George Gascoigne's Posies and the persona in sixteenth century poetry

GEORGE GASCOIGNE’S POSIES AND THE PERSONA IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY POETRY

Although literary criticism has generally accepted the notion of a widespread use of personae in all kinds of English Renaissance poetry,l and the self-conscious use of it by, for example, the satirists of the 1590’s has been ably explored, 2 the earliest allusion to the use of personae in lyric poetry remains unnoticed. This is an important aspect of George Gascoigne’s discussion of his poetic practices and aims in his “Epistle to the yong Gentlemen” which begins the Posies (1 575).3 In discussing the response to his previous volume (A Hundreth Smdrie FZowres, 1573) of which the Posies is a revision and expansion, and trying to explain why he thinks his poems were misread, Gascoigne has much to say about the way readers can and should read poetry, and shows us what one sixteenth century poet hoped for from the hypothetical “good reader”. While I do not wish entirely to discount biographical considerations, I think an examination of what Gascoigne has to say about the persona will supply a necessary corrective to what C.T. Prouty argues about the prefaces to the Posies.4 For Prouty, the problem is whether Gascoigne in asserting a moral perspective in his poetry might be guilty of hypocrisy - “Was the forswearing of green youth’s delights merely a pose designed to bring favours and rewards?“(p.8 1) - and the ensuing argument which excuses him is strictly biographical and historicist, paying no attention to actual poetic practice.

The explanation Gascoigne advances for the misreading of his poems is a sophisticated one, but because he lacks an appropriate and precise critical vocabulary it appears somewhat naive and indirect. Important topics such as the use of personae or the relationship between a poem and the life-experience of the reader tend not to be taken up directly but are largely implied by his selection and arrangement of examples. In general, he suggests that his poems were read very superficially, and he locates the source of this failing in the readers rather than in the poems. (This, incidentally, may partly account for Prouty’s feeling that the revisions made for the Posies were “of a rather strange nature” [p.79], for their main function is to enhance the fictive status of the poems.) Gascoigne identifies three kinds of misreaders: “curious Carpers, ignorant Readers, and grave Philosophers”, and although he discusses them separately an essential unity emerges from the discussion, and the whole adds up to a very sensible account of how to read poetry. The first category is dismissed very quickly: these are poorly-motivated, if not poorly-dis- posed, readers who are so concerned to quibble about surface details that they don’t get any further; the second group are better-motivated but profoundly ignorant about literary conventions, and are hence apt to confuse such things as literal and figurative, actuality and fiction; the

Neophilologus 70 (1986) 13Sl41

John Stephens - George Gascoigne’s “Posies” 131

third group misread because they take a very narrow view of the relationship between the form, function, and subject matter of poetry - because Gascoigne writes about love they conclude that the effect of the poems is “more likely to stirre in all yong Readers a venemous desire of vanitie, than to serve as a common myrrour of greene and youthful1 imperfections” (p. 12). Gascoigne again denies this accusation, for such a view is simply misreading. He feels his poems are such a mirror, confor- ming to the didactic function appropriate to poetry but that the poet cannot control reader intent: “as the industrious Bee may gather honie out of the most stinking weede, so the malicious Spider may also gather poyson out of the fayrest floure that growes” (p.12). The ideal reader implied by this discussion may be summed up thus: he reads carefully; he grasps the work in its entirety, rather than being waylaid by details of mere form or mere content; and he understands the conventions through which a poem is expressed and which give it its shape. “Meaning” is the relationship of all the parts, not to be isolated in any one. This is, of course, a very acceptable picture of the ideal reader, and still valid today.

The section of the argument which focuses particularly on the convention of the persona is that dealing with the second category of misreaders mentioned above:

There are also certaine others. who (having no skull at all) will yet be verie buste in readmg all that may beeread, and thinke it sufticient if(Parrot like) they can rehearse thmgs without booke: when within booke they understand neyther the meaning of the Authour, nor the sense of the figurative speeches, I will forbeare to recyte examples by any of mine owne doings. Since all comparisons are odious, I will not say how much the areignment and divorce of a Lover (being written in jeast) have been mistaken in sad earnest. It shall suffice that the contentions passed m verse long sithence, betwene maister C’/mrc/iyurdand Cume/i, were (by a blockheaded reader) construed to be indeed a quarell betwene two neighbors. Of whom that one having a Camel1 m kepmg, and that other having charge ofthe Churchyard, it was supposed they had grown to debate, bicause the Camel1 came into the Church-yarde, Laugh not at this (lustie Yonkers) smce the pleasant dittie of the noble Erie of Surrey (b,eginmng thus. In vnzrer.r jusf refurrze) was also construed to be made Indeed bv a Shepeherd. What shoulde I stande much m rehersall how the L. VUUX his dittie (beginning thus: I /oth r/m Idid love) was thought by some to be made uvon his death bed? and that the Soulkmll of M. Edwards was alsowritien in extremitie of &knesse? Of a truth (my good gallants) there are such as having onlv lerned to read En&h* do intervret Latin. Cireke. French and Italian phrases or metaphors, everi according-to their owneXmotherly conception and childish skill The which (because thev take Chalke for Chese) shall never trouble me. whatsoever fault they find in my doings, . (p, 1 I).

Gascoigne couches the reference here to misreading of his owns poems as the familiar Chaucerian dichotomy of gume (“jeast”) and eurnest but, as we can see from the subsequent direction of his argument, his real distinction between jest and earnest is effectively a distinction between fiction and autobiography. It is not suggested that the poems aren’t to be taken seriously, but that the principal speaker of the “Arraignment of a Lover”, for example, who is twice addressed during the poem as “George”,is not exactly George Gascoigne. The “Arraignment”, in presenting the love-experience through the metaphor of an unjust legal

132 John Stephens - George Gascoigne’s “Posies”

trial conducted by personitied aspects of love, explores the process of being in love rather than the amatory feelings of an individual. Condem- ned to death by a jury of Flatterers led by Falsehood and by Will, the judge, the Lover appeals to Beauty and is pardoned, but bound over as her prisoner to keep the peace for the term of his life:

Thus am I beauties bounden thrall, At hir commaunde when shee doth call. (lines 53-54)

The attitudes of poet and persona towards this outcome differ, The persona is content with his lot, whereas the reader is aware of a different attitude suggested by the poet: the Lover may have escaped from death to permanent enslavement, but he has still lost control of his emotions, and the central metaphor of a legal process which victimizes the weak suggests a moral judgment against “George’s” failure to correct his behaviour. The poem is a good example of how an elaborated metaphor- ical frame can function to distinguish the attitudes of poet and persona, and Gascoigne has frequent recourse to this method. The poem’s misrea- der presumably fails to grasp both “the sense of the ligurative speeches” and the simple principle that the lirst person singular pronoun, the “I”, refers not to the poet but to a persona created by the poet. Such an interpretation of Gascoigne’s argument does depend on its overall direction, and it seems a pity that he didn’t take it up more directly at this point, since his subsequent examples represent rather grosser forms of poet/persona confusion. There are, however, clear thematic links between those of his own poems mentioned and the others, and this further confirms that they should be considered a group. Moreover, they appear to be carefully ordered from the incredible to the nearly plausible.

The Churchyard-Camel example, which he offers instead of analyzing his own poems, seems at first sight too ludicrous to delay our attentions ~ and Gascoigne is writing rather polemically. It does, however, make two serious points: firstly, there is a cuveut about misreading “the sense of the figurative speeches”; secondly ~ and this is the cause of the first problem- there is the difliculty which arises when a reader is unaware of the convention of the persona. A normal feature of flyting poetry (which enjoyed some vogue in the tifteenth and sixteenth centuries) is that poets overtly step outside their own personalities.‘j But what we are asked to envisage is a reader so “blockheaded” that he attributes an inappropriate literal significance to the names of the disputants, confusing the functions of the words as names and the more common denotations of churchyurd and camel. Instead of the delicate distinction between poet and speaker we are shown a coarse distinction which transforms the poems into crude allegory. Thus the consequence of the reader’s lack of critical delicacy is a confusion of genres: in this case flyting with personification allegory/debate. This is the most obvious kind of misreading. That the notion of persona is involved in it becomes clear from the next three examples,

J&n Stephens - George Gascoigne’s “Posies” 133

which are presented in order of increasing complexity as it becomes more possible for the poem to have been composed in accord with its fictive circumstances and the distinction between poet and persona becomes less obtrusive.

The Surrey poem is narrated by a shepherd, who tells how on a winter morning he met with a grieving lover; how the lover related the story of his Iady’s betrayal, and then died; and how the shepherd buried him. It is a palpable fiction: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was not, like the speaker of the poem, a shepherd. Apart from such an obvious fact, though, the reader ought to have very little difficulty in determining that the poet is not the same person as the speaker. This is an easy example, but if we examine the poem to isolate the features which create and detine the sense of persona we begin to build up a number of critical principles with wider application, to the other poems, to Gascoigne’s poems, and beyond. Firstly, the poem is readily identifiable as belonging to a specific genre with specific conventions, as the opening lines reveal:

In winters just returne, when Boreas gan his raigne, And every tree unclothed fast, as Nature taught them plaine; In misty morning darke, as sheep are then in holde, I hyed me fast, it sat me on, my sheep for to unfolde. And as tt is a thing that lovers have by tittes Under a palm I heard one crye as he had lost hys wyttes. Whose voice did ring so shrill in uttering of his plaint, That I amazed was to hear how love could hym attamt. “Ah wretched man”, quad he, “come death, and ridde thys wo; .’

The convention of the poem about love in a pastoral frame is very manifest here: time of year and of day are used in a characteristically symbolic way in the first three lines, and the introduction of the stricken and demented lover in line five seems inevitable. The link between lines four and five, in which each of the characters is seen fultilhng his predetermined role, underscores the conventionality of both roles, and the lover immediately begins his complaint with the conventional call upon Death to end his suffering. The conventional aspect of the depiction of the speaker is further extented by the use of past tense first person narrative. The narrative is largely conventional in form and content, being essentially a C/UWZWI d’uventure and having affiliations going back to medieval lyric and such narrative poems as Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. The use of a past tense first person narrative distances reader from poem, since we are contemplating a completed action rather than an unfolding one, and are thus enabled to pass judgment on the persona’s responses with the advantage of hindsight, as it were. Verb tense is in general an important aspect of persona creation, though it only functions in conjunction with other elements. Present tense first person discourse can quickly create a poet/persona distinction by insisting on the convention that the poem and an action it describes exist simultaneously in the present. One might point to the major contribution this makes to the


unsettling experience of reading George Herbert’s ‘&The Forerunners”.* Past tense - and especially the sense of retrospectivity - can sharpen the reader’s awareness that the speaker of the poem is oblivious to larger ironies, or even local ones, and hence is to be distinguished from the poet who creates them. Thus Surrey’s persona in this poem can repeat the lover’s account of his lady’s defection without any sense of undermining irony. Early in the poem (lines 35-36) the shepherd describes himself as “but poore, and simple in degre” and unworthy of being even a shepherd, which in itself suggests a speaker for whom the writing of a poem would be an unlikely or improbable enterprise. This quality of naivete interacts with the features already mentioned. It is pointed most sharply at the end of the poem when the speaker decides to bury the now-defunct lover beside “Chreseids love, king Priams sonne, the worthy Troilus” (line 78), since this emphasizes his unquestioning acceptance of the lover’s essentially wrong-headed view of his situation (characterized by his excessive joy in “worldes blisse” (line 49), and by his grandiose conception of the magnitude of his loss+ “a greater losse than Priam had of Troy” (line 52) naively echoed by the speaker’s final resolution). Lastly, the speaker’s inability to see this implication is stressed in the passage where he expresses his feeling of empathy with the dead lover (lines 67-74), by mirroring and re-enacting his grief and madness. The reader therefore must be fully aware of the poet/persona distinction here, not just because it is merely simple-mindedness to overlook it, but because Surrey exploits the difference to explore the dangers inherent in both excessive passion and unthinking empathy with it.

The next poem, by Thomas Vaux, may be dealt with briefly, as the reasons for avoiding an autobiographical reading are straightforward. Firstly, as the poem appears in Tottel’s A4iscellany,9 it has, like Gascoig- ne’s own mentioned poems, a title which suggests that the poem is a generalization: “The Aged Lover Renounceth Love”, and such titles indicate a persona as speaker. The title may, of course, be editorial, but Gascoigne’s contemporaries most likely knew the poem from Totted. Secondly, the theme ~ the assessment of life’s value from the point of view of a speaker for whom life is almost over - is a conventional one. An alternative title, found in ms. BM Harl. 1703, identifies the poem as a memento mori: “A dyttye . . . made by the lorde Vaus . . . representing the Image of deathe”. There is no confusion of poet and persona here, though readers (and even editors) have always been prone to read such poems as direct transcripts of experience. The example is most apposite to Gascoigne’s discussion because his ‘&Divorce of a Lover” and “Lulla- bie of a Lover” are each a version of this same theme. Thirdly, the exemplary function of the poem is stressed in the closing lines which use typical memento mori diction to generalize the experience:


And ye that bide behind, Haue ye none other trust: As ye of claye were cast by kinde. So shall ye waste to dust.

Finally, the poem’s normal tense is the present, suggesting the kind of simultaneity of poem and events referred to previously, and yet a tempo- ral progression is implied within the present tense situation by the shift from somewhat greying hair in lines 7-8 to total baldness in lines 45-46. Such a shift helps signal that the speaker is a generalized persona. Thus, while it is more possible that the poet Vaux might be old and writing in his own person than it is that Surrey might be a shepherd (and it would be too crass to point out that Vaux only lived to the age of forty-six), the elements I have pointed to militate against such a reading, and should compel the reader to identify the experience as that of Everyman, and hence himself, rather than of Vaux.

With Richard Edwards’ poem (number 288 in The Arundel Harington Manuscriptlo) we find Gascoigne in direct disagreement with the poet’s modern editor. Bradner surmised that the poem was probably written as the result of an actual experience which might have taken place in the periode 1550-55, during which there is no record of Edwards’ wherea- bouts. Gascoigne, in scorning the view that the poem was “written in extremitie of sicknesse”, rather directs the reader’s attention to the conventional aspect of the work. Bradner has, indeed, not understood “the sense of the figurative speeches”: the poem uses a double metaphor in which a storm at sea is at first an image of physical illness and then an image of human life as a whole. The poem is in the present tense, and this combines with the central metaphor to effect a twofold removal of persona from poet: the improbability that the speaker might write such a poem apparently at the point of death is underlined by the physical impossibility of writing such a poem during a storm and on the point of shipwreck. The shipwreck itself functions as an image for death. To conceive preparation for death in terms of a sea-journey of great peril is quite conventional, and many examples of similar sea-metaphors can be found by opening The Arundel Harington A4anuscript at random. The image of man wending his way precariously across the threatening depths has a currency of centuries: the Old English Wanderer and Seafarer spring immediately to mind as early examples of the tradition.

Whereas Vaux appends his explicit moral generalization, Edwards builds his into the poem by means of an embedded “prophecy” concern- ing the fate of the drowned body: this takes the form of a prayer uttered by the finder of the body, which is framed by the moral application for which the persona’s experience is exemplary:

136 John S’tephens - George Gascoigne’s “Posies”

0 Lord, my frendes & Children all guide with thy holy hand, And gram-it they flye the raging Seas and dye uppon the Land . Vppon his grave shah stand a stone/in witnesse of his case, That shah forbid all such as saile t’attempt that dredfull place.

(lines 13-14.23-24)

With the moral application thus presented, and helping to determine the reader’s attitude toward the persona, the poem then moves to identify the sea with “earthlye ioyes” (line 36) and with “synne” (line 47) and the tenor of the metaphor shifts from storm = illness to storm = life; finally, the two tenors are united in the closing quatrain (especially through the word play on mortal1 ):

Lo, now I synck beholde I drowne/ and drinck the mortal1 flood 0 Christe make speede take thow my sowle/ it trusteth m thie blood

(lines 51-52)

This represents a hard-won position, and the persona of this poem is marked by the shifting in his attitudes which is central to the dramatization of his situation: at the outset his acceptance is bland and unthinking; by the middle of the poem he is beset by multifarious fears and a desire for an extension of time to repent; and in the last section the persona moves to a considered and understanding acceptance. So while one could expect that of Gascoigne’s examples the poem dealing with “extremitie of sickness” might be less apt to distinguish poet and persona, this proves not to be the case. Rather, Edwards has employed quite palpable methods to establish the presence of the persona, which he uses to present an exemplary experience, not a personal one.

In each of the poems discussed above the persona has been used for an exemplary purpose. If we turn now to one of Gascoigne’s own poems mentioned in his epistle we tind that the persona is defined by similar methods and performs a similar exemplary function. Thus “The Divorce of a Lover” is marked by the following features: a title which points to a dramatic but generalized situation; a speaker who reviews his life as it approaches its end (lines 15-2 1 - “nature fadeth fast. . ./ The greenesse of my yeares, doth wyther now”; he suffers from “crampe” and is impo- tent); the frame of the poem, a legal suit in which the speaker presents a petition to Death and which being present tense is an overt dramatic fiction, and the consequent specitic audience within the poem which is quite separate from the reader (line 1 - “Divorce me nowe good death . . . “); the personifications of Death, Love and Life, which further generalize the lover’s experience. The theme of the poem is the mutability of human emotion and of life itself, a theme which constantly recurs throughout Gascoigne’s poetry, including the love poems. The function of the persona is to highlight this theme by his wrong-headed attitude towards mutability: its operation plunges him into despair. This is further pointed by a twist given by the poem to the conventions of love


complaint-instead of calling upon death because he has lost his love, the speaker here calls on it because his whole life follows such a paradigm of loss, and the movement from love complaint to life examination opens up a larger moral perspective. The diction also helps to create the double perspective, in that the mixing of legal and love dictions in the closing lines gives ironic emphasis to the speaker’s error:

Yes gentle judge give care, and thou shah see me prove, My concubine incontinent, a common whore is love. And in my wyfe I find, such discord and debate, As no man living can endure the tormentes of my state. Wherefore thy sentence say, devorce me from them both, Since only thou mayst right my wronges, good death nowe be not loath. But cast thy pearcing dart, into my pantmg brest, That I may leave both love and hfe, 19 thereby purchase rest.

(lines 33-40)

The persona is in this way a device the function of which is to prevent two kinds of misreading: a reading which identifies the content as something which pertains only to “the poet” and not to the reader; or one which merely assimilates the content to the reader’s own experience without forcing any introspection upon the reader. Rather, the distance created by the use of the persona should challenge the reader’s view of his own experience.

Finally, how central the use of personae is to Gascoigne’s poetry can be brought out by examining “Woodmanship” (pp. 348-52) an overtly autobiographical poem, and comparing it with a different kind of autobiographical poetry, a sequence from Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1.301- 414). There is an immediate similarity in that each states a theme at the outset:

wonder not To see your woodman shoote so ofte awrie

C’Woodmanshtp”, lines l-2) Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear .i i

The important difference is that Gascoigne presents himself through a role- not “I” but “your woodman” and, as the prose introduction to the poem indicates, the speaker feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable in this role. Further, the imagery of these lines points us towards Gascoigne’s more prominent use of artilice: Wordsworth is content to have his metaphor shift from “seed-time” to “Fostered” and then allow it to lapse; Gascoigne, within a dozen lines, has taken up the figurative potential of “shooting awry” and has developed it into a metaphor for misdirected ambitions, which is then sustained throughout the poem. In these ways, then, some element of mask has been swiftly interposed between the reader of “Woodmanship” and the poet. Another similarity between the poems is that each seeks to interrelate actual life-experience and broad generalizations about life, without any suggestion that the


events described by either poet are at all fictional. Each poem depicts actions which are to some extent reprehensible, but the attitude towards them diverges sharply and this contributes much to the tonal differences between the poems. In “Woodmanship” the misdirected ambitions of Gascoigne’s youth are deplored, albeit that different assumptions are made about the reasons for failure: the persona locates the failure in his own personality and capabilities, whereas the poet sees it as a consequence of Fortune’s control of the mutable world. In The Prelude the young Wordsworth engages in activities which are clear lapses from propriety, and are described in appropriate language: he steals woodcocks from other’s snares - “a strong desire/O’erpowered my better reason” (I.3 18- 19); he robs bird’s nests of their eggs - “mean/Our object and inglorious” (1.32%29);l z he helps himself to a boat he finds moored in a cove- “an act of stealth/ And troubled pleasure” (1.361-62). In each description, however, the perceptions and emotions of the child are mediated through the reflections of the mature man and his sense of their ultimate purpose: this is evident in the qualifications already cited, but even more in the way the experience is in retrospect related to the stated theme, as “beauty” and “fear” are shown in all three experiences to coexist in the service of the large abstractions-the “dark/ Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles/ Discordant elements” (1.341-43), “Nature”, who led him to the boat in the first place (1.351, 357) and the “Wisdom and Spirit of the universe” (1.401) which in these ways purifies “The elements of feeling and of thought” (1.411). While we remain aware of the two views of experience, the child’s and the man’s, it makes no difference whatsoever whether we think of the speaker as “Wordsworth” or “the persona”, because there is nothing in the sequence to suggest a difference in point of view between them.

Gascoigne’s reflection of his past experiences - his life as, consecutive- ly, student, lawyer, courtier and soldier ~ is very different, and he finds the universe a much less beneficent place. The outstanding quality of “Woodmanship” is its tone, l 3 the key to which lies in the differentiation of poet and persona by means of the “woodman shooting awry” metaphor. This enables Gascoigne to maintain a gentle tension between the comic bumbling of the speaker in every walk of life he attempts and the harsher capriciousness of Fortune’s world in which man only accidental- ly succeeds by his own endeavour. The gap between poet and speaker is clearly delineated in the poem’s penultimate section (lines 87-124) in which any attempt of the speaker’s to act is paralyzed by his bewilder- ment and chagrin at the paradox which is his life. His continual failure suggests that his youth has indeed been “myspente” (line 90) and yet he feels that he is well-educated and accomplished- “not all the worlde . . ./ Shootes bet than I, nay some shootes not so well” (lines 99-100). If the reader has grasped that the speaker has been shooting at illusory targets, then he must be aware of the difference in perception between poet and


persona. And the irony inherent in the mirror image of lines 120-121 should alert the slowest reader:

And whiles mine eyes beholde this mirrour thus, The hearde goeth by, and farewell gentle does.

The image relates the poem to the speculum tradition whereby, to quote the “Epistle” again, literature transforms experience into “a common myrrour of greene and youthful1 imperfections”, but up to this point the speaker has not grasped the lesson. His response is closer to despair than to understanding and acceptance.

As the final section of the poem moves to resolution the views of poet and persona merge, as the wrong-headed attitude of the latter gives way to a greater awareness. The transition is marked by a new way of treating the deer-shooting metaphor, which now becomes a hypothetical case shaped to explain the higher purpose of the passions (“rage”) which have driven the persona towards his false goals. The metaphor becomes a tool for analysis and points to the conclusion which ought to have been drawn from past experience.

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 should strike hir deade, Atid then shee prove a carrian carkas too, What figure might I finde within my head, To scuse the rage whiche rulde mee so to doo?

Now, to shoot a carrion doe (that is, one pregnant and unfit for eating) is neither comic bumbling, as in line 6, nor a sign of lack of skill or the operation of Fortune (line 134). Instead, another “figure” is found:

Some myght interprete by playne paraphrase. That lacke of skill or fortune ledde the chaunce, But I must otherwise expounde the case. I say Jehovu did this Doe advaunce, And made hir bolde to stande before mee so, Till I had thrust mme arrow to hir harte, That by the sodaine of hir overthrowe, I might endeavour to amende my parte, And turne myne eyes that they no more behoide, Such guylefull markes as seeme more than they be, And though they glister outwardely like golde, Are inwardly but brasse, as men may see.

(lines 136-44)

The doe has two significances: it is an image of the delusiveness of human perception and hence ambition, and a demonstration in itself of the suddenness with which circumstances may be radically changed in the mutable world. It also functions as an analogy for the speaker himselfi in killing it he takes on the role of Fortune’s agent, just as the objects of his


own ambitions have always been Fortune’s agents. His need is to see beyond the flux of Fortune’s world to the providence of God. This is the insight the persona has had to reach, and which he has reached through the poem’s dramatization of the movement from the misguided responses to his unsuccessful life to the wiser and more accepting attitude at the poem’s close. The function of the persona has been to enable the two interpretations of experience to be kept before the reader as the poem grapples with the problem of the relationship between the responses of an individual to the world and a general truth about how the world works. The result is an insight more complex than either the persona’s naivete or the proverbial platitude of lines 143-44 could reach on its own. And this, it seems to me, is how Gascoigne wants his poems to be read and what he is driving at in his discussion of misreading in the “Epistle to the young Gentlemen”.

ikfacquarie University JOHN STEPHENS

Notes

I. Acceptance has, of course, never been universal. See, e.g., the rather inconclusive symposium on Donne and the persona in SO.14 (1976). 173-213, - ~

2. See especially Alvin Kernan, The CankGed huse:‘iafire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, 1959); Adrian Weiss, “Rhetoric and Satire: New Light on John Marston’s Pigmalion and the Satires”, JEGP, 7 1 (1972) 22-35; R.B. Gill, “A Purchase of Glory: The Persona of Late Elizabethan Satire”, ,SP, 72 (1975) 408-18.

3. All quotattons from Gascoigne are taken from The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge, 1907) Vo1.I.

4. George Gascoigne. Eh:abethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York, 1942) pages 78- 84.

5. The poems forming part of thts debate (by Churchyard, Camel and other writers) were gathered together under the title The Contention between Churchyeard and Camel/ upon David Dycers Dreame sett out in suche order that it ls bothe wyttye andprofytablefor all degryes, and was registered on Sept. 26, 1560. Gascoigne’s spider-and-bee commonplace. cited above. was used by Churchyard in the third of his poems in the series (page B.iii[b]):

Out of the sweete, and fayrest tloure, the spider poyson takes. And yet the Bee, doth feede theron, & therwith hony makes. 6. Clearly evident still in the satirists, See Gill’s discussion of Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiae

(opxit., 411-12). 7. Henry Howard, Ear/ of Surrey Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford, 1964) p.12. 8. See Stanley Fish’s analysts m SeljX’onsuming Arti&acts (Berkely, 1972). pages 216-23,

with which I concur. 9. Tottel’s Miscellanv, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster. 1903), pages 173-75. IO. The Arundel Har&gton Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed Ruth Hughey (Columbus, I960),

Vol.1, pages 336-38. I havecited this text, rather than Bradner’s, because Hughey gives variants and both versions contain obvtously inferior readings. See Leicester Bradner, The ,Ll$z und Poems of Richard Edwards, Yale Studies in Enghsh. LXXIV (New haven, 1927). pages 105-108.

11. The Prelude, Book I, lines 301-302 (1850 text), in Wi&m Word.vworth: The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, Second Edition, revised by Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1958).

12. In this case the condemnatory language is immediately offset by the framing opposition between “objects” and “ends”. The full quotation is: “though mean/Our objecf and mglorious, yet the end/ Was not ignoble.” (my emphases).

13. Compare Ronald C. Johnson, George Gascoigne (New York, 1972). page 66: “[Gascoig- ne] establishes a delicate, consistent tone in the poem, a difIicult feat in that the tone from start


to finish balances on a line between questionmg and reluctant acceptance. The tone combines cries of inJustice, feelings of reproach, moments of frustration, feelings of self-prude, and a sense of universal irony underlying the hopelessness of endless misfortune.” Johnson’s account of the poem, however, scarcely goes beyond description ofcontent, and he does not attempt to explain /WV these conflicting emotions are combined.

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George Gascoigne's Posies and the persona in sixteenth century poetry