were possessed by temporary passions (such as grief, lust, anger, and fear), or are in an unreasoning state (such as childhood, sleep, drunkenness, or madness). In the case of the slave, it can also be physical, ‘for what men say when they have been worn down by stripes, the rack, and fire, seems to be spoken by truth itself ’. 30 Clearly the appeal in the case of the slave must be to constraint rather than to the respected qualities of character evidenced in their circumstance of life. Going one step further, Lycurgus reminded advocates, slaves could be considered to be outside the realm of rhetoric at all: in matters of dispute it is considered by far the just and most democratic course, when there are male or female slaves, who possess the necessary information, to examine these by torture and so have facts to go upon instead of hearsay . . . Which people could not have been misled by cunning or a deceptive argument? The male and female slaves. 31

The form of the challenge created certain assumptions which endured in discussions of the practice by both Greek and Roman orators. As Page duBois says, ‘the slave body [became], in the democratic city, the site of 29 Gagarin, ‘The Torture of Slaves in Athenian Law’, p. 10; Mirhady, ‘Torture and Rhetoric in Athens’, p. 119. 30 Cicero, Topica, 20.74–5, in De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, and Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). 31 Quoted in Page duBois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 51–2. Demosthenes gives the same reasons for calling such evidence preferable to the testimony of free persons, quoted Gagarin, ‘The Torture of Slaves in Athenian Law’, p. 1.

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torture and of the production of truth’. 32 Here proof was made, not discovered, as the result of a series of formal procedures. One might appeal to the reason of the freeman (whose honour and stake in the community were at risk if discredited), but only to the body of the slave. Since slaves could never be part of the political community, their evidence was regarded as the more persuasive precisely because it was given from outside the society listening to it, and so could be considered impartial. There were a few dissenting voices, but on the grounds of efficacy, not of human rights. Aristotle’s Rhetoric pragmatically points out that compulsion demonstrably produces false evidence, and Quintilian warns that the duty of the orator is first to consider the motives of those demanding the basanos. 33 Roman oratory discussed torture as evidence of a master’s wrongdoing. Accounts circulating in England of continental law and practice focused on confession by the guilty person himself. John Langbein has argued that the use of torture on the Catholic continent was prompted by the abolition of the judicial ordeal under the Fourth Lateran Council. 34 This left judgement solely to human reason, which called forth a system of statutory proofs which reduced judicial discretion in capital cases (codified in, for instance, the Constitutio criminalis Carolina, promulgated for the Holy Roman Empire in 1532, Sebastian Guazzini’s Tractatus ad defensam Inquisitorum of 1612, and Joost Damhouder’s Praxis rerum criminalium of 1554). 35 Conviction in these required the confirmation of two eyewitnesses or a confession by the guilty person. However, the latter could be made to make a statement where sufficient confirmatory evidence existed. As under Roman law there were strict guidelines on the use of torture: it could only be applied for capital crimes, and solely where there were no other means of getting the evidence. It could not be applied to children under the age of fourteen, pregnant women, the aged infirm, and, sometimes, those of high rank. It had to be ordered and supervised by the judge himself, who might not pose leading questions, and who was accompanied by a clerk 32 33

duBois, Torture and Truth, p. 50. Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1376b–77a; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 5.4. 34 John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), pp. 4–8. 35 E. Peters, Torture (1985; Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), chs 2, 3.


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to transcribe the whole of the proceedings. The coerced confession had to be repeated voluntarily. These limits sound as if they would ensure that torture were not applied to produce a false confession. However, an initial confession under torture could be regarded as a suspicious circumstance itself, which would allow the torture to be repeated until the authorities were convinced they had got full information. Moreover, magistrates could take account of physical signs (such as silence, sighs, and pallor) and reports about the body from physicians, just as they could listen to ‘language coaxed or coerced from the body, the voice of the self brought to speaking by another, in scenes of mesmerism [and] hypnotism’. 36 A guilty conscience was widely expected to weaken a person under torture, so wincing was in itself suspicious. 37 Even after conviction, the possibility of torture remained; since a convicted man’s body already belonged to the state it was permissible to torture him for further information about other crimes. The precautions which were enforced before torture could be applied also gave it the appearance of punishment after confession. In short, the state had a right to inflict pain until the response required by the legal situation had been given. Apart from legal theory, the gruesome details of continental practices also fascinated English audiences. They were a regular feature of popular anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish propaganda. One instance of how this xenophobia was exploited is in a report by William Lithgow, a professional traveller who published anecdotes of his journeys. The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles (1632) describes how Lithgow was imprisoned by Malaga’s governor on suspicion of offering information about the Spanish treasure fleet due in from the West Indies. Unable to rebut this story he was examined under oath; his jailors ‘clapping [his] cheeks with a Judas smile’ and writing down his answers, while detailing the sufferings in store for the uncooperative. Lithgow then was offered their version of ‘his’ confession, and accused of following an art of memory when he preferred his own account. An ‘incessant 36 For procedures in Lyons between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, see Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), pp. 60–2. 37 An assumption voiced, for instance, by Michel de Montaigne, The Essays, trans. John Florio, ed. G. Saintsbury, 3 vols (1615; London: D. Nutt, 1892–3), ii, pp. 47–8.

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imploration: confesse, confesse, confesse’ accompanied the following (and repeated) preparations for torture. He was starved, cramped in an iron leg gad, racked, cut with cords, had water forced into him, and halfstrangled. Standing firm in his story, the Spanish eventually reclassified these sessions from an interrogation for spying to the punishment of a blasphemer against the Virgin Mary. Though ‘innocently Tortured (as we acknowledge we were better informed lately from Madrile of the English intention) yet it was her power, her Divine power, which brought these judgments upon thee’, they said, dryly. On his return to England Lithgow provided yet more grisly spectacle in the display of his ‘martyred anatomy’ before James at Theobalds. 38 Some private travellers made visits to torture chambers on the Continent a part of their comparative studies into judicial systems. In 1651, for instance, John Evelyn attended one session by water and cords in Paris although forbidden to do so by French law. Evelyn did not comment on the institutional aspects which had brought him to observe it—namely, its efficacy—and instead focused on its physical elements. He reported that these made him ‘so uncomfortable’ that he could not stay for the next session, and rapidly moved away into a moral point; the spectacle ‘represented yet to me the intollerable suffering which our [Blessed Saviour] must needes undergo’. 39 At home, Tudor and Stuart debate about, and practice of, torture was carried on above the law. Confession was unnecessary for conviction under English common law, since the jury system, by spreading the burden of judgement, required a lower standard of proof than under a single magistrate. Torture was illegal. Yet when English justicing handbooks dealt with the pre-trial examination of defendants, their discussion of confession, suspicion, proof, and witness credibility used the same ideas as those of the continental codes (though English writers referred their discussions to Roman law rather than to canon law). This was particularly the case for self-incriminatory oaths. Civil lawyers increasingly eschewed the inquisitorial procedure of Star Chamber and the Church court of High Commission in following the canon law precept nemo 38 W. Lithgow, The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles (London: N. Okes, 1632), pp. 451, 463, 471, 483. 39 11 March 1651, in J. Evelyn, The Diary, ed. E. S. De Beer, 6 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), iii, 28–9.


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Fig. 2.2 The author is tortured, in William Lithgow The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles.

tenetur seipsum prodere (no one is bound to betray himself ). 40 This gave guidance to the guilty person in capital crimes about which duty he should follow, in the dilemma between preserving his life but doing 40 M. MacNair, ‘The Early Development of the Privilege against Self-Incrimination’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 10 (1990), 66–84.

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so without perjury. 41 Instances of equity courts refusing to compel defendants to answer to charges carrying criminal liability start in the reign of Elizabeth I, and were later extended by analogy to common law courts and then, by the late 1630s, to Star Chamber itself. There was one exception to this trend: in grave cases the right of the individual to immunity from violence had to yield to the greater right of the state to detect treason. Torture could be used solely under the royal prerogative for information affecting national security, rather than for evidence of guilt, as Sir Francis Bacon advised James I. Moreover, this power was in the prerogative only defensively, relying on the fact that the sovereign could not be prosecuted in his own courts. Yet, as the security situation relating to Catholic Europe worsened over Elizabeth’s reign, the exception became more usual. An increasing number of prominent men were appointed by the Privy Council as commissioners to torture sessions (including Bacon himself, Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Julius Caesar, and Sir Thomas Bodley). 42 John Bellamy and Langbein cite over eighty interrogations ordered by the Council between 1540 and 1640, for a variety of crimes from suspected treason, riot, and murder, down to horse stealing and the petty theft of royal property. Most examinations took place at the Tower, but there were exceptions. Some officials were licensed to carry out torture on their own premises (the pursuivant Richard Topcliffe and Bishop Bonner, for instance, both kept their own manacles), there were racks to be operated on the orders of the Privy Council at Bristol, Bridgnorth, and Bridewell, and the Council of Wales and the Marches had a general grant of authority to apply torture without specific advance Privy Council licence. 43 Apart from these legal records, other instances appear in the martyrologies (such as the use of the manacles on the missionary priest Robert

41 B. J. Shapiro, ‘Classical Rhetoric and the English Law of Evidence’, in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, ed. V. Kahn and L. Hutson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 54–72, especially pp. 64–5; Langbein, Torture, pp. 8–10, 79–80. 42 Langbein, Torture, pp. 94–122. His argument that the reappearance of torture in Tudor England followed on from the change in the composition of juries (when the centralization of legal proceedings made them unlikely to know the litigants) does not explain why this mode of proof was selected before others. 43 J. G. Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), ch. 3.


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Fig. 2.3 An interrogation, in William Allen, Historia del glorioso martirio di sedici sacerdoti (a translation of A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII Reverend Priests).

Southwell by Topcliffe). 44 The interrogations show a care to convert a proffered story into third-party evidence. Most coercive activity, of course, never reaches the page. The instances of reported torture are interesting precisely because they were formally authorized and written 44 The interrogation is detailed by Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer: A Study in Religious Inspiration (London: Sheed and Ward, 1935), pp. 65–8.

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down, not because the suffering was extraordinary. A city officer, the remembrancer, had to be present at all rackings carried out in the Tower to transcribe proceedings. These notes show that the rackmaster characteristically varied the tone of his questions, moving quickly between the bland, the ironic, the farcical, and the informative, to unsettle the victim’s confidence and make him dependent on the torturer’s version of events. The rackmaster talked of a joint search for a truth that was already known, repeatedly referring to the ‘obstinacy’ of prisoners, when they did not give the right answer. 45 One remembrancer, Thomas Norton, said he saw no one on the rack ‘but where it was first knowen and evidentlie probable by former detections, confessions, and otherwise, that the partie so racked, or tortured, was giltie’. 46 Michel Foucault argues of the French enlightenment that the accused was called upon—if necessary by the most violent persuasion—to play the role of voluntary partner in the procedure . . . of producing truth. Subjectivity and subjection went hand in hand, in the way institutional power operated on the body. Testing this in the early modern English context, Elizabeth Hanson shows that Privy Council warrants similarly describe such ‘official terrorism’ as an acquisition of knowledge, part of a culture of discovery. Hanson concludes that in the case of martyrs the truth of faith was not the state’s truth; since martyrs could provide no referential narrative about their faith, the state eventually had to provide one for itself to justify its actions. 47 The accounts also show how much reliance English rackmasters placed on the victim’s imagination. Usually, they elaborated on other forms of suffering ahead for the victim, before they used or removed their chosen instrument, characteristically called their ‘device’. This term held at the time the interlinked connotations of mechanical operation, ingenious contrivance, dramatic representation, and the exertion 45

115.

W. D. Cooper, ‘Further Particulars of Thomas Norton’, Archaeologia 36 (1855),

46 A Declaration of the Favourable Dealing of hir Majesties Commissioners Appointed for the Examination of Certeine Traitors, and of Tortures Unjustlie Reported to be Done upon them for Matters of Religion (1584; attributed to William Cecil but, according to Conyers Read, probably by Thomas Norton), reprinted by Raphael Holinshed; see Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols (London, 1808), iv, 511–14; Cooper, ‘Norton’, p. 116. 47 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 39; Elizabeth Hanson, ‘Torture and Truth in Elizabethan England’, Representations 34 (1991), 53–84.


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of willpower over another person’s wishes. Those who ordered the torture variously represented such fictional efforts as either benevolent in intention or utilitarian in saving time, since they might forestall having actually to torture the victim. Thus, in 1570 the Privy Council ordered that John Felton be ‘brought to the place of torture and so put in feare thereof ’ before he suffered, and in 1574 required Humphrey Needham to be put before the rack ‘without stretching his bodye to th’intent he might discover the trothe’. 48 Norton said the ‘devices’ were applied to the victims very slowly, ‘with so manie preparations of persuasions to spare themselves, and so manie meanes to let them know that the truth was by them to be uttered’. 49 Unlike continental law, which frowned on innovation, the English torturer was noted for his ability to caricature the natural body, extending or contracting it beyond limits. ‘Wee have invented’, remarked Robert Burton, ‘more torturing instruments, then there be severall members in a mans body’. 50 Inscriptions by victims in the Tower repeat the phrase ‘torture straunge’. 51 Such ‘strange devices’ appealed to a sense of the ridiculous in rackmasters. When Topcliffe asked for permission to use the manacles on Southwell, he gloated that ‘it will be as though he were dancing a trick or a figure at trenchmore’ (a lively country dance). 52 Norton boasted of how another Catholic priest, Alexander Briant, was stretched ‘a foote longer than God made him’. 53 Norton had already proved his creativity in another sphere, as coauthor of the first Senecan tragedy in English, Gorbuduc (1561). When talking about torture we are in the area of what Nicholas Brooke calls the horrid laughter provoked by revenge tragedy. The revenger’s witty and cruel displacement of body parts to get at a hidden truth suspected by him elicits a guilty engagement by the audience. Their nervous laughter disavows the sadistic fantasy, as the revenger presses on to get the confession he needs, and which, in fact, will convert interrogation into punishment. The high-tech, high-concept element in, say, The Duchess of Malfi 48 50

49 Bellamy, Treason, p. 112. Norton, in Holinshed’s Chronicles, iv, 514. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. T. C. Faulkner et al., 6 vols (1621; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), i, 127. 51 Such as the anonymous graffito in the Bell Tower and Thomas Miagh’s verse of 1581 in the Beauchamp Tower, which both declare ‘bi torture straunge my trouth was tried yet of my lybertie denied’, John Bayley, The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1821), i, 134, 154. 52 53 Bellamy, Treason, p. 112. Cooper, ‘Norton’, p. 115.

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(kissing a dead hand, glimpsing waxwork corpses, a ghost as an echo, a dance of madmen and a bellman with a garrot) shows both torturer and dramatist as mannerist artists. As Elaine Scarry has argued of twentiethcentury torture, it is a grotesque drama that compensates for the torturer’s real powerlessness to get true agreement with his point of view. 54 Ingenuity was not a solely professional attribute. A Commons debate in 1621, on what to do with a man who had insulted Princess Elizabeth, shows how spontaneously inventive amateurs can be. One after another members rose to suggest that Edward Floyd be whipped, pilloried, squeezed into the Tower’s Little Ease, fined and pressed to the wars, banished, have his tongue bored through or slit, or have his chaps and ears sliced off (rank was the only point on which they paused, Sir Edwin Sandys gravely noting that in Roman law whipping is allowed for slaves only, and that ‘torturing is unlawfull on the rack for a knight and so a Lord’). 55 Sectarian publications linked extreme suffering and truth claims by the victim. How else could he withstand the pain unless upheld by God, for ‘Thy Martyrs were known to be but men, and therfore it pleased thee to fill them with thy Spirit . . . in that they did more than men’, as Donne tells God. Such books were thus particularly interested in involving the reader in the curious varying of the victim’s body. 56 For instance, Richard Verstegan’s Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (1587; ‘a display of the cruelties of the heretics of our time’) circulated in England and on the continent to gain support for French and English Catholics. Illustrations invited the viewer to be amazed at the strange devices of a torturer who sliced a gobbet of flesh off a man, grilled it, fed it to him, then peered through his slit abdomen to see it being digested. 57 On the Protestant side, the Actes and Monuments gave 54 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 27–8. 55 Commons Debates 1621, ed. W. Notestein, F. H. Relf, and H. Simpson, 7 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), iii, 123–7, v.130. 56 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. J. Sparrow (1624; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), p. 34. 57 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (1588; Antwerp: H. Hubert, 1604), p. 49. Richard Verstegan (known as Rowlands while living in England) took an active part in the mission to reconvert his homeland, as a Catholic printer, engraver, and devotional author. Lionello Puppi details the graphic depictions of torture circulating in the period, in Torment in Art: Pain, Violence, and Martyrdom (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), pp. 11–67.


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accounts of the torture sessions under Henry and Mary, often in the victim’s own words. Cuthbert Simpson, for instance, marvelled at his own silence when he was set in ‘an engine of iron’ (the brake) for three hours, then had an arrow grated between his bound forefingers. Finally he was racked twice, to get the names of those who were his fellowmembers of a congregation holding services in English. The resistance of Ann Askew, racked for information about the Protestant practices of the Duchess of Suffolk’s circle, provoked the official recorder—supposed to view only what went on in the cell—to move from writer to actor in the drama. ‘Because I laie still and did not crie, my lord chancellor and M. Rich took paines to racke me with their owne hands, till I was nigh dead’, Askew reported. 58 Behind these scenes lie the exemplary and imaginative sufferings detailed by early Church histories, such as Prudentius’ Crowns of Martyrdom, and book eight of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History. Prudentius’ accounts of early Christian martyrdoms regard both speaking out and silent suffering as forms of witness. They are brought together in the case of Cassian, a schoolmaster who bleeds to death under the pricking styli of his pupils (‘you see we are giving you back all the thousands of characters which as we stood in tears we took down from your teaching’), and Romanus, whose tongue is ripped out but who continues to praise God (‘the voice that bears witness to the truth cannot be annihilated, even if its passage be cut away’). Eusebius is more summary in his descriptions of martyrs rent in two when tied to saplings or whose ribcages are clawed apart by hooks. However, he does meditate on how his governors use ‘all kinds of devices for torture’ on Christians, ones which ‘the noble and law-abiding judges devised with more than ordinary eagerness, displaying their cruelty as a kind of wise virtue, always striving to surpass one another with their more recently invented tortures, as if prizes in a contest were offered’. 59 The element 58 John Foxe, The Second Volume of the Ecclesiastical Historie, Containing the Acts and Monuments of Martyrs (London: For the Stationers’ Company, 1610), ii, 1843, ii, 1129. Debora Shuger finds a similar attempt to involve the viewer in Calvinist passion narratives that show a bestial rage against the meek Christ, in The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ch. 3. 59 Prudentius, trans. H. J. Thomson, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949–53), ii, 227, 229–31. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History Books 6–10, trans. R. J. Deferrari (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1955), pp. 178–87. Tudor and Stuart probate inventories show the Latin editions of both martyrologies were popular:

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Fig. 2.4 Strange devices, in Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Theatre of the cruelty of the heretics of our time).


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of marvel is maintained in the sectarian account, as Herbert’s reference to the early martyrs in a letter to his mother suggests: they were ‘burnt by thousands, and have endur’d such other Tortures, as the very mention of them might beget amazement’. 60 In contrast to the number of interrogations in Elizabeth’s reign, there were only seven ordered by the Privy Council between 1603 and 1640, each of which dealt with offences against the state. 61 However, during this period debates about the institution of torture grew in volume, as part of a move to limit the royal prerogative. These focused less on its efficacy than on its implications for the contract between subject and king. The issue came to the fore in 1628, when the Privy Council considered the interrogation of the man who murdered the Duke of Buckingham, John Felton, to discover whether he had accomplices. Despite his fury, Charles was cautious about intervening in the affair. He asked the Lord Chief Justice of Common Pleas if Felton could be racked under the law as it stood, ‘(for said the King) if it might be done by Law, he would not use his Prerogative in this Point’ (it could not). 62 Lawyers associated with the Puritan attempt to found civil rights in Magna Carta referred torture to the nemo tenetur principle. 63 Of course, said Sir Thomas Smith listing its disadvantages, it was unfair to the innocent, produced unreliable information, and often proved futile as proof in court if the statement was recanted or the jury’s pity overcame their judgement. Primarily though ‘it is taken for servile. For what can he serve the common wealth after as a free man who hath his bodie so E. S. Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ii, 326–7, 645. There is no record of a translation of Prudentius published before 1696, but a translation of Eusebius by Meredith Hanmer received six editions before 1663. 60 Herbert is advising his mother to copy their demeanour in her sickness; letter of 29 May, 1622, in George Herbert, The Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 373–4. 61 Langbein, Torture, p. 128. 62 Instead of mounting a legal challenge to the request, Felton warned the Council of the notorious unreliability of compelled evidence, stating that he might name the councillors themselves as accomplices, ‘for torture might draw unexpected things from him’: John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, 5 vols (London: T. Newcomb 1659), v, 638; Langbein, Torture, p. 138. 63 Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 16.

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haled and tormented?’ 64 In Sir Edward Coke’s Third Institutes (written in the 1620s), torture is defined as an attack on the liberty of the subject, and therefore contrary to long-held English civil freedoms and inimical to the proper working of common law. 65 Going from a subject’s rights (rather than common law duties), Thomas Hobbes argued that the right to save oneself was above all other rights which might be asserted over subjects; thus the tortured cannot be believed, and thus it would be wrong to torture them. 66 Certain common assumptions about torture run through these otherwise varied and well-known discussions in oratory, law, martyrology, and travel writing, and these need to be carried forward in considering the confessions extorted by the conscience. As the final section of this chapter will argue, the talk in the poems of racking, pressing, manacling and so on is not a platitude; their first readers knew how, when, where, and why such devices were to be applied. From the point of view of the authorities, they were principally to be applied to those (slaves, criminals, recusants) whose lack of honour disabled them from being believed by the community. Torture was most effective when it stretched the sufferer’s imagination as strangely as his body. The victim was expected to acknowledge the right of the state to torture him, and indeed, to cooperate with the search for truth—effectively, to torture himself. The product, the confession, was known before interrogation. Prisoners who refused to admit it were obstinate and deserved torture to move them, while prisoners who admitted it reconfigured their suffering as justified punishment. In rhetorical terms, both victim and torturer used the structure of subjectio, where the interrogator’s desired answer was to be ventriloquized. How does this model work when God is the torturer, going after an acknowledgement of some kind? Take Job, handed over to Satan to test his faith in divine justice. Job—a manifestly righteous man— sees his sons and daughters drop dead at a feast, his animals perish, his 64 Thomas Smith, De republica anglorum, ed. L. Alston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906), ii, ch. 24. 65 Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: Concerning High Treason, and other Pleas of the Crown, and criminall Causes (London: M. Flesher, 1644), pp. 25–35; W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 16 vols (London: Methuen, 1922–72), v, 194–5, 428. 66 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (1651; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 98–9.


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body boil with pus, and has to listen to three friends who tell him it is his own fault. He initially resists the temptation his wife offers, to rail at God, but then gives in; he is silenced by a display of God’s might, and finally admits God’s right to try him. Most contemporary responses to the tale follow Calvin’s Sermons . . . upon . . . Job (translated into English in 1580), which focus more on the response by a strong faith to suffering than on the reasons for God’s actions. Calvin bluntly states these to be unknowable in detail. Innate depravity in man in any case converts all pain into unwarrantably gentle chastisement. Even questioning its causes could be dangerous, since it might make the sufferer resent God. 67 Typical of those English ministers who followed Calvin’s line would be George Abbott, whose suffering Job is so ‘appaled by Gods immediate parlee; and unexpected apparition in the whirlwind’— so ‘non-plust’—as to challenge God for his reasons. This merely calls down further trials as punishments, to ‘breake the necke of his pride’. 68 More human (and controversial) are those Stuart writers who find it difficult to distinguish between the Almighty’s power to judge and just his power. In Richard Humphreys’s The Conflict of Job (1607) characters from the morality tradition—the Naked, Poor, Lame, Fatherless, Blind, and so on—file before the narrator to testify to Job’s refulgent goodness. The wife of this Job says what many readers think, when she raps out, tartly, doest thou not see how ridiculous thou art, in that thou continuest sitting in Ashes, to shew thy magnanimity, humility, and repentance: seeing that [God] doth nothing but afflict thee more and more? . . . neither is this thy disease, such as benummeth the sences, but such rather as woulde make a man roare, and cry out . . . as they are wont that are pierced with hot yrons.

When Humphreys’s Job accuses God, he is not met with an amiable explanation about hidden divine benevolence that will be ultimately revealed. Instead, God boasts about his might (‘waigh then with thy selfe how unequall God and man are matched together in disputation’), withers Job with sarcastic rhetorical questions (‘but what meanest thou, 67 John Calvin, Sermons . . . upon the Booke of Job, trans. A. Golding (London: H. Bynneman, 1574), especially sermons 6–9. 68 George Abbott, The Whole Booke of Job Paraphrased (London: E. Griffin, 1640), p. 252.

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Job, art thou blanked alreadie of that of late wast so bold?’), and finally insists that Job should admit His justice: I would have thee openly to confesse, that thou hast done mee injurie, in charging mee with unjust dealing toward thee . . . Thou wilt abstaine thou sayest, from such answers as before. That is not enough, unlesse withall thou revoke thine error, and make a large recantation of thy severall faultes, committed against me heere in the face of the Congregation, in calling my righteousnesse into question. 69

Throwing aside the trivial persona of Satan as tempter, this God engages in a battle of willpower directly with Job. He is after a specific, detailed public confession. Silence, since it implies residual criticism, is not enough, and Job must speak God’s words. Francis Quarles’s Divine Poems, Containing the History of . . . Job (1630) is similarly unconcerned to ameliorate God’s image. Man’s release to torture is explicitly on God’s orders, when Satan asks the Almighty to Lend mee thy Power, then, that I might once But Sacrifice his Flesh, afflict his Bones . . . To which, th’Eternall thus: His body’s thine, To plague thy fill, withall I do confine Thy power to her lists: Afflict and teare His flesh at pleasure.

Quarles points out where Job might fail in faith, smugly murmuring after each disaster that ‘in all this passage, Job, in heart nor Tongue,/ Thought God unjust, or charg’d his hand with wrong’—until Job does ask why. God’s roaring response in Quarles does not answer Job’s question except in a series of furious rhetorical questions: Dost thou command the Cisternes of the Skie . . . From thy full hand will hungry Lions eate? . . . Canst thou subject unto thy soveraigntie The untam’d Unicorne? . . . Plead then: No doubt but thine will be the Day: Speake (peevish Plaintiffe). 69 Richard Humphreys, The Conflict of Job, by Way of Dialogue (London: W. Jaggard, 1607), pp. 45, 206–8. The sermon was reissued in 1624, slightly revised, as Jobs Pietie.


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God’s final, snide rebuke ends with the binary moral: ‘Wilt thou make Comments on my Text, and must/ I be unrighteous, to conclude thee, just?’ It causes Job to collapse, not to agree: I am a sinner (Lord,) my words are wind, My thoughts are vaine, (Ah Father) I have sinn’d: Shall dust reply? I spake too much before, Ile close these lips, and never answer more. 70

Having looked at rackmasters’ techniques, it is no surprise to find that God in both Quarles and Humphreys swiftly varies his tone from angry assertions of absolute power to mock humble questions to sarcastic deflations of Job’s flattering complaints. The justice of Job’s position is never made an issue, only his temerity in asserting it. In refusing to accept the narrative offered by God through the three friends, Job has refuted an interpretative law (‘God is good’) by referring to his own particular pains, inciting empathy in readers who are all under the same constraint. 71 Both Quarles and Humphreys offer a God who is the final lawgiver, judge, and prosecutor, and thus outside the possibility of being weighed up himself. Ostensibly, this test is between Satan and God; in fact it is between the human understanding of divine justice and omnipotence. 72 To which does Job submit? Can the former attribute be separated from the latter? Can God be judged in terms of morality? The Book of Job ends in questions that God also answers, in a way Job chokes on. We have learned to think of the patient suffering and bold speech of an early modern martyr as means of resistance to wrongful authority, where identity is affirmed through beliefs held through trial. 73 This cannot hold for these early modern Jobs, however, where the victim 70 Francis Quarles, Divine Poems, Containing the History of . . . Job (London: M. F. 1630; 1633), pp. 189, 185, 256, 257, 259. Quarles (1592–1644), a minor courtier who accompanied Elizabeth to Bohemia on her marriage in 1613, returned to London in 1620 and by 1629 had taken up the post of private secretary to James Usher, Archbishop of Armagh. 71 This argument by Jonathan Lamb brilliantly places Job as a trope of the move in legal, scientific, and political discourses in the later seventeenth century from deductive to inductive reasoning: Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ch. 1. 72 Bruce Zuckerman, Job the Silent: a Study in Historical Counterpoint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 5. 73 Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, pp. 8–10.

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agrees with the torturer that refusing to speak the words of the torturer is a sin, for which the same torture is also an appropriate punishment. What looks like a reasonable resentment against God must be the effect of a state of total depravity, because it is felt toward a perfect being. In the similar context of Puritan spiritual autobiography, John Stachniewski says of the experience of reprobation that ‘the imaginative impact of being loathed and daily victimized by an all-powerful deity . . . [was] a feeling of total self-alienation (because the justice of the ruler of the universe—the ultimate patriarch—seemed axiomatic)’. Though Puritan diarists attempt to suppress their resentment at God’s ‘malevolence’, Stachniewski sees it in their eruptions into uncontrollable blasphemy. Tellingly, it also appears in the diarists’ masochistic pleas for annihilation, for what was left after the individual’s submission to God was ‘surplus self-hood unaccommodated to the divine scheme’, and should be disposed of. 74 In the seventeenth-century books about Job, the implicit rebuttal of God’s actions lies not in the voiced objections, but in the victim’s absolute collapse (a strategy that will be examined in poems on dust in Chapter 5). In this abject figure there is no ‘Job’ left to agree with his torturer. Donne regularly preached on the Book of Job, working over the sobering thought that one ‘must not exalt any mans Reason so far, as that there should lie an Appeal, from Gods Judgements to any mans reason’. The sinner in his congregation was expected to complete the syllogism, a ‘Sentence pronounced by his own Conscience . . . Treason is death, and sin is Treason’. 75 Donne’s meditation on his near-fatal illness in 1623, Devotions upon emergent occasions, and severall steps in my sicknes (1624, with a further four editions by 1638), includes an exploration of the sovereign right to torture. Dedicated to Prince Charles, the text’s political insubordination has been noted by others, in particular where it takes up the literal meaning of the phrase ‘king of kings’ to promote values contrary to royal inclination (primarily the rule of law, freedom to counsel the monarch, and openness in government). 76 74 John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 77. Stachniewski considers that reprobation succeeded as a discourse because it drew both on the effects of severe parental discipline and on a volatile economy that left many insecure. 75 Donne, Sermons, i, 169, 173; see also ii, 314. 76 Douglas Gray and Jeanne Shami, ‘Political Advice in Donne’s Devotions: no Man is an Island’, Modern Language Quarterly 50 (1989), 337–56; Jeanne Shami, ‘Kings and


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Less discussed is Donne’s interest in how the ‘first grudging of the sicknesse’ is aggravated by ‘jelousies and suspitions and apprehensions of sicknes’ which are figured as treason against the sovereign, ‘so that now, we doe not onely die, but die upon the Rack’. Likening himself in his fourth and sixth expostulations to Job in his desire to reason with God, Donne acts as his own comforter, pointing out to himself that the signs of sickness are evidence of God’s presence (‘these spots are but the letters, in which thou has written thine owne Name’, a theme which is taken up again in Chapter 3). 77 Donne detects the ‘secret, the mistery of the right use of feare’: since ‘this sicknesse is thy immediate correction’ then Donne can feel assured that he is in God’s hands. 78 Devotions goes on to maintain a threefold comparison between the state, the body, and the conscience, which places torture as an emergency measure under the royal prerogative. The body politic racked by disorder, but also, and conversely, overstretched by authoritarian measures, was a familiar image in political discourse. In 1556, for instance, the Marian exile Bishop John Ponet argued in favour of some religious toleration, since ‘if the sinowes be to muche racked and stretched out, or to muche shrinked together, it brideth wonderfull paines and deformitie in mannes body: so if obedience be to much or to litell in a common wealth, it causeth much evil and disorder’. 79 Initially, ‘the pulse, the urine, the sweat . . . have sworn to say nothing, to give no Indications of any dangerous sicknnesse’. 80 Donne rebels against the ‘Manacles’ of his loosened sinews. The tautology of conscientious hands taking themselves as treacherous hands into custody ready for further questioning becomes the theme of the meditation. Thus, Donne’s physicians are forced to interrogate the patient’s ‘secret disobediences, secret repugnances against his declar’d will . . . against those secret conspiracies Desperate Men: John Donne Preaches at Court’, JDJ 6 (1987), 9–24; Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: the Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), ch. 2. 77 Donne, Devotions, pp. 1, 78, 11. Donne equates those who mangle others’ bodies with those who pollute their own with sin: Donne, Sermons, vi, 266. 78 Donne, Devotions, pp. 3, 33. 79 David G. Hale, The Body Politic: a Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 81. Similar echoes appear Herbert’s poems, in the ‘rebel-flesh’ of ‘The H. Communion’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Affliction IV’, and the ‘deposition scene’ at the end of ‘Justice II’. 80 Donne, Devotions, p. 56.

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in the State, the Magistrate hath the rack; and against the insensible diseases, Phisicians have their examiners’. 81 God must use force to get the ‘queen of proofs’, confession, of his power and his subject’s guilt: in intestine Conspiracies, voluntary Confessions doe more good, then Confessions upon the Rack; in these Infections, when Nature her selfe confesses, and cries out by these outward declarations, which she is able to put forth of her selfe, they minister comfort; but when all is by the strength of Cordials, it is but a Confession upon the Racke. 82

It does not matter whether the confession comes from the first torture of sickness or the repeated torture of medicine purges (and early modern laxatives and emetics for ‘intestine Conspiracies’ were violent indeed): if my spots come forth, by what meanes soever, whether by the strength of nature, by voluntary confession . . . or by the vertue of Cordialls (for even thy Corrections are Cordials) if they come forth either way, thou receiveth that confession with a gracious interpretation. 83

Devotions thus investigates the verbal end-product wrung out of a rotting body, since pus, phlegm, vomit, and faeces are, correctly judged against God’s law, signs of a working conscience. In Devotions and in his sermons, Donne links evacuation and annihilation: ‘a working upon my selfe by thy . . . purgative physicke, a free and entire evacuation of my sole by confession . . . violent and contrary to nature’. 84 This way of thinking is paralleled in, say, Martin Luther’s alternating despair over his depravity and his constipation, or Job’s belief that his dunghill squat and festering flesh are signs of rebellion. Donne’s worry that his confession is inadequate (‘I know [the sins] not so well, as to name them all, nor am sure to live hours enough to name them al’) is a common experience for Christians, who can never confess enough— there is always more to come out. 85 Devotions is able to move easily between the political, the doctrinal, and the experience of the body because God prizes the abjected discharges above all else, whether they are words, mucus, or sounds that are midway between the two, part verbal, part somatic (Vaughan in ‘Thou that know’st’ and Herbert in ‘Affliction I’, ‘Sion’, ‘Gratefulnesse’, and ‘The Crosse’ can boldly assert 81 84

82 Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 74. Noted by Sparrow, ibid., p. xxii; 124.

83

Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 59.

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that God graciously tunes groans into harmony). 86 The only adequate and full account of sin is by God himself, so all full confessions will be involuntary signs. Donne sighs that ‘thou interpretest the very purpose of Confession so well, as that thou scarce leavest any new Mercy for the action itselfe’, particularly in the case of sins hidden from the sinner’s conscience. 87 From the start, Donne is quite clear that the sickness can be translated, since God speaks in a ‘figurative, in a Metaphoricall language’, and his very acts can be read as types of other acts. 88 Since the groans, pains, and spots of sickness are God’s figures, his ‘remote and precious metaphors’, God also supplies the ‘gracious interpretation’: ‘thou givest us the same Word for our satisfaction and for our inquisition’. 89 In other words, in Devotions God poses the questions and gives the answers. A move into the figurative to translate an experience from the human to the divine is characteristic of the vocabulary of suffering, as Richard Whitlock argues: ‘the reward of Afflictions, [is] the Hyperbole of Mercy: all wee can suffer here, being not a moity of our deservings; what infinite Mercy must that be, that maketh even our Punishments meritous’. 90 Since the human race is enslaved to sin, and so is without ‘honour’, it cannot speak credibly of its own accord, and must be forced to speak the truth. This is the violence which rhetoric is accused of from Plato onwards: the forceful manipulation of another, the use of verbal devices on a person’s will, to make him agree with the orator. 91 The torture God inflicts is what in secular situations Page duBois calls a form of anamnesis. 92 In the religious texts also, God tries to recover the buried truth of his own justice, and the victim has a duty to cooperate. In the terms used by the casuistry manuals, the Lord’s spy (our traitor) is expected to speak up. In Donne’s later meditations, the patient more dutifully reads his suffering in this light: 86 Clarke points out the connection with Augustinian sign theory, where grimaces and cries have a more integral connection with the signified than words do: Clarke, Theory and Theology, p. 117. 87 88 89 Donne, Devotions, pp. 58, 59. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., p. 113. 90 Richard Whitlock, Zootomia, or, Observations on the Present Manners of the English (London: T. Roycroft, 1654), p. 37. 91 As, for example, in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S.F. Rendall (Berkeley: California University Press, 1984), p. 158. 92 duBois, Torture and Truth, ch. 8.

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let me think no degree of this thy correction casuall, or without signification; but yet when I have read it in that language, as it is a correction, let me translate it into another, and read it as a mercy; and which of these is the Originall, and which is the Translation . . . I cannot conclude. 93

In the context of the metaphysical poems, there is as little to choose between their groans and confessions as there is between omnipotence and divine justice; the latter pair elides the difference between the former. Thus, for instance, Milton’s devils prove their punishment merited precisely when they rage against it, planning to turn their ‘tortures into horrid arms/ Against the torturer; when to meet the noise/ Of his almighty engine he shall hear/ Infernal thunder . . . / and strange fire,/ His own invented torments’. 94 The distorting effect of torture is doubled in the devils’ engines against the Almighty, but their shrieks are to the right ears, of course, prayers of praise on God’s imaginative devices (indeed, Herbert describes prayer as an ‘engine’ or ‘reversed thunder’ against God in ‘Prayer I’). Taking Foucault’s view of the victim of torture as the symmetrically inverted figure of authority, these devils are perfect mirrors of God, where the very excess of the violence employed is one of the elements of its glory: the fact that the guilty man should moan and cry out under the blows is not a shameful side-effect, it is the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force. 95

As the Introduction showed, confession has a sectarian as well as a political context. The Protestant penitent examines his conscience on his own, though he may later profit from the assurances of forgiveness offered generally to all believers in the scriptures by Christ. In the auricular form of confession used by Catholics, the circumstantial detail of sin is acknowledged openly to a priest, and forgiveness is granted individually. Luther’s Sacrament of Penance (1519) denounced confessors as ‘inquisitorial tyrants’. In reply, Session 14 of the Catholic Church’s reforming Council of Trent (1551) showed that confession requires only what the penitent can remember; it is not a ‘tormentor of consciences’ to recover forgotten sins. By 1559 the Book of Common Prayer was 93 94

Donne, Devotions, p. 41. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Poems, ed. J. Carey and A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1968), ii, 63–70. 95 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 34.


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cautiously requiring any curate who administered the Lord’s Supper to exhort those troubled in conscience to repair to him privately, but only for ‘ghostly counsel, advice and comfort’. English casuists, such as Perkins, argued that their art was simply a perspicacious description of godly judgements, which could be applied by the troubled individual to his own case. 96 Such moderate empiricism seemed under threat in the 1630s, when suspicions grew of a Laudian plan to revive compulsory auricular confession: private confession to a clergyman was increasingly urged in the decade’s visitation articles: some preachers spoke of it as a necessity, and Donne himself determines to undergo it if in need. 97 The degree to which one could or should be forced to admit sin was a hot topic. Though his ‘racking questions’ are put by Donne to himself, there is enough of external compulsion to echo the political and sectarian debates. God speaks through his body expressing a sickness that God knows is there but which prevents Donne from seeing it. Donne acknowledges God’s right to bring it to light: ‘I know, I am not submitted to such a confession as is a racke and torture of the Conscience; but I know I am not exempt from all.’ 98 He employs his utmost imagination to follow the conspiracy God has with the body, considering the progress of the disease limb by limb, organ by organ, in an internal scan to pick up festering matter. God’s ‘gracious interpretation’ then turns the investigation into the cure of giving the ‘right’ answer. This may not be as comfortable a conclusion on Devotions as Walton’s (‘a book that may not unfitly be called a Sacred Picture of Spiritual Ecstacies’), but it is where the metaphors of the text point. 99 With this mass of reluctant dialogue in mind—from Athenian slaves, unfortunate travellers, enraged monarchs, snide Satans, pustulated deans, and hardbody martyrs—I now turn to the poems to ask if they resemble other scenes of early modern torture, and what sort 96 The still-open question of whether or how casuistry superseded confession in England in the seventeenth century is weighed up by Edmund Leites in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 3; Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 349–62. 97 Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (1987; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 221; Donne, Devotions, p. 124; Donne, Sermons, ix, 309–10. 98 99 Donne, Devotions, p. 124. Walton, The Lives, p. 52.

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of confession God gets. There are five poems most frequently cited by Herbert scholars as demonstrating God’s torturing power: ‘Confession’, ‘Justice II’, ‘Temper I’, ‘The Crosse’, and ‘Affliction IV’. As the citations from the start of this chapter showed, each of the poems made no bones about the modern and skilful methods of torture used by God. In ‘Confession’ Herbert praises God’s workmanlike ability to inflict pain (better than Herbert’s defences, and the poet thinks himself a ‘master in my trade’ on these), his persistence in continuing them (‘they never cool, much less give out’, as though they were under guarantee), and imagination in devising them (‘too subtill for the subt’llest hearts’). The soul is flung across ‘fourtie heav’ns’ and a crumb of dust stretched from heaven to hell in ‘Temper I’. God shows a peculiarly refined sense of irony in ‘The Crosse’, where Herbert struggles to get a place to serve God, gets it, and then is made too weak to act in it: ‘To make my hopes my torture, and the fee/ Of all my woes another wo’, says Herbert, with reluctant admiration. The rackmaster’s right to torture is similarly assumed in these poems. Not only are there no anguished questions about why this is happening, but ‘yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best’ and ‘Thy will be done’ are the resigned conclusions of ‘Temper I’ and ‘The Crosse’. The poems offer two ways to stop the torture. ‘Confession’ takes the obvious route of immediate and unreserved acknowledgement. ‘Fiction’, lying to yourself and the interrogator, will simply ‘give a hold and handle to affliction’ reapplied. The second method is relying on Christ to hide Herbert from the torture. The scales of ‘Justice I’ become a beam with buckets lifting penitent tears to heaven, if seen through Christ’s flesh. ‘The Crosse’ starts and ends with the torturing engine endured by Christ, the cross, which turns Christ’s words into Herbert’s. At this point, the argument returns to the problem of who is confessing. In obediently claiming that God’s words go back to him, the poets disown the products of his forcing. They account the words twisted out as best when least part of the poet’s own language: the burped-out biblical texts or sighs or groans of poems such as ‘Sion’ (‘All Solomons sea of brasse and world of stone/ Is not so dear to thee as one good grone’), ‘Affliction III’ (‘My heart did heave, and there came forth, O God!/ By that I knew that thou wast in the grief ’), or ‘The Crosse’ (‘my words, Thy will be done’). In these poems, God does not seem to want specific information from the poet. Elsewhere, Herbert is unembarrassed to detail homely and specific temptations,


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from injunctions not to giggle foolishly or mix jokes and oaths in ‘The Church Porch’ to the personal temptations of fame, learning, and a role at court worried over in ‘The Pearl’ or ‘The World’. Here, however, though God demands a confession to convict, this must, since man’s doubled will denies him credibility, be wrenched from his body in involuntary spasms. No need for details: guilt is created by the act of confession. In secular situations such forced confession provides a false sense of reference to reality. 100 It is, therefore, always ‘true’, but only as a speech act that does what it says, by the action of saying it. In such ars moriendi as Donne’s Devotions and the poems, the symptoms necessarily discover the crime, because there can be no perjurous gap between statement and bodily confirmation. I would therefore take issue with Schoenfeldt’s argument that Herbert’s God is one who converts absolute pain into a fiction of absolute power. 101 The anguished pleas of ‘do not bruise me . . . scourge me . . . grinde me . . . kill me’ (Herbert, ‘Sighs and grones’) are the glory of God, the ‘very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force’. This is a new take on the issue often raised in Herbert studies of the problems of using human art in writing on devotional issues. Herbert seems to have thought of the act of writing as self-torture: the heart should spin out praise, ‘and when it stops for want of store,/ Then will I wring it with a sigh or grone,/ That thou mayst yet have more’ (‘Praise III’). The issue is whether the poet should try to add to God’s speech. One of the metaphors for superfluous art is the tortured word. Herbert’s emulator, Goodman, for instance, criticizes those who ‘Torture poore names,/ Transposing all their parts,/ Thrusting them into broken frames,/ So racking mens intelligence/ To some mistaken, bald, and uncouth sense’ (‘Anagram’). 102 Dryden similarly criticizes Herbert’s pattern poems and copia in his advice to Shadwell that ‘thou maist wings display, and Altars raise,/ And torture one poor word Ten thousand ways’. 103 In devotional writing, this is a forbidden mixture, a ‘resting’ on human duty and ability. A. D. Nuttall argues that the problem of ‘The Holdfast’ (where ‘But to have nought is ours, not to confesse/ That we have nought’) is usually solved by perceiving the dialogue as 100 101 102 103

Brooks, Troubling Confessions, pp. 22–5. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power, ch. 3. Goodman, Beawty in Raggs, p. 47. C. A. Patrides, ed., George Herbert: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 137.

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an attempt at a monologue, where the poet tries to write away from his own voice and to speak in God’s. In the torture poems, however, God’s devices get the right answer, which is no answer at all (‘thou hast made a sigh and grone/ Thy joyes’, ‘Gratefulnesse’). Turning to Vaughan, ‘torture’ sounds a strong word to be used in conjunction with the poet of transcendence. Generally, the worst he has to confess is a lack of fervour (‘oft have I prest/ Heaven with a lazie breath’, he admits in ‘The Showre’) or too quick a response to what is around him (‘The world/ Is full of voices; Man . . . / Answers all’, ‘Distraction’). His day of judgement is a ‘day of life, of light, of love’ which all creatures yearn for, not the day of trial other poets fear (‘The Day of Judgement’, Silex I). As has been said, his body and soul dialogues are trusting agreements to wait patiently for Christ—even cosy, as Soul tucks up Body for its long sleep, and assures it the curtains will part again (‘Death. A Dialogue’, ‘Resurrection and Immortality’). In ‘The Storme’, Herbert’s ‘throbbing conscience spurred by remorse’ rises to heaven to demand a hearing. In Vaughan, ‘The Storm’ makes the poet sigh dismally until his conscience has been washed clean. Vaughan’s ‘Relapse’, which deserves (and would certainly have got, in Herbert) a darting conscience full of stabs and fears, gets instead through Christ’s virtue ‘sweet downie thoughts; soft Lilly-shades; calm streams;/ Joyes full and true’. Herbert’s four violent poems on ‘Affliction’ are opposed by Vaughan’s ‘Affliction’ which murmurs ‘Peace, peace; It is not so. Thou doest miscall/ Thy Physick’. Herbert’s racking ‘tuning’ (in ‘Temper I’) becomes in Vaughan both breath and alternating moods: ‘Tuning his brest to rise, or fall;/ And by a sacred needfull art/ Like strings, stretch every part/ Making the whole most Musicall’ (‘Affliction’). Loving trust and cheerfulness is the key note to his relationship with God (as his poem of that name says), and when he tries to write on ‘Anguish’ he cannot keep it up: ‘My God, could I weep blood,/ Gladly I would’. This is not to say Vaughan’s poems do not deal with specific problems, such as the death of his brother William or the turmoil of civil war. However, these miseries are not connected by Vaughan to a state of sin. His affliction, anguish, judgement, corruption, relapse, and so on are not, as they are for Herbert, occasions to torture his conscience. There is, however, one startling exception to this, which takes on some elements of the show trial and interrogation: ‘The Stone’. The


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poem starts with a furtive exclamation of triumph, when Vaughan realizes a guilty desire (‘I have it now’) and then scouts about to find ‘where to act, that none shall know/ . . . My dark designs’. Men and women, he says with Machiavellian coolness, can be bribed—but then, there are the ‘dumb creatures’. God keeps a ‘busie commerce’ with them, and listens first to their eyewitness accounts against men: ‘They hear, see, speak,/ And into loud discoveries break,/ As loud as blood’. Then comes a menacing volte face: ‘Not that God needs/ Intelligence’. He knows already, and is looking for a tautological confession from man, to justify God’s right to force man to admit God right to force him . . . Yet will not he by his own light (Though both all-seeing and all right,) Condemn men; but will try them by A process, which ev’n man’s own eye Must needs acknowledge to be just.

The unnecessary witnesses are there to endorse God’s justice. Though Vaughan’s headnote to the poem refers to the witness stone that Joshua uses to remind the Israelites of God’s words (‘a witness unto us . . . lest ye deny your God’, Joshua 24:27), in fact the poem gives the stones a role in witnessing man’s acts, not God’s covenant. 104 The notion that ‘mans sinne hath so corrupted, enthralled, perverted, and daily paineth the creature, that it, weary of this intollerable bondage doth in its kinde, make pitiful complaint unto God’ is common. 105 Less so is the nightmare notion that the stones we step on are tablets of conscience, which record sins that even we do not suspect we have committed: Hence sand and dust Are shak’d for witnesses, and stones Which some think dead, shall all at once With one attesting voice detect Those secret sins we least suspect. 104 Ernest Pettet shows how Vaughan habitually treats such stones in the hermetic tradition, as sentient beings: E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s Silex scintillans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 36. 105 Thomas Draxe, The Earnest of our Inheritance . . . and a Demonstration of the Glorious Resurrection of the Bodie (London: F. K., 1613), p. 16. Draxe (d. 1618), was Vicar of Dovercourt cum Harwich in Essex.

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Generally, as Stevie Davies says, Vaughan loves stones. Here, though, the stones are very different to the cooperative ‘creatures’ which lie stunned in a state of deep admiration and longing for ‘The Day of Judgement’, in Silex II. Even the judgement is delivered by something other than God: ‘the Gospel then (for ’tis his word/ And not himself shall judge the world)/ Will by loose Dust that man arraign’. Bar physical torture, the elements of interrogation in Herbert’s trials are present here: a closed self-justifying system, which requires cooperation from the accused, who cannot be trusted to speak the truth. This image of legal pleadings is common in contemporary meditations on selfincrimination. For instance, one of Herbert’s admirers, Henry Colman, adapts the conventions of the body and soul dialogue in a series of poems on ‘the Spirit adulterated by the flesh’, which runs through summons, arraignment, indictment, prisoner’s plea, verdict, and sentence. 106 Robert Burton similarly sees conscience as ‘a continuall testor to give in Evidence, to empanell a Jury to examine us, to cry guilty, a persecutor with hue and cry to follow . . . a Jayler to torment, a Judge to condemne, still accusing, denouncing, torturing’. 107 In Vaughan’s poem, the third-party element of the conscience is taken by the creatures around the sinner. Donne is a different case. The model of torture and confession clearly seen in Devotions does not carry through into his poetry. Some of his disquiet at God’s silence comes from a fear that he has a benumbed, sleepy, or even seared conscience. The casuist William Fenner calls the sleepy conscience ‘very dangerous’ since it ‘letteth [men] see their faults, but amendeth none’. Even worse is the benumbed conscience, where it ‘though informed, and in some measure knowing the evil of their courses and the severitie of God’s judgement, yet let them go on still’. Worst of all is the seared conscience, which speaketh not a jot . . . This is a great judgement of God: greater than this there cannot be . . . It is like a gravestone lying upon their consciences, which keepeth them under untill the day of judgement: at which time God will awake their consciences, and then they will be more furious in tormenting then the very devils themselves. 108 106 Henry Colman, Divine Meditations, ed. K. E. Steanson (1640; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 87–96. 107 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, iii. 417. 108 William Fenner, The Souls Looking-Glasse . . . with a Treatise of Conscience (Cambridge: R. Daniel, 1640), pp. 83–4.


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Critics have noted Donne’s carking anxiety in his poetry at the absence of a response from God; seeing this against the dialogue of symptoms he has in Devotions gives a new angle on the issue. Questions such as ‘Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?’ (Holy Sonnet 1) or ‘Why doth the devil then usurp on me?’ (Holy Sonnet 2) alternate with requests for grace to begin repentance (Holy Sonnets 3, 7), for God to burn his sins away (Holy Sonnet 5), for Donne to take the place of Christ in the crucifixion (Holy Sonnet 11), and to be broken, burned, ravished, and imprisoned (Holy Sonnet 14). These requests get no answer. The problem is summed up in ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, where Donne tells Christ I turn my back to thee, but to receive Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. O think me worth thine anger, punish me, Burn off they rusts, and my deformity.

If Donne lacked such attention, God might have decreed him unworthy of his anger. A sleepy conscience that does not hurt leaves the sinner unaware of sin, so ‘no affliction/ No cross, is so extreme, as to have none’ (‘The Cross’). A sermon by him in 1620 at Whitehall expanded on the ‘seared conscience’, which ‘never [finds] that it is we, that the Preacher means’. 109 There is a theological as well as familial or masochistic basis to Donne’s cry that for ‘some/ Not to be martyrs, is a martyrdom’ (‘A Litany’). The poem hastens to find torments for him: ‘In every Christian/ Hourly tempestuous persecutions grow,/ Temptations martyr us alive; a man/ Is to himself a Diocletian’. If these stanzas are not to be read as grossly self-deceptive then the tortures of the conscience must have been fearsome to Donne, but their absence even worse. Francis Quarles’s adaptation of Herman Hugo’s Pia desideria meditates on the spectacle of a chained soul crying out to God: Is this the sad condition Of those that trust thee? Will thy goodnesse please T’allow no other favours? None but these? Will not the Rethrick of my torments move? Are these the symptoms? these the signes of love? 110 109 110

Donne, Sermons, iii, 56. Emblemes, in W. A. McQueen, ed. and intro., A Selection of Emblems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 137. Kitty Scoular Datta links this and Marvell’s

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Put bluntly, the answer this chapter gives is yes: his own rhetoric is exactly the answer God is looking for. The I is the subject of his sentences, combining subjectivity and subjection. Yet though the justified torturer’s subjectio may produce the only full confession, it also allows poets to disclaim any part in it. It is a purely rhetorical admission of guilt. poem, ‘New Light on Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body” ’, Renaissance Quarterly 22/3 (1969), 242–56.

3 Godly Graffiti, or, the Enigma of the Conscience ‘We dissemble . . . under covert and darke speaches, when we speake by way of riddle (Enigma) of which the sence can hardly be picked out, but by the parties own assoile’. 1

It is a commonplace that God’s law is written on our hearts. As the Introduction argued, casuistry manuals are clear that the conscience is both an excellent ‘notary’ of our deeds and an equally professional witness to the ‘Characters of the Deitie, so plainely and deepely written with GODS owne hand in the heart of every man’. 2 When it is the law of God which is written on the heart it is clearly important that the conscience can read it properly. God provides to man, muses Donne, ‘his manuall, his bosume, his pocket book, his Vade Mecum, the Abridgement of all Nature and all Law, his owne heart and conscience’, out of which ‘the testimonies of the conscience will shine through’, even if ‘shut up’ or ‘interlined’ with other studies. 3 Yet there are many devotional poems where this element of the conscience is found but not understood. The problem of such failed instruction is usually tackled by critics solely in terms of the divine authorship, without reference to what has been said, where it is engraved, or how each poem’s narrator reads his heart. This chapter, however, has a prosaic and hoary point: when God carves on a heart, the medium is the message—and that message does not always get through. 1 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarum, 1971), p. 157. 2 William Worship, The Christians Jewell: Or the Treasure of a Good Conscience (London: W. Stansby for J. Parker, 1617), p. 17. 3 John Donne, The Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), ix, 237, probably preached Whitsunday, 1630.

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Godly Graffiti, or, the Enigma of the Conscience

Godly writing appears in the context of two scriptural topics: man’s stony heart, and the tables of stone on which the decalogue was inscribed. For the popular scriptural commentator Henry Ainsworth, ‘the first tables which God made, signified the stonie harts which all men have by nature now corrupted’, the second stood for the hearts of the Jews, still stony but ‘hewed and polished by Moses’, and the third represented ‘the tables of flesh . . . the work of Christ’. 4 There is an accepted process of engraving on a stony heart, a practice which is repeated across a range of seventeenth-century devotional verse. First, the ground is prepared by erasing previous sinful marks. This can be a simple wash by Christ. Adam, in Vaughan’s ‘Man’s fall and recovery’, finds ‘A plenteous way . . . / To cancel all that ere was writ in stone,/ His saving wound/ Wept blood, that broke this Adamant’. But more vigorous means may be necessary. God may need to strike the heart again and again, so that, as in the title page image of Silex scintillans, faces can emerge from the belaboured flint. You draw nearer and break that mass which is my rocky heart, and that which was formerly stone is now made flesh. See how it is torn, its fragments at last setting your heavens alight, and tears from the flint staining my cheeks. 5

The poet’s ‘Tempest’ further develops the theme that hearts are ‘flints [which] will give no fire/ Without a steel’. God’s blows are not always so violent. The organizing figure of Ralph Knevet’s collection of verse, The Gallery, is the delicate chipping away at the poet’s heart, to make it into an image of God done by a ‘holy chesill’, destined for a divine art collector. 6 Knevet’s adamantine heart initially resists the blows, but yields when Christ’s blood is dropped onto it. Vaughan’s ‘Begging I’ asks 4 Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the Second Book of Moses (Amsterdam: G. Thorpe, 1617), Cc2 v—Cc3 r, referring to 2 Cor. 3:1–3, Jer. 31:33. Ainsworth (1571– 1623), a leader of the Brownist congregation at Amsterdam, was a respected rabbinical commentator. Similar images appear in Ez. 36:26, Ex. 17:6, 20:25, 31:18, 32:15. 5 ‘Author’s emblem of himself ’, first edition only (1650); trans. J. Drake-Brockman and G. Speake, in Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. A. Rudrum (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 137–8. 6 Ralph Knevet, The Shorter Poems, ed. A. M. Charles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), ‘Contrition’, pp. 326–7;


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That hereafter, when I look O’r the sullyed, sinful book, I may find thy hand therein Wiping out my shame, and sin.

With typical hyperbole, Alabaster gets a double wash—not only his own record of sin is to be wiped out, but also the contrition it aroused: My tongue shall be my pen, mine eyes shall rain Tears for my ink, the place where I was cured Shall be my book . . . Thus plainly will I write: no sin like mine. When I have done, do thou, Jesu divine, Take up the tart sponge of thy Passion And blot it forth (sonnet 24).

After the tablets have been scraped, God’s image, name or law is carefully incised on them. Sometimes this has already been done. At one point, Herbert confidently rejoices that ‘Jesu is in my heart, his sacred name/ Is deeply carved there’ (‘Jesu’). More often, the poets look to the future: smooth my rugged heart, and there Engrave thy rev’rend Law and fear; Or make a new one, since the old Is sapless grown (Herbert, ‘Nature’).

Alabaster and Constable, anxiously, ask Christ to be ‘the quill,/ Thy blood the ink, and with compassion/ Write thus upon my soul: thy Jesu still’ (Alabaster, sonnet 24), and pray that God ‘An heavenly knowledge in my minde engrave,/ That yt thy sonnes true image may become’ (Constable, ‘God the Father’). Knevet’s heart ends up as a posy jewel for God, Knevet musing that on this ruby he ‘therin,/ Desir’d t’ingrave’/ Some Imprese fine’, and settling at last on ‘a blessed Name’. 7 By contrast, Milton’s counter-offer in his early poem ‘The Passion’ to ‘score’ his own ‘plaining vers’ onto Christ’s ‘Sepulcral rock’ shows 7

Knevet, Poems, ‘The Imprese’, p. 382.

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considerable and characteristic confidence. 8 Sometimes the poets’ hearts are inkhorns: Since blood is fittest, Lord, to write Thy sorrows in, and bloudie fight; My heart hath store, write there, where in One box doth lie both ink and sinne (Herbert, ‘Good Friday’).

Just as often, though, the heart is unwilling to cooperate: ‘thou, which also art/ The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart/ To hold thee’ (Herbert, ‘Sepulchre’). Where fly-tipping has left ‘quarries of pil’d vanities’ needing to be cleared away, God must write alone, for ‘though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,/ Remember that thou once didst write in stone’ (Herbert, ‘The Sinner’). So far, so unequivocal: everyone agrees that the first term of the syllogism of the conscience is written on the heart. It gets interesting, however, when you consider what is written and how it is read. Do heart poems represent how you remember God’s word, as in, say, the common advice by preachers on reading the scriptures, that ‘that which we read so nearly concerning us . . . must be carefully laid up in our hearts and written there’? 9 Are the heart murmurs commonplaces of deep desire, along the lines of Mary Tudor’s famous lament that, ‘when I am dead and opened, you shall finde Calice lying in my heart’? 10 Are the metaphysical poets referring back to a medieval tradition, where ‘cordiforms’ (books shaped like a heart) figure interior writing, and, conversely, the self forms a verbal centre, an eager heart that confesses, listens, remembers, hears, and weeps? 11 These lines of enquiry about the 8 John Milton, The Poems, ed. J. Carey and A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1968), pp. 119–22. 9 John White, A Way to the Tree of Life: Discovered in Sundry Directions for the Profitable Reading of the Scriptures (London: M. F., 1647), p. 129. White (1575–1648), a moderate Puritan, was rector of Holy Trinity, Dorchester. He was said to have expounded the whole Bible, verse by verse, one and a half times during his incumbency. 10 John Foxe describes Mary’s cry on losing Calais before her death on 17 November 1558 in The Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall Historie, Containing the Acts and Monuments of Martyrs (London: For the Stationers’ Company, 1610), ii, 1901. Similarly, Charles V is reported to have said that the francophile Pope Paul III had three fleurs-de-lis on his heart. 11 The Augustinian roots of the cordiform are traced by E. Jager, ‘The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject’, Speculum 71/1 (1996), 1–26.


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poems are blocked when one recalls that God, not the poet, is writing. What, then, about an appeal to the recent, brilliant explications of the semiotics surrounding a subjugated early modern body, by theologians on the Reformation, and by historians of court politics? The former argue that the sacramental (and hence somatic) apprehension of God in the Middle Ages gave way in the early modern period to a relationship with him that was negotiated through words. Each Protestant character was formed by the Word. This left each ‘Protestant body’ as a remainder, an unwanted and isolated object whose cowed flesh, deprived of spiritual significance, was in need of discipline. In Peter Brown’s words, this ‘human person was an unfinished block, destined to be cut into the form of an awesome model. The body required the deep chisel-bites of permanent renunciation.’ 12 Thus, in the context of metaphysical poetry, Barbara Lewalski has shown how emblem books in the schola cordis tradition reflect a Protestant self-awareness of being formed by the Word. For instance, Daniel Cramer’s Emblemata sacra tags an emblem of a heart crushed between a hammer and a stone with the question ‘is not my word like a hammer that breaketh the rocke in pieces?’ (‘Mollesco’, Jeremiah 23:29), and his emblem ‘Praedestinor’ shows God’s hand painting ‘Jesu’ on a heart. Lewalski reads these as expressions of a Calvinist desire for active grace that will work on a passive soul, such as inspires the violent demands in Donne’s sonnets for his heart to be broken by God. 13 Early modern historians take a similar line. Human power, Michel de Certeau argues, was ‘inscribed on bodies . . . through all sorts of initiations [transforming] them into tables of the law’, ‘living tableaux of rules and customs’. 14 The state displayed its authority over and on the cooperative body of the early modern subject. In the exemplary spectacles of punishment Foucault also analysed ‘the body of the condemned man became the king’s property on which the sovereign left his mark, and brought down the effects 12 P. A. Mellor and Chris Shilling, Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community, and Modernity (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 42–6; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988; London: Faber, 1989), p. 442. 13 Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), figs. 11, 12; pp. 195, 271–2. 14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 139.

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of his power’. 15 Since there was always a danger that the condemned person could to some extent take over any ritual of marking, Foucault argues that procedures were developed by the authorities to make the subject internalize the discipline of the state, before it was needed. In these readings, the mottos of the hearts in the poems appear either as penal brands that evidence past error, or as injunctions to regulate future conduct. There are three problems to using these coruscating past and present scenarios of desire and power, both human and divine, on the heart poems. Surprisingly, the natural response to ‘God scribbled on me yesterday’ (‘No! What did he say?’) tends not to come from current commentators, who focus on the fact of God writing at all. Who writes where does contribute to meaning, but what gets said and how it gets read must also. Moreover, critics interested in the model of secular authority see the poems in terms of resistance, rather than investigating any desire by the bearers of these marks of power to cooperate with their commands. Finally, the cultural context of the image of carving on stone has not been examined. Matter does not wholly bind thought in early modern devotional graffiti. 16 Clearly, this sort of flesh is not the remaindered object that Brown finds; it is a valuable testament, a tablet of stone. These three problems with current criticism (what is said, the material it is written on, and how it is read) are the focus of this chapter. The detail of the godly text is barely spelled out by the functionally illiterate speakers of the poems. Incomprehension is a severe problem for the conscience. It has to work out whether it is missing a major term because of its own wilfulness, or because of God’s decision to be mysterious. I will argue that the conscience does so by reference to the period’s understanding of inscription technologies. The following three-part discussion moves from the context of writing on stones and walls to that of carving on the flesh. The third part returns to the poems to ask what the poets should understand from the unexpected and unauthorized etchings appearing on them, and what they do with 15 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), ch. 2. 16 As Juliet Fleming argues of early modern secular graffiti in Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001), pp. 13, 24.


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them. It concludes that poets extend the ban on human interference in divine affairs to their comprehension of the godly laws written on them. Such a move makes operating the syllogism of the conscience difficult. It also provides some of the poems’ finest moments of comedy, where God sardonically handles their narrators’ cross-talk, goggle-eyes, and breathily sincere stupidity. Early modern writers are fascinated by words on durable materials. Their fingers itch to turn blank spaces into texts—Renaissance walls had tongues as well as ears. From the start of the sixteenth century, there was a vigorous expansion in the use and sophistication of lapidary forms, ranging from the school commonplace book, to the posy or mourning ring, to the memorial epitaph. Two key antique disciplines which use mural marking, rhetoric, and epigraphy were revived by humanists and brought together. As Chapter 4 will describe in more detail, English rhetoricians repeat the advice about memory they learned in school from their study of Quintilian and Cicero: visualize a scene (especially a building); project onto it vivid images of the items to be remembered; read off the whole picture to recall each point in order. This concept of memory as a series of marks on walls or alcoves, onto or into which a point is scored or placed, is mirrored by their instructions about rhetoric’s first stage, invention. Material for a speech may be created by posing standard questions to its topic, or by recollecting previous successful speeches where certain lines of enquiry have brought conviction. Both forms of memory and invention rely on a spatialized concept of the topos or the subject, where the memorable question or statement is kept. 17 Peacham describes this sententia as a saying pertaining to the maners and common practises of men, which declareth by an apte brevitie, what in this our life ought to be done, or left undone . . . everie sentence is not a figure, but that only which is notable, worthy of memorie. 18 17 W. J. Ong traces how Ramist thought reified invention in Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Decay of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). 18 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, intro. W. G. Crane (1593; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), p. 189.

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Its sharp-edged truth should produce a sudden and possibly even violent response in the audience member, one that lingers in his memory to impel him to action. In Quintilian’s words, sententiae strike the mind and often produce a decisive effect by one single blow, while their very brevity makes them cling to the memory, and the pleasure which they produce has the force of persuasion. 19

Since its effect lies in concision, operating in a one-strike mode, the sententia demands immediate assent, not slow, reasoned approbation. It aims at the emotions, not the intellect. The sententia presents itself as closed to argument or negotiation, reducing the receiver’s responses to two: first unqualified assent, then application to his personal circumstances. For the rhetorician, then, the winning strategies in techniques of memory and invention are thought of in terms of permanent, vigorous scoring on walls. More kickable stones supported the humanist endeavour to supplement or recover lost texts, as evidence of, and tribute to, the past. The initial interest in epigraphy stemmed from a desire by rhetoricians to gather authorities for argument on diverse contemporary topics, an interest which turned to the script, grammar, and history of the inscription itself. 20 The epigraph’s material foundation was retained by the printed collections of inscriptions that were increasingly common from the end of the sixteenth century. For instance, Emanuele Tesauro’s Caesares gathered twenty-line inscriptions about the first twelve Caesars, and set them out as though on stone (Herbert contributed dedicatory memorial verses to its second edition, which came out in 1637, after his death). Contemporary use of inscription also began to develop a pedagogic and theoretical underpinning. Sample books showed how new inscriptions could be arranged, giving patterns for lettering, and writing masters spoke of calligraphy as a civilizing pursuit. 21 Carving, like calligraphy, was admitted into the education of a gentleman; Sir Thomas Elyot noted that the technique makes the gentleman-artist 19 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (1920–2; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–86), 12.10.48. 20 John Sparrow, Visible Words: a Study of Inscriptions in and as Books and Works of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 25–37; Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), ch. 11. 21 J. Goldberg, Writing Matter: from the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 154–64.


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attend to objects before him more closely and remember them longer. 22 Playing between two- and three-dimensional representations of architecture, epigraphs were worked into paintings and the sets for processions and entertainments, giving details of the subject to model a viewer’s response. For instance, in the Holbein wall painting for the Privy Chamber at Whitehall of 1537, Henry VII, Elizabeth of York, Henry VIII, and Jane Seymour were arranged around a stone monument. This listed their successes, and pointed up for the viewer/reader the unbroken Tudor dynastic triumph. 23 Similarly, though criticism focuses on what was heard and seen on urban public occasions (from the glorious entry of the monarch into the City of London down to the civic opening of a well-head in Islington), written texts that moralized the triumphs were abundantly present on the processional arches, wagons, and costumes. 24 Frequently, then, public images were labelled, or labels imaged. In ingeniously reversing this application in the great houses, lettering was used architecturally, not as ornament applied to walls but as part of the building’s fabric, like the late sixteenth-century balustrade lettering at Felbrigg Hall, Hardwick Hall, Oriel College, Skipton Castle, Dunfermline, and Castle Ashby (where ‘the landscape thunders at you’). 25 In private spaces, too, householders could absent-mindedly gaze at speaking pictures and mottos on their walls, lintels, and ceilings. 26 For instance, the ceiling of the Long Gallery at Pinkie House, installed by Alexander Seton, is painted with seventeen emblems, each composed of a Latin motto, picture, and subscription, and the designs for 22 Thomas Elyot, A Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Elyot’s ‘The Boke Named the Governour’, ed. D. W. Rude (1531; New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 37–40. 23 According to the copy by Remy van Leemput: Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England 1537–1837, 2 vols (London: Country Life, 1962), i, plates 21, 22; Sparrow, Visible Words, pp. 48 ff. 24 Ian Archer and Lawrence Manley, in David Bevington, David L. Smith, and Richard Strier, eds, The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London, 1576– 1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 1. 25 A. Bartram, Lettering in Architecture (London: Lund Humphries, 1975), pp. 18–54; Nicolete Gray, A History of Lettering: Creative Experiment and Letter Identity (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), p. 147. Similar lettering has vanished from Northumberland House, Charing Cross, Audley End, and Temple Newsam. 26 Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting, i, 27–8, 183–8. Examples of this survive on the panels of the Gallery at Oatlands, Surrey, the wall frieze at Loughton Manor House, Buckinghamshire, in a black-letter overmantle cartouche at Vernon House, Farnham, and in the strap-work plaster decorations at 3 Cornmarket, Oxford.

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Sir Nicholas Bacon’s gallery at Gorhambury relied on sententiae and epigrams. 27 This practice seems to have become a way of life for Herbert’s friends and spiritual counsellors, the Ferrar family, who had formed a godly community in Little Gidding. Here, they hung writing tablets around the great dining-room where strangers were entertained, ‘to receive any sentence their friends and visitants had a mind to insert or by way of good counsel bestow upon them’. The chamber where the Ferrars worked on their biblical concordances (commonplace books from other commentaries, produced on a cut-and-paste basis) also had sentences from family and friends pasted around the upper walls. 28 Herbert was said by Walton to have verses engraved over his mantle at Bemerton (disappointingly, ‘If thou dost find an house built to thy mind/ Without thy cost,/ Serve thou the more God & the poore;/ My labour is not lost’). 29 He commends the practice to the country parson: ‘even the wals are not idle, but something is written or painted there, which may excite the reader to a thought of piety’. 30 In an undated letter, John Ferrar recommends that his son remember ‘tow Divine Verses’ featured in a collection which Herbert contributed to largely, 1032 Outlandish Proverbs (published in 1640), and adds, ‘I shall leave you a Table to be hunge up in the house where in these Verses shalbe written’. 31 There were printed godly tables as well as handwritten ones, to decorate walls, with prayers, inspiring pictures, moral precepts, and disciplinary advice for the householder. Tessa Watt speculates these must have become so familiar to the family’s eyes that even those who could not read would have achieved a sort of ‘secondary literacy’ in recognizing 27 Michael Bath, ‘Alexander Seton’s Painted Gallery’, and Christy Anderson, ‘Learning to Read Architecture in the English Renaissance’, both in Lucy Gent, ed., Albion’s Classicism: the Visual Arts in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 79– 108, 251–2; E. McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae (Amherst: ELR, 1977), 1–58. Seton was a principal in Scottish government, and first Earl of Dumferline. Over fifty quotations in Greek and Latin, about the ignorance and frailty of man, were painted on the beams of Montaigne’s study. 28 N. Ferrar, The Story Books of Little Gidding, Being the Religious Dialogues Recited in the Great Room 1631–2, ed. E. Cruwys Sharland (London: Seeley and Co., 1899), xxxi–xxxii; Alan Maycock, Chronicles of Little Gidding (London: SPCK, 1954), pp. 19–20. 29 H. Wilcox, ‘ “ Something Understood”: The Reputation and Influence of George Herbert to 1715’ (Oxford University: DPhil thesis, 1984), p. 24. 30 George Herbert, The Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 240. 31 Ibid., p. 572.


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tags such as ‘Fear God’. 32 Pedagogues moved rapidly between tracing ‘hieroglyphical partitions’ on their classroom walls and describing their pupils as surfaces to be carved on. Children had to read tablets in order to engrave their contents on the memory, and the same children are talked of as wax tablets to be written on, stamped, or sealed to bring their nature to perfection. 33 Alarmingly, Elyot pursues his students into their nightmares: ‘these articles wel and substancially graven in a noble mannes memorie, it shall also be necessary to cause them to be delectably writen and sette in a table within his bedde chamber’. 34 You could expect, then, that walls in the street and at home would act as memory places that might nag at you rather more than they listened to you. This was particularly the case with sacred writing, the sort framed by the poets’ hearts. It is a proud boast of writing manuals that, as N. B.’s Stenographie declares, ‘Fair Writing is a thing made sacred by God himself, who with his owne finger wrote the Commandments’, and, in John Evelyn’s words, ‘the Tables of stone [were] engraven by the Finger of God himself ’. 35 Students could be inspired (or confused) by similar claims in the works of Joseph Hall, William Bullokar, and John Brinsley, where writing was both of divine origin and at the same time a sign of the failing, post-lapsarian memory. 36 Bringing the conceptual topos into physical sacred space, church walls were rich in didactic sentences and biblical texts. 37 It had been mandatory to have the decalogue painted at the east end of the parish church since 1560, under Archbishop Parker’s 32 T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 217–53. 33 Erasmus, De pueris . . . instituendis (1529), trans. B. C. Verstraete, in C. R. Thompson, ed., Literary and Educational Writings (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978–89), pp. 305–6; Goldberg, Writing Matter, pp. 31–2. 34 Elyot, Governour, p. 114 (see also Erasmus, De ratione studii (1511), trans. B. McGregor, in Thompson, Literary and Educational Writings, pp. 670–2); Bath, ‘Alexander Seton’s Painted Gallery’, p. 107. 35 N.B., Stenographie and Cryptographie, or the Arts of Short and Secret Writing (1659), A5 v; John Evelyn, Evelyn’s Sculptura, with the Unpublished Second Part, ed. C. F. Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), p. 15; also Ainsworth, Second Book of Moses, CC2v, and Gervase Babington, Comfortable Notes upon the Bookes of Exodus and Leviticus (London: T. Chard, 1604), pp. 434–6. Babington (1550–1610), successively Bishop of Llandaff, Exeter, and Worcester, was admired for his scholarship and preaching. 36 Goldberg, Writing Matter, pp. 207–22. 37 George W. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), pp. 35–6, 103–7.

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instructions. Canon 82, passed by convocation in 1604, required the display of further ‘chosen sentences’ of scripture on church walls (sometimes dealing with the feature of the church they were painted on). 38 Visitation articles of the seventeenth century take on a Horatian tone when speaking of such church loci: they are there to instruct through delight. The sentences chosen were not always taken from the Bible; catechisms, in particular, provided material on the sacraments, and, in return, Parker’s commandment boards could be used in catechizing. Herbert’s country parson ensures ‘that there be fit, and proper texts of Scripture every where painted, and that all the painting be grave, and reverend, not with light colours or foolish anticks’. 39 Sacred spaces were internalized, as were secular ones. Donne praises writing on the memory as a permanent change to the character, figuring the former as the Gallery of the soul, hanged with so many, and so lively pictures of the goodness and mercies of thy God to thee . . . as a well made and well placed picture, looks alwayes upon him that looks upon it; so shall thy God look upon thee, whose memory is thus contemplating him. 40

The Temple’s organizing principle takes the architecture and fittings of the parish church as a mnemonic, where one walks around the poems in imagination, to be admonished by the windows, floor, lintels, pews, and tombs (‘God according to vestry arrangements’, said Edmund Blunden). 41 Harvey unintentionally parodies Herbert by his naive enthusiasm for the device, writing specific poems on the stepping stone to the threshold, churchyard, style, gate, walls, utensils, font, pew, books on the pew, pulpit, communion table, and plate. 38 E. Cardwell, Synodalia: A Collection of Articles of Religion, Canons, and Proceedings of Convocation in the Province of Canterbury . . . 1547–1717, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1842), i, canon 82; G. J. Cuming, A History of Anglican Liturgy (1969; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), ch. 7; I. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 138–44. 39 Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, in Works, p. 246. 40 Quoted in Helen Wilcox, ‘ “Squaring the Circle”: Metaphors of the Divine in the Work of Donne and his Contemporaries’, JDJ 13 (1994), 70, from Donne, Sermons, ii, 237. 41 Herbert’s editor, Grosart, suggests that the second stanza of ‘Superliminare’ acts as a church inscription: Works, i, 273. Helen Wilcox notes that the commonplace book of a royalist, James Polweale, talks of Herbert as a sacred architect who could ‘unstone’ hard hearts: Wilcox, ‘ “Something Understood” ’, p. 15. Blunden is cited by Stevie Davies in Henry Vaughan (Bridgend: Seren, 1995), p. 101.


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The most common form of the brief, durable, devotional, and didactic church text—the one many of the congregation could see themselves putting up—was the epitaph. According to Nigel Llewellyn, in the two decades after 1610 more than double the number of tombs were built than in the twenty years before 1600. The Counter Reformation’s emphasis on the return of the individual body to the dust (evident in the popularity of memento mori tombs, death’s head orders, and ossaries) was balanced in Britain by an assertion of enduring family power, in lengthy engravings on triumphal arches and catafalques. 42 Legible text was important enough to require specifications for lettering as well as iconography in contracts to build the memorials. Expansive tablets were preferred to the concise medieval straplines that had edged a tomb chest. The qualities of the deceased were extolled in English as often as in Latin, using Roman rather than black letter. 43 As with classical epigraphy, the early seventeenth century saw several notable printed collections of epitaphs, in particular John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631, based on a chapter of William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain), and Henry Holland’s Monumenta sepulchraria Sancti Pauli (1614). The first commentators on such tombs, the antiquaries, ignored any ‘baroque tableaux of mortality’ present, in favour of the tablets’ assertions about qualities of character which in some sense justified political affiliations and landownership. 44 Such epitaphs were thus part of a rhetoric of exemplarity that survived the Reformation; no longer prompts to prayer for the souls in purgatory, as under the Catholic faith, they now told the Protestant congregation about a past godly life. Weever calls them memorials ‘of some remarkable action, fit to be transferred to future posterities . . . they are sometimes called memories . . . for they are externall helpes to excite, and stirre up our inward thoughts’. 45 As Joshua Scodel has demonstrated, 42 Howard Colvin, Architecture and the Afterlife (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), ch. 11, p. 225; Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 82–90, 116–28. 43 Brian Kemp, English Church Monuments (London: Batsford, 1980), pp. 6–9. 44 Adam White describes London’s ‘sculptural parade’ as ‘one of the sights of the kingdom’, ‘Westminster Abbey in the early seventeenth century: a powerhouse of ideas’, Church Monuments 4 (1989), 16–53. 45 John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments within the United Monarchie of Greate Britaine (London: T. Harper, 1631), pp. 1, 9. Weever (1576–1632) was both poet and antiquary; Henry Holland (1583–?1650) was a compiler and publisher. Eamon Duffy

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brevity imposed by space can become an expressive challenge to be memorably and strikingly gnomic. 46 Puttenham describes contemporary epitaphs as epigrams about a man’s estate and abilities, whose ‘pithy, quick, sententious’ qualities are central to their effect in moving the reader. He gets angry with long and tedious discourses, [as are written] in large tables to be hanged up in Churches, and chauncells over the tombes of great men and others, which be so exceeding long as one must have halfe a dayes leasure to reade one of them, & must be called away before he come halfe to the end, or else be locked into the Church by the Sexten as I my selfe was once served. 47

The carvings on the heart are not somatic responses forced out of a sinner (like the groans, tears, and sighs of the torture poems), since they are produced by another and appear in verbal form. Yet they still participate in what Juliet Fleming calls the ‘ostentatious materiality of sixteenth-century literary writing’. She discusses the second book of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie on proportion in poems. Pattern and concatenation poems (such as Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ and Donne’s ‘La Corona’) are ‘predicated on the recalcitrant exteriority of language to meaning’, in number, weight, and measure. 48 Such poems are not seeking to be apotheosized (in Fleming’s witty formulation) into our unbounded notions of text. Texts on early modern monuments are memorials, and, reversing the argument, poetry is seen as a memorial which will outlive these monuments, as many of Shakespeare’s sonnets reflect on: ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes, shall out live this powerful rhyme’. 49 Renaissance poets fuse the classical topos of the poem that lasts longer than brass or stone with the Petrarchan notion of the poem as an urn, where the dead beloved or lover lives on in the verse. 50 In doing so, they convert long-lasting blank matter discusses laudatory funerary inscriptions, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 332–7. 46 Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), ch. 1. 47 Puttenham, Arte, p. 46. 48 Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, pp. 13–24. 49 William Shakespeare, Sonnets (1604), ed. K. Duncan-Jones (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), number 55. See also numbers 65, 81, 107, and 123. 50 The boasts of Ovid and Horace that they have finished monuments more lasting than brass or stone (Metamorphoses 15.871–79; Odes 3.30) become a commonplace in Renaissance writing. See, for instance, Chapman’s dedicatory epistle to his translation


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into a doubly functioning text, both ornament to be looked at and words to be read. The poem that is a memorial must be considered a public document, the messages left for any passer-by to decipher. In this context, the heart poems are not the currency of a coterie manuscript group, circulating as private poems and loving notes between two close associates. They are memorial poems, sharing the same conceptual space as monuments with inscriptions. They are public, permanent, and imperative. Unlike private correspondence, the poems do not need to recognize the particularity of their readers. Early modern readers had sufficient experience of the genre of the lapidary text to know they were expected to act on the message, not reason about it. Poets, then, have a cultural context in which to understand the connotations of the material on which God’s messages are written. What about the place they are written on, the heart? Marking the skin has a less elite profile in the period than inscription on stone. The most obvious example is tattooing. The practice had been noted by European travellers, and by 1617 merited a separate entry in the index of the world geography by Samuel Purchas (‘racing and printing the flesh’). In Cardanan, ‘they make blacke lists in their flesh, razing the skin, and put therin some blacke tincture, which ever remayneth, accounting it a great ornament’ (Purchas’s marginal comment is ‘naked pride’); Bramans ‘pricke some part of their skinne, and put therin a black colour, which lasteth alway’; Egyptian Moors tattoo themselves with ink on the arms, and the women on the chins also. 51 Purchas’s commentary cites religion, tribal grouping, and gender as motives for these practices. Hariot’s account of Virginia, republished in the first volume of Theodor de Bry’s America (1590), included engravings of tattooed Algonquians by John White and Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (a fuller set of the latter’s drawings of tattooed Timuca were published in the second volume in 1591). Direct experience of tattooed foreigners was also possible when visitors came to Britain, such as the Inuit woman who accompanied Martin Frobisher on his return in 1578. Tattooing of the Iliad (1598), ll. 62–70, and Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586; Aldershot: Scolar, 1989), pp. 131, 196, 183 (where, for Arthur Manwaring, ‘scripta manet’, ‘writings endure’, and for Edward Dyer, ‘pennae gloria perennis’, there is ‘the everlasting glory of the pen’). 51 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in all Ages, 3rd edn (London: W. Stansby, 1617), pp. 487, 571, 743.

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was not, however, regarded as an exotic art of aliens. Some Christian pilgrims took literally Paul’s boast that ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus’ (Galatians 6:17). For instance (prudently putting himself under double protection), Lithgow describes how at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem there came a fellow to us, on Elias Areacheros, a Christian inhabitout at Bethleem, and purveier for the Friers; who did ingrave on our severall Armes upon Christ Sepulcher the name of Jesus, and the Holy Crosse; beeing our owne option, and desire . . . I, decyphered, and subjoyned below mine the four incorporate Crowns of King James, with this Inscription, in the lower circle of the Crowne, Vivat Jacobus Rex. 52

Similar devotional and political tattoos were reported by George Sandys, Thomas Coryat, and Fynes Moryson, coming from Loretto, Egypt, the Holy Land, and the Balkans. 53 Tattooing took its place as a native British art with the historian William Camden, who (in the cause of national unity) described both Picts and insular Celts as ‘painted peoples’, and put a tattooed ancient Briton on the frontispiece of The Historie of Britain (1611). De Bry, who also used illustrations of tattooed Picts, included a flower-woman, a ‘yonge dowgter of the Pictes’, which he implied was copied by John White from an ‘old English chronicle’. 54 In these instances, marks on the skin are regarded as expressions of sincerity, evidence of primitive authenticity, and aids to a sense of belonging. The pain and permanence of the tattoo become part of an initiation rite, with the tattoo left as a sign of commitment and an affirmation of the entrant’s courage. The neutral or approving tone of travel and antiquarian commentary changed down to an habitual indignation over body art that was contemporary and local, such as hair styles, jewellery, and cosmetics. As Juliet Fleming and Jane Caplan have shown, scandalized chiding about 52 William Lithgow, The Totall Discourse, or the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles (London: N. Okes, 1632), p. 285; discussed by Fleming in ‘The Renaissance Tattoo’, in Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and American History (London: Reaktion, 2000), pp. 79–82. 53 C. P. Jones considers that the tattoo was used by Greeks, Romans, and Celts as a penal and property signal, but that its stigmatizing use was reversed when it was claimed by early Christians as a sign of dedication, in Caplan, Written on the Body, pp. 1–30; see also Fleming, in Caplan, Written on the Body, pp. 78–81, and Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, pp. 90–112. 54 Fleming, in Caplan, Written on the Body, pp. 61–82.


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self-marking at home often drew parallels between native Americans and Europeans, since ‘the slashing, pinking and cutting of our Doublets, is but the same phansie and affectation with those barbarous Gallants who slash and carbonado their bodies’. 55 These cultural historians remark on body art in terms of national identity, ethics, and taste. They do not, however, comment on the point most relevant to the heart poems, namely, a stress on the rhetorical art used in changing the body. John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or, the Artificiall Changling (1653), for instance, is devoted to proving that man is tempted into ‘a corporal apostasy from himself ’ to produce ‘monstrous conformations’, ‘auricular fashions’, and ‘strange inventions’. God hath ‘wonderfully, and most artificially framed the body of man’, but upon such Blasphemous fancies men have taken upon them an audacious Art to forme and new shape themselves, altering the humane Figure, and moulding it according to their own will and arbitrement, varying it after a wonderfule manner . . . [of ] their own invention . . . into diverse depraved Figures. 56

Invention, art, figures, varying, fancies . . . the protest against the human authorial element—made in specifically literary terms—repeatedly occurs in pre-Restoration social critiques, from Philip Stubbes’s The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) to R. Smith’s A Wonder of Wonders: or, a Metamorphosis of Fair Faces (1662). Tudor objections to the overt sexual invitation of a painted woman are decreasingly in evidence as Stuart authors are more often offended by the varying of what should be a natural, a given, quality. Thus, in A Treatise against Paintng [sic] and Tincturing of Men and Women (1616) Thomas Tuke growls that ‘a painted face is a superfluous face’, ‘the pictur of a pictur’, a 55 John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or, the Artificiall Changling (London: W. Hunt, 1653), p. 537, cited by Rosecrans, in Caplan, Written on the Body, pp. 49–50. Bulwer, a physician, was interested in physical sign systems, and published a gestural language for the deaf. 56 Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis, A4 r-v, B1 v; R. Smith, A Wonder of Wonders: or a Metamorphosis of Fair Faces (London: J. G., 1662), A4 r-v, pp. 1–2, 11–2; Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583; London: J. Danter, 1595), pp. 37–8. M. B. Campbell analyzes the anxiety about personal mutability suggested by fashion commentary, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 7.

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Fig. 3.1 Skin decorations compared, in John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or, the Artificiall Changling. creature, that had need to be twice defined, for she is not that she seemes. And though she bee the creature of God, as she is a woman, yet is she her owne creatrisse, as a picture. 57

The clichéd charge made against rhetoric from Plato on, that its figures and fancies paint over the truth of an issue, is revived in these protests against an artist turning him- or herself into art. The speaking skin is an orator whose ‘audacious Art’ tries to persuade us of what is not true, against our reason. Moreover, its meaning is also contingent on reception: Lithgow’s tattoo caused him a problem when 57 Thomas Tuke, A Treatise against Paintng [sic] and Tincturing of Men and Women (London: T. Creed and B. Allsope, 1616), p. 57.


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read by his Spanish torturers, but earned him credit when read by the king. 58 Contrast the suspicion which Stubbes and Tuke feel for selfdefinition with our own admiration for body sculpture, cyborg technology, piercing, and the like. These engage with what Didier Anzieu calls the ‘skin ego’, the psychic envelope that represents the border between the outside and the inner world. 59 This is the site where impediments to the desire to harmonize actual and imagined physical selves are fought. When we accessorize the flesh we bring into line an errant exterior, and, conversely, admit that our consciousness is dependent on its physical situation. 60 The margin of the skin is both dangerous and powerful, since it is a place where such change can occur. 61 The tattoo, thus, can be seen as a mark of abjection, where low or unconscious forces inside have been forced to the outside, and kept there (just about). 62 We also celebrate the aesthetic of body art. Though the natural body is outside communication, an artist turns a skin bag of organs into a medium. The action of being altered, as well as the product itself, is a creative performance that makes something of the self. The living palimpsests created in hospital theatres and tattoo parlours are continuous productions, where the body is the variable principle and the aesthetic the stable one. To modify oneself, boast those who do so nowadays, reclaims personal freedom for a body more usually configured by signs given by society. 63 For the heart poems, the relevant point to come from these discussions is how the skin was seen as a margin of danger and power. In Renaissance anatomy woodcuts, the controlled exposition of knowledge is helped when the flayed figures calmly, even absently, hand their skins over to a valet out of the frame. 64 Markings on the skin are expressions 58 59

Lithgow, Travayles, pp. 462, 483. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. C. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 1–20, 96–113. 60 Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 126–40. 61 Mary Douglas’s view on the margin is adapted to tattooing by V. Eubanks in, ‘Zones of Dither. Writing the Postmodern Body’, Body and Society 2/3 (1996), pp. 73–5. 62 Fleming, in Caplan, Written on the Body, pp. 63–5. 63 Eubanks, ‘Zones of Dither’, pp. 73–88; C. Grognard, The Tattoo: Graffiti for the Soul (London: Sunburst, 1994), pp. 16–17, 26. 64 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).

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of authenticity, of community, of self-expression, and by the same token devices that move away from the natural, God-given body. As with the torture poems, the emotional charge in the familiar image is reignited by the specificity with which the heart poems describe the mechanical and physical aspects of engraving, and refer to the debates surrounding them. Lose the skin and you lose the zone of dither. Keep it, and the skin becomes a textual prosthesis: a part of the body’s functions in praising God, but apart from the body’s members. Moving on from where the text is written to who writes it reinforces this liminal element. All the poems are clear that the marks are God’s. They can be stumbled on, already present, in the hearts, which sometimes burp up these textual fragments without their owner’s volition (‘My heart did heave, and there came forth, O God!’, says Herbert’s ‘Affliction III’, rather wearily). More often, poets beg for the engraving to start. As ‘A fruitful exhortation to the reading and knowledge of holy scripture’ in the Book of Homilies muses, earnest reading should make the Bible ‘deeply printed and graven in the heart, [so that it] at length turneth almost into nature’; the qualifier is the significant point. 65 Even in the case of the preparatory cleaning work in the poems, where poets push damaging forces to the outside to be sloughed off, the significant moment comes when they bare their breasts for blows from God’s ‘chisel’. To have ‘Iesu’ instead of ‘Susie’ traced over a heart is an edenic gesture, sharing something with the tattoo as a divine mark of possession, and demonstrating victory over obedient but shrinking flesh. 66 This conclusion agrees with some notable recent expositions on the metaphysical poems. In Lacanian terms, Jonathan Goldberg says, the ‘origin of speech within is the space God engraves . . . God founds the subject in a lack. The subject’s words are not his own’. 67 Thus, though Herbert is able to raise a ‘broken Altar. . . . / Made of a heart, and cemented with teares’, it is only his by use. God’s hand framed it, for ‘A Heart alone/ Is such a stone,/ As nothing but/ Thy power doth cut’. Even if Herbert is not able to continue with his tears of praise ‘each 65 66

1623 edition, p. 10. Goldberg argues that early modern writing manuals show all writing as violent; their illustrated hands hold pens that forcibly score the paper: J. Goldberg, Writing Matter, ch. 2. 67 J. Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 102.


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part/ Of my hard heart’ will continue to praise God (‘The Altar’). The stones referred to are, of course, both his heart and the poems making up The Temple. Lewalski describes the poets’ struggle with the prevenient text, the Bible, where its words anticipate the conclusions of the poems and Harman shows how attempts to circumvent this are foiled, so that, in the case of Herbert, he becomes both an agent of inscription and a ground for inscription. 68 This notion of a godly author engages critics either as a challenge to postmodernism (since there is a final speaking subject, albeit not human), or as evidence of a sectarian allegiance (the words engraved being biblical, the ultimate source of Protestant inspiration). I can only endorse, not contribute to, these sophisticated and credible arguments on authorship. But I can point out a surprising omission. Most commentators take for granted that what is chipped onto the heart is what is understood by its bearers. Having settled that these are God’s words, critics mostly move off to find less obvious points. They show faint interest in God’s diction or syntax, few queries about his tone of voice, little worry that he has not been in contact recently. Labelling God’s idiolect and points as ‘scriptural’ and finding the relevant chapter and verse seems to settle a blanket of scholarly boredom over what God says. Yet heart murmurs can only form a safety cordon in so far as the poets are actually struck by his words. A more literal minded approach by criticism could be fruitful. Admittedly, neither the poets’ narrators nor we critics have got much to go on in terms of what is written. There is none of the embarrassing specificity of private admonition, nor even the details of sins given in the casuistry manuals. Take Herbert’s ‘Good Friday’. The preparations for writing are carefully laid out: Since Bloud is fittest, Lord, to write Thy sorrows in, and bloudie fight; My heart hath store, write there, where in One box doth lie both ink and sinne.

So much for the place and the ink. Now for the writing instruments and an initial reader, Sin: 68 Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, pp. 56–9, 149–50, 187–9; B. Harman, Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 27.

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Godly Graffiti, or, the Enigma of the Conscience That when sinne spies so many foes, Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes, All come to lodge there, sinne may say No room for me, and flie away.

It is possible at this point to read the instruments of the passion as pens with which to write or as images sketched in the heart which give no space for sin to write. What would naturally follow is an equally specific description of what so much effort should produce, but nothing happens. The final stanza shows the heart prepared but not what ‘all the writings’ will say. Collected together, the mottos specifically stated throughout The Temple to be on the heart run ‘My Master’, ‘My faults are thine’, ‘Jesu’, ‘thy Jesu still’, ‘an heavenly knowledge’, ‘a blessed Name’, ‘no sin like mine’, ‘thy rev’rend Law’, ‘O God’, ‘thy sorrows . . . and bloudie fight’, ‘the Law’, ‘Thy will be done’, and ‘Jesus Christ’. These do not look like the clear legal predicates needed to operate the conscience (say, interest rates above 5 per cent are usury, or the third glass of wine is a mistake). For them to work, the poets are going to have to expand on what will be done . . . what sort of heavenly knowledge . . . what significance Christ’s name has . . . But this they fail to do. Each poem gives very full information on the medium and the genre, but markedly refrains from elaborating on the message. This is despite the encouragement to appropriation by the general passer-by that any public poster, any graffito, gives, with its collective notions of authorship and audience. 69 The remainder of the chapter will argue that, so far are the poets from intruding on their own hearts’ statements, they would rather bear than read the godly epigraphs. To avoid the desecration of writing over the original they repeatedly rehearse a failure to understand their own sententiae. In doing so they turn the commonplace, that everyone assumes they know, into an enigma, waiting for a fit reader. This is not to end up with the postmodern critics, exhaustedly gazing at an ever-receding horizon of meaning. Herbert and Vaughan show there is a source of language which does what it says, and which they must try to understand. 70 It 69 Andrew Gordon points out that graffiti uncovers the ‘author function’, ‘The Act of Libel: Conscripting Civic Space in Early Modern England’: Andrew Gordon, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32/2 (2002), 375–97. 70 Matthew Prineas argues that Vaughan rehearses a consoling fantasy of a scripture which shows an integrity, in the face of competing interpretations by Puritan readers:


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is, however, to say that they are thrown back on the generic conventions adhered to by both godly author and inscription bearer, of the lasting, didactic locus and the exotic, authentic tattoo. Bearers are rarely able to easily read the dictates of their own consciences. Like good humanists, poets scrabble about in dusty corners to recover the lost bits of text, and then try to edit them: first I found the corner, where was J, After, where ES, and next where U was graved. When I had got these parcels, instantly I sat me down to spell them (Herbert, ‘Jesu’).

Occasionally this is resoundingly successful (aha, ‘I ease you’!), often it is not. In Herbert’s ‘Love-joy’, the poet’s naive confidence that he can spell out the significance of the heart-shaped grapes marked with J and C is sardonically treated: One standing by Ask’d what it meant. I, who am never loth To spend my judgement, said, It seem’d to me To be the bodie and the letters both Of Joy and Charitie

—a merely adequate answer, which is tactfully rephrased by the lecturer (‘Sir, you have not miss’d . . . / It figures Jesus Christ’). Vaughan, without a kindly editor at hand, ruefully recalls how he ‘beg’d here long, and gron’d to know’ God’s will. He violently ‘summon’d nature . . . rifled quite’ her ‘womb, her bosome’. Nothing works until he looks to his own heart. He came at last To search my selfe, where I did find Traces, and sounds to a strange kind. . . . Ecchoes . . . Weake beams Which shew’d me in a nook cast by A peece of much antiquity With Hyerogliphicks quite dismembred, And broken letters scarce remembred. Matthew Prineas, ‘The Dream of the Book and the Poetry of Failure in Henry Vaughan’s Silex scintilans’, ELR 26 (1996), 333–55.

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These synaesthetic aids from God show carvings already there, but in an enigmatic state, and his reading soon ends: I tooke them up, and (much Joy’d,) went about T’unite these peeces, hoping to find out The mystery; but this neer done, That little light I had was gone (‘Vanity of Spirit’).

Meditating on this poem, Stevie Davies contrasts the Hermetic epistemology of the two Vaughan brothers. Unlike Thomas (the author of several books on how to penetrate the influence of the Creator in his works), Henry’s experimentation ‘was inner and spiritual rather than forensic and chemical, and he seems to have doubted the credibility of technical research in the light of the inscrutability of God’. 71 William Alabaster lumpenly dramatizes his failure to follow God’s meaning in (or with) any sense at all: Whither? who seeth it? whither doth it rise? Or do I see, or am I in a trance? . . . My dazling thoughts do hold this sight for pain . . . And still it soareth: gaze no more my mind! (sonnet 57).

Not only does the Holy Spirit not speak clearly, he does not speak for long. 72 At best, intensive search and self-examination uncover vaguely defined fragments of ‘each line’ in scriptures or pious ejaculations (‘his sacred name’, or ‘God writeth, Loved’). In this, the heart poems join many other situations in Herbert and Vaughan where an interpreter looks comically desperate for a strike. A number of such flops in Herbert’s ‘Hope’ (is a prayer book the appropriate response to an anchor? What does it mean to get a vial of tears in return? And anyway why can we not use words?) end in a tantrum of disappointment (‘Ah Loyterer! I’le no more’). Vaughan, whose macho self-image (as in ‘Vanity of Spirit’) is one of not stopping ‘i’ th’ face of things’, but instead going to the root of a matter, grubs up bulbs to pose ‘Many a question Intricate and rare’ (‘I walkt the other day’). Still, all he can ‘extort’ is the general lesson that spring will succeed 71 72

Davies, Henry Vaughan, pp. 131–3. Tessa Watt finds that, over the sixteenth century, popular dialogues with God gave ever less space to God’s side of the dialogue: Watt, Cheap Print, p. 105.


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the death of winter. Less self-mocking are the foregrounded failures of pilgrimages of the memory which Vaughan often takes (‘Ascensionday’, ‘Religion’, ‘The Search’). In these there are repeated revisions to the enigmas which the bemused narrator meets, with an end but no conclusion to the lengthy series of puzzles. In Vaughan’s ‘Regeneration’, for instance, the primrose way the poet follows he ‘straight perciev’d’ became frosty. He toils up a mountain where a pair of scales show that smoke is lighter than the pains he has taken. Suddenly, ‘some cryed, Away’, urging him to visit a grove with a fresh spring, and, ‘amaz’d’, see a cistern filled with stones which dance or sink. Having ‘wonder’d much’, the ‘restless’ pilgrim gazes on a bank of flowers both open and shut, ‘musing long’ and hearing a wind blowing where it pleases—and is just left there. Vaughan has mixed conventional Christian symbols, which are easy to decode (the primrose path to hell, the scales of judgement, the breath of God), with his own enigmas (the stones and flowers that are quick or dull). He stresses these leave his narrator bewildered. Unlike the heart carvings, the meaning of these emblem poems has aroused critical interest. Richard Todd explains them in Augustine’s terms, as providing signs of what we know about God’s nature. Reading the signs involves not so much revelation as recognition, not new knowledge but new comprehension. They show the world as a divine poem ready to be read, ‘covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers’, there to arouse us to recollect aspects of God we know innately. However, post-lapsarian man finds it difficult to understand this primary text by God because of its double nature, where creatures are both things and signs of things. 73 This is one leg of Stanley Fish’s famous proposition that the reader of Herbert’s poems is involved in an initial conclusion about these signs, but which the development of each poem later declares to be invalid. This spelling of God’s ways will have to be corrected, as the poet-catechist changes his reader-pupil’s mind. 74 73 Richard Todd, The Opacity of Signs: Acts of Interpretation in George Herbert’s ‘The Temple’ (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1986), ch. 2, expounding Augustine, Confessions, book 10; Michel Foucault, Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. anon (1966; London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 25–30. 74 S. E. Fish, Self-consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); idem, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), ch. 1.

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However, considering the material aspect of the heart poems, it might be hasty to conclude that sin causes stupidity, and confession creates clarity. In choosing the image of the godly engraving, poets overstate (to the point of parody) the common understanding that sententiae are designed to bite into the heart before they do the understanding. They declare themselves unable to comprehend the marks on their chests, with hyperbolic obedience to the otherness of the word. The Bible’s ability to change the reader was debated in the period. On one side, its deliberative rhetoric is celebrated in sacramental terms by the Book of Homilies: he most profiteth not always that is most ready in turning of the book, or in saying of it without the booke; but he that is most turned into it . . . most in his heart and life altered and changed into that thing which he readeth. 75

Here its power seems somatic. The scriptures can be proved to be God’s words since, unlike other texts, they prick and quicken the heart. 76 Perkins perceives the Holy Spirit to ‘effect’ God’s word, not in understanding, but in moving the reader’s will. 77 There is no distinction between the thing and the word here. God’s word is performative: it does what it says it does, as it says it. As Andrew Willet says, explaining God’s mysterious writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, ‘God useth not to feed men’s eyes with phantasies, but true appearances’. 78 John Prideaux thinks that, hidden under scriptural mysteries, is knowledge ‘not attainable by any strength of flesh and blood, but by divine revelation’. The tropes of scripture are a condition of man’s ‘weak capacity’, a wresting of meaning to allow him to feel, if not to understand. 79 Thus, there can be no need for human exposition. In the poems by Herbert and Vaughan, too, the Word simply acts directly on a responsive narrator. In ‘The Book’ and ‘To the Holy Bible’, Vaughan meditates on 75 77

76 Book of Homilies (1571), p. 10. White, Tree of Life, ch. 2. Cited in Elizabeth Clarke, ‘Silent, Performative Words: the Language of God in Valdesso and George Herbert’, L&T 5 (1991), 355–74. 78 Willet, Danielem, p. 153. In Daniel 5, a godly hand writes ‘mene, mene, tekel, upharin’ (weighed, weighed, numbered, found wanting) on the hall wall as the king feasts, a graffito which only Daniel can read since, Willet explains, the other revellers are blinded by God. 79 John Prideaux, Sacred Eloquence: or, the Art of Rhetorick, as it is Layd Down in Scripture (London: W. Wilson, 1659), pp. 21, 17.


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how it ‘oft left open would’st convey/ A sudden and most searching ray/ Into my soul’, while God’s words ‘finde . . . out’ Herbert, not them (‘H. Scriptures II’). ‘O make thy word a swift word, passing from the ear to the heart, from the heart to the life’ prays his country parson before preaching, omitting to take it through the reason, and ‘let my heart/ Suck ev’ry letter, and a hony gain’ (‘H. Scriptures I’). 80 John Knott concluded from these sorts of working words that Puritans saw ‘the spiritual power of God’s word [as] almost independent of language. The Holy Spirit acts through but not in the words of the text’. 81 Neither Vaughan nor Herbert could be classed as Puritan, but their poems do take this view of language. Yet there was unease, even among Puritans, about wholly abandoning reason in reading the Bible. One, William Bradshaw, enjoined himself to ‘follow those rules only that are followed in finding out the meaning of other writings’. 82 Henry Hammond warned against assuming that scripture is not interpretable by ordinary means (he names, among others, the aids of meditation, rational inference, the collation of places, the etymologies of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, understanding the editorial decisions in producing stemmata, and analogies with received doctrine). He remarks dryly that if the Bible is to be understood only by extraordinary means, that is, momentary grace granted by God, then the whole work of exposition is in vain (noting in passing that he has not felt such inspiration himself ). 83 Similarly, John White, while vehemently upholding the moving nature of the style of scripture as having an emotive power beyond a human orator’s reach, pays substantial attention to the conventional rules for reading it, asserting that God intends to be understood. 84 As Chapter 4 will discuss, the question of how far, when writing devotional texts, the author can add his own art has interested many critics looking at poems such as Herbert’s ‘The Posie’, ‘The Forerunners’, ‘A 80 Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, in Works, p. 289. Thus Lewalski concludes of the two ‘H. Scripture’ poems that ‘related texts interpret, and are interpreted by, a Christian’s life’: Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 305. 81 John Knott, The Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 1. 82 William Bradshaw, English Puritanisme (1605), cited in Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution (1993; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 13. 83 Henry Hammond, A Paraphrase and Annotations upon all the Books of the New Testament (London: J. Flesher, 1653), advertisement to reader. 84 White, Tree of Life, pp. 164 ff.

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True Hymne’, and the two ‘Jordan’ poems. They have not yet realized that the same problem arises in reading God’s texts. The image of the altar of unhewn stones which God commanded Moses to raise (Exodus 20:25) is commonly used by ministers to deny the place of human art in expounding the Word. For Ainsworth, commenting on this verse, that which in mans judgement and art, should polish it, Gods Law maketh to be pollution. So humane wisdome of speech, in preaching the Gospell, maketh the crosse of Christ vain. 85

John Trapp also warns that Exodus 20:25 shows that ‘God cares not for outward pomp’ in preaching, where ‘som mar all by over-doing’. 86 Gervase Babington explains the double inscription of the decalogue (first by God himself, then by Moses under his dictation, in Exodus 31:18, 32:15): Moses is commanded to hewe the stones, but the Lord would write in them; so may Gods Ministers by preaching and crying upon men, as it were hew their stonie hearts, that is, prepare them for writing, but onely the Lord must write in them by the finger of his blessed Spirit. 87

Richard Bernard warns the preacher to take heed that he ‘carnally wrestle not with the holy Scriptures, and thinke by his meere wit, art and skill in humane sciences, & industry therin, to make it subject to his understanding’. 88 This is the worry behind Donne’s request 85 Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the Five Bookes of Moses, the Booke of the Psalmes, and the Song of Songs (London: J. Bellamy, 1627), ‘Exodus’, p. 78; see also Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Exodum (London: F. Kyngston, 1608), p. 449. Willet (1562– 1621), rector of Barley, Hertfordshire from 1597, was a famous and copious antiCatholic controversialist. 86 John Trapp, A Clavis to the Bible, or a New Comment upon the Pentateuch (London: For T. Garthwait, 1649), second series pagination, p. 79; see also Arthur Jackson, A Help for the Understanding of the Holy Scripture (Cambridge: R. Daniel, 1643), p. 177. Trapp (1601–69) was rector of Welford in Gloucester, then Weston-on-Avon; Jackson (?1593– 1666) was the Presbyterian rector of St Michael’s, Wood Street, then rector of St Faith’s under St Paul’s. Both were noted biblical scholars. 87 Babington, Comfortable Notes, p. 455. 88 Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepherd (London: T. Pavier, 1621), p. 204. Bernard (1568–1641), a Puritan, was minister at Batcombe, Somerset, when this revised edition was published. See also Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Style of the H. Scriptures (1661), in his The Works, ed. M. Hunter and E. B. Davis, 14 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2000), ii, 406–7; Francis Osborne, The Private Christian’s


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to God to ‘decline/ Mee, when my comment would make thy word mine’, in ‘A Litanie’. Of course, secular texts could encourage readers to struggle with their enigmas and so put themselves into the text. Virgilio Malvezzi’s preface to Discourses upon Cornelius Tacitus explains how difficulties in reading ensure that whosoever by labouring about it, findes out the true meaning . . . counts it an issue of his own braine, and taking occasion from those sentences, to goe further then the thing he reads, and that without being deceived, he takes the like pleasure as men are wont to take from hearing metaphors, finding the meaning of him that useth them. 89

The question for the heart poems is whether their bearers should struggle to make something of their inscriptions. There is a substantial body of theological commentary explicating 1 Corinthians 13:12, ‘Now we see through a glasse darkly’ (the 1611 marginal note reads ‘Gr. in a riddle’, translating the Vulgate’s in aenigmate). 90 The standard arguments about how it is impossible to understand God’s nature as his word use the doctrine of ‘hard places’. Generally, the commentators follow Augustine’s line in De doctrina Christiana that scripture has a mixture of styles, sometimes obscure, sometimes easy, to speak to the converted. 91 Arthur Jackson, in A Help for the Understanding of the Holy Scripture (1643), points out that God hath purposely intermixed some passages that are knotty and intricate with others that are plain and easie, first, That no men might slight and disregard his word for the plainesse of it: to prevent the scorn of proud men that are wont to vilifie what ever is not above the reach of ordinary capacities, God hath here non ultra (Oxford: H. Hall, 1656), p. 27; John Hales, A Sermon Preached at St. Maries in Oxford (Oxford: J. Lichfield, 1617) p. 37. 89 J. M. Wallace, ‘ “Examples are Best Precepts”: Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-century Poetry’, Critical Inquiry 1 (1974), 273–90, 282. 90 Augustine’s The Trinity XV says that this verse may not be understood without the theory of tropes; though human words do image God, they bring out unlikenesses as well as likeness in their metaphors. See E. Cook, ‘The Figure of Enigma: Rhetoric, History, Poetry’, Rhetorica 19/4 (2001), 349–78. 91 James Baumlin, John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1991), pp. 208–9.

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given us not onely shallows wherein lambs may wade, but also depths wherein Elephants may swim. 92

There is widespread, active defence of failing to understand scripture which sounds strange to modern ears. The preface to the Authorized Version (1611) explains that God, having put into plain words all that is necessary to salvation, is sometimes obscure in other parts of the Bible, in order to whet the reader’s wits, wean the curious from boredom, stir up a prayerful desire for divine help in interpretation, and force collaboration with other readers. 93 In A Priest to the Temple, Herbert argues that the scriptures are dark in some respects to all men, so that the learned and simple alike must consult together, ‘for the planting both of love, and humility’. 94 John Marbecke defends enigma and allegory as the protection of ‘the precious doctrine of God’ from the ‘impudent and obstinate’, and as an enticement to further engagement by the devout. 95 As well as offering the possibility of reader engagement these arguments stress the agonistic element to reading: a hubristic wrestling with a sovereign text determined to keep its secrets. Their terms are those of the cryptographers, who claim that obscurity is a strategy to audit out the unfit reader. Though the public was suspicious of underhand dealings, writers on cipher defended it where state secrets were concerned. Interest grew with a number of high-profile legal cases which used cryptography (such as the Mary Stuart trial, which hinged on letters in code unravelled by the top cryptographer, Thomas Phellippes). The civil war increased the reliance on secret writing, especially for royalists (who were most often deprived of safe lines of communication). 96 Justifying 92 Jackson, Holy Scripture, A5 r; the elephant and lamb analogy is ubiquitous, and variously attributed to Gregory or Ezekiel in the period: Green, Print and Protestantism, p. 101. 93 A. W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible: the Documents Relating to the Translation and Publication of the Bible in English 1525–1611 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), pp. 371–4. 94 Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, in Works, p. 229. 95 John Marbecke, A Booke of Notes and Common Places (London: T. East, 1581), pp. 22–4. 96 David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (1967; New York: Scribner, 1996), chs. 3, 4; S. Singh, Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), ch. 1; Lois Potter, Secret Rites


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its use by those in authority, John Wilkins’s Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641), and its redaction, John Falconer’s Cryptomenysis patefacta: or the Art of Secret Information Disclosed without a Key (1685), argue that fables, allegories, metaphors, and oracular sayings were used by the ancients to veil the secrets of their Religion and Philosophy, counting it a prophane thing to prostitute the hidden matters of either, unto vulgar apprehension . . . Hence was it that the learned men of former times were so generally inclined, to involve all their Learning in obscure and mysterious Expressions. 97

The unlearned, it seems, should not attempt to impose their interpretation on what seems enigmatic. Henry Reynolds remarked that the ancient poets so valued their learning that they concealed it from the vulgar in ‘hieroglyphicks or sacred engravings’, or delivered portions of it in enigmas and in mystical numbers. The technique, he continues, was used by God in Exodus, whose interpretation was given to Moses, then by him to Joshua, and so on to succeeding priests, so that ‘those secreter Mysteries and abstrusities of most high divinity [were] hidden and concealed under the barke and rude cover of the words’. 98 There were a number of sacred riddle books published in the period of the type Herbert plays with in his ‘Ana(Mary/Army)gram’, such as Thomas Wilson’s Theologicall Rules, to Guide Us in the Understanding and Practise of Holy Scriptures (1615), which appends a collection of aenigmata sacra. His two prefatory letters address separate audiences: the general reader, assuring him that these riddles are excellent pastimes which please and exercise the wit, and the Christian reader, praising their use to draw out scriptural knowledge, increase understanding, and help application. Wilkins viewed such riddles with disgust, arguing that producing anagrams out of scripture is a ‘trivial’ reason to believe, ‘as if Moses by such an artificial contrivance of the letters at the beginning of his writings, did purposely commend unto our belief the following and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 2. 97 John Wilkins, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641; London: R. Baldwin, 1694), p. 15. 98 Reynolds, Mythomystes (1632), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–9), i, 161.

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Books’. 99 Nonetheless, he acknowledged that ciphers could encourage some readers, so that even an ‘Adversary might unawares be brought over to an acknowledgement and confession of the thing we would have’. Moreover this way of teaching hath a great advantage above any other, by reason it hath much more power in exciting the Fancy and Affections. Plain Arguments and Moral Precepts barely proposed, are more flat in their Operation. 100

Coming back to the poems, if the language of scripture is not simply an expression but an extension of the Godhead—incarnational, selfevidencing, efficacious, self-illuminating—the heart’s pithy comments are recalcitrant marks to be borne about proudly. They cannot be read by the unfit (that is, all of us), but they do move their bearers more than in reason they are able to. They demand awestruck obedience to the sovereign secrets they hold. I want, therefore, to separate the heart poems from those of Herbert’s poems which Joseph Summers and Martin Elsky call hieroglyphs (glossed in the seventeenth century as ‘sacred carvings’). The two critics find a secret meaning in the shape or the position of Herbert’s words, one which supplements their denotation. Understanding the doubled meaning is a form of revelation granted to the poet. 101 However, this chapter has argued that, given that the heart poems have messages that are not to be accommodated to the human perspective, we should read them not through the hieroglyph’s surplus communication but through the enigma’s paucity of meaning. Though to us the poems’ narrators seem placidly obtuse about their 99 100

Wilkins, Mercury, p. 64. Ibid., pp. 64, 16–18, 20; J. Falconer, Cryptomenysis patefacta, or, the Art of Secret information Disclosed without a Key (London: D. Brown, 1685) pp. 119–21. John Wilkins (1614–72) was to become Bishop of Chester and Warden of Wadham College, Oxford. Following the publication of Mercury (1641), he participated in the scientific discussions in London in the mid-1640s that anticipated those of the Royal Society. Wilkins’s work drew on Giovanni Battista Porta, De furtiva literarium notis (1563), Potter, Secret Rites, p. 39. 101 J. H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), pp. 123–46; Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), ch. 5. One of the most cited encyclopaedias of imagery, Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (1556, thereafter frequently published and regularly expanded), explained the hieroglyph in the context of fragmentary and powerful inscriptions such as coins and Egyptian tablets.


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semiotic rash, the incised element of the conscience will have striking and lasting force precisely because of its bearer’s delicate and deliberate incomprehension. It is only our own hermeneutic greed which gets aroused when attempts to read the law on the heart are only partially successful. Moreover, it is not as ticklish as it sounds to end at the point where a godly inscription is looked at rather than read. The wholly acceptable genre of the pious ejaculation comes close to a synaesthetic apprehension of the godly word, as in ‘How sweetly doth “My Master” sound!/ . . . An orientall fragrance, “My Master” ’ (Herbert, ‘The Odour’). It did not, however, provoke charges of idolatry, of worshipping the thing rather than what it signifies. The genre was flagged up in the subtitles used for Herbert and Vaughan’s collections of ‘sacred poems and private ejaculations’. Still, the enigma does leave the conscience unenlightened. In Perkins’s terms, it makes for an erring conscience, sincerely misunderstanding the law. Having God carve on you shows your heart to be committed and permanently struck by his words. At the same time, the brevity of the legend itself gives a certain amount of interpretative freedom, which Herbert and Vaughan are not slow in taking. For instance, Herbert’s ‘Judgement’ looks to the point when God ‘shalt call/ For ev’ry mans peculiar book’ of conscience. Some will have logged only good deeds, but Herbert is less confident of finding many in his own case, and decides instead to ‘thrust a Testament’ into God’s hand, so ‘There thou shalt find my faults are thine’. Vaughan goes further in ‘H. Scriptures’. Philip West has pointed out the number of uses the scriptures are put to in the octet of this poem. Vaughan can consume spiritual food, be medicined, interpret other mysteries from it, and rest on it. 102 In the sestet of the poem, Vaughan gets bolder. He asks that the original book, written by God and read by Vaughan to learn about the law, be swapped for Vaughan’s heart, carved on with God’s words: ‘O that I had deep Cut in my hard heart/ Each line in thee!’ Vaughan himself becomes the site of Christ’s autobiography: ‘Then would I plead in groans/ Of my Lords penning’. Moreover, the 102 Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s ‘Silex scintilans’: Scripture Uses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 9–11.

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poet envisages Christ reading what he has written, so that Vaughan will ‘by sweetest Art/ Return upon himself the Law, and Stones’. In doing this, the word of God is kept ‘other’ by being read by God, not Vaughan. Finally, Vaughan repeats Herbert’s impertinent coda: ‘Read here, my faults are thine’. The effect of Vaughan’s humility and sincerity is to make Christ both lawgiver and sinner; Christ’s groans are deserved. While this is strictly within the doctrine of imputed grace, it feels somehow ungracious for the original sinner to remove himself so entirely from the judgement of his conscience. No one could complain, since Vaughan’s heart is now permanently signed as Christ’s, so the fingerwagging with which the poem ends is true (‘This Book, and I/ Will tell thee so’)—but it is not seemly. This chapter has been silent about Donne. The image of the caved heart rarely appears in his poems or sermons. In the Songs and Sonets, his heart is black, dull, broken, nestling, or misshapen; in the sermons, it is sealed by his faith, echoes what it hears, is circumcised, glad or sorrowful, and foolish. There are a few, brief, and uninspired references to ‘the book of God, the Law, written in our own hearts’, or to how the children of God are the ‘Marble, and the Ivory, upon which he workes . . . to re-engrave, and restore his Image’. 103 Sometimes, Donne’s sermons refer in passing to the moral law in the heart, and two of his love poems show a mistress’s picture hidden there, but he writes scenes of engraving, not reading off the heart. Though he declares that his body is an ‘abridgement’ of the ‘tomes of Gods creatures’ and it inspires meditations in sickness, there are no enigmas there. 104 This is not even the case in Devotions and ‘A Hymn to God My God’ when his heart is in question (in the eleventh meditation, where the physicians administer cordials). I cannot explain why a poet equally interested in a textual relationship with God and a somatic apprehension of himself would not use an image which brought the two together, an image conveniently to hand and sanctioned by scripture. Less surprising, perhaps, is why Donne, who admitted to a ‘hydroptique, immoderate desire of human learning and languages’, and whose third satire urges the ‘mind’s 103 104

Donne, Sermons, iii, 103, 193. Donne, Sermons, iv, 166–7. Winfried Schleiner brings together images of the book of the world used by Donne and the Church fathers in her The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), pp. 94–103.


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endeavour’ in uncovering truths, would not be content to stay at the level of an enigma. 105 While he admits that he sees God at present ‘in aenigmate’, as a ‘riddle’, he imagines his delight when the ‘Riddles [are] dissolved’ after death. 106 Torturing a subject to get at its pith is much more in Donne’s line. His books are largely outside himself, and it is to these that the next chapter turns. 105 106

Letter to Sir Henry Goodyer, probably 1608: Donne, Sermons, i, 128. Donne, Sermons, iii, 111. On Donne’s use of reason, see Terry G. Sherwood, Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of Donne’s Thought (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1984), chs 1 and 2.

4 Bumptious Reading and Priggish antanaclasis ‘A figure when the same word is repeated in a divers if not in a contrary signification’. 1

The principal way to instruct the conscience is by reading the scriptures. At Oxford, John Hales warns tyro expositors in the student congregation not to ‘deal with scripture as chemicks deal with natural bodies, torturing them to extract that out of them which God and nature never put in them’. 2 William Ames stresses that the only human judgement about scripture that is important—and indeed possible—is its authorship. ‘By the Word of God we must passe judgement of all things else: but as for it, we are not to judge it, but to submit our selves to it to be judged’, not subjecting ‘the Oracles of God to the pleasure of vaine men, to be drawne hither or thither as they thinke good’. Thus, attention to the scriptures should differ ‘not onely in degree, but in the whole nature of it, from that attention which is due to the words of men’. 3 Four lengthy chapters of John White’s Way to the Tree of Life insist this should not be like other reading: the manner of Reading the Scriptures, must be with great deliberation, and that not onely because the matter contained in them is weighty, and of a mysterious 1 John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d . . . Conducing Very Much to the Right Understanding of the Sense of the Letter of the Scripture (London: E. Cotes, 1656), p. 107. 2 John Hales, A Sermon Preached at St. Maries in Oxford (Oxford: J. Lichfield, 1617), p. 4. 3 William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (1639; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1975), 25, 75. Erasmus’s interpretation of scripture sees it as self-authorizing, though the reader’s understanding of the final sense is deferred: T. Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), ch. 3.

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nature, the Phrases significant, the expressions briefe . . . but also because that which we read so nearly concerning us . . . must be carefully laid up in our hearts, and written there. 4

The first half of the seventeenth century is, as Philip West has admirably demonstrated in the case of Vaughan, a period when people did not merely read but used scripture as a guide and as an arena for debate on contemporary topics in all areas of life. 5 This chapter agrees wholeheartedly with West that Vaughan—and Donne and Herbert also—are users of scriptures, with all the hints of mercenary and partisan readings this implies, but points out a moment when they have doubts about doing so. The sub-genres formed by readers of the heart take an enigmatic way out of mixing themselves into an interpretation of what the conscience tells them. They rest on the guaranteed alterity and authenticity of the message. Another way is taken by a different sub-genre, that of wreath poems. I argue that when poets read the law directly from scriptures, they escape its meaning by obediently repeating its words, but out of context. The group formed by Marvell’s ‘The Coronet’, Donne’s ‘La Corona’, Vaughan’s ‘The Wreath’, and Herbert’s ‘Jordan II’ and ‘A Wreath’ is well recognized by critics. Their narrators try to weave a ‘crowne of frail bayes’ in praise of God, which, by the end of the poems, they find inadequate in various ways. Analysis of the group takes two directions. Some commentators think these efforts are shown as sinful, since they have an art which boasts that it can act in such a praiseworthy way by its own efforts. Thus, A. D. Nuttall convincingly argues that parts of The Temple show Herbert’s despair of finding a creative area where he can contribute to his own salvation. He must recognize his work was God’s all along, as the ‘Dedication’ says: ‘Lord, my first fruits present themselves to thee;/ Yet not mine neither: for from thee they came,/ And must return’. 6 4 J. White, A Way to the Tree of Life: Discovered in Sundry Directions for the Profitable Reading of the Scriptures (London: M. F., 1647), p. 129. 5 West shows how Vaughan consoled himself for the defeat of the royalist side by using scripture to shape a narrative of his life, taking in particular the life of Christ, the figure of Jacob in the wilderness, and Hezekiah’s recovery: Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s ‘Silex scintilans’: Scripture Uses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6 A. D. Nuttall, Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St. John (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 14–16. The effects of the ‘inherent worthlessness of human acts’ in art are similarly explored by Lewalski in ‘Marvell as Religious Poet’, in C. A. Patrides, ed., Approaches to Marvell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978),

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Other critics see such poems as debates on decorum in religious verse, which question how thick a layer of tropes the faithful may have to peer through if ‘Beautie and beauteous words should go together’ (Herbert, ‘The Forerunners’). 7 The cure, both sides agree, is a plain citation of scripture. This is the most respectful of styles, since it sends God’s word back to him. For instance, in ‘The Posie’, despite temptations to use witty ‘invention’, Herbert twice decides that ‘Lesse then the least/ Of all God’s mercies, is my posie still’. It was not only his own motto, cited by the printers of The Temple, but also Jacob’s words, in Genesis 32:10. I too will end in repetition, but repetition where careful reading is treated ironically. To me, the wreath poems show how what the casuists call an erring conscience can inform itself, energetically but incorrectly. Herbert’s poem alerts us to the familiar central pun of the wreath poems, where posies are both flowers and poetry. These refer to themselves as devotional florilegia, where beautiful words and images are cited, from secular and sacred texts, gathered up into hymns of praise. The pun is used in a much larger group of poems than is generally realized, including, among others, Herbert’s ‘Jordan I’, ‘Employment I’ and ‘Employment II’, ‘To All Angels and Saints’, and ‘The Flower’, and Vaughan’s ‘The Garland’, ‘Religion’, ‘Unprofitableness’, and ‘Misery’. The classic form of the wreath poem is taken in Herbert’s ‘Jordan II’ and Marvell’s ‘The Coronet’. In each, the stance taken by each poet is ostentatiously correct. Marvell shakes his head over how for ‘long, too long’, he has wounded Christ’s head with a crown of thorny sins, before joining Herbert in throwing himself enthusiastically into collecting the best of their poetic resources, ‘set with skill and chosen out with care’ (‘The Coronet’ parenthetically and pathetically noting how even Marvell’s ‘fruits are only flowers’). Then comes a theatrical moment of self-understanding—the self has put a serpent or a fire in here! Work pp. 253–7; A. Pinnington, ‘Prayer and Praise in John Donne’s “La Corona” ’, in Peter Milward, ed., Poetry and Faith in the English Renaissance (Tokyo: Renaissance Institute, 1987), pp. 133–42; J. Kronenfeld, ‘Herbert’s “A Wreath” and Devotional Aesthetics: Imperfect Efforts Redeemed by Grace’, ELH 48 (1981), 290–309. 7 See J. Daalder, ‘Herbert’s “Poetic Theory” ’, GHJ 9/2 (1986), 17–34; Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 105–11; J. Walker, ‘The Religious Lyric as Genre’, English Language Notes 25 (1987), 39–45; M. Carpenter, ‘From Herbert to Marvell: Poetics in “A Wreath” and “The Coronet” ’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 69 (1970), 50–62.


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must stop while this is disentangled or the poem shattered, in order to read beyond the ‘pretence’ (‘Jordan II’) and copy out what God has already written. The other three poems in the group are variations on this. Herbert’s ‘A Wreath’ moves towards giving God a ‘garland, of deserved praise’, before realizing that this garland will be as crooked as his ways. Vaughan’s ‘The Wreath’ says he has no such gleanings as he has been in storms, so brings a ‘twin’d wreath of grief and praise,/ Praise soil’d with tears, and tears again/ Shining with joy’, which Christ’s breath will waft back to him. In the first stanza of ‘La Corona’ Donne has the confidence to offer his ‘crown of prayer and praise’, and wants in return the better ‘crown of glory’ Christ could weave for him. In all, God’s inspiration is acknowledged as the source of true poetry. It replaces Donne’s ‘muse’, yields Vaughan a ‘quickening breath’, gives Herbert dictation or corrects his ways, and ‘Heaven’s diadem’ goes before Marvell’s art. The wreath poems evidently contain standard professional discussions on religious verse. May you use art to celebrate God? Yes? Write a poem on how the ability comes from God. No? Write one on how unnecessary such art is. May you write poetry on secular subjects? Yes? Write a poem in which choosing such subjects is relegated to youthful indiscretion. No? Write one deploring the folly of those who praise mistresses not God. Does your devotion match your words? Yes? Write a poem on how sincerity is a gift of faith. No? Write one bringing your words into scripture’s. A poet, of course, can take a different answer to the same question in different poems, as do Herbert and Vaughan. Herbert very properly acknowledges the primary force of ‘invention’ by God in ‘Love II’, where ‘immortall heat’ shall make ‘our brain/ All her invention on thine Altar lay’. In ‘Love I’ he ridicules those who expend wit and invention on mortal love, just as Vaughan’s determines to ‘idolize’ the Mount of Olives above the locus amoenus of love poetry. Herbert terms himself merely a ‘Secretarie’ of God’s praise, writing on behalf of all creation (Herbert, ‘Providence’). Like Donne, the two poets resign corruptible flowers of ephemeral fame or pleasure. Herbert’s ‘Life’ tuts that ‘I made a posie, while the day ran by/ . . . But Time did becken to the flowers’, and an intrusive friend tells Vaughan: Desist fond fool, be not undone, What thou hast cut today Will fade at night, and with this Sun Quite vanish and decay (‘Garland’).

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They are punctilious about giving their charming (if self-consciously naive) wreaths to the correct person: All worship is prerogative, and a flower Of his rich crown . . . Therefore we dare not from his garland steal, To make a posie for inferiour power (Herbert, ‘To all Angels and Saints’).

Thus, the reproaches of ‘The Garland’s’ ‘dead man’ should fall flat. The previous chapter showed how ubiquitous stones were, standing in both for the human heart and for the poems making up The Temple and Silex; just so with flowers, standing in for human art and the collections across a range of poems, not solely the wreath group. The perennial way buds, sprouts, roses, leaves, trees, bulbs, roots, and seeds shoot up over these cases of conscience suggests that, like the images of torture and heart carvings, it could be fruitful to take the metaphor more literally and recognize its widespread presence. This four-part chapter looks first at how methods of reading secular texts changed in the period. The particular hazards of, and protective guidelines for, note-taking from divine texts are examined next. The chapter then looks at the floral and apian images habitually used about the collection of poetic beauties. Materials are stripped for reuse from groves, meads, bowers, and fields, without distinguishing the holy from the lay texts, and without regard for their meaning. Finally, the argument turns to how the godly recipient of these flower arrangements sardonically responds to their pastoral register. Repetition out of context is met with a brutally bucolic pruning hook. If scripture has been read for posies, not instruction, then the conscience will remain uninstructed. As historians of reading point out, Tudor and Stuart schools think about the reception of texts in terms of what could be reused in future work. 8 Anthony Grafton traces a shift over the period from scholastic reading (which aims at a synthesis of canonical authorities 8 Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), ch. 1; R. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), chs. 3, 4; G. Cavallo and R. Chartier, eds, A History of Reading in the West, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), chs. 7–10; John Kerrigan, ‘The Editor as Reader: Constructing Renaissance Texts’, in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).


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from across the centuries, who are seen, ahistorically, as a coherent group) to humanist reading (an attempt to read the texts against the original context, followed by a reuse in current circumstances, so doubly situating them). 9 The teachers’ preferred style of reading is primarily extrapolatory, because they anticipate that their pupils will in turn write using the subjects they read about. At some point in the future, each will invent and arrange material on a subject, look for words to clothe it, memorize these, and speak the product. The collection of commonplaces while reading is held to aid three parts of this rhetorical process: invention, diction, and memory. In terms of inventio, there is no assumption that what one has to say springs directly from the subject at hand. Instead, the classical rhetorics used in the early modern schoolroom give three main methods of gathering matter. 10 The first deals in specifically legal proofs, and the way a case is built through induction from ‘indications’ (including the response to torture). The sorts of facts to be considered in each type of case are detailed by the handbooks on the basis of precedent. The second technique involves categorizing areas of knowledge from which topics can be taken. These draw on what were at heart the Aristotelian predicaments, general statements that establish the essence of an object, which subsequently reappeared in other rhetoricians’ lists, with minor modifications. Every item is asked about its substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, and whether it does or suffers an act. The third method, which was touched on in the previous chapter, is the collection of ready-made arguments, questions, or descriptions which a speaker saves for possible use on future occasions. Such loci are picked out of reports of successful appeals to the audience in similar cases. Thus matter can be drawn from the facts of a specific case, from questions asked in all situations, and from prepared appeals (‘Has he been knifed?’, ‘By accident or intent?’, ‘Murder most foul!’) Topics created by all these methods can, in their turn, be formally interrogated to produce further points. Thus, 9

Anthony Grafton, ‘Humanist Readers’, in Cavallo and Chartier, History of Reading,

ch. 7. 10

Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 2–13, describes the classical handbooks used. See also A. Blair, ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: the Commonplace Book’, JHI 53/4 (1992), 541–51; Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: the Seventeenth-century Commonplace Book’, in W. Speed Hill, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghamton: MRTS, 1993), pp. 131–47.

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successful invention requires training in dialectical questioning and also experience of what has roused audiences in the past. Rhetoricians speak of these topics as ‘places’ that can be resorted to by all speakers, where common strategies are stored. The rhetor’s habit of visiting these storehouses of content appears again when he puts the topic into words, in the process of elocutio. This element becomes a substantial and ever-growing area of study in the Renaissance. Commonplaces are not only spacious locales around which an orator strolls to mark material, they are also persistently associated with brilliance, polish, and ornament. Quintilian, for instance, devotes the best part of book ten of Institutio oratoria (out of twelve books) to listing these reserves, and lauding them as feathers, flowers, jewels, and accessories which are essential to win assent. Peacham praises the ‘excellent sentences . . . esteemed as precious pearles and costly jewels in princely vestures, and as the most beautifull flowers in gardens and fields, and as the most glorious lights in the firmament’. 11 These beauties entice an audience’s affections in the direction which the orator’s reasoning should already be taking it. The effect on reading practices of their resplendence, combined with inventio’s appeal to the wisdom of the places of invention, is to produce a situation where ‘everyone is quoting everyone else . . . on purpose and with a feeling of achievement’. 12 The early modern pupil attempts to imitate the styles of the best writers, as he is trained to pluck out and reuse themes, tropes, schemes, and other beauties from the poets, historians, and orators he reads. Finally, as Chapter 3 noted, the fourth element of composition, artificial memory, reinforces a similar spatial understanding of composition. Striking images, which stand for points in the speech to be remembered, are arranged in the orator’s mind on images of buildings, to be read off when needed. Such representations, both cognitive and mimetic, are held to take up ‘space’ in the brain. They can be consciously hunted up and creatively combined in intricate and original ways, giving the chance to engineer a character in judgement and piety. 13 This 11 Joan M. Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1962), p. 13. 12 Walter J. Ong, ‘Commonplace Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger, and Shakespeare’, in R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on European Culture AD 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 102. 13 For instance, in Peter Gerard, A Preparation to the Most Holie Ministerie, trans. N.B. (London: T. Creed, 1598), pp. 176–80, memory is credited with allowing the minister to


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learning from ‘vicarious and empathetic experience’ formed a training in ethics and effective communication. 14 Thus commonplaces, dull though they sound to us, in the 1600s were the really exciting ideas and phrases to come across in reading. They were treasures, well worth the vast resources of time and effort expended by early modern readers. Rhetorical invention, ornamentation and memory alike, in the most effective power-knowledge of the period, depended on the selection, interrogation, and spatial storage of loci from past reading and events. The mechanism to prise out gobbets from past reading for writing into new works was at the heart of the learning process from early Tudor to late Stuart schools. The statutes of Rivington grammar school were typical in requiring the master and ushers to ensure that the elder sort must be taught how to refer every thing they read to some common place, as to virtue, vice, learning, patience, adversity, prosperity, war, peace, etc. for which purpose they must have paper books ready to write them in. 15

In 1570, the educational theorist Roger Ascham asked the young scholar, as he got more confident in his Latin/English translations, to start three such paper books where he could transcribe startling metaphorical, literal, and synonymous phrases which he had marked up while reading. The notebooks would, thought Ascham, improve comprehension in directed study: bookes of commonplaces be verie necessarie, to induce a man, into an orderlie generall knowledge, how to referre orderlie all that he readeth, ad certa rerum capita and not wander in studie. 16 build up complex knowledge, exercise judgement, and give appropriate and immediate advice. Mary Carruthers describes similar medieval expectations of memory in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 9. The parallels between memory and invention are analysed by Moss, Commonplace-books, pp. 217–18, in relating commonplaces to the emblem book; and Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces, section 4. 14 W. J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Human Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 168. 15 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1944), i, 351. 16 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium 1968), p. 43 r.

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John Brinsley, in 1612, was perhaps more realistic about his pupils’ abilities. Certainly they were to be taught how to highlight hard words, grammatical examples, flowers, and so on in the margins, or even write them out fully in notebooks. Such books would be ‘a great help where the schollars have leasure and judgement to gather them; I meane, to gleane out all the choyse sentences and matter in the best Authors’. However, if this was too hard for young scholars, he suggested using one of the many collections of pre-gathered topoi (making it clear that for Brinsley, finally, the important part was getting the stores themselves, not the prudential reading that ideally produced them). 17 The tyro linguist could begin with Tullies Sentences arranged by Lagnerius as a model of connected Latin, and move on to double translation from the Ovidian commonplace book of Octavianus Mirandula, Flores poetarum. His way was then open, Brinsley said cheerily, to examine whole books (Susenbrotus’ Epitome troporum ac schematum was the standard textbook for consultation on beauties taken from a larger library of texts). 18 Half a century on, Charles Hoole, another pedagogue, was still recommending that the grammar school’s second formers use a ‘little paper-book, wherein to gather the more familiar phrases, which they finde in every Lesson printed in a different character’, and exchange their own and printed commonplace books to ‘pick out of them such pretty notes, as they have not formally met withall’. 19 Like Brinsley, Hoole waives process for product. Only after the mid-seventeenth century did the teaching of commonplaces in schools decline. As teachers ceased to want to replicate the exact language of the classical models, and a perception grew that the machinery of dialectical argument operated by loci was obsolete, there was a re-emphasis on the role of author as composer rather than collector. 20 The printed collections spanned a variety of genres, from encyclopedic manuals that pointed out the principal ways to trade in wool or plant a garden, to anthologies such as A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres 17 John Brinsley, Ludus literarius, or, the Grammar Schoole (1612; Menston: Scolar, 1968), pp. 187–8; 153–4; 193. 18 Moss, Commonplace-books, pp. 140, 215. 19 Charles Hoole, A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660; Menston: Scolar, 1969), pp. 51, 65, 68, 71, 131. 20 Moss, Commonplace-books, ch. 9.


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(1573) of George Gascoigne, or Robert Allot’s Englands Parnassus: or, Flowers of our Moderne Poets (1600) which picked out ‘the choystest Flowers’ and ‘flowers of learning from the stem’. There was encouragement to print compilations or redactions from theological and devotional works. Timothy Bright’s abridgement of The Booke of Acts and Monuments (1589) explains why Foxe’s volume needs a summary. The reader may want money or time, and the memory of the Acts will be improved by reading short extracts, for ‘the copiousness of that notable worke, hath hid the riche treasures of the same’. Moreover, Bright adds judiciously, Large volumes, and Abridgements have both their use: and if Abridgements witholde from reading large volumes, because men find the contents of them in briefe: even as much are the large bookes an hinderance to themselves, in discouraging the negligent and slouthfull by their length. The diligent man that loveth knowledge, will use the one for his memory, and the other for his judgement. 21

Foxe himself thought redaction useful, and published his own Pandectae locorum communium (1572), a skeleton commonplace book with printed headings to note ideas as one read (amor, amor dei, ambitio, anabaptismus). Walton says that Donne left at his death ‘the resultance of 1400 Authors, most of them abridged and analyse with his own hand’. 22 Instruction in the extrapolatory practice was not necessarily sectarian. Margo Todd, looking at a number of classical commonplace notebooks by early Stuart students at Trinity College, Cambridge, shows how they turned to Catholic humanist writings for instruction on how to deal with a text. 23 Gnomic print conventions in textbooks facilitated and directed such extrapolatory reading, by using different typefaces for notable sections, placing inverted commas at the start of a quotation or in the margin where important statements appeared, adding asterisks or insistently pointing hands, giving the comments of model readers, 21 Timothy Bright, An Abridgement of the Booke of Acts and Monuments of the Church (London: J. Windet, 1589), preface to the reader. 22 Isaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (London: for R. Marriott, 1670), p. 62. 23 Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 3.

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and so on, practices which G. K. Hunter thinks peaked during the early years of James’s reign. 24 Making one’s own selection, however, was preferable, and regarded as not just a youthful reading habit. Though private collections by adults did not circulate widely, their creators took pride in them as proofs of taste and learning, as well as making use of them in managing their affairs. Kevin Sharpe has investigated the reading and noting habits of a Puritan landowner, Sir William Drake, whose own rules for notation required him to break up the body of a text into ‘members’, to epitomize chapters, and to make frequent comparison between texts. He rarely read steadily through a book, telling himself that ‘a wary reader will not endeavour to remember the mass and whole bulk of books but only to extract the spirit and quintessence thereof and what is most applicable to business’. 25 The practice of compilation was professionalized. Grafton, Lisa Jardine, and William Sherman show how widely scholars and secretaries were employed to read for others, providing executive summaries for public figures in the form of synopses and annotated texts, using local or specialist knowledge. This sort of information processing could be done with a colleague where more efficient, for while the documents might be secret, the mode of reading was public and task-orientated. 26 At one point, Drake considered getting a secretary who would read Drake such summaries at mealtimes or when Drake was exercising. Jardine and Sherman point out that such ‘knowledge transactions’ gave patrons easily manipulated cultural capital. 27 The end result, the anthology, subjugated a range of important texts to its new circumstances of usage, accumulating supplements around each. 28 24 G. K. Hunter, ‘The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances’, The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951), 174; William Slights, Managing Readers. Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 25 Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: the Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 85. 26 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990), 30–78. 27 Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, ‘Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts, eds, Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 102–24. 28 For instance, Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, pp. 37–40; M. T. Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), ch. 1.


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The Arcadia’s afterlife is a good example of how thoroughly a book could be cannibalized by other texts. After its publication in 1590 it was cited as an exemplary text, just as its author was acclaimed as a model soldier, courtier, and poet. Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) and Francis Meres’s Wits Commonwealth (1598) use the Arcadia as a collection of posies which they expect to be imitated. Fraunce gives brief definitions of rhetorical figures, then extensive quotations from Homer, Virgil, Sidney, and Tasso. Meres omits the definitions, providing lists of similes from Sidney. Sidney’s style, they agree, should be emulated to increase the sweetness and fluency of the reader’s language. By contrast, Milton’s private commonplace book, dealing with politics, ethics, theology, and economics, cites the 1633 edition of the Arcadia on suicide, drunkenness, oligarchy, and political moves (the 1655 edition of Sidney gave a table of principal heads). Milton sums up situations rather than quoting the text, reminding himself of Sidney’s shrewd political judgements. Moreover, Sidney’s imitators could expect to be copied themselves. John Hoskyns’s Direccions for Speech and Style was written around 1600 for a student at the Middle Temple, to show how features of style vary by circumstance and audience. Hoskyns took paginated examples from the Arcadia’s first edition, and gave the student a marked-up copy of Sidney’s book, which pointed out ideas and verbal figures for varying, amplifying, and illustrating. In Direccions, he defined, excerpted, then analysed each figure, showing where Sidney himself had used quotations. The chain of intertextual reference continued when other students took notes from Hoskyns’s work (one of the three extant manuscripts of Direccions is updated to take account of the page numbers of the 1621 edition of the Arcadia). Ben Jonson copied sections from Direccions into his commonplace notebook, Timber or Discoveries, published in 1640 as part of Jonson’s collected works. 29 In effect, The Arcadia had become a network of repeated readings and rewritings through the medium of the commonplace notebook, not just a single originary text. In ‘The Church-Porch’, Herbert advises conversationalists to ‘stuffe thy minde with sold braverie . . . substantiall worth’ (stanza 35), and Helen Wilcox’s study of Herbert’s influence on seventeenth-century readers shows how, for some readers, The Temple itself was a 29

Hunter, ‘Marking of Sententiae’, pp. 175–6.

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commonplace collection, to be reincorporated into their own work. 30 There are royalist commonplace books which adapted Herbert’s work for various local circumstances (one jotted down his verses between prescriptions for horses). Peers imitated him by building his words into their own work. Throughout Silex scintilans Vaughan credits the words of the ‘dead man’, Herbert, with inspiring him or stopping his ‘career’ into vice. ‘The Garland’ talks of Herbert’s verse as a posie that retains its savour and curative values, even after the poet’s death. 31 Such uses see Herbert’s work as universally relevant, not as a record of one man’s meditation. Thus, Harvey says he ‘comprehended’ Herbert’s matter (in both senses) by building extracts into his own verse. Herbert’s line, ‘Thy word is all, if we could spell’ (‘The Flower’), becomes in Harvey Let us learn first to know our letters well Then syllables, then words to spell; Then to read plainly, e’re we take the pen In hand to write to other men (‘The reading pue’).

A concern for elocutio as well as ethics caused a private schoolmaster at Hadley, Joshua Poole, to compile a collection of rhyming words, epithets, and phrases to teach pupils to compose verse by imitating English models including Herbert (the English Parnassus, 1657), and Charles Hoole followed him, in A new discovery of the old art of teaching schoole (1660). Thomas White’s Little book for little children (1671) gives the alphabet illustrated by moral couplets from ‘The Church-porch’. Since Herbert was being read in this excerpted fashion, Philemon Stephens added to the seventh edition of The Temple an ‘Alphabeticall Table for ready finding out chief places’, with page and line references for each theological topic (such as heart, cross, man, sin, love). Amid this warm praise for the technique came some worries about the way it was moving from process into product. Ascham, for instance, considered that an epitome was ‘good privatelie for himself that doth worke it, but ill commonlie for all other that use other mens labor 30 Helen Wilcox, ‘ “Something Understood”: The Reputation and Influence of George Herbert to 1715’ (Oxford University, DPhil, 1984), pp. 127–31, 35–6, 50–1, 135–7, 139–41, 242–4; Robert H. Ray’s findings endorse this in ‘The Herbert Allusion Book: Allusions to Herbert in the Seventeenth Century’, Studies in Philology 1986 (83), supplement pp. 1–167, eg. pp. 11, 14, 20. 31 F. Malpezzi, ‘Dead Men and Living Words: Herbert and the Revenant in Vaughan’s “The Garland” ’, GHJ 15/2 (1992), 71–4.


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therein: a sillie poore kinde of study’. 32 Bacon agreed: the ethical and intellectual value lay in the act of selection (anyone might do the actual copying out), which produced copia in invention, made the judgement forceful, and ensured attentive reading. More worrying was the dislocative effect on what was read. Having been taught a hierarchy of reading in school, of subordinating a text to one’s own headings, the latter naturally configured an adult’s readings in later life. The reader’s conceptual framework, manifest in his notebook headings, was part of his reading of the host text. This conservative approach ended up with the notions the reader started with, just more expressed in examples, in what Victoria Kahn calls a prelude to reception theory. 33 Whatever the humanist ideal of historically situating a text might be, the pragmatics of reuse predictably took over, and notebook reading removed context and integrity from what it studied. Moreover, the commonplace collections rarely attempted to reconcile citations that took different positions on an issue. In practice, a reader’s multiple headings were ‘supremely tolerant of cognitive dissonance’. 34 Inevitably authors were irritated; many prefaces grumbled like John Hayward’s that ‘men will be not readers only but interpreters, but wresters, but corrupters and depravers of that which they read’, or with George Chapman that ‘let the writer mean what he list, his writing notwithstanding must be construed . . . to the intendment of the Reader’. 35 The defence was, once again, in terms of function. Commonplacing was intended to give rise to action and naturally produced multiple readings depending on the differing needs of the collector or his patron. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, there was less enthusiasm for going from the general heading to the particular example. The spread of the new science, and a thorough acceptance of Ramist categorization, made starting with the individual fact or axiom the primary way to reason. Reservations already voiced about an ‘over-early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into arts and methods’ grew in volume and number. It was felt that the headings of a commonplace notebook could discourage intellectual enquiry, showing, as Donne’s 32 33

Ascham, Scholemaster, p. 42 v. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), chs 1, 4. 34 Blair, ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy’, p. 548. 35 Quoted in Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 41–3.

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friend Sir Henry Wotton said tersely, ‘a short course to those who are contented to know a little’. 36 Bacon agreed; knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth; but when it once is comprehended in exact methods, it may perchance be further polished and illustrate . . . but it increaseth no more in bulk and substance. 37

Commonplacing could only contribute to inductive thinking as long as conclusions were ushered back to the facts, since knowledge drawn freshly and in our view out of particulars knows best the way back to particulars again; and it contributes much more to practice when the discourse or discussion attends on the example, than when the example attends upon the discourse. 38

Bacon’s places, then, are not places of proof but places of enquiry, places where things can be compared to generate questions about their substance. Historians of ideas habitually link the mid-century’s desire to categorize the natural world, its interest in experimental knowledge, and the universal taxonomies attempted by Royal Society members, with this change to the status of commonplaces. 39 Under the influence of Ramus, too, places had shifted status. 40 Ramus made short work of memory places—better to remember material by the divisions inherent in any subject, each of which would naturally suggest a succeeding pair of divisions, than use the complex heavy machinery of architectural mnemonics. Even more significant in this context was his famous 36 Wotton, quoted in Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, p. 139. Montaigne had already protested that ‘rapsodies of common places, wherewith so many stuffe their study, serve not greatly but for vulgar subjects’, quoted in F. Goyet, ‘The Word “Commonplaces” in Montaigne’, in Lynette Hunter, ed., Toward a Definition of Topos: Approaches to Analogical Reasoning (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 69. 37 Francis Bacon, ‘Of the Advancement of Learning’ (1605), in J. Spedding, R. Ellis, and D. Heath, eds, The Works of Francis Bacon, 5 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1857–87), iii, part 1.292. Herbert was one of the team of translators who turned this treatise into Latin. 38 Francis Bacon, ‘De augmentis scientiarum’ (1623), trans. F. Headlam, in Works, v, 56. See Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, pp. 138–9. Crane, Framing Authority, ch. 1, comments on the intellectual prudence acquired by the activity of anthologizing. 39 For instance, W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), ch. 6.2; N. W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), ch. 9. 40 Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, ch. 4.1; Moss, Common-place Books, ch. 9.


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division between inventio and elocutio, the former being reserved for dialectic, the latter, rhetoric. This had a particularly significant effect on the places, since they had hitherto united appeals to reason and experience. In approaching a topic, the Ramist could no longer recline gratefully on the plenitude of the past; he had a lot more work to do in dividing his subject down to the point where each statement was obviously true. Such divisions were made on the basis of what Ramus called ‘artistic’ arguments, basically a rearrangement of the ten Aristotelian categories. Places of authority, on the other hand, were classed as ‘inartistic’ arguments which by and in themselves could not create belief. They appeared as arguments by analogy (a notoriously weak form), or, principally, as rhetorical amplifications applied to affect the reader emotionally, after the real work had been done. Thus, though the use of ‘tables’ remained an essential epistemological tool to the middle of the seventeenth century, the change in their significance is mirrored in the even-handed comment by Donne that ‘All wayes of teaching, are Rule and Example: and though ordinarily the Rule be first placed, yet the Rule it selfe is made of Examples’. 41 By the 1650s, the content of places was now what you started with to create categories, not ended with as examples of categories. What happened when the text you read was sacred? Learning to read meant learning to read the Bible; as Terence Cave shows, early modern reading was an increasingly self-conscious preparation for the supreme exercise of approaching scripture. 42 Early modern schools taught extrapolatory methods to mine divine texts, just like secular ones. The statutes of the petty school of St Saviours, Southwark, of 1562 are typical of Tudor schools’ practice: on holy days ‘the best scholers shall versify upon a chapter of the Newe Testament’, and at St Olave’s in 1572 sentences of scripture were set daily as copies. This continued at grammar school. T. W. Baldwin shows that the Bible was the ‘chief source for sentential dictates’. Colloquies were held in school on biblical subjects; at Rivington school in 1596 scholars were required to learn by heart 41 Donne, The Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), ix, 274, 278. The sermon, on Psalm 32:3, 4, is undated, but Donne’s editors suggest that it comes from 1624–5 (ix, 37). 42 Terence Cave, ‘The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance’, in J. D. Lyons and S. G. Nichols, eds, Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Hanover: New England University Press, 1982), p. 150.

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biblical sentences commonplaced by the master and ushers. 43 In 1604, canon 79 required the schoolmaster to escort his scholars to church on Sundays and holy days, and ‘train them up with such sentences of holy scripture, as shall be most expedient to induce them to all godliness’. 44 Brinsley shows how to ‘open’ Genesis by posing short questions (though he warns the teacher not to go far beyond the words themselves and to leave it to God in his own time to clarify points), and Hoole requires the second form to use the Bible for Latin exercises (particularly the psalms). 45 Pedagogical writing serviced this interest. The grammarian Edmund Coote’s highly popular English Schoolmaster (1596) includes a catechism and observations on a Christian life with marginal biblical references. Primers for learning to read allow the pupil to move from easy to hard biblical passages. 46 Richard Hodges’s Most Plain Directions for True-writing (1653) declares its aim is to teach how to read the Bible; it includes lessons on punctuation, for instance, which use biblical examples. His English Primrose (1644) takes its reading lessons from the Old and New Testaments, especially the psalms. George Robertson’s Learning’s Foundation Firmly Laid . . . whereby any One of Distinction may be Brought to Read the Bible Truly in the Space of a Month, Though He Never Knew Letter Before (1651) works from letters, through biblical hard words, to full scriptural chapters. Private tuition was also available in the printed versions of devotional commonplaces, which often merged in form and function with scriptural commentaries, as does John Marbecke’s A Book of Notes and Common Places . . . Necessarie to those that Desire the True Understanding and Meaning of Scripture (1581). Others were provided for meditation, such as Nicholas Byfield’s Principles or Pattern of Wholesome Words, Containing a Collection of Such Words as are of Necessitie to be Believed unto Salvation, Separated Out of the Body of all Theology (1627), or John Clark’s Holy Oyle (1630), which give lists of topics with associated scriptural phrases. Popular sectarian polemic energetically imagined itself in real-time conversation 43 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Petty School (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1943), pp. 84, 103; idem, Small Latine, i, 682–8. 44 E. Cardwell, Synodalia: A Collection of articles of Religion, Canons, and Proceedings of Convocation in the Province of Canterbury . . . 1547–1717, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1842), i, canon 79. 45 Brinsley, Ludus literarius, ch. 23. 46 Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 181–5.


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with the opposition, strategically pushing the debate towards such places of scripture as made for their side: the Common Places of . . . Peter Martyr (1583) with over 1,200 pages of confounding places, say, or Richard Bristow’s Demaundes to be Proponed of Catholics to the Heretics (1576). This was unexceptional, provided such excerpting was done prudently. Although Donne justifies cavalier quotation for a good purpose (‘neither Christ in his preaching nor the Holy Ghost in penning the Scriptures of the New Testament were so curious as our time in citing . . . the very very words of the places’), his comparison implies a divinely judicious reader. 47 Some writers were more cautious about excerpting in the case of scripture, since abridgements and citations violate the work of a supreme organic text and originary author. The distinction that should be made between the quotation of scripture (the only wholly sufficient argument by authority) and that of human work (only ever probable) could get sidelined in instrumental reading for reuse. 48 In particular, any attempt to note God’s words down merely as precious materials to be saved, or as flowers to be plucked, could be classed as self-satisfied stupidity. Two contemporary debates on editorial conventions in the printed Bible exemplify the care to be taken in dividing and selecting scriptural pieces: the effects of the newly inserted verse divisions in the testaments, and commentaries and annotations for private readers of the Bible. Like other texts, the printed Bible could seem like a collection of ‘separate recombinable texts’, ‘quantifiable, malleable, even mechanical units’, which might encourage skip reading. 49 The effect was doubled when verse divisions were introduced (chapters had been recognized three centuries earlier). The French humanist printer Robert Estienne was the first to divide the New Testament into verses, in his Greek– Latin 1551 edition (the whole Bible in French was divided in 1553). Genevan printers followed suit. By the mid-seventeenth century, the same readers who worried about commonplacing in secular texts began to worry over verse divisions. In Some Considerations Touching the Style of the H. Scriptures, for instance, Boyle thought that there was an 47 Cited by David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature, vol. 1: From Antiquity to 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 227. 48 Moss, Commonplace-books, p. 21. 49 Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, pp. 44, 35.

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inconvenient Distinction of Chapters and Verses now in use: which though it be a very great Help to the Memory and be some other wayes serviceable; yet . . . sometimes Sever’d Matters that should have been left United, and United others which more conveniently he might have sever’d . . . ev’n some Pious Readers are easily tempted to look upon the Bible as barely a Repository of Sentences and Clauses, where Divine Truths ly Huddl’d, and not Rang’d.

Some ‘heated Spirits . . . would be willinger to have the Texts of Scripture loose stones, which they may more easily throw at their Adversaries, than built up into a Structure’. 50 Locke similarly criticized a paraphrase by Bright of the Pauline epistles: they were so ‘chop’d and minc’d’ by the verse divisions that the eye was confused, and the intellect took them for distinct aphorisms. Thus, ‘sober inquisitive Readers had a mind to see nothing in St. Paul’s epistles but just what he meant; whereas those other of a quicker and gayer Sight could see in them what they pleased’. 51 There is similar interest and unease over the division of scriptures and their reincorporation into other texts. In 1604, each beneficed preacher resident upon his living was required every Sunday to ‘soberly and sincerely divide the word of truth’ to his parishioners. 52 Taking a cue from the advice on dividing the scriptures by William Perkins in The Art of Prophesying, published recommendations to preachers and to private readers were remarkably uniform. Of course, this is useful for memory. Thomas Fuller’s advice is to learn the sermon first and quote only such loci of scripture which are ‘pregnant and pertinent’, splitting the load of places between the memory and a commonplace book. 53 It is also helpful for devotion. Isaac Ambrose describes reading the scriptures as a holy conference with God which requires ‘a firm and constant resolution’, and asks the reader to observe special passages where individuated advice is given: 50 Boyle, Considerations (written around 1651–2), in The Works, ed. M. Hunter and E. B. Davis, 14 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2000), i, pp. 415, 416, 419. 51 John Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, ed. A. W. Wainwright, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), i 105, 107. 52 Cardwell, Synodalia, i, canon 45. 53 Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane States (separately printed as two States 1642; London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1884), p. 84. Fuller (1608–61), moderate divine and popular preacher, was curate at the Savoy Chapel while completing this book.


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every Christian following this direction, should make a little paper-Book of a sheet or two, and write on the top of every leaf, the title that he would observe in his reading . . . observe such places as stare him in the face, that are so evident, that the heart cannot look off them.

The headings should be such ‘sweet passages which melted his heart’, or ‘directed him in his particular calling’, or ‘comfort him against outward crosses’. 54 Nicholas Byfield’s reader should note those places by which he was warmed, smitten, or counselled, and return to them in later life (again, using a little portable two-page booklet). 55 Byfield’s own printed commonplace book contains only chapter and verse numbers, not full quotations, both to save time and to force the reader back to the original. 56 Clearly, these leaflets were regarded not as permanent stores (like secular books), but as temporary aids to concentration. Elnathan Parr suggests bringing biblical commonplaces together to form a prayer manual, to be read over frequently. External ordering schemes, such as clauses of the Lord’s Prayer, are suitable as headings for this. 57 Ames thinks the practice helpful for memorizing places for future composition. 58 Everyone agrees that it is important that preachers keep going back to the main text after noting the epitome. Herbert tells them to draw ‘some choyce Observations . . . out of the whole text, as it lyes entire, and unbroken in the Scripture it self . . . [not] crumbling a text into small parts’, even where these are standard headings such as speaker, addressee, subject, and the like. 59 In ‘Divinitie’ he objects to those who ‘with the edge of wit . . . cut and carve doctrine’. In Ecclesiastes John Wilkins advises the minister to use his ‘tables’ as a compositional aid to pull in one text when examining another (Wilkins gives substantial 54 Isaac Ambrose, Prima, media, & ultima: the First, Middle, and Last Things (1650; London: T. R. and E. M., 1654), pp. 438–41, 485–7. Ambrose (1604–64) was a Puritan divine with Presbyterian leanings. He was at Garstang, Lancashire, when Prima came out. 55 Nicholas Byfield, Directions for the Private Reading of the Scriptures (London: E. Griffin, 1618), A6 r-A8 v, A10 r-A11 v. Byfield (1579–1622), Puritan divine, was vicar of Isleworth from 1615. 56 N. Byfield, The Principles, or, the Patterne of Wholesome Words (London: W. Sansby, 1627). 57 Elnathan Parr, Abba Father: or, a Plaine and Short Direction Concerning Private Prayer (London: F. K., 1618), pp. 55–6, 85–8. Parr (d. 1632) was rector of Palgrave, Suffolk. 58 William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London: E. Griffin, 1642), p. 192. 59 Priest, in George Herbert, The Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 234–5.

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bibliographies of the ubiquitous published place collections). 60 There was no danger anywhere here that the technique of commonplacing would overrule the intention of the divine text. The reformers’ claim that the Bible was self-interpreting (‘this verse marks that, and both do make a notion/ Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie’, says Herbert in ‘H. Scriptures II’) was based on the ‘sufficiency’ of scripture, which would bring to the attention of the reader any verses necessary for his salvation. In practice, there was also confidence that the materials with which commentators surrounded the text would stop dubious selection or interpretation. 61 To ensure that the right things were noted, extensive technical aids were made available in the printed Bibles. 62 In particular, the success of the Geneva Bible, whose wide circulation lasted from 1576 (when publication was first permitted) until at least 1621, came from its provision of ‘a splendid self-study package’—though, T. N. Corns points out, this also produced ‘a disturbing disparity of power between maker and user that is far greater than that between [present-day] critic and reader’. 63 This, the first English Bible with verse divisions, adds page headers of such notable words or sentences as ‘may greatly further aswel for memorie, as for the chief point of the page’. Summaries of the arguments of each chapter and book are given. Sigla point to notes which deal with words that had proved difficult to translate. An alphabetical index of subjects, maps of Paul’s journeys, and annotated illustrations of Old Testament subjects, are included. Its translators were trying to both ‘substantiate a new Biblical authority and restrict the subjectivism of interpretation’. 64 The Geneva’s format proved influential. Even the margins of the Authorized Version of 1611—subdued under royal disquiet about pointed applications—show where to find parallel texts at ‘hard places’. 65 60 John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, or, a Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching as it Fals Under the Rules of Art (London: M.F., 1647), pp. 47–51. 61 Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: the Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1993), ch. 1. 62 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 56–78, 403–10. 63 In Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, eds, The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 102–3. 64 G. Ward, ‘To Be a Reader: Bunyan’s Struggle with the Language of Scripture in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners’, L&T 4 (1990), p. 30. 65 W. W. E. Slights, ‘ “Marginall notes that spoile the text”: Scriptural Annotation in the English Renaissance’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly 55 (1992), 255–78. M. Jensen


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Yet, ironically, the very richness of such interlinear and intertextual presentation in adding notes and texts to the Bible also split it into topics in a way that encouraged readers to take material from it. Reading merged into rewriting in the textual penumbra of the scriptures, which the reader was urged to mark up or consult before, and as he moved through, the testaments. For instance, Perkins requires that, after preparatory prayer, the reader first considers ‘the substance of divinity described, with definitions, divisions and explications’, well before he turns to the Bible itself. In advance of approaching the sacred text he should ‘view and read over some analytical table that so [he] better [marks] the drift and scope of the Holy Ghost, and . . . [he] may with ease and delight remember the same’. He puts anything memorable or worthy in his ‘tables’, which he should ‘always have in a readiness’. 66 Richard Bernard’s treatise on ministerial duties, The Faithfull Shepherd (1621), requires the preacher to unfold a Bible verse by reading around it, according to headings, in concordances, analytical expositions, reconciliations of hard places, catechisms, commonplace books, church histories, councils, and controversies. 67 The secular authorities were uneasy about glosses that disguised or brought forward contemporary references, pointed out ironies, and prompted other interpretations. Archbishop Parker’s criticism of the Geneva Bible’s ‘diverse prejudiciall notis’, his rebuke to the Bishops’ Bible translators on ‘bitter notis’, and James’s injunctions to the translation groups set up after the Hampton Court conference show doctrinal as much as political unease. 68 It was recognized that such annotation created endless opportunities for further interpretation, rather than fixing a meaning. These notebooks organized their matter to place the reader at the centre of its meaning, argues that the Genevan annotation expected its readers to be strictly attentive, lacking in education, but bold in speech, and as a community apart from the worldly, well able to use the annotations correctly, ‘ “Simply” Reading the Geneva Bible: The Geneva Bible and its Readers’, L&T 9 (1995), 30–45. 66 W. Perkins, The Art of Prophesying, or a Treatise Concerning the Sacred and Only True Manner and Method of Preaching, in The Works, ed. I. Breward (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), pp. 336–9. 67 Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepherd (London: T. Pavier, 1621), book 1. ch. 3. See also Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, pp. 22–61; Perkins, Prophesying, in Works, pp. 336–43. 68 M. Betteridge, ‘The Bitter Notes: the Geneva Bible and its Annotations’, The Sixteenth-Century Journal 14 (1983), pp. 41–62; Slights, Managing Readers, ch. 3.

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‘liberating’ scripture from the confines of scholastic ahistorical readings into the vastness of a postponed future sense. 69 Division and selection, then, are as authoritarian as paraphrase or rewriting, though they appear to be humble aids to the original text. At this point, things start to get interesting. On the one hand, the education system is producing hugely self-confident, purposeful, pragmatic readers, who approach texts with excerpting in mind. On the other, the absolute authority of the scriptures makes dividing the text a potentially heretical activity. Informing the conscience is not without problems. There is a very thin line between reading and rewriting in extrapolatory reading habits. The selection of commonplaces makes the reading process useful, orderly, efficient, memorable, and affective, but it also runs the risk of limiting deep thought, and of ignoring the host text’s meaning. The question is, do the wreath poems register anxiety over secular topoi impertinently intruded (as, Baxter remarks, competitors and not servants of scripture), or over sacred topoi imperiously selected? 70 The former position is the one taken by most commentators on the poems. However, as the next section of this chapter will show, the latter also has a claim to attention considering the poems’ governing metaphor, ‘poesie’, which the next section will show refers specifically to commonplace reading. We are familiar with the idea of supererogation in writing because it is an act. It also lurks, however, in reading, since reception—particularly where commonplacing is done—is also an act. The interest in wreaths has, of course, many biblical precedents: there are crowns of thorns, of righteousness, of life, of glory, of the sun and the stars. 71 Yet the specifically floral tributes of the poems are less biblical than classical. Medieval and early modern commonplace collections cite Seneca’s advice ‘on gathering ideas’. One must follow the bees which cull the nectar of assorted flowers and blend it to produce honey; only then may ‘the fruits of one’s reading . . . be reduced to concrete form by the pen’. 72 The preface to Macrobius’s Saturnalia, written at the end of the fifth century, picks up Seneca’s image: writers who borrow from 69 Benedict, Making the Modern Reader pp. 44–5, considering Locke’s A Common-place Book to the Holy Bible (1697). 70 Baxter, Gildas salvianus: The Reformed Pastor, ed. J. T. Wilkinson (1656; London: Epworth, 1939), p. 139. 71 For instance, 1 Cor. 9:25, 2 Tim. 4:8, James 1:12, 1 Peter 5:4, Rev. 2:10. 72 Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, trans. R. M. Gummere, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), ii, 277–85; Moss, Commonplace-books, pp. 24–7.


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their miscellaneous reading in original texts imitate ‘the bees . . . [which] in their wanderings to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the combs’. 73 This metaphor does not imply the faint pursuit of beauties by a dilettante. Though the final product—pressed flowers—brings a restful sense of completion (Ong calls an anthology a ‘floral necropolis’), using them should be done energetically. 74 Petrarch stressed the secret, active transformation of old texts into new thoughts: ‘we should write as the bees make sweetness, not storing up the flowers but turning them into honey, thus making one thing of many various ones’. 75 In considering which spatial images to use about commonplaces, books published in England tend to omit the urban elements of Roman rhetoric (the buildings or streets one walks about in memory) in favour of the pastoral. A collection often features as a meadow or garden to be harvested. Juan Luis Vives, for instance, describes one volume as ‘a large field, in which grow herbs, some useful, some noxious, some meant for pleasure and ornament’. 76 Bacon uses his lists of common topics to be expanded on as ‘seeds only, not flowers’, ‘promtuaries’ to further thought. 77 Elizabethan commercial anthologies, such as the Palladis tamia, speak of how ‘out of hearbs and plants the best things are to be extracted: so the best sayings are to be gathered out of authours’, and note how ‘Bees out of divers flowers draw divers juices, but they temper and digest them by their own vertue’. Not all meadows are wholesome: ‘bees abstaine from withered flowers: so we should abstaine from corrupt, vicious and obscene bookes’, and ‘as it is safe to lie uppon the hearbe Tryfolie, because serpentes cannot abide to come neare it: so wee shoulde be conversant in those books, in which no infection is to be feared’. 78 Elyot likewise warns readers to take care 73 Macrobius, The Saturnalia, trans. P. V. Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 27. 74 Ong, Interfaces of the Word, pp. 235–7. 75 Cited in Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 98–9. 76 Cited in Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, p. 135; Ong, ‘Commonplace Rhapsody’, pp. 118–20; Crane, Framing Authority, pp. 57–9. Michael Leslie describes how, conversely, early modern gardens such as Kenilworth or the Herbert family gardens (noted for their striking Italianate ingenuity) were seen as ‘eloquent’ rhetorical landscapes to be read as one walked around them: Hunter, Toward a Definition of Topos, pp. 17–44. 77 Bacon, The Works, iv, 492. 78 Francis Meres, Palladis tamia, introd. D. C. Allen (1598; New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1938), 265 v, 268 v–269 r.

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in selecting passages: ‘no wyse man entreth into a gardein but he sone espiethe good herbes from nettiles, and treadeth the nettiles under his feete’. 79 Therefore, good schools control their scholars’ reading, ‘as the little bee-hives, everie one in his own cell, and each knowing his own taske, and all gathering jointly to fill the hives with the most excellent life honey’. 80 Naturally, therefore, when private readers compile divine florilegia they also turn to the image of harvesting the fields. Robert Cawdrey’s Treasure or Store-house of Similies (1600) taken from secular and divine texts rejoices that like as the busy Bee when as shee flieth into some faire and pleasant Garden, and lighteth sometimes here, and sometimes there, as it falleth out, sucketh out some sweetnesse out of every flower and hearbe, whereon she sitteth: Even so a Christian, looking into the volume of the sacred scriptures, and reading sometimes this parcell thereof, sometimes that, shall receive by everie booke therein, some comfort and profite; as will cause him to preserve the same, before the honie and the honie comb. 81

Elizabeth I talks of how she wanders in meditation manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holye Scriptures, where I pluck up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences, eate them by reading, chewe them up musing, and laie them up at length in the seate of memory. 82

The same metaphor is used by Herbert’s country parson, who creates a commonplace book in his youth (organized around the church catechism) to act as a textual treasury for his later sermons. The person finds scripture to be a ‘storehouse and magazene of life and comfort . . . There 79 Thomas Elyot, A Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Elyot’s ‘The Boke Named the Governour’, ed. D. W. Rude (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 64. 80 J. Brinsley, A Consolation for our Grammar Schooles (1622; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1969), p. 9. 81 R. Cawdrey, A Treasure or Store-house of Similies (1600; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1971), pp. 630–1. Apian metaphors were also frequently used of translation, Theo Hermans, in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. T. Hermans (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 103–7. 82 Quoted in Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 171–2.


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he sucks and lives’. 83 Moreover, there are side-benefits for secular learning, as the Presbyterian Thomas Hall remarked, since the Sacred Scripture abounds with tropes and figures of all sorts, and is like a pleasant garden bedecked with flowers . . . or a fruitful field, full of precious treasures, I conceived it might be time well spent to dig into those sacred minerals for the better finding out of those metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, etc. which lie hid there. 84

The many printed garlands of godly buds, gardens of herbs from scripture, poesies of spiritual sweetness, and handfuls of fragrant fair flowers produced by popular devotional writers such as Nicholas Breton, George Webbe, and Thomas Twyne were a huge publishing success. The upshot is that when Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan refer to flowers, bees, posies, and crowns the flores auctorem come to mind, as do the opportunities and dangers associated with this reading technique. Their poems show how often the conscience will appear to be reading the last justly, where in fact the conscientious and obedient repetition of scriptures is done out of context. Correction by ‘friends’ becomes as necessary in reading the Bible as in consulting the heart. Mostly, everything in the garden is rosy. The ‘leaves’ of Herbert’s ‘H. Scriptures II’ are like ‘dispersed herbs’, which point from one to another in a healing chain. Elsewhere, Herbert follows the example set by Seneca’s bees with enthusiasm. They are implied in ‘H. Scriptures I’: ‘Oh Book! infinite sweetnesse! Let my heart/ Suck ev’ry letter, and a hony gain’. A stanza of ‘Employment II’ (Williams MS only) thinks of Herbert as a preacher distributing the sweetness collected: ‘O that I had the wing and thigh/ Of laden Bees;/ . . . On men [to] dropp blessings as I fly’. The specific reference in the image of bees to reading scripture is elided in ‘The Starre’ in favour of the poet’s heart first as a locus where honey may be found, then as a collector of love to be taken back to 83 Priest, in The Works, p. 195. Such reading should be followed up with action. A. M. Endicott draws parallels between ‘A parsons library’ and a sermon by Donne of 1624–5, where the preacher ‘labors not to shew his reading, but his feeling; not his learning, but his compunction; his Conscience is his Library, and his Example is himselfe, and he does not unclaspe great Volumes but unbutton his owne breast’ (Donne, Sermons, ix, 274), and, from 1629, ‘a godly man is a Library in himself ’ (ix, 185): A. M. Endicott, ‘ “The Soul in Paraphrase”: George Herbert’s “Library” ’, Renaissance News 19/1 (1966), 14–16. 84 Quoted in Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature, p. 251.

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Christ. He assures the star-bee that ‘Sure thou wilt joy, by gaining me/ To flie home like a laden bee/ Unto that hive of beams/ And garlandstreams’. Herbert longs even more to move from collecting to providing what is collected, in ‘Employment I’. At present, ‘All things are busie; onely I/ Neither bring hony with the bees/ Nor flowres to make that’. He wants to be pressed into service by God: If as a flowre doth spread and die, Thou wouldst extend me to some good . . . The sweetnesse and the praise were thine; But the extension and the room, Which is thy garland I should fill, were mine.

God is invited to weave Herbert into a chain of praise for himself, where the poet will be a ‘place’ containing sweetness in God’s anthology. At first, man was one of God’s treasures, ‘A ring, whose posie was, My Pleasure/ He was a garden in a Paradise’ (‘Miserie’). Even now, when God allows it, Herbert exalts that ‘in age I bud again . . . / I once more smell the dew and rain/ And relish versing’ (‘The Flower’). Herbert’s imitator, Cardell Goodman, uses the image less tactfully, where Christ becomes a bee. ‘The litle bee doth work and sing,/ Closely contrive/ Within her hive/ That which Shee gathers from the spring . . . And having ravished the flowres,/ Extracting thence/ The quintessence,/ Not for her owne delight butt ours,/ Att last is made a sacrifice/ For men’ (‘The Bee’). Goodman’s ‘The Honey Dew’ laments our unwillingness to follow the bee’s example. 85 Vaughan habitually associates a revival of his ability to celebrate God with budding. In ‘The Morning-watch’, he opens ecstatically with ‘O Joyes! Infinite sweetnes! With what flowres,/ And Shoots of glory, my soul breakes, and buds!’ In ‘Unprofitablnes’, one glance from God turns ‘bleak leaves hopeles hung/ Sullyed with dust and mud’ into sprouts from a flourishing, spicy plant. In ‘Disorder and Frailty’, touched by God’s ‘dew’, he breaks out in buds. The analogy between reading and walking through meadows and groves is more strictly maintained in Vaughan’s ‘Religion’ and ‘The Agreement’. In the first, he looks from place to place: ‘when I walke in those groves,/ And leaves thy spirit doth still fan . . . / Here Jacob dreames, and wrestles; there/ Elias by a Raven is fed’. This ‘Conf ’rence’ 85 Cardell Goodman, Beawty in Raggs, or, Divine Phancies Putt into Broken Verse, ed. R. J. Roberts (Reading: Reading University Press, 1958), pp. 11, 16–17.


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is now broken, and religion has run ever more muddily through time, acquiring error. In ‘Religion’, the cure for false accretions after the days of the early Church is, as Protestant theologians also agree, a return to the ‘springing rock’ or fountain of scripture. In ‘The Agreement’, Vaughan copies down an assurance which will exterminate ‘fears and night’. The implication is that his agreement with Christ has been written on his heart, since the ‘Record’ is later obscured by Satan. When the cloud is lifted, his heart points outside itself to a ‘place’, a ‘beamy book’, towards which his thoughts ‘glitter and kindle’ (Vaughan is here mirroring Herbert’s ‘The Starre’). This contains the ‘present healing leaves,/ Blown from the tree of life’. Its guidance allows Vaughan to reread the ‘place’ he copied into his heart, and it as a ‘Hive of beamy, living lights’. The wreath poems similarly reflect on their authors’ reading, as they eagerly seek ‘choice bowres’ to gather garlands and reap meadows. This is the process that they have used for secular poetry. Vaughan, in ‘youthfull, sinfull age’, sought choice bowres, haunted the spring, Cull’d flowres and made me posies: Gave my fond humours their full wing, And crown’d my head with Roses (‘The Garland’)

and Marvell has woven pastoral crowns to adorn this ‘shepherdess’s head’. Yet on devotional topics also, writers go to a variety of places, turn leaves, judge carefully, and look to see what will please the patron. Thinking of the crown of thorns woven by his sins, Marvell desires with Garlands to redress that Wrong: Through every Garden, every Mead, I gather flow’rs (my fruits are only flow’rs) . . . So rich a Chaplet thence to weave (‘The Coronet’)

and Herbert longs to give a ‘wreathed garland of deserved praise’ to God (‘A Wreath’). His budding thoughts ‘sprout, and swell’, ‘curling with metaphors a plain intention’ (‘Jordan II’). It appears Herbert’s answer to the rhetorical question structuring ‘Jordan I’, ‘Is it no verse, except enchanted groves/ And sudden arbors shadow course-spunne lines’, is a yes. Poets have read other poets conscientiously and now reuse their florilegia, with skill and enthusiasm.

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Yet the professional way that the poets sit down to flower-arrange seems smug. In ‘The Search’, Vaughan has spent all his time reading for loci in scripture, so then misses the point. He has scurried from scriptural scene to scene in his memory, where ‘all night have I/ Spent in a roving Extasie/ To find my Saviour’. The amount of energy expended in this pilgrimage of the imagination is emphasized. He has ‘gon as far as Bethlem’, ‘fled’ to Egypt, indeed, he ‘ran’ there and comes back, goes to the Temple to enquire for Christ, rests briefly at Jacob’s well, then is off again on a second journey, through the places of the passion of Christ. When this also fails, he projects a third tour into the desert, only writing ‘down/ What pleasures should my Journey crown’ and ‘Sugring all dangers’. Yet God wants vegetables not flowers from such rambles, ‘hearbes’ of ‘morall discourses’ and ‘reformed inventions’ not flowers of ‘light occasion . . . more pleasant than profitable’. 86 So Vaughan’s progress is halted by a dismissive command to leave ‘gadding’ and collecting the ‘skinne, and shell of things’. When poets reach for their scriptural notebooks, as school exercises on a theme (say, latria), they show they have read for ornament rather than understanding. Moss argues that the comparisons between literary items in the Renaissance commonplace book encouraged the emergence of a specifically literary sensibility, and this certainly happens in the case of the wreath poems. 87 Their offerings are not an absorbed, wholehearted response to God’s glory, but a self-possessed gift, as when Herbert exults how ‘Thousands of notions in my brain did runne,/ Off ’ring their service, if I were not sped’ (‘Jordan II’), or Marvell looks proudly over his ‘store’ of commonplaces. The problem is deftly addressed by Vaughan’s ‘Preface’, which complains that ‘Certain Authors have been so irreverently bold, as to dash Scriptures . . . with their impious conceits’. The difference between the work of these ‘desperate adventurers’ and Herbert’s verse is left unclear by Vaughan, but the difference between Herbert and the ‘pious Converts’ who attempt to imitate him turns out to be a qualitative one, of type of life, not a quantitative one, of who has the more skill. The latter ‘aimed more at verse, then perfection . . . not flowing from a true, practick piety’, and were thus unable to encourage a devotion which they had not felt themselves, so producing ‘weak, and 86 George Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G.W. Pigman III (1573; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 367. 87 Moss, Commonplace-books, pp. 200 ff.


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lean conceptions’. In other words, a literary critique enforces an ethical position. The proprietorial aspect to collection is shown in Marvell’s poem, where the first person pronoun appears ten times in ten lines, but almost vanishes after he realizes that ‘the Serpent old . . . / About the flow’rs disguised does fold’. 88 It appears wherever commonplacing is spoken of; these are stores of ‘substantiall worth’ (Herbert, ‘The Church-porch’, stanza 35). Thus, after collection and before the grand rewrite, just as happens in ‘The Search’, poets are interrupted by a friend or a dead man, or a serpent, and required to strip this carpe diem gathering of rosebuds back into a memento mori. In response, they histrionically trample on their stores of places and lumber on into self-righteously plain styles that are heavily dependent on repetition. Such places can reintroduce scriptural flowers, but in a less self-interested register: the ‘Lesse than the least/ Of all thy mercies’ of Herbert’s ‘The Poesie’, the ‘sweetnesse readie penned’ copied from love of his ‘Jordan II’, or the ‘simplicite’ of his ‘A Wreath’. In ‘The Thanksgiving’, Herbert makes the bumptious proposal that Christ’s ‘thorns [should be] my flower?/ Thy rod, my posie? crosse, my bower?’. He tries to outdo Christ in a love competition, ‘copy[ing] thy fair, though bloudie hand’ in deciding to fulfil to the utmost scriptural commands: ‘Nay, I will reade thy booke, and never move/ Till I have found therein thy love,/ Thy art of love, which I’ll turn back on thee’. However, three times he tries to find an equivalent to the passion, and three times finds himself unable to copy it in art or life: ‘Then for thy passion—I will do for that—/ Alas, my God, I know not what’. Likewise in ‘Easter’, though the poet, with heart and lute, has ‘got me flowers to straw thy way’, Christ brings his ‘sweets’ first, pre-empting Herbert’s art. When panicked by the obverse of writers’ block (too many words and all of the wrong sort), the poets return to the metaphor of fruitless growth. They talk about themselves as the barren vines and fig trees of scriptures, or as thankless weeds (Herbert, ‘Employment I’). In ‘Affliction I’ (‘I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree;/ For sure then I should grow/ To fruit or shade’), ‘Grace’ (‘My stock lies dead, and no increase/ Doth my dull husbandrie improve’), and ‘Employment II’ (‘Oh that I 88 The proprietary aspect of commonplace collecting is examined in Ong, Interfaces of the Word, pp. 233 ff.

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were an Orenge-tree,/ That busie plant’), nothing grows except words. 89 Likewise, Vaughan’s ‘Unprofitablenes’ admits he has been a bit weedy in the face of God’s expectation of bucolic action, not pastoral loci: But, ah, my God! what fruit hast thou of this? What one poor leaf did ever I yet fall To wait upon thy wreath? 90

The problem of antanaclasis is particularly acute when the poets try sanctified citation. This can be simple compliance with previous meanings. In Vaughan’s ‘The Wreath’, despite declaring that joy and grief are twined together, ‘Praise soil’d with tears, and tears again/ Shining with joy’, repetition in subsequent lines reinforces rather than corrects the first use of a word (with the exception of a quibble on the vanity corrected by death, which is therefore not in vain), as in ‘I bring for all thy pain,/ Thy causeless pain’ or ‘now beg thy breath;/ Thy quickening breath’. Vaughan’s ‘Love-sick’ works to similar effect, merely emphasizing the previous line, though with the additional technical complexity of an internal repetition across a caesura, as in thou in mercy hear, So hear that thou must open: open to A sinfull wretch, A wretch that caus’d thy woe, Thy woe, who caus’d his weal; so for his weal That thou forgott’st thine own.

Where simple repetition becomes involved in schemes of gradatio, concatenation, or antanaclasis, so that God’s words are not repeated back to him exactly, he ruthlessly cuts off the additions. For instance, in the gradatio of Herbert’s ‘A Wreath’ declarations by the speaker at the end of each line are repeated by him in the following line, but in an increasingly shrill tone: 89 See F. Malpezzi, ‘The Withered Garden in Herbert’s “Grace” ’, JDJ 4 (1985), 35–47. As Todd remarks, Herbert’s wishes ‘to become a plant . . . characteristically carry a curious and problematic combination of spiritual fervour and withdrawal’: R. Todd, The Opacity of Signs: Acts of Interpretation in George Herbert’s ‘The Temple’ (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1986), p. 59. 90 The inscription on Vaughan’s gravestone, placed there by his own wish, reads ‘servus inutilis: peccator maximus hic iaceo’ (‘a useless servant, greatest of sinners, here I lie’): Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 565.


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A wreathed garland of deserved praise, Of praise deserved, unto thee I give, I give to thee, who knowest all my wayes, My crooked winding wayes, wherein I love, Wherein I die, not live

The self-satisfied ‘deserved praise’ and ‘unto thee I give’ are repeated without comment. However, when Herbert comes to consider that he is giving a wreath of actions—ways—that are wound together only because they are bent or ‘crooked’, his confidence wilts down to the blunt ‘Wherein I die’. Form and content in the scheme work against each other, the repetition of words twining the garland and what is meant by the words unpicking it again. The crossover back into faith comes in the central lines, which reject the wreath’s art in favour of God, who is ‘more farre above deceit/ Then deceit seems above simplicitie’. 91 Now the repetition becomes double, reciting Herbert’s own words in the first four lines, but in the sense given them by the second repetition in the preceding line, and ending by erasing the whole poem: Give me simplicitie, that I may live, So live and like, that I may know, thy wayes Know them, and practise them: then shall I give For this poore wreath, give thee a crown of praise

—or perhaps not, since the last line takes the reader back to the first line, to start sinning all over again. In ‘The Holdfast’ Herbert starts by saying he will read the scriptures and act exactly in accordance with them: ‘I threatned to observe the strict decree/ Of my deare God’. As in ‘A Wreath’, in this love match the busily self-righteous poet repeatedly settles—with decreasing confidence (‘threatned’ yields to ‘will’, then dwindles to ‘confesse’)—on stock phrases, righteous in themselves but whose uses are redefined by a friend standing by: 91 Antanaclasis, or repetition with a different meaning (Quintilian, Insitutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (1920–4; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979– 86, 9.3.68), is the ‘politic’ figure of ‘rebounde’, says G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1971), p. 173. Commenting on a similar movement in Marvell’s ‘The Coronet’, John Carey attributes a political motive to the poet’s interest in actions that coil back on themselves: Carey, ‘Reversals Transposed: An Aspect of Marvell’s Imagination’, in Patrides, Approaches to Marvell, pp. 143–4.

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Bumptious Reading and Priggish antanaclasis But I was told by one, it could not be . . . Then will I trust, said I, in him alone. Nay, ev’n to trust in him, was also his . . . Then I confesse that he my succour is. But to have nought is ours, not to confesse That we have nought.

The way out in this poem—for citation as well as trust in God— is to consider ‘That all things were more ours by being his’. In the case of quotation, this brings us back to the determined unoriginality boasted by Herbert’s ‘Dedication’. Herbert’s ‘Justice (1)’ similarly recasts its opening line ‘I cannot skill of these thy wayes’ into the last line ‘I cannot skill of these my wayes’, using a self-correcting gradatio. This uncovers purpose and aid in God’s actions in the first five lines (‘Lord, thou dost wound me, yet thou dost relieve me:/ Lord thou relievest, yet I die by thee’). A central couplet provides a hinge to turn Herbert’s thoughts towards his own actions for the last five lines, where ‘I do praise thee, yet I praise thee not:/ My prayers mean thee, yet my prayers stray’. In both stanzas, ‘yet’ is the binary point, where the definition is mirrored from God’s point of view. There is, therefore, a double repetition at the level of the line and the poem, where self-citation shows a godly conscience at work. ‘Beginnings touch their end’ again in the last line of Herbert’s ‘Paradise’. The poem is based on imagining Herbert as a tree being pruned to become more fruitful. Each of its five stanzas have three lines whose final words have their initial letters cut off, one by one: When thou dost greater judgements SPARE, And with thy knife but prune and PARE, Ev’n fruitfull trees more fruitfull ARE.

Pruning is a standard humanist trope for training a child. Herbert’s country parson thinks of his family as a garden, labouring to ‘dresse and prune them, and take as much joy in a straight-growing childe, or servant, as a Gardiner doth in a choice tree (p. 275). In ‘Paradise’, however, the pruning produces a circular rather than a linear movement, where the last line echoes the first, having been cut by ‘art’ into more proper shape. ‘Paradise’ also, of course, shares a form with the echo poem, where the eroding epistrophe trains the poet’s nature into


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productive forms. 92 Herbert’s ‘Heaven’ takes human questions and slices off syllables to show the godly already within the secular. Once again, we are invited to think of scriptural leaves in a delightful garland of ‘light, joy, and leisure’: are there any leaves, that still abide? Echo. Bide. What leaves are they? Impart the matter wholly. Echo. Holy. Are holy leves the Echo then of blisse? Echo. Yes.

A particularly involved set of ironies are woken when Herbert and Marvell cite the third sonnet of Astrophil and Stella (1591). Sidney’s ‘In Stella’s face I read/ What love and beauty be; then all my deed/ But copying is, what in her nature writes’ becomes ‘There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d:/ Copie out onely that, and save expense’ in ‘Jordan II’, as Herbert’s editors point out. In biblical, platonic, and medieval literature, the heart is literally the site of memory and understanding, so sincerity should be assured if Sidney refers to its inscription. What tends not to be remarked is that in sonnet 3 Sidney himself has set up a scene of copying by turning his own anthologies’ leaves, and even copying his own copying in sonnets 1, 6, 15, and 28. In sonnet 1 he studies ‘inventions fine . . . / Oft turning others’ leaves’ (his Muse’s injunction at the end of this poem is, again, to ‘look in thy heart, and write’). The topoi other lovers use are dismissively run through in sonnet 6 (‘heavenly beams . . . / living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms and freezing fires’, myth, pastoral, and pathos), before the usual reduction to a plain style admission ‘that I do Stella love’. Lover-poets, who ‘every flower, not sweet perhaps, which grows/ . . . into your poesy wring’ in sonnet 15 are sent off to look at Stella, and then begin to write. In sonnet 28, Astrophil says he ‘in pure simplicity,/ Breathe[s] out the flames . . . / Love only reading unto me this art’. The desire to speak truly is more appropriately answered by sinking the self ’s style into the Bible’s words (as happens, say, in ‘Coloss. 3:3’, where the poem twines round 92 Humanists use the images of weeding and pruning, thinking these to be of as much importance in training a child as sowing and nurturing, Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, p. 90. Knevet’s ‘Transmutation’ is a similar pruning poem: R. Knevet, The Shorter Poems, ed. A. M. Charles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), pp. 363–4.

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an italicized sash, ‘My Life is Hid in Him that is my Treasure’), not by urging an ever-more self-reflexive register. In fact, as Harman, Lewalski, Fish and others point out, Herbert (or indeed Sidney) never tries this new type of writing from the heart, but simply writes about it. Marvell, asking God to ‘shatter . . . my curious frame’, impudently cites Sidney’s request, at the start of sonnet 28, for readers not to misquote him: ‘You that with allegory’s curious frame/ Of others’ children changelings use to make’. 93 Significantly, these citations do not come in the first two-thirds of each poem, where Herbert and Marvell are bustling about collecting material. They come in the closing lines, where the poets are claiming to have reduced their words to the heart’s truth. Such inscriptions on the heart are, as the last chapter also showed, no guarantee of sincerity or what we would regard as originality. Like Astrophil and Stella, The Temple habitually uses ‘invention’ to refer to the activity of collecting topoi, the ‘sweet phrases, lovely metaphors’ which ‘The Forerunners’ faces losing—the very same which, in ‘The Author to the Critical Peruser’, Traherne attempts to strip away. He promises, using the words of ‘Jordan II’, merely ‘the naked Truth’, with ‘No curling metaphors that gild the Sence/ . . . But real Crowns’. Of course, such intertextual reference would only be caught by a reader who remembers a number of passages, that is, one who has collected an anthology and missed the point of the poems. The ‘look in thy heart’ trope is one of two in ‘Jordan II’ which engage with imitation. Its image of flames that ‘do work and winde, when they ascend,/ So do I weave my self into the sense/ . . . while I bustled’ finds an analogue in Herbert’s own ‘Sinnes Round’, his ‘offences course it in a ring/ . . . thoughts working like a busie flame’. Here each of the three stanzas appears to reach to the utmost sin that thoughts, words, and actions can do, respectively. Each climactic final line, however, becomes the basis for the next stage of sin in the following stanza, as for instance in the second: My words take fire from my inflamed thoughts . . . But words suffice not, where are lewd intentions: My hands do joyn to finish the inventions. 93 Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene I.xi.15 is referred to by Marvell in the ‘speckled breast’ of his serpent.


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The end of the final stanza writhes back to the start in an ungodly crown, for ill deeds suggest ‘new thoughts of sinning’, using all the art celebrated elsewhere. In ‘Misery’ Vaughan’s passions intrude on his resolution to sit in silence, and they do so in Herbert’s words: As flames about their fuel run And work, and wind til all be done, So my fierce soul bustles about And never rests til all be out.

‘Jordan II’ also inspired an imitation by Vaughan’s admirer, Thomas Traherne. The Temple echoes throughout Silex as much as does the Bible, and Vaughan announces himself in his preface to be one of Herbert’s ‘converts’. As Stevie Davies says, Herbert’s ‘poems have lodged in [Vaughan] so deeply that, with that eagerness so understandable in ourselves and so annoying in other people, he longs to say them out loud to anyone who will listen’. 94 In this, Vaughan, as all his editors point out, is matching up to Herbert’s offer in ‘Obedience’. Here, Herbert yet again offers himself and his work to God, the poem acting as a ‘Deed’ to pass on ownership. He pauses at the end to urge emulation: He that will passe his land, As I have mine, may set his hand And heart unto this Deed, when he hath read . . . How happie were my part, If some kinde man would thrust his heart Into these lines.

Vaughan’s ‘The Match’, addressed to Herbert as his ‘Dear friend’, answers this: Here I joyn hands, and thrust my stubborn heart Into thy Deed, There from no Duties to be freed.

‘The Match’ produces a chain of poems. Arguably, the ‘Record’ of Vaughan’s ‘The Agreement’ could refer to this resolve, not a separate one with Christ, as could the ‘match’ set up in ‘Idle Verse’, which eschews 94

Stevie Davies, Henry Vaughan (Bridgend: Seren, 1995), p. 95.

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the ‘sugred sin’ of ‘bays’ and ‘roses’. The proprietorial aspect in the three poems is peculiarly strong, given they are poems about giving up the self and its goods, including these poems. After all, Vaughan’s store of bays and roses is largely made up of Herbert’s abandoned verses. In his ‘Dedication’ of Silex to God, Vaughan declares that ‘he/ That copyed it, presents it thee/ ‘Twas thine first, and to thee returns’. Since this imitates Herbert’s ‘Dedication’ of his collection to God, where his ‘first fruits present themselves to thee;/ Yet not mine neither: for from thee they came,/ And must return’, there must be a question over who is the dedicatee of Vaughan’s work. The issue of misinterpretation by over-reading haunts Donne’s ‘A Litanie’. Commentary on the poem generally notes how it retains the liturgical form of Prayer Books from 1644, only adding an invocation to the doctors of the Church. Critics often give an ecumenical reason for this, since the doctors appear in the Roman Catholic litany. 95 I would argue that the addition of the Doctors, whose function it is to draw ethical and doctrinal conclusions out of the scriptures, is precisely because they are tempted to the sin Donne worries over in the poem: making God’s word his own. Of the invocations addressed to humans (the Virgin Mary, Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, Virgins, and Doctors) four focus on this problem, unlike the invocations of traditional litanies. Where the Patriarchs saw God through faith (that is, not in the flesh), Donne prays that ‘Reason added’ will not cause him to be more blind. The Prophets make him anxious about overwriting: ‘those heavenly Poets/ . . . pray for mee,/ That I by them excuse not my excesse/ In seeking secrets, or Poetiquenesse’. The Apostles are asked to ‘pray still . . . that I goe/ Th’old broad way in applying; O decline/ Mee, when my comment would make thy word mine’. The Doctors pray with Donne ‘That what they have misdone/ Or mis-said, wee to that may not adhere;/ Their zeale may be our sinne’. When ‘A Litanie’ moves from enumerating the persons of the Church Triumphant to direct petition on behalf of the Church Militant, the theme continues. ‘When wee are mov’d to seeme religious/ Only to vent wit’ (stanza 21) is succeeded by ‘In Churches, when th’infirmitie/ Of him that speakes, diminishes 95 J. E. Wellington, ‘The Litany in Cranmer and Donne’, SP 68 (1871), 177–200; P. M. Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing: a Discourse of Feigned Devotion (London: Longman, 1997), ch. 3.


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the Word’ (stanza 22). Far from the litany being, as P. M. Oliver and Annabel Patterson think, ‘a perfect vehicle for conveying a feeling of helplessness’, encouraging ‘passivity and mindlessness’ and ‘intellectual laziness’, in Donne’s poem the form worries over his principal fear of overactivity, of working out the Word in interfering words. 96 A decade later, Donne still suspects there may be a problem with all poetry on divinity. In the first four lines of ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes’, he raises the question of seeking ‘new expressions’ for God as one of thrusting him into our ‘poore wit’. Ostensibly, this is a digression to explain his opening address, ‘Eternal God’. In the fifth line there is a transitional line of question-begging: ‘I would but blesse thy Name, not name thee now’. The rest of the poem celebrates how God, as Muse, taught David to sing ‘formes of joy and art’, and David, in his turn, the Sidney siblings. However, the position of the digression, its subject, and the quite unnecessary explanation of why he addresses God as ‘Eternall God’ suggests his caution about adding human art to divine subjects could also be extended to the translations themselves—and the poem ends by looking forward to the ‘Extemporall song’, without art, we will sing after death. ‘A Litanie’ shares some of the features of wreath poems, in its structural parallels between stanzas (invocation, followed by petition), the cross references between them (for instance, the stanza to the Virgin Mary refers to her as a ‘She-Cherubim’, linking into the following stanza to the Angels), and its scepticism over being able to exclude the self in receiving God’s word. It also provides a useful commentary on a poem which most commentators agree was written in the same winter of 1608/9, ‘La Corona’. 97 This poem brings together the Italian secular genre of a sequence of sonnets linked through their first and last lines, and a Catholic tradition of saying the rosary using seven, rather than the more usual five, decades; both were known as a corona. The rosary (from the Latin rosarium, ‘rose garden’) is one of the references behind the poem’s view of itself as a wreath of flowers and 96 Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing, p. 90; Annabel Patterson, ‘ “A Man is to Himself a Dioclesian”: Donne’s Rectified Litany’, JDJ 20 (2001), 39, and idem, ‘Donne’s Re-formed “La Corona” ’, JDJ 23 (2004), 80. 97 John Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 81, 152.

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prayers. Illustrated verse and prose rosaries in English were published by Catholic presses at the turn of the century, and Annabel Patterson conjectures that here, as in ‘A Litanie’, Donne is salvaging a Catholic form. 98 The humble lover of the secular sonnets is also present in sonnet 1, imploring his beloved to inspire and accept his poetry and himself. Yet the citation tradition of anthologies should not be forgotten as a source for ‘A Litanie’. Helen Gardner has shown how Donne weaves together phrases from the Advent offices in the Breviary in the first sonnet, for instance. ‘La Corona’ concatenates the first and last lines between the seven sonnets, and between the start of sonnet one and the end of sonnet seven, in the first-last prayer of ‘Deigne at my hands this crowne of prayer and praise’. Each repeated line finishes a stage in the story of the incarnation, and starts the next stage in the following sonnet, from the annunciation to the nativity, Christ as a child teaching in the temple, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension. The conventional topoi of the subgenre appear in the first verse, where a ‘treasury’ of good is rifled, and a ‘vile crown of fail bays’, that is, earthly fame, is rejected in favour of a crown of glory. However, the usual subject positions are swapped about. The ‘crown of prayer and praise’ which Donne presents (that is, ‘La Corona’ itself ) he finds quite adequate, and assures God it has not come from an upstart poetic (such as Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell will later fear), but from a ‘low devout melancholie’. The crown-substitution which goes on is not, as with the other poems, done by the poet but by Christ. Moreover, Christ has to denude himself, to give over his crown of thorns to Donne to make the latter a crown of glory. The issue arises of whose work this is, just as it does with the three other poets, but there is no lack of confidence in Donne’s assessment. ‘The ends crowne our workes’, he says, so that Christ, as an appreciative audience, can be relied on to ‘crown’st our ends’. The six substantive sonnets on Christ’s life which follow the first’s reflections on its own composition are dominated by unsettling repetitions. It appears in Donne’s habit of self-citation, so that readers of his secular poetry get the shock of recognition. For instance, as Helen Gardner points out, three lines from the second stanza on the 98

Patterson, ‘Donne’s Re-formed “La Corona” ’, 69–93.


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annunciation had already appeared in Donne’s satire on metempsychosis, ‘The Progress of the Soul’ of 1601, in a stanza on the crucifixion. In ‘La Corona’, the lines repeated between verses undergo a change of function, so that, for instance, the prayer to Christ to ‘Moyst, with one drop of thy blood, my dry soule’, which ends the sixth sonnet, becomes an adjectival clause at the start of the seventh: ‘Moyst with one drop of thy blood, my dry soule/ Shall . . . bee/ Freed by that drop’. Antanaclasis is particularly noticeable when Donne structures it around a paradox: ‘Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare’, ‘Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die’, ‘Whom thou conceiv’st, conceiv’d; yea thou art now/ Thy Makers maker’, ‘Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,/ That would have need to be pittied by thee’, ‘Beares his owne cross, with paine, yet by and by/ When it beares him, he must beare more’, ‘Death, whom thy death slue’. That it is characteristic of Donne’s theology to meditate on self-reflexive paradoxes is by now a critical axiom, and none the less true for being so widely noted. Perhaps the most convincing defence of the poem’s ingenuity has come from Margaret Maurer, who argues that it takes a solafidian line, where Donne’s effort to understand God’s ways is made inside the human experience of time. This effort disappears when the poem looks at his ways from the imagined perspective of eternity. 99 It might, however, be worth adding to her perspective the critiques by succeeding wreath poems, such as Herbert’s, about how the self is involved in divine poetry. Clearly, paradoxes are useful tropes to encompass the problems humans have in understanding how God can become man. However, winding them in a scheme of verbal repetition brings the two positions into stark opposition, forcing a reader to switch from God to man to God, rapidly and alternately. If the point of the poem is, as it declares, to weave a tight-knit devout crown of praise on the most mysterious of theological unities, God become man, this form of paradox could not have a more disjunctive effect. It pushes attention onto Donne’s incapacity to understand, and away from the incarnation. In effect, the antanaclasis of ‘La Corona’ makes God’s word Donne’s, and fully justifies the concerns explored in wreath poems by later poets.

99 Margaret Maurer, ‘The Circular Argument of Donne’s “La Corona” ’, SEL 22/1 (1982), 51–68.

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In summary, I have argued that a conscience whose major term is formed by self-selective reading cannot be rightly instructed. The posies made from scriptural commonplaces are risky, because they repeat the word out of context, giving power to the reader. Even, therefore, when the poems attempt to quote scriptural places exactly, their humility still has a trace of their own reading. Conscientious repetition is not always self-abnegating.

5 Peevish Weariness, aposiopesis, and the Irresolute Conscience ‘A form of speech whereby the speaker through some affection, as either of sorrow, bash-fulnesse, fear, anger, or vehemency breaks off his speech before it be all ended’. 1

It is sometimes said that metaphysical poems are poems on a question. Bold opening demands, such as Donne’s ‘What if this present were the worlds last night’, or Herbert’s ‘is there in truth no beautie’ (‘Jordan 1’), seem to call for similarly strong, masculine lines in answer. Questions will be reduced to their premisses. Decisions will be made. Actions will follow. Rather less often noted is the aposiopesis (breaking off from discussion) that habitually follows the question. Observations range from a sardonic groping after resolution, Why do I languish thus, drooping and dull As if I were all earth? . . . Sure thou didst put a minde there, if I could Finde where it lies (Herbert, ‘Dulnesse’),

to dispirited whines for attention, Oh, what a thing is man! how farre from power, From setled peace and rest! Lord, mend or rather make us: one creation Will not suffice our turn (Herbert, ‘Giddinesse’),

to snarls at restraint by God, At length I feel my head to ake, My fingers Itch, and burn to take Some new employment (Vaughan, ‘Misery’). 1

J. Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d (London: E. Cotes, 1656), p. 148.

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Peevish Weariness, aposiopesis, and the Irresolute Conscience

This chapter will explore faults in the final operation of the conscience’s syllogism, when poets seem incapable of making a resolution. Any insistent direction to conclude on an issue of conscience and act on it simply trails away, often expressed in broken poems and their bodies. I am not referring here to poems of the paralysed will, which squats miserably under a persistent dilemma, like a hen in the rain. The group of poems I will be looking at are instances of distraction, where—despite a vociferously expressed aspiration to ‘white sincerity’ (as Donne puts it in ‘La Corona’), and contrary to our own pious expectations about the emotionally charged religious self-wrestling of the century—boredom is the dominant and highly indecorous emotion. It is widely felt. Nothing on Earth, nothing at all Can be exempted from the thrall Of peevish weariness!

yawns Vaughan (‘Casimirus, Lib.4. Ode 15’). Goodman lambasts his own heart of ‘linsey-Woolsey’, his ‘cameleon’ and ‘forward will’, his ‘fangling’ inconstancy and ‘backsliding’, and wants to be less like himself in changeableness. Even a heatedly imprudent tyro convert like Alabaster mumbles on and on about his ‘languor’, lack of ‘sap’, ‘dull heart’, ‘dull languor’, and ‘thoughts’ unrest’. 2 Why? Such poems are usually read as expressions of melancholy. Our discussions reflect the Renaissance division of the medieval trespass of acedia (torpor towards God) into a sinful distaste for devotion, and a melancholic illness. Commentary on the former angle follows a familiar solafidian line, where, just as a work ethic in worship is a sign of grace, distracted movement and a disinclination to pray shows the opposite. For instance, Gerald Hammond argues that Herbert characterizes the sinful condition as a mindless rotation; in ‘Sinnes round’ and ‘Giddinesse’, ‘only God’s fiction holds it all together—a massive act of creative will which freezes 2 Cardell Goodman, Beawty in Raggs, or, Divine Phancies Putt into Broken Verse, ed. R. J. Roberts (Reading: Reading University Press, 1958), pp. 28–9, 35; Alabaster, sonnets 28, 72, 73. The original of Vaughan’s poem was by Casimir Sarbiewski, a Polish Jesuit, who produced four books of odes which drew on stoic themes. His work is sketched in Maren-Sofie Røstvig, ‘Casimire Sarbiewski and the English Ode’, SP 51 (1954), 443–60. The first English translation of the Odes (1646), by ‘G. Hills’, includes this poem (‘That nothing in humane affaires is not full of tediousnesse’, an ‘uncured paine’), pp. 75–9.


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movement into stasis’. 3 The alternative, that melancholy is a sickness of obsession which produces the converse symptom of distraction, is taken up by commentators on the failing politics, careers, or faiths of Herbert, Donne, and Vaughan. Sympathetic critics treat of the ensuing psychological damage or frustration, as it is manifested in pallid longing for a string of lost figures: mother, true Church, God, martyrdom, or country. 4 Both lines of argument are based on the absence of a significant other to the poets. This chapter, however, detects an all-toopresent other—the divine—in the poems, and so takes their distraction as a form of repression (not depression). Although poets acknowledge they go to bits if not pulled in by God’s demands for an answer, the effects on the self of this conversation are ungratefully expressed as ‘peevish weariness’. My argument about the irresolute conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan’s work is in four parts. This chapter first discusses the concept of an emptied self, both in contemporary tracts on religious melancholy as a vocational duty, and in our own idea of depression as a psychological defence against the effects of loss. It then considers boredom as a social and ethical problem consequent on such selfmortification, instanced by early modern advice on how to listen at sermons. It continues by standing the usual ideas of melancholy on their head. There is a subversive aspect to distraction, shown in the use of dust to figure the melancholic humour. Finally, it concludes that the frequent aposiopesis and elision in the poems are the results of an enforced theocentricity, where the insistent requirement by a superior to judge the self is neither simply ignored nor complied with. Aposiopesis occurs when the orator breaks down, as though overcome by emotion, anxiety, or scruple. Generally, it is praised as a figure of emphasis, but it can also be used to indicate disrespect and inattention. Puttenham, for instance, links it to distraction as an ‘auricular’ figure of defect or 3 Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 264. 4 For instance, ‘Herbert’s career was strongly marked by an extended suspension of commitment. He spent almost a whole lifetime . . . searching for suitable employment’: E. Pearlman, ‘George Herbert’s God’, ELR 13 (1983), 89. The effects of Donne’s similarly unchosen sojourn at Mitcham are detailed in John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (1981; London: Faber and Faber, 1990), ch. 3. Carey also partly attributes Donne’s intense interest in ‘cataloguing the morbid symptoms of change’ in society, and his mental ‘habit of inconstancy’, to the apostasy of his earlier life: see ch. 6.

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interruption, ‘fit for phantasticall heads and such as be sodaine or lack memory’. 5 In the poems, when the conscience should bring together acts and law to judge itself, there is instead a break in coherence of mind and body. Early seventeenth-century medical writers plait together three notions of melancholy: the humoural, the penitential, and the professional. As the exhaustive analysis by Lawrence Babb shows, melancholy was thought to be half excremental. 6 After matter has been digested to its final state of animal spirits (quick, pure, and subtle), bile is left: the humour of earth, which is cold, dry, black, sour, and heavy. Its physiological effect is to contract the heart, so its sufferers became sardonic, sullen, and introspective. The last is the feature on which the French royal physician André du Laurens, much cited by English medical writers, lays most stress. His Discourse of . . . Melancholike Diseases (translated into English in 1599) sees them as madnesses that deform the soul; the melancholic ‘is become a savadge creature, haunting the shadowed places, suspicious, solitarie, enemie to the Sunne’. His spirits are dissipated, as they are in the old, in gelded men, and in women. Lacking reason and a settled centre, a victim is never still: ‘sadness doth never forsake him, suspition doth secretly gall him, sighings, watchings, farefull dreames, silence, solitarynes’. 7 Writers admit that the individualizing effect of the humour could be creative, albeit malignly at times. 8 Edmund Gregory observes, in An Historical Anatomy of Christian Melancholy (1646), that the melancholy man’s 5 Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. H. Caplan (1954; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) 4.30.41, 4.54.67; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols [1920–4; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–86], 9.2.54–7; Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, intro. W. G. Crane (1593; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles Reprints, 1954), N1 v-2 r; G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1971), p. 139. 6 Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), chs 1 and 2, fully details the following points. 7 A. du Laurens, A Discourse of . . . Melancholike Diseases, trans. R. Surphlet (London: F. Kingston, 1599), pp. 82, 89; Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, pp. 3–7. Du Laurens (1558–1609) was physician to the French court, and professor of physic at the University of Montpellier. 8 The idea that the melancholic is creative is raised in Aristotle’s Physics and Ficino’s De vita triplici: see Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), ch. 1.


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phansie is as it were alwayes in a constant Motion: no sooner [does he] discharge [his] braines of the diviner thoughts and meditations . . . but forth with it is in action, either with some idle, or ill employment; either [he is] building of Castles in the ayre, or framing of Utopias, and the Ideals of one thing, and of another. 9

Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie (1586) also considers that a substantiall obscurity . . . taking hold of the brayne by processe of time giveth it an habite of depraved conceite . . . This causeth not only phantasticall apparitions wrought hy [sic] apprehension only of common sense, but fantasie, an other parte of internall sense compoundeth, and forgeth disguised shapes. 10

Medical writers largely agree that the cure for this type of melancholy is further distraction, not concentration on the issue that initiated the problem. ‘Suffer the thoughts, terrours and dismayednesse of our minds, silently and quietly to passe away againe unregarded as they came.’ 11 Religious melancholy demanded a more cautious approach, since it might be fully justified after recognizing one’s sinfulness. Perkins’s Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606) finds it necessary to distinguish between the two, since they could feel the same. 12 Sermons commonly described depression born of guilt as a reasonable response to the consequences of evil. Ever since the Fall, God has afflicted us in this way, to rouse our consciences and to punish us. 13 Gregory thinks it laudable that when we are solitary and melancholy, private musing upon our selves and our miserable condition, there doe often such quames of terrour come over our minds and consciences, with such fainty fits of despair, that we are even as heart sick. 14 9 Edmund Gregory, An Historical Anatomy of Christian Melancholy (London: H. Moseley, 1646), p. 23. 10 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London: T. Vautrollier, 1586), pp. 103, 101. Bright (?1551–1615) was variously a doctor, the inventor of a shorthand system, an abridger of Foxe, and the rector at Methley, Yorkshire, and at Barwick-in-Elmet. He was a physician at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London at the time he wrote the treatise on melancholy. 11 Gregory, Anatomy of Christian Melancholy, p. 106; see also John Durant, Comfort and Counsell for Dejected Soulls (1650) pp. 161–73; Richard Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. T. C. Faulkner et al., 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), iii, 411–9; Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, p. 243; Montaigne, Essays, iii.50. 12 13 Pages 194–5. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i, 122–3. 14 Gregory, Anatomy of Christian Melancholy, p. 91.

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The experience is sometimes described as peculiar to the period, ‘a misery, which our time hath been well acquainted with, and had much experience of ’, and which, Donne muses, should be employed as a ‘Rheubarbe’ to cure, not a ‘ratsbane’ to kill. 15 This tempers it with a recognition of God’s mercy, as well as his justice. Bright describes how the sinner, seeing his guilt clearly and panting with the terror of God, is tempted to abandon himself, for in this affliction, the perill is not of body, and corporall actions, or decay of serville, and temporall uses, but of the whole nature soul and body cut of from the life of God. 16

Burton, however, takes on a slightly different approach, by locating religious melancholy as the point where boredom and enthusiasm meet, as a result of defective or excessive love. 17 In the former, men think themselves inspired by God and so are ‘zealous without knowledge’. In the latter, they fail to respond to the love of God, either because they are atheists with ‘mad cauterized consciences’ or because they are in despair, tempted by the devil to be worried over enigmatic scriptures, cast down by ‘rigid ministers’, suffering from a weak faith or a guilty conscience, or exhausted by immoderate meditation. 18 Burton’s last cause of defective melancholy moves back towards those of excess. Douglas Trevor points out that religious melancholy is a professional risk for the practising Christian; as Donne asks, ‘was I not made to think?’ 19 The scholarly monotony of the spiritual life, expressed rather ungraciously by Vaughan’s request to God to bind me up, and let me lye A Pris’ner to my libertie . . . I School my Eys, and strictly dwel Within the Circle of my Cel (‘Misery’), 15 John Donne, The Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), v, 46, 285, vii, 68–9. 16 Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, pp. 189–90. 17 For the fusion of the two traditions, see M. Heyd, ‘Robert Burton’s Sources on Enthusiasm and Melancholy: From a Medieval Tradition to Religious Controversy’, History of European Ideas 5 (1984), 17–44. 18 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i, 302–05. 19 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. J. Sparrow (1624; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 69; D. Trevor, ‘John Donne and Scholarly Melancholy’, SEL 40 (2000), pp. 81–102.


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ignores the distinction between attention and interest. Meditation maintains the former irrespective of the latter, and eventually such selfmortification may overcome even the most devout. Moreover, as well as mental there are physical and ethical dangers in solitary deliberation. The sedentary life of the scholar, muses Burton, weakens the body, dulls the spirits, abates the courage, and dries the brain (the discouraging figure of the martyr to learning still lingers on today). 20 In the course of deep reading, the scholar can become ‘mazed’ by wondering among ‘such mysteries as exceed secret counselles’, and such as are most contemplative, except they be well grounded in the word of God, & remove not one haire therfrom in their speculations, are this wayes most overtaken, & receave the punishment of overbold attempt of those holy things, which the Lord hath reserved to his owne counsell. 21

As Pascal put it, it is natural for the dispossessed monarch of Eden to try to distract himself from an ever-present experience of loss. 22 There may be a greedy desire for the spiritual joys in God’s gift, and foolish fear when these are not felt. A Catholic meditation manual popular in England, Diego de Estella’s The contempte of the world and the vanitie thereof (1584), warns against those who ‘commit spirituall adulterie, in appointing with them selves to make sensible [felt] devotion, the uttermost end’, rather than fixing their minds on praise of God. 23 In Comfort and counsell for dejected soules (1650), John Durant observes that when, in the autumn of the soul, ‘flowers fade, leaves fall, cold nips, trees wither, sap runnes down, night growes long and dark too, wayes grow dirty, aire chilly’, God is trying our faith by removing the ‘incomes of grace’; 20 21 22

Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, pp. 30–1; Donne, Devotions, pp. 68–9. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, pp. 199–200. Pascal, Pensées (1670), quoted Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide, pp. 107–15; Michael L. Raposa, Boredom and the Religious Imagination (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1999), pp. 44–8. 23 Diego de Estella, The Contempte of the World and the Vanitie Thereof, trans. G. Cotton (1584; Ilkley: Scolar, 1975), S11 v. Estella (1524–78), a Franciscan professor at the University of Salamanca, published a number of meditational works that proved popular in England with recusants and others.

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to call and not bee heard: to pray and not be answered, is a threatened judgement. This, oh this! is our feare, that we are those at whose calamitie God will laugh. 24

A violent desire to get any response at all elicits fantasies that sidle away from the declared focus of the attention, and is expressed physically by restless, pointless actions. For early modern commentators, the effort of introspection in worship fragments the subject who is enquiring within himself. They refer to accounts of the ‘noontide demon’ of acedia. Under the desert sun’s glare, where all things become tediously plain to view, coenobites are tempted to stop rejoicing in God, to desire distractions away from the horror loci of their cells, to feel incapable of good actions, and at the same time to think themselves superior to those not thus afflicted. 25 Donne warns that ‘this retiring thy self from the world [may] degenerate into a contempt and despising of others, and an overvaluing of thine own perfections’. 26 These contemporary medical and theological discussions both stress the experience of absence. The melancholic finds himself outside divine or human company, without understanding or resolve. At the end of this lies despair, where nothingness has supplanted the divine as the locus of meaning and thus the proper object of human aspiration. [Burton’s] single brief paragraph on the ‘Prognostics of Despair’ finds only this one, bluntly stated, possibility worth discussing: ‘Most part, these kind of persons make away themselves’. 27

This sense of nothingness is also at the centre of a secular understanding of depression. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud argues that melancholia, presenting as an overstated reaction to a current loss, is the echo of a forgotten but unabsorbed trauma of the past. 28 It manifests 24 John Durant, Comfort and Counsell for Dejected Soules (London: R. I., 1650), pp. 13, 23. Durant was an independent preacher at Sandwich in 1644. 25 According to the fourth-century anchorite, Evagrius of Pontus, Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide, ch. 2; Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression from Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press 1986), pp. 65–77. 26 Donne, Sermons, ii, 243. 27 J. Miller, ‘Plotting a Cure: the Reader in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’, Prose Studies 20/2 (1997), 65–8. 28 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. J. Strachey and A. Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), xiv, 250–1.


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itself in feelings that the world outside is empty, and that the sufferer is unworthy, a fact which he cannot stop himself declaring to others. Speculating about whether such depression is used by the adult ego as a defence against the possibility of being parcelled out, Julia Kristeva sees two advantages in the depressive state: it gives an affective cohesion to the self, but at the same time inhibits self-destructive action. She describes melancholia as a desire for ascendancy over (or even a deferred hatred towards) a once-valued person, who has died, betrayed us, or otherwise left. In normal mourning, she argues, such loss arouses our imagination to force out works of art as fantasy alleviations, substituting descriptions of the item that has gone for its real presence. The melancholic, however, refuses to accept the artifice of the word, and strains to perceive, beyond language, the lost thing. He sets up images that he then decries as inadequate. Following Kristeva, feminist commentators on a range of genres, from sonnets to epics, have shown the frequent melancholia of fragile male protagonists, who search for their missing ideal (often represented by a female figure). These show a politics, as well as an aesthetic of inspiration, of impairment, as they punish the missing love object. 29 Kristeva disputes Freud’s observation that the melancholic is loquacious, pointing out that though he may speak of his own worthlessness, he also distrusts the restorative perversions that words represent, and eventually falls silent, buried in a tomb of flesh. 30 Thus, what medieval theologians put down to the trespass of acedia, and early modern authors variously saw as guilt, sickness, or the effect of extended spiritual labour, modern analysts view as a revulsion towards the use of a therapeutic signifier, and a preference for a permanent situation of loss. All theorists base their explanations on a structure of absence from the final source of meaning (whether willed, imposed, or inadvertent). This reverberates in a hollowed-out self to produce broken, incoherent speech. However, the compensatory resources of language arguably available to assuage mourning are always barred to the theocentric poet. God’s 29 Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 39–83; Julia Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), ch. 1. 30 J. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. L. S. Roudiez (1987; New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), ch. 1.

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presence and absence are equally unspeakable. In any case, the speaking subject is precisely what should and will be split up at the last, preferably with its own cooperation. In dealing with poems that pose the question ‘Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay’, many critics have joined in Stanley Fish’s compelling demonstration of the ‘acts of decomposition’ in Herbert’s work, where the start and end point is a self which collapses before God. The poems return this self to its particles of dust, showing the body to be a temporary instrument that holds origins and ends apart. The restlessness which readers find in Herbert’s poems is a result of a catechetical structure that invites the reader of inadequate faith to make a premature interpretation. This, like the poem and the narrator, finally implodes, taking our certainty with it. 31 Barbara Harman sees in Herbert’s poems a speaking subject which is only just held from dissolution by speech, while Terry Sherwood’s Herbert fears dull cloddishness, an inability to persuade, which is the effect of a joyless separation from a God of energy. 32 J. H. Summers points out how the very syntax of Herbert’s ‘Church-monuments’ decays. 33 Julia Guernsey’s Herbert ‘repeatedly figures himself as less than one . . . at times the pieces even talk to each other’. This conversation is rarely peaceful; ‘The Altar’ shows ‘the speaker in pieces, broken, flailing, separated, but not adequate’ to meet the demands of the introjected law, the conscience. 34 In such readings, the poems’ reference to the cold, dry humour of earth is held to provide an appropriate image for a self which lacks integrity in life and is fragmented in death. A syncopated debate on the topic might run: lost self (figured as dust), the humour of the earth (black bile), melancholia (lost ideal), substitute words (abjection)—and back again. I would endorse the conclusions of these well-supported and sensitive readings, but add a particular emphasis to them: the poets are behaving 31 S. E. Fish, Self-consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 167–70; idem, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), ch. 1. 32 Barbara Harman, Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), ch. 4; T. G. Sherwood, Herbert’s Prayerful Art (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1989), pp. 128–9. 33 J. H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), p. 131. 34 Julia Guernsey, The Pulse of Praise: Form as Second Self in the Poetry of George Herbert (London: Associated University Press, 1999), pp. 175, 44; Trevor gives a similar picture of Donne, in ‘John Donne and Scholarly Melancholy’, pp. 89, 95–6.


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in a blatantly rude way. Their reiterated fantasy of dispersal is one dreamed specifically before a God whom they acknowledge should be the focus of attention. The next section of this chapter argues that some of these poems also exploit the second strand of acedia, peevish weariness, which gets lost in our mapping of Kristevan on to Renaissance reactions to loss. The unheroic attitude of boredom is usually studied in the context of the succeeding century’s social and economic history. Its primary commentator, Patricia Spacks, argues that the experience of boredom becomes notable with the Enlightenment’s interest in subjectivity, its increased leisure time, and the split between such time and work, a weakening expectation of religious conformity, and a socially mobile society that offered choice. 35 The terms ennui and boredom come into use from the later seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries respectively. Yet the penumbra of words around ‘weariness’ in the early periods is also extensive: acedia, the sin of devotional listlessness first discussed by the church fathers, maintains its value; weariness, originating in Old English, is used for the effects of under- and over-exercise of the faculties; tedium, from Latin, appears in medieval texts onwards as a synonym for that which is tiresome and dilatory. All these are available in the seventeenth century, and have as much bearing as melancholy does on the poems about dust. Modern discussions of the psychology of boredom take their cue from Otto Fenichel, who describes it as a defence against impermissible feelings. In an unequal power relationship, the subjected libido is withdrawn from distasteful but inescapable external circumstances. This inward retreat, Fenichel argues, incurs the cost of repression, shown by a sardonic or even provoking indifference to the insistent interlocutor. 36 Such a refusal to engage suspends the claims of the powerful partner. Michael Schoenfeldt’s argument about courtship in Herbert’s poetry, that minimal compliance is a ruse by which inferiors preserve some independence, runs along the same lines. A dull inattention does not, therefore, necessarily arise from the affliction of 35 Patricia Spacks, Boredom: the Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), ch. 1; Frances Colpitt, ‘The Issue of Boredom: Is it Interesting?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1985), 359–65. 36 Otto Fenichel, ‘On the Psychology of Boredom’, in Collected Papers: First Series, ed. H. Fenichel and D. Rapaport (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 292– 302.

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an absence of affect, but can come from a self-possessed choice not to respond (though this choice, in its turn, also reaffirms the presence of the unwanted demand). Since, as Thomas Jackson says, ‘no creature (the best of which is but the image of God; his being, at the best, but participated) truly is . . . So we say God alone Is’, a reformed value structure would be predicated on the loss of the self before Yahweh. 37 Boredom resists the assumed corollary of the divine I AM, that YOU AREN’T. 38 It claims that interest is something offered by the listener, not a power of the speaker. From this view, the metaphysical texts are distempered by too much of the eternal presence, not too little— a rather less glamorous explanation than melancholic distraction. The minor social sin of boring others becomes the ethical one of ignoring the Almighty, a sinful concern with one’s own uninterest, a mulish refusal to concentrate. A certain pompous self-involvement shows up in our misrecognition of the early modern period as one of universal and unending agonizing over religious matters. Our model is the tormented Bunyan, who cannot jump over a puddle or pass a hedge without considering the state of his soul. It comes as a surprise to learn just how often, and how bluntly, the seventeenth-century listener admits his boredom. A sign of how much of a problem it was among congregations comes in the thirty or so ‘arts of listening’ that suddenly appear in the four decades after 1599, each insisting with anxious dignity that, ‘preaching and hearing are Relatives, Ministers must not Preach to the walls’. 39 Such comments indicate a reluctance to leave reception to the vagaries of inclination. They are a new development in rhetoric, which up to then had focused on the speaker. 40 The pivotal role of sermons in the reformed churches required a new theory of listening, which could no longer be deemed an unproblematic exposure to another’s words. Moreover, practices in 37 Thomas Jackson, A Treatise of the Divine Essence and Attributes, 2 parts (London: M.F., 1628–9), p. 24. 38 This witty formulation is by C. Hodgkins, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1993), p. 6. 39 Charles Broxolme’s redaction of William Perkins’s The Foundation of Christian Religion (1591), as The Good Old Way; or Perkins Improved (1657), pp. 222–3 (revising Perkins’s principle five). 40 Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (Routledge: London, 2002), ch. 1; Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), pp. 247–9; Christina Luckyj, ‘A moving rhetoricke’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), ch. 1.


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early modern education—listening to speeches from the classical past, analysing their techniques, imitating them, and responding to peers who did so—presumably provided listeners with some defence mechanisms against persuasion, an immunity to or at least ironic distance from its effects. Such an audience member would not be the engaged interlocutor of judicial and political rhetoric (possibly the orator’s best listener), one who anticipates what he might say and gazes at him intently as he speaks. This would be a listener whose formal role is passive, but who is, in fact, coolly appraisive. Comment on the listener (rather than advice about addressing him) in the classical rhetorics used by Stuart schools is sketchy, and characterized by goodwill rather than explicit instruction. Such obiter dicta are given from the speaker’s position, and often merely assume certain effects in an overhearing audience, while rhetorical strategies concerning the opponent remain the true focus. Indeed, the Horatian use of the speaker’s own feelings as a quality control on his effectiveness doubly occludes the role of the audience. 41 The starting point in Latin rhetorics is usually Aristotle’s opinion that the exordium, the principal place to arouse the audience’s benevolence or indignation, is where the orator as ‘physician’ remedies a bias or inattention present in his hearers beforehand. They are told that the matters to be dealt with are important, or concern themselves, or are amazing or pleasing. Cicero uses the same metaphor; the orator ‘will be like a careful physician, who investigates the malady and a man’s habits before giving a remedy’. Admittedly, the quality of a speaker is judged by the audience, not the opponent: ‘the popular ear is for the orator a kind of [wind] instrument; if it refuses to accept the breath blown into it . . . there is no use of urging’. Moreover, ‘the intelligent critic not by patient sitting and attentive listening, but by a single glance in passing can often form a correct judgement of an orator. He observes one of the judges yawning, talking to a fellow judge, sometimes even gossiping . . . [or sees] if the judges are alert, attentive, and have the appearance of . . . hanging upon the words of the orator’. Yet though Cicero is more aspirational than Aristotle, he is not much more specific about how to judge an audience’s state, merely suggesting that the orator engages ‘wholeheartedly in a consideration so careful, 41 Horace, Ars poetica, l. 102, in Satire, Epistles, The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Ruston Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969).

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that [he scents] out, with all possible keenness, [the auditors’] thoughts, judgements, anticipations and wishes, and the direction in which they seem to be led away most easily by eloquence’. As Quintilian goes through the elements of a speech, he also tries to cure the disengaged: the exordium should make the audience well disposed and attentive; the skilful orator uses insinuation when it is tired, or says he will be brief, or is occasionally witty. In the statement of facts, partition will show the listeners what is left of the case to plod through. The excessive nature of figures will relieve tedium since they claim attention, just like errors. In terms of delivery, ‘the speaker stimulates us by the animation . . . we are moved not merely by the actual issue of the trial but by all that the orator himself has at stake’. 42 There is a vaguely malevolent aspect to these shadowy Roman audiences: anxious to get through, faultfinding, piqued by the hint of personal embarrassment on the orator’s part. Inattention, of course, is not new (woodcuts of the humanist schoolmaster, with apple in one hand and switch in the other, come to mind), but it is new to think attentive listening requires theoretical study and practical training, rather than a sharp poke between the shoulder blades. Pedagogues are the first to address the issue of the audience directly: boys in class, says Quintilian in passing, ‘no less than the speaker should . . . keep their eyes fixed on their teacher’s face, since thus they will learn to distinguish what is praiseworthy and what is not’. Naturally, ‘teachers must also insist on receiving an attentive and quiet hearing from the class when they themselves declaim’. 43 Plutarch’s essay ‘Of Hearing’ in the Morals (first published in English in 1603) recommends taking lessons on proper listening, on how to focus the attention, and how to revise the material and one’s judgements on it after the lecture. The engaged listener ‘is partaker with [the speaker] of his speech, yea, and by right a coadjutor of him’, while ‘that schollar, who seemeth not to be moved or touched with any thing that he heareth, is a heavy 42 Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926) Rhetoric, III.xiv.7–8; Cicero, De oratore, II.186, trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); idem, Brutus, xlix.184, 194, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 4.1.5, 4.1.48, 4.5.25, 9.3.27, 10.1.16. 43 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2.2.10, 2.2.13.


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and unsupportable audience, full of a secret presumptuous opinion of himselfe’. 44 There is, therefore, an uneasy awareness among earlier Tudor rhetoricians that countering boredom is one of the less glamorous but more necessary uses of rhetoric. Thomas Wilson, for instance, argues that rhetorical ability ‘is the reason, that menne commonly tarry the ende of a merrie plaie, and cannot abide the halfe hearyng of a sower & checkyng Sermon’. He repeatedly returns to the same topic: ‘assuredly it behoveth a man, that must talke muche, evermore to have regard to his audience, & not onely to speake so muche as is nedefull, but also to speake no longer than thei be willyng to heare . . . the preachers of God, mynd so muche edefiying of soules, that thei often forget, we have any bodies’. 45 Though such modesty vanishes from later Tudor and Stuart pedagogical and style manuals (Fraunce, Clement, Fenner, Kempe, Ascham, Blount, Rainolde, Mulcaster, Hoskyns, Sherry, and Puttenham largely ignore the glassy-eyed in front of them), it emerges in force after 1599 in the manuals for congregations on how to listen to sermons in response to the Reformation’s vision of the Word as an instrument of salvation. The two historians who have dealt with this genre, John Morgan and Arnold Hunt, warn that ‘the fervency and level of attention of congregations should not be overestimated’, before turning to the preparation for and expected effects of a well-received sermon. 46 Yet it is arguable that the main interest of the prescriptive manuals is in the ironic submission and bad faith of a disengaged congregation. For every text that picks up William Perkins’s six congregation types (ignorant and unteachable, ignorant but willing, taught but unsanctified, taught and sanctified, declining and falling back, or mixed), three list those that do not hear in the first place. There are a multitude of ways to show boredom. Stephen Egerton’s ‘five ears’ are dull, stopped, prejudicial, itching for new things, and 44 Plutarch, The Philosophy, Commonly called the Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (1603; London: S. G., 1657), pp. 50, 48. 45 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553; London: R. Grafton ), Aiiv, f. 75r. 46 John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 128; Arnold Hunt, ‘The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640’ (Cambridge: DPhil, 1998), ch. 1.

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adulterous to hear anyone other than their own pastor. 47 Robert Wilkinson complains of straying thoughts, a wandering eye, a ‘gazinge after every picture, upon every mote, or flie, and rolling up and downe in every corner’, a ‘needelesse shiftinge, and stirringe of the bodie, a fumblinge with the handes, a shuffling with the feet’, much ‘unreverent talking and uncivil laughinge’, ‘a secure and senceles sleeping’, and— a sixth indignity suddenly coming to memory—‘a shameful departing out of the church, and violent breaking away from the congregation, wherein a man doeth as it were openlye protest, that he is exceeding weary, and hath but to much for his money’. 48 Jeremiah Burroughes is irritated by grudging agreements: ‘it is not enough . . . to think thus, well I must yeeld to it, this is the word of God and if I do not yeeld to it I must expect the plagues and judgements of God’. 49 Even the Westminster Directory finds it necessary to require the people to forbear ‘to read anything except what the minister is then reading or citing, and abstaining much more from all private whisperings, conferences, salutations . . . as also from all gazing, sleeping, and other indecent behaviour’ (a stricture missing from the Book of Common Prayer). 50 ‘I have noted some to laie their heads upon their desk, as if they meant that should be their pillow to sleep on; and to pull their hat about their eyes, as if they meant to draw the curtains about the bed, and bid goodnight to the Preacher’, says Henry Mason, tartly. 51 Richard Younge sighs that when he asks his congregations what they remember, or how the sermon worked on them, they say—nothing. 52 William Harrison, on the other hand, objects to their cheery patronage: ‘many will say they like [the preacher] well, he is a good man, and made a very good sermon, yet cannot tell one word that he spake’. 53 Donne himself preached a sermon 47 Stephen Egerton, The Boring of the Eare . . . Hearing . . . the Word of God (London: W. Stansby, 1623), A4r-A6v. 48 Robert Wilkinson, A Jewell for the Eare (London: for T. Pavyer, 1605), B6v–B7r. 49 Jeremiah Burroughes, Gospel-worship . . . Hearing the Word (London: P. Cole and R. W., 1647), p. 184. 50 Westminster Directory, A Directory for the Public Worship of God (1644), in Peter Hall, ed., Reliquiae liturgicae: Documents Connected with the Liturgy of the Church of England, 5 vols (Bath, n.p., 1847), iii, 22. 51 Henry Mason, Hearing and Doing the Ready Way to Blessednesse (London: M. F., 1635), pp. 483–4. 52 Richard Younge, The People’s Impartiall and Compassionate Monitor; About Hearing of Sermons (London: J. B., 1657), pp. 17–19. 53 William Harrison, The Difference of Hearers (London: T. C., 1614), p. 39.


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early in his ministry (1619) claiming that he might as well be a musical instrument to some people, ‘for they hear thy words, but they doe them not’. He tactfully reminded his congregation that they have a duty in a sermon as much as he did, theirs being to hear ‘cheerfully, desirously’ rather than stopping their ears, which he terms a ‘Recusancy’ which partners the ‘Non-conformity’ of not acting on what they hear. 54 A few years on, churchgoers were startled to hear that they castrated themselves by failing to listen, so that ‘the soul becomes a Eunuch’; ‘let no man thinke that he hath heard enough, and needs no more’. 55 His editors note how often he refers to the congregation’s patience or boredom, and attempted to alleviate it by apologies, or telling them what he had omitted. 56 The most common image in the manuals is of idle hearers that ‘sitte in their seates as images in the glasse windowes’, for, as ‘David said of the Idolls, They have eares and heare not’. 57 Reformed antagonism toward metaphor is aroused by these congregated rebuses of vacant reception. Mary Morrissey has shown how it is a matter of concern, for Stuart Puritan and Laudian preachers alike, how far both the Holy Spirit and the congregation collaborate with the preacher. 58 In the arts of listening, the word of God gets the active verbs, not the listeners. 59 It is ‘a two edged sword, that pierceth into the inward thoughts and affections, and goeth through into the joyning together of the bones and the marrow’, says Ames. Ambrose finds it makes one quicken, inflame, tremble, be refreshed, enjoy, feel cheerful, and digest its import vigorously. 60 John 54 56

55 Donne, Sermons, ii, 173. Ibid., v, 54–6. Ibid., ii, 9. One of his paradoxes jokes about Puritan preachers, who think it ‘theyr duty to preache on till their Auditory wake agayne’: see Donne, Paradoxes and Problems, ed. H. Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 44. 57 Psalm 115: 4–6; Wilkinson, Jewell for the Eare, B1 v; Egerton, Boring of the Eare, A3v; Wilhelm Zepper, The Art or Skil, Well and Fruitfully to Heare the Holy Sermons of the Church, trans. T. W. (London: F. Kingston,1599), p. 8. Conversely, Herbert’s preacher is best heard when he acts rather than speaks, becoming a stained-glass figure filled with God’s light in ‘The Windows’. 58 Mary Morrissey, ‘Scripture, Style, and Persuasion in Seventeenth-century Theories of Preaching’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002), 686–706. 59 By contrast, Margaret Zulick points out that the Hebrew Bible uses strong versions of the verb ‘to hear’ when responding to God, such as ‘pay attention to’, ‘persuade’, ‘obey’, and ‘consent’: ‘The Active Force of Hearing: the Ancient Hebrew Language of Persuasion’, Rhetorica 10/4 (1992), 367–80. 60 William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London: E. Grifin, 1642), p. 179; Isaac Ambrose, ‘Of the Necessity of Preparation to the Hearing of the Word’,

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Traske fears it as a dangerous word, convincing, terrifying, humbling, restraining, reforming, astonishing, tormenting, binding, hardening, destroying, opening, and pricking (it has rather fewer pleasant effects). It is, moreover, a particular word; ‘hence one man is wrought on in a sermon, another not’, says Thomas Shepard, and Ambrose discerns ‘the effectual voyce of God’ by the way it singles a man out, so ‘that one man is wrought upon in the sermon’. This makes boredom a sensitive topic. The very same men who are giving aids to an active reception of the word also see auricular grace in terms of double predestination. Egerton comments that ‘to be a good and fruitfull hearer is a speciall gift of God, and peculiar to the Elect’, and Wilkinson, that the children of God ‘only have sanctified and prepared eares’. Conversely, Roberts describes how God refuses to mollify our hearts for just causes which are not known to us, and Shepard praises ‘the righteous judgment of God, in leaving men to be blinded and made deaf ’; ‘the deep and hidden rise of all is Gods eternal dereliction of them, God never intended love, special love to them; hence he never speaks one word to them’. For Burroughes, it is a dreadful sign of reprobation if one is not worked on by the word, for if it does not save it will harden the heart, and so damn one. 61 God’s language is not something that requires cooperative reception. It is not a spoken substitute to be reconstituted by the receiver. Thus, Burroughes listens ‘to have that good conveyed to us by way of an Ordinance beyond what the thing is able in it self to do, and therefore ’tis worship [to listen]’. 62 The hearer is an object moved by a word, where being ‘moved’ involves neither understanding nor feeling, which are separate gifts; ‘this work is rather a work upon them, then in them’. 63 As Chapters 3 and 4 remarked, speech and writing are considered as acts, and therefore can easily be stopped in favour of God’s speech. Prima, media, & ultima; the First, Middle & Last Things (London: J. F., 1654), pp. 338–9. 61 Egerton, Boring of the Eare, p. 3; Hugh Roberts, The Day of Hearing (Oxford: J. Barnes, 1600), pp. 55–60; Wilkinson, Jewell for the Eare, B2 r; Thomas Shepard, Subjection to Christ . . . Ineffectual Hearing the Word (London: T. R. and E. M., 1652), p. 160; Burroughes, Gospel-worship, pp. 202–3; John Brinsley, The Preacher’s Charge and People’s Duty about Preaching and Hearing of the Word ((London: for R. Bird, 1631), p. 20. 62 Burroughs, Gospel-worship, p. 163. 63 Ambrose, Prima, media, & ultima, p. 339; original mispaginated.


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Through reception tends not to be seen in this way, it too is active for these manuals, and must be halted. Listening here is a prelude to a fundamental passivity, where the word works on the heart without the aid of such creatures as understanding, language, memory, passions, or will: ‘the seeking the good-will, docility and attention (in which consists the end of preambles) among Beleevers well-instructed, acknowledging their Pastor, prepared and excited by prayers, both publike and private, to the hearing of the word of God; hath no necessary use’. 64 Preparation is, therefore, irrelevant to the word’s effects, as Ambrose explains: God would not have us make an Idol of preparation, as if therefore God draws nigh to us, because we are prepared; No, no: though preparation in ordinary course is a means to finde God, yet doth God sometimes hide himself when his people are prepared; he would have us know, that if he be found of us at all, it is of meer mercy; he is not bound in Justice (setting aside his Promise) to reward this preparation: it’s but our duty. 65

The metonymy at the heart of reformed soteriology, where good actions are either seeds or fruits of grace, means that, in Thomas Granger’s words, ‘to be a good hearer is no lesse excellent a gift of grace, then to be a good speaker’. 66 William Gryffith agrees: the word ‘seemes to require a peculiar manner, both of preaching and hearing of it, by it self, free from all mixture and sophistication of our owne fancies and devices’. 67 Accounts of actual listening to God’s word show hearers who are bored, frustrated, and exhausted by keeping passively attentive. John Rogers reports how Captain John Spilman, when in a ‘carnal condition’, ‘did slight the Ministers of Christ, especially your long Preachers, and could not abide that any should preach long’. 68 A lecturer at Harvard, Michael Wigglesworth, is equally frank: ‘on the 4th day at lecture I found my vile heart apt to be weary beforehand of the feared length of the publick ordinances’; ‘a heart so dead . . . and thoughts so wandering’; 64 W. Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases There of (1639; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1975), iv.76. 65 Ambrose, Prima, media, & ultima, p. 339. 66 Thomas Granger, Pauls Crowne of Rejoycing . . . How to Heare the Word with Profit (London: T. S., 1616), A2r. 67 William Gryffith, The Best Religion (London: G. Miller, 1636), p. 153. 68 John Rogers, Ohel, or Bethshemesh: a Tabernacle for the Sun (London: R. I. and G. G. and H. Eversden, 1653), [book 2, ch. 6, pp. 4–5; original mispaginated].

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‘my heart very dead and little stird’; ‘I found my heart secretly weary of the ordinance . . . and desire greatly to loath myself for’; ‘weariness of gods precious ordinances’. 69 The London turner, Nehemiah Wallington, prepares himself before a January sermon by praying that the time might ‘not seeme longe & tiddeous’, that he will not have ‘straggeling’ thoughts, not forget what he hears, nor fall asleep. On a variety of occasions, he feels ‘much backwardnesse and dulnes’; ‘yeet did I remaine dead & drousie the day being very ercksome and duties very tedtious unto me . . . I wished in my heart that M. Ash might be hindred from comming’; having already heard two sermons when the next man had gone on awhile I began to grow weary and wished he had don, for fain I would be at home and there was no more exspected to parform any more But yt Mr. Ash being come (weary in) not makeing a count to have done anything yet with much parswastion did goe up which did grive & was ireksome to my carnall and unregenerat part,

and so on, and on, and on. 70 Even when the preacher himself tries to concentrate, other thoughts intrude, as Donne admits to his congregation: I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say to one another, when I have done. 71

If there was one sin besetting the parishioners at Bemerton in the early 1630s, it was boredom. The country parson is hypersensitive to boring listeners who are ‘thick and heavy, and hard to raise to an poynt of zeal, and fervency, and need a mountaine of fire to kindle them’. In taking services the priest must behave in a dramatically devout way, ‘lifting up his heart and hands, and eyes, and using all other gestures’. While Herbert hastens to say this is not acting as such, the tact, observation, and expressive ability it requires does suggest a split attention in the priest himself, as he deals with the inattention of the audience. While 69 The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653–1657, ed. E. S. Morgan, pp. 18, 26, 28, 47, 49. 70 British Library MS Additional 40.883, ff. 65v, 11v, 92v-93r, 102v. 71 Donne, Sermons, iii, 110.


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praying aloud, he must ensure that ‘the fervency of the supplicant [does not] hang and dy between speaking’. The laity are admonished also, the parson by no means enduring either talking, or sleeping, or gazing, or leaning, or halfe-kneeling . . . but causing them . . . to do all in a strait, and steady posture, as attending . . . and every one, man, and child, answering aloud . . . not in a hudling, or slubbering fashion, gaping, or sratching the head, or spitting even in the midst of their answer, but gently and plausably, thinking what they say.

When preaching, the parson ‘procures attention by all possible art’, such as earnestness in speech, looking at people who could be particularly benefited from that section of the homily, and referring to current local affairs. The sermon is not above an hour long, to ensure it does not make the auditors ‘weary’. Again, the problem of watching yourself act sincerely comes to Herbert’s mind: ‘by these and other means the Parson procures attention, but the character of this Sermon is Holiness’. When travelling, the priest takes public prayers, but does so start ‘pleasantly’, with a proverb, and mixes amusing in with improving talk with his fellows on the road, to make the latter ‘more welcome, and lesse tedious’. When catechizing his flock he uses questions not statements, since these involve the listeners more. 72 Trained as a professional orator, Herbert is acutely aware of the difference between interest and attention. One of his best jokes is a proverbial meeting between himself and Old Time. As a cheerfully bumptious fellow traveller, Herbert does exactly what his country parson is advised not to do, bounding into the catechetical situation with a reproof, not some pleasantry: ‘Meeting with Time, slack thing, said I,/ Thy sithe is dull; whet it for shame’. Time deprecatingly blames this on slack customers for a sharp blade. The casuist immediately takes three and a half stanzas to deliver a stock answer (death prunes us for heaven, thus is a gardener, not an executioner, pleasures here lengthen punishment elsewhere, and so on): Thus farre Time head me patiently: Then chafing said, This man deludes. What do I do here before his doore? He doth not crave lesse time, but more (‘Time’). 72 Priest, in George Herbert, The Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 231–3, 235, 251, 257.

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Herbert here is both a joke-book trickster, getting our admiration for winning a few more years from Time, and also a very boring casuist, giving us every sympathy with Time. The ideal state in devotions is one of ‘resolution’, where engaged attention moves into action. This word is used variously in the midseventeenth century for the process by which a material thing is reduced to its elements, a dissolution of the humours, the movement in logic from a conclusion to its premisses, the answering of a doubt, a sense of certainty, and a statement on some matter. It appears frequently and prominently in most of these capacities in what we now consider to be the disposable preliminary elements in the titles of early modern religious polemics, ‘a resolution towards . . . ’. The need for ‘resolution’ to move from the general rule to the particular action is the subject of Christopher Harvey’s poem, ‘The logick of the heart’, in his Schola cordis. This thinks through the implications of 1 Pet. 3:15, ‘be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you’. My Logick is the faculty of Faith Where all things are resolv’d unto he saith And Ergoes drawn from trust and consequence . . . What the heart objects none can resolve, But God himself, till death thy frame dissolve.

Resolution banishes doubt, settling what the question is, looking to authority, working through the logical implications, concluding on a specific deed. The term is used by casuists. In Perkins’s Arte of prophesying, the ‘resolution’ of a biblical text is the process of making it unloose a specific meaning, by applying the dialectical places of argument to the verse. 73 Yet, as Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan show, they may have to listen to God but they do not always attend to him. Commentary which sees a yearning for order and obedience in Donne and Vaughan, such as that by Carey and West, can be nuanced by a look at the moments 73 W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500–1700 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), pp. 206–19. Such a ‘resolution’ of issues for analysis is characteristic of intellectual activity in the period on a number of fronts; Foucault describes this epistemological shift, from the recognition of resemblances to the analysis of differences, in various social structures and academic disciplines: see his The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), trans. anon. (London: Tavistock, 1970), ch. 3.


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when disorder is enjoyed. The topoi of melancholy appear in the poems (decentred author, lost ideal, earthy humour, solitary wanderings, and distraction). However, I will argue that these are expressions of a selfpossessed self-abdication. Some poems focus on an indecorous repetition of how dull life is in God’s service, on the paradox of artful constructions about breaking up art, on the giggly and irresponsible way their dust behaves, and on the fact that God is left with the undignified task of forcing it into a resolution. Sometimes, poets’ frustration at the slow pace and othered focus of the spiritual life is not politely silenced. Vaughan yells at God that the present times are not To snudge in, and embrace a Cot . . . I’d loose those knots thy hands did tie . . . Thousands of wild and waste Infusions Like waves beat on my resolutions . . . I storm at thee, calling my peace A Lethargy, and meer disease (‘Misery’).

Angry protagonists, such as those of Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ (‘I struck the board, and cry’d, No more’) and ‘Artillerie’, snarl about a life ‘defined by duties and demands and renunciations’. 74 Sometimes they sigh wistfully at enforced inactivity, and impotently charge their employer with neglect: He that is weary, let him sit. My soul would stirre And trade in courtesies and wit . . . Life is a businesse, not good cheer . . . Oh that I were an Orenge-tree, That busie plant! (Herbert, ‘Employment II’).

‘Affliction I’ longs to transmute a profoundly vacant life into a stirring one, changing sterile dust to fertile soil: Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me None of my books will show: I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree; For sure then I should grow To fruit or shade. 74 Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 295–6.

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Herbert’s dry joke appears in Vaughan’s characteristic desire to be an organic whole, ‘instinct with the sap of grace’, as Stevie Davies says: a stone, or tree . . . Then should I (tyed to one sure state,) All day expect my date; But I am sadly loose, and stray A giddy blast each way (‘And do they so?’) 75

Yet this understandable reluctance to live at low ebb and await God’s pleasure gets only a dusty answer in return. Either God is only ‘fitfully present’ (in Fish’s words), or exhibits a ‘punishing changefulness’ (in Harman’s). Poems such as ‘Deniall’ and ‘The Search’ rail at this emotional aloofness: To thee my sighs, my tears ascend: No end? . . . Behold, thy dust doth stirre, It moves, it creeps, it aims at thee: Wilt thou deferre To succour me, Thy pile of dust, wherein each crumme Sayes, Come? (Herbert, ‘Longing’)

Noting thirty-five such references to dust in The Temple, Chana Bloch thinks ‘Herbert sets the dust in motion, visualizing its physical properties, in order to express what it feels like to be totally dependent on God’. 76 Such a built-in obsolescence has a soteriological use: ‘Lord! what a busie, restles thing/ Hast thou made man’, and ‘Oh to vex me, contraryes meete in one’ cry Herbert (in ‘The Pursuite’) and Donne in the Holy Sonnets. The reason, God remarks of man, is that ‘If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse/ May tosse him to my breast’ (Herbert, ‘The Pulley’). This feeling is not the virtuous disposition of divine discontent, where earthly things are overlooked in favour of heavenly by the poet (as in Vaughan’s ‘The World’), but the result of a strategically inflicted mortification of the creature. In withdrawing himself from his 75 76

Stevie Davies, Henry Vaughan (Bridgend: Seren, 1995), p. 97. Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 48.


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supplicants, the perfect object of love also empties them of themselves. The fretful instability of the human self is a consequence of the lack of God’s full presence, causing complaints to him that he ‘tarriest, while I die,/ And fall to nothing’ (Herbert, ‘Longing’), or angry demands for his attention in Donne’s Holy Sonnets. Vaughan worries about running out of warmth and responsiveness: ‘What thin Ejections,/ Cold Affections,/ And low motions here’ (‘Midnight’). But two can play at that game . . . Dust also provides the poets with a means of protest against God’s absent-mindedness. In their turn, the poets deplete the selves waiting for the discipline of godly neglect. Such a lack of resolution should be an effective tactic; as Donne warns, God ‘takes it worse to be slighted, to be neglected, to be left out, than to be actually injur’d’. 77 The obloquy of boredom, like adultery, stays with the innocent party. Thus, though poets claim they are the nothingness of nothing in competitive self-division, this synecdochic self-consciousness refuses any simulacrum of wholeness, in favour of the status of highly ‘active dust’ (‘The Pursuite’). These distracted poets produce words, but none to the point. As dust, the self is not seen as nothing; it is multiple and everywhere, practising for the moment ‘ten yeares hence,/ After the losse of life and sense,/ Flesh being turn’d to dust’ (‘Death’), when it will be free to move away from the demand to focus. The poems appear to refer to Genesis 3:19 (‘in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’), used by the Book of Common Prayer at the committal of the body in the burial service. However, they do not look forward to this as a quiet settling into the ground, but as an opportunity for increased movement: Here I intombe my flesh, that it betimes May take acquaintance of this heap of dust; To which the blast of deaths incessant motion . . . Drives all at last (‘Church-monuments’). 78 77 78

Donne, Sermons, i, 195. The Book of Common Prayer, 1559, ed. John Booty (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1976), pp. 412–13. The distribution of ashes on Ash Wednesday (when the Catholic Church used the verse) was replaced in the Book of Common Prayer with the commination against sinners.

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The religious body is characterized by Peter Brown as one which, in the face of acknowledged inadequacy before the divine, adopts an ethical and physical regime to subordinate itself. Establishing clear boundaries to discipline its desires prevents its disintegration before God’s impervious perfection. Brown describes the heroic moral ‘hardbody’ as an allpurpose tool, toughened by tests, removed from affections, coherent and even predictable in response to temptation or persecution, and rejoicing in its integrity. 79 Such an indivisible subject can be found in the poems, enclosed in the safe spaces of God’s law (often figured as a room, arm, bed, garden, or box). But there are many other poems that delight in the mobility of dust’s wilful particles, where self-partition creates monstrous but, finally, self-possessed bodies. The celebration of God’s orgulous sufficiency may—does—show up man’s insignificance. From the human reader’s point of view, though, this mixing of the minute and the vast also creates an affinity with the infinitesimal mote, charged with giddy, but at least (to us) comprehensible life. Ironically, the Pointillist bodies, crushed by synecdochic violence, share the features of the perfected body: they are light, quick, and omnipresent. They have the melancholic man’s phantasm, creativity, and unsettled nature. Bloch’s view of the dust, as proof of a total dependence on God, does not account for its energy and omnipotence in the poems. Focusing on the minute, we see things from another point of view, disturbing any fixed sense of scale or conventional engagement with the thing observed. Man’s natural senses are no longer the sole measure, as ‘material objects, that till [then eluded] . . . all human eyesight’ become ‘marvellous objects’ in a ‘new world’. 80 Indeed, dust gets everywhere in the poems. Not all of it is rebellious; some settles quietly on worldly concerns: ‘That which was dust before, doth quickly rise,/ And prick mine eyes’ (‘Frailtie’), ‘Our eies shall see 79 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988; London: Faber, 1989), epilogue. 80 As Huygens’s amazed report on Drebbel’s microscope ran. The instruments of the new optics were in commercial production from 1608. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London: John Murray, 1983), p. 9; R. S. Clay and T. H. Court, The History of the Microscope (London: Charles Griffin, 1932), pp. 6–19; A. N. Disney et al., The Origin and Development of the Microscope (London: Royal Microscopical Society, 1928), ch. 3; E. Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: the Shaping of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 6–10.


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thee, which before saw dust/ Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blinde’ (‘Love II’), and There dust that out of doors might fill Thy eies, and blind thee still Is fast asleep (Vaughan, ‘Retirement’).

Rank boundaries crumble in the laughing ‘good fellowship of dust’, where ‘dustie heraldrie and lines’ (‘Church-monuments’) are subjected to a ‘black satire of genteel pretensions’. Antiquaries were inclined to be peevish about tombs that failed to maintain these (Weever, for instance, gives a scale: nothing for the lower ranks, a ledger slab for the lesser gentry, a wall-hung half-bust for the greater, and a full-length chest tomb for the nobility). 81 Not in these poems, however, which declare that ‘Dust lies with dust/ And hath but just/ The same Respect, and room, with ev’ry clay’ (Vaughan, ‘Retirement’). 82 As Donne repeats in his sermons, playing on the politics of recycling, ‘dust upon the Kings high-way and dust upon the Kings grave, are both, or neither Dust Royall, and may change places; who knows the revolutions of dust’, for ‘in the Earth, in the grave, there is no distinction’. 83 The dissolution into dust produces a community, and a release from the strain of keeping oneself together as an heroic individual. 84 As the melancholic would expect, even the trace of the single speaker is rubbed out. ‘A dusty story/ A speechlesse heap’ will be read over by ‘some youthfull Eie’, which, finding nothing to detain attention, ‘shal leave thee to the wind,/ Or the next foot to Crush’ (‘The Check’). In the poems, however, the despair associated with such self-elision in twentieth-century theories of speechless depression is gone. Funerary arrangements allow an individual to change status, in a party which the particles enjoy: the grave will ‘laugh at Jeat and Marble put for signes’ (‘Church-monuments’). 85 81 J. Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments within the United Monarchie of Great Britaine (London: T. Harper, 1631), pp. 10–11. 82 C. Malcomson, Heart-work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 135. 83 Donne, Sermons, iii, 105–6, iv, 277. 84 Hammond, Fleeting Things, p. 264; Harman, Costly Monuments, pp. 110–20. 85 A. Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Culture of Conflict in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 55–6.

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Good times cannot last forever, so what do the poems expect to happen, when God’s ‘Power shall collect the severall dusts, and atomes, and Elements of our scattered bodies at the Resurrection’? 86 Having ground themselves to dust, they consider that the rest is his responsibility. As Vaughan cheerfully tells his flesh, when thou lyest Unnumber’d in thy dust . . . Then may his peace be with thee, and each dust Writ in his book, who ne’er betray’d mans trust! (‘The Evening-watch’)

This leaves God to do the numbering, allocating the almost invisible as a sore-tested book-keeper: What though my bodie runne to dust? Faith cleaves unto it, counting evr’y grain With an exact and most particular trust, Reserving all for flesh again (Herbert, ‘Faith’).

With the patience of a parent towards a teenager out late, he repeatedly tells his creation to ‘Up then, and keep/ Within those doors, (my doors) dost hear?’, getting a mumbled but obedient ‘I will’ from Vaughan (‘Retirement’). Since identity is obviously not dependent on material continuity, it is up to God to recognize his synecdoche: Though then (thus crumm’d) I stray In blasts . . . Yet thy love spies That Change, and knows thy Clay (Vaughan, ‘Buriall’).

Such bean-counting is particularly undignified in the problem/joke of the cannibal (men—worms; fish—men). 87 There is much interest in a ghastly agape, where, as Knevet puts it, ‘the Graves unsatiate throte’ eats even kings, ‘where worms unhospitall doe dwell:/ who (like Lycaon) doe each guest devoure’. 88 The period’s theologians speculate about regeneration by esoterically drawing on the indissoluble atoms of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, on Epicurean philosophy, and on Augustine’s discussion of the essential and accidental aspects of the 86 88

87 Donne, Sermons, ii, 270. See Donne, Sermons, iii, 96–7. ‘Crosses’, in Ralph Knevet, The Shorter Poems, ed. A. M. Charles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), p. 309.


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resurrected body in book 22 of De civitate dei. 89 In sermon literature on the body’s decay and resurrection, any fears about a paucity of material because of consumption in the food chain are soothed with a reference to Genesis (God can create new matter where necessary, as Eden proves, so ‘our remainder after death can never be so small as our being was before the world; ashes is more than nothing’). 90 The lost is reincorporated twice, either as what is eaten or as what is recreated. Our own discussions of depression take up the metaphor. Freud argues that the melancholic reincorporates something lost by introjecting a love object which the reality principle says must be given up. Kristeva also labels the melancholic’s use of images as cannibal, where the lost object is cut into pieces and ‘swallowed’, leaving ‘a deserted self but not separated from what still and ever nourishes it’. 91 However, the poets refuse the consolations of cannibalism. Rather than fantasizing about redigestion into another whole, as do the sermons (the trope of eutrepismus, the incorporation of material into a single form, was occasionally referred to as digestio), they imagine escaping the clutch of form. 92 Though the pious hope is that at the resurrection the self will be fully present to itself, body and soul, just now the writers’ minds are everywhere else. Each is ‘A heap of sand!/ Which busie thoughts (like winds) would scatter quite’ (‘Church-service’). Since ‘Man is out of order hurl’d,/ Parcel’d out to all the world (‘Dooms-day’), it is up to God to act: O knit me, that am crumbled dust! the heape Is all dispers’d and cheape . . . The world Is full of voices (‘Distraction’). 93 89 John Lepage, ‘Kindled Spirits: Cremation and Urn Burial in Renaissance literature’, ELR 1998 (28), 3–17; Nancy Selleck, ‘Donne’s Body’, SEL 41 (2001), 149–74. 90 For instance, Donne, Sermons, iii, 96, iv, 326; T. Draxe, The Earnest of our Inheritance . . . and a Demonstration of the Glorious Resurrection of the Bodie (London: F. K., 1613), p. 54; Samuel Gardiner, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the 9. of June. 1605 (London: E. Allde, 1605), C1 r; W. H., Credo resurrectionem carnis: a Tractat on the 11th Article of the Apostles Creed (1633; 1636), ch. 7. 91 92 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 12. Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, S3 r. 93 Caroline Walker Bynum describes how medieval fears of partition in decay at the Last Judgement were calmed by assertions that the part will become the whole: see her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays in Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 11–14, 239–99, esp. 253 ff.

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In this poem, West points out, ‘heavy, unhappily irregular rhythms, ever changing line lengths, and staccato, unsatisfying rhymes hurl Vaughan’s Man around the like the voices of the world’. 94 These dust poems can be distinguished from poems of the paralysed will, whose speakers obsessively go over a question that they cannot resolve. When a vehement anti-Catholic writer, George Goodwin, studies Automachia, or the Self-conflict of a Christian (1607), he endlessly worries over that fact that ‘I am not mine (I weet)’ or ‘I am not with my Selfe (as I conceive)’, and exclaims over his state of mind: O how I like! dislike! desire! disdaine! Repell! repeale! loath! and delight againe! O what! whom! whether! (neither flesh nor fish) How weary of, the same again I wish! I will, I nill; I nill, I will. 95

Similarly, many of Southwell’s characters fret in ‘a maze of doubtfullness’ (‘Joseph’s amazement’) that plays fugues on the modal verb, as Peter does when he remembers his actions before the crucifixion: A poor desire I have to mend my ill: I should, I would, I dare not say, I will. I dare not say, I will; but wish, I may (‘Saint Peters Complaynte’, ll. 761–3).

Mary Magdalen tells Christ ‘You wooe, you weane, you draw, you drive me back’, by conscience’s ‘crosse-encountring’ (‘Mary Magdalens Blush’). Joseph considers the pregnant Mary with a confused I goe, I come, she drawes, she drives away, She wounds, she heales, she doth both marre and mende, She makes me seeke, and shunne, depart, and stay (‘Josephs Amazement’).

Southwell’s most characteristic image is one of civil strife, used in a string of poems whose titles demonstrate the paradox of living as a Christian: ‘Mans Civill Warre’, ‘Life is but Losse’, ‘I Die Alive’, ‘What Joy to Live?’, and ‘Lifes Death loves life’. Alabaster, understandably 94 Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s ‘Silex scintillans’: Scripture Uses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 115. 95 C7v, C5v–C6r.


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given his multiple conversions, is both relieved and puzzled that imprisonment for his faith coalesces his hitherto ‘unbalanced irresolution’ (‘Captivity Great Liberty’). An extended treatment of the irresolute conscience of the religious convert is given in Crashaw’s address to the countess of Denbigh, ‘persuading her to resolution in Religion . . . into the communion of the Catholic Church’. The countess is said to lie in labour of herself, a self whose ‘definition is a doubt’ (notably, she is not ‘in’ doubt), who keeps itself prisoner in ‘sad self-captivity’. This ‘fair indefinite’, still under the ‘rebel-word—Irresolute’, must have her ‘peevish strength’ killed by Love’s dart, so she may write ‘Resolved at last’. Echoing Donne’s fantasy of a ravaged city (‘Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee’, in the sonnet ‘Batter my heart’), Crashaw advises her to yield the fort of herself: ‘if ’t be not won,/ He is repulsed indeed, but you’re undone’. By contrast, there is something of a threat in the highly dramatized boredom of, say, Vaughan’s ‘The Resolve’, where the inverse power relationship in weariness appears. The superior force of a speaker, who can require the attention of his inferior, is reversed when it comes to interest, when he is in a suppliant position: To mind One path, and stray Into another, or to none, Cannot be love . . . Loose, parcell’d hearts wil freeze.

In dissolving binaries, particularization also dissolves the hierarchies of engagement. The poems’ self-possessed and impertinent dust is not the humble (though well-theorized) dirt, a dependent by-product of a system of order. 96 Danger and power lie in these inarticulate mites outside social boundaries. Dust escapes the hierarchies of both subjection and subjectivity in torture. Indeed, the multiple ‘I’s of the poems’ selfanatomization deny any other’s property in their ‘selves’. It is impossible to exert control in the face of such an ironically literal strategy for disempowerment as this deliberate, self-conscious, reiterated aposiopesis. 96 Mary Douglas’s distinction between dirt and dust is discussed in Joseph A. Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 23–9.

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For Perkins, this is a conscience which is benumbed in its refusal to judge, not because of ignorance of the law or because passion stops it remembering what sins have been committed, but because it is crazed and unable to reason on its own actions. 97 Donne’s sonnet on his own irresolution stands out from the other Holy Sonnets for two reasons. Most of his sonnets work through a theological problem, often waiting at the end for some agreement from God. 98 They pose firm questions and sound incredulous that the answer does not come at once: why does the devil take control when Donne is God’s? Who can give him grace to repent? Why should the possession of reason damn him more in sinning? If anyone, it appears that God is the inattentive one. The sonnet ‘Oh, to vex me, contrayes meete in one’, however, is a poem on an ethical not a doctrinal issue. It laments a problem of the will: ‘I durst not view heaven yesterday; and to day/ In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God’. Donne lists instances of this, without attempting to account for them after he gives the first paradox, that inconstancy has become a habit. At least, he concludes resignedly, that means that some of the time he must be behaving properly. Donne’s sermons show similar frustration about his own distraction, where he never seems wholly present to himself when praying or preaching. 99 A sermon on the resurrection of the body looks forward to when ‘Ego, I, I the same body, and the same soul, shall be recompact again’ before turning to the present situation, where neither he is preaching, nor his congregation listening, with attention. While he speaks, his mind is off considering comparable texts and wondering what his hearers will think, while they ‘are not all here neither . . . hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a better Sermon somewhere else . . . [or] you remember your selves that now yee think of it, this had been the fittest time, now, when every body else is at Church, to have made such and such a private visit’. 100 Sermons repeatedly face the difficulty of distraction in private prayer. In one, Donne begins to 97 98

W. Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (Cambridge: J. Legatt, 1596), p. 151. On the critical consensus about this, see P. M. Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion (London: Longman, 1997), pp. 8–9. 99 These instances are highlighted by Donne’s editors (Sermons, iii,8, vii, 20, x, 9) and are brought together by Carey, John Donne, ch. 6. 100 Donne, Sermons, iii, 109–10.


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recite the Creed, and cannot even get as far as the third clause, ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost’, before his mind is elsewhere: I lock my doore to my selfe, and I throw my selfe downe in the presence of my God, I devest my selfe of all worldly thoughts, and I bend all my powers, and faculties upon God, as I think, and suddenly I finde my selfe scattered, melted, fallen into vaine thoughts, into no thoughts . . . I deprehend my selfe in it, and I goe about to mend it, I gather new forces, new purposes to try againe, and doe better, and I doe the same things againe. 101

In another, a funeral sermon, he stumbles over the Lord’s Prayer: ‘which of us ever, ever sayes over that short Prayer, with a deliberate understanding of every Petition as we passe or without deviations, and extravagancies of our thoughts, in that halfe-minute of our Devotion?’ Once again the preparations for prayer are earnestly self-dramatizing, and the rudeness shown in losing himself is felt: I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the samae posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I prayed to God; and if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell: Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. 102

A sermon on the angels of the Apocalypse lists the spirits which paralyse him in private prayer: slumber, ‘deviation and vaine repetition’, error, and even inadvertent double entendres in his devotions. 103 He cannot understand where the self is which he has tried to direct, and the very effort made to focus his attention demands a self-awareness which splits it. At the start of his ministry, in 1616, Donne plays with a word to describe how men cannot be constant, even in sin, which he had previously used of secular love. ‘The holyest man cannot at all times finde his own heart’, much less the ‘various and vagabond heart of such an indifferent sinner’. The swagger of the lover in ‘The Indifferent’, who ‘can love her, and her, and you, and you/ I can love any, so she be not true’, continues into the way the heart gallants around in sin: 101

Ibid., v, 249–50.

102

Ibid., vii, 264.

103

Ibid., x, 56–7.

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‘if he enquire for his heart, at that Chamber where he remembers it was yesterday, in lascivious and lustful purposes, he shall hear that it went from thence to some riotous Feasting, from thence to some Blasphemous Gaming, after, to some Malicious Consultation’. 104 This sermon’s plea to change indifference into resolution appears right at the end of his preaching career, too. In 1630, the court heard of the triple dangers of ‘inconsideration’, ‘irresolution’, and ‘inconstancy’, his terms for not hearing, not resolving, and not acting. The phrase Donne uses for the ‘dangerous impotencie’ of irresolution stretches back to what he said of himself in Devotions about his youth: ‘not to be able to con-centre these doubts . . . in a resolution at last, whether in Moral or in Religious Actions, is rather a vertiginous giddiness, then a wise circumspection’. 105 Generally read biographically, these moments are also central to the concerns of casuistry. The first work Perkins published on the conscience describes as its ‘greatest’ case the decision about whether a man has an ‘assurance’ of salvation. 106 Perkins works through the promises of salvation given by Christ, treated as laws by which Christ bound himself in conscience. They are promises which may be relied on and so will produce a subjective certainty of election. Herbert uses this term with theological precision in ‘Assurance’, when he rebuffs doubts by relying on Christ’s words, and not on his own behaviour: Thou art not onely to perform thy part, But also mine; as when the league was made Thou didst at once they self indite And hold my hand, while I did write.

This case of conscience is not like any other case, since it does not judge on acts but on words, and it results in belief. In a later text, Perkins gives full credit to the devil’s logic in overturning these promises. The deuill begins and disputes thus. Thou, O wretched man art a most grieuous sinner: therefore thou art but a damned wretch. The conscience answereth and 104 106

105 Ibid., i, 180. Ibid., x, 178–80. A Case of Conscience the Greatest aht [sic] Euer Was, How a Man May Know, Whether He Be the Son of God or No (Edinburgh: R. Waldegrave, 1592), especially pp. 4, 11, 20, 22, 26, 29, 32, 35, 41, 50, 55, 56, 71, where assurance is key to the case.


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saith, I know that Christ hath made a satisfaction for my sinnes, and freed me from damnation. The deuill replyeth againe thus: Though Christ haue freed thee from death by his death: yet thou art quite barred from heauen because thou neuerr didst fulfill the lawe. The conscience answereth, I knowe that Christ is my righteousnesse and hath fulfilled the lawe for me. Thirdly the deuill replies and saith, Christs benefites belong not to thee, thou art but an hypocrite and wantest faith. Now when a man is driuen to this straight, it is neither wit, nor learning, nor fauour, nor honour that can repulse this temptation, but onely the poore conscience directed and sanctified by the spirit of God which boldly and constantly answereth, I know that I beleeve. 107

From this angle, Donne’s Holy Sonnets are largely casuistical answers to the devil’s logic. The poet tries to argue himself into believing that God will come to the right conclusion on whether to save him, not because of Donne’s inherent merit or godly behaviour, but because he is God’s, and ‘shall thy work decay?’ If God feels as irresolute or absent-minded about his own words as Donne often finds himself, then assurance would seem a long way off. Even torture would be preferable to such neglect. It is, as he says in a sermon on Lamentations 3:1, terrible when ‘God leaves us to ourselves, and studies our recovery no further, by any more corrections’. 108 Postmodern theologians postulate a God whose being is a consequence, not a condition, of his love. In the poems and sermons, ‘not being’ is a consequence of human irritation, not a condition of God’s inattention. 109 Their fissiparous self does not dream of returning to a state of fullness and unity. It is not, in Lacan’s words, ‘caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the armour of an alienating identity’. 110 The process is seen on a large scale in the body and soul dialogues, where participants tear each other apart, and on a small scale in the early modern drama’s new punctuation mark—the en-point—that indicated when a character broke off his speech when people stopped listening to 107 109

108 Perkins, Discourse of Conscience, p. 148. Donne, Sermons, x, 211. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. T. Carlson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), section 2. 110 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1966), trans. A. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 4.

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him . . . 111 The conscience that is seen as absolutely insignificant is not one that can then be forced into judgement. The devotional space of private prayer, where that conscience should recollect its sins and God’s law, apparently evades resolution. 111 M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992), p. 56.

6 Eyes, Tears, Eyes, and the Penitential chiasmus ‘The Counterchange . . . takes a couple of words . . . making them to chaunge and shift one into others place’. 1

So far, I have emphasized the rhetoric of failure, or at least of reluctant agreement, in the language of the conscience used by Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan. There were, however, other models of godly warning and judgement available to them, which they conspicuously refer to but do not follow. This chapter takes up one instance, the affective meditations on the result of judgement. Contrition is represented as an exchange of subject positions in one of the most popular devotional genres in England between about 1595 and 1625, weeping meditations. In these, Protestant and Catholic writers alike use a chiasmus (a scheme where a first element is repeated but inverted by a second, in a crossing of parts). In their glances and tears, their viewpoints move from I to God to I. In doing so, the authors avoid the narcissism of their secular predecessors, the sonneteers, who reflect on themselves in their mistresses’ eyes. Nor do weeping texts show the clunky mechanisms of the syllogism as it engineers a correct response, which is found in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan. When these three turn to deal with remorse, they stubbornly assert their inability to melt into tears. Donne and Vaughan, in particular, are liquid-loving poets in other situations. Yet, when it comes to the conscience, they stay dry-eyed and resolutely themselves, unable to leap over the chiasmus into God’s position. Their subject position is literally founded in a lack and only partially recovered by words. 1 G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarium, 1971), p. 174 (speaking about a limited form of the chiasmus, the antimetabole).

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Eyes, Tears, Eyes, and the Penitential chiasmus

This chapter will turn first to Petrarchan sonneteers. Current criticism borrows from film theory to argue that such lovers mythologize the way they gaze on their powerful mistresses. By their obsessive stares they guard against dissolving themselves, so reinstating a gendered hierarchy. I then go to similar structures in sacred parodies introduced by 1590s Catholic writers, particularly Henry Constable, William Alabaster, and Robert Southwell. Popular Protestant writers, such as Gervase Markham and Nicholas Breton, quickly followed suit. Here, tears and looks are part of a wholehearted chiasmus. Poets, frequently taking up a female position, have no trouble in dissolving into abundant tears. A neverfailing circle of sympathy involves looks of love to and from Christ, which elicit tears from the poets, which in return produce absolving tears from Christ, which are in their turn requited by looks of love from the poet, and so on. The chapter ends by looking at the weeping poems of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, at points where they glumly tinker with faulty pumps. It concludes that their conscience remains verbal, judgemental, and dryly masculine. New historicism recognizes in the Elizabethan sonnet an author’s desire for political success, represented by the person of his beloved. 2 The poet’s show of sprezzatura or careless grace over the trifling issues of love shows how he could manage the greater pressures of state. Meanwhile, the mistress should admiringly watch the poet’s skill. Since she may respond to (or ignore) the sonneteer who catalogues her beauties’ effects on him, ostensibly he submits to the queen of his heart. The secular use of this strategy was so commonplace by the 1590s as to allow even its objects to parody it, so that, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the petulant shepherdess, Phoebe, rounds on her unwanted lover, Silvius, with a sharp Thou tell’st me there is murder in mine eye: ‘Tis pretty, sure, and very probable, That eyes, that are the frail’st and softest things . . . Should be call’d tyrants, butchers, murderers (III.v.10–14). 3

However, feminist critics hold that the fixed power positions of the Petrarchan sonnet—where a chaste, unresponsive mistress is obsessively 2 Michael Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: an Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 124–6, 144–8. 3 Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. A. Latham (London: Methuen, 1975).


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implored to yield by the besotted, incoherent suitor—are not what they seem. In their more suspicious readings, the poet, threatened by her power over him, uses his ideal to focus on and thus cohere his sense of self. 4 The mistress here is a mirror, used to recuperate the sonneteer’s performed self-loss in love. 5 Instead, she becomes the one anatomized, by being watched and described in detail. Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella repeatedly turns Stella into a collection of objects (her face, for instance, is inventoried with an estate agent’s care in ‘Queene Vertue’s court’, which lists its porches, doors, locks, and windows). Astrophil’s strategy of control is unmasked in his vengeful fifth song, that begins a contrablazon on his uncooperative mistress: I said, thine eyes were starres, thy breasts the milk’n way . . . But now that hope is lost, unkindnesse kils delight . . . Thinke now no more to heare of warme fine odourd snow, Nor blushing Lillies, nor pearles’ ruby-hidden row. 6

On the woman’s part, though the ‘cureless wounds’ inflicted by the ‘beamy darts’ fired by her eyes are cherished (‘Her flamy glistering lights increase with time and place/ My heart cries, “ah, it burns”, mine eyes now dazled be’, moans Astrophil), Stella does not actively look at him, even when the sonnet celebrates her eye: She comes, and streight therewith her shining twins do move, Their rays to me, who in her tedious absence lay Benighted in cold wo. 7

Her eyes can pierce, melt, burn, and torture but they cannot see, even when implored to ‘looke, O shine, O let me die and see’. The peremptory gaze of the lover is more important than the reactions of a silenced, and now blinded, beloved. Astrophil has brought back together a self that has threatened to dissolve before Stella’s chastity, by looking 4 Nancy Vickers, ‘Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme’, in Elizabeth Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 95– 109. 5 Herbert Grabes studies the widely used image of the mistress’s eye as mirror; see his The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in Title and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance, trans. G. Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 6–8, 335. 6 Sidney, The Poems, ed. W. A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 169, 212–13. 7 Sidney, Poems, pp. 204–5.

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at her in bits. 8 He, not she, is at the centre of the sonnet, so that her reactions are taken over by him: Only with paines my paines thus eased be, That all thy hurts in my hart’s wracke I reede, I cry thy sighs; my deere, thy teares I bleede. 9

There is little trace left of the mistress in these reflections on male selfloss. As Debora Shuger remarks, it is a truism that the figurative language of passion is also the language of divine disclosure. 10 The appropriation of secular topics is a common marker of religious conversion or new-felt devotion, and Catholic weeping poems take up some of these positions to unusual effect. The Petrarchan mode gives a model for addressing or referring to a feared and desired other. Alabaster, Southwell, and Constable (two of whom also composed love lyrics) use many of the loci of secular love in approaching God. Sacred imitations murmur about the tortured heart, one that nurses the image of the beloved, the distraction of the silenced lover, or his fixed gaze, tears, and sighs in the divine ear, which can be as deaf as any mistress’s. What had by the last decade of the sixteenth century become a rather tarnished golden age mode is revived by being taken literally—God really is the source of all light, and so on—thus reversing contemporary criticism of the Petrarchan ‘idolatry’ of a mere woman (‘if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something’, growled Ben Jonson of Donne’s ‘Anniversaries’). 11 There is a notable revision of the model, however, in that the secular sonneteer’s recovery from his lovelorn powerlessness, by a fragmentation of his beloved, is obviously not a method open to the devotional writer. Indeed, in the weeping poems it is he, not the beloved, who is broken into bits when he looks away from himself to God. 8 L. Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–38; Barbara L. Estrin, Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 20–38. 9 Sidney, Poems, pp. 188, 227. 10 Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 11. 11 ‘Conversations with William Drummond’, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 462.


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In view of the disparate rank, education, funding, and careers of the three Catholics, they cannot be said to form a cohesive group, though their poems seem to have come from periods when each was considering his vocation. Constable’s sonnets appear to have been written about the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1590; similarly with Alabaster, who converted in 1597–8. In Southwell’s case, the translations which heavily influenced Saint Peters Complaint date from the period of his novitiate at Rome in the early 1580s. All three had travelled on the Continent, meeting the new liturgical and meditational forms sanctioned by the Council of Trent, and the expressive art these inspired. Constable’s seventeen Spirituall Sonnettes are perhaps the simplest models of how Petrarchan issues of the eye can be inflected. The modish connotations of his sonnet on ‘the conspiracie of his Ladies eyes and his owne to ingender love’ (p. 117) are revived in his ‘To our blessed Lady’, in order to mark the difference in value between the two mistresses: An earthlye syght doth onely please the eye, and breedes desyre, but doth not satisfye: thy sight, gyves us possession of all ioye (p. 190).

Mary Magdalen’s overflowing love for Christ, combined with her visual allure as distressed and half-clad, particularly engages Constable. He competes with her in yearning for Christ: ‘joyne thy wett eyes, with teares of my complaint,/ while I sighe for that grave, for which thow cry’d’ (p. 191). Since she gazes at Christ, and Constable at her, she is in the position of both sonneteer and beloved. As the former, from ‘ech teare, which from thyne eyes then fell,/ a sea of pleasure now ys rendered’ (p. 187). Such eroticism is amplified with Mary’s declaration of ‘what pleasure ys obtayn’d by heavenly love,/ then they which other loves, dyd never prove’ (p. 192). 12 Thomas Roche says of Constable’s saints (two of whom are virgin martyrs) that they are placed as ‘incitements to the battle of love’, as beautiful and chaste as any Petrarchan mistress. 13 Yet while secular sonnets may foreground their 12 Patricia Badir examines the eroticism of a Reformation play which strips the figure of the Magdalen of Catholic connotations, in ‘ “To allure unto their love”: Iconoclasm and Striptease in Lewis Wagner’s The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene’, Theatre Journal 51 (1999), pp. 1–20. 13 Thomas Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 190–1.

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irony about giving in, their sacred parodies may not. Thus, Constable sincerely asks for grace to change the object of my love, [so] the wyng’d affection which men Cupid call may gett his syght, & lyke an Angell prove (p. 192),

lines which Constable’s editor, Joan Grundy, compares with the assertion in Walter Montague’s Miscellania spiritualia (1648) that ‘Saint Austin said The holy Magdalen changed her object only, not her passion’. Here, scopic pleasure articulates religious fervour: with such full delyghtes ech sense shal fyll, as harte shall wyshe but for to see thee styll, and ever seyng, ever shall inioye (p. 190). 14

Moreover, released from the staring fidelity of the secular lover, Constable’s flirtatious gaze can wander among the co-lovers of Christ, from the Virgin Mary to Mary Magdalen, from St Katherine to St Margaret—the more, the better. Indeed, three of the four sonnets to ‘our blessed Lady’ are forced to take custody of his eyes: although thy beuty rayse upp mee from syght of baser beutyes here belowe: Yett lett me not rest there: but higher goe (p. 190).

Constable’s roving eye, his speaking glances, and his labile regendering (his soul is ‘lyke a woman spowse’, and ‘uncloth’d, shall rest from labors past:/ and clasped in the armes of God, injoye/ by sweete conjunction, everlastyng joye’, p. 192) nudge both discipline and Mary out of the picture. He is an arch and unstable voyeur, who is neither disciplined by what he looks on, nor cohered by the act of looking. Alabaster’s nineteen penitential sonnets were written while or shortly after he was given the Loyolan spiritual exercises by a Jesuit missionary, John Gerard, who was responsible for his conversion to Rome. 15 One 14 To invert the conclusion of A. G. Martin, in ‘Herbert’s “Love” Sonnets and Love Poetry’, GHJ 17/2 (1994), pp. 37–49. 15 Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 199–203. Alabaster’s was a celebrated conversion, and Donne followed its progress, annotating an answer by Roger Fenton to Alabaster’s Seven Motives for becoming Catholic, P. M. Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion (London: Longman, 1997), p. 143.


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of the four weeks of the exercises aims to provoke contrition by placing the meditator in imagination inside a biblical scene of penance. This experience may have prompted Alabaster to write the sonnets, but he does not paint the scenes, nor detail his own sins. Instead, he speaks directly of, and to, his tears. All nineteen sonnets surprise them in midflow, so the narrator can converse with them. He goes through the stages of penance, without ever claiming the tears as his own: The first are bitter, of compunction, The second brinish, of compassion, The third are sweet, which from devoutness rain (sonnet 16).

Alabaster wittily assumes as evident the literal truth of a divine conceit, and so begins to explain the everyday as strange: How it is then your tears the earth bedew, And go not straight to heaven? Indeed ’tis true, They take their race upon humility (sonnet 14). 16

Though Alabaster praises his own initial efforts to produce tears (he who ‘Draweth his soul by penance into tears,/ His worthlessness to Christ thereby endears’, sonnet 17), they soon get agency, moved by his prayer to them to intercede themselves: Then run, O run Out of mine eyes tears of compunction . . . Until you come before his heavenly throne. There beg of Christ grace for me to repent (sonnet 12).

Grace firmly settles the roots of his newly converted soul into Christ’s wound: ‘Then you two characters, drawn from my head,/ Pour out a shower of tears’ (sonnet 13). Such ‘characters’, signs with a will of their own, twist the devotional chain back into a chiasmus, where his signs pray for Alabaster. He is helplessly amazed at such active and selfpossessed effusions, that are, and are not, part of himself. The Niobean petrifaction of the secular lover before the awesome beloved (of, say, Donne’s ‘Twicknam Garden’) becomes literally true, in the face of a stronger gaze that produces tears: 16 The same strategy appears in Crashaw’s matter of fact statement to Mary Magdalen’s tears that ‘Upwards thou dost weep’ (‘The Weeper’).

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Eyes, Tears, Eyes, and the Penitential chiasmus O dart one beam into that cloudy night That holds my heart, that melted heart may rain Grace to mine eyes (sonnet 39).

William Stull has argued that Alabaster exemplifies how ‘the decline of Petrarchanism coincides with the rise of metaphysical poetry’. 17 In the case of the sonnets on the gaze, however, Petrarchanism seems to be reaching forward to the metaphysical style, in the conceits arising from its abrupt reversals of subject positions. The paradox of secular sonnets, written to close the gap between the lover and his mistress but only existing because of this gap (the ‘absent presence’ of Astrophil’s sonnet 106), becomes the paradox of a penitential rhetoric, which describes its speaker’s feelings but does not affect them. 18 The otherness of the tears, their status as both relics of grace conferred and as human effusions, is maintained. The problem of finding sincerity in the Petrarchan mode, so acidly denounced by Sidney (‘if I were a mistres, [poets] would never perswade mee they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lover’s writings’), becomes irrelevant. 19 These tears should be third party, best when least felt by the poet. They are decorations to Alabaster: Then weep forth pearls of tears to spangle thee, In tears draw forth thyself until there be Sufficient for thee to be enrolled (sonnet 17).

God’s presence in the tears dictates the subordination of the author to ‘his’ productions, as well as to their addressee. The eye/I pun in secular sonnets is a marker of concurrent identification with, and difference from, the object of sight. Clearly, this would be impertinence in devotional sonnets. As Regina Schwartz asks of the circle of regard in Paradise Lost (between the reader, God, Satan, Adam, and Eve), since 17 William Stull, ‘ “Why are not sonnets made of thee?” A New Context for the “Holy Sonnets” of Donne, Herbert, and Milton’, MP 80 (1982), pp. 129–35. 18 R. V. Caro analyses the drama in Alabaster’s rhetorical techniques, in ‘William Alabaster: Rhetor, Meditator, Devotional Poet’, RH 19 (1988), pp. 62–79, 155–70. 19 Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry (1595), in Miscellaneous Prose, ed. K. DuncanJones and J. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 117.


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subjects and objects are constituted by the act of seeing—the subject sees and the object is the focus of sight—what happens when the watching subject is watched and the object of sight looks back? 20

Schwartz takes the Freudian line that frequent narratorial switching between the positions of the beholder and the beheld ensures that the object of the gaze is never lost. It is necessary to go further with the Catholic blazons. Christ reflects on the image of himself in Alabaster, not Alabaster on Alabaster in Christ’s image: how can clearness to my soul be brought, To see and to be seen, that hath his sight From Christ, and what it sees is his fair spright, That sense and object both by him are wrought? (sonnet 68)

This self-reflexive and oblique visual perspective (held to be characteristic of metaphysical wit’s interest in the ambiguous link between knower and knowable) is, in fact, the expression of a simple fact here. 21 Alabaster has a certain knowledge of the relationship between the creator and his creature. His perspective challenges the Platonic assumption that sight is the appropriate descriptor for the divine because it is a sense which works through distance rather than contact. Unlike the other senses, it therefore creates a neutral relationship with what it beholds and provides an understanding of perspective which suggests a vanishing point beyond human sight. 22 It can, therefore, clarify a concept of God that focuses on his immutability, objectivity, and infinity. But such decorous distance is not how Alabaster relates to God. His divine vision is a form of touch, and it is, thus, mutual. Though the investigations of Kepler and Descartes had postulated a passive eye, where images of objects were projected onto the retina (leaving the activity of seeing to the brain), the earlier classical theories about an active eye were 20 Regina Schwartz, ‘Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy: the Case of Paradise Lost’, Representations 34 (1991), 88 ff. 21 Ernest Gilman, The Curious Perspective: History and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeeth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), chs 2, 3. 22 H. Jonas, ‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14/4 (1954), 507–19; E. Fox Keller and C. R. Grontkowski, ‘The Mind’s Eye’, in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds, Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), pp. 218–21.

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still widely held. 23 In the Euclidean model of extramission, visual rays moved from eye to object, then brought back shape and colour in streams from object to eye, in a continuously drawn rectangle. In the atomists’ theory of intromission, simulacra that shimmied off the object were received into the eye, and recognized there by an inborn light. 24 Alabaster’s streams of looks and tears, to and from the object, use this earlier optical vocabulary. The subordination of the speaker to his tears is taken further in Southwell’s long poem Saint Peters Complaint, dated in its final form to the early 1590s and published repeatedly by both licensed and secret presses after Southwell’s execution. Some critics have argued that the poem ministers confession by desire to isolated Catholic recusants. 25 In session fourteen of the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church clarified the doctrine of the sacrament of penance. It involves, successively, contrition, confession to a priest, satisfaction, and the purpose of amendment, before absolution is granted. Trent did, however, make provision for confession by desire alone where a priest was not available (the situation for most English recusants). Southwell’s work can be read as an aid to achieve this intense sense of contrition. In the poem, Peter stands in memory before the cross, and relives the moment he betrayed Christ. In a digression of 120 lines (ll. 325–445), he apostrophizes Christ’s eyes, those ‘gracious spheres’, Christ’s tears, the streams of ‘liquid pearle’, and the ‘cyphred words’ of his glances. 26 The Petrarchan register is insistent. For Joseph Scallon, such amplification shows evidence of a Jesuit meditation on the sacred body of Christ, and Christopher Devlin considers this passage plays ‘over theological 23 Donne, for instance, says he cannot decide which hypothesis is correct: Sermons, iv, 83. 24 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), chs 8, 9; E. F. Langley, ‘Anatomizing the Early Modern Eye: A Literary Case-study’, Renaissance Studies 20 (2006), 340–55. 25 Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr (London: Longmans, Green, 1956), pp. 258–73; Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer: A Study in Religious Inspiration (London: Sheed and Ward, 1935), pp. 205–27; Joseph Scallon, The Poetry of Robert Southwell, S.J. (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1968), pp. 151–219; Nancy Pollard Brown, ‘The Structure of Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint’, Modern Language Review 61 (1966), 3–11. 26 In The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., ed. J. H. McDonald and N. P. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 75–100. By far the most popular of all the weeping texts with both Catholics and Protestants, Saint Peters Complaint (1595) went through nine editions before 1615.


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depths with a sensuous ardour that cedes nothing to Crashaw’. 27 The tears, however, are not only part of a devotional blazon. Repeatedly, the object which the narrator beholds looks back, eliciting tears: ‘Thy eyes, one looke servd as an onely knocke,/ To make my heart gush out a weeping floode’ (p. 89), or The matchles eies matchd onely each by other, Were pleasd on my ill matched eyes to glaunce . . . Brochte tears in mine to weepe for my mischaunce (p. 86).

The comfortable identification of the self with the ideal that was available to the secular sonneteer would here be a misrecognition. Apostrophes to Christ’s eyes (‘little worldes, the summes of all the best,/ Where glory, heaven, God, sunne: all vertues, sterres . . . doth rest’, p. 88) contrast their central position with Peter’s (‘outcast from these worlds exiled rome . . . / Lost fish, from those sweet waters kindly home’, p. 88). Peter goes to pieces before the powerful glance of God, the tears welling from him without his control. Like Alabaster, Southwell explores the possibility that Peter’s perception is established by Christ’s view of him: ‘By seeing things, you make things worth the sight,/ You seeing, salve, and being seene, delight’ (p. 87). These features (floods of self-possessed tears and looks in a chiasmus of grace, with a willing loss of control by the sinner) also appear in Catholic prose meditations. Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares of 1591, for instance, elaborates at length on Mary’s desolate state when she misses the entombed body of Christ: the Angels must still bathe themselves in the pure streames of thy eies, and thy face shall still bee set with this liquid pearle . . . Till death damme up the springs, they shall never cease running: and then shal thy soule be ferried in them to the harbour of life.

Mary’s outpouring is repeatedly interrupted by Southwell, who amplifies each grief before allowing her to respond to the angels and to Christ. Standing with her before the tomb, Southwell steps in to voice all the participants’ words: 27 Scallon, Poetry of Robert Southwell, pp. 199–201; Devlin, Life of Robert Southwell, p. 259. Janelle details the Italian amatory poetry which also lies behind Southwell’s work: P. Janelle, The Catholic Reformation (1963; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), pp. 142–6.

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O Mary, thy good hap exceedeth thy hope . . . These Angels invite thee to a parlee . . . O good Iesu what hath thus estranged thee from her? . . . But O Mary it seemeth too strange that he whome thou seekest, and for whome thou weepest should thus give thee over . . . Thou wilt say that . . . he forbad thee to weepe for him . . . But I aunswer thee again. 28

The passivity of the central characters is in contrast to the Italian models used by Southwell in both his weeping texts. Luigi Tansillo’s Lagrime di San Pietro (which he translated), and Erasmo de Valvasone’s Lagrime della Maddalena are event-filled narratives of the days after the crucifixion. 29 Like St Peters Complaint, Thomas Lodge’s Prosopopeia Containing the Teares of the Holy, Blessed, and Sanctified Marie, the Mother of God (written about the time of his conversion to Catholicism; published in 1596) floods a static pietà with questions and applications by the author, on behalf of himself and other characters. Mary’s dead joyes gave [her] sorows suck . . . Oh ye Angels of peace weep with this virgin . . . O my God, lend mine eyes a well of teares . . . Come yee daughters of Jerusalem, and weepe with mee.

No one answers these questions, nothing happens, no one enters, and the tract ends rather than concludes: she swounded on the senselesse earth, and being conveied to her oratorie by the holy assistance, the sacred body of Christ was bound up and borne to the sepulchre. Finis. 30

Both Southwell and Lodge preface their works with a desire that they will be used in a devotional routine: ‘a plentifull harvest of teares by this meditation, that the devout heereby may wax more confident, the incredulous beleiving: the indifferent, more zealous’. Such a digressive 28 Southwell, Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares (1591; 1594; Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), 56 v. 29 Janelle, Catholic Reformation, pp. 142–6; M. Praz, ‘Robert Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint and its Italian Source’, Modern Language Review 19 (1924), 273–90. 30 Thomas Lodge, Prosopopeia (1596), in his The Complete Works, ed. E. Gosse, 4 vols (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), iii, 13, 18–23, 126. I follow A. F. Allison’s attribution of Prosopopeia to Lodge rather than Lawrence Twine, given its Catholic bias: A. F. Allison, Thomas Lodge, 1558–1625: A Bibliographical Catalogue (Folkestone: Dawsons, 1973). Lodge (1558–1625) was the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor of London; he converted to Catholicism in middle life.


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style, unconcerned with narrative progress, keeps the reader ruminating on one topic, rather than demanding a close attention to the logic of the text. Like the penitential sonnets, the meditations divorce the central figure from its expressions of sorrow. They focus on the rhetorical character of the ‘teares of the penne’, murmuring that ‘silent teares are speaking advocates’. 31 These works use a chiasmus, one that works to and fro, substituting the looker for what is looked at: eyes melt to tears; tears are eyes that regard their originator; God looks at the sinner looking at God. 32 Thus, Alabaster rejoices that ‘For love of Christ to tears mine eyes do turn,/ And melted tears do make my soul to burn’ (sonnet 18). This cyclical flow appears again in Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’ and ‘The Teare’, as tears move, run, fly up, and fall down in a derangement of subject and object. ‘Each Drop leaving a place so deare/ Weeps for it selfe, is its owne Teare’, until it reaches heaven, where it becomes one of the ‘singing Orbes’, regarding God (‘The Teare’). In his ‘Sancta Maria dolorum’, ‘with a faithful, mutual flood/ Mary’s eyes bleed tears, His wounds weep blood’. Such a chiasmus leads into and out of the surface of a mirror, where God and the sinner can touch each other. In this movement of tears and looks, there is no originary image—no source—only correspondences. ‘The sinners teares are Gods mirrours: their penitent sighs, his incense’, says Lodge (p. 41), and Southwell praises Christ’s eyes as a ‘living mirrour, seeing whom you shew’ (Saint Peters Complaint, p. 87). The genre of the speculum or the ‘mirror for’ (whose publication peaked in the sixteenth century) generally gives the glass a didactic role. The mirror points out what is (or should be) true. Both are the case with these Catholic texts, where human capacity is gathered into its opposite. Such mirroring is infinitely regressive, with no actual moment of final separation between God and man. 33 Human eyes become God’s tears, which are God’s mirrors of human eyes—and vice versa—and vice versa. The streams of tears and looks that run from God to the poets are the 31 32

Lodge, Prosopopeia, p. 41. The formal structure of chiasmus in biblical narratives is studied by John M. Welch, ed., Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1981), ch. 1; Nils W. Lund, Chiasmus in the New Testament (1942; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1970), ch. 1. 33 David Reid, ‘The Reflexive Turn in Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry’, ELR 32 (2002), pp. 417–23 on the interiority of the tear; Grabes on the didactic mirror, The Mutable Glass, pp. 33–6, 48–60.

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active rays of extramission, of working looks. Far from vision connecting us to the truth by distancing us from the corporeal, sight models the divine–human link as an intimate form of touch. This is also the case in Protestant penitential meditations, partly because there were already parallels between the working words of Christ in the New Testament (examined in Chapter 3) and working glances by him, either at biblical characters or at the individual soul. In the anonymous Peters Fall (1585), for instance, Peter’s repentance starts when he hears the sign Christ gave that Peter would betray him, the crowing of a cock (Matthew 26:74, 75). However, only the externall & outward meane was the crowing of the cocke: the internall and inwarde meane was, that Jesus looked upon him, which looke was not of the corporal eye, but spiritual grace: Christ and Peter beyng by place dissevered. 34

Forty years on, the analogy between effectual look and word was still popular. Zachary Boyd’s The Last Battell of the Soule in Death (1629), using the old style optics, declares that the looke of our Lord is a working looke. Our beholding is but by reception of spaces, but Christs looking is by emission of graces, which like streames of heate and light come from the Sunne, the worldes eye, with a most powerful influence. 35

Popular writers were quick to see the possibilities of bringing this doctrine together with a revived Petrarchan passion, in a situation which, because it was about God, demanded excess. Not that much skill was demanded in the adaptation of the Catholic texts. There is little dogma in them to offend a Protestant; indeed, licensed as well as secret presses printed Southwell’s work. Between 1595 and 1625, literally hundreds of Protestant ‘lamentations of ’, ‘tears of ’, and ‘despair of ’ works were published, where heroic weeping is undertaken by a few biblical figures, most frequently Mary Magdalen, Jeremiah, Peter, Christ, Judas, and David (roughly in that order of popularity). As this range indicates, the stress is on weeping with love or pity as much as penitence. 34 Peters Fall (1585), B7r, quoted in M. Lange, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1996), p. 137. 35 Quoted in Lange, Telling Tears, p. 140. Boyd (1585–1653) was successively dean of faculty, rector, and vice-chancellor of Glasgow University.


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In the case of the Magdalen, this dual motive for tears is helped by a traditional identification of the unnamed woman who was a sinner, and who washed Christ’s feet with her tears (Luke 7:38), with Mary Magdalen, whom he exorcised (Luke 23:55), who stood at the foot of the cross, and who was the first to meet him at the resurrection (Matthew 28:1). 36 In the meditations, this composite Mary stands for both pain and pleasure, and her lachrymose state is more important to their authors than reasoning why she is so. As with the Catholic texts, these meditations are not taxing to read, preferring affective length to connected plot or argument. Francis Quarles, in Sions Elegies: Wept by Jeremie the Prophet (1624), gives an argument from verisimilitude about why this is so: the Methode is truly elegious, not bound to any ordinarie set forme, but wildly depending upon the sudden subject, that new griefes present; and indeed the deepest sorrowes can not be, but distracted from all rules of methode. 37

Vaughan makes the same point on David’s psalms, ‘we can see/ Confusion trespass on his Piety . . . / his witts and he/ Did know no Method, but their Misery’ (‘To Mr. M.L. upon his reduction of the Psalms into Method’). In practice, the method of ‘no method’ always totemizes the tears, always works in hyperbole, always takes literally the secular topoi on the lover’s eye, always refers to its own art of sincerity, always appeals to the reader, and never considers acts in terms of laws to substantiate this remorse. For instance, the preface to Gervase Markham’s lengthy verse meditation Marie Magdalens Lamentations for the Losse of her Master Jesus (1601), urges readers to ‘gush forth fresh fountains’ so that their ‘eyeflouds would helpe to fill the maine’, and ‘decke their rose-like cheekes/ With showers of grief ’. He is vague on what this might be for, merely saying that ‘we should give way unto our woes,/ When the excess no fault or errour shows’. Both the vagueness and the Petrarchan register are maintained when Mary starts to speak about Christ: 36 On the popularity of this saint, see J. Gibaldi, ‘Petrarch and the Baroque Magdalene Tradition’, Hebrew University Press Studies in Literature, 3/1 (1975), 1–19; Patricia Phillippy, ‘Sisters of Magdalen: Women’s Mourning in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus rex Judaeorum’, ELR 31 (2001), 78–106. 37 Letter to the reader.

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Eyes, Tears, Eyes, and the Penitential chiasmus The deepest passion of true burning love That ever any love-sicke heart possest, (Drown’d in distresse) I silly woman prove, Whose ardent zeale is nurse of mine unrest.

She plays with thoughts of a ‘sweet’ death of ‘deepe joy’, musing on how she would feel being nailed to the cross a ‘sweet divine felicitie’, and wanting to be laid in Christ’s grave. 38 She itemizes the ‘hot desire’, ‘vehement love’, and ‘scalding sighs’ aroused by his body, which is missing from the tomb, with no sense she is mourning a corpse. When Christ appears, the biblical command noli me tangere (John 20:17) seems like the chaste drawing back of an unobtainable mistress, literally ‘do not want to touch me’, not just ‘do not touch me’. Though he is alive, Mary’s tears continue to fall abundantly, this time with joy and desire. Likewise, in Nicholas Breton’s The Passion of a Discontented Minde (1601), the narrator humbly comes with sorrow-rented hart, With blubbered eies, and hands uprear’d to heaven; To play a poore lamenting Maudlines part, That would weepe streames of blood to be forgiven.

Though his sins have made him dry and steely-hearted, Breton is confident that his appeal to readers to ‘spare a teare,/ To fill the welsprings that must wet his cheekes’ will be answered. He sees himself recuperating the topics of the secular sonnets: ‘I sing not I, of wanton love-sicke laies/ . . . A guiltie conscience this sad passion beares’. 39 His pen will create tears in them, as it does in his Divine Poeme . . . the Blessed Weeper (1601), where his Mary Magdalene concludes that she wishes ‘all women might such weepers be’. Early modern writers widely refer to Horace’s dictum in ‘The Art of Poetry’ that art and tears go together: ‘If thou wouldst have me weep be thou first drowned/ Thyself in tears, then me thy loss will wound’. 40 This is akin to method acting. A self-stimulated, though 38 Preface, B1v, B3v, B4r, C3r. Markham (?1568–1637) wrote prolifically on horses and husbandry; the volume of his devotional works is comparatively small. 39 B1v, D1v. Breton (c.1554/4–c.1626) had already practised secular weeping about frustrated ambition and love, the standard Petrarchan topics, in the verses making up his Melancholike Humours (1600). A fertile author, he generally wrote recreations, merry letters, conceits, and dialogues. 40 ‘The Art of Poetry’, trans. Ben Jonson, Complete Poems, ed. Parfitt, p. 357.


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not necessarily impersonated, grief should find an answering echo in the reader, so that art will produce sincerity. The anonymous collection of verse, Saint Peters Ten Teares (1597), calls each poem a tear which will dismiss ‘Imaginarie Muses’ in favour of truthful art to ‘unloose the Springs of Peters poore repentance’. 41 All problems of insincerity disappear if God answers the sort of prayer Thomas Nashe puts up in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593): ‘O dew thy spirit plentiful into my inke . . . let my braines melt all to inke’. Yet Nashe draws attention to his own rhetoric, putting on the persona of Christ himself to present him as an accomplished ‘collachrimate’ orator who speaks for nearly fifty pages, intensively using erotesis and apostrophe to break through the text into his auditor’s heart; he wastes his ‘eye-bals well-neere to pinnes-heads with weeping (as a Barber wasteth his Bal in the water’). 42 In Thomas Jackson’s sermon, The Tears of St Peter (1612), tears are themselves intercessors. Peter sendeth not messengers of ordinarie nature, as a few penitent words . . . but he dispatcheth his Teares as his Embassadours, that . . . before the cry of his sinne should be heard in the high Court of Heaven, his Teares might pray and plead for pardon (p. 34). 43

This exercise in rhetorical amplification is approached with methodical vigour by Samuel Rowlands in The Betraying of Christ (1598). He promises to give an alphabet of self-accusation: Me thinkes my conscience turnes a blacke leav’d booke, Titl’d Distrust, dedicate to Despaire . . . The argument is shame, the subject sinne, The index thus explaines the evils therein.

And so he does, from ‘Apostle once’ down to ‘Zeale in his services lost’. 44 It is the duty of the writer to use art to persuade himself that he has been overcome beyond all use of method, in order to affect his reader and back-form his sincerity—a chiasmatic pattern thoroughly familiar from discussions of divine artistry as the cause or the effect of grace. 41 43

42 Introductory verse. 1613 edition, pp. 1, 2, 25. This image, taken from Gregory’s commentary on the Song of Songs, is cited by Donne, Sermons, vi, 47. 44 D1v. Rowlands (fl. 1598–1628) generally wrote satires, characters, and humours.

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As with the Petrarchan sequences, the violence threatened by the male eye is present in these meditations. In Quarles, for instance, Jerusalem is gloated over by the troops of the invader Nebuchadnezzar, as she ‘extends/ Her brawneless armes to them, whose ruthlesse eyes/ Are red with laughing at her miseries; / Naked she lies’. 45 Shuger argues that this is a development of the eroticism present in most early modern images of the Magdalen. Under the older model of extramission, desire was seen as originating in the object, as an influence that then passed through the eyes to the heart and liver. Thus, Shuger shows that sacred spectacles were doubly able to arouse longing in a spectator, who yearned for and with them. Yet, at the same time, distress and even violence against these humble weepers proved to be expressive palliatives of the pain of separation from a beloved. Protestant masculine subjectivity, convinced of its own unworthiness, and formed by violence against itself in obedience to an interior, sacrificial command, could not melt with love before God. 46 Thus, a malicious response to a chastely withdrawn ideal appears in some lamentations, as it does in some love sonnets. It would seem, then, that weeping with Mary or Christ or Peter is not simply a topic; it is a genre, with conventional positions in language, authorial personae, and subjects to be dilated on. These weeping texts give one model of what a working conscience should be in response to sin. When it is touched by God’s motions, the conscience lovingly sends back to heaven those looks and tears inspired by grace. At the same time, the authors hint that sincerity might be an issue, and a vaguely sadistic element to this ocular eroticism appears. Donne and Vaughan had a clear idea of the standard hyperbole available on secular lovers’ glances and tears. In ‘Twicknam Garden’, Donne is not satisfied with simply sighing over love; he wants to become ‘a stone fountain weeping out my year’, so that ‘Hither with crystal vials, lovers come,/ And take my tears, which are love’s wine’. In ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’, his tears englobe whole worlds of love, are ‘pregnant’ with his mistress’s image, and could overflow if mixed with hers, to destroy the heaven they create. Building their sonnets in ‘The Canonization’, the lovers find all the world mirrored in each other’s eyes. In ‘The Ecstasy’, their eyebeams twist into a string knotted at each end 45 46

Quarles, Sions Elegies (London: W. Stansby, 1624), elegy 17. Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ch. 5.


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with an eye. Vaughan’s early volume, Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished (1646), also dwells on the pleading ‘language of tears’ (‘To his Friend being in love’), and leaves his legacy of sighs and tears to after-lovers (‘An Elegy’). He even cites Donne on the value of the tears of ‘base, Sublunarie Lovers’ (‘To Amoret, of the Difference ‘twixt him and other Lovers’, citing Donne’s ‘Valediction: forbidding mourning’). Herbert is not known to have written love poetry, but, as his familiarity with Sidney shows, he read it closely. He numbered off its topoi of doves, roses, lilies, crystal, cheeks, and eyes in two sonnets to his mother in 1610, asking whether poetry should only ‘wear Venus livery’. 47 Given this expertise, and the popularity of the genre of looks and tears, it is notable how mealy-mouthed the three poets seem when it comes to tears of remorse. 48 They repeatedly declare themselves thirsty or dry, and rarely gaze on God with mutual passion. The eye is not an erotic organ for these poets. This is not to say that they do not show amorousness to God. This is a critical commonplace in the case of Donne. In that of Herbert, Schoenfeldt had the courage of his conviction that erotic, political, and religious models could be paralleled in Herbert’s work more literally than they had been by critics. When he demonstrated, say, the onanistic ring of ‘Sinnes Round’ (with cockatrices, volcanic eruptions, proud towers, heavy breathing, and hands joined to act on lewd intentions), the Herbert world gasped, and admitted that he was right to say that we, not Herbert, have repressed the erotic element. 49 Vaughan, faintly damned in this respect by a critical heritage of pure-minded transcendence, awaits such a transformation. Yet none of the three show the ocular eroticism which Shuger describes. In the Holy Sonnets, Donne gloomily notes that water recycling from his earlier work is not possible: ‘O might these sighes and tears return again/ Into my breast and eyes . . . / In my Idolatry what showres of raine/ Mine eyes did waste’ (perhaps remembering his Niobean weeping in ‘Twicknam Garden’). With ironic ostentation, he reserves his most tender mourning for himself. It is he who must suffer 47 Herbert’s editor, Hutchinson, points out a parallel between these and Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint: George Herbert, The Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 206, 549. 48 For the impression which Constable and Alabaster made on Donne, see Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing, pp. 143–4. 49 M. C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), ch. 6, especially pp. 241–3.

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for his earlier suffering over his mistresses—‘To (poore) me is allow’d/ No ease’—arousing a suspicion that this new suffering will in its turn require further contrition for its self-centredness. In ‘I am a little world’, astronomers are implored to ‘powre new seas in mine eyes, that so I might/ Drowne my world with my weeping’. Since he can produce neither water for weeping nor washing, Donne turns to fire to cleanse his world. When he takes up the favourite subject of other weeping texts, Mary Magdalen (whose picture he had in his chamber), she is not shown dissolving in tears. The sonnet ‘To Mrs. Magdalen Herbert: of St. Mary Magdalen’ merely joins her devotion to Mrs. Herbert’s innocence. Donne’s editor, Helen Gardner, wonders at him ‘writing so forced and frigid a sonnet on the Magdalene in an age when her cult was so intense. Neither here, nor in his sermons, is his imagination stirred by the favourite saint of the Counter-Reformation’. 50 The composition of Donne’s verse paraphrase, ‘The Lamentations of Jeremy’, also resists amplifying on the biblical account it uses, Tremellius’s translation of the Old Testament. 51 Only when Donne turns to the Christ are there tears, joined by blood; on the cross, all Christ’s ‘body was eye; every pore of his body made an eye by teares of blood, and every inch of his body made an eye by their bloody scourges’. 52 ‘Moyst, with one drop of thy blood, my dry soule’ (‘La Corona’), he prays, and ‘Oh! of thine onely worthy blood,/ And my teares, make a heavenly Lethean flood,/ And drowne in it my sinnes black memorie’ (‘If poysonous mineralls’). Even then, these are requests, not descriptions of a grace already granted. Donne is all talk when it comes to remorse. In the sermons, too, he does not expect a loving glance from God just yet. At present, we have ‘blindnesse in our spirituall eyes. Eternal life hereafter is Visio Dei, the sight of God’. Only through the ‘eyesalve’ of affliction or the ‘red glasse’ of miserie can we get a glimpse. 53 A sermon delivered on the first Friday in Lent in 1623 on John 11:35, ‘Jesus wept’, starts coolly with ‘It is a common place I know to speake of teares’, before expanding on the three types of tears Christ wept (as 50 Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. H. Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 56–7. 51 The final form of the paraphrase is provisionally dated to around when Donne appears to have written most of the sonnets, that is, before 1610, J. Klause, ‘The Two Occasions of Donne’s “Lamentations of Jeremy” ’, MP 90 (1993), 337–59. 52 Donne, Sermons, iv, 338 (Lent 1623 sermon on ‘Jesus wept’, John 11:35). 53 Ibid., iv, 173–4.


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a friend, as a citizen, and as saviour). Though his exordium claims to want empathetic tears from his congregation, the sermon prefers to enquire into the how and why of Christ’s tears. Topics which Alabaster, Southwell, and Crashaw handle with passionate reciprocity, Donne academically returns to their biblical sources. For instance, he talks of how we ‘shall looke upon those lovely, those heavenly eyes [of Christ’s], through the glasse of his own teares’, or, referring to the crucifixion, ‘if all the body were an eye, argues the Apostle in another place (marginal note 1 Corinthians 12:17); why, here all the body was eye; every pore of his body made an eye by teares of blood’. His original thought is saved for those who cannot weep: ‘this is a spunge dried up into a Pumice stone; the lightnesse, the hollowness of a spunge is there still, but (as the Pumice is) dried in the aetnaes of lust, of ambition, of other flames in this world’. 54 A sermon in 1623 passes quickly from David weeping to God hearing this (that is, not seeing the tears). God is ‘all eye, an universall eye . . . but he is all eare too, and heares even the silent and speechlesse man’. Tears are prayers, but the next step is ‘a verball, and a more expresse prayer’. Like Jackson, Donne cites Gregory on the embassy of tears, but his tears are no Ciceronian orators with moving elocutio and pronuntiatio. Instead, they have a Senecan ‘simplicity’, which God ‘hearkens to, and believes’. 55 When Donne’s elegists celebrated the way he banished windy golden age ornament from writing, they should have mentioned tears as well. 56 His sermons on the penitential psalms repeatedly urge specificity in our trial of conscience (1622): ‘before we can be competent witnesses to our owne Consciences, of our reconciliation with God, wee must understand that we are Sinners, but sinners in such and such kindes, such times, such places, such persons’. 57 He thoroughly disapproves of those who elicit tears as a good in themselves; there is a dark pastoral knowledge in his comment on some ‘over-doing Penitents, to put chips, and shels, and splints, and flints, and nayles, and rowels of spurres’ in their beds. 58 54 55

Ibid., iv, 324, 326, 338, 339. Ibid., vi, 47–9. On the eyes of the soul in Donne, see W. Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1970), pp. 137–56. 56 See the elegies in Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), especially those by Jasper Mayne, Henry King, and Richard Corbett. 57 58 Donne, Sermons, iv, 151. Donne, Sermons, viii, 203.

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In Herbert’s ‘Marie Magdalene’ too, the saint does not weep for her own sins in contrition. Since ‘She knew who did vouchsafe and deigne/ To bear her filth’, Mary pragmatically directs her tears to washing Christ. These, as Richard Strier remarks, are not tears of repentance, nor those which merit grace. 59 Herbert is a dry-eyed beggar in other poems on grief. Though he sorrows at the Holy Spirit’s pity over his sins in ‘Ephes. 4:30’, Christ is needed to ‘make good/ My want of tears with store of blood’. Plumbing for penitence is installed in ‘The Water-Course’, whose first stanza acknowledges the afflictions of life, and whose second urges the reader to take advantage of these, not waste them: ‘But rather turn the pipe and waters course/ To serve thy sinnes, and furnish thee with store/ Of sov’raigne tears, springing from true remorse’. There is a brief and wistful memory of melting when God’s ‘sweet and gracious eye’ looked on him, filling him with ‘sugred strange delight’, but Herbert resigns himself to waiting until death for ‘full-ey’d love’ (‘The Glance’). In ‘Love III’, it takes a great deal of pressing to meet God’s working glance. A guest invited into heaven demurs with ‘I the unkinde, ungrateful . . . / I cannot look on thee’. Love’s answer combines selfhood and vision in a way that would satisfy Markham and his peers: ‘who made the eyes but I?’ It is not enough for Herbert’s guest, however, who murmurs ‘but I have marr’d them’, until Love takes the soul’s sins on his own shoulders (‘who bore the blame’). Only when the judgement of his conscience has been met can the guest look fully on Love. You can see the result of an economy of scarcity in another genre which Herbert explores, one closely related to tears and looks: the echo poem. Arguably, the love sonnet’s use of the Ovidian myth of Narcissus and Echo is rebutted by a dry masculinity in Herbert’s echo poem. Only able to repeat others’ words, the nymph Echo fell in love with Narcissus, but he refused her. She faded to a lamenting voice, while he was punished by falling in love with his own reflection in a pool. Elements of the story haunt secular sonnet sequences, with their selfinvolved lovers, coldly chaste beloved, endless tears, and repetitions of loss. Like all literary resources, the echo could be sanctified, and was. In 1612, John Swift describes how, in response to scripture, the good ‘Christian soule doth suddenly returne backe an answer like the Echo, or rather I may say more truly like a voice from heaven unto 59

Richard Strier, ‘Herbert and Tears’, ELH 46 (1979), 221–47.


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what he demaundeth of her’. The last word of each of his own lengthy meditations on doctrinal issues is echoed in agreement (for instance, ‘so long on our sins hee hath even winkt and smilde’ is echoed as ‘mild’). 60 It is usual for the echo to be this compliant, as with the conscience of Herbert’s elder brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury: Where shall my troubled soul, at large Discharge The burden of her sins, oh where? Echo Here . . . Say, if thou hear my prayers when I call. Echo All . . . But who will keep my soul from ill, Quench bad desires, reform my Will? Echo I will (‘Echo in a Church’). 61

In Thomas Washbourne’s ‘The Eccho, or Answer of a good Conscience’, the conscience’s answers are also uncontentious: ‘What’s a good Conscience, Eccho, canst say? Ay./ Say then, and what ’tis manifest. A feast’. 62 Knevet’s ‘The Echo’ is equally helpful: Telle me (my Soule) how doth thy comfort flow? Ech. Law. What thoughts dos’t thow retaine of Melancholy? E. Holy. 63

In these examples, the divine voice is already present, inside the human words, and is dutifully sent back. Predictably, the conscience in Herbert’s ‘Heaven’ is altogether less obliging. It first meets the narrator’s doubt about its status with a flat negative (‘Thou Echo, thou art mortall, all men know./ Echo: No.’). Herbert then requests it to find leaves (pages) which will last forever. In response, Echo first peremptorily requires him to ‘Bide’, and then, when Herbert repeats the question (with an equally imperious ‘impart the matter wholly’) redirects his 60 61

John Swift, The Divine Eccho (London: R. Bonion, 1612), A4 r, B4 v. Occasional Verses (London: T. R., 1665), pp. 47–8. Edward Herbert (1583–1648) was a diplomat as well as a writer. 62 T. Washbourne, Divine Poems (London: H. Moseley, 1654), p. 83. Washbourne (1608–87), a royalist, was rector at Dumbleton, Gloucestershire, when his poems were published. 63 Ralph Knevet, The Shorter Poems, ed. A. M. Charles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), pp. 363, 372.

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reading. Echo ends by contumaciously refusing a full answer to the question of what is bliss (forcing Herbert to ask for details three times). Though the chiasmatic form is retained, Herbert does not find much more than himself in the answers, which come from a cantankerous conscience. Despite being an aqueous poet who delights in rivers, rain, and waterfalls, Vaughan can only imagine his relief if his ‘eyes could weep/ O’re my hard heart’ (‘The Showre’). The few, ‘shril’ tears he can produce are overwhelmed in ‘Admission’, where God answers ‘e’er my eies could overflow their brink’, and is enjoined to ‘Hear now a floud/ A floud that drowns both tears, and grones,/ My Saviour’s blood’. When he does manage to squeeze out a few tears of his own, they are measurable units. He weighs up how many sinful minutes he has lived, in order to weep enough ‘untill/ The glasse with teares you fill’ (‘The Call’). There is a similar situation in Herbert’s ‘Praise III’; when his eyes ‘Did weep to heav’n, they found a bottle there/ (As we have boxes for the poore)/ Readie to take them in’. Like most alms boxes, contributions have been stingy, for the box was ‘yet of a size/ That would contain much more’, and it takes a drop from Christ’s ‘right eye’ to fill his bottle. Contrast this with how, in Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’, ‘Angels with Bottles come;/ And draw from these full Eyes of thine,/ Their Masters water, their owne Wine’. Perhaps the most active and least miserly tears are those which Vaughan weeps when he misses God (that is, not when he repents): Wee are thy Infants, and suck thee; If thou But hide, or turn thy face . . . We send tears to the place, These find thee out (‘Admission’).

Even here, his tears are dependent. This is in striking contrast to the eagerness to mix eyes and mouth with which Alabaster and Crashaw handle the topos. Alabaster’s tears act as an optic glass, which allows his conscience, taste, and vision full access to the body of Christ, in a much less maternal image than Vaughan’s: When without tears I look on Christ, I see Only a story of some passion . . . But if I look through tears Christ smiles on me . . . And from his side the blood doth spin, whereon My heart, my mouth, mine eyes still sucking be (sonnet 71).


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Crashaw’s ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord’ similarly asks ‘Are they Mouthes? Or are they eyes?’ Addressing the Magdalen, who ‘on this foot hast laid/ Many a kisse, and many a Teare’, he tells her that she will be repaid when the foot weeps blood and the lips of the wound kiss her back, with ‘full-bloom’d lips’ and a ‘blood-shot eye’. 64 Vaughan, by contrast, is stony-hearted, and his poem ‘St. Mary Magdalene’ largely concentrates on her ‘Cheap, mighty Art’ of artless love. Her tears, which washed Christ’s feet, are of less interest than her hair (in its ‘Spires, Globes, angry Curls and coy’), which dried them. Herbert and Vaughan turn to comment directly on the topos of the weeping conscience in ‘Grief ’ and ‘Anguish’ respectively. In vain, Herbert successively invokes springs, clouds, rain, rivers, conduits, fords, and spouts, before he turns on his verses (‘too fine a thing, too wise/ For my rough sorrows’), to leave them for secular sonneteers, ‘for some lovers lute/ Whose grief allows him musick and a ryme’. Vaughan (glancing at Mary Magdalen’s gesture) offers his heart for Christ’s ‘holy feet’, with an attitudinizing disregard for his own comfort: ‘Cast it, or tread it! It shall do/ Even what thou wilt, and praise thee too’. His second stanza goes further in paralleling crying and art as tears of the pen, and longing to lose himself in them: My God, could I weep blood, Gladly I would; Or if thou wilt give me that Art, Which through the eyes pours out the hart, I will exhaust it all, and make My self all tears (‘Anguish’).

The third stanza, like the concluding third of Herbert’s ‘Grief ’, turns to the failure of Vaughan’s own talents in pouring out his heart in verse. In doing so, both poems are ironically referring to the topoi of secular love. In Sidney’s sonnet 45, for instance, though Stella will not pity Astrophil’s ‘beclouded stormy face’, she can weep over a sad story. Astrophil takes his chance: ‘Then think, my dear, that you in me do read/ Of love’s ruin some sad tragedy./ I am not I, pity the tale of me’. This self-dramatizing strategy was laid out in his first sonnet, where he expects that Stella will take pleasure in reading his verses, will thus 64 R. Crashaw, Poems: English, Latin, and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin (1927; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 99.

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come to know his pain in fiction, thus pity him, and finally love him. Yet, as chapter four argues, the ‘fit words to paint the blackest face of woe’ involves ‘others feet’ to little effect. The instruction which Herbert gives his verses, to ‘Give up your feet and running to mine eyes’, uses the common pun on metre and limbs to endorse Astrophil’s sense that feigned tears, the pretence of eye and I, get nowhere with a mistress. Similarly, where Sidney is ‘Great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes’, Vaughan prays ‘To act as well as to conceive’, that is, to write ‘true, unfeigned verse’. Both poems end with an aposiopesis, since, unlike the lucky Sidney (and in contrast to other poems by the two), no muse or godly Friend arrives to advise them. This is to rebut the position of West that, throughout Silex, ‘tears are a complementary offering to prayer and poetry, and an important check on creativity’, since they give Vaughan confidence in his own sincerity. 65 Given the popularity of the weeping genre, and its well-established style and themes, I would argue that Herbert and Vaughan are casting sardonic looks at the original and at its sacred parody. Critical nervousness with this term, originally aroused by Rosamund Tuve’s conclusion that sacred parody is ‘provocative neither of ambiguities or ironies’, was dispersed by Anthony Martin’s disproof of any neutral usage in the seventeenth century. His corollary was that in using the term Herbert is signalling his poetry to be ‘seriously trivial’, ‘secondary and ludicrous’. 66 One could go one step further than Martin, and say that the two poets are parodying both the original and the parodies, in making both tropes and tears fail. Why do the three poets never dissolve in tears? It is not just because of a change in fashion. Though the three are a generation after the late Elizabethan weepers, the genre proved popular until the 1620s, and acceptable until the 1640s (as Crashaw’s example proves). Thomas Healy has shown that the models available to Crashaw and his peers included Spenserian poets, early and medieval Church affective writers, and continental Catholic models. Drawing on these resources, authors such as John Preston, Francis Rous, Thomas Goodwin, and Peter Sterry celebrated a God of love, who is often figured through somatic, and particularly visual, imagery. Healy contrasts Crashaw with Donne, 65 Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s ‘Silex scintillans’: Scripture Uses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 93. 66 R. Tuve, ‘Sacred “Parody” of Love Poetry, and Herbert’, Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961), 271; A. G. Martin, ‘George Herbert and Sacred “Parodie” ’, SP 93 (1996), 468.


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Herbert, and Vaughan, who feel that they might be separated from divine mercy. 67 They cannot melt into another’s meaning. Instead, the three found themselves, on their conscience as a self-regarding, verbal faculty. As the Introduction noted, Huit, Bernard, and Bourne talk of it as ‘both the Agent, and the Object’ of its own regard, the eye and glass of the soul, but they do so distinctly as a metaphor, not as a literal truth. 68 In the case of the three poets, the inevitable consequence of encouraging self-possession in judging the self is self-awareness. Their attempts to stimulate grief by fictional means peter out in embarrassment; they cannot give themselves up to a divine chiasmus. The notion that the Petrarchan gaze coheres the self and fragments its object assumes an irony in the secular lover, about his own passive position, which is not shared by the lover of the divine. In most devotional blazons, tears flow regardless of the poet’s will, as he and God reflect on each other. In Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, however, the working looks and tears of grace are as noticeably absent as the replies extorted by torture, the biblical words understood from books and hearts, and the resolutions barely made. The final chapter, the Conclusion, will argue that, in preferring a model of the conscience which is textual and logical to one which mixes itself with God, Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan mark a new idea of individuality. It may be mean-minded, unitized, even commercial, but it also maintains a space for a self which is other than God. 67 68

Thomas Healy, Richard Crashaw (Leiden: Brill, 1986), ch. 2. Ephraim Huit, The Anatomy of Conscience (London: I. D., 1626), p. 91.

Conclusion: The Engineered Conscience Not all terms in the conscience press equally heavily on all three authors, as the previous chapters have shown. Donne and Herbert, for instance, are more enthralled by God’s might than Vaughan is; Vaughan and Herbert are more interested in the enigmas which God leaves than Donne is; and all three are distracted at times. Nonetheless, each recognizes each term in the syllogism, albeit in his own way. In ‘A Hymne to God the Father’, Donne acts as his own casuist in a series of cases of conscience. Will God forgive original sin? What about habitual sins of omission or commission? Sins others do with Donne’s encouragement? He ends with fear of a sin not yet committed: a lack of assurance at his death in his own salvation. 1 Until God does forgive, he will not, each stanza concludes, ‘have done’. Characteristically, no ‘friend’ appears in Donne’s poem to put him right. Christ is enjoined to swear by himself— what in human terms would be the act of binding his conscience—to save Donne. The poem shows a conscience with an inquisitorial turn, able to judge even itself. Vaughan, in ‘Repentance’, envisages no such logical negotiation with God. Having slurred over divine ‘laws’ and ‘promises’, Vaughan gets a brief visit from a friend who whispers ‘No’. It is not, however, this casuist but the sighs of Vaughan’s ‘seduced soul’ which prompt a judgement on him. All the innate goodness of creation, from dust to stars, does not weigh as heavily as his sins, which are left unspecified. Vaughan’s conscience is one that acknowledges but slips through acts and laws to focus on whether he has responded with love to the Creator’s influence. Herbert, by contrast, is most interested in actions and judgements. In ‘The Method’ he searches his conscience. Twice, the heart finds a specific sin written up on it (careless prayer on 1 The same catechism appears in Donne, The Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), v, 81.


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one occasion, and ignoring an impulse for good on another). Twice, Herbert explains how each would seem from God’s perspective. The brisk conclusion, that he should ask pardon, produces an imaginary dialogue with God himself, who will answer the casuist with ‘Glad heart rejoice’. The inscriptions on the heart, the legal explanation, the dialogue form, and the domestic setting are characteristic of Herbert’s understanding of conscience. I am not claiming that I have provided a comprehensive survey of each poet’s theology, nor what such a comparison would find. It is not remarkable that the three men have different emphases. It is remarkable, though, that, despite their doctrinal and devotional differences, they should think about the same problems in how the conscience works by using similar images in similar tropes. So far, this has raised two questions: who is speaking in this godly faculty, and how are rhetorical and somatic expressions employed? This concluding chapter will discuss whether the poems have a corporeal rhetoric that is simply ‘about’, or fundamentally ‘of ’, the conscience, and how far the conscience creates the self registered by the poets. Over the last two decades, literary critics have thought about the early modern self as a process, rather than as a finished product. The notion of a materially formed subject, which can only fancy what interiority might be, has been put up against the concept of a self-awareness that is part shaped by, and part resistant to, external forces. This, in its turn, was faced down by the idea of a theatricalized subject, whose actions gesture towards a real but inaccessible interior. These models largely used secular terms: sometimes the opposition between court and private life, sometimes the split between domestic and working life in a newly urbanizing, industrializing society. They all produced a self that was discontinuous, in essence and expression. Yet, Katharine Maus has shrewdly remarked, since . . . the idea of ‘inward truth’ in early modern England is intimately linked to transcendental religious claims, antagonism to those claims perhaps contributes to the recent tendency to under-estimate the conceptual importance of personal inwardness in this period. 2 2 Katharine Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 27.

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My argument has followed this insight. If we lose sight of the conscience we lose the period’s own discussions about what the self is. For instance, Anne Ferry’s subtle delineation of the early modern use of words like feeling, inner man, our, mine, secret, private, and individual focuses on their secular appearance. She conscientiously breaks off to note that ‘self ’ is ‘sometimes a simple synonym for the human soul’, that ‘conscience’ overlaps with ‘conscious’ as a term for continuous selfawareness, and that there are significant shifts between ‘I’ and ‘we’ in private prayers ordained by the Church. 3 However, she does not pursue either the possibility that the religious register provides a lexicon of inwardness, or, more radically, is a condition for its experience. Maus does. Inwardness in the period, she holds, is constituted by the difference between a human vision of what can only be externals, and the godly, penetrating vision. ‘The presence of the omniscient spectator seems so fundamental to the structure of human subjectivity that the fact of that subjectivity becomes part of the proof of God’s existence’. 4 In terms of the conscience, it witnesses us to God, God to us, and us to ourselves. Who we are is partly who we think we should be. The fact that this is defined by an absolute authority does not make it any less of a dialogue which respects the human point of view. Perhaps the millennium has made us softer, since historians of ideas have begun to recover the self from being othered, forced, and secularized out of existence. In a recent article, Camille Slights revisited her earlier authoritative work on English seventeenth-century casuistry to look sceptically at the 1980s’ early modern self produced by force. She insisted, first, on the adequacy of the period’s own discourses to talk about self-consciousness, particularly in relation to God. Second, she pointed out that these assumed there was an autonomous self to be discoursed upon. Third, she said incisively, the early modern authors of these discussions saw no necessary divide between decisions made in private and actions performed in public, so that the latter could (and usually did) reflect something of the former. Thus, the individual was not a passive object of an all-powerful other, but a subject that chose between disputing advisers, and then acted on that choice. ‘Competing 3 Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), pp. 38, 45, 53. 4 Maus, Inwardness and Theater, p. 10.


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ideologies’, she ended crisply, ‘prevented automatic assumptions about the nature of the self, of God, and of human authority’. Debates on the nature of the conscience enabled and contained discussions about who the individual was, and how he responded to negotiation or definition by an external power. 5 This is not to conclude that religious terminology was, as is sometimes said, ‘simply the available language for investigating questions on topics ranging from the functioning of the human body to social interaction to the politics of pleasure’. 6 The continuous nature of the conversation with God does not suggest that a discussion about its features is ‘simply’ a useful meta-discourse for exploring the vagaries of a shifting self. When metaphysical poets make an effort to listen to God’s word, they expect to hear in return a voice from wholly outside them. The active element (from outside, from God) is the conscience, and is variously cooperated with by the reason, will, and passions. Stuart casuists talk of the conscience as part of the self without ever being tempted to indicate a ‘real’ self to be rummaged for, somewhere further in. Their self is corporate, conglomerate, conversational—not, then, the unredeemable stasis of an originary, unified identity, but a self that can be modified and engineered. Thus, for instance, the structure of Herbert’s ‘Clasping of hands’, ‘Lord, thou art mine, and I am thine,/ If mine I am: and thine much more,/ Then I or ought, or can be mine’, is not ‘simply’ a dizzy derangement of pronouns to represent an interlocutory self, one that uses God as a laudable projected other to talk about itself. The you and me of the poem start distinct and will at some point be united as (not reduced down to) one: I (subject) am you plus me (object), not I am I because you are not me. 5 C. W. Slights, ‘Notaries, Sponges, and Looking-glasses: Conscience in Early Modern England’, ELR 28 (1998), 231–46, looking again at her conclusions in The Casuistical Tradition. David Aers and Robert Ellrodt also dismiss those who deny agency to the early modern self: D. Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; Or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the History of the Subject’, in Aers, ed., Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 177–202; R. Ellrodt, Seven Metaphysical Poets: a Structural Survey of the Unchanging Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Introduction. 6 This instance is from Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 21.

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Poems on the conscience do not show a forceful monologue which quashes interruptions, but a dialogue that takes account of the listener—unfamiliar ground in most discussions of religious discourse. On the one hand, it is tedious for God to have to scribble a note, wait for an answer, or pick up the bits, and yet he does it. On the other, it is brave of the poets to take time to reflect on God’s position before agreeing with him finally (that is, take the moment for choice that Slights considers constitutes the self ). Of course, in dealing with God, poets are always in the area of tactics rather than strategy; operating within the space of the other is the art of the weak. Nonetheless, persuasion and negotiation rather than force are the keynotes, and the tropes of reluctant agreement are the sign of a self with agency. This is to endorse Shuger’s liberal declaration that ‘the Renaissance saw the self not as a reflexive internal awareness but as man’s generic nature . . . [as it existed] in relation to various “pulls” from a divine or demonic beyond’, including the Holy Spirit’s persuasive powers. 7 God and man together influence his will. It is also to nuance the arguments made by Michael Schoenfeldt of Herbert and Brent Nelson of Donne, that they court God. They do, but with reservations. 8 Shuger is primarily interested in the mutually constitutive relationship between spiritual grace and the formal disciplines of human oratory, such as sermons and meditations. The verb orare (to pray) lies behind oratory. Just so with the conscience. Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan become aware of God nagging them to listen, rather than feeling him perform mighty speech acts upon them. A ‘prattler’ of ‘chatting fears’ Herbert calls the faculty in ‘Conscience’. Here, it is a persistent little beast which enjoys turning sins sour, and can barely be quietened even by ‘the Saviour’s blood’. It seems to need a second dose of this ‘physick’, given Herbert’s exasperated shrug of ‘yet if thou talkest still’ of the last stanza. Recipes, prattling, carping, cleaning, and purgatives are all domestic upsets which spoil Herbert’s peaceful assurance of God’s love. The same irritating, sublunar persistence is shown by the 7 Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 232–4. 8 Michael Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991); Brent Nelson, Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (Tempe: MRTS, 2005).


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‘throbbing conscience’ of Herbert’s ‘The Storm’. God himself is ground down, not so much by its martial qualities in daring ‘to assault . . . and besiege’ him’ as by its importunity, which spoils his own home peace: ‘There it stands knocking, to thy musicks wrong/ . . . til it/ An answer get’. Prayer, Donne remarks, ‘hath the nature of Impudency’. 9 Stuart theologians also speak in a register of marital complaint. Samuel Clarke advises you to ‘listen attentively to the mutterings, and whisperings of thy own Conscience: take notice what news Conscience brings thee home every day’, and Jeremy Taylor declares that ‘its nature is to be inquisitive and busie, querulous and complaining’, despite the soul’s ‘thousand little arts to stifle the voice’. 10 Jeremiah Dyke thinks it is ‘as with men that have shrewish Wives . . . [with] clamorous, and clattering tongue’, and William Fenner says firmly that it is ‘better to live with a curst scold then live with an offended conscience’. 11 Certainly, sometimes it thunders or seduces, but more often it argues, mutters, and screeches, a barrack-room lawyer and a homely pest, which calls out a reluctant or surly response from the poets, in the same sub-heroic register. This is, therefore, a sacred rhetoric in that it enables negotiation between two incompatible positions. The excuses it mutters are understandable and temporary ways to do what God asks, but retain a little space for the self. The rhetoric of the conscience in these poems evades coming to a final decision, in order to allow dust some breathing time when it treats with God. Its tropes are not ornaments but clarifications of this relationship. Their linguistic structures organize an experience of meeting him. It has been said, with some justice, that ‘divine language is easier to envisage in theory than in practice’, referring to models such as the ‘rousing motions’ felt by Milton’s Samson, and the ‘something 9 Donne, Sermons, v, 364, cited in J. Johnson, The Theology of Donne (Cambridge; D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. 47. 10 S. Clarke, Medulla theologiae: or the Marrow of Divinity: Contained in Sundry Questions and Cases of Conscience (London: T. Ratclife, 1659), p. 449; J. Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience in all her General Measures, 2 vols (London: J. Flesher, 1660), p. 20. 11 J. Dyke, Good Conscience: or a Treatise Shewing the Nature, Means, Marks, Benefit, and Necessity thereof (London: I.D., 1624), p. 68–9; W. Fenner, The Souls Lookingglasse . . . with a Treatise of Conscience (Cambridge: R. Daniel, 1640), p. 40.

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understood’ of Herbert’s ‘Prayer I’. 12 Perhaps a short scene from the early 1650s can illustrate what the sinner might expect to hear when his conscience speaks. The young George Trosse’s liver and spirits had both suffered from years of heavy drinking, and he was on his knees, praying for recovery, when I heard a Voice, as I fancy’d, as it were behind me, saying Yet more humble; yet more humble; with some continuance. And not knowing the meaning of the Voice, but undoubtably concluding it came from God, I endeavoured to comply with it. Considering that I kneel’d upon something, I remov’d it; and then I had some kind of intimation given me, that that was what was required. Thus I kneeld upon the Ground: but the Voice still continued Yet more humble, yet more humble. In compliance with it I proceeded to pluck down my stockings, And to kneel upon my bare knees. But the same awful Voice still sounding in mine Ears, I proceeded to pull off my stockings, and then my hose, and my doublet. 13

This piece of practical criticism ends with Trosse nestling naked under the floorboards. He makes considerable physical effort to understand what is being said to him. Admittedly, he is at the start of a melancholic fit, but his later commentary on the incident (from the position of respected non-conformist minister to the godly in Exeter) does not debase his response as madness, and he dates his conversion from this moment. Trosse listens with care to a brief and precise, if enigmatic, verbal instruction. He does not experience a vague spiritual feeling, however intense, as we might expect to do. As Donne repeatedly says of searching the conscience, it is useless to ‘rest in generalls’. In listening to the voice of the conscience one must be active and methodical: ‘our religious duties require meditations, for God is no extemporall God; These produce determinations; for God must not be held in suspence; And they flow into executions, for God is not an illusible God, to be carried with promises, or purposes only’. 14 The command is persistently repeated until Trosse obeys. It matters that Trosse gets 12 Elizabeth Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: ‘divinitie, and poesie,met’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 238. 13 G. Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse: Written by Himself, and Published Post-humously According to his Order (Exeter: J. Bliss, 1714), p. 47. 14 Donne, Sermons, iv, 151; ix, 304.


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the point; a good intention to understand and obey is not enough. 15 There is no interest in sportingly giving credit to someone who sincerely tries; inadequate understanding of instructions is similarly dismissed as a failure of conscience. Trosse’s story of partial understanding occurs in the poems, whose rueful comedy is appreciated even by the fools themselves. For instance, when a shooting star lands in Herbert’s lap, ‘I rose, and shook my clothes, as knowing well,/ That from small fires comes oft no small mishap’ (‘Artillerie’). His self-congratulation on his prudence is rudely undercut by God’s cross ‘Do as thou usest, disobey,/ Expell good motions from thy breast’. The householder permits himself a small private joke (‘I, who had heard of musick in the spheres,/ But not of speech in stars’), then tries a new interpretation of the star. Of course, he starts by saying, he will agree with whatever God is telling him, ‘I will do or suffer what I ought’. Yet God might think about his own conscience, for ‘Thy promise now hath ev’n set thee thy laws’. There are a number of comic elements here, from the abrupt deflation of Herbert’s initial pride, to the incommensurate attempt by man to article with God, to the double talk of star and conscience as both shooting at the heart. Why do Herbert and Trosse respond so physically to the voice of the conscience? A writer may naturally turn to the nearest material at hand, his body. There is, of course, an early Church and medieval tradition of doing so in theological writing. More specifically, however, the element of the ‘practical’ is evident in early modern discussions of the conscience. It lives through action in time. Ian Maclean has argued that such thinking, through the body in action, was habitual to early Stuart natural philosophers, who were interested in Aristotelian theories of the mind. The Cartesian self which succeeded this model would be one in which thinking is apparent to the self, and where the mind is free of material determinants. By contrast, early modern commentators on Aristotle’s De anima see a mind that is not always accessible to consciousness, where being and thinking are elided, and where there is a meeting of sensibles and intelligibles as the character develops in action through time. Augustine, continues Maclean, makes the link between these and Christian ideas of consciousness in De trinitate, which reasons 15 Perkins says we are bound not to be ignorant: W. Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (Cambridge: J. Legatt, 1596), pp. 11–14.

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that since one cannot love what one does not know, and knowing is an act of love (a movement towards something), one is already in a relationship with God that is being developed in history, as part of Christian revelation. 16 Early modern English works on the conscience are closer to these Aristotelian reflections which model mind on body than to later Cartesian meditations on an alienated cogito. To the casuists, an enquiry into the body, made in the image of God, is also an enquiry into the godhead. The conscience should bring together nature, desire, and training to create an organic and perfect self. The conscience, not the court, provides an arena for self-fashioning. As the humanist Pico della Mirandola dreams, at creation God tells Adam that neither a fixed body nor a form that is peculiar to thyself have we given thee . . . to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou shalt desire . . . Thou, constrained by no limits . . . shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. 17

In secular terms, we have already theorized the costs of inscribing these limits on a body, making it sociable and orderly through clothes, gesture, stance, furniture, and so on. 18 The history of the body tells of unruly flesh that is to be restricted by civility, hygiene, sanitation, and dress. These practices rely on an habitual self-surveillance, one that mediates between the body and the various demands of rank, or industry, or gender. In the devotional context too, similar bodily 16 Ian Maclean, ‘Language in the Mind: Reflexive Thinking in the Late Renaissance’, in C. Blackwell and S. Kusukawa, eds., Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Conversations with Aristotle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 296–321. 17 Quoted by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development, 2 vols (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967–70), i, 47, in support of his proposition that ‘man is preeminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal’, pp. 6–13; L. Gent and N. Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London: Reaktion, 1990), p. 3; Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: the Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), ch. 1. 18 For instance, Roy Porter, ‘History of the Body’, in P. Burke, New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 206–32; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), ch. 10; S. Mennell, ‘On the Civilising of Appetite’, in Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Brian S. Turner, eds., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Change (London: Sage, 1991), ch. 4.


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disciplines fuel exemplary resistance to evil rulers. The bodies memorialized in the period’s martyrologies are in a privileged relationship with the divine. Mystical signs appearing on the body are recognized by oppressed groups as expressions of God’s intention that the silenced should be heard. They are above normal physiological and social rules, able to undergo extreme mortifications on earth, and restored to perfection in heaven. 19 However, I have argued that the devotional bodies of the metaphysical poems are not so incarnational. As Freud says, when man assumes these disciplinary habits he is ‘a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on him and they still give him trouble at times.’ 20 The corollary of ‘that facultie and power of the will . . . virtus transformativa’, John Bulwer comments sardonically some three hundred years earlier, is that ‘by it we change our selves into that we love most, and we are come to love those things most which are below us’. 21 The poems are not reliquaries for perfected bodies. Instead, they speak of the self with a particularized vocabulary of improvisation and unfinished process. Thus, when Harvey’s methods do not work, there is still hope: There’s not a blot Will stirre a jot For all that I can doe: There is no hope In Fullers sope, Though I adde nitre too. I many wayes have tri’d, Have often soakt it in cold feares, And, when a time I spi’d, Powred upon it scalding teares, Have rins’d, and rub’d, And scrap’t and scrub’d, 19 Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mutilation in Religion and Folklore, trans. T. Croft-Murray and H. Elsom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 25–35. 20 Quoted John O’Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 11. 21 John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or, the Artificiall Changling (London: W. Hunt, 1653), B4 r.

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Conclusion: The Engineered Conscience And turn’d it up, and downe: Yet can I not Wash out one spot, It’s rather fouler growne . . . Then to that blessed spring, Which from my Saviours sacred side Doth flow, mine heart I’ll bring, And there it will be purifi’d. 22

Our ears may, after years of commercials, hear a housewife on washing day turning from one brand of soap powder to another in despair, but the domestic tone is also there in the casuists. They dwell on the grubby costs of establishing, to use Freud’s term, a prosthetic conscience, one that is and is not one’s own. The stress on self-fashioning and its only ever partial success appears in a metaphor many poets and casuists use, of the body as an engine. Engines at this period arouse amusement, interest, awe, and some anxiety. They are not the industrial scale, inhumanly reliable, powers we see them as now. ‘Wit’, for instance, muses Herbert, is ‘an unruly engine, wildly striking/ Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer’ (‘The Church-porch’). We have grown used to reading the body in terms of the period’s emerging technical literature, covering mining, hydraulics, printing, textile machines, clock-making, and automata. 23 Descartes’s comparison of the piping of ornamental water gardens to pressures within the human body, and Hobbes’s image of the heart as a spring come to mind. Like the physical body and the troped language of the conscience, the body of the conscience also has its mechanistic devices. The Introduction showed how casuists speak of the ‘engineered’ conscience, as Huit calls it. Donne praises those ‘who with their Engines, can/ Bring man to heaven, and heaven againe to 22 C. Harvey, ‘The cleansing of the Heart’, in Schola Cordis, or, the Heart of it Selfe, Gone Away from God Brought Back Againe to Him & Instructed by Him in 47 Emblems (London: for H. Blunden, 1647), pp. 70–1. 23 E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); Bertrand Gille, The Renaissance Engineers (1964; London: Lund Humphries, 1966), ch. 9; Arnold Pacey, Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology (1976; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), chs. 4–5.


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man’ (‘To Mr. Tilman after he had taken orders’). Harvey pictures faith, hope, and love as grace’s ‘engines’ of conscience: when nature’s at a stand, And hath in vain try’d all her utmost strength, That art, her ape, can reach her out an hand, To piece her powers with to a full length. 24

The engine of the conscience is permeable, pragmatic, and based on workable compromises, not heroic authenticity. It is opposed to that totalizing holistic fiction, the religious hardbody, which (rather than who, under the circumstances) is finally disciplined as a subject under God’s law, becoming an ekphrasis of pain heroically born. Of course, it is much more romantic to imagine tortured souls, squarejawed with anxiety, or, alternatively, apotheosized souls, sodden with tears or luminous with love. But there it is. The piecemeal selves of the poems are, in fact, altogether more comically opportunist, more human in scale and engineering, more of a con-science. As Jeffrey Johnson has remarked of Donne, there is a theology of communal participation, ‘Con’ is a ‘sociable syllable’, and God delights ‘in it, from us, when we expresse it in a Conformity, and Compunction, and Compassion, and Condolency’. 25 There is a space here for a sense of humour, for ambiguity, for some play at a plural personality. 26 Is it a boast and a confession when Quarles wakes up of a morning, feeling the prick of conscience? There is a kind of conscience some men keepe, Is like a Member that’s benumb’d with sleepe; Which, as it gathers Blood, and wakes agen, It shoots, and pricks, and feeles as bigg as ten.

Quarles is not doctrinaire about the size of his conscience. His accommodating Lucro has a more feminine wide-pouched conscience, made 24 Harvey, ‘Engines’, in The Synagogue, or the Shadow of The Temple (1640; London: J. L., 1647), p. 30. 25 Citing sermon iii, 376, The Theology of John Donne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 32–5. 26 Joan Webber considers that these qualities are characteristic of an uncommitted Anglican persona developing in mid-seventeenth-century Church literature: see her The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 3–8, 15–25, 80–114.

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of ‘stretching leather’. 27 The erection of a conscience may make an event into a thing, but even as a noun it retains a certain verbal force. That leaves the question of what force raises the conscience. 28 The instruments of rhetoric, the twisted tropes, haunt the poets with the trace of another will inside their own. As the Introduction showed, casuists try to define this. Dyke and Worship rebut the position (taken from Origen), that the conscience is a separate spirit which cohabits with the soul, but Bernard thinks it to be ‘a divine thing in the soule, less then God, and above man’. 29 It is, and is not, man. Poems also— sometimes uncomfortably—move between the rigid support of ethical rules and their living, recalcitrant flesh. When the French royal surgeon, Ambrose Paré, praised prosthetic surgery, he did so for its edenic aims, ‘by what meanes things dissolved and dislocated might bee united, things united separated, and superfluities consumed or abated’. Contrariwise, David Wills argues that the ideal of an indivisible subject is called into question by any supplement. 30 As the poets displace and replace an attachment to themselves, the conscience, they become a supplement to that greater other. The alien enunciation of this other’s words, seen in a range of religious discourses from liturgy to ranting, is at work in the tropes of the poems. The poems move away from the Tudor view that metaphor translates between God and man, and toward the Stuart use of synecdoche when thinking about God. Their authors are parts of him, and he of them. As the rhetorician Samuel Shaw declares, ‘it is by a real Metonimy that men of devout and refin’d minds discern the Creator, where others see nothing but the Creature . . . in room of the Creator’. 31 27 Francis Quarles, Divine fancies: Digested into Epigrammes, Meditations, and Observations (London: M. F., 1632), pp. 200, 189. 28 In comparison with cyborgs, hybrids without an origin, Donna Haraway finds in early modern machines a haunting, animating force: see her Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (1991; London: Free Association Books, 1995), ch. 8, using Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. J. Strachey and A. Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), xvii, 220. 29 Dyke, Good Conscience, p. 12; W. Worship, The Christians Jewell: or, the Treasure of a Good Conscience (London: W. Stansby For J. Parker, 1617), pp. 1–2; R. Bernard, Christian See to thy Conscience (London: F. Kyngston, 1631), p. 9. 30 A. Pare (?1510–90), The Works of that Famous Chirurgeon Ambrose Parey, ed. G. Baker, trans. T. Johnson (London: T. Cotes, 1634), p. 869; D. Wills, Prosthesis (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 9, ch. 7. 31 Samuel Shaw, Words Made Visible (1678), quoted by N. Christiansen, in ‘Synecdoche, Tropic Violence, and Shakespeare’s imitatio in Titus Andronicus’, Style 34/3


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Understanding the conscience has acquired contemporary importance, as political events force us to consider, once again, whether moral responsibility is an integral part of the self, how best to train it, and how to negotiate between consciences that cite different values and authorities from one another. I have tried to show, from English literary history, the effects of believing that a divine voice is speaking to you directly, and expecting action. In the seventeenth-century context, that omniscient listener’s prevenient comprehension (not his prevenient text) has thrown poets into stylistic excess. It is possible, of course, to overstate this position. Clearly, the speakers in the poems hope to be reconciled eventually with God. However, to move straight to the concluding peace of each poem would flatten their success in keeping some of their own meanings, even while God gets an answer of sorts. As Alabaster muses, the origins of both his wit and his devotion lie in accepting the theocentric strain a dialectical conscience puts on him: So moves my love about the heavenly sphere, And draweth thence with an attractive fire The purest argument wit can desire . . . And these conceits, digest by thoughts’ retire, Are turned into April showers of tears (sonnet 15).

Though the devotional conceit brings together the most heterogeneous elements from the divine and the human, it does so because they are becoming parts of the same self. (2000), 352. Quintilian discusses metonymia as part of naming by association or attribute, in Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (1920–22; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–86), 8.6.23–7; also G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Amsterdam: Theatrum orbis terrarum, 1971), p. 150.

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Index Abbott, George 65 acedia 158, 164, 165, 167; see also boredom adiaphora 23 Aers, David 223 Ainsworth, Henry 82, 108 Alabaster, William 2, 43, 83, 104, 158, 197, 198–202, 205, 216, 233 Allen, William 57 Ambrose, Isaac 134–5, 173, 174, 175 Ames, William 14–15, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 116, 135, 173, 175 antanaclasis 116, 146, 147 anthologies, see florilegia Anzieu, Didier 99 aposiopesis 157, 159–60, 187 Aquinas, Thomas 13, 33 architecture 89–90 Aristotle 52, 169, 227–8 Ascham, Roger 123 Augustine 34, 47, 84, 105, 109, 184–5, 227–8 Babb, Lawrence 160 Babington, Gervase 108 Bacon, Francis 56, 130, 139 Baldwin, T. W. 131 Barbour, Reid 37 Barlow, Thomas 14 baroque 37 Baxter, Richard 14, 29, 138 bees 138–41 Belshazzar’s feast 106 Bemerton 90, 176 Bernard, Richard 15, 16, 18–19, 21, 22, 23–4, 108, 137 B., N. 91 Bible verses 133–4 Bloch, Chana 180, 182 Blunden, Edward 92 body 9–10, 41–64, 84–6, 99–100, 106, 182, 227–9 body art, see cosmetics, tattoos

Book of Homilies 100, 106 boredom 101, 158, 167–8, 171–7 Bourne 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 23–4 Boyd, Zachery 206 Boyle, Robert 133–4 Boys, John 30–1 Bradshaw, William 107 Braun, Harald 21 Breton, Nicholas 208 Bright, Timothy 125, 134, 161, 162, 163 Brinsley, John 124, 132 Brooke, Nicholas 59 Brown, Meg Lota 11–13, 27 Brown, Peter 85, 182 Browne, Thomas 35 Bulwer, John 97–8, 229 Bunyan, John 168 Burroughes, Jeremiah 172, 174 Burton, Robert 59, 78, 162, 163 Byfield, Nicholas 132, 135 Bynum, Caroline Walker 185 Cade, Anthony 16 Calvin, John 16, 61, 65, 85 Camden, William 96 cannibalism 184–5 canon law 20, 52–3, 54–5 Caplan, Jane 96–7 Carey, John 147, 159 Carpenter, Richard 16, 17, 18 catachresis 31, 33, 36 Cathcart, Dwight 12–13 cases of conscience, see casuistry casuistry 11–38 Catholic poetics 2–3, 8, 36–7, 43 Cave, Terence 131 Cawdrey, Robert 140 Certeau, Michel de 71, 85 Chapman, George 129 chiasmus 193, 205 church walls 91–2 cipher, see cryptography

270

Index

Cicero 33, 51, 169–70 Clark, John 132 Clarke, Elizabeth 47 Clarke, Samuel 22, 225 Coke, Edward 64 Coleman, Henry 78 Colie, Rosalie 37, 47 commandment boards 92 common law 54–5 commonplace, see sententia confession, auricular 72–3, 202 conscience 14–27, 78, 113, 224–7 Constable, Henry 83, 197–8 Coote, Edmund 132 cordiform 84 Corns, T. N. 136 coronet, see wreath cosmetics 97 Crashaw, Richard 8, 34, 37, 48–9, 187, 199, 205, 216, 217 cryptography 110–12 Davies, Stevie 78, 104 device 42, 49, 54, 58–9 Derrida, Jacques 4 Devlin, Christopher 202 distraction, see melancholy Donne, John casuistry 14 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions 60, 68–72, 75, 79–80, 114, 162 Essays in Divinity 23 Paradoxes and Problems 173 Sermons 27, 34, 46, 68, 69, 81, 92, 114–15, 131, 133, 141, 162, 164, 172–3, 176, 183, 184, 188–90, 191, 209, 212–13, 220, 225, 226, 231 Poems: ‘The Canonization’ 210 ‘La Corona’ 94, 119, 153–5, 158, 212 ‘The Crosse’ 79 ‘The Ecstacy’ 210–11 ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’ 79 Holy Sonnets 43, 79, 114, 157, 180, 181, 187, 188, 191, 211–12 ‘Hymn to God my God’ 114 ‘A Hymne to God the Father’ 220

‘The Indifferent’ 189 ‘The Lamentations of Jeremy’ 212 ‘A Litanie’ 79, 108–9, 152–3 ‘The Progresse of the Soul’ 155 Satire III 11, 114–15 ‘To Mr. Tilman after he had taken orders’ 230–1 ‘Twicknam Garden’ 199, 210, 211 ‘Upon the translation of the Psalms’ 35 ‘A Valediction: fobidding mourning’ 211 ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’ 210 doubt, see irresolution Drake, William 126 Draxe, Ernest 77 Dryden, John 9, 75 duBois, Page 51–2, 71 Dundas, Judith 46 Durant, John 163–4 dust 178–86, 187 Dyke, Jeremiah 16, 17, 19, 24, 225 echo 214–16 education 91, 123–6, 128–9, 131–2, 149 Egerton, Stephen 171–2, 173, 174 ego see selfhood ejaculation 113 Elizabeth I 140 Ellrodt, Robert 223 elocutio 122, 124, 127, 128, 130–1; see also tropes Elsky, Martin 112 Elyot, Thomas 88–9, 91, 139–40 emblem, see schola cordis enigma 81, 109–13 engine 19, 230–1 enthymeme 37 epigraphy 88–91 epitaph 93–4 Estella, Diego de 163 Estienne, Robert 133 Eusiebius 61, 63 eutrepismus 185 Evelyn, John 53–4, 91 Falconer, John 111 fashion 97–8 Felton, John 63 Fenichel, Otto 167

Index Fenner, William 16, 19 20, 39, 78, 225 Ferrar family, see Little Gidding Ferry, Anne 222 Fish, Stanley 105, 166, 180 Fleming, Juliet 86, 94, 96–7 florilegia 138–41; see also reading practices; sententia Foucault, Michel 58, 72, 85, 105 Foxe, John 48, 60–1, 84, 125 freemen 50–2 Freud, Sigmund 164–5, 185, 201, 229 Fuller, Thomas 134 Gagarin, Michael 51 gardens, 139 Gardner, Helen 154, 212 gaze 197–211, see also Petrarchanism Gilbert, N. W. 28 God, in language 30–7, 173–4, 225–7 Goldberg, Jonathan 100 Goodman, Cardell 42, 75, 142, 158 Goodwin, George 186 Gordon, Andrew 102 Gorhambury 90 gradatio 146–7 graffiti 102 Grafton, Anthony 120–1 Granger, Thomas 175 Greenham, Richard 22 Gregory, Edmund 160–1 Gryffith, William 175 Guernsey, Julia 166 Guibbory, Achsah 47 Hales, John 116 Hall, Joseph 14, 21 Hall, Thomas 141 Hammond, Gerald 158–9 Hammond, Henry 107 Hanson, Elizabeth 58 Harman, Barbara 101, 166, 180 Harrison, William 172 Harvey, Christopher 42–3, 44, 92, 128, 178, 229–30, 231 Hayward, John 129 Healy, Thomas 218 Herbert, Edward 215 Herbert, George casuistry 24–5 letters 24–5, 63

271 Outlandish Proverbs 90 A Priest to the Temple 28, 92, 110, 135, 140–1, 148, 176–7 Poems: ‘Affliction I’ 47, 70–1, 145, 180 ‘Affliction III’ 74, 100 ‘Affliction IV’ 2, 41, 69, 74 ‘The Altar’ 100–1, 166 ‘Ana(Mary/Army)gram’ 111 ‘Artillerie’ 179, 227 ‘Assurance’ 190 ‘Church-monuments’ 166, 181, 183 ‘The Church Porch’ 75, 127, 145, 230 ‘Church-service’ 185 ‘Clasping of Hands’ 223 ‘The Collar’ 179 ‘Coloss 3.3’ 4, 149 ‘Confession’ 18, 40, 47, 74 ‘Conscience’ 23, 224 ‘The Crosse’ 40, 70–1, 74 ‘Death’ 181 ‘Dedication’ 117–18, 148 ‘Deniall’ 180 ‘Divinitie’ 135 ‘Dooms-day’ 185 ‘Dulnesse’ 157 ‘Easter’ 145 ‘Easter Wings’ 94 ‘Employment I’ 142, 145 ‘Employment II’ 141, 145–6, 179 ‘Ephes. 4: 30’ 214 ‘Faith’ 184 ‘The Flower’ 128, 142 ‘The Forerunners’ 118, 150 ‘Frailtie’ 182 ‘Giddinesse’ 157 ‘The Glance’ 214 ‘Good Friday’ 84, 101–2 ‘Grace’ 145 ‘Gratefulnesse’ 70–1, 76 ‘Grief ’ 217 ‘The H. Communion’ 69 ‘Heaven’ 149, 215–16 ‘The Holdfast’ 75–6, 147–8 ‘Hope’ 104 ‘H. Scriptures I’, 107, 141 ‘H. Scriptures II’, 107, 136, 141 ‘Jesu’ 83, 100, 103

272

Index

Herbert, George (cont.) Poems: (cont.) ‘Jordan I’ 143, 157 ‘Jordan II’ 118–19, 143, 144, 145, 149–51 ‘Judgement’ 113 ‘Justice I’ 74, 148 ‘Justice II’ 40, 45, 69, 74 ‘Life’ 119 ‘Longing 180, 181 ‘Love I’ 119 ‘Love II’ 119, 182–3 ‘Love III’ 214 ‘Love-joy’ 103 ‘Love Unknown’ 30, 39–40, 45, 47 ‘Marie Magdalene’ 214 ‘The Method’ 220–1 ‘Miserie’ 142 ‘Nature’ 69, 83 ‘Obedience’ 151 ‘The Odour’ 113 ‘Paradise’ 148–9 ‘The Pearl’ 75 ‘The Posie’ 118, 145 ‘Praise III’ 75, 216 ‘Prayer I’ 72, 226 ‘Providence’ 31, 119 ‘The Pulley’ 46, 47, 180 ‘The Pursuite’ 180, 181 ‘The Search’ 180 ‘Sepulchre’ 84 ‘Sighes and Grones’ 75 ‘Sinne I’ 30 ‘Sinnes Round’ 150–1 ‘The Sinner’ 84 ‘Sion’ 70, 74 ‘The Starre’ 141–2, 143 ‘The Storm’ 76, 224–5 ‘The Thanksgiving’ 145 ‘To all Angels and Saints’ 29 ‘Temper I’ 5, 41, 45, 74, 76 ‘The World’ 75 ‘Time’ 177–8 ‘To all Angels and Saints’ 120 ‘The Water-Course’ 214 ‘The Windows’ 173 ‘A Wreath’ 119, 143, 145, 146–7 Hermeticism 104 hieroglyphs 112 Hill, Robert 34

Hobbes, Thomas 21, 64 Hodges, Richard 132 Holbein, Hans 89 Holland, Henry 93 Hoole, Charles 124, 132 Horace 94, 208–9 Howell, James 48 Huit, Ephraim 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24 Humphreys, Richard 65–6, 67 Hunt, Arnold 171 hyperbole 35–6, 71, 106 hyphora, see subjectio iconoclasm 32 ingegno 36–7 irresolution 186–7, 188–91 inscription 18–19, 81–95 inventio 121–2, 130–1; see also tropes Jackson, Arthur 109 Jackson, Thomas 31, 168, 209 Jardine, Lisa 126 Job 64–8 Johnson, Samuel 36 Kerrigan, William 33 Kahn, Victoria 129 Knevet, Ralph 41, 82, 83, 184, 215 Knott, John 107 Kristeva, Julia 165, 185 Lacan, Jacques 15–16, 100, 191 Lamb, Jonathan 67 Langbein, John 52 Laurens, Andre du 160 Lewalski, Barbara 2–3, 8, 45, 85, 101 listening 168–77 Lithgow, William 53–4, 55, 96 Little Gidding 90 Llewelyn, Nigel 93 Locke, John 134 locus, see sententia Lodge, Thomas 204–5 Lycurgus 51 Maclean, Ian 227–8 Magdalen, Mary 197–8, 203–4, 205, 207, 210, 212, 214, 217 Malvezzi, Virgilio 109

Index Maravall, J. A. 37 Marbecke, John 110, 132 Markham, Gervase 207–8 Martin, Anthony 218 martyrdom 56, 60–3 Martz, Louis, 3, 8 Marvell, Andrew 42, 46, 48, 79–80, 118, 143, 144, 145, 147, 150 masculinity 210 Mason, Henry 172 Maus, Katharine 221 melancholy 160–5 memory 87–8, 122–3 Meres, Francis 139 metaphysical poetry 9 method 26–7 microscopes 182 Miller, John 164 Milton, John 26, 72, 83–4, 200–1, 225–6 Mirandola, Pico della 228 Montaigne, Michel de 53 Morgan, John 171 Morrissey, Mary 173 Moss, Ann 144

273

Petrarchanism 42–3, 48–9, 94–5, 139, 194–6, 199–200, 210–11 Pinkie House 89 Plutarch 170–1 Ponet, John 69 pornography 49 Praz, Mario 36 prerogative, sovereign 56, 63, 69–70 Preston, John 32 Prideaux, John 32, 106 Prineas, Matthew 102–3 probabilism and probabiliorism 20 prosthesis 100, 191, 229–30, 232 Protestant poetics 2–3, 8, 43 Prudentius 61, 63 Purchas, Samuel 95 purging 70 Puttenham, George 33, 35–6, 49, 81, 94, 193 Quarles, Francis 66–7, 79–80, 207, 210, 231 Quintilian 33, 35, 49, 52, 88, 122, 170

occupatio 34 Oliver, P. M. 153 Ong, Walter J. 87, 139, 145 Origen 18 Ovid 94

rack, see torture Ramus, Petrus 25–8, 32–3, 129–31 reading practices 106–14, 132–8; see also sententia Reid, David 37 resolution 178 revenge tragedy 59–60 Reynolds, Henry 111 Roberts, Hugh Robertson, George 132 Rogers, John 175 rosary 153–4 Rowlands, Samuel 209

pageants 89 pain, see torture Pare, Ambrose 232 parody, sacred 218 Parr, Elnathan 135 Patterson, Annabel 153 Peacham, Henry 32, 87 Perkins, William 1, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23–4, 25, 27, 32, 45, 106, 134, 137, 161, 171, 178, 188, 190–1, 227 Peters Fall 206

Saint Peters Ten Teares 209 Sanderson, Robert 14, 23 Sawday, Jonathan 9–10 Scallon, Joseph 202 Scarry, Elaine 60 Schoenfeldt, Michael 29, 46–7, 75, 167, 211, 224 schola cordis 42–4, 85 Schwartz, Regina 200–1 Scodel, joshua 93–4 self-fashioning, see engine; see also body self-incrimination 54–5, 78

nagging 224–5 Nashe, Thomas 209 Nelson, Brent 224 Norton, Thomas 58, 59 Nuttall, A. D. 75, 117–18

274

Index

selfhood 1–2, 221–3, 227–8 sententia 87–8, 106, 120–31, 144 sermons, see listening Shakespeare, William 24, 94, 194 Sharpe, Kevin 126 Shaw, Samuel 232 Shepard, Thomas 174 Sherfield, Henry 32 Sherman, William 126 Sherwood, Terry 166 Shuger, Debora 61, 196, 210, 211, 224 Sidney, Philip 127, 149–50, 195–6, 200, 217–18 sight, see gaze skin ego 99 slaves 50–2 Slights, Camille Wells 12–13, 29, 222–3, 224 Smith, John 35, 116, 157 Smith, R. 97 Smith, Thomas 63–4 Southwell, Robert 37, 56–7, 59, 186–7, 197, 202–4, 205 Spacks, Patricia 167 Spenser, Edmund 150 spiritual exercises, Jesuit 43, 198 Stachniewski, John 68 Steele, Oliver 45–6 Strier, Richard 45, 47, 214 Stubbes, Philip 97 Stull, William 200 subjectio 39, 49 Summers, Joseph 112, 166 Swift, John 214–15 syllogism 5, 14–15, 23–7 synteresis 18 tattoos 95–9 Taylor, Jeremy 14, 17, 21, 22, 225 tears, see gaze Tesauro, Emanuele 36–7, 88 Todd, Margo 125 Todd, Richard 105, 146 topos, see sententia torture 41–64 Traherne, Thomas 35, 48, 150, 151 Trapp, John 108 Traske, John 174 Trevor, Douglas 162

tropes 1–5, 9–10, 32–3; see also antanaclasis, aposiopesis, catachresis, chiasmus, enigma, eutrepismus, gradatio, hyperbole, occupatio, subjectio Trosse, George 226–7 Tuke, Thomas 97–8 tutiorism 20 Tuve, Rosamund 218 Vallance, Edward 21 Vaughan, Henry Poems: ‘Admission’ 216 ‘Affliction’ 76 ‘The Agreement’ 143, 151 ‘And do they so?’ 180 ‘Anguish’ 76, 217 ‘Ascension-day’ 105 ‘Begging I’ 82–3 ‘The Book’ 106–7 ‘Buriall’ 184 ‘Casimirus, Lib. 4. Ode 15’ 158 ‘The Call’ 216 ‘The Check’ 183 ‘Cheerfulness’ 76 ‘The Day of Judgement’ 76, 78 ‘Death. A Dialogue’ 48, 76 ‘Dedication’ 152 ‘Disorder and Frailty’ 142 ‘Distraction’ 76, 185–6 ‘An Elegy’ 211 ‘The Evening Watch’ 48, 184 ‘The Garland’ 119–20, 128, 143 ‘H. Scriptures’ 19, 113–14 ‘Idle Verse’ 151–2 ‘I walkt the other day’ 104–5 ‘Love-sick’ 146 ‘Man’s Fall and Recovery’ 82 ‘The Match’ 151–2 ‘Midnight’ 181 ‘Misery’ 30, 151, 157, 162, 179 ‘The Morning-watch’ 142 ‘Mount of Olives I’ 119 ‘Mount of Olives II’ 119 ‘Regeneration’ 105 ‘Relapse’ 76 ‘Religion’ 105, 142–3 ‘Repentance’ 220 ‘The Resolve’ 187

Index ‘Resurrection and Immortality’ 48, 76 ‘Retirement’ 183, 184 ‘St. Mary Magdalene’ 217 ‘The Search’ 22, 105, 144, 145 ‘The Showre’ 76, 216 ‘The Stone’ 76–8 ‘The Storm’ 76 ‘Tempest’ 82 ‘Thou that know’st’ 70–1 ‘To Amoret, of the Difference “twixt him and other Lovers” ’ 211 ‘To Mr. M.L. upon his reduction of the Psalms into Method’ 27–8, 207 ‘To his Friend being in love’ 211 ‘To the Holy Bible’ 106–7 ‘Unprofitablnes’ 142, 146 ‘Vanity of Spirit’ 103–4 ‘The World’ 180 ‘The Wreath’ 119, 146 Vendler, Helen 47 Verstegan, Richard 60, 62 Vives, Juan Luis 139

Watt, Tessa 90–1, 104 Washbourne, Thomas 215 Weever, John 93, 183 Wellek, Rene 37 West, Philip 113, 117, 186 Westminster Assembly 13 Westminster Directory 172 White, John 84, 107, 116–17 Whitlocke, Richard 71 Wigglesworth, Michael 175–6 Wilcox, Helen 92, 127–8 Wilkins, John 33, 111–12, 135–6 Wilkinson, Robert 172, 173, 174 Willet, Andrew 106 Wills, David 232 Wilson, Thomas 111, 171 Worship, William, 13, 17, 18, 22, 24, 81 Wotton, Henry 130 wreaths 144–55 writing manuals 91 Younge, Richard 172

Waddington, R. B. 46 Wallington, Nehemiah 176 Walton, Izaak 45, 73, 90, 125

275

Zepper, Wilhelm 173 Zulick, Margaret 173

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