PSALM CULTURE AND EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature examines the powerful influence of the biblical Psalms on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. It explores the imaginative, beautiful, ingenious and sometimes ludicrous and improbable ways in which the Psalms were “translated” from ancient Israel to Renaissance and Reformation England. No biblical book was more often or more diversely translated than the Psalms during the period. In church psalters, sophisticated metrical paraphrases, poetic adaptations, meditations, sermons, commentaries, and through biblical allusions in secular poems, plays, and prose fiction, English men and women interpreted the Psalms, refashioning them according to their own personal, religious, political, or aesthetic agendas. The book focuses on literature from major writers like Shakespeare and Milton to less prominent ones like George Gascoigne, Mary Sidney Herbert, and George Wither, but it also explores the adaptations of the Psalms in musical settings, emblems, works of theology and political polemic.

HANNIBAL HAMLIN is Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University, Mansfield. He has published articles on the Psalms and early modern English literature in Renaissance Quarterly, Spenser Studies, and The Yale University Library Gazette. He has also published an edition of and commentary on the first correspondence between Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound in The Yale Review and an article on biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same: New Essays on Poetry and Poetics, Renaissance to Modern edited by Jennifer Lewin (2002).

PSALM CULTURE AND EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

HANNIBAL HAMLIN

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011”4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© Hannibal Hamlin 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Adobe Garamond 11/12.5 pt. System LATEX 2_e [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Hamlin, Hannibal.
Psalm culture and early modern English literature / Hannibal Hamlin.
p. cm.
ISBN 0 521 83270 5
1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism.&quad;2. Christianity and
literature – England – History – 16th century. 3. Christianity and literature – England – History –
17th century. 4. Bible. O. T. Psalms ” Paraphrases, English – History and criticism. 5. Bible. O. T.
Psalms – Criticism, interpretation, etc. – History – 16th century. 6. Bible. O. T. Psalms – Criticism,
interpretation, etc. – History – 17th century. 7. Religion and literature – History – 16th century.
8. Religion and literature – History – 17th century. 9. Bible. O.T. Psalms – In literature. I. Title.
PR428.C48H36 2004 820.9' 382232 – dc21 2003055172

ISBN 0 521 83270 5 hardback

To Cori

Contents

Figures

Acknowledgments

Portions of this work have appeared in articles in scholarly journals. Part of chapter 1 appeared as “‘Very mete to be used of all sortes of people’: The Remarkable Popularity of the ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalter,” in The Yale University Library Gazette 75:1”2 (October, 2000). Versions of chapters 5 and 7 appeared as “Another Version of Pastoral: English Renaissance Translations of Psalm 23,” in Spenser Studies 16 (New York, 2002), 167”96, and “Psalm Culture in the English Renaissance: Readings of Psalm 137 by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Others,” in Renaissance Quarterly 55:1 (Spring, 2002), 224”57. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to republish this material.

This book is the product of a number of years of work, and my scholarly and personal debts are too many to acknowledge in full. For crucial support and counsel at Yale, I thank my dissertation advisor John Hollander, as well as Lawrence Manley, Annabel Patterson, Thomas Greene, John Rogers, Leslie Brisman, and David Quint. My interest in biblical allusion and English poetry began much earlier at the University of Toronto while I was studying with Eleanor Cook, to whom I shall always be indebted. For helpful comments on various parts of this study, some presented at conferences, I want also to thank Anne Lake Prescott, Margaret Hannay, Paula Loscocco, and Thomas Herron. I am also grateful to my readers at Renaissance Quarterly, Diane Kelsey McColley, P. G. Stanwood, and Paul F. Grendler, who offered a number of useful suggestions on my study of Psalm 137. My colleagues at The Ohio State University, especially Barbara McGovern, John King, and Christopher Highley, have been unfailingly supportive. I have benefited from the resources of a number of libraries, and I would like to thank the staffs of the Yale Libraries, especially the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Stephen Parks in particular), the New York Public Library, and the British Library. At Cambridge University Press, my anonymous readers provided some helpful and detailed advice, and Victoria Cooper has been all that one could wish in an editor. I am also indebted to the meticulous and patient labor of my copy-editor, Margaret Deith. Turning to more personal debts, I am grateful for the interest my parents-in-law, Abner and Shirley Martin, have shown in my work on the Psalms. Their enthusiasm has led to what is almost certainly the first reading of the countess of Pembroke’s psalms in a Canadian Mennonite church. My own parents, Cyrus Hamlin and Rosamond Greeley Hamlin, have encouraged my work at every stage, and my father has been a shaping influence on my development as a teacher and scholar. My wife, Cori Martin, deserves all the gratitude customarily expressed to a spouse in the sub-genre of “acknowledgments,” but she has also been my most influential editor and critic, and the source, direct or indirect, of more of my ideas than I can remember. Only she knows how much of this book is really hers.

Note on the Text

Unless otherwise noted, biblical citations are from the King James Version (KJV). Citations from the psalm translations of the English Bibles (Coverdale, the Great Bible, Geneva, Bishops’, King James) are from The Hexaplar Psalter, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1911). Wherever possible, the original spelling of quoted material has been maintained, even though this results in the occasional risk of confusion (“the” for “thee,” for instance). Contractions, however, have been expanded, the archaic use of u/v, i/j, and long s modernized, and elaborate variations in font size and character have been normalized. To avoid adding further complications to an already substantial body of citations, page numbers have been omitted when psalms are quoted from whole psalters, on the principle that psalm numbers provide sufficient reference. Page numbers have been supplied for all selected psalms included in larger volumes.