‘Nedelesse Singularitie’: George Gascoigne’s
Strategies
for Preserving Lyric Delight
Matthew Zarnowiecki
Auburn University
jmz0002@auburn.edu
Zarnowiecki, Matthew. “‘Nedelesse Singularitie’: George Gascoigne’s Strategies for Preserving Lyric Delight.” Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18 (May, 2008) 4.1-28<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/14-1/zarnowecki.htm>.
1. George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) is among the most miscellaneous of early miscellanies printed in England.[1] It contains two dramatic texts, a prose romance that is arguably England’s first novel,[2] and more than seventy pages of poetry ranging from short lyrics to poems of more than three hundred lines. Judging from the attributions in the title page, front matter, and throughout the volume, the collection has almost as many authors as genres: the first play, Supposes, was “written in the Italian tongue by Ariosto and Englished by George Gascoygne,” Jocasta was “written in Greke by Euripides, translated and digested into Acte by George Gascoygne, and Francis Kinwelmershe,” The Adventures of Master F.J. is credited to a man by those initials but also contains text written by a “G.T.,” while the poems, or “Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen,” are either anonymous or credited to Gascoigne.[3] The greatest influence on the form of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres was almost certainly Songes and Sonettes, a verse miscellany printed by Richard Tottel in 1557, with six editions by 1567. This collection was in fact multiply authored, with poetry by the Earl of Surrey (the only author mentioned on the title page), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald, and other poets. But recent bibliographical evidence suggests, and critics accept, that the multiple authorship of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (hereafter HSF) is a façade, with Gascoigne as its sole author.[4]
2. Accordingly, critics have focused attention on Gascoigne’s multiplicity, primarily by examining the differences between the 1573 and 1575 editions. (The second edition, entitled The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire, does not claim to have multiple authors, though it retains the same miscellaneous material as the first edition.) For example, Adrian Weiss and G.W. Pigman address the multiple states of the text in their efforts to establish how it was printed originally, and how it should be edited today.[5] Cyndia Clegg examines the apparent censorship of the 1573 edition, the documented censorship of the 1575 edition, and the changes between the two.[6] Other critics examine Gascoigne’s posture of penitence with regard to the revised edition, or note the multiple motivations of the characters in F.J., or call attention to Gascoigne as an author who inhabits the persona of G.T. in order to critique his own poems.[7] These critical efforts signal a robust poetic principle in Gascoigne’s work, in which he eschews what he calls “nedelesse singularitie,” in favor of multiple representations of similar events, poems, and characters.
3. A related, but more basic question concerning Gascoigne’s poetic method nevertheless remains unanswered. That question is, why does Gascoigne eschew singularity in favor of multiplicity? One way to answer this question is to analyze Gascoigne’s relentless pursuit of delight, both physical and artistic. Multiplicity is his solution to the impossible task of preserving those delights. I take it to be no accident that his collections are named A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and The Posies of George Gascoigne, since these titles demonstrate the paradox of all poetic anthologies (literally, flower-collections).[8] That paradox involves the instantiation of ephemeral, evanescent delight into a more permanent form such as the printed book. Thus, rather than seeking social answers to Gascoigne’s multiplicity, such as J.W. Saunders’s “stigma of print,”[9] or biographical answers, such as allegations of slander, I seek an answer that can yield a fuller account of Gascoigne’s poetry as it appears in its larger context, the miscellaneous A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres.
4. This line of inquiry furthers critical work that links Gascoigne’s career trajectory to his literary output. Richard Helgerson and Richard McCoy, for example, have both commented on the theme of disillusionment and reversed fortune in Gascoigne’s work. While Helgerson numbers Gascoigne among his “Elizabethan prodigals,” McCoy focuses on how Gascoigne’s literary output changed once he finally enjoyed some success in his bids for patronage.[10] Gascoigne’s “creative autonomy diminished as his proximity to power increased” according to McCoy, and his later writings reflect a self-conscious turn to “works which were either grimly moralistic or insipidly occasional.”[11] The best evidence for this negative evaluation comes in the form of Gascoigne’s later works themselves, such as The droomme of Doomes day or The Steele Glas (1576). But the most frequently cited evidence for Gascoigne’s savvy consciousness of this transition is the phrase “poëmata castrata,” invoked by Gascoigne to describe the supposed vast changes he wrought upon the second edition.[12] Both McCoy and Alan Stewart have argued persuasively that in using this phrase, Gascoigne is referring to Théodore Beza’s substantial changes to his own Poemata. Gascoigne, however, playfully signals his awareness that he is not, in fact, changing the poetry in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres much at all – certainly not gelding or castrating it.[13] For McCoy, this ironic phrase nevertheless presages a significant development in Gascoigne’s artistic output: poor poetry from thenceforward. Stewart argues instead that when they move from manuscript to print, Gascoigne’s works have already been gelded.[14] For Stewart, all Gascoigne’s assertions, ironic or not, that he has gelded his own poetry (by getting rid of objectionable phrases) overlook the fact that the process of print is much more destructive to his autonomy than he allows.
5. Such studies raise the thorny question of just what poëmata castrata might look like. Particularly, how can poems possess, and lose, the capacities associated with the word “castrata?” These capacities seem to be twofold: the capacity for delight, and the capacity for reproduction. And while poems arguably possess an active, perhaps even autonomous capacity to delight, they nevertheless possess only a passive capacity to be reproduced. Thus a gelded poem either ought not exist, or not delight. But Gascoigne repeatedly lavishes his attention on the nature of the delight which short lyric poems both describe and provide. For Gascoigne, textual and bodily delight are often combined or confused, while the reproduction of those delights often occurs beyond the controls and boundaries of established systems, whether manuscript or print. These confusions and combinations of delight and reproduction are what make HSF such a groundbreaking miscellany, and such a fascinating collection of poetry.
6. Although Gascoigne’s work continually explores the connection between bodily and textual delight, and their preservation, Gascoigne also uses “delight” in its most conventional sense – paired with “profit” as a rhetorical goal. This pairing appears frequently in contemporary title pages and front matter – “thine owne profite and pleasure” (Songes and Sonettes), “to stir up thy pleasure and further thy profit” (Barnabe Googe, Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes, 1563), the posthumous Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate (1568), and Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandry (1570): “What looke ye for more in my booke? / Things nedefull in tyme for to come? / Else misse I of that I do looke / If pleasant thou findest not some.” Rooted in Horace’s dulce et utile, and in Cicero’s earlier, tripartite formulation of “ut et concilientur animi et doceantur et moveantur,”[15] the phrase “pleasant and profitable” often simply reassures readers of early modern English miscellanies that the contents of the book are beyond reproach.[16] Both the 1573 and 1575 editions of Gascoigne do make such conventional assurances. The title page of HSF promises that its contents will be “bothe pleasaunt and profitable to the well smellyng noses of learned Readers,” while the address “To al yong Gentlemen” in the revised 1575 Posies qualifies this promise by categorizing the contents into flowers, weeds, and herbs. The flowers are “more pleasant than profitable,” the herbs “more profitable than pleasant,” and the weeds are “neither pleasant nor yet profitable,” and yet still have some “medicinable” qualities (367).
7. Although these references to a solidly established rhetorical tradition seem offhand, Gascoigne makes it clear that for him, delight itself poses more essential questions: what does it mean to experience delight, how should he portray that experience, and how preserve it? Tellingly, there is never a single answer to such questions. In fact, the concept of singularity itself immediately comes under scrutiny, in the opening passage of the collection.[17] As well, the full title of HSF helps to emphasize Gascoigne’s concern with singularity and multiplicity. There, “A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres” have been “bounde vp in one small Poesie,” and yield “sundrie sweete sauours of tragical, comical and moral discourse, bothe pleasant and profitable to the well smellyng noses of learned Readers.” The term “a hundreth” was conventionally used to signal a large, indeterminate number, but Gascoigne’s title calls attention to the conflict between unity and miscellaneity with the phrase “one small Poesie.” The term “singularitie” occurs soon after, in one of the most intriguing moments in the miscellany, when we learn of the (fictional) textual transmission of The Adventures of Master F.J. and the other “devises of sundrie Gentlemen.” In a letter to the reader, the figure H.W. describes how he received the text we are about to read from his friend G.T., calling the text “divers discourses and verses” by various authors:
And herewithal my said friend charged me, that I should use them onely for mine owne particuler commoditie, and eftsones safely deliver the originall copie to him againe, wherein I must confesse my selfe but halfe a marchant, for the copie unto him I have safely redelivered. But the worke (for I thought it worthy to be published) I have entreated my friend A.B. to emprint: as one that thought better to please a number by common commoditie then to feede the humor of any private parson by nedelesse singularitie. This I have adventured, for thy contentation (learned Reader.) [141-42]
Gascoigne here portrays the opposed wishes of two agents: G.T., who has collected and organized texts from a variety of sources and who wants to control their circulation, and H.W., who instead immediately both copies and distributes them.[18] H.W.’s bias is against restricted coterie exchange, as seen in the phrase “particuler commoditie,” in contrast to the more public model of “common commoditie.” This bias leads H.W. to wrest control over what he terms “the worke.” At first he states that what he returns to G.T. is the “originall copie,” but a moment later, it is just “the copie.” Already, the thing itself – the work – is that which H.W. has dispersed among many, rather than that which G.T. would like to restrict for the few.
8. H.W.’s impulse is to disperse textual pleasure, to “please a number,” and this action provides a pattern for other experiences of delight in the collection. That pattern is one in which there is a short-lived, and ultimately futile struggle to reserve for oneself a private, personal moment of delight. Only when that experience is transmitted, or revisited, or even reconceived, is this futility forestalled. The strategies for transmission and reconception, of course, are all textual strategies. One such pivotal moment occurs in Gascoigne’s tale of The Adventures of Master F.J., on the morning after F.J. and the married Lady Elynor have spent a delightful night of illicit passion together. The narrator has related the entire episode, and proceeds to describe these events as the conditions under which F.J. composes a poem: “At last F.J. awaked, and apparreling himselfe, walked out also to take the ayre, and being throughly recomforted aswell with remembraunce of his joyes forepassed, as also with the pleasaunt hermony which the Byrdes made on every side, and the fragrant smel of the redolent flowers and blossomes which budded on every braunche: hee did in these delightes compyle these verses following” (169). F.J.’s method of poetic composition, or “compiling,” recasts the previous evening’s dalliances as a narrative poem, which has as its central conceit the moon’s vanishing, and how that vanishing facilitated their sexual encounter. G.T. takes care to tell his readers that F.J. was still experiencing sensual delights when he composed this poem. His experience of the “remembraunce of his joyes forepassed” is one among other, more immediate pleasures: the “pleasaunt hermony” of birds and the “fragrant smel” of flowers. F.J.’s delights at this moment of composition both surround and infuse him. He sees, hears, and smells delightful natural objects while he is remembering the previous night. He thus compiles and writes from an actual locus amoenus, a place that is “in these delightes.”
9. With F.J. in this state of sensory overload, his next few poems all continue to praise Mistress Elynor and relate with much bravura their romantic exploits. “A Frydayes Breakefast,” for example, laughingly figures another tryst as a breakfast, while a poem beginning “As some men say there is a kind of seed” uses several different cuckold euphemisms to laugh at Mistress Elynor’s husband by sharing a secret sonnet behind his back. But amatory and lyric delight have a strange relationship to one another, and Gascoigne explores this relationship with an intentionally confusing explanation from G.T. as to why the majority of F.J.’s most delight-filled poems have not made it into this printed volume:
Well, thus these two Lovers passed many dayes in exceding contentation, and more than speakeable pleasures, in which time F.J. did compyle very many verses according to sundrie occasions proffred, whereof I have not obteyned the most at his handes, and the reason that he denied me the same, was that (as he alleged) they were for the most part sauced with a taste of glory, as you know that in such cases a lover being charged with inexprimable joyes, and therewith enjoyned both by dutie and discretion to kepe the same covert, can by no means devise a greater consolation, than to commit it into some cyphred wordes and figured speeches in verse, whereby he feeleth his harte halfe (or more than halfe) eased of swelling. For as sighes are some present ease to the pensife mind, even so we find by experience, that such secrete entre comoning of joyes doth encrease delight. (178)
G.T. continues at some length with his analysis of affect and expression, coming to the same conclusions already apparent here – that the recording of such delights may help to prolong and preserve them, but these records should be kept entirely private. Examining this passage, Elizabeth Heale focuses on the bodily implications of expressing passion: “The dissemination of F.J.’s verses beyond the bed closet threatens to dissipate his inner self, to diminish his real presence through language. The only solution to F.J.’s dilemma, caught between the need for bodily relief and fear of bodily loss, is private writing, verse as a form of auto-eroticism.”[19] Heale’s analysis is acute, but in focusing on the pen / penis wordplay (and the related semen / dissemination pun), she emphasizes expulsion and dissipation over contrasting references here to collection, prolongation of delight, and remembrance in posterity. The passage is also full of words like “reteyne” and “kepe,” where those verses that F.J. does not share with G.T. nevertheless can provide a “pleasaunt record” that is like a “hidden treasure” that helps him to “record unto him selfe in the inward contemplation of his mynde the often remembraunce of his late received joyes” (179). Heale’s analysis describes a solitary, jealously guarded version of poetic creation in which pleasure, self-conservation, and artistic output all combine in a single act. Gascoigne’s inclusion of G.T. in this scenario, however, immediately calls into question the privacy and solitude of F.J.’s poetic composition.
10. G.T. himself emphasizes delight’s privacy, even as his actions prolong that delight by means of a more public, textual form. His statement that “secrete entre comoning of joyes doth encrease delight” accents reproduction (“encrease”) as a result of the sharing of delight between two people. Yet there is an evident conflict between F.J.’s attempt to “commit” his own delight to the form of verse, and G.T.’s attempt to distribute F.J.’s poetic delights, making them more common, and less secret. Both agents aim to increase delight, to prolong it and change its form, yet their desires are clearly at odds with one another. Typographic variety helps the reader to visualize the contrast between Gascoigne’s fictional agents. At the opening Fiv-Fiir for example (1573 HSF; see Figure 1 below), different type faces punctuate the actions of the different agents involved in F.J.’s delight. At left, G.T. narrates the delightful occasion that led to the poem titled “a Frydayes Breakefast.” The poem then narrates another tryst between F.J. and Lady Elynor. But G.T. also relates to the audience F.J.’s delightful remembrance of this episode, and then presents another poem in which this remembrance spurs more poetic creation on F.J.’s part. Finally, at right, F.J.’s verse includes the experience of being overcome by his lady’s beauty: “The wyndowes of myne eyes, are glaz’d with such delight, / As eche new face seemes full of faultes, that blaseth in my sight.” Simultaneously, then, we are confronted with no fewer than three versions of F.J.’s delight. In this context, the “entre comoning of joyes” takes on a new meaning, as the joys themselves begin to interact with each other on the facing page.
Figure 1: George Gascoigne, A Hundreth
Sundrie Flowres (1573), Sig. Fiv-Fiir
Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California
11. In the last analysis, however, F.J. must revisit these joys in a much more downcast mood, once his love affair has gone awry. The narrative of The Adventures of Master F.J. ends badly for F.J., with the discovery that Elynor’s infidelity with him has changed into what he perceives as an infidelity to him. His last three poems ruefully echo the words that she has most recently spoken to him, and tellingly, they gradually lose their instrumental poetic force. That is, each successive poem fails F.J. more grievously than the last in his immediate, amorous purpose. With the first of the three, he attempts unsuccessfully “to recover some favor at her hands” (212). The second poem quickly escapes his control: “he lost it where his Mistresse found it, and she immediately emparted the same unto Dame Pergo, and Dame Pergo unto others: so that it quickely became common in the house” (213).[20] This commonality, we should recognize, is precisely what F.J. was avoiding, and what H.W. was seeking when he first reproduced the text of F.J.’s story and poetry. Now the same lesson occurs again: F.J.’s delights will be shared and multiple, despite his attempts to keep them to himself. F.J., unaware of the irony of his situation, becomes embittered that his own joys have been shared to the whole household. With that bitterness, his poetic output changes to complaint, and the third poem reaches no audience at all (in the tale’s world). In stark contrast to the “mooneshine Banquet,” it is “compiled” not in a delightful garden, but in a “place sollitary” (215).
12. These last poems force us as readers to reevaluate the earlier, manic, delight-filled moments of poetry. F.J. himself reevaluates them, when he finds himself in a state of jealousy, then in a state of being quite plainly rejected by his former lover. F.J. just as plainly asks for more delight, via a letter “thrust...into her bosome, wherein he had earnestly requested another mooneshyne banquet or frydayes breakfast to recomfort his dulled spirits” (211). And when she repels this request, it is clear that what remains of his delight is now textual. However, by the end of the narrative, it is not at all clear that F.J. can return to these textual witnesses of his delight, for he never relives these moments by poring over his poems. Instead, he makes an acidic poem out of Lady Elynor’s last, challenging words to him, “And if I did [leave F.J. for another lover] what than?” (214) F.J.’s delights do seem to exist multiply, in many private poems, only a few of which have escaped singularity by being reproduced. But here, in the face of F.J.’s obsessive, myopic concentration on the most recent event, we are forced to acknowledge how the delight of these poems survives into the present. Primarily, Gascoigne makes it clear that this delight passes out of F.J.’s experience, and into textual circulation. F.J.’s delights need the meddling of G.T. and H.W. in order to be preserved beyond their brief moment. F.J. might feel the loss of control and pleasure implied by “gelding,” but Gascoigne carefully includes the subsequent reproduction and preservation of his pleasures as well.
13. Gascoigne thus makes it clear to the reader that F.J.’s insistence on singularity is misplaced, that G.T.’s willingness to reproduce those delights in fact saves them from annihilation. And beyond The Adventures of Master F.J., throughout HSF, Gascoigne frequently demonstrates the same “nedelesse singularitie.” In the “Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen,” poems #15-20 narrate a series of incidents very similar to those that occur in F.J.[21] There are verses written into a lady’s book, her answer, and a whole dinner sequence which chiefly involves lots of meaningful looks exchanged silently among the various characters. These events, as in F.J., are preserved for the reader’s perusal in a series of short narratives. When read together with F.J., it is clear that this episode is meant to evoke, even reproduce, that narrative.
14. One key verbal connection between these two episodes is Gascoigne’s use of the word “contented.” This is the word with which Lady Elynor decorates herself just after she and F.J. have first become lovers (171-72), and it is also with this word that she finally discards him at the end of the story (211).[22] The state of being “contented,” like that of delight, is thus never to last. (In fact, Lady Elynor’s sign marks her as recently delighted, but when she applies it to F.J. at the end of the story, it is closer to “never-more-to-be-delighted.”) In Devises 19-20, we see another version of the lovers’ quarrel over such contentment:
He held himselfe herwith contented: and afterwardes when they were better acquainted, he chaunced once (groping in hir pocket) to find a letter of hir old lovers: and thinking it wer better to wincke than utterly to put out his eyes, seemed not too understand this first offence: but soone after finding a lemman (the which he thought he saw hir old lemman put there) he devised therof thus, and delivered it unto hir in writing.
I groped in thy pocket pretty peat,
And found a Lemman which I looked not:
So found I once (which now I must repeat)
Both leaves and letters which I liked not.
Such hap have I to find and seeke it not,
But since I see no faster meanes to bind them,
I will (henceforth) take lemmans as I find them.The Dame within very short space did aunswere it thus.
A Lymone (but no Lemmane) Sir you found,
For Lemmans beare their name to broad before:
The which since it hath given you such a wound,
That you seeme now offended very sore:
Content your self you shall find (there) no more.
But take your Lemmans henceforth where you lust,
For I will shew my letters where I trust. (#19-20)
This, we should recognize, is F.J. redux. There is a gentle re-working of the same problems F.J. encountered: the transitory quality of his pleasure, the discovery that his leman has other lemans of her own, and the mutual accusations that result from such discoveries. In both cases, the male lovers expect a faithfulness that is impossible, given that their relationship was a secret and illicit one to begin with. Here, in this condensed version of the same problems, there is not as much time for the pathos of discovering faithlessness, and experiencing disillusion. Instead, the more light-hearted lemman - lemon pun serves as the fulcrum on which the poems of both the lover and the “Dame” turn. She answers his single rhyme royal stanza with one of her own. Within those seven lines, all three of his points are economically answered: the pun, his suspicious searching of her pockets, and the results of that search. The last three lines, in which we see the use of “contented” in its negative sense, demonstrate that the loss of the lover’s delight is again accompanied by a loss of control over circulation. But rather than F.J.’s situation, in which his writings were dispersed against his wishes, here “The Dame” exerts control over her writings by taking them out of circulation: “For I will show my letters where I trust.” In this version, then, each poetic response recuperates from the bitterness in F.J. by looking forward rather than backward. The male lover looks forward to new “lemmans,” while the female lover looks forward to a situation in which she can trust her lover not to question the past. Both these responses mitigate, and provide a new perspective on, the bleak picture of delight drawn at the end of F.J.
15. After Devise #48, Gascoigne’s name is continually attached to each poem, until the last sequence (the poems and story of “Dan Bartholmew of Bath”). From among these poems, three of his finest and most often anthologized demonstrate that Gascoigne’s subtle portrayal of delight depends on the connections between individual, or singular, poems; likewise, his special brand of delight insists on a constant appraisal and re-appraisal of one’s own inward state. These three are “Gascoignes Lullabie,” “Gascoignes passion,” and “Gascoignes wodmanship.” His Lullabie (#56) is a masculinized and uneasy entrance into the lullaby tradition.[23] “And lullabie can I sing to / As womanly as can the best,” boasts the speaker in the first stanza. The bawling child he must quell, we find out in successive stanzas, takes multiple forms: Gascoigne’s youth, his “gazing eyes,” his “wanton will,” and finally his “louing boye” or his “little Robyn” – his penis. These four aspects of Gascoigne’s earlier, delight-filled wanton days are supposedly put to rest by Gascoigne’s lullaby; night-time squawking and middle-aged lust are thus conceived to be of a piece.
16. If any poem in Gascoigne’s early oeuvre could be said to be a gelded or castrated poem, it is this lullaby. Gascoigne seems systematically to reduce himself, eventually renouncing his own sexual organ as part of the pleasures of his former days. Yet the instruments of youthful delight survive, precisely because the poem follows its conceit to a logical, if unexpected, conclusion.[24] Having anatomized himself and attempted to quell each aspect of his earlier days, the final stanza begins with a formulaic recapitulation of the verses that have come before:
Thus Lullabie my youth, myne eyes,
My will, my ware, and all that was,
I can no mo delayes devise,
But welcome payne, lette pleasure passe…
In each previous stanza, the lines that would come next employ “lullabie” in a refrain that forms a repetitive and hypnotic couplet, such as “With Lullabye bee thou content, / With Lullabye thy lustes relent…” Each of these stanzas furthers the sense that youth is being successfully quelled, rocked to sleep both by repetition and persuasion. One logical end-point to the poem would be here, at sleep. The infant is finally rocked to sleep, just as Gascoigne finally bids farewell to all that his youth entailed. But Gascoigne instead ends the poem not with sleep, but with waking. In the final stanza, the “you” of the poem, which by now entails all the previous aspects of Gascoigne’s life, takes over:
With Lullabye nowe take your leave,
With Lullabye youre dreames deceyve
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remembre Gascoignes Lullabye.
Ever or Never.
Though the commands from the speaker of the poem continue in these lines, Gascoigne himself has ceased to be the subject. Instead, all the elements of youth and sexuality show themselves capable of surviving beyond the song that was supposed to lull them to sleep. The song may help against bad dreams, but ultimately Gascoigne’s youth survives the song – that is, it survives his own attempts to quell it. The bawdy image of a single, “waking eye” combines with the final command to “remembre” this song, ending the poem with a sexual dawn rather than a lustless sleep. But it is not Gascoigne, the singular author, who rises at the end of the poem. That would entail an impossible re-dawning of his past youth and his wanton ways. Instead, “when you rise” refers to the youthful, anatomized elements of Gascoigne that he was trying to quell throughout the poem. Perhaps these elements will be “remembered” in some other, hapless young lover. Or perhaps Gascoigne’s attempts continually to rid himself of these elements nevertheless continually fail, just as infants are bound to wake again and wail again. In any case, the poem effects its own preservation, and thus the preservation of lyric delight: the song itself, Gascoigne’s singular lullaby, will replicate – or “remember” – itself in all of these future instances.
17. F.J. and “Gascoignes Lullaby” thus accent the productive confusion between bodily and textual delight, and the implications of this confusion for the preservation and continuation of delight. In both cases, delight escapes the strictures imposed on it, and survives into an extended moment and a new form. In the final two poems I will examine, Gascoigne more explicitly addresses poesis itself. The first, entitled “Gascoigne’s passion” (#53), takes on the pleasures and pains associated with Petrarchan metaphors. Gascoigne begins by belittling the songs of other lovers: he smiles “to heare and see these lovers paint their paine, / And how they can in pleasaunt rimes repeate, / The passing pangs, which they in fancies faine.” It is the feigning performance of passion that is at issue here. Rather than reading their verses, the speaker is watching these lovers perform. He hears and sees them, and it is apparent to him from the parroted conventions of their verses that the lovers lack real passion. For these feigning lovers, the pains of love are “passing” – that is, both exaggerated and ephemeral. “They friese, they flame, they flie alofte, they fall,” says the speaker with disdain, and it seems that this disdain is directed at the manner of expression, which is trita et obvia,[25] since it uncritically reproduces Petrarchan metaphors.
18. The poem turns at its midpoint, when Gascoigne devotes the entire stanza to his own affective and poetic state, rather than to a comparison with others’ states:
I live in love, even so I love to live,
(Oh happie state, twice happie he that finds it)
But love to life this cognisance doth give,
This badge this marke, to every man that minds it,
Love lendeth life, which (dying) cannot die,
Nor living live: and such a life lead I.
As the speaker of the poem, Gascoigne claims that his passion differs from that of other courting lovers not by its outward signs, but by his “cognisance” of what these signs entail. In the next four stanzas, Gascoigne exhibits many of the signs that he has just lampooned in others. He enjoys “No quiet sleepe,” he has a “fever first…caught by wanton will,” and he experiences the same “heate…And shivring cold” described by other poets.[26] But these poets ask silly questions like “How live I then, which thus drawe foorth my daies? / Or tell me how, I found this fever first?” Gascoigne’s passion entails a kind of reflective and experience-based recognition, or cognizance, of just what kind of “happie state” he has entered into.
19. Yet the happy state described in stanzas 5-9 is not an unfamiliar one. These lines describe the torments of love, and portray the poet in the act of coming to terms with these torments, primarily by asserting a voluntary quality to his state. The torments, fevers, inflammations, and shivers are one side of the happy state that he is unwilling to relinquish. Thus he ends the poem in the present continuous tense, since the state is an ongoing one. He continues “delighting most in that which hurts my hart, / And hating change which might relieve my smart.” These statements are not expressions of affect so much as of cognizance: he may be feeling delight, but he ends the poem by expressing his thoughts on the seeming paradoxes of his feelings.
20. Surprisingly, in “Lenvoie” at the end of the poem, Gascoigne addresses “you dere dame” directly. Even more surprising are his traditional conceits, which seem identical to the ones he has just decried. He seems stuck in older modes of poetry, despite his cognizance of the differences between himself and superficial, unthinking Petrarchan poets. But that is his point here: his poetry cannot escape the same tropes and conceits of those other poets. In the lullaby, we saw that an effort to bid farewell to youth and sexuality was thwarted by the implications of the form in which that farewell was couched. Here, an effort to change the nature of expressions of passion gets thwarted by the inevitable somatic similarity with which all feeling bodies respond. Poetic fevers, burning and freezing, happen to Gascoigne in his passion just as to any other poet, and his attempt at cognisance is subsumed under the strength of these sensations. Gascoigne’s own vaunted singularity, which is the subject of the poem and which the title reinforces, dissolves in the very same urgent pangs he had set out to mock. It is as though Gascoigne is simultaneously coming to terms not only with the pleasures and pains of loving, but also with his own inability, as a poet, to do anything but reinforce and reproduce the expression of these pleasures in Petrarchan metaphors. The final lines of the envoy encapsulate this predicament, since Gascoigne can neither escape his own passion, nor convincingly differentiate it from that of other, lesser poets: “And though fond fooles set forth their fittes as fast, / Yet grant with me that Gascoignes passion past. / Ever or never.” As in “lullaby,” the final tag line expands the poem’s timeline, from the momentary to the eternal. This poem, like the lullaby, will continue to survive for “ever.” But he also embeds the opposite into the line, the negative “never.” Again we see that in place of singularity, here the supposed singularity of “Gascoignes passion,” arises a productive poetics that allows for reproduction and continuation. Within the lines of this poem, that passion itself never passes. Rather, it is ever passing.
21. Finally, in his best-known poem, “Gascoignes wodmanship” (#72), we see the poet again combining his delights and disillusionments into a single poem. Though much longer, the poem works in nearly the same way as the lullaby: a renunciation of former ways does not quite hold up under scrutiny, and in fact leads to their prolongation. In the lengthy preceding material, the (singular) occasion of the poem is set out in detail. It involves the Lord Grey of Wilton, who has been doing some winter hunting, and has given Gascoigne a crossbow, “calling him one of his wodmen.” But Gascoigne’s ineptitude at hunting causes Grey to laugh at him, and he composes the poem to “excuse” his actions.
22. The poet, of course, responds to this occasion with a conceit: his shooting awry should not surprise Lord Grey, for Gascoigne has had this little problem for some time: “First if it please your honour to perceive, / What makes your wodman shoote so ofte amisse, / Beleeve me Lord the case is nothing strange, / He shootes awrie almost at every marke…” The poet then elaborates these “marks” in succession: he has failed at attempts to be a man of law, a courtier, and a soldier. As Gascoigne lists these marks, however, he makes them seem much less desirable targets to attain. The law books studied nowadays allow no room for artful phrasing (ll. 25-30), the courtier’s clothes bankrupt him with no discernible gain (42-56), and the soldier can only succeed by cheating those under him and greedily despoiling innocent people (73-86). Gascoigne initially changes the poem’s specific occasion, his missing Lord Grey’s actual marks, into its central conceit. But that central conceit has, by the middle of the poem, been turned on its head. Those who hit their marks are those who “spoile the simple sakeles man,” or “pinch the painefull souldiers pay…” The specific objection turns out to be a more general, robust error. So much for Grey’s objections to missing the mark.
23. But Gascoigne pursues Grey’s laughter further. He also needs to address Grey’s other objection, the tendency to let deer pass by without even attempting to shoot them. He answers that he is lost in thought – “rapte in contemplation” – at the prospect that many men have hit the marks he has missed, even though they are far less worthy. While he muses, the deer escape without his ever letting an arrow fly. The interaction between poem and occasion complicates in this moment. We should recognize that this complication constitutes another, more masterful instance of the principle of “nedelesse singularitie.” In this instance, Gascoigne forces his reader to attend to the multiplication that is inherent in the act of imagination, which requires only a word or a phrase to muse upon and reduplicate in a new context. The repeated event of Gascoigne missing actual deer leads him to excuse this tendency by musing poetically on the similar events from his life. But that musing itself now causes another instance of missing. This instance differs in quality: he not only fails to hit, but fails to shoot. Here, as in F.J., “Gascoignes Lullabie,” and “Gascoignes passion,” the processes of poetic composition and textual preservation are at odds. Specifically, the chain of causality moves back and forth between the events of the occasion (which are presented as actual, but past), and the events of the poem itself (which are presented as imaginary, but current). The figure “in” the poem, the musing Gascoigne, lets pass the real deer that Lord Grey has already laughed at him for missing. Tenor and vehicle become as interchangeable as the past and present. The occasional world and the poetic world thus each lead to the other’s “encrease.” We have seen a similar instance of encrease already, when G.T. and H.W. circulated, reproduced, and thus effected the continuation of F.J.’s most private, singular delights. Here, a more pensive Gascoigne wonders how to move forward, how to escape this cycle of seeming failure, a failure that he implies affects him singularly.
24. As though to emphasize that such increase is never-ending, in the final lines of the poem, Gascoigne uses the word we so rarely see in the poets of the so-called plain style, “if.” He posits this hypothetical:
But since my Muse can to my Lorde reherse
What makes me misse, and why I doe not shoote,
Let me imagine in this woorthlesse verse:
If right before mee, at my standings foote
There stoode a Doe, and I shoulde strike hir deade,
And then shee prove a carrion carkas too,
What figure might I fynde within my head,
To scuse the rage whiche rulde me so to doo?
Why does Gascoigne’s woodmanship never succeed, even when the poem’s speaker is himself imagining another occasion, and thus another poem? The imaginary situation is nearly indistinguishable from the accounts of what has happened previously. When faced with yet another hunt, the imagined homunculus within the poem also chooses incorrectly, since the doe turns out to be another “carrion carkas.”[27] The ideal situation, Gascoigne finally hitting a mark, defies imagination even in the poem-within-a-poem. By now, an acute reader knows that hitting would be missing, and thus missing is a proper response. Equally important, however, to Gascoigne as the maker of this poem, is how to react to this familiar situation, and to “the rage” that accompanies this act. In answering the question posed above, Gascoigne discards the option of “playne paraphrase,” in favor of a more divine intervention: “I saye Jehova did this Doe advance…That by the sodaine of hir overthrowe, / I myght endevour to amende my parte…” As the poem ends, the only situation in which the Gascoigne figure does not make a mistake is in the interpretation of his mistakes. On the face of it, Gascoigne’s woodman seems to be one of Helgerson’s traditional Elizabethan prodigals, repenting of his ways and professing amendment. But as we have seen before, Gascoigne recuperates this self-effacing and self-dismembering process in order to accomplish the production and reproduction of delight. His admission of failure is simultaneously an enactment of success, since what comes out of his failures at traditional professions is the continual production and reproduction of poetry.
25. I dwell on this poem’s successful failure because it represents a subdued, though equally forceful example of Gascoigne’s lyric method in HSF. In contrast to earlier examples, it is neither brash, sexual delight nor clever, conversational delight that the poet seeks to retain, and prolong, but instead the delight of poesis itself. That kind of delight is what he longed after in all his earlier attempts at law and soldiering: if the law had been written “by arte,” he could have learned it “with pleasure.” Those who do succeed lack this artfulness, and continually demonstrate that they “can nor speake, nor write in pleasant wise.” Gascoigne’s version of woodmanship, however, prolongs the delight of making poetry by exemplifying those delights within the poem itself. Unlike F.J.’s mischievous editor, or the lullaby song that survives after Gascoigne himself is gone, Gascoigne’s poetic delight in “wodmanship” is preserved without seeming to need any outside forces to prolong its existence. Rather, it sustains itself by continually reproducing the paradox in which the only way to succeed is to continue shooting awry, and by continually spawning imaginative acts of poesis.
26. When we read “Gascoignes Wodmanship” together with his lullaby, the other devises, and the poems in F.J., the overwhelming effect is accretion: individual moments, or occasions, of delight find their way into myriad textual situations. F.J.’s exuberance is quickly tempered by the complexities of textual exchange, expanding his attempts at private poesis into more “common” forms. He and G.T. may think that they want such private delights, but these are shown to be illusory. Likewise, in the Devises I have examined, Gascoigne uses the illusory or fleeting qualities of his youthful delights to highlight the crucial importance to him of textual, poetic delights. Repeatedly, and sometimes painfully, he demonstrates that delight, whether it is bodily delight or poetic delight, cannot long be “singular,” that any such singularity disappears with its occasion.
27. For this reason, we should pay special attention to Gascoigne’s ironic cognizance that he does not qualify as a typical prodigal, and that his poems are far from poëmata castrata. The more recent view of the censorship controversy surrounding HSF and The Posies is that Gascoigne probably achieved his goal of patronage because of these poetic efforts rather than despite them, since preferment soon followed. He dedicated The Glasse of Governement To Sir Owen Hopton, acted the part of a “savage man” in the 1575 entertainment of Elizabeth by Leicester, and presented The Tale of Hemetes the Heremyte to Elizabeth at New Year’s 1575 / 1576; a flurry of similar efforts followed in 1576 (The Steele Glas, The Droomme of Doomes day, and others), and he received his desired employment in the same year.[28] By his own admission, these are the poetic efforts of a middle-aged man who has atoned for his youthful missteps, and who would be absorbed into society rather than continuing his rampages.
28. Yet his absorption, resignation, and correction come
at a cost that he is not completely willing to pay. Although it seems clear
that he did in fact resign amatory verse and the gross ribaldries in F.J.,
he nevertheless holds out the possibility that his verse will be reproduced by
younger men than he. He creates this possibility by appearing to argue against
it, in the address “To al yong Gentlemen, and generally to the youth of
England...” (The Posies, 1575, ¶¶.ii - ¶¶.iiiiv). On the
face of it, this address is a perfectly straightforward and conventional
monitory address, of one who has erred in his youth and wants others to avoid
his mistakes. He calls himself “a man of middle yeares,” and wants to “serue
as ensample to the youthfull Gentleman of England...” But the longer this
address wears on, the more apparent it is that he wants his full, poetic
example to live on in them. For he addresses these Gentlemen excitedly, not
soberly as would fit the occasion: “Gallant Gentlemen, and lustie youthes of
this my natiue Countrey,” he opens, “my lustie youthes” a bit later, “my lustie
Gallants” toward the end, and finally “my yong blouds.” And that is just what
they are to Gascoigne: something like his poetic offspring, those who will
carry on his poetry. Likewise, of the poetry itself, he reminds the reader
that “my Posies hath beene verie much inquired for by the yonger sort.” Most
tellingly, he reveals a state of mind very much like F.J.’s, after he has been
disillusioned in his love affair, and must settle for contentment rather than
delight. That contentment, as we have seen, depends on both the remembrance of
joys past, and on the fact of their dispersal to a new audience. Gascoigne
realizes that this new reprint might brand him as a man “rather desyrous to
continue in the freshe remembraunce of my follyes, than content too cancell
them in obliuion by discontinuance” – and yet the work is reprinted, and the
lusty young Gentlemen are left to pursue these delights, Gascoigne’s and yet
their own. It is no wonder, then, that in the 1575 Posies he refuses to
excise or even significantly change his poems, for to do so would prevent these
flowers’ perennial bloom.
Notes
