|
Texas Studies in Literature and
Language, Vol. 39, 1997. 230-258.
Country Mouse and Towny
Mouse: Truth in Wyatt
Christopher Z. Hobson Truth is a crucial term in the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt. The word and its derivatives, with closely related terms like "trust" and "faith," and their derivatives and opposites, appear in nearly 50 percent of his poems. These terms frequently clump together, three and four to a poem, although it is equally true that there are major poems raising the issue of truth in which none of them appears.1 Their frequency in Wyatt is an index of the importance of a cluster of ideas: truth in its various senses, particularly the value and power of truth. Wyatt's "truth" has become a touchstone of competing critical methods. Older critical approaches, despite their own differences, have found in the poet's work a stable core of belief, in which speaking truth is central. Whether the core is seen as Tudor humanism, the "inner man," Senecan-stoic disregard of circumstance, religious affirmation, or the stabilizing value of ironic statement, the poems that embody the core of belief are seen as those in which Wyatt lays aside his characteristic "doubleness" and speaks directly. A contrasting strand of New Historicist interpretation has challenged the existence of any such stable core. In Stephen Greenblatt's influential formulation, a Wyatt poem is "not a direct expression of the author's mind," but an instrument "to manifest and augment his power." Hence the ostensible subject -- "the single self, the affirmation of wholeness or stoic apathy or quiet of mind" -- is actually "a rhetorical construction designed to enhance the speaker's power, allay his fear, disguise his need." The real drama of the poems, in such a reading, comes in the inadvertent bleeding through of these fears and needs, which makes it possible to see behind the façade.2 My purpose is to criticize the
polarities assumed in such treatments,
through an examination of Wyatt's career lyrics and satires. While
rejecting the idea that any set of Wyatt poems presents his real
concerns straightforwardly and arguing that Wyatt invariably operates
from concealment, I criticize the counterassumption that finds in him
only a shifty self-presentation. I argue that through extraordinary
poetic craft Wyatt
constitutes a self that is
definable though concealed, and definable through its
concealment. Further, the need for this concealment is itself a thesis
of some of Wyatt's major poems. This discussion of Wyatt points, as
well, to underlying conceptions
about subjectivity and social opposition found in some New Historicist
theorizing. New Historicist interpretation has often argued that
"autonomous self and text are mere holograms, effects that intersecting
institutions produce"; that "the creation of modern subjectivity [lies]
in the necessary failures to produce a stable subject" (Veeser, xiii;
Gallagher, 47). Wyatt, indeed, has served as one vehicle for such
arguments. Simultaneously, much New Historicist criticism has assumed
that a society's structures of power permeate the entire field of
cultural production, so that all cultural works, willingly or not,
reproduce the ruling ideology; in Greenblatt's apothegm, "There is
subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us" ( Negotiations,
39, 65). The issues are of course linked, in that denial of a
relatively stable subjectivity removes one arena in which oppositional
thought could take form. In contention between proponents of this view
and some of their critics has been the degree to which culture reflects
dominant ideology -- whether artistic works can embody a consciousness
that is counter to the ruling ideology, in whole or in part, within the
framework of other powerfully supported cultural norms, such as ethical
or religious values.3 Acknowledging that Greenblatt's
approach "makes no space for change or
for contestation," Louis A. Montrose has formulated a modified New
Historicist position to take account of the differing "interests,"
"social positionalities," and "properties" of the makers, receivers,
and media of cultural communications, and so to recognize "the manifold
mediations involved in the production, reproduction and appropriation
of an ideological dominance" (33n, 22). Montrose wishes to acknowledge
"the relative autonomy of specific discourses and their
capacity to impact upon the social formation, to make things happen"
(23; Montrose's emphasis). Yet there are two problems with these
loosened formulations. The first lies in the phrase "production,
reproduction and appropriation of an ideological dominance." Despite a
nod toward Elizabethan "heterodoxy" (24), this formula still pictures
culture at any moment as a "dominance," thus minimizing the ways it can
be opposed within a larger consensus or given different meanings in
practice. The second, more subtle problem is that of how "discourses"
shift. This problem involves an avoidance of that problematic element
(for New Historicists), the individual and collective self. The idea of
the dominance of a discourse, even when modified by the specification
that other discourses have "relative autonomy," provides no explanation
of how discourses merge, recombine, change the reference and meaning of
their terms, and develop new terms. Such
an explanation requires not merely
the idea of relatively autonomous discourses, but that of
relatively distinct individual and group identities
whose communications or reactions rework them. Though Montrose does not
necessarily share the view that the self is mere artifact, it is not
among the elements of the New Historicist paradigm that he chooses to
recast. To criticize such
approaches, it is not necessary to return to ideas of a presocial,
autonomous self or of art standing apart from social structures. It is
only necessary to recognize that subjectivities shaped by often
crosscutting social contexts acquire their own hardness and resilience,
in varying degrees. A historical period such as the English
Renaissance, marked by increased personal mobility for the elite, by
overlapping intellectual vocabularies -- those of changing Christian
doctrine, classical traditions, courtly politics, courtly love, and so
on -- and by conflicts between public discourse and backstage conduct,
need not produce only a self whose discourse mirrors career
vicissitudes. Such a period may also produce a self that takes defined
form around archaic or nondominant discourses; additionally, and
centrally for my purposes, it may produce one that simply holds back,
creating a second layer of ideas open only to a few. In our own time,
the career of an Andrei Sakharov, and the practice of others in
Communist regimes who kept their own truths while repeating approved
slogans, should remind us of these possibilities. The basic weakness of
New Historicist formulations is not their attack on the notion of an
individuality apart from society. It is that they insist on a concept
of self as vector sum of social pressures. This conception reifies one
aspect of a complex relation -- between social existence and
subjectivity -- into the only determining aspect, just as humanism and
romanticism did, though in the opposite direction. Wyatt's treatment of truth is a
corrective to such conceptions. Neither
confidently resting on inner truth nor uneasily betraying inner
anxiety, Wyatt works through purposeful concealment to present a
"truth" that is primarily a negative social criticism. Its central
messages are that truth and personal integrity are not to be relied on
in a world of power and, in the satires, that neither honest counsel
nor withdrawal is a solution to traditional dilemmas of truth versus
service. Wyatt's characteristic tone of embattled honesty, implying
that the speaker is entangled in false social relations but not false
statements, is thus a surface one; underneath it is the more radical
suggestion that truth is powerless. Wyatt's poems veil truth by
concealing risky meanings under conventional ones, suggesting latenter
(to use Annabel Patterson's term borrowed from Vergilian commentary)
what they deny or slur over on the surface.4 Wyatt's evasions and ambiguities
are a purposeful defense that secures
a genuine subjectivity at the price of careful concealment. The
base-level value of this
subjectivity lies in its power of covert
social criticism. While Wyatt, as a court poet and Henrician diplomat,
does not question the court system's fundamental legitimacy, he does
question its operations, the precariousness of honesty within this
system, and the necessary dissimulation of political life. And he does
so systematically, through art. The only evidence of an art of
indirection, as opposed to simple contradiction between surface and
subtext, is the existence of pattern. Methodical juxtaposition of
different conceptions at distinct levels of text suggests conscious
control. Such a patterning in Wyatt's career lyrics and satires allows
us to observe Wyatt's control of his evasions and allows Wyatt, through
this control, to get away with them. This art of indirection is Wyatt's
truth about truth. Its emblem is the two mice of the second satire, who
are at one level characters in a conventional moral fable, at a second
level the objects of a latent political satire, and at a third, even
more hidden level figures for the slipperiness needed to tell the truth
and survive. Wyatt's
characteristically double way of functioning is found in several lyrics
that have received important recent commentary. Jonathan Crewe's
analyses of "What vaileth trouth" and "Goo burnyng sighes" form an
appropriate starting point, because Crewe starts from New Historicist
conceptions yet challenges them by ascribing Wyatt's evasions to a
consciously dissimulating self. Crewe's concern is with what he sees as
a New Historicist romanticization of potentialities for metamorphosis
and transgression in Tudor-Elizabethan discourses of gender. He
stresses, instead, a conservative resistance to the erosion of
boundaries and an effort to construct a "centered masculine,
aristocratic poetic character" (18). His treatment of Wyatt's erotic
lyrics argues that they construct such a character indirectly, via
purposeful dissimulation, and this is his relevance to my focus on
Wyatt's view of truth. "What
vaileth trouth" and "Goo burnyng sighes" discuss duplicity while
presenting their own truths duplicitously. In the first, Crewe finds a
hidden resonance in the characteristic Wyatt complaint, "against
deceipt & dowblenes / What vaileth trouth" (8-9).5 Under
the surface point that craftiness (line 4) and doubleness prevail over
truth, the pun vail/veil suggests a second level of meaning on which
truth itself works in a veiled way, so that "it, rather than the
obvious deceit and doubleness, emerges as the figure of craft" (30-1).
The poem, then, both displays double levels of meaning and discusses
the need for them, though "veiledly." In "Goo burnyng sighes" the overt
theme is the need for "craft" in
love, but as Crewe notes, "craft" also refers to the poet's art (33-4).
Hence,
a poem on the need for stratagems
in love becomes a comment on truth and stratagem in language. Goo burnyng sighes Vnto the
frosen hert I must goo worke I se by craft
& art "Craft & art" here are the same
as the "veiled" truth of "What
vaileth." The futility of the standard lover's appeal also refers
indirectly to the futility of direct statement in poetry, and the poem
announces, more clearly than the other, a tactic of indirection.7
Crewe's excellent analysis nevertheless misunderstands the final lines
in arguing that they lead only to "an anticlimactic repetition of "Goo,
burning sighes' " that "takes us back to where we started" (34) and
shows Wyatt's predilection for "perverse repetition" (36). The
recurrences of the opening phrase indeed create a surface effect of
endless iteration. But underneath this effect, the refrain changes
subtly in meaning through the poem. In lines 1-5 the sighs are simply
dispatched "Vnto the frosen hert" of the woman; in lines 6-9 they are
directed to her heart but also away from the speaker's heart ("leve me
then in rest I you require / Goo burning sighes"). Finally, in lines
10-15, since the impotent "pitefull plaint & scalding fyer" are
the burning sighs, the conclusion is that assailing with sighs will not
work, there is no place to send the sighs "Vnto," and the speaker's
instruction to his sighs becomes: Go away, cease. "Goo burnyng sighes" is in fact a
poem of resolution; it both records
and enacts a decision to be cold, to cease sighing, and to substitute
craft for plaint. The poem carries out two simultaneous operations: by
circling back verbally it reassures us that we are still in the
conventional courtlylove world of burning sighs and cold hearts; by
changing the meaning of the refrain phrase it moves forward,
undermining that assurance and telling us that the sighs have become
ice. As a statement about language and
verse, "Goo burnyng sighes" is a
comment on the uses of subtlety and
indirectness, and the need for speech that subverts through indirection
rather than "assailing" through open statement. Indeed, the "trueth
& faith" that the lady is charged with abandoning are also
qualities that the lover -- and by extension the poet -- must spurn as
he turns instead to "craft." This analysis, while it takes from Crewe
the emphasis on "craft & art" as elements of Wyatt's poetic method,
departs from Crewe's assessment that Wyatt's masking is merely the
construction of a persona -- that of "crafty strongman" who
"dissimulate [s]" his masculine centeredness through "performances of
clumsiness, weakness, martyred innocence," and the like (27-8).
Instead, this analysis implies at the core of his art a definable self
engaged in self-masking and obsessed with the perils of openness. The sense of a veiled, double truth
and self that emerges from these
poems can be clarified by distinguishing it from the idea of a
clear-cut core of truth signified through irony, as proposed in one of
the best traditional readings of Wyatt, that of Thomas M. Greene.
Greene's overall focus is on Renaissance uses of imitatio to
shape a relation to the past, a conserving tradition that he explores
both in its own terms and in implicit opposition to Derridean emphases
on linguistic instability. Hence, his treatment of Wyatt strives to
find the terms that the poet invests with a stability that resists the
social and linguistic mutability otherwise pervasive in his verse.
Greene points to the centrality of truth in Wyatt's personal ethics,
evidenced in his letters to his son, and to the way this term, in
sixteenth-century usage, encompassed the concepts "truth" and "troth"
-- factual and religious truth, on the one hand, and the truth of one's
pledges, or honesty and faithfulness, on the other (254-5). For Greene,
Wyatt's uses of "trouth" imply a "troth" devalued by amorous and
political duplicity, and a "truth" threatened with devaluation yet
ultimately rescued as transcendent value through irony. Because it
creates a hierarchy of meanings, "ironic statement seems to acquire a
certain stability that resists the attrition of conventional meanings .
. . [and] affirms the integrity of the isolated moral observer" (259).
Greene finds such affirmations in a series of Wyatt statements about
truth and honesty, some examined below: "These proverbis yet do last,"
"Content the then with honest pouertie," and others (258, 262-3). At one level, Greene's distinction
makes a great deal of sense. While
Wyatt frequently subjects the idea of "troth" to ironic devaluation,
truth in the sense of true statement is never directly ironized. A poem
like the familiar "Blame not my lute" shows Wyatt's claim of an
overriding value for truth in this sense. Playing on the lack of truth
as "troth," the poem simultaneously, without using the word, states the
need for truthful speech:
Yet the importance of truth is only the surface meaning, for the injured lover is transparently using the excuse of truthtelling to get back at his mistress. The very insistence with which the poet refers to new examples of faithlessness circumvents this deflection and calls attention to the fact that truth is being valued not for its own sake but as a means of retribution. The poem thus begins to work on two levels. We can accept "Of right it must abroad be blown" at face value, crediting the sincerity of the truthtelling stance and assuming that egotism and misogyny blind the speaker to its retributive uses, or we can regard the poem as indirectly revealing these uses. I am not suggesting that the poem criticizes male vengefulness, but rather that it shows an awareness of the use of truthtelling as mask and tactic. To read only the affirmation of truth's value is to miss this second level. Only by questioning the ironic statement of truth's value, in which Greene would find resistant moral integrity -"Blame not my lute" -- can we penetrate to this deeper and more complex truth. The layering and concealment characteristic of these erotic lyrics is also found in Wyatt's political or career lyrics, to which I now turn. They are exemplified in his epigram "Sighs are my food," apparently written in one of his periods of imprisonment -- either in 1536, when he was jailed along with Anne Boleyn and her accused lovers, or in 1541, when he was accused of treason after the execution of his patron Thomas Cromwell. His life was in real danger on both occasions.
The poem concerns the value and
efficacy of innocence, a quality Wyatt
links with truth in "Who list his wealth and ease retain" (discussed
be
low) and elsewhere. It has been
read as a straightforward assertion of
Wyatt's "innocence," with its apostrophe to Sir Francis Bryan showing
Wyatt's "trust" in him (Muir, 185; Thomson, 275). Such readings do
accurately register its surface content. The poem's apparent confidence
and plainspokenness exemplify qualities in Wyatt's poetry that
impressed at least Surrey among his contemporaries. Surrey quoted the
"scar" remark (probably remembered from Wyatt repetition in his Defence)
in an epigram to Radcliffe -- "Salomon sayd, the wronged shall recure;
/ But Wiat said true, the skarre doth aye endure"; in an elegy he
credited Wyatt with "A hart, where drede was neuer so imprest / To hyde
the thought that might the trouth auance" (Surrey, 93, 98). Yet
forthright as the poem may appear, ambiguity is its hallmark, as
becomes clear when we examine its syntax and construction. At first reading we seem to "know"
what the poem means -- the poet is
in miserable conditions, sure of vindication, but bitter about the
lasting effects of the experience. We may skip over or discount such
salient features as the reversed syntax in line 1, the unclear
reference of "such" in line 2, or the placement of line 4's reference
to hope midway in the list of complaints rather than after them. But
the ambiguities are Wyatt's. The parallel verbal structures in the two
halves of line 1 (noun, verb, possessive, noun) lead us to expect
syntactic parallelism ("sighs" and "drink" as subjects), but the line
resists clarity until we realize that "drink" is the complement. In
line 2 "such" at first seems to be an adjective, and "such music" to be
the music of sighs and tears; but the puzzling questions of why the
clinking of fetters would crave the music of tears (or the reverse),
coupled with the underlying metaphoric structure (food, drink, music:
sighs, tears, clinking), lead to the realization that "such" is a
pronoun, "music" is a dative, and the line is to be read "such (the
sighs and tears) crave the clinking as music." If one is attentive to these
syntactic disruptions that force the
reconsideration of apparent meanings, one will also realize that
"Innocency is all the hope I have" is not "misplaced" among several
lines referring to the poet's miserable circumstances, but rather is to
be read as one of those circumstances, as a shocking, bitter statement
on the powerlessness of truth: innocency is all the hope I
have. The line's placement is a kind of visual metaphor that stymies
the first, easy, consolatory reading: innocency cannot get me out of
prison any more than it can move from line 4 to line 6. The "weather"
of line 5 now acquires a second, political sense: I can only judge by
mine ears the weather at court (on which my reprieve actually depends).
And the apparent confidence of line 7 becomes darkly bitter once we
realize that Wyatt was probably fully aware of the shiftiness of Sir
Francis Bryan: directing the statement to Bryan, among all possible
addressees, suggests the unsureness of vindication.9
In this short poem, then, one comes
face to face both with the
persistent Wyatt persona -- rough, honest, assailed, confident,
dedicated above all to truth -- and with the underlying, contrary
assertion of indirectness and lack of truthfulness. Sighs are my
food is a poem that insistently whispers, I am devious, do not
accept what I seem to say. The masking seen here is similar
to, but goes beyond, Wyatt's
procedures in some of his erotic poems. There, he may introduce
Petrarchan tropes and then violate them in a way that implies a
political subtext ( The flaming sighs, discussed by
Heine-Harabasz [308]); or he will oscillate between erotic and
political meanings before settling into an erotic context that leaves
the political reading as only an undertone ( Cesar when that the
traytour of Egipt).10 But Sighs are my food
uses layered construction not to deflect political interpretation but
to give it purposeful indirection. The same tactic is found in a series
of poems that allude to career vicissitudes -- Who list his wealth
and ease retain, Stand whoso list upon the slipper top, Venemus
thornes, He is not ded, After great stormes, and Mistrustful
minds. These poems, separated in the
manuscripts and presumably written at
different times, form a group only insofar as they deal with political
danger and disgrace. Since Raymond Southall first focused on it in The
Courtly Maker, the most discussed of these poems has been Who
list his wealth and ease retain;
it is also the most explicit. The poem opens with two stanzas adapted
from Seneca on the insecurity of the lives of the great, each ending
with the motto "circa Regna tonat" -- "he [Jupiter] thunders
around thrones." It continues: These bloody days have broken my
heart. The bell tower showed me such
sight By proof, I say, there did I
learn: The final lines state openly what is only hinted in Sighs are my food -neither innocence nor intelligence are any help to the accused. If, as is usually assumed, the poem refers to Anne Boleyn's execution, these lines may also reflect an awareness that the poet's position as Cromwell's protégé and Sir Henry Wyatt's son counted for as much as or more than his circumspect behavior toward Anne in gaining his survival. "Truth" (and the related "sure") is used in the factual sense in this poem to emphasize the inability of truth (in the sense of fidelity) or innocence to assure survival. This point is underlined by the Latin motto appearing at the top of the poem:
The virtues that surround Wyatt's name, innocence, truth, and faith, are those that are of no avail in the final stanza. Together with the following line, My enemies have surrounded me, they form a visual metaphor like that in Sighs are my food: on the one hand they keep the enemies away from Wyatt's name, on the other they are the surrounding enemies (Foley, 44) -- grimly varying the courtly-love trope that the lover's virtues, such as constancy, are also his pain. As a whole, the poem radiates a kind of radical passivity, a sense not of the preferability of low estate, but of the impotence of truth and innocence. It ends in fatalistic resignation, a decision to give over the steering of the ship to God, not out of piety, but because of the thoroughgoing unpredictability of human action.12 None of the other poems in this group is as skeptical about the relationship of truth to political power as this one; indeed, with the exception of the Seneca adaptation Stand whoso list -- an ethical reflection on the courtier's life -- they all profess confidence in or thanks for a return to favor:
These poems differ from "Who list his wealth" not simply on the likelihood of vindication, but on the power of truth or innocence, a more fundamental question. So far as this is the case, they raise again the paradoxical character of Wyatt's verse. As John Kerrigan comments, "A Wyatt poem is typically plain (advertising the sincerity of its self in a world that is otherwise) and extraordinarily opaque (reserving that self to itself)" (7). In the case of Who list his wealth, Kerrigan points out, there is no certainty of its biographical reference, no way to get past "the secretively self-centered poem's defiance of us" (8). The problem, however, goes beyond the "defiance" offered by this particular poem. Juxtaposing all these poems with their distinct attitudes raises once again the question of "self-fashioning," the possibility that all the poems are performances, enactments of stances, and that the Wyatt who seems to speak in a whisper of his dreads is no more real than the bluff, confident Wyatt of "He is not ded." While the juxtaposition does yield the opaque, self-masking Wyatt we are familiar with, it does not at first glance define a central cluster of ideas about truth or specify that those ideas imply a layered speaking, with surface content masking an underlying insinuated content. But on closer
examination, these poems do display such layering, through echoes of
Wyatt's usages elsewhere and through their own ironic undertones. In He
is not ded
the word "trust" (line 4) reverberates with Wyatt's other uses of it in
contexts that reveal the folly of trust. In "Venemus thornes" the same
word, coupled with the phrase "if thes bene true" (my emphasis),
conveys a palpable ironic reservation. These two poems are translated
from Serafino, and comparison with the originals underscores the point:
no equivalent for "if thes bene true" appears in the Italian, and both
poems use the verb "spero." I hope would be the more normal
translation for "spero"; the substitution of "trust" cuts two ways,
making the emotion more definite than in the original but also loading
it with all the freight of Wyatt's other uses of the term: to speak of
trust in a Wyatt poem is almost to predict betrayal.13 In
"After great stormes" Wyatt's twist comes at the end, where he notes
that others are not as fortunate as he and hints at the precariousness
of his own good fortune:
Of these poems only Mistrustful minds, a distinctly minor effort, has no perceptible ironic subtext. The others hint faintly at what Who list his wealth states directly -- directly, yet not openly, for Wyatt appears to have restricted the circulation of this palpably dangerous text.14 Wyatt's erotic and career lyrics, then, establish a pattern of layered attitudes toward truth and its efficacy. This is the pattern played out in the three satires, which, additionally, add a further layer of meaning when read against one another. Here, Wyatt's examination of truth and its relation to power occurs through layering both within and among the three poems. A discussion of Wyatt's "layering" in the three satires can conveniently begin with those amiable creatures, the country mouse and the towny mouse. In the second satire's retelling of the Æsopian/Horatian fable,15 the country mouse approaches her town sister's door "by stelth":
Her pleasure is short-lived, for the cat interrupts their meal:
The fable itself has received less critical attention than the moral reflections that follow it. The fable deals, of course, with the folly of greed, but it also tells another tale told over and over in Wyatt:
The central situation of a character entrapped because of naive hopes reminds us of Wyatt's obsessive concern with betrayed trust. More specifically -- given the apparent composition of the satires at some time after Wyatt's 1536 imprisonment and rustication -- it may suggest the fate of Anne Boleyn and her accused lovers.17 The betrayal of trust is usually,
in Wyatt, a betrayal in courtly love,
and there are overtones of the courtly love situation in the fable. The
timid scratching of the country mouse, the secret partaking of
forbidden pleasures, and the sudden appearance of the cat remind us,
though in a comic fable context, of the often exaggerated accounts of
court sexuality that circulated in such accounts as the Crónica
del Rey Henrico,
in which gentlemen insinuate themselves into bedrooms not their own
only to have the lady excuse herself and go upstairs, where she is
found subsequently with a groom.18 Indeed, the country
mouse's foot scraping the door contains a faint echo -- just the trace
of a footfall -- of another well-known poetic foot in Wyatt, the naked
one in his chamber ( They fle from me, 2; Harrier, 131). At a
different level, the reflections following the fable proper -- "And
blynde the gyde anon owte of the way / goeth gyde and all in seking
quyete liff" (73-4; Harrier, 176) -- recall in feeling a lament
(possibly by Wyatt) over Boleyn's associates: "To think what hap did
thee so lead or guide, / Whereby thou hast both thee and thine undone"
( In mourning wise, 26-7; Rebholz, 255).19 And
finally, the fate of the country mouse, whom we last see "caught . . .
by the hipp" and made to remain "against her will" (66-7), suggests a
scene of imprisonment. While not decisive separately, together these
points seem suggestive enough to have been read topically by
contemporaries. Patterson Fables of Power traces from Lydgate
an "English tradition of political fabling as a form of resistance to
unjust power relations," which competed with the "conventional and
conservative notion that the content of fables was merely ethical"
(47). Patterson does not discuss Wyatt as a fabulist, but her detection
of an
echo of Lydgate The Churl and
the Bird in Sighs are my food makes it clear that he was
familiar with the tradition she has in mind.20 I am not contending that the
entrapment scene in the fable strictly
represents Boleyn's fall; indeed, if at one level the trapped country
mouse would represent Boleyn, at another level she would have to
represent the accused lovers, and at a third level Wyatt himself, who
suffered imprisonment presumably because of his association with
Boleyn. Rather than being directly allegorical, the scene, when read
with contemporary events in mind, seems to refer to the danger and
slipperiness of court intrigues in a way that alludes to the
executions, yet uses the form of a beast fable both to disguise the
reference and to broaden it beyond specific commentary. The fact that
the mouse's downfall comes when she "tripp[s]" reminds us of Wyatt's
Seneca paraphrase on the "slipper top / Of court's estates." Even more
telling is the reference to the cat as "traytour." In the poem's
fictive context, it makes no sense to apply this epithet to an animal
acting according to nature, but as an extratextual reference it could
apply to several of the actors in Anne's downfall, most consistently to
Henry himself; indeed, the cat as king is a conventional identification
in fable (Thomson, 239). Overall, despite the fable's whimsical
tonality, the description of the "sely" mouse surprised by heaven or
"chaunce" and brought low by the "traytour Catt" suggests the same
helplessness in the face of terror and violence as in "Wit helpeth not
. . . / Of innocency to plead or prate" or "Innocency is all the hope I
have." Critical tradition regards
the mouse's fate as condign punishment. Thomson, for example, argues
that by mentioning the country mouse's fright, "Wyatt is again
stressing the mouse's free will, her responsibility for what happens"
(261). On one level Wyatt does take such a stand. Yet even on the
surface, this reading does not seem entirely adequate for a fable in
which -- unlike in Æsop and Horace -- the mouse goes to town
because of
starvation. More fundamentally, this reading stays on the
surface, confining itself to the tale's morally conventional, overt
meaning and ignoring a second, contrary level of reading that suggests
an amoral, anarchic universe ruled by inscrutable "hevyn" and
unpredictable "chaunce" (line 63). Wyatt was no rube; he knew and
presumably accepted "how it is," including that Boleyn had lovers and
that in the existing court system her execution was legitimate. But
this does not mean he was incapable of sympathy for her or her
supposed, perhaps actual, lovers, or of rage and resentment against the
equally culpable "mice" (rats) who knew when and how to get clear. The
second-level point of Wyatt's fable, contrary to the moralism of the
first, is that the world is not divided into guilty and innocent, but
into knowing and "sely" -- a word that combines the senses of blessed,
innocent, defenseless, foolish, and simple.
But if this is the case, the most
corrosive aspect of the fable is the
escape of the town mouse. This takes on a charge all its own: the mouse
who "fled she knowe whether to goo" suggests all those who, in the
downfall of a major power figure, are knowing, nimble, cynical, and
quick enough to change sides or simply make themselves scarce. Wyatt
does not need to mention such people specifically for us to know, from
our own experience, that they exist. Let us now view the three satires
together. As with Wyatt's work
generally, two interpretive traditions exist with them. One finds in
them powerful, perhaps definitive expressions of Wyatt's integrity,
whether derived from settled conviction, a reaction to his court
experiences, or some combination of these. Thus to Southall "the
criterion of inwardness . . . is brought in the satires to the
juxtaposition of two ways of life and to the establishment of a
preference for that which embraces naturalness even in poverty over
that of courtly hypocrisy" ( Courtly Maker, 98). For Greene
these poems embody the "unassailable poise" and "firm moral style" of a
speaker "confident of his unblinking estimates, registering depravity,
hypocrisy, and suffering without hysteria, [and] strong in his
independence" (263, 262). New Historicist readings, to the contrary,
recognize the strength of this voice but find it an ideological one
that slurs over the truth and is challenged by submerged tonalities
that threaten its integrity. Greenblatt, for example, taking the
intended message of "A spending Hand" to be the acceptance of "honest
poverty and occasional adversity" as posed in the final lines,
concludes that the message requires "forget[ting] everything that the
preceding lines have implied"; but, he goes on, Bryan's presence in the
poem, if nothing else, threatens to undo this very forgetting -- a
paradox Greenblatt can explain only by invoking Wyatt's "extraordinary
intelligence, . . . [his] need to give vent in however indirect a form
to his perception of his situation" ( Renaissance Self-Fashioning,
134-5). Greenblatt's assumption that the contradictory meanings which
surface in this poem result from a difficulty in fully "forgetting" is
typical of his and similar approaches. Wyatt is "only too aware that he
has doffed his mask" (Panja, 355), he is "defensive" (Foley, 59, 63,
66, 68, 69), and "what should be solid and unambiguous . . . threatens
to crack apart" ( Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 135).21
I wish instead to treat this
double- or triple-voiced character of the
satires as a deliberate construction, both on the level of the
individual poems and on that of the poems as a set that comment on one
another. Overtly, each of the
satires poses a distinct but related problem of the life of government
service: sycophancy and false counsel in the first, ambition in the
second, corruption in the third. Each poses its own distinct solution
-- withdrawal from court, inner freedom, honest service -- and each
solution is undercut by internal discordances. New Historicist
critics
have noted some of them, always
with the implication that they are
inadvertent. Stephen Foley and Shormishtha Panja, for instance, have
both noticed an unspoken longing for court beneath the rustic aloofness
of the first satire, Myne own Iohn poyntz. Foley points to
Wyatt's acknowledgment of the "clogg [that] doeth hang yet at my hele"
(line 86) as undermining the poem's surface composure: "Wyatt has
claimed all along that his own independent moral judgment is what
"makes" him withdraw homeward, but this claim overlaps with the
suggestion that it has been royal judgment that 'makes' him stay there"
(62). Panja argues that the topos of rural withdrawal itself
was seen by contemporaries as a pose, as evidenced by an aphorism of
Francesco Guicciardini: "Those who say they have voluntarily
relinquished power and position for love of peace and quiet . . . as
soon as they are offered a change to return to the former life . . .
seize it with the same fury that fire seizes dry or oily things" (356).22
Though such moments have been read
as Wyatt's blunders, they can also
be read as Wyatt's art. Guicciardini's epigram surely represented a
fairly common piece of worldly wisdom. Let us assume, in addition, that
Wyatt could anticipate that his first readers would know the
circumstances of his rustication. In this case, for an adroit reader Myne
owne Iohn poyntz
would create its own subtext. On one level the poem would offer only
slightly uncomfortable country pleasures as an antidote to court
falseness; on a second, by deliberately indulging in a discredited
commonplace while inserting quiet reminders of the limits on the
speaker's freedom, it would criticize the antidote as inadequate. Such
a procedure allows Wyatt to present a blistering attack on the vices of
court and a defense of his own integrity in a genre that was familiar,
socially safe, and not taken very seriously. At the same time, it
allows him to suggest that simple withdrawal from political life is not
a real solution to the problem the poem identifies but to do so in a
way recognizable only to those capable of reading below the surface. More so than Myne owne Iohn
poyntz, My mothers maydes
-the mouse fable already discussed in part -- appears to break apart in
the middle, both formally, in the transition from tale to moral, and
substantively, in the thematic contrasts between the two. Subliminally
but strongly, the fable suggests moral anarchy, the ability of the
knowing and agile to get by while the naive are destroyed. Yet its
conclusion -- "[she] had forgotten her poure suretie & rest / for
semyng welth wherin she thought to rayne" (68-9) -- states a
conventional lesson, as does the moral discussion that follows. The
second part, then, seems to try to put a lid on the tensions raised by
the first. Nevertheless the second section does contain reminders of
the world suggested in the first. The opening of this part --" Alas my
poyngz how men do seke the best / and fynde the
wourst by errour as they stray"
(70-1; Harrier, 176) -- seems capable
of "too broad" a reading: people striving to be good can meet disaster
through innocent "errour." In a moment the expected meanings appear:
"the best" means "the quyete liff" (an echo of Wyatt's translation of
Plutarch, Quyete of Mynde), and the "errour" is seeking it
through wealth, power, or lust rather than within oneself (74-99). Yet
momentarily the lament for those who seek the best has seemed to apply
as much to the "honest Wyatt" persona as to unscrupulous courtiers and
to remind us that the mouse was not wicked but only "sely." Reading the
conventional meaning back into the opening phrases does not fully erase
the first impression. Moreover, even the conventional moral has
disturbing overtones if the fable is read topically: it suggests that
Boleyn and her accused lovers may have been guilty only of "errour" and
further that honest error can lead to downfall, which a better
knowledge of the back passages of the "town house" might avert. Overtly, then, the fable presents a
possibly ambiguous situation to
which the commentary gives a conventional gloss; like some of the court
lyrics, this poem opens on one plane and seeks closure on a safer one.
Tonally, too, the voice that recalls the mother's maids and addresses
John Poins remains outside the fable's ambiguities. Yet to take this
voice as the satire's true speech is to ignore the "mood-voice
dichotomy" found in many Wyatt poems, the existence of a disturbed
underlying mood constituted by the poem's overall construction and
distinct from the confident surface voice (Panja, 348, 354-61).
Additionally, while the moral provides a comment on the fable, the
fable also comments by implication on the moral, so that at a second
level the safe moral itself is called into question. The commentary,
for example, invokes the "uneasy lies the head" topos to argue
that true quiet of mind is to be preferred even to kingship: "tho thy
hed were howpt with gold / sergeaunt with mace hawbert sword nor knyff
/ Cannot repulse the care that folowe should" (77-9; Harrier, 176). But
the lines unavoidably remind us of Anne's "hed" and the officers and
instruments that removed it, and so raise again the fable's topical
associations and its more worldly law: the survival of the seamy and
fraudulent. That is the topic of
"A spending Hand." The satire, as we understand, denies the
worldly-wise recommendation of corruption that it seems to affirm; the
seemingly naive persona of Bryan is the one we are expected to identify
with, and do. Bryan's statement of the ideal of service -- "Yet woll I
serve my prynce my lord & thyn / and let theim lyve to fede the
panche that list / so I may fede to lyve both me & myn" (25-7;
Harrier, 184) -- has a ringing quality that lifts it out of its satiric
context and seems that of personal statement. Indeed, the tone is the
same as in "Tagus fare well," which also seems to voice a personal
credo: "My kyng my Contry alone for whome I lyve / of myghty love the
winges for this me gyve" (7-8;
Harrier, 211). In contrast to the
first two satires, then, A spending Hand
affirms the value of government service, in a way that seems very much
Wyatt's own. It serves, further, to raise the issue of truth and its
uses: who so can seke to plese We have no trouble separating "
Wyatt's" advice from Wyatt's truth
-truth does go in misease (36), but that does not convince us to flee
it for wealth and ease (34). We do not hesitate to reject, with
"Bryan," the speaker's advice to be corrupt or to take the speaker's
final bitter admonition to accept "honest pouertie . . . And for thy
trouth surntyme aduersitie" (86-8) in a positive sense. But several factors complicate the
seeming simplicity of the final
advice. The first is the actual character of the fictive addressee, Sir
Francis Bryan. As several readers have noted, the real Bryan was a
practitioner of most of the specific vices that his fictitious self
rejects, including career marriage, sycophancy, and procuring (
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 135; Panja, 358-9;
Foley, 74-5). David Starkey has filled out our knowledge of Bryan's
character and historical role, noting that in addition to his vices he
embodied certain aspects of the courtier ideal: he was cultured,
well-mannered, and frank, daring to "boldly speak to the king's Grace
the plainness of his mind," in the words of a contemporary ( Intimacy
and Innovation,
102). Starkey considers Bryan's frankness as the real target in the
third satire, which he reads as a critique of Castiglione's myth of the
courtier as honest counselor: the point of the poem is that "in most
respects Bryan's character was bad enough for him to be a thoroughly
successful courtier," yet "[u]nfortunately . . . he spoke his mind, and
this glimmer of virtue . . . would destroy him" ( The Court,
238).23 Attractive as this gloss is,
Starkey does not show that Bryan's
downfall was due to open speaking, and indeed the kind of unbridled
speech to Henry that Bryan was famed for is not what Wyatt means by
"trouth." As Starkey shows elsewhere, Bryan was an opportunist who "had
swung wildly from being an enthusiastic supporter of Anne during her
ascendancy to a determined opponent during her decline" ( Intimacy
and Innovation, 114).24 In short, he was the type of a non-truthspeaker
-indeed a towny mouse. Either Wyatt is truly "forgetting" all this, or
the true point of Bryan's presence in the poem lies precisely in the
double meaning that becomes possible by giving Wyatt's assumed virtues
to a
character who in reality was an
opportunist and timeserver. If, at the
surface level, Wyatt intends to idealize himself in the character of
Bryan, then the real character of Bryan is a warning that the issue is
more complicated. It serves as a warning that the positions of the
fictional Bryan are not to be taken at face value, that the real
message is something else. The point then is not that speaking his mind
destroyed Bryan, but that such behavior would destroy Wyatt. A second indication that the poem
is really concerned with
dissimulation rather than openness lies in the mode of speech with
which A spending Hand begins: A spending Hand that alway
powreth owte The proverbs function as more than
homely truths that are misused by
the Wyatt character. In the poem's development, the first becomes the
basis for "Wyatt's" plea in favor of corruption; the second is turned
into an argument against government service and in favor of retirement,
an idea it is the poem's actual intention to rebut. Yet the proverbs
themselves are not being questioned; their place is sure. What
the poem does is to exalt a certain mode of speech as true and lasting,
then to systematically show how this kind of speaking can be used for
corrupt purposes. In doing so it shows that its own speech is not to be
trusted, that "trouth" is not what is said to be true but what is found
by looking behind the surfaces of language. The final instance of layered
speech in "A spending Hand" occurs in the
closing lines, already referred to, which recommend accepting "for thy
trouth sumtyme aduersitie" (88). This statement has a quite different
force if it is read on the surface, where the poem's somewhat jocular
tone encourages us to understand it as mere occasional inconvenience,
or with a full awareness that in Wyatt's life (and not only his)
"sumtyme aduersitie" refers to imprisonment and the danger of
execution. We do not merely supply this sense from knowledge of Wyatt's
biography. The phrase itself is a signpost that points silently to
other Wyatt poems on adversity. Two of these indeed echo the word
"sumtyme": He is not ded that sometyme hath a fall; I trust
somtyme my harme may be my helthe
(see citations above). In pointing to this group of Wyatt poems, the
"adversity" line points also to their divergent views on truth -- as
shield ( Mistrustful minds)
or as none, even as enemy ( "Who list his wealth and ease retain"). It
alludes, then, to these poems' uncertainty about what speaking the
truth may bring. Sumtyme aduersitie describes, too, the country
mouse caught by the "traytour Catt," while "honest pouertie" recalls
her rural starvation; thus the couplet notes the unpalatable choices
she faces and should also remind us of the unequal success of the two
mice in escaping peril. Hence, it points in the contrary directions of
luck and skill; if the "sely" mouse was overcome by "hevyn" and
"chaunce" -- and if this suggests that other Wyatt recommendation,
"Bear low, therefore, give God the stern" -- the town mouse escaped
through skill, not honesty. The reference to "aduersitie," then,
negates its own cheery surface and opens up conflicting perspectives on
how to meet adversity. Finally, as
Wyatt has told us before, a crucial skill is to be able to ask "What
vaileth trouth?" and to understand the implied answer: "I must goo
worke I se by craft & art." Taken in isolation, the ending to "A
spending Hand" appears straightforward, conventional, unexceptionable:
speak truth and accept the consequences. Taken in conjunction with the
lyrics of adversity and the second satire's tale of the mice in
adversity, it raises the issue of craft and craftiness. Out of all
these poems emerges a second level of meaning, not overtly stated but
visible in their conjunction: while the poet may empathize with the
"sely" country mice, he is determined not to be among them. He means to
be a survivor and therefore to speak behind veils. Each of the satires, then, exists
on (at least) two levels. There is an
overt, relatively conventional satire based on classical and
contemporary models, focusing on such topics as the sycophancy and
corruption of court life and the follies of ambition. And there is a
hidden, far more radical satire addressing the linked questions of
whether it is possible to speak the truth directly and whether survival
depends on truth or -- as the poems suggest latenter -- on wit,
canniness, and ability to maneuver. When the satires are considered
together, their layered quality is
reinforced; they form a dramatic enactment in which each criticizes the
solutions overtly recommended by the others. In "Myne owne Iohn
poyntz", as we know, the overt solution is country retirement. This
solution is criticized in My mothers maydes through the
alternative solution -- inward peace -- and more directly in A
spending Hand
with the rejection of the barnyard and its swine who "chaw the tordes
molded on the grownd" (19). In turn the solutions of both the first two
satires are criticized by the reaffirmation of the life of service in A
spending Hand.
But this solution in its turn has been nullified already: when the
poems are read together, the powerful "yet woll I serve my prynce" is
attacked by the first satire's equally powerful I cannot frame my
tune to fayne
(19) -- equally powerful, and yet
deceptive, for Wyatt is always doing just that. More strongly than
anything within A spending Hand itself, the justifications for
leaving court in Myne owne Iohn poyntz
remind us that speaking truth in court is impossible, that "for thy
trouth sumtyme aduersitie" is not even on a minimal level a statement
about giving honest counsel but one about the terrible consequences of
truthsaying. When all three poems
are considered together, it is apparent that the long string of
feignings that the speaker rejects in the first -- too easily, as that
poem's subtext and the later poems both show -- are what save the town
mouse in the second and what appear as ironic recommendations in the
third. A dramatic progress occurs by which the idea of framing one's
tune to feign becomes more and more central and by which we finally
realize that the third satire does not offer a solution, but a dilemma:
"frame your tune" or get out, losing influence and risking imprisonment
and death. Together, the three poems form a negative criticism of the
social "world" alluded to in the final lines of A spending Hand
-- "in this worould now litle prosperite" (90) -- and an exposure of
the weakness of 'trouth." There is no positive solution, in the sense
of a formula that allows service to the state and the speaking
of truth; the solution is a series of contingent, qualified ideas that
are implied rather than stated: "Yet woll I serve my prynce,"
swallowing the guff and telling the truth only by subterfuge, by "craft
& art." The country mouse and
town mouse define the issue of truth in Wyatt. This is so in two
distinct, though related, ways. First, it is essential to the satires
-- and much of the rest of Wyatt's poetry -- that they function on two
levels, that the underlying targets remain obscure and layered. To
write more openly would have been to act as a country mouse, and Wyatt
is very much a town mouse, determined to survive in the world of power
where only town mice can. He died not as the king's prisoner but on the
king's service, and all his formidable "craft & art" were employed
to this end. This Wyatt --
tough-minded, aggressive, canny -- emerges from the defense speech he
prepared (but may not have delivered) in 1541. The speech sheds a
notable light on Wyatt's poetic procedures. Wyatt, in brief, was
defending himself against charges of disloyal speech and treasonable
contact with the king's enemies (Cardinal Pole). He answers the charges
in a way that is legalistic and contemptuous at the same time: Reherse the lawe, declare, my
lordes, I beseke you, the meaninge
therof. Am I a traytor by cawse I spake with the kinges traytor? No, not for that, for I may byd
hym "avaunte, traytor" or "defye hym, traytor" . . . . What I mente by yt [sending an
emissary to Pole] ys declared vnto you:
it was lyttell for my avayle, yt was to vndermynde hym, yt was to be a
spye ouer hym. Yt was to lerne an enimmies councell . . . . The confidens put in my affares
is for you to acquyte me. And yt is an
nawghtie fere yf any man have any suche, to thynke a queste dare not
acquyte a man of treason when theie thynke hym clere; for yt were a
fowle sclaundere to the kynges maieste. God be thanked, he is no tyrant
. . . . He will but his lawes and his lawes with mercie. . . . . . . put that I were the
naughtieste ranck traytor that ever the
grounde bare, dothe any man thynke that I were so folysshe, so voyde of
wytt, that I wolde have tolde Bonar and Haynes [his accusers] . . . ? .
. . I [am] not so veri a fole . . . (Muir, 190, 194, 208, 197) Wyatt here both advertises and
practices his approach to truth. He
makes clear that he knows how to use spies -- to practice deception to
learn the truth. He rehearses the law, but knowingly, not naively: on
the right to acquit he offers what he has good reason to know is at
best a half-truth about Henry but one that no one will dare contravene.
Knowing truth and conscience are not enough, he uses a layered,
lawyer's defense: he is not guilty, but assuming arguendo that
he is . . . and crossing from the assumed territory in which treason is
unthinkable to the real political territory he shares with his judges,
in which anyone may think treason, Wyatt argues that the very
possibility of guilt acquits him: he would not be so stupid as to tell those
people. It is a bravura performance in which truth exists on different
levels at once, levels Wyatt negotiates with ease. As such, it both
demonstrates and comments on the different levels of speech that exist
in the poems, particularly the satires. But the country mouse and town
mouse do not merely emblematize the
layers of speech in Wyatt's poems; in addition, the acts of concealment
that they represent are the subject matter of much of Wyatt's verse.
This is true in relation to both their political meaning and their
aesthetic form. Politically, the satires take
place, as David Starkey has argued, on the common ground also occupied
by More Utopia and Castiglione Courtier, that of the
dilemma between the court and humanism, between service to the state
and devotion to truth ( Starkey, The Court,
234). The first satire's long list of courtly requisites -- cloaking
the truth, calling craft counsel, wresting the law, etc. ( Myne
owne Iohn poyntz, 20, 33, 34) -implicitly endorses Hithlodaeus's
view (in Book I of Utopia) that "there is
no place for philosophy in the
councils of kings" and rejects as
fantasy More's alternative -- "You must strive to influence policy
indirectly, urge your case vigorously but tactfully, and thus what you
cannot turn to good, you may at least make as little bad as possible"
(35, 36). What is new in Wyatt's treatment is the recasting that occurs
between the first and third satires, whereby the traditional opposition
between philosophy and state service is accepted but not resolved, and
the veiling of truth is accepted as the cost of the ideal of service.25
The third satire, and also "Tagus fare well," speak eloquently of the
ideal; the pattern by which the first satire comments on the third
speaks by implication of the costs. Wyatt's uneasy answer to the court
service dilemma, then, agrees to lie, while the poems conspire with the
penetrating reader to make this clear. And it is exactly this emphasis
on the perils of truth that constitutes Wyatt's most radical criticism
of the court world he inhabits. Aesthetically, the satires have
been read either as standing firm on
their own surface content -- advertising personal integrity as the
answer to courtly intrigue -- or as inadvertently revealing the career
ambitions and unresolved resentments beneath this surface. Neither view
is tenable -- the first because the satires themselves criticize it,
the second because the poems really demand not an act of "forgetting"
(Greenblatt) but one of remembering: they advance a set of mutually
exclusive solutions which they criticize by the comments they make
within themselves and upon one another. Once this pattern is perceived,
it is seen to depend not on unconscious slippages but on that purposive
ordering of language that we call art. Hence, through "veiling" his
truth Wyatt shows that a personal core of integrity exists, that truth
matters and is of value in his own life, and yet his emphasis lies
elsewhere -- on the need to keep that core shifting and elusive, to
conceal its workings. To return to
the debates provoked by criticisms of the idea of the autonomous self,
Wyatt's poems indeed confirm that the self is not constituted apart
from its social engagements. Leaving aside the erotics of his poems,
which has not been my concern, Wyatt's identity is powerfully
constructed on the basis of government service, within the world of
court intrigue that he does not, indeed, see as the only possible arena
but that he knowingly affirms as the most worthwhile. The game of
service and power is the one he knows and wills. But neither is Wyatt's
integrity reducible to mere mask. To the idea that the self is mere
"hologram" (Veeser), that subjectivity is constituted in "the necessary
failures to produce a stable subject" (Gallagher), the poems give
answer with their extraordinarily tenacious acts of concealment, tacit
disclosure, and clandestine social criticism of a court that makes
impossible the kind of truth they seem to affirm. The poems thus
explode the facile opposition between a humanist-romantic transcendent
self capable of criticizing society because it is presocially
constituted and a New Historicist
self incapable of genuine criticism because it consists only of
successive self-fashionings. They reveal, instead, a self socially
constructed yet ultimately consolidated as a stubbornly cohesive
entity. Out of all the contradictions of its society -- within the
court world between the demands of truth and camouflage, and between
that world and the world of ethics and precept drawn from religious and
classical sources that are also part of its social construction -- this
socially constructed self fashions a hidden integrity out of its
adherence to and veiled criticism of a corrupt system. In so doing, Wyatt defines not
just a Tudor, early modern self, but an
early version of a recognizably modern self: the real-world self
constituted in social systems that reward deceit and concealment. In
the decade following the collapse of one of those systems, in Eastern
Europe and the ex-USSR, we should not need to be reminded that they
have been characterized, among other things, by the construction of
noncompliant selves behind stances of conformity. This consideration
enlarges the bearing of my discussion. New Historicism originated in a
period of the apparent solidification of systems that demanded the
limitless malleability of self. To some extent it bears the marks of
this birth; it accepts too easily the idea of the social as an
all-enveloping matrix in which the self is the determinate result of
dominant (and perhaps also other) discourses. We should now know, from
recent history, that this model is over-simple. Not only individuals
but -- far more importantly -- large social groups in the onetime
"Soviet bloc" performed acts of concealment and covert social
self-definition that weakened the ruling systems and undercut the power
of official ideology. These points
define the larger significance of the debate over Wyatt's "truth."
Wyatt's speech testifies finally to the possibility of outwitting the
censor and hence to the inability of systems that seek the full
domination of culture to achieve it. The story of dominant discourses
has been told, challenged, and concessively defended. What needs to be
recognized is the formation of discourses that are resistant, even
through self-concealment, and this is the tale told by the town mouse's
survival to tell the tale of town and country mouse. State University of New
York Old Westbury, New York
WORKS CITED
Buzacott, Martin. "A Boethian Analogue for Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'Who List His Wealth.'" Notes and Queries, n.s. 31 ( 1984 ): 163-4. Crewe, Jonathan. Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 . Cullen, Patrick. Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970 . Daalder, Joost. "Seneca and Wyatt's Second Satire". Études Anglaises 38 ( 1985 ): 422-6. -----. "Wyatt and 'Liberty.'" Essays in Criticism 23 ( 1973 ): 63-7. -----. "Wyatt and 'Liberty': A Postscript". Essays in Criticism 35 ( 1985 ): 330-6. -----, ed. Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 . Foley, Stephen Merriam. Sir Thomas Wyatt. Boston: Twayne-G. K. Hall, 1990 . Friedman, Donald M. "The 'Thing' in Wyatt's Mind". Essays in Criticism 16 ( 1966 ): 375-81. Gallagher, Catherine. "Marxism and the New Historicism". The New Historicism. Edited by Aram Veeser, 37-48. London: Routledge, 1989 . Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 . -----. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 . Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982 . Guicciardini, Francesco. Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi). Trans. by Mario Domandi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972 . Halasz, Alexandra. "Wyatt's David". Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 ( 1988 ): 320-44. Hangen, Eva Catherine. A Concordance to the Complete Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941 . Harrier, Richard. The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975 . Heine-Harabasz, Ingeborg. "Courtly Love as Camouflage in the Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt". Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 14 ( 1982 ): 305-13. Kerrigan, John. "Wyatt's Selfish Style". Essays and Studies 1981. Edited by Anne Barton , 1-18. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1981 . Mason, H. A. Editing Wyatt: An Examination of Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Cambridge: Cambridge Quarterly, 1972 . -----. Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period. London: Routledge, 1959 . Montrose, Louis A. "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture". The New Historicism. Edited by Aram Veeser, 15-36. London: Routledge, 1989 . More, Thomas. Utopia. Edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 . Muir, Kenneth. Life and Letters of Sir
Thomas Wyatt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963 .
Norbrook, David. "Life and Death of Renaissance
Man". Raritan 8 ( 1989 ): 89-110. Panja, Shormishtha. "Ranging and Returning: The
Mood-Voice Dichotomy in Wyatt". ELR 18 ( 1988 ): 347-68. Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and
Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern
England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984 . -----. Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing
and Political History. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991 . -----. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to
Valry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987 . -----. Shakespeare and the Popular Voice.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1989 . Rebholz, R. A., ed. Sir Thomas Wyatt: The
Complete Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978 , rept. 1988. Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. Tottel's
Miscellany (1557-1587). 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1928 . Sinfield, Alan. "Power and Ideology: An Outline
Theory and Sidney's Arcadia". ELH 52 ( 1985 ): 259-77. Sorge, Thomas. "The Failure of Orthodoxy in
Coriolanus". Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and
Ideology. Edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor , 225-41.
New York: Methuen, 1987 . Southall, Raymond. The Courtly Maker: An
Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and His Contemporaries. New York:
Barnes and Noble, 1964 . -----. "'Love, Fortune and My Mind': The
Stoicism of Wyatt". Essays in Criticism 39 ( 1989 ): 18-28. Starkey, David. "The Court: Castiglione's Ideal
and Tudor Reality". Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
45 ( 1982 ): 232-9. -----. "Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of
the Privy Chamber, 1485-1547". The English Court: from the Wars of
the Roses to the Civil War. Edited by David Starkey et al., 71-118.
London and New York: Longman, 1987 . Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of. The Poems of
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Edited by Frederick Morgan Padelford.
Revised ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1928 . Thomson, Patricia. Sir Thomas Wyatt and His
Background. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964 . Veeser, Aram, ed. The New Historicism.
London: Routledge, 1989 . Whigham, Frank. Ambition and Privilege: The
Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984 . -----. "The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Suitors'
Letters". PMLA 96 ( 1981 ): 864-82. |