“Some Other Kind of Lore”: Satire and Self-Governance in Spenserian Poetry

Abstract

This article investigates William Browne's use of a poem by the medieval poet Thomas Hoccleve as a tribute to his imprisoned fellow-poet George Wither. It argues that Hoccleve's self-referential poem-sequence The Series plays a wider role in Browne's poem, and Wither's responses to it, than has been realised. Recent scholarship has emphasised the unity of these "Spenserian" poets, and explored their innovative uses of the pastoral genre to express public, political concerns. But Browne's Hoccleve quotation reveals the important role that satire, and its traditional interests in self-governance, played in their work, strengthening recent arguments for these poems' influence on Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The Spenserians used dialogic forms not simply to demonstrate consensus but to explore their differences, and rather than the poetic and political alliance that has been assumed, Browne's ambiguous tribute to Wither may have created a lasting rift. But it also had a more productive legacy in shaping Wither's turn to the psalms. Browne's Hocclevian eclogue helps to uncover the political roots of this project, and of the wider prophetic identity that Wither came to assume.The Shepheards Pipe (1614) opens with an encounter between two live poets and a dead one: William Browne, George Wither and Thomas Hoccleve. Hoccleve, the Lancastrian civil servant who claimed to be Chaucer's literary heir, is the silent partner in this relationship. Discussions of this collection of pastoral dialogues by Browne, Wither and their "Spenserian" poetic associates have paid Hoccleve relatively little attention. 1 Yet The Shepheards Pipe is dominated by Browne's opening eclogue, which is almost entirely comprised of a transcription of Hoccleve's poem 'Jonathas' (c. 1420), presented as an inset "song" performed by Wither at Browne's request.Browne's use of Hoccleve has been viewed as a proto-nationalistic gesture, part of the wider Spenserian project to build a 'kingdom of our own language' identified in Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood. 2 But Wither, who in 1621 was to criticise one of the weaker passages in his own earlier poetry as a 'foolish Canterbury Tale', and later attacked poets who 'keep the fashion / Of elder times', seems unlikely to have shared this goal. Browne's turn to 'Jonathas' was a less predictable move than scholars have assumed, and one whose implications challenge the currently-accepted view of the Spenserians as a 'homogeneous literary community . . . constituted by the equality of friendship'. 3 The 'Jonathas' eclogue provoked multiple responses from Wither, and one by another of the Shepheards Pipe poets, John Davies of Hereford. Satire, a genre whose importance to the Spenserians has sometimes been obscured by their pastoral stylings, is central to these exchanges. Both before and after his relatively brief association with Browne and the other Shepheards Pipe contributors, Wither was a satirist; and it is Roman satire rather than British nationalism, I will suggest, that furnishes the principal mo...