Poetry and paternity in renaissance england sidney, spenser, shakespeare, donne and jonson

Poetry a nd Pater nit y in r ena issa nce engl a nd Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson in the english renaissance, becoming a father was the main way for a man to be treated

Poetry a nd Pater nit y in

r ena issa nce engl a nd

Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson

in the english renaissance, becoming a father was the main way for

a man to be treated as a full member of the community yet archal identity was by no means as secure as is often assumed: when poets invoke the idea of paternity in love poetry and other forms, they are therefore invoking all the anxieties that a culture with contradictory notions of sexuality imposed This study takes these anxieties seriously, arguing that writers such as sidney and spenser deployed images of childbirth to harmonize public and private spheres, to develop a full sense of selfhood in their verse, and even

patri-to come patri-to new accommodations between the sexes shakespeare, donne and Jonson, in turn, saw the appeal of the older poets’ aims, but resisted their more radical implications The result is a fiercely personal yet publicly committed poetry that would not be seen again until the time of the romantics

tom m acfau l is lecturer in english at Merton college,

University of oxford He is the author of Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (cambridge, 2007) and many articles on renaissance poetry and drama

Poetry a nd Pater nit y

in r ena issa nce

engl a nd

Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson

toM M acFaU l

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© Tom MacFaul 2010

2010

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For my parents

2 Uncertain paternity: the indifferent ideology of patriarchy 36

3 The childish love of Philip sidney and Fulke greville 63

4 spenser’s timely fruit: generation in The Faerie Queene 95

5 ‘We desire increase’: shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry 130

7 ‘to propagate their names’: Ben Jonson as poetic godfather 188

My first debt of gratitude in the writing of this book is to richard Mccabe, who supervised my doctoral thesis on spenser, and who has continued to offer much-valued advice on spenserian and other matters as an under-graduate, i was introduced to many of the authors considered here by Howard erskine-Hill and gavin alexander, and for that i continue to owe them a great deal other friends and colleagues who have helped me clarify my thinking or given valuably of their time on matters of fact and interpretation include glenn Black, guy cuthbertson, ian donaldson, Katherine duncan-Jones, Hugh gazzard, steve gunn, amanda Holton, david norbrook, emma smith, Michael Whitworth and Kieron Winn

i am also very grateful to cambridge University Press’s readers for gestions as to how the book might be improved – one of whom, Patrick cheney, having removed the veil of anonymity, i am glad to be able to thank by name Many thanks are due to sarah stanton at cambridge University Press for having faith in the project, to rebecca Jones for seeing the book through the press, and to annie Jackson for careful copy-editing, which has saved me from many infelicities

sug-in many ways, this book began as an attempt to answer some of the questions regularly raised by students when dealing for the first time with the poetry of the english renaissance: i’m immensely grateful to a large number of my students (too many to name here) for their enthusiasm, fresh perspectives and insight in particular, i’d like to thank those who have taken special author papers with me on donne, spenser and Jonson

an earlier version of chapter 3, ‘The childish love of Philip sidney and

Fulke greville’ was published as an article in Sidney Journal 24 (2006);

i am grateful to the editor, Mary ellen lamb, for her advice on this piece, and for permission to use this work here a brief section of chapter 6 has appeared as donne’s ‘The sunne rising’ and spenser’s ‘epithalamion’, in

Notes & Queries 54 (2007); i am grateful to the editors for allowing me to

republish this here

Abbreviations

ELR English Literary Renaissance

NQ Notes & Queries

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary

RES Review of English Studies

RQ Renaissance Quarterly

SEL Studies in English Literature

SP Studies in Philology

ch a pter 1

Presumptive fathers

When Ben Jonson wrote that his dead son was ‘his best piece of poetry’,1

he was not merely following a common convention of analogizing writing and fatherhood, but tapping into a deep well of feeling about children, poems and what they mean to one’s sense of selfhood elizabethan and Jacobean poets make paternity a central preoccupation: it is a model for all forms of achievement (poetic, political and economic) and provides a way

of imposing some unity on one’s life and one’s work By figuring oneself as

a father, or by focussing on biological generativity, one could create a sense

of aesthetic order and literary authority, the idea or model of paternity also acting as a means of relating the public and private spheres yet it is a mis-take to think of this as being founded on a stridently confident and uni-fied notion of patriarchy; male writers were anxiously aware that paternity was a position of presumption in tudor and stuart england: it was pre-

sumptive in that a man could never be entirely certain that he was a father;

it was also presumptuous in that it involved taking on a role and name that was properly god’s (as Matthew 23:9 has it – see below) The idea of paternity, then, was alienated, never quite wholly possessed by an indi-vidual owing to the presence of a virginal woman on the throne, taking the place of the ultimate patriarch, paternity was further marginalized in elizabethan england, despite being the central role of masculine identity such tensions persisted into the reign of James i, even though that king developed an increasingly insistent paternalistic ideology conceiving of themselves as fathers in various ways, poets from sidney to Jonson tried

to resolve these tensions and, though they may have failed to develop the secure and unified self-images they sought, they succeeded in creating a lit-erary tradition that was both highly personal and able to make significant interventions in the public sphere Three major poetic purposes are served

by focussing on paternity: poets create unified but alienated voices for themselves, use images of generativity to establish new accommodations

between the sexes, and reflect on the different spheres into which an vidual may invest himself.

indi-‘Pater semper incertus est’, runs the roman legal proverb; ‘mater certissima’ – that is, paternity is always uncertain, but maternity is the

most certain thing of all This simple fact implies a tremendous effect on the whole of human psychology (and that of other species), as sociobiol-ogists and evolutionary psychologists have emphasized.2 if we are looking for a cross-cultural human ‘universal’, it is surely in this area that we will find it; yet it is also very much subject to cultural variation (as well as vari-ation on the basis of individual peculiarities).3 Precisely because paternity

is uncertain, an element of flexibility enters into male identity: one can choose one’s allegiances and the nature of one’s investments Freud would suggest that this involves the masculine ‘renunciation of instinct’:

an advance in intellectuality consists in deciding against direct sense-perception

in favour of what are known as the higher intellectual processes – that is, ies, reflections and inferences it consists, for instance, in deciding that paternity

memor-is more important than maternity, although it cannot, like the latter, be lished by the evidence of the senses, and that for that reason the child should bear his father’s name and be his heir.4

estab-yet instinct is not so easily renounced Paternity involves a strange ture of freedom and obligation, of uncertainty and fixity; an awareness of natural instinct cuts across cultural formations any given social structure (but particularly a modern one) needs to police both the breeding and the sexuality of individuals;5 questions of reproduction and sexuality are always public matters, even though the feelings involved are to some degree individualistic The pressures were particularly acute in elizabethan and Jacobean england, where a long-standing tradition of individualism was

mix-in conflict with an mix-increasmix-ingly centralized and unified state,6 and where older customary practices were challenged by newly unified and textual-ized ideologies one of the major functions of poetry may be to express the problems of negotiating the interaction between self and world in this case, giving meaning to individual desires within publicly negotiated structures, whilst seeking to shape those structures in ways which may better accom-modate the individual’s desires Various factors made this agenda seem par-ticularly urgent in the period under consideration: a woman on the throne challenging normative ideas about relations between the sexes; competing religious and scientific ideas about generation; a greater consciousness of social mobility; and the rise of a semi-professional idea of authorship all this meant that poets had to reflect deeply on their own masculinity, see-ing that its foundations were changeable or even non-existent

We might infer from this, however, that no notion of essential masculinity

was available, and that masculinity was all process with no final result This will not quite do: a male god, the ultimate sacred Father, and His representatives on earth, particularly kings and familial fathers, but also perhaps priests and educators, constituted, at least notionally, a dwelling place for the idea of the father – the sacred name of the father is therefore not merely to be treated as an object of conventional reverence, but as a guarantee of the full masculinity which is never quite realized in an indi-vidual’s life

in many societies, to become a father is to become a man in the full sense, but that full masculinity is challenged in a number of ways, not

least by women to be a man in most pre-feminist societies is to identify

with the paternal line; the classic misogynistic trope attacking the verbial mutability of women surely reflects male anxiety about women’s ability to interfere with this straightforward line, on the one hand by introducing the radical uncertainty of paternity, and on the other by

pro-altering a man’s sons – both in carrying and in nurturing them – so that

the son is not an identical copy of the father as sir Walter ralegh put

it in his Instructions to His Sonne, ‘Wives were ordayned to continue the

generation of men, to transferre them, and diminish them, eyther in countenance, or abilitie’.8 Women are necessary, but regarded as apt to translate men into diminished forms denials of women’s contribution

to offspring (based on aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals),

mak-ing women out to be mere seedbeds for the transmission of masculinity, constitute an attempt to still this anxiety, and to pretend that masculin-ity is primary when there is a real suspicion that it is secondary There

is no doubt that much of the anxiety we see expressed in these poets is chauvinistic if not misogynistic; yet there are many varieties of sexism involved, some of which involve an awareness of their own absurdity and weakness, and many of which are rooted in more complex anxieties than mere prejudice against women.9

nature itself (or herself) could come in for some criticism in Fletcher

and Field’s The Honest Man’s Fortune (c 1613), lady orleans, suspected of

infidelity by her paranoid husband, articulates an understandable female desire for men’s sense of feminine mystery to be dispelled:

o Heaven, how gratious had creation been

to women, who are borne without defence,

if to our hearts there had been doores through with

our husbands might have lookt into our thoughts,

and made themselves undoubtfull (i ii 21–5)10

By contrast, in the anonymous Swetnam, the Woman Hater (1620), the titular misogynist (aka Misogynos) argues

Happy were man, had woman neuer bin

Why did not nature infuse the gift of Procreation

in man alone, without the helpe of woman,

euen as we see one seed, produce another? (B2r)

Though this character is the play’s villain, and though his misogyny will

be confuted by the play’s conclusion, his position is merely an extreme sion of the anxieties expressed in more normative discourse

ver-it has often been noted that elizabethan poets appropriate images of pregnancy to depict their own creativity, but there has been some debate about the reasons for this.11 Katharine eisaman Maus postulates that it may simply be because ‘men envy women’s ability to give birth’, but thinks this insufficient given the renaissance tendency to denigrate maternity.12 The more profound reason, for Maus, may be that men want to appropriate some of the mysteriousness of femininity, and specifically of the womb.13

elizabeth d Harvey similarly sees the appropriation of femininity as ling writing but at the same time as making the writers appear helpless.14

enab-Men in all cultures may envy the certainty of female creativity, and though

it would be glib to suggest that this impels male artistic creation, an ness of this aspect of the artist’s motivation is quite commonplace (it goes back at least as far as Plato); when such an awareness is allied with an active cultural disparagement of motherhood, the most thoughtful poets may have to respond by acknowledging the anxieties that lie behind the asser-tions of masculine primacy When patriarchal manliness is taken as too absolute a value, the threats to it become all the more troubling, particu-larly if it is recognized as being founded on fictions; yet this frees poets up

aware-to create their own fictions – hoping aware-to improve on the official ones.Whilst it is certainly true that reproductive sexuality was the cul-tural norm in elizabethan and Jacobean england, it was by no means

Presumptive fathers

an unproblematic norm although the patriarchal nuclear family was increasingly valorized in the elizabethan era, it was challenged by a num-ber of factors Firstly an ideology of masculine friendship as the highest form of love made the family secondary.15 yet ‘homosocial’ attempts to exclude women from the father–son bond which is taken to be the fun-damental basis of society are even more doomed than similar attempts

to exclude women from amicable male society in an exaggerated ideal of friendship.16 The patriarchal and the homosocial are bound together, but

are equally unrealizable ideals it is the fact that both are unnatural that

creates a genuine sense of confusion in the renaissance period The male line ‘ought’ to be central and primary, but many men can see that it is really secondary and culturally formed

a second major challenge came from the anomalous position of the female monarch The family had to be validated from on high by a woman who had no family at all.17 These factors in some ways marginalize the heterosexual, patriarchal family – and one might even argue that this mar-ginalization contributed to a developing private sphere of the nuclear fam-ily it is important to avoid imposing a modern dichotomy of public and private onto a period in which there was no such sharp dichotomy,18 but

equally it is important to be aware that there was some distinction between

the spheres, and a consciousness that it was growing The decline of larger kinship and clientage structures, along with the emergence of the machin-ery of the modern nation state, meant that people were increasingly begin-ning to see their loyalties in terms of a division between nation and family, with less intermediate institutions blurring the lines.19 it is not surprising then that ‘natural’ familial urges become confused in this period; in fact, one could argue that monogamous procreative marriage is as confused a category as Foucault famously argued that sodomy is.20

Protestant ideology also had complex effects Mary Beth rose argues that

although Protestant sexual discourse retains much of the erotic skepticism of the dualistic sensibility, it nevertheless unites love with marriage and conceives

of marriage with great respect as the foundation of an ordered society Protestant discourse is not dualistic, but complex and multifaceted, and one of its most sig-nificant and far-reaching changes is a shift in the prestige and centrality granted

to the institution of marriage.21

These ideas of marriage may not have been new, but as rose shows, they were more generally disseminated in elizabethan england than they had been before she also challenges arthur Marotti’s notion that discourses

on love are primarily a way of presenting other discontents: ‘whatever else

it may be, love, definitely, is love.’22 one of my central enquiries here is

to what extent love is sex – that is, to what extent poetic discussions of love are preoccupied by sexual generation, and how far anxieties about sex and childbirth inform poets’ attitudes to their art, and their sense of its significance in the public realm Both sex and poetry are ways of guar-anteeing the continuity of the self, preventing isolation in the here and now, and giving one an afterlife in the future, but both are also uncertain endeavours

The major stream of paternal imagery in elizabethan verse begins with

Philip sidney, whose hugely influential sonnet sequence Astrophel and

Stella commences with the struggles of male poetic parturition:

loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,

That the deare she might take some pleasure of my paine:

Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine,

i sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,

studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine:

oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow

some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine

But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay,

invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame studie’s blowes,

and others’ feete still seemed but strangers in my way

Thus great with child to speak, and helplesse in my throwes,

Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,

‘Fool’, said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write.’23

The tension between nature and art is deeply woven into the texture of the poem: from the initial pun on fain (wanting to, or feigning to), through the structural irony of such highly wrought rhetoric being used for the purposes of supposedly simple, true love, and the pen which is truant or true-ant (truth-making?) to the final pun on art/heart, sidney continu-ously expresses the self-confounding secondariness of masculine self-expression Though the idea of the poet as father to his words does not emerge until the sestet, it is suggested at the end of the octave, where the idea of being ‘fruitful’ prompts us to think of the ways in which an indi-vidual can come to fruition The ways in which he may do so are many, and are at the centre of this book’s concern: he may mature, and this will involve giving fruition to his own father as well as himself; he may win the woman, and thus not only gratify himself but also beget children of his own; he may gain other kinds of grace than female favour – godly and royal; he may achieve things in the public world; finally, he may make a

Presumptive fathers

poem that lasts yet the idea of fruition is not only complex in its results, but problematic as a process: however much one may want it to be a mat-ter of hard work and study, it may also involve an element of passivity Just like a fruit, one cannot force it: external influences must bring it steadily

to ripeness (which is ‘all’ according to edgar in King Lear (v ii 11)); those

influences are experienced as female – the Queen, nature, the beloved, the Muse – and they, paradoxically, make the process of masculine self- making feel feminine, like the apparently passive suffering of childbirth The process of becoming fully masculine involves dealing with the femin-ine in ways that can fundamentally undermine one’s sense of masculinity.For this reason, hermaphroditism is a powerful notion, allowing accom-modations to be made between the sexes The common galenic model of sex-difference considered the body as flexible; able, through the influence

of the humours, to acquire characteristics of either sex, femininity being the basic condition, and masculinity being something one had to strive for.24 This model sat side-by-side with an idea that masculinity and femin-inity (as abstractions, at least) were fundamentally different, but the hows and whys of that difference required much rhetorical fancy footwork, as in donne’s ‘air and angels’ in some ways, it was masculinity that was more

the abstraction (being that which needed to be added), femininity being

associated with nature, the body and the material world any dation between the sexes, then, would have to be figured in a hermaph-roditic manner if offspring were a mixture of masculine and feminine, then so might be poems; for some poets that might even be a desirable result, allowing some redemption of condemned or repressed feminine elements in themselves Mostly, however, poems are presented as male (though romances and translations might be considered as female, for reasons of genre and reflecting a sense of secondariness respectively) The ideal essence of the original poem is conceived as primarily masculine, but sometimes with feminine characteristics (such as mutability) that may enable a redemption of both sexes, or even a redemption of the anxieties created by sex-difference and masculine secondariness For many poets, then, one of the major points of amatory verse is to negotiate better rela-tions between the sexes and therefore between the masculine and femin-ine aspects of themselves

accommo-all this said, conceiving of literary work in paternal terms is usuaccommo-ally intended as a mode of authorial assertion The dedication of the printed

text of Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607, pub 1613) is

unusual in deploying the paternal conceit on behalf of a play The publisher

Walter Burre writes, to robert Keysar, manager of the children of the Queen’s revels:

sir,

This unfortunate child, who in eight days (as lately i have learned) was begot and born, soon after was by his parents (perhaps because he was so unlike his breth-ren) exposed to the wide world, who for want of judgement, or not understand-ing the privy mark of irony about it (which showed it was no offspring of any vulgar brain) utterly rejected it; so that for want of acceptance it was even ready

to give up the ghost, and was in danger to have been smothered in perpetual oblivion, if you (out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude) had not been moved

to relieve and cherish it, wherein i must needs commend both your judgement, understanding, and singular love to good wits you afterwards sent it to me, yet being an infant and somewhat ragged, i have fostered it privately in my bosom these two years, and now to show my love return it to you, clad in good lasting clothes, which scarcely memory will wear out, and able to speak for itself; and withal, as it telleth me, desirous to try his fortune in the world, where if yet it be welcome, father, foster-father, nurse and child, all have their desired end if it be slighted or traduced, it hopes his father will beget him a younger brother, who shall revenge his quarrel, and challenge the world either of fond and merely literal

or illiterate misprision.25

There may be several reasons for this: the play is an exceedingly unusual one, and had been a theatrical flop, and the printing is clearly an attempt not so much to cash in on a stage reputation as to find a different kind

of audience in print, so that the paternal metaphor is used to assert the play’s status as a theatrical poem; Beaumont also was a man of consider-ably higher social status than most playwrights, and the paternal meta-phor may be a way of endowing the play with some of this status despite the play being published anonymously, as if it were a noble foundling, Beaumont, who would be buried in Westminster abbey near chaucer and spenser (in what would become Poets’ corner), is made into a theatri-cal poet by the publisher’s gesture: the paternal metaphor insists on both familial and poetic status and gives a sense of inherent social and aesthetic value to a man’s works

a play of the same year, edward sharpham’s Cupid’s Whirligig, also has

a dedication using the paternal metaphor, the author telling his ‘friend’ robert Hayman

I aime at you rather then the Reader, because since our trauailes I haue been nant with desire to bring foorth something whereunto you may be witnesse [a rather low-church term for godfather], and now being brought a bed if you please to be Godfather, I doubt not but this childe shal be wel maintained, seeing hee cannot liue aboue an houre with you, and therefore shall intreat you, when he is dead, he may be buried deepe enough in your good opinion, and he shall deserue this Epitaph:

Presumptive fathers

Heere lies the childe, who was borne in mirth,

against the strict rules of all childe-birth:

and to be quit, i gaue him to my friend,

Who laught him to death, and that was his end.26

as the play centres on a man who castrates himself in order to test his

wife’s chastity, the theme of paternity is rather grotesquely appropriate an

end to paternity and therefore to masculinity may be treated comically in the play, but to be laughed to death for a failure of one’s masculine creativ-ity is a deep fear for many renaissance writers – there is a risk of humili-ation in publication which might be considered a kind of emasculation.Paternal imagery is perhaps most commonly to be found in dedications and prefaces, where it frames the work and relates it to its author, often in

rather ironic ways When sidney calls the Arcadia ‘this child i am loath to

father’,27 it is not just a modesty formula or an instance of a courtier’s tance to see his work in print (he was writing the dedication for a manuscript,

reluc-after all), but rather a mark of the way in which fathering can mean

acknow-ledging as one’s own, or even as a part of one’s self His paternal reluctance may be as unaffectionate as the behaviour of the prime father in the text, euarchus, who sentences his son to death, but it shows how much of a com-

mitment fathering a text might be spenser’s dedication of The Shepheardes

Calender (1579) to sidney is still more complex; he does not address sidney,

but the book itself, presenting it as a child going out to be fostered:

to His BooKe

Goe little booke: thy selfe present,

As child whose parent is vnkent:

To him that is the president

Of noblesse and of cheualree, And if that Enuie barke at thee,

As sure it will, for succoure flee Vnder the shadow of his wing, And asked, who thee forth did bring,

A shepheards swaine saye did thee sing, All as his straying flocke he fedde:

And when his honor has thee redde, Crave pardon for my hardyhedde.

But if that any aske thy name, Say thou wert base begot with blame:

For thy thereof thou takest shame.

And when thou art past ieopardee, Come tell me, what was sayd of mee:

And I will send more after thee.

Immeritô.28

The book is accorded a self and therefore an ability to act as well as speak

in the world: it can move about in the world and, like Jonson’s poem on his son, it can be ‘asked’ about its origins Those origins are ‘base’ for a num-ber of reasons: the passage reflects spenser’s sense of his own lowly status (though given his desire to be connected with the spencers of althorp this may be modesty); it is also a literary modesty formula refusing to boast of his poem’s worth; it is linked to the supposed lowness of pastoral on the hierarchy of genres, and the social lowness of the shepherds central to that genre; finally, it reflects spenser’s decision to remain anonymous, thus in

a sense bastardizing his poem His preoccupation with foundlings in the

later Faerie Queene would develop from this, suggesting that one needs

to form one’s own identity in a way we would call meritocratic, before one’s paternity can be acknowledged despite later becoming a pub-

licly acknowledged poet (and implicitly acknowledging The Shepheardes

Calender in the opening lines of The Faerie Queene), spenser would never

put his name to the Calender, even in the five later editions published in

his lifetime.29 This may be because, having dedicated the work to sidney,

he no longer considered it his own Poems, considered as children, take

on a life of their own, and find their own way in the world like sons; yet the father’s very anxiety about them suggests how much of themselves is

off-or artistic generativity, and thus of the investments poets make in it The very confidence of his own voice militates against the tensions we find in earlier poets

Presumptive fathers

The analogy between poetry and paternity is so obvious that it can seem

transparent: poets and fathers are both culturally privileged makers; yet,

whilst the analogy may be intended to validate both roles, the effect tends

to be much more complex, as neither role has as much real power as people would like Privileged as fathers and poets were, they also knew that their privileges depended on an uncertain system that patronized them and put them in their place Fathers remain uncertain that they are really fathers, and can see that their power within the family is subordinated to other power structures Poets, particularly in a culture of print-publication without authorial copyright, know that they have relatively little con-trol over the fate of their works, and are as aware of themselves as sons

to a larger tradition as they are of their paternal relation to their poems instead of providing mutual validation of two important roles, then, the analogy in fact enables the expression of anxieties about selfhood, even as the self tries to extend itself into the wider world and claim some of it for its own The fact that such anxieties get expressed does, however, imply or even insist that the self may be transmitted into the world: some real and important part of one’s individuality is at stake in both poetry and pater-nity However distorted – or even autonomous – the version of the self that comes out may be, some kind of organic connection with the world

is established

among other things, then, the paternal analogy is a way for poets to signal their personal investment in their works This notion needs to be approached with caution: teachers of literature probably find this issue

to be the one on which we most frequently have to correct our students,

so that it has become an automatic reflex to remind ardent youth of the impersonality of poetry ‘it is not the poet speaking directly; we must refer

to “the speaker of the poem” (however clumsy that may seem)’; ‘sincerity is not necessarily an aesthetic virtue’: these have become professional shibbo-leths, and up to a point this is right and proper; Harold Bloom’s sugges-tion that university gates should be adorned with Wilde’s dictum ‘all bad art is sincere’ might well save us a lot of time if adopted.32 yet there are occasions when we must consider that the student’s supposedly nạve per-spective has something valuable in it of course poets use masks of various sorts when they write, but then almost every speech-act can be treated in this way: ‘i’ is always alienated to some degree it is one of the critic’s tasks

to assess what degree of selfhood can be found in a work of art of course,

we may further contend that selfhood is an illusion and the attempt to fix

it a bourgeois mystification, but these ideas are, i think, more useful as correctives than as foundational principles let us rather start from the

assumption that the poet feels himself to have some sort of self, illusory

or not, and that he wants to communicate this to some degree He may find that he can only confirm his feeling of selfhood by investing it in something he knows not to be himself, and the more sophisticated he is as

an artist the more aware he may be of the paradoxical nature of this ceeding Most of the poets examined here took their investment in their works very seriously even as they played with their poetic identities The differing degrees to which they found satisfaction in this activity and the different modes by which they attained it will be central preoccupations

pro-of this study none pro-of this is to say that renaissance poets really pated the romantics in a preoccupation with subjectivity, or at least not

antici-in a straightforward way They are antici-interested antici-in themselves, but they see themselves as divided into many spheres of interest endowing their works with a sense of agency by regarding them as children may be an attempt to create some unity which resolves the divisions of selfhood in that much,

at least, they may have some resemblance to the coleridgean yearning for wholeness

some of the more important connections of poetry and paternity to selfhood can be captured in the connotations of the word ‘conceit’ or

‘concept’ (used quite interchangeably in the period): the OED gives the

two main meanings of ‘conceive’ as ‘i to conceive seed or offspring: with extensions of this sense’ and ‘ii to take into, or form in, the mind’;33 yet the core meaning of the word points, i think, to an originating moment which gives some kind of unity to the productions of the self; the ultim-

ate etymology of the word involves taking together, either within oneself

or with someone else; it implies understanding and, through that standing, making something new; though basically a subjective process, it can either be wholly internal or be linked, however tenuously, to the outer world sidney and spenser could think of their works as having a ‘conceit’ from which all the various aspects of the whole ramify sidney argues that

under-‘any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that

idea, or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself’.34 Here the erence is to the originating Platonic idea that allows the poet to conceive the whole, yet sidney must bolster this essentialism by an appeal (which

ref-is more than rhetorical) to truly insightful understanding similarly, spenser, who repeatedly uses the word ‘conceive’ in describing his plan for

The Faerie Queene, tells ralegh that his letter is intended ‘to direct your vnderstanding to the wel-head of the History, that from thence gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a handfull gripe al the discourse’

(letter to ralegh, 82–3);35 the metaphors of origin and of unified grasping

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here are powerful indicators of the desire for conception to be single, tained within the mind, but focussed and communicable; nonetheless,

con-spenser’s conceit is famously a ‘darke conceit’ (letter to ralegh, 3) such

a conceit is mysterious because it is concealed in the writer’s mind but nonetheless is supposed to manifest itself throughout the work a similar sense of mystery is found in thinking about biological conception, another form of conceit, which is also considered to reveal itself, however fitfully and uncertainly, in a child The almost arrogant hopefulness and obses-siveness of this idea (which the modern word ‘conceit’ conveys) is often recognized by writers, who know that the unity they claim is elusive and may be illusory – that it may amount to an idol of the mind nonetheless,

it provides a valuable fiction of integrity – and, yes, even of sincerity – to the process of artistic creation

We need go no further than the works of shakespeare to demonstrate how the word ‘conceit’ is used to intimate the extraordinary and mys-terious powers – for good and ill – of the mind’s creations, and to relate these to the idea of biological generativity seemingly simple jokes link the idea of understanding to that of procreative conception, as in the comic

exchange at the end of The Taming of the Shrew:

WidoW: He that is giddy thinks the world turns round

petruchio: roundly replied

katherine: Mistress, how mean you by that?

WidoW: Thus i conceive by him

petruchio: conceives by me! How likes Hortensio that?

hortensio: My widow says, thus she conceives her tale (v ii 20–4)36

For her to conceive from him would indeed be to make her grow round; her understanding of Petruchio, limited as it is, is related to the diffi-culty of conceiving the world going round, unless one is as giddy as he

is Mutual incomprehension is at the heart of this linguistic play: people are always conceiving each other wrongly, but it is the only link they have

with one another in King Lear, goneril, having given hints of her desires

to edmund, tells him ‘this kiss, if it durst speak, / Would stretch thy spirits

up into the air / conceive, and fare thee well’ (iv ii 22–4); he is bidden to make an imaginative leap, and to begin the growth of his fortunes; right understanding will enable self-development, the mysteries of the mind are presented as setting things in motion, for good or ill When lorenzo, in

The Merchant of Venice, tells Portia that she has ‘a noble and a true conceit /

of godlike amity’ (iii iii 2–3), he is not just saying that she understands antonio’s true friendship for Bassanio, but that her understanding will be the driving force that saves him gratiano had earlier said of antonio that

he wanted to be ‘dress’d in an opinion / of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit’ (i i 91–2), making him seem like an oracle, and nicely expressing the idea that conceit is mysterious – comprehension involves something incomprehensible such an idea is perhaps most satisfyingly found in Bottom’s discussion of his dream: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear

of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to

con-ceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (A Midsummer Night’s

Dream, iv i 211–14); famously a parody of 1 corinthians 2:9,37 this aesthetic garbling points to the difficulty of separating inward and out-ward conception and of drawing any crisp distinction between objective reality and the imagination to conceive, which seems to involve not just understanding, but understanding of something fresh, is to bring some-thing wholly into consciousness, but even as one does so it strikes one with

syn-a kind of unresyn-ality Thus Msyn-acduff, hsyn-aving seen the murdered duncsyn-an, can only say ‘o horror, horror, horror! tongue nor heart / cannot con-

ceive nor name thee!’ (Macbeth, ii iii 64–5); as with Bottom, conception

is seen as something which might be felt inside the heart and expressible

on the tongue, but which seems more often to be a matter of profound difficulty, if not error othello, observing iago’s gnomic evasions, accuses

him of having shut up in his brain ‘some horrible conceit’ (Othello, iii

iii 115); already, we have the sense that othello understands this to be desdemona’s infidelity, but though he is right that this is what iago wants him to think, and though he is ironically right that iago has a horrible plot conceived (his ‘monstrous birth’, i iii 404), all this conceiving is only hor-ribly in error

subjective, imaginative and erroneous though it may be, conceit has considerable power to impel action This is forcefully communicated in titania’s description of the indian child’s mother:

Full often hath she gossip’d by my side

and sat with me on neptune’s yellow sands,

Marking th’ embarked traders on the flood;

When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive

and grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;

Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait,

Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)

Would imitate, and sail upon the land

to fetch me trifles, and return again,

as from a voyage, rich with merchandise

But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,

and for her sake do i rear up her boy (A Midsummer

Night’s Dream, ii i 125–36)

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The boy’s paternity here is strikingly ruled out: one might almost infer that she is pregnant with the winds like the sails of the ships she imitates conception seems to come from nothing, enabling all sorts of real and imaginative movement and exchange, rather as imaginative metaphor or conceit carries things across seemingly unbridgeable distances; yet this conception is also lethal, and we cannot forget the dangers of mothers and sea-merchants; nothing is carried across without a price The idea that

such conceit involves pride before a fall is also present in Richard II where

the imaginative king knows his own fate:

within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps death his court, and there the antic sits,

scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

allowing him a breath, a little scene,

to monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks,

infusing him with self and vain conceit,

as if this flesh which walls about our life

Were brass impregnable (iii ii 160–8)

The idea of ‘self and vain conceit’, a willed and empty illusion of power, does not reduce the fact that it has power over others as much as it is ultim-ately fatal to the self ophelia’s ‘conceit upon her father’ (as claudius puts

it, Hamlet, iv v 45) is enough to drive her to madness and death; conceit

here seems to imply obsession or oppression by an idea as well as ous understanding Hamlet had earlier warned Polonius that ‘conception

mysteri-is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to ’t’ (ii ii 184–6); the joke is primarily a sexual one, but the irony is that what she conceives from Hamlet is not a child but the idea of death Juliet fears that she will go mad like ophelia if she wakes in the family tomb because

of the ‘horrible conceit of death and night’ (Romeo and Juliet, iv iii 37);

ironically, of course, she is conceiving of this in advance, anticipating and perhaps even in some sense causing her own doom

it is certainly felt that women are more subject to horrible conceit than

men: as the ghost warns in Hamlet ‘conceit in weakest bodies

strong-est works’ (iii iv 114, speaking of gertrude) yet men are also subject to it: edgar fears (rightly, it turns out in the end) that his father’s ‘conceit

may rob / The treasury of life’ (King Lear, iv vi 42–3) Most powerfully

of all, Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale dies of ‘mere conceit’ (iii ii 144)

of his mother’s danger; Paulina insists that his thoughts ‘cleft the heart / That could conceive a gross and foolish sire / Blemish’d his gracious dam’ (iii ii 196–8), but his father thought his decline caused by ‘conceiving

the dishonour of his mother’ (ii iii 13); the irony that his conception of his parents’ misconceptions undoes his biological conception is inescap-able leontes is projecting his feelings onto his son, obviously, but such

is the emphatic likeness between them that the projection really does make Mamillius ill When his jealousy began, leontes sought reassurance from looking at his son, presumably and inevitably seeing more difference between them the more he looks:

Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that i have

to be full like me; yet they say we are

almost as like as eggs; women say so –

That will say anything (i ii 128–31)

of course the son does not have his father’s grizzly hair; but what are these ‘shoots’? a double sense is suggested: on the one hand they might

be young branches – i.e potential offspring; on the other, they might be the cuckold’s horns that leontes now feels emerging in this double mean-ing leontes is intimating that for a son to be a true copy of his father, he must be a father himself, and a cuckold and therefore uncertain father at that Mamillius is made into a conceiving father, begetting self-destructive

ideas even more intensely than in Hamlet an imaginary

hyper-identifica-tion between father and son has created tragedy ideas, perhaps especially the idea of paternity, can destroy life

as with iago’s monstrous birth, when male characters in drama talk about conceiving things, they tend to be conceiving evil plots lazarotto

in The First Part of Jeronimo says that he has ‘mischiefe / Within my breast

more then my bulke can hold, / i want a midwife to deliver it’ (iii 7–9) –

he simply has the potential for evil which will be realized in the schemes

of his master lorenzo.38 a more notable example can be found in John

day’s Law Tricks (1604, pub 1608), where the villainous Horatio says in an

opening soliloquy

i turnd my thoughts into a thousand shapes:

Moulded the fashion of ten thousand plots,

lik’d and dislik’d so many, that my brayne

The mother of invention grew barrayne,

almost past bearing, still my labouring thoughts

conceiu’d a yet more strange and quaint Idea,

gaue it proportion, and i brought it forth (lines 13–19)39

The language here is very sidneian (talk of invention and problems of portion, for example), but it is treated very negatively (Horatio has plotted

Presumptive fathers

against the virtuous wife of his friend) The play’s heroine emilia, by trast, has a more virtuous plot which is presented as a ‘huge birth of knau-erie’ (line 284), and an ‘embrion’ (lines 298–9) wittily planning to test out

con-her brotcon-her’s virtues such imagery is developed in Middleton’s A Trick

to Catch the Old One (c 1606), where Witgood develops his plot with his

whore Jane:

What trick is not an embryo at first,

Until a perfect shape come over it?

jane: come, i must help you Whereabouts left you?

i’ll proceed

Though you beget, ’tis i must help to breed

speak, what is is? i’d fain conceive it (i i 57–62)

Their plot, mischievous as it is, and deceptive to the play’s two usurers, leads ultimately to their reform, so that it can be said to make them perfect

The heroes of Mary Wroth’s Urania overhear a damsel singing a song

that gives evidence of ‘a reasonable good conceit of love’:

love peruse me, seeke, and findeHow each corner of my minde

is a twine woven to shinenot a webb ill made, foule fram’d,Bastard not by Father nam’d, such in me

mys-not all conceits, then, are destructive They can be a mode of clearer understanding between the sexes orlando, who says he ‘can live no

longer by thinking’ (As You Like It, v ii 50), can gain access to life (and

presumably procreation) with rosalind, because she decides he is ‘a man of good conceit’ (lines 53–4); that she, of course, has conceived him and made him into such a good conceiver of her and of their children has been the central process of the play Here, conception has been a bless-ing: a self and a fate have been made through the process of dramatic interaction, moving him away from writing poems to being a man yet his earlier poems have proved something Whilst drama can articulate and represent such processes of conception/conceit, it is only poetry that really

gentle-is an instance of conceit.

The generative meaning of ‘conceit’ is surely invoked in sir John davies’s gulling sonnets, where he speaks of clothing love in various witty ways, including supplying a ‘codpeece of conceite’ (gulling sonnet 6, line 9);42

though the primary meaning here is pride in phallic power, it also gests the creation of odd ideas as well as procreation richard Barnfield,

sug-in a poem prsug-inted as shakespeare’s sug-in The Passionate Pilgrim, says that

‘spenser [is dear] to me, whose deep conceit is such / as passing all ceit needs no defence’ (8 7–8); in praising spenser, he essentially suggests that his work is incomprehensible and that it therefore needs no critical justification The idea of conceit becomes an aesthetic category involving depth and perfection: spenser is praised in this poem alongside the com-poser dowland, implying that really perfect conceit is the attainment of the condition of music in poetry

con-More thoughtful poets than Barnfield would see the real difficulty

of attaining this, making great poetry out of the process of trying to convey their conceptions and imbue them with both depth and unity edward de Vere, 17th earl of oxford’s ‘When werte thow borne, desyre?’ makes ‘good conceyte’ the father (reportedly) of the ‘sweet boy’ desire (lines 3–4).43 The poem plays very interestingly with voice, asking ques-tions which are answered in a second voice which only gradually emerges

as that of desire himself it is as if the autonomous voice of desire is ually being generated by the poet’s enquiries, and by the ‘sweete speech that lykte me best’, until it obtains an ‘i’ that can say ‘in gentle hearts

grad-i rest’ (lgrad-ines 14, 16) such desgrad-ire ‘lgrad-ikes to muse alone’ (lgrad-ine 20), but grad-is immortal, being born and dying ‘ten thoWsande tymes a day’ (line 28) The idea – unsurprising in the holder of england’s oldest earldom – that true desire must be of high status is undercut by its lack of perman-ent integrity as such, this voice seems very like the voice of poetry itself, floating free of its aristocratic begetter’s conceit and gaining immortality only at the cost of stability

shakespeare’s sonnet 15 takes this even further:

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When i consider every thing that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment;

That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows,

Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;

When i perceive that men as plants increase,

cheerèd and checked even by the selfsame sky,

Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,

and wear their brave state out of memory;

Then the conceit of this inconstant stay

sets you most rich in youth before my sight,

Where wasteful time debateth with decay

to change your day of youth to sullied night,

and, all in war with time for love of you,

as he takes from you, i engraft you new.44

The octave considers and perceives the impermanence of the universe, but

at the sonnet’s volta this is made to amount to one unified conceit which

brings a vision of the beloved to his mind, the poet’s conception of which allows the young man’s originating sap to be memorialized for ever: in the poet’s conceit, origin and memorial are one in sonnet 26, the poet’s sense

of his inadequate expression is compensated for by hope for ‘good conceit

of thine’ (line 7) which will clothe his thought; full conceit cannot be just internal, but requires someone else coming to meet one half way Mutual friendship, based on love and understanding, enables connections to be both growing and perfect, though perhaps only for a moment, and only in the imagination

This yearning for mutuality that will most fully express the unity of the self and that can transcend time reaches its richest expression in sonnet 108:

What’s in the brain that ink may character,

Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?

What’s new to speak, what now to register,

That may express my love, or thy dear merit?

nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,

i must each day say o’er the very same,

counting no old thing old, thou mine, i thine,

even as when first i hallowed thy fair name

so that eternal love in love’s fresh case

Weighs not the dust and injury of age,

nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,

But makes antiquity for aye his page,

Finding the first conceit of love there bred,

Where time and outward form would show it dead

The theological language here reaches to the ultimate origin of love to refresh expression of self and love; the idea of making anew in the moment (‘now’) of poetic creation captures the very essence of the life-giving property of poetry, thus rivalling even god’s creation (with a mixture of extraordinary arrogance and self-deprecating modesty) This perfect con-ception, which is both origin and end of the poetic process, can be so self-sufficient only because women have been ruled out (along with necessity, mutability and the material world, all perhaps associated with femininity)

it works for the moment, but the Sonnets’ ultimate failure to achieve their

erasure (probably hinted at in the poem’s final word) will be the subject

of chapter 5, below The problem is that one cannot simply brush women aside, as many renaissance men seemed keen to do; men could perhaps try to be friends without mediating women, but they could hardly become fathers without them

Men would have liked to think of the father–son line as perfect, without feminine interference, and mothers, wives and daughters were therefore continual causes of barely repressed anxieties in a number of ways: wives and mothers could, for instance, be regarded as either unreliable or effemi-nizing, daughters could compromise a man’s honour; loved as they often were, women were reckoned to be fundamentally inferior, especially in their intellects45 – an ideological position that must surely have come under some evidential pressure as david cressy demonstrates, ‘the mys-tery of childbirth’ was an exclusively feminine sphere (perhaps really the only one), men not being allowed into the bedchamber during labour.46

This accentuated male jealousies of female reproduction; the one area in which men were explicitly disempowered may partly be appropriated in order to compensate for those jealousies, but a clear effect of that appro-priation is to reveal and even revel in disempowerment anthony Fletcher argues that

men’s long-established and traditional conception of womankind as the weaker vessel, it seems, left them [women] in possession of sources of power which men found mysterious and threatening Meanwhile men’s overall conceptions of gen-der, in terms of hierarchy rather than incommensurable difference, gave them

an insufficiently competent means of imposing a patriarchal order rooted in nature.47

Poetic considerations of fatherhood, then, offered the opportunity to entrench paternity on a more solid basis, but only by admitting the femin-ine side of the writer himself

as we will see in more depth in chapter 2, paternity was both uncertain

and in some important ways optional, and these factors had an important

Presumptive fathers

effect on masculine self-conception eve Keller demonstrates that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women became more tightly identified with their wombs and their reproductive capacities;48

men may concomitantly have become more dissociated from tion, thus prompting a desire to find an alternative form of paternity in poetry certainly a woman was more likely to be reduced to a mere car-rier of a womb, which was thought to have some sort of life of its own, than a man was to be considered as a walking penis.49 as Keller observes,

reproduc-‘Much of the vernacular bio-medical literature of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century england perpetuates the fundamental components

of galenic anatomy and physiology but, even as it does so, it insistently rewrites their workings to support a notion of subjectivity more nearly aligned with masculinist and Humanist ideals.’50 Keller sees increasing medical efforts to deny the mother’s role in procreation and to intellec-tualize the father’s role as enabling the emergence of a modern mode of selfhood and subjectivity that is strongly gendered as male: of course, whilst this more explicitly involves children’s autonomy from the mother,

it also at least implies autonomy from the father The fact of male identity being dependent on such problematic figures as women seems to some almost intolerable,51 but it is also one of the major reasons for the brilliant complexity of elizabethan and Jacobean verse every assertion of paternal masculinity must be accompanied by a new configuration of men’s rela-tion to women, and even to their own femininity

We have seen that the idea of paternity involves considerable personal investment, but the nature of this investment was very much optional (just

as the time and resource investment of a father always seems to be more optional than that of the mother) Whilst figuring oneself as a father indi-cates a yearning for unity, and the investment of one’s selfhood into some form of creation, there are several spheres in which this might operate We can identify four central modes of generativity that occupied elizabethan and Jacobean minds: the biological, the poetic, the political and the eco-nomic The spheres are fairly distinct, but because of analogies operating between them, which are often taken to be more than analogies, there can

be real (and creative) confusion each mode is quite complex in itself The biological ought to be relatively simple, as it is after all the core category

by which the others are understood, but there was considerable doubt as to how it actually worked (see chapter 2, below), and it develops further com-plexity, not least owing to infection by ideas and problems emerging from the other categories The poetic may include the sphere of artistic achieve-ment in general, but perhaps also involves the educative – what richard

dawkins would call the ‘memetic’.52 The political includes all achievement for the nation and public success for oneself – though there seem to be potential conflicts here; many authors (perhaps most notably spenser) use paternal imagery as a way of suggesting that public and personal inter-ests may harmonize; in a similar way, the use of biological imagery to represent economic success constitutes an attempt to naturalize the mak-ing of money and to distinguish good thriving from supposedly unnatural modes such as usury although the various aspects of this paternal nexus might be conceived as mutually validating, in practice there were conflicts between the various spheres.

some thinkers of the time considered that people only had a certain quantum of fertility, that energies put into the family would reduce one’s

political or poetic achievement and so on in Marston’s Sophonisba (1606),

when Masinissa is called away to war, interrupting his wedding night with the titular heroine, she tells him

Fight for our country; vent thy youthful heat

in fields, not beds; the fruit of honour, fame,

Be rather gotten than the oft disgrace

of hapless parents, children (i ii 219–22)53

The sense of children as frequently disappointing alternatives to fruits in other fields is powerfully articulated – all the more so in that it comes from a woman

Thomas cogan concludes The Haven of Health (4th edn, 1636) with a

chapter ‘of Venus’, in which he decides that sexuality is natural to man, as the production of seed (both male and female) is the natural consequence

of eating:

and the commodities which come by moderate evacuation thereof are great For it procureth appetite to meate, and helpeth concoction, it maketh the body more light and nimble, it openeth the pores and conduits, and purgeth flegme,

it quickneth the mind, stirreth up the wit, reviveth the senses, driveth away nesse, madnesse, anger, melancholy, fury Finally it delivereth us utterly from lecherous imaginations, and unchaste dreames (p 280)

sad-The problem for cogan is that his text is ‘chiefely gathered for the comfort

of students’, who have no legitimate means of procuring such ‘evacuation’ (cogan considers masturbation an odd and exotic practice only performed

by diogenes).54 He therefore has to propose cures; other than a few herbal remedies for concupiscence, there are three main approaches: prayer, avoidance of women and hard work The second point is a clear instance of the fact that people thought sexual desires could only exist in the presence

Presumptive fathers

of an object The last, however, is particularly important, as it implies that erotic energies can be diverted into such spheres as ‘earnest study’ (p 285).Francis Bacon has a similar sense of competition between the modes of (re)production, arguing that

The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to men and surely a man shall see the noblest works and foun-dations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed so the care of pos-terity is most in them that have no posterity.55

More gnomically, Ben Jonson stated that ‘samuel daniel was a good est Man, had no children, bot no poet’,56 rather implying that having no

hon-children ought to have helped him be a poet Montaigne, whose own

chil-dren had died in infancy, argues for the superiority of brainchilchil-dren to biological ones:

now if we shall duly consider this simple occasion of loving our children, because

we have begotten them, for which we call them our other selves it seemes there is another production comming from us, and which is of no lesse recommendation and consequence For what we engender by the minde, the fruits of our courage, sufficiencie, or spirit, are brought forth by a far more noble part, than the corpo-rall, and are more our owne We are both father and mother together in this gen-eration: such fruits cost us much dearer, and chiefly if they have any good or rare thing in them For the value of our other children, is more theirs, than ours The share we have in them is but little; but of these all the beautie, all the grace, and all the worth is ours and therefore doe they represent, and resemble us much more lively than others.57

Montaigne’s desire to be both father and mother reflects a common envy

of the one sphere belonging to women His desire for absolute possession

of value, meanwhile, hints at the totalizing but futile possessiveness of authorship There is a yearning here for the preservation of the self in per-fect form, without the distorting interference of a mother, which is com-

mon in the poets of the time, most notably in shakespeare’s Sonnets The

masculine need to distribute one’s eggs (should that be seeds?) carefully between different baskets complicates the use of imagery of biological generation for poetic and other achievement, as we shall repeatedly see.The Protestant emphasis on all forms of work as spiritually equal may have been disingenuous (and would rarely regard poetry as work), but it had certain important effects:58 if every man was to discover his honourable vocation, and any kind of productivity was pleasing to god, it behoved each individual to think hard about how he might best use his talents sir John davies’s epigram ‘in cosmum’ (on cosmus) nicely captures the

idea of competition between various spheres of activity in a procreative metaphor:

cosmus hath more discoursing in his head,

Then Jove when Pallas issued from his braine,

and still he strives to be delivered,

of all his thoughtes at once, but all in vaine

For as we see at all the play house dores,

When ended is the play, the daunce and song:

a thousand townsemen, gentlemen, and whores,

Porters and serving-men togither throng,

so thoughts of drinking, thriving, wenching, war,

and borrowing money, raging in his minde,

to issue all at once so forwarde are,

as none at all can perfect passage finde

Though basically a simple satire of inarticulacy, the poem neatly expresses disorder in terms of class mixture: the separate functions of the different orders of society need to be kept separate if any is to thrive The poem’s irony operates in a double sense: occupying oneself with so many matters

is obviously very different from the wisdom Jove supposedly gave birth

to with Pallas, yet we may also infer that wisdom is holistic for a god and not for a human; if man wants to gain any perfect issue, he must focus his endeavours

alexandra shepard has argued, coherently and convincingly, that

‘manhood and patriarchy were not equated in renaissance england, and should not be elided by gender historians While men were often better placed to benefit from them, patriarchal imperatives nonetheless consti-tuted attempts to discipline and order men as well as women.’ 59 There were

‘alternative meanings of manhood independent of patriarchal hood, and not solely defined in its shadow’;60 poetry may be one of the most important of these alternative spheres of meaning at times, poetry seems to emerge as the result of failure in other fields of action george gascoigne’s ‘gascoignes lullabie’ presents his sorrowful losses as ‘wan-ton babes Which must be stilld with lullabie’ (lines 7–8); his sufferings have feminized him so that he must ‘sing lullabie, as women do’ (line 1).61

man-He has lost his youth, his gazing eyes and his wanton will, and must even say goodnight to his ‘loving boye’, his ‘little robyn’ (i.e his penis – lines 33–4) going to its rest such poetry seems self-cancelling even as it urges us to ‘remembre’ his song (line 48) Verse replaces phallic potency, and its associated procreative capacities, yet it is only in losing his amorous capacities that they have become ‘babes’ creation is necessarily a kind of loss, as the creation itself is the being with the voice

as statius’s ‘epicedion in patrem suum’ (Silvae, v iii)) the roman practice

of adoption made it less intense.62 The nexus is most prominent – though

it is very varied – in the poets who have become the most canonical, and one might speculate that it is one reason for these poets’ canonicity They are staking the main part of their selves in their writing, as poets had not before in establishing a paternal relationship to their poetic works, sidney and later poets made a claim on posterity that is emotional and political as well as poetic They are not, however, engaged in some time-

less Bloomian agon:63 their desire to invest themselves in their works is persistently inflected by the circumstances in which they lived, as we will see in the next chapter

Most of what follows will deal with works that we would consider poems – lyrics, epics, elegies, etc., principally in verse (though sidney and others thought that prose fiction might be a poem) This is because

these works have a voice, and it is through a voice that the poet can

dir-ectly or indirdir-ectly present himself as a father, or present the poem as a son Whilst prose tracts and sermons will also be examined, their more declarative voices will rarely reach the same intensities as poetry drama

is more problematic: the plays of shakespeare, Jonson and their poraries are full of fathers and sons, and it would be foolish not to listen

contem-to their voices as appropriate, but there are good reasons for ing our attention to them Firstly, drama always seems able to keep these voices at a distance: we are always conscious that actors are mere parts of

minimiz-a dynminimiz-amic whole, minimiz-and usuminimiz-ally conscious thminimiz-at they minimiz-are plminimiz-aying minimiz-a role; the sense of authorial investment is bound therefore to seem attenuated, how-ever much some authors may have cared about their plays secondly, it is rare for characters in plays to make anything; dramatic action is largely human interaction rather than creation, so that there is no room for the striking analogies and tensions between the various forms of creativity that we find in poems Finally, owing in part to the nature of dramatic

types, a character who is a father is almost always completely determined

by his paternity; i plan in a future study to explore why this might be, but may it suffice here to observe how far this shows that being a father was the primary role a man could have

However, the centrality of fatherhood was challenged by the gent importance of education: the new learning characteristic of the renaissance shook up traditional notions of patriarchy education ena-bled men at least to rise above their parents; whilst the contents of that education very frequently privileged filial piety – most notably Virgil’s

emer-Aeneid – other texts, such as ovid’s Metamorphoses, seemed to run against

the central Virgilian model by emphasizing modes of continuity that work very differently from the dynastic additionally, Plato’s works presented the private family as a lesser point of allegiance than the state (in the

Republic) or the amicable education system (in the Symposium) cicero,

the most esteemed of all classical authors, joined these views together, making the oligarchical, educated in-group the central point of allegiance, and subordinating patriarchy to meritocracy The result of all this is that there was a considerable variety of available models to which an individual

may choose to attach himself, making paternity only at best a primus inter

pares of models for individuality, and allowing people to choose what kind

of relation they would have to a paternalistic system

Heather dubrow has suggested that ‘the loss, real or feared, of a boy’s father may help to explain the extraordinary impact of those pater-nal surrogates, the Humanist schoolmasters’;64 it may also help explain the need to make poetry, as it was a core element of the Humanist cur-riculum, into a surrogate for paternal and filial feeling one of the central ideas derived from both cicero and Plato, and which is perhaps always implicit when education is highly valued, is the superiority of cultural

school-to biological transmission – in dawkins’s terms, memetic rather than genetic inheritance We have already seen this idea expressed by Francis Bacon; add to this a growing sense of a continuous poetic tradition, in which poets such as spenser can take chaucer or Virgil as their fore-bears, and poetry becomes one of the crucial means by which men can meditate their position in relation to the possible models of individuality This meditation is further complicated, of course, by the centrality of amorous material to that poetic tradition amorous poetry, then, both provides a sense of entering into a wider, non-familial culture, and allows writers to meditate on their own origins This will be a central focus of this study, but a few examples here will demonstrate the complexity of feeling involved in texts with less explicit ideological agenda than we will find in prose tracts

The perilous likelihood of early paternal (and maternal) death, along with high levels of infant mortality, tended to add an element of pathos

Presumptive fathers

to all parent–child relationships, something which is often exploited for amorous purposes it is in texts which exploit the pathos of orphancy that we can see some of the fullest developments of poetic individuality Michael Witmore describes renaissance children, who were regarded as

in some senses not quite human (because not rational), as ‘living sadors for the realm of the imagination’ and ‘agents without interests’,65

ambas-rather as poems may be; this gives an important pair of reasons for the use

of imagery of children in referring to poetic creativity, allowing the poem

to be both in need of rational correction and aesthetically autonomous, whilst also investing it with pathos as needed samuel daniel’s presen-tation of writing as masculine parthenogenesis involves a desire to find

a mother for his work; indeed writing is figured as a means by which the cruel woman’s instinctive maternal pity can be evoked:

goe, wailing verse, the infants of my loue,

Minerua-like, brought foorth without a mother:

Present the image of the cares i proue,

Witnesse your Father’s griefe exceedes all other

sigh out a storie of her cruell deedes,

With interrupted accents of despaire:

a Monument that whosoeuer reedes,

May iustly praise, and blame my loueless Faire

say her disdaine hath dryed up my blood,

and starued you, in succours still denying:

Presse to her eyes, importune me some good

Waken her sleeping pitty with your crying,

Knocke at that hard hart, begge till you have mou’d her,

and tell th’ vnkinde, how deerely i haue lou’d her (Delia, sonnet ii)66

The poem as child is a representation of the father, but tells the story of the mother, bringing her both credit (for beauty) and disgrace (for cruelty)

as the poem is consequently a product of both man and woman, it is clear that it really does have a mother and that daniel is asking her to acknowledge her maternity as such, it is an inversion of the more nor-mal desire of a woman to have her illegitimate child acknowledged by its father The pathos of the poem becomes a mediation between the poet and his beloved, and also calls upon the wakening of pity, a characteris-tically feminine emotion The wailing of the verse itself indicates that it may be feminine (if not female), for tears were considered to be manifest-ations of feminine humours.67 even as he makes demands on the woman, then, daniel is also making some recognition of a feminine element in his creativity

By contrast, robert greene’s Menaphon gives voice to an abandoned

mother, sephestia, for whom her ‘poore babe was the touch-stone of his mothers passions’:

Weepe not, my wanton, smile vpon my knee, When thou art olde, there’s grief inough for thee.

Mothers wagge, pretie boy, Fathers sorrow, fathers ioy.

When thy father first did see Such a boy by him and mee,

He was glad, I was woe:

Fortune changde made him so, When he left his pretie boy, Last his sorowe, first his joy (vi: 42–3)68

it is instructive that the first reaction of the father is joy (whereas the mother’s is woe, both in her labour-pains and in her sense of shame at her unauthorized marriage), but the poem gives no fuller explanation of the sorrow the father finally feels – is it sorrow at leaving, or sorrow that causes him to leave? Perhaps the point is that the mother doesn’t know which, fortune having caused Maximus to leave her yet the turning of the verse in the lines that become the poem’s refrain results in ‘joy’ being the final word However much pathos there may be in the reversal of fortune, there is an ultimate assertion of joy in paternity, leaving a silver lining to the poem’s clouds of misery The mother is subsequently consoled by her attendant, and the work as a whole is presented as a consolation to the widowed dedicatee lady Hales The use of a child as a touchstone enables hope to emerge

a similarly pathetic tack is taken, in much more extravagant terms, in

sir Walter ralegh’s Ocean to Scinthia, which encapsulates so many uses

of the idea of paternity that it deserves extended attention here, not least

as it demonstrates fascinating revisions of the idea of paternity as the elizabethan era gave way to the Jacobean The poem is an elizabethan

Waste Land, filled with images of frustrated fertility it was probably

writ-ten some time in 1592/3, when ralegh was in disgrace after the Queen discovered his marriage to her lady-in-waiting elizabeth Throckmorton (Bess); as such, it is a kind of counter-epithalamium, a lament for mar-riage obviously, in writing to the Queen ralegh presents his feelings in very different terms from those he might use to his wife, but the emotional situation as presented does mingle his private and his public selves The poem we have is fragmentary, our only witness being an incomplete and apparently unfinished manuscript in ralegh’s own hand; it purports to