Samuel Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamond and an emblematic reconsideration of A Lover's Complaint

Studies in Philology

Volumn 104, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 82-122

  Go, Kenji ^a  

^a TEIKYO UNIVERSITY   (Japan)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950708494     PISSN: 00393738     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sip.2007.0001     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. See Brian Vickers's two recent letters to the editor in the Times Literary Supplement (17 December 2004, p. 17; 21 January 2005, p. 15)
2. which criticize David Kathman's entry for Thomas Thorpe in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004)
3. William Shakespeare, "The Sonnets" and "A Lover's Complaint", ed. Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, 1995), 95
4. Kerrigan, "Shakespeare's Poems," in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 65-81, esp. 65, 77
5. Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 140
6. In Reading Shakespeare's Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets, Lisa Freinkel observes that "[e]ven now, almost fifteen years after John Kerrigan's New Penguin edition of the Sonnets - one of the first editions since 1609 to include A Lover's Complaint - the silent omission of that last, strange poem is still common editorial and critical practice. . . . Even now A Lover's Complaint is rarely, and only with difficulty, read as an integral part of the book called Shakespeare's Sonnets" ([New York: Columbia University Press, 2002], 189)
7. See Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, "And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants," Computers and Humanities 30 (1996): 191-245, esp. 236-37, 241
8. "Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots: C-Prompted Doubts About Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover's Complaint to Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 177-207, esp. 189-98
9. However, according to Elliott and Valenza's more recent "hyperspheric analysis," A Lover's Complaint is, on the contrary, "much more likely to be Shakespeare's than, say, the Funeral Elegy," though "LC is more than a thousand times less likely to be Shakespeare's than the most discrepant of Shakespeare's other blocks" ("Did Shakespeare Write A Lover's Complaint? The Jackson Ascription Revisited," in Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, ed. Brian Boyd [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004], 131)
10. For a counterargument to Elliot and Valenza's stylometric test results, see MacDonald P. Jackson, "A Lover's Complaint Revisited," Shakespeare Studies 32 (2004): 267-71
11. Tarlinskaja, "The Verse of A Lover's Complaint: Not Shakespeare," in Words That Count, ed. Boyd, 157
12. Vickers, "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's "Funerall Elegye" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 118, 568
13. Vickers, "A Rum 'Do': The Likely Authorship of 'A Lover's Complaint,'" Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 2003, pp. 13-15. Vickers concludes this essay as follows: "To adopt a phrase from A Lover's Complaint,' the claim for Shakespeare's authorship of this longer-lived foreign body is another 'unapproved witness'; its title should finally be restored to its rightful owner, John Davies of Hereford" (15)
14. In her essay, "Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?" Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that "whatever we may think of its poetic quality," A Lover's Complaint is "an intended component of the volume as first published" (Review of English Studies 34/134 [1983] : 169)
15. In her edition of the sonnets, she maintains that "A Lover's Complaint is not merely a formal pendant to the sonnets, but a carefully balanced thematic counterpart to them" and was written "as a carefully designed component of the whole" of Q (Shakespeare's Sonnets, Arden 3rd ed. [London: Thomas Nelson, 1997], 92)
16. Ilona Bell likewise argues that "the 1609 text is a brilliantly imagined and intricately interconnected volume of poems" ("That Which thou hast done': Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint," in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer [New York: Garland, 1999], 471)
17. Sasha Roberts concurs. Assuming Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint, she seeks to read the Sonnets "in dialogue with" the poem (Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England [London: Palgrave, 2003L 143-53). However, she offers no new evidence for the interconnectedness between these two components of Q
18. Jonathan Crewe, who edited Shakespeare's narrative poems for the Pelican Shakespeare, maintains that Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint "remains doubtful" and relegates his introductory discussion of it to the section of "Minor and 'Dubious Poems'" (Narrative Poems [New York: Penguin, 1999J, xxix)
19. John Roe, in his Shakespeare edition of The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), concludes his introductory statement on A Lover's Complaint as follows: "the poem's imperfect balance of narrative manner and expression leaves it a good deal less readable, and artistically less assured, than Shakespeare's other verse narratives" (73)
20. Roger Kuin describes the poem as a "mediocre narrative of an appalling seduction" and characterizes it as follows: "Not truly awful .... But bad it is: lengthy, unexciting, couched in lumpy, pseudo-Spenserian stanzas, it bumbles its pretentious way through a tale that is merely depressing" (Chamber Music: Elizabethan Sonnet-Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998], 96, 85)
21. Craik, "Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint and Early Modern Criminal Confession," Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002): 437, 442. Craik does not discuss the duplicitous significance of the love tokens in this "confessional" narrative of the female complainant
22. Bell, "That Which thou hast done," 455
23. This essay offers some telling new evidence not previously noted in those studies or critical editions of A Lover's Complaint which have either strongly argued for or simply taken for granted Shakespeare's authorship of the poem. See, for instance, Kenneth Muir, "'A Lover's Complaint': A Reconsideration," in Shakespeare 1564.-1964: A Collection of Modern Essays by Various Hands, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1964), 154-66
24. Jackson, Shakespeare's "A hover's Complaint": Its Date and Authenticity, University of Auckland Bulletin 72, English Series 13 (Auckland: Dobbie Press, 1965)
25. Richard Underwood, Shakespeare on Love: The Poems and the Plays. Prolegomena to a Variorum Edition of "A Lover's Complaint"'(Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1985)
26. Kerrigan, ed., Sonnets
27. Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets
28. Bell, "That Which thou hast done"
29. Burrow, ed., Complete Sonnets
30. Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 239-66
31. and Jackson, "A Lover's Complaint Revisited," the "provisional conclusions" of which are "that Shakespeare was the author of A Lover's Complaint and that he most probably wrote it within the period 1603-1607, which might reasonably be narrowed to 1604-1606" (290)
32. See Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 124
33. and Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets, 92
34. Daly, "Emblematic Studies of Shakespeare since 1990" in The Shakespearean International Yearbook 2, ed. W. R. Elton and John M. Mucciolo (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002), 237
35. Jackson has shown persuasively that "A Lover's Complaint cannot have been written before 1596" ("Echoes of Spenser's Prothalamion as Evidence against an Early Date for Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint," Notes & Queries, n.s., 37 [1990]: 180-82)
36. See, for example, Robert Law, "Daniel's Rosamond and Shakespeare," University of Texas Studies of English 26 (1947): 42-48
37. Cecil Seronsy, "Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond: Origins and Influence of an Elizabethan Poem," Lock Haven Review 2 (1960): 46-57
38. Underwood, Shakespeare on Love, 20-38
39. Quotations from Rosamond follow the 1592 text edited by Kerrigan in his Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and "Female Complaint": A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 165-90
40. the Delia sonnets follow the first 1592 edition of Delia as reproduced in facsimile in Daniel, "Delia"; with, "The Complaint of Rosamond" (London: Scolar Press, 1969). Both will be cited parenthetically within the text, Rosamond by line and Delia by title, sonnet number, and line
41. For a detailed discussion of the double entendre of talent in line 281 of Rosamond, see my essay "The Bawdy Talent' to 'Occupy' in Cymbeline, The Complaint of Rosamond, and the Elizabethan Homily for Rogation Week," Review of English Studies 54/213 (2003): 27-51
42. For the "widespread" male use of the bawdy talent ("penis"), see Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Athlone, 1994)
43. and A Glossary of Shakespeare's Sexual Language (London: Athlone, 1997), s.v. "talent."
44. r-v
45. For a modernized text, see John Griffiths, ed., The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), 481-82
46. See my "The Bawdy 'Talent,' " 28-31, 51, for a detailed discussion of the same double entendre latent in the word talent in Giacomo's enigmatic speech to Innogen: "But yet Heauen's bounty towards him, might / Be vs'd more thankfully
47. In himselfe 'tis much; / In you, which I account his, beyond all Talents" (Shakespeare, Cymbeline, in The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman [New York: Norton, 1968], fol. 684-86, 1.6.79-81; emphasis added)
48. All subsequent citations from the First Folio follow this edition and will be cited parenthetically within the text. This same covert double entendre of talent found both in Cymbeline and A Lover's Complaint corroborates the earlier findings of Eliot Slater and A. Kent Hieatt, who noted some significant association of these two works in the use of rare words. See Slater, "Shakespeare: Word Links between Poems and Plays," Notes & Queries, n.s., 22 (1975): 157-63
49. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, and E. A. Nicholson, "Shakespeare's Rare Words: 'Lover's Complaint,' Cymbeline, and Sonnets," Notes & Queries, n.s., 34 (1987): 219-24
50. Hieatt, "Cymbeline and the Intrusion of Lyric into Romance Narrative: Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint,' Spenser's Ruins of Rome," in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 98-118, esp. 100-107
51. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry: A Study of His Earlier Work in Relation to the Poetry of the Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 234
52. V. Heltzel, Fair Rosamond: A Study of the Development of a Literary Theme (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1947), 1-20. The "marvellous coffer" given by the king to Rosamond in earlier versions was not described as adorned with pictures
53. Hallett Smith, for instance, merely notes that the place its pictures fill in the poem is "one of pictorial embellishment" (Elizabethan Poetry [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952], 107)
54. This view is repeated by M. M. Reese in the commentary on Rosamond in his Elizabethan Verse Romances ([London: Routledge, 1968], 206)
55. Though Ira Clark focuses on this episode and notes that the "Casket" is an "emblem," he does not explain why or how it can be regarded as such either in structure or in significance ("Samuel Daniel's 'Complaint of Rosamond,' " Renaissance Quarterly 23 [19701:152-62)
56. For Kelly Quinn, the emblematic nature of this casket is in effect negated ("Ecphrasis and Reading Practices in Elizabethan Narrative Verse," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 44 [2004]: 19-35). Quinn argues as follows: "The primary function of the responses to art in The Complaint of Rosamond, Lucrece, and Mortimeriados is characterization; their responses emphasize character attributes [such as] Rosamond's vanity.... Instead of taking moral instruction from art, as its defenders expect, these characters generate interpretations that serve only to demonstrate and reinforce their preexisting traits and states of mind" (30-31)
57. Kerrigan, ed., Motives of Woe, 178
58. Clark, "Samuel Daniel's 'Complaint of Rosamond/" 156
59. See Thomas P. Roche Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 350-51
60. Kelly, "Ecphrasis and Reading Practices," 21. Kelly goes on to argue, unconvincingly, as follows: "By emphasizing Amymone's lack of choice and then suggesting Amymone is a precedent for herself, Rosamond indicates that she too was raped" (21). Nowhere in the poem, however, does Rosamond once indicate that she was "raped" by the king
61. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, 236
62. The "loue" in "O myracle of loue" (394) was printed as "Loue" in Daniel's Whole Workes (London, 1623), 14. The mosaic picture (dating from the third century A.D.) photographically reproduced by Yves Bonnefoy depicts Amymone and the sea-god Poseidon with a winged Cupid hovering in the middle (Greek and Egyptian Mythologies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 101)
63. "Yet will I weepe, vowe, pray to cruell Shee; / Flint, Frost, Disdaine, weares, melts, and yeelds we see" (Delia, 11.13-14)
64. "And still against her frownes fresh vowes repayrest, ... And you mine eyes the agents of my hart,... Did treate the cruell Fayre to yeelde reliefe" (Delia, 8.3-8; emphasis added)
65. For a general account of the emblem and emblematic poetry, see Peter Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1998). Rosamond is not discussed in this monograph
66. Burrrow, ed., Complete Sonnets, 141
67. Hyland, An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems (London: Palgrave, 2003), 192
68. Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare's Will, 235
69. Unless otherwise noted, all play quotations and references from Shakespeare follow William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Citations will be noted parenthetically within the text by act, scene, and line number
70. See Hyder Edward Rollins's lengthy note on the word in his edition, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), 352-53
71. See my essay "The Bawdy 'Talent,'" 28-31
72. In Duncan-Jones's edition, the phrase in line 204 reads, "talons of their hair" (Shakespeare's Sonnets, 444)
73. See, for example, Lynda E. Boose, "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,' " English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360-74
74. and Frances Teague, Shakespeare's Speaking Properties (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991), 25-27
75. For the sexual sense of the word kind (i.e., "sexually complaisant"), see Williams's Dictionary, s.v. "kind."
76. Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets, 445. Biblical quotations follow the Geneva Bible (1560) unless otherwise noted and will be cited parenthetically by chapter and verse. Roe cites Revelation 1:8 and Hebrew 12:2 ("Iesus the autor [i.e., author] and finisher of our faith") in his note on this phrase (Poems, 276). Though both Roe and Duncan-Jones thus refer to only one verse in the Book of Revelation, there are in fact three more similar verses there where the same title is applied to God: Rev. 1:11,1:17,21:6. In Rev. 2:8 Jesus is referred to as "he that is first, and last, Which was dead and is aliue"; and in 22:13 Jesus says, "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last."
77. In Venus and Adonis, Venus salutes the morning sun as follows: "Oh thou clear god, and patron of all light" (860; emphasis added)
78. And the opening salutation of Armado's letter to the King of Navarre, in Love's Labour's Lost, reads: "Great deputy, the welkin's vicegerent and sole dominator of Navarre, my soul's earth's god, and body's fostering patron" (1.1.216-18; emphasis added)
79. Q reads "Hollowed." This may be either due to a compositor's error or, as Fausto Cercignani notes, due merely to the spelling variation between "a" and "o" sometimes observed in Shakespeare's day (Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], 98)
80. Crewe glosses the word as "love tokens and accompanying sonnets" (Narrative Poems, 149)
81. Edmondson and Wells explain it as "presumably a reference to the sonnets" (Shakespeare's Sonnets, 113)
82. OED, s.v. "audit," 3
83. The word servant was of course often used by Shakespeare in the sense of "one devoted to the service of a lady, professed lover." See C. T. Onions's A Shakespeare Glossary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), s.v. "servant."
84. For the sexual sense of joy (i.e., "sexual pleasure") in Shakespeare's usage, see Williams's Glossary, s.v. "joy."
85. Obviously, Christ too is repeatedly referred to as "King" in Scripture
86. For a concise account of Daniel's influence on Shakespeare, see the entry for Daniel in Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare's Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sources (London: Athlone, 2001), 122-32, esp. 127-30
87. Gillespie observes that "if 'Mr W. H.' is William Herbert, Daniel may be the rival poet in Shakespeare's Sonnets" (124)
88. See Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 137
89. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117
90. As Lisle Cecil John observes, the sonnet-lady's beauty was then often accounted for as being "a gift from the gods and the goddesses" (The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences [New York: Columbia University Press, 1938], 161, 248). In Delia, 34.7, for instance, Daniel refers to the various qualities of Delia's beauty as "the giftes that God and nature lent thee."
91. See, for example, W. G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath, eds., Shakespeare's Sonnets (London: University of London Press, 1964), 12
92. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 97
93. Booth, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets, 140
94. and Evans, ed., Sonnets, 119
95. In his edition of the sonnets, Rollins quotes J. Q. Adams's following comment on 4.12: "This thought, and indeed the whole sonnet, glances at the parable of the talents (Matthew xxv.14-30) - may even be said to be based upon it" (A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, 2 vols. [Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944], 1:16)
96. Partridge glosses the word as "sexual commerce; (sexual) intercourse" and explains the secondary meaning of 4.9-10 as "by masturbating, you wrong your true self" (Shakespeare's Bawdy [London: Routledge, 1947], 208)
97. and Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 15-17, where this sonnet is "aptly" (?) dubbed "A Disquisition Forbidding Masturbation" (15)
98. Frederick Turner, Shakespeare's Twenty-First-Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 117-38, esp. 121
99. David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace (London: Palgrave, 2001), 95-114
100. and Alison V. Scott, "Hoarding the Treasure and Squandering the Truth: Giving and Possessing in Shakespeare's Sonnets to the Young Man," Studies in Philology 101 (2004): 315-31
101. See, for example, Bell, "That which thou hast done," 465
102. Roger Warren, "'A Lover's Complaint,' 'All's Well,' and the Sonnets," Notes & Queries, n.s., 17 (1970): 130-32, esp. 131
103. Oscar Wilde assumed that these two fair young men in Q are one and the same person, commenting on the young seducer of A Lover's Complaint (which he refers to as "this lovely pastoral") as follows: "It had never been pointed out before that the shepherd of this lovely pastoral, whose 'youth in art and art in youth' are described with such subtlety of phrase and passion, was none other than the Mr W. H. of the Sonnets. And yet there was no doubt that he was so. Not merely in personal appearance are the two lads the same, but their natures and temperaments are identical" (The Portrait of Mr. W. H., ed. Vyvyan Holland [London: Methuen, 1958], 38-39)
104. Peter Milward, however, comments on Lady Macbeth's speech as follows: "The imagery is that of Christ's parable of the talents in Matt. xxv.14-30, which the lord entrusts to his servants, till the time he returns 'and made a count with them' (19. Rheims)" (Biblical Influences in Shakespeare's Great Tragedies [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 123)
105. This is an extensively revised and updated version of what I originally submitted as a part of my doctoral dissertation to Oxford University. I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Emrys Jones and Dr. R. Robbins, and my examiners, Professor A. D. Nuttall and Professor John Manning, for their critical comments. Special thanks are due to Professor Manning who, as an authority on emblem literature, assured me that the bawdy image and significance of the emblematic love tokens in A Lover's Complaint presented in this essay fall unquestionably within the Renaissance emblem tradition