Heather Dubrow - Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses

To Don

I thank the Graduate School Research Committee of the University of WisconsinMadison for supporting my research on this book; I am also grateful for both the released time and the collegiality I enjoyed during my semester at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities. Librarians at the University of Wisconsin Library and the Harvard College Library were patient and helpful throughout the project. David Rowe, computer whiz, repeatedly rescued a scholar in distress by fighting off software and hardware gremlins. It has been a pleasure to work yet again with the staff of Cornell University Press, especially Bernhard Kendler, my editor. Susannah Brietz, Stacey Knowlton, Amy McConnell, and Amelia Nearing provided valuable assistance with research on this book, and I look forward to reading their own books in due course. I am happy to record long-standing debts to two of my undergraduate teachers: honors tutorials with the late David Kalstone and with Nell Rudenstine sparked my fascination with the sonnet tradition over twenty-five years ago. Much more recently, the University of Wisconsin English Department Draft Group provided fruitful suggestions about sections of this book, as did audiences at Bryn Mawr College, the University of California at Los Angeles and at Riverside, Claremont McKenna College, Dickinson College, the University of Southern California, and here at the University of Wisconsin. I am indebted to more individuals than I can enumerate for help with the manuscript; in particular, I thank Ilona Bell, Barbara Bono, Douglas Bruster, Nona Fienberg, Susan Stanford Friedman, Jane Hedley, Constance Jordan, William Kennedy, Mary Ellen Lamb, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, David Loewenstein, Naomi Miller, Sherry Reames, Johann Sommerville, Michael Stapleton, Marguerite Waller, Susanne Lindgren Wofford, and Cathy Yandell. For years I have been fortunate enough to enjoy the friendship and collegial generosity of Gwynne Blakemore Evans and Anne Lake Prescott; their extensive work on the manuscript of this book deepened my gratitude to them. I hope to repay these two unpayable debts, at least in part, by heeding the suggestion of Sandy Mack, another colleague and friend, when I tried to thank for professional help: Thank me by doing it for someone else.

I have retained Renaissance spelling but modernized i/j and u/v; capitalization in the tides of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts has been regularized.

Quotations from scholarly editions have been reprinted by permission of the publishers as follows: Basil Blackwell (The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 19311941); Harvard University Press (Petrarchs Lyric Poems, ed. Robert M. Durling; copyright 1976 by Robert M. Durling); Houghton Mifflin (The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Gwynne Blakemore Evans, 1974); Johns Hopkins University Press (The Variorum Spenser, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 19431957); Macmillan (John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes; copyright 1957; copyright 1985 by Macmillan Publishing Company); Oxford University Press (The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap, 1957; The Poems English and Latin of Edward Lard Herbert of Cherbury, ed. G. C. Moore Smith, 1923; The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. A. Ringler, 1965; The Divine Poems of John Donne, ed. Helen Gardner, 1952; John Donne: The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner, 1965; John Donne: The Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate, 1967; John Donne: The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes, ed. Wesley Milgate, 1978); Yale University Press (Shakespeares Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth, 1977; 1977 by Yale University); University of Wisconsin Press (The Poems of John Collop, ed. Conrad Hilberry, 1962).

H. D.

Author. In all world I thinke none lovs but I.

Echo. None lovs but I. Auth. Thou foolish tattling ghest,

In this thou telst a lie. Echo. thou telst a lie.

Author. Why? Love him selfe he lodgeth in my brest.

Echo. He lodgeth in my brest. Auth. I pine for griefe;

And yet I want reliefe. Echo. I want reliefe.

Author. No starre more faire then she whom I adore.

Echo . Then he, whom I adore. Auth. Herehence I burne

Stil more and more. Echo. I burne stil more and more.

Author. Love , let my heart returne. Echo. my heart, returne.

Auth. Is then the Saint, for whom thou makest mone,

And whom I love, but one? Echo. I love but one.

Author. O heavns, is ther in love no ende of ills?

Echo. In love no ende of ills. Auth. Thou pratling voyce,

Dwelst thou in thayre, or but in hollow hills.

Echo. In hollow hills. Auth. Cease of to vaunt thy choyse.

Echo. Cease of to vaunt thy choyse. Auth. I would replie,

But here for love I die. Echo. for love I die.

(Watson, Hecatompathia, 25)

Thomas Watsons dialogue between a lover and Echo might well tempt literary critics themselves merely to echo the conventional wisdom about Petrarchan poetry. Though published in 1582, the poem is in many ways representative both of earlier Tudor sonnets and of those that appeared in the 1590s. It invokes the diction of Petrarchism when its author describes the mistress as a saint and compares her to a star. It confirms the ideology of Petrarchism when Echo assents, In love no ende of ills (14). And it not only exemplifies but also enacts the repetitiveness that is the fundamental praxis of Petrarchism, typically realized on levels ranging from diction to stanzaic structure to plot: if the speaker named Author is trapped in repeating sentiments from which he cannot escape, that process itself is replicated when Echo mimes his words. All these mirrorings are ironically played against the dialogue form, which normally implies their opposite, a give-and-take conversation.

Yet by turning the dyad of Petrarchan lover and mistress into a triad whose third member, Echo, in some sense rivals the lover (he lodgeth in my brest. / Echo. He lodgeth in my brest [45]), Watson directs our attention to an often neglected aspect of Petrarchism: the significance of competition, whether with other poets or other lovers. As we see, not only texts participating in that movement but also ones reacting against it are triangulated in this and many other ways. More to our purposes now, if in some respects Watsons dialogue substantiates the conventional wisdom about Petrarchism, in others it challenges both that discourse and our critical perspectives on it. Certain passages in the lyric render this apparently straightforward Petrarchan poem anti-Petrarchan in at least the broadest senses of that contested and complex term. And the text calls into question as well many of the academic discourses that examine Petrarchism.