1 Sonnet sequences and social distinction
Why must we worry over so simple a thing as preface-making?1
The individual or collective classification struggles aimed at transforming the categories of perception and appreciation of the social world and, through this, the social world itself, are indeed a forgotten dimension of the class struggle.2
Who so shall duly consider the whole Progresse of mans estate from life to death, shall finde it gentle Reader, to be nothing else but a verse pilgrimage through this earth to another world.3
One of the remarkable features of Drayton's 1619 folio Poems is the persistent voice of Drayton the pedantic literary historian. At the beginning of each section, a note lectures readers about the poem that follows. The preface to The Barrons Warres contains an elaborate discussion (complete with diagrams) of the rhyme-scheme of the stanzas, and Drayton goes on to cite as models “Homers Iliads, and Ulysiads,” “Virgils Æneis, Statius Thebaies, Silius worke of the Carthaginian warre, Illyricus Argonauticks, Vida's Christeies,” and Spenser. At the beginning of the Odes, Drayton launches into a two-page defense of his use of the term “ode” (“yet Criticism it selfe cannot say, that the Name is wrongfully vsurped”), citing as models Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, Petrarch, Chaucer, and “Colin Clout.” Drayton justifies his use of “heroicall” in Englands Heroicall Epistles (from Ovid), of “legend” in The Legend of Robert, Dvke of Normandy, Matilda the Faire, Pierce Gaveston . . . [and] Thomas Cromwell (“so called of the Latine Gerund, Legendum, and signifying . . . things specially worthy to be read, was anciently used in an Ecclesiasticall sense, and restrained therein to things written in Prose, touching the Lives of Saints”). Likewise, he defends his use of an animal in The Owle (“As the Princes of the Greekes and Latines, the first of the Frogs Warre, the latter of a poore Gnat”) and finally of “pastoral” in Pastorals Contayning Eglogues, With the Man in the Moone (from Theocritus, Virgil, and, of course, Spenser again).
Idea, however, receives no such attention. Rather than a learned discussion of models (“from Petrarch, the Pléiade, Sidney, and Spenser”), the only prefatory material to Idea is the sonnet “To the Reader of these Sonnets”:
INTO these Loves, who but for Passion lookes,
At this first sight, here let him lay them by,
And seeke else-where, in turning other Bookes,
Which better may his labour satisfie.
No farre-fetch'd Sigh shall ever wound my Brest,
Love from mine Eye a Teare shall never wring,
Nor in Ah-mees my whyning Sonnets drest,
(A Libertine) fanstastickly I sing:
My Verse is the true image of my Mind,
Ever in motion, still desiring change;
And as thus to Varietie inclin'd,
So in all Humors sportively I range:
My Muse is rightly of the English straine,
That cannot long one Fashion intertaine.4
While the sonnet alludes to “other Bookes” where one seeking “Passion” might be better served, those books are never cataloged. Instead, the speaker tries sharply to distinguish himself from a vague sense of “Ah-mees in whyning Sonnets drest” by emphasizing that “My Muse is rightly of the English straine, / That cannot long one Fashion intertaine.” The sonnet certainly invokes a loose tradition within and against which it is set, but read against the detailed, almost prolix, standard of Drayton's other introductions, “Into these Loves” sounds notably brief and vague. Despite Drayton's evident obsession with delineating the poets and the works upon which his own are based, the exact genre of Idea and the contours of “the English straine” are never made explicit. Indeed, Drayton's gestures toward “other Bookes” might suggest a nervousness about his new and (merely) fashionable poetry. What did Drayton think he was writing? What models does he follow? What genre is Idea?
This book tries to answer these questions by reconsidering, in broad poetic and social perspectives, what works like Idea are and what it meant to write them in Renaissance England. I call these works sonnet sequences, which is not a term Drayton or any other English Renaissance writer uses.5 I employ it, somewhat anachronistically, in order to explain what Drayton was writing, but I also use it to understand why he did not, and could not, write a preface to Idea. Unlike epic and romance, which were well-defined forms with distinct classical precedents that maintained definite social positions in the Renaissance, sonnet sequences were always hazy in both their form and their social implications.6 They were, in Petrarch's famous phrase, “rime sparse,” scattered rhymes, whose coherence is notoriously difficult to pin down. Sonnet sequences have classical influences (Ovid and Catullus most prominently), but there are no classical precedents.7 As Bakhtin remarks about the novel, Renaissance sonnet sequences develop “in the full light of the historical day.” Like novels, the “forces that define” sonnet sequences “as a genre are at work before our very eyes.”8 The absence of a preface to Idea is consequently more than a purely literary or linguistic problem: it is also a social problem. The cultural importance of sonnet sequences from 1560–1619 occurs, I will argue, because they provided writers with a unique form to describe, and to invent, new social positions before there existed an explicit vocabulary to define them. There is no preface to Idea, and no name in the period for the sort of work it is, because the social position that could create such a name is in the process of differentiating itself. My interest in reading these works lies in this emergent sense of social distinction embedded in a tacit sense of form. As a result, I am not interested in defining sonnet sequences in any systematic way.9 Rather than supplying the missing preface to Idea, I want instead to describe the implications of its conspicuous absence. Sonnet sequences articulate an emergent way of making social distinctions for which no explicit terms existed in Renaissance England, and I will call this nascent process class. By the term class I do not mean distinct groups or “classes”; instead, throughout the book class names a unique process of social differentiation. Sequences are not, of course, the only location where such a procedure appears, but, as their massive literary influence suggests, they are a vital one.
The dynamics of this implicit sense of form are tied up in the couplet of Drayton's introductory sonnet: “My Muse is rightly of the English straine, / That cannot long one Fashion intertaine.” “[S]traine” here is a structural, virtually generic, term; it means an order, a class, a lineage – a specific means of organizing the playful changes of “Fashion.” The genre of the poem might reasonably be called, in this sense, “the English straine” itself, because “English straine” names the order into which the sonnet fits (“is rightly of”). But “straine” also means tension and discontinuity. The playful paradox of the sonnet, of course, is that whatever organizing principle operates in the poem is centrally defined by its fashionableness, by its mutability and changeableness – exactly the opposite, in some sense, of an organizing principle. “Straine” means both order and absence of order; it suggests a virtually random, isolated poem as well as a more coherent work and a tradition within which that poem fits, a presence and its deconstruction. If the sonnet is distinguished by its position within “the English straine,” it is also distinguished by its changeableness, by its resistance to being “positioned” at all.
The social implications of this formal argument are apparent in the word “Fashion.” “Fashion” signifies not only a momentary cultural taste of which Drayton's speaker is a dedicated follower. “Fashion” also implies a social rank, a sort or kind. When Hermione protests in The Winter's Tale, for example, that she has been “denied” the “child-bed privilege” “which 'longs / To women of all fashion,” she means a “privilege” belonging to women of all social rank.10 Her complaint is that her social status has not assisted her at all, that she is denied “privileges” enjoyed by all women; moreover, she seems to stress that all women have a fashion, that they do not exist apart from a specific rank. The speaker's claim in Drayton's sonnet that he is “rightly of the English straine / That cannot long one fashion intertaine” consequently indicates that he occupies a specific point in social space. To be of “the English straine” is to exist in a particular “Fashion,” a particular social position. Drayton's speaker is remarkable, of course, because his “Fashion” calls social rank and social order itself into question. “The English straine . . . cannot long one Fashion intertaine”: his strain cannot long maintain a particular social rank or a specific social order. Instead, Drayton's “straine” “intertaine[s]”: it obtains or gets a distinct social position between (“inter”) more permanently maintained social positions or “Fashions.” What is changeable or fashionable in Idea is not only poetic taste but the social distinction produced and reflected by that taste: the fashion of fashion. We might consequently call the performance of Drayton's speaker an instance of what Stephen Greenblatt terms “self-fashioning,” but it is a “Fashion” that calls into question the stability of the very social order into which this poetic self places itself.11 Drayton's speaker both claims a social rank and calls into question the means by which social rank might be understood at all: “Fashion” itself becomes merely “fashionable.”
At the same time, the contradictions tied up in Drayton's fashionable strain themselves reflect broader social processes. Drayton's speaker does not only insert himself into a preexisting order; his desire to do so enacts a structuring process – a social order which orders the speaker. To paraphrase Bourdieu, distinctions distinguish the distinguisher; fashion fashions the fashioner.12 Drayton's speaker claims to be “rightly of the English straine” because “the English straine” has already, in a sense, created his desire to be rightly of it. Such an argument need not mean that Drayton's speaker is merely contained within a larger social formation, helplessly interpellated by the ideological apparatus of “the English straine” or a mere effect of power, two by now notorious critical turns.13 Instead, the subtle breakdown in social order apparent in Drayton's strain, its ability to “intertaine” Fashion, is also a manifestation of a broader shift in social categories, a social struggle over how to classify and organize social space14 What is “the social order” in this sonnet? What is “the English straine” that inscribes itself through the speaker's desire?15 The paradox of the sonnet is a social position which emerges out of a change in social positioning, that emerges out of social incommensurability. The work actively participates in the struggle to conceptualize, and to produce, poetic and social order in early seventeenth-century England. This process of production signals, in Christopher Pye's words, “that any cultural phenomenon exists always in relation to a necessarily forced and unstable totalization of the social domain as such.”16 Drayton's “English straine” is a struggle over what the social order is and should be.17
The 1619 Idea stands at the end of a moment in which sonnet sequences maintained a remarkable cultural influence. Sonnet sequences were popular in England for about thirty years, from the 1580s to the 1610s. Depending on how one counts, there were about twenty written, but their influence was felt everywhere, ranging from parody (Donne insisted that only a fool couldn't write a sonnet; Jonson went to some length to explain why he wrote “not of love”) to hegemonic dominance (Queen Elizabeth's tendency to use the language of sonnets to conduct foreign policy).18 Nevertheless, the primary source of the influence of sonnet sequences, I will argue, is their participation in social struggle, their conceptual discontinuity. I want to describe the dynamics of Drayton's “straine” without stabilizing it to the point where it becomes definitive and systematic because it is the social and poetic instability of sequences which made them culturally influential. My operating assumption is that sonnet sequences throughout the period tend to articulate a series of social and linguistic contradictions. On the one hand, these works generally imagine an idealized social order – Lok's Calvinist God, Sidney's nobility, Spenser's Irish landlord, Shakespeare's young man. This idealized order inscribes itself in the desires of the speakers in the sequences; what they desire is, in a general sense, this ideal order. On the other hand, the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus used to reinforce that order tends paradoxically to undermine it. In an effort to be “rightly of” a particular social order, sonnet speakers instead articulate a new form of social distinction. When Shakespeare's speaker uses a distinct economic vocabulary to praise the young man (“increase,” the last word of the first line of the first sonnet, means among other things financial interest), that vocabulary itself becomes associated with the dark lady – the conceptual antithesis of the young man. The distinction the work tries to confer on the young man threatens to collapse as a result of the very vocabulary used to create that distinction. Likewise, when Spenser's speaker in the Amoretti fantasizes about becoming a quasi-feudal landlord, that social imaginary is undermined when he describes both his land and his lady as capital – a new form of property which tends to replace “lords” of land with “owners” of land. Sonnet sequences articulate new forms of social authority, consequently, but they do so without the cooperation, or possibly even the awareness, of their speakers.19
The forms of social distinction that emerge in these sequences are consequently an unintended consequence of their internally contradicted desires. As Joel Fineman argues in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye, the presence of the dark lady in Shakespeare's Sonnets, as one who “is both fair and foul at once,” “situate[s] the poetics of ideal visionary presence in a retrospective past, marking it as something which exists ‘now’ only as an imaginary ideal after which the poet lusts . . . Representation carries with it its regretting difference from that which it presents, provoking a desire for that which, as representation, it necessarily absents.”20 While Fineman sees this “perjur'd eye” as an “invention” of Shakespeare's Sonnets, I see this internally contradicted desire as a general feature of all sonnet sequences in the period. More importantly, I see this desire as a social desire, a yearning for an idealized social order that, in turn, articulates the social position of the speaker. Rather than Fineman's term “poetic subjectivity,” an abstraction which tends to obscure the social specificity of desire under the rule of what Fineman calls the “languageness of language,” we should instead speak of social distinction. Bourdieu's phrase maintains the emphasis on the “regretting difference” of Fineman's subject, but it addresses itself to the social position of such utterance, what Marx (whom Fineman curiously never mentions) might call the real conditions of such difference. The social struggle in these sequences lies in the (preposterously failing) efforts of the speakers to impose one system of classification – a Calvinist God, a feudal lord – by utilizing a set of terms which introduces a different system of classification – say, mercantilism. This struggle, in and of itself, demarcates the social positions of these sonnet speakers, and this process is what Drayton calls “the English straine,” an emergent form of social distinction.
These are not the usual questions posed about sonnet sequences. Indeed, for well over a hundred years, the name of the genre of Idea, and the models that Drayton follows, have seemed pretty obvious. In what has become an orthodox literary history, Idea is ordinarily seen as a work following the model of Petrarch's Rime Sparse and subsequent continental poets that is composed out of conventional, often hyperbolic language expressing the complaint of a male lover directed at a cruel yet remote mistress.21 In this now traditional account, Drayton's Idea sits (a bit belatedly) at the end of the great moment of Petrarchism in England, the “vogue for sonneteering.” This vogue occurred in the 1590s in the wake of the publication of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella in 1591, and it drew upon and expressed many of the core ideas of the cult of Queen Elizabeth. Sonnet sequences were popular and culturally significant, the argument runs, because a prominent, learned noble had written one and because they struck a chord with Elizabeth's political penchant for depicting herself as a love object. The association with the prestige of humanist continental learning and the power of the English court likewise encouraged the influence of these poems on other genres, readily apparent in works from Romeo and Juliet to Book III of The Faerie Queene. Something like this definition has held since about the mid-nineteenth century. Since the 1960s, this account has been partially amended, so that now the conventional language of Petrarchism is generally understood as also facilitating more political concerns, especially the ideological construction of the Elizabethan court, Tudor absolutism, Renaissance patriarchy, and nascent imperialism. Over the last twenty-five years, the idea that Renaissance sonnet sequences are not simply about love but also about politics broadly conceived has itself become nearly as entrenched as the concept of their “conventional” language.22
There have always been well-known difficulties with these explanations, but recent scholarship has begun to push them to the breaking point. First, if the vogue for sonnets was closely tied to the cult of Elizabeth, how come this vogue did not occur until twenty-five years after she came to power? Tying sonnets to the queen likewise assumes a cultural centrality to the court that much recent historical work has substantially called into question.23 Steven May has shown that very few Elizabethan poets could count as “courtiers,” and even fewer writers of sonnet sequences could.24 If court remained a crucial influence upon any poet, it was certainly not the only one. Second, if Petrarchism was a highly conventional language, why are the works under that name often so different? As William Kennedy has shown, there were many “Petrarchs” in Renaissance Europe “authorizing” a wide variety of political, religious, and gender configurations; out of the many commentaries on the Rime Sparse “emerges a Petrarch who could be anything and everything to all readers.”25 Suggesting that English sonneteers are somehow “late” on the Renaissance literary scene, that they stand at the end of an exhausted epideictic tradition, posits a homogeneity to Petrarchism that exists only in theory, a true path through Petrarchism that no one ever actually took. It assumes that Petrarchism is, in Roland Greene's critique, “one thing,” a literary form with a clear set of ideological implications.26 Indeed, the critical compulsion to trace the origins of sequences to the unified corpus of Petrarch perhaps betrays a critical suspicion that these works might be thoroughly unconventional and that they are continually on the verge of deconstructing themselves. Third, if Petrarchism was so central to the formation of Renaissance patriarchy, why is the use of gender in these works so notoriously slippery – from conspicuously female authors, to dominating queens, to effeminate, if not emasculated, male speakers? As Diana Henderson argues, the gender dynamics of Petrarchism in the period do not play out an “injustice” so much as they dramatize a number of competing interests. Lynn Enterline similarly emphasizes that the “narrow focus on the Petrarchan blason” inaugurated by the work of Nancy Vickers has produced “a too monolithic view of subjectivity and masculinity (or of gender more generally) and a too pessimistic view of the regulatory force of [Petrarch's] rhetorical practice.”27 Such criticism has consequently begun to undermine the concept of an eternal “masculine domination” in these works by examining the “historical mechanisms and institutions” which abstract specific gender relations from their historical moment in order to make these relations appear universal.28
In light of such revisions, it is no longer critically viable simply to label Idea and other sonnet sequences as “Petrarchan” and then proceed to catalogue the various ideologies purportedly expressed by a homogenous tradition. As I argue in chapter two, the use of “conventions” to read Renaissance sonnet sequences was effectively invented in the nineteenth century and actually reiterates nineteenth-century conceptions of class. I do not at all mean to imply, of course, that a tradition of sonneteering did not exist in the Renaissance or that there were no “Petrarchan tropes”: these things obviously existed. Drayton and the other writers I study are clearly operating within well-defined, though largely tacit, parameters, and it is impossible that any contemporary reader would pick up the 1619 folio, turn to Idea, and have no idea what it was. The term “sonnet” itself, though flexible, tended to indicate a poem of a particular length with a particular rhyme scheme (though, as we will see, the sharp differentiation of rhyme scheme according to author and nationality – especially Italian versus English, Petrarch versus Shakespeare – is also largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon). Throughout, I am interested in precisely this pervasive yet tacit understanding of the form. At the same time, however, the conspicuous lack of a preface for Idea is inescapable in such an otherwise scholarly volume; likewise, the mutability of the term “sonnet” to mean anything from a strictly defined poetic form to any love poem at all reiterates the opaque unity of these works. As Greene argues, lyric was “a widely adaptable literary technology in the early modern period, offering an outlet to any number of formed views and inchoate reactions”29 putting sonnets into a broader work, a sequence of sonnets, tends in the period to exacerbate this adaptability, not resolve it into a coherent, systemic, and ideologically stable meaning. Filling in the blank at the start of Idea with a static conception of “Petrarchism” consequently misses everything that is dynamic about Drayton's work and sequences in general: Drayton both knows perfectly well what he is writing, and he has no name for it – that is, at some level he does not know what he is writing even though he has a feel for how it ought to look. Like other sonneteers, Drayton participates in a series of social contradictions of which he is only partially aware but to which he intuitively responds. Rather than a homogeneous poetic tradition, sonnet sequences mediate between a wide range of cultural events: English Calvinism (Lok), colonial activity in Ireland (Spenser), mercantilism and the new language of economics (Shakespeare), the book trade and absolutism (Drayton), and the reinvention of a masculine, aristocratic imaginary (Sidney). Sonnet sequences are intimately connected to all these issues (and many others as well, of course) because they provide a form within which writers could begin to describe the implications of these events and discourses, a vocabulary with which a new sort of social distinction, class, could in part be invented. The distance between a devout Calvinist like Anne Lok and a public playwright like William Shakespeare is consequently not so great as it might initially seem.30 What ties them together are not simply the technical similarities of their works (fourteen-line poems gathered together) but the broader cultural implications of the incommensurability of the form itself: the social distinction that begins to emerge in poetic form.
There is, of course, a long critical tradition of formal analysis of these works, and it has tended to center on the complex relation between “sonnet” and “sequence,” between the desires and language of particular sonnets and the broader organizations within which those desires exist. The terms usually deployed to describe this problem are “lyric” and “narrative,” by which critics have tended to mean either a sense of a sonnet sequence as an internally directed, lyric performance or a sense of it as an externally directly mimesis, usually an attempt to represent a performance or character.31 Conceived in a lyric mode, for example, Drayton's “English straine” is an isolated, ephemeral moment, resisting, if not transcending, any broader organizing principle. Here is the fragility, the temporal effervescence, the inwardness, that critics since the Romantics have celebrated as lyric's most important defining feature.32 On the other hand, conceived as a narrative, Drayton's sonnet is an introduction to a more coherent story, the tale of his passion and his love, a familiar (the usual term is “conventional”) complaint that firmly establishes the position of the sonnet in a narrative trajectory and (usually) a social hierarchy. Whatever lyric brilliance flashes forth is contained in the broader conceptual organization of the story of the speaker's woe.33
At a phenomenological level, this tension probably always exists in any lyric utterance. I depend on this formal tradition in my account of sequences, and in particular on those readers (Mazzota, Vickers, Freccero, Greene) who have stressed the dialectical relation between lyric and narrative in these works. But I also build on this tradition by stressing the historical specificity of these formal relations: while a phenomenological reading can always identify these formal structures, what those structures signal socially changes dramatically over time. Writing in 1880 to D. G. Rossetti, T. H. Hall Caine makes clear that he imagines sonnets and sequences as very different things. He remarks about Shakespeare's Sonnets that “although every fully authenticated sonnet has something about [it] of the charm peculiar to Shakespeare whenever the personality of the creator is seen behind the veil of the creation, I doubt if there are not very many poor things in the series when judged of as sonnets, not as parts of a poem.”34 In contrast, for Drayton, and for all English Renaissance sonneteers, such distinctions remain much less clear. Rather than resolving this formal tension in favor of lyric or narrative, for these writers the relation between “sonnet” and “sequence,” between lyric and narrative, remains, in the end, undecidable. If such aporia is, as Derrida demonstrates, a necessary effect of language, the focus upon that undecidability, whether in Derridean criticism or Renaissance sonnet sequences, is historically specific. As Bourdieu argues about Derrida's celebrated reading of Kant, the emphasis on incommensurability manifests a specific social position (marking, in Derrida's work, not the end of philosophy but the rebirth of the philosopher).35 What then are the social effects of Renaissance writers such as Drayton adopting a form and highlighting its undecidability, a form that conspicuously fails to enforce a transcendent or metaphysical grounding of meaning, a work to which one cannot write a preface? Or, to put the matter slightly differently, why would a form that stresses the unrequitedness of desire and the undecidability of its own generic contours become popular?