Jonson in Coote

On Ben Jonson. From The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote (1993).

 ("Shakespeare and the Drama: 1500-1642", 12):

...

Shakespeare's work is never (...) openly autobiographical. Indeed, on the level of personality, England's greatest poet remains her most enigmatic. In studying the works we come no nearer to the man. Rather, Shakespeare is so wholly absorbed in his art—in the imaginative exploration of mankind through the dramatist's resources of language, action, and role-play—that what we do come to appreciate is the inexhaustible richness of human invention itself. In the noble words of Ben Jonson: 'He was not of an age, but for all time'.

 

12

The tribute paid to Shakespeare by Jonson (1572-1637) was the more generous for the rivalry he felt towards the greater man, but if Jonson awarded Shakespeare the honours of posterity, he gained for himself some of those offered by his age. He was effectively Poet Laureate (pensioned, but not titled) and, though his later years were spent in poverty, the nobility of England attended his funeral in recognition of his genius. 

Jonson—convivial, critical, the pundit of his age—remains a fine writer of lyric, a great satirist and a major figure in that classical and humanist tradition of literature which stretches from Sidney, through Milton and Dryden, to the other Johnson and Gray. That this tradition of humane, decorous, yet profoundly experienced poetry was also the standard by which to satirize his times is given dramatic form in Jonson's Poetaster (1601) where the serene values of Virgil and Horace are juxtaposed to seventeenth-century pretenders to art. 

Jonson's two surviving tragedies derive from Roman history. The first is by far the greater, though neither was a popular success. Sejanus (1603) presents the emperor Tiberius's bestial reign of terror in a Rome where, amid parasites and fearful hypocrites—people swollen to distortion with their desire for power—liberty, language and human worth are crushed in the self-destructive intricacy of machination. In Catiline (1611), Jonson shows the working of conspiracy with an even darker and self-conscious scholarship, but the play cannot be counted a dramatic success, and it is in his comedies of city life that we find Jonson's most telling portrayal of human folly. These works were profoundly influenced by classical theory. They also relate to a rich and varied native tradition which they effortlessly transcend. To this last we should briefly turn. 

The rapid expansion of population and mercantile activity in London was a leading phenomenon of the age, and theatres like the Fortune produced plays designed to please the merchant classes. The immensely prolific Thomas Heywood (?1575-c. 1641), for example, wrote The Four Prentices of London (c. 1592-1600) in which the heroes are noble yet 'of city trades they have no scorn'. In the second part of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1605), praise of the great merchant Sir Thomas Gresham combines with intense patriotism. Domestic virtue and moral edification are again central to Old Fortunatus (1599) by Thomas Dekker (?1572-1632) while in the same year Dekker produced The Shoemaker's Holiday in which imaginative comic prose, romance and touching marital fidelity are allied to the eternally comfortable story of an apprentice's rise to the position of Lord Major.  

Dekker's seemingly unlikely collaboration with the tragedian Webster in Westward Ho! (1604) and Northward Ho! (1605) led him beyond the praise of 'a fine life, a velvet life, a careful life'. Others were actively to criticize citizen tastes in drama however, and the most lasting exposure of the works produced for this market is The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) by Francis Beaumont (1584-1616). This piece is both a kind-hearted burlesque and a clever exercise on the idea of the play within the play. Contrasts between chivalry, modern aristocratic values and merchant ideals here centre around the sympathetic figure of Rafe, the apprentice and comic knight errant.

A more bitterly satirical humour is to be found in the comedies of George Chapman (c. 1560-1634) and John Marston (1576-1634). Cynicism is a marked tone in Chapman's work in the form, while Marston's comedies are the work of a verse satirist and reveal the aggressive and twisted syntax characteristic of that genre. Jonson himself came into collision with Marston and Dekker in the so-called 'war of the theatres'. He had already completed Nashe's The Isle of Dogs (1597) and been imprisoned for sedition as a result. Shortly after finishing the first version of Every Man in His Humour (1598, revised by 1616) he duelled with a fellow actor, killed him, and only escaped the gallows through a legal technicality. In Every Man Out of His Humour (1599)—a drama of plays within plays which discusses the problems of play writing and then satirizes the nature of satire—Jonson lightly critized Marlowe in the figure of Clove. Marston himself had recently essayed an unfortunate eulogy of Jonson in his revision of the anti-theatrical diatribe Histriomastix (c. 1599), a portrait which is in fact nearer to parody.

Marston retaliated to the figure of Clove with an open caricature of Jonson in Jack Drum's Entertainment (c. 1600). He received his rebuff in Cynthia's Revels (1600), a boys' company play satirizing the follies of the court. The work is reminiscent of Lyly, and contains the exquisite lyric 'Queen and huntress, chaste and fair.' Jonson's Poetaster, written for Paul's Boys, presents caricatures of Marston and Dekker among the pretenders to art in Augustan Rome and triumphed completely over Marston's What You Will (c. 1601). Dekker was now recruited on Marston's side with his Satiromastix (1601), but Jonson himself tried to rise above the fray with Sejanus. Then—such is the abiding nature of the literary world—he collaborated with Marston and Chapman in Eastward Ho (1605), voluntarily joining his co-authors in prison when the play was considered seditious. However, in the following year, the King's Men gave a triumphantly successful performance of Jonson's Volpone, one of the great comic masterpieces of the English stage. 

All Jonson's immense energies are focused in Volpone where he deals with one of his most characteristic themes: the corruption wrought by greed on those obsessive and fantastic creatures who dupe each onther on the lunatic finges of an enterprise culture. 'This', Jonson wrote, 'is the money-get mechanic age', and Volpone's cunning scheme for getting money makes gold itself the object of a parody religion.

As a rich man without heirs, Volpone adds to his wealth through the brives offered the apparently dying man by those hoping for an advantageous mention in his will. To secure this, people will disinherit their children, pervert the law and prostitute their wives. Volpone's bedroom becomes the centre of inverted human values where money is gained without real work, innocence is all but corrupted by glittering lust, and men are reduced to the foxes, flies, vultures, ravens and crows which give them their names.

To draw his heroic caricature of materialism, Jonson turned to a wide range of sources, his classical training especially. There was nothing frigid or pedantic about this. He confined his play largely within the unities of time (twenty-four hours), place (Venice) and action (the refusal to admit material distracting from the main narrative), not because Renaissance scholars loved Aristotle had promulgated such rules as laws. He did it because these devices help concentrate the dramatic excitement. Again, Jonson did not reduce his characters to types because Terence and Plautus had done so, but because an overmastering obsession or 'humour' caricatures itself, as the anonymous writers of medieval Morality plays had been aware. If older forms helped give a framework, the foundation of Volpone is passionate observation.

As a result, Volpone himself throbs with something of his creator's vitality. He relishes his own play-acting, his frequent disguises and performances which eventually lead to his undoing and that of his parasite Mosca. As a result, the effect of the play is far from simple. The energy of corruption is infectious, and if we are pleased that the villain is exposed by means of his own designs, then the worthlessness of the Venetian authorities who clap him in irons gives justice itself as ironic final twist.

Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609) is again concerned with man as a social (or antisocial) animal. Morose tries to shelter himself from the world's din, declaring 'All discourses, but mine own, afflict me; they seem harsh, impertinent and irksome.' The world appears to justify his misanthropy. Morose tries to disinherit his nephew by marrying an apparently silent bride. She turns out, however, to be first a scold and then a boy in disguise. The comedy ends in separation rather than marriage, while its sexual ambiguities may be a taunt at the Puritans' objection to the portrayal of female roles in the theatre by boys. 

The Alchemist (1610) again concerns itself with distorting dreams of gold. It is constructed in brilliant conformity to the unities and, in its earthy and imaginative richness of contemporary dialogue and folly, embodies Jonson's ideal of a comedy which employs

     deeds, and language, such as men do use,

And persons, such as Comedy would choose

When she would show an image of the times,

And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

The particular follyhere is the lure of easy money: Sir Epicure Mammon's dream that through the philosopher's stone he can 'turn the age to gold'. Interestingly, it is not alchemy itself that is satirized but the attitude which sees science (which alchemy was still widely held to be) as a fulfilment of fantasy. Face, Subtle and his consort Doll Common—rogues who have employed Lovewit's house for their purpose—are adepts in manipulating vain desires in a variety of characters: Epicure Mammon himself, Abel Drugger the tobacconist, Kastril the roistering boy and the comic puritans Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome. The real transformations in The Alchemist are thus not of base metal into gold but of human folly into absurdity. When the off-stage laboratory finally blows up, fantasy explodes with it. The return of Lovewit brilliantly resolves the action but hardly restores official law and order.

A Puritan is again humiliated in Jonson' prose comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614). Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a hypocritical creature of appetite, ends up in the stocks. The dramatic re-creation of a real fair allowed Jonson to celebrate de all-licensed, topsy-turvy world of mardi gras with great diversity of action and a matching richness of dialogue. The simple-minded Cokes is robbed, while Justice Adam Overdo, out to spy on 'enormities', also winds up in the stocks. Nonetheless, when he ends the play by inviting all to dine with him, the foolish Cokes insists they be accompanied by the puppet show which has already offered one of the best episodes in the play. The fari itself—its vitality memorably embodied in Ursula, the Pig-woman—is Jonson's image of raucuous humanity, variously hypocritical, simple, vengeful and forgiving.

The plays for the commercial theatre Jonson wrote in the later stages of his career — The Devil Is an Ass (1616), The Staple of News (1626), The New Inn (1629) and The Magnetic Lady (1632) — were harshly if not wholly inaccurately described by Dryden as his 'dotages.' A fascinating and very different aspect of Jonson's dramatic art however is revealed in the series of masques he wrote as Twelfth Night entertainments for the court of James I (1605-25). Here we see an élite drama dealing explicitly with contemporary theories of political power.

Jonson had already designed the lavish and arcane symbolism of the Scottish king's triumphal entry to his new capital, and the masques extend his exploration of James's notion of the divine right of kings: the belief that James was accountable to God alone, that his position partook of divinity and that he was endowed with supernatural wisdom. In The Golden Age Restor'd (1615), we see how classical larning, music, poetry, dance and the lavish sets of Inigo Jones (1573-1652) present James as Jove, the benevolent guide of the nation's fate. Whn the Iron Age is routed in a conventional anti-masque, Astraea or Justice heralds the return of the Golden Age. Through the Neoplatonic philosophy that underpins the Jonsonian masque, the dancing courtiers come to symbolize the completeness, harmony and peace attained by the dramatic enactment of the divine king's decrees.

The Jonsonian masque was an élite celebration of a political and cultural ideal. For many, however, these sumptuous illusions disguised a more troubled reality. Though the court encouraged the highest cultural sophistication, its moral tone was low and corruption and factionalism were rife. James's assertion of divine right gave a dangerous edge to the royal prerogative, while his reckless expenditure led to increading debt in a period of economic uncertainty and bad harvests. Further, while the king (an enthusiastic amateur theologian) failed to satisfy moderate Puritan demands for church reform, his rash creation of new titles (partly as an attempt to raise money) exacerbated a deep sense of status insecurity in a society where ancient notions of hierarchy were being eroded by the power of money and capital. This uncertainty is reflected in the work of a number of Jacobean comic writers.

The 'city' comedies of Thomas Middleton (?1580-1627), for example, combine the idiom of London life and its pace with deft plotting and realistic satire. Middleton is consistently ironic about the rabidly acquisitive London of his time. Merchants, usurers, idle aristocrats and an extravagant gentry are all exposed in a world where it is increasingly the cleverest rather than the most virtuous who succeed. In A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), surface cleverness works alongside deeper moral concerns with something of the force of the exempla in contemporary Puritan sermons. A Mad World, my Masters (1605) represents the marriage of a whore to a dupe, while in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611) sex is traded for money as the appetites and restless folly of city life controls the gulls and cheats who populate it. Philip Massinger (1583-1640) borrowed the plot of A Trick to Catch the Old One in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1621), turning it to different and Jonsonian purposes in the humiliation of the great comic figure of Sir Giles Overreach, the loan shark. Overreach is the focus of Massinger's violent and deeply conservative satire of a corrupt Jacobean world, a world where titles are sold to the nouveaux riches and, as traditional social ties collapse, so madness looms.

....

 

("From Donne to Dryden", 2):

The courtiers addressed by Donne in many of his sermons were also the recipients of verses by Ben Jonson (1572-1637), and it is a measure of Jonson's stature that, in addition to being one of the leading playwrights of the age, he was also its most influential court poet.

Drawing extensively on the classics and Renaissance theorists, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry elaborates the ideals and criticizes the shortcomings of those involved in his vision of a cultured, socially responsible life of 'manners, arms and arts'. In these works, Jonson thus aspired to a seventeenth-century version of the urbane and moral gentleman of Latin literature: sociable yet self-contained, grave but unpedantic, a man in whom the virtues of the golden mean have been refeined in the fires of art and personal integrity. Jonson thereby presents himself as an arbiter of civil virtue, an English Horace.

In the prose of his Timber, or Discoveries (1640-41), and often through extensive and unacknowledged paraphrase of Vives and other scholars, Jonson showed how the classical basis of his poetry was rooted in nature, exercise, imitation, study and art. The classical rhetoricians were the masters of his particular practice. Their works were to be used only as guides however, not as commanders. What Jonson was seeking was to relate an awareness of his own time to the timeless values of the past, and to do so in a distinctive idiom. To achieve this, he perfected the rhetoric of the middle voice in which he declared: 'the language is plain, and pleasing; even without stopping, round without swelling; all well tuned, composed, elegant, and accurate'. 

These qualities can be seen in Jonson's Epigrams, 'the ripest of my studies'. In pieces such as 'Inviting a Friend to Supper', the courteous social tone, tinged with fantasy, is modulated through reminiscences of Martial to create the ideal of a shared and civilized enjoyment of good food, good talk and good books. A sense of self-knowledge and self-respect, of constancy tempered by experience, is the subject of 'An Epistle Answering to One that Asked to Be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben', an informal group that numbered some of the finest intellects of the age.

A shared sense of high values is also clear in Jonson's praise of other literary and artistic men, though this was something that did not always come naturally to him. The torrential release of pent-up irritation in 'An Expostulation with Inigo Jones' vividly suggests Jonson's envy of a rival's success at court and his refusal to believe that this great architect and scene designer's skills ranked with his own poetic arts. Jonson's tribute to William Camden, his master at Westminster, achieves a moving reverence. When Jonson writes of Shakespeare however, in a poem printed in the First Folio, his lines are among the most generous of the age.

Jonson's epitaphs to his children temper contradictory feelings of grief and Christian acceptance through an art that seems to belie the emotions that sustain it. In Jonson's two odes to himself, his deep feeling for the integrity of that art is asserted against the allegedly gimcrack tastes of his age. In his few religious pieces, such art also expresses a sinner's measured awareness of his own iniquity.

A contemporary is supposed to have declared that Jonson 'never writes of love, or, if he does, does it not naturally'. This is hard but not wholly unfair. 'My Picture Left in Scotland' has a delicate, honest pathos, and Jonson was capable of both the shrewd cynicism of 'That Women Are but Men's Shadows' as well as the artifice and high compliment 'Drink to me only with thine eyes'. In 'See the chariot at hand here of Love', such artifice creates its own exotic sense of wonder:

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,

    Before rude hand hath touch'd it?

Ha' you mark'd but the fall o'the snow

    Before the soil hath smutch'd it?

Ha' you felt the wool o'the beaver?

    Or swan's down ever?

Or have smelt o'the bud of the brier?

    Or the nard in the fire?

Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!

                                (nard: ambergris)

It is as the poet of the civilized aristocratic community however that Jonson is at his best, the mutual and by no means automatic respect of patron and poet serving to create a Roman ideal of behaviour, an aristocracy of mind as much as birth. Consequently, Jonson was a fine writer of eulogies. These, as in the excellent 'To Sir Robert Wroth', are often tempered by a moral concern for the corruptions of the city and court, a feeling for the virtues of country existence and a piety in which the classical ideal of the good life blends easily with a restrained Christian faith. Bravery, patriotism and friendship—the aristocratic life of action—are celebrated in the Pindaric ode to Cary and Morrison, but it is a tribute to the breadth of Jonson's classicism that he could also celebrate the scatological and mock-heroic exuberance of 'On the Famous Voyage'. 

Such poems to the aristocracy suggest the great importance of patronage to the creative life of the age. When Jonson wrote in praise of his patroness the Countess of Bedford, for example, a new image of woman emerged, one that was aristocratic, liberal and educated, and allowed her to move on an equal and graceful footing with men. In 'A Farewell for a Gentlewoman', this is tempered by a stoic, Christian rejection of worldliness. In one of Jonson's finest achievements, the 'Elegy on Lady Jane Paulet', such faith creates a genuine sense of exultation.

It is in 'To Penshurst' however that such concerns combined to form Jonson's supreme evocation of Christian humanism as well as a work which inaugurated the important tradition of the country-house poem. The ancestral seat of the Sidneys here becomes the focus of all aspects of the good life. Modest yet dignified, blessed by the heritage of a great poet and rich in the bounty of nature, Penshurst is the centre of a humane community where all—peasant and poet—join in Sir Robert's courteous hospitality. Rural England is remade through the classics into an image of harmony, decency and integrity, fit and able to welcome the king and so be part of a patriotic ideal. And at the basis of this public excellence lies private virtue. The lady of the house is 'noble, fruitful, chaste withal', while the children, encouraged in rectitude by the example of their parents, are pious and keen to learn the ways of aristocratic merit. Jonson's vision is thus comprehensive and humane, Christian and classical, private and public. However we may question its political implications, it remains a noble image of a civilizing ideal.

 

 Will Durant on Ben Jonson

 

—oOo—

 

 

 

Edward Herbert of Cherbury

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

HERBERT of Cherbury, Edward, Lord (1582-1648), elder brother of G. *Herbert, born at Eyton-on-Severn, Shropshire, into one of the foremost families of the Welsh border. In 1596, aged 14, he was enrolled as gentleman commoner at University College, Oxford. That year his father died, and Herbert became ward of Sir George Moore (later *Donne's father-in-law). At 16 he was married to his cousin Mary, daughter of Sir William Herbert of St Julians, five years Edward's senior and heiress to her father's estates in England, Wales and Ireland. By the time he was 21 the couple had had, he reports, 'divers children', of whom none survived him. He was created Knight of the Bath in 1603. His adventures are recounted by Herbert in his Life, a remarkable document, not least for its unabashed presentation of its author's martial valour, success with women, truthfulness, sweetness of breath, and other virtues. Herbert aspired to a career in public service and spent much of the time from 1608 to 1618 in France, getting to know the French aristocracy and court. He also travelled in Italy and the Low Countries, fighting at the siege of Juliers (1610).

In 1619 he became ambassador to France, on *Buckingham's recommendation. His most famous philosophical work, De Veritate, was published in Paris in 1624. He was recalled to London in 1624, where he unsuccessfully petitioned for high office. Although he joined Charles's council of war in 1629, becoming Baron Herbert of Cherbury, recognition still eluded him. To attract royal notice he wrote, in 1630, The Expedition to the Isle of Rhé, which tries to justify Buckingham's calamitous generalship, and in 1632 he began a detailed 'official' history of *Henry VIII's reign, assisted by Thomas Masters, which was published in 1649. At the outbreak of the Civil War he retired to Montgomery Castle and declined to become involved. The castle was threatened by Royalists in 1644, and he admitted a parliamentary garrison, under Sir Thomas Myddleton, in exchange for the return of his books, which had been seized. He moved to his London house in Queen Street, St Giles, and dedicated himself to philosophy, supplementing his De Veritate with De Causis Errorum and De Religione Laici, both published in 1645, and writing besides De Religione Gentilium and his autobiography (begun in 1643). In 1647 he visited Gassendi in Paris.

Herbert's De Veritate postulates that religion is common to all men and that, stripped of superfluous priestly accretions, it can be reduced to five universal innate ideas: that there is a God; that he should be worshipped; that virtue and piety are essential to worship; that man should repent of his sins; and that there are rewards and punishments after this life. It gained Herbert the title of father of English *Deism. It was widely read in the 17th cent., earning the attention and disagreement of Mersenne, Gassendi, *Descartes, and *Locke. Herbert also wrote poetry which is obscure and metrically contorted, evidently influence by his friend Donne, but he also wrote some tender and musical love lyrics. (See also METAPHYSICAL POETS.)

Life, ed. S. Lee (1886, rev. 1906), and ed. J. M. Shuttleworth (1976); Poems English and Latin, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (1923); De Veritate, ed. and trans. M. H. Carré (1937); De Religione Laici, ed. and trans. H. R. Hutcheson (1944); R. D. Bedford, The Defence of Truth (1979).

Deism (Wikipedia)

 

—oOo—

Some Notes on John Donne

(from The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote; 1993; "From Donne to Dryden", I)

While playwrights of the early seventeenth century were fashioning language into a supreme theatrical medium, other poets were submitting lyric, satire and elegy to a searching re-examination. The most brilliant of these figures was John Donne (1572-1631).

Donne's was a life of passionate intellectual and personal drama. Reared as a Roman Catholic in a protestant nation state, aware of being part of a group often summoned to suffering and martyrdom, Donne called the basis of his creed in doubt and read and questioned his way towards a hard-won, restless Anglicanism. Yet the man who annotated nearly fifteen hundred works of theology and argument was not a mere bookish recluse. Donne was a soldier of fortune, the author of perhaps the finest collection of love lyrics in the language and a man whose naked ambition and sheer recklessness traped him at servile hopes of court patronage. From these he was finally called to the deanery of St Paul's and emerged as one of the most popular preachers and mighty poets of Christian salvation.

Donne's early prose Paradoxes (published 1633) give an indication of the manner of his thought. When he argues that 'a wise man is known by much laughing' or proves 'the gifts of the body are better than those of the mind', Donne was writing in a long-established rhetorical tradition. The plenitude of his inventiveness however suggests a skeptical fascination with the workings of reason as these are revealed through the display of wit.

Wit as ingenuity — the creation of far-fetched arguments or conceits — was a prized rhetorical achievement, and Donne's skill earned him the highest praise from his contemporaries. For later critics such as Dryden and Dr Johnson however, men working in different modes of literary decorum, such effects supposedly revealed a lack of taste which earned Donne and his followers the misleading name of 'metaphysical'. They were accused of linking together recondite ideas, and so failing to achieve the central and classical voice of broad human experience. It took later generations of critics, first Coleridge and then T. S. Eliot, to rediscover in Donne's poetry the thought of a complex and very masculine brain, one which dwelt on the nature of its own perceptions and, by bringing a passionately critical intellect to bear on the traditions of rhetoric, revealed its force through the quality of its wit.

Such wit is often allied to worldly cynicism in Donne's Elegies and Satires, works which pay tribute to the classics by revolutionising them. The Elegies, for example, frequently surpass their Ovidian model in the sceptical analysis of base human motive, in the sheer versatility of 'The Autumnal' and, above all, in the sensual, colloquial force, the vividly re-enacted drama, of 'His Picture' and 'To his Mistress Going to Bed'. In this last work, a new style of love poetry comes to maturity as Donne re-creates the appearance of passionately articulate self-awareness:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious sones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee! 
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

empery: empire

This passage is one of the great achivements of seventeenth-century erotic wit, a combination of passion and artifice that seems to re-create the wonder and excitement of sexual arousal itself. The woman is a virgin continent to be explored for her hidden wealth and 'manned'. Such puns, as in Shakespeare's Sonnets, lead to profound emotional insights. In the last line, for example, the poet in bed, naked and erect, envisages his body as a seal which, in the act of love, will validate the union of the lovers themselves. This appearance of a dramatised self — a central feature in all Donne's work — is conveyed here through a language at once knotty, colloquial and capable of supreme sensuousness. Donne's 'strong lines', as contemporaries called them, can thus be seen as a liberating force of criticism which swept away nymphs and goddesses, pining Petrarchan lovers and a melliflousness of tone that all too easily sank to servile imitation.

In the Satires, Donne was concerned to develop what some contemporaries thought they had discovered in Latin satire: the harsh tones of classical moral outrage. In Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597) and his rival John Marston's Scourge of Villanie (1598), for example, we hear the 'savage indignation' of Juvenal and what was believed to be the dense syntax of Persius. These are re-created through the 'persona' or assumed personality of the intellectually superior malcontent. Though Donne could also clothe a moral type in the foolish fashions of the day, he had an alert sense of the relative foolishness of all human activity, whether this be the teeming life of the streets and court or his own scholarship. With 'Satire III', such scepticism becomes a matter of intense personal seriousness, for this is the work to which Donne criticized the aberrations of all Christian sects in his search for 'true religion'. The tough syntax of the poem is not a literary affectation but the voice of a great intellect in turmoil:

To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely, in strange way
To sand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reachher, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so:
Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night,
To will, implies delay, therefore do now.

Donne's wit is here the medium of his radical play of mind. It is the discourse of a restlessly argumentative intellect which dramatizes aspects of a complex and obsessive intelligence. Clearly, this is not the verse of Sidney's 'right popular philosopher' proceeding through formal logic and ornament to settled verities.  An acutely questioning self-awareness has intervened to make Donne's the poetry of a highly civilized small group such as that gathered round the great literary patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford (d. 1627), a coterie that was sufficiently daring to question convention in pursuit of the fresh and tougher truths of experience. It was also a group sufficiently small to subsiste on the passing of manuscripts. The greater part of Donne's poems were published posthumously by his son. They are thus the records of a poetic revolution wrought among the few.

Such qualities can be seen again in the love lyrics that make up Donne's Songs an Sonnets. These were probably written over some twenty years. None can be readily dated, and few if any should be given a precise biographical significance. Each however concentrates with a unique rhetoric the colloquial force and erotic passion of the other early works, while the testing, inclusive reference of their wit invariably dramatizes aspects of relationship. These may be cynical, sensuous, mystically celebratory, or give voice to a mournful sense of loss.

Donne's cynical lyrics vary between the flippancy of 'Go, and catch a falling star' and the more intricate worldly satire of 'Love's Alchemy' and the 'Farewell to love' with its ironic and closely observed analysis of the demystification of desire in post-coital enervation. Persuasions to love itself sometimes attain the outrageous casuistry of 'The Flea'. Here, a girl's loss of honour in surrendering her virginity is compared to the loss of blood suffered in a flea bite which, since the flea has bitten the poet too, mixes the blood of both man and woman in its shell, even as the lover's bed will join their bodies.

In 'The Ecstasy', by contrast, Donne discussed with witty yet passionate rigour the deepest relation between shared spiritual love and the natural needs of the body. United, these offer that rapture which is the subject of 'The Dream' and 'The Good Morrow'. These poems are among the great celebrations of intimacy in English literature. It is perhaps in 'The Sun Rising' however that Donne's combination of stanza form and speech rhythm, observation of the world and celebration of the idea that the lovers in their bed are the world, is most wittily yet profoundly expressed. The tradition of the aubade, or the lover's lament for the coming of dawn, is there transformed as the poet seeks to persuade the sun to irradiate a triumphant and mutual passion:

Thy beams, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
     If her eyes have not blinded thine,
     Look, and tomorrow late, tell me, 
  Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
  Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saws'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

both th'Indias: the East and West Indies.

Such deep erotic satisfaction is also the subject of 'The Anniversary', 'Love's Growth' and 'The Canonization'. In these works we again see Donne as one of the supreme analysts of passion fulfilled, a man drawing on the notions of scholasticism for conceits that convey a sense of wonder all the more mireculous for the sceptical intellect that apprehends it.

Such learned references in Donne's poetry were drawn from a memory stocked with the arcana and commonplaces of science and theology, and were then juxtaposed to sharply immediate perception. By a transforming paradox, this meeting of opposites frquently 'interanimates' both, and from this flows a new awareness of the complexity of experience. In poems such as 'The Canonization', for example, the doctrine of the intercession of saints suggests how rare yet powerful is a mutual human relationship. In 'Air and Angels', adapting Aquinas's belief that God permits the heavenly hosts assume a body of condensed air in order to appear to men, Donne shows a lover's progress between a too acute sensuousness and a too ethereal idealism:

   Every thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought:
   For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
   Then as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
   So thy love may be my love's sphere;
        Just such disparity 
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.

Love itself is here irradiated with a sense of the divine. But if Donne's is a voice of celebration, he is occasionally a great poet of love's defeat. We see this particularly in 'Twicknam Garden' and, above all, in one of his finest works, 'A Noctural upon S. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day'. Here the desolation of a love occluded by death offers a sense of universal loss, the nothingness of the bereaved and learned self as it seeks a greater darkness in which to prepare for spiritual truth:

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me preparare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

With the death of the beloved, the poet becomes an eremite devoted to the holy service of his departed saint.

Although such poems seem to touch an unworldly ardour, Donne was in fact very much concerned with the world at this stage of his careeer. Hence his writing of verse letters, obsequies and occasional pieces to aristocratic figures. These can sometimes seem mannered and over-ingeniously flattering when compared to his major and more popular work. Nonetheless, while it is right to see some of these verses as the poet's labours as he drudged for patronage — a necessary task in a society where advancement lay in the gift of the great — it is also important not to miss their discussion of attitudes crucial to Donne's maturing thought.

Amid the compliment and professions of friendship, for example, we are offered glimpses of a corrupt and perilous world of relative values, disillusion and vulnerability, the futility and spite of fallen man. In 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' — perhaps the most stimulating of Donne's Epistles — he also debunked the heroic pretensions of the military adventures in which he followed Essex and Ralegh. What in Hakluyt might be a chronicle of national endeavour, here becomes a re-creation of diminishingly painful experience raised to an almost surreal intensity by prodigious wit.

Such techniques are further developed in those most bizarre works The Progress of the Soul and the two Anniversaries (1611-12). These last were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, a girl Donne had never seen, and were then printed by her influential father. Donne was later to regret this publicity both as a stain on his gentleman's amateur status and because these essays in extreme hyperbole were persistently misunderstood. What Donne was here concerned to achieve however was a contrast between the powers of Christian innocence imagined in his ideal of Elizabeth Drury and the decay of a corrupt, fallen world. The issue was thus between faith and virtue on the one hand and the toils of worlliness on the other. It is an old theme, but one examined here in the glare of new problems, in particular that scepticism which was to transform the intellectual life of the century.

At its most fundamental, the scepticism with which Donne had already approached literary convention challenged the ordered world inherited from Aquinas and the scholastics. It declared that ultimate truth cannot be approached by reason alone since, in a notion given classic formulation by Montaigne in The Apology for Raymond Sebond (c. 1576), reason works only on sense data and cannot be definitively checked. The central questions that sprang from this dilemma were whether and how one may know God — in other words, is belief a matter of faith or reason? — and whether and how one may gain a knowledge of the physical world — in other words, is fact only opinion or can some enquiries be verified?

In the Anniversaries, Donne set his face against the empirical investigation of nature that was soon to prove if not the final answer to these questions then at least their most powerful reply. He suggests that to let oneself be 'taught by sense, and Fantasy' is only to pile up useless and pedantic confusion. If the new astronomy of Galileo and Copernicus shows that the universe is not the regular, serene construct of the scholastics, then that is not a stimulus to inventing new theories, but proof that the physical world is irremediably corrupt. If the links in the great chain of being are broken, then matters are worse than ever we thought:

    new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament 
They seek so many new; they see that this 
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.

 Donne's answer to this predicament was 'fideism': not sharper telescopes but intenser prayer, not knowledge but virtue, not science but faith. When the soul, shot like a bullet from a rusted gun, courses through the celestial spheres, Donne shows it does not stop to question their movement but hurtles to the seat of all knowledge — the bosom of God. Meanwhile, with the removal of such inspiring virtue as Elizabeth's Drury's, the rest of mankind is left to stagger on in a dark, decaying world lit only by the ghostly memory of the heroine's worth. The intellect at its most extended can only expose its own fallacies, and we must finally admit that the mysteries of Christ 'are not to be chewed by reason, but to be swallowed by faith'. 

This last quotation comes from Donne the preacher. The sermons are the greatest of his prose works, but were preceded by a number of pieces which show Donne involved in both the personal quest for religious experience and the worldly pursuit of profitable employment. His Pseudo-Martyr  (1610) and Biathanatos — a work unpublished in his lifetime — suggest the problems this entailed. Pseudo-Martyr, for example, was designed to appeal to James I by suggesting that Roman Catholics went against the rule of nature when they refused to swear to the king's supremacy in church matters and so laide themselves open to the death penalty. As with Ignatius his Conclave (1611), the work relishes a convert's scabrous anti-Catholic satire. In the labyrinthine and sceptical paradoxes of Biathanatos, on the other hand, Donne argued for the morality of suicide with an involvement rooted in acute personal experience. 

And it is the obsession with death and the last things that characterizes Donne's mature religious works. The Devotion on Emergent Occasions (published 1624) were written when Donne's doctors had declared him too ill to read, let alone compose. The afflicted body houses a soaring mind however. Donne's emotions range over the fear of solitude and physical disintegration, the relation between sickness and sin, sin and death. The entire universe is raided for images because man himself —John Donne— is an image of the universe, an epitome, a microcosm. It is this belief that underlies the most famous passage in Donne's prose:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy frieds, or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The moment of union is perceived but, as is appropriate for a sick-bed meditation, is perceived in the instant of its dissolution.

It is for his sermons that Donne is best known as a writer of religious prose. In the Jacobean period especially, occupied by preachers of great distinction, the pulpit gained extraordinary influence as a focus of spiritual thought and the dissemination of ideas. Led by the king, the court itself relished the finesse of religioius analysis, and connoisseurs of style and content memorized sermons and took notes on a form of literature that was both popular and learned. Donne's contributions should not be seen in isolation.

Many preachers, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, argued for an unornamented clarity of style. Others dressed spiritual matters in the garment of learning. While Thomas Adams (c. 1583- ante 1660) combined both in a manner that is often theatrical and powerfully directed to the abuses of the time, Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) brought his immense erudition in fifteen languages to passages of Scripture, each word and syllable of which he believed to be divinely inspired. As a result, each word and syllable is examined with the pious ardour of a philologist revealing the depths of the Word of God.

With Andrewes, human drama is often conveyed through a tiny yet telling comment in parenthesis. With Donne it moves to the centre of the stage. The immediate impact of the man, of course, is irrecoverably lost, but his devout biographer Izaak Walton (1593-1683) described Donne 'preaching to himself like an angel from a cloud' and appealing to the conscience of others 'with a most particular grace and an unexpressable addition of comeliness'.

The literary style of Donne's sermons is partly a distinctive reworking of its many sources. For example, Donne could exploit rhetorical patterning with the startling virtuosity of the sermon preached to the Earl of Carlisle in c. 1622 where he describes the agony of being 'secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God'. From Seneca, Tacitus, and their Renaissance editor Justus Lipsius however Donne and many others derived an anti-Ciceronian style. This was carefully contrived with a dramatic, irregular immediacy to express a concern with personal experience rather than settled certainties. Sermons such as Death's Duel (published 1632) however suggest that of all the influence on Donne's sermon style the Geneva and Authorized versions of the Bible — the parallelism of the Psalms, the visionary urgency of the Prophets and the evangelical fervour of St Paul especially — were the most telling. Nonetheless, when all the influences have been traced, what finally impresses is the compelling sense of Donne's unique spiritual sensibility, the range and drama of a religious intellect for which every aspect of the world could be a metaphor of the soul's experience.

As part of this technique, the sermons frequently juxtapose macabre effects with the tremblingly numinous, decay with resurrection. On the one hand is the conviction that 'Between that excremental jelly that any body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last, there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature.' In contrast is the image of the redeemed soul springing up in heaven like a lily from the red soil of its first creation. Between these experiences come the life of prayer and temptation, the imagining of the last things and, finally, an awareness of mercy.

This was not lightly won, and Donne's religious poetry dramatizes his spiritual conflict with great power and formal mastery. However, since distinctions in the psychology of faith are not always as easy to discern as those in Donne's love lyrics, it is important to emphasize the variety in his religious poetry. The sonnets in 'La Corona', for example, draw on the church's traditions of oral prayer to fashion a devout and accomplished celebration of the mysteries of faith that was to some extent influenced by Roman Catholic practices. 'The Litany', by contrast, while not perhaps a wholly successful poem, is an attempt to express the modest, sober delight in daily piety which is a great achievement of seventeenth-century Anglicanism, and one which finds its truest expression in the work of George Herbert and Thomas Ken (1637-1711). The personal realization of such ideas was terrifying — 'those are my best days, when I shake with fear' — and it forms the true spiritual centre of Donne's alternately defiant and submissive drama of sin and judgement. Around this centres the fear of physical decay. Sonnets such as 'Oh my black Soul!', 'At the round earth's imagin'd corners' and 'Death be not proud' contain doomsday in their small compass.

In 'Good Friday, riding westwards' Donne investigated the paradoxes of Christian faith with intensely dramatic wit, but it is in the 'Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness' and a 'Hymn to God the Father' that his relish of paradox and the strong speech rhythms of personal drama merge most tellingly with theology and faith. In these poems we watch Donne's advance towards the unity of the human and divine. In the first hymn, Donne's body is again a microcosm, a little world hurrying to decay. Yet, in its pain, it also imitates Christ's Passion and so may eventually rise like him to paradise. Finally, at the close of the second hymn, Donne hovers on the edge of death in a state at once confessional, wittily serious and almost ready to accept the extinction of his turbulent personality:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
    Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
        And, having done that, thou hadst done,
            I fear no more.

In the end, Donne's own name — that very personal token of self — becomes something to offer in with to God and so a means of surrendering the human to the divine.

Simon Schama's John Donne

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Simon Schama's John Donne

 A BBC documentary on John Donne:

 

Simon Schama's John Donne from Videos on Vimeo.

 

 

Notes on the definition of poetry

It may seem paradoxical that many elements characteristically found in poetry are not strictly definitory or characteristic of poetry, as they may be found in other kinds of writing or other arts. These may be important in a given poem, although they are not exclusive to poetical compositions. (E.g. narrative structure). The specificity often lies in their combination.

According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, "A poem is an instance of verbal art, a text set in verse, bound speech. More generally, a poem conveys heightened forms of perception, experience, meaning,, or consciousness in heightened language, i.e. a heightened mode of discourse" (938).

There is some fuzziness in the concept, therefore: poetry spills over into other artistic modes, and other types of discourse may share elements with poetry. We'll have to consider the existence of more typical or central, and more peripheral or even questionable kinds of poetry.

Typically, poetry is divided into recurrent formal units smaller than the text (verse): lines and stanzas. Verse is an important constituent of poetry, both formally and historically (poetry was necessarily associated to verse until the nineteenth century). Prosody may be primarily aural, or visual (in written poetry), or both.

But already Aristotle said that verse is not enough to define poetry: poetry requires something else. For him, it was the original retelling and the shaping of a story, and the creative use of language. Many after him will emphasize creativity, invention, intensity of feeling…

Then, poetry is too encompassing a term, and it is perhaps more useful to speak of poetrical genres with specific conventions, historically situated. E.g. tragedy, odes, sonnets,  surrealist poems, imagist poems, prose poems…

A looser sense of "poetic" includes other kinds of texts or artworks:
- Verbal but not artful texts (e.g. rhetorical elements in practical discourse, all the way into 'unofficial' art)
- Artful but not verbal works: 'poetic' elements in other arts, associated with iconic value or intensified experience. "These foreground the act of attention itself, which is the paradigmatic criterion of aesthetic events" (Princeton 939).

In the poems most characteristically poetical (especially lyric poetry, in our tradition), speech and meaning are memorably intertwined: the poem is a memorable expression of perceptions, situations or feelings, articulated through words chosen and organized in such a way that their sound, their associations, their rhythm, become part of the experience or perception which is expressed through them. In poetry, "the medium is the message"—the texture of language is an essential part of the poetical experience, which is what makes it difficult and partly impossible to translate. A poem cannot be adequately summarized, because it is made of the specific words which make it up, not just of an abstract meaning. That is one reason why poems, like other artworks, are "display texts", that is, they are carefully preserved in their original shape and are not expected to be altered in their transmission (although this may happen of course).

Poetry can be defined by its aims (e.g. instruction, delight, or instruction and delight), but there is one primary aim of all poems, which is a claim on the reader's attention, and an attempt to hold it and guide it through the poem—the poem's invitation into its own virtual world, so to speak, which may be instrumental to other ideological or practical aims, e.g. to promote a mode of feeling, a political idea, or to get the poet a pension or a prize.

A poem, then, is an intervention on the reader's consciousness and perception–first of all by fixing the reader's attention upon it, its situation, speaker, objects, attitudes and feelings, characters. Then by shaping these into a small-scale model of the world—therefore, the poem offers itself as a shaping instrument to redefine our perception of the world, and it intervenes indirectly on the way we experience things in the world apart from the poem —in this respect it is similar to other works of art like painting or film.

Each of these two steps may be emphasized: the poem may either focus primarily on itself, the experience intrinsic to poetry—and present itself as quite another world from that of ordinary experience (reflexive axis). Or the poem may emphasize its continuity with the world beyond the poem, and its ability to represent or model it, its intervention in the life-world (mimetic axis)

In a particular historical context, we should take into account that poetry is what is generally taken to be poetry, and is used as poetry in a given circle. For instance, there is nowadays an explosion of poetic self-publishing in the form of poetical blogs: many of these poems would probably not be considered "poetical" or even artistic by many critics or writers, but nevertheless they use poetical conventions and are appreciated as poetry by their readers. Both good and bad poetry are criticized and rejected, or appreciated and praised, by some section of the public—which doesn't mean that one should reject ideas of goodness and badness altogether.

Poetry exists to some extent in the poems, but the poems are nothing apart from the ways they are used and read. The same poem may be used or read very differently: for pleasure, or for analysis, to take two extremes. More generally, the text is an expectation of response, and it appeals to a number of conventions and presuppositions. When analysing a poem we should be aware of the different circumstances of its production, circulation and use, as it is only through an understanding of discursive conventions that discourse in general can be understood and used. The fixed text of a poem is only a part of these circumstances and conventions.

Also, poetry changes along with its media. In the remote past, poetry was typically sung by bards or rhapsodes. Then, many genres were developed as reading matter, and poetry became a kind of writing, not a kind of sound or speech. The printing of poems was also influential in the perception and circulation of poetry—a literary canon was created or rather reinforced, and poets wrote with a view to having their poems published in the literary marketplace. 

All of these elements survive in some way, and make for diverse and multiple expreriences of poetry. And poetry may combine with other art forms: with romances and novels (inserted poetry), drama and songs, musicals and opera, visual arts, video, television and film… 

Nowadays we speak of blogs and social networks, in which the readers and the poet can interact directly. The transformation of the written medium through electronic textuality will have far-reaching consequences for the practice of poetry, but one additional thing about poetry is that it already carries the substance of its history along with it, surviving through many modes and contexts of social communication, and it is already partly defined by what it has been, while remaining open to future transformations.

William Drummond (1585-1649)

 

From  The Lives of the British Poets. By Samuel Johnson. Completed by William Hazlitt. 4 vols. in 2. London: Nathaniel Cooke, 1854. I.273-75.

 

WILLIAM DRUMMOND (1585-1649)

William Drummond, a descendant of the ancient family of Drummond of Carnock, and the son of Sir John Drummond, was born at Hawthorndean, in Scotland, 13th December, 1585. He received his education at the University of Edinburgh, where he took the degree of M.A. At the age of twenty-one he went to France, and attended lectures on the civil law, a subject on which he left sufficient documents to prove that his jugment and proficiency were uncommon.

After a residence abroad of nearly four years, he returned to Scotland in 1610, in which year his father died. Instead, however, of prosecuting the study of the law, as was expected, he thought himself sufficiently rich in the possession of his paternal estate, and devoted his time to the ancient classics, and the cultivation of his poetical genius. Whether he had composed or communicated any pieces to his friends before this period, is uncertain. It was after a recovery from a dangerous illness that he wrote a prose rhapsody, entitled Cypress Grove; and about the same time his Flowers of Zion, or Spiritual Poems; which, with the Cypress Grove, were printed in Edinburgh in 1623. A part of his sonnets, it is said, were published as early as 1616.

During his residence at Hawthornden, hecourted a young lady of the name of Cunningham,to whom he was about to be united, when she was snatched from him by a violent fever. To dissipate his grief, which every object and every thought of his retirement contributed to revive, he travelled on the continent for about eight years, visiting Germany, France, and Italy. During this time he invigorated his memory and imagination by studying the varous models of original poetry, and collected a valuable set of Latin and Greek authors, with some of which he enriched the college library of Edinburgh, and others wre deposited at Hawthorndean. The books and manuscrips which he gave to Edinburgh were arranged in a catalogue printed 1627, and introduced by a Latin preface from his pen, on the advantage and honour of libraries.

On his return to Scotland, he found the nation distracted by political and religious disputes, which combined with the same causes in England to bring on a civil war. He retired to the seat of his brother-in-law, Sir John Scot, of Scotstarvet, a man of letters and probably of congenial sentiments on public affairs. During his stay with this gentleman, he wrote his History of the Five James's, Kings of Scotland; a work so inconsistent with liberal notions of civil policy as to have added very little to his reputation, although when first published, a few years after his death, and when political opinions ran in extremes, it wa probably not without its admirers.

It is uncertain at what time he was enabled to enjoy his retirement at Hawthorndean; but it appears he was there in his forty-fifth year, when he married Elizabeth Logan (granddaughter of Sir Robert Logan, of the house of Restelrig), in whom he fancied a resemblance to his first mistress.

During the civil war, his attachment to the king and church induced him to write many pieces in support of the establishment, which involved him with the revolutionary party, who not only called him to a severe account, but compelled him to furnish his quota of men and arms to fight against the cause which he espoused. His grief for the death of his royal master is said to heve been so great as to shorten his days. He died on the 4th of December, 1649, in the sixty-fourth year of his age, and was interred in the church of Lasswade. Unambitious of riches or honours, he appears to have projected the life of a retired scholar, from which he was diverted only by the commotions that robbed his country of its tranquillity. He was highly accomplished in ancient and modern literature, and in the amusements which became a man of his rank. Among his intimate friends and learned contemporaries, he seems to have been connected with the Earl of Stirling, Drayton, and Ben Jonson. The latter, as already noted in his life, paid him a visit at Hawthorndean, and communicated to him without reserve many pariculars of his life and opinions, which Drummond committed to writing, with a sketch of Jonson's character.

As a poet he ranks among the first reformers of versification, and in elegance, harmony, and delicacy of feeling is far superior to his contemporaries. One poem lately added to his other works, entitled Polemo-Middinia, or the Battle of the Dunghill, is a good example of burlesque.

 

 

 

 

 

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Birth of the Foreign Correspondent (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Journalism was not born in one day. Its origin is linked not so much to curious, inquisitive, comunicative and talkative (or writative) people, but rather more to party politics, secret agents and information services, espionage, political surveillance and the intrigues of the powerful. Before El Confidencial, there were, for real, confidential reports, confidential reporters, and information services for the State, for the elites and for burgeoning political parties. There is still today a continuity between the secret services and the Press, and secret reports which may be leaked or made public if necessary. Such reporters may sometimes appear to be neutral observers, but their reports are supported by the political interests they are meant to benefit in the last instance. Information is power, and power needs the best information available—through information services and later through the press, the powerful will control public opinion, public discourse, and gossip (the social networks of the age, regardless of platform). Ben Jonson wrote what is perhaps the first play on journalism and the information market, The Staple of News (1626), because he was familiar with the intrigues around the court involving the control and manipulation of information.  That was in the early 17th c.; in this passage from Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex (1928) the author describes the early information services and the reporter network developed in the Elizabethan age by the ambitious Earl of Essex, with the help of Anthony and Francis Bacon, in an information war against the ministers William Cecil (Lord Burghley), his son Robert Cecil, and their associates:

There it was that a great design was planned and carried into execution. The Cecils were to be beaten on their own chosen ground. The control of foreign affairs—where Burghley had ruled supreme for more than a generation—was to be taken from them; their information was to be proved inaccurate, and the policy that was based on it confuted and reversed. Anthony had no doubt that this could be done. He had travelled for years on the Continent; he had friends everywhere; he had studied the conditions of foreign States, the intricacies of foreign diplomacy, with all the energy of his acute and restless mind. If his knowledge and intelligence were supported by the position and the wealth of Essex, the combination would prove irresistible. And Essex did not hesitate; he threw himself into the scheme with all his enthusiasm. A vast correspondence began. Emissaries were sent out, at the Earl's expense, all over Europe, and letters poured in, from Scotland, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Bohemia, with elaborate daily reports of the sayings of princes, the movements of armies, and the whole complex development of international intrigue. Anthony Bacon sat at the centre, receiving, digesting, and exchanging news. The work grew and grew, and before long, such was the multiplicity of business, he had four young secretaries to help him, among whom were the ingenious Henry Wotton and the cynical Henry Cuffe. The Queen soon perceived that Essex knew what he was talking about, when there was a discussion on foreign affairs. She read his memoranda, she listened to his recommendations; and the Cecils found, more than once, that their carefully collected intelligence was ignored. Eventually a strange situation arose, characteristic of that double-faced age. Essex almost attained the position of an alternative Foreign Secretary. Various ambassadors—Thomas Bodley was one—came under his influence, and, while corresponding officially with Burghley, sent at the same time parellel and more confidencial communications to Anthony Bacon. If the gain to the public service was doubtful, the gain to Essex was clear; and the Cecils, when they got wind of what was happening, began to realise that they must reckon seriously with the house in the Strand.

Some Early Periodicals and Newspapers

 

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