Misogyny in Heywood’s The Four PP

 

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of the text.

 

     Though it is never produced (apart from a few times in academic settings), Thomas Heywood’s comic interlude The Four PP (ca. 1530) retains some comic appeal yet today.  Its lively tetrameter couplets move briskly along and a bit of earthy humor revives the reader (or viewer) whose interest might be flagging.  In spite of this apparent popular appeal, Heywood was a courtier and the piece was most likely performed for Henry VIII.  All of its characters, the four Ps of the title (normally pronounced "four pees"– a palmer, a pardoner, a peddler, and a “pothecary” (medical practitioner) – are satirized as professionals who all excel in lying.

     Each of these groups has, of course, long been subject to suspicion and wit.   Heywood’s reservations about the physicians of his day recalls Montaigne’s remark that “I see no kinde of men so soone sicke, nor so late cured, as those who are under the jurisdiction of Physicke” (Bk. II, 37, “Of the resemblance betweene children and fathers”).   This attitude is surely understandable given the state of science during the Renaissance and indeed persists in many  people’s distrust of conventional medical treatments even today.  Before the development of experimental science and the professionalization of the practice of medicine, a great many medical practitioners were out-and-out charlatans, and, for good reason, even the university men enjoyed little confidence from their patients.

     Doubting the spiritual benefits of pardons, relics, and pilgrimages, all practices sanctioned and encouraged by the church, might seem to make Heywood seem a partisan of the Reformation, did we not know that he clung to the Roman church when it became disadvantageous, even dangerous, to do so.  His interlude was written very close to the times that religious controversies led to the Schism of 1531 and Henry VIII’s foundation of the Church of England a few years later, so the issues were certainly part of public discourse, but his criticism of Catholic practices surely follows in the tradition of fundamentally orthodox reformers such as Chaucer, Dante, and Rabelais rather than of schismatics. 

     The peddler, asked to judge among the other three, notes that he himself is a skilled liar (one might think of the popular image of a used car salesman) and thereby something of an expert on deceit, so he asks the others to compete to see who might be judged the greatest liar.  Contemporaries accustomed to today’s onslaught of advertising claims will need no convincing that those in the retail trade are often accomplished at misrepresentation. 

      Yet another unrelated theme runs alongside the ridicule of religion and science.  The palmer, the pardoner, the peddler, and the apothecary are all mendacious, but they are also all  misogynists.  This commonality is unsurprising as denigrating women and limiting their power is surely the most widespread and enduring form of prejudice.  Since the Bronze Age, at any rate, women have been subordinated socially and, like other targets of discrimination, assigned characteristics that justify their oppression.  From Semonides in archaic Greece through Tertullian to Jean de Meun to Donne’s inability to imagine a woman both “true, and fair” and consistently in the centuries since, women have been subject to sexist slanders. 

     The first sustained reference to women in The Four PP occurs in the peddler’s introduction of himself as he lists his wares just as he would have done when approaching prospective customers.  His inventory is heavily slanted toward “women’ triflings” (219) such as “gloves, pins,combs . . . “

 

Pomanders, hooks, and laces knotted,

Brooches, rings, and all manner beads,

Lace, round and flat, for women’s heads,

Needles, thread, thimbles, shears, and all such knacks

                                                          (236-239)

 

The pardoner then refers to another female trait that remains today the theme of jocular criticism, the time spent in toilette and dressing.  This leads the apothecary to dilate on women’s “trimming and pinning up their gear” (266).  He notes that they have particular difficulty “fiddling with the tail-pin” (267), an anticipation of the apothecary’s ribald story, soon to come.  The peddler, anxious to make his pitch, says, “let women’s matters pass” (279), but the theme soon returns. 

     As the men set to arguing about who should have mastery, the peddler suggests that since “all three can lie as well/ As can the falsest devil in hell” (442-443), their leader should be the one who can tell the single biggest lie.  The peddler is competent to judge such a competition as he boasts “some skill” (446) in fraud.

     Each contestant then offers a sample of his self-praise, including a certain amount of scatological humor, first about the musty relics; one is a “buttock-bone of Pentecost” (521) while another “relic hath beshitten the roast” (523).  This vein intensifies and focuses on the female body in the apothecary’s tall tale about inserting an anal plug which the female patient expels with such force that it razes a castle ten miles away (710-767). 

     Not to be outdone, the pardoner responds with a story of his fetching a woman out of hell (776-976) to the great relief of the devils to whom she had been a constant trial.  They ask the pardoner to divert other such impossible creatures from their realm and “roar” with joy at her departure (964).  Women are such monsters, it seems, that even devils cannot bear their company. 

     After these flights of fancy, the palmer delivers the interlude’s punch line.  In the vast number of women whom he has encountered he has never, he maintains, met a single one “out of patience” (1004).  The four instantly agree that this is surely the greatest lie possible.  All find then that they are in complete agreement, and the losers are released from “their bond” (1134) in an act of masculine solidarity.

     Having reinforced received opinion in this way, the play turns to a pious conclusion (not sufficiently pious, however, to prevent some play with the word “virtue” [1182-1190]), ending in their embrace of “the Church Universal.” (1236)  Male chauvinism seems the vehicle for their unanimity even more than Jesus Christ.  Like locker-room vulgarity, attacks on women provide reassurance of male power as well as timeless humor, enjoyed by Henry VIII as well as by commoners.  The “war of the sexes” is in some ways perennial, but, because of the male domination of education and literature, only one side of the propaganda is preserved.   

 

 

The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers

  

This essay is an attempt to be more popular and journalistic than usual.  I shall be curious to see what readership the following piece attracts. I am contemplating a similar article on the scandals of the Romantic poets.

  

     Were an Elizabethan or Jacobean sonneteer to appear in a cartoon strip, he would probably be depicted as a mincing aesthete, a sort of Percy Dovetonsils in doublet and breeches, yet anyone with the sketchiest knowledge of history would know that poetry was associated with powerful men in those days.   The sonnet form in particular was associated with courtiers who were, of course, warriors as well, suffering the chances of combat, including becoming prisoners of war.  In addition a significant percentage of prominent poets in Elizabeth’s time were imprisoned at home by their own queen, always on the lookout for signs of opposition to her will, while others fell afoul of the ordinary criminal laws.  The life expectancy of members of the ruling class was limited by the fact that under an absolute monarchy in which the will of the ruler is law, a court will inevitably be filled with back-biting and tale-telling among ambitious aristocrats quite willing to sacrifice their rivals while seeking to advance their own prospects.

     The link between high nobility and the arts was emphasized in Castiglione’s The Courtier, published in English translation by Thomas Hoby in 1561, which emphasized that the best courtier, the noblest aristocrat, must cultivate excellence of all sorts, not only athletic and martial abilities, but aesthetic skills as well, including the practice of music, painting, and poetry.  Verbal skills, honed by literary study, Castiglione argues, allow the courtier to be at once more beautiful and more persuasive.    

     Since his own time, Sir Philip Sidney has been considered the embodiment of Castiglione’s ideal.  Strikingly handsome, valorous in war and accomplished in sports, quick and clever in conversation yet discerning in judgement, he was always the faithful servant of the queen.  The center of his career was his work as parliamentarian, soldier, ambassador, and counsellor to Elizabeth.  His masterful sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella was not published until five years after his death and then only because faulty pirated editions were already circulating. 

     Dead before his thirty-second birthday from a wound received at the Battle of Zutphen, his character inspired legends immediately.  He was said to have removed the thigh armor that could have prevented his mortal injury when he noticed that one of the men under his command had incomplete armor.  As he lay bleeding, water was brought which he was said to have declined, offering it to a comrade with the words "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."

     Despite his conformity to his culture’s standards, even Sidney might have suffered an even earlier end due to his bold advocacy in a time of customs that seem today savage.  Though at the age of eighteen he was a member of the embassy sent to seek to arrange Elizabeth’s marriage to the Catholic Duke of Alençon, as a Protestant partisan he fervently opposed the union and quarreled with Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, to the point of challenging de Vere to a duel.  Fortunately for literary history the queen ordered that they not fight.  The young Sidney persisted in writing a letter detailing his strong opposition to the match, attracting her disapproval of his presumption and prompting his temporary absence at court. 

    The sonnet form had been introduced in England by Sir Thomas Wyatt with translations of Petrarch and original compositions.  Though his father had been incarcerated and tortured under Richard III, the elder Wyatt then became Privy Counsellor when Henry VII and after him Henry VIII succeeded.   By his late teens the son was already a prominent figure in court, taking a ceremonial role, for instance, as the champion of the Castle of Loyalty during the Christmas celebrations of 1526.  As a teenager he was named Esquire of the Body serving as a personal attendant and confidant of the king and a few years later acquired the remarkable title of Sewer Extraordinary. 

     Though popular, Wyatt was known as an impulsive, headstrong individual, and, from the testimony of his contemporaries as well as from his poetry, a passionate lover.  With a reputation as a ladies’ man, he surprised no one when he separated from his wife after three years and accused her of adultery while conceding as well his own infidelity. 

     He was meanwhile active as a negotiator, ambassador, and advisor to the throne.  On a mission to Italy in 1527 he insisted on parting with his company, saying he was “desirous to see the country” and was taken prisoner by forces controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who demanded a substantial ransom for his release.  A captive of unpredictable soldiers on the edge of mutiny, he was certainly in mortal danger, but he did go free.  It is unclear if the money was paid – some think he was repaying the debt for years --  or if perhaps he escaped, but he did manage to return to his own country unscathed.

    Before long however, he aroused Henry’s ire.  He had been a childhood friend of Anne Boleyn, and some whispered that he was paying particular her attention even when she was the queen consort.  The unfortunate Boleyn had given birth to Elizabeth but subsequently suffered three miscarriages, trying the king’s patience.  Henry turned his attentions to Jane Seymour and sought to remove Boleyn.  She was seized and placed in the Tower of London, accused of a series of ill-documented crimes including treason, and beheaded.

     Doubtless suspicious about the dashing courtier’s relationship with his wife, and likely thinking that he could at any rate get some useful information about her from Wyatt, Henry had the poet put into the Tower of London, accused of an affair with her.  From his cell, Wyatt probably witnessed Boleyn’s death and must have felt that his own survival was again in doubt. 

     Surely shaken by this experience, Wyatt stayed out of trouble for a time, but in a few years he was again arrested and himself charged with treason.  The poet’s charm may have saved his life, as the current queen consort Catherine Howard intervened on his behalf and obtained his release with the condition that he must reconcile with his wife.  It was not long before Howard in her turn was led to the executioner’s block.   After her death, it was whispered that the king had his eye on Wyatt’s wife, but, as it happened, Wyatt died of natural causes shortly thereafter.  (His sole legitimate son, Thomas Wyatt the Younger, was executed under Queen Mary.)

     Though Wyatt managed to avoid the headsman, the other poet credited with introducing sonnets to the English language (and the originator of the English or Shakespearean sonnet rhyme pattern) the contentious Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, did not.  The poet, well aware of the dangers of royal service as a first cousin of both Boleyn and Howard, was made Lieutenant General of the King on Sea and Land and fought in France.

    His pride and temper were as well-known as his gallantry under fire.  Though he (and his father as well) had taken the crown’s part in opposing the Lincolnshire rebels who had taken up arms against the dissolution of the monasteries, a fellow courtier suggested that he had been in fact sympathetic to their cause.  Offended, Surrey struck the man in the park at Hampton Court and was imprisoned for breaking the peace in the king’s domain. 

     After his release he was for a time absent from court but he returned to royal favor after a few years.  In 1543 he was accused by the Privy Council of a nighttime adventure in which he (in company with Wyatt and others) broke windows of London homes using a sort of crossbow that could hurl stones in what must have been a drunken revel, and a second charge – eating meat during Lent – was added.  Once again, his friends were able to secure his release.  In “A Satire on London” he makes the unlikely claim that his disorderly actions were meant to awaken the citizens to their sins. 

    The poet’s ego, however, led eventually to his downfall.  Though immensely proud of his descent from the Plantagenets, he and his family had long been loyal to Henry and the Tudors.  As the king aged, afflicted by health problems, he became increasingly suspicious that Surrey meant to usurp the throne from his son, the future Edward VI.  When Surrey’s sister, Mary FitzRoy, widow of Henry’s illegitimate son, was to be married to Jane’s brother Thomas Seymour with the blessings of her father and of the king, she and Surrey objected and the match was called off.  According to her statements, Surrey then tried to persuade her to seduce the king, suggesting that she might as a palace mistress "wield as much influence on him as Madame d'Etampes doth about the French King."  In response, she flatly declared that she “would sooner cut her own throat.”

     With the tensions over succession rising, in 1546 at Kenninghall Surrey chose to include on his quartered shield (quartering allowed more visible connections to highly placed lines of descent) the arms of Edward the Confessor.  In spite of the fact that the rules of heraldry allowed this usage and that Surrey had collared the leopards in the royal arms and placed them in the secondary quarter of his shield, he was arrested on the excuse that he had symbolically indicated his own ambitions on the throne.  Once he was prisoner, he was questioned not about his arms but only about his attempted use of his sister as an informer, his supposed plans to depose Henry, claims of his heterodoxy, and his preparations to leave the country.  He mounted a full defense of his innocence, yet was executed.  His father would have been beheaded as well had Henry VII not died whereupon the Privy Council removed the death penalty but seized his lands and kept him locked up for years.  

     Another of the group known as the “silver poets” for their eloquence was Sir Walter Ralegh, whose name is known in this hemisphere for his role in early colonization.  He campaigned in France for the Huguenots, and for his service in suppressing the Irish received considerable estates there, but he had little success in inducing English tenants to emigrate.  He turned his attention to the New World, sponsoring the failed settlement that became known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke.   Dubious about his ability to fund settlements that, beyond being self-supporting, could make him rich, he set out to find El Dorado in South America but there too had little success. 

    A few years before his South American venture, he had impregnated and secretly married one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting.  When their relationship was discovered, he and his wife were sent to the Tower.  He was temporarily released to oversee the spoils of a ship captured from Spain, but then returned to the Tower, only to be again set free and assume a seat in Parliament.  His influence rose once more, though he was accused (and acquitted) of atheistic views.  He fought to capture Cadiz, to repel the Armada, and became governor of the Isle of Jersey.

     Yet, with the demise of Queen Elizabeth, his loyalty to James was suspected, and he was arrested for involvement in the “Main Plot” to replace James with Lady Arbella Stuart.  The evidence was slight, and Ralegh claimed he could exonerate himself if he were allowed to question his friend the Baron Cobham, the main witness against him, but this was not allowed and he was incarcerated for thirteen years during which he worked on his Historie of the World.  Even in this scholarly enterprise he attracted the doubts of the king who found the book "too sawcie in censuring Princes."

     He was freed in 1617 after thirteen years confinement to lead another expedition to South America during which men commanded by his friend Lawrence Kemys attacked the Spanish outpost of Santo Tomé de Guayana in violation of the Anglo-Spanish treaty and Ralegh’s instructions.  In this conflict his son Walter was killed and Ralegh was arrested when he returned, having spurned chances to flee into exile.  The Spanish demanded his execution, and he was beheaded.  (His subordinate Kemys committed suicide.)

     A sonneteer might encounter all manner of other calamities.  Virtually every biography includes episodes of violence of harsh legal judgements.  The account of all these tumultuous events would be voluminous.  Some are entertaining enough to seem as though written for the stage.  Attorney and Parliamentarian as well as sonneteer, John Davies was disbarred for attacking a colleague with a cudgel upon which he promptly repaired to Oxford for the next year where he devoted himself to literature.  He was later made attorney-general of Ireland.  In 1613 he was the king’s candidate for speaker of the Irish Parliament but was opposed by the Catholic members who instead proposed Sir John Everard.  The dispute led to an absurd scene in which Everard seized the speaker’s chair, refusing to vacate it until Davies’ supporters carried the stout poet and placed him on Everard’s lap.  Edmund Spenser, who wrote the Petrarchan Amoretti, was also an Irish landlord whose castle in North Cork was taken and burned by rebels after which the writer died in London “for want of bread,” according to Ben Jonson (though this statement is surely inaccurate).  Politics also made Henry Constable a convict, largely over his urging of toleration of Catholics.  The prolific Samuel Daniel was praised for his sequence of love sonnets Delia but called before the Privy Council for supposedly seditious implications of his play The Tragedy of Philotas.

     Several were at least suspected of common crimes including murder.  Barnabe Barnes, who wrote a sequence called Parthenophil and Parthenophe (Virgin-lover and Virgin-voiced), engaged in ferocious pamphleteering polemics and was tried for attempting to poison a man, though he escaped custody and was never recaptured, doubtless due to the influence of powerful friends.  The prolific George Gascoigne who came between Wyatt and Surrey, was a noble soldier when taken prisoner during the Siege of Leiden, but a common criminal as well, arrested more than once for debts and apparently also for attempted murder.  He had served in Parliament, but in a re-election bid was disqualified as a man not only “noted for manslaughter" but also "a common Rymer.”  A poet might also be a crime victim.  Fulke Greville, a protégé of Sidney, was stabbed by a servant.  His learned physicians filled the wound with pig fat and he died a lingering death.  A number of writers, including William Percy, the writer of Sonnets to Coelia, and the middle-class Henry Lok who wrote religious sonnets were imprisoned simply for debt.

     A few years later after the tumultuous careers of these poets Hobbes was to describe human life in general as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” characterized by “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”  While everyone half a millennium ago suffered equally from the lack of effective medical knowledge and the draconian, often arbitrary, legal system, and the poor contended with a constant fear of malnutrition, belonging to the power elite was no guarantee of longevity.  Those at the top faced the perils of war, but combat was hardly a greater threat to them than their own monarch’s disfavor.  Perhaps the beauties of their poetry, and the sonnet during this period became one of the most subtle and expressive forms in all of literature, far from conflicting with a hazardous life, proved the best response to uncertainty and danger.  Many of us who are far from courtiers in the great chain  of being have found that, for us as well as them, love and art can make an otherwise intolerable life worth living.

Every Reader's Wyatt

This is the second of a series of essays meant to engage non-specialists, indeed, non-English majors, with the work of important poets. In spite of my own inclination toward the abstruse I mean to limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography. I vow to avoid tempting byways and to include no footnotes whatsoever.


    Like other sixteenth century poets, Wyatt might be said to be an incidental author. None of his poetry was published until fifteen years after his death. He spent his life as a courtier, beginning with the post of Sewer Extraordinary to Henry VIII (nothing to do with waterworks) and serving in such roles as Marshal of Calais, Sheriff of Kent, Ambassador to Spain, and factotum. Proximity to power was not only rewarding, but dangerous as well; Wyatt was three times imprisoned. He very narrowly avoided the fate of his contemporary Surrey, famed as the perfect courtier, and the later Raleigh, both of whom were executed.
     A courtier in Wyatt’s day was a soldier and a statesman, but he was also expected to be a cultivated man with musical and artistic accomplishments and a mastery of elegant and sophisticated flirtation and love. Palace intrigues were erotic and personal as well as political, and, under the rule of an almost absolute monarch, each of these activities had its perils. In 1536 Wyatt fell under suspicion of adultery with Anne Boleyn and was imprisoned in the Bell Tower at the Tower of London. From his window he witnessed her execution and that of five of her reputed lovers. Surely only through the influence of powerful friends did the poet avoid the same scaffold. Anne Boleyn is commonly regarded as the subject of one of his most lovely and haunting poems.


Who so list to hount I know where is an hynde
but as for me helas I may no more,
the vayne travaill hath weried me so sore.
I ame of theim that farthest cometh behind;
yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde
drawe from the Deere but as she fleeth afore,
faynting I folowe. I leve of therefor.
sithens in a nett I seke to hold the wynde.
Who list her hount I put him owte of dowbte,
as well as I may spend his tyme in vain;
and graven with Diamondes in letters plain
There is written her faier neck rounde abowte;
noli me tangere, for Caesar's I ame;
and wylde for to hold though I seme tame.


     Thomas Wyatt (and Surrey) introduced the sonnet in English sometimes using what came to be called the English rhyme scheme. This poem is in part derived from Petrach’s 190th sonnet, “Una candida cerva,” but it is far from a translation. The initial ambiguity of love as hunting (like love as war) is balanced and heightened by the poet’s fruitless exhausted devotion, the picture of the Ovidian or courtly lover. To him joy in love is as unlikely as seeking to hold the wind in a net. The Latin tag “do not touch me” is often regarded as evidence that the beloved lady is already claimed by the king, but many lovers far from royal courts might experience the same frustration. Another might express similar sentiments as, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The original use of “noli me tangere” spoken by Christ to Mary Magdalene in the Latin Bible in a scene painted by Fra Angelico, Botticelli and many others, is complicated by its use (according to Solinus) as a warning to poachers against taking Caesar’s deer. The concluding line is a beautiful expression of the fierce emotion that necessarily accompanies tender feelings.
     Wyatt in another poem delineating the subtle ambivalences of desire figures the beloved as a wild beast once more. The mysterious evocative power of those lovers who “with naked foot” “stalked in my chamber” is outdone by the straightforwardness of the natural encounter of the second stanza. The lady, her gown falling off her shoulder in “a pleasant manner,” kisses the poet and asks “How like you this?” To me the conclusion, which lapses into a mild resentment, is anticlimactic, but the first two stanzas are sublime.


They fle from me that sometyme did me seke
With naked fote stalking in my chambre.
I have sene theim gentill, tame, and meke
That nowe are wyld and do not remembre
That sometyme they put theimself in daunger
To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge
Besely seking with a continuell chaunge.

Thancked be fortune it hath ben othrewise
Twenty tymes better, but ons in speciall,
In thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse,
When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her armes long and small,
Therewithall swetely did me kysse,
And softely said "dere hert, howe like you this?"

It was no dreme: I lay brode waking.
But all is torned thorough my gentilnes
Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking;
And I have leve to goo of her goodeness,
And she also to vse new fangilnes.
But syns that I so kyndely ame served,
I would fain knowe what she hath deserved.

 

     These are the poems I most remember, though Wyatt’s importance as a translator and importer of Continental forms and conventions to England had immense historical consequences. His first publisher Tottel said the country owed to him and Surrey “that our tong is able in that kynde [the French or Italian style] to do as praiseworthy as ye rest.” Tottel was speaking of what amounted to nearly the last gasp of courtly love, yet when Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, memorialized Wyatt, he mentioned only his translations of the Psalms. To Thomas Warton he was the “first polished English satirist,” and his most “pleasing” work was moralizing on “the felicities of retirement” as in “Mine owne John Poynz” (a poem of over a hundred lines appended to this essay). If Wyatt’s love poetry represents a late efflorescence of the troubadour tradition, the lines addressed to John Poynz look forward to the measured pentameters of Dryden and then the masterful Pope.
     Like many another writer of sublime love poetry, Wyatt could also advocate an abstemious withdrawal. When obliged to leave the court he expressed what might be regarded as admirable detachment (philosophic or, in terms of poetry, Horatian, perhaps) though he had no hesitation about returning as soon as he was able. Assuredly a literary convention – he sticks fairly close to Luigi Alamanni’s tenth satire and uses the Italian’s terza rima (the first instance in English) – the praise of a life of retirement is doubtless also true, at least as true as the same man’s delight in the complex rivalries and games he here ridicules. One thinks of the magnificent Chinese poems reflecting on the civil service and, for some, the greater wisdom of a solitary life in the mountains, not for fear of losing innocence, but because one is sated and yet not satisfied with having had altogether too much of court life. The Wyatt who wrote these lines would have understood Yuán Méi, who at the age of thirty-two, resigned his post and spent the remainder of his career writing books of poetry and travel and cooking. If Wyatt is expressing sour grapes over his involuntary rustication, he has made as fine a wine of it as he had done with the sweets of love.


Myne owne John Poynz, sins ye delight to know
The cause why that homeward I me drawe,
And fle the presse of courtes wher soo they goo,
Rather then to lyve thrall, under the awe
Of lordly lokes, wrappid within my cloke,
To will and lust learning to set a lawe;
It is not for becawse I skorne or moke
The powar of them, to whome fortune hath lent
Change over us, of Right, to strike the stroke:
But true it is that I have allwais ment
Lesse to estime them then the common sort,
Of outward thinges that juge in their intent,
Withowt regarde what dothe inwarde resort.
I grawnt sumtime that of glorye the fyar
Dothe touche my hart: me lyst not to report
Blame by honour and honour to desyar.
But how may I this honour now atayne
That cannot dy the coloure blak a lyer?

My Poynz, I cannot frame me tune to fayne,
To cloke the trothe for praisse withowt desart,
Of them that lyst all vice for to retayne.
I cannot honour them that settes their part
With Venus and Baccus all theire lyf long;
Nor holld my pece of them allthoo I smart.
I cannot crowche nor knelle to do so grete a wrong,
To worship them, lyke gode on erthe alone,
That ar as wollffes thes sely lambes among.
I cannot with my wordes complayne and mone,
And suffer nought; nor smart wythout complaynt,
Nor torne the worde that from my mouthe is gone.

I cannot speke and loke lyke a saynct,
Use wiles for witt and make deceyt a pleasure,
And call crafft counsell, for proffet styll to paint.
I cannot wrest the law to fill the coffer
With innocent blode to fede my sellff fat,
And doo most hurt where most hellp I offer.
I am not he that can alow the state
Off highe Cesar and dam Cato to dye,
That with his dethe dyd skape owt off the gate
From Cesares handes (if Lyve do not lye)
And wolld not lyve whar lyberty was lost:
So did his hert the commonn wele aplye.
I am not he suche eloquence to boste,
To make the crow singing as the swane,
Nor call the lyon of cowarde bestes the moste
That cannot take a mows as the cat can:
And he that dithe for hunger of the golld
Call him Alessaundre; and say that Pan
Passithe Apollo in muske manyfolld;
Praysse Syr Thopas for a nobyll talle,
And skorne the story that the knyght tolld.
Praise him for counceill that is droncke of ale;
Grynee when he laugheth that bereth all the swaye,
Frowne when he frowneth and grone when he is pale;
On othres lust to hang boeth nyght and daye:
None of these pyntes would ever frame in me;
My wit is nought--I cannot lerne the waye.
And much the lesse of thinges that greater be,
That asken helpe of colours of devise
To joyne the mene with eche extremitie,
With the neryst vertue to cloke always the vise:
And as to pourpose like wise it shall fall,
To presse the vertue that it may not rise;
As dronkenes good felloweshippe to call;
The frendly ffoo with his dowble face
Say he is gentill and courtois therewithall;
And say that Favell hath a goodly grace
In eloquence; and crueltie to name
Zele of justice and chaunge in tyme and place;
And he that suffreth offence withoute blame
Call him pitefull; and him true and playn
That raileth rekles to every mans shame.
Say he is rude that cannot lye and fayn;
The letcher a lover; and tirannye
To be the right of a prynces reigne.
I cannot, I. No, no, it will not be.
This is the cause that I could never yet
Hang on their slevis that way as thou maist se
A chippe of chaunce more then a pownde of witt.
This maketh me at home to hounte and to hawke
And in fowle weder at my booke to sitt.
In frost and snowe then with my bow to stawke,
No man doeth marke where so I ride or goo;
In lusty lees at libertie I walke,
And of these newes I fele nor wele nor woo,
Sauf that a clogg doeth hang yet at my hele:
No force for that for it is ordered so,
That I may lepe boeth hedge and dike full well.
I ame not now in Ffraunce to judge the wyne,
With saffry sauce the delicates to fele;
Nor yet in Spaigne where oon must him inclyne
Rather then to be, owtewerdly to seme.
I meddill not with wittes that be so fyne,
No Fflaunders chiere letteth not my sight to deme
Of black and white, nor taketh my wit awaye
With bestylnes, they beeste do so esteme;

Nor I ame not where Christe is geven in pray
For mony, poison and traison at Rome,
A commune practise used nyght and daie:
But here I ame in Kent and Christendome
Emong the muses where I rede and ryme;
Where if thou list, my Poynz, for to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my tyme.

Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa]

Jane Shore [Rowe]

     Nicholas Rowe had edited his acknowledged master Shakespeare, and he would perhaps not be surprised to hear that a modern reader finds his own play Jane Shore suffers by comparison. Rowe’s entire effect depends on the delicious spectacle of the set-upon lady, an appeal in vogue during his time as what the playwright called the “she-tragedy.”
     Shore’s public humiliation for promiscuity is only the most piquant instance of this commonplace yet slightly kinky taste, so common through world literature. Shore’s story is well-suited to a wheel of fortune theme as she had had, for a time, very nearly the power of a queen as well as having possessed what all regarded as extraordinary beauty and a sharp wit that led Edward to call her the “merriest” of his consorts. The plot is flat and simple in plot, the poetry thin in imagery, the sentiment almost wholly pathetic. Though words flow with energy, their moving streams are so shallow that they suggest nothing new in the course of the drama.
     In contrast to her depiction by Thomas More and Shakespeare (in Richard III), Rowe achieves his effect by treating her sympathetically, depicting her as genuinely repentant for her immorality and politically engaged in combating Richard’s usurpation of power.
     Rowe’s widow received a pension from George I in thanks for his translation of Lucan, which demonstrates that, in one way at least, that age was more civilized than our own.


The Master of Ballantrae [Stevenson]

     Were Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel a modern movie (it was originally serialized in Scribner’s and filmed at least twice), it might even be labeled a thriller. It may be a “Winter’s Tale” (as the subtitle has it) for its nearly constant suffering, relenting only to make more distinct a succession of plot turns that hold the reader until what some have considered the extravagance of the final twist. The book is highly reminiscent of Scott’s novels, full of Scotland, and concerns with nobility and morality, but Stevenson’s characters are more complex. The master himself possesses wicked charm and immense brio (temporarily even winning some affection from the dour narrator); Alison’s passion betrays her own best interests; and Henry, though the good man from the start, turns out only human as the constant pressure on his flawed virtue finally drives him into moral confusion and madness. All this serves an exciting story which from Scotland moves to colonial New York and finally, the wilds of the Adirondacks which the author knew well (as well as India, which he did not).
     The book maintains the old novelistic façade of a true story with supposed lengthy statements and relations from several of the characters as well as from our narrator, Mr. Mackellar. These have the effect of casting a slightly prismatic glow over the whole. Stevenson himself mentioned as a model not Scott but Frederick Marryat whose The Phantom Ship he had been reading. “Let us make a tale,” he recalled proposing to himself, “a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.”
     Whether one considers his method “summary” and “elliptical” or not, Stevenson was repeatedly capable of composing a ripping yarn. Some may think higher peaks exist on the fiction Parnassus, but few writers reach the heights Stevenson here achieved.
 

The Year of my Life (Oraga Hara) [Issa, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa]

     I confess to little sympathy for the haiku in English, but I relished both verses and prose in this little book, written in 1819, by the author who reinvigorated the form of which Basho was the recognized master. Kobayashi Issa, a lay Buddhist priest, wrote with a passion, often choosing “low” subjects such as insects. While his work struck some as unseemly in his own day, he is now regarded as one of the four great writers of haiku along with Basho, Buson, and Shiki.
     The little book defines its tone with its opening with story of the priest who greets the New Year with tears. The succeeding chapters relate autobiographical incidents along with odd stories and folklore yet all the prose aims toward accommodating the poet to the all-but-intolerable conditions of life.
     Issa compares what he calls the “thin thread of my life” to that of a tortured tree. In order to “get more experience writing haiku,” following the examples of Saigyo, Basho, and others, the poet sets out traveling with a beggar’s bag and bundle. He proceeds (in the haibun form, mixing prose and verse) to provide a curious succession of information which, while entertaining, supports this theme throughout.      In a pleasant mood, the poet and his friends seek to hear a strange “celestial music” of which they have heard. He speculates on the meaning of a children’s game involving killing frogs and recalls an earlier poet’s story of a frog who judged a poetry contest. A physician who kills coupling snakes finds he has brought impotence to his son who had “a huge mushroom-shaped thing between his legs.” Each topic is oddly entertaining while reinforcing a sense of the fragility and impenetrability of earthly life. Most powerfully, the pathetic story of the boy swept away by the stream in whose pockets were found flowers he was carrying to his parents, inspiring a moralizing passage which prepares the ground for death of the author’s beloved daughter later.
     The nineteenth century introducer rightly says that Issa’s verses “would tickle even Yama the great king of hell.”