University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
2012
Unspeakable joy : rejoicing in early modern
England
James Schroder Lambert
University of Iowa
Copyright 2012 James S. Lambert
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1348
Recommended Citation
Lambert, James Schroder. "Unspeakable joy : rejoicing in early modern England." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of
Iowa, 2012.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1348.
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Part of the English Language and Literature Commons
UNSPEAKABLE JOY: REJOICING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
by
James Schroder Lambert
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2012
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Alvin Snider
1
ABSTRACT
My dissertation, Unspeakable Joy: Rejoicing in Early Modern England, claims
that the act of rejoicing—expressing religious joy—was a crucial rhetorical element of
literary works in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England. The
expression of religious joy in literature functioned as a sign of belief and sanctification in
English Protestant theology, and became the emotive articulation of a hopeful union
between earthly passion and an anticipated heavenly feeling. By taking into account the
historical-theological definitions of joy in the reformed tradition, I offer new readings of
late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century texts, including the Sidney Psalms,
Donne’s sermons, Spenser’s Epithalamion, Richard Rogers’s spiritual diaries, and
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. I suggest that much of early modern poetics stems from
a desire, on behalf of writers, to articulate the ineffable joy so often described by sermons
and tracts. By establishing Renaissance emotional expression as a source of religious
epistemology and negotiating the cognitive and constructive understandings of emotion, I
show that religious rejoicing in Elizabethan Protestantism consists of a series of emotive
speech acts designed to imitate the hoped-for joys of heaven. Finally, these readings
emphasize the ways in which rejoicing not only functions as a reaffirmation of belief in
and commitment to the state church but also becomes the primary agent for spiritual
affect by bestowing grace on an individual believer.
Abstract Approved:
___________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Title and Department
___________________________________
Date
UNSPEAKABLE JOY: REJOICING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
by
James Schroder Lambert
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2012
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Alvin Snider
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
James Schroder Lambert
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English at the July 2012 graduation.
Thesis Committee: __________________________________
Alvin Snider, Thesis Supervisor
__________________________________
Miriam Gilbert
__________________________________
Claire Sponsler
__________________________________
Raymond Mentzer
__________________________________
Blaine Greteman
For Maria, Henry, and Calvin, joys unspeakable
ii
“There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to
make men rejoice.”
John Calvin (translation William J. Bouwsma), Sermon no. 10 on 1 Corinthians
“Thogh ye se him not, yet do you believe, and rejoyce with joye unspeakeable and
glorious, Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your soules.”
1 Peter 1:8, Geneva Bible
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation is the result of passions regulated and redirected by others
towards productive scholarship and honest argument. To those who have helped me
conform enthusiasms to real work, I owe a great debt. The late Huston Diehl, who
listened to so many of my ideas with a look of determined patience until finally nodding
at the word “joy,” proved to be my most generous advocate, mentor, friend, and
dissertation advisor. I attribute most of the work I am proud of to our initial
conversations. Alvin Snider and Miriam Gilbert, both eagerly stepping in to support me
after the loss of Huston, have since overseen this project with a generosity of time and
spirit, and to them I am greatly indebted.
For crucial guidance, advice, and correction, I thank the faculty in the English
Department at the University of Iowa, notably Blaine Greteman, Adam Hooks, Claire
Sponsler, Garrett Stewart, Lori Branch, and Eric Gidal. I should also thank my peers and
faculty mentors outside the University of Iowa, especially Kimberly Johnson, Brian
Jackson, Adam Bradford, and Bryan Mangano for their comments and critiques, prodding
me towards work that is more precise, clear, and better. I have taken some of these
chapters on the road at the Shakespeare Association of America in Washington, DC, and
the South-Central Renaissance Conference in Saint Louis, and I need to thank Maurice
Hunt, Paul Cefalu, James Kearney, Raymond-Jean Frontain, and my anonymous readers
at SEL and Huntington Library Quarterly for their helpful comments and rigorous
reading.
I completed the dissertation with the help of a Graduate College Summer
Fellowship in 2009, the Marcus Bach Fellowship in 2010 and the Ballard/Seashore
Dissertation Fellowship in 2011-2012, and I would be remiss not to mention the College
of Liberal Arts and the Graduate College’s encouragement and support through those
fellowships. All those who facilitated a more efficient working environment and schedule
iv
bear my gratitude, including Cherie Hansen-Rieskamp, Linda Stahle, and Gayle Sand.
Those that staff the Special Collections at the University of Iowa Main Library, the
Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA, have had to
deal with a confused graduate student overwhelmed by knowledge in its primary form,
and I am grateful for their patience and help.
My interest in the experience of religious joy in Puritan history stems from a
seminar I took from Marilynne Robinson, whose teaching and prose have had the greatest
influence on my thought, and I need to acknowledge her invisible hand, even when my
own hand bears little trace of her elegance and grace. My own parents, whose emphasis
on the Book of Mormon scripture that “Adam fell that men might be, and men are that
they might have joy,” provided me with an intense curiosity in the way emotions
configure religious experience, and they never ceased to encourage wherever that interest
has taken me. My wife, Kathryn, has been the sounding board for all my good ideas and
the shredder for most of my bad ones, but more importantly, she has been the central
source of encouragement as well as the locus of reward as I wrote this dissertation. I
mention my children Maria, Henry, and Calvin because trying to describe them is the
only way I began to really identify with the central notion of my work, unspeakable joy.
v
ABSTRACT
My dissertation, Unspeakable Joy: Rejoicing in Early Modern England, claims
that the act of rejoicing—expressing religious joy—was a crucial rhetorical element of
literary works in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England. The
expression of religious joy in literature functioned as a sign of belief and sanctification in
English Protestant theology, and became the emotive articulation of a hopeful union
between earthly passion and an anticipated heavenly feeling. By taking into account the
historical-theological definitions of joy in the reformed tradition, I offer new readings of
late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century texts, including the Sidney Psalms,
Donne’s sermons, Spenser’s Epithalamion, Richard Rogers’s spiritual diaries, and
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. I suggest that much of early modern poetics stems from
a desire, on behalf of writers, to articulate the ineffable joy so often described by sermons
and tracts. By establishing Renaissance emotional expression as a source of religious
epistemology and negotiating the cognitive and constructive understandings of emotion, I
show that religious rejoicing in Elizabethan Protestantism consists of a series of emotive
speech acts designed to imitate the hoped-for joys of heaven. Finally, these readings
emphasize the ways in which rejoicing not only functions as a reaffirmation of belief in
and commitment to the state church but also becomes the primary agent for spiritual
affect by bestowing grace on an individual believer.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: O QUAM!: REFORMED EXPRESSIONS OF JOY ......................... 1
Inward and Outward Joy in Early Modern England ........................................ 7!
Joyfully Expressing the Inexpressible............................................................ 13!
The Parameters of Joy: A Methodological Admission .................................. 23!
CHAPTER 1: “SHOW US ILANDERS OUR JOY”: THE PSALMS, DONNE’S
ACCIDENTAL JOYS, AND THE SIDNEY PSALTER .............................. 27
“Until this be reformed”: The Rhetoric of Metrical Psalm Translation ......... 29!
“Seek new expressions”: Religious poetry and the language of delight ........ 43!
“Show us ilanders our joy”: Donne’s Accidental and Essential
Rejoicing ........................................................................................................ 53!
“Now let the isles rejoice”: Psalm 97............................................................. 61!
“We thy Sidneian Psalms shall celebrate”: Psalms 95-100 ........................... 64!
CHAPTER 2: THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EXPERIENCE OF JOY:
SPENSER’S EPITHALAMION ..................................................................... 77
Psalmic Hymns of Poetic and Public Joy: Epithalamion Stanzas 1–16 ........ 86!
The Private Joy of the Marriage Chamber: Stanzas 16–24 .......................... 103!
Coda: The Mystery of Joy ............................................................................ 114!
CHAPTER 3: “RAISED UNTO A CHEAREFUL AND LIVELY BELEEVING”:
THE 1587-90 DIARY OF RICHARD ROGERS AND PURITAN
WRITING INTO JOY ................................................................................. 117!
The Puritan diary and the question of emotion: the expression of joy
through life-writing ...................................................................................... 126!
“Moveing of our affections”: Event into Emotion ....................................... 134!
“Out of order”: The Emotional Micro-narrative of Puritan Exercise .......... 149!
CHAPTER 4: “YOUR JOYS WITH LIKE RELATION”: INTO THE JOY OF
THE WINTER’S TALE ................................................................................. 165!
“Not for joy, not joy”: Joyless Grace and Jealous Assurance ...................... 168!
“Come, lead me to these sorrows”: Emotional Time and the Hidden
Narrative of Joy ............................................................................................ 184!
“It should take joy”: The Emotional Climax of Act V ................................ 192!
“Partake to everyone”: The Collective Joy of Emotional Payoff and
Religious Devotion ...................................................................................... 201!
CONCLUSION: THE LIMITS OF REJOICING ........................................................... 207!
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................ 211!
vii
1
INTRODUCTION
O QUAM!: REFORMED EXPRESSIONS OF JOY
On August 5, 1615, Lancelot Andrewes delivered a sermon in front of James I
that took Psalm 21:1 as its text: “The King shall rejoice in Thy strength, O Lord.” This
particular kind of sermon, a celebration of the divine right of kings, had become a
tradition since 1603, when celebrations began on the anniversary of the Gowrie
conspiracy, a supposed plot to kill James on August 5, 1600 in Perth, Scotland. The
circumstances of the actual event are still disputed, but the annual celebrations took on a
life of their own, providing Andrewes, at least, with the chance to unabashedly preach on
James’s favorite topic—the providential legitimacy of his governance. In the 1615
sermon, however, Andrewes does not quite focus on James’s divine right as much as he
focuses on the circumstances and feelings of the yearly jubilee. In fact, Andrewes seems
almost tired of justifying the king’s right—his conventional approach to that section
belabors the point—but Andrewes’s language quickens as soon as he begins his discourse
on the meanings of “rejoice” or the types of joy that can be expressed. Indeed, the sermon
opens, “Upon a day of joy, here is a text of joy.”1 The “text of joy” is two-fold: the Psalm
on which the sermon is based, and the sermon itself, a remarkable combination of
scholasticism and exegesis that anatomizes joy—its “ground or causes,” its “soul,” its
“outward” expression, its “matter,” and its “sound” application. While the “here” in “here
is a text of joy” refers back to the Psalm as the homiletic epigraph, as if Andrewes is
pointing to his own hardcopy of the Psalm, the “here” also announces Andrewes’s own
1 Lancelot Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty, in the Cathedral
2
rhetorical purpose in the sermon itself, to give joy through his own carefully constructed
“text.” As such, the sermon enacts a double joy: the original Psalm in all its rejoicing, and
Andrewes’s interpretive riff on the Psalm to give it contemporary resonance and
application. I suppose in that manner the approach—celebrating the original event in
order to highlight contemporary concerns—functions a bit like an anniversary does,
fittingly. For Andrewes, the text of joy is the retelling of an original joy in order to repeat
its effects, and affect.
This notion of joy as a textual repetition of sorts, offers a unique variation on the
traditional Western religious definition of joy. As Aquinas, and Augustine before him,
define it, joy is the feeling derived from the union of God and man, the final unification
of spiritual desire and its object (God).2 Joy as union, as holy desire at rest, functioned as
the soteriological goal to be achieved in Christian systematic theology. Parcel to the
union of God and man, joy could be felt in any analogous, perhaps typological, religious
occurrence, such as the experience of personal grace, the partaking of the sacrament,
marriage, or other religious activities that represented this union. In the Andrewes text,
however, joy comes not from the union of God and man or the reception of Christ’s
grace, but from a scriptural utterance (the Psalm) and its reiteration (the homily). The
2 The Thomist notion of joy spreads in many directions, but his central definition stems
from the closure after desire: “Joy is full when there is nothing left to desire. As long as we are in
this world, however, there is no end to the movement of desire in us, because, as we have seen, at
every stage we can still draw nearer to God by grace. But when we come to perfect happiness,
nothing will remain for us to desire, because even the full enjoyment of God will be ours, and we
will find there whatever we have wanted of the goods also. . . . Desire, therefore, will come to
rest; and not merely our desire for God, but all our other desires too.” Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae, Latin Text and English Translation, 2d2ae, (Cambridge, UK: Blackfriars,
McGraw-Hill, 1964-1981), Question 28; 34:193. Nicholas Lombardo suggests that “For Aquinas,
desire is the affection that describes the will’s movement toward a particular good, and joy is the
affection that results when the will rests in that good.” Nicholas Lombardo, The Logic of Desire:
Aquinas on Emotion (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2011), 265.
3
repetition of expressive language about joy lies at the heart of my thesis, an argument
about what happens to this holy, spiritual emotion when it either partakes of or emanates
from the literature of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century in England.
Here I argue that religious joy occupies a central place in the literary culture of early
modern England not only by its theological and teleological closure but also by its
expressive potential, which includes the ability to produce positive affective experience
by using the conscripted language of rejoicing. Before the Protestant Reformation, the
experience and expressions of feeling joy already had their central texts—the Eucharist,
pilgrimage, marriage, the mass—but when the bulk of worship turns from iconography
and ritual to hymnody and language, the experience of religious joy shifts as well, not so
much in feeling (it would be difficult to argue that Roman Catholics feel, or felt, a
different kind of joy than Protestants, a speculative move that has too often characterized
critical assumptions about early modern religious culture), but rather in the manner of
expression, or, even more provocatively, true joy’s lack of appropriate expression.
Religious joy, as an affection, has always posed a problem for language, primarily
because it is so often described as inexpressible, untenable, and ineffable in the Reformed
theology of England, and I attend to that problem by reading the ways in which the
experience, or inward feeling, of joy is transformed into a scripted, repeated, and
auricular kind of “rejoicing,” the linguistic analogue to immortal, heavenly joy. In the
same sermon, Lancelot Andrewes admits that his own attempt to express heightened
religious joy has been fraught with difficulty. As he discusses the tradition of rejoicing,
he wonders how one might exultabit, his expression for the “overflowing of inward joy
into the outward man.” He asks openly what words might be used to “sound forth, and be
4
heard, from the lips, ‘the voice of joy and gladness,’” and he cannot quite achieve an
English equivalent: “But it is not every mean degree will content in these. Not any ‘glad,’
but ‘exceeding glad.’ The Hebrew is, O quam! . . . The meaning is; so very glad, as he
cannot well tell how to express it.”3 The Latin word “O quam!” (I assume Andrewes
meant Latin when he said Hebrew, or this was mistranscribed—I don’t think Andrewes
has any “quams” about his Hebrew) roughly translates to “How!” a simultaneous
question and exclamation, a non-descriptive plaintive that is reversed to suggest joy. That
is to say, it is a word that is pure expression without signification: the difficulties of
expressing joy in one exclamation.
The careful attention to expressing joy in a religious context is not particularly
unique to Andrewes, or to me, for that matter; it often became the subject of sermons,
poems, meditations, and devotions in the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth century, but
I begin with him because of his theological, poetical, and political centrality: a moderate
Protestant of old church sympathy, an insider to the court of James, and a speaker
concerned with the poetics of early modern literary and rhetorical culture, Andrewes
embodies a certain kind of religious discourse that weaves through the many forms of
worship and expression in seventeenth-century England.4 That, and his discussion of
3 Andrewes, 4:105
4 Puritan divines, university scholars and high church preachers often discoursed over joy
between 1585 and 1625, and most of whom I will discuss in later chapters. Thomas Jackson, the
President of Corpus Christi College and Dean of Peterborough, often returns to joy in his
commentaries as a locus of mortal emotions against heavenly emotions (which he terms, like
John Donne, “accidental” and “essential” joys). Commentaries on the Creed (1613-1657), Book
XI, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1844), 10:418-480. John Donne, who frequently
appears in this dissertation, has no less than five sermons that treat joy similarly, as an experience
that approximates but cannot approach a heavenly joy. The concern with the contrast between
“accidental joy” and “essential joy” is a bit misleading, though, because it acts as a frame for
discussing the proper execution of “external joy,” the expression of “singing praise and glory,”
5
religious joy is as articulate and systematic as can be found in the extant theological
works of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a discussion trying to answer the
questions that in some sense mirror my own: what is joy for the religious culture(s) of
early modern England? Where does it come from? How is it recognized? Felt?
Expressed? Finally, what can studying expressions and occasions of joy tell us about the
religious and literary culture of the time and place?
All these questions are not only presentist manifestations of a “recent” critical
concern about the place of emotions in literary discourse, although they admittedly reflect
that personal interest of mine, they are also questions that poets and parsons, commoners
and courtiers often posed or attempted to answer, wondering what kind of joy seemed
appropriate for religious experience and expression and, further, what kind of expression
or experience seems appropriate for joy. Thomas Jackson, Oxford theologian of the
seventeenth-century, asks in his Commentaries “But wherein doth this joy in the Holy
Ghost consist?” and tries, unconvincingly, to answer that the joy consists of
contemplation upon “all visible creatures” of the earth that have been preordained “unto
man, for his use.”5 Andrewes asks another, more pointed question (and wonders about
the act of asking this question) in the work I have already quoted, “’O Lord, how joyful
and glad shall he be!’ The meaning is; so very glad, as he cannot well tell how to express
it. Else, asking the question, why doth he not answer it?” If not as concerned with the
and the one aspect of joy shared by both heavenly and earthly joy. Chapter 1 will discuss Donne’s
use of essential and accidental joy in depth. I use Andrewes as a frame in part because he does not
concern himself with the difference between the mortal and immortal joys and moves straight to
the intricacies, and difficulties, of expressing joy.
5 Thomas Jackson, Commentaries, 10:480-481.
6
expression, John Donne wonders about the actual experience of religious joy, which he
calls “essential,” in The Second Anniversary: “And what essentiall joy can’st thou expect/
Here upon earth?”6 The two latter questions seem to answer one another: the “essential
joy” that might be expected “upon earth” is such that “he cannot well tell how to express
it,” or, there are no answers nor expressions, at least in words, that can adequately do
heavenly joy justice. But this is, precisely, the invitation to investigate joy through mortal
faculties. Andrewes adds to his question, “Else, asking the question, why doth he not
answer it? But that he cannot but that he hath never a tam for a quam, but is even fain to
leave it to be conceived by us.”7
The joy to which Andrewes refers, “to be conceived by us,” is the joy to which I
attend, the joy which I see being conceived, and expressed, in the “text of joy” in early
modern literature. It is an unspeakable joy always beyond mortal articulation, yet it is
simultaneously the joy which all rejoicing moves towards. More succinctly, my project
seeks out the texts of joy that help articulate an ineffable feeling, and my method attempts
to define how those articulations create the anagogical joy of earthly experience. The
justification for studying these particular texts will be offered below, but let me briefly
suggest that the following texts provide me, like Lancelot Andrewes’s sermon does, both
an opportunity to explore several different approaches to religious joy and a chance to
close read the ways in which joyful utterance bears on the structural and rhetorical
operations of five distinct modes—the sermon, the psalm, the lyric poem, the spiritual
6 John Donne, The Second Anniversary. Of the Progres of the Soule, in Complete English
Poems, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Everyman, 1985, 1998), 269-86.
7 Andrewes, 4:105
7
diary, and the secular tragicomedy—of religious expression. Joy, I assert, is inseparable
from its expression, even if that expression is scriptural, lyrical, personal, performative,
or even absent or silent. The joy of rejoicing might sound like a redundancy, but rejoicing
held tremendous power for the devout, and the act of rejoicing initiated an affective joy
that defined religious experience. To begin, I argue that this process developed as part of
a larger concern for the power of language, the Word, during the flowering of Calvinist
doctrine and other reformed theologies in Elizabethan England. By first examining the
relationship between language, ritual, and religious feeling in the Reformation, I plan to
show how “rejoicing” became the primary expression of the language of belief.
Inward and Outward Joy in Early Modern England
The operation of emotions in the late 16th and early 17th centuries in England have
been the subject of a dizzying number of studies, particularly in the last ten years, as the
study of early modern literature has paralleled the “affective turn” in the social sciences,
even partaking in a more historicist move towards the passions, the sixteenth century
synonym for our contemporary usage of “emotions.”8 These turns, together with the
8 Many of these studies can be categorized into three subfields:
1) bodies and emotion, see Katharine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern
England (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Robert Erickson, The Language of the Heart 16001750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Marion Müller, “These
savage beasts become domestick”: The Discourse on the Passions in Early Modern
England (WVT: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004); Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies
and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser,
Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Gail
Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004);
2) gender and emotion, see Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early
Modern English Literature (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Gwynne Kennedy, Just
8
highly publicized “turn to religion” in studies of early modern England, have provided
enough turns to begin the construction of a new scholarly square, which has inspired and,
to some extent, required that a study of religious joy be made. For far too long, literary
critics often assumed that the emotional discourse of early modern England was
dominated by desire, melancholy, sorrow, and anxiousness.9 The editors of the seminal
essay collection Reading the Early Modern Passions acknowledge as much when they
claim that sadness and melancholy take “center stage . . . in modern studies of
Renaissance affects,” and they continue working within those same assumptions,
devoting one-third of the volume’s essays to melancholic affections without a single
examination of “positive” emotions.10 Even Adam Potkay’s recent The Story of Joy,
which chronicles how “joy” has been a crucial component of Western philosophy and
literature, devotes his chapter on early modern England to “joylessness.”11 The
assumption that the era is characterized by melancholy and sorrow allows us to examine
Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); Cora Fox, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in
Elizabethan England (New York: Palgrave, 2009);
3) philosophy and emotion, see Stephen Gaukroger, ed., The Soft Underbelly of Reason:
The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1998); Jürgen Schlaeger
and Gesa Stedman, eds. Representations of Emotions (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag,
1999); Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
9 See Peter Iver Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in
Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Gary Kuchar, The
Poetry of Religious Sorrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007).
10 Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Introduction,” Reading the
Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. (Philadelphia, PA: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 13.
11 Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7388.
9
its literature and culture in terms of powerful passions and feelings, but it also blinds us
to the other side of the era’s emotional tenor, which arguably demonstrates much more
clearly the centrality of emotional expression in both the literary and religious culture. In
early modern literature, joy was both a mode of rhetorical and literary expression and a
primary agent of spiritual affect, and studying the joy of and in early modern texts will
alter common interpretations of the emotional content of Renaissance literature.
This is primarily the case because joy had a peculiar metaphysical definition: it
was both the affective result of union between God and man but also the primary
emotional state in which the believer ought to be living. Therefore the experience of joy
had both teleological significance and a practical application, two opposing ideas that
tried to conflate the anticipation of heavenly joy (union with God) with the experience of
inward joy (the “settled” state of mortal discipleship). The result was the explication of
an emotional state that seemed to be glimpsed but still always just out of mortal grasp.
Thomas Wilson, in his amplified Christian Dictionary, has no less than nine definitions
for “joy,” most of which refer to its primary “sweet motion of the Soul, in regard of some
present or hoped for Good.” Yet even in the space of these sweet motions, the definition
is bookended by references to its expression, beginning with “shouting” or “singing” and
ending with “see Rejoyce.” Even the “hoped for Good” is dependent on “joyful speech,
or songs of thanksgiving and prayse.” Wilson’s definition never lands on anything other
than 1) expression, or 2) apprehension, with the rest of the definitions working as a kind
of negative theology (it is not “worldly joy” nor “natural joy” nor “mixt joy” and so
10
on).12 Like defining God, the best descriptions come from what is absent, and then the
description themselves, or the expressions in any case, are all that is left.
This resulted in the curious overarticulation of joy in grand gestures. Later in the
sermon that I started this introduction with, Andrewes proclaims that, after everything we
can do to obey, “Joy is all in all.” Andrewes’s statement, to me, signals the trouble that
religious writers, and I, have with the temptation of describing joy in ontological terms:
“Joy is ______.”13 The “to be” verb hardly suits an abstract emotion because every
description on the other side falters; the study of emotion as a subject itself suggests that
emotions are active agents rather than passive occurrences, and psychologists continue to
debate the causal sequence of strong emotions. Andrewes’s solution eschews any
specifics—to say that joy is “all in all” offers the feeling both subjectivity and passivity, a
problem that I see replayed in several early modern texts. The temptation to claim what
joy is, I suggest, belies its power to exist beyond, or outside, language, and the only
adequate manner to explain joy is feel it. This particular problem, as I begin to explore
below, had special resonance for the religious culture as verbal and eloquent as the one to
which Andrewes belonged.
The definition of true joy was taken for granted in the sixteenth century among
Protestants in England: easy to define religiously but almost impossible to locate
pragmatically, or at least with evidence of its existence.14 The distinction between
12 Thomas Wilson, A Complete Christian Dictionary, . . . (London: 1661), 340.
13 Andrewes, 4:106
14 This is typical of the religious reality of the time. Paul Cefalu, in Moral Identity in
Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) claims that
religious ideas are based on their inapplicability and were virtually impossible to practice.
11
outward and inward manifestations of joy is hard to determine, which proved to be a
source of anxiety for Protestants, particularly because the emotion inward might be
betrayed by the outward expression, which often seems conniving or untruthful. It was to
be performed in “secret,” beyond the bounds of the visual sign. John Barlow, in a 1619
sermon on joy admits that this sense does create a kind of anxiety for some: “Feare and
joy are internall,” he claims, “but trembling and gladnesse externall.” Barlow’s definition
of joy depends on its distinction from outward manifestation, which he claims is
“gladnesse,” but this is confusing, for what then does joy look like? Barlow continues,
“The common objection” to understanding the joy is that there is “none more sad to see
to, none lesse chearefull to behold, than such as seeme to be most religious, uprighthearted.” Barlow tries to assuage the disparity between appearance and the heart by
suggesting that true joy is “secret”: “Why? Have we not already heard, that their harvest
is secret, hidden? For as in laughter, the heart may be sorrowfull; so under a sad
countenance, the heart may be merry. And as the wicked have many a secret sting, the
righteous feele not; so have the upright hidden comforts, that the wicked know not.”15
The joy of the believer hides itself within, supposedly, and one can sense Barlow’s
anxious defensiveness in his tone. I use “anxiety,” however, with caution, trying to avoid
the familiar turn of locating present anxieties in a past that does not necessarily
experience troublesome concepts and changes with the same degree of secular
psychological dissonance. Perhaps this “anxiety” is something more akin to “desire”—
the desire to express the kind of joy that adequately represents, even while not flaunting,
15 John Barlow, The Joy of the Upright Man, in a sermon preached at Grayes Inn
(London: Imprinted by Felix Kyngston, 1619), 31.
12
the joy that is promised for the elect, the devout believer, and the desire to hold joy
within the soul without necessarily expressing it bodily. Joy’s innate relationship with
desire was well-known, given the understanding of Thomist doctrine that joy occurs as
the adequate completion of desire. The desire, though, to articulate joy came from an
unsurety of how exactly that joy is supposed to feel.
The particulars, and analogues, of this practicable kind of joy provided
theologians with the problem at hand. True joy, limited to believers in Christ, was only a
foretaste of the final joy that would come in actual soteriological union with Christ. That
is, all joy that is “spiritual,” or joy that comes from the apprehension of grace, is
unknowable, and can only be described in terms of the hypothetical eternal joy of
salvation.16 Commonly referred to as “heavenly joy,” this joy exists only as
approximation, foreknowledge, revelation, or “light.” What this means pragmatically was
anyone’s guess—the particulars of how this joy in Christ might feel was often equated
with “comfort” or “peace,” being “sweete” and “honeste,”17 hardly specific descriptions
in a sixteenth-century English vocabulary—and joy had not yet really been seized upon
16 The idea that all earthly joy is a precursor to heavenly joy is ubiquitous. A few wellknown examples: In his Newly Revised Acts and Monuments Vol. 2 (London, 1583), 1840, John
Foxe describes receiving special “spirituall revelations” about infant baptism as “a tast of the joy
and kingdome to come, which fleshe and bloud can not comprehend.” In a treatise on felicity by
Alexander Hume, the Scottish poet, asks: “What then of al these joies and pleasures? Were thy
ever injoied by any man, or is it possible that any man can injoy them in this life? No certainlie,
they cannot be fully injoyed so long as wee dwell here upon earth, and remaines in this tabernacle
of fleshe and blood: But these are heavenly joyes, pertaining to the life to come, which all the
faithfull shall undoubtedlie injoye: yea, and greater nor these also: For the wit & ingine of man is
able to comprehend and understand these joies before rehearsed: But the perfit joy and felicitie fo
the life to come, passeth all understanding.” (Alexander Hume, A treatise of the felicitie, of the
life to come. Edinburgh, 1594), 46.
17 Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ . . . yeeres since by one Thomas of
Kempis (London, 1580).
13
as the “affection” that it is known as in the seventeenth century. The causes of joy had
been plainly laid out in Reformation theology, but the actual experience of joy was still
vague, confused with gladness, mirth, and comfort. Joy was often described through its
negation: heavenly joy was certainly not the carnal joys “of the flesh” of eating, whoring,
gambling, or sexual deviance or the lighter “vain” joys of music, dancing, or acting.18
Heavenly, true joy exists in opposition to these more secular joys but it remains without a
clear definition, which was a symptom of its properties: if it can only be experienced in
heaven, its earthly manifestation would have been particularly enigmatic. Indeed,
language won’t do it justice, it “paseth all understanding.”19
Joyfully Expressing the Inexpressible
The ineffability of true joy remains a problem for Protestants, but only up to a
point. The Old and New Testaments command believers to rejoice, but it sometimes
seems as though true religious rejoicing was hard to come by.20 Even Luther finds true
joy an impossible task: “[Christ] should fill me with supreme joy . . . yet the malice of my
flesh prevents it, and the law of sin has so thoroughly taken me captive that I cannot fill
all my members, all my bones, and my innermost being with this blessing of Christ as I
18 “Vain” joys were not looked down upon as much as the label would lead us to believe.
Certainly, Puritans or extreme religious figures found “vain” joys to be just as destructive as joys
of the flesh, but a vain joy for most was simply a joy that was not overtly heavenly. Vain joys
were often categorized as things “indifferent,” to use Donne’s terms.
19 Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1840. For a wonderful explanation of the common
problem of ineffability, see Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, ed. Peter
S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: AMS Press, 1984).
20 Psalms 32:11 (“Be glad in the Lord.”); Philippians 4:4 (“Rejoice in the Lord always”);
Luke 10:20 (“Rejoice that your names are written in heaven”); and so on.
14
surely would like to do.”21 Adam Potkay, in the only critical work of joy in literary
studies The Story of Joy, also cites this odd passage from Luther, and reads it as
symptomatic of an early Protestant “angst,” in which joylessness “became a new site of
dubious battle with the flesh and the devil, or a new demon against which the wayfaring
Christian must contend.” Potkay’s assertion that “Protestant divines agree . . . that true
spiritual joy is a rare thing” belies, however, many of his own citations, particularly this
other comment from Luther:
God is repelled by sorrow of spirit; He hates sorrowful teaching and
sorrowful thoughts and words, and He takes pleasure in happiness. For He
came to referesh us, not to sadden us. Hence the prophets, apostles, and
Christ himself always urge, indeed command, that we rejoice and exult.
Zech. 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter
of Jerusalem! Lo, your King comes to you.” And often in the Salms
(32:11): “Be glad in the Lord.” Paul says: “Rejoice in the Lord always.”
And Christ says: “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” When
this is a joy of the Spirit, not of the flesh, the heart rejoices inwardly
through faith in Christ, because it knows for a certainty that He is our
Savior and high Priest; and outwardly it demonstrates this joy in its words
and actions.
The passage, from Luther’s commentary on Galatians, lays out the command to have joy,
which for Potkay, increases the anxiety felt among believers when they simply were not
feeling joyful. But Luther does not point out the command to have joy without explaining
how that feeling comes about: to “rejoice and exult.” That is, the way to joy is, just as
Luther’s biblical references say, to “rejoice always,” and “outwardly it demonstrates this
joy in its words and actions.” Luther, in this passage, betrays little anxiety about the
presence of joy in his own theology, and he is confident it can manifest itself in “words.”
Potkay sees “joylessness” as the predominant threat to believers in early modern
21 Martin Luther, cited in Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy (Cambridge University Press,
2007), 78.
15
England, echoing the sense of most critics that the greatest plague in Early Modern
England was that of melancholy and sorrow. While most of Potkay’s findings
demonstrate his considerable knack for understanding the way joy becomes a great
concern in early modern England, he ignores the ways in which that concern specifically
relate not to joy’s absence but to its appropriate expression, the objects through which the
rarefied Christian joy can be articulated.
The explanation of the joyless anxiety ignores the voices of most English writers,
who betray little anxiety about the unknowability of joy; rather, most seem fairly
comfortable with the notion that heavenly joy is promised rather than lived. To return to
Barlow, he understands the misunderstanding of joy as precisely the proof of its reality:
And if the upright man be the only merry man here on earth among his
enemies, and singeth his Hebrew songs, with delight, in a strange land:
Then what joy shall he have in heaven, in the presence of the Lord, and
communion of all the blessed Saints and Angels? … Is it possible for an
Hebrew to sing and play in Babylon? And not be ravished with joy in the
house of Bethel? Will strangers doe thus from home? What then will they
doe in the heaven of heavens? And how should this carry the minds of the
upright to thinke of their latter end, to desire the coming of the Lord, and
restauration of all things? Truly this, if it were jest in part, tasted here
below, and seriously thought upon, it would fill the heart with joy
unutterable glorious; make our Pauls long to be loosed, and Johns to crie,
Come Lord Jesus, come quickly. The little experience that we have, what
joy is in an upright heart here, must make us wonder at that which shall be
in heaven hereafter.22
Barlow seems wholly contented asking questions about the nature of earthly joy as a
hopeful endeavor that something much better awaits. The joy of the earth is fine, but it
will really feel at home in heaven. The implications are such that any articulation of joy is
inadequate to its heavenly potential, but that is exactly the concept worth holding onto.
22 Barlow, 34.
16
Barlow’s emphasis is not in the satisfaction that great joy awaits, but in the
possible location of the joy on earth. His first question, referring to the ubiquitous Psalm
137, asks if the Hebrew can sing the song of joy in the land of his enemies. He equates
the question with the notion that “stranger” souls have difficulty singing at “home,” but
the joy of the upright consists of finding an auricular space for joy on the earth. The
grounds for earthly joy, it seems, are in the act of singing sacred songs, vocally rejoicing,
rather than holding that joy in “secret” as Barlow had suggested earlier in his sermon.
The expression of joy is heavenly joy transferred to earthly grounds, even if that singing
is done “in a strange land.” Here the experience of joy is conflated with its expression, a
common trope that is returned to over and over again in the Protestant experience. The
Hebrew songs contain the experience of joy, even when they are not recognized as such
by “strangers.”
Barlow’s series of questions are answered by analogy: how do the transitory joys
of earthly experience mirror the possible joys of heaven? We might attribute this central
question to the fundamental change in Christian theology to which I have already
alluded; during the Reformation, the objects of joy can no longer be the Saints, relics, and
the Eucharist. The image of the Hebrew songs, Psalms sung in worship, suggest exactly
how the traditional object of joy have been replaced with something else: the Word. After
all, the English Church of Elizabeth retained most of the ritual language of Catholic
sacraments and Mass, yet changed the emphasis from the material ritual to the language
itself.23
23 Perhaps I am pressing too much on the difference between Roman Catholic affective
piety and Protestant versions of the same. Let me emphasize, however, that the distinction
between Roman Catholic affective piety and that of the Reformist movements was less about the
17
Nowhere is this more evident than in Thomas Becon’s fascinating Jewel of Joy
(1550), written as Becon’s celebration of the underground burgeoning of contintental
Protestantism in England.24 In the dialogue, Philemon, recently arrived from the
continent, declares to his many English friends that he has brought them a special “jewel”
or “thyng” of joy: “The gyft which I wyll nowe geve is called the jewell of joy, & not
wythout a cause. For in it you shall receive muche true joye and perecte solace, much
godlie pleasure and spirtuall conforte. In it ye shal se in what thing alone ye oughte to
rejoyce.” Philemon’s friends respond with a certain eagerness: “I pray you what is it. . .
Let it be brought forth.” Philemon finally declares, “Lo, here it is. Rejoyce in ye Lorde
always, and agayne I say rejoice. How like you this Jewell? Is it not boeth goodlye and
precious? Is it not worthe ye lokynge on as they saye? Is it not a Jewel worthye to be
worne of everie true herted christian man?” Philemon’s jewel of joy is nothing more than
a sentence, culled from Philppians. Yet the utterance itself is treated as an object to be
“worne” that will bring unalterable joy to the Christian man. The shift from object to
kind of emotions felt and more about 1) what the religious objects of those affections were, 2)
how those emotions were expressed, and 3) what those emotions had to do with belief and
salvation. For an excellent discussion of how this came about, see Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The
Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 55-70. See also Ted A. Campbell, The Religion of the Heart
(Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 3-21. For an early, and rather bold,
view of how the religious passions entered into language during the Reformation, see Martin
Elsky’s translation of Erich Auerbach’s 1941 PMLA article, “Passio as Passion,” in Criticism
43.3 (2001), 288-308. See also Martin Elsky, “Erich Auerbach’s Seltsamkeit: The Seventeenth
Century and the History of Feelings, “ in Reading the Renaissance: Ideas and Idioms from
Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Marc Berley (Pittsburgh, PN: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 176204.
24 Thomas Becon, The Jewell of Joy, in The Catechism of Thomas Becon and other
pieces (The Parker Society: Cambridge: University Press, 1944), 427. Becon had already been
imprisoned on account of his heretical beliefs on clerical marriage and the Mass, as well as his
close associations with Latimer and Bailey. He recanted his some of his beliefs in order to be
released (which some suspect was a very calculated wink at his Protestant followers), and then
began a career as one of Cranmer’s chaplains.
18
word, the jewel as utterance, signifies the abstraction to which Protestant religious joy
had to attend.
The paradox, of course, comes from the way true joy had been described as
ineffable, passing all understanding and language. If joy is ineffable, but the object of joy
is a sentence, an utterance of belief, and the Word, how does joy articulate itself? Perhaps
Protestant joy came from this particular paradox itself, as is often the case in Reformation
theology: if there were a paradox in joy, there would also be joy in the paradox. This is
all to say that joy occupied a unique position in Protestant theology, mandatory but
elusive, essential but abstract. The expression of joy became its own object, and although
being language itself, it had to be recognizable as a religious object; in much the way that
the Word represents Jesus Christ, the expression of joy had to be a phrase already known
through established scripture. That is, one cannot invent the language of joy because its
construction would already be prescribed as an utterance of joy. Thomas Becon’s “Jewel
of Joy” is a direct quote from Philippians, and most of the common joyful expressions
were directly lifted from Geneva Bible. Almost all discussions of joy in the reformation
are contained within commentaries on the Psalms, and those commentaries rarely
expound on joy but rather refer back to the Psalm, as if that joy is self-explanatory. This
is a problem for poetry—if the object of joy is a phrase that has already been solidified in
the religious culture—“rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice, etc”—what place
did new constructions of language have? An expression of joy must draw on a scriptural
phrase or ritual language in order to recognizable as such. Otherwise, the joy expressed
would just seem worldly.
19
The ritual language of joy as well as its paradox created an almost mystical sense
of rhetoric; in the ritual expression of joy, joy can finally be felt. This, in a sense, is a
self-perpetuating speech act: when a speaker is expressing joy, the hearer will receive it, a
little as if I were to tell you that you are enjoying reading this dissertation, you would
automatically enjoy it. And you are enjoying this dissertation. The only difference would
be the scriptural sense of expression. If I were to say specifically, “Rejoice in this great
work of dissertating always, and again I say rejoice,” joy would magically be bestowed
upon you, whereas if I were just to say, “Enjoy this dissertation because it is really good,”
no true joy would come. That is, the true religious joy, a lasting joy, is never approached
nor conjured, but in a sense bestowed.
The structural language of religious joy is the subject of my first two chapters, the
first on the metrical translations of the Psalms and the second on Edmund Spenser’s
marriage ode Epithalamion. Each of the sermons I have quoted in this introduction are
homilies on a Psalm, and any discussion of the language of religious joy must take into
account the virtual monopoly that the Psalms had on the discourse of spiritual emotion,
most pointedly in the late sixteenth century as the many published Psalters become as
important as The Book of Common Prayer. In “Upon the translation of the Psalms,” John
Donne’s poem about the Philip and Mary Sidney psalter, the speaker claims that the
Psalms had been through a series of transmissions that end with the Sidneys.
The songs are these, which heavens high holy Muse
Whisper’d to David, David to the Jewes:
And Davids Successors, in holy zeale,
In forms of joy and art doe re-reveale
To us so sweetly and sincerely too (31-35)
20
Donne’s claim that the Psalms, in their English translation, have been offered “In forms
of joy and art” allows for the rethinking of those translations as contributing to the shift
from object to word in affective emotions as well as the understanding of poetic
translation of scripture as joy’s qualifying “form.” The Psalms had always been used to
offer solace, peace, or answers for particular emotional states or specific experiences.
Virtually every Psalter that appeared during Elizabeth’s reign was prefaced by
Athanasius’s list of “use” for the Psalms, “according to the effect of the mind, for
gladness and sorrow.” So it would make sense that the Psalms were used as expressions
of joy, but the Sidney Psalms in particular attempted to marry poetic expressions of
delight with religious evocations of joy. What results is Mary Sidney’s forceful
articulation of “earthy” joy, an anagogical sense that heavenly expression lies behind the
poetic forms of rejoicing. By using Donne’s theology of “accidental” and “essential” joys
to read Mary Sidney’s Psalms 95-100, I uncover the ways in which this particular
translation brought forms of joy to art, altering the structures of language that produce,
sustain, and recast the experience of spiritual joy.
If the metrical, i.e. poetical, settings of the Psalms reflected and recast the forms
of joy in the English Protestant religious culture, Spenser’s Epithalamion took this work a
step further by using joy as the vehicle to explore public exclamations of joy through the
Psalms, the common recitations of which allowed ordinances, such as marriage, to verge
on holy celebrations. But the Epithalamion, despite its emphasis on the poetic language
of joy, finally eschews this form for a more intimate, sacred, and personal joy that veers
closer, for Spenser, to the heavenly joys as promised. This is when the poem begins to
address the issue of ineffability and language compensation that I have already identified
21
as characteristic of the discourse of religious joy. This shift from public exclamation to
private inarticulation proves useful for the poem’s final purpose, to hint at, suggest, and
even slightly bestow joy on its subject, whether it be his wife Elizabeth, to whom the
poem was gifted as a “jewel” or “joie,” or the reader, who experiences the joy that
accompanies the “endless monument” of marriage, ordinance, sex, and poetry.
Each of these chapters attempt to locate joy not only as something these particular
texts are concerned with but also as something they try to invoke in their audiences.
While the Psalms were regularly used for this purpose, and Spenser’s Epithalamion
mimics the language of bestowing grace in order to bestow joy, another genre has its own
pressing concerns about the ways in which it ought to bring joy to both its readers and its
producers: the spiritual diary. My interest in spiritual diaries originated in the ways I
thought that the texts would describe “signs” of belief and election, including the settled
state of joy that accompanies sanctification, as the Calvinist-Puritan line has it. What I
found, along with that particular concern, was the practice of what I call “writing into
joy,” the tendency on the part of the diarist to begin writing about the drudgeries, even
sorrows, of the day but ending each entry with an exclamation of joy, as if the practice of
writing became almost therapeutic for the devout. My study focuses on Richard Rogers,
the Puritan divine responsible for the most complete and earliest Puritan diary, a diary
that was well-read and subsequently emulated by many of the major spiritual diarists in
the later sixteenth century. He is also the author of Seven Treatises, a guidebook of sorts
for spiritual examination. Using both of his text, his diary and the Seven Treatises, I trace
how he uses the diary as a vehicle both to write his way into expressions of joy and
actually experience joy through that process. By expressing joy in order to feel it, Rogers
22
flips the common “inside to outside” model of emotion, and by writing sorrow in order to
get to joy, he demonstrates the careful work that personal writing and spiritual
examination does for the religious affections.
Rogers’s diary, for all its focus on sorrow, ends in joy, and his readers (as
opposed to later historians and literary critics) often express their own joy upon reading
it. The transferal of textual joy to felt joy in a reader or audience is usually discussed in
the context of affect, but the peculiar ways in which joyful affect operates in the
Renaissance, primarily in the way that joyful affect draws on religious structures of
feeling, informs my final chapter. Protestant divines, particularly William Perkins, had
developed a theology of emotions that emulated and accompanied the Godly narrative of
salvation. Beginning with a spiritual “deadness,” a true believer was to undergo a process
of patience and holy sorrow that eventually led to a realization of final joy. This final joy
accompanied sanctification but was dependent on the process by which it was given, a
process that included time, sorrow, submission, and release. This joy, however, is not
achieved as much as it is given—God’s grace is a gift of joy rather than an ending
earned—so the religious narrative of joy was less causal as it was resultant, but it
nevertheless necessitated a movement through emotional states. Shakespeare’s The
Winter’s Tale not only emulates this emotional movement, particularly through its
principal character Leontes, it also reflects, and endows, the gift of religious joy that
comes at the end of this process, occurring both for Leontes and by extension for the
audience. In the play, Leontes begins his emotional progression with joylessness (what he
calls his “not joy”) for the first three acts, but he—and the audience—must undergo an
emotional change that allows for the unique joy that culminates in the final scene of the
23
play. The plot of the The Winter’s Tale depends on this emotional movement, and the
rhetorical effect of the play, which is one of Shakespeare’s most powerful, hinges on a
parallel emotional process. Because the play operates in “emotional time,” distorting
unified time in order to emphasize the subjective experience of sorrow and joy through
Leontes, the audience’s joy is repeatedly delayed, which makes the final scene that much
more gratifying, and surprising. My argument weaves its way through the emotional
extremes of the play, locating the markers of the Christian’s journey towards
reconciliation and collapsing the emotions performed on stage with the emotions felt in
the audience. Through emotional time, Protestant theology, and audience identification,
Shakespeare’s late play performs a story of joy, allowing grace to descend on its
characters and its audience.
The Parameters of Joy: A Methodological Admission
Each of the joyful texts that bear analysis are just that: joyful. I chose them, or
they chose me, because the criticism of them, especially that of twentieth and twenty-first
century, often sees joy as their primary emotive mode, with the notable exception of the
Rogers diary (which I argue has been emotionally misread on a consistent basis). There
are undoubtedly many poems, sermons, prose, and plays of the period that can contribute
to this study, and many of them I have tried to incorporate as part of individual chapters,
yet these four texts seemed exemplary in their respective genres for the following
reasons: 1) each seems especially interested in the usage of the word “joy,” repeating it
often in different, crucial contexts that suggest the word itself is of central concern; 2)
each text not only represents a different, and popular, genre, but also represents slightly
24
different nodes of Protestant religious thought, from Rogers’s Puritanism to
Shakespeare’s contested Catholicism; and finally, most importantly, 3) each text is
invariably rich in regards to its formal construction, careful structure, and most of all,
emphasis on emotional affect. That is all to say, each text I analyze expresses joy in ways
that are wholly unique but wonderfully exemplary.
The difficulties raised in undertaking a study such as this usually stem from the
slippery terminology for emotion, particularly positive emotions. Melancholy had its
Burton, disdain had its Jonson, sorrow even had its Crashaw, but joy, unless you count
the Lancelot Andrewes sermon above, did not have its philosophers in the milieu of early
modern literary culture. This makes it difficult to pin down any one definition or usage of
joy with any consistency. In my work, I have developed a set of rules that have helped
prevent me from making false connections that could derail my own topography of joy in
early modern literature. I share them with you so that you might keep in mind the trouble
of systematically tracing one kind of emotion through a diverse and multivocal culture.
1) “Joy” is applied inconsistently—it could result from a holy state of affection
or be felt as a result of a night of gambling, whoring, and rabble-rousing.
Hobbes called joy the affection one feels at another’s loss, while Barlow
thinks it is the quiet feeling of sanctification. I try to follow usages of the
latter.
2) There is almost no consistency in the early modern terminology for emotions:
passion, emotion, and affection were used interchangeably, sometimes used as
synonyms and sometimes markedly distinct. If they are used in distinction, I
25
have tried to call attention to that in regards to each usage. Otherwise, I also
use them as synonyms.
3) There is disagreement on when emotion can be “excessive.” If one thinks of
“ecstasy” as excessive and joy as moderate, that might help, but where
“leaping for joy” ends and “ecstasy” begins are difficult to determine.
With these three guiding points, the task of defining religious joy in a unified way
consistently eluded me. Nevertheless, I have compiled another list, this one operating as
characteristics of the religious joy that is discussed in the early sixteenth century. Each of
the items on this list might be thought of as lines drawn to perhaps enclose a definition, or
at least limits on the definitions of joy that I have already suggested above.
1) Joy usually stems from a union or reunification, either of people, heavenly
beings and mortals, soul and body, desire and object, or language and feeling.
2) Joy can be a public, shared feeling among a congregated group with like
purpose, or it can be a private, deeply inward sense only experienced alone.
3) Joy is most often a result rather than an original state; it is closure rather than
exposition, its story precedes it.
4) Joy is most often dependent on sorrow, especially if one defines sorrow as the
effect of separation between subject and object. Joy depends on the
possibility, or the potential, for sorrow to acquire its vitality. Sorrow and joy
are like flip sides of the same coin.
5) Joy is most often a momentary state. Because it depends on a preceding
narrative, a carefully constructed expression, or a context of reunification, joy
is temporal, and therefore that much more precious.
26
I suppose this might frustrate us into repeating Lancelot Andrewes’s claim that
“Joy is all in all.” Yet these lists also allow us to look for the contexts, traces, or evidence
of joy rather than a statement of “joy” itself. This method restructures definitional notions
of joy into causes, contexts, results, and diverse expressions, which are perhaps more
useful in allowing us to see the plurality of religious experience in early modern England.
In 1655, Edward Reynolds told his congregation at St. Paul’s that the “end of all”
sermons was to “quicken the joy” of the hearers.25 This was no idle statement: the
operation of joy on an audience proved indispensable to the understanding of religious
rhetoric. My project seeks to uncover a similar rhetorical structure in the literature of
early modern England, and in so doing, unloose “joy” as an object of serious study, an
emotion that can both revise current interpretations of Renaissance literature and
revitalize its rhetorical power. An admission: I also aim to follow Reynolds’s rhetorical
prescription in this book. By examining the joy of early modern literary and religious
texts, I hope to “quicken the joy” of the critical conversation about them. Enjoy.
25 Edward Reynolds, Joy in the Lord: Opened in a Sermon Preached at Pauls, May 6
(London: Printed by Tho. Newcomb, 1655), A3.
27
CHAPTER 1
“SHOW US ILANDERS OUR JOY”: THE PSALMS, DONNE’S
ACCIDENTAL JOYS, AND THE SIDNEY PSALTER
John Donne’s late poem, “Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip
Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister,” contains several phrases ripe for the
titular pickings, giving many a critical article on the Sidney Psalms its colonic prefix: “In
forms of joy and art,” “Make all this All,” or “The highest matter in its noblest form.”26
Its quotability for critics and scholars is not surprising: Donne’s poem offhandedly sets
out a theory of religious lyric, postulating that religious expression depends on an early
modern version of the high modernist “make it new.” Older, more traditional forms of
sacred writ are to be recast and, in Donne’s term, “translated” into a careful idiom of
contemporary resonance, and in so doing the poetry will “teach us how to sing.”
After John Donne describes the Sidney Psalms as “forms of joy and art” in this
early act of literary criticism, critics have often focused on how the Sidney Psalms perfect
their “art,” recognizing the ways in which Sir Philip experimented in verse forms and
Mary Sidney played with rhythm, meter, structure, and repetition to render the Psalms in
English palatable for the poetry types.27 Less often do those same critics examine the
26 See Anne Lake Prescott, “Forms of Joy and Art’: Donne, David, and the Power of
Music,” in John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 3-36; Heather Asals, “David’s Successors: Forms of
Joy and Art,” Proceedings of the PMR Conference 2 (1977): 31-37; Raymond Jean Frontain,
“Donne’s ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes’ and the Challenge to ‘Make all this All’ in
“Colloquium: ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of
Pembroke his Sister,” in John Donne Journal 27 (2008): 161-174; Hannibal Hamlin, “’The
Highest Matter in the Noblest Form’: The Influence of the Sidney Psalms,” in Mary Sidney,
Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009), 317-341.
27 Hannibal Hamlin calls the Sidney Psalms, “The greatest achievement in literary psalm
translation in the English Renaissance is the Sidney Psalter. In The Arte of English Poesie,
28
“forms of joy” that Donne identifies, a large oversight considering Donne proclaims that
the Sidney Psalms “show us ilanders our joy, our King, / They teach us why and tell us
how to sing.” For Donne, the joy of the islanders was no idle afterthought—it was the
central topic of at least five sermons, and it is the central motif in his justly popular The
Second Anniversarie, or The Progress of the Soule. Joy for Donne was the conditional
proof of the truly religious man, the emotional marker of a Christian’s potential as a
believer, and he drew many of his ideas about joy, as one might guess, from the English
Psalms. Joy became the primary affect of the recitation of the Psalms, and the metrical
Psalms, as I will demonstrate, stood as the early modern ur-text of joy. This chapter
examines psalmic expression of joy and Donne’s articulation of the same in sequence.
First, I suggest that the way Donne defined joy both in his sermons and poetry lays the
groundwork for a public, communal articulation of religious reform, and how that
definition of joy operates in his theory of what the religious lyric should do, especially as
suggested in “Upon the translation of the psalms.” The second part of my argument uses
Donne’s poem as an actual primer of how to read the Sidney Psalms, a method that has
seldom, if ever, been used. As part of this process, I compare the Sidney Psalter to the
larger psalm culture of late sixteenth-century religious England, revealing how each
George Puttenham discusses the ‘Arte’ of what would now be called English accentual-syllabic
verse in terms of five types of proportion: the number of lines in a stanza, the number of syllables
in the line, the choice of rhymes, the spacing and patterning of rhymes, and the use of lines of
different lengths to make visual shapes. The full potential of all of these proportions was explored
by Philip and Mary Sidney. . . . making [the Sidney Psalter] in essence a source-book for English
poetic form.” Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 118. See also Suzanne Woods, Natural
Emphasis (Pasadena, CA: Huntington Library, 1984), 138-148.
29
participated in the rhetorical transmission of religious joy. Reading Donne’s “Upon the
translation” alongside the Sidney Psalms 95-100 will ultimately demonstrate how
rejoicing was both vehicle and effect of religious devotion, proof of spiritual authenticity,
and the method of bringing down to earth the ineffable, “essential” joys of heaven.
“Until this be reformed”: The Rhetoric of Metrical Psalm
Translation
Nobody really knows why Donne wrote “Upon the translation of the Psalms by
Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countesse of Pembroke, his sister” (“Upon the translation”
from now on), but many have tried to account for it within Donne’s own career
trajectory. There is only one surviving manuscript of the poem, despite its rather public
purpose (perhaps “intended to intervene in liturgy and church music debates,” as
Hannibal Hamlin claims28), and it appears in print in the 1635 second edition of Donne’s
Poems. At least David Novarr and Arthur Marotti have argued that the poem’s purpose
was to further the career of Donne, personally flattering William Herbert, son of Mary
Sidney, into advancement.29 In that case, the poem would have been for a private party,
which belies not only its argument about larger church reform but its emphasis on the
virtue of public poetry over private. Besides, “Upon the translation” might be Donne’s
only poem about the virtue of public poetry besides the Anniversaries. Much more
28 Hannibal Hamlin, “Upon Donne’s ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes’” in
“Colloquium: ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of
Pembroke his Sister,” in John Donne Journal 27 (2008): 175-189, 180.
29 David Novarr, The Disinterred Muse: Donne’s Texts and Contexts (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1980), 153-157. Arthur Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 284-285.
30
plausible is Gary Stringer’s recent suggestion that the poem has not survived in more
manuscripts because it was probably immediately set into type from only one manuscript
not meant for circulation but for publication, alongside a new edition of the Sidney
Psalms in 1625. Stringer’s careful textual analysis argues that there was indeed not more
than one manuscript, intended for a printer, and that although the Sidney Psalms were
never printed, Donne’s poem was part of an attempt to reform church liturgical practice
after the death of James. If this is the case, and I am inclined to follow Stringer’s work, it
suggests that Donne’s poem was instructional, acting as a primer for the reading and
understanding of the Sidney Psalms.30 Granted, Stringer’s theory is not definitive yet, but
the question of whether the poem has a public or private function is crucial for
understanding the poem’s rhetorical space in the debates over the function of the Psalms
in public, and of the place of religious poetry in general.
The question of how religious poetry should operate as sacred utterance is the
central concern of the poem. Donne’s “Upon the translation” begins with the invocation
of a prayer: “Eternal God,” the speaker implores, immediately followed by a
parenthetical phrase that qualifies the act of speaking for God as an impossible task.
Eternal God (for whom who ever dare
Seek new expressions, do the circle square,
And thrust into straight corners of poor wit.
Thee, who art cornerless and infinite),
30 Gary A, Stringer, “Donne’s Dedication of the Sidney Psalter” in “Colloquium: ‘Upon
the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister,” in
John Donne Journal 27 (2008): 190-198. See also Michael Brennan, in “The Queen’s Proposed
Visit to Wilton House in 1599 and the ‘Sidney Psalms,’” Sidney Journal 20 (2002): 27-54, where
Brennan suggests that the Sidney Psalms were to be used for public worship, based on a reading
of Simon Van de Passe’s engraving of Mary Sidney holding up David’s Psalms. Brennan believes
the engraving was intended as a title page.
31
I would but bless thy name, not name thee now (1-5)31
Donne’s prayer, doubling as praise, begins with the criticism of those whose
poetry of religious praise strays outside the prescripted language of God, holy writ. Citing
the risk attendant in religious poetry, Donne creates the circle-square metaphor in
claiming that the limits of mortal imagination cannot adequately evoke the language of
God, and any “new expressions” of God fall short of the infinite roundedness of scripture.
The central problem of religious poetry, or any new religious expression, then, is its
inability to measure up to the real thing, the word of God. The rest of Donne’s “Upon the
translation” attempts to respond to this problem by explaining how the Sidney Psalms
manage to marry “new expression” to the original, the Psalms. As in any invitation to
“make it new,” the implication points towards of an affective duality, tradition and
individual talent, in order to combine, in Donne’s phrase, the “highest matter in the
noblest form.” The marriage of doubles is echoed throughout the poem, a phenomenon
that Raymond-Jean Frontain identifies as the poem’s central motif: psalm and poetry,
praise and prayer, Spouse and King, brother and sister, word and song, joy and art.32
31 I follow the spelling and punctuation of Donne’s poem in The Sidney Psalter: The
Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney, ed. Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P.
Hannay, and Noel J. Kinnamon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3-4. Because my
citations of the Sidney Psalms comes from this edition as well, and because I follow Gary
Stringer in believing that “Upon the translation” was intended as a preface to the Sidney Psalter, I
follow this version of the poem throughout this chapter.
32 Raymond-Jean Frontain identifies the metaphor of turning the square into a circle as
the precursor for what he identifies as a “circle of praise,” appropriately enough, where Donne
praises the Sidneys, who praise David, who praises God in the Psalms, Who praises Donne and
the Sidneys for their good work. See both Raymond Jean Frontain, “Donne’s ‘Upon the
translation of the Psalmes’ and the Challenge to ‘Make all this All’ in “Colloquium: ‘Upon the
translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister,” in
John Donne Journal 27 (2008): 161-174; and Raymond-Jean Frontain, “Translating
Heavenwards: ‘Upon the Translation of the Psalmes’ and John Donne’s Poetics of Praise,” in
Renaissance Culture 22 (1996): 103.
32
“New expressions” is not necessarily the object of Donne’s criticism, but rather it is the
“Seeking” of new expressions that vainly attempt to square the circle. The expressions
are already there—the Psalms—but they need to be, in Donne’s fraught term, “translated”
by someone skillful enough to both retain the original power of God’s word and build in
a contemporary poetic resonance.
His praise of the Sidney Psalms centers on this: their ability to “translate” God’s
own expression through David into an idiom that serves the dual function to delight and
impress.
The songs are these, which heavens high holy Muse
Wisper’d to David, David to the Jewes:
And Davids successors, in holy zeal,
In forms of joy and art doe re-reveal
To us so sweetly and sincerely too. (31-35)
The genealogy of poetic transmission—God to David to Jews to successors—climaxes at
his emphasis on what these songs do, which is “re-reveale” something “To us so sweetly
and sincerely.” The repetition of the prefix in “re-reveale” is part of a larger thematic of
the poem, a process that Frontain calls the “circle of praise,” (Donne has, after all,
managed by the end of the poem to “circle the square”) in which God inspires David,
who gives the Sidneys the raw material for translation, which “allows the people on earth
to sing,” influencing Donne to praise the Sidney Psalms. Donne’s praise refocuses the
“people” towards the Psalms, re-igniting desire to sing the “extemporal song,” which is in
praise of God.33 Frontain’s identification of the process is intriguing, and it suggests that
Donne’s remark on “new expression” echoes the “new song” of Psalms 96 and 98, or at
least suggests that the “new song” of the Psalms is really just the old song with a new
33 Frontain, “Translating Heavenwards,” 113.
33
melody.34 The “new expression” ought not to be original in content nor even in phrasis,
but new only through temporal translation. Part of the century-old argument about faith in
the vernacular, “Upon the translation” sits firmly within the Protestant tradition of how
careful devotional utterance alone fulfills worship’s potential. Scriptural language
contains the primal voice, and translation, even when originally intended for private
worship, has the residual benefit of giving set wording to the language that can be
standardized to allow for public worship. Donne’s poem, however, does much more than
suggest that this circle of praise allows for adequate worship, it also defines the nature of
that worship—poetry—and allows for spiritual affect.
Rather than focusing on how formal choices of translation or experimental meter
causes that “re-reveal,” I see the primary interest of the poem in the substance of what is
being re-revealed, and how this affects a reader. The form is named in the passage I have
already quoted: “In forms of joy and art.” The “art” is clear—he is, after all, speaking of
the Sidneys, whose art had been renowned for thirty years prior to Donne’s praise, even if
the translation of the Psalms were never printed for the general public.35 But the form of
joy? What exactly is a form of joy and why is it put on par with art? A close study of the
34 Frontain’s “circle of praise” would benefit as well from fitting into Donne’s own
identification, in one of his sermons, of the way God and “man” interact through the Psalms:
“Whatsoever it bee, it is the very first word, with which David begins his booke of Psalmes;
Beatus vir: as the last word of that booke is Laudate Dominum; to shew, that all that passes
betweene God and man, from first to last, is blessings from God to man, and praises from man to
God.” John Donne, “Sermon 2: Preached at White-hall, the 30 Aprill 1620. Psalm 144.15.” in The
Sermons of John Donne, in Ten Volumes, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1962), 3:78.
35 Although the Sidney Psalter was never printed, there are 17 surviving manuscripts,
testament that they were perhaps more widely circulated than many printed books. For details, see
“Manuscripts of the Psalmes,” in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert: Countess of
Pembroke, ed. Margaret Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan. Vol. II: “The Psalmes of David,”
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 308-336.
34
Sidney Psalms themselves might reveal part of this answer, which will arrive in the
second part of this chapter. Certainly the Countess of Pembroke’s careful construction of
formal affect contains within it a form of joy, but it might be useful to first examine the
larger function of the metrical Psalms during the Reformation in England, and how the
translations of Psalms into meter attempted to formulate a special kind of religious joy.
Almost all discussions of joy in Reformation England are contained within commentaries
and homilies on the Psalms, and those commentaries rarely expound on joy but rather
refer back to the Psalm, as if that joy is self-explanatory. This poses a problem for
poetry—if the explanation of joy is a phrase that has already been solidified in the
religious culture—“rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice” or “Rejoice and be
glad all our days”—what place did new constructions of language have? In order to be
recognizable as such, an expression of religious joy must draw on a scriptural phrase or
ritual language. Otherwise, the joy expressed would just seem worldly, a “false” joy.
To examine the larger function of the Psalms in Early Modern England, I will be
drawing on the excellent work by Hannibal Hamlin, Beth Quitsland, and Rikvah Zim,
who have scrupulously limned the function and form of the English Psalms in the late
sixteenth century, both in the religious culture as well as in the literary culture (hardly
distinct, anyway).36 Hannibal Hamlin reminds us that the Psalms “were not really
conceived of as ‘texts’ in the way that translations of Catullus or Petrarch were,” but
instead were more like everyday material, being used most days of the week as the
36 I might also mention, as excellent resources, Phillip Von Rohr-Saur, English Metrical
Psalms from 1600 to 1660: A Study in the religious and Aesthetic Tendencies of that Period
(Universitatsdrukcerin Frieburg, 1938); Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England,
1549-1660 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press reprint with corrections, 1937, 1978).
35
accompaniment to household tasks and being collectively sung in church every Sunday,
of which attendance was mandatory by law. The metrical versions of the Psalms were
probably the most familiar of all texts in early modern English life, and any reference or
allusion to them would have been widely and immediately understood.37 During private
prayer, public singing, and even secular theater, the Psalms were invoked with a
frequency that was only noticeable if absent: they were the sacred soundtrack to the
secular life.
The Psalms’ ubiquity stemmed largely from the belief that they were both the
most accessible of holy writ and the easiest to memorize. The language of the popular
Psalms was akin to nursery rhymes, and as such was the language of anecdotes, grammar
lessons, and allusions. The Sternhold and Hopkins translation, compiled and published as
a whole book in 1562, had the effect of spreading the Psalms out to all classes—they
were first created, by Sternhold alone, in order to please Edward at court in the late
1540s, and eventually they became the primary tool of psalmic transmission, sung in
church and available to the illiterate. The Sternhold and Hopkins was reprinted over 700
times in the sixteenth century, far outpacing any other popular book. Perhaps because of
its popularity and accessibility, and certainly because of its strange solutions to metrical
inconsistencies, the Sternhold and Hopkins was also the subject of much derision and
scorn, especially among the literati.38 Donne himself called the Sternhold and Hopkins
Psalms “vulgar” and “more hoarse, more harsh” for their use of odd noises to fulfill the
37 Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 6.
38 There are indeed many uses of “aye” in the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalms, only
rivaled by how many “–ly” adverbs are added to complete metrical rules.
36
meter, and George Wither claimed the Sternhold and Hopkins was “full of absurdities,
scolescismes, improprietyes, non-sence, and impertienent circumlocutions.”39
Nevertheless, the Sternhold and Hopkins The Whole Book of Psalms quickly became the
central book of Psalms glued into any Bible, the primary text for most cultural and
literary allusions to the Psalms, and the straw man for all later translators.
My interest in the Sternhold and Hopkins is not with its ineptitude, although that
was certainly the greatest of Donne’s concerns, but rather with the way it emphasized, in
most of its editions including in its original conception, certain functions of the Psalms.
Beth Quitsland, in her fascinating study of the Sternhold and Hopkins, argues that these
Psalms were not so much created for the purposes in which they were eventually used, as
the primary text of public worship, but rather that “the decades-long composition of this
collection of paraphrases and prayers forms a record of the very different stages of the
English Reformation and, further, that its numerous authors and editors were actively and
influentially engaged in shaping the nature of that Reformation.”40 Quitsland chronicles
the creation of the Sternhold and Hopkins as a response to the way the Psalms were to be
used in Reformed England, in the language of the vernacular and as “advice” for the
current monarch. The early output of Sternhold certainly upholds this reading, and it
might be noted that none of the “royal Psalms”—those that become the Psalms of joy for
the Sidneys—were translated first, perhaps because, if Quitsland’s thesis is correct, the
39 George Whither, The Schollers Purgatory (London, 1624), 37.
40 Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English
Metrical Psalter: 1547-1603 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 5. See also Hamlin, Psalm
Culture, 65, where he points out that the early Sternhold Psalms return to the them of “repression,
tyranny, or captivity. . . very much like the kind of thing that would seem appropriate to an
evangelical sensibility at points in the mid-1540s, during the sometimes savage setbacks of the
Henrician Reformation.”
37
royal Psalms praise the monarch as a stand-in for Jehovah, and these initial Psalms were
meant to correct the erroneous notions that the monarch retained.41
What strikes me, however, about the list of early Sternhold Psalms is that none of
the Psalms that he chose to translate in the first edition are “joyful” Psalms, with the
exception of Psalm 32 (“Be mery therefore in the Lorde”), but rather penitential Psalms
and prayers of petition. Even in the second edition, filling out the absent Psalms, rare is
the Psalm of praise or rejoicing. Although Quitslund does not mention this phenomenon,
it would be in keeping with her sense of the chronological Reformation that translations
of the joyful Psalms would come later, as the Reformation theology that developed in the
late sixteenth century had greater interest in the centrality of affections, especially as
William Perkins, Henry Smith, and Richard Hooker began to examine the fault lines of
feeling, and a new emphasis was placed on the Psalms as texts of joy. Other early
translations, including those of Wyatt and Surrey, also focused on the Penitential Psalms
and the songs of despair, as if these Psalms had most resonance to the culture of the time.
This was in keeping with tradition: the early psalters of medieval England were books of
prayer, but those soon evolved into the Book of Hours, or the Primer, which included the
seven Penitential Psalms, the fifteen Gradual Psalms, some prayers, and the “Little
Hours” of the Virgin. Psalms as expressions of repentance, guilt, sorrow, and confusion
41 Sternhold’s first edition included the following Psalms: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 20, 25, 28, 29, 32,
34, 41, 49, 73, 103, 120, 123, 128. The Second edition added the following: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 43, 44, 63, 68, and Hopkins then came on board, adding 30, 33, 42, 52,
79, 82, 146 in the appendix as well as the comment that his Psalms might be “comfortable unto a
Christian mind, although not so pleasant in the mouth or ear.” Even Hopkins knew the
translations weren’t all that great. To Quitslund, the original grouping was “not a program of
private devotion: Sternhold’s biblical poetics are deliberately engaged in mid-Tudor politics as
well as the Tudor Reformations.” That is, the grouping was not necessarily thematic, both on the
normal groupings of the Psalms as well as current considerations. Quitslund sees it as “speaking
to the king” on the part of Sternhold.
38
also came from an old tradition, cited from Athanasius but also part of midrash, of using
the Psalms as correctives, comfort, and penitence rather than ecstatic pronouncements.
The 1562 first complete edition of Sternhold and Hopkins includes the “Treatise
by Athanasius” as prefatory matter, which includes a long list of functions that comes
from Athanasius includes specific use for each Psalm: for example, “If any consult or
conspire against thee, as Achitophel against David, and some man tell in thee, syng the 7.
Psalme.” The list includes most of the Psalms, and is fairly comprehensive, and the 1562
Psalter adds even more specific purposes for “the use of the rest of the Psalms not
comprehended in the former Table of Athanasius,” which mostly include the timely
concerns of the Reformation, including being “banished for religion,” and “if though
seest the nobilitie, the councell, the magistrates, and princes not geven to religion.” The
two lists together, even when the joyful Psalms are named, do not include any imperative
to feel joy or express it through rejoicing, focusing instead on comfort in afflictions. Yet
in editions of the late sixteenth century and most of the seventeenth century, the
Athanasius preface is omitted entirely, even if the functions of the Psalms as private and
public prayers may not have changed much.
The influx of Calvinist theology, a seemingly odd candidate for the proliferations
of mirth, helped change the perception of the Psalms from expressions of despair to
expressions of joy. The 1560 Geneva Bible prefaces its Book of Psalms with the
“Argument” that the Psalms “apperteine to true felicitie”:
This boke of Psalmes is set forth unto us by the holie Gost to be estemed
as a moste precious, treasure, wherein all things are conteined that
apperteine to true felicitie: as wel in this life present as in the life to come.
. . . He that wil rejoice, shal knowe the true joe, and how to kepe measure
therein. They that are afflicted and oppressed, shal se wherein standeth
39
their comforte, and how they oght to praise God when he sendeth them
deliverance.42
The purported function of the Psalms in the Geneva Bible follows the traditional
lines set out by Athanasius, but the emphasis shifts from Athanasius’s “effect of the
mynde” to the Calvinist effect of the heart, principally through “true felicitie.” Rejoicing
becomes the vehicle for “true joie,” and the Psalmes contain instruction for the “measure
therein.” Archbishop, and ardent Calvinist, Matthew Parker’s own metrical translation of
the Psalms from 1567 further this sense, where in that preface he carries on the tradition
of the Psalms being a “mirror of the soul,” a metaphor initially used by Augustine and
echoed by Miles Coverdale, Roger Ascham, and Arthur Golding, but he adds to it the
sense that the Psalms induce joy: “The psalme doth cheare the feastfull day, the better to
rejoyce, it worketh that same heaviness which is heaviness to godwarde: for the psalme is
able to plucke out teares of any mans hart, though it be never so stony harde.”43
Parker, of course, was not the first to emphasize the function of the Psalms as
vehicles of joy, but as Archbishop, his theological voice was legitimized by the state even
as his metrical Psalms never much gained enough of a popular foothold to supplant the
Sternhold and Hopkins.44 Much earlier than Parker and Sternhold and Hopkins, Miles
Coverdale’s Goostly Psalmes and spirituall songes, probably published in 1535, followed
Tyndale’s theology of the heart, in which scripture is meant to be affective rather than
42 Geneva Bible preface to the Psalms, in The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560
edition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 215 (emphasis mine).
43 Matthew Parker, The Whole Psalter translated into English Metre (London, 1567), 21.
44 It is more than tempting to try and fit in the psalter by the aptly named George Joye,
who derived his translation from Zwingli and Bucer and published it in 1530. The problem,
however, is that Joye’s psalter was almost too quickly overcome by Coverdale’s superior version.
40
representative. Coverdale conceives of his metrical Psalms as texts of affect, stepping in
line with Tyndale’s understanding of the Bible as an unmediated text, in which the
reader, by experiencing the Bible in unfettered English, overcomes the gap that had
traditionally been filled by mediators. That gap is what J.M. Perez Fernandez calls the
“affective gap” or the “hermeneutical screen” that disallows the reading experience to
move inward. Tyndale and Coverdale led this early movement to make the Bible a text of
empathy and affection, and naturally the most effective example of this process would be
the singing of the Psalms.45 Coverdale explains in the preface that the Psalms ought to be
sung, “For truly as we love to synge we: and where our affeccyon is, thence commeth
oure myrth and joye.”46 Further, Coverdale claims, when the Psalms become a “pastyme
and pleasure, our joye, myrth, and gladnesse is all of [God],” which allows “us altogether
(from the most unto the least) be glad and rejoice and be mery even from our herte.”
After all, Coverdale’s full title is Goostly Psalms and spirituall songes drawen out of the
holy Scripture, for the comforte and consolacyon of soch as love to rejoyse in God and
his Worde. Coverdale’s metrical Psalms, banned in 1546 with most copies burnt a little
later, were eventually re-collected in a book edited by John Wedderburn in 1567 that
45 J. M. Perez Fernandez, “Translation and Metrical Experimentation in SixteenthCentury English Poetry: The Case of Surrey’s Biblical Paraphrases,” in Cahiers Elisabethains,
(Spring 2007): 1-13. In Calvin’s preface to The Forme of Prayers (Geneva 1556), he suggests
that the Psalms not only contain the most moving language in Scripture, because of their poetry,
but also the most representative and comprehensive: “And there are no songes more meete, then
the Psalms of the Prophete David, which the holy ghoste hath framed to the same use, and
commended to the churche, as conteininge the effect of the whole scriptures, that hereby our
heartes might be more lyvelie touched, as appereth by Moses, Exechias, Judith, Debora, Marie,
Zacharie and others, who by songes and metre, rather then their commune speache, and prose,
gave thankes to god, for suche comfort as he sent them.”
46 Miles Coverdale, Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes, (London: Johan Gough,
1535), A4
41
used melodies of several bawdy songs to set the Psalms.47 Coverdale was primarily
concerned with the opposition of joy found in the Psalms to the delight and merriment
found in secular songs, and music’s “mirth and joye” transforms from vanity to verity
when the songs are given a psalmic purpose.
Although his Ghoostly Psalms and spirituall songes had little influence on
subsequent Psalm translations, Coverdale’s prose translation of the Psalms in the Great
Bible (1539) eventually became the translation used in the Book of Common Prayer, and
hence became the most widely-known prose translation, or even counter-translation to the
Sternhold and Hopkins, at least up until the King James Version. Nevertheless, the
proliferation of psalm translations between 1549 and 1601 is astounding: Rikvah Zim
counts ninety different versions of newly-translated Psalms, not counting prose
translations.48
To avoid allowing this chapter to drown in the vastness of the psalm translations
(I sympathize with John Donne’s warning, after having moved his discussion of joy into
the recitation of the Psalms, that “we are launched into too large a Sea, the consideration
47 This is nicely explained in Robin Leaver, Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes:
English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535-1566 (Clarendon Press,
Oxford 1991). I’ll add a few lines from Coverdale’s preface, just to show how his Psalms were
eventually put to use in the way he preferred: “Therefore to geve oure houth of England some
occasion to change theyr fouse and corrupte balettes into swete songes and spirituall hymnes of
Gods honoure, and for theyr owne consolation in mym, I have here (good reader) set out certayne
comfortable songes grounded on Gods worde, and taken some out of the holy scripture
especiyally out of the Psalmes of David, at who wolde God that oure Musicians wolde lerne to
make theyr songes: and they which are disposed to be mery,” (A5).
48 See Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535-1601
(Cambridge University Press, 1987), Appendix, 211-259.
42
of this Booke of Psalmes”49), let me summarize briefly the directions the psalm
translations moved prior to the Sidney Psalter and their variable functions. There is
indeed a contrast between those songs and Psalms by those influenced by Luther or
Tyndale before the reign of Mary and the Psalms by those influenced by Calvin,
including Parker, Arthur Golding (the translator of the Calvin commentaries), Thomas
Wilcox, and others. The former were composed mostly by the Marian exiles that left to
Geneva: Joye (who translated some of Luther’s hymns unwittingly), Coverdale, John
Fisher, and these translations focused on the Penitential Psalms and the Psalms that
would encourage comfort in the face of tribulation, The latter focused on a collective
rejoicing, not necessarily in the face of tribulation but rather as a way to bind a building
church, unite behind a growing theology, and nationalize believers.50
Another way to approach this is to say that relatively few of the Psalm translators
before the Sidney siblings understood the potential for rejoicing contained within the
Psalms, and instead saw the Psalms as correctives rather than embodiments of joy. With
the oppressive regimes of the mid-sixteenth century, whether it was Henry VIII or Mary,
49 John Donne, Sermons of John Donne, sermon 14 (Psalm 90:14: “O satisfie us early
with thy mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our dayes.”), 5:288
50 Rivkah Zim notes that in the mid-sixteenth century, the Psalms were most popular as
texts recited and rewritten by political and religious prisoners as a method of comfort and
solidarity (see Zim, 82). Zim also notes that the Psalms were the primary outlet for emotional
expression: “In the Psalms the personal expression of deep feeling is proper to the biblical texts.
It was these expressive qualities which made the Psalms appropriate vehicles of personal
devotion.” (Zim, 6). Hannibal Hamlin notes that “A notable feature of some ‘literary’ psalm
translations, as discussed above in connection with Wyatt, Surrey, and Gascoigne, is the focus on
inwardness and the exploration of the self. A number of their Psalms were expressions of
powerful emotions or explorations of inner states, but later Renaissance authors intensified and
dramatized these qualities.” Psalm Culture, 123. John Donne, in the second of his Prebend
Sermons, explains that “The Psalmes are the Manna of the Church. . . . As Manna tasted to every
man like that that he liked best, so doe the Psalmes minister Instruction, and satisfaction, to every
man, in every emergency and occasion. . . . command over all affections.” Sermons of John
Donne, 3:51.
43
or even just the specter of religious appropriation, the speakers of the Psalms looked for
comfort in the face of fear. When the relative stability of Elizabeth standardized worship,
by and large, the emphasis shifted to the eloquence of joyful outpourings. So,
alongside—but also in counter to—the development of metrical precision for the united
singing of the Psalms came the development, and even urgency, of giving language to the
Psalms that could adequately infuse the words with an articulation of joy. The meter,
once established, now had to have the right words.
“Seek new expressions”: Religious poetry and the language
of delight
In the late sixteenth century, it would not have been heresy, or even a minor
indiscretion, to rewrite the Psalms with the intensely personal language of subjective
experience. Paraphrasing the Psalms with the language of poetry, in the vernacular, was
even encouraged as a practice that would bring scripture “into the heart,” a major
preoccupation of Tyndale and Luther. Archbishop Parker went so far as to suggest that
the “learned” ought to rearrange and retranslate the Psalms according to the most
personal form of worship. In his preface to the Psalms in the Bishops’ Bible, Parker deemphasizes the specific language of the Psalms in favor of describing a feeling that the
Psalms are supposed to produce. To the reader, he says, “let him not be too much
offended with the work, which was wrought for his own commodity and comfort,”
And if he be learned, let him correct the word or sentence (which may
dislike him) with the better, and whether his note riseth either of good will
or charity, either of envy and contention not purely, yet his reprehension,
44
if it may turn to finding out the truth, shall not be repelled with grief but
applauded to in gladness, that Christ may ever have the praise.51
Parker’s peculiar stance on translation circumscribed the experience of reading the
Psalms with a subjective approach to feeling—that is, if a personal translation fits the
truth better, and the response of “gladness” confirms it, its purpose is fulfilled. This
method of translation places the Psalms in a peculiar position between poetry and
scripture, the literary and the religious. The Psalms are the medium to which that
distinction, an anachronistic one for sure, breaks down. If “literary” emphasizes aesthetic
criteria while “religious” emphasizes a set of practices based on an arguable truth claim,
or even more to the point, an epistemological claim towards emotion and feeling, then the
two meet in the metrical Psalms.
The duality that becomes one in the Psalms—the literary and the religious—has
its analogy in the Horatian purpose of poetry that dominated literary criticism of the late
sixteenth century: to delight and instruct. But “delight” in the Psalms is not so easily
categorized as simply aesthetic. Often contained within the category of “false” joy was
the festive language of the courtly lyric. Poetic joy is a “joyaunce vain,” according to
much of the religious discourse at the time, and not just for Puritans.52
The “joyaunce vain” should not be understood negatively, but rather akin to
“delight,” a catch-word for the literary theorists of the late sixteenth century, which
51 Matthew Parker, The Bishop’s Bible (Special Collections, University of Iowa)
52 Frances Bacon, in his Colours of Good and Evil (Essayes and Religious Meditations,
London: 1597), 30, describes the common manner of discussing poetry even among the masses.
He claims that vain joy is “the term we give unto poesie, terming it a happie vain.” This is fairly
typical, and is what Sidney was responding to in his Defense.
45
concedes that the enjoyment does not necessarily evoke the sacred emotions of worship
but should not be shunned. Thomas Nashe and other defenders of poesy remark that the
joy of poetry remains productive in itself: “that delight doth prick men forward to the
attaining of knowledge, and the true things our father admired if they be included in some
witty fiction, like to pearls that delight more if they be deeper set in gold.”53 William
Webbe makes a similar case for poetic joy, that it has the ability to instruct the reader
towards the good, something he takes from Horace: “The perfect perfection of poetry is
this, to mingle delight with profit in such wise that a reader might by his reading be
partaker of both.”54 Yet each of these stop shy of taking poetry into the realm of religious
affectation until Philip Sidney. He concedes that much of poetic verse aims at something
completely different than traditional religious affection, but just before he discusses
poetry’s ability to “teach and delight,” he reminds his readers that some of the best poetry
has been recitative and religious in nature, and that perhaps the categories of poetry and
recitative scriptures ought not to be separated. Sidney famously asks if “holy David’s
Psalmes are [not] a divine Poem? . . . but even the name Psalmes will speake for mee,
which, being interpreted, is nothing but songes.” Sidney continues, “His Poesie must be
used, by whosoever will follow Saint James his counsel, in singing Psalmes when they
are merry, and I knowe is used with the fruite of comfort by some.”55 Sidney’s attempt to
bring Psalmic recitation together with poetry finds its justification in its affect: that they
53 Thomas Nashe, The Anatomy of Absurdity (London: I. Charlewood, 1589), C1
54 William Webbe, A Discourse on English Poetrie (London, 1586), D3.
55 Philip Sidney, “Defense of Poesie,” in Defense of Poesie, Astrophel and Stella, and
Other Writings. (Everyman, 1997), 87-90.
46
are sung to be “merry” and “find comfort.” To find joy, as it were. If the poetic affect of
the Psalms (“joy”) is only slightly different than the affect of poetry (“delight”), the
minute differences would have to be derived from the source of the language—God or
man—and the language itself—commanded or conjured. The Psalms repeatedly
command joy while poetry conjures delight. The art of poesy, which can only mimic the
discourse of joy without creating its own, seemed too far removed from the authentic
language of religious rejoicing, and the strict Neoplatonist would sever the relationship
between the two kinds of utterance. Nevertheless, Sidney’s approach in the Defense
closely linked the established religious language of scripture and liturgy with poetic
language in the vernacular. While each might have a different affective agenda, the
combination of “poetic joy” and the “sound joy” of scripture gives religious poetry an
appeal outside the strictures of worship but still within the religious structures of emotion.
Donne, in one of his sermons on the imperative to rejoice, distinguishes between
delight and religious joy, and then quickly rearranges that distinction into a hierarchy of
godly feeling:
there is a difference inter delectationem & gaudium, between delight and
joy (for delight is in sensuall things, and in beasts, as well as in men, but
joy is grounded in reason, and in reason rectified, which is, conscience)
therefore we are called to rejoyce again; to try whether our joy be true joy,
and not onely a delight, and when it is found to be a true joy, we say still
rejoyce, that is, continue your spirituall joy till it meet the eternall joy in
the kingdome of heaven, and grow up into one joy.56
Donne suggests that delight is a subspecies of “true joy,” an indicator that true joy might
be possible if the delight of aesthetics is “grounded in reason,” moved into instruction,
56 Donne, Sermons of John Donne, 3:340.
47
the intellectual contemplation of truth. “Not onely a delight,” joy combines the beauty of
poetic versification with the poem’s content, the reason as part of the “sensuall.”
Sidney recognized the overlap of delight into spiritual emotion as a productive
possibility for poetry, but he struggles to reconcile the two in his own poetry, at least until
his sister translates the bulk of the Psalms. Sidney’s earlier forms of “sound joy” in
poetry seemed fallen, allowing that the sacred expression of rejoicing was often
subsumed by the courtly poetics of desire. In sonnets 68 through 70 of Astrophil and
Stella, the poet emphasizes his poetry’s desire to achieve the kind of joy associated with
religious utterance. After sonnet 68 ends with a typical pun on “Vertue,” using it both as
a description of Stella’s reasons for resistance but also a euphemism for sexual pleasure:
“O thinke I then, what paradise of joy / It is, so faire a Virtue to enjoy,” sonnet 69 begins
with a move from sexual pleasure to poetic style: “O joy, too high for my low stile to
show.” The “joy” of sexual indiscretion in sonnet 68 moves into a reflection on the
ineffability of “joy” in sonnet 69, a concept beyond courtly poetry. But Sidney’s
recognition of this comes in the concluding couplet of 69: “This realm of blisse, while
virtuous course I take, / No kings be crown’d, but they some covenants make.” The
transformation from false joy to religious joy continues; even while the speaker changes
“O joy” to the “realme of blisse,” he recognizes that this kind of joy has enshrouded the
lovers in the language of religious offering as opposed to courtliness—no kings are
crowned, but they do make “covenants” in the joyful realm.
The transformation of joy that takes place in these two sonnets culminates in the
tension between poetic mirth and “heavenly joy” in sonnet 70:
My Muse may well grudge at my heav’nly joy,
If still I force her in sad rimes to creepe:
48
She oft hath drunke my teares, no hopes to enjoy
Nectar of Mirth, since I Jove’s cup do keepe.
Sonnets be not bound prentise to annoy:
Trebles sing high, as well as bases deepe:
Griefe but Love’s winter liverie is; the Boy
Hath cheeks to smile, as well as eyes to weepe.
Come then my Muse, shew thou height of delight
In well raised notes; my pen the best it may
Shall paint out joy, though but in blacke and white.
Cease, eager Muse; peace pen, for my sake stay;
I give you here my hand for truth of this,
Wise silence is best musicke unto blisse. (1-14)57
The distinction between the genre of poetry that the poet has undertaken, the “sad rimes”
of “sonnets,” does not, by virtue of the poetry’s own tradition, participate in the
“heavenly joy” of “Jove’s cup.” But the exhortation to the Muse after the volta suggests
that courtly poetry perhaps can turn into the heavenly joy where kings make “covenants,”
if indeed it is turned to music. The “height of delight / In well raised notes . . . .Shall paint
our joy.” The sonnet’s final couplet, though, turns its back on the promise of the
preceding four lines by not only requesting silence but asking for a profaning touch,
repeating the frustration of trying to fit courtly poetry into a sacred utterance, squaring
the circle, and recognizing that although sacred “music” may evoke joy, the best “music”
for “blisse” is no music at all.
Sonnets 68 through 70 of Astrophil and Stella carefully dramatize the desire to
turn a certain kind of poetic delight into the higher realm of “heavenly joy,” and the
attempt fails, as most attempts to unite in a sonnet sequence inevitably must, and what is
left is silence. Gary Waller, in several articles on the Sidney siblings, suggests that the
two modes of poetry, the courtly and the sacred—the “matching of contraries,” as he has
57 Sir Philip Sidney, Sonnets 68-70, in Defense of Poesie, Astrophel and Stella, and
Other Writings. 51-52.
49
it—characterize the achievement of the Sidney Psalms: “[The Sidney Psalms] bring into
play an intellectual tension, a ‘matching of contraries,’ between the theological drives of
their Protestant piety and attitudes derived from courtly neo-Platonist, even Magical,
philosophies, which have their roots in principles ultimately hostile to Reformed theology
but which were nevertheless held together in the shimmering dialectic of the Sidney
Circle.”58 The poetic experimentation of Astrophil and Stella never achieves this unity,
perhaps because of its initial genre—the Petrarchan sonnet cycle—cannot overcome its
secular roots, but if the original scriptural locutions are put in the service of the courtly
lyric—the Psalm first, courtly poetic experimentation second—delight can possibly be
turned to joy. Mary Sidney, in some sense, fulfills the project begun by her brother.
Again, Gary Waller: “Sidney was the pioneer, wrestling with the problem of smooth
versification and vivid expression; his sister builds, with increasing confidence, on his
precedents and, more conclusively, brings to her work a distinctive ideological edge.”59
If Waller’s identification is true, Donne’s description of the Sidney Psalms as
“forms of joy and art” might indeed be thought of as conjoining religious rejoicing and
the courtly lyric, but this is still somewhat unsatisfying as a response. Donne speaks of
58 Gary Waller, “A Matching of Contraries”: Ideological Ambiguity in the Sidney
Psalms,” Wascana Review 9 (1974): 124-33, 25. See also “This Matching of Contraries: Bruno,
Calvin, and the Sidney Circle,” Neophilologus 56 (1972): 331-43; “This Matching of Contraries:
Calvinism and Courtly Philosophy in the Sidney Psalms,” English Studies 55 (1974): 22-31; Gary
Waller, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of Her Writings and Literary
Milieu (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1979).
59 Waller, “Matching of Contraries,” Wascana Review 125. Rivkah Zim further explains
that “The Countess’s own versions do not represent further significant development in the
English metrical psalm as a literary king. She accepted and adopted her brother’s view of the
Psalms as ‘holy Daivs . . . divine poem’ in which the psalmist’s ‘heavenly poesie’ could best find
expressin the the best contemporary English verse: ‘that Lyricall kind of Songs and Sonets’.” Zim
187. See also Margaret P. Hannay, “Re-revealing the Psalms: The Countess of Pembroke and Her
Early Modern Readers,” Sidney Journal 23 (2005): 19-36.
50
“form,” and while we can quickly identify the form, strictly speaking, of the courtly lyric
by its meter, versification, and common tropes, it is more difficult to identify the formal
particulars of religious joy. To understand a religious form of joy, a return to Sidney:
what remains most powerful about Sidney’s early attempt to fuse heavenly joy into the
“realm of blisse” is his identification, in Sonnet 70, of music as the vehicle that would
make that possible: “Come then my Muse, shew thou height of delight / In well raised
notes; my pen the best it may / Shall paint our joy.” Music’s ability to “paint” joy was a
commonplace assumption, particularly in the form of the metrical Psalms. Anne Lake
Prescott argues that the spiritual power of the Psalms arose from the ways that they were
set to music, and uses the episode of David’s music casting the devil, melancholic or
otherwise, out of Saul. This particular story, Prescott explains, allowed the figure of
David to be conjoined with the figure of Orpheus, whose music moved stones and beasts.
The Psalms of David, when set to music, she argues, created in the body a natural
affective reaction that was known to “propel the mind upward in rapid ecstasy, not just
settle it into dutiful piety,”60 and therefore had more emotive power than almost any
other liturgical practice. Prescott quotes George Wither’s Preparation to the Psalter, a
gathering of Psalm commentary, as a gloss on the biblical episode of David and Saul,
explaining that music, as a secondary effect, accompanied the miraculous healing by its
ability to turn melancholy into joy—David “allayed the evill affections in his Maister
Saul”—by the careful combination of musical form and joyful content: “I thereto answer,
It cannot be denyed, his skill in Musicke was a special gift of the Spirit, and that he had
60 Anne Lake Prescott, “Forms of Joy and Art’: Donne, David, and the Power of Music,”
in John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 3-36.
51
greater power given to his Psalmes, then to his Harpe; yet we read not of any song then
used.” Nevertheless, “if Sauls servants had not knowen before, that there was that virtue
naturally in Musicke, to cure their Maister, they would never have willed him so
confidently, to search out a cunning Musician for that purpose.”61 Wither’s point, as
Prescott explains in the bulk of her excellent article, is that the power of music to
accompany the holy writ of David’s poetry lies in its ability to put the joy in rejoicing,
create affect from the sacred word.
The music of David initiated a kind of heavenly joy: “Learn to tune thy voice here
on earth,” says Richard Chapman on a gloss of Psalm 117, “that thou mayest have a place
among the Psalmodicall quier of Heaven, acquaint thy heart with spiritual mirth, sing
David Psalms, that thou mayest have Davids spirit.”62 If “spiritual mirth” is tied to the
singing of the Psalms, then the practice of rejoicing is inevitably a poetical practice, a
“form of joy” dependent on the spiritual content. In another commentary on the Psalms in
1613, John Boys regards the musical shape of the Psalms as the connection between
feeling and expression: “God is to be praised (saith Augustine) totis votis de totis vobis,
with all your soules, & with al your selves. That therefore we may manifest our inward
affections by such outward actions as are commendable . . . . let trumpet and tongue, viol
and voice, lute & life witness our harty reioycing in the Lord.”63 The “form of joy” is the
artful combination of the sacred utterance, its musical and poetic precision, and affective
power.
61 Wither quoted in Prescott, 30-31.
62 Richard Chapman, Hallelujah, or, king Davids shrill trumpet (London, 1635).
63 John Boys, An Exposition of the Last Psalme (London 1613), 21.
52
When Donne speaks of “forms of joy and art,” he is not only speaking of the
manner in which the Sidneys construct lyric poetry from the metrical Psalms, he is also
recognizing the affective power of the Sidney Psalms’ musicality, something that the
common metrical psalter, Sternhold and Hopkins, as well as others, evidently lacked.64
Just after his praise of the Sidneys’ “forms of joy and art,” Donne pointedly contrasts
them with the other Psalters in English,
That I must not rejoice as I would do
When I behold that these Psalms are become
So well attired abroad, so ill at home,
So well in chambers, in thy church so ill,
As I can scarcely call that reformed, until
This be reformed. (36-41)
The choice of subjunctive rejoicing, “as I would do” not only identifies rejoicing as an
action beyond simple utterance, it also highlights the affect of the Psalms when they are
“well attired” in forms corresponding to their majesty. Donne’s mention that they have
also been well-used “in chambers” as opposed to in churches has caused some comment,
but it mostly points to the rhetorical purpose of the poem, to elevate the Sidney Psalms as
a standard text to be used in public worship, part of the possibility for reformed worship
after the death of James. If and when the Sidney Psalms would replace the Sternhold and
Hopkins metrical Psalms as the source of public worship, Donne could then “rejoice as I
64 I defer to Margaret Hannay’s articulation of the question: “The poetic nature of the
Psalms mandated a need for both scholarly commentary and poetic translation, but the goal was
to bring the two genres closer together while making them accessible to the common reader. That
is, authors of metrical Psalms seem to agree that their ultimate goal was accurate transmission of
sacred words, a transmission insured by consulting the best scholarship. But if one could attain
the ultimate goal of the highest matter in the noblest forme, as Donne put it, was it a good idea?
Or would the beauty of the form obscure the text? Is bad poetry a help in transmitting sacred text?
The revisers of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter seemed to think it might be.” (Hannay, “Rerevealing the Psalms: The Countess of Pembroke and Her Early Modern Readers,” Sidney
Journal 23 [2005]: 24.
53
would do,” appropriately conforming his act of rejoicing to the language of the Sidneys, a
poetic art to create a public “form of joy.”
“Show us ilanders our joy”: Donne’s Accidental and
Essential Rejoicing
Donne’s urge to bring better worship through better Psalms in “thy church”
conforms in part to what Adam Potkay has identified as Donne’s theological definition of
religious joy, that “real joy abides only in the true church or body of believers”—not
necessarily only the Calvinist church of England but broadly defined as any Christian
participating in “a true Church,” with the emphasis on the indefinite pronoun.65 Potkay’s
incisive reading of Donne’s several sermons on joy details the connections Donne makes
between works and grace, the commandment to have joy in order to achieve salvation is
parcel to the joyful feeling that comes as a result of recognizing salvation. “One must
have joy in order to be saved,” Potkay summarizes, “and yet joy is what proves that one
is saved: albeit illogically, Donne here offers a pas de deux between God and man that
attempt to reconcile free will and election, having it both ways in good Anglican
fashion.”66
But affection understood as evidence is only pretext to something else, a higher
state in which affection becomes permanent and fulfilled. The ways in which earthly joy
65 Adam Potkay The Story of Joy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87.
As an interesting aside, Potkay argues that Donne was “so invested in ‘holy joy’” because
“fearing damnation as a Catholic apostate, [Donne] had tremendous ansiety to allay; thus, he may
have sought the Lutheran antidote of spiritual joy in his own spiritual life.” (85).
66 Potkay, 86.
54
indicate, or apprehend, a higher state is what Donne is after when he categorizes two
kinds of joy in an anagogical sequence, “accidental” joy and “essential” joy. In a late
sermon, Donne begins to delineate the two by using the analogy of natural conditions
renewed upon themselves: “From that inglorious drop of raine, that falls into the dust,
and rises no more, to those glorious Saints who shall rise from the dust, and fall no more,
but, as they arise at once to the fulnesse of Essentiall joy, so arise daily in accidentall
joyes, all are the children of God, and all alike of kin to us.”67 Essential joy is permanent
joy of the hereafter and accidental joy the ephemeral joy of daily mortal existence, yet the
latter still signifies or even analogizes the former. The terms reflect Donne’s interest in
the analogies of sacramental theology, but they do so not in “good Anglican fashion” but
rather as part of his own personal Catholic history. Just as the “essential” qualities of the
Eucharistic wafer refer to its properties of flesh and the “accidental” properties refer to its
tangibility and materiality, essential joy is the joy inherent in Christ, the thing itself,
whereas “accidental” are all those things that might contain Christ within them—the daily
experience of love, praise, prayer, and grace. These properties, unsustainable in mortality,
become the essence of heavenly existence, and as such are indicators of what awaits. The
Eucharistic language gives the affection itself the quality of ordinance and sacrament, and
all that induces the experience of joy becomes sacred, particularly the practice of
rejoicing. For Donne, the “accidental” really becomes the real presence of occasion, the
only way to know of the unassailable essential joy, and therefore essential itself.
Donne’s poetry illustrates this sacramental anagogy further. In The Second
Anniversarie, Of the Progres of the Soule, his contemplation on the death of Elizabeth
67 Donne, Sermons of John Donne, 7:418.
55
Drury, Donne “pauses” his meditation on heaven to “study” the relationship between
“accidentall joyes” on earth and those in heaven:
All this, in Heaven; whither who doth not strive
The more, because shee’is there, he doth not know
That accidentall joyes in Heaven doe grow.
But pause, My soule, and study ere thou fall
On accidental joyes, th’essentiall. (378-384)68
In the study of earthly, accidental joy, comes the illumination, or a glimpse of the
essential joy of heaven: “And what essentiall joy can’st thou expect / Here upon earth?
What permanent effect / Of transitory causes?” The “fall / On accidental joyes” that the
speaker refers to is a pun on both the nature of “accident,” extemporal, and on the
original Fall into mortality by Adam, but the completion of those joys is the movement
from interrupted grace to permanent state, or the “essential.” Commentaries on the poem
suggest that this essential joy is the Beatific Vision or simply, from line 441, “the sight of
God,”69 but the sight can only stem from a preparation of accidentals, facilitating that
moment. In the climax of the poem, the speaker returns to “thy first pitch” in order to
loudly proclaim the nature of joy:
Then, soule, to thy first pitch worke up againe;
Know that all lines which circles doe containe,
For once that they the center touch, do touch
Twice the circumference; and be thou such.
Double on Heaven, thy thoughts on Earth emploid;
All will not serve; Onely who have enjoyd
The sight of God, in fulnesse, can thinke it;
68 Donne, The Second Anniversary. Of the Progres of the Soule, in Complete English
Poems, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Everyman, 1985, 1998), 269-86.
69 P.G. Stanwood, “’Essential Joye’ in Donne’s Anniversaries,” in Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, 13 (1971): 227-38, 234. The Second Anniversary. Of the Progres of the
Soule, in Complete English Poems, ed. C.A. Patrides, fn.382-84, 282; see also Frank Manley,
John Donne: The Anniversaries (Baltimore, 1963); commentary on “essential joy.”
56
For it is both the object, and the wit.
This is essentiall joy, where neither hee
Can suffer Diminution, nor wee;
Tis such a full, and such a filling good; (435-445)
For “essentiall joy” to be the “object, and the wit” of the religious poet, “he” has to have
“enjoyd/ The sight of God, in fullnesse,” making it virtually impossible. Nevertheless,
through accidental joyes, the sight of God becomes a heavenly hope that much closer to
reality. The “object, and the wit” are further analogues to essential and accidental joys:
content and form. When the form can consistently unite with the content, for the poet
“object, and wit,” the wafer and flesh become the “sight of God.” The Second
Anniversarie ends with this meditation—the joys of the flesh, described in terms of
accidents, might transform into permanence:
Onely in Heaven joies strength is never spent;
And accidentall things are permanent.
Joy of a soules arrival neere decaies;
For that soule ever joyes, and ever staies.
Joy that their last great Consummation
Approches in the resurrection. (487-92)
Permanent joy, of course, is unknowable, and Donne’s final flight of fancy, even
going back to the “first pitch,” tries to transform his expression of joy into a permanent
state. Joy, he recognizes, comes from the great consummation, but joy is still speculative
here, an unknowable presence that only later in his life he would identify. The first
indication that these concerns are revisited in “Upon the Translation” are the echoed
metaphors: both the “object, and the wit” of the poet and the metaphor of the lines inside
the circle that “do the center touch,” prefigure the initial question of “Upon the
translation,” in which the poet that seeks new expression of deity does attempt “the circle
square” in “poore wit.”
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Yet still, the nature of “accidental joyes” is only defined by generalities,
unspecific and transitory, accompanying any sense of possible grace on the earth. Only
later, from his sermons, are we given an indication of what he sees as “accidental joys” in
the tenor of specifics. To return to “Upon the translation,” those joys are crucial for
existence but are undefined. Donne claims that those joys become evident in the Sidneys’
translation, and there they take on an aural resonance.
A brother and sister, made by thee
The organ, where thou art the harmony.
Two that make one John Baptist’s holy voice,
And who that Psalm ‘Now let the isles rejoice’
Have both translated, and applied it too,
Both told us what, and taught us how to do.
They show us islanders our joy, our King,
They tell us why, and teach us how to sing. (15-22)
To “show us islanders our joy” suggests that before the proper psalmic expression, the
English did not know why or how that joy would manifest. Whatever the earthly joys may
be, they involve the accidents of song, which uncover the essential, “our King.” That is,
the Psalms “show” us “our joy,” which is “our King”: the “sight of God,” essential joy.
Rejoicing is aural, but it allows a spiritual vision.
To see “our joy, our King” depends on the commandment to rejoice, here through
the Sidney Psalms. The argument that this Beatific experience of joy depends on the
commandment to rejoice is only a manifestation, though, of the Donnean conundrum that
wonders how spiritual joy can be authentically felt. In the sermon that Potkay cites as
Donne’s “clearest formulation” of joy, on 1 Thessalonians 5:16, Donne has trouble
separating inward, spiritual joy from outward expression, although his strident insistence
on the necessity of joy makes the point clear enough: “When David danced and leaped,
and shouted before the Arke, if he laughed too, it mis-became him not. Not to feele joy is
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an argument against religious tendernesse, not to show that joy, is an argument against
thankfulnesse of the heart: that is a stupidity, this is a contempt.”70 Although Potkay does
not cite this particular moment, it crucially indicates a blurring between the
understanding of inward joy and outward rejoicing. “Not to feele joy” belongs outside of
the realm of the true Christian, but where feeling ends and display begins is mute. Later,
Donne claims that “the best evidence that a Man is at peace, and in favour with God, is
that he can rejoice.”71 It would seem, then, that rejoicing follows joy, but at the onset of
the sermons, Donne claims rejoicing is the beginning: “It is not Gaudebitis, you shall
rejoice, by way of Comfort, but it is, Gaudete, Rejoyce, see that you doe Rejoyce, by way
of Commandement, and that shall be our first part.”72 The subsequent sermon delineates
the appropriate forms of rejoicing, which primarily consist of congregational worship in
church: “A Church is a Company, Religion is Religation, a binding of men together in
one manner of Worship; and Worship is an exterior service; and that exterior service is
the Venite exultemus, to come and rejoice in the presence of God.”73 Rejoicing becomes
the form in which joy can be felt, and proper rejoicing is the closest approximation to
“true joy,” the joy of heaven.
Donne’s emphasis really belongs in this, the inchoative joy on earth as a type of
heavenly joy, and his sermons detail the ways in which earthly joy could more closely
approximate the joys of heaven, which he calls, “the affection it selfe, Joy, which when it
70 Donne, Sermons 10:213, 217.
71 Donne, Sermons 10:215
72 Donne, Sermons 10:213-214
73 Donne, Sermons 10:219
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is true, and truly placed, is a representation of heaven it selfe to this world.”74 For
Donne, the theology of joy became the theology of affective salvation, the only way to
understand the course of religious experience as redemptive. The only way to understand
the reality of salvation is to explore the avenues of joy now, which Donne analogizes
with the traveler preparing for his journey: “Hee that were to travel into a far country,
would study before, somewhat the map, and the manners, and the language of the
Country; Hee that looks for the fulnesse of the joys of heaven hereafter, will have a taste,
an insight in them before he goe.”75 Yet that joy, so crucial for the believer’s faith and
hope, could only be bound within proper expression, even of a fallen language, and then
repeated over and over again:
And this Kingdome of heaven is Intra nos, says Christ, it is in us, and it is
joy that is in us; but every joy is not this Kingdome, and therefore says the
same Apostle, Rejoyce in the Lord; There is no other true joy, none but
that; But yet says he there, Rejoyce, and again, I say rejoice; that is, both
again we say it, again, and again we call upon you to have this spirituall
joy, for without this joy ye have not the earnest of the Spirit; and it is
again rejoyce,”
Donne repeats the exhortation to “again rejoyce” at least six times in this particular
sermon, urging the congregation to purge the sorrow that remains inward by repeating
joyful praises until the “true joy” is found, because “no false joy enters into heaven, but
yet no sadness either.”76 His interrogation of earthly joy is where Donne’s theology
74 Donne, Sermons 3:334. Later in the same sermon, Donne explain that there “there
must bee a joy here, which must prepare and preserve the joys of heaven it selfe, and be a shell of
those joys. For heaven and salvation is not a Creation, but a Multiplication; it begins not when
wee dye, but it increases and dilates it self infinitely then;” (339)
75 Donne, Sermons 3:340.
76 Donne, Sermons 3:340
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becomes quite nuanced, calling its experience “evidence” of salvation but its vocalization
a “commandment.” The combination of commandment and evidence provides order to
affectation, and this is the theologically precise systematization that dominates Donne’s
understanding of joy.
First comes the commandment to rejoice, whether it is by prayer or by recitation,
and then comes joy of hope. In Donne’s sermon on Psalm 90:14 (“O satisfie us early with
thy mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days”), he makes explicit the
chronology of heavenly affection:
There remains yet a third Part, what this Prayer produces, and it is joy, and
continual joy, That we may rejoice and be glad all our dayes. The words
are the Parts, and we invert not, we trouble not the Order; the Holy Ghost
hath laid them fitliest for our use, in the Text it selfe, and so we take them.
First then, the gaine is joy. Joy is Gods owne Seale, and his keeper is the
Holy Ghost; wee have many sudden ejaculations in the forme of Prayer,
sometimes inconsiderately made, and they vanish so; but if I can reflect
upon my prayer, ruminate, and returne againe with joy to the same prayer,
I have Gods Seale upon it.77
Joy is the “Seale” that solidifies the authenticity of the prayer, the rejoicing, and that
prayer, the “same prayer,” language given to produce that joy, is the “Text it selfe.” This
is precisely the manner in which the Sidney Psalms “show us islanders our joy”; by
translating the Psalmic sacred utterance in verbiage that can adequately combine the
content of joy—the Word—with its appropriate form, the Sidneys got as close to an
approximation to the Holy Ghost’s articulation of joy. The process of this articulation,
Donne explains, when not performed in private prayer, is performed through the best
translations of the Psalms.
77 Donne, Sermons, 5:286.
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The Holy Ghost is an eloquent Author, a vehement, and an abundant
Author, but yet not luxuriant; he is far from a penurious, but as far from a
superfluous style too. And therefore we doe not take these two words in
the Text, To rejoice, and to be glad, to signifie merely one and the same
thing, but to be two beames, two branches, two effects, two expressings of
this joy. We take them therefore, as they offer themselves in their roots,
and first natural propriety of the words. The first, which we translate To
rejoice, is Ranan; and Ranan denotes the externall declaration of internall
joy; for the word signifies Cantare, To sing, and that with an extended and
loud voice, for it is the word, which is oftenest used for the musique of the
Church, and the singing of Psalmes; (288)
Donne’s identification of the Psalms as the ur-text of joy helps explain his
comment that the Sidneys’ perform their translation in “forms of joy and art,” but it is in
his separation between “to rejoice” and “to be glad” that gives his line that they “show us
islanders our joy” resonance. In the act of rejoicing through the language of the Psalms,
joy is given shape and charge, and the accidental joys of earth have a medium in which
they can begin to transform into the essential joys of heaven.
“Now let the isles rejoice”: Psalm 97
Oddly enough, Donne’s one major quotation from the Psalms in his “Upon the
translation” does not actually come from the Sidney Psalter, but is instead his own
paraphrase of Psalm 97:1, and has little resemblance to the Sidney version, which reads:
Jehovah comes to reign!
Rejoice, O earthly main:
You isles with waves enclosed,
Be all to joy disposed. (1-4)78
78 All citations of the Sidney Psalms come from The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir
Philip and Mary Sidney, ed. Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, and
Noel Kinnamon.
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Donne’s version, “Now let the isles rejoice,” comes closer to the regular King James
translation, not metrical: “let the earth rejoice; let the multitude of isles be glad thereof.”
Donne’s conflation of “be glad” and “rejoice” is both politically expedient and
theologically coherent: the “isles” are clearly England and Donne, as illustrated above in
his sermons, believes rejoicing and gladness are part of a two-pronged system of joy. The
rhetorical strategy seems to be one of redirection: Donne’s emphasis is on the ways in
which the Sidney translation allows England to rejoice, so in restating Psalm 97:1 in his
own words, he puts more pressure on the specific, and different, way the Sidneys “both
translated, and applied it too.” Donne’s citation of Psalm 97 is particularly significant,
though, not only because it highlights the purpose of the Psalms as joyful material, but
also because Psalm 97 lands within a short sequence that is especially striking in the
Sidney version, Psalms 95-100. Arguably, this section contains the pinnacle of joyful
expression in the whole of the Psalms, and the six verses are often placed in the “royal
psalm” grouping, which equates the reign of Jehovah to the office of a king, something
Donne calls attention to when he claims that the Psalms “show us ilanders our joy, our
King,” as if the two concepts—kingship and joy—are religiously linked, as they often are
in Andrewes’s sermons. Psalms 95-99 are also, interestingly, largely ignored in the
common sixteenth-century translations and guides to Psalm-singing, and the earlier poets
and metrical translators do little with them.79 By drawing attention to this set of royal
Psalms, Donne asks his readers to see what the other psalters have missed: joy.
79 In context, Psalm 100 was highlighted and translated several times in the publishing
culture before the Sidneys, primarily because it was often considered a simple prayer that was
adaptable in several situations. These translations included John Fisher’s Psalmes of prayer taken
out of holy scripture (1544), John Pits, A poore mannes benevolence to the afflicted church
(1566), and Thomas Whythorne, Triplex of Songes (1571).
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In context, Donne’s paraphrase is as follows:
And who that Psalm ‘Now let the isles rejoice’
Have both translated, and applied it too,
Both told us what, and taught us how to do.
They show us ilanders our joy, our King,
They tell us why, and teach us how to sing.
Make all this All, three quires, heaven, earth, and spheres;
The first, heaven, hath a song, but no man hears,
The spheres have music, but they have no tongue,
Their harmony is rather danced than sung;
But our third choir, to which the first gives ear
(For, angels learn by what the church does hear),
This choir hath all. (18-29)
If Donne’s citation of Psalm 97 offers a clue to where exactly the form of joy might be
found in the Sidney Psalms, it might make sense that his poem’s broader themes derive
from the ways in which these Psalms function. Indeed, in the above excerpt, just after
Donne claims that the Sidney psalter does “show us ilanders our joy,” he demonstrates
the unifying parts of that joy, the parts that “Make all this All,” the capitalization of “All”
referring to the common phrase to describe the unifying trinity. This phrase, though, also
echoes Psalm 97, and this exclusively from the Sidney translation. After Psalm 97’s first
stanza from which “You isles with waves enclosed / Be all to joy disposed,” the second
stanza imagines the Lord destroying all in his path, from which comes this injunction,
His flashing lightnings maketh
His earth beholding quaketh
The mountains at his sight
His sight that is by right
The Lord of all this all,
Do fast on melting fall,
As wax by fire’s light (12-18)
The Lord of Psalm 97’s “all this all” is destroying the earth in his path, whereas the Lord
of “all this All” in Donne’s poem brings the voices of the earth, heaven, and spheres
together so that the isles can rejoice. The two uses of “all this all” have much in
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common—both focus on the heaven, earth, and spheres coming together, whether this
happens by the Lord creating beauty in unity or by using lightning from the spheres to
destroy the earth in his “sight.” Both usages come just after the imperative to let isles
rejoice—but the disjunction between the two, of course, comes from the way each
imagines the way the unity of heaven, earth, and spheres operate on the senses. The
Sidney psalm focuses on sight, especially with its indented image of God moving forward
with each couplet, only to go back again as the metaphor halts momentum (“As wax by
fire’s light”). Pembroke often arranges the shape of a psalm to evoke its content,
anticipating—or influencing—Herbert’s use of the same in The Temple, but her use of
iambic trimeter also gives Psalm 97 the quality of a song, or “ditty,” as she describes it in
the previous Psalm. Donne’s passage, between explicitly referencing Psalm 97 twice,
refers to ways in which the Sidney psalter teaches “us why, and how to sing,” and then
goes on to claim that the heavens cannot be heard and the Spheres cannot vocalize, so the
earth must sing to teach the angels, for the choir of the earth “hath all.”
So what is “all” that can become “All”? What is it that the earth has that might be
heard in heaven? In what form? These are the questions that Donne is alluding to in his
discussions of accidental joy (of the earth) and essential joy (of the heavens), and it is my
contention that the Sidney Psalms 95-100 provide the theogony of joy on which Donne
draws his own theology.
“We thy Sidneian Psalms shall celebrate”: Psalms 95-100
When Sir Philip started his project of translating the Psalms, he was heavily
invested in the question of poetic metaphysics that he wrote about in the Defense and
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dramatized in his sonnets—how does the “muse of heavenly joy” recast itself in poetry?
Philip’s death cut short his full exploration of this issue (he left it at Psalm 43), but what
Mary performs in Psalms 95-100 is a vital rethinking, and completion, of the manner in
which joy functions on the earth, and its relation to heavenly joy. This is not to say that
Psalms 95-100 are the only Psalms that deal with joy directly, and certainly there are
other Psalms that reveal a close examination of their joyful terms.80 But as a unified
section of the psalter, 95-100 offer the clearest sense of what the editors of Mary Sidney’s
works have identified as the “lilt of joy” in her Psalms and what Coburn Freer calls Mary
Sidney’s “devotion as a joyful game.”81
Psalm 95 begins with the repeated call to congregate and give voice to praise:
80 Briefly, here are some Psalms that are particularly joyful in the Sidney Psalter:
Psalm 16:9-11: “Wherefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoyceth” which reads in the
Sidney Psalter (a poem by Sir Philip), “heart is fully glad/So in joy my glory clad.” The
Sidney version downplays the use of the tongue, which is again a Sir Philip emphasis.
But consider the early translation of Mary’s, Psalm 51:8, which emphasizes the outward
manifestation of joy much more than Philip’s do: “To ear and heart send sounds and
thoughts of gladness,/ That bruised bones may dance away their sadness” This emphasis
probably comes from Calvin’s commentaries, in which he suggests that “As the Psalmist
requires the nations, in token of their joy and of their thanksgiving; to God, to clap their
hands, or rather exhorts them to a more than ordinary joy, the vehemence of which breaks
forth and manifests itself by external expressions.” John Calvin, Commentary on the
Book of Psalms, vol 2, trans. James Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books House,
1996), 212, 295.
Psalm 81 is one of Mary’s strongest, enthusiastically proclaiming joy through music:
All gladdnes, gladdest hartes can hold,
In merriest notes that mirth can yield,
Let joyful songs to God unfold
To Jacob’s God our sword and shield.
Muster hither music’s joys,
Lute, and lyre, and tabret’s noise (1-6).
It would be useful to compare this psalm to Psalm 98, which I discuss at length below,
primarily for its overflowing mirth.
81 The Collected Works of Mary Sidney, “Literary Context,” 26; Coburn Freer, Music for
a King: George Herbert’s Style and the Metrical Psalms (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972),
25.
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Come, come, let us with joyful voice
Record and raise
Jehovah’s praise:
Come, let us in safety’s rock rejoice.
Into his presence let us go
And there with Psalms of gladness show,
For he is God, a God most great,
Above all gods a king in kingly seat. (1-8)
An important distinction needs to be made at the outset, one that subtly pushes the poetic
form of praise beyond its common understanding: to praise and to rejoice, in a religious
context, are rhetorically distinct, even when they are combined for heightened effect. The
difference comes in the direction they move, or the way each relates to a direct object.
“To praise” moves in the direction of its object, allowing the spectacle to be the object
itself, so rhetorically, the substance of the praise emanates from qualities of the direct
object, and the relationship is linear. “To rejoice” has no real direct object nor indirect
object, strictly speaking, but rather it inhabits: While one might “praise God,” she can
only “rejoice in God,” the object already referring back to the act itself. One cannot
“rejoice God,” but as a result of God, one can rejoice. As such, rejoicing does not point
directionally, certainly not vertically, but emanates: rejoicing is the act itself that occurs
and spreads with affection at its center. “To rejoice” exists within itself and can only
extend as far as the multitude of voices that participate.
Mary Sidney’s opening to Psalm 95 emphasizes the potential of rejoicing as a
gathering, or as an act of public congregation. The initial repetition of “Come, come”
unique among psalters of the time, gives the act of gathering an added immediacy, as if
the speaker addresses a multitude. This mode of address, the immediate second-person
plural, dominates Psalms 95-100. Just before this grouping of Psalms, Psalm 94 is a
prayer, addressed directly to God asking for God’s wrath; and just after the group, Psalm
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101 is also a prayer, albeit one in which addressing God is really only an excuse to
address the individual self by Calvinist self-inspection, and occasional laceration. These
bookend a remarkably stable set of Psalms that all have a similar rhetorical function: to
praise through the act of rejoicing, or through the act of joining voices together in happy
song. In Psalm 95, as the voices come together, the rhyme of “praise” and “raise” reassert
that rhetorical movement—to praise God is to move vertically. But immediately after the
injunction to “praise,” a third “Come” exhorts “us” to “in safety’s rock rejoice,” bringing
the vocalization back to the space—whether spiritual or spatial—of the congregation.
“Rock” could both be the rock that sheds water in Exodus 17:6 or a metonym for earth,
but either way, the rock becomes the habitat of rejoicing, and the rhetorical rise of praise
comes back down to earth, and spreads.
“Safety’s rock,” if from Exodus, is also the place on which the Lord stands, hence
the Psalm continues, “Into his presence let us go, / And there with Psalms of gladness
show.” The Lord’s presence, both in Exodus and in this Psalm, is horizontally on the
same plane as those doing the rejoicing, and Pembroke’s wording here, “Psalms of
gladness show,” both offers metacommentary on her own project but also reasserts the
mode of psalm that encompasses the presence of the Lord. None of the common
psalters—Geneva, Sternhold and Hopkins, Matthew Parker’s, Calvin’s, Beze’s—contain
the phrase “of gladness show” in this verse. Rather, each psalter simply stops with
“Psalms” or “songs” that can be sung to the Lord. The addition of “gladness” makes the
Sidney project that much clearer: the Psalms of gladness, the Psalms of joy, or those that
can be sung in the Lord’s presence, the only heavenly utterance contained in the
scriptures. To combine Pembroke and Donne, “And there with Psalms of gladness show
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us ilanders our joy.” Yet these songs are still sung from “safety’s rock” on earth, and
island itself, with the Lord standing on the rock to receive them.
The psalm continues its focus on the geographic space of rejoicing with its next
stanza, which begins,
What lowest lies in earthy mass,
What highest stands,
Stands in his hands (9-11)
When, in the previous stanza, God is identified as “above all gods,” the vertical hierarchy
is reestablished, only to be conflated in the next stanza. The spatial relation between God
and earth’s inhabitants continues to be flattened as the “lowest” and “highest” are brought
together “in his hands.” Pembroke’s point of view in this sonnet is a middle ground
between those that highest stand and “lowest lies” rather than through the perspective of
God looking down or the psalmist looking up.
But what is most striking here is Pembroke’s use of “earthy” as the adjective to
describe the plane on which those who rejoice stand. “Earthy,” in the next three Psalms,
quickly becomes the central location, adjective, and thematic metaphor that attend the act
of rejoicing. Psalm 96 (“Sing and let the song be new”) describes the earth rejoicing itself
with the same adjective:
Starry roof, and earthy floor,
Sea and all thy wildness yieldeth:
Now rejoice and leap and roar
Leafy infants of the wood,
Fields and all that on you fieldeth,
Dance, oh dance, at such a good. (31-36)
The “earthy floor” becomes the space for the personified act of rejoicing: as the
“Starry roof” and the “earthy floor” again conflate, rejoicing spreads out infinitely, and
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the sea, the trees, and the fields participate. Psalm 97 immediately picks up that image at
its beginnings:
Jehovah comes to reign,
Rejoice, O earthy main:
You isles with waves enclosed,
Be all to joy disposed. (1-4)
The “earthy main” is again personified in rejoicing, this time giving Donne his
own impetus for suggesting that England itself is the isles—here “main” would refer to
“mainland.” Psalm 98 furthers the adjective along in adjacent usage:
Which every margin of this earthy sphere
Now sees performed in his saving grace,
Then earth, and all possessing earthy place,
Oh, sing, oh, shout, oh, triumph, oh, rejoice: (11-14)
“Earthy” is a peculiar adjective; nowhere else in any of the psalters is “earthy” used at all,
as far as I have been able to tell. In the Sidney psalter, though, it is used at least sixteen
times, usually accompanied by a call to rejoice. In Mary’s poem of praise to her brother
that acts as preface to the psalter, she proclaims that Philip’s soul resides in heaven,
where he is “enjoying heav’n delights, / Thy maker’s praise: as far from earthy taste.”82
Psalm 65 ends with “Rejoice, shout, sing, and on thy name do call” only to be
immediately followed by the opening of Psalm 66 with “All lands, the limbs of earthy
round, / With triumph tunes God’s honour sound.” “Earthy,” with its rather marked
material connotations, contrasts the sight, smell, taste, and touch of earth with its
heavenly counterpart, but in the context of these Psalms, “earthy” becomes the space of
82 “To the Angel Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” included as a
Dedicatory poem in most manuscripts.
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rejoicing on which the Lord is invited. Its base materiality is emphasized as godly in
itself, and capable of rejoicing in its “sphere.”
As in Pembroke’s image of her brother “far from earthy taste,” “earthy” is also
always a contrast to that which is heavenly. Yet, the “earthy” adjective brings rejoicing to
the level of the fallen earth in its imperfections, and then spreads it to “all possessing
earthy place”: earth’s substance provides the accidental attributes to the essential. The act
of rejoicing on earth does not fly up into heaven as praise would but rather brings heaven
down to earth, allowing rejoicing in God as God stands on the same horizontal plane. The
essential, as in Donne’s theology, becomes the accidental, allowing believers to “arise at
once to the fulnesse of Essentiall joy” by arising “daily in accidentall joyes.”83
The process which brings heavenly joy down to earth involves the singing of
Psalms of gladness, rejoicing itself. Pembroke’s Psalm 97 articulates this sense as it
moves from the rejoicing isles of the sea to the specific place of Zion. After the psalm
speaks of the “earthy main” rejoicing, it figures the order of joy, from rejoicing first to
feeling, as the order in which God’s “holiness make known.”
When Zion this did hear,
How did her joys appear!
....
Now light and joy is sown
To be by good men mown.
You just with joyful voice
Then in the Lord rejoice:
His holiness make known. (28-29; 41-45)
83 Donne, Sermons, 7:418.
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Zion hears rejoicing, then “her joys appear,” which then allows the Lord to be “known.”
Through the colon (found in each manuscript) of the penultimate line, “His holiness make
known” is encapsulated within “in the Lord rejoice.”
Yet this order of joy also needs to be cultivated with the right language, which is
the suggestion in the couplet of “Now light and joy is sown / To be by good men mown.”
The image of light being “sown” is also used in the Geneva Bible, and what follows in
Geneva is famously “joy for the upright in heart,” a phrase that was often used in
scholastic discourse on justice. But Pembroke’s “To be by good men mown” is odd, with
nothing close to it in her major sources, the Beze and Calvin commentaries. The use of
“mown” suggests restraint on the way joy is conceived, perhaps by the manner in which
it is vocalized, as in the “just with joyful voice” in the following line. The gendered noun
is even more puzzling, particularly in a Psalm that usually mentions how the “daughters
of Judah rejoiced” after Zion heard the joyful song but in this case the metaphor is
missing. As the editors of the Oxford Sidney Psalter note, the omission of the daughters
is “uncharacteristic” for Mary, “given her usual interest in women,”84 but the addition of
“good men” where the other psalters remain gender neutral suggests something else about
the way joy is conceived and expressed by men and women. Still, the articulation of
rejoicing here is crucial, and Pembroke’s emphasis on proper light through the right kind
of language, the poetics of rejoicing, is given shape.
The question of how new expressions of old songs of worship—Donne’s initial
concern in “Upon the translation”—ought to be produced is the subject of the next psalm,
which begins
84 Hamblin et al. The Sidney Psalter, 317
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Oh, sing Jehovah, he hath wonders wrought,
A song of praise that newness may commend (1-2)
A psalm that usually begins “Sing unto the Lord a new song,” or some very slight
variation thereof, Pembroke’s rearrangement of Psalm 98 emphasizes the “newness” of
the song, alluding to the contemporary vogue of metrical psalm translations. Perhaps she
is here referring back to her sly beginning to Psalm 96,
Sing and let the song be new
Unto him that never endeth:
Sing, all earth and all in you.
Sing to God and bless his name
Of the help, the health he sendeth
Day by day new ditties frame. (1-6)
“Ditties” anachronizes the psalm into contemporary language, illustrating her
willingness, in following her brother, to use whatever verse form might have been
available to express the Psalms. Yet, by using the rather less experimental iambic
pentameter, the accepted meter of speech, in Psalm 98, she again ironizes the “song of
praise that newness may commend” by placing it in a conventional meter. The newness
of the song, though, is found in the nearly ecstatic stressed syllables when Pembroke
arrives at the actual section of rejoicing:
Oh, sing, oh, shout, oh, triumph, oh, rejoice:
.....
Roar, sea, and all that trace the briny sands;
Thou total globe and all that thee enjoy;
You streamy rivers, clap your swimming hands;
You mountains, echo each at other’s joy. (14; 17-20)
Besides this being a remarkable piece of poetry, with its “briny sands, “streamy rivers,”
and “swimming hands,” its staccato rhythm echoes “each at other’s joy” with each
repeating “O” and “Y” sounds in the way and order of rejoicing: to sing, to shout, to
triumph, is eventually to rejoice, which brings together the earthy elements in an echoing
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song of joy. The lines make a ditty out of the briny streamy earthy rejoicing voice,
spreading assonance like a happy contagion. No longer is this language that has been
“mown” but is ecstatic in its rhythms, wildly echoing and overflowing to the ends of the
earth. Psalm 98 had particular significance for the church in the late sixteenth century as a
hymn of typological rejoicing of Christ at his birth. John Boys, in An Exposition of Al the
Principall Scriptures Used in our English Liturgie, sensed that the Psalm contained
within it the sacred song of Mary, the mother of Jesus: “The Church hath done well in
joyning to the Magnificat, Psalme 98, Davids mysterie, and Maries historie, are all one.
Whatsoever is obscurely foretold in his Psalme, is plainly told in her Song: as he
prophesied, O sing unto the Lord a new song: shew yourselves joyful: So she practiced:
My soule doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit rejoyceth in God my Savior.”85 Heather
Asals has suggested that Mary Sidney believed herself to be the latest Mary of the sacred
song that Boys refers to here. In this sense, Mary Sidney, in combining herself with the
Mary Virgin, “re-reveals” the new within the old song, the verbum in the vox, perhaps
suggesting Pembroke’s hint at how female rejoicing was conceived and performed.86
As the language of rejoicing is given voice in Psalms 95-98, earthy joy is also
given its own structural form, contained within the “new song” of Psalm 96 and 98 and
then disseminating out in eruptions of lyric ecstasy. Psalm 99 then holds back that joy,
and instead asks that question of joy’s place in a fallen world: “What if nations rage and
85 John Boys, An Exposition of Al the Principall Scriptures Used in our English Liturgie,
(London 1610), 62-63.
86 Heather Asals, “David’s Successors: Forms of Joy and Art,” Proceedings of the PMR
Conference, 2 (1977): 31-37, 36.
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threat? / What if earth do ruin threat?” The questions, again completely Pembroke’s
invention, are quickly answered by the substance of the Biblical psalm, that God is king
and ruler of the earth, and the language thereof, the substance of rejoicing and praise, will
be allowed and controlled by him: “Thence his sacred name with terror, / Forceth truth
from tongues of error.” The subject is always, how do we praise God in a fallen
language? The answer is always, with the “new song,” that which Pembroke is so
skillfully formulating. How do we “seek new expressions?” as Donne would have it? In
“forms of joy and art.”
The final psalm in this small collection of joyful songs encapsulates the five that
have come before it, and does so in perhaps the most self-conscious form of joy and art:
the holy sonnet.
O all you lands, the treasures of your joy
In merry shout upon the Lord bestow:
Your service cheerfully on him employ,
With triumph song into his presence go.
Know first that he is God; and after know
This God did us, not we ourselves create:
We are his flock, for us his feedings grow;
We are his folk, and he upholds our state.
With thankfulness, oh, enter then his gate:
Make through each porch of his your praises ring.
All good, all grace, of his high name relate,
He of all grace and goodness is the spring.
Time in no terms his mercy comprehends
From age to age his truth extends. (1-14)
A Spenserian sonnet, the only sonnet in the Sidney Psalter, Psalm 100 takes the
concerns of the previous five Psalms and recasts them in the form most associated with
secular verse. Rejoicing has now been joined with the purest poetic device of the late
sixteenth century, and as such the “earthy” substance of secular poetry is also given space
to rejoice. The form of poetry allows its sacred content to give it “form of joy and art”
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fused, so that rejoicing becomes the adhesive between poetry and prayer.87 The sonnet
begins with an address outward to the earthy world surrounding, “O all you lands, the
treasure of your joy,” which lets geography, and all inhabitants, participate in the act of
rejoicing. Yet the final line goes even further, not only spreading joy to “all you lands”
but throughout all time as well: “Time in no terms his mercy comprehends / From age to
age his truth extends.” As Rikvah Zim reads it, Pembroke’s “final couplet lends an apt
weightiness to the concluding sententia, and the last word—‘extends’—is a triumphant
summary of the psalmist’s teaching: mercy and truth stretch into eternity.”88 In the
second quatrain of the sonnet, the same vertical collapse occurs that has been the
structural rhetoric of the last five Psalms: we are not only God’s “flock,” but we are his
“folk,” and as such he “upholds our state,” on a level. The reversal of the middle letters
between “flock” and “folk” takes us from God’s underlings to his compatriots: as we
rejoice, our state includes God in our own earthy state, and the accidental—our language,
bodies, substance, forms, sonnets—becomes the essential means of worship, the essential
“all in all.” Perhaps this acts like the tower of Babel in reverse: rejoicing, in the language
of translation, does not build a tower unto heaven only to have languages divided, but
rather it allows heaven to come down to earth, confirming that the translated, vernacular
language itself worthy enough for holy utterance. When Donne claims that the Sidney
87 Rikvah Zim explains, “In her imitation of Ps. 100, the Countess matched form and
content very deliberately: she represented this psalm’s lyric mode of praise and prayer by
exploiting a form more traditionally associated with a secular convention for praise and devotion:
the sonnet. . . .There is a close correspondence between the structure of the biblical psalm (which
in the Bishop’ Bible is divided into four verses) and the argument of the Countess’s sonnet. She
rejected the opportunity to make the opening phrases of her first two quatrains parallel each other
in the manner of several of Sidney’s secular sonnets, or of some of the biblical translations of this
psalm.” (Zim, 196).
88 Zim, 196-97.
76
Psalter “shows us ilanders our joy,” he is also claiming that the Sidney Psalter shows us
ilanders heaven’s joy, which is simultaneously “our joy, our King.”
77
CHAPTER 2
THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EXPERIENCE OF JOY: SPENSER’S
EPITHALAMION
My sense of Spenser’s Epithalamion is lifted from C.S. Lewis’s succinct
evaluation: “Those who have attempted to write poetry will know how very much easier
it is to express sorrow than joy. That is what makes the Epithalamion matchless. Music
has often reached that jocundity; poetry seldom.”89 Lewis, intentionally or not, lifts his
sense of the poem from William Teignmouth Shore, who in 1903 wrote, “Joy never had
such expression as in the ‘Epithalamion,’ so serenely noble that its intensity of joy may
almost be missed, . . . To express supreme joy is the most difficult of tasks (as a critic has
remarked), far more difficult than to express intense sadness, which is the chosen aim of
most modern poetry.”90 Shore seems to have derived his sense from another “critic”—in
fact, this joyful echo rings throughout the last two centuries of commentary on the
poem.91 But Lewis is not the last of the genealogical line identifying joy—since the
rebirth of interest in the poem occurred in the 1960s, criticism on Epithalamion has
89 C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1966), 130.
90 William Teignmouth Shore, ed., “The Poet’s Poet,” The Academy and Literature 1636
(12 September 1903): 249.
91 In a newspaper review of a new edition of Spenser’s works in 1840, an anonymous
reviewer proclaims that he would rather not discuss the Faerie Queene, but “We would gladly
quote the whole of the ‘Epithalamion,’ written on the occasion of the poet’s own marriage; it is so
instinct and tremulous with joy.” (Review of “The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. In Five
Volumes. First American Edition,” Christian Examiner and General Review 28, 2 [1 May 1840]:
208). In a 1905 review of a concert, the reviewer praises a work by William H. Bell entitled
Epithalamion, “based upon Spenser’s poem of that name, the joyous character of which is
reflected in the music with delightful directness and clearness of expression.” (“The Patron’s
Fund Concert,” The Musical Times 46,746 [1 April 1905]: 260).
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identified joy as the primary expression of Spenser’s marriage ode.92 Yet the actual study
of “joy” in the poem, for all its ubiquity in Epithalamion criticism, has largely been
ignored in favor of general affective joy; joy has become a representative emotion from
which to depart rather than study in and of itself. And more recent critics have been very
eager to depart from joy, setting out to show how Spenser’s plenary poem is actually full
of a kind of sorrow and anxiety, locating a “disturbance” or “spiritual predicament.”93
But this is all part of a piece: the joy with which Spenser was dealing was as much a part
of sorrow and anxiety as it was delight, and to notice sorrow in the poem as opposed to
joy is like noticing the thorny stem and ignoring the rose: the flower is one, precisely
beautiful in the unification of its oppositions. As John Donne put it, “To conceive true
92 A. Kent Hieatt’s enormously influential 1960 book attributes the poem’s joy to “not
only Spenser’s decorous skill, but also from the joyous import of the occasion.”A. Kent Hieatt, A
Short Time’s Endless Monument (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 5. Wolfgang
Clemens combines Hieatt’s and C.S. Lewis’s interests by identifying “order and joy” as the poetic
pillars of Epithalamion: “[N]ote the frequency of words expressing joy” in the poem, he says,
“joyance, pleasure, pleasance, delight, happiness, jollity, cheerful, glad, happy.” Wolfgang
Clemens, “The Uniqueness of Spenser’s Epithalamion,” The Poetic Tradition: Essays on Greek,
Latin, and English Poetry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), pp. 81–93, 83. W.
Speed Hill’s 1972 take, who starts with the “order and joy” of Clemens and tries to give us a
sense of how Spenser’s “particular joy” comes from the poem’s ability in “creating its own world
and referring us to it simultaneously,” which “asserts the reality and validity of a vision of human
love, its worth and joy and value.” “Order and Joy in Spenser’s Epithalamion” Southern
Humanities Review 6 (Winter 1972): 81-90, 83. For this earlier generation of critics, joy is found
in the reader’s sense of unity in the poem; the formal features—imagery, metaphor, numerology,
setting—create the joy that has been so often identified.
93 Douglas Anderson recognizes that “Matrimonial joy is surely the dominant theme for
Spenser’s purposes,” but also finds an expressive melancholy and sorrow that permeates the
poem’s “spiritual predicament” of ephemerality. Douglas Anderson, “’Unto My Self Alone’:
Spenser’s Plenary Epithalamion” Spenser Studies V (1984), 149–66. Anderson’s identification of
something other than joy in the poem sets off critical work that begins to examine the strange
incongruities in the poem and contest joy as the poem’s only affect. This joy/sorrow dichotomy is
summed up by Judith Owens, who classifies readers of the poem into two groups: those who find
joy in the “harmony, unity, and jubilation” and “those who hear . . . something other than
unmitigated joy and assurance of the world’s responsiveness,” who “typically identify the figure
of echo as the source of disturbance and regard the disturbances as psychological, vocational, and
metaphysical.” Judith Owens, “The Poetics of Accommodation in Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion,’”
SEL: Studies in English Literature 40, 1 (Winter 2000): 41–62, 41-42.
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sorrow and true joy, are things not onlely contiguous, but continuall; they doe not onely
touch and follow one another in a certain succession, Joy assuredly after sorrow, but they
consist together, they are all one, Joy and Sorrow.”94 Finding sorrow in Epithalmion is
another way to reinscribe its joy.
The critical move of identifying joy without interrogating its historical or critical
contexts is characteristic of even the most pointed work on Epithalamion, yet the
theological realities of religious and philosophical joy in Spenser’s England can yield
new insights into how the poem functions culturally, religiously, and structurally. Adam
Potkay remains the only scholar to confront joy as a vital emotional discourse in the
Western canon, and his sweeping research argues that the study of joy is crucial for
understanding the emotional narrative of literary affect. Potkay’s treatment of latesixteenth-century literature emphasizes, however, the specter of joylessness, and he
locates Spenser’s Sansjoy, the brother of Sansfoy in Book One of the Faerie Queene, as
representative of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ethos.95 Potkay’s
sense that joylessness weighed down English religious life carefully conveys an anxiety
over the religious command to have joy, but the Epithalamion flips that coin: Potkay’s
joylessness remains one part of the contiguity that Donne identified. In the presence of a
kind of cultural joylessness, the search for a true joy becomes all the more pressing
within any medium, and this is what my reading of the Epithalamion allows. If nothing
94 John Donne, Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols. eds. George R. Potter and Evelyn M.
Simpson, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1953–62), Vol. 4, 343. Numerous
divines attest that sorrow and joy are adjacent emotions, and Gary Kuchar (The Poetry of
Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press 2007), 6, points out that
John Climacus coined the term carmolypi to denote “joy-sorrow.”
95 Potkay, The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 79–84.
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else, this reading will reaffirm just how joyful the poem is in its rhetorical movement, but
only by reforming the way in which we think about late sixteenth-century joyful
utterance and expression, particularly as it relates to congregational recitiation, marriage
ceremonies, The Book of Common Prayer, poetry, and sexual consummation.
Because “joy,” as I argued earlier, was difficult to experience and express on an
individual, personal level for Protestants, it was often transferred to a more public and
communal setting, particularly as congregations would sing hymns, recite Psalms, and
participate in the “common worship” of English Reformation ritual.96 Spenser’s
Epithalamion reflects this communal joy as it narrates a public celebration of marriage,
and does so in song and Psalmic refrains. Spenser’s poetic interest in the earthly nature of
joy takes Epithalmion beyond an expression of celebratory, communal joy and into a
more private, secret joy that remains ineffable, and finally, the poem moves towards
affective joy, bestowing a kind of blessedness, or even grace, upon the listener, much like
the practice of reciting the Psalms themselves was supposed to do. Countering the
relative absence of joy as a lived emotion, Spenser’s Epithalamion sets out to combine
the discourses of joy—Psalmic praises, hymnody, spiritual comfort, heavenly foretaste,
festivity, matrimony, and finally, sex—into an all-inclusive articulation.
Spenser wrote the Epithalamion to commemorate his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle
in 1594, and the occasion would have offered at least a primary typological event for the
experience of joy. Joy had been traditionally defined, by Aquinas and Augustine among
others, as the effect of a union between subject and object, often prefigured as the end of
desire, and the highest joy was to be reserved for the union between Christ and Church.
96 See Potkay’s reading of Luther’s Galatians commentary in The Story of Joy, 75–7.
81
Typologically, marriage became that union for Protestants, and joy, unsurprisingly, is the
word most often associated with the secular and religious understanding of marriage in
the late sixteenth-century. In 1583, George Whetstone asks the readers of A heptameron
of cvill discourses to “Compare the joye, honour and reverence, given unto Mariage, by
the delight that proceedeth from any othe cause, and you shall see her gleame, lyke a
blasying Comet, and the other, but twinckle as an ordinarie Starre.” Whetstone adds, in
one of his marginal notes, that “The joye of marriage shineth above all other
delightes.”97 If a betrothed couple were to announce their engagement in a public setting,
the common congratulatory response was “God give you joy.”98 Culturally, the joy of
marriage was characterized by a general public acknowledgment; religiously, the joy of
marriage came from the marriage ceremony accompanied by Psalms in the Book of
Common Prayer. The joy of marriage seems to be a public affair.
Yet for Spenser, the poet, speaker, subject, and perhaps ringmaster of the poem,
there is something unsatisfying about the relentless public celebration of communal
joy.99 Indeed, marriage as simply a communal experience of joy belies the actual
97 George Whetstone, A heptameron of civill discourses, (London: Richard Jones, 1582),
xi and marginal note. Whetstone’s celebration of joy and marriage is echoed throughout the
numberous marriage advice of the sixteenth-century. These include Edmund Tilney’s A briefe
and pleasant discourse of duties in marriage (1577), Richard Greenham’s A goodle Exhortation
(1584), and John Heywood’s A Dialogue . . . Concerning Two Meanes of Maryages (1568); Juan
Luis Vives, The Office and Duetie of a Husbnad (London 1553); And Homily of the State of
Matrimony (in Elizabeth’s Homily book of 1562).
98 This epithet referring to marriage conspicuously appears in Shakespeare’s Titus
Andornicus and Much Ado About Nothing, and George Wilkins’ The Miseries of Enforced
Marriage (1607) among others.
99 Because Spenser’s Epithalamion is autobiographical, most critics just allow that the
poet-speaker is Spenser himself, a convention that I will also take the liberty of using. “Spenser”
and “poet” and “speaker” will be used interchangeably.
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experience of an expressly personal union with another individual, or God. The joy of
marriage is not adequately served by pronouncements and public celebrations, even if
that seems to be what Protestants are left with in the late sixteenth century. When the
reformers called an end to the sacramental status of marriage in the mid-sixteenth
century, they displaced the principal nexus of romantic love and religious meaning.
Nevertheless, marriage in Reformed England retained similar language and ceremonial
significance, even if it was not called a sacrament anymore. The method to retain
sacramental significance was to imitate the sacramental “feeling” in the marriage
ceremony. Henry Smith’s 1591 admonition on proper Church marriage especially
emphasizes how a feeling can signify that the ceremony is “like” a sacrament if done
correctly: “If Christ be at your marriage, that is, if you marie in Christ, your water shall
bee turned into wine, that is your peace, and your rest, and your joy, and your happiness
shal begin with your Mariage.”100 Besides alluding to Christ’s first miracle, Smith’s
analogy is riddled with Eucharistic significance: the water into wine, the miracle Christ
performed at the wedding he attended, was often associated with the similar
transubstantiation of wine to blood. Moreover, Smith’s “wine” symbolizes the “peace,
and your rest, and your joy” that will come in marriage, with the “and your happiness”
separated from those other affects by its association with the last clause, “shall begin with
your Mariage.” “Your happiness” is the comprehensive state of marriage, distinct from
the “joy” that comes as the “water is turned to wine.”101 Later in the same tract, when
100 Henry Smith, A preparative to marriage (London: By R. Field for Thomas Man,
1591), 6.
101 Potkay’s separation of happiness and joy is helpful here: “Stories of joy are
fundamental to us. Happiness, by contrast, has no story to tell, except insofar as it includes
83
Smith discusses the symbolic power of the Eucharist, he uses the same language to
describe the effect of eating the bread: “So, when the faithfull recyve the Bread and
Wine, one like the Sonne of God seemeth to come unto them, which fils them with peace
and joy, and grace.”102 The parallels in Smith’s treatise are striking: marriage in Christ
turns water to wine, symbolically, which results in peace, rest, and joy. Similarly, the
reception of the bread and wine results in peace, joy, and grace. The common
denominator is joy, principally because true joy, in theological terms, comes as the result
of the union between Christ and man, traditionally represented as a marriage.
The experience of religious joy seems to be inextricable from both the
sacramental and the wedding ceremony, both rituals of intense personal significance.
Curiously, then, in the Book of Common Prayer’s matrimonial service, the most pertinent
for Spenser’s purposes, joy is mentioned but once, and that only in the context of the
collective “nations” rejoicing. Instead of a joyful discourse directed toward the union of
the conjugal couple, the joy becomes a marker of the public nature of the ordinance, and
the language reveals itself to be collective and participatory: just before the couple takes
the bread and wine, the pastor recites Psalm 67, which occurs while the couple kneels
before the Lord’s table, the presiding authority emphasizes that all will vocally “praise”
God and that all nations will “rejoice and be glad” for this moment of union: “Let the
people praise thee: yea, let all the people praise thee. O let the nations rejoice and be
episodes of joy. . . . Joy is a sudden illumination, a climactic moment in a life-story, a gift, an
experience of fullness. Happiness, by contrast, has been conceived of as a steadiness, constancy.”
Story of Joy, 20.
102 Henry Smith, 89.
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glad.”103 The gesture is to all, and the joy is communal among all believing “nations.”
Following, the minister delivers the Lord’s Prayer with answers by the couple and the
congregation. The worship is participatory and auditory—all those within hearing
distance of the service are to feel and express that same joy, born from the prescripted
language of the Psalms.
The familiar scriptural joyful utterances—“rejoice in the Lord”—are imperatives
and performatives, but the contexts in which they bestowed joy were also decidedly
public. These utterances are benedictions, taken primarily from the Psalms and used to
rally congregations towards happiness. In effect, proclamations of joy were part of the
larger project of common prayer, uttered in prescribed language in public settings. This
joy was to have a communal application and a public affirmation, authorized by the
Church and located within the language of ritual, sacrament, and ordinance, the language
of The Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer is not necessarily
remarkable in its own articulation of religious joy; rather, The Book of Common Prayer
includes countless recitations and scriptures that express the kind of communal joy of
which I have been writing. Of the more than seventy references to “joy” and “rejoicing”
in the whole of The Book of Common Prayer, more than forty directly involve a
collective vocal exclamation of joy, usually in the form of a Psalm. This, of course, was
in keeping with the vague sense of joy that permeated Reformation theology. Joyful
expression is found in scripture, and those scriptural expressions were to be voiced in a
communal, common, and public setting. By expressing joy publicly, that joy spreads
103 The Book of Common Prayer 1559. Ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville, VA:
University Press of Virginia, 1976), 294. All subsequent citations will be from this edition.
85
among congregations, and the Church would be united in the practice. Calvin emphasizes
this sense of communal joy throughout his highly influential commentary on the Psalms:
David testifies that he felt in his heart a double joy on observing
that the whole people concurred in yielding obedience to the oracle
which declared mount Zion to be the place which God had chosen
for his solemn worship. By this example we are taught, that our
joy, in like manner, should be doubled, when God by his Holy
Spirit not only frames each of us to the obedience of his word, but
also produces the same effect upon others, that we may be united
together in the same faith.104
This unification continued to be the primary purpose of reciting the Psalms together in
common prayer: all joy that comes from God was to be common, shared with all
believers, and utterly lacking in private contentment. The contemporary translation
(1588) of Thomas a Kempis’s “Imitation of Christ” goes so far as to exclude “private
joy” from the righteous endeavor of the Christian, that the true Christian “loveth no
private joy.”105 Apparently, joy in its religious manifestation was a collective emotion,
expressed through the public recitation of common scripture and felt only through
unification with the church.
Spenser’s poem, I argue, acts “like” a sacrament by figuring joy as the primary
feeling involved, and the central effect, even affect, of the ode—in much the same way
marriage in the Church of England was supposed to imitate sacramental ordinance. But
this joy is not staid, prescripted, or consistently public. Rather, this is a dynamic
“sacramental” joy in public ordinance and expression as well as in private and personal
104 Jean Calvin, Commentary on The Book of Psalms. Trans. Rev. James Anderson, 6
vols., 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1844, 1996), Psalm 122, 70.
105 Thomas Rogers, trans. Of the imitation of Christ . . . by one Thomas of Kempis
(London: by Henry Denham, 1580), 30.
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manifestation. As Epithalamion progresses Spenser tires of festivity and common joy and
wishes for his bride and himself to be left alone. Besides creating a world in which
common joy has its apotheosis, the poem also functions as a rejection of this same
celebratory joy for something more private, intimate, and secret. Epithalamion turns a
communal celebration of language into a quiet, private consecration of joy, allowing
poetry itself to become the medium of both outward and inward joy, ornamental and
sacramental joy. To this end, Epithalamion becomes the poet’s expression and
exploration of earthly joy, sowing poetry to the ritual expression of common joy and the
private devotion of secret joy.
Psalmic Hymns of Poetic and Public Joy: Epithalamion
Stanzas 1–16
Before discussing the ways in which Epithalamion builds on some of these
religious notions of joyful expression, it might be useful to very briefly mention how
Spenser had constructed joy in some of his previous poetry, especially because the first
stanza of Epithalamion looks back on Spenser’s other joyful poetry before moving on to
its new articulation. To find Spenser’s theological treatment of joy, most critics would
immediately (and only) go to Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, where the Redcrosse knight
confronts Sans-joy, brother to Sans-loy and Sans-foy. Sans-joy represents a psychological
setback of Redcrosse that he must overcome to be a true Protestant exemplar, but Sansjoy is one of the few symbolic figures never defeated in the poem, perhaps a sign of the
persistence of joylessness in the English Protestant church, or perhaps an indication of
Spenser’s own failure to achieve a poetic and theological sense of earthly joy. Although
87
Sans-joy is never actually defeated in the poem, he is also curiously not mentioned again
after Book 1, which might suggest that there is not so much an emphasis on the defeat of
Sans-joy rather than a lack of later concern on Spenser’s part for the spectre of
joylessness after the first three books were completed. After all, between the completion
of Books I-III and Books III-VI came the Amoretti and Epithalamion, and perhaps no
further concern with religious and earthly joy is really needed after those poems’
treatment of the emotion. It is not that Sans-joy dies for Spenser—he’s just not important
enough to be around anymore after the betrothal and marriage of Redcrosse at the end of
Book 1, and Spenser at the end of Book III.
But the character of Sans-Joy comes as a result of a consistent theme in Spenser’s
poetic cosmology: his lifelong concern with the earthly nature of joy manifests itself in
his earliest work, and his concern usually reflects these two problems: 1) that full earthly
joy is unobtainable, ephemeral, and ineffable, and 2) that true joy cannot come through
the invented language of poetry. His first published works, teenage translations in Jan
Van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings (1569), describe joy in two ways: joy can be the
ephemeral enjoyment of a moment of mortal pleasure, or it can be a mysterious foretaste
of the real joy that occupies the heavens, unknown to those grieving below.106 These
106 Spenser’s epigram translations in Theatre for Worldlings are particularly concerned
with the ephemerality of experience: each sonnet contains an apocalyptic vision, literally etched
for the reader on the printed page that visually vanishes when the page is turned. From Epigram
2: “Thus in one moment to see lost and drowned/ So great riches, as lyke can not be founde.”
Epigram 3: “Which makes me much and ever to complaine,/ For no such shadow shal be had
againe.” The closure of each epigram is a question of if and when such visions should ever return,
yet those questions are asked in a lingering state of rapture that each vision provides. Each vision
makes the poet’s “heart rejoice” or experience “great delight,” depending on its nature, but that
vision is gone before the poet can adequately dwell on it. Systematically, a force in the poem’s
imagery devours the image before the poet has digested it, and joy becomes completely
ephemeral, as is rued at the end of each Epigram. The final epigrammatic vision is of a “Ladie”
that is quickly bitten by a serpent. The remainder of the lady intriguingly is “mounted up to joy./
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early translations forecast a peculiar problem for Spenser, one that parallels the larger
theological conundrum in Protestant England: if a true believer is to have full joy as
commanded in the New Testament and in the Psalms, how and where might that joy be
found? Spenser’s concern with joy reflects this, particularly as he began to outline his
larger poetic cosmology. He uses “November” in his Shepheardes Calendar to
contemplate the possibilities of “joyfull verse” as a tool to dispel his sense of mortal
sorrow. The final four stanzas of “November” end with “O joyfull verse,” which
simultaneously reaffirms melancholy and dismisses it with the sighing “O.” Even after
Colin Clout has ended his paean to joyfull verse, Thenot has to entreat him to get up, “Up
Colin up, ynough thou morned hast” (l. 207).107 The joyous possibilities of verse are
here completely unsuccessful, for word alone does not rouse Colin from his sorrow. This
sentiment continues in the Complaints, where Spenser decides that the only joy left for
earth is “sad joy,” a residue of the heavens’ perfect joy.
The thread of joy as affective verse bespeaks itself immediately in the opening
stanza of Epithalamion. In Epithalamion’s invocation, the Spenser-poet not only
Alas in earth so nothing doth endure/ But bitter griefe that dothe our hearts anoy.” These final
lines of the visions suggest a melancholic interest in the mutable nature not of things per se but of
aesthetic responses, particularly the joy that comes from a vision. Spenser’s concern, evident in
his clear invocation of a joy all but devoured, echoes Van de Noot’s subtitle to his work: A
Theatre wherein be represented as wel the miseries & calamities that follow the voluptuous
Worldlings, As also the greate joyes and pleasures which the faithfull do enjoy. Van der Noot’s
volume predictably has less interest in the joy of the saints as in the misery of the worldlings—his
subtitle is really his first and last mention of that joy—but Spenser’s verse translations are very
much concerned with it, or at least with the impossibility of its duration. In sonnet 3, the poet
proclaims the “nought in this worlde but griefe endures,” and the vision poems always end in
destruction, offering no “greate joys and pleasures” for the “faithfull to enjoy,” which becomes
troublesome for Spenser. This concern with joy, or its lack, follows him throughout his career.
107 Spenser, “November,” The Shepheard’s Calendar, in Edmund Spenser’s Poetry: A
Norton Critical Edition, ed. Hugh Maclean, Anne Lake Prescott, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton &
Company, 1993). All subsequent citations to Spenser’s poetry are from this edition unless
otherwise noted.
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immediately sets out to place his marriage poem within a larger tradition of classical
form, he also aligns his poem as the latest in a line of his own poems with an emotional
affect, referring back to the mourning verses of the Shephearde’s Calendar and the
Complaints.108
Ye learned sisters which have oftentimes
Beene to me ayding, others to adorne:
Whom ye thought worthy of your gracefull rymes,
That even the greatest did not greatly scorne
To heare theyr names sung in your simple layes,
But joyed in theyr prayse.
And when ye list your owne mishaps to mourne,
Which death, or love, or fortunes wreck did rayse,
Your string could soone to sadder tenor turne,
And teach the woods and waters to lament
Your dolefull dreriment.
Now lay those sorrowfull complaints aside,
And having all your heads with girland crownd,
Helpe me mine owne loves praises to resound,
Ne let the same of any be envied:
So Orpheus did for his owne bride,
So I unto my selfe alone will sing,
The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring. (1-18)
The conventional epithalamic opening, complete with allusions to the nine sisters
and Orpheus’s song, introduces the tradition within which Spenser is working, but the
opening is also laced with references back to his earlier poetry and particularly to the
emotional tenor of that previous poetry. The “learned sisters” that have aided him in the
past have helped him project the desired poetic affection for each brand of poetry:
Spenser’s epideictic poetry, probably “April” in The Shepheardes Calendar or the
108 Spenser had clearly been wanting to write in the epithalamic form for some time. As
early as 1580, in one of his famous letters to Gabriel Harvey, Spenser proclaims his intention to
write epithalamic verse based on the river Thames. It is probably just as well that this was never
executed—and epithalamia are better suited for a wedding, after all.
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proems and dedications in The Faerie Queene, have allowed “joy” to be bestowed on the
“greatest” of subjects, whether they were patrons or Queen Elizabeth, while his laments
and “complaints” projected a “sadder tenor.” The second part of the stanza allows
Spenser to warn against the familiar inclination to mourn through poetry, a tendency that
Gary Kuchar identifies as the primary religious devotional code of Renaissance poetry,
and indeed popular poetry at large.109 Up to the point when the addressee is told to “lay
those sorrowfull complaints aside,” the lines have become an admonition against the
poetic imperative to lament, and with the pleonasm of “sorrowfull complaints” the poet
redundantly emphasizes the stronghold of “sorrow” over the poetic form, especially in
Petrarchan love poetry, a form he had also emphatically explored in his companion
sonnets Amoretti.110 The poet of Epithalamion refers back to those Complaints in his
opening stanza in hopes that he can dispel the “sad joy” that characterized those poems
and transform that joy into an exuberant exclamation of full joy. If complaints are
“sorrowfull,” they can be joyful as well, otherwise the poet would have not qualified
them as such. The “joyful complaint” is the form to which the Epithalamion aspires, but
109 Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow (Cambridge University Press: New
York, 2008), 1-6. Kuchar’s idea is that poets used holy mourning to investigate the complexities
of and debates of common theology. Kuchar is absolutely right in this assessment, and he even
identifies “joy” as part of this process. I would further Kuchar’s argument, though, and suggest
that joy, in Spenser particularly, is the emotional context to view certain religious expressions,
such as ritual or biblical utterance and the singing of hymns.
110 Spenser’s Amoretti would make an interesting case for the study of religious joy as
well: it seems clear to me that the Amoretti uses Petrarch’s matrix of desire as the medium for
love poetry, as the other Elizabethan sonneteers did, and then subverts it by completing that
desire into marriage and consummation, something both Petrarch and Elizabethan sonneteers
never did. If one were to follow the traditional Christian narrative of desire, it would complete
itself in sorrow or joy (this comes from Aquinas’s highly influential systematization of the
passions). The Amoretti, by virtue of its outcome, completes its narrative desire in joy. Of course,
its narrative ends, in its original publication, with the Epithalamion.
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this is precisely the peculiar move: the opening stanza is not only announcing the
subsequent poem’s tone but its rhetorical purpose.
The joy of the opening stanza is principally poetic—the kind of joy that Spenser
had been attempting to project in his earlier poetry but had failed. In the first short-lined
rune, “But joyed in theyr praise,” Spenser acknowledges that the previous poetry had
indeed given “grace” and “joy,”111 but this joy is not the religious, inclusive joy of
union. Rather, the joy referred to in the first six lines is the joy of flattery or hearing
praises. It may have produced the kind of joy that is “delight” but it has not effectively
produced the kind of joy that comes from communion. After all, this joy is “theyr” joy—
it excludes the poet, and the readers receiving joy have only been the ones receiving
praise. The first “joy” of the Epithalamion is poetic joy, a delight or “joyaunce vain.” But
this joy is necessary as verbal groundwork for the more holy joy of ritual and festivity.
The poet’s plea that the sisters “lay those sorrowfull complaints aside” and allow his
joyful voice to reign gives him the vocabulary to begin his articulation of holy joy. Poetic
expressions of joy and delight are what Spenser knows, and combining them with the
holy joy that the occasion of marriage will produce will expand the joy outward among
the public and inward to the speaker.
Spenser’s first refrain begins to chart this course by turning affective poetic joy
simultaneously inward to the self and outward into a public proclamation. The first line
of the refrain, “So I unto my selfe alone will sing,” projects back on the self, emphasizing
the poet as creator and speaker, but the second line projects that poetry out, and does so
111 The “graceful rymes” suggest that those particular rhymes conferred grace (OED
“gracefull=to confer grace”) and caused joy for their subjects, but that joy was not necessarily
shared by the poet himself in these earlier epideictic poems.
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with the emphasis on a ritualized language that becomes public, “The woods shall to me
answer and my Eccho ring.” The woods will answer and echo the speaker’s song in this
first stanza, like the psalmic call and response of public worship and ceremonial
marriage, but will do so with special emphasis on the subjectivity of the poet as opposed
to the parish priest. Epithalamion is often thought of as Spenser’s most personal poem
because of this initial announcement of the self (and its autobiographical valences), but
the poem is not necessarily personal but rather inclusive—the first refrain clearly turns
the poet’s song over to the “woods” and “Eccho,” and in so doing the song has moved
beyond the subject’s voice. While the first stanza establishes the poet’s credentials and
announces the hopeful emotional outcome of the poem, the song quickly becomes a
public entity.
The public spreading of the poem’s refrains continues beyond the woods into the
public realm of celebration. The personal pronoun “me” and the possessive “my” are
used for the first, and last, time in the first refrain, and the following twenty-two echoing
refrains avoid the personal pronouns. Rather, they become increasingly public and
communal as the poem hits its center point. That the woods no longer answer the poet
himself suggests that once his praise (or song) goes public, the original utterance no
longer matters. Even in the seventh refrain, where the speaker reemphasizes his own
voice (“Then I thy soverayne prayses loud wil sing”), the answer and echo are entities all
their own (“That all the woods shal answer and theyr echo ring” [emphasis mine]). It is as
if the poet, upon turning his poem over to the woods, loses subjectivity and the words
themselves become ritualized and prescribed. The song here has no composer, it is now
part of a common exclamation, common prayer.
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The ritualized and public utterances that make up Epithalamion do not only
mimic common prayer, they also function for the express purpose of articulating joy in a
way that would have drawn upon the utterances of joy in actual religious experience, the
joy that comes from the recitation of joyful language already found in scripture. While
the Spenser-poet of the first stanza reminds his audience of his former attempts to bestow
joy and hopes that this particular poem will be able to more successfully do that, he also
quickly reneges on his attempt to personally bestow joy and gives that responsibility to
the poem itself by virtue of its allusive language. The second stanza’s refrain commands
that others (whether they are the nine “sisters” or just maidens) sing of the joy that had
previously been the poet’s to bestow: “Do ye to her of joy and solace sing, / That all the
woods may answer and your echo ring (lines 35–6). Not only commanding others to do
the singing of joy, the second refrain also echoes an already well-known Psalm recitation
that is about joy itself, Psalm 96:12: “Let the fielde be joyfull, and all that is in it: Let all
the trees rejoyce before the Lord.” Both the Psalm and the refrain depend on a spreading
and echoing of joy, and in turn the joy becomes disembodied—or at least displaced onto
natural surroundings like “trees” or “the fielde”—into pure rejoicing for rejoicing’s sake,
without imaginable human subjects.112 The Psalm has the trees of the wood rejoicing
rather than human voices, and the image is one of communal, disembodied expression,
spread so thin that the act of rejoicing is all that matters instead of who is doing the
rejoicing. The second refrain operates by this same principle: the joyful song is given
112 Calvin’s commentary on this particular verse is interesting: “the Psalmist calls upon
the irrational things themselves, the trees, the earth, the seas, and the heavens, to join in the
general joy. Nor are we to understand that by the heavens he means the angels, and by the earth
men; for he calls even upon the dumb fishes of the deep to shout for joy.” Calvin, Commentary on
The Book of Psalms, Psalm 96.
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over to the woods and given its own voice. The poet has extricated himself from the song
and given it over to the congregation of trees and woods: the song is now a recitation of
the earth rather than a specific creation of the poet. In effect, Spenser is rewriting the
Psalms, the primary vehicles of religious joy, by imitation, and doing so in the context of
his own marriage.113
Spenser’s reappropriation of Psalmic authority also takes the imperative language
that so characterizes both the Psalms and any other scriptural utterance of joy in order to
spread the joy horizontally. The refrains are always commands to the collective voice,
and ten of the twenty-four stanzas begin with an imperative verb: (“Bring,” “Wake,”
“Harke,” “Tell,” “Open,” “Behold,” “Ring,” “Now Cease,” “Now welcome,” “Let,”), and
the bulk of all declarations are imperative. David Chinitz reads these imperatives as
evidence of the poem’s “magical powers” that commands reality to perform this
particular marriage.114 The commands, Chinitz argues, make the poem sacramental in
the way it imitates the performative language of the matrimonial ordinance. But Chinitz
neglects the ways in which the poem more clearly echoes the biblical imperatives of joy
in both the Psalms and the Song of Songs. The sentences attempt to confer, give, bring
forth, enchant, imitating the diction of common praise. The poem takes on an imperative
tone that emphasizes its rhetoric: it is not “praising” with joy as a possible result; it is
113 For a comprehensive reading of the way Spenser uses the Psalms here, see Carol
Kaske, “A Psalter of Love: Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion,” in Centered on the Word, ed.
Daniel Doerksen and Christopher Hodges (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp.
28–49. Kaske’s argument lies in the way Spenser’s poems work as a larger imitation of the
Psalms, and her sense that the emotional states of the Amoretti and Epithalamion imitate the
emotional states of the Psalms mirrors my sense that the joyful Psalms are the Psalms most cited
in the Epithalamion. The Penitential Psalms are most often cited in Amoretti.
114 David Chinitz, “The poem as sacrament: Spenser’s Epithalamion and the golden
section,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21, 2 (1991): 251–68.
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commanding a public, congregational joy. The poem’s ability to command its listeners to
joy echoes the Psalter, both in its form as an imperative “call” to rejoice and in its
function as a public recitation, enacting joy as affect, and as an effect of sacramental
completion.
But why would it be so necessary for Spenser to create this explosion of public
joy in celebration of his matrimony? Some have argued that this is Spenser’s fantasy
fulfillment—his actual wedding would have been a fairly standard middle-class affair,
hardly the stuff of worldwide jubilation. Perhaps Spenser’s invocation of communal joy
is “hyperbolic,” echoing Calvin’s own sense that anytime the Lord told the trees and
woods rejoice it was only to attract attention.115 Nevertheless, the open and public nature
of matrimony, in the religious culture at large, was not just wish-fulfillment, but an
important aspect of ceremony, especially in the late sixteenth-century.116 In many ways,
this testified to the sacred nature of marriage: if it was a public act, it could be sanctified
by “common” prayer and solidified through ordinance and ceremony. Because marriage
was still being debated as to its legitimacy as a sacrament, ordinance, or simple practice
in the late sixteenth century, its status as one of the liturgical occasions for common
prayer was always in question. The marriage ceremony had to be public in order for it to
be legitimized by the state, especially when Puritans openly questioned the legitimacy of
115 Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 96:11–12 is analogous to the way Spenser uses that
Psalm in his refrain as a vehicle for common prayer and rejoicing. After Calvin discusses the
trees rejoicing, he concludes that “The language must therefore be hyperbolical, designed to
express the desirableness and the blessedness of being brought unto the faith of God.”
(Commentary on the Psalms, Psalm 96:11–12)
116 For an excellent discussion of how ceremony relied on a public, at least in the
seventeenth century, see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton:
Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
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marriage as an ordinance to be accompanied with holy communion, which often caused
Separatists to perform marriages in the privacy of homes without ministers or authorities
present.117 Public marriage as a state apparatus continued to be of interest through the
1590s, and often Puritans and mainstream Protestants alike advocated the necessity of
public marriage in order to control old laws of consent that dictated that a congregation
must approve and bless a marriage.
Beyond the legal implications of the public wedding and the theological
importance of public rejoicing for a Church that had based its proper worship on common
prayer, there were other important religious aspects of public joy. Rejoicing should be
public, the clerics noted, because it would allow all to partake of the fruits of the gospel,
particularly in respect to the sacred ordinances allowing grace. In his commentary on the
Song of Solomon, Thomas Wilcox takes special note of the wedding banquet as a public
affair, “So plentifull and kind harted is the lord, he can not keep his joy with in himself,
but stirreth up his friends & companions, to eat and drincke, and rejoyce with him.”118
The joy of the Lord, upon his own “marriage” in the Song of Solomon, cannot be
contained within and has to be shared by others. Likewise, this religious joy is an
outward signal, something to be demonstrated in a public manner. In Calvin’s
commentary on Galatians 5:22 (“But the frute of the Spirit is love, joy, . . .”), he notes
117 In 1587, several Separatists were arrested for marrying in private, without a minister
on duty. Eric Carlson suggests that this was only one of many instances where private marriages
were being punished by the state. See Eric Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation
(Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994), 48.
118 T.W. (Thomas Wilcox), An Exposition upon the Booke of the Canticles, otherwise
called Schelomons Song, published for the edification of the Church of God. (London: Robert
Walde-grave, 1585), 111.
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that spiritual joy is “that cheerful behavior towards our fellow-men.”119 Joy can’t help
but spread, and with the first fifteen stanzas of Epithalamion, Spenser’s joy moves
outward in sound and command: the joy of the public ceremony is merry, comforting,
generous, and binding. The “frute” of the Spirit, joy, which is to say the “effect” or even
“affect” of the Spirit, might be shared among all.
The primary medium for this public joy is through song—hymnody, joint voices
in anthemic rejoicing. Epithalamion is a song, indicated at every refrain, but it is also
about singing—joyful singing.120 The poet refers to the song of the refrain as one of “joy
and solace” (l. 35) or “joy and pleasance” (l. 90), and he also includes other kinds of
songs in the poem, all of which function as indicators of different kinds of joy. On the
way towards the “temple,” the couple is serenaded by the old Roman marriage cry
“Hymen io Hymen” in “loud advance”:
the Minstrels gin to shrill aloud
/ Their merry Musick that resounds from far,
....
And thereunto doe daunce and carrol sweet,
That all the sences they doe reavish quite,
119 Arthur Golding, trans., Sermons of M. John Calvine upon the Epistle of Saincte
Paule to the Galathians, Chap. 5 (London: by Lucas Harison and George Bishop, 1574), 277. See
also Potkay’s reading of Luther’s commentary on Galatians, perhaps the most popular of Luther’s
works in England. The Story of Joy, 76.
120 Epithalamion has often been thought of in musical terms, both as a poetic
embodiment of harmony as well as a structural ode that illustrates Protestant homophonic
advances in musical theory, but the poem also acts as a response to an ongoing debate about the
function of music for the English Church. See A. R. Cirillo, “Spenser’s Epithalamion: The
Harmonious Universe of Love,” SEL: Studies in English Literature [Winter 1968], 19-34). The
nature of this debate had to do with the form and function of music in worship services: some
claimed music was popish and excessive, unintelligible for the masses and needlessly obscure in
their latin and polyphonic complexities, while others demanded music as an integral aid to proper
worship whether it was difficult or not. See Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation, New
York: Oxford Unviersity Press, 1967). At any rate, Richard Hooker eventually writes in his Laws
that “music is a thing apt for all occasions . . . as seasonable in grief as in joy” (sections 38-39 of
Laws).
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The whyles the boyes run up and downe the street,
Crying aloud with strong confused noyce,
As if it were one voyce. (129-139)
The “merry Musick” unites a disparate crowd.121 The language is cacophonous: the
Minstrels “shrill,” the “sences” “doe ravish,” and the “Crying” is of “confused noyce.”
Yet it harmonizes perfectly “As if it were one voyce.” The merry song, coming from
disparate voices and pagan traditions, unites and “even to the heavens theyr shouting
shrill/ Doth reach, and all the firmament doth fill.” The auricular sense of the lines is
united in the “noyce-voyce” couplet, and the two adjacent l’s of the “shrill-all-fill”
consonance scriptically follows the line’s function, to come together in parallel lines,
united and joined upward. The cacophonous music of public festivity has taken a
heavenly turn in joyful song.
The next instance of music, the “joyous Antheme” sung within the temple walls,
is of a completely different type, but the effect of cacophonous union is similar. Spenser’s
inclusion of the “roring Organs” and “the Choristers the joyous Antheme” in the stanza in
which the couple stands at the altar and participates in the traditional matrimonial
ceremony, seems particularly loud, especially during the “sacred ceremony”:
Bring her up to th’high altar, that she may
The sacred ceremonies there partake,
The which do endlesse matrimony make,
And let the roring Organs play
The praises of the Lord in lively notes,
The whiles with hollow throates
The Choristers the joyous Antheme sing (215-221)
121 Sidney’s description of singing Psalms, referenced earlier, also uses “merry” to
describe this particular type of holy and festive music. Sidney, Defence 88.
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As the “Choristers” sing “joyous Anthemes,” the couple experiences the ordinance of
marriage, and the sound is almost cacophonous—“roring organs” and “lively notes”—but
the loud music allows the moment of the actual ordinance to be auricular, public, joyful,
and, in a sense, profane. Music accompanying a marriage service would not have been
out of place, but its particulars were heavily debated in Spenser’s time, especially the
kind of music that Spenser evokes in his lyric.122 While the musical anthem eventually
made its way into the matrimony section of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, it was
still part of the cathedral tradition, a tradition often considered popish and excessive and
used outside of traditional ordinances in the 1590s.123
These joyful songs operate reciprocally. The excessive secular music of the streets
becomes “one voice” and moves heavenward, and the “joyous Antheme” inside the
temple becomes excessive and public. The poet’s joy in music goes beyond the common
joy of ritual and into the joy of festivity, and vice versa, joining the religious exhortation
to rejoice with the secular sense of jubilee. Just as the poet has allowed traditionally
excessive forms of music with Reformation homophonic hymns of joy, he has allowed
the “merry” song of festivity to be included as well in a syncretistic gesture of common
worship and celebration. This harmonizing of disparate parts in Epithalamion has not
gone unnoticed among even Spenser’s earliest commentators. In 1643, the Platonist Sir
122 Edward Topsell, the popular Puritan clergyman, writes in his 1596 Reward of
Religion that “Truely in these dayes how doe men and women prouide for mirth, not for
modestie, that their day of marriage may bee ioyfull with worldly disportes, not godly with
Christian exercises: they buy & hire musitians to passe the time in pleasant dauncing.”
123 Anthems were popular among Laity at the time, but the question of whether they
should be used for ordinances and official church worship was a debate that had not yet been
decided. For the larger context of the debate, see Kenneth T. Long, The Music of the English
Church.
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Kenelm Digby called Epithalamion Spenser’s most beautiful “diapase,” a musical term
that brings disparate parts into perfect harmony and sound, which, according to Digby,
results in the poem’s profound powers of joyful union: he describes the effect of
Epithalamion as “this Joy, this Happinesse, which is an everlasting Diapase.” In this
everlasting “Diapase” Digby not only remarks on the marriage of music, joy, and
harmony, but also on the disparate worlds, the festive and the sacred, that are enfolded
and brought into perfect harmony, produced by Epithalamion’s joyous music and
producing “this Joy, this Happinesse.”124
The ability to unite through joyous music is appropriate, of course, for a poem
celebrating, for Protestants, the most sacred union on earth—marriage of bride and
groom—and representing the most sacred union of the heavens—marriage of Christ and
Church. Union is all over represented in Epithalamion, whether it is in the actual
marriage of bride and groom or in the scriptural union of poetry and recitation in the
imitation of the Psalms. But with its music, the joyous union emphasized is among
hearers.125 The auditory power of Epithalamion comes from its musicality and recitative
style, as I have tried to show, and the joy of that union is public, inclusive, and
performative. Everything about the first fifteen stanzas of Epithalamion is public: the
singing, the ceremony, the parade in the streets. All those within hearing distance of the
marriage song are encouraged to join in the song of joy, to celebrate with the invocation
124 Kenelm Digby, Observations on the 22. Stanza of the 9th Canto. London: 1643.
125 “Hearing” would have been especially important to Spenser, especially because he
was echoing and imitating liturgical practice and ordinance. Ramie Targoff notes that “At the
heart of the liturgical changes introduced during the Reformation was the shift of emphasis from
a visual to an auditory register.” (Common Prayer 23) She notes that this created a new sense of
uniformity of participation; because you could understand the prayer you hear, you might
participate more spiritually. The same goes for joy.
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of Psalms, to dress the bride and groom, to behold the festivities “Fit for so joyfull day,/
The joyfulst day that ever sunne did see” (116-117).
While the joy of the first fifteen stanzas is manifestly tied with the auricular
functions of song, poetry, and Psalm, the joy that begins to appear in stanza 16 marks a
gradual shift in emphasis on function, although the effect remains intact. The sixteenth
stanza narrates the end of daylight, as the stars begin to “Appeare out of the east,” and the
poet laments that the “weary day” has gone on entirely too long. While the 16-stanza day
was marked by celebrations, song, “joyaunce” and “jollity,” the night beckons more
private desires: “Ah when will this long weary day have end, / And lende me leave to
come unto my love?” (lines 278–9), Spenser asks, even after he had just declared that
“Never had man more joyfull day than this” (line 246). The public joy of festivity and
song has overstayed its welcome, and the poet wants nothing more than to move into the
joy of the bedchamber. Before that, however, there is one last invocation of joy in stanza
16 that is at odds with the auditory joy that has come before. As the poet sees the bright
evening star appear, he remarks
How chearefully thou lookest from above,
And seemst to laugh atweene thy twinkling light
As joying in the sight
Of these glad many which for joy do sing. (291-94)
The bright star here, at least in the perceptual “seemst” to Spenser, is enjoying the
festivity as much as everyone else, but it is also approving the marriage from on high.
The star’s joy is emblematic of heavenly joy, particularly because this star has appeared
out of the east “with golden creast,” a direct reference to Christ’s star. But the star does
not hear the “glad many which for joy do sing,” it sees the glad many, and enjoys the
sight. The shift in senses suggests a difference in earthly joy and heavenly joy: the
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heavens look down on us and joy, but we can only listen and enjoy, our eyes are not
spiritual eyes as the heavens’ are, and true joy in the sight eludes us. The short-lined rune
“As joying in the sight” emphasizes the sense shift by punning phonetically while
containing image of “sight”: “joying” sounds almost identical to “join,” a pronunciation
that is reemphasized with the adjacent “in”: the line sounds like “As join in the sight.”
The conflation of “joy” and “join” would not have only been phonetic but also scriptic:
“joy” and “join” appear as “joi to joine” or “joyne in joy” countless times in late
sixteenth-century tracts, sermons, and poems as phonetic and scriptic partners, and the
phrases almost always refer to a holy union of some sort.126 Indeed, because the
Epithalamion celebrates and imaginatively narrates Spenser’s own marriage to Elizabeth
Boyle, the conflation is that much more deliberate. In this short-line rune, Spenser allows
both the real narrative outcome of the poem (“to join” in marriage) coincide with the
emotional outcome of his poem (“to joy” in their marriage’s praise) to produce a peculiar
rhetoric. Yet he does so by joining the “sight” of the star with the sound of joining the
joyful song, and the joy of Epithalamion climaxes aurally—all those within hearing
distance can hear the song—and visually—the heavens look down and “join” in the sight.
The joyous song of Epithalamion has joined the couple but also joined the earth and
heavens in poetic exclamation. The song’s listeners cannot help but be swept up in the
joyous Antheme, and this holy sense of communal joy is shared among tress, forests, and
126 In Calvin’s Golding-translated sermon on the Ephesians, he remarks that “Let us
cleave, let us cleave too our God, according too this saying of David, behold, all my felicitie, and
all my ioy is too be ioyned too my God.” Jean Calvin, The Sermons of M. John Calvin, (London:
by Thomas Dawson, 1577), 129. William Baldwin’s The Canticles and balades of Salomon
(London: by William Baldwin, 1549), 16e: “By byrth, with myrth, the day whan man and
God/Wer ioynde with ioye, who long before wer od.” In Chap. V of Edmund Coote’s The English
Schoole-master, “joi” and “join” are adjacent in the phonetic training of dipthongs. (The English
Schoole-master [London: by T. Snodham for the Company of Stationers, 1630]), 6.
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angels, and the poem’s readers experience song visually, through the stanzaic ordering of
the poem on the page. The joyful expression produces joy by its command and invitation
to join in the celebration of song and poem, bride and groom, utterance and Word.
The Private Joy of the Marriage Chamber: Stanzas 16–24
Spenser famously and meticulously follows the common prayer in his
construction of Amoretti; each of the 89 sonnets corresponds to a day of worship in the
prayer book, and the poems follow the scriptural reading for each of those days.
Amoretti’s companion and extension, Epithalamion, continues to celebrate the common
joy of common worship with its joyful song and echo of the Psalms, but the liturgical
utterance and public celebration finds its limit in the last third of Epithalamion. One can
sense something unsatisfying for the love poet in this collective, maybe impersonal, joy.
What about the private contentment of “secret joy”? Ramie Targoff, in her study of The
Book of Common Prayer, attempts to answer this by suggesting that private devotion
would have been prescribed by the directives of common devotion. She claims that
common prayer, both from the Psalms and The Book of Common Prayer, was meant to be
carried out privately as well, removing the boundaries between individual expression of
worship and state-ordained expressions: “Instead of the church supplying a space for
private worship, the home was now imagined as an additional site for common
prayer.”127 The frustrations of this are easy to deduce: it is not surprising that so many
Elizabethan dissenters were born out of the desire to worship privately, without the
127 Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 34.
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interference of state mandate. The implications for experiencing joy are especially dire; if
joy is mandated as a collective expression, when would one be allowed to feel the
religious joy that comes with other kinds of union like, say, a marriage? This is precisely
what Spenser engages in the second half of his poem. The Epithalamion wants its joy
both ways: collective and private, prescribed and personal. In order to do this, the poem
must move through the ritual expression of joy with celebratory sincerity, calling on
hymns, Psalms, and poetry to frame Spenser’s marriage with “joyous” import. But
midway through, the poem abruptly closes off public celebrations and demands a
different kind of joy, something quiet, individual, and private.
In the 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible, the Song of Solomon is placed after
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, Solomon’s other books, but the order of these books was
known to be in dispute.128 Some said, “as all the Latine writers do consent,” that the
Song of Songs was written later and therefore should go after his other works, while
others claimed, “as the Jewes imagine,” that the Song of Songs was the first of
Solomon’s books, and it should directly follow David’s Psalms.129 If the Song of Songs
comes after the Psalms, the shift is not only from one rhetorical mode (the proclamation)
to the next (the allegory), it is also spatial. The joy of the Psalms is public and
incantatory—widespread rejoicing—in liturgical use, the mode of the early
Epithalamion. The joy of the Song of Songs is private, contained, secret, and erotic, the
128 The Song of Songs was also known as the Canticle, the Canticle of Canticles, and
the Song of Solomon. I will use each title in the context of how it is referred to by the particular
writer.
129 “Dedication,” in Antonio Brucioli’s A Commentary upon the Canticle of Canticles.
trans. Thomas James (London: by R. Field, 1598), 6.
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mode of the latter Epithalamion. This is precisely the shift that Spenser, the poet and
groom, desires in the Epithalamion, although whether he achieves this privacy or not is a
question of how one reads his interpretive anxiety. At any rate, Spenser follows the joyful
noise of the Psalms by attempting to enter the joyful, private space of the Canticle
bedchamber in Stanza 17 and beyond.130
The marginalia of the 1560 Geneva Bible iterates this private sense clearly.
Whereas the marginal notes from the Psalms persistently remind the reader that the
Christians “rejoiceth” as Jerusalem and spread that rejoicing among the earth, the
marginal notes of the Canticle subdue the loud rejoicing of the Psalms and focus that
rejoicing inward. In Song Chapter 1, the beloved asks “Drawe me: we wil runne after
thee: the King hathe broght me into his chamber: we wil rejoyce and be glad in thee; we
wil remember thy love more then wine” (Song 1.3). The explanatory note for this verse
explains that the rejoicing of this verse is private, “Meaning, the secret joye that is not
knowen to the worlde.” The “secret joye” of the bride and groom relationship in the Song
is often left alone by commentators: Antonin Brucioli’s commentary, translated into
English in 1598, suggests that “we must note, that the spouse doth always long to bee in
the house, bed, or other secret and inward place, with her welbeloved, according unto the
custome of women,” but that does little to suggest what this “secret joy” might be other
130 We know that Spenser wrote, or at least attempted to write, a translated version of
the Song of Songs himself called Canticum canticorum. No copy of this work has been found, but
critics have often noted the frequency with which Spenser alludes to the Song of Songs in his
works. Israel Baroway (“The Imagery of Spenser and the Song of Songs,” Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 33 [Jan. 1934]: 23–45) argues that Spenser’s Canticum is not really needed
because his “version” of the Canticles is already spread in allusions throughout his works. As
early as 1623, Samuel Purchas asks “How doth [the Lord] himselfe sing his Amoretti, if not
Epithalamion, his loves in that Song of Songs?” (The king’s towre and triumphant arch of
London [London: W. Stansby, 1623], 19)
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than an enclosed space, and only for the bride.131 Thomas Wilcox, in his 1585
commentary, only notices the strange change in plural and singular pronouns of the verse,
and suggests that “the matter of our joy” is “to thinke upon and speake of Gods
goodnesses towards us both generally and particularly.”132 Wilcox’s commentary is
typical: the allegory is safer than the literal action of the Song, so most commentators
discuss it only in terms of “Christ” and “Church” instead of grappling with the very vivid
imagery of lovers alone in the bedchamber.133 Little is made of the secret, private joy of
the bedchamber, as if that joy were so secret that it remained unspoken, even by the
biblical commentators.
Spenser’s plea for privacy comes immediately in Stanza 17:
Now cease ye damsels your delights forepast;
Enough is it, that all the day was yours:
Now day is doen, and night is nighing fast:
Now bring the Bryde into the brydall boures.
Now night is come, now soone her disarray,
And in her bed her lay. . .
Now it is night, ye damsels may be gon,
And leave my love alone,
And leave likewise your former lay to sing:
The woods no mor shal answere, nor your echo ring. (296–301)
The groom asks the damsels to “bring the Bryde into the brydall boures,” directly
echoing the bride of the Canticle’s request to “Drawe me: we wil runne after thee: the
131 Brucioli, B1
132 T.W. (Thomas Wilcox), An Exposition Upon the Booke of Canticles (London:
Printed for Thomas Man, 1585), 10-11.
133 One good example of this is Theodore de Beze’s commentary, which claims that “the
Canticle of Canticles is to bee taken and altogether to be understood in a spiritual sense,” and in
no manner is it to be read as a literal treatment of a marriage, particularly of Solomon to
Pharoah’s daughter, which is a marriage “condemned, and that worthily by the holy ghost.”
(Master Bezaes sermons upon the three chapters, Trans. John Harmer, [London: Joseph Barnes,
1587], 4a).
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King hath broght me into his chambers.”134 The speaker then dismisses the damsels, and
the refrain now calls for silence, and the “former” song of joy is to be left for the
speaker’s “love” alone. The public joy so celebrated in the previous stanzas is now
banished from the new private space—this is the bride and groom’s moment of sexual
dalliance, and all public joy would intrude into this part of the marriage, newly minted
and approved in the Protestant understanding of chastity.
The call for privacy is immediately followed by Spenser’s desire to undress his
bride, and the anticipation of intercourse is now expressed with the desire for quiet and
private love. This sexual anticipation can quickly turn to fear for the lovers if there is at
all a breach of privacy. The following stanza asks night to
Spread thy broad wing over my love and me,
That no man may us see,
And in thy sable mantle us enwrap,
From feare of perrill and foule horror free.
Let no false treason seeke us to entrap,
Nor any dread disquiet once annoy
The safety of our joy. (319–25)
The speaker’s tone has become insistent in its desire for quiet and privacy, as if the world
beyond the bedchamber can only offer “treason,” (another reference to the King/groom of
the Canticle) “perrill,” and “horror.” Sexual intercourse, in this stanza, is to be enwrapped
in privacy and safe from the outside, and the joy of the poem has now completely shifted
from public declaration and festivity to something shared, distinct, and secret. When the
groom describes “The safety of our joy,” he is referring to a state of perfect
equilibrium—the end of desire—and rest, no more public song, no more “joyous day,”
134 Song of Solomon 1:3, The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 edition. (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). All biblical citations in this chapter are taken from this
edition, the edition that Spenser likely used.
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but rather a timeless joy of being literally united in body after being sacramentally united
in soul. In Amoretti 63, the same groom anticipates this moment of perfect “rest”: “Most
happy he that can at last atchyve / The joyous safety of so sweet a rest” (Amoretti 63,
lines 9–10). But this particular rest is not quite as restful as we might assume: it is the rest
of sex, the unification of jouissance, the private joy of bodies becoming one—true union
in rest. Joy as rest was common in traditional Christian theology: Aquinas claims the
narrative of desire that stems from love finds its “rest” in joy: “Joy bears the same
relation to desire as rest to motion.”135 The sexual element through marriage is explained
in terms of marriage in George Whetstone’s 1582 fictional (and influential) treatise on
marriage, in which the groom, in a moment of inspired song, proclaims how desire’s
passionate end is the joy of sexual union: “For why this joye, all passions sets in rest: / I
dayly see, my Mistresse in my breast.”136
This joy, a moment of rest and safety, is a state of being rather than an expression
as it had been through Stanza 16. Where earlier the poem had a disembodied expression
of rejoicing—rejoicing qua rejoicing, here exists a joy for joy’s sake—joy qua joy. This
state of joy is perhaps the “secret joy” to which the Song of Songs refers, the state of
sacred sexual intercourse is no longer expressive in the Biblical sense of “rejoice” but
rather a moment of perfect stillness and quiet, outside time and verbal prescription. The
plural pronoun “our” in “The safety of our joy” refuses both the heavenly imperative to
“rejoice” and the poet’s call “Doe ye to her of joy and solace sing.” The joy of “our joy”
135 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, 61 vols.
(Cambridge, UK: Blackfriars, 1964–81), 2ae, V. 34, 191.
136 Whetstone, A heptameron of civill discourses, 149.
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is shared between the speaker and his lover rather than dispersed among the congregation
or felt in the speaker alone. The line tellingly corrects the poet’s earlier selfishness in
Amoretti 51, where he claims that “having her, my joy wil be the greater.” (line 14). This
joy is not pronounced from Church authority, not felt individually, but produced and
embedded within the lovers, the secret joy “not knowen to the world,” the joy created by
sexual union rather than by utterance.
The groom struggles to retain and contain this private joy of rest through the next
three stanzas of the poem, which narrate his firm insistence on the privacy and secret joy
of the moment. The world outside the bedchamber is burnished with vivid evils,
reversing the public celebration of worldly joy that accompanied the first half of the
poem into a dreary mob of harmful “lamenting cryes,” “false whispers” and “hidden
feares” (line 334–7): the “Angels” that surround the altar have now become “evill
sprights” (lines 229, 341), the “yong men of the towne” have turned to “hob Goblins”
(lines 261, 343), and instead of “the Choristers the joyous Antheme sing,” the
“unpleasant Quyre of Frogs” croak (lines 221, 349). The once public joy has become a
threatening encroachment of “deluding dreames” and dreadfull sights.” Spenser’s
reversal of imagery not only suggests the ephemerality of this public joy—common joy
only lasts as long as the congregation is invited to participate, and once night comes that
same liturgical ritual turns the congregation into a mob, dark and destructive—but also
the fragility of their private joy, the “gentle sleepe” that Spenser protects.
The “sacred peace” (line 354) and “secret darke” (line 360) allow the poet to
focus on his beloved’s “paradise of joyes” (line 366) without interruption. The sense of
joy as liturgical song and biblical utterance has completely vanished by the time Spenser
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is focusing on “her paradise of joyes,” and joy has taken on a new resonance of private
jewels, a common slang term for jewels was “joies,” and the common slang term for
genitals is “jewels.” Spenser here leaves behind the joyful Psalms of the common prayer
and liturgy for something completely domestic and private.
The private joy of Spenser and his beloved results from the public ritual in which
they had already participated, but that joy also is transformed into something else, not
only sexual but more secret and indescribable, perhaps closer to the heavenly joy that “no
flesh and blood comprehendeth”—the joy of perfect union, inward grace, all passions set
at rest. This joy is the joy of exclusion rather than inclusion, a joy of passionate union
rather than congregation, and a joy that was articulated as selfish and dangerous by the
state church but is sacred and secret to Spenser. Yet it is also the joy that hewed closest to
the inexpressible joy of heaven, and was therefore ineffable, even in the lyric poem. Just
following the mention of “joyous safety,” stanza 19 operates in opposition to what is
actually occurring, as the poet describes the dark outside of the bedchamber rather than
focusing on the events within. That joy is private, even to the reader. Similarly, stanza 20
cloaks the events in metaphor by letting little cupids, like the eager readers, “filch away
snatches of delight” by implication while the poet’s “greedy pleasure . . . / Thinks more
upon her paradise of joyes.” This alone is Spenser’s “greedy” and selfish joy, and here
his description allows the reader only vague impressions of that private joy, perhaps
bringing the reader just a slight sense, a foretaste, of the joy reserved for consummation,
and, by analogy, heavenly communion, although that joy is never clearly articulated in
words nor commanded. This joy is a mystery, beyond words and expression, private for
the poet and his lover’s secret pleasure.
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As is clear from the religious discourse, articulating heavenly joy, whether as a
private or public affair, has always been a losing enterprise. But as Donne makes clear in
his Second Anniversarie, the closest approximation would be to celebrate earthly as if it
were heavenly joy, and then await for new iterations of earthly joy in order to piece
together an apprehension of the joy of heavens. This is why he often calls it an
“inchoative joy,” always on the verge of fulfillment but always cut short by mortal
time.137 After Spenser the husband, poet, and speaker, participates in the private, sexual
joy of jouissance, the joy is gone, having disappeared under the weight of time and
earthly experience, and horizontal bodies, perhaps, but the residue remains—an
apprehension that the fullness of joy had been obtained and can be added to the
comprehension of eternal joy.138 The poet’s final sense that there are joys to come, still
unknown, surfaces in the final full stanza before the envoy, where he leaves the joy of
“rest,” rues the joys cut short by time, and looks forward to the next joy, children: “So let
us rest, sweet love, in hope of this, / And cease till then our tymely joyes to sing” (lines
424–5). The “joyes” that have been sung already have been “tymely,” and the hope is that
the new joys will be children, clear from the sense that the poet had earlier asked Juno to
“bring forth the fruitfull progeny, / Send us the timely fruit of this same night” (lines
403–4). Children are the “timely fruit” of this sexual union, as joy is one of the “fruits of
the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22), but “tymely joys” also refers to the sense that the joy of the
137 John Donne, Sermons, 7:70.
138 I follow Ryan Netzley’s sense that desire is an end in itself, not operating in the
absence of “real presence” but rather as the constituent of presence and therefore, desire is “a
loving attention to an immanent divinity” rather than an indicator of “pain, doubt, and anxiety.”
Joy’s ephemerality is not so much an anxiety as it is an understanding, or glimpse, of a wholeness
present: heavenly joy contained in the moment of earthly joy. Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist
in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 6.
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ceremony and sexual union has also been ephemeral. When the joys of sex quickly
become joys of children, the nature of that joy has already changed, a tone of grandeur
rather than privacy displayed in “thou, great Juno! Which with awful might / The lawes
of wedlock still dost patronize” (lines 390–1). The following “religion of the faith first
plight / With sacred rites hast taught to solemnize” (lines 392–3) demonstrates both
Spenser’s reliance on ritual or “rites” as his guide to intercourse and marriage but also his
recognition of the element of control by the church in “faith first plight” that “hast
taught.” His private joy is caught in a state between public ordinance, religious obedience
to rites, and the joy of private dalliance and sweet rest. The joy in the poem is now
suspended either looking forward to future children or looking back to joy’s moment, and
his “tymely joys to sing,” the last line before the refrain and envoy (line 425), cannot help
but simultaneously miss the present moment in favor of the previous marriage ceremony
and sexual consummation with the uncertain tense “to sing,” building up the heavenly
joys that he aspires to with the earthly and temporal joys of his poetic and religious
articulation of joy, making his joy an “endless monument” built on snatches of joy,
jouissance, rejoicing, and the future of family.
This sense is finalized in the poem’s ponderous envoy, where the poet looks back
on his joyful creation and wonders about its ability to evoke an eternal, heavenly joy.
Song made in lieu of many ornaments, . . .
Be unto her a goodly ornament,
And for short time an endlesse moniment. (427, 432–3)
In this delicate, albeit imperative, syntax, the “Song” made in lieu of ornaments becomes
one “goodly ornament.” The “Song” refers back to the larger poem itself, and it functions
“in lieu” of the ornaments, or jewels, that should have adorned, or “bene dect,” Elizabeth.
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These jewels, or “joyes,” as they were commonly called at the time, have been replaced
by one “goodly ornament,” a Song, a Jewel of Joy, 139 a joy of joys, a Song of Songs.
This Song represents “an endlesse moniment,” but “for short time.” The conceit of the
endless monument is familiar, and Spenser uses it to remind his readers of the rhetorical
function of his poetics: He gifts these songs, like jewelry, to court his beloved, who
adorns herself with these “joyes,” which, although “tymely,” represents the endless
monument of full joy.
The enigmatic envoy of Epithalamion has been at the center of most
Epithalamion criticism, and deservedly so. The poetic moment is aesthetically selfreferential, but also deeply theological. It refers to the poetic project as a whole,
reminding the audience of its rhetorical function as gift of “ornament.” In so doing, the
envoy effectively tells its audience how to read it: the poem is a gift to be enjoyed at the
moment of reading, “short time,” but to stand as an eternal marker of joyful ritual and
ceremony. The tension between short time’s enjoyment and endless poetic monument
permeates the final three stanzas of the poem, where the poet and husband wonders how
to encrypt this moment of ritual union and joy into a model of “full joy,” the Christian
139 Let me return to the central passage from Thomas Becon that I quoted in the
Introduction to this project, from The Jewel of Joy (1550), this time with the emphasis being on
the usage of “Jewel” and its conflation with “joy”: Philemon, recently arrived from the continent,
declares to his many English friends that he has brought them a special “jewel” or “thyng” of joy:
“The gyft which I wyll nowe geve is called the jewell of joy, & not wythout a cause. For in it you
shall receive muche true joye and perecte solace, much godlie pleasure and spirtuall conforte. In
it ye shal se in what thing alone ye oughte to rejoyce.” Philemon’s friends respond with a certain
eagerness: “I pray you what is it. . . Let it be brought forth.” Philemon finally declares, “Lo, here
it is. Rejoyce in ye Lorde always, and agayne I say rejoice. How like you this Jewell? Is it not
boeth goodlye and precious? Is it not worthe ye lokynge on as they saye? Is it not a Jewel
worthye to be worne of everie true herted christian man?” Thomas Becon, The Catechism of
Thomas Becon and other pieces (The Parker Society: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 427.
The utterance itself is treated as an object to be “worne” that will bring inalterable joy, adorning
the Christian.
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code for salvation, as if Spenser wants to fashion his own epithalamic urn in praise of the
moment. Moreover, the envoy reifies the poem into an object or gift of marriage, or the
principle object of joy, to be partaken in “endlesse” remembrance of the marriage but for
“short time” enjoyment. It is the sacramental object of joy, earthly representation of an
eternal affect.
Coda: The Mystery of Joy
In his 1643 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, John Milton pines, “And it is a
lesse breach of wedlock to part with wise and quiet consent betimes, then still to soile and
profane that mystery of joy and union with a polluting sadness and perpetuall
distemper.”140 Amidst this pithy construction is a theologically bold claim about the
nature of marriage, a “mystery of joy and union,” which uses language that is expressly
sacramental. This was noted and attacked in at least one anonymous responder to
Milton’s tract, who asks, “Mysterie of joy, what language is this? Is marriage now a
Sacrament signifying joy? this I never heard of before: the Papists indeed make it a
Sacrament, but not of joy, and yet I doubt they can say more for their opinion then you
for yours.”141 The anonymous author claims he had never heard of marriage being a
“mystery of joy” and that indeed such language seems Papist, but even then claims that
joy is not part of the Catholic theological take on sacramental marriage. The dispute
draws on what had become by 1644 a century-old anxiety about the status of marriage in
140 John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. (London: 1643), 12.
141 Anonymous, An Answer to a Book intituled The Doctrine of Discipline of Divorce.
(London: 1644), 36.
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the Protestant, and particularly Anglican, theology. Milton certainly has precedent in
claiming “mystery,” or sacramental status for marriage, but the anonymous author does
make a valid point in questioning the sacrament being one of joy. Where does this come
from? Why does Milton make this claim? Perhaps the answer lies in some of the late
sixteenth century discourse from which Spenser’s Epithalamion arises, or perhaps the
answer lies in Epithalamion itself.142
I conclude with Milton’s “mystery of joy” and sacramental marriage because I
find it to be culturally, rhetorically, and theologically summative for Spenser’s
Epithalamion. The occasion of Spenser’s own marriage, the occasion of “joy that shineth
above all other delights,” provides a ready vehicle for the examination of how joy might
function both publicly and privately in the religious culture of obedience and worship.
This I have tried to demonstrate with a systematic reading of how public joy spreads joy
like a happy contagion of song and Psalm, and then how that joyful public proclamation
might not adequately communicate the more singular joy of private devotion,
communion, and consummation, the joy of the marriage Canticle taken in literal
interpretation. At the end of the poem, as Spenser looks back at his own “Song made in
lieu of many ornaments,” he distills the joy of the poem into “a goodly ornament” and an
“endlesse moniment,” confirming that the poem itself will always be the Jewel of Joy for
his beloved. This final envoy commands that the song of Epithalamion be its own object
of joy and forever testify of the joy of marital communion. It is perfectly understandable
142 Let me quickly invoke Milton’s famous declaration in Aeropagictica that Spenser
was “a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,” comparing him, oddly enough, to other Catholic
theologians. The comparison with Aquinas becomes even more crucial in my section on Amoretti
below.
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that the many readers who have found Epithalamion so profound in its happiness find the
poem to be a perfect expression of joy: it was intended as a reminder of joy, or as a verbal
object granting joy on its beloved.143 The poem functions as a rhetorical blessing,
bestowing joy on the congregation of readers by emulating the marital miracle of turning
water into wine, making the middle-class marital ceremony into a cosmic celebration of
common joy. Yet it also functions as a rhetorical sacrament, allowing the marital miracle
of consecrated union to be one of private joy and perfect rest, bestowing the beloved with
joys private and sacred, “joyning” its “gracefull rymes” into a sacramental jewel of joy
and union.
143 I have already quoted him in part to begin this essay, but the rest of William
Teignmouth Shore’s 1903 evaluation of the Epithalamion would seem like a good note to end on,
an envoy perhaps, and prescient for my own sense of the poem’s theology: “Here [in the
Epithalamion] it is supremely expressed, in connection with the culminating point of natural joy;
and is ennobled by the interfused presence of something loftier and more perfect than joy—that
static joy which is peace. . . . Spenser found his greatest gift, his truest line of work, all too late,
when the night was closing on him wherein no man can work—the night of poverty, ruin, and
sorrow-hastened age.” (Shore, “The Poet’s Poet,” Academy and Literature, 249.) Overstated
certainly, but Spenser’s “static joy” in a “sorrow-hastened age” wonderfully captures the poem’s
final affect.
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CHAPTER 3
“RAISED UNTO A CHEAREFUL AND LIVELY BELEEVING”: THE
1587-90 DIARY OF RICHARD ROGERS AND PURITAN WRITING
INTO JOY
In 2007, John Cowart, a devout Evangelical Christian from Jacksonville, Florida,
self-published a reprint of Richard Rogers’s late sixteenth-century spiritual diary.
Cowart’s other books mostly include Jacksonville local history or Christian science
fiction, and although he is an amateur with only self-published books, he has a large web
presence that documents his rather ordinary life, both on his daily blog and in his website.
Cowart’s web self is genial, folksy, and sincere—his default mode is both selfdeprecating and assured, a mode that generally characterizes blogs that also act as diaries.
Cowart’s seemingly arbitrary choice to reprint the diary of Richard Rogers is explained in
a few very short paragraphs:
He [Rogers] got a lift by reading the daily diary of someone else
whose writing resonated with his own heart.
Isn’t that exactly what those of us who read other people’s diaries
and journals want to happen?
We build each other up by sharing our common experiences.
Often in reading diaries I’ll say, “Hey, I’m not the only one! I
know exactly how he feels; I feel the same way. I’ve thought that way
myself.”
When I first encountered the Diary of Richard Rogers, the man’s
search for God moved me to seek the Lord myself with more intensity and
less pretense.
The diary of this good and godly man inspired me in my own
spiritual walk.
That is what spiritual diaries are supposed to do.144
144 John Cowart, ed. Seeking a Settled Heart: The Sixteenth Century Diary of Richard
Rogers (Bluefish Books: Jacksonville, FL 2007), 1-2.
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The last line of this punchy assortment of short paragraphs qualifies as literary criticism
in an oddly sophisticated way. Cowart, after having explained that he is the latest in a
chain of inspired diarists, claims that spiritual diaries act like public sermons: they are not
private endeavors, principally because they “are supposed to” inspire others.145 Rogers
himself found inspiration in another series of private writings, as Cowart mentions, from
“an other brother,” as he writes in his July 9, 1590 entry: “Reading the writeinges of an
other brother about his state an houre and longer, I was moved to write, and to bring my
hart into a better frame.”146 The private writings of one “brother” became the private
reading of another, resulting in inspiration and imitation. As such, Rogers teaches Cowart
how to read his journal, and Cowart’s reprinting pays it forward, so to speak.
Perhaps I am taking Cowart’s reprint more seriously than it deserves, but I see a
contemporary Evangelical Christian’s desire to reprint Rogers’s obscure journal as an
145 Cowart’s suggestion about the public nature of spiritual journals has been, to be sure,
the topic of some recent fascinating work on the spiritual diarists of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.Andrew Cambers cites the many instances in which private diaries were distributed to
certain religious communities, arguing that “the public context of the religious community is in
the realm of the private self,” a claim that combines the practices of writing diaries with reading
them. (“Reading, the Godly, and Self-writing in England, circa 1580-1720,” in Journal of British
Studies [October 2007]: 796.) Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Phillippa Kelly, in Early
modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-representation, 1500-1600. (Ashgate: Hampshire,
England, 2007), argue “that in early modern English writings there did not exist the sharp
dividison that is commonly made today between the private ‘I’ and the social role permitted to the
‘I’,” (4) which means that any private diary, especially among a pertaining religious group, was
fair game for public consumption. Elaine McKay, in “The Diary Network in 16th and 17th-Century
England,” claims that the flourishing of diary keeping at the time depended on the “influence of
one individual upon another giving encouragement to keep a personal account of one’s life.”
ERAS Journal (November 2001).
146 The manuscripts are located within the Richard Baxter Collection in Dr. Williams’s
Library in London (Rogers, Baxter MSS.61/63). I primarily identify entries by dates within the
text. The only known published edition of the diaries is Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward, Two
Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, ed. M.M. Knappen (Chicago: The American Society of Church
History, 1933). I occasionally use this edition, which I clarify in the text. Cowart’s reprint is from
the Knappen edition as well.
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indication of something peculiar, or exemplary, about Rogers’s text. The Richard Rogers
diary, often cited but rarely studied, provides an early example of Puritan selfexamination writing, a genre that would grow in the seventeenth-century into its own
major literary movement, culminating perhaps in Samuel Pepys’s diaries, Richard
Baxter’s spiritual experiences, or John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. Although we might
assume that Puritan spiritual diaries were kept before and simultaneous to Rogers, his is
the earliest diary of which we still have a substantial portion, and it indeed not only
illuminates the nature of the Elizabethan Puritan settlement but also offers surprising
insight into the act of personal spiritual writings, a practice that later flourished in the
seventeenth century.147 Owen Watkins’s observation that Rogers’s diary “embodies the
essential features of the Puritan tradition of self-examination, which were to remain
basically unchanged until well into the eighteenth century,” gives it a foundational
quality, or at least exemplary status, that past and present scholars regularly
147 Studies of English Puritans invariably take into account the rich history of selfwriting that the tradition maintained, and traditional historians of the Puritan character has
allowed ample discussion of the many diaries to inform each general pronouncement. William
Haller, the godfather of contemporary Puritan studies, sees the Puritan diaries as evidence of a
kind of interiority crucial to the theological underpinnings of Puritanism. (The Rise of Puritanism.
New York: Harper, 1938). The late Patrick Collinson finds the diaries ripe with revealing
passages not of separatist rhetoric but rather devout mainstream Protestantism; hence the diaries
become the primary evidence of the central thesis that has been his talking point for five decades:
“much of what we call Puritanism at this time (Elizabethan) was nothing but authentic
Protestantism.” (A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism. London: Dr. Williams’ Trust, 1964, 4).
Peter Lake follows Collinson’s work closely by using the diaries as documents that negotiate, and
attempt to close, the gap between the state church and non-conformists (Moderate Puritans and
the Elizabethan Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). In more recent studies
of the “nature” or “character” of the Puritan, self-writing has become the site of Renaissance
subjectivity. See Brigitte Glaser, The Creation of the Self in Autobiographical Forms of Writing
in Seventeenth-Century England: Subjectivity and Self-Fashioning in Memoirs , Diaries, and
Letters. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 2001. Meredith Anne Skura, Tudor
Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 2008. David Thorley, “Sick Diarists and Private Writers of the Seventeenth Century,” in
Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography, and Literature, ed. Richard Bradford. New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. 185-208
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recognize.148 Andrew Cambers acknowledged recently that “Much of the historiography
[of diary-keeping in England] begins and ends with Richard Rogers,” a statement which,
in a sense, also suggests the methodology most scholars have used in reading the
diary.149 It has become an artifact that sheds light either on a way of life or on other
diaries rather than a text worthy of close reading in its own right, an unfortunate
oversight: the diary has, along with its tremendous historical import, a rather
sophisticated formal and psychological structure that invites the kind of reading usually
reserved for later Puritans like Bunyan, Cotton Mather, Richard Baxter, and Thomas
Goodwin.
John Cowart, at least, sees the Rogers diary as more of an inspirational work of
literature than an answer to a historical question, and Rogers’ contemporaries, and his
immediate successors, saw it the same way.150 Scholars have already asked the
contextual questions: Why was it written? For whom was it written? What cultural more
or religious dogma did it reflect? By and large, scholars have also answered them in a
number of interesting ways.151 But these questions, for the purposes of someone like
148 Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography. New
York: Schocken Books, 1972, 18
149 The latest example of this is the otherwise excellent Andrew Cambers, Godly
Reading: Print, Manuscript, and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).
150 Samuel Rogers, the grandson of Richard Rogers, and a diarist in his own right,
inherited the diaries and drew explicit inspiration from them. Richard Baxter soon received the
journals from Samuel Rogers and often referred to them in his spiritual writings as well. Tom
Webster and Kenneth W. Shipps, eds. The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634-1638. Church of
England Record Society: Cromwell Press, 2004, lxxix.
151 Margo Todd believes that Rogers’s diary was a clear example of “a self-conscious
fashioning of one’s identity,” whereas Watkins claims the diary acted as “experience,” or proof of
genuine conversion. (Margo Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” in
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Cowart, are irrelevant. Indeed, these questions obscure the important emotional work of
uplift to which Cowart refers, an element of the diary that largely goes unnoticed in
academic analysis. Cowart reads for instruction and emotional inspiration, much as
Rogers himself writes to be “cheereful” and to “rejoice,” as he repeats often. Indeed,
Rogers’ reading of his colleague’s journal, which I briefly cited above, ends with an
admission of rhetorical purpose: “Reading the writeinges of an other brother about his
state an houre and longer, I was moved to write, and to bring my hart into a better frame,
which in the beginning was impos[sible] to me, but, I thanck god, I feel a sensible chaung
of that.” By conjoining writing, personal expression, and emotional uplift, Rogers’s diary
is not simply reflecting back on the self, but rather calling attention to its own emotional
input, or “sensible chaung,” bringing the unsettled heart into the Calvinist comfort of joy.
The process of personal writing provides the Puritan with a means of fostering emotional
fulfillment, culminating in what Rogers calls a “better frame” of heart or a “settled joy.”
The method of conjuring joy through writing, the psychological move at the heart of this
chapter, is the key to understanding the diary’s rhetorical operation.
I am offering here a reading of Rogers’s diary that seeks to approach it on the
terms in which it was written, and as it was often read—as an expression of and guide to
the art of living joyfully. I contend that the journal models the Christian operation of
sorrow to joy through the act of writing, that holy process by which events signify
emotions, thoughts flood into feeling, feelings transform into joy, and in the process an
British Studies [July 1992]: 238, fn). Andrew Cambers sees the Rogers diary as a devotional work
that would be used as common experience for the godly community that Rogers led. (Andrew
Cambers, “Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580-1720,” in Journal of
British Studies 46 (October 2007), 796-825).
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emotional conversion takes place. This conversion, however, is not the initiatory moment
of regeneration that is so often celebrated by Puritan poetry and autobiography, but rather
a type of “post-conversion experience,” repeated often enough to sustain obedience and
to mark it as a sign of assurance. Puritan spiritual diaries, by virtue of unavoidable daily
repetition, narrate the same experience—the experience of grace—over and over again,
but what quickly becomes clear is that the events of grace and assurance, signified by a
transformation from sorrowful reportage to joyful exclamation, are occurring as the
writing is taking place, and the act of diary-keeping transforms into the will to grace.152
With religious emotions as its heuristic, Rogers’ diary is less the chronicle of a godly life
than it is an exercise in writing through and with attendant religious emotions,
particularly writing sorrow into joy. This is a process that occurs in real time, and
momentarily, for once joy is written, or expressed, it dies, vanishing into some other
feeling. The Rogers diary writes itself into an emotional expression that is wholly present
upon utterance but must be constantly re-experienced, renewed, and repeated in order to
be sustained. This is the mode of the exemplary Rogers diary and, indeed, the model for
the subsequent spiritual diaries in England and in America. To this end, an understanding
of the rhetorical operations within the Rogers diary can extend to a clearer knowledge of
the emotional theology behind the seventeenth-century practices of daily examination and
individual expressions of religious joy.
152 I borrow the emphasis on “post-conversion experience” from Charles HambrickStowe, whose The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth Century New
England (Chapel Hill, NC: University North Carolina Press, 1982) remains the standard analysis
of devotional Puritan writing, to whose work I am indebted. He affirms, indeed, that “Puritan
spiritual writing was, in short, a means to grace” (187).
123
By outlining the operation of joy—from sorrow and deadness to gladness and
spiritual uplift—within the diary, this reading also offers a counterpoint to the most
common reading of Rogers’s diary, that it “leaves us with the impression that he was a
morbid and overscrupulous introvert.”153 Scholars, perhaps for the purposes of
historiography, often gloss over the journal’s nuances in order to uphold the view that
Puritan self-examination was a painstaking process that caused endless anxiety. This is
not to say that previous critics have not read whole entries, but rather that they
understand, erroneously, the tone of each daily entry, from start to finish, to be
consistently dour. A cursory perusal of Rogers’s diary yields precisely this tone: glum,
frustrated, dark, angry: the Puritan of the popular imagination appears in all his
moodiness, sinister justice, and self-pity. William Haller suggests, in an oft-cited reading,
that the Puritans, particularly Rogers, retreated to their studies to write only when the
complications of living and the despair of their theology became too difficult to bear.
Haller recognizes the strategic sense of Rogers’ exclamations: “The preacher kept a diary
not as a diversion but as a tactical maneuver against the adversity within,”154 M.M.
Knappen, whose 1933 edition of Rogers’ diary remains the only one widely in print,
suggests that “The Anglican practice of delighting in nature or the simple joys of daily
living was beneath [Rogers’] ethical standard.”155 Perhaps Rogers didn’t delight in the
153 Watkins, 19-20.
154 Haller 41. Jurgen Schlaeger (“Self-Exploration in Early Modern English Diaries,”
Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History. Ed. Rachel
Langford and Russell West, Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA 1999, 22-36) adds that
“Writing keeps [Rogers’s] ‘wanderings’ and the ‘unsettledness’, the ‘temptations’ and ‘fantasies’
under control.” (34)
155 M.M. Knappen, “The Puritan Character,” in Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, M.M.
Knappen (Chicago: The American Society of Church History, 1933), 2. Knappen does, to his
124
simple joys of daily living as much as a more mainstream Protestant, although he
certainly enjoyed simple pleasures, like “conferences with the godly” and “private
fasts.”156 But Haller’s readings of Rogers have stuck: the tone of Rogers’ diary conforms
to the simply-dressed Puritan of our, or perhaps Ben Jonson’s, imagination.157 If we read
diaries simply as report, this kind of reading makes sense: the writer reports his or her
feeling in the entry in an objective manner, as if the hypothetical diarist were to write
“Today I am sorrowful because I didn’t follow God’s laws.” But Puritan diaries, or any
diaries for that matter, rarely actually do just this; rather, these diary entries have an
inward rhetorical mission that overshadows the documentary impulse, and what may
begin as reportage ends as exploration: the writing itself shifts in tone, and the writer is
no longer reporting but experiencing in real time. The emotions may begin on one plane
but by virtue of writing through and about those emotions, they end on another.
More specifically, Puritan journal entries reflect, in miniature, the emotional
narrative of regeneration: what begins as a lament on the day’s sorrowful experiences
credit, recognize that “the Puritan . . . lived nine-tenths of his time for the joys of this world. They
were spiritual joys and not material ones, it is true, but they were of this world in the temporal
sense of the phrase. One did not need to wait for the future life of live only in anticipation of it. . .
. This conclusion is established by noticing the number of instances in which emotional pleasure
is mentioned. Rogers is constantly speaking of his sweet meditations, his cheerful frames of
mind, . . . we do not have to read very far to find recurring such words as ‘delight,’ ‘injoy,’
‘rejoic,’ ‘liberty,’ (in the sense of exaltation), and ‘comfort.’ (Knappen, 9)
156 Rogers, October 20, 1589; October 31, 1589. It seems that late October of 1589 held
lots of simple pleasures, like fasts and “conferences,” which left Rogers in “good grace” with
“exceeding joy.” To each his own pleasure I suppose.
157 The current sense is that the Puritans in England were a dour bunch while those in
New England were perhaps less so. That is the current academic narrative at any rate. See Charles
Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (Oxford University
Press, 1987); Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); John Stachniewsky, The Persecutory
Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Despair (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991).
125
often develops into hope for salvation, peace with assurance, and joy from recognition,
all within the writing exercise. Understanding the diary’s content not as day-by-day
reported events but rather as emotional events in real time (during the writing) might
make John Cowart’s devout reading of the Richard Rogers diary much more believable:
to be inspired by a text, a reader must see it through to the end, experiencing and
identifying with its pathos, a response sometimes averse to academic distance. Where
scholars see sorrow, anxiety, and anguish, Cowart feels hope, inspiration, and uplift. In
what follows, I will give some credence to Cowart’s reading of uplift by examining the
operation of joy within Richard Rogers’s diary and how that conforms to a larger project
of emotional justification by joy. Understanding Rogers’s diary, a clear harbinger of and
influence on the spiritual diaries of the seventeenth century, in this manner allows us to
rethink Puritan self-examination practice, writing exercises, and emotional habits of
thought.158 In light of reading Rogers’ diary as an exercise in emotional expression, I
hope to allow for a reinterpretation of Puritan diaries that focuses not on the fact of their
chronology nor on the theological interpretation of the events reported, but rather as short
prose meditations that operate individually and in the absolute present. The narrative
contained is not the writing of a life but the writing of experience as emotional exercise,
which then becomes, dutifully repeated, an exercise as emotional experience.
158 Owen Watkins sees Rogers’s diary as embodying the Puritan process of selfexamination that characterizes orthodox Protestantism up through the eighteenth-century. Rogers
is the first to do this and the best, he says (18).
126
The Puritan diary and the question of emotion: the
expression of joy through life-writing
Perhaps the most surprising element of Puritan diary writing in the late
Elizabethan age is that there were no written instructions on how or why one should keep
a diary. Calvin’s emphasis on self-knowledge notwithstanding, guidebooks on how to
write about spiritual experience were essentially nonexistent.159 Not until Thomas
Beadle’s 1633 sermon on diary-keeping, which would later become the cherished
publication Diary of a Thankfull Christian, did any specific mandate for diary writing
become part of the public discourse.160 Previous to the 1630s, however, writing was not
the accepted mode of performing that daily accounting. Rather, constant meditation and
regular prayer played the role of daily confessional, giving the practice an appropriate
immediacy. Writing felt almost too ceremonious, too witty, too concerned with
performance, for the spiritual life with which Puritans were to be devoted.161
Recognizing that writing was essentially a public act, and with a concern more for
“spiritual” or individual rather than common worship, the Puritans felt that setting down
159 Calvin offers surprisingly little that would point towards “writing” the self. While he
believed that self-knowledge was the path toward, or perhaps the result of, knowledge of God, he
gives no instruction that would lead his followers to keep a day-book or anything like it.
160 Tom Webster, “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early
Modern Spirituality,” The Historical Journal (March 1996), 33-56. 38. See also John Beadle,
Diary of a Thankfull Christian (London: Printed by E. Cotes, 1656).
161 Webster, 39
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spiritual things to paper ran the risk of prolixity, an identified hazard of the conservative
church in England.162
But the evidence remains: even before specific instruction to write appeared in
publication, Puritan diaries were common, and they contain much of what historians,
from Max Weber to Patrick Collinson, have used to justify their work. So why the
prevalence of these early Puritan journals? Andrew Cambers suggests that these diaries
sprang from the regular experimental Calvinism in its earliest forms, even if the content
of the Rogers diary does not quite fit: “they appear to show individuals testing their
spiritual condition and attempting to discern marks of election in the routine of daily
life.”163 Repeating a common assumption about the purpose of the diaries, Cambers
believes the actual writing of this process came about because of the need to circulate
these proofs to a godly community. These diaries were shared and read by a community,
both within the immediate family and beyond, and the process of evaluating the self had
to be written down in order to be circulated. This seems to be the case with many of the
early diaries, particularly that of the Rogers family, and Cambers persuasively points out
that the diaries themselves often address outside readers. However, the later guidebooks,
although rather thorough, say surprisingly little about the circulation of such manuscripts.
Rather, these calls to journal-keeping only addressed readerships of the self: John Beadle
devotes a whole section of his comprehensive Diary of a Thankfull Christian to rereading
162 Haller, 27
163 Cambers, 800; A similar, if more concrete, approach comes from Margo Todd
(“Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” The Journal of British Studies 31.3 [July
1992], 236-264), who suggests that diaries could have been undertaken as a scholarly exercise for
budding young Calvinists invested in emulating their Puritan teachers, which explains why the
1590s were roughly the starting dates in Puritan diaries.
128
one’s own journal for personal benefit but does not mention even once the possibility of
others reading it. This is not to say the journals were not circulated—they were—but it
suggests that this was not a primary justification for the increased practice.
Tom Webster takes a more nuanced approach to the question of diary writing,
wondering whether it was a natural, if unintended, outgrowth of a new emphasis on the
self—an accounting of the day’s events that contributed, in some sense, to a spiritual
version of self-fashioning. Webster claims that the diary makes concrete the action and
speech of the day “by producing a material site for the self which, in the case of the past
self, is perhaps the only site.” Indeed, Webster believes that diary-writing lived on the
edge of unintentional self-making: “It seems that the puritan spiritual journal was a
phenomenon that the godly acquired in an unusual fit of absence of mind, incompletely
understood and didn’t wholly trust.”164 Webster’s rather novel view of the way diaries
were composed, “in an unusual fit of absence of mind,” contrasts his view that diarywriting is a kind of self-fashioning, which Margo Todd had already argued convincingly
in her careful work on the Elizabethan diarist Samuel Ward.165 Todd claims that the
Puritan diary functions as a “technology of the self,” which constructs identity in
negotiation with religious, institutional, and familial pressures—mediating between
subject and culture. This ultimately places Samuel Ward and other diarists squarely
among the self-fashioners of New Historicist liking, broadening their psychological
motivation beyond their spiritual and emotional well-being.
164 Webster 40
165 Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” The Journal of British
Studies 31.3 (July 1992): 236-264.
129
What Cambers, Webster, and others miss in their understanding of how the diaries
function is the primary motivation of Puritan theologies, the emphasis on the heart—the
feelings and emotions that come to characterize radical Protestantism in the late
Elizabethan age and into the seventeenth century. Puritans thought of these diaries not
only as markers of godly identity or accounts of godly living but also as accounts of
godly feeling. Richard Baxter, the outspoken mid-century divine, brings up diaries only
within the context of taking account of one’s passions: “How clearly may the Heart
perceive all these, and write them down; and ere long have lost the sight and sense them
all, and find it self in darkness and confusion, and perhaps be perswaded that all is
contrary with them! And when they reading in their Diary, or Book of Heart Accounts,
that at such a day in examination they found such or such an Evidence . . . contrary to
their present sight and feeling!”166 Not only does Baxter suggest Christians “write them
down” what the “Heart perceive” but he also says that reading in the “Diary, or Book of
Heart Accounts” will alter the reader’s “present sight and feeling,” bringing her out of
“darkness and confusion.” The message is clear: write down your feelings so that you can
read about them later in order to lead yourself out of a depressive state. The diary should
act as a book of accounts, depositing feelings in order to withdraw them at a more
needful time.167
166 Richard Baxter, The mischiefs of self ignorance and the benefits of self-acquaintance.
London: 1662, 304-05.
167 Perhaps the central metaphor of self-examination diaries, the economic language of
“accounts” permeates most entries, and indeed is the framing device for Beadle’s Journal of a
Thankfull Christian. See Stuart Sherman, “Diary and Autobiography,” in Cambridge History of
English Literature, 1660-1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
649-672, 651.
130
If rereading one’s spiritual feelings in a diary had a salutary effect on the heart,
initially writing it also had a peculiar effect on emotions that seems in part to be the
purpose of the exercise. James Janeway, in a biography of his beloved brother John,
described his brother’s habit of keeping a journal in terms of how writing emotionally
affected him.
He was one that kept an exact watch over his thoughts, words and actions,
and make a review of all that passed him, at least once a day, in a solemn
manner. He kept a Diary, in which he did write down every evening what
the frame of his spirit had been all the day long, especially in every duty.
He took notice . . . what deadness and flatness, and what observable
providences did present themselves, and the substance of what he had
been doing; and any wandrings of thoughts, inordinancy in any passion;
which, though the world could not discern he could. It cannot be
conceived by them which do not practise the same, to what good account
did this return! . . . This, brought him to a very intimate acquaintance with
his own heart; this, kept his spirit low and fitted him for freer
communications from God; this, made him more lively and active, . . . in a
word, this left a sweet calm up on his spirits.168
Janeway, as his brother describes it, began his daily writing in “a solemn manner”
wherein he initially wrote down his “deadness and flatness . . . wandrings of thoughts,
inordinancy of any passions,” yet he ended with “a sweet calm up on his spirits.” For
Janeway, the process of writing itself became an emotional progression from solemnity
and despair to calm and peace. Writing in his journal was not so much an accounting as it
was a spiritual experience in itself—from sorrow to joy. The setting down of one kind of
feeling produced another.
The feelings set down and the feelings received are different: one is a “deadness”
or sorrow and the other is a “sweet calm,” or joy. This juxtaposition, both in the
description and in the action being described, suggests a link between emotional flux and
168 James Janeway, Invisibles, Realities. London 1674. 58-9.
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the practice of writing. To return to our earlier question: Why were these written long
before published instruction mandated them? For a Puritan practicing self-examination,
writing a diary, expressing the heart through the accounts of God’s dealings with the soul,
was really writing into joy.
Although no explicit instruction to write spiritual diaries has been found from the
sixteenth century, Richard Rogers’s own highly influential Seven Treatises contained one
treatise (the fifth) that gives clear directives on the daily practice of self-knowledge. The
treatise would not be considered a journal mandate because it never directly mentions
diary-keeping nor writing, but the Seven Treatises became a guidebook for several
religious diary-keepers of the time, suggesting that its neglect of writing practice might
have come from a common assumption that writing was already an accepted method of
proper self-examination.169 Rogers apparently conceived of the Seven Treatises in
December 1587, a fact he notes in his own diary, and he directly conceives it as a result
of recording experience. Throughout the next three years of his extant diary (to 1590, at
least) he works on the book, periodically referring to his progress on it, even trying out
passages in his diary that would eventually appear in a more polished form in the 1604
publication.170 The Seven Treatises, basically a large instruction book for the daily
practice of a devout Protestant, stems in part from his own experiences of selfexamination through his diary. If the Seven Treatises is not about specifically writing in a
diary, it is about reflecting daily on events and feelings that made up one’s experience,
169 Cambers 813; Webster 38-40
170 M.M. Knappen, ed, Two Elizabethan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward,
Chicago: American Society of Church History, 1933. 94n.
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and its primary research consisted of writing in a personal diary. At any rate, the
devotional manual was often read as a guidebook on writing diaries: Mary Hoby wrote
her journal with the Seven Treatises beside her,171 and the book was abridged at least
twice in editions more specifically as instructions to write in a diary.172 For all intents
and purposes, the Seven Treatises was a diary guidebook.
The book’s emphasis, particularly in the fifth treatise that explains how to daily
examine the experiences of each day, lies in emotional outcomes. Consider the full title
of the tract: Seven Treatises containing such direction as is gathered out of the Holie
Scriptures, leading and guiding to true happines, both in this life and the life to come:
and may be called the practise of Christianity. The treatises lead to “true happiness,” a
state that Puritans often invoked as a guarantee for the saved in heaven, but in this case it
is also “in this life,” a caveat that suggests the book’s instruction will consider not just
obedience to godliness but the emotional state that can be felt if daily godliness is
achieved. The title itself, so often elided by the Short-title Catalogue, allows a sense of
closure (“leading and guiding”) that imitates the practice of writing as well, which ends
in true happiness. The introduction to the section on daily direction makes it even clearer:
To whom, as to all other who shall regard it, I offer a cleerer knowledge of
the will of God, which hath long been smothered by the bold contempt of
some, and a safer way to their owne happines, then is commonly found of
the most Christians, that is, that as I said, they must euery day looke to
171 Cambers, 814.
172 John Bruen abridged the Seven Treatises, as Samuel Clarke mentions in The Second
Part of the Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (London, 1675), 93. Thomas Cooper, who reprinted
it in 1608, did specifically mention writing: that we ought to be “writing and registering all the
noble acts of the Lord” in a day-book, something that did not appear in the original Seven
Treatises. The Christians Daily Sacrifice (London, 1608), 143.
133
their waies and lives, and settle themselues constantly therein. This is the
principall end of my writing.”173
If daily examination is “a safer way” to a Christian’s “owne happiness,” of which is not
“commonly found among most Christians,” the instruction then compares itself to other
ways to happiness, or not to happiness at all, an absence that would afflict the most
devout. Rogers then adds the evocative statement, “This is the principall end of my
writing.” Rogers most explicitly refers to the composition of the Seven Treatises in his
mention of “writing,” but the construction of the Seven Treatises also coincides, and is
inextricably intertwined, with the writing of his diary. The “principall end of my writing,”
his daily writing, is his “owne happiness.”
To that end, Rogers lessens the focus on actual events in the subject’s life, which
would be highly variable and in many ways beside the point, in favor of the experience of
rehashing them in order to live “with sound peace.”
Yet let none think, that I meane to set downe to them particularly what
actions they shall doe every day, for they are for the most part variable, &
innumerable (on the sixe daies especially) & therfore impossible to be
injoyned; but only such as bind the conscience every day . . . This daily
direction then of a Christian, is a gathering together of certaine rules out of
Gods word, by which we may be enabled every day to live according to
the will of God, with sound peace: and therefore the following of such
direction is a faithfull and constant indevour to please God in all things
every day, as long as we live here to the peace of our conscience, and to
the glorifying of him.
Rogers’ instruction leaves out duties and actions of the day in favor of rewriting them
according to “certaine rules out of God’s word.” The diary, then, would be a set practice
that conforms to common doctrine, not a highly variable reporting but rather empirical
exegesis, interpretation of events through the lens of God’s word. Rogers never explains
173 Richard Rogers. Seven Treatises (London, 1604), 295.
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the process of this interpretive undertaking but rather assumes the end: by rearranging
recorded experience to conform to God’s rules, one can align their conscience toward
“sweet peace.” Daily examination, seen through the lens of praising God, eschews the
facts of experience for the meaning, and emotional outcome, of experience. The way to
know if experience was meaningful in any kind of godly way was to feel as if it was.
“Moveing of our affections”: Event into Emotion
Rogers’s extant journal, according to Knappen’s abridgement, begins on February
28, 1587: “Of thinges worth the remembr[ance] in this month this was one: a most sweet
jorney with mr. Cu 2 dayes.” Knappen’s arrangement makes sense in a traditional
interpretation: Rogers’ introductory phrase “Of thinges worth the remembrance” might
provide a perfect title for a diary—the focus on experiences (“thinges”) and selective
memory (“worth the remembrance”) fits nicely into theories of Puritan personal writing,
with its emphasis on experience over argument, typology over allegory.174 Yet, an
opening phrase does not a journal make, and Knappen’s opening might mislead a reader
into thinking that Rogers’s journal is indeed a report of daily experiences. Nor indeed
does this opening phrase the Richard Rogers journal make. Knappen omits the actual first
entry, found in Dr. Williams’ library, dated 10 February 1587, “A week wel bestowed in
study. Diseas somewhat unsettled me. P ill taken. A swet conference in the way mr. Cu of
godes merciful deal with me in my call in comfort to me. No withdrawing by
worldliness.” That first entry is much more indicative of what the diary actually
174 E. Pearlman, “Typological Autobiography in 17th Century England,” Biography 8
(1985), 95-118. See also Thomas Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation
Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1995).
135
performs: it does not account for many “thinges” worth remembering. On the contrary,
events are often obscured by the feelings that attend them. A better encapsulation of
Rogers’s journal might come in the adjectives describing the event, in this case that the
journey with a friend, Mr. Cu, in both cases was “sweet.” The fact of the journey’s
sweetness remained with Rogers enough that it inspired the rest of Knappen’s first entry,
which completely leaves off the thing worth remembering in order to discursively
consider the mercy of God in an unworthy soul such as Mr. Rogers. “I am stayed, though
hardly, when I consider that god hath brought many to the knowledge of his truth by my
weak minist[ry],” he mentions before glorifying God’s hand in his lamentable state.
The tonal shift of the first entry sets a template for what is to come, however
slight the actual narrative may be. The remembrance of an event relies on its attendant
emotions, such that the journey with Mr. C was “sweet,” (we get nothing of where the
journey was going or what occurred along the way), which spurs Rogers into a feeling of
sweet mercy that is felt as it is reported. The process brings a past feeling into a present
state, combining the event being described with the event of writing about it, and the
reflection on experience becomes experience itself. Writing about affairs of the heart,
especially through the Puritan prism of specialized grace, produces a dialogic negotiation
between what one has been feeling, what one should be feeling, and, in a kind of
emotional synthesis, how one ultimately feels—in the present tense. This negotiation, and
its outcome, gives the Puritan diary its immediacy, its pathos, and its formal structure,
which borders on a heavy-handed repetition. What results is a double narration: what he
feels that day based on the experiences he had, and what he feels at the moment based on
the experience of reporting them. Both go into the entry, usually with the former
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dominating the first half of the entry and the latter overtaking the second half. Webster
describes this doubling as the power of devotional writing: “Writing becomes a way of
validating experience . . . At its most extreme, this kind of thinking encouraged the godly
to attempt to fix experience in writing almost as it happened, a kind of ‘live’
reportage.”175 The fixing of experience, though, goes further: as experience is “set
downe,” those events create a new emotional charge for the writer.
The entry most characterized by event-reporting, 29 November 1587, the eventto-emotion process creeps in even as the language marks pure retelling: Three paragraphs
begin with “The next day . . .” and four paragraphs begin “After this . . .” While the entry
seems to adhere to the language of reporting, each paragraph quickly pulls experience
into the realm of feeling, hardly pausing in an attempt to construct meaning from the raw
materials of emotion, theology, and events:
After this I was sodainly moved at a pi. lost, but stayed my selfe. And thus
continued till December 4, when 12 of us mett to the stirreinge up of or
selves, per. and Sand. and others, 4 or 5 houres, with much moveinge of
our affections. It is not to be doubted that in this while that I could not
bestow much time at my study, . . . I thanck god, my tyme is bestowed. So
that I must needes confesse with much comfort that for unfitness to duty,
weariness or untowardnes, earthliness, wandringe desires, or any other
inordinate caryinges of my minde I have been greatly freed from them,
which estat beigne compared with my lif past, for the most parte, it
differeth from it very much.
What begins as reporting some events that have already occurred quickly transfers to a
self-reflection in the present. The paragraph emphasizes the present result of the loss of
“tyme” which results in a confession “with much comfort” that the time is spent in good
deeds or godly conferences. The shift from past to present tense also marks the shift from
175 Webster, 47
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outward experience to inward reflection, and the diary becomes an ongoing displacement
of events as inward lessons. His religious diary, as opposed to a more conventional, and
later more popular, genre of autobiographical writing, the biography, or even the
collection of conversion experiences, constructs the experimental theological pattern in
real time, so the process by which explication takes place can be witnessed as it unfolds.
By all indications, Rogers’ life was relatively eventful on a political and social
level, but those events are often alluded to only in passing or as a justification for
producing a change in the affections.176 We get his inward events with more clarity
because those are the events that spur the writing process to which he subscribes, that the
value of writing comes through its resulting affect. His emotional reactions to
momentous occasions in his life overshadow the occasions themselves. One example
comes in Dec. 16, 1587, when several people call for the relief of Rogers’ preaching
duties, primarily because he seemed to have refused to sign Archbishop Whitgift’s decree
of conformity and, subsequently, Rogers resisted continuous efforts to rein him in.
Instead of dwelling on the particulars of his situation, he uses the occasion to rejoice in
the pleasure he receives from preaching: “But leavinge the persons [who called for his
ousting], I did consider how long liberty and peace god hath geven me unlooked for, thus
good reason whi I shoulde thanckfully and paciently goe under it, knowinge that if it be
176 Rogers was always on the edges of trouble, meeting in secret with special worship
groups, preaching against the Book of Common Prayer, not wearing the required clothes of a
minister. Rogers also had a robust business life accumulating and selling property and a robust
family life, having married three times and fathered many children. Not only were there personal
stakes in his journal that generally are glossed over, but he also occasionally refers to major
political events—the Spanish Armada and the proposed marriage of Elizabeth to Alencon, for
example: “I have been oft times well moved with thinckinge on our late deliv[erance] form the
rage of Spain, as memorable a woorcke of god as ever was any in my remembr[ance], more then
that of Mouns[ieur Alencon].” (October 26, 1588).
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his pleasure I shall inioy it still . . .” The perilous experience of preaching under the
watchful eye of state and church authority diminishes under the joyful experience of
preaching itself. The “liberty” with which God lets him preach acts in direct opposition to
the demands of state church authority, but the juxtaposition is not explicit; rather, Rogers
spends the entry in rejoicing for liberty and “such incouragment” from God. Experience,
at least at this moment, is coded as “sweet comfort” even when the events of his life leave
little room for joy.
The opposition between perilous event and coded joy occurs in the cosmic
significance of experience, which is not realized at once but expressed upon reflection,
precisely the purpose of setting it down. So what does meaningful, godly experience feel
like once written? Here the chasm between Christian ideal and dogged practice reveals
itself most dauntingly: the “sweet peace” and joy which Rogers urges seems to be at once
a result of daily self-examination and a precondition to its proper practice. Rogers implies
as much when he explains the actual practice of daily examination, which he claims
should be taken up “cheerefully, thankfully, and fruitfully”:
And who doth not know, that these both should bee daily? . . .
And although the word (daily) be not there mentioned, and where he [I]
saith, rejoyce in the Lord alwayes, Phil. 4.4. yet who doubteth that he can
meane any lesse then this, when hee saith, in all things: even such, as
come to passe daily and every day? and yet even this word (daily) is in
other Scripture used. For as the mercies of God are renewed daily upon
his: so Gods people are in the example of the man of God (whose praise is
so great in the Scripture) taught, that as they enjoy them every day; so they
are every day to sound forth his praise thankfully and cheerefully, as such
who feele and acknowledge thereby, the exceeding sweetenes of Gods
loving kindnes and benefits, and that is to make the true and right use of
them.177
177 Rogers, Seven Treatises, 304
139
The instruction relies on the tone in which the daily examination should be undertaken,
relying on the imperative “rejoice” to characterize the practice. The directive is clear,
especially that this joy should be daily—“they enjoy them every day”—so that selfexamination is anything but dreary. Self-examination, this would imply, simply means
rejoicing in the works of God enacted on the individual life. Following Calvin’s rather
poetic imposition that “There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that
is not intended to make us rejoice,”178 Rogers conceives of the daily offering as a ritual
of rejoicing.
Reading Rogers’ actual diary initially seems to contradict this sense, especially in
perusing the beginnings of entries, as on 4 August 1587: “I cannot yet setle my selfe to
my study, but through unfitnes of mind, weaknes of body, and partly discontinueing of
diligence thereat am holden back . . . I am much discouraged.” Or 30 September 1587:
“Declineings this first week I have senseibly found in my selfe from that staidness in a
godly life in the which I lately determined a new to continue.” And so on. The
consistency with which Rogers glumly states his bad moods rivals only the periodic
sorrow he feels at the desperation of his finances, job security, and lack of study. It seems
that the Rogers of the Seven Treatises idealizes the devout self-examiner, and
consequently overestimates the Rogers of the diaries.
Rogers himself acknowledges that this sorrow will be the way into each entry. In
fact, he claims, beginning with pity and anger necessitates writing in the first place. To
return to Rogers’ Seven Treatises, he acknowledges that the beginnings of many daily
178 Sermon No. 10 on 1 Cor., 698, Translated by William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A
Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 134-35.
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exercises will be glum. In speaking of the way to commence the daily dose of self
knowledge, Rogers tells his readers to begin at despair:
For the first point, that we must be displeased with our selves, and
humbled for our sinnes every day, as ignorance, deadnesse of heart,
rashnesse, uncharitablenesse and wrath, or any other, that shall give us
occasion: yea, even the body of sin it selfe, that verse of the Psal. 51.3.
doth prove: where Dauid seeking pardon of his sinne, acknowledged it to
God, saying: I know mine iniquity, & my sinne is ever before me; then no
day to be forgotten.179
The expression of self-disgust competes with the expression of joy that Rogers claims is a
precondition to daily writing. But immediately following, Rogers articulates the way in
which daily self-pity transforms, or must transform, into “a cheareful and lively
beleeving.”
So the Apostle saith, the sunne must not go downe upon our wrath,
meaning thereby, that we must soone forget and forgive, and compound
our controversies, and breake off our strife; and not lie therein till the
evening: therefore daily confesse, and be humbled for the[m], which
cannot be done (we know) to the pleasing of God, except our harts be
broken with relenting and melting for them. And if the sunne may not go
downe upon our wrath, neither (by the like reason) any other sinne may be
suffered to lurke or abide any such time in us, who doth not see, that it
should be a good part of our care throughout the day, both to cast out such
draffe, (as we haue drunke in) by lamenting our estate, euen as it ought to
be another part of it, to hold and keepe it out? . . . .The second point
followeth, namely, that every day we ought to be raised unto a cheareful
and lively beleeuing, . . . Bring we therefore our hearts daily to count it
our treasure, that so they may delight in it: (for where our treasure is,
there will they be also) and then we have well and wisely provided for our
selves in that day, and our greatest toyle is over (as they say) for the whole
day following. And this will be done, if, as it is the greatest of all other: so
we resolve, that none is greater with us.180
179 Rogers, Seven Treatises 320-321
180 Rogers, Seven Treatises, 323.
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The process from despair to “cheareful beleeving” involves a kind of confession,
humbling, and forgetting in Rogers terms, but little else is said besides that. For the
English Calvinist, joy and sorrow are barely distinguishable: “You must submit to
supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy” was the Calvinist axiom on
emotional progress, yet Calvin articulated almost nothing about the particulars of the
discovery of joy through suffering. Despite the abundance of processes in Calvinist
theology—one can hardly speak of any moment in Calvinist conversion without listing its
surrounding steps: election, vocation, humiliation, contrition, justification, adoption,
sanctification, and so on—little mention is given toward the process that turns supreme
suffering into joy. This problem becomes the paradoxical conundrum for the daily
examiner, or Puritan diarist, because the instruction mandates a systematic turn from
sorrow to joy, on a daily basis no less, but does not give name to the axis on which those
emotions turn.
Furthermore, starting with sorrow could become material evidence for the
working out of grace and justification. The entry from 22 July 1587 begins with a
discussion of “sensible sorow” that Rogers had felt during the entire month for his “four”
sins—materialism, bible neglect, light thoughts, and bad communication skills—but then
abruptly turns to commentary on the act of writing through these problems:
I thanck god at the setting downe hereof I was well affected, and mine hart
since yesterday was greeved to see such a decay of grace as partly now I
have set downe. And in deed I am glad that I may see with grief when
there is any declineing in my life, seing it cannot be avoided but such
shalbe, but yet that thei are so often, and that so few times of grace may be
redde in thiese papers to have been injoyed of me, it is no meane grief
unto me.
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The entry exemplifies the shift in tone that takes place as Rogers sets down his sins with
the intention of using recognition and inscription as reason to rejoice, turning what might
be “redde in thiese papers” as grief into one of the “few times of grace . . . to have been
injoyed of me.” The entry offers a metacommentary on the process of recording past
griefs into present joy, and the “setting downe” offers a new, and emotionally charged,
way of seeing. “I am glad,” Rogers claims, “that I may see with grief.” The present
feeling of happiness arises from the past feeling of grief, and that recognition creates a
narrative pattern that translates past events, often fraught with sorrow, into present
gladness.
The experience of emotional change in real time—the shift from past sorrow into
present joy—contracts even further when entries begin at the present, already in
reflection mode. “Grief hath taken hold of me in exceeding maner,” Rogers begins his
entry from January 13, 1588, using present perfect to immediately set the past into the
present as if reflection comes in the midst of this “grief,” not yet ready to relinquish the
emotion in favor of something else. Immediately following the present perfect admission
comes the reasons for this feeling, ascribed to “wandrings and more unsetling of my
minde,” and eventually Rogers confesses his sins of omission (lacking study, rigor,
profitable conversations) in detail. But writing about his unsettled mind in fact settles it,
his “wandrings” reclaim course with the self-examination, and by the end of the entry,
Rogers looks forward to the next day, in which he can “fast againe.” At that, Rogers
ends: “Thus it may be seen what goodnes I may rejoice of.” Rogers’ sense of time
becomes the primary variable here: the pattern that characterizes his diary, from sorrow
to joy, is certainly evident, but after Rogers has thought of his grief in terms of present
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perfect, he shifts into an ambiguous future conditional to describe his rejoicing. The
“goodness” of which Rogers may rejoice might come with the “fast againe” the next day,
in which case future conditional would be appropriate, but that “goodness” also might
refer to the present entry—“Thus it may be seen”—which refers back causally to the
unfortunate events that lead up to his expressed “grief.” Only those events no longer lead
to grief: once they are written, those events in their written form become “goodness” for
the occasion of rejoicing, and the future conditional would actually be future perfect (to
paraphrase: “Thus it may be seen of what goodness I rejoice of now and will have
rejoiced of during tomorrow’s fast”). Either way, the entry has reversed the emotional
symbiotics of its events, and what was once, and immediately, cause for grief has now
become cause for immediate, and future, joy.
The process functions as if difficulties or sorrows are once set down from life to
the page, what comes back from the page is a kind of inward relief, a secret joy, which
then is retranslated back onto the page. The outcome of writing sorrow is the permission
to rejoice. In turn, that permission is acted out in writing. Effectively, the diarist enacts in
script an emotional renewal that both conforms to a prescribed teleology of emotions and
breaks from the passive worship of the devout Calvinist. The “sorrow to joy” mechanism
fits into the sense that grace and election should prove themselves daily, and the diarist
would have to recode his experience in order to place it within that set spiritual
experience. The act of doing so was not passive: to inject new meaning into daily events
required the ability to reconceive and rearrange daily sense experience. This was
surprisingly bold: understanding events as providential suited the Puritan theodicy, but
reinterpreting the emotional effect of those events as modifiable required an act of
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agency, particularly as it pertained to “setting down” those events and ending with
something else. The act of writing as an act of spiritual agency belies the usual stance the
Puritan diarists take toward their lives, as passive receptors of godly events. In Ron
Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly’s analysis of Ralph Josselin’s seventeenthcentury diary, the Puritan diarist “is characterized more as victim than agent, as observer
and sufferer rather than chooser and determinant, a person to whom ‘things’ happen and
who is ever willing to forfeit any act that may have the appearance of autonomy.”181 In
many respects, Rogers’ diary follows the passive examination with each new report of
events handed him by God. However, things that happen to him change their character
once he writes them down. For someone whose agency is always dependent on
Providence, or at least each action undertaken in his life is directed by God’s wrath or
grace, Rogers’ only moment of action is the ability to turn the life of the depressive into
the life of rejoicing through writing. Writing is the act of agency that social experience
lacked—an endeavor that sought joy, and perhaps as residue, pleasure.
For Rogers, writing is the act of daily-examination, and finding joy becomes the
method of demonstrating his agency. In a word, the action is to “rejoice.” But this
rejoicing is not the public affair of singing—this is an inward, personal process by which
rejoicing is an act of resistance against the passive acceptance of life’s sorrows. In our
wretched state, Rogers implies, we must “daily confesse” our badness before the sun “go
down upon our wrath”; we need to “cast out such draffe [the emotional relics of sin, in
this case] by lamenting our estate.”182 As the sun goes down and darkness comes, the
181 Bedford, Davis, Kelly 33.
182 Rogers, Seven Treatises, 323.
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daily examiner dispels sorrow, shame, and burden by confessing, lamenting, and
accounting. The image strikes the senses in counterpoint: as physical darkness comes,
internal light will begin to shine through verbal, and written, expression of godly sorrow.
Eventually, the lament, confession, and accounting turn positive as we “count it our
treasure, that we may delight in it.” The formula is fairly simple: sorrow turns to joy
through expression so that lamenting becomes rejoicing in the same utterance. To this is
the daily examiner bound, to this the diary writer writes. Sorrow becomes joy simply by
finding a means of expressing it as such—the process, it turns out, is hardly the internal
moving outward but quite the opposite. Rogers expresses joy in order to feel it. Rejoicing
is the chicken from which the egg comes.
The Seven Treatises repeat this directive over and over again: joy is only
experienced through its expression. One of the better examples stems from Rogers’s
emphasis on the manner in which a person ought to go about their daily duties: “And they
who go to worke after this maner, may be merry at their worke, and merry at their meate”
Rogers explains, will find the grace of God in daily activity. But this merriness is only
achieved through expression, and a particular kind of prescripted expression. He goes on,
. . . and yet I meane not as the prophane and earth-wormes, who sometime
are merry when they have more cause to be heavy, seeing neither they nor
their worke are pleasing to him; but the other may rejoyce and be glad by
Gods allowing, yea commanding it them, where he saith: Rejoyce thou
and thine, before the Lord thy God, in all that thou puttest thine hand
unto. And againe: Serve the Lord thy God (that is, in that thou art
appointed by him to do) in joyfulnesse and with a good heart for the
aboundance of all things. And this is the mirth and joy of heart, which the
Apostle willeth us to take our part in, saying: Speake to your selves in
Psalmes, and Himnes, and spirituall songs; singing, & making melodie to
the Lord in your hearts, . . . In this sort hath God allowed his servants,
who have learned and are resolved to obey him in all things, to rejoyce,
and go about their worldly affaires; and in like maner, doth he allow them
to use all their lawfull liberties in this life: all which, he knoweth they
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have need of, to allay the tartnesse, and asswage the painfulnesse and
griefe which through their afflictions are infinite wayes ready in all places
to meete with them.”183
Essentially, having joy became the product of rejoicing within the parameters of
religiously set language. The Psalms, hymns, and “spirituall songs . . . allowed his
servants to rejoyce.” But these songs had to become personal as well, “in your hearts,” as
Rogers stresses; without the emptiness of “common prayer” but still within the bounds of
scriptural language. As the Psalms become David’s book of emotional expression, the
diary would become the devout Puritan’s song of degrees, in which the process of
sorrow-to-joy became available only through a particular personal expression of joy.
David’s Psalms, as Rogers suggests, provide a common template for rejoicing because
they are written, which allows them not only to be recited and resung at moments of great
sorrow but also to be emulated in form and structure for the most personal and individual
expression. Writing in the diary combines those two imperatives; what is most personally
expressed still conforms to the structure of rejoicing, which in turn sets the example for
the diarists to follow.
Rogers rewrote his own way into rejoicing in almost every entry by finding a way
to take the events of his heavy life and reframing those events under a new rubric of joy.
Beginning with expressions of lament and sorrow only in order to rejoice in his sorrow,
Rogers eventually writes himself into a settled heart. The process repeats itself in at least
every other entry, and is most consistent when the events that correspond to each entry
are latent with grief. The redundancy is purposeful: if Rogers can repeat the process of
writing sorrow into joy by finding the means of rejoicing, he has effectively used writing
183 Rogers Seven Treatises 325.
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to reinscribe the world according to a God that commands joy in suffering. The entry
becomes a proof through expression. This is not so much therapeutic as testimonial: by
expressing, one believes. Therapy uses a set practice to change the inward emotional
makeup, usually functioning from a behavior that shifts attention from the problem at
hand to something more productive. Testimony, I suppose, can be therapeutic, but it
emphasizes expression as a means towards closure. That is, in expressing one’s witness
to grace, truth, faith, and joy in Christ, the full belief materializes. In that sense, writing
into joy is a way of mediating belief; externalizing one’s experience into an act of writing
allows the diarist to create signs that can achieve joy, and as such the text is the
confirmation that mirrors back the writer’s spiritual status. In this operation, the question
of doubt is overcome by publicly declaring it so. The conviction follows the expression,
both in the act of self-examination and in public address. Rogers’ diary is not a sermon,
and has no immediate audience, but for Rogers, the audience is always implied—himself,
his progeny, God. Rogers habitually reads his own writings, and others’ personal
writings, for inspiration, so the testimonial mode drives the rhetorical address. Besides,
the intimate relationship between personal expression and anticipated audience marks the
diary as a unique site of expressed religious belief, with an emphasis on the personal
nature of expression. When Rogers writes with the personal conviction of his own
witness, expressing joy would become that much more individually powerful, to the point
that he is finally convincing himself of joy.
For Rogers, there is nothing delusional about the process of convincing himself to
feel joy by expressing it, this is just one of the beneficial effects of speaking, or in this
case writing, testimony. The expression and the essential emotion are mutually reliant,
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only in this case the joy is etched, written, recorded for future remembrance. The fact of
writing this testimony gives it lasting power, especially as Rogers plans to reread his
entries in the future. In the logocentric world of early modern religious culture, writing
had a peculiar role to play, both in its ability to remain and in its ability to testify. In the
preface to a sermon published after the funeral of Katherine Bettergh in 1602, William
Harrison reminds his readers that writing has its own religious purpose, although lesser in
impact to speaking: “I know that speaking hath alwaies been accounted more powerfull
than writing . . . Yet writing hath his use and profit: both for the instruction of those
which did not heare the doctrine delivered by liuelie voyce, and also for the helpe of their
memories which before heard it.”184 The “helpe of their memories” is the conventional
justification for writing, and Rogers indeed writes his way into joy in order to relive that
experience later, but the act of writing has goes a few steps beyond to confirm, set down,
or complete, the utterance’s implications. The act of writing takes feeling and implication
and marks them as emotion and conviction.
I suppose we could say that Rogers writes to turn his frowny face upside down, to
create a narrative that combines the feelings of the soul with the expression of the mouth
and then reverses roles. After all, to write through the lens of the Christian narrative is to
assume, or trust, that joy will be the outcome, even if the beginning is sorrow. Rogers’s
diary might function to us now as a template for later journals of its ilk, but it also acts as
a private experiment in the daily expression of joy as a counter to the daily feeling of
sorrow. In many ways, joy is beyond exercise, not a repetition to recite, but an utterance
that replicates by sense.
184 William Harrison, Death’s Advantage Little Regarded (London: 1602), 3.
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“Out of order”: The Emotional Micro-narrative of Puritan
Exercise
The rhetorical process that moves sorrow into joy appears often in religious
discourse, particularly in sermons and homilies, even in certain stage genres and musical
settings, and locating all the moments in which religious sorrow is converted into
religious joy would result in a study so expansive as to include the experience of
Christianity completely.185 Nevertheless, the operation of joy in the Rogers diary moves
in a sphere all its own, found in the matrix cornered by personal theology, emotional
examination, individual and scripted expression, and subjectivity itself. As opposed to the
more public modes of poetry, drama, and sermons, this operation primarily relates to the
individual and secondarily instructs other individuals in the act of self-examination,
bound in individual meaning and personal perception. Above all, this process reflects
back on the central text of the Puritan, the text of mortal experience. Life narratives in the
seventeenth century became testaments to the efficacy and satisfaction of the devout, and
experience remained the Puritan’s highest art. But here I wish to make a crucial
distinction between life narratives and the diary, a distinction which is implicit in Rogers’
work and has become increasingly blurred as the study of “writing the self” has become
an industry all its own.
185 See, for example, Thomas Connolly, Mourning into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint
Cecilia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); David D. Hall, Worlds of
Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1989); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle
in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 1997).
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In 1653, Samuel Clarke published the first of many versions of his very popular
Lives of Sundry Immanent Persons, a rather compelling compendium of English Puritan
biographies drawn together to demonstrate parallels in godly lives. Central to our
concerns is the way Clarke understood each life as a narrative of emotional recognition,
usually going from the difficult life of persecution, hard work, and sorrows to a final
triumph before death. The common denominator in almost all of the biographies was a
final joy, an end-of-life realization, on the part of the biographical subjects, that joy
triumphs. An excerpt from the biography of Thomas Cartwright, a contemporary of
Rogers, well demonstrates the motif:
The morning before his death which was the Tuesday following [his
sermon about death], he was two houres on his knees in private prayer: In
which (as he told his wife) he found wonderful and unutterable joy and
comfort [margin: “Joy unspeakable”], God giving him a glimpse of
heaven before he came to it, and within a few houres after he quietly
resigned up his spirit unto God, December 27, 1603.186
The life ends under contemplative, visionary joy, and the result seems to be confirmation
of a life well-lived. This process, what I will call biographical joy, emulates the common
understanding of the English Puritan’s life. The final sense is very different from the
dramatic, often violent, ends of Foxe’s martyrs, and the focus on joy-in-end claims to be
reassuring rather than rousing. But final joy within the context of a whole life lived
proves very different from the final joy of the diarist. Indeed, while Cartwright’s joy here
is a result of a finality and “glimpse” of heaven, Rogers’ daily joy is a result of his active
process of daily conversion, a simple, repeatable process at end rather than life’s finality.
Joy, for the biographer and autobiographer, is the end of a chronological reflection of a
186 Samuel Clarke, General Martyrologie, “The Lives of Sundry Modern English
Divines,” accessed at Huntington Library, 13 August 2010, 373.
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whole, the traditional linear narrative of the devout life. This is the traditional joy of the
devout, a joy that combines mortal obedience with heavenly aspiration, a final sigh
before giving up the ghost.187
In the same year that Clarke’s Lives was published, Vavasor Powell, a Fifth
Monarchist of some renown, published his fascinating collection that acts almost as a
countergenre to Clarke’s collection. Powell’s Spiritual Experiences contains forty-two
narratives of individual experiences from different believers, most often recorded in first
person. Experience, Powell claims, “is one of the chiefest; for that is the inward sense and
feeling, of what is outwardly read and heard; and the spirituall and powerfull enjoyment
of what is beleeved.”188 Powell’s description merits special attention for its
understanding of experience as an “inward sense” and the “enjoyment of what is
beleeved,” an apt understanding of the way diaries operate towards life events. But within
Powell’s collection, the order of a life, the whole of a life, matters little; all that really
counts are the particulars of each experience as they are felt, both by those whose
experiences they are and those who have the experience of reading about them (as Powell
also says in his preface, “for that which cometh from one spirituall heart, reacheth
another spirituall heart”). The experiences that Powell compiles in his work vary, but the
187 Stuart Sherman describes the difference between autobiography and diary similarly:
“The diarist, in this opposition, deals in small, serial durations, and works more or less (in Samuel
Richardson’s famous phrase) ‘to the moment’, writing up recent events in regular or irregular
instalments, one of whose chief characteristics is an ignorance of the instalments that will ensue.
The autobiographer works with less ignorance and larger retrospect, recording is or her life
perhaps from the moment of its inception to the present moment of composition, when the life is
presumably full enough (of attainment, or discovery) to warrant the act of autobiography.” (Stuart
Sherman, “Diary and Autobiography,” in Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780,
ed. John Richetti (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 649-672, 650)
188 Vavasar Powell, Spiritual experiences of sundry believers, (London, 1653). A2
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general tone remains similar: the subject begins with an uncertainty that usually wreaks
“terror” or “discomfort” on her soul, but by the end of the spiritual experience (which
often is hardly an “experience” as we understand it but just a realization or epiphany
without catalyst), there is a “settled” comfort or, indeed, “joy.”
The diarist must negotiate the Clarke and Powell modes of emotional narrative:
the life lived and the experience felt. The daily writing occurs as the life is lived;
complete reflection on the whole is not yet available, yet there is not one experience to
draw joy from, so each day must have its own framework from which to eventually
rejoice. For the diarist, that joy is created, expressed, and felt with the sole purpose of
understanding the life in terms of its meaningful increments rather than a narrative whole
or a defining moment. The diarist has episodes, the biographer has a miniseries. After all,
the chronological life neglects the structure of emotional narratives, which are always
grafted from the specific contexts of each event. A record of emotional life must tell
stories in real time so that each event is as closely charged with the corresponding
emotion as possible, which gives the rhetorical force of the retelling an immediacy
otherwise lacking. This results in a rather fragmentary view of a life; when life is ordered
not by events but by the emotion that can be gleaned from those events, chronology
becomes secondary. If joy occurs, at the force of the diarist, at the end of each entry, what
then keeps us from mixing up all the entries and concentrating on a collection of
moments rather than a narrative from beginning to end? Nothing does, but this is
precisely the point; in this theology, linearity makes little sense—you either experience
grace or you do not, and once found, it does not necessarily stick around. Moments of
grace matter without the order in which they are served: joy comes in making sense of
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those moments, writing about them, or even writing into them. To borrow a central
metaphor of Puritan reading practice, diary entries and experiences of grace occur not as
the teleology of the pilgrim, but as the deposits of the bee, analogies that Matthew Brown
registers carefully in his study of early American Puritan reading practices: bees “extract
and deposit information discontinuously, treating texts as spatial objects,” while pilgrims
move towards a telos and “grow in grace.”189 The combination of these two types of
readers provide Brown with a frame for understanding the Puritan approach towards
knowledge-making and recovering grace—the spatial and temporal registers of devotion,
the diary and the autobiography.
Rogers’s own writings acknowledge the spatial organization of diary-writing,
which allows him to move beyond the linearity of the pilgrim moving towards grace and
instead explore the branching organization of the “great house” of experience. Rogers’s
analogies have a similar resonance. Rogers recognizes the order within the otherwise
fragmented record of life in his Seven Treatises, where he offers two central analogies for
understanding daily examination. The whole life, he claims, must be thought of as a
“great house” comprised of “severall rooms.”:
I have taken some little paine to unfold and lay out this happie estate, and
to teach a more sound use of it, then the most that professe, have
acquaintance with, by shewing how it is to bee made an every daies
worke, and to be brought into daily practise, that so the whole being seene
in her parts, every thing in it may be better perceived and discerned, with
the manifold priviledges and benefits thereof; as a great house, when the
severall roomes of it, are with their furniture particularly viewed, and not
confusedly beheld.190
189 Matthew Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in
Early New England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. xii
190 Rogers, Seven Treatises, 297
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The whole of life is made up of daily experiences, “severall roomes” of the same house,
whose “furniture particularly viewed” still do not confuse because, although different in
particulars, they are recognizably part of the same house. The pun on each person’s
“happy estate,” comprised of the many rooms, or experiences, that create it, links the
economic metaphor of the diary’s “book of accounts” with the domestic property of
“estate,” suggesting that the book of accounts allows the happy estate to be maintained.
At the same, no order of rooms is indicated, but only noticed with their “furniture
particularly viewed,” as if the details of experience justify the habitation. It does not
matter how the rooms are ordered as long as they are not “confusedly beheld.” The
spatial implications suggest that the greatest goods in a life, the “manifold priviledges and
benefits thereof,” are made known through the spatial metaphor of a floorplan. The order
does not count as much as the organization.
At the same time, Rogers builds on this metaphor almost by contradiction in the
next section, where he uses another, more familiar analogy to indicate how the diary
functions:
And if we see this in common reason, that a man which hath a long
journey to travaile, as an hundred or two hundred miles, will not count this
sufficient direction, to go on Eastward or Westward, as his way shal lie, or
by a generall rule only; but will take a particular note by what townes he
must goe euery day, and how hee must passe from one to another: what
marueile should it be, that they who are to trauaile this great and long
voyage to the kingdome of heaven, yea and that through this large and
wearisome wildernes of the world, doe not reckon their way generally by
the yeere, but particularly by every day, and through the day consider the
diuers kindes of dutie, which they are to performe, as a part of the way by
which they should goe, that at night they may reioyce, that they are so
much neerer their iourneys end (and that in safetie and quiet) then they
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were in the morning at their setting foorth, and haue not (with the greatest
part) lost their labour, by going out of their way?191
With the broader view of the “journey,” Rogers attempts to conform his view of the daily
examination a little closer to the biographical whole that the English Calvinist might have
been more used to. Yet Rogers claims that the journey should not be marked as a whole
but rather by each town “he must goe every day, and how hee must passe from one to
another.” The journey is marked, again, by episodes first and linearity as an afterthought.
Furthermore, Rogers sees the crucial element of this analogy in the manner in which the
traveler should account for progress, “at night they may rejoyce” for the incremental
progress they have made towards salvation. Daily rejoicing is the most accurate
measurement of the journey; what matters is the process of rejoicing rather than the larger
sense of narrative movement. The two analogies operate simultaneously; one to organize
the experiences of joy into rooms of which their specific furniture can be admired, and
the other in which daily experience can be marked by acts of rejoicing, ultimately, and
without notice, moving the traveler closer to their final destination. Rogers’s metaphors
offer another instance of Matthew Brown’s summary of the syncretistic life organization,
for the Puritan “devotional experience was cyclical as well as teleological, joyously
fulfilling as well as recursively abject, a lifelong process that was a linear growth in grace
and a static meditation on sin. . . . By understanding the devout as pilgrim, ruminator,
and—in the syncretic figure of progress and stasis—bee, we can best comprehend how
191 Rogers, Seven Treatises, 298
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lived spirituality for New Englanders meant simultaneous emotions of anguish and joy
amid covalent discourses of mercy and punishment.”192
Tom Webster, in his wonderful article on the process of writing Puritan spiritual
diaries, distinguishes the operation of time in spiritual diaries from the operation of time
in a more conventional journal entry by claiming that the Puritan diary repeats episodes
of grace rather than moving linearly. “If the purpose of self-examination was to write the
diarist into a teleology of grace,” he claims, “the journal entry might be understood as a
micro-narrative of grace which attempts to incorporate, in miniature, the ordo
salutis.”193 Webster’s observation, that each entry performs its own miniature salvific
narrative, diminishes the sense that a reader might understand the diary as a narrative
whole. Reading Rogers’ diary as a sustained narrative, one might get the sense that
nothing happens: the Richard Rogers of the beginning of the diary closely resembles the
Richard Rogers at the end of the diary. Any narrative suspense lies in the slight concern
that Rogers will eventually be stripped of his “liberty” to preach, and even that threat
contains no development, only an occasional mention. Yet the Richard Rogers of the
beginning of each entry is wholly different than the Richard Rogers at the end of each
entry, and the narrative arc missing in the larger journal shows up in each entry as a
repeated movement towards emotional climax, a passionate progress culminating in a
momentary expression of joy. The thread of narrative may be missing, but the endlessly
reproduced good—joy—flows along as if on an assembly line, ready to provide the writer
himself and his select readers with identical objects of joy.
192 Brown, 30.
193 Webster, 53.
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Rather than focusing on causal relationships, the diary places the emphasis on the
thing felt in real time, obscuring the macro-chronology of the entries. You may have
noticed a possible factual mistake above when I quoted a journal entry of November 29,
but it referred to events on December 4. The confusion can be taken several ways: Rogers
revisited his journal often and rewrote sections or added commentary, showing how he
thought of it as a scriptural text to be read, yet this mistake is also indicative of a general
carelessness towards dates on the part of Rogers. The confusion of order is part of the
way this narrative works, not the linear life of a journey but rather the spatial life of a
house. The self of the journal is not moving but rather repeating its foreordained graceful
echoes over and over again. Another entry, dated 22 December 1587, M. M. Knappen
labels “evidently an error, as entries for earlier dates follow it.” Perhaps, but the
carelessness of a chronological error is telling in a man scrupulous enough to insistently
demand correctness in himself. Curiously, this entry contains a direct discussion of what
it means to be “out of order”:
And I had this med[itation] one morn that, comparing this course in which
I vew my life continually, with the former wherin I did it by fits and thus
was oft unsettled, out of order, and then ether not seeing my self, though I
had been unwatchfull, walked in great daunger by every occasion, or
seeinge it, could not easily recover my selfe, and so went unfit, many
hours and sometime dayes, for my calleinge, sometime dumpish and too
heavy, sometime loose, and many such frutes followinge, as no study, but
unprof[itableness], I saw an unmeasurable difference, and said with my
selfe that as this was the life of a Christian so I desired that it might ever
be my companion. Oh lord, say I to my selfe, when I deeply weigh the
benefit of such a course keepinge, how little a man doth tast of the bitter
cupp of other men who runn their course in foly and licentiousness. What
should be so regarded of me, that for the seekinge after it, I should deprive
my selfe of this comfort and happiness?
The out-of-order entry’s content reflects its chronological placement: Rogers’ meditation
is on the room/journey dichotomy, and to which of these narrative frames better informs
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the “life of a Christian.” The solution to this question is obscure, to say the least: he
wonders how his life “unsettled, out of order” could yield anything more than
“unprofitableness.” On the other hand, he follows this with a strange reflection of the
course of life that veers off track, so to speak: he claims that by his new idea of viewing
life “continually” that he does not “tast of the bitter cupp of other men.” The question of
narrative framing becomes a question of empathy—is living in “fits” or “out of order” the
only way to taste of the sorrows of others who “runn their course in foly and
licentiousness”? The immediate question following this observation becomes the central
question of the self-examiner: How much should he sacrifice “comfort and happiness” in
seeking after an examined life? The primary concern is not of everlasting salvation—that
will come or it will not, regardless—but earthly “comfort and happiness,” a thing that
Rogers seems unwilling to give up. The focus on earthly joy is further exemplified in
Rogers’ address to himself when he says “Oh lord, say I to my selfe,” addressing the
Lord but only through himself. The doubled audience becomes a plea for self-reflection
in which questions like the one that ends this passage have no answer but only a practice,
undertaken by experience. Essentially, Rogers wonders what narrative structure can allow
the self-examiner to maximize his joy. In this entry, which is out of order, the form belies
the content, and the question ends the entry rather than the usual expression of rejoicing.
The ironies continue: the same entry date of December 22, 1587 returns after two
previous dates’ entries from December 16 and December 19, and the discussion
continues as if the vein of thought had only been briefly interrupted. Rogers takes the
return to the date as a return to the meta-diary discussion: “And here in these 2 months I
have more particularly set downe thinges—not to observe the same course throughout,
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for that were infinit—but where any part of my life hereafter shall agree with any of this,
which I have here set downe, that I may mak relation of it to some of this and not
allwaies sett downe the same thinges againe.” Returning to the discursive comparison of
linearity with fragmentary records, Rogers wonders if the “room” method will only result
in repetition. He speaks to his future self here, not to warn him of future dangers but
rather to speak to his future writing self, that he not write the same things down again.
The implication is thus: in the future, the events will be the same—the progression of life
is endlessly repetitious, so the writing self indeed might fall into the repetitive trap. The
tension between a life viewed as a journey and the life viewed as rooms in a “happy
estate” has implications for the immediate emotional sense of things. The question
remains, Should the self-examiner postpone joy until the end or attempt to feel joy at
every moment? The answer for Rogers, I would suggest, occurs in practice.
In the later treatises on joy, indeed in the Geneva Bible’s many exhortations
toward joy, constancy reigns. The “joy of the Lord” is defined by its staying power,
whereas the joy of mirth is transitory, earthly, always on the brink of vanishing. To
experience a constant joy was the goal of the Christian and the effect of good faith.
Rogers’ journal, however, does not subscribe to the goal of constant joy; on the contrary,
the joy that Rogers practices in his self-writing proves to be a momentary utterance
achieved by constant striving, only to have it disappear once expressed and felt. The joy
of Richard Rogers, being ephemeral, hews closer to the joy of the apocalyptic Isaiah 24, a
chapter that describes “darkened joy” that turns to lament the minute the “rejoicing
noise” stops. (Isaiah 24:11) The joy of Isaiah 24, dependent on rejoicing in order to exist,
cannot be sustained in silence; rather, this joy only lasts as long as it is pronounced, and
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then darkens into renewed despair. Joy, as the 1661 edition of Thomas Wilson’s
Christian Dictionary claims, comes from two immediate causes: the acquisition of a good
or simply the act of rejoicing. The first definition in the Christian Dictionary of “joy” is
“singing” or “shouting,” emphasizing its expression over its cause, or expression as its
cause.194 But this has the effect of eliminating it once its cause diminishes. The joy a
Christian strives for may be constant, but the joy a Christian usually gets is quick. Rogers
highlights this process when he claims that rejoicing, for him, is not an ongoing process.
In a reference to some unnamed “preferrment” that had been given him, Rogers reflects
on the brevity of rejoicing as a consequence: “In deed I did not a little rejoice before in
the late preferrment which the lorde had brought uppon me, and least I shoulde have been
too joyfull the lord did show me weaknes that I might still be holden under with it.” (29
Nov 1587) Rogers apparently felt his joy had been adequately expressed, for
confrontation with his weakness quickly darkened his otherwise religious joy.
The ephemerality of expressed joy occurs in real time in the entry of July [?],
1587, after Rogers has described his interaction with “a company of bad felowes,” an
occasion that has hardly been a highpoint in his recent life, but nevertheless the writing of
which has given him occasion for rejoicing, as goes his pattern:
Thus I have sett downe some part of those thinges which have fallen out
this month and the sweet peace which I finde and feele since I wrot this,
which seasoneth mine hart with aptnes and willinges to doe duty aright,
different unspeakably from that untowardnes which before was in me.
The writing of his experience brought him delight, which is claimed in the present. But
the present “sweet peace” quickly vanishes as he continues to write, as if the cause of
194 Thomas Wilson, Christian Dictionary, (London: 1661), 331: “joy.”
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rejoicing slips away as the actual rejoicing stops. Even more peculiarly, and emphasizing
the writerly process of real-time emotional movement, his rejoicing reminds him of other
“transitory things”:
For in this estat my minde is on some good thing with delight and upon
transitory thinges which little regardeinge them. But before it was my
chiefest delight to be thincking upon any profit or vaine pleasure, even
longe before I had to doe with them. Yet thus I must say that when so ever
I have weltred in any looseness or securitie, yes such wherein I have been
unwillinge to be awaked, yet I thought even in the same time that god
woulde bringe it against me some one time or other, and the longer that I
have deferred it, the greater is my torment, and then have I no sounde
peace until I retourne.
This beguiling passage rebukes joy even as it has just been expressed, but then
immediately looks forward to that joy returning soon, deferring joy for another day until
it can be rewritten. The joy is gone once it is felt, the doubt comes just when the
realization of faith is achieved. At any rate, the entry quickly transforms into an almost
desperate attempt to return to the joy just expressed, and the final sentence defers joy in
its construction, adding that he has “deferred it” as he repeats the first-person pronoun (“I
must say”; “I” I I), becoming more self-conscious and inward as if searching for that joy,
with the last word of the entry, to “retourne.”
But this joy will not return, at least not until he renews his writing experience in
the next entry, the July 22 entry that begins, again, with his “sensible sorrow.” The
process creates an endless repetition, an experience of dogged redundancy that emulates
life’s mistakes recommitted, life’s lessons relearned, and life’s joy re-earned. The diary
does not move as a whole narrative but as a collection of different vignettes with the
same epiphany. Let me return to another analogy I briefly used above: the diarist’s life
has episodes, the autobiographer’s life is a miniseries: The television sitcom tells a story,
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perhaps even a larger story in which characters eventually get married or move out, but
this story has little bearing on each episode. Rather, each episode has its own arc, going
from complication to eventual solution within the 22 minutes allotted, and the characters
often go from naïve, deceptive, uncaring—all the things that make them funny—to
thoughtful, humbled, understanding by the end of each episode. But, in next week’s
program the characters have reverted back to their regular behaviors, personality traits,
and hubris as if last week’s valuable lesson could only sustain itself for the closing
credits. Essentially, the characters never grow from episode to episode—the only change
comes within the 22 minutes allowed, at the end of which each lesson is wiped clean so
we can laugh at the characters’ individual foibles again.
Rogers diary, perhaps less funny than a season of sitcoms, lays out no larger
narrative as a biography or autobiography would: the only beginning, middle, and end to
his diaries come in each individual entry. Likewise, the emotional development only
occurs in real time, starting fresh with each entry. In this way, Rogers’ diary becomes a
practice rather than a product, an endlessly repeatable ritual that can produce a temporary
state of happiness, much like an ordinance or ceremony, only the materials that make up
the ordinance are variable: the personal daily experiences of life. The outcome, however,
remains the same: through the performance of the ordinance—the confession of sorrows
and the pronunciation of rejoicings—joy comes. It does not stay, but like the sacrament,
writing into daily joy always has tomorrow.
In the final entry still available in manuscript, Rogers acknowledges, oddly
enough, that his writing might be coming to an end, but he turns that fact into a parallel
process of equal efficacy: reading. His final entry of August 26, 1590 ends with this:
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“The last, I desire to have daily before mine eies the times and yeares past of my life,
which doe not a litl rouze me up to care, if it were neglected. Uppon thes matters chiefly,
hath my minde been occupied in this time, and to come out of the contrary bondage. . . .”
The daily process of writing immediately, and for Rogers unproblematically, converts to
a daily process of reading his own previous journal—“daily before mine eies the times
and yeares past of my life”—which in turn will “rouze me up to care.” The entries he has
produced in writing, and which have consequently produced daily joy, will continue to
serve their purpose by rousing Rogers “out of the contrary bondage,” much like they have
already done. The idea that reading past self-writings in order to come out of grief is old
hat for Rogers, who claims in the previous entry of July 17, 1590, that his “mind is well
seasoned, chiefly by reading my med[itations], 40 or 50 of them, though I felt it disordred
and confounded very much . . . I see againe that fayth and godlines are the upholders of
our joy.” Reading his old meditations produced at least a new meditation on joy, even
though he found the previous meditations “disordred.” No doubt he will also find his own
diary disordered, as I have, but that will only produce that present joy that needs no
sustained narrative to felt at the moment.
Rogers’ final gesture towards the future diary reading foreshadows the way the
future Puritans would read his journals, whether it was Samuel Rogers, Richard Baxter,
or John Cowart down in Fort Lauderdale. To view the diary entries as such is to see
Puritan self-writing not as records of joy but rather as materials of joy themselves,
forever read as objects that produce and can be emulated as experiences of joy. Rogers
diary repeats a process whose emotional outcome functions for him as well as his
believing readers. This rhetorical process moves back to the writer and forward to the
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reader, creating epistle out of diary, emotion out of experience, common experience out
of personal expression, and religious exercise out of emotional teleology. For us, finding
the joy of the Puritan life requires the Puritan himself to emote through writing about his
life: turning social, cultural, and personal sorrows into a momentary, albeit endlessly
repeated, joy.
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CHAPTER 4
“YOUR JOYS WITH LIKE RELATION”: INTO THE JOY OF THE
WINTER’S TALE
In a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Winter’s Tale in New York
in the summer of 2011, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times begins with the rather
effusive statement, “A thrill of true feeling runs through virtually every scene.”195 Just
two years earlier, also in The New York Times, Ben Brantley reviewed Sam Mendes’s The
Winter’s Tale by claiming that “The feelings that [Leontes] generates are too intense, too
authentic, and—this is the scary part—too familiar for cool on-the-spot analysis.”196 It
seems that one can hardly review Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale without invoking
some kind of personal feeling experienced while watching it, and the authenticity of “true
feeling” becomes the commonplace of the critics’ evaluative rubric.
Popular reviews echo much of the current criticism on the play by focusing on
feeling. In a recent refutation of Stanley Cavell’s influential “skeptical” reading of The
Winter’s Tale, Charles Altieri argues that “Cavell’s investments lead him to stress the
affective dimensions only of the fundamentally cognitive values organized around his
concern for what we can learn. . . . [Cavell] takes [the characters’] affective states as
195 Charles Isherwood, “The Cool Ferocity of a King Inflamed by Jealousy,” in The New
York Times, 24 July 2011. (Review of The Winter’s Tale, dir. David Farr, RSC at Park Avenue
Armory)
196 Ben Brantley, “Alas, Poor Leontes (That Good King Has Not Been Himself of
Late),” in The New York Times, 23 February 2009 (Review of The Winter’s Tale, dir. Sam
Mendes, Brooklyn Academy of Music).
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primarily phenomena to be interpreted rather than forces inviting our participation.”197
Altieri’s critique of Cavell suggests that feeling in The Winter’s Tale is the thing: the
play’s power comes in its ability to create intense feeling not for analysis, as Ben
Brantley emphasizes, but rather for participation. Perhaps this is why Trevor Nunn’s
1976 production was met with slight disappointment. The major criticism of Trevor
Nunn’s production was that it was an “interpretation” rather than an “experience” of
theater. The “emotional impact of the [statue] scene was blunted” because of the
interpretive ingenuity, said Robert W. Speaight, and Gareth Lloyd Evans explained that
“one comes away [from the production] dazzled with interpretation and musing upon
what happened to experience.”198
Paulina, in her final lines of the play, makes a similar move. After Hermione asks
for explanations of all that has led to the moment of reconciliation, Paulina refuses her
with an almost transcendental plea for presence and affective participation:
There’s time enough for that
Lest they desire upon this push to trouble
Your joys with like relation. Go together
You precious winners all. Your exultation
Partake to everyone. (5.3.162-66)199
Paulina exhorts those who have been reunited keep their joy untroubled by the “relation”
of explanation. Instead, she encourages each character on stage, and surely the audience
197 Charles Altieri, “Wonder in The Winter’s Tale: A Cautionary Account of Epistemic
Criticism,” in A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Wonder. Ed. John Gibson
et al. New York: Routledge, 2007. 267.
198 Both reviews are found in The Winter’s Tale: Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt
(New York: Garland Press, 1995), 363-367.
199 Quotations from The Winter’s Tale come from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Edition, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Washington Square Press, 1998.
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in a metatheatrical gesture, to “go together . . . all” and spread the available “exultation”
to “everyone.” Clearly, a feeling shared has more theatrical impact than a feeling
analyzed, and Paulina, the last act’s puppeteer, anticipates an audience of “precious
winners” with untroubled joys.
Yet I cannot resist the pull of interpretation here. What are these untroubled joys?
What do they have to do with “exultation”? How should “everyone” “partake”? Without
trying to dim the emotional power of the play, this essay will attempt to analyze the
principal feelings within the world of the play even as those feelings spread to the
audience.200 I will operate on the premise that to understand the play as redemptive, as I
think we should, one must understand the affective experience of the characters. My
sense is that the audience’s emotional experience functions alongside, even analogously
to, the emotional world of the characters, and the result is (in this order) joylessness,
sorrow, mourning, festivity (a false joy), and finally, true joy. When Paulina requires that
“Your joys” be unspoiled by relation, she uses “joys” to refer to a specific emotion that
contains its own trajectory, history, antecedents, and allusiveness. This emotionally
200 It is instructive to cite the near-universal feeling attributed to the play, or at least to
the way the audience feels upon leaving the theater: uplift and joy. Paul Taylor’s review of the
Swan Theatre’s production of The Winter’s Tale in late 2006 describes this elevation in clear
terms: “With this production, the expression ‘reduced to tears’ seemed more than ever to get it the
wrong way round. It ‘raised’ the entire audience to tears of joy, hilarity, and—in the statue
scene—pain, wonder, and delight.” Paul Taylor, “The Bard’s Big Year; A Nation Still in Love
with Shakespeare,” The Independent, 24 December 2007, 8. Or to quote the Ben Brantley 2009
review again, who suggests that seeing the characters look upon each other in reconciliation “is
sure to open the sluice gates for anyone with heart.” A less flattering review of Blake Robison’s
2009 Folger production describes the sense that the end cannot help but be elevating: “The
various reconciliations require a massive leap of faith, . . . but by the play’s end, you find yourself
warmed by The Winter’s Tale and the idea that with belief and forgiveness, happy endings are
plausible indeed.” Jayne Blanchard, “Reconciling Winter’s Tale contrasts” Washington Post, 6
February 2009. The language consistently emphasizes a religiously redemptive quality (“belief
and forgiveness”) of the end, the source of aesthetic uplift.
168
religious process is, as I will attempt to demonstrate, coded as a peculiarly Protestant
experience of emotional progress.
In what follows, I will argue that the emotional effects of religious experience
provide the emotional affect of The Winter’s Tale. The play has, in Charles Frey’s terms,
a “mysterious power to move its audience,”201 but that power seems to me not so
mysterious at all—it draws on the already known power of affective spiritual experience,
the “sanctitie of affections, or the right mooving of them,” as William Perkins called the
experience of religion in his 1600 treatise.202 The affection that provides Christianity its
emotive teleology and animates the end of The Winter’s Tale is joy. To get to true joy,
however, and to recognize it as such, the play must provide not only its emotive
precedent (sorrow) but also its emotive opposite (not joy) and its counterfeit (mirth), and
then the playwright must construct a narrative that ultimately finds a joy that can “partake
to everyone.”
“Not for joy, not joy”: Joyless Grace and Jealous Assurance
The first moment that we recognize something foul is afoot in The Winter’s Tale
comes during Leontes’s initial aside. “Too hot, too hot!” he exclaims in response to
seeing his wife, Hermione, take his old friend Polixenes’s, hand,
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me. My heart dances,
But not for joy, not joy. (1.2.139-42)
201 Charles Frey, Shakespeare’s Vast Romance: A Study of The Winter’s Tale
(Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 1980), 5-6.
202 William Perkins, The Golden Chaine (London: Printed by John Legate, 1600), 127128.
169
Then for what does your heart dance, Leontes? The emotion actually felt is identified in
the negative—it is “not joy”—but that does not make the feeling any less intense.
Leontes’s feelings cause the physiological reaction of tremor cordis, commonly
recognized as “heart palpitations,” or heart dancing, as it were. Tremor cordis was often
the named symptom of any number of things, including, according to 16th-century
physician Phillip Barrough, “heate, anger, hunger, watching, lecherie, unmeasurable cold,
meate of evill juice.”203 Each cause on Barrough’s list could possibly allow for
Leontes’s dancing heart, particularly “watching,” which emphasizes Leontes’s
misinterpretation of events, or “heate,” which Leontes’s identifies first with his “too hot!”
exclamation. Of course, the question of what causes his tremor cordis seems passé at this
point: jealousy, goes the accepted criticism, causes it, so the more salient question has
always been “what causes Leontes’s sudden jealousy?”204 But I am not sure jealousy
alone is adequate explanation for Leontes’s tremor cordis, primarily because Leontes
spends more time exclaiming about his condition than naming its cause, and the printed
evidence of the seventeenth century rarely makes the connection between tremor cordis
and jealousy.205
203 Phillip Barrough, The method of physicke (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1583), 73
(chap. 13, “Of panting of the hart”)
204 The cause of Leontes’s jealousy was a major critical problem in the 1960s; see
Hallett Smith, “Leontes’s Affectio,” Shakespeare Quarterly 14.2 (Spring 1963): 163-66; John
Ellis, “Rooted Affection: The Genesis of Jealousy in The Winter’s Tale,” College English 25.7,
(April 1964): 545-47; Norman Nathan, “Leontes’s Provocation,” Shakespeare Quarterly 19.1,
(Winter 1968): 19-24. More recently, David Ward has attributed the jealousy to overindulgent
affective intention, and Rene Girard has attributed that jealousy to the operation of mimetic
desire.
205 Besides Barrough’s list, John Taylor calls tremor cordis one of the “melancholick
diseases” in Drink and welcome (1637), but he is never more specific than that. Christopher
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We can safely assume that “My heart dances for joy” was a common saying in
Shakespeare’s day,206 and when Leontes subverts it, “My heart dances,/ but not for joy,
not joy,” he draws attention to the real affection, “joy,” behind the cliché and repeats its
negative to emphasize its lack. The first “not for joy” twists the common saying, the
second “not joy” brings the negative into relief and, with the elided “for,” names the
condition. Naming an affection “not joy” would not have seemed so strange to an early
modern audience—one only needs reminding of Sansjoy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene
creation who moves around the countryside cursing justice and moderation, and like
Leontes’s heat, Sansjoy is “Enflam’d with fury and fiers hardyhed.”207 Similarly, the
1638 Richard Brome play The Antipodes surnames a whole family “Joyless,” whose
father, simply called Joyless throughout, is an older man afflicted by a raging jealousy
and suspicion that is wife is satisfying herself elsewhere.208 “Joyless” in this case is
perhaps a phonetic pun for “jealous,” but the corresponding state of affection is marked
by doubt, anger, and a moral emptiness.
Joylessness, as Adam Potkay observes, was a common spiritual malady for
Reformation Protestants; it “came to be seen as a sign of the Spirit’s absence from the life
of the individual believer and from the corporate Church, a corollary of a lack of love for
Wirtzung, in General Practise of Physicke (1617) attributes it to “great heat, sudden and great
cold, great emptiness, great sorrow, fright, great fear, and other motions of the mind.” (263)
206 J.H.P. Pafford, in the older Arden footnotes of the play, mentions that “the audience
would expect ‘for joy’ after ‘my heart dances’ and the text carefully indicates the opposite.” (The
Winter’s Tale, Arden 1963, fn. 110-111, 10)
207 Spenser, Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, stanza 38
208 Richard Brome, The Antipodes. Ed. David Scott Kastan and Richard Proudfoot.
London: Globe Quartos, 2000.
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God and neighbor . . . what distinguishes the Protestant discourse of joy . . . [is] its
anxiety over joylessness.”209 Indeed, what in a secular mode of discourse was called
“melancholy,” or even “fury,” had its spiritual equivalent in “joylessness.” Theologically,
“not joy” is a condition that occurs when the peace and joy of assurance and grace is
beset by anger and doubt. After all, the brother of Sansjoy is Sansfoy. Richard Baxter, in
a sermon about the joys of the earth, suggests that “To be without joy is the part of some
of the ungodly under the terrours of their consciences, and of true Christians that know
not their own sincerity.”210 Edmund Calamy adds, in his Evidence for heaven containing
infallible signs, that “assurance never goes without joy, spirituall joy.”211 Joylessness
would have been an identifiable state of emotion, an active passion capable of
committing grievous interpretive error through doubt or anger, or unjustly attacking its
foes in a kind of faithless vengeance.
The religious associations between Leontes’s lack of joy and Protestant
joylessness are not only tangentially constructed. Consider the accompanying physical
reaction of “not joy,” tremor cordis, which seems at once to be a result of “anger” or
“watching,” as alluded to above. But tremor cordis was also a common sign of the
Calvinist assurance of grace, ironically. “Though the Physitians call a disease Tremor
cordis,” explains Anthony Burgess in 1652, “yet the Scripture calls a grace, The
209 Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 73-74.
210 Richard Baxter, The crucifying of the world by the cross of Christ (London, 1658),
232-33.
211 Calamy, Edmund. Evidence for heaven containing infallible signs (London, 1657),
201
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trembling of the heart.”212 Likewise, one of H.W. Clasmata’s spiritual poems, about the
realization that God’s grace covers the speaker’s sins, is entitled “Tremor Cordis,” and
describes the physical reaction of spiritual and emotional reception. The theological
understanding of the physical reaction is fairly uniform; always upon realization of grace,
heart palpitations of joy would signify the reality of the moment. The language of
Leontes’s exclamation is religious in itself, particularly when saying that his “heart
dances,” which echoes the Psalm 28:8 in the popular Psalter, reading, “therefore my heart
danceth for joy.”213 Leontes is having the same physical reaction, heart palpitations, with
precisely the opposite cause, doubt and faithlessness, an ironic juxtaposition that is
marked by the subversion of the cliché “my heart dances for joy.” 214 Leontes’s heart is
dancing, tremor cordis has taken hold, but only for “not joy,” the emotional equivalent of
rage, passion, and anger in the absence of assurance and grace. Here the link between
Leontes’s emotional condition and the spiritual malady of joylessness is most
pronounced, and that emotional state, with its itinerant religious dangers, moves into the
realm of emotive religious allegory.
Leontes’s lack, the absence of joy, sets the narrative in motion, naming the thing
that must be overcome, joylessness, in the course of the tragicomedy. As any plot is
propelled by lack, closure contains the completion or fulfillment of that lack—in this
212 Anthony Burgess, Spiritual Refining, or a Treatise on Grace and Assurance.
London: Printed by A. Miller, 1652.
213 I get this from Richmond Noble’s landmark Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge (New
York: Macmillan, 1935), 79-80.
214 In a treatise about the “religious life” in 1677, Anthony Horneck exclaims that Paul,
in all his trials, continuously realizes God’s grace and “his heart dances for joy” because of it.
Anthony Horneck, The Great Law of Consideration, 1677, 340.
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case, “joy.” This process has a more universal Christian antecedent in Aquinas’s
systematization of the passions, where he labels desire as the drive towards fulfilling a
lack, and that joy is the “end of desire.”215 “Desire,” for Aquinas, was the force driving
the anticipated union between subject and object—man to God, heaven, Christ—that had
an ultimately teleological component (once heaven is reached, joy is permanent). This
process, in traditional Christian theology, could only be manifest in ephemeral analogues
on earth, whether that is the Eucharist, matrimonial union, or descending grace. Joy’s
relation to narrative desire is as its closure, as Aquinas suggests.
The notion of joy in early modern England was usually divided into several
categories: found joy, accidental joy, true joy, false joy, inchoate joy, everlasting joy.
They are all different, and are all bound within particular contexts, but the joys that really
mattered, that is, the joys that were either necessary for Christian salvation or damning,
were completely dependent upon a narrative of desire that facilitates their occasion. John
Donne explains in one of his Thessalonians sermons that joy arises out of narrative
movement: “As Rest is the end of motion, every thing moves therefore that it may rest, so
Joy is the end of our desires, whatsoever we place our desires, our affections upon, it is
therefore, that we may enjoy it.” Donne goes on to emphasize that a certain joy will come
to those whose desires are “carnall,” while “Joy” will come to those concerned with the
“intellectual part.” Donne’s assertion that joy is dependent upon the movement of desire
is Thomist in its theological modality, but Donne’s idea goes one further in saying that
joy comes in the idea of the movement itself, not only in the “rest” at the end: “Joy is not
215 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 25.1. Aquinas’s Aristotelian categorization pits
desire as emotion’s “chief element of movement.” Joy, for him, is this desire “at rest.”
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such a Rest, as the Rest of the Earth, that never mov’d; but as the Sunne rejoyceth to
runne his race, and his circuit unto the end of heaven; so this Joy is rest and testimony . . .
that we have mov’d in our Sphere.”216 Donne claims joy is wholly dependent on
something happening instead of stasis—it is only the rest that comes after, between, and
during the exertion of energy. Joy is peace and rest during movement, the emotion felt
when something good happens because of work, desire, movement.
This process is adapted in English Protestantism to emphasize the emotional
experience of regeneration, in which righteous desire is characterized by grief only to be
finalized in joy. Thomas Gataker, in a 1623 sermon, claims that there is one definite “way
to joy,” the finality of Christian being, and that way is grief: “Even such sorrow and
sadnesse there is the seed of found joy. The way to joy is by griefe; as the way by
Physick is to health. As the worldly mans joy endeth in grief; for the godly mans griefe
endeth in joy.”217 An early modern audience would be familiar with the narrative of
joy—separation, sorrow, and desire transformed into union, joy, and restitution—because
common theology would have ingrained this discourse into the regenerative narratives of
life. After all, the homilies on Psalm 126:5 (“Those that have sown in sorrow reap in
joy“) emphasize that sorrow turning to joy should be expected, yet exactly how that
sorrow will transform to joy was a mystery, making it a wonderfully provocative paradox
216 Sermons of John Donne, ed. George Potter and Evelyn Simpson. Volume X, Sermon
10: “A sermon preached in Saint Dunstans. 1 Thessalonians 5:16.” Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1953-1962.
217 Thomas Gataker, The Joy of the Just; With the Signs of Such. London: Printed by
John Haviland, 1623. 21.
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of Protestant theology.218 Usually, commentaries on Psalm 126:5 suggest that once
sorrow is exhausted, God will allow grace to descend and rejuvenate the soul towards
joy, but no real instance is given for this to occur: the material behind the transformation
from sorrow to joy is left unsaid, but the emotional reaction is emphasized as
recognizable to the true Christian.219 This kind of joy has a plot, a process that allows it
to come into being.
For that matter, the trope had been a part of an important older tradition as well,
one in which, as Thomas Connelly indicates, the Manichean philosophy of creation
contained sadness and joy, and hence in the medieval mind “the fluctuations of sadness
and joy stood for all change—within the individual, within the material world, and within
the working out of the divine scheme of redemption.”220 Indeed, the Christian sense of
218 Walter Balcanquhall’s 1623 sermon asks the wonderful question (one that he will
attempt to answer), “And indeed from every seede sowne, men doe expect to reape graine, or
corne, einsdem species, of the same kind. How can wee then expect from teares to reape joy,
which differeth from it in the whole species or kind?” Balcanquhall then explains, “To naturall
and worldly men this is one of the paradoxes, wherewith they use to charge Divinitie, and indeed
a paradox it must needs be to all those who are not orthodox, and found in the doctrine of
spirituall teares and joy which are here meant, who know no other joy but jollitie, nor teares, but
when they are troubeled; who know not the joy of the Spirit which Chrisitans have here.” (A
Sermons Preached on St. Maries Spittle on Munday in Easter Week, London: Printed by F.K. for
John Budge, 1623).
219 Calvin, in his commentary on the Psalms, uses this verse as something “extended to
the future [rather] than understood of the past” and simply exhorts, “let us learn to apply our
minds to the contemplation of the issue which God promises.” Calvin’s hope for the joy in the
future is equally vague; he states that the promise is there, but the only way to recognize it is to
trust in the “common interest” that joy will eventually descend (Calvin, Commentary on the Book
of Psalms. Vol. 4, Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eeardmans, 1949, Psalm 126:5)
220 Thomas Connelly, Mourning into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia. (London:
Yale University Press, 1994), 5. Connelly’s analysis focuses on Raphael’s depiction of St.
Cecilia, and his study follows the way late medieval music follows the motifs of St. Cecilia,
patron saint of music, in her mythic quest for joy through mourning. I find the connection
intriguing, if tangential, to The Winter’s Tale, principally because Hermione could have been
depicted in much the same form as Raphael’s St. Cecilia, and Hermione is “awakened” by
Paulina’s call to “music.”
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sorrow to joy would have been familiar enough to qualify it as a “habit of the medieval
mind,” and religious narratives almost invariably included some variation of this sense
unless they were “warnings.” But the older stories of joy clung to a notion of worship that
included the experience of supreme joy when one united with Christ’s body through the
Eucharist or experienced profound blessings by praying before Mary, a notion of worship
that was wholly rejected, of course, by the Reformed church. Doctrines of Protestant
devotional joy did not much change this narrative as adapt it to their new interests in
inwardness, grace, and assurance—the movement from mourning into joy was eagerly
adapted in the English Church, but the newer iterations of joy were bound in individual
narratives of regeneration rather than the witnessing of miracles, icons, and rituals. That
is, the stories of joy that permeate Christianity even through the Reformation are given
new emphasis through emotion as a sign of regeneration and forgiveness. The Protestant
religious narrative, even told on a grand scale, is the story of individual emotional
progress among the metaphors and tropes that reflect self-transformation and eventual
grace.
The narrative of joy, then, is the common Protestant narrative of personal
regeneration: there can be no personal redemption without the large-scale possibility of
damnation nor can there be grace without its previous absence. Thomas Whitfeld, a
popular Calvinist minister in the mid-seventeenth century, put it this way: “A Christian in
the exercise of a broken heart, though he begins in sorrow, he ends in joy”; and “For as
the weeke is made up of day and night, and the yeare of Summer and Winter, so is the
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life of a godly man made up of joy and sorrow.”221 Whitfeld’s analogy is given a whole
chapter in his treatise A Righteous Man’s Rejoicing, and he contends, much like Gataker
above, that joy is dependent on previous sorrow, and he devotes a whole chapter of his
treatise to the process in which winter can become summer, a winter’s tale ending in
summer. The metaphor’s tenor far outweighs its vehicle, but at the same time, the stakes
of personal joy are just as grand as the collective summer of the earth. The metaphor is
not unusual in the rhetoric of emotions of the early seventeenth century, and the journey
of the religious passions had become commonplace to which analogies endlessly attach
themselves, particularly those analogies of cyclical regeneration, winter to summer, day
to night, sow to harvest.
William Perkins lays this out in his theological structure of conversion and
assurance in his highly influential Golden Chain, which came out in fifteen editions
between its initial publication in 1590 and 1610. Perkins claims that the “sanctitie of
affections, or the right mooving of them,” begins with an initial hope that assurance is
promised, but then must move through the particulars of sorrow, tears, and “an anguish of
mind,” which then culminates in “exceeding great joy,” the final affection in his outline.
Perkins’s theological structure of conversion and recognition may be much more detailed
than my broad strokes here, but his emphasis resides on the affections that accompany the
process. Without those affections, particularly final joy, he claims, there is no inward
sanctification. The particulars of each “case” may change, but the emotional effects
remain theologically consistent.
221 Thomas Whitfield, The Righteous Man’s Rejoicing. London: Printed for J. Wright,
1649. 41.
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This is all to say that Leontes’s “not joy” is a sign of tragic implication, both in
the play and in the religious discourse, and to recognize the emotive typology is to begin
to understand the way Leontes’s lack of joy functions as a vehicle towards death, a drive
towards treachery and injustice, hopefully to be overcome in a story of regeneration.
Leontes’s joylessness becomes the dominating emotional catalyst of the first three acts,
and its influence over all of Leontes’s rash and injust decisions make it pervasive. While
Leontes’s joylessness continues to manifest itself as an effect of lack of assurance, it
eventually results in something far more insidious. Indeed, if Leontes’s “not joy” is the
same joylessness that threatens the well-being of Protestants, it would be distinct from
sorrow, akin to despair, and bent on vengeance and injustice as its end. Sorrow, as it is
often explained by sixteenth-century Protestant divines, is godly, and a necessary step
towards salvation, whereas despair is different—it is the “sorrow of the world” that
“worketh death” (2 Cor. 7:10 KJV).222 Joylessness differs from sorrow in its lack of
hope and emphasis on strict justice over mercy, and when it “worketh death” it manifests
itself through vengeance, a perversion of true justice. After all, Sansjoy’s other brother
was Sansloy, whose emphasis on vengeance and wild injustice makes him the perfect
companion for joylessness.
In Leontes’s infected world, “justice” comes up with a frequency that would
suggest his sense of true justice is pathological. “How blest I am,” Leontes exclaims in
his self-congratulatory condemnation of his friends, “in my just censure” (2.1.48). His
222 Of this scripture, Walter Balcanquhall explains that the tears of joylessness “are so
far from producing any joy, as considered in themselves, they produce nothing but death.” This
is, he explains, very different than the tears of true sorrow, which produce humility and Godly
joy. Balcanquhall, A sermon preached at St. Maries Spittle, April 14, 1623.
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“just censure” is exactly the opposite, and eventually his perverted sense of justice
becomes his mantra:
Look on her, mark her well; be but about
To say, ‘she is a goodly lady,’ and
The justice of your hearts will thereto add
‘Tis pity she’s not honest, honourable; (2.1.83-86)
Leontes’s full confidence remains in his perverted sense of justice, just as his joylessness
is a perversion of true sorrow. Later Leontes emphatically commands Antigonus to
abandon Perdita for death and announces it with, “I do in justice charge thee” (2.3.221),
with the emphasis on the phonetic pun “in justice.” In the same scene, he remarks that
Hermione shall have a “just and open trial,” immediately and provocatively followed by
his declaration that “while she lives/My heart will be a burthen to me.” The agitating
joylessness in his heart is juxtaposed with his sense of a just trial, and the connections
between destructive joylessness and injustice link Leontes’s behavior to his affections.
The trial scene reifies Leontes’s joyless justice—Leontes announces that “we so
openly/Proceed in justice” and that Hermione “Shalt feel our justice” when she feels
sorrow for the abandonment of her daughter.
It may seem odd to pit joy and joylessness with justice and injustice, especially
considering affect was often consciously divorced from law, but the theological
connection between the two was a given in ecclesiastical affairs, and juxtaposing
joyousness and justice together was part of the common liturgie. The combination of
judgment and joy had specific religious and philosophical contexts at the time: the writer
of Proverbs proclaims that “it is joy to the just to do judgment” (Prov. 21:15, KJV),
which became the basis for sixteenth-century homilies by Joseph Hall and John Boys that
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examine the role of emotions in judgment.223 Gataker’s 1623 sermon on joy,
appropriately titled The Joy of the Just, claims that “Joy is the just man’s lot and the just
mans lot alone.”224 It is no surprise, then, that the greatest marker of joylessness is the
inability to bring forth just acts. In Leontes’s case, his dogged insistence on justice
becomes a gross parody of true justice, masking lawfulness with angry dominion and
charity with vengeance. The world and realm of Leontes has become a perversion of the
joyful kingdom, and in its official business, like the trial, joyless affect dominates the
proceedings and skews the sense of things.
Leontes’s “not joy” indeed dominates the first three acts of the play, and
ostensibly sets the narrative course towards tragedy. But this is not the misery of, say,
Malvolio, religiously penitent, or Jacques, world weary; this is the joylessness of jealousy
on an earthly level and the joylessness of doubt, as opposed to faith, on a spiritual level. It
can only operate by the absence of any virtue or productivity. If piety comes from the felt
experience of inner joy, the lack of any joy suggests a lack of belief, moving all toward
vengeance and death. Furthermore, Leontes’s joylessness is dishonest about itself: when
he says, “While she lives,/ My heart will be a burden to me.” (2.3.205-206), his very next
pronouncement suggests the opposite: “This sessions, to our great grief we pronounce,/
Even pushes ‘gainst our heart.” (3.2.1-2) This introduction to the trial scene, however,
223 Joseph Hall, in Salomons divine arts (1609) calls justice the true mark of the joyful
man, and goes on to say that “As to do justice and judgement is more acceptable (to the Lord)
then sacrifice; so it is a joy to the just himselfe, to do judgement: all his labour therefore tendeth
to life” (55); see also John Boys, An exposition of the dominical epistles and gospels (1610).
224 Gataker, Joy of the Just, 4. The experience of joy and the proper application of
justice was of concern to scholastics as well, who took Aristotle’s injunction that “nobody would
say that man is just unless he enjoys acting justly” to operate on the same level as the Proverbs
verse (Ethics, Trans. JAK Thomson. London: Penguin Books, 1953. 1099a, 79).
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has more emotional import than just suggesting Leontes’s lying heart: the royal “we” is
used peculiarly—the “great grief” that “pushes ‘gainst” the heart is not Leontes’s grief,
nor Leontes’s heart. Rather, “our great grief” might describe the audience’s reaction to
the results of Leontes’s joylessness instead of sharing it. The emotional separation
between the audience’s “great grief” and Leontes’s joyless injustice provides the emotive
separation between character and audience that will eventually become the rhetorical
reconciliation of “our joys” in the final act, in which the audience has been reconciled to
Leontes in much the same way that Hermione and Perdita have been reconciled to
Leontes. In the meantime, joylessness has moved the narrative towards falsehood,
emptiness, and death.
If this joylessness is only interested in vengeance and injustice, how does it
eventually move towards productive religious emotion? The simple answer is that it
doesn’t; joylessness can only “worketh death.” This is the primary difference between
Godly sorrow and despair (“worldly sorrow”): whereas sorrow moves towards
restoration, despair enacts death; indeed, is dead in itself. Protestant divines so often
highlight the difference between the sorrow and despair that one wonders to what extent
the concern over true despair dominated religious emotion in the seventeenth century. It
has certainly become a concern for scholars.225 If “worldly sorrow” or not joy, “worketh
225 The study of melancholy, despair, and sorrow has a virtual monopoly on scholarship
that treats Renaissance emotion, and with good reason: the concern over what happens to the
body and spirit when a person is feeling down was the subject of many treatises and sermons. Yet
many of these scholars, in analyzing the seventeenth-century work on the negative emotions, stop
before their texts do. Most of the sermons, treatises, and manuals give the anatomy of sorrow,
despair, and melancholy in order to get to joy. Yet it seems to me that the critics of “emotion”
content themselves with sorrow, and refuse to see the joyful end. Perhaps this would explain the
heavy majority of “melancholy” articles in the seminal Reading the Early Modern Passions. See
also Peter Ivan Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1996); John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English
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death,” the emotional drive will only end in despair. On the other hand, if the sorrow
experienced is Godly, it will lead to reconciliation. This truism becomes a Protestant
commonplace in the late sixteenth century in England, and reconciling the two was
almost unheard of. Peter Kaufman claims that although continentalists began to reconcile
despair with Godly sorrow, English pietists “stressed the discontinuity between worldy
sorrow, disquiet stemming form a natural aversion to punishment, and godly sorrow, the
‘greefe and displeasure of mind which we feele for offending God.’”226 Hermione, just
before the judgment of the oracle, juxtaposes the two responses to something sorrowful
when she proclaims that the Emperor of Russia was her father, and if he were witnessing
the trial, he could “but see/ The flatness of my misery, yet with eyes/ Of pity, not
revenge!” In one sense, Godly sorrow presupposes mercy—it is a necessary step towards
final joy—while worldly sorrow presupposes death—a necessary step towards final
despair.
The distinction between joylessness and sorrow is explicitly pronounced, and
clearly divided, for Leontes in The Winter’s Tale at the moment of the first death. The
process of joylessness leads to death, and it takes that process to complete itself in order
for Leontes to be conscious of his injustice. Consider the end of joylessness, death, and
the abrupt shift towards recognition:
Servant:
Leontes:
My lord the King, the King!
What is the business?
Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Marjory E.
Lange, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Gary Kuchar, The Poetry
of Religious Sorrow (Cambridge University Press: 2008).
226 Peter Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama (Chicago: University Illinois Press
1996), 22.
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Servant:
Leontes:
Servant:
Leontes:
Oh, sir, I shall be hated to report it!
The Prince your son, with mere conceit and fear
Of the Queen’s speed, is gone.
How? Gone?
Is dead.
Apollo’s angry, and the heavens themselves
Do strike at my injustice. (3.2.137-143)
The strikingly abrupt change is not prepared for at all: once “is dead” is pronounced for
Mamillius, the effect is the same for Leontes’s joylessness. From this moment on,
Leontes’s grief is of a different nature, repentant and sorrowful, on the way to hoped
forgiveness. Immediately, Leontes begins the course of repentance—“Apollo, pardon/
My great profaneness ‘gainst thine oracle”—but that repentance is too immediate to be
effective nor is repentance even the proper response. Of course, Paulina refuses this
abrupt change in Leontes, and declares that he is unworthy of repentance:
Do not repent these things, for they are heavier
Than all thy woes can stir. Therefore betake thee
To nothing but despair. A thousand knees
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert. (3.2.229-235)
Paulina reminds Leontes that he must still complete “despair”—an unproductive emotion,
but the only one Paulina finds acceptable. The “penitence” that Paulina seems to be
referring to—“A thousand knees/ Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting”—is often
referred to as the set exercise in which Leontes must participate, but Paulina’s actual
point is that his joyless deeds are irreparable, and even traditional penitence could not
“move the gods.” Something else, beyond or outside of acts towards penitence, must be
performed. The gods will not be moved, but Leontes can attempt to achieve grace
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through another measure, that of productive emotion, perhaps. In the meantime, the
effects of joylessness have taken hold: emptiness, death, despair.
Leontes’s attempt to repent his misdeeds, which have resulted in damage that
cannot and will not be undone at the end of the play, appears misguided, but his
willingness to submit to Paulina’s instruction crucially emphasizes his newfound “Godly
sorrow.” Paulina mentions, offhandedly, that Leontes’s emotional torment should not be
compelled. “Do not receive affliction/ At my petition,” she explains, and in so doing
allows his sorrow to be an individual, inward, and silent experience.
“Come, lead me to these sorrows”: Emotional Time and the
Hidden Narrative of Joy
The final words spoken by Leontes in Act III, “Come and lead me/ To these
sorrows” bespeaks the penitence Leontes must face, the true sorrows of which Paulina
will instruct. Leontes’s plea to Paulina suggests these “sorrows” are specific things, acts
that perhaps must be completed in order for Leontes to feel peace again. It sounds just
like Catholic penitence, as David Beauregard notes. Beauregard sees The Winter’s Tale
as a “mimetic representation based on a penitential ritual, albeit in secular and analogical
form . . . following the movements of contrition, confession, and satisfaction.”227
Beauregard’s observation seems to fit with Leontes’s final utterance in Act III, and his
perceptive grasp on the way the play follows a theological structure works holistically,
but those “movements” of penitence seem slightly off-kilter with what Leontes actually
227 David Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays. Delaware: Newark
University of Delaware Press, 2008. 109.
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does in the play, and in what order. His confession comes first, immediately after his son
is pronounced dead, and his contrition is hidden away from us: between his call to “Come
and lead me/ To these sorrows” and Cleomenes proclaiming “Sir, you have done enough,
and have performed/ A saintlike sorrow,” in Act V, we hear nothing from Leontes.
Sixteen years pass without a word from him. All we have is imagined time and imagined
sorrow: the penitence process has been tucked away under Act IV, the pastoral festivity
in Bohemia. In other words, the process of sorrow is indicated by no more than time. The
audience is not shown the “exercise” of sorrow in any penitential way primarily because
that process is private (and long). Sorrow in the Protestant tradition requires time rather
than ritual, inwardness rather than corporeality. Perhaps Leontes has “performed” his
“saintlike sorrow,” but not for the audience. It has been private, long, and almost static:
individual, hidden—Protestant in nature.
Nevertheless, Leontes must sow in sorrow in order to reap in joy: his “saintlike
sorrow” must come from somewhere, must take time, must, in Calvin’s description of the
process of sorrow, “be extended to the future.” If Leontes is allowed joy, he must be
given time for his true sorrow. Time is the space of sorrow, it slows, speeds, extends in
temporality depending on the emotion fixed to it. But in The Winter’s Tale, that time is
elided, tucked between Act III and IV, and although it is stated that Leontes has “done
enough” sorrow in sixteen years, the audience certainly has not experienced that time,
and the audience’s willingness to allow true joy to spring from sorrow depends on time
enough.228 The space usually filled, and stetched, by time must be occupied by
228 David Scott Kastan argues that each genre of Shakespeare’s plays contains its own
“grammar” of time, in which something like “tragic time” can speed plot by pushing the narrative
forward beyond true time. That is, experienced time is based on genre, the creation of subjectivity
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something else in order for the audience to eventually get to the joy promised. Time, with
a capital “T,” knows this, and explains it in terms of emotions:
I, that please some, try all—both joy and terror,
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me of my swift passage that I slide
O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried (4.1.1-6)
That first utterance of Time acknowledges the difficulty of filling time with something a
little shorter, with condensed experience, and using emotions to simulate the passing of
that time. “Joy” and “terror,” heightened states of emotional reaction, will become the
attempts of Time to simulate time. Of course, the audience has already experienced
“terror”: and immediately after Leontes asks Pauline to “lead” him to “these sorrows,”
Polixenes is threatened by a storm and dismembered by a bear. The “terror” of the bear
scene overwhelms the play to such a degree that it might be conceivable that the audience
would lose track of logical time in favor of a kind of emotional time, in which heightened
emotions dismember the proper experience of time itself.
in time. (Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, 1982). This sense of subjective temporality operates here too, but I would not base that
experienced time on genre as much as I would on emotional experience. I follow David Houston
Wood’s assertion that this subjective temporality is “associated with that most volatile of
emotions in the early modern period: melancholy.” (Wood 186). Wood’s observation that
emotions are changing the experience of time seems correct, but I would argue that “melancholy”
is precisely the emotion that is not operating during the Act IV stretch of time. Rather, it is the
tried experience of earthly joy, attempted by the pastoral festivity, that encloses time within its
emotional frame.
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Time tries all, even “joy,” but all the audience has experienced thus far in the play
is “not joy.” Time even acknowledges this fact at the end of his monologue when he
explains, with a metatheatrical wink, that the experience of the play thus far as been fairly
unpleasant:
If ever you have spent time worse ere now;
If never, yet that Time himself doth say
He wishes earnestly you never may. (4.1.30-33)
The focus is on the experience of the audience, and the self-deprecating remark directly
acknowledges that the last three acts have been rough for the spectators, but the tone of
the remarks suggest that the audience is in for a good time in the future, whatever that
may be. Certainly, with the action shifting to the pastoral Bohemia, the experience is sure
to be more pleasant.229
The final two acts function as an emotional foil of the first three acts. Whereas the
first three acts chronicled the shift from joylessness to godly sorrow, or worldly sorrow to
godly sorrow, the last two acts follow the shift from worldly joy to godly joy. Worldly
joys, or “false joys” as they were often called in the religious rhetoric, included unfettered
merriment, lusting, laughing, trickery, and so on for the Protestant and Puritan divines.
Puritans came down especially hard on these false joys, condemming dancing, singing,
and playing as pernicious, deceptive joys that lead us away from the true joy of God,
found in his Word. The theater itself was often called a false joy for its reliance on the
229 According to Robert Henke, the shift to the pastoral is an important one in
understanding the “tempered” emotional extremes of the tragicomedy. That is, in order to
experience the play emotionally, the emotional extremes of what I am calling “joylessness” and
“joy” must be tempered in order to plausibly lead into one another. Henke’s argument is that the
nature of tragicomedy is to reduce the intensity of feeling in tragedy and comedy so that one can
more seamlessly lead into the other. “Guarinian Dramaturgy and The Winter’s Tale,”
Comparative Drama 27, 2 (Summer 1993): 200.
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spectacle for pleasure.230 Gataker calls false joys the joys of “strange” dreams; joys that
are real and pleasantly experienced, but “which as soon as they are awaked, doe all
vanish, and prove just nothing.”231 However, false joys were not necessarily bad, at least
in the mainstream Protestant view, and indeed, were part of the joys of living on the
earth.232 John Barlow, in his treatise on joy, makes the distinction between “gladnesse”
and “joy,” proclaiming “gladnesse” as “seene in the face, or some outward signe
discerned” whereas “joy is in the heart, secretly hidden.”233 Gladness is a worldly joy,
evidence of a joyful moment, and is good, but it is not true joy of the heart, signified by
the spiritual, emotional, and verbal union with God, and therefore cannot be counted as
productive. At the same time, gladness and mirth were considered joys of great
importance but also only preparatory to a final, internal, and eternal joy. John Donne calls
this gladness or mirth “earthly” but also an “inchoative joy,” that is indicative of a joy to
be had more fully elsewhere. In one of his 1626 sermons on the Psalms, Donne explains
that “as no man shall come to the joyes of Heaven, that hath no joy in this world, (for,
there is no peace of conscience without this joy).”234 The earthly joys of song and dance,
230 Stephen Gosson, in his infamous Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: 1582),
puts it this way: “It behooveth a Christian so to delight, and rejoyce nowe, that he maye rejoyce &
delight at the last daye, which joye is accomplished by this that wee are partakers of the crosse of
Christe. Howe farre this delight is different from Comedies, is easie to bee seene with halfe an
eye.”
231 Gataker 33-34.
232 “Worldly joys” were often used to describe the sweetness of flowers (Humphrey
Gifford’s A posie of gilloflowers, 1580) or the glory of great military or political achievement
(Thomas Churchyard’s the miserie of Falunders 1579). But “worldly joys” most often referred to
children, food, festivity, and/or sexuality.
233 J. Barlow, The Joy of the Upright Man, London: Imprinted by Felixe Kingston for
Nathaniel Newberry, 1619.
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mirth and laughter, are contested in their particulars (mirthful singing is joyful or vain,
depending on who you ask), but whatever the moral judgment is upon the specific
context of earthly joy, they are always “outward” joys, which is to say they can be
witnessed, whereas “inward” joys are often hidden from worldly eyes but felt on a deeper
level.
The fourth act of The Winter’s Tale is a spectacle that trades in mirth, outward
joys, and laughter, aiming for the worldly joys—festivity, pastoral, theatricality, music—
that are at least celebratory if not redemptive. The sheep-shearing festival, the splendor of
youthful love and “lustiness,” the laughter of clowns—the act is filled with mirth,
gladness, theatrical warmth, if not theatrical “wonder,” which is reserved for the final act.
The sadness of Mamillus’s tale of winter has turned “merry” with the fourth act: the
“merry” ballads in Act IV finally respond to Hermione’s wish that his tale be “merry.”
The word “merry” is used five times in the act in various ways, to describe the heart and
to describe a ballad, altering the tone of the tale from sadness to merry, although not yet
from sorrow to joy. The tone becomes light and festive, and the feeling of the play
effectively shifts into new geographic, emotional, and generic territories.
Beyond the merry ballads, the Act IV uses of “merry” are telling, if for no other
reason than that they indicate the lack of depth to this merriness. Florizel, calming
Perdita’s sadness over their inability to join together in love, tells her to “Be merry,
gentle.” The command to be merry is furthered by Florizel’s warning that Perdita “darken
not the mirth of the feast,” and enjoins her to be “red with mirth” once the others come
(IV.4.49, 63). Florizel’s command is that Perdita show mirth outwardly—being “red
234 John Donne, Sermon 9, Volume VII, Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn Simpson.
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with mirth” does not necessarily indicate her inner happiness; on the contrary, it masks
her uneasiness. Florizel’s warning touches on the current emotional state of the Act IV
itself, in which the mirth is temporary and superficial, gone and forgotten once the
laughing ceases. The merriness is only on the countenance, the play has become a
delightful spectacle, leaving aside the inward joy of union and reconciliation.
This sense of emptiness behind the mirthful mask surfaces subtly, much before
Florizel and Perdita put on their happy faces. The scenes of Bohemia begin with
Autolycus singing a song of joyful festivity for the onset of flowers, spring, and
sweetness. The song is lovely, but no sooner is the audience enjoying the mirth of
spring’s song when it realizes Autolycus is a highway trickster, a trader in delightful
spectacle at the expense of the virtues of charity. Immediately after his joyful song of
spring, Autolycus sees the “Clown” and tricks him into a parody of the Good Samaritan
parable. While Autoloycus plays the beaten, robbed, and injured Jew and the Clown plays
the Samaritan, Autolycus robs him of his purse and clothes while the Clown believes to
the end that he has helped Autolycus in charity. The deception reflects the larger
deception of the joyful act: the Clown comes upon a scene that he believes to be sincere,
yet Autolycus’s appearance is only a game to distract him from the true purpose. Act IV
is a joyful distraction as well while time passes and Leontes can sufficiently repent, and
the audience can soften its own animosity towards Leontes. This is a preparatory act, an
“inchoate joy,” an earthly bit of mirth to prepare us for the cumulative joy of Act V.
Autolycus cannot embody inward virtues, and while his merry ballads and joyful trickery
have seduced audiences for centuries, he acts as the false outward appearances of
emotional resonance. This section of the play is perhaps the most “pleasant” for the
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audience, and from Simon Forman’s notice of Autolycus’s delight and on through the
nineteenth century, audiences have been seduced by the pure pleasure of the pastoral joy
of the scene.235 The pleasure of watching the scene unfold is the pleasure of the theater
itself, where clowns dance, young lovers rebel, shepherds sing, and tricksters play.
Celebrating this Act as theatrical mirth without understanding its role in the larger
play neglects the experience of the play itself. Its theatrical function, in celebration of
worldly joys, cannot be analyzed in a vacuum, particularly in the context of a play that
has put the audience through the terror of the first three acts. Perhaps each individual
event in Bohemia has little to do with the larger plot, but they offer an opportunity for
Time to “try all,” including “joy.” That the joy of Time is not wholly adequate in
repairing the sorrow and terror of the first three acts is not surprising; it is a superficial
joy that can keep the audience laughing or smiling, but nonetheless remains a “worldly
joy” that cannot result from true sorrow. If nothing else, the worldly joy of Act IV
functions as a foil to the worldly sorrow that “worketh death” in the first three acts, but it
is not an antidote or solution to the narrative of sorrow and joy in the play. Likewise, it
gives Time a trial of “joy” in which the audience experiences something in a heightened
state—laughter, mirth, spectacle—that fills the space of time, and allows the emotional
process of regeneration to occur for the audience on behalf of Leontes. That emotional
experience, although explicitly not religious, fills a gap.
235 We know Simon Forman, in his 1611 comments, was most interested in the light
mirth of the pastoral scenes, and Dennis Bartholomeusz clearly chronicles the ways in which
audiences and adaptations preferred the pastoral plots and tone in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century. In many ways, The Winter’s Tale was recast as a festive play. See Dennis
Bartholomeusz, The Winter’s Tale in performance in England and American, 1611-1976.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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The rhetorical effect this act has on the audience is often debated, and placing an
act of mirthful festivity in the midst of a grave plot of injustice and redemption might
seem cynical at best. If the act truly distracts the audience from the severity of Leontes’s
earlier sins and covers for the disunity of time (it is, after all, one of the longest acts in all
of Shakespeare), the audience would seem to be wholly deceived. But this is precisely the
point, I think. In the moment of watching Autolycus’s escapades and the ritualistic
spectacle of the sheepshearing festival, the audience might not be aware, or care, that it is
being moved and prepared for a quicker tragicomic ending. But when the joy of this
spectacle wears out and Act V begins, the audience can use its previous experience of
witnessing “mirth” in its worldly forms to compare it to a different kind of joy that will
come with reunion and reconciliation. What results is the difference between the “false
joys” that come from ritual, miracles, and images with the “true joys” that come from
earthly regeneration and spiritual grace.
“It should take joy”: The Emotional Climax of Act V
In his 1623 sermon on Psalm 126:5, Walter Balcanquhall divides joy into several
parts: there is “sensuall joy,” which is only a joy because “men call it such”; there is
“worldly and humane joy,” which is the joy one feels when delighted by virtue,
goodness, or beauty, and there is “spirituall joy,” which cannot be felt by the outward
senses and is eternal. The final joy, Balcanquhall claims, has a correct order to it. Besides
having to have been preceded by sorrow, “godly tears,” and repentance, this joy first
manifests itself by glimpses, or “something answerable to a gleaning” of its fruits. He
describes the order of these joys in regards to the parable of the Prodigal Son:
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The one is, the joy which the prodigall conceived, when hee thought but of
returning to his father; the other, the joy of kissing, weeping, falling on his
necke, feasting, and musicke, which hee conceived upon his meeting with
his Father.236
Balcanquhall’s division splits the apprehension of grace with its actual receiving. The
division is important; for Balcanquhall, one can be felt on the earth, and we should strive
for that joy, whereas the other can only be felt in heaven. Because of this, the joy of
apprehension is the “first fruites of the Spirit” on the earth. “The object of both these
joyes,” Balcanquhall continues, “is the same, God and heavenly things; but our joy here,
ariseth from our being united to these objects by hope and faith: but our joy hence, shall
arise from our actuall being united to them, by vision, comprehension, and fruition.”237
Act V of The Winter’s Tale is the joyful harvest of a play sown in sorrow. Yet the
reaping of joy has its own process, akin to Balcanquhall’s description of the joyful
harvest and following the Christian theodicy from sorrow to joy. After the audience has
been conditioned in external mirth in Act IV, given to physical manifestations of gladness
in song, dancing, and, for the audience, laughing, the emotional, internal narrative still
has not resolved itself. On the contrary, the wordly joy of Act IV has been a distraction
from the heavier things that truly need resolving—things that, when resolved, promise a
joy that will make the previously experienced lesser joy pale in comparison. The first line
of Act V, in which Cleomenes tells Leontes “Sir, you have done enough, and have
performed/ A saintlike sorrow,” is an immediate indicator what kind of emotional
236 Walter Balcanquhall, A Sermons Preached on St. Maries Spittle on Munday in Easter
Week, (London: 1623), 78.
237 Balcanquhall, A Sermons Preached on St. Maries Spittle on Munday in Easter Week,
79.
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narrative we have returned to once we get back to Sicily. The audience is immediately
reminded of the grave sorrow still lingering, yet the line simultaneously also puts that
sorrow in the immediate past, allowing the reaping of joy to really become the
inevitability.
But this joy is only gradually given to Leontes, as it is to the audience, in three
distinct parts that each successively build up to the fullness of its final joy. At each
successive moment, the word “joy” becomes a conspicuous marker of this emotional
progression, both marking the associated affection for the audience and crafting the
audience’s anticipation of witnessing that joy on stage. The first moment comes when
Paulina assures Leontes, after toying with his sustained remorse, that he will marry again.
“She shall not be young,” Paulina explains about the new bride,
As was your former, but she shall be such
As walked your first queen’s ghost, it should take joy
To see her in your arms. (5.1.78-81).
The usage of “joy” is curious here: as a line’s end, “joy” is heavily emphasized, but its
referent is hidden—who should “take joy” in the new wife of Leontes? Whether “joy” is
taken by Leontes himself, Paulina, or whoever else is beside the point; “to see” the
couple together again will “take joy,” give joy, induce joy, to whoever may see the two
together. The line is anticipatory: joy is promised, but for whom remains open, and the
actual resolution is not yet known. This joy is a joy of hopeful anticipation, and the
passive construction suggests that the receiver of joy could be any or all of the characters,
but also the audience itself. The audience knows here that joy will be revealed but does
not yet know how, and that anticipation is a joy in itself, the joy approximate to
“gleaning” before the harvest.
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The second moment of joy in Act V is more explicit in its articulations, yet it is
still not witnessed visually by the audience. Leontes’s reunion and recognition of Perdita
is described by the “Third Gentlemen,” who seems particularly sensitive to the way “joy”
operates in what he had just witnessed. The description of that reunion is marked by four
different uses of the word joy, culminating in tears that are shed equally for the joy of
reunion as for the sorrow of Leontes’s continued separation from Hermione. “Did you see
the meeting of the two kings,” the Third Gentleman asks. “No,” replies the Second,
Then have you lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of.
There might you have beheld one joy crown another, so and in such
manner that it seemed Sorrow wept to take leave of them, for their joy
waded in tears. There was casting up of eyes, holding up of hands, with
countenance of such distraction that they were to be known by garment,
not by favor. Our king, being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his
found daughter, as if that joy were now become a loss, cries ‘O, thy
mother, thy mother!’” then asks Bohemia forgiveness; then embraces his
son-in-law (5.2.53-55).
The emphasis is immediately on witnessing. What the Third Gentleman sees “cannot be
spoken of,” a phrase adhering to the common descriptions of joy, although he proceeds to
give a fairly verbose description of it. In so describing, the Third Gentlemen only allows
his audience, the other gentlemen, and the audience, a vocal remainder of that joy, where
“one joy crown another,” the same way many joys build to climax.
The scene being described by the Third Gentleman, though, is not entirely free of
sorrow, and the juxtaposition of sorrow and joy becomes the emotional reminder of the
loss effected by Leontes’s earlier joylessness (“as if that joy were now become a
loss”).238 The loss at the climax of joy repeats itself as the Third Gentleman describes
238 I like the way Nietzsche describes this sense: “At the very climax of joy there sounds
a cry of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth
of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 2.
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Paulina’s own reaction upon hearing the truth: “But oh, the noble combat that twixt joy
and sorrow was fought in Paulina! She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband,
another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled” (5.2.54-57). Gataker claims that tears of joy
and sorrow are often indistinguishable, and “so true joy may well stand with some grief. .
. . Yea, though it may seeme strange, yet it is questionlesse true, the greater griefe
sometime the greater joy; and the greater joy, the greater grief.”239 The conflation of the
affections make this a pivotal moment in the play, during which the transfer from godly
sorrow to true joy begins, yet it holds back the full joy of the scene itself, opting for
description over representation.
Interestingly, the Third Gentleman describes the joy in physical terms, again
emphasizing what one can see in the countenances of the participants, an outward joy. It
might be helpful, though, to further understand the religious notion of the “outward sign”
of joy, which is not only loud laughter and sin. Lancelot Andrewes claims that some joy
allows for a “triplicity of joy” that grants not only the “desire of the heart, “ but also the
“request of the lips, and at the same time granting something beyond what was desired in
the heart nor uttered.” In the case of this kind of “tripartite joy,” manifestations might
flow out so that “the voice of joy and gladness, that it may be heard to the ear; if there be
not the habit, gesture, and other signs of it, to be seen to the eye, that it may give
evidence to both senses.”240 The Third Gentlemen’s speech gives evidence to “both
senses,” and emphasizes the unique power of joy to do create this effect. He begins his
description with sight (“you lost a sight which was to be seen”) and ends his description
239 Gataker, 57-58.
240 Lancelot Andrewes Sermons, ed. G.M. Story, Vol 4, (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 121.
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with a comment that he has “never heard of such another encounter, which lames report
to follow it and undoes description to do it.” The Third Gentlemen’s emphasis on the
inability to adequately describe the joy experienced both by the characters and him, as the
audience, conditions the audience in the theater to anticipate a similar scene that might
defy description. The Third Gentlemen’s description of the reunion scene articulates a joy
and loss that has yet to be witnessed by the audience, and in so doing conditions the
audience with the proper modes of affection when that moment comes. As the audience
listens to provocative descriptions of weeping, “casting up of eyes,” “cries,” “one eye
declined . . . another elevated,” the anticipation of emotional outbreak is given
imaginative and verbal proximity. The Third Gentlemen positions himself as part of the
audience privy to the scene of joy, and his own profound reaction articulates what might
happen to the audience when Hermione is revealed to be alive.
When Paulina draws the curtain to the statue of Hermione, Leontes’s speech is
paralyzed, and Paulina notes that “I like your silence. It the more shows off your wonder”
(V.3.24-25). The line nicely echoes Claudio’s “Silence is the perfectest herald of joy”
(II.1.384) in Much Ado about Nothing, in which Claudio also reunites with his betrothed
after the error of jealousy, and it exemplifies the commonplace that labels unspeakability
as the greatest marker of joy’s fullness. Innumerable sermons on “true joy” in the early
seventeenth century all point back to 1 Peter 1:8, proclaiming that upon believing God
“ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”241 This moment, indeed, is the first
241 To cite the many sermons that repeatedly use the phrase would be unwieldy, but
those sermons often cite different variation for the cause of “joy unspeakable,” such as belief,
grace, God’s love, the church, Resurrection, Atonement, and so on.
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moment (of several) that would literalize the Third Gentlemen’s identification of a
“scene, which cannot be spoken of.” It is wondrous, bedecked by silence.
The silent joy of the reunion scene between Leontes and Hermione eventually
does get a kind of articulation, though. Immediately following Leontes’s silent reaction,
Paulina asks him to speak, but all that can come out of his mouth are words of sorrow.
Camillo chides Leontes for this by observing that Leontes’s language and conscience had
been so “laid on” by sorrow for sixteen years that he cannot articulate any joy still.
Camillo’s observation is especially poignant for the emotional tenor of the scene when he
mentions that “Scarce any joy/ Did ever so long live; no sorrow/ But killed itself much
sooner” (60-63). This particular joy is bound by sorrow and is, perhaps, ephemeral, but
this is precisely why Leontes cannot bear it, and also why the final scene is so
exhilarating for the audience: each successive joy is ephemeral, it kills itself with the
memory of Leontes’s misdeeds, but each successive joy also builds towards climactic
joy. The joy of the act comes in fits and bursts, conditioning the senses to receive the full
joy that is yet to come.
When Paulina threatens to close the curtain for fear of confusing Leontes’s senses
even more, Leontes responds that his passions will settle themselves with time. But I am
not sure Leontes wants to settle his passionate response to what he sees—his sorrow is
changing into something else. “No settled senses of the world can match,” he says, “The
pleasure of that madness. Let’t alone.” (90-91). The “pleasure” that comes from his
emotional frenzy is a marker of his emotions changing—his “affliction has a taste as
sweet/As any cordial comfort” (95-96). Leontes seems to be having trouble describing
exactly what he is feeling: “pleasure,” “madness,” “affliction,” “sweet,” and “comfort”
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all come within six lines of each other. What emotional state includes pleasure, madness,
affliction, but settles into sweetness and comfort? Or rather, what emotional state
performs all of those affections simultaneously? I interject: witnessing, experiencing, this
moment in The Winter’s Tale seems to me to be the only way to adequately approach a
formal description of this scene’s emotional payoff. Perhaps I doth sentimentalize too
much, but the definition of joy can only be approached through experience, which is
precisely how Shakespeare’s romance operates: the joy of Hermione’s descent is bound
in the narrative that comes before it, the experience of joy is predicated on the experience
of emotional progress.
This moment in The Winter’s Tale is manifestly emotional, and the basis of those
emotions is hotly contested. Religious joy centers itself through an object. For Catholics
and Jesuits, those objects have real power in their materiality as icon, statue, church,
saint, Eucharist. For Protestants, the object of joy remains in the abstract: the Word,
grace, sanctification, experience. Hermione, standing as an icon while Leontes emotes
and Perdita kneels, seems to be the prototypical Jesuit sainted Lady. But she’s not. She is
real. Hermione lives—the object of joy is a living person, with experience, love, and life.
Hermione’s statue, probably resembling the image of the Virgin, seems to fit into the
Jesuit-inflected theology of emotive images. But Hermione is no image, no object, no
material: she is human, and always has been.242 The “wonder” comes not from the
242 Huston Diehl understands this scene similarly: “The revelation that Hermione is alive
and has performed the statue naturalizes a work of art that initially appeared to be magical, but it
is a mistake, I think, to equate naturalization with demystification.” There is marvel, Diehl
explains, in the human self, and that alone is worth a sense of joy. “Strike All that Look Upon
With Marvel”: in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early
Modern English Stage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 28.
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miraculous but from the living, breathing Hermione, as physically alive as she has always
been. Yet her awakening in the scene is somewhat spiritual, and it has the effect of
awakening Leontes to the reception of grace. Richard Hooker, in his Discourse of
Justification, describes the “disposition” of the Godly person who faithfully waits for
grace to descent, for reunion to happen spiritually: “They seem stone-dead, who
notwithstanding are alive unto God in Christ.”243 Hermione has only appeared “stonedead” but her descent from the stand “awakens” “all that look upon with marvel.” The
actions of the play are not miraculous but theatrical representations of spiritual
experiences, marvels in themselves, the kind of typological moments that represents the
grace of God descending onto the sorrowful believer. Hermione’s descent is not
anagogical towards resurrection itself but rather a practical indicator of the grace that can
come as a free gift, always available but waiting for the right time to descend. When
Paulina says that “Were [this scene] but told you, it should be hooted at/ Like an old
tale,” she recognizes the tension that this scene might cause someone who denies the
miraculous as “popish” (after all, William Crashaw had just published a parody refuting
the miraculous Lady in The Jesuits’ Gospel).244 But Hermione herself suggests she has
“preserved” her life. The moment, finally, is the culmination of the plot, a story sown in
sorrow but reaped in joy, the Protestant notion of joyful experience through emotional
243 Richard Hooker, “Discourse of Justification,” in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
(New York: E.P. Dutton & co, 1907), 3:517
244 William Crashaw, The Jesuites Gospel (London: Printed by E.A. for Leonard Becket,
1610).
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progress. Here is the joy of unexpected grace, the “joy [that] ariseth from our being
united to these objects by hope and faith: . . . by vision, comprehension, and fruition.”245
“Partake to everyone”: The Collective Joy of Emotional
Payoff and Religious Devotion
As the scene progresses and Hermione comes to life, Leontes’s sense of joy also
settles itself into life, and eventually he uses it as an impetus to give the “joy” to others,
commanding that Paulina herself join with Camillo in marriage. The progression from
hints of joy among extreme sorrow at the mimetic draw of the statue to full joy in the
instance of life and reunion acts as a microcosm for the emotional progress of the scene
itself. Even moreso, the scene uses the delay strategy, in which the audience waits and
anticipates as Paulina repeatedly stalls the statue from reanimating. As the audience
stares at the statue, aware of its possible reanimation, the anticipation of joy builds, but
time extends it into an analogous realm of long sorrow and extended pain. The joy will be
that much greater once the wait is over.
The audience has already been conditioned to participate in the joy of the reunion
scene, particularly during the Gentlemens’ reaction to the parallel scene earlier in the act.
The Gentlemen, as I discuss above, describe the reunion with an emphasis on the joy felt
and experienced by witnesses. Eventually, the First Gentlemen says, perhaps
metatheatrically, that “The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and
princes, for by such was it acted” (5.2.60-61) to which the Third Gentlemen replies that
“Who was the most marble there changed color; some swooned, all sorrowed. If all the
245 Balcanquhall, 79
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world could have seen’t, the woe had been universal.” (5.2.68-70). The Third
Gentlemen’s suggestion that had all seen it, the emotional response would have been
“universal” remains the rhetorical affect of the play. In the final scene, “all the world,” or
at least everyone in the audience, did see it, and I suspect that the joy would be
“universal” at this moment as well. Paulina, when she urges all to not spoil “your joys,”
invites the audience to universally “partake” in the emotional resonance of what is being
witnessed, like a common invitation to rejoice.
But how would the audience react to such an invitation? Perhaps with reverential
silence; after all, silence remains the perfect herald of joy. But at this moment in the play,
the end, the audience does react audibly without speaking: they clap. Applause would
have been the appropriate expression of joy in this moment, and the gesture of applause
would have a kind of joyful and sacred significance. Andrew Gurr claims that clapping
became the norm once the passing of the hat began to wane in the mid-sixteenth century.
Clapping at performances came into more public fashion about the same time that
common prayer was established as the religious practice of England, and both
“performance” modes would have been met with a similar gesture. 246 John Bulwer
describes clapping as appropriate “when [an audience] cannot contain their joy in silence
. . . there is nothing more common with them than by clapping their hands to signify their
exceeding joy and gladness of heart.”247 Ramie Targoff associates applause with the
246 Andrew Gurr Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004),11-12
247 John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand, and Chironomia: or
the Art of Manual Rhetoric; ed. James W. Cleary (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1974), 34.
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liturgical “amen” as a vocal utterance of approval and consent, and the use of clapping in
the Renaissance playhouse becomes analogous to a vocal expression of consent. Bulwer’s
emphasis, though, is on silence and joy, and clapping becomes the joyful expression
without like “relation.” That is, it is a non-verbal sign without utterance nor narrative to
ground it in time. The silence and applause at the end of a play like The Winter’s Tale is
the affirmation of the timeless, heavenly sense of joy without the binding and earthly
nature of time. Yet that clapping, as Targoff suggests, implies consent, approval of what
has come before as well as an emotional answer to the sacred nature of the performance
witnessed, whether it was a play, sermon, or ordinance.248 It may take too much to
assume that an early modern audience would be enthusiastically applauding The Winter’s
Tale without real records to show it, but the response would have been a standard joyful
consent.249 When Paulina exhorts the players and the audience to “Go together/ You
precious winners all. Your exultation/ Partake to everyone,” the audience’s “exultation,”
248 Ramie Targoff, “’Dirty Amens’: Devotion, Applause, and Consent in Richard III,”
Renaissance Drama 31 (2002): 61-84.
249 In a reading of the The Winter’s Tale as a late iteration of the medieval Resurrection
Drama, Karen Sawyer Marsalek sees the play as a particularly Reformist version of the genre.
The Resurrection Drama, Marsalek claims, following Alexandra Johnston’s work on the topic, is
associated with liturgical performances, and the statue scene would have been used as a way to
allow the audience (or parish) to experience the joy of spiritual uplift: “The play’s cycle of
mourning to reconciliation, winter and spring, also parallels the structure of the church calendar,
where a vigil separates Good Friday observances from the joyous performances of Easter week.”
She goes on to mention that “at least one production of The Winter’s Tale capitalized on this
liturgical aptness, for the King’s Men presented it at court on Easter Tuesday, 1618.” (Karen
Sawyer Marsalek, “Awake your faith’: English Resurrection Drama and The Winter’s Tale” in
Bring furth the pageants’: Essays in Early English Drama presented to Alexandra F. Johnson,
271. The liturgical significance of the last moment of joy presents itself when Paulina invites the
audience to “partake” in the “exultation” of common worship.
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both an expressive term of joy and a religious term of salvation, would likely be a standin for the religious sense of joyful wonder.250
Interpretation over emotional affect is the dominant academic mode, but it does
not need to be, especially as we recognize joy and sorrow as having their own living
history that can tell us as much about a work of literature or drama as it can about its
audience. The identification of joy, both now and in early modern England, as a
biological, historical, culturally powerful emotion might help us understand the nature of
art, religion, belief, and wonder. Charles Altieri’s critique of Cavell, cited above,
specifically locates Cavell’s interpretive problems with his misreading of the statue
scene, which does not “account for the way the statue confers a kind of blessedness and
rapture on all concerned parties”251 As the statue begins to move, the audience is moved,
and that movement becomes a figure for emotional identification that spreads joy like
sense made warm. The audience, at any rate, does not need to simply trust its emotions
but can also trust the physical reaction of perfect joy. The sensation, by its emotive and
physical conjunction, of seeing Hermione brought back to life is just as physically real as
Leontes’s earlier tremor cordis. In an unpublished paper given at the 2010 Shakespeare
Association Conference in Chicago, Michael Witmore claims that Leontes’s emotional
sense is awakened alongside his physical sense: “He names the sight, sound, touch
(“she’s warm”) and even taste (“an art as lawful as eating”). Tears here, if they come, are
250 It might be useful to reference Aquinas’s usage of assentire for “to rejoice in” was
closely related to assensio, or “applause.” Assentire also suggested religious recognition of truth.
The three meanings in the Latin roots point towards what I believe is happening at the end of The
Winter’s Tale. See Summa Theologiae 2.2.4.5, as translated in Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and
Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 87.
251 Altieri, 270
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not simply an expression of joy, but the pluperfect trace of sensation itself—a having felt
of one’s own feelings.”252 The tears, the happy tears, are the physical embodiment of
silent joy, and the clapping, always done communally, is the audible sound of ineffable
joy.
Let us return to the moment in which Leontes is first introduced to the statue,
before he knows of its true nature. As I cited at the beginning of this chapter, Camillo
takes grave note of Leontes’s forceful emotional response to the statue, a response that
completely overwhelms the appreciation of its aesthetic qualities. Leontes’s reaction is
one of sorrow, which Camillo emphasizes, whereas it should be joy in the beauty of the
thing itself. At any rate, Leontes cannot see the aesthetic nature of the statue through his
emotionally-strewn tears, but his reaction is ever the more powerful for it. Nevertheless,
Leontes’s reaction is more accurate than we suspect; after all, he is looking at his wife,
not an aesthetic object, and an emotional outpouring would seem to be the only
appropriate response, even if he doesn’t know it yet. What if the audience’s response to
the end of the play functions inversely but with the same result? To suspect that our
overwhelming emotional response, probably of joy, to the final scene of reconciliation is
not entirely accurate is to not see the truth behind the aesthetic object. The living,
breathing thing behind the mimetic object of the play is what sets us clapping, crying,
elevated. Perhaps the most appropriate response is our initial intuitive emotion that sees
more than the beauty of the thing itself; like Leontes, we may not totally understand what
252 Michael Witmore, unpublished talk at SAA 2010
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we are looking at, but we do know how we feel, which might finally give us the answer.
The big reveal at the end of The Winter’s Tale is the revelation of our own joy.253
In the last line of the play, Leontes speaks metatheatrically, mentioning that each
character and player will “answer to his part/ Performed in this wide gap of time since
first/ We were dissevered.” Sorrow as separation, characters “dissevered,” players will
“answer to his part”: the lines reflect back on the Calvinist narrative that has eventually
brought this joy. However, paradoxically, the present joy of Leontes, and the audience, is
also independent: the play itself has been performed in a gap of time, a moment
disembodied or “dissevered” from normal earthly experience. Joy has had its story, its
plot, but now that it is experienced, it moves into its own realm, outside horizontal, linear
time and into vertical time, the time of climax, wonder, jouissance, disseverence. Once
religious joy is experienced, there is no time, no progress, no history, only emotional
outflow, upward, outward, and inward. This joy is the joy of elevation, stemming from a
linear story of mourning to joy but immediately rising up beyond the state of narrative
grounding. The play has performed a story of joy and left the audience in a state of joyful
wonder, contemplating the timeless nature of reconciliation, regeneration, and, most of
all, the emotional payoff that comes with an awakening of faith.
253 I will liken this to the Russ McDonald observation that “much of the poetic language
is organized periodically: convoluted sentences of difficult speeches become coherent and
meaningful only in their final clauses.” “Poetry and Plot in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 36 (Fall 1985): 315.
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CONCLUSION
THE LIMITS OF REJOICING
I began this dissertation with the shift from the material object of joy—a relic, an
image, a body—to the articulation of a pre-scripted joy that then attempts to unite an
ineffable feeling to a fallen language. Reading the Psalms as the scripted object of joy
emphasizes how joy and “art” can be fused into a new language of poetics. Seeing the
public expression of common joy unable to fulfill the emotional longing of Spenser’s
sanctioned lover creates an urge to re-sacralize poetic language. Chronicling a Puritan’s
daily writing as an attempt to turn deep melancholy into settled joy provides a template
for a new narrative of emotional self-creation. And, finally, witnessing the way
joylessness can move through a sanctifying process into a holy order of joy illustrates the
ways in which the movement from sorrow to joy had become a part of secular
storytelling at its most performative. To end this dissertation with The Winter’s Tale is to
suggest that there is a tale to joy, to pin a pun on the proverbial donkey, no matter how
blindly I go about it. But the tale of joy can end in many different places or times. Of
course, all dissertations have to end somewhere, and I have chosen to end with one of my
favorite endings, a reunification of penitent husband with a (perhaps) forgiving spouse,
and a return to corporeality. The curtain rises to Hermione’s body, and joy, on the part of
Leontes, is presumably seen but not heard (“I like your silence”). The bodies remain,
testament to a kind of joy that The Winter’s Tale has been both suspicious about and
celebratory of, that of clear embodied joy, albeit with a gravity of holy union at its center.
The body can be the vehicle of a carefully sanctified joy but joy cannot the vehicle of the
body, which would lead to a more overt bodily ecstasy, a loss of bodily control into pure
expression without the holy object, the Word, as its center.
This, indeed, is a return to a pre-sixteenth century corporeal joy and the setting off
of another narrative of joy, one that sees performance as clear evidence of emotional
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sanctification and justification. And that is precisely why I have chosen to end my
dissertation there—the seventeenth-century understanding of religious joy branches in so
many directions that rejoicing as a verbal script becomes only a small part of the
boisterous displays of joy and the severe suspicion of the same. I have tried to locate a
few crucial texts, both religious and secular, that illustrate the ways in which the
expression and the feeling of religious joy undergo a great change during the late
Reformation in England. This change could be approached in a number of ways—from
sacrament to ordinance, from material to verbal, from outward to inward, from
unbounded to strict—but the larger point is that the literary endeavors of poets, parsons,
and playwrights had to grapple with a shifting concept of how appropriate rejoicing
looks, sounds, and ultimately feels.
Negotiating true joy, false joy, mirth, gladness, pleasure, and excess became the
primary task of rejoicing, and the bounds placed upon joyful expression—scriptural,
careful, restrained, and repetitious—created the necessity of a new articulation. Edward
Reynolds opens his 1655 sermon on the ubiquitous Philippians 4:4 (“Rejoice in the Lord
alway; and again I say, rejoice.”) with this particular tension:
There is nothing which the hearts of Believers doe either more
willingly hear, or more difficultly observe, then those precepts
which invite them unto joy and gladness, they being on the one
hand so suitable to the natural desires, and yet withal on the other
so dissonant to the miserable condition of sinful man. Had our
Apostle called on the blessed Angles to rejoice, who have neither
sin, nor sorrow, nor fear, nor sufferings, nor enemies to annoy
them, it might have seemed for more congruous: But what is it less
then a Paradox to perswade poor creatures, loaded with guilt,
defiled with corruption, cloathed with infirmities, assaulted with
temptations, hated, persecuted, afflicted by Satan and the world,
compassed about with dangers and sorrows, born to trouble, as the
sparks fly upward, that notwithstanding all this, they may rejoice,
and rejoice alway?254
254 Edward Reynolds, Joy in the Lord: Opened in a Sermon Preached at Paul’s, May 6.
London: Printed by Tho. Newcomb, 1655. 1-2.
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The injunction to rejoice that believers “so willingly hear” is the same injunction that is
so difficult to observe. Reynolds sees this as a “Paradox” to be reconciled through
understanding that the object of a believer’s joy can only be Jesus Christ, so that any
difficulty in observing the commandment to rejoice ought to be eased by the practice of
redirecting all joy in earthly treasures towards Christ. After all, rejoicing is a
commandment, and must be observed in order to allow sanctification. Again, this
paradox, says Reynolds, can allow us to reframe our rejoicing by locating all objects of
joy within Christ. “Do we delight in pleasure?” he asks,
Behold, the rivers of pleasure that never dry, pleasures
forevermore that never vanish . . . Do we delight in beauty? He is
fairer then the children of men. In sweet odours? All his garments
smell of myrrh, alloes and cassia, he is perfumed with all the
spices of the Merchant. . . . . In musick or elegant orations? His
mouth is most sweet altogether lovely, grace is poured into his lips.
. . . In him the fullness of all delectable things; and that which
makes all the more delightful, it is bonum parabile, though so
superlatively precious, yet not to be purchased at a dear rate, set
before us, offered unto us. . . Well might the Psalmist bid us
rejoyce, and exceedingly rejoyce, Well might the Prophet bid us
sing, and shout, and rejoyce, and be glad with all the heart. Well
might the Apostle call it a joy unspeakable, and full of glory.255
Reynolds’s series of questions are essentially the same questions asked by the writers of
both secular and religious texts: What does it mean to take joy in the earthly? How does
that joy figure into the joy commanded in scripture? Reynolds answers by allowing the
figure of Christ to subsume all earthly joys into Himself. John Donne answers these by
claiming that joy and art form a heavenly joy that can become foreknowledge, or even
practice, for a final glorified joy. Mary Sidney makes poetic form the ground on which
that religious joy stands, and rejoicing as the measure of true joyful feeling, as does
Spenser, but the Epithalamion adds to it the desire to locate that heavenly joy within the
private moments of earthly love, the ineffable delights of consecrated passion. Richard
255 Reynolds, 32-33.
210
Rogers sees earthly record, the writing of the self, as the means to a new understanding of
joy in existence, making a theodicy out of the grief of his own life. And, finally, The
Winter’s Tale makes that joy into closure, a teleological goal of sanctified repentance,
patience, and performance.
That joy, which the “Apostle” calls a “joy unspeakable,” is only unspeakable in
its purely heavenly form. Once Puritan divines, Reformed preachers, and poets found the
analogues to that unspeakable joy in “art,” in the repetition of the Psalms, in consecrated
love and sex, in self-examination, and in tragicomic resolution, the unspeakable joy of
heaven became articulated to elevate a fallen language and to give language to the
ineffable. When Lancelot Andrewes exclaims that the best way to speak joy is to exclaim
“O Quam!” he allows a verbal expression without its own semiotic signification to be a
placeholder for an ineffable feeling, but that placeholder simultaneously becomes joy
itself—from then on, “O Quam!” can arouse the faculties. If the injunction is to “rejoice
always, again I say rejoice,” the word “rejoice,” repeated like the shout of “Alleluia”
becomes the marker of joy, and joy becomes speakable in its second iteration: “Rejoice
by saying ‘Rejoice!’” Speakable joy is precisely the innovation of the writers I have
analyzed in this dissertation: each has found a manner in which the unspeakable may be
given to speakability, and as a result, the heavens can be rearticulated in earthly forms.
Joy, the union of subject and beloved object, ultimately becomes the union of feeling and
expression by using the genre innovations of Renaissance writing, performance, poetry,
and praise.
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