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‘Pleasure with Profitt’; References to the Art and Business of Sonneteering in John Davies of

Hereford’s Wittes Pilgrimage.


John Burton

Early modern English sonnet sequences tend to be self-referential and self-reflexive to an


unusual degree. Indeed it is a paradox of the genre that the poetry, in addressing the beloved
or the divine, does so in highly self-referential terms. As Joel Fineman puts it, there is a
sense in which the poet ‘will first praise his love and then proceed to love his praise.’1
Because of this, Petrarchan lyric – both the epistlatory forms intended for the beloved and the
private meditation or complaint – frequently made reference to its own artifice and
construction. References to writing, composing, and transmitting poetry abound in the genre.
One may think of Sidney’s highly influential opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, in which
the poet looks ‘into [his] heart and write[s]’ to gain a sense of the basic intra-textual
grounding of the form, and the extent to which the sonnet sequence is so often a piece of
writing about writing. Like so many who followed, Sidney pursued the textual rendition of
his beloved, unable to resist the impulse to compose self-referential verse;
Stella, the fullness of my thoughts of thee
Cannot be stayed within my panting breast
But they do swell and struggle forth of me,
Till that in words thy figure be expressed.
(Sonnet 50)
But this is a mere allusion to a whole series of literary and textual references in a work
abounding in terms which constantly draw attention to the voice and art of the lover. In one
sense such references undermine the proclaimed love of Stella, demonstrating
Astrophil’sfascination with his own poetic and highly sociable textual transmission. As
Arthur Marotti put it, the Petrarchan sequence is a ‘literary work whose metacommunicative
character made the relationship of poet and audience more important than either the
ostensible amorous subject-matter or its sociopolitical coordinates.’2 Sonnet writers often
spoke to fellow poets through their sequences, discussing matters of poetics and the work and
trade of the sonneteer.
As a rather extreme example, it is by no coincidence that George Chapman’s attack on
the sensual carnality of amorous Sidneian imitations in the 1590s was framed itself in a

1
Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 53-54.
2
Marotti, ‘Love is not Love’, 406.
sonnet sequence, ‘A Coronet for Mistresse Philosophie’ in his Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, which
begins,
Mvses that sing loues sensuall Emperie,
And Louers kindling your enraged fires
At Cupids bonfires burning in the eye,
Blowne with the emptie breath of vaine desires 3
Working at the end of the sonnet sequence vogue, William Drummond of Hawthornden
attempted to prolong the English Petrarchan tradition, beginning his 1616 sequence in his
Poems by referring to earlier models;
In my first Yeeres, and Prime yet not at Hight,
When sweet Conceits my Wits did entertaine,
Ere Beauties Force I knew or false Delight,
Or to what Oare shee did her Captiues chaine;
Led by a sacred Troupe of Phoebus Traine,
I first beganne to reade, then Loue to write
And in Sonnet 27 he laments of the meagre value of his work in comparison to the ‘sweet
Conceits’ of the ‘sacred Troupe’ of earlier poets;
That I so slenderly set foorth my Minde,
Writing I wote not what in ragged Rimes,
And charg'd with Brasse into these golden Times
When others towre so high am left behinde:
Following the example of others such as Barnabe Barnes and John Davies of Hereford, he
turns away from amorous lyrics and opens his 1623 volume of spiritual sonnets Flowres of
Sion in a repentant mood;
Alas! and what wee write to keepe our Name,
Like Spiders Caules are made the sport of Dayes:
These kinds of references to the vocation of the sonneteer are not unusual in the genre; the
more than fifty sonnet sequences published in the period – both courtly and devotional –
often refer to the cries, the woes, the pen, and the pain of the poet who cannot resist
addressing his or her readership in a meta-textual voice of authorial self-reflexivity.
John Davies of Hereford took this pattern of mirroring one’s own predicament to an
unusual degree. His sonnet sequence Wittes Pilgrimage, probably published 16054, contains

3
I have used Chadwyck-Healey’s digital online version on Literature Online, a transcript of the 1595 edition.
4
The volume was entered on the Stationer’s Register 27 September 1605.
a series of 104 amorous sonnets under the title ‘Wittes Pilgrimage’, which culminate in a
further 48 sonnets following the arrival of the speaker in ‘LymittlesseLondon’ under a
subheading ‘Other Sonnets upon other Subjects. The Trinity illustrated by a three-square
perpective Glasse.’ This little-known sequence in two parts charts the progression of the
speaker from the base carnality of a country lover paralysed by desire to an enlightened and
spiritually astute town wit as a kind of Neoplatonicdrama.
Like other sequences of the period, the speaker refers to his work to convey first his
love, and then his pain to his beloved, followed by a rejection of love and a desire to ascend
to ‘high’ or ‘celestialllove’ (sonnets 20 and 99). However, unlike other sequences, Davies
continues his fiction beyond this point, to encompass the spiritual development of the poet
from courtly lyric to metaphysics, and in so doing responds to his apparently earlier sonnets
in a kind of reportage of the art and artifice of the Petrarchantradition. Two sonnets from the
later sequence stand out particularly in this regard, 9 and 23.
Sonnet 9
Search all the Sonnets set Loue wealth to wynne,
And you shall see (how euer darkly donne)
That lightly with the Eye they do begin
As if Loues heate, and Witts , came from that Sunne .
And I, as if the Eye bewitched mee,
Oft sett my Sonetts Seane iust in the Eye
Of beaming Beauty , that it, so, may see
Wherein consists Loues Comick-Tragedie.
Thus is the Sences Sou'raignes Subiect , made
Loues Sonetts Subiect, in faire Paper- Reames ;
Sith with Loues fire it doth the Hart inuade:
For, that cold Christall burnes with Beauties Beames.
Then ô the Eye, the Eye! I, I, that's it
Wherein men see their want of Grace, and Wit.
This is the only sonnet of which I am aware dealing explicitly with the business of composing
love sonnets, and has sadly been missed from studies of the genre as far as I can tell. ‘Lightly
in the eye they begin,’ he asserts of love sonnets. That is, the poet develops a poetic subject
‘I’ first and foremost, within which one may see ‘loves comic-tragedy’, and thus is ‘Love’s
sonnet’s subject’ made. Again this calls to mind the preoccupation Davies exhibits with the
matter of the poetic persona. For him the founding issue in the drama of the sonnet sequence
is the question of the speaker. The subject, a complete and unified identity, is his chief
concern, and reading the cycle as a progressive dramatic work, a poetic study (essaie) of a
man who raises himself from his troubled carnal impasse, seems to be Davies’s intention.
But ‘I’ in the love sonnets initially gains his sense of corporeal reality from that of the
beloved. According to Émile Benveniste, the linguistic construction upon which all language
becomes possible is the ‘I’, and the only way of identifying the other (‘you’) is only in terms
of the relation to self, as ‘non-je’.5 In this sense, all relations and deixisbear significance only
in relation to the self. We have with the deictic “I” the problem of linguistic code referring
only to itself, for as we have no proper name (unlike Sidney’s Astrophil, but similar to
Shakespeare’s sonnets) we have no option other than to first conceive of the “I” as that which
is different to the “thee”, as the speaker himself does in the Davies’s opening sequence,
Ore those faire Alpes, thy Brests, (that naked lie
Towards the blushing heau'n of thy bright face)
When as I trauell with my wandring Eye
The Snowes twixt Them, and That , do let her pace:
For, passing through the Valley of thy Neck
Mine Eie there sticks, as drowned in those snowes.
The speaker’s parts (here the eye) are revealed only in relation to the other. However this
cannot be fully resolved until some measure of the person – the subject of the sonnets – is
unfolded to us. Davies tells us he begins to develop the sequence by firstly developing the
‘I’, and this in turn is done by extending that which is not ‘she’, or that which responds to the
other. By arranging his subject this way, the beloved becomes the literal structure or basis
upon which the lover is formed – ‘Then what I am at best I am of thee/ Virtue’s best
instrument to fashion me.’ This explains the weak position from which this subjectivity
emerges; a conflicted offspring of the beloved. The self emerges from within the pronounced
subjectivity of the beloved, and must assert himself in some way as an oppositional force. He
must use his intelligence (or wit) to ascend (as in pilgrimage) and develop himself to be a
fully self-aware being, rather than an extension of the beloved.
But even more complex is the designation of the other, ‘she’ or ‘thee’, for this can
only be conceived as that which is different from the ‘I’. This shifting symbol (of which
Roman Jakobson wrote as the problem of the ‘shifters’) causes the text to refer constantly to
the ‘I’ as a person known only by the text uttered.6 Benveniste:

5
See Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 225-236, 251-257.
6
See Roman Jakobson, ‘Shifters, Verbal Categories, and The Russian Verb’ in Russian and Slavic Grammar
Studies 1931-1981, ed. by Linda R. Waugh and Morris Halle (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 41-57.
Quelle est donc la «réalité» à laquelle se réfère je ou tu? Je ne peut être dèfini
qu’en termes de «locution», non en termes d’objets, comme l’est un
signenominal. Je signifie «la personne qui énonce la présente instance de
discours contenant je».7
Thus the text cannot truly speak of anything else than the subjectivity of the speaker/lover,
which it both feeds and is fed by.8
The opening trio of Davies’s love sonnets in Wittes Pilgrimage confirm that the
speaking subject is conscious only of his bodily self as it is reflected in the beloved – ‘in the
Eye/ Of beaming Beauty’. As Davies explained in a side note in his earlier work
Microcosmos, ‘The Eie is the Index of the Minde’9, and while the poetry speaks of the
beaming eye of the beloved, the speaker’s centre of subjective tension lays outside of himself.
His pain with himself, the burden of his lack and the extent to which this burden troubles
him, calls out from within the ‘eye’ of the beloved.
But the eye of beaming beauty proves itself a double-edged sword, for on the one
hand the speaker is drawn to the carnal subjection of ‘she’, while on the other he becomes
increasingly conscious of his own lack of spiritual power. For within her he can see a more
promising and spiritually progressed form of himself, a tantalizing potential.
Davies not only explained the composition of his love sequences, but explored the
financial motives which prompted the work;
Sonnet 23
Pleasure with profit is the pin where unto
The best pens direct their best directed aim
Which if they split they do as they should do
And justly, for it glory’s prize they claim.
Now from my Will (well-bent as I supposed)
With Shafts of the endeavours of my wit
I have roud at this point and them disposed
As the wind sat abroad, the pin to split
I have shot too much on the left hand

7
What is, therefore, the ‘reality’ of which is referred by I or you? Icannot be defined other than in terms of its
‘idiom’, not in terms of objects, as if it is a nominal sign. I signifies ‘the person who enunciates the present
instance of discourse containing the word I. (p. 252).

For a broader discussion see Bertrand Russel, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: George Allen and
8

Unwin, 1940), pp. 108-115.


9
John Davies, Microcosmos THE DISCOVERY OF THE LITTLE VVORLD, VVITH the government thereof
(Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1603) p. 91.
I as not weather wise the wind mistook
Yet I considered both the air and land
But though my shafts can neither of them brook
I loose them right though light mine arrows were
Yet some being weighty I must needs be near.
This sonnet treats the misfortunes of the poet who writesfor ‘pleasure with profit’. It is
certainly unusual to find such a frank discussion on the financial aspirations of the sonneteer,
particularly set together in a sequence of love sonnets. Also of note is the possible reference
to Shakespeare’s commercial successes in the line ‘Glories prize they claime/ Now from my
Will (well bent as I suppos’d)’. Davies would not be alone in commenting on Shakespeare’s
wealth; Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour (1599) has a number of satirical allusions to
Shakespeare's recent plays as well as to his gentrified status, a series of jests that appear more
than a private dig at a friend: Jonson appears to have expected the audience to understand the
barbs.
The writer’s profession and Davies’s lack of commercial success are explored here.
Davies is not above humorous analysis of his own work. The last song of the love sequence
has the poet lament;
Busie invention, whie art thou so dull
And yet still doing?
And no conceits ensconst in thy scull
To help my woing? 10
Davies is willing to allow the mask of conceit to slip, and the workings of the sonnet are
displayed alongside the artifice that is simultaneously produced. We see in one poem the
brains of the poet, his personal inner world, and the forces which combine for and against
him;in effect his world, and the overlay of the synthetic world he tries to create. The poet,
discontent with the golden world he tries to project, adds an air of authenticity by peeking
from behind the curtains and shows himself to be the architect of the entire production –
pulling the strings – and all the while attempting to maintain the integrity of the art he
produces.

10
Finkelpearlmakes much of this in his entry on Davies in the ODNB, suggesting that Davies was aware of the
limits of his own skill. However, in other sonnets in the same sequence he boasts of his ability, suggesting this
phrase to constitute a brief faltering of confidence rather than a serious admission of failure. For example, see
Sonnet 4 of the first sequence which describes the sonnets as ‘words of wonder’, and Sonnet 8 which begins,
‘Some say they wonder how so well I write’. The final sonnet of the entire sequence, has the lines ‘To draw
such lines . . . Do grace their Worker, sith they are well wrought/ And drawne of matter that drawes out the
Braine.’
This was not Davies’s first mention of the economic plight of the poet, nor would it be
the last. In Microcosmos (1603) he locates sonneteering within a discussion of pure
economics:
But lewde Lust is so loose that shee restraines
Her will in nought, though it bringes all to nought:
...
For this, al that pertaines, must be in print ,
VVeeds, VVords, Lookes, Loks , in print , not one awry,
Whose Motions must be currant for the Mynt ;
(4084-4100)
The phrase ‘Weeds, words, looks, loks’ appears to refer to the flowers, empassionedspeech,
locks of hair, and longing looks exchanged by lovers. Yet the repetition of the words ‘in
print’ suggests an alternate meaning. By 1575 George Gascoige had rearranged his poems,
sonnets, and the prose tale of Master F.J. into the volume Poesiesand the section entitled
‘Weeds’ contained his sonnets, a move designed in an effort to legitimise his works and avoid
further sanction by court censors. Henry Lok had followed his mother’s footsteps of
composing devotional sonnets, and it is interesting that Davies should expose the economic
motives of even religious sonneteers, being ‘currant for the mynt’.
In openly confessing the aim of the sonneteer to ‘be in print’ and to combine ‘pleasure
with profit’, the metaphor of the archer sending his arrows towards social, publishing, and
financial success further advances the case for Davies’s sequence to be reconsidered in
studies of the genre.
The desired target is not, as the earlier sonnets in the sequence would have us believe,
the arms of the beloved. Yet not only does Sonnet 23 suggest that the poet was conscious of
the conflict between the Petrarchan and its counter, but because Davies himself had not
published, to our current knowledge, lovepoetry other than the sequence earlier in the work
itself, it also suggestive that the entire sequence as a whole is a presentation on the vocation
of a sonneteer, with the later sequence elaborating upon the first.
In this way the self-conscious poet-persona of Wittes Pilgrimage often peeksfrom
behind the façade of his artifice to illustrate his literary development, his failure, his lack.
The ‘I’ of the poems appears to be used to illustrate the career and the moral and social
function of the poet. Indeed, the love sonnet sequence he presents is demonstrably shown to
fail, only to be redeemed by the later stages of spiritual development it permits. It is not too
extreme to claim that WP is a sonnet sequence about sonnet sequences. In the very least it is
a sequence which deploys a considerable tension between its poetic intention (love), its
revealed intention (popularity and money) and its ultimate destination (high love).

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