The Columbia History of British Poetry (47 page)

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry

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ine, Rosalind, expose the banality of such sentiments, even as they acknowledge their truth and inevitability.

By altering the dramatic context, Shakespeare further complicates the significance of the lyric verse in his plays. The garden world of Belmont in
The Merchant of Venice
resembles the idyllic retreats of romantic comedy, and here too music features prominently. Nevertheless, the song preceding Bassanio's symbolic marriage choice, "Tell me where is Fancy bred" (3.2.6572), inspires caution and calculation in this somewhat callow suitor, and Portia's description of herself as "the sum of something" blurs the distinctions between love and commerce that the play supposedly affirms.

In the even more harshly cynical "problem play"
Troilus and Cressida
, the double entendres and brittle cruelty of a seemingly light-hearted love lyric are accentuated by the context. The lewd go-between Pandarus sings of "love, love, nothing but love" to Helen and Paris, and his mirth at the injuries caused by "love's bow"whose "shaft confounds not that it wounds, / But tickles still the sore "dissolves at the song's conclusion into almost orgasmic gasps of laughter (3.1.116125).

With
Hamlet
the idyllic innocence of pastoral and romantic ballads is utterly shattered. In a cryptic pastiche of his own Hamlet alludes to "the strucken deer" and calls his friend Horatio, Damonbut the golden world suggested by the name of a faithful shepherd has been irretrievably "dismantled" by his uncle (3.2.265278). The ballad lyricssuch as "How should I your true love know" (4.5.23) and "For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy" (4.5.184)sung by Ophelia with their conventional themes of love and death and fidelity and betrayal are made even more painful by her suicidal grief and madness.

The incongruous bawdiness of Ophelia's song of St. Valentine's Day, in which a maid courts a man, who then deflowers and abandons her, concludes on a note of helpless pathos and reproach:


Young men will do't if they come to't By Cock, they are to blame. Quoth she, "Before you tumbled me, You promis'd me to wed . . ." "So would I a done, by yonder sun, And thou hadst not come to my bed." (4.5.60-66)

Ophelia's deranged singing "takes off the rose," as Hamlet says in another context, "from the fair forehead of an innocent love"

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(3.4.4344), while giving tragic expression to impulses which this play cannot accommodate.

In Shakespeare's late romances lyric song can express both innocence and experience as well as spontaneity and sophistication. The shift from the paranoia and misery of the first part of
The Winter's Tale
is marked by the entry of Autolycus singing, and the ballads hawked by this trickster and vagabond resemble him in their combination of ribaldry, cunning, and joie de vivre. "When daffodils begin to peer" celebrates spring as "the sweet o' the year"a season beloved by Autolycus not only because "the red blood reigns in the winter's pale," but also because he can snatch the "white sheet bleaching on the hedge" while he and his ''doxy" lie "tumbling in the hay" (4.3.112).

Perdita reigns as the queen of the sheep-shearing festival, distributing flowers and leading a dance of shepherds and shepherdesses, and afterwards one of Autolycus's admirers enthusiastically announces his arrival at the feast: "He has the prettiest love-songs for maids, so without bawdry (which is strange); with such delicate burdens of dildoes and fadings, jump her and thump her" (4.4.194197). The terms repeated pointedly convey the bawdy meanings the rustic misses, and the scene's subsequent declarations of love and desire provoke a renewed outburst of paternal rage and repression, but this time it proves harmless. The natural appetites and vitality celebrated in the ballads are finally accommodated within the play through marriage and reunion.

Shakespeare's uses lyric verse in his plays as he does in his sonnetsto explore ambiguities inherent in the mode itself. Despite its apparent simplicity, the lyric is immensely sophisticated and flexible in its recognition of complexity, and this makes it an excellent counterpoint to a vast array of dramatic actions. The fools in both
Twelfth Night
and
King Lear
sing songs in which "the rain it raineth every day." Amiens in
As You Like It
agrees with Lear that human ingratitude is unkinder than bad weather. The songs in these plays provide a perspective on the joys and sorrows of all dramatic genres and occasions, one that is both movingly sympathetic and strikingly balanced.

The lyric tradition does not end with Shakespeare or Donne. While the enthusiasm for sonnet sequences certainly diminishes, the lyric continues to be a larger force in English poetry. In the seventeenth century it takes an increasingly religious directionin the verses of Donne, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and George Herbert. Herbert rejects the "fictions" and "false hair" of Petrarchan love poetry ("Jordan

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I") in order to redeem the lyric from the disillusion and solipsistic impasse he finds inevitable in profane love, but this shift from praising the lady to praising God is hardly a departure from earlier trends in the sixteenth-century lyric.

The Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell wrote
St. Peter's Complaint
(1595) as an antidote to the languid eroticism of Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis
, employing the standard paradoxes and sensuous conceits of Petrarchan verse to turn his readers away from desire. In "Look Home" Southwell says that "Man's mind a mirror is of heavenly sights, / A brief wherein all marvels summed lie," and his belief in human sufficiency and perspicacity is sustained by his belief in God. Claims for the mind's microcosmic autonomy are an article of faith and essential feature of lyric poetryaffirmed most famously in Sir Edward Dyer's "My mind to me a kingdom is" and reaffirmed in Andrew Marvell's "The Garden."

Poets who wrote philosophic and religious lyrics in the sixteenth century not only set a direction for those who followed, but they also reclaimed the possibility of a wholesome subjectivity, intellectual detachment, and virtue in love. This can be seen in three writers connected to Sir Philip Sidneytwo writing near the end of the sixteenth century and the other in the first two decades of the seventeenth. Sir Fulke Greville was Sidney's closest friend and he devoted much of his life to preserving Sidney's memory, sharing responsibility with his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, for the authorized publication of the dead poet's works, and subsequently writing a biography of Sir Philip.

Greville also wrote a collection of sonnets entitled
Caelica
, never published in his lifetime. Although they have their origin in the sonnet vogue inspired by
Astrophil and Stella
, they strike out in a very different direction, praising a variety of somewhat shadowy mistresses, including Diana, Myra, and Caelicathe first apparently a traditional reference to Elizabeth. Greville's verse lacks the seductive urgency and purpose of Sidney's sonnets, and he announces at the start that "I have vowed in strangest fashion, / To love, and never seek compassion" (sonnet 4).

Initially, these various mistresses serve to embody unchanging virtue beyond the reach of world, but by the end of the sequence, they have dropped from sight. The fiction of courtship is abandoned, and the poems simply become intensely introspective reflections on human weakness, the vanity of the world, and death and the hope of redemp-

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tion (sonnets 97102), as well as occasional meditations on political corruption (sonnets 91, 95, 106108). Greville demonstrates and develops the lyric's implicit capacity for contemplation. His profound
contemptus mundi
carries a conviction not always found in other poets, while displaying the lyric's ability to maintain one's distance from worldly concerns.

Mary Sidney, Sir Philip's sister and the Countess of Pembroke, presided over a select literary coterie at her Wilton estate and took responsibility for her brother's literary legacy. Although an intelligent and authoritative figure, she assumed in her own writing the somewhat subordinate role considered appropriate for women, overseeing editions of her brother's work and translating pious and edifying literature. Nevertheless, her translations display not only her talents as a lyric poet in her own right, but they also manage to establish a new independent direction. In continuing the translation of the Psalms she had begun with her brother, she embraced the sacred poetry Sidney praised but steered away from in the
Defence
claiming that only those who had "no law but wit" were "right poets." The words of her translations thus acquire a truth and authority lacking in his.

Mary Sidney also translated Petrarch's
Trionfo della Morte
("Triumph of Death"), which can be seen as Petrarch's palinodein it the chaste Laura finally succeeds in winning her lover over to virtue and putting an end to the desire and vacillation of the
Rime Sparse
. In doing so, Sidney points to a resolution of the moral and emotional dilemmas besetting the lyrics of her brother and all his imitators. Moreoveras Margaret Hannay shows in
Philip's Phoenix
, a study of Mary SidneyLaura is praised in this poem for her eloquence and wisdom as well as for her chastity and thus a previously passive mistress acquires greater authority and a more active role.

This resolution was taken up and pursued further by her niece, Mary Wroth, the daughter of Sir Robert Sidney and another talented woman of letters. Wroth wrote a sonnet sequence,
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
, as well as a prose romance resembling her uncle's
Arcadia
, and both works were published together in 1621. She paid sorely for her violation of literary and sexual decorum:one of her enemies attacked her as a hermaphrodite and urged her to "leave idle bookes alone / For wise and worthyer women have writte none." Her work was suspected of being a slanderous roman à clef, but the deeper scandal derived from a woman writer publishing her passions.

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Indeed, Wroth seems determined to make a spectacle of herselfalthough she laments that "I should nott have bin made this stage of woe / Where sad disasters have theyr open show"for she still demands that her audience "looke on mee; I ame to thes adrest / I, ame the soule that feeles the greatest smart" (sonnet 48). Her verse constitutes a stirring demonstration of her constancy in love and the redemptive power of suffering. By making her pain into a show of virtue, Wroth's lyric protagonist resembles both Pamela and Philoclea, the heroines of her uncle's sixteenth-century romance, and Pamela and Clarissa, the heroines in Samuel Richardson's eighteenth-century novels. Whether such heroism challenges or reinforces female stereotypes remains a serious question.

Nevertheless, this descendant of the Sidneys clearly made the most of her literary legacy, adapting the love lyric to a woman's voice. Like other writers before and since, Wroth realized the potential for introspective discovery inherent in the lyric, declaring in "A Crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love" (sonnet 82) that "Itt doth inrich the witts, and make you see / That in your self, which you knew nott before."

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