Writing on water

English Literary Renaissance

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 282-305

  Kilgour, Maggie ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 61149716998     PISSN: 00138312     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6757.1999.tb01151.x     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. See Wyman H. Herendeen, From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography (Pittsburgh, 1986);
2. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), pp. 107-91.
3. For examples of the metaphor of the river or sea of time, see Ovid, Metamorphoses XV. 179-85, and Spenser's pun on "Themmes" and Time in "Prothalamium." See also Herendeen's discussion of the taming of water as a symbol of the human need to rise above the ephemeral and to conquer nature through human arts, pp.8-9.
4. See A. Bartlett Giamatti, "Proteus Unbound: Some Versions of the Sea God in the Renaissance," in Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (New Haven, 1984), pp. 115-50.
5. In Origins and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, 1983), pp. 32-42, David Quint contrasts the figure of Proteus with that of Orpheus as alternative types for the poet derived from Vergil's Fourth Georgic.
6. On this topos in general see Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1973), pp. 128-30.
7. In Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1993), pp. 248-67, David Quint focuses on the association of the boat with romance;
8. in Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven, 1981), pp. 112-57, Richard Peterson discusses the traditional use of the vessel (in its double meaning of ship and cup) as a symbol for the poet.
9. See also Herendeen, who notes that the image of the river "helped Milton to explore the very goals of poetry" and also to investigate ideas of nationhood and cultural inheritance (p. 329).
10. Quoted from John Milton: Complete Poetry and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y Hughes (Indianapolis, 1957). All further references to Milton's works are from this edition.
11. The connection is reinforced too by the extended simile in lines 200-08, in which Satan is compared to the Leviathan, mistaken by a sailor for an island. Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton uses images associated with ships and voyages to describe the devils: see, e.g., the simile in II. 285-90.
12. See J. Martin Evans, Milton's Imperial Epic: "Paradise Lost" and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca, 1995)
13. and Quint, Origins and Originality, pp. 207-14 and Epic and Empire, pp. 253-67. Both critics raise the question of Milton's attitude toward imperialism;
14. see also the response to Quint by Paul Stevens, "Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative," Milton Studies 34 (1996), pp. 3-21. More importantly, perhaps, Milton indicates his awareness of the similarities between the poet and imperialist, who are both colonizers of new worlds-a likeness which does not, however, necessitate complete identity.
15. In "Samson Agonistes," II. 198-200 and 1044-45, the fallen hero is represented as a shipwrecked vessel, while the approaching Dalila first appears to the Chorus as a "stately Ship / Of Tarsus" (U. 714-15).
16. See Lawrence Lipking, "The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism" PMLA 111.2 (1996), 205-21, who discusses the poem in relationship to Milton's national territorialism.
17. There has been very little discussion of the relation between Drayton and Milton. A few possible echoes have been noted, such as Archie Burnett, "Annotations to Milton," Notes and Queries 227 (1982), 28-29. Significantly the parallels noted by Burnett are mostly connected to water imagery, and the connection through the figure of Sabrina generally acknowledged. Given Milton's interest in how other writers had adapted Spenser's works, I think it is extremely likely that he read Drayton carefully, if not with unmixed admiration.
18. See Drayton Poly-Olbionin The Works of Michael Drayton Vol. IV. ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford, 1961) I.26, 45; all further references will be to this edition.
19. See also Helgerson, pp. 107-47.
20. Helgerson, pp. 1-18. Claire McEachern discusses the debates over the point of the emergence of British nationalism in The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590-1612 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 5-20 especially.
21. Forms of Nationhood, p. 8.
22. See also Herendeen, p. 216, and William A. Oram "The Invocation of Sabrina," Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), 138: "The island England encloses a multitude of local rivers, a national instance of the larger dialectic of unity and multiplicity." On this aspect of the image of the "source," central to both neoplatonic and Christian thought,
23. see Quint, Origins and Originality, pp. 32-42, 149-66. In Milton's "At A Vacation Exercise" (1628), a catalogue of British rivers is invoked as manifestation of the Aristotelian principle of Relation which joins Essence and Substance, Father and Son, as source and manifestation.
24. Thomas P. Roche Jr. reads the procession as a revelation of "the unity underlying the multiplicity of life" in The Kindly Flame: A Study of the "Faerie Queene" III and IV (Princeton, 1964), p. 181.
25. For discussions of Spenser's sources for the motif of the river-marriage, especially Leland's Cygnea Cantio and Camden's History (which included passages from the later "De Connubio Tamae et Isis"), see Herendeen, pp. 181-225;
26. Jack B. Oruch, "Spenser, Camden and the Poetic Marriage of the Rivers," Studies in Philology 64 (1967), 606-24.
27. See also Herendeen who argues that water thus serves as a unifying element in Spenser's work as a whole (pp. 218, 225-54). In several essays, John Hollander has traced this Spenserian topos in his followers; see "Spenser's Undersong," and "The Footing of His Feet: A Long Line Leads to Another," in Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven, 1988), pp. 149. 79. I'd like to acknowledge my debt here to Professor Hollander, whose comments in a graduate seminar on Spenser back in 1981 left me with water on my brain.
28. In "Arcades," however, a reciprocal movement is established. While water suggests the domestication of foreign sources, the pretext of the masque itself, in which the native masquers are disguised as foreign gypsies, establishes a balancing estrangement of the familiar. On the latter dimension, see Cedric C. Brown, "Milton's Arcades: Context, Form and Function" in Renaissance Drama VIII, ed. Leonard Barkan (Evanston, 1977), pp. 245-75. Brown argues that the masque thus celebrates the joy of disguise and fiction-making (p. 269). While this is true, and explored through the figure of Spirit in Comus, it is important to note that the earlier entertainment suggests an attempt to create a complex exchange between the native and the foreign.
29. See Quint, Origins and Originality, pp. 149-66.
30. Spenser and the Numbers of Time (NewYork, 1964), pp. 174-75.
31. Spenser draws attention to both the fertility of the sea and its association with passion when he reminds his readers that " Venus of the fomy seas was bred" (IV.xii.2.2).
32. Herendeen describes the central paradox that water poses for the human mind: it "challenges our epistemological concepts, our language, and understanding. It forces us to work toward ordering concepts, and yet it defies them; it tends toward unity while we require the separation of waters" (p. 3).
33. Elizabeth's claim to be married to her people enabled her to reject individual offers; her chaste body became symbolically analogous to the independent island; see also Louis Adrian Montrose, "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," in Literary Theory /Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore, 1986), p. 315.
34. The Stuarts continued to identify love and power. In James's opening speech to Parliament in 1603 he proclaimed: "I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife" (The Political Works of James I, ed. CH. Mcllwain [New York, rpt. 1965], p. 272).
35. In a speech of 1607 to Parliament on the union of England and Scotland he again claimed: "You are to be the husband, they the wife; you conquerors, they as conquered, though not by the sword, but by the sweet and sure bond"; quoted from Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983), p. 46.
36. Goldberg further notes how in the Irish Masque, Ireland is included in the political marriage (see pp. 267-68, n. 19). On James's peculiar use of the imagery of marriage see further Goldberg, pp. 141-47, and McEachern, p. 148; for Charles's further adaptation of this vocabulary in relation to his own idealized neoplatonic marriage, see Goldberg, p. 95,
37. and Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), pp. 265-301.
38. Herendeen, pp. 257-339.
39. See William H. Moore, "Sources of Drayton s Conception of Poly-Olbion," Studies in Philology 65 (1968), 783-803,
40. who reads the poem as simple political propaganda supporting James's myth of a unified realm. Barbara C. Ewell, "Drayton's Poly-Olbion: England's Body Immortalized," Studies in Philology 75 (1978), 297-315,
41. also sees the poem as a celebration of ideal political and aesthetic unity, which draws indirectly on the image of the body as a version of concordia discors. See also Stella P. Revard, "The Design of Nature in Drayton's Poly-Olbion," Studies in English Literature17 (1977), 105-17, and Herendeen, pp. 295-96.
42. More recently, in Michael Drayton Revisited (Boston, 1990), pp. 88-89, Jean R. Brink has focused on the way in which the poem constantly offers scenes in which authority and order are challenged. In her reading of the poem in relation to the union debates provoked by James's succession, Claire McEachern notes how the poem focuses on contests which are not permanently divisive, to suggest a nation in which differences can be acknowledged but contained; see pp. 138-91.
43. McEachern also notes briefly the paradoxical role played by the rivers, suggesting that while "in the manner of the unionist metaphors, Drayton's rivers unite, erode and quench difference, dissolving the boundaries between native and foreign"; they also are "the chief marks of divisiveness" (The Poetics of English Nationhood, pp. 162-63).
44. See also Paula Johnson, "Michael Drayton, Prophet Without Audience," Studies in the Literary Imagination 11 (1978-88), 47, who notes how the poem encourages a piecemeal reading in which the reader "may wish to sample sweets here and there" rather than read the whole.
45. See also Helgerson, pp. 142-43, who notes that geography helps the poet in his creation of differences, as it prevents the individual rivers from merging too completely.
46. The Thames seems torn between "The often quickning sparks of his more ancient love" (XVII.68-with its echo of Dido's famous "veteris vestigia flammae," Aeneid, IV.23), and his parents' desire that he forge an alliance between the two great watery houses of the island. Marriage thus subordinates erotic desire to national duty, a subordination Milton will also examine in "Samson."
47. Drayton's pro-Welsh sympathies were first noted by Robert Ralston Crawley in "Drayton's Use of Welsh History," Studies in Philology 22 (1925), 234-55. These sympathies seem often at odds, however, with Drayton's praise of the inevitable unification of Britain and his approval of authoritative and powerful kings: he particularly praises Edward I, and in general is happy to celebrate battles in which England's triumph over Wales helps form the nation (as in XVII. 189-92).
48. In The Faerie Queene II.x.ix.5, monsters may be "borne of her [the land's] own natiue slime." 33. Song II, 157-60 succinctly summarizes history as the chain of usurpation of power by foreigners.
49. This representation of the English as a hybrid people produced by miscegenation plays a part in later satiric representations of Britain's national diversity. Daniel Defoe's The True Born Englishman (1700)mocks: That heterogenous thing, an Englishman: In eager rapes, and furious lust begot, Betwixt a Painted Britonand a Scot:Whose gend'ring offspring quickly learn't to bow, And yoke their heifers to the Romanplough: From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With neither name nor nation, speech or fame In whose hot veins now mixtures quickly ran, Infus'd betwixt a Saxonand a Dane. While their rank daughters, to their parents just, Receiv'd all nations with promiscuous lust. Quoted from Linda Colley's superb study of later British nationalism, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837(New Haven, 1992), p. 15.
50. In Book IX the Snowdon describes the Tudors as "by heaven appointed to unite / (After that tedious warre) the red Rose and the white" (367-68), and in Book XVII, Henry VII is credited with "grafting of the White and Red Rose firme together, / Was first, that to the Throne advanc't the name of Tether" (309-10).
51. Similarly, the effect of the Norman conquest is to reunite two originally united peoples, the Normans and the Saxons: "To grafte againe in one, two Remnants of her race" (IV, 398). What appears to be conquest is thus really at one level the recovery of an original unity; see also IV, 410-13. The representation of the union of the realms as the recovery of a lost unity was common in the rhetoric of the period, in which various forms of change and innovation were frequently represented as forms of restoration; see, for example, Bacon's claim that James would "reduce these two kingdoms of England and Scotland into the unity of their ancient mother kingdom of Britain"; "Certain Articles or Considerations Touching the Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland," in The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England. With a Life of the Author by Basil Montague, Esquire. (3 vols.) (Philadelphia, 1889), II, 142. For Bacon, geography offers one proof of the "naturalness" of this union: "there are no natural boundaries of mountains or seas, or navigable rivers" (p. 144).
52. The separation of the realms before James in fact seems both unnatural and puzzling as "there be no mountains nor races of hills, there be no seas or great rivers, there is no diversity of tongue or language that hath invited or provoked this ancient separation or divorce," "A Discourse of the Happy Union" in Works, II, 139.
53. See, e.g., the slaughters of the Scots in XVIII and esp. XXIX.254-58, where English invasions of Scodand are said to be provoked by Scottish treachery.
54. As McEachern also notes, pp. 139, 167.
55. This message appears in the landscape as well; in Song III, the rivalry between the Willy and Avon over the Plaine is resolved when they unite against a common foe. Through a simile they are compared to fighting kings forging an alliance against a mutual enemy (II. 99-105).
56. See Faerie Queene (II.x.v.5-6) "Ne was it Island then, ne was it paysd / Amid the Ocean waues." Britain's difference from and connection with Europe was an issue for James, who tried both to unite the country internally in a symbolic marriage and to create alliances with Europe, especially through the marriage of Charles.
57. See also Johnsons claim that "Poly-Olbion is not a kingdom but a nation, hierarchically ordered, but with nobody at top" ("Michael Drayton, Prophet Without Audience," p. 55). Johnson argues, however, that "because the sovereign is absent, the poem's integrative system gives the land to the readers" (p. 55). If that is the case, Drayton was clearly disappointed by the failure of his literary democracy to be appreciated by its representatives.
58. On Drayton's attempt to translate "land into language" see Paula Johnson, pp. 51-54.
59. Drayton's increasing anxiety about foreign imports eroding British values belies his own poetic debts to international sources, and illustrates the complicated relation between the native and the foreign in the period. McEachern nicely notes the poem's formal internationalism: "Its insistent Ovidian prosopopoeia, along with its chic French alexandrines, offer a literary cosmopolitanism that overrides the parochialism of its British and Arthurian story matter, and signals the poem's relation to a wider cultural context" (p. 187).
60. See A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. II, part 3. The Minor English Poems, ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush (New York, 1972), II, 748.
61. Milton's relation to the masque and his purpose in appropriating this particular form with its ideological associations has been much debated; for a summary of these debates, see the Variorum Commentary, pp. 751-68.
62. Two important readings of Milton's use of the genre are David Norbrook, "The Reformation of the Masque," and John Creaser, " 'The present aid of this occasion': The Setting of Comus, " both in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (London, 1984), pp. 94-110 and 111-34.
63. There appear to be clear parallels with many earlier works by Fletcher as well as Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtueand Hymenai. There are analogues also to William Browne's Inner Temple Masque(1615), in which Circe tries to impede Ulysses' journey home. Circe also appears in Aurelian Townshend's Tempe Restored(1632), in which Alice Egerton appeared, and in which Circe usurps the place of Tempe but is converted at the end by being allegorized into a desire that, governed rightly, can lead to higher aspirations. There may be some allusion to Carew's 1633 Coelum Britannicum, in which the two Egerton boys had recently appeared, and which develops similar themes and motifs. A celebration of the neoplatonic monarchical marriage as the source of national unity, Carew's masque includes a dance of figures representing the three peoples and kingdoms which were considered to make up Britain; see The Poems of Thomas Carew with His Masque Coelum Britannicum, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford, 1949), p. 176.
64. See Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness, Vision of Delight, Masque of Augurs, Neptune's Triumph, and The Fortunate Isles;
65. Daniels, Tethys Festival (1610), written for the investiture of Henry as Prince of Wales;
66. Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple (1613), which celebrates the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector as that of Thames and Rhine. See also Herendeen, pp. 130-31.
67. See Jonson's Hymenai and D. J. Gordon's essay, "Hymenai: Ben Jonson's Masque of Union," in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 157-84.
68. Jonson used the occasion of the disastrous marriage between Frances Howard and the Earl of Essex to celebrate James's self-proclaimed marriage of Scodand and England. As David Lindley notes, for Howard's equally ill-fated marriage to Robert Carr, Jonson wrote The Irish Masque, which was "structured to embody and celebrate James s desire to bring unity to disunited Ireland" (p. 295)
69. in "Embarrassing Ben: The Masques for Frances Howard," in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins (Amherst, 1987).
70. See Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (New York, 1967); Goldberg, pp. 128-31, and Sharpe, pp. 179-264, 290-301. Annabel Patterson has suggested that Carew's masque, traditionally read as straight panegyric to the Stuarts, is a critique of Charles and Henrietta Maria;
71. see Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, 1984), pp. 116-19.
72. Helgerson also notes how for writers after Spenser, the poet and King are rivals for authority (p. 146), so that in Milton, "the poet moves into the place formerly reserved for the ruler, appropriating as he does so the ancient forms that once stood for imperial power" (p. 61). From Milton's point of view, however, this is not an act of appropriation but the recovery of a rightful inheritance: a power which belongs to the godlike artist rather than the too human king.
73. On the traditional iconographical representation of Comus, see Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, pp. 153-58, and the illustrations between pp. 150-51. Milton's use of boundary figures has been suggestive for poststructuralist readings which claim that the text subverts binary oppositions.
74. See Richard Halpern's argument in "Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern England, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and NancyJ. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), pp. 88-105.
75. See Paradise Lost, I, 521 and Hughes's note, p. 224.
76. Stella Revard also points out how the masque recalls the Homeric model, though significantly reversing the gender positions of the figures, in Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair: The Making of the 1643 Poems (Columbia, Mo., 1997), p. 137.
77. For example, William Browne's Inner Temple Masque (1615), in The Whole Works, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (Hildesheim, 1970), pp. 241-59.
78. Halpern thus reads the text as a narrative of English conquest in Wales: "When the Lady defeats Comus, her victory is an imperial one that definitely inscribes Wales as the inferior or barbarian culture" ("Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask, " p. 102). However, Comus is hardly a typical or stereotypical Welshman. For that, one would have to go to Jonson's revised antimasque for the unappreciated Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, For the Honor of Wales, which pokes fun at literalist and nationalist yokels who prefer their native countryside to Jonson's idealized classical landscape.
79. As in II. 373-84 and 453-75.
80. See also Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, 1986), pp. 179-86. Creaser also points out that in this description England's uniqueness as an island is undercut (" 'The present aid of this occasion,' " p. 129).
81. See Marcus, pp. 169-212 and Creaser, pp. 111-34. In Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), Michael Wilding argues that the period marked increasing discontent in Wales (pp. 34-37). The fact that the Earl of Bridgewater was given increased powers in the Marches reflects not fear of Welsh insurrection so much as Charles's attempt to reinforce his authority in general at this period. Wilding argues more persuasively that the masque suggests a general concern with Bridgewater s appointment as a symbol of Charles's personal rule which raised questions concerning the limits of the King's authority (pp. 28-88).
82. On the situation in Wales during this period, see J. Gwynfor Jones, Early Modern Wales: 1325-1640 (New York, 1994), pp. 197-206.
83. In his notes to Poly-Olbion, John Selden discusses the etymology of the word Marches, which he links to Mercury and identifies with borders, limits, and frontiers; see pp. 61-62, 136-37.
84. Sharpe notes that the bridge was "a favourite metaphor of the time" (p. 205), used in masques as another symbol of union.
85. Revard also shows Sabrina's relation to classical water nymphs which complicates her presentation as part of the native landscape; Tangles, pp. 128-61.
86. R. A. Shoaf discusses divorce as a central metaphor for creation in Milton's poetry in Milton: Poet of Duality (New Haven, 1985), pp. 25-29.
87. For a summary of the various Platonic readings, see the Variorum Commentary, pp. 777-81.
88. I am here referring to the printed version, as opposed to the performed; for the differences between the two, see the Variorum Commentary, pp. 735-40,
89. and A Masque at Ludlow: Essays on Milton's "Comus," ed. John Diekhoff (Cleveland, 1968), pp. 251-75. The careful revision creates a strong contrast between the opening and closing visions of heaven which may suggest a transformation in the Spirits character through the experience of descent.
90. For a discussion of the politics of Caroline Neoplatonism, see Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, p. 282-90, 294.
91. In Milton's Puritan Masque (Athens 1983), pp. 130-66, Maryann Cale McGuire also argues that Comus involves a redefinition of the interconnected ideals of chastity and Neoplatonism which dominated Caroline art.
92. On the political uses of Comus by eighteenth-century radicals, see Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford, 1993), pp. 17-28.
93. Sharpe also critiques historical readings of the period that have tended to polarize the conflicts (pp. 1-53).
94. "Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition" (in Hughes, p. 739). It is not the movement of water that is dangerous, but its total stagnation, the kind of freezing seen in Sin and Death's petrifaction of flux (X.293-320), which parodies Christ's earlier, less rigid containment of Chaos within "bounds" (VII. 230). The building of Sin and Death imposes likeness: Christ's act of creation both unites and separates (VII.234-42).
95. McEachern notes that "The border remains a dangerous place. Rivers may run together, but they are also, like the border countries, prime sites of division" (p. 190). As she claims further, Henry VIII especially was concerned with regulating transport across the river Severn to keep presumed Welsh criminals from preying easily on the English and then disappearing into the wild woods of Wales. In Milton's times, concern with the regulation of water transport was reflected in the works of John Taylor, the Water-Poet.
96. IX, p. 191: "There was long since a Controversie, whether it belonged to Irelandor England (for you may see in the Civill law, with which, in that kind, ours somewhat agrees, that all lesser Isles are reckoned part of some adjoyning continent, if both under the same Empire) and this by reason of equal distance from both. To decide it, they tryed if it would endure venomous beasts, which is certainly denied of Ireland; and, finding that it did, adjudged it to our Britaine."