ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
Wither because of the zealously Protestant attitude the poet had already
expressed in Prince Henries Obsequies (1612) and his Epithalamion (1612)
celebrating the marriage of Elizabeth—“another Terror to the Whore of
Rome”—to the Elector Palatine. 28
On the surface, or at least apart from its abrasive title, the work seems
innocent enough. It is mild Marston: a collection of satirical verse essays on
various human passions like love, lust, envy, revenge, and so on, topped off by a
whimsical dedication to the author and an apparently autobiographical verse
introduction in which Wither plays the melancholic truth seeker. But there is
also more than a little of Webster’s crafty and suspicious Bosola in Wither, and
whether or not he actually reveals many “secret villanies” of state, his constant
insinuating pose of “worldly sagacity” at least promises much. In the unstable
political circumstances of 1613, when court factions, responding to the death of
Henry and the marriage of Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, were vying over
the role England might play in international politics (1613, it will be
remembered, was also the year in which Browne first “went forth” in Britannia’s
Pastorals) and doing so, moreover, in the unfolding context of one of the great
domestic scandals of James’s court (the highly suspicious annulment of the
marriage between the Earl of Essex and Lady Frances—Howard’s niece—in order
to allow her to marry the king’s favorite, Robert Carr), Abuses Stript and Whipt
struck home, especially as far as Howard was concerned.
Wither was also never one to let an opportunity for advancement pass.
Although he spent only four months in prison, from March to July of 1614, he
managed through the publication of The Shepherds Hunting to make it seem as
if all England were sharing his drama. Subtitled “Certaine Eclogs written
during the time of the Authors Imprisonment in the Marshalsey” and bearing a
double dedication “To those honoured, noble, and right vertuous friends, my
visitants in the Marshalsey: And to all other my unknowne favourers, who
either privately, or publickly wished me well in my imprisonment” (I, p. 3),
the work reverses the formula for Spenserian pastoral in which, as Drayton
remarked, “the most High, and most Noble Matters of the World may bee
shaddowed” in this lowly form (II, 517). In Wither, the background is the
foreground. The political and historical have become the occasion for the
poetic, as interlocutors like Willy (William Browne) and Alexis (William
Ferrar, brother to Nicholas of Little Gidding and adventurer) visit their friend
Philarete (Wither) in jail, who alternately proclaims his innocence—“I suffer
’cause I wish’d my country well;/ And what I more must bear I cannot
tell” 29 —and the efficient power of his song. In the latter case, Wither
commemorates not simply his “transcendent” virtuosity as a pastoralist but his
previous role as a scourge in Abuses.
A penchant for the pyre and a desire to self-dramatize were essential to
Wither’s early popularity. (In 1622, he was back in jail, this time for publishing
his Motto.) But Wither also had a keen eye for the literary marketplace, and in
1623, he secured from the king, perhaps with aid from the Earl of Pembroke, a
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