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ABSTRACT
Sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers were preoccupied with reflecting on the nature of the mind. A vast array of authors seized upon the opportunities offered by new and established literary genres to explore the place that the mind held as a governing force of the human individual, but little attention has been paid to the portrayal of minds suffering from creative frustrations of a non-romantic nature. My article establishes the importance of this literary topos in respect to Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay (1573), Nicholas Breton’s A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers (1575), and George Gascoigne’s The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575). I explore the prefatory materials of each collection to reveal their shared concern with the ways that the mind can be corrupted, and perhaps cured, by the labor of poetry creation. More specifically, I trace the notion of the bruised brain as it appears in the prefatory poems of Whitney’s Nosgay to Gascoigne’s Posies to establish new points of connection and potential influence between these authors, in addition to shedding new light on an underappreciated aspect of Elizabethan poetic culture.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Helen Hackett, The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 286–87.
2 Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), “Sonnet 44,” line 2. Anne Ferry’s The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) was an influential study of this key feature of Renaissance poetry.
3 Kirk Melnikoff, “Jones’s Pen and Marlowe’s Socks: Richard Jones, Print Culture, and the Beginnings of English Dramatic Literature,” Studies in Philology, 102.2 (2005): 138.
4 Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 223. For recent studies of prefatory and paratextual material, see Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai, Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2018), esp. 27–76; Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, eds. Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
5 Richard A. McCabe, ‘Ungainefull Arte’: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 85.
6 Mary Ellen Lamb’s and Dana E. Lawrence’s work sheds light on the correlation between Hugh Plat’s sententious Floures of Philosophie (1573) and Whitney’s Nosgay. See Mary Ellen Lamb, “Isabella Whitney and Reading Humanism,” in Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation, ed. Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 43–58; Dana E. Lawrence, “Isabella Whitney’s ‘Slips’: Poetry, Collaboration, and Coterie,” in A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Phillippy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 119–36.
7 Sarah C. E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Anthologizing Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” in Editing Early Modern Women, eds. Sarah C. E. Ross and Paul Salzman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 216. To date, the most comprehensive edition of Whitney’s work is Danielle Clarke’s Renaissance Women Poets: Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer (London: Penguin, 2001). Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull’s essay in this present collection of Women’s Writing “‘I must request you spoyle them not’: The Reading, Reception, and Collecting of Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay, c.1573–1871” offers new information on how Whitney’s poetry was interpreted and anthologized through the 1600s–1800s, 101–24.
8 For an illuminating recent study of Whitney’s career and responsiveness to literary trends, see Lindsay Anne Reid, “The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint,” in Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics, ed. Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith (London: Palgrave, 2020), 89–114.
9 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye (London, 1573), sig. E2r. STC 25440. For recent studies of this poem, see Laurie Ellinghausen, “Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s ‘A Sweet Nosgay’,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 45.1 (2005): 1–22; Paul Gleed, “‘I lov’de thee best’: London as Male Beloved in Isabella Whitney’s ‘The Manner of her Wyll’,” The London Journal, 37.1 (2012): 1–12; Jill Ingram, Idioms of Self Interest: Credit, Identity, and Property in English Renaissance Literature (London: Routledge, 2006), 73–98; Helen Wilcox, “‘Ah famous citie’: Women, Writing, and Early Modern London,” Feminist Review, 96 (2010): 20–40.
10 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E3v; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1993), 303.
11 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E8v.
12 The potentially punning and semantic conflation between these words is also reinforced by the fact that the word posies “has as its root the same root for poetry, the Greek word poieisin (‘to make’).” Miriam Jacobson, Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 142. Thomas Becon’s A Pleasaunt newe nosegaye (London, 1542) represents an example of the scriptural posies that were also compiled by authors during the period.
13 Danielle Clarke, “Mid-Tudor Poetry,” in The Oxford Handbook of Poetry in English, vol. 4, eds. Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 432.
14 This collection is sometimes attributed to Nathaniel Baxter (who begins his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1569), but Jean Robertson has, to date, made the most convincing case for Breton’s attribution: Jean Robertson, ed. Nicholas Breton: Poems Not Hitherto Reprinted (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1967), xxxiii–xxxvii.
15 Nicholas Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers (London, 1575), sigs. A1r–v. STC 3695.
16 Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, sig. A1v.
17 Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, sig. A1v.
18 Michelle O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer must, haue somewhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books,” Women’s Writing, 26.1 (2019): 28.
19 Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, sig. A1v.
20 Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, sig. A2r.
21 Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, sig. A8r.
22 Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, sig. A8r.
23 O’Callaghan, “Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books,” 26.
24 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sigs. A4r–v.
25 Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, sig. A1v.
26 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A4v. Patricia Vance rightly notes that for Whitney, “as for humanist theorists of the period, the labour exerted on the raw material [Plat’s philosophical flowers] is the element that turns it into something new.” Patricia Vance, “Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay,” in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 99.
27 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A4v.
28 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sigs. A4v–A5r.
29 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5r.
30 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5r.
31 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5r.
32 Whittney Trettien, “Isabella Whitney’s Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship, and the Early Modern Miscellany,” JMEMS, 45.3 (2015): 515. Trettien offers an illuminating study of the interrelationship between botanic and textual slips in early modern English culture.
33 Breton, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, sig. A1v.
34 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A4v.
35 Lawrence, “Isabella Whitney’s ‘Slips’: Poetry, Collaboration, and Coterie,” 123–24.
36 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A4v. Ellinghausen notes that Whitney refers to a famed meeting between a labourer and Artaxerxes, taken from Plutarch’s Lives. See Ellinghausen, “Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s ‘A Sweet Nosgay’,” 6.
37 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5r.
38 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5v.
39 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5v.
40 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5v.
41 Richard J. Panofsky, ed. The Floures of Philosophie (1572) by Hugh Plat (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints) 1982, sig. L4v. All future references to Plat’s work will cite the signature series of this facsimile edition (STC 19990.5).
42 See Kirk Melnikoff, “Isabella Whitney Amongst the Stalls of Richard Jones,” in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 153.
43 Plat, The Floures of Philosophie, sig. L4v.
44 Plat, The Floures of Philosophie, sig. L4v.
45 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5v.
46 Plat, The Floures of Philosophie, sig. L5r.
47 Plat, The Floures of Philosophie, sig. L5r. This idea is taken up in educational manuals of the period, as witnessed in Thomas Twynne’s The Schoolemaster (London, 1576), STC 24411. In this text, Twyne alludes to Aristotle’s comments on the utility of leisure in the Nicomachean Ethics to suggest that the “tediousnesse of the minde” is “asswaged by pleasure of recreation, which is also a certaine resting of the minde” (sig. O1r).
48 Plat, The Floures of Philosophie, sig. L5v.
49 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5v.
50 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A6v.
51 See Anna-Rose Shack’s essay “‘I walked out’: perambulatory poetics, authorial independence, and Isabella Whitney’s poetic voice in A Sweet Nosgay” in this present collection for a study of the conceptual links established between mobility and authorship in Whitney’s poetry.
52 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A6r.
53 Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 299.
54 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A6r.
55 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A6v. It is understandable then that Whitney associates the possession of “wealth” and “quietnesse of mynde” in the poem addressed to “her younger Sisters serving in London” (sig. C7v).
56 John Stephens, Essays and Characters, “Essay VII, Of Poetrie” (London, 1615), sig. L1r. STC 23250. Stephens also suggests that “freedome of Braine and Body is a Poets musicke. A peaceable fruition doth preserve, and doth reivive his fancie” (sigs. L1r–v).
57 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E7r.
58 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E7r.
59 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5v.
60 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sigs. A7r, B2r, and C5r respectively. In the conclusion of her poem a ‘Farewell to the Reader,’ Whitney tries to convince her reader that the sequence as a whole should not be spoiled or torn into pieces by the reader. After explaining how her poetic legacy should be interpreted (“And that when I am distant farre … That some may say, ‘God speede her well’,” sig. C5v) Whitney states that “My mind is fully satisfied / I crave none other meede” (sig. C6r).
61 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sigs. B1r–v.
62 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1r.
63 Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 41.
64 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1v. Lindsay Anne Reid counters Berrie’s remark by arguing that Whitney’s Nosgay actually demonstrates a “new – and purportedly more deeply sorrowful – form of Ovidian complaint,” which draws attention to the conditions of her social exile. See, Reid, “The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint,” 101.
65 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1r. Patrick Cheney also helpfully points out that Whitney “may be the first female English poet to adopt the classical recusatio” – a modesty topos, whereby a poet refuses to write in the grand style of an acclaimed literary mode like epic and instead chooses their own less prestigious style of verse to fit their particular subject matter. See Patrick Cheney, “Literary Careers,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume 2 (1558–1660), eds. Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 182.
66 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1v.
67 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1v.
68 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1v.
69 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1v.
70 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1v.
71 A few scholars have noted the ways that Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Floures also relates to the form and content of Whitney’s Nosgay. For some brief comments, see Andrew Gordon, Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community (London: Palgrave, 2013), 91; Felicity Sheehy, “Reading Isabella Whitney Reading,” Studies in Philology, 118.3 (2021), 508.
72 George Gascoigne, The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (London, 1575), sig. 3¶2v. STC 11636.
73 Robert Maslen, ed. An Apology for Poetry, Or The Defence of Poesy: Sir Philip Sidney, Third Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002), 85.
74 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 3¶2v.
75 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1r.
76 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 4¶2v.
77 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 4¶2v.
78 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 4¶2v. I.B. alludes here to Gascoigne’s role as a mercenary in the Low Countries. See Mark Netzloff, Agents Beyond the State: The Writing of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. 99–123 for a review of Gascoigne’s military exploits.
79 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 4¶2v.
80 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 4¶2v.
81 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 4¶3r.
82 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 4¶3r.
83 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 5¶1v.
84 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 5¶1v.
85 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A5v. Gascoigne’s reference to the Pryapus stems from the now mistaken attribution of the Carmina Priapea to Virgil. The Priapea is a collection of erotic poems in Latin dedicated to the Greek god of Priapus – guardian of gardens, whose permanent erection was thought to have apotropaic powers.
86 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 5¶1v.
87 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 5¶1v.
88 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. A8r.
89 Gascoigne recognises, as stated in his earlier “Epistle to yong gentlemen,” that many gardens contain the “malicious Spider” who “may also gather poison out of the fairest floure that groes.” Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 2¶3v.
90 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 4¶3r.
91 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. B1v.
92 Gascoigne, Posies, sig. 3¶2v.
93 For additional information on Whitney’s relationship to her literary contemporaries, see Michelle O’Callaghan’s “How Isabella Whitney read Christine de Pizan,” and Lindsay-Ann Reid’s “Isabella Whitney and George Turberville: Mid-Tudor Ovidiana and Some Questions of Precedence” in the present issue.
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Douglas Clark
Douglas Clark is a Research Fellow in the Moore Institute at the University of Galway. His work has appeared recently in the Spring 2022 issue of Renaissance Drama, and the spring 2023 issue of Studies in Philology. His first book, The Will in English Renaissance Drama, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.