Macbeth is rather unique among Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists. His is a dynamic character that undergoes drastic changes in personality over the course of the play. To be sure, it is true that the other tragic heroes experience transcendent moments of self-awareness that alter their perceptions of themselves and their places within their respective worlds: Lear learns the folly of flattery, Othello the value of temperance. But none of these characters come close to Macbeth’s seismic shifts in behavior and temperament. By analyzing several of Macbeth’s key speeches closely we can chart the evolution of the character and see that his story represents the fall of man itself.
When Macbeth is first introduced he exists in a pre-fall state of grace. He earns the respect and devotion of his sovereign lord by serving that lord faithfully in war. Although we get our first hints of Macbeth’s character in 1.2 when his martial deeds are reported to and praised by Duncan we do not meet the character himself until the following scene. This is where we are first invited into Macbeth’s mind and see the world from his perspective through the asides he makes while Banquo is preoccupied with Ross and Angus. This is also where Macbeth is first tempted and he begins his fall from grace. Macbeth says, “Two truths are told, / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme” (1.3.128-30). The two truths mentioned here refer to the witches’ greeting of him as Thane of Glamis and Cawdor and as the future king. Macbeth, who was already the Thane of Glamis, has just now been informed that he is also Thane of Cawdor. Thus the witches have told two truths, one making reference to the past—Macbeth was Thane of Glamis—and one to the present—he is now Thane of Cawdor. The future truth is all that remains to be learned and these two truths, representing the past and the present, serve as prologues or precursors to that future truth. The term “prologue” is also functioning here as a reference to drama, to the actor that presents the argument of a play or an act of a play, hence the following phrase “the swelling act.” The witches who embody time and truth (and therefore appear to be the Classical Fates) function as harbingers of the greater drama that unfolds on “the imperial theme.” Macbeth's character is established as an actor in a pre-scripted cosmic drama by virtue of his place in time. He is on a path that leads inevitably to the throne.
Macbeth continues:
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? (131-38).
The reference here to the “supernatural” or that which is greater than nature does not seem to allude to the witches per se as they are associated with the natural or preternatural worlds. While the witches do seem unearthly they are found in the natural world; as Banquo states, “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them” (79-80). The fact that they seem to disappear into the natural element of the air further establishes their elemental connection to nature. The “supernatural soliciting” or counsel therefore comes from a more divine source that is channeled through the witches.
The information comes with no inherent moral value attached to it; it “cannot be ill, cannot be good.” Indeed no value judgment is implied by the assertion that Macbeth shall be king. It is a statement of fact or at least hypothetical fact and facts are value neutral. Another fact is that there are only two ways that he can become king: either through succession or usurpation. Macbeth is unsettled by the assertion that he will be king however because his mind leaps automatically to the latter option. He “yields” to “that suggestion” that goes “against the use of nature” even though there is no particular reason why he should. He just became Thane of Cawdor without aiming for it so it would seem that he should expect naturally to become king without striving to do so. Macbeth realizes that he has made a counter-intuitive leap of logic as he taken aback by his thoughts. “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man / That function is smothered in surmise” (140-43). In other words his natural thought processes are overcome by fantasy to the extent that he is unable momentarily to function rationally. But though he resolves to leave the future to time and chance—“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me” (145)—he is already on the path to murder and destruction.
In his next aside in the following scene Macbeth reveals that his spiritual descent is well underway. When Duncan declares that Malcolm is to be the Prince of Cumberland and thus the official heir apparent Macbeth’s words betray the fact that he has at least subconsciously settled on usurpation as a foregone conclusion. “The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step / On which I must fall down or else o’erleap, / For in my way it lies” (1.4.48-50). It is perhaps ironic that his descent runs parallel to the upward movement of his social ascendancy, visually portrayed here as climbing a staircase. While these particular lines do not explicitly state a direction of movement beyond that of forward momentum the word “step” suggests a climbing motion which is reinforced by Macbeth saying, “Stars, hide your fires” (50). This phrase indicates that Macbeth is looking upward.
This passage also introduces the paired concepts of vision and darkness which will become significant later as Macbeth goes to murder Duncan. Here he commands the stars to hide their light: “Let not light see my black and deep desires. / The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see” (51-53). As the previous speech shows, Macbeth is a character of imagination and vision. He can readily foresee himself performing that act that shortly before he was horrified to envision though as of yet he is reluctant to admit it consciously to himself. While the sin he contemplates has not been committed in fact it has been committed in thought.
By the end of the first act, we see that Macbeth’s downward spiral has progressed to the point that he is almost committed fully to his fatal path. It is clear though that he has not yet passed the point of no return. In his first true soliloquy of 1.7 he is shown to be on the horns of a moral dilemma. His obsession with time is prominently displayed here.
If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly. If th’ assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success—that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all!—here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’ inventor. (1-10).
Macbeth has become consumed by his desire to be king and though earlier he had told himself to leave the matter to the natural passage of time here we see that time is passing much too slowly for his liking. He is here trying to talk himself into giving time a shove. If the situation comes to fruition (“If it were done”) upon the completion of a dark deed (“when ‘tis done”) then it is best to get on with it and settle the situation quickly. However Macbeth who is described as Bellona’s bridegroom or the god of war is all too aware that violence begets violence and treachery has a nasty habit of rebounding on the traitor—“Bloody instructions . . . return / To plague th’ inventor.” He therefore begins to offer reasons to justify not going through with the assassination, all of which are eminently reasonable.
He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. (12-16).
Murdering Duncan would be a despicable act for Macbeth not only because it would be a breach of the Biblical commandment on homicide. It also would be a form of fratricide since Macbeth and Duncan are blood relations and therefore the deed recalls to a certain extent the story of Cain and Abel. The murder would also be regicide which was widely regarded as a heinous crime because a king was frequently believed (especially by King James, supposedly a descendant of Banquo) to have been anointed by God and was God’s representative on earth. To kill a king was to strike out against God Himself and was a magnification of the original sin of disobedience. Finally murdering Duncan would be a violation of the law of hospitality, one of the basic tenets of civilization. Within the medieval cosmology, particularly as articulated by Dante in the Divine Comedy, any single one of these crimes is enough to send your soul to the very bottom of Hell. For Macbeth it would be a crime on four levels; his fall would be the fall of man in the greatest degree.
But Macbeth is not yet finished considering the situation, suggesting that these reasons themselves are not sufficient to dissuade him. He reserves the greatest argument for last.
Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And Pity, like a naked newborn babe
Striding the blast, or Heaven’s cherubin, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. (16-25).
Macbeth doesn’t fear for the fate of his soul. Instead his chief fear is that he will be prevented from carrying out the act by being driven to compassion. This is an oddly compelling reason for the audience as well as Macbeth because it is an affirmation of Macbeth’s innate goodness and basic human nature. This also explains why he began this speech by telling himself to act quickly and without hesitation for if he hesitates all is lost. We have no way of knowing how long he has been debating with himself but the cyclical nature of this speech suggests that it has been going on for some time. It is fortunate for the play although unfortunate for Macbeth that Lady Macbeth enters at this point and interrupts his train of thought.
We can see from this speech and the theme of fantasy that has been established previously that Macbeth is a character given to introspection and fancy. His is a personality that is driven by imagination. It is his imagination that prepares him for the murder of Duncan and it is his imagination that causes the paranoia that leads him to become a tyrant. Just as he can imagine himself taking power he can imagine it being taken from him. Montaigne wrote that the imagination is so powerful that it can affect the body physically (Montaigne 413). Macbeth’s imagination affects him mentally, altering his personality and behavior.
Arguably the best example of how Macbeth’s imagination affects him is found in 2.1 as he makes his way to Duncan’s bedchamber. He asks, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still” (34-36). The hallucination that Macbeth experiences here reflects the violent thoughts that fill his mind and acts as a guide for him: “Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going, / And such an instrument I was to use” (43-44). Up to this point he has experienced bouts of indecision brought on by the conflict of his clashing desires to get the crown and to protect his lord and kinsman. Now the apparition of the dagger pointing toward Duncan like the needle of a compass resolves the issue. It’s also interesting to note that Macbeth anthropomorphizes the dagger, calling it “thee” and “thou.” It is as if the dagger is his dark angel encouraging the commission of bad deeds.
Macbeth continues:
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw. (37-42).
The darkness of the night has limited Macbeth’s physical vision causing his imagination to heighten in order to compensate for the lack of sight and his imagination proves so powerful that it confuses his senses. Whereas a less imaginative person may realize that the dagger is not real Macbeth is not sure. The disconnection between his sense of sight and sense of touch disturbs him, causing him to pull a real dagger in order to reconcile the disjunction. Like a child he must feel that which he sees. This becomes the top of a slippery slope for Macbeth for he goes on to say that “I see thee still, / And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, / Which was not so before” (46-48). For Macbeth reality must correspond to fantasy. He sees an imaginary dagger so he pulls a real one. If the imagined one is stained with blood, the blood in which he has been steeped from the recent battles, then so must the real one be.
At this point Macbeth's "heat-oppressèd" brain causes his imagination to get the better of him. He thinks that the night is no ordinary night but an ominous stage for evil acts.
Now o’er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered Murder,
Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. (50-57).
In this passage archetypal images of death are brought together in Macbeth’s mind and imposed on his surroundings. In this hemisphere of the world that is shrouded or curtained in the darkness of night the elements of nature seem dead because they are asleep. If nature is asleep then it must be dreaming of wicked things because Macbeth is about to perpetrate a crime against nature on many levels. Indeed, to foreshadow the later voice that Macbeth imagines hearing it is as if he is about to commit a crime against sleep itself. Macbeth is therefore stating that he feels like he is caught in a dream and his actions do not seem altogether real. He has stepped into a fantasy world which makes his evil deed easier to perform.
There is also the suggestion that Macbeth does not feel responsible for what he is about to do. He is under the influence of witchcraft and “pale Hecate.” This phrase of course refers back to the witches and foreshadows the appearance of Hecate later in the play. But it also implicates these figures in Macbeth’s crime. Hecate is a goddess of the underworld which is associated with Hell and she is therefore connected to witchcraft and the witches we have already met. Also Hecate is mythologically equated with Persephone and Morpheus which connects her to night, death and dreams; night is her domain, death her subject and dreams her art. The fantasy world in which Macbeth finds himself belongs to her and it is natural that he think of her. Perhaps more importantly though the allusion brings the past and future into the present, showing an awareness on Macbeth’s part that this moment in time is the fulcrum upon which history or “his story” turns.
The unnaturally ominous night also makes him think of other dark things. He imagines murder personified as a sort of bastard son of Death, a predator with a baying wolf as his watchman. The night also brings to his mind another type of predation embodied in the allusion to Tarquin who moved “like a ghost” as he went to rape Lucrece. Macbeth constructs himself as one with these figures and asks the earth to remain quiet while he stalks his prey so that no noise will disrupt the fantasy or “take the present horror from the time / Which now suits with it” (60-61). Whether or not he is denying responsibility for his actions the night puts him in the necessary frame of mind to carry them out and helps distance himself from them. Macbeth is clearly transported and once he steps outside himself he is lost to darkness.
The fall of man archetype has two basic components: the descent or fall from grace and the ascent or redemption. One must fall in order to be able to rise; one must experience darkness to be able to appreciate light. Therefore before the hero can be redeemed he must reach his lowest point. Macbeth’s lowest point comes in 5.5 revealed in a speech that echoes the themes of his initial asides. When Macbeth learns his wife is dead we see the depth to which he has fallen. He states:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (17-28).
The concept of time is expressed several times here, eight times in the first six lines alone. While the collocation of “died” and “hereafter” suggests a spiritual dimension the following line roots “such a word” in time as “that which follows now,” i.e. the future. The concept of the future is drawn out in the succeeding line: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” The repetition of the word serves to emphasize it while the length of the word slows down the meter creating a monotony of sound. The effect created is a sense of time slowing down, of “[creeping] in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time.” Time so far containing the future and the present (“to day” = today) is presented as a halting creature moving sluggishly toward an oblivion that is once more too slow in coming. Finally the full scope of time is expressed with the reference to “all our yesterdays” connecting the past with the present and future in reverse chronological order. It is as if Macbeth is expressing a desire to turn back time or triumph over the power of the witches who personify time. Macbeth seems to suggest that if he had not had murdered Duncan then he would not be in his present doomed predicament and his wife would still be alive since “there would have been a time for such a word” as the future. He is aware however that such a desire is futile for he says bleakly that “all our yesterdays,” meaning the history of the world, has served to lead him and us “to dusty death.” The audience has become an accomplice in Macbeth’s deeds and the full extent of human history has brought him and by extension us to this point in time. No matter what was done in the past the end would have been the same.
Moreover Macbeth makes it a point to say that the people time has led to dusty death are “fools.” Of course “fool” has a general derogatory meaning but it is also a particular term for professional performers or jokers (McKellen). It is this meaning that is the focus of the second half of the speech as it employs several images associated with the theater. Life is personified as “a walking shadow” which alludes to the theatrical term “walking gentleman” or an actor that plays several minor, typically non-speaking roles (McKellen). This connection is reinforced by the phrase “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” Life is so insignificant in relation to time that it is merely the shadow of the most inconsequential actor in a play. As if that is not bleak enough Macbeth refines his assessment of life to give it even greater meagerness. In the end life is not even a shadow: “It is a tale / Told by an idiot.” It is the breath of incompetence exhaled by a fool, “Signifying nothing.” Time is the stage upon which the play of life is enacted by buffoons and the part that Macbeth has played is so pointless that it signifies nothing.
It is at this point when Macbeth has completely gone over to the dark side that he is made ripe for redemption and true to the fall of man archetype he is redeemed by a son “not of woman born.” Just as Jesus was born of a virgin and therefore technically a girl and not a woman Macduff was not technically born. While it may at first seem a stretch to suggest that Macduff is a messiah figure it must be noted that it is through Macduff that order is restored to the world of the play. We are told that he was “from his mother’s womb / untimely ripped” (5.8.15-16), meaning both that he was brought into the world before his natural time but also that he exists outside of time and nature. While Macduff does not sacrifice himself he does end up sacrificing that for which he cares, albeit unwittingly, for the greater good of his people. And his final confrontation with Macbeth does bring a measure of grace to the latter that is perhaps just enough to restore him to his former glory. The fact that Macbeth does not back down from Macduff even though he realizes that he is facing certain defeat and death recalls Macbeth’s innate nobility.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”
(5.8.30-34).
Macbeth acknowledges his culpability for his acts and refuses to cheapen the deaths of those he has killed by trying to escape the justice he is due. Instead he chooses to go out in a blaze of glory.
The story of Macbeth illustrates the Greek concept of thanatos or the death drive. The seeds of self-destruction are present in Macbeth from the beginning as integral elements of his character. But so too are the seeds of his redemption and if someone as perverted by evil as he can be redeemed then so can anyone. The key to overcoming the fall of man lies finally in choosing to remain true to one’s character.
Bibliography
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, Volume Two: The English Plays. New York: Random House, 1970.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.
Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
McKellen, Ian, perf. Ian McKellen Acting Shakespeare. Dir. Kirk Browning. Videocassette. S.H.E. Corp., 1982.
Montaigne, Michel de. “Essays: Of the Power of the Imagination.” Trans. Donald Frame. The Longman Anthology of World Literature, Volume C: The Early Modern Period. Ed. Jane Tylus and David Damrosch. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
Shakespeare, William. “Macbeth.” The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Longman, 1997.
Van Doren, Mark. Shakespeare. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1939.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Monday, January 21, 2008
Seriously Funny: The Faerie Queene and the Art of the Elizabethan Jest
In the epistle preface to The Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser professes that his intention is “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (15). In other words he means to provide moral instruction for upwardly mobile young men. Spenser sets out to accomplish this goal through the presentation of exempla that utilize allegorical emblems or as he puts it a “dark conceit.” His goal was a lofty one to be sure. However the manner in which Spenser employs allegory creates an issue that presents an interpretive problem. As Anthony Esolen puts it, “Of one thing I am sure as I read Spenser’s Faerie Queene: it is witty, at times quite funny. My reaction poses a difficulty. Allegory is supposed to subordinate pleasure to profit” (3). Esolen’s statement highlights the gravity associated with allegory and the reverence with which it is treated and regarded. Allegory is used for the purposes of moral edification. It is difficult, perhaps even blasphemous, to imagine Jesus cracking wise and delivering a parable with a wink and a smile. While there is no mistaking Spenser for Jesus he deliberately chooses the rhetorical strategy of the latter to expound upon Christian virtues. It is therefore puzzling that The Faerie Queene should frequently evoke laughter and apparently by intention. Does not such a reaction run counter to Spenser’s objective and the serious nature of allegory?
When considering the poem in relation to its social and literary context the answer is an unequivocal “no.” Although that which is comic has traditionally been ignored if not outright derogated by critics going back to Plato the ability to make a joke has long been perceived as a valuable tool to orators and rhetoricians. “Jesting is a neglected subject in historical studies of rhetoric. Its neglect, however, cannot be attributed to a lack of discussions in the rhetorical treatises themselves. From antiquity into the nineteenth century, many rhetoricians viewed jesting as part, oftentimes an important part, of rhetoric” (Holcomb 1). Indeed in the early modern period jesting and comic affectation were viewed as necessary skills particularly for gentlemen, the same gentlemen that Spenser hopes to fashion. If a gentleman were to receive an invitation to court, for example, he must be prepared to mingle with an elite group of people who would be educated, urbane and politically savvy. The gentleman would be expected to fit into this company and hold his own. His duties to his prince, to borrow a term from Machiavelli, would be to carefully assess socio-political situations and offer advice pertaining to them or perhaps to distract the prince from them. It is this diversionary aspect of jesting that Castiglione endorses in his immensely influential Book of the Courtier, first translated into English in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby.
For the early modern period the value of jesting lies in the fact that the comic sensibility transcends social boundaries. “Laughter is such a basic, universal, and useful response that it is difficult to conceive of any group of people—anywhere or any time or any place—not laughing. We commonly speak of a person’s ‘sense of humor,’ acknowledging just how basic laughter is, by ranking it along with the traditional five senses” (Sanders 6-7). When we consider that one of the defining characteristics of the period was the reshaping of social structures fueled by such culturally altering forces as the Black Death, the colonization of the New World and the Protestant Reformation it is understandable that jesting would become a vital way of communicating as it speaks to the lowest common human denominator. In a rapidly changing social landscape in which geographical, economical and educational barriers were breaking down jesting became a valuable rhetorical tool.
As important as jesting is to communication it is also important for dealing with the anxiety created by the breakdown of traditional social order or more precisely the potential conflicts inherent to the mixing of people of disparate social origins. Jesting becomes a means of coping with otherness. “Jests of the period typically dramatize encounters between people of divergent social origins or occupations, and in doing so, they play on the tensions and anxieties that almost invariably occur when different kinds of people find themselves in one another’s company”
(Holcomb 5).
There are three theories regarding humor[1]: the Superiority Theory, the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory (Morreall 5). The Superiority Theory holds that humor arises out of situations in which people feel superior to others; when a person slips on a banana peel the watcher feels elated by someone else’s foolishness. As the Caroline philosopher Thomas Hobbes states as he articulates his concept of ‘sudden glory’:
The benefit of this type of jesting is that it boosts the ego and forges a sense of identity either national as in the above example or personal. It raises morale and camaraderie. However because this type of jesting contains an innate maliciousness both Plato and Aristotle disregarded its merits. Plato felt that such jokes actually harmed the joker by causing damage to the soul. “Our argument leads to the conclusion that if we laugh at what is ridiculous about our friends, by mixing pleasure with malice, we thereby mix pleasure with pain. For we had agreed earlier that malice is a pain in the soul, that laughing is a pleasure, and that both occur together on those occasions” (Philebus 50a). For Plato malice was a type of vice and so therefore to make derogatory jokes is to engage in vicious behavior which prevents one from perfecting his or her soul. While Aristotle disagreed with Plato on the effect these jokes have on the soul he agreed that they lowered the self to a standard that was beneath it.
In contrast to the Superiority Theory there is the Relief Theory. According to this theory humor acts as a safety valve allowing for the release of nervous psychic energy; the person who slips on a banana peel makes a joke to alleviate the uncomfortable embarrassment that comes from appearing foolish. This is the type of jesting that Castiglione refers to as being praiseworthy as it serves to distract attention from that which is unpleasant. In Sigmund Freud’s examination of humor he posits an example that illustrates this theory. He imagines a man who makes a joke while facing execution. He writes, “Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph not only of the ego, but also of the pleasure principle, which is strong enough to assert itself here in the face of the adverse real circumstances” (217). Freud denies Plato’s assertion that jesting causes the soul pain, claiming instead that people have a natural tendency to avoid pain. Jesting therefore becomes a means of pain avoidance. An early modern example of the Relief Theory in action is expressed in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “Carnival.” The social inversions frequently seen during early modern festivals presided over by a Falstaffian “king of fools” that mocks legitimate authority allowed the lower strata of society to release its frustrations in a safe way. Just as in the Superiority Theory the Relief Theory thus implies that jesting serves to affirm the self.
Finally the Incongruity Theory perceives humor arising out of situations in which an outcome differs from what is expected, in which reality and expectation diverge; seeing a person slip on a banana peel provokes laughter because it disrupts the expected mechanics of normal human movement. The incongruous nature of the situation is highlighted, arousing delight and amusement by drawing attention not only to what is “wrong” but also to what is “right.” “First, a person who stumbles or stutters surprises us by re-presenting the mundane in an absolutely fresh way. The stumbler permits us to see the grammar of walking, just as the stammerer allows us to hear the grammar of speech. In a sense, both take back what we take for granted in the everyday” (Sanders 8). Early modern examples of incongruous humor abound in the numerous texts that feature cross-dressing; transvestism creates a disjunction between expectation and actuality that was frequently used to create comic confusion. However since the incongruous joke is caused by the unexpected or the frustration of expectations it is perhaps the most difficult to construct. Unlike jesting that falls under the Superiority or Relief Theories incongruous jesting occurs outside the self and hinges on surprise. “It is virtually impossible, for example, to tickle oneself—to give oneself a ribbing—since ticklish laughter must be triggered by surprise. And no matter how sneaky or speedy, one can never surprise oneself” (8).
Despite the theoretical work that has gone into the study of jesting in recent years and the importance placed on the ability to jest and the rhetorical value of jesting throughout history the subject of comic affectation is still largely ignored by critics. To refer back to Esolen’s reaction to Spenser the amusement that comes from reading The Faerie Queene is problematic as it is not considered proper or appropriate to criticism. As Lauren Silberman notes in her analysis of Spenser’s humor: “. . . resistance to Spenserian humor manifests itself not so much in the failure to acknowledge comic episodes in The Faerie Queene, but in an unwillingness to act critically on that knowledge. Perhaps few critics would deny outright that Spenser can be funny, but many more might hesitate to accept laughter as a critical response to The Faerie Queene” (24). This unwillingness is somewhat understandable as it smacks of the Affective Fallacy. Identifying what is funny and why is difficult to pin down. What is considered comic is frequently culturally constructed and conditional to time and place. Tastes change and what was funny in Elizabethan England does not play in Peoria, so to speak. This critical neglect is unfortunate however since creating comic effects is central to Spenser’s purpose and so much of his moral allegory is contingent on “getting the joke.” Moreover laughter can be a valuable critical response to literature. As Bakhtin sees it,
By understanding why something makes us laugh we gain an understanding of ourselves and more importantly we gain an understanding of the thing itself. If this is true it goes a long way to explaining why Spenser relies so much on the comic. It forces the reader to examine the allegory more closely and it renders the moral principles expressed more memorable by virtue of being amusing.
While the humor of The Faerie Queene falls under each of the three theories Spenser seems to rely mostly on incongruity particularly in Book 3. Since Spenser sets out to construct an elaborate allegorical world in his poem it is natural, perhaps inevitable, that it be funny since allegory works through the disparity created between signifier and signified (Esolen 3). Such incongruity is personified in Britomart the practically oxymoronic “Martial Maid.” With Britomart Spenser inverts the traditional gender roles of the romance genre by placing her into the “hero” role thereby spoofing the genre. Gender confusion ensues almost immediately with Britomart rescuing not a damsel in distress but the male Redcross Knight. Afterward in a scene that reads like The Crying Game in reverse in which the man is revealed to be a woman Britomart (unexpectedly for a knight) wards off the advances of Malecasta who is understandably shocked to find that Britomart is not a man. “Although she chastely disapproves of Malecasta’s seeming lightness, Britomart entertains her advances out of a naïve courtesy and wish to please, totally unaware of the unfortunate surprise she thereby prepares for Malecasta”
(Silberman 31). The incongruous humor in this situation lies not in the transsexual nature of it but in the fact that we as readers know what Britomart and Malecasta do not. We know what Malecasta is after and we know that her desires are impossible to be fulfilled. While the chaos that ensues can provoke laughter our understanding of the allegorical message that chastity counters and trumps promiscuity can only be grasped by being in on the joke.
Being open to humor is thus a necessary stance for reading and interpreting The Faerie Queene. Attaining such a stance may not be easy though since critics in our culture are not encouraged to value comic affectation and therefore tend to ignore it. “Appreciating Spenser’s humor requires readers to refrain from taking themselves entirely seriously and to recognize that even deeply held values can manifest themselves comically in a world set awry by human foolishness”
(Silberman 32). Such foolishness is illustrated in the story of Malbecco and Hellenore found in cantos 9 and 10 of Book 3. This story allegorizes the jealousy that is attendant on infidelity. Hellenore allows herself to be stolen from her miserly husband’s house, which results in her living lustfully with a group of satyrs.
At night, when all they went to sleepe, he vewd,
Whereas his louely wife emongst them lay,
Embraced of a Satyre rough and rude,
Who all the night did minde his ioyous play:
Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day,
That all his hart with gealosie did swell;
But yet that nights ensample did bewray,
That not for nought his wife them loued so well,
When one so oft a night did ring his matins bell. (3.10.48)
Traditional interpretations of this scene emphasize the licentiousness displayed in it and read it as a critique of unchecked female sexuality. “When, however, one considers the process of Hellenore’s debauchery in its comic context, one might begin to notice the extent to which the cuckolded husband rather than the fallen wife actually suffers as a consequence of female unchastity” (Silberman 24). The problem with the traditional interpretation is that it ignores the role that Malbecco plays in the situation, overlooking the fact that it is his avarice that causes the rift between him and Hellenore. Malbecco is more concerned with his wealth than with his wife and it is this neglect that makes her receptive to being enraptured. The moral lesson embodied in this comic parable is that gentlemen such as those that Spenser aims to educate must attend to their wives.
In Book 3 Spenser deliberately creates incongruity that transcends the allegorical. If Spenser was simply writing allegory chastity could simply have been prefigured as Sir Galahad, a more traditional and better known figure associated with that virtue, and we would have a perfectly serviceable allegory and romance narrative. But Spenser chose to give us Britomart instead and the gender inversion created disrupts the expected structure of the romance and draws attention to it. He deconstructs the genre in a way that challenges our assumptions about it as well as our assumptions about allegory and the very world in which we live. “Britomart’s trials as she undertakes her career as a Martial Maid mirror our own uncertain progress as we learn to make our way through Book III of The Faerie Queene; learning to be open to humor is part of our education as readers” (Silberman 27). Like a good early modern rhetorician Spenser uses the comic effect to his advantage to communicate his moral philosophy in a memorable and relatable fashion while fashioning us as proper gentlemen and women.
Spenser does not employ comic effects only in Book 3 although certain comic tropes are more visible there by virtue of that book’s subject matter: “To be sure, sex is probably funnier than holiness, temperance, friendship, justice or courtesy” (Silberman 27). Comic affectation is also particularly evident in Book 1 as well mostly because the hero of that book the Redcross Knight is a character who is less spiritually perfect and naturally virtuous than his counterparts in the other books. Unlike the elfin knights from fairy land that inhabit most of the poem Redcross is depicted as all too human which befits his changeling origins. The incongruity created by placing the human Redcross into Spenser’s fantasy world reflects the situation found within the early modern jest which dramatizes the tensions inherent to the breakdown of traditional social orders.
The comic incongruities of Book 1 are evident from the very beginning when we see the procession of Redcross, Una and the dwarf. At first glance this parade appears conventional; the confident knight takes the lead followed by his lady and his squire. Upon closer inspection though we see that there is something wrong with this picture. We are told that the knight is “Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde, / Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, / The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde” (1.1.1). This image of battle-tested armor fits our idea of a gallant knight but that idea is undermined by the very next line: “Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield” (1). We suddenly realize that the armor doesn’t belong to the knight, that it wasn’t made for him and that it therefore doesn’t fit him. The armor is in effect a hand-me-down into which the knight is expected to grow. The image this realization conjures is that of a little boy wearing his father’s comically large clothing which disrupts our expectations and sets our perceptions askew. The off-kilter perspective is carried over to the lady. We are told that she is riding an ass. The allegorical significance of the ass at first seems consonant with the allegorical nature of Una; the ass is a sure-footed beast of burden that moves patiently and methodically with a mulish stubbornness that prevents it from losing its path. We are therefore prepared to associate the animal with fidelity to the one true faith. However the ass is also regarded as a stupid, braying creature that is associated with lust and boastfulness both to the Elizabethans and to people today[2]. We are again jarred by the incongruity which continues further with the squire. Typically a knight’s squire is a boy or a young man; instead we find that Redcross’s squire is a dwarf. While dwarfs were a fairly common sight in early modern courts and were prized as servants the appeal of the dwarf lies in his stunted stature. The incongruity caused by the apprehension of an adult in a child-like body serves to amuse. The dwarf here is rendered even more amusing because he is over-burdened with luggage and is desperately struggling to keep up with his lord and lady: “Behind her [Una] farre away a Dwarfe did lag, / That lasie seemd in being euer last, / Or wearied with bearing of her bag / Of needments at his backe” (6). The fact that the dwarf is not carrying the knight’s shield and weapons as a squire ordinarily would do and is instead carrying the lady’s luggage further upsets our perception of the world Spenser is creating. “In such allegory a humorous incongruity between tenor and vehicle might serve any purpose, from undermining or fortifying the message of the allegory to providing a pleasure which, though semantically empty, inspires the games with which we playful human beings engage each other” (Esolen 3). In this particular case the incongruity that underscores our introduction to Spenser’s world acts as a discordia concors that serves to capture our attention and to deny us the safety of our expectations.
Once Spenser has our attention, he uses comic incongruity to further set the hook and drag us into his world. We become implicated, for example, during the first major conflict of Book 1, the battle with Errour. On one level the scene acts out a nice allegorical conceit about the recursive, self-spawning nature of error and how error receives sustenance from feeding on itself. But then something bizarre happens: Errour spews vomit on Redcross which consists of books and papers.
Due to his peculiarly human nature Redcross becomes a sort of everyman. As a character his mistakes and foibles strike us as understandable and natural, underscoring the absurdity of the situations in which he finds himself.
Yet goodly court he made still to his Dame,
Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd,
Both carelesse of his health, and of his fame:
Till at the last he heard a dreadfull sownd,
Which through the wood loud bellowing, did rebownd,
That all the earth for terrour seemd to shake,
And trees did tremble. Th’Elfe therewith astownd,
Vpstarted lightly from his looser make,
And his vnready weapons gan in hand to take. (1.7.7)
The sudden appearance of the giant catches the unawares Redcross so unprepared that the knight is “astownd” by the “dreadfull sownd.” We can easily imagine the sudden sinking feeling that overcomes him in this scene of coitus interruptus since we have all been caught doing something about which we feel guilty or embarrassed. Spenser uses the comic sensibility to draw us into his world and we become so engrossed that we imbue his text with our own experiences. We can thus relate to the discomfort that Redcross feels, for example, in the House of Holiness. “When Charissa meets the Redcross knight, we know that the reason why ‘her necke and breasts were euer open bare’ (I.x.30) is that she is a rhetorical figure representing charity, profusely generous and loving; and yet we are still surprised by her appearance, because we cannot forget how we would feel if we were in the knight’s shoes” (Esolen 12).
While Spenser relies upon incongruous humor to the greatest extent relief humor and superiority humor are not absent from The Faerie Queene. Spenser mostly uses relief humor to serve a narrative purpose. When his protagonists are put into tense situations that produce anxiety in the reader he frequently undercuts the suspense by using a comic image. When Redcross confronts Despair and is nearly driven to suicide our anxiety is alleviated by the image of Despair’s own futile attempts at suicide. In contrast Spenser uses superiority humor for a more abstract purpose. The superiority humor is mostly evident when Spenser presents the villains or less virtuous characters such as Sir Scudamore. Scudamore is treated as effeminate, weeping helplessly instead of doing his manly duty to rescue his lady Amoret. Although there is an incongruity in Scudamore’s figure the humor arises less from that than from his impotence. The disparagement of characters like Scudamore serves to show the heroes in a better light as the heroes are capable of doing what characters like Scudamore cannot. It should also be noted that the heroes of The Faerie Queene are English; the other characters are not and are frequently like Sir Scudamore, Italian. Just as the Queen Gloriana is meant to extol the virtues of Queen Elizabeth the heroes of the text extol the innate virtues of the English people.
Considering the importance that early modern writers placed on jesting and the comic sensibility it is unfortunate that comic affectation remains largely ignored by critics. Studying the subjects is valuable for many reasons. For one thing it allows us to better understand the literature of the period. As Chris Holcomb points out, “Like the early modern jest, rhetoric and courtesy manuals of the period must be viewed, at least in part, as responses to widespread increases in geographic and, especially, social mobility, although the nature of each kind of manual’s response differs considerably. The rhetorics were, in effect, handbooks on social mobility” (9). The same can easily be said of The Faerie Queene since Spenser intended the text to be a manual on social mobility and it is apparent that he expected his readers to understand the humor. Moreover an understanding of and appreciation for a humorous response to literature is also of critical value because it allows us to reconstruct a culture’s ideas of what is funny. Obviously we cannot hop into a “way-back machine” to find out what made the Elizabethans laugh but we can take an overview of their literature to find recurrent themes or images that seem calculated to amuse. The identification of such tropes would go a long way to reconstructing how a text was meant to be read and received. And finally a receptivity to literary humor is valuable simply for the sake of humor’s ability to uplift and delight. As Castiglione noted laughter makes us forgot our troubles and the person who makes us laugh is to be commended. “In a flash, then, the stumbler pulls aside the thin cloak of civilité, revealing humanity in its gestureless state. Stumblers cause us to laugh in delight, in perceiving our own fleshy essence, at reviewing our unadorned animal nature. We are called back into the Garden” (Sanders 12-13).
Works Cited
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature. Trans. Leon Golden. Comm. O. B. Hardison, jr. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981.
Castiglione, Baldessar. The Second Book of the Courtier. Trans. Sir Thomas Hoby. Ed. Walter
Raleigh. London: David Nutt, Publisher, 1900. 5 Nov. 2005 http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/courtier/courtier2.html.
Esolen, Anthony. “Spenserian Allegory and the Clash of Narrative Worlds.” Thalia: Studies in
Literary Humor 11.1 (1989): 3-13.
Freud, Sigmund. “Humour.” Trans. Joan Riviere. Collected Papers, Volume 5: Miscellaneous
Papers, 1888-1938. Ed. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959.
Hobbes, Thomas. “From Human Nature.” The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Ed. John
Morreall. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
Holcomb, Chris. Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Morreall, John, ed. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1987.
Plato. Philebus. Trans. Dorothea Frede. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993.
Sanders, Barry. Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Silberman, Lauren. “Spenser and Ariosto: Funny Peril and Comic Chaos.” Comparative
Literature Studies 25.1 (1988): 23-34.
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. London: Penguin Books,
1987.
[1] N.B. Throughout this article, the term “humor” is used in the modern sense as appertaining to amusement rather than referring to the early modern concept of “humours” or fluids that influence behavior.
[2] Consider the example presented in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the dim-witted braggart Bottom is given the head of an ass.
When considering the poem in relation to its social and literary context the answer is an unequivocal “no.” Although that which is comic has traditionally been ignored if not outright derogated by critics going back to Plato the ability to make a joke has long been perceived as a valuable tool to orators and rhetoricians. “Jesting is a neglected subject in historical studies of rhetoric. Its neglect, however, cannot be attributed to a lack of discussions in the rhetorical treatises themselves. From antiquity into the nineteenth century, many rhetoricians viewed jesting as part, oftentimes an important part, of rhetoric” (Holcomb 1). Indeed in the early modern period jesting and comic affectation were viewed as necessary skills particularly for gentlemen, the same gentlemen that Spenser hopes to fashion. If a gentleman were to receive an invitation to court, for example, he must be prepared to mingle with an elite group of people who would be educated, urbane and politically savvy. The gentleman would be expected to fit into this company and hold his own. His duties to his prince, to borrow a term from Machiavelli, would be to carefully assess socio-political situations and offer advice pertaining to them or perhaps to distract the prince from them. It is this diversionary aspect of jesting that Castiglione endorses in his immensely influential Book of the Courtier, first translated into English in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby.
Whatsoever therefore causeth laughter, the same maketh the minde jocunde and geveth pleasure, nor suffreth a man in that instant to minde the troublesome greefes that oure life is full of. Therefore (as you see) laughing is very acceptable to all men, and he is muche to be commended that can cause it in due time and after a comlie sort. (Castiglione, The Second Book of the Courtier).A gentleman’s ability to make a joke and please a court was therefore a ticket to social preferment and advancement, a concern of particular importance during the period.
For the early modern period the value of jesting lies in the fact that the comic sensibility transcends social boundaries. “Laughter is such a basic, universal, and useful response that it is difficult to conceive of any group of people—anywhere or any time or any place—not laughing. We commonly speak of a person’s ‘sense of humor,’ acknowledging just how basic laughter is, by ranking it along with the traditional five senses” (Sanders 6-7). When we consider that one of the defining characteristics of the period was the reshaping of social structures fueled by such culturally altering forces as the Black Death, the colonization of the New World and the Protestant Reformation it is understandable that jesting would become a vital way of communicating as it speaks to the lowest common human denominator. In a rapidly changing social landscape in which geographical, economical and educational barriers were breaking down jesting became a valuable rhetorical tool.
As important as jesting is to communication it is also important for dealing with the anxiety created by the breakdown of traditional social order or more precisely the potential conflicts inherent to the mixing of people of disparate social origins. Jesting becomes a means of coping with otherness. “Jests of the period typically dramatize encounters between people of divergent social origins or occupations, and in doing so, they play on the tensions and anxieties that almost invariably occur when different kinds of people find themselves in one another’s company”
(Holcomb 5).
There are three theories regarding humor[1]: the Superiority Theory, the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory (Morreall 5). The Superiority Theory holds that humor arises out of situations in which people feel superior to others; when a person slips on a banana peel the watcher feels elated by someone else’s foolishness. As the Caroline philosopher Thomas Hobbes states as he articulates his concept of ‘sudden glory’:
. . . men laugh at jests, the wit whereof always consists in the elegant discovering and conveying to our minds some absurdity of another: and in this case also the passion of laughter proceeds from the sudden imagination of our own odds and eminency: for what is else the recommending of our selves to our own good opinion, by comparison with another man’s infirmity or absurdity? For when a jest is broken upon ourselves, or friends of whose dishonor we participate, we never laugh thereat. I may therefore conclude, that the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly . . . (20)In an early modern context this theory would apply when the joker denigrates another’s place or state of origin in order, for example, to bolster national identity. Consider the English propensity during the period for calling syphilis the “French disease.” Based on the historical rivalries between the English and French it was natural for the English to claim that such an unpleasant and widespread malady would originate from their foes and not from themselves. The jokes made about the origin of syphilis allowed the English to overlook their own faults at the expense of a rival culture.
The benefit of this type of jesting is that it boosts the ego and forges a sense of identity either national as in the above example or personal. It raises morale and camaraderie. However because this type of jesting contains an innate maliciousness both Plato and Aristotle disregarded its merits. Plato felt that such jokes actually harmed the joker by causing damage to the soul. “Our argument leads to the conclusion that if we laugh at what is ridiculous about our friends, by mixing pleasure with malice, we thereby mix pleasure with pain. For we had agreed earlier that malice is a pain in the soul, that laughing is a pleasure, and that both occur together on those occasions” (Philebus 50a). For Plato malice was a type of vice and so therefore to make derogatory jokes is to engage in vicious behavior which prevents one from perfecting his or her soul. While Aristotle disagreed with Plato on the effect these jokes have on the soul he agreed that they lowered the self to a standard that was beneath it.
As we have said, comedy is an imitation of baser men. These are characterized not by every kind of vice but specifically by “the ridiculous,” which is a subdivision of the category of “deformity.” What we mean by “the ridiculous” is some error or ugliness that is painless and has no harmful effects. The example that comes immediately to mind is the comic mask, which is ugly and distorted but causes no pain. (Poetics 5.1-7)To be sure Aristotle is here referring to comedy as a theatrical form and not to jesting per se. Comedy however as Aristotle perceived it functions the same way as jokes that arouse feelings of superiority. They both are vulgar and contrary to Plato’s impression they do not arouse pain which can be used toward attaining catharsis and therefore enlightenment.
In contrast to the Superiority Theory there is the Relief Theory. According to this theory humor acts as a safety valve allowing for the release of nervous psychic energy; the person who slips on a banana peel makes a joke to alleviate the uncomfortable embarrassment that comes from appearing foolish. This is the type of jesting that Castiglione refers to as being praiseworthy as it serves to distract attention from that which is unpleasant. In Sigmund Freud’s examination of humor he posits an example that illustrates this theory. He imagines a man who makes a joke while facing execution. He writes, “Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph not only of the ego, but also of the pleasure principle, which is strong enough to assert itself here in the face of the adverse real circumstances” (217). Freud denies Plato’s assertion that jesting causes the soul pain, claiming instead that people have a natural tendency to avoid pain. Jesting therefore becomes a means of pain avoidance. An early modern example of the Relief Theory in action is expressed in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “Carnival.” The social inversions frequently seen during early modern festivals presided over by a Falstaffian “king of fools” that mocks legitimate authority allowed the lower strata of society to release its frustrations in a safe way. Just as in the Superiority Theory the Relief Theory thus implies that jesting serves to affirm the self.
Finally the Incongruity Theory perceives humor arising out of situations in which an outcome differs from what is expected, in which reality and expectation diverge; seeing a person slip on a banana peel provokes laughter because it disrupts the expected mechanics of normal human movement. The incongruous nature of the situation is highlighted, arousing delight and amusement by drawing attention not only to what is “wrong” but also to what is “right.” “First, a person who stumbles or stutters surprises us by re-presenting the mundane in an absolutely fresh way. The stumbler permits us to see the grammar of walking, just as the stammerer allows us to hear the grammar of speech. In a sense, both take back what we take for granted in the everyday” (Sanders 8). Early modern examples of incongruous humor abound in the numerous texts that feature cross-dressing; transvestism creates a disjunction between expectation and actuality that was frequently used to create comic confusion. However since the incongruous joke is caused by the unexpected or the frustration of expectations it is perhaps the most difficult to construct. Unlike jesting that falls under the Superiority or Relief Theories incongruous jesting occurs outside the self and hinges on surprise. “It is virtually impossible, for example, to tickle oneself—to give oneself a ribbing—since ticklish laughter must be triggered by surprise. And no matter how sneaky or speedy, one can never surprise oneself” (8).
Despite the theoretical work that has gone into the study of jesting in recent years and the importance placed on the ability to jest and the rhetorical value of jesting throughout history the subject of comic affectation is still largely ignored by critics. To refer back to Esolen’s reaction to Spenser the amusement that comes from reading The Faerie Queene is problematic as it is not considered proper or appropriate to criticism. As Lauren Silberman notes in her analysis of Spenser’s humor: “. . . resistance to Spenserian humor manifests itself not so much in the failure to acknowledge comic episodes in The Faerie Queene, but in an unwillingness to act critically on that knowledge. Perhaps few critics would deny outright that Spenser can be funny, but many more might hesitate to accept laughter as a critical response to The Faerie Queene” (24). This unwillingness is somewhat understandable as it smacks of the Affective Fallacy. Identifying what is funny and why is difficult to pin down. What is considered comic is frequently culturally constructed and conditional to time and place. Tastes change and what was funny in Elizabethan England does not play in Peoria, so to speak. This critical neglect is unfortunate however since creating comic effects is central to Spenser’s purpose and so much of his moral allegory is contingent on “getting the joke.” Moreover laughter can be a valuable critical response to literature. As Bakhtin sees it,
Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing
it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides . . . Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. (qtd. in Sanders 16)
By understanding why something makes us laugh we gain an understanding of ourselves and more importantly we gain an understanding of the thing itself. If this is true it goes a long way to explaining why Spenser relies so much on the comic. It forces the reader to examine the allegory more closely and it renders the moral principles expressed more memorable by virtue of being amusing.
While the humor of The Faerie Queene falls under each of the three theories Spenser seems to rely mostly on incongruity particularly in Book 3. Since Spenser sets out to construct an elaborate allegorical world in his poem it is natural, perhaps inevitable, that it be funny since allegory works through the disparity created between signifier and signified (Esolen 3). Such incongruity is personified in Britomart the practically oxymoronic “Martial Maid.” With Britomart Spenser inverts the traditional gender roles of the romance genre by placing her into the “hero” role thereby spoofing the genre. Gender confusion ensues almost immediately with Britomart rescuing not a damsel in distress but the male Redcross Knight. Afterward in a scene that reads like The Crying Game in reverse in which the man is revealed to be a woman Britomart (unexpectedly for a knight) wards off the advances of Malecasta who is understandably shocked to find that Britomart is not a man. “Although she chastely disapproves of Malecasta’s seeming lightness, Britomart entertains her advances out of a naïve courtesy and wish to please, totally unaware of the unfortunate surprise she thereby prepares for Malecasta”
(Silberman 31). The incongruous humor in this situation lies not in the transsexual nature of it but in the fact that we as readers know what Britomart and Malecasta do not. We know what Malecasta is after and we know that her desires are impossible to be fulfilled. While the chaos that ensues can provoke laughter our understanding of the allegorical message that chastity counters and trumps promiscuity can only be grasped by being in on the joke.
Being open to humor is thus a necessary stance for reading and interpreting The Faerie Queene. Attaining such a stance may not be easy though since critics in our culture are not encouraged to value comic affectation and therefore tend to ignore it. “Appreciating Spenser’s humor requires readers to refrain from taking themselves entirely seriously and to recognize that even deeply held values can manifest themselves comically in a world set awry by human foolishness”
(Silberman 32). Such foolishness is illustrated in the story of Malbecco and Hellenore found in cantos 9 and 10 of Book 3. This story allegorizes the jealousy that is attendant on infidelity. Hellenore allows herself to be stolen from her miserly husband’s house, which results in her living lustfully with a group of satyrs.
At night, when all they went to sleepe, he vewd,
Whereas his louely wife emongst them lay,
Embraced of a Satyre rough and rude,
Who all the night did minde his ioyous play:
Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day,
That all his hart with gealosie did swell;
But yet that nights ensample did bewray,
That not for nought his wife them loued so well,
When one so oft a night did ring his matins bell. (3.10.48)
Traditional interpretations of this scene emphasize the licentiousness displayed in it and read it as a critique of unchecked female sexuality. “When, however, one considers the process of Hellenore’s debauchery in its comic context, one might begin to notice the extent to which the cuckolded husband rather than the fallen wife actually suffers as a consequence of female unchastity” (Silberman 24). The problem with the traditional interpretation is that it ignores the role that Malbecco plays in the situation, overlooking the fact that it is his avarice that causes the rift between him and Hellenore. Malbecco is more concerned with his wealth than with his wife and it is this neglect that makes her receptive to being enraptured. The moral lesson embodied in this comic parable is that gentlemen such as those that Spenser aims to educate must attend to their wives.
In Book 3 Spenser deliberately creates incongruity that transcends the allegorical. If Spenser was simply writing allegory chastity could simply have been prefigured as Sir Galahad, a more traditional and better known figure associated with that virtue, and we would have a perfectly serviceable allegory and romance narrative. But Spenser chose to give us Britomart instead and the gender inversion created disrupts the expected structure of the romance and draws attention to it. He deconstructs the genre in a way that challenges our assumptions about it as well as our assumptions about allegory and the very world in which we live. “Britomart’s trials as she undertakes her career as a Martial Maid mirror our own uncertain progress as we learn to make our way through Book III of The Faerie Queene; learning to be open to humor is part of our education as readers” (Silberman 27). Like a good early modern rhetorician Spenser uses the comic effect to his advantage to communicate his moral philosophy in a memorable and relatable fashion while fashioning us as proper gentlemen and women.
Spenser does not employ comic effects only in Book 3 although certain comic tropes are more visible there by virtue of that book’s subject matter: “To be sure, sex is probably funnier than holiness, temperance, friendship, justice or courtesy” (Silberman 27). Comic affectation is also particularly evident in Book 1 as well mostly because the hero of that book the Redcross Knight is a character who is less spiritually perfect and naturally virtuous than his counterparts in the other books. Unlike the elfin knights from fairy land that inhabit most of the poem Redcross is depicted as all too human which befits his changeling origins. The incongruity created by placing the human Redcross into Spenser’s fantasy world reflects the situation found within the early modern jest which dramatizes the tensions inherent to the breakdown of traditional social orders.
The comic incongruities of Book 1 are evident from the very beginning when we see the procession of Redcross, Una and the dwarf. At first glance this parade appears conventional; the confident knight takes the lead followed by his lady and his squire. Upon closer inspection though we see that there is something wrong with this picture. We are told that the knight is “Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde, / Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, / The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde” (1.1.1). This image of battle-tested armor fits our idea of a gallant knight but that idea is undermined by the very next line: “Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield” (1). We suddenly realize that the armor doesn’t belong to the knight, that it wasn’t made for him and that it therefore doesn’t fit him. The armor is in effect a hand-me-down into which the knight is expected to grow. The image this realization conjures is that of a little boy wearing his father’s comically large clothing which disrupts our expectations and sets our perceptions askew. The off-kilter perspective is carried over to the lady. We are told that she is riding an ass. The allegorical significance of the ass at first seems consonant with the allegorical nature of Una; the ass is a sure-footed beast of burden that moves patiently and methodically with a mulish stubbornness that prevents it from losing its path. We are therefore prepared to associate the animal with fidelity to the one true faith. However the ass is also regarded as a stupid, braying creature that is associated with lust and boastfulness both to the Elizabethans and to people today[2]. We are again jarred by the incongruity which continues further with the squire. Typically a knight’s squire is a boy or a young man; instead we find that Redcross’s squire is a dwarf. While dwarfs were a fairly common sight in early modern courts and were prized as servants the appeal of the dwarf lies in his stunted stature. The incongruity caused by the apprehension of an adult in a child-like body serves to amuse. The dwarf here is rendered even more amusing because he is over-burdened with luggage and is desperately struggling to keep up with his lord and lady: “Behind her [Una] farre away a Dwarfe did lag, / That lasie seemd in being euer last, / Or wearied with bearing of her bag / Of needments at his backe” (6). The fact that the dwarf is not carrying the knight’s shield and weapons as a squire ordinarily would do and is instead carrying the lady’s luggage further upsets our perception of the world Spenser is creating. “In such allegory a humorous incongruity between tenor and vehicle might serve any purpose, from undermining or fortifying the message of the allegory to providing a pleasure which, though semantically empty, inspires the games with which we playful human beings engage each other” (Esolen 3). In this particular case the incongruity that underscores our introduction to Spenser’s world acts as a discordia concors that serves to capture our attention and to deny us the safety of our expectations.
Once Spenser has our attention, he uses comic incongruity to further set the hook and drag us into his world. We become implicated, for example, during the first major conflict of Book 1, the battle with Errour. On one level the scene acts out a nice allegorical conceit about the recursive, self-spawning nature of error and how error receives sustenance from feeding on itself. But then something bizarre happens: Errour spews vomit on Redcross which consists of books and papers.
If they were but eyeless and poisonous amphibians, we might suspend our disbelief, remain in the reasonably coherent romance-world of Faery Land, and enjoy the interesting congruity between those who publish heretical treatises, or the readers who digest them, and Errour’s spawn. But the books and papers . . . jolt us out of any pleasantly self-consistent narrative world, and force us to think again about what Errour might have to do with our own books, or with the very book before us. (Esolen 5)The comic image of Errour’s vomit breaks down the dimensional boundaries between our reality and Spenser’s surreality. We are drawn into a world that we can “finger familiarly on all sides” in which we identify with Redcross and his tribulations become ours.
Due to his peculiarly human nature Redcross becomes a sort of everyman. As a character his mistakes and foibles strike us as understandable and natural, underscoring the absurdity of the situations in which he finds himself.
Redcross’s reactions come across as realistic because we can readily imagine ourselves reacting in the same ways. Consider, for example, his confrontation with Orgoglio. Redcross becomes so preoccupied with dallying with Duessa that he lets the giant catch him with at least his proverbial pants down.Henri Bergson says that we laugh whenever a human being appears as a thing: a man slips on a banana skin, and in an instant he falls from rational enveloper of the universe to a sack of mass and acceleration. How close this everyday slapstick is to Spenser’s allegorical slip-ups, for with little or no warning from his innocent narrative voice Spenser’s characters turn that corner which divides symbolism from naturalism. They become too bulky, too real. Suddenly the artifice is highlighted, playing with the fiction it is supposed to represent. (Esolen 10)
Yet goodly court he made still to his Dame,
Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd,
Both carelesse of his health, and of his fame:
Till at the last he heard a dreadfull sownd,
Which through the wood loud bellowing, did rebownd,
That all the earth for terrour seemd to shake,
And trees did tremble. Th’Elfe therewith astownd,
Vpstarted lightly from his looser make,
And his vnready weapons gan in hand to take. (1.7.7)
The sudden appearance of the giant catches the unawares Redcross so unprepared that the knight is “astownd” by the “dreadfull sownd.” We can easily imagine the sudden sinking feeling that overcomes him in this scene of coitus interruptus since we have all been caught doing something about which we feel guilty or embarrassed. Spenser uses the comic sensibility to draw us into his world and we become so engrossed that we imbue his text with our own experiences. We can thus relate to the discomfort that Redcross feels, for example, in the House of Holiness. “When Charissa meets the Redcross knight, we know that the reason why ‘her necke and breasts were euer open bare’ (I.x.30) is that she is a rhetorical figure representing charity, profusely generous and loving; and yet we are still surprised by her appearance, because we cannot forget how we would feel if we were in the knight’s shoes” (Esolen 12).
While Spenser relies upon incongruous humor to the greatest extent relief humor and superiority humor are not absent from The Faerie Queene. Spenser mostly uses relief humor to serve a narrative purpose. When his protagonists are put into tense situations that produce anxiety in the reader he frequently undercuts the suspense by using a comic image. When Redcross confronts Despair and is nearly driven to suicide our anxiety is alleviated by the image of Despair’s own futile attempts at suicide. In contrast Spenser uses superiority humor for a more abstract purpose. The superiority humor is mostly evident when Spenser presents the villains or less virtuous characters such as Sir Scudamore. Scudamore is treated as effeminate, weeping helplessly instead of doing his manly duty to rescue his lady Amoret. Although there is an incongruity in Scudamore’s figure the humor arises less from that than from his impotence. The disparagement of characters like Scudamore serves to show the heroes in a better light as the heroes are capable of doing what characters like Scudamore cannot. It should also be noted that the heroes of The Faerie Queene are English; the other characters are not and are frequently like Sir Scudamore, Italian. Just as the Queen Gloriana is meant to extol the virtues of Queen Elizabeth the heroes of the text extol the innate virtues of the English people.
Considering the importance that early modern writers placed on jesting and the comic sensibility it is unfortunate that comic affectation remains largely ignored by critics. Studying the subjects is valuable for many reasons. For one thing it allows us to better understand the literature of the period. As Chris Holcomb points out, “Like the early modern jest, rhetoric and courtesy manuals of the period must be viewed, at least in part, as responses to widespread increases in geographic and, especially, social mobility, although the nature of each kind of manual’s response differs considerably. The rhetorics were, in effect, handbooks on social mobility” (9). The same can easily be said of The Faerie Queene since Spenser intended the text to be a manual on social mobility and it is apparent that he expected his readers to understand the humor. Moreover an understanding of and appreciation for a humorous response to literature is also of critical value because it allows us to reconstruct a culture’s ideas of what is funny. Obviously we cannot hop into a “way-back machine” to find out what made the Elizabethans laugh but we can take an overview of their literature to find recurrent themes or images that seem calculated to amuse. The identification of such tropes would go a long way to reconstructing how a text was meant to be read and received. And finally a receptivity to literary humor is valuable simply for the sake of humor’s ability to uplift and delight. As Castiglione noted laughter makes us forgot our troubles and the person who makes us laugh is to be commended. “In a flash, then, the stumbler pulls aside the thin cloak of civilité, revealing humanity in its gestureless state. Stumblers cause us to laugh in delight, in perceiving our own fleshy essence, at reviewing our unadorned animal nature. We are called back into the Garden” (Sanders 12-13).
Works Cited
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature. Trans. Leon Golden. Comm. O. B. Hardison, jr. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981.
Castiglione, Baldessar. The Second Book of the Courtier. Trans. Sir Thomas Hoby. Ed. Walter
Raleigh. London: David Nutt, Publisher, 1900. 5 Nov. 2005 http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/courtier/courtier2.html.
Esolen, Anthony. “Spenserian Allegory and the Clash of Narrative Worlds.” Thalia: Studies in
Literary Humor 11.1 (1989): 3-13.
Freud, Sigmund. “Humour.” Trans. Joan Riviere. Collected Papers, Volume 5: Miscellaneous
Papers, 1888-1938. Ed. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959.
Hobbes, Thomas. “From Human Nature.” The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Ed. John
Morreall. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
Holcomb, Chris. Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Morreall, John, ed. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1987.
Plato. Philebus. Trans. Dorothea Frede. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993.
Sanders, Barry. Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Silberman, Lauren. “Spenser and Ariosto: Funny Peril and Comic Chaos.” Comparative
Literature Studies 25.1 (1988): 23-34.
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. London: Penguin Books,
1987.
[1] N.B. Throughout this article, the term “humor” is used in the modern sense as appertaining to amusement rather than referring to the early modern concept of “humours” or fluids that influence behavior.
[2] Consider the example presented in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the dim-witted braggart Bottom is given the head of an ass.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Patterns of Dissent in Lollard Thought and Language
Recent scholarship on the medieval heresy known as Lollardy has focused on issues of language. Specifically the research has examined the ways Lollards taught the Bible and articulated their doctrinal values. When looking at these studies in relation to each other an interesting thing becomes apparent: Lollard dissent was characterized by patterns of language usage in which the Lollards appropriated orthodox modes of discourse for their own ends.
In Rita Copeland’s book Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages she examines the way Lollards taught the Bible and Christian morality in contrast to the way those things were taught in the Church ordained scholastic and university systems. Her objective in this book is two-fold: to show that Lollards appropriated ancient anti-intellectual ideas about teaching that had been rejected by the Church and to save these ideas from the obscuring power of history. As she puts it, “Modernity hardly recognizes itself in the Middle Ages . . . What this book offers, however, is a study of issues that were of profound importance for the Middle Ages and that will disappear from our historiographical map if we do not recognize them as being important to ourselves.”[1]
Copeland’s argument is composed of two basic parts. In the first she discusses Lollard pedagogy, focusing on the idea of teaching the “literal sense” of the Bible. She reconstructs the Lollard pedagogy in three ways: through examining court documents of heresy trials which discuss how accused and professed Lollards disseminated their beliefs, by looking at anti-Lollard polemics—most notably those produced by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury—which attack Lollard methods of “corruption” and from referring to research published by other historians, particularly that of Anne Hudson. In the second part Copeland analyzes two Lollard prison narratives written by Richard Wyche and William Thorpe and shows the way they use the methods of the Lollard pedagogical model.
The pedagogical model that Copeland reconstructs employs several methods of instruction. The first and the most important to Copeland is teaching what she calls the “literal sense” of the Bible or stressing what happens in the text on the literal level as opposed to the allegorical level. This relates to the Wycliffite call for translating the Bible into the vernacular; the complaint was that the Vulgate served to mystify the word of God and render it as a tool of hegemony. Similarly, allegorizing the Bible implied that only certain, properly trained people could understand its true meaning. This establishes an intellectual hierarchy within society, one that was threatened by teaching the “literal sense.”
The point here is that teaching to read for the literal meaning was traditionally the domain of childhood education and thus reading for the literal sense marked one as socially inferior, as having the mental faculties of a child. The Lollard emphasis in teaching the literal sense became a means of challenging that intellectual hierarchy by employing the rejected methods of that hierarchy. To teach the literal sense was to subvert the educational values of the intellectual elite. “. . . [I]t is the work of a dissenting community to challenge the common sense of a naturalized order. The success of Lollardy’s radical pedagogy is that it refused to reproduce the fundamental distinction between childhood and adulthood which had been served, traditionally, by identifying childish reading with the literal sense.”[3] The Lollard heresy therefore was as much a class struggle as it was a spiritual one.
Copeland makes several interesting points in her book. For one thing she makes it clear how the medieval educational model parallels our modern one. We still consider people who are formally educated as being somehow better or more qualified. We mandate that students receive a college education in order to “make something of themselves.” In this sense Copeland succeeds in showing how “issues of profound importance to the Middle Ages” apply to ourselves. “The relevance of modern radical pedagogies to thinking about Lollard models of learning is in fact striking. One might look at [educational theorist Paolo] Freire’s writing and almost see a blueprint for the Lollard’s dissenting pedagogy.”[4] By examining the Lollard model we can see just how modern the Middle Ages were and perhaps even learn ways to shape and not shape our own educational systems.
Underlying Copeland’s argument is another idea that is equally intriguing. The Lollard community, and presumably other movements deemed heretical, was not merely an expression of religious discontent. The Lollards embodied multiple heterodox ideas.
The dissenting philosophy of the Lollards was actually a nexus, a complex network of ideas and social anxieties that converged in the figure of the dissenter.
There are two potential flaws in Copeland’s argument. For one thing there is a danger, if it can be called that, of projecting modern ideas onto the Lollard movement. Although Copeland avoids this issue for the most part, she does hint at it. “The concerns of postmodern educational theory should be of no less relevance or value to our investigations of medieval culture than the concerns of other arenas of postmodernist debate, such as literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and materialisms.”[6] The problem here is that the Lollards did not leave behind a statement of their pedagogical theory. What we can know of it is necessarily imprecise since we have to reconstruct it as Copeland herself does from exterior sources and analysis. We therefore run the risk of filling in the gaps in our knowledge by imputing our own biases to it. The other weakness in Copeland’s argument is that it does not acknowledge a distinction between thought and act. Just because the Lollards valued literalism and expected their members to live by the letter of the Gospels does not mean we should believe they behaved accordingly. As Copeland points out regarding the prison narratives of Wyche and Thorpe, these two men drew attention because they represent “the intellectual who has taken his project of producing knowledge extra muros.”[7]
It is this disparity between thought and action that Katherine Little takes up in her article “Chaucer’s Parson and the Specter of Wycliffism.” Whereas Copeland discusses specifically Lollard ideas of education Little examines Lollard ideas of language reform particularly as they were perceived in the popular imagination. She focuses on the figure of the Parson in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a contemporary representation of the Lollard preacher. The point that she sets out to make is that the apparent disjunction between the way Chaucer constructs the Parson and the seemingly antithetical message of “The Parson’s Tale” reflects the Lollard’s fundamental inability to match word to deed.
Before Little can begin her argument proper she has to acknowledge the debate amongst Chaucerian scholars over whether or not the Parson is actually a representation of a Lollard. Since this issue is not central to her argument she dismisses the debate ultimately as “a relatively fruitless exercise”[8] but not before pointing out that Chaucer wanted his readers evidently to connect the character to Lollardy. Some copies of the Tales contain an “Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale” in which the characters of the Host and the Shipman accuse the Parson of being a “Lollere” because he seems to have a predilection for preaching. As Little says, “In this exchange between the Host and the Shipman, the term ‘Lollere’ is so clearly defined in relation to preaching that we can be sure that Chaucer knew what he was about in using it. While this use certainly does not establish the Parson as a Lollard, it should suggest that Chaucer wanted his readers to think of the Parson in relation to Lollardy.”[9]
Having established this point Little goes on to present her argument which is based primarily on a synthesis of a close reading of “The Parson’s Tale” in relation to other manuals on penance of the period, a comparison of the Parson to other representations of reformed preachers in the contemporary literature—notably John Gower’s Confessio Amantis—and references to the work of other scholars both of literature and history. From all of these sources Little concludes that “The Parson’s Tale” is a record of Lollard anxiety over traditional religious language and the need to have a language for religious purposes. As she explains, “the two versions of the Parson [as he’s constructed by his tale and by the rest of the Tales] reflect an uneasy and unresolved dialectic within lay instruction between, on one side, the demands for reform and, on the other, the limits of clerical language to enact that reform.”[10]
Perhaps the most interesting point that Little makes concerns the Lollard discomfort with the sacrament of confession. According to her the Lollards did not object to confession on doctrinal grounds but because of the language used to articulate confession. As seen from Copeland the Lollards called for a plain-spokeness that emphasized literal meaning. In the case of confession this plainness of speech works to the detriment of the speaker. “Wycliffites systematically point out that confession has been corrupted by the improper use of language: the penitent’s confessional language is forced or seduced from him or her or silenced altogether.”[11] This idea highlights the Lollard problem of thought and act. If a Lollard is to strive for a union of speech and deed, to practice what he preaches, then confession which “generates sinful narratives of desire”[12] becomes a form of sinning in itself. To say it is to do it. Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale,” presenting the “proper” way to confess, thus reflects the Lollard anxiety of clerical language and represents a resolution of that anxiety.
The obvious weakness of Little’s argument lies in the fact that Chaucer’s Parson is a fictional construct. Despite how realistic the character seems or whether or not the character is based on a real person the most we can hope to reconstruct from analyzing the character as a Lollard is Chaucer’s views on Lollardy. We cannot even say with any certainty that Chaucer was a Lollard himself since the explicit references to Lollardy that occur in his work were expurgated from later copies of his manuscripts. Chaucer seems to have gone out of his way to distance himself from the Lollards. However, based on what we know of Lollard ideas regarding language and religious speech and the fact that Chaucer would have known these ideas very well, Little’s argument seems sound. It is also intriguing to consider the Parson as a representation of Lollardy in the popular consciousness and to view the Parson and his tale as a happy medium between orthodox and heterodox language.
Finally, Lollard ideas about language, particularly poetic language, are explored by Ritchie D. Kendall in his book The Drama of Dissent. To be sure, Kendall does not limit his examination solely to the Lollards but discusses later reformist movements as well. As he says, “This is a study of the aesthetic convictions of a diverse group of religious dissenters active in England between 1380 and 1590.”[13] However Kendall presents Lollardy as central to his argument, treating it as the genius loci to those later movements.
Unlike Copeland and Little whose arguments were in the vein of other contemporary research and furthered that research Kendall argues against contemporary research. As he puts it, “I would like to position this work vis-à-vis several areas of current scholarly inquiry that intersect with my own concerns and views.”[14] He presents his book as a response to literary critics, namely Jonas Barish, Russell Fraser, and Richard Lanham, whose work he seems to feel was too biased and which he regards as a “revisionist assault.”[15] Whereas these other scholars Kendall claims collapsed distinctions between the heterodoxical communities, he sets out to show that they developed independently along the same lines and from the same source. This common development is reflected in the groups’ poetics or the way they produced literature.
The main focus of Kendall’s argument is on the Lollards’ and later dissenters’ Platonic disdain for drama. Even though the Lollards strove to practice the values of the Gospels, in effect reenacting the Acts of the Apostles, they disliked drama—i.e. miracle, mystery, and morality plays—because of the drama’s allegorical nature and function. The threat of drama is that people could confuse it for reality, accepting the imitation in place of the real thing. As Kendall puts it, “In the fusion of a transcendent truth to a temporal signifier, the artist seduced his audience into loving the human over the divine.”[16] This disapproval of drama reflects the Lollard disapproval of “dressing up” the Bible in Latin and through exegesis. It also reflects the Lollard disapproval of orthodox ceremony and ritual such as Communion which are essentially little allegorical dramas with the priest playing the role of Jesus.
The important point that Kendall sets out to prove about the Lollards is that they practiced self-definition through negation, defining the self in opposition to the other, which in this case is orthodoxy. They disclaimed the obfuscating power of drama but had to appropriate the tools of drama in order to articulate themselves and their beliefs. “In its early stages Lollardy was forced, like primitive Christianity, to draw much of its theoretical and practical machinery from the work of its enemies. Never allowed to reach its full maturity, Lollardy failed to outgrow its early dependence on the language and instruments of orthodox Christian worship.” [17] This idea dovetails interestingly with that presented by Little that the Lollard call for language reform had to be expressed in the language of the orthodox. Kendall’s point is that for the Lollard to practice his beliefs he had to assume the role of an apostle, thus falling into drama. To make this point Kendall marshals a great deal of evidence from primary sources such as Lollard sermons and prison narratives including that of William Thorpe which Copeland also uses.
Kendall’s argument is compromised ironically by a tendency toward preachiness. In formulating the argument as a response to other scholars there is a persistent danger of it falling into polemic. Kendall acknowledges this tendency, stating, “Although I have attempted to be always cognizant of that dangerous impulse, and have perhaps overreacted with paroxysms of citation and qualification, distortions remain in my treatment of the Lollards—both in terms of the perceived unity within the party itself and between that party and later reformers.”[18] The danger however does not lie in the presentation of his argument but in the way he presents dissenting opinions. It is difficult to see which argument is orthodox and which is heterodox, which provides an odd illustration of Kendall’s point. Nevertheless much of what Kendall has to say about Lollard poetics seems valid.
It is clear from each of the these texts that much is known about what Lollards thought. What is frustrating however is that we do not and cannot know much else about them. Our image of the Lollard is at best a patchwork reconstruction as artificial as Chaucer’s Parson, comprised of documents left by both themselves and their enemies. But based on the extant information and the tantalizing clues that we have we get a fascinating picture of medieval life and can see much of ourselves reflected back to us.
[1] Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.
[2] Ibid., 4-5.
[3] Ibid., 24.
[4] Ibid., 22.
[5] Ibid., 6.
[6] Ibid., 21-2.
[7] Ibid., 144.
[8] Katherine Little, “Chaucer’s Parson and the Specter of Wycliffism,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001), 228.
[9] Ibid., 225-6.
[10] Ibid., 229.
[11] Ibid., 233.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380-1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 3.
[14] Ibid., 9.
[15] Ibid., 3.
[16] Ibid., 62.
[17] Ibid., 20.
[18] Ibid., 11.
In Rita Copeland’s book Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages she examines the way Lollards taught the Bible and Christian morality in contrast to the way those things were taught in the Church ordained scholastic and university systems. Her objective in this book is two-fold: to show that Lollards appropriated ancient anti-intellectual ideas about teaching that had been rejected by the Church and to save these ideas from the obscuring power of history. As she puts it, “Modernity hardly recognizes itself in the Middle Ages . . . What this book offers, however, is a study of issues that were of profound importance for the Middle Ages and that will disappear from our historiographical map if we do not recognize them as being important to ourselves.”[1]
Copeland’s argument is composed of two basic parts. In the first she discusses Lollard pedagogy, focusing on the idea of teaching the “literal sense” of the Bible. She reconstructs the Lollard pedagogy in three ways: through examining court documents of heresy trials which discuss how accused and professed Lollards disseminated their beliefs, by looking at anti-Lollard polemics—most notably those produced by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury—which attack Lollard methods of “corruption” and from referring to research published by other historians, particularly that of Anne Hudson. In the second part Copeland analyzes two Lollard prison narratives written by Richard Wyche and William Thorpe and shows the way they use the methods of the Lollard pedagogical model.
The pedagogical model that Copeland reconstructs employs several methods of instruction. The first and the most important to Copeland is teaching what she calls the “literal sense” of the Bible or stressing what happens in the text on the literal level as opposed to the allegorical level. This relates to the Wycliffite call for translating the Bible into the vernacular; the complaint was that the Vulgate served to mystify the word of God and render it as a tool of hegemony. Similarly, allegorizing the Bible implied that only certain, properly trained people could understand its true meaning. This establishes an intellectual hierarchy within society, one that was threatened by teaching the “literal sense.”
The picture that I present here of lay textuality in the Lollard movement is not framed primarily in terms of Latin and vernacular, but in terms of a structure of dissenting pedagogy . . . Lollard pedagogy was dissenting from ancient traditions of intellectual hierarchy, and especially representations of elementary teaching, traditions that carried with them deeply engrained assumptions about the borders between childhood and adulthood, as these conditions stand for states of political disenfranchisement and political agency.[2]
The point here is that teaching to read for the literal meaning was traditionally the domain of childhood education and thus reading for the literal sense marked one as socially inferior, as having the mental faculties of a child. The Lollard emphasis in teaching the literal sense became a means of challenging that intellectual hierarchy by employing the rejected methods of that hierarchy. To teach the literal sense was to subvert the educational values of the intellectual elite. “. . . [I]t is the work of a dissenting community to challenge the common sense of a naturalized order. The success of Lollardy’s radical pedagogy is that it refused to reproduce the fundamental distinction between childhood and adulthood which had been served, traditionally, by identifying childish reading with the literal sense.”[3] The Lollard heresy therefore was as much a class struggle as it was a spiritual one.
Copeland makes several interesting points in her book. For one thing she makes it clear how the medieval educational model parallels our modern one. We still consider people who are formally educated as being somehow better or more qualified. We mandate that students receive a college education in order to “make something of themselves.” In this sense Copeland succeeds in showing how “issues of profound importance to the Middle Ages” apply to ourselves. “The relevance of modern radical pedagogies to thinking about Lollard models of learning is in fact striking. One might look at [educational theorist Paolo] Freire’s writing and almost see a blueprint for the Lollard’s dissenting pedagogy.”[4] By examining the Lollard model we can see just how modern the Middle Ages were and perhaps even learn ways to shape and not shape our own educational systems.
Underlying Copeland’s argument is another idea that is equally intriguing. The Lollard community, and presumably other movements deemed heretical, was not merely an expression of religious discontent. The Lollards embodied multiple heterodox ideas.
Pedagogical orthodoxies, whose filiations need to be traced through their own long history, were thoroughly naturalized in the environment of late-medieval culture and politics, so much so that they were virtually homologous with religious orthodoxies. In other words, I am suggesting that there are several axes of orthodoxy and heterodoxy that meet in the Lollard movement.[5]
The dissenting philosophy of the Lollards was actually a nexus, a complex network of ideas and social anxieties that converged in the figure of the dissenter.
There are two potential flaws in Copeland’s argument. For one thing there is a danger, if it can be called that, of projecting modern ideas onto the Lollard movement. Although Copeland avoids this issue for the most part, she does hint at it. “The concerns of postmodern educational theory should be of no less relevance or value to our investigations of medieval culture than the concerns of other arenas of postmodernist debate, such as literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and materialisms.”[6] The problem here is that the Lollards did not leave behind a statement of their pedagogical theory. What we can know of it is necessarily imprecise since we have to reconstruct it as Copeland herself does from exterior sources and analysis. We therefore run the risk of filling in the gaps in our knowledge by imputing our own biases to it. The other weakness in Copeland’s argument is that it does not acknowledge a distinction between thought and act. Just because the Lollards valued literalism and expected their members to live by the letter of the Gospels does not mean we should believe they behaved accordingly. As Copeland points out regarding the prison narratives of Wyche and Thorpe, these two men drew attention because they represent “the intellectual who has taken his project of producing knowledge extra muros.”[7]
It is this disparity between thought and action that Katherine Little takes up in her article “Chaucer’s Parson and the Specter of Wycliffism.” Whereas Copeland discusses specifically Lollard ideas of education Little examines Lollard ideas of language reform particularly as they were perceived in the popular imagination. She focuses on the figure of the Parson in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a contemporary representation of the Lollard preacher. The point that she sets out to make is that the apparent disjunction between the way Chaucer constructs the Parson and the seemingly antithetical message of “The Parson’s Tale” reflects the Lollard’s fundamental inability to match word to deed.
Before Little can begin her argument proper she has to acknowledge the debate amongst Chaucerian scholars over whether or not the Parson is actually a representation of a Lollard. Since this issue is not central to her argument she dismisses the debate ultimately as “a relatively fruitless exercise”[8] but not before pointing out that Chaucer wanted his readers evidently to connect the character to Lollardy. Some copies of the Tales contain an “Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale” in which the characters of the Host and the Shipman accuse the Parson of being a “Lollere” because he seems to have a predilection for preaching. As Little says, “In this exchange between the Host and the Shipman, the term ‘Lollere’ is so clearly defined in relation to preaching that we can be sure that Chaucer knew what he was about in using it. While this use certainly does not establish the Parson as a Lollard, it should suggest that Chaucer wanted his readers to think of the Parson in relation to Lollardy.”[9]
Having established this point Little goes on to present her argument which is based primarily on a synthesis of a close reading of “The Parson’s Tale” in relation to other manuals on penance of the period, a comparison of the Parson to other representations of reformed preachers in the contemporary literature—notably John Gower’s Confessio Amantis—and references to the work of other scholars both of literature and history. From all of these sources Little concludes that “The Parson’s Tale” is a record of Lollard anxiety over traditional religious language and the need to have a language for religious purposes. As she explains, “the two versions of the Parson [as he’s constructed by his tale and by the rest of the Tales] reflect an uneasy and unresolved dialectic within lay instruction between, on one side, the demands for reform and, on the other, the limits of clerical language to enact that reform.”[10]
Perhaps the most interesting point that Little makes concerns the Lollard discomfort with the sacrament of confession. According to her the Lollards did not object to confession on doctrinal grounds but because of the language used to articulate confession. As seen from Copeland the Lollards called for a plain-spokeness that emphasized literal meaning. In the case of confession this plainness of speech works to the detriment of the speaker. “Wycliffites systematically point out that confession has been corrupted by the improper use of language: the penitent’s confessional language is forced or seduced from him or her or silenced altogether.”[11] This idea highlights the Lollard problem of thought and act. If a Lollard is to strive for a union of speech and deed, to practice what he preaches, then confession which “generates sinful narratives of desire”[12] becomes a form of sinning in itself. To say it is to do it. Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale,” presenting the “proper” way to confess, thus reflects the Lollard anxiety of clerical language and represents a resolution of that anxiety.
The obvious weakness of Little’s argument lies in the fact that Chaucer’s Parson is a fictional construct. Despite how realistic the character seems or whether or not the character is based on a real person the most we can hope to reconstruct from analyzing the character as a Lollard is Chaucer’s views on Lollardy. We cannot even say with any certainty that Chaucer was a Lollard himself since the explicit references to Lollardy that occur in his work were expurgated from later copies of his manuscripts. Chaucer seems to have gone out of his way to distance himself from the Lollards. However, based on what we know of Lollard ideas regarding language and religious speech and the fact that Chaucer would have known these ideas very well, Little’s argument seems sound. It is also intriguing to consider the Parson as a representation of Lollardy in the popular consciousness and to view the Parson and his tale as a happy medium between orthodox and heterodox language.
Finally, Lollard ideas about language, particularly poetic language, are explored by Ritchie D. Kendall in his book The Drama of Dissent. To be sure, Kendall does not limit his examination solely to the Lollards but discusses later reformist movements as well. As he says, “This is a study of the aesthetic convictions of a diverse group of religious dissenters active in England between 1380 and 1590.”[13] However Kendall presents Lollardy as central to his argument, treating it as the genius loci to those later movements.
Unlike Copeland and Little whose arguments were in the vein of other contemporary research and furthered that research Kendall argues against contemporary research. As he puts it, “I would like to position this work vis-à-vis several areas of current scholarly inquiry that intersect with my own concerns and views.”[14] He presents his book as a response to literary critics, namely Jonas Barish, Russell Fraser, and Richard Lanham, whose work he seems to feel was too biased and which he regards as a “revisionist assault.”[15] Whereas these other scholars Kendall claims collapsed distinctions between the heterodoxical communities, he sets out to show that they developed independently along the same lines and from the same source. This common development is reflected in the groups’ poetics or the way they produced literature.
The main focus of Kendall’s argument is on the Lollards’ and later dissenters’ Platonic disdain for drama. Even though the Lollards strove to practice the values of the Gospels, in effect reenacting the Acts of the Apostles, they disliked drama—i.e. miracle, mystery, and morality plays—because of the drama’s allegorical nature and function. The threat of drama is that people could confuse it for reality, accepting the imitation in place of the real thing. As Kendall puts it, “In the fusion of a transcendent truth to a temporal signifier, the artist seduced his audience into loving the human over the divine.”[16] This disapproval of drama reflects the Lollard disapproval of “dressing up” the Bible in Latin and through exegesis. It also reflects the Lollard disapproval of orthodox ceremony and ritual such as Communion which are essentially little allegorical dramas with the priest playing the role of Jesus.
The important point that Kendall sets out to prove about the Lollards is that they practiced self-definition through negation, defining the self in opposition to the other, which in this case is orthodoxy. They disclaimed the obfuscating power of drama but had to appropriate the tools of drama in order to articulate themselves and their beliefs. “In its early stages Lollardy was forced, like primitive Christianity, to draw much of its theoretical and practical machinery from the work of its enemies. Never allowed to reach its full maturity, Lollardy failed to outgrow its early dependence on the language and instruments of orthodox Christian worship.” [17] This idea dovetails interestingly with that presented by Little that the Lollard call for language reform had to be expressed in the language of the orthodox. Kendall’s point is that for the Lollard to practice his beliefs he had to assume the role of an apostle, thus falling into drama. To make this point Kendall marshals a great deal of evidence from primary sources such as Lollard sermons and prison narratives including that of William Thorpe which Copeland also uses.
Kendall’s argument is compromised ironically by a tendency toward preachiness. In formulating the argument as a response to other scholars there is a persistent danger of it falling into polemic. Kendall acknowledges this tendency, stating, “Although I have attempted to be always cognizant of that dangerous impulse, and have perhaps overreacted with paroxysms of citation and qualification, distortions remain in my treatment of the Lollards—both in terms of the perceived unity within the party itself and between that party and later reformers.”[18] The danger however does not lie in the presentation of his argument but in the way he presents dissenting opinions. It is difficult to see which argument is orthodox and which is heterodox, which provides an odd illustration of Kendall’s point. Nevertheless much of what Kendall has to say about Lollard poetics seems valid.
It is clear from each of the these texts that much is known about what Lollards thought. What is frustrating however is that we do not and cannot know much else about them. Our image of the Lollard is at best a patchwork reconstruction as artificial as Chaucer’s Parson, comprised of documents left by both themselves and their enemies. But based on the extant information and the tantalizing clues that we have we get a fascinating picture of medieval life and can see much of ourselves reflected back to us.
[1] Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.
[2] Ibid., 4-5.
[3] Ibid., 24.
[4] Ibid., 22.
[5] Ibid., 6.
[6] Ibid., 21-2.
[7] Ibid., 144.
[8] Katherine Little, “Chaucer’s Parson and the Specter of Wycliffism,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001), 228.
[9] Ibid., 225-6.
[10] Ibid., 229.
[11] Ibid., 233.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380-1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 3.
[14] Ibid., 9.
[15] Ibid., 3.
[16] Ibid., 62.
[17] Ibid., 20.
[18] Ibid., 11.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
From Chaucer’s Parson to the Country Parson: Proto-Calvinist Lollardy in the Poetry of George Herbert
One of the great debates concerning George Herbert’s poetry is over Herbert’s religious convictions. Specifically the question is whether or not Herbert was a practicing Calvinist. Those who claim that he was base that claim primarily on the fact that the Church of England in Herbert’s day practiced a de facto Calvinist doctrine. Under this doctrine, the reasoning goes, to be Anglican was to be Calvinist. Other more moderate critics say that Herbert either explores many different Christian doctrines in his poetry as a means of finding one that suits him best or that Herbert was a Calvinist who grew to reject a hardline dogmatic perspective. As evidence of this rejection, they cite the fact that Herbert’s work The Temple exists in two separate manuscripts in which the second seems to revise the first in a way that reflects Herbert’s spiritual and philosophical growth. Still other critics claim that Herbert’s moderate Calvinism was closer to Calvin’s own ideas and not the doctrine that was promulgated posthumously in his name. The problem with each of these claims is that they each presuppose that Herbert was a Calvinist. When examining objectively the spiritual ideas presented in Herbert’s poetry, they seem to have more in common with the doctrine of Lollardy, which served as a sort of proto-Calvinism.
As noted, the argument in favor of Herbert being a Calvinist is predicated upon the doctrinal position held by the Church of England in Herbert’s day. Since the late sixteenth century the Church of England was governed by the Thirty-Nine Articles. These articles define the Anglican faith in relation to Roman Catholicism, specifying for example that only certain sacraments are necessary.[1] Many of England’s more extreme Protestant sects, such as the Calvinists, rejected the Articles for not going far enough to separate Anglicanism from Catholicism. For example Article XXV, that which is alluded to above, “did not deny the existence of seven sacraments, but only affirmed that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, being ordained by the Gospels, were sacraments in a different sense from the traditional other five.”[2] In response to this religious conservatism Calvinist-leaning churchmen proposed and eventually adopted the Lambeth Articles which codify Calvinist ideas of predestination. These Articles specify that only certain people are marked for salvation and that those that are so marked are determined by God. Moreover, “these are the tenets that the framers believed would underlie a truly Calvinist Church of England; and these are the tenets that would underlie a truly Calvinist ‘Church’ of George Herbert . . .”[3]
“I: God from eternity has predestined some men to life, and reprobated some to death.”[4] The justification of the Lambeth Articles comes from the Bible. Humanity is tainted by original sin the reasoning goes and therefore is damned or “reprobated.” Only God can grant a remission of sin and God has chosen only an elect group of people to favor with such remission. Therefore only certain people favored by God will be saved.
“II: The moving or efficient cause of predestination to life is not the foreseeing of faith, or of perseverance, or of good works, or of anything innate in the person of the predestined, but only the will of the good pleasure of God.” Instead of basing its authority on dogmatic law as Catholicism does, in which whatever is decreed by God’s representative on Earth is acknowledged by God, this doctrine denies the authority of mediating influences by emphasizing the power of God as an autonomous and supreme being. This doctrine also denies a humanist philosophy that claims that individuals can fashion their own destinies. No one can grant salvation to others nor earn it for him or herself.
“III: There is a determined and certain number of predestined, which cannot be increased or diminished.” God is omniscient, knowing who will—and more importantly who will not—receive salvation. God is also infallible and therefore incapable of being proven wrong or indecisive. No one can change God’s mind or prove him or herself to be more worthy of salvation. Either you are saved or you are not.
“IV: Those not predestined to salvation are inevitably condemned on account of their sins.” Again, humanity is innately sinful and those who are not saved must ipso facto be condemned for their innate sinfulness.
“V: A true, lively and justifying faith, and the sanctifying Spirit of God, is not lost nor does it pass away either totally or finally in the elect . . .” Although crises of faith do occur, once someone is blessed by God the blessing cannot be lost or rescinded. Someone who experiences a true loss of faith never was truly faithful in the beginning.
There are nine Lambeth Articles altogether, all dealing with the same ideas of predestination, that people will either be saved or damned, that God makes that distinction and that people cannot influence God’s decision. Much of Herbert’s poetry reveals an understanding if not an acceptance of this Calvinist doctrine of predestination. These ideas however have some problematic implications which also find their way into Herbert’s poetry. For one thing, if the fate of one’s soul is predetermined why need one engage in virtuous behavior since increased piety will not help him or her achieve salvation? Furthermore, what would be the point of preaching since the preacher would not be able to win souls for salvation?
Consider the Italian sonnet “Redemption,” unarguably one of Herbert’s most recognized poems. This poem appears to contain not only a statement of predestined salvation but also the idea that an active faith is not a prerequisite to salvation.
The poem’s conceit of Jesus as landlord has been widely discussed by critics as has the idea that the “old lease” refers to the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. What has been less discussed is the problem of the seeming antipathy of the poem’s speaker and his unwillingness to keep to the dictates of the old lease. Are the requirements of the old lease too strict? If we read the old lease as representing the Mosaic law then this question is answered easily in the affirmative. The Old Testament law is regarded frequently as harsh and vengeful; even Jesus is reputed to have said that the “old law” is death. However if we examine the poem in its historical post-Reformation context it seems clear that the old lease is the Catholic faith which prevents the speaker’s thriving because it places the Church as a barrier between him and God. By viewing the poem in this way we can argue that the speaker finds the old lease too expensive because it requires him to observe practices that are unnecessary like the extraneous sacraments. If as the Lambeth Articles contend a person’s salvation is predestined then there is no point in spending more than is necessary.
The succeeding stanzas of the poem further suggests reading the old lease as Catholic doctrine:
The final stanza presents the ultimate statement of Calvinist predestination. When the speaker finally finds Jesus on the cross we are told that Jesus “straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died” (14). The poem’s speaker ironically does not have to say a word. His salvation is determined before he asks for it and the terseness of the poem’s final line suggests the effort expended by the speaker in the preceding lines was unnecessary.
Based on this poem and others like it it seems justified for critics to call Herbert a Calvinist. However other poems would appear to contradict the sentiment conveyed here. Consider “The Pulley.” In this poem Herbert seems to articulate the idea that salvation can be achieved through hard work. In fact this poem seems to express what we would call the “Puritan work ethic.”
According to Herbert’s doctrine man is not given everything that God has to offer. God, Pandora-like, has thrown open a treasure chest but closes it before everything is allowed to pour out. The “rest” of the treasure is the greatest part of it: “rest” or relaxation. God decrees that man may never rest but must toil ceaselessly instead. We can again compare this restlessness to Milton’s Adam who as the gardener of Eden must work in Paradise. Why must man work and for what is he working?
God denies man rest because He wants to prevent man from becoming too content. Contentment leads to satisfaction and a sense of sufficiency. If man was content he would feel that he has everything and feel no need to seek for more. He would lose sight of God and work for himself rather than for God. Herbert ends this stanza by stating that both God and man would lose by such an arrangement. It is clear to see that God would lose man but what would man be losing?
The implication that is left hanging by the previous stanza is that a contented man would lose God. This stanza furthers that thought for the meaning of this passage is that the weariness experienced by restless man will draw man to God in search of respite. Weariness is the pulley that brings man closer to God. It is in the making of this ultimate point that Herbert makes an apparent departure from Calvinist predestination. Herbert appears to say that man can work to save himself and elect to come to God which denies the doctrine of the Lambeth Articles.
How can we reconcile these seemingly antithetical ideas of salvation that, for lack of better terminology, I shall call the Predestination Model and the Labor Model?. One explanation is provided by Louis Martz:
There are however two problems with this explanation. For one thing we have no way of knowing when Herbert’s poems were composed or even if the version of the text that was printed in 1633 is actually a revision of the other one. The so-called “early version” may be an alternate or incomplete manuscript. The other problem lies in the fact that The Temple as we have it contains “Redemption” and other apparently Calvinist poems. If Herbert grew to reject Calvinism it seems likely that those poems would have been expunged from the final collection.
Another possibility is expressed by Christopher Hodgkins. Hodgkins points out that Calvinism as we know it is not actually what Calvin had in mind when he wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Many of the ideas that we have come to associate with Calvinism such as the points set forth in the Lambeth Articles and their problematic implications did not originate with Calvin. While Calvin did argue the Predestination Model of salvation he did not claim that faith in that model should lead to the exclusivity or self-righteousness that came to mark at least in the popular imagination the practitioners of Calvinism. “Calvin presents election and damnation as God’s secret business from first to last; the believer’s business is to love all people as God’s image-bearers (ICR 3.7.6-7) and invite all to be his spiritual children. Thus Calvin attacks the parsimonious exclusivity so often attributed to him and to his doctrine.”[9] With this understanding in mind we can begin to reconcile Herbert’s clashing models of salvation. These two models are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Just because one strives for salvation does not mean that one is not predestined for it. According to Hodgkins that proposition is at the heart of true Calvinism and thus “. . . Herbert, in following the Elizabethan middle way, is closer to the heart of Calvin’s ‘Calvinism’ than were many of the reformer’s most ardent English and Continental devotees.”[10]
Another explanation that is more plausible however is that Herbert was not a Calvinist at all. He was more likely a believer of a more specifically English doctrine that easily could be confused with Calvinism, a doctrine that was essentially a proto-Calvinism. This doctrine was that of the Wyclifite or Lollard.
The Lollards were early English Protestant reformers. They were often called “Wyclifites” after John Wyclif who argued for the translation of the Bible into vernacular English. The Lollard doctrine like that of Calvinism was one predicated upon equality. Every human had the same capacity and predilection for sin but they also had the same chances of salvation. Moreover they each had a responsibility to work for salvation and to help their community achieve it. This work was done through a personal knowledge of the Bible and the ability to preach it, the knowledge and ability possessed by Herbert.
The supreme example of the Lollard preacher is the Parson of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Again, the central tenet of Lollardy was that every individual had the right to an education in the Bible and lay preachers had the ability to provide that education. In “The Epilogue of the Man of Law’s Tale,” Chaucer’s Host explicitly accuses the Parson of being such a preacher. The Parson teaches directly from the Bible and by living his own life according to the lessons of the Bible he becomes a living version of the Gospels himself. This is the model of the country parson to which Herbert adheres in his works.
Herbert’s Lollard sensibilities are seen in the preaching style in which he writes his poetry. In poems like “The Sacrifice,” “The Bunch of Grapes” and “Joseph’s Coat” Herbert employs Biblical allusions and conceits in order to convey moralistic messages. His poems act as sermons and it is clear that he is relying on his audience to understand the Biblical references in order to get the meanings of the poems. Herbert uses poetry to sermonize in a way that is delightful and palatable thus spreading the Gospel in a gentler and more reasonable manner than most Calvinist preachers. The confusion of doctrinal ideas that are present in the poetry and the fact that Herbert allowed them to remain also reflect a Lollard perspective. Far from being strictly dogmatic like their Catholic—and later Calvinist—counterparts Lollards encouraged a spirit of free inquiry into religious matters. “The religious questioning that was so crucial to his [the Lollard’s] way of faith, was, in the orthodox mind, reserved for the learned . . . Such a call for obedient silence ran counter to the Lollard’s thirst for intellectual awakening.”[11] Thus the confusion of doctrines is actually a pluralism of doctrines that allows Herbert’s audience to come to God in whatever fashion they find most compelling.
In the end George Herbert is Chaucer’s Parson. The ultimate purpose of Herbert’s poetry like the rest of his life’s work is to bring people closer to God. Like his Chaucerian model Herbert was a country parson that practiced what he preached. What he preached was tolerance, compassion and “Love”: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat” (17-18).
[1] Louis L. Martz, “The Generous Ambiguity of Herbert’s Temple,” in A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton, ed. Mary A. Maleski, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, no. 64 (Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1989), 31.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 33.
[4] Each of the Articles enumerated here are taken from Martz, 33.
[5] All quotations from Herbert come from Mario A. Di Cesare, ed., George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978).
[6] Martz, 36.
[7] Martz, 35-36.
[8] Christopher Hodgkins, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 12-13
[9] Ibid., 14.
[10] Ibid., 13.
[11] Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380-1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 26.
As noted, the argument in favor of Herbert being a Calvinist is predicated upon the doctrinal position held by the Church of England in Herbert’s day. Since the late sixteenth century the Church of England was governed by the Thirty-Nine Articles. These articles define the Anglican faith in relation to Roman Catholicism, specifying for example that only certain sacraments are necessary.[1] Many of England’s more extreme Protestant sects, such as the Calvinists, rejected the Articles for not going far enough to separate Anglicanism from Catholicism. For example Article XXV, that which is alluded to above, “did not deny the existence of seven sacraments, but only affirmed that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, being ordained by the Gospels, were sacraments in a different sense from the traditional other five.”[2] In response to this religious conservatism Calvinist-leaning churchmen proposed and eventually adopted the Lambeth Articles which codify Calvinist ideas of predestination. These Articles specify that only certain people are marked for salvation and that those that are so marked are determined by God. Moreover, “these are the tenets that the framers believed would underlie a truly Calvinist Church of England; and these are the tenets that would underlie a truly Calvinist ‘Church’ of George Herbert . . .”[3]
“I: God from eternity has predestined some men to life, and reprobated some to death.”[4] The justification of the Lambeth Articles comes from the Bible. Humanity is tainted by original sin the reasoning goes and therefore is damned or “reprobated.” Only God can grant a remission of sin and God has chosen only an elect group of people to favor with such remission. Therefore only certain people favored by God will be saved.
“II: The moving or efficient cause of predestination to life is not the foreseeing of faith, or of perseverance, or of good works, or of anything innate in the person of the predestined, but only the will of the good pleasure of God.” Instead of basing its authority on dogmatic law as Catholicism does, in which whatever is decreed by God’s representative on Earth is acknowledged by God, this doctrine denies the authority of mediating influences by emphasizing the power of God as an autonomous and supreme being. This doctrine also denies a humanist philosophy that claims that individuals can fashion their own destinies. No one can grant salvation to others nor earn it for him or herself.
“III: There is a determined and certain number of predestined, which cannot be increased or diminished.” God is omniscient, knowing who will—and more importantly who will not—receive salvation. God is also infallible and therefore incapable of being proven wrong or indecisive. No one can change God’s mind or prove him or herself to be more worthy of salvation. Either you are saved or you are not.
“IV: Those not predestined to salvation are inevitably condemned on account of their sins.” Again, humanity is innately sinful and those who are not saved must ipso facto be condemned for their innate sinfulness.
“V: A true, lively and justifying faith, and the sanctifying Spirit of God, is not lost nor does it pass away either totally or finally in the elect . . .” Although crises of faith do occur, once someone is blessed by God the blessing cannot be lost or rescinded. Someone who experiences a true loss of faith never was truly faithful in the beginning.
There are nine Lambeth Articles altogether, all dealing with the same ideas of predestination, that people will either be saved or damned, that God makes that distinction and that people cannot influence God’s decision. Much of Herbert’s poetry reveals an understanding if not an acceptance of this Calvinist doctrine of predestination. These ideas however have some problematic implications which also find their way into Herbert’s poetry. For one thing, if the fate of one’s soul is predetermined why need one engage in virtuous behavior since increased piety will not help him or her achieve salvation? Furthermore, what would be the point of preaching since the preacher would not be able to win souls for salvation?
Consider the Italian sonnet “Redemption,” unarguably one of Herbert’s most recognized poems. This poem appears to contain not only a statement of predestined salvation but also the idea that an active faith is not a prerequisite to salvation.
Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’old. (1-4).[5]
The poem’s conceit of Jesus as landlord has been widely discussed by critics as has the idea that the “old lease” refers to the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. What has been less discussed is the problem of the seeming antipathy of the poem’s speaker and his unwillingness to keep to the dictates of the old lease. Are the requirements of the old lease too strict? If we read the old lease as representing the Mosaic law then this question is answered easily in the affirmative. The Old Testament law is regarded frequently as harsh and vengeful; even Jesus is reputed to have said that the “old law” is death. However if we examine the poem in its historical post-Reformation context it seems clear that the old lease is the Catholic faith which prevents the speaker’s thriving because it places the Church as a barrier between him and God. By viewing the poem in this way we can argue that the speaker finds the old lease too expensive because it requires him to observe practices that are unnecessary like the extraneous sacraments. If as the Lambeth Articles contend a person’s salvation is predestined then there is no point in spending more than is necessary.
The succeeding stanzas of the poem further suggests reading the old lease as Catholic doctrine:
In heaven at his manor I him sought:The significance of this passage lies not in what it says but in what it does not say and who is not included. The speaker seeks out God directly and on his own. This is not the pilgrim Dante traveling through the universe guided by Virgil or Beatrice. He does not need an intercessory; there is a direct communion between him and God.
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts,
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts . . . (5-11).
The final stanza presents the ultimate statement of Calvinist predestination. When the speaker finally finds Jesus on the cross we are told that Jesus “straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died” (14). The poem’s speaker ironically does not have to say a word. His salvation is determined before he asks for it and the terseness of the poem’s final line suggests the effort expended by the speaker in the preceding lines was unnecessary.
Based on this poem and others like it it seems justified for critics to call Herbert a Calvinist. However other poems would appear to contradict the sentiment conveyed here. Consider “The Pulley.” In this poem Herbert seems to articulate the idea that salvation can be achieved through hard work. In fact this poem seems to express what we would call the “Puritan work ethic.”
When God at first made man,Here, God creates man—and here we should probably read “man” to mean Adam—as master of the world, paragon of creatures, possessor of the world’s riches. We can visualize man easily in this poem as Milton’s Adam whose existence in his pre-fall state of grace is bliss. Herbert then goes on to specify the blessings that God has bestowed on His favored creation:
Having a glass of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) pour on him all we can:
Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span. (1-5).
So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom lay. (6-10).
According to Herbert’s doctrine man is not given everything that God has to offer. God, Pandora-like, has thrown open a treasure chest but closes it before everything is allowed to pour out. The “rest” of the treasure is the greatest part of it: “rest” or relaxation. God decrees that man may never rest but must toil ceaselessly instead. We can again compare this restlessness to Milton’s Adam who as the gardener of Eden must work in Paradise. Why must man work and for what is he working?
For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be. (11-15).
God denies man rest because He wants to prevent man from becoming too content. Contentment leads to satisfaction and a sense of sufficiency. If man was content he would feel that he has everything and feel no need to seek for more. He would lose sight of God and work for himself rather than for God. Herbert ends this stanza by stating that both God and man would lose by such an arrangement. It is clear to see that God would lose man but what would man be losing?
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast. (16-20).
The implication that is left hanging by the previous stanza is that a contented man would lose God. This stanza furthers that thought for the meaning of this passage is that the weariness experienced by restless man will draw man to God in search of respite. Weariness is the pulley that brings man closer to God. It is in the making of this ultimate point that Herbert makes an apparent departure from Calvinist predestination. Herbert appears to say that man can work to save himself and elect to come to God which denies the doctrine of the Lambeth Articles.
How can we reconcile these seemingly antithetical ideas of salvation that, for lack of better terminology, I shall call the Predestination Model and the Labor Model?. One explanation is provided by Louis Martz:
. . . [W]e have two versions of The Temple, the final version of 1633, and the earlyThe fact that there exists two versions of the manuscript would be a plausible way of explaining the shift in doctrine. Herbert may have began his religious life as a Calvinist and then rejected that perspective as he grew older and more experienced. Martz relates this “conversion” of Herbert’s to that expressed in Donne’s work.
version in the manuscript now in Dr. William’s Library, London, which contains only 69 of the 164 poems in the final version, plus six more that were discarded. This early version seems more strongly imbued with Calvinism than the ultimate version,
partly because it lacks most of the strongly eucharistic poems that appear in 1633, and partly because some of its phrasing, later revised, and some of its poems, later removed, have a Calvinist ring, or deal with Calvinist issues.[6]
Donne is dealing here [in his sermons] with the tension between the ‘Lord of Power’ and the ‘Lord of Love’ that represents the central problem of Calvinism, the central problem in the controversies that beset the Church of England in the days of Donne and Herbert, a problem that runs throughout George Herbert’s Temple, and a problem which he, like Donne, resolves in favor of Love, as in ‘The Flower.’[7]
There are however two problems with this explanation. For one thing we have no way of knowing when Herbert’s poems were composed or even if the version of the text that was printed in 1633 is actually a revision of the other one. The so-called “early version” may be an alternate or incomplete manuscript. The other problem lies in the fact that The Temple as we have it contains “Redemption” and other apparently Calvinist poems. If Herbert grew to reject Calvinism it seems likely that those poems would have been expunged from the final collection.
Another possibility is expressed by Christopher Hodgkins. Hodgkins points out that Calvinism as we know it is not actually what Calvin had in mind when he wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion.
It is nearly axiomatic that the zealous disciple is the dead master’s bane . . . Calvin was similarly unfortunate in his designated successor, Theodore de Bèze (Beza), and in many of Beza’s English followers, who created a neo-scholastic, hyper-dogmatized ‘Calvinism.’ Ironically, as Calvin’s name became more and more identified with English Protestantism, Beza departed increasingly from Calvin’s original emphases and even his substance.[8]
Many of the ideas that we have come to associate with Calvinism such as the points set forth in the Lambeth Articles and their problematic implications did not originate with Calvin. While Calvin did argue the Predestination Model of salvation he did not claim that faith in that model should lead to the exclusivity or self-righteousness that came to mark at least in the popular imagination the practitioners of Calvinism. “Calvin presents election and damnation as God’s secret business from first to last; the believer’s business is to love all people as God’s image-bearers (ICR 3.7.6-7) and invite all to be his spiritual children. Thus Calvin attacks the parsimonious exclusivity so often attributed to him and to his doctrine.”[9] With this understanding in mind we can begin to reconcile Herbert’s clashing models of salvation. These two models are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Just because one strives for salvation does not mean that one is not predestined for it. According to Hodgkins that proposition is at the heart of true Calvinism and thus “. . . Herbert, in following the Elizabethan middle way, is closer to the heart of Calvin’s ‘Calvinism’ than were many of the reformer’s most ardent English and Continental devotees.”[10]
Another explanation that is more plausible however is that Herbert was not a Calvinist at all. He was more likely a believer of a more specifically English doctrine that easily could be confused with Calvinism, a doctrine that was essentially a proto-Calvinism. This doctrine was that of the Wyclifite or Lollard.
The Lollards were early English Protestant reformers. They were often called “Wyclifites” after John Wyclif who argued for the translation of the Bible into vernacular English. The Lollard doctrine like that of Calvinism was one predicated upon equality. Every human had the same capacity and predilection for sin but they also had the same chances of salvation. Moreover they each had a responsibility to work for salvation and to help their community achieve it. This work was done through a personal knowledge of the Bible and the ability to preach it, the knowledge and ability possessed by Herbert.
The supreme example of the Lollard preacher is the Parson of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Again, the central tenet of Lollardy was that every individual had the right to an education in the Bible and lay preachers had the ability to provide that education. In “The Epilogue of the Man of Law’s Tale,” Chaucer’s Host explicitly accuses the Parson of being such a preacher. The Parson teaches directly from the Bible and by living his own life according to the lessons of the Bible he becomes a living version of the Gospels himself. This is the model of the country parson to which Herbert adheres in his works.
Herbert’s Lollard sensibilities are seen in the preaching style in which he writes his poetry. In poems like “The Sacrifice,” “The Bunch of Grapes” and “Joseph’s Coat” Herbert employs Biblical allusions and conceits in order to convey moralistic messages. His poems act as sermons and it is clear that he is relying on his audience to understand the Biblical references in order to get the meanings of the poems. Herbert uses poetry to sermonize in a way that is delightful and palatable thus spreading the Gospel in a gentler and more reasonable manner than most Calvinist preachers. The confusion of doctrinal ideas that are present in the poetry and the fact that Herbert allowed them to remain also reflect a Lollard perspective. Far from being strictly dogmatic like their Catholic—and later Calvinist—counterparts Lollards encouraged a spirit of free inquiry into religious matters. “The religious questioning that was so crucial to his [the Lollard’s] way of faith, was, in the orthodox mind, reserved for the learned . . . Such a call for obedient silence ran counter to the Lollard’s thirst for intellectual awakening.”[11] Thus the confusion of doctrines is actually a pluralism of doctrines that allows Herbert’s audience to come to God in whatever fashion they find most compelling.
In the end George Herbert is Chaucer’s Parson. The ultimate purpose of Herbert’s poetry like the rest of his life’s work is to bring people closer to God. Like his Chaucerian model Herbert was a country parson that practiced what he preached. What he preached was tolerance, compassion and “Love”: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat” (17-18).
[1] Louis L. Martz, “The Generous Ambiguity of Herbert’s Temple,” in A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton, ed. Mary A. Maleski, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, no. 64 (Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1989), 31.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 33.
[4] Each of the Articles enumerated here are taken from Martz, 33.
[5] All quotations from Herbert come from Mario A. Di Cesare, ed., George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978).
[6] Martz, 36.
[7] Martz, 35-36.
[8] Christopher Hodgkins, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 12-13
[9] Ibid., 14.
[10] Ibid., 13.
[11] Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380-1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 26.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)