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Transmission and Transgression

 | 
Sophie Chiari
, 
Hélène Palma

Part III. Travelling and Circulation

Chapter 7. Transgression in Potentia

Translatio and Imitatio in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt

William T. Rossiter

Résumé

This chapter examines the systematic ways in which Thomas Wyatt creates the potential for what can be termed a transgressive hermeneutics of his translations, and of his poetics more generally. The chapter refutes the political allegoresis of Wyatt’s poems by previous critics by adopting the Aristotelian principle of potentiality and actuality as a model whereby we, the readers, are made responsible for the act of transgression, not Wyatt himself—that is, we actualize the transgression for which Wyatt provides the potential. This semantic responsibility is illustrated by Wyatt’s statement in his 1541 Defence that “yt is a smale thynge in alteringe of one syllable ether with penne or worde that may mayk in the conceavinge of the truthe myche matter or error” and that “No man can beleve you that I mente yt as you constere yt, or that I spake yt as you alledge yt.” As part of this examination, the chapter discusses how Wyatt adapts the late medieval triangulated form of translatio to his own methods of post-Petrarchan imitatio.

Texte intégral

  • 1 I am not alluding here to the new historicist view of the text as a Foucauldian discursive matrix, (...)
  • 2 On the interaction between the erotic and the political in late medieval and early modern courtly v (...)
  • 3 For all of Wyatt’s poems I have referred to Muir and Thomson (1969), hereafter MT, and the roman nu (...)

1The poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt is situated—ontologically, historiographically, aesthetically—within and across a plurality of faultlines.1 His poetry transgresses the boundaries which traditionally separate the late medieval from the early modern, translatio from imitatio, the erotic from the political, and the private from the public.2 Translation, for Wyatt, is a means of both self-expression and self-concealment, a means of both declaring his separateness from the dowblenes of court— “I cannot speke and lok lyke a saynct, / Vse wyles for witt and make deceyt a pleasure” (MT, CV. 31-2)—and a means of displaying his mastery of it.3 His poems, in their original form, were transmitted via a select group of courtiers as part of a public self-fashioning, whilst at the same time emphasizing the ostensible inwardness and isolation of the speaking voice. It is these qualities which give Wyatt’s poetry its defining characteristic, what Stephen Greenblatt terms Wyatt’s “deniability” (1980, 121). This concept of deniability is best explained by Wyatt himself, who illustrates it in his 1541 Defence “To the Iudges after the Indictement and the evidence,” composed when he was charged with transgressing the 1534 Treason Act (the “lawe of words”), and as such facing execution:

  • 4 Wyatt was accused by Bishop Bonner and Dr Heynes of communicating with a known traitor (Reginald Po (...)

Reherse here the lawe of wordes. Declare, my lords, I beseke you, the meaninge thereof […] yt is a smale thynge in alteringe of one syllable ether with penne or worde that may mayk in the conceavinge of the truthe myche matter or error. For in thys thynge ‘I fere’, or ‘I truste’, semethe but one smale syllable chaynged, and yet it makethe a great dyfferaunce, yea and the settinge of the wordes one in an others place may mayke greate dyfferaunce, tho were the wordes all one […] I besyche you therfore examen the matter vnder this sorte. Confere theire [Wyatt’s accusers] severall sayings togyther, confer th’ examinations vpone the same matter and I dare warrante ye shall fynde mysreportinge and mysvnderstandinge. […] But bringe me my garment as yt was. Yf I saide anye lyke thynge, reherse my tale, as I saide yt. No man can beleve you that I mente yt as you constere yt, or that I spake yt as you alledge yt, or that I vnderstonde Inglyshe so evell to speak so owte of purpo-se (Muir 1963, 196-99).4

  • 5 I have discussed the dynamics of intentio elsewhere, see Rossiter and Brie (2010, 10-13).
    Boccaccio’ (...)

Wyatt’s use of translation enables him to challenge his readers with the position that “No man can beleve you that I mente yt as you constere yt,” thereby denying semantic responsibility to the reader and drawing upon the medieval hermeneutic concept of intentio auctoris, which for Wyatt supersedes intentio lectoris.5 Indeed, Wyattic “dyfferaunce” may be seen to be predicated upon the same semiotic slippage which characterizes Derridean différance, whereby “fere” is elided with “truste,” the difference being that for Wyatt there is a transcendental signifier— “truthe”—which arrests, or seeks to arrest, semantic slippage. There is an obvious dowblenes in operation here: Wyatt both depends upon and denies semantic instability. He insists upon an indisputable truth but only insofar as it serves his purpose, that is, insofar as truth is with him, not with the misinterpreter of his words. Yet his words inevitably elicit misinterpretation, as Wyatt himself admits:

Me list no more to sing
Of love nor of suche thing,
How sore that yt me wring;
For what I song or spake
Men dede my songis mistake.

My songes ware to defuse, Theye made folk to muse [...]

  • 6 For a similarly faux-valedictory poem see “Ffarewell Love.” The valediction of love and desire is o (...)

Yf this be undre miste,
And not well playnlye wyste,
Vndrestonde me who lyste;
For I reke not a bene,
I wott what I do mene.
(MT, CCX. 1-7, 40ff.)6

  • 7 Stamatakis provides a brief but useful conspectus of the Devonshire MS (2012: 216-7). I also recomm (...)

This poem, which appears in the multi-authored, frequently circulated Devonshire MS, is an example of Wyatt’s mastery at the courtly game of self-presentation.7 It is light-hearted and frivolous, but light-heartedness and frivolity are never what they seem—this poem is an example of Castiglione’s sprezzatura. Wyatt—if indeed he is the author of the poem—clearly does “wott [know] what I do mene,” a fact which is confirmed by the existence of the poem in the first instance. Against such a poem we might place the sonnet “Eche man me telleth” (MT, X):

Eche man me telleth I chaunge moost my devise
And on my faith me thinck it goode reason
To chaunge propose like after the season,
Ffor in every cas to kepe still oon gyse
Ys mytt for theim that would be taken wyse,
And I ame not of suche maner condition,
But treted after a dyvers fasshion,
And thereupon my dyvernes doeth rise.
But you that blame this dyvernes moost,
Chaunge you no more, but still after oon rate
Trete ye me well, and kepe ye in the same state;
And while with me doeth dwell this weried goost,
My word nor I shall not be variable,
But alwaies oon, your owne boeth firme and stable.

  • 8 Wyatt here echoes Chaucer’s invective against shifting positions in the Clerk’s Tale: “O stormy pep (...)

Wyatt’s speaker’s words are thus “to defuse” to be “plainlye wyste,” which the speaker ironically claims is the fault of the reader or audience, whilst being clearly aware of the fundamental ambiguity and crypticism of his “songes” and his “devise.” At the same time the Wyattic courtier admits that he will “change propose like after the season” because others treat him “after a dyvers fasshion / And thereupon my dyvernes doeth arise”; dowblenes is both a game and a necessity of realpolitik, but the ideal, which is rendered forever beyond reach by the courtly environment, is truth and honesty, as Wyatt wrote to his son before he left for his extended Imperial embassy in 1537: “I haue nothing to crye and cal apon you for but honestye, honestye. It may be diuersly named, but it alway tendith to one end. [...] if you wil seme honist, be honist, or else seame as you are” (Muir 1963, 41-42). Wyatt’s speaker (s) thus claim “dyvernes” (diversity, plurality or mutability) as a self-defence which would be forsaken were “Eche man” to do the same, and do so first— “Chaunge you no more” and then “My word nor I shall not be variable”—whilst claiming that minor divergence, such as the differentiation between “I fere” and “I truste” “maketh a great dyfferaunce,” despite his view that a quality such as honesty or truth “may be diuersly named, but it alway tendith to one end.” When reading Wyatt’s poetry we are then faced with a plurality of perspectives upon the nature of truth, meaning and divergence, perspectives which are frequently, and one suspects deliberately, contradictory, indeed necessarily contradictory due to the labile existence of the early modern courtier—as the whims, desires and policies of the ruler shift, so must the practices and discourses of the courtier change “after the season.”8 With this understanding of Wyatt’s dowblenes and dyvernes established, we can proceed to the central thesis of this article, which is that transgression exists within Wyatt’s translations in potentia only. Wyatt’s transgression is never explicit, always beyond heuristic verification and obscured by the plurality of positions he adopts within his work, despite giving his readers the appearance of one who is “both ferme and stable,” and abused by a culture of duplicity of which his speaker is in fact a master. Despite our attempts to prove Wyatt’s poems as commentaries upon Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell and other members of the court, we repeatedly are rebutted by the statement from the Defence: “No man can beleve you that I mente yt as you constere yt, or that I spake yt as you alledge yt, or that I vnderstonde Inglyshe so evell to speak so owte of purpose.”

  • 9 Potentia and actus are the medieval scholastic equivalents of Aristotle’s energeia/entelechia (actu (...)

It is necessary to admit here that the meaning of all poetry is necessarily heuristic and in potentia, being contingent upon the reader’s Rezeptionästhetik as it works upon and within the text. I am not claiming such a generic potentiality for Wyatt’s poetry, which would be a somewhat impotent thesis, but something more deliberate. What is intended by the pseudo-Aristotelian term (in potentia) is Wyatt’s careful provision of allusions, suggestions and deictic ambiguities which together constitute a semantic gestalt that might be thought of as transgressive. However, it is the reader who converts potentia to actus by amalgamating these constituents into that transgressive Gestalt, which ultimately is the intentio lectoris, and which can—equally potentially— be denied by the assertion and supersession of the intentio auctoris.9

  • 10 I have discussed “Who so list” and its related subtexts elsewhere in detail (Rossiter 2009).
  • 11 Greene discusses Wyatt’s “willed asceticism of the poetic word” (1982, 247).

Indeed, despite the attempts of generations of critics, it must be said from the outset that Wyatt’s translations are not allegories to be deciphered. Whilst Wyatt’s poems owe a great deal to the medieval tradition (see for example Peterson 1967 and Cooper 1982), one mode which he does not favour is political allegory—one thinks of the references to John of Gaunt in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, or the allegory of the future Queen Anne’s suitors in his Parlement of Fowles. Wyatt’s political experiences shape, inform and determine the content and choice of his translations, certainly, but those translations do not equate to his experience. The closest Wyatt comes to the medieval allegorical mode is his adaptation of Petrarch’s “Una candida cerva” (RVF 190) as “Whoso list to hount” (MT, VII), which innumerable critics have read, understandably, as an allegory of the alleged love triangle between Wyatt, Anne and Henry.10 However, Wyatt’s adaptation strips away the Italian poem’s dense allegoria in an act of poetic kenosis, leaving it emptied and bare.11 The pleasure for Wyatt and his audience again lies in the possibility of the suggestion, not in a code to be deciphered. We may choose to interpret the hind as Anne, and Caesar as Henry, as Wyatt’s poem enables such an interpretation, but the poem in no way confirms that interpretation as, to use Wyatt’s own words, the reader “may mayk in the conceavinge of the truthe myche matter or error.”

  • 12 Allegoria in factis (historical allegory), as opposed to allegoria in verbis (verbal allegory), is (...)

Moreover, the willingness to decode Wyatt’s poetry as allegoria in factis has led to creative misreading of the available facts on at least one occasion:12

Some tyme I fled the fyre that me brent
By see, by land, by water and by wynd;
And now I folow the coles that be quent
From Dovor to Calais against my mynde.
Lo! How desire is boeth sprong and spent!
And he may se that whilome was so blynde;
And all his labor now he laugh to scorne.
Mashed in the breers that erst was all to torne.
(MT, LIX)

  • 13 L & P, v. 1374. 2 (Brewer et al., 1862-1933). Thomas Grey, 2nd Baron of Dorset (22 June 1477-10 Oct (...)
  • 14 Brigden reaches the same conclusion: “They [previous scholars] have found him—as I have not, in any (...)

A.K. Foxwell claimed that the strambotto “Some tyme I fled the fire that me brent” is “probably a translation, with local colour added to suit Wyatt’s case” (Foxwell 1911, II: 64), but provides no evidence in support of this probability. According to the established critical tradition, the poem does not stem from Wyatt’s period as Marshal of Calais (officially 1528-1530), as the reference in line 4 would suggest, but instead commemorates Wyatt’s participation in the train that accompanied Henry and Anne to Calais in October 1532 in order to meet with Francis I, a claim first made by G.F. Nott (1815-16, xxiii). Foxwell notes that “Wyatt’s name is not amongst those in personal attendance on the King, but it is probable that he was chosen to superintend the arrangements for Henry’s visit, being peculiarly fitted for the duty after his recent four years’ experience at Calais” (1911, II: 64). As Susan Bridgen (2012, 164-73) has shown in her recent biography of Wyatt, Foxwell’s claim that Wyatt spent four years as Marshal of Calais is exaggerated; he does not seem to have spent a very great deal of time in residence at all, as his appointment began in October 1528, and by December of that year he had returned to England. There is a reference in the list of lodgings appointed in October 1532 for the king’s company to one “Thos. de Wyes,” who was to be lodged at the “Marshall’s house otherwise Whitwaies” (L & P, v.1734.2), which might be a misprision of Wyatt, given that Thomas Grey de Wye had died in 1530, and that Wyatt had recently served as Marshal.13 However, the assertion that Wyatt was in the October 1532 retinue, reiterated by Muir and Thomson (1969, 311), Rebholz (1978, 374) and Daalder (1975, 51), does not have a documentary basis, to my knowledge, but rather is based upon the willingness to read the reference to “Calais” and “the fyre that me brent” as signifying Wyatt’s relationship with Anne.14

Before we proceed to specific examples of Wyatt’s translations and the potential for what we might term a transgressive hermeneutics, it is necessary to consider briefly the models of translatio and imitatio which informed Wyatt’s practice of translation.

  • 15 Copeland defines exercitatio as “the discovery of one’s own literary language through contestation (...)

The model of translation which Wyatt inherited was, on a functional level, that which had been predominant in the late medieval period, whereby the new work is produced in conjunction with the original and the commentary upon that original, in a form of triangulation, whereby the “glosses actually become part of the fabric of the translation” as they as part of a “vernacular tradition of translation in which interpretatio (exegesis) and exercitatio are conflated” (Copeland 1987, 61, 57).15 As part of this late medieval model, the translator becomes a conduit for the matter, as we see in Chaucer’s statement in his Treatise on the Astrolabe that “I n’am but a lewd compilator […] and have it translated in myn Englissh oonly for thy doctrine” (Preface to Astrolabe 61, 64, in Chaucer 1988, 662). This view is prevalent also in books I and III of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde:

And of his song nought only the sentence,
As writ myn autour called Lollius,
But pleynly, save our tonges difference,
I dar wel sayn, in al that Troilus
Seyde in his song, lo! every word right thus
As I shal seyn; and who-so list it here,
Lo! next this vers, he may it finden here.
(Troilus, I.393-99, in Chaucer 1988, 478)

For myne wordes, here and every part,
I speke hem alle under correccioun
Of yow, that feling han in loves art,
And putte it al in your discrecioun
To encrese or maken diminucioun
Of my langage, and that I yow bi-seche.
(Ibid., III. 1332-37, in Chaucer 1988, 531)

  • 16 See chapters 2 and 3 of Rossiter (2010b).

In the first instance Chaucer is clearly being ironic, as there is no Lollius, and “myn autour” is in fact Boccaccio, whose Filostrato is the poem which Chaucer transmuted into the Troilus. In the lines which follow, furthermore, Chaucer inserts an adaptation of a sonnet by Petrarch (RVF 132, which becomes the Canticus Troili).16 Nevertheless, Chaucer’s parody of the relationship between medieval translator and source-text illustrates the ethos of late medieval translatio: “pleynly, save our tonges difference [...] al that Troilus / Seyde in his song, lo! every word right thus / As I shal seyn.” We find a less ironic statement of this ethos at the close of Petrarch’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s tale of Patient Griselda (Decameron, X.10):

Whether I have deformed [the tale] or, perhaps, beautified it by changing its garment, you [Boccaccio] be the judge—for it all began there, and it goes back there; it knows the judge, the house, the way—so that you and whoever reads this may be clear on one point: that you, not I, must render an account of your works. Whoever asks me whether it is true, that is, whether I have written a history or just a tale, I shall reply with the words of Crispus [Sallust], “Let the responsibility fall on the author” [Jug. 17], namely my Giovanni.] (Sen., XVII.3 in Petrarch, 1992, 656)

Both Chaucer and Petrarch, despite the extensive alterations they make to the source-text, deny responsibility for its meaning, which one might identify as a precursory stance to Wyatt’s “deniability”: “you, not I, must render an account of your works.” However, Chaucer’s subsequent placement of semantic arbitration with the reader—the privileging of intentio lectoris over intentio auctoris—runs contrary to Wyatt’s claim of misinterpretation in his Defence: Wyatt does not speak his words under correction, and would not “putte it al in your discrecioun / To encrese or maken diminucioun / Of my langage,” far from it. Wyatt thus follows the triangulation technique of late medieval translation—obvious examples being “Who so list,” which has already been mentioned, and “The pillar pearisht is,” both of which fuse the Petrarchan source-text and Alessandro Vellutello’s commentary to create the new work—but inverts the fundamental principle; he does not point to his source or to his reader and endow either with complete semantic responsibility for his works. As we have seen, the meaning of Wyatt’s poems is concordant with what he portrays as an objective “truthe,” a “truthe” which is necessarily, and by way of contradiction, determined by him. In this use of translation as both a means of exculpation and self-concealment, Wyatt appears to fuse the late medieval practice of translatio with the early modern discourse of imitatio. For a clear conception of the latter we can turn again to Petrarch, and again to a letter written by him to Boccaccio:

An imitator must take care to write something similar yet not identical to the original, and that similarity must not be like the image to its original in painting where the greater the similarity the greater the praise for the artist, but rather like that of a son to his father. While often very different in their individual features, they have a certain something our painters call an “air,” especially noticeable about the face and eyes, that produces a resemblance; seeing the son’s face, we are reminded of the father’s, although if it came to measurement, the features would be all different, but there is something subtle that creates this effect. We must thus see to it that if there is something similar, there is also a great deal that is dissimilar, and that the similar be elusive and unable to be extricated except in silent meditation, for the resemblance is to be felt rather than expressed. Thus we may appropriate another’s ideas as well as his coloring but we must abstain from his actual words; for, with the former, resemblance remains hidden, and with the latter it is glaring, the former creates poets, the second apes […] we must write as the bees make honey, not gathering flowers but turning them into honeycombs, thereby blending them into a oneness that is unlike them all, and better. (Fam. XXIII.19 in Petrarch 1985, 301-02)

Petrarch’s prescription for imitatio accords with Wyatt’s practice, and indeed Wyatt’s statement in his Defence that, were his accusers’ several accusations to be compared then “I dare warrante ye shall fynde mysreportinge and mysvnderstandinge” is predicated upon the same logic as Petrarch’s “if it came to measurement, the features would all be different.” When we read Wyatt’s translations in conjunction with their source-texts then we do repeatedly find that “if there is something similar, there is also a great deal that is dissimilar” and that frequently “the resemblance is to be felt rather than expressed.” We thus find in Wyatt’s blurring of the boundary between medieval translatio and early modern imitatio three forms of difference, identified by Chaucer, Petrarch and Wyatt himself: “our tonges difference,” the “different [...] features” revealed through “measurement,” and the “greate dyfferaunce” in meaning which stems from a minor semiotic difference.

It should however be mentioned that early modern imitation affects the constituents of triangulated medieval translation—in the former the commentary or exegetical gloss (interpretatio) upon the source-text can be displaced by the sub-text which exists beneath it, as Thomas M. Greene explains:

[…] it is above all the humanist literature of the Renaissance that requires an “archaeological” scrutiny, a decipherment of the latent or hidden or indecipherable object of historical knowledge beneath the surface. I propose to call this activity subreading. [...] Petrarch [in Fam. XXIII.19] is describing an object of knowledge that, unlike the “truth” represented by medieval allegory, cannot by definition be fully and succinctly delimited. The resemblance of a poem or a series to its model or series of models will never be fully articulated, even supposing that it will be fully grasped. Rather one subreads, patiently and intuitively, the dim, elusive presence of the model in the modern composition. (Greene 1982, 93-96)

This “truth” which eludes delimitation in the act of Petrarchan subreading is akin to Wyatt’s own “truthe” which, whilst he asserts its inviolable existence, repeatedly is placed beyond the grasp of the transgressive reader. As readers of Wyatt we are subreaders who intuit the penumbral presence of the subtext, just as Wyatt himself had done when reading Petrarch.

Let us take as our first example of Wyatt’s practice one of his most famous translations, “The longe love” (MT, IV), which takes as its source-text Petrarch’s “Amor, che nel penser mio vive e regna” (RVF 140):

Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna
e ’l suo seggio maggior nel mio cor tene,
talor armato ne la fronte vène,
ivi si loca, et ivi pon sua insegna.

Quella ch’amare et sofferir ne ’nsegna
e vòl che ’l gran desio, l’accesa spene,
ragion, vergogna et reverenza affrene,
di nostro ardir fra se stessa si sdegna.

Onde Amor paventoso fugge al core,
lasciando ogni sua impresa, et piange, et trema;
ivi s’asconde, et non appar piú fore.

Che poss’io far, temendo il mio signore,
se non star seco infin a l’ora extrema?
Ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more.
(Petrarch, 2005: 679)

[The longe love, that in my thought doeth harbar,
And in myne hert doeth kepe his residence
Into my face preseth with bold pretence,
And therein campeth, spreding his baner.
She that me learneth to love and suffre,
And will that my trust, and lustes negligence
Be rayned by reason, shame, and reverence
With his hardines taketh displeasure.
Wherewithall, vnto the hertes forest he fleith,
Leving his entreprise with payne and cry
And there him hideth and not appereth.
What may I do, when my maister fereth,
But, in the felde, with him to lyve and dye?
For good is the liff, ending faithfully.]

The influence of the Ovidian “love as war” trope from the Amores is unmistakable here, yet it would be wise to remind ourselves of the relevant section from Ovid’s text in order to note first Petrarch’s divergence, and Wyatt’s subsequent paraphrase, but also in order to note the aforementioned variation upon the triangulation model, the subreading of the text which underpins the source-text:

Militat omnis amans et habet sua castra Cupido; Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans.
[…]
quid me, qui miles numquam tua signa reliqui, laedis, et in castris uulneror ipse meis?
[…]
me quoque, qui totiens merui sub amore puellae, defunctum placide uiuere tempus erat.
(Amores, I.9.1-2 – II.9.3-24 in Ovid 1994)

[Lovers are soldiers, Atticus. Believe me, Lovers are soldiers, Cupid has his corps.
[…]
Why hurt me, when I’ve never left your [Cupid’s] colours? In my own camp I’m wounded—tell me why.
[…]
I too in Love’s campaigns have done long service; It’s time to live in peace and end my toils.
(Amores, I. 9. 1-2 – II. 9. 3-24 in Ovid 1998)]

  • 17 “The longe love” is most likely an earlier translation, given its position in Wyatt’s Egerton copyb (...)

Whilst Petrarch extends Ovid’s basic metaphor, Wyatt reforms it for the court, aligning it with “Tudor ideals of service,” wherein “Service to God and service to the King are found in perfect harmony” (Thomson 1964, 3). The temptation in this poem is to read God (Amor) and King as synonyms, which are collapsed by Wyatt into the term “maister,” thereby reinstating the Henry-Anne-Wyatt critical patellar reflex, but there is nothing in the poem to justify this. Yet, in accordance with Wyattic translatio, there is nothing to prevent us from reading it thus either—the interpretation exists in potentia by virtue of the matter, which has that possibility pre-programmed in, as it were. Again, the components are present, but the amalgam is our own. Wyatt’s profession of the Tudor ideal of service is clarified at the close of his poem “Tagus, fare well” in the line: “My kyng, my Contry, alone for whome I lyve” (MT, XCIX.7), thereby forming a discursive continuum with “The longe love,” despite their being composed at different stages in Wyatt’s life.17 Wyatt’s opening phrase, “The longe love” has no Petrarchan equivalent, although it suggests his subreading of Ovidian tropes in Petrarch’s poem through its echo of Ovid’s “Long love has shrunk me for this business” ( “longus amor tales corpus tenuauit in usus,” Amores, I. 6. 5). Wyatt’s

  • 18 The numbering is that used by Padelford 1928, 57.
  • 19 Which nevertheless suggests a Royal residence (or indeed a diplomatic residence).

divergence from his source-text extends through the entire line, replacing the magisterial pomp of “vivo et regna” with the more surreptitious “harbar.” The Earl of Surrey’s translation of the same line, by contrast, is much more faithful to Petrarch: “Love, that doth raine and liue within my thought” (4.1 in Padelford 1928, 57).18 Wyatt omits any reference in Petrarch’s poem which may be misinterpreted as an implicit admission of faltering loyalty to his “maister,” hence following the covert “harbar,” Petrarch’s “seggio maggior,” the principal seat or throne, is replaced by the unobtrusive “residence.”19 Rather than an explicit admission of allegiance, which we find in Petrarch, the overall impression is more akin to Sidney’s later description of Cupid, “Who like a thief in dark bush doth lie” (Astrophil and Stella, XX. 3 in Sidney 2002, 160-61). Yet Wyatt appears to be complicit in Love’s concealment, he is not ambushed so much as collusive in treason. Again, the theme of transgression is prevalent, but it does not equate to biographical allegory.

  • 20 “This perpetual Petrarchan threat of collapsing reference yields in Wyatt to a different semiotic t (...)

Why then do the remaining lines of the opening quatrain return to the Petrarchan image? It would appear that Wyatt did not want to elide Petrarch’s imaginative use of Ovid’s metaphor; the “colours” of the Amores become the lover’s blush upon seeing his beloved. The authenticity of Wyatt’s “longe love,” however, is partially dependent upon our reading of “pretence,” which can signify the assertion of a right, a display of ostentation, or a form of public self-representation. Again Wyatt allows linguistic play and Rezeptionästhetik to settle the matter, creating a centre of meaning which is rendered impotent by the deliberate incorporation of terms whose meanings are “pointedly eroded or debased” (Greene 1982, 256).20 The further question of why Wyatt would undermine the authenticity of his blushes surely stems from Heale’s assertion of the corrupting effeminacy of court:

Attendance at court could be for an aspiring gentleman an opportunity, and, potentially, a mark of favour, but it could also bring with it the threatening stigma of corruption and effeminacy. Through a discourse of misogyny, however, effeminacy could be wrested to assert a male solidarity of and scorn of women. […] The male speaker’s initial, effeminate, vulnerability is aggressively transformed into sexual potency: the supposedly helpless object of a female script imagines himself as the controlling subject. (Heale 1998, 48-50)

  • 21 One is reminded here of the dictum which Greenblatt asserts in relation to Wyatt’s paraphrases of t (...)

The speaker is at pains both to display himself, spread his banner as it were, as an adept courtly lover whilst maintaining his masculinity, through his use of both martial imagery and the possibility that his physical colours are merely a “bold pretence” practised by the body which is controlled.21

The second quatrain is almost uniformly faithful to its source, although Wyatt reasserts his masculinity through the addition of the scornful “lustes negligence” to the Petrarchan semantic field. However, the volta signals a rupture between the source-text and the translation, as Wyatt inserts the metaphor of “the hertes forrest,” whilst Petrarch’s “Amor” flees only to the heart ( “fugge al core”). The image is synonymous with one of Wyatt’s central thematic concerns:

Forests were, in the sixteenth century, the special domain of the monarch, subject to laws which protected the deer (hart/heart) for royal use. They were also wild places, although not necessarily wooded, the refuge of the outlaw, not easily accessible, within the fiction of this sonnet, to the lady’s or reason’s authority. If Love’s residence is the poet’s “heart’s forest,” is Love the monarch whose royal domain is the forest of the heart? Or is he an outlaw taking refuge in the fastness of the forest? Does his “residence” there associate him with the hunted animal, the hart, or with the hunter? Is he a creature of the forest, belonging on the margins of civilized society, or an aristocratic predator? (Heale 1998, 95-6)

As we see in poems such as “They fle from me,” and “Who so list to hounte,” Wyatt’s repeatedly returns to the binary opposition constituted by civilization and wilderness, which in turn causes him to vacillate between passivity and aggression. Wyatt’s Love is not found in the well-organized garden, the hortus conclusus of the Roman de la Rose, but in the irrational, uncultivated lust symbolized by the “forrest.” Yet Love’s “residence” proper is not the forest, but the battlefield; the forest is alien, and we can therefore refuse the understanding of Love as monarch of the “forest” (although this ambiguous image does return in “Who so list”). I would concur with Heale’s second reading of Love as outlaw, the hunter become hunted, who “fleith” to the forest in which he is a trespasser.

This reading also enables the characteristic biographical potentiality of the poem by associating Love, and by extension the speaker, with transgression against the king’s property. The forest is not only the refuge of the hart / heart but also the dwelling place of the hind who “nowe [is] wyld and do [es] not remember” in “They fle from me” (MT, XXXVII.4); the flight has been reversed. Yet Love’s flight is futile as he “fleith” from the battlefield, from “She that me lerneth to love and suffre,” only to take refuge in a topography with which she is synonymous. In which case, trapped between two equally fatal extremes of civilization and wilderness, both the speaker and “maister” must return to “the felde,” to court, and therein face death: “For goode is the liff, ending faithfully.” This last line is characteristically open-ended, and the speaker’s allegiance is offered up again for interpretation. The debasement of “maister” allows it to appear—to those readers who wish to find it—a pledge of fidelity to the monarch, yet the transgression of Love into the “hertes forrest,” that place of royal privilege, places him in direct opposition to the crown. To whom will Wyatt remain faithful? Petrarch’s closing line is less ambiguous, although similarly left to the reader’s discretion: “For he makes a good end who dies loving well” ( “ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more”). Wyatt omits the final reference to “amando,” as this perhaps would clarify his position more than he would like, or allow. Instead, the poem ends on a note of masculine virtue (which stems from vir, man), which reminds us that Wyatt’s access to Petrarch’s poems was mediated by the interposing commentary of Alessandro Vellutello, who says the following of Petrarch’s closing lines:

Domanda quello che egli de altro fare, se non fino allhora estrema star col suo signore amore, cio è se non fino a l’ ultimo giorno della uita sempre amare, Et dice, che fa bel fine chi mor ben amando, per che a ben amare ogni uirtu ui con corre, & chi uiue con uirtu, non puo far tristo fine. (Vellutello 1525, 41r-v)
[Asking what else might he do, except abide with his lord Love until the final hour—that is, what can he do but love until his dying day—he says that whoever dies through love makes a good end, because every virtue is attendant upon loving well, and who lives with virtue cannot make a sad end.]

  • 22 On Tudor rescription see Stamatakis 2012, 21-31.

Wyatt’s poem clearly uses Vellutello’s commentary as a means of modifying Petrarch’s closing line, imbuing it with a more masculine (in the Henrician sense) conclusion that accords both with the ideal of service to the monarch and Wyatt’s own sense of virtue: “if you wil seme honist, be honist, or else seame as you are.” It is interesting to note that the Ovidian subtext to Petrarch’s final line is more attuned to Wyatt’s masculine rescripting: “Happy the man who dies amid love’s duels” ( “felix, quem Veneris certamina mutua perdunt,” Amores, II.10.29).22 As we have seen, the potential for transgressive interpretation is carefully woven into the very fabric of Wyatt’s translation, but at no point can we be certain that any such interpretation would hold up under the kind of cross-examination which Wyatt himself underwent and which he, in his Defence, would have his interpreters undergo: “Confere theire severall sayings togyther, confer th’ examinations vpone the same matter and I dare warrante ye shall fynde mysreportinge and mysvnderstandinge.”

  • 23 For example, Twombly refers to Aretino’s “shorter pieces of dramatically superfluous interspersed p (...)

An ideal illustration of the fusion of translatio and imitatio, which together enable transgression in potentia, is to be found in Wyatt’s paraphrase translations of the Penitential Psalms, which are perhaps his crowning achievement as a translator and poet (a terminological division which does not adequate to an ontological division in late medieval and early modern poetry). Clearly there is neither the time nor the space here to provide any substantial discussion of these substantial poems, so we must select a smaller section as a case study of Wyatt’s method: the section selected is the opening stanzas of Wyatt’s translation of Aretino’s preface to the first penitential psalm, a section which is not as highly regarded as the rest of the sequence23:

Love to give law unto his subiect hertes
Stode in the Iyes of Barsabe the bryght;
And in a look anone hymsellff convertes,
Cruelly plesant byfore king David sight;
First dasd his Iyes and forder forth he stertes
With venemd breth as sofftly as he myght
Towcht his sensis and ouer ronnis his bonis
With creping fyre, sparpled for the nonis.

And when he saw that kendlid was the flame,
The moyst poyson in his heart he launcyd,
So that the sowle did tremble with the same;
And in this brawle as he stode and trauncyd,
Yelding vnto the figure and the frame
That those fayre Iyes had in his presens glauncid,
The forme that Love had printyd in his brest
He honourth it as thing off thinges best.

So that forgot the wisdome and fore-cast,
(Wych wo to Remes, when that thes kynges doth lakk;
Forgetting eke goddes maiestie as fast,
Ye and his own, forthwith he doth to mak
Vrye to go in to the feld in hast,
Vrye I say, that was his Idolles make,
Vnder pretence off certen victorye,
For enmys swordes a redy prey to dye.

Whereby he may enjoy her owt of dowte,
Whom more then God or himsellff he myndyth;
And after he had browght this thing abowt,
And off that lust possess hym sellff, he fyndyth
That hath and doth reuerse and clene torn owt
Kynges from kyndomes, and cytes vndermyndyth:
He blynded thinkes this trayne so blynd and closse
To blynd all things that nowght may it disclosse.

But Nathan hath spyd out this trecherye
With rufull chere, and settes afore his face
The gret offence, outrage and Iniurye,
That he hath done to god as in this Case,
By murder for to clok Adulterye:
He shewth hym ek from hevyn the thretes, alas,
So sternly sore, this prophet, this Nathan,
That all amasid this agid wooful man.
(MT, CVIII.1-55)

  • 24 The dating of the composition of the Psalms paraphrase is a long-standing one to which I return in (...)
  • 25 It is possible that Wyatt was sent to France and Italy (in 1526-1527) when Henry first became infat (...)

Let us begin by noting the obviously transgressive potential of these stanzas. For those who would “constere” it so, the stanzas are a thinly-veiled allegory of the Henry-Anne-Wyatt triangle once again, a view which would appear to be reinforced by David’s cave in the psalms providing a parallel to the prison in which Wyatt was being held when he was thought to have written his paraphrase.24 However, even in this preliminary allegoresis there is an immediate fault. If the prologue is to be read as referring to Henry, Anne and Wyatt, then Henry needs must approximate David to Anne’s Bathsheba and Wyatt’s Uriah. This view is reinforced by the argument that Wyatt was sent abroad as a kind of exile when Henry’s courtship of Anne became serious, first to Italy, then to Calais: “he doth to mak / Vrye to go in to the feld in hast.”25 If this is to be so, then Wyatt’s cell cannot approximate David’s cave as Wyatt is not serving as David. Moreover, David enters the cave of his own volition: “Withdrawyng hym into a dark Cave / Within the grownd wherein he might hym hyde, / Fleing the lyght, as in a pryson or grave” (MT, CVIII. 60-62). Furthermore, David “His harpe he taketh in hand to be his guyde” (57), which would accord more with the figure of the poet who wrote “My lute, awake! perfourme the last / Labour that thou and I shal wast / And end that I have now begon” (MT, LXVI.1-3). Is the Wyattic speaker both David and Uriah, and Nathan the poet-prophet also? We recall the claims that Wyatt confessed his carnal knowledge of Anne prior to Henry’s marriage to her:

  • 26 As a Catholic apologist Harpsfield’s account must be read guardedly. However, as Eric Ives argues, (...)

Sir, I pray your grace pardon me, both of my offence and my boldness. I am come to your grace of myself to discover and utter my own shame […] she is not meet to be copled with your grace, her conversation hath been so loose and base; which thing I know not so much by hear-say as by my own experience as one that have had my carnal pleasure with her. At the hearing of this, the King for a while something astonyed, said to him, – Wyatt, thou hast done like an honest man, yet I charge thee to make no words of this matter to any man living. (Nicholas Harpsfield’s account, cited in Muir 1963, 20)26

  • 27 In his Defence, Wyatt, responding to charges of papistry by Bishop Bonner and Dr Simon Heynes, clai (...)

It would not be impossible to stretch our hypothetical allegoresis to equate Wyatt’s revelation, which left the King “for a while something astonyd” with Nathan’s setting “afore his face / The gret offence [...] That all amasid this agid woofull man.” Yet this would make Wyatt a Catholic recusant, something akin to the man he sought to apprehend during his Imperial embassy, Reginald Pole.27 Again this will not work. Wyatt allegedly came to Henry to “utter my own shame,” not to set “afore his face / The gret offence, outrage and Iniurye, / That he hath done to God in this case,” as Nathan did to David. The discussion of how David abused and forsook his role and position might very easily be read as barbed comments upon the devastating effects of Henry’s desire upon the spiritual life of England in the early 1530s— “So that forgott the wisdom and fore-cast / (Wych wo to Remes when that thes kynges doth lakk) / Forgetting eke goddess maiestie as fast, / Ye and his own”—but again, as we cannot equate David with Henry or Wyatt with any degree of consistency, such an interpretation can only be refuted by the author whom the text serves to represent, as a diplomat does his prince. At this point it is necessary to revive the thesis made earlier in this chapter: Wyatt’s political experiences frame and inform the content and choice of his translations, but those translations do not equate to or allegorize those experiences. To seek to identify Henry with David or Wyatt with Uriah, or Nathan, or also with David, is to completely misunderstand and undervalue the nature and efficacy of Wyatt’s transgressive translatio. He has taken those political and personal experiences, which could by no means be put asunder, and, to use Petrarch’s words, blended them into “a oneness that is unlike them all.” Moreover, remaining with Petrarch’s statement, we can see clearly here how when it comes to measurement, all the features are different. Wyatt’s translatio operates upon Aretino’s Italian source-text, but, in this instance, his imitatio operates upon his own experiences, transforming them into a potentially transgressive text which could not be traced back to those experiences with any degree of exactitude. Having thus dismissed the allegorical approach to Wyatt’s potentially transgressive poetics, we must turn to his translatio, and the ways in which he subtly reformulates Aretino’s prose.

Aretino, as we can see, has already translated the Scriptural narrative into a post-Petrarchan account of innamoramente: the unwary lover inadvertently gazes into the eyes of the beloved-to-be, Cupid, who dwells in those eyes, carves the image or figura of the beloved in the fleshly tables of the lover’s heart, and thenceforth she becomes his infatuation. The process and the narrative is all too familiar. Wyatt begins faithfully enough, his opening lines echoing those of Aretino: “Standosi Amore a dar legge a le persone gentili ne gliocchi di Bersabe, si trasformò in vno sguardo crudelmente pietoso, e trapassato al Rè David” (Aretino 1538, A5r). For the most part Wyatt does remain faithful to his source, but at key junctures he makes minor variations, and as we know from the Defence “yt is a smale thynge in alteringe of one syllable ether with penne or worde that may mayk in the conceavinge of the truthe myche matter or error.” In one case the amendment is notable for what it removes, which suggests a pre-emption of the ways in which the poem would be interpreted on Wyatt’s behalf. At the opening of Wyatt’s fourth stanza he writes that David, having sent Uriah to his death, “may enjoy her [Bathsheba] owt of dowte, / Whom more then god or hymsellff he myndyth.” The original Italian states that “egli [David] potesse diuenire sposo de la Donna [Bathsheba], che piu che Dio, e che se medesimo amaua” (Aretino 1538, A5r), that he could become the husband of Bathsheba, whom he loved more than God or himself. This use of the word sposo draws on the earlier description of Uriah as “marito de lo Idolo,” the husband of his idol, a phrase which in Wyatt’s translation becomes “his Idolles mak [mate]”; these are minor alterations, but they make a great difference. Had Wyatt written that David, by marrying Bathsheba, whom he loved “more then God” ( “piu che Dio”), forsook God as a result ( “non riguardando ne la Maestà d’Iddio” / “Forgetting eke goddess maiestie as fast”), bringing woe to his kingdom ( “guai à i Regni quando i Rè ne mancano” / “Wo to Remes when that thes kynges doth lakk”), then he would be placing himself in a very precarious position (Aretino 1538, A5r). By altering so slightly the terms of reference the point can still be made, but in potentia, being actualized by the reader, the intentio lectoris, not the intentio auctoris.

We thus do Wyatt a disservice by trying to pin his poetry down to specific events so that they operate as poetical-political allegories; his transgression is so much more complex than that, because in his careful, minute alterations to the source-text, he skilfully makes the transgression ours, not his.

Notes

1 I am not alluding here to the new historicist view of the text as a Foucauldian discursive matrix, but the intersectional view I am proposing can interact with that perspective.

2 On the interaction between the erotic and the political in late medieval and early modern courtly verse, see chapter 4 of Simpson (2002, 121-90). For a recent discussion of the various oscillations between the private and public spheres in the production and contemporary reception of Wyatt’s poetry see Stamatakis 2012.

3 For all of Wyatt’s poems I have referred to Muir and Thomson (1969), hereafter MT, and the roman numerals used therein, followed by line numbers. When necessary, I amend the MT version through reference to BL MS Egerton 2711, Wyatt’s copybook. In the passage cited, Wyatt is adapting Alamanni’s lines “Non saprei no, doue ’l contrario intendo / I maluagi consigli usar per buoni, / Dauanti al uero honor l’ util ponendo” (Satira X. 31-33), which recalls Petrarch’s phrase “l’animo ciascuna / Sua passion sotto ’l contrario manto” (RVF 102.9), which Wyatt translates as “So chaunceth it oft that every passion / The mynde hideth by colour contrary” (MT, III. 9-10), before continuing “Whereby, if I laught, any tyme, or season / It is for bicause I have nother way / To cloke my care but vnder spoort and play” (MT, III. 12-14). For Alamanni’s poems I have used the 1532 Opere toscane, the edition used by Wyatt; it is to be noted that the pagination of Satire X in this edition is erroneous, moving from p. 401 to p. 404 in the lines cited, just as the signatures are inconsistent (for the pages cited they should be sigs C2r-v). For Petrarch’s poems I have used Bettarini’s edition throughout. On Wyatt’s expertise in dowblenes see Susan Brigden’s recent discussion in the opening chapters of her excellent biography (2012).

4 Wyatt was accused by Bishop Bonner and Dr Heynes of communicating with a known traitor (Reginald Pole) and of imagining the king’s death.

5 I have discussed the dynamics of intentio elsewhere, see Rossiter and Brie (2010, 10-13).
Boccaccio’s statement at the close of the Decameron that ‘ [c] iascuna cosa in se medesima è buona a alcuna cosa, e male adoperata può essere nociva di molte; e così dico delle mie novelle’ (1985; repr. 1989, 911) is functionally equivalent to Wyatt’s position.

6 For a similarly faux-valedictory poem see “Ffarewell Love.” The valediction of love and desire is of course a core constituent of the courtly pose.

7 Stamatakis provides a brief but useful conspectus of the Devonshire MS (2012: 216-7). I also recommend that the reader consult the Social Edition Wikibook of the Devonshire MS, which has been organized under the auspices of Raymond Siemens: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript (Date accessed: 1 March 2013).

8 Wyatt here echoes Chaucer’s invective against shifting positions in the Clerk’s Tale: “O stormy peple! Unsad and evere untrewe! / Ay undiscreet and chaungynge as a fane!” (ClT, 995-6, in Benson 1988, 150). We know from “Mine Own John Poins” that Wyatt was entirely familiar with Chaucer’s work. See Cooper 1982.

9 Potentia and actus are the medieval scholastic equivalents of Aristotle’s energeia/entelechia (actuality) and dunamis (capacity or potentiality). See for example Aquinas’s commentary on De anima 412a1-412b9: “Matter is that which is not as such a ‘particular thing’ but is in mere potency to become a ‘particular thing’. Form is that by which a ‘particular thing’ actually exists. And the compound is ‘the particular thing’ itself; for that is said to be a ‘particular thing’ (i.e. something you can point to) which is complete in being and in kind; and among material things only the compound is such. For although immaterial substances are not compounds of matter and form, still they are particular things, having actual existence in themselves, and being complete in their own nature. […] Matter, then, differs from form in this, that it is potential being; form is the ‘entelechy’ or actuality that renders matter actual; and the compound is the resulting actual being” (Foster and Humphries 1951, II. Lect.1. 215).

10 I have discussed “Who so list” and its related subtexts elsewhere in detail (Rossiter 2009).

11 Greene discusses Wyatt’s “willed asceticism of the poetic word” (1982, 247).

12 Allegoria in factis (historical allegory), as opposed to allegoria in verbis (verbal allegory), is Bede’s term. See Singer 2010, 25.

13 L & P, v. 1374. 2 (Brewer et al., 1862-1933). Thomas Grey, 2nd Baron of Dorset (22 June 1477-10 October 1530) is referred to as “Thomas Grey de Wye” in the University of Chicago’s Nicholas Bacon Collection, MS. 2351.

14 Brigden reaches the same conclusion: “They [previous scholars] have found him—as I have not, in any known list—in the train of King Henry and Anne Boleyn” (2012, 182). I address this issue in further detail in Chapter 1 of my forthcoming monograph, Wyatt Abroad: The Politics of Translation (2014).

15 Copeland defines exercitatio as “the discovery of one’s own literary language through contestation and displacement of the original text” (1987, 57). I discussed the issue of late medieval forms of translatio in the Introduction to my previous monograph (see Rossiter 2010).

16 See chapters 2 and 3 of Rossiter (2010b).

17 “The longe love” is most likely an earlier translation, given its position in Wyatt’s Egerton copybook, whereas “Tagus, fare well” was composed during the Imperial embassy of 1537-1539, and is entered in Wyatt’s own hand. On the dating of the poems in Egerton see Daalder 1988 and Powell 2004.

18 The numbering is that used by Padelford 1928, 57.

19 Which nevertheless suggests a Royal residence (or indeed a diplomatic residence).

20 “This perpetual Petrarchan threat of collapsing reference yields in Wyatt to a different semiotic threat, the collapse of traditional, principled relationships on which a coherent society has depended and in which language has been grounded. In the satires as in the lyrics, the word is in danger of losing its trouth, its basis in common practice, and the poet regards the ungrounding of truth, a property of human relations that is also a property of language. […] One of his solutions was to build his poems consciously around words whose meanings are pointedly eroded or debased” (Greene 1982, 255-56).

21 One is reminded here of the dictum which Greenblatt asserts in relation to Wyatt’s paraphrases of the penitential psalms: “power over sexuality produces inwardness” (Greenblatt 1980, 125, original emphasis).

22 On Tudor rescription see Stamatakis 2012, 21-31.

23 For example, Twombly refers to Aretino’s “shorter pieces of dramatically superfluous interspersed prologue, lending outward, novelistic continuity to a dramatic sequence that that has otherwise little connection with outward things” (1970, 357). Twombly’s critical terms “dramatic” and “novelistic” are misplaced and anachronistic, to my mind.

24 The dating of the composition of the Psalms paraphrase is a long-standing one to which I return in my forthcoming monograph.

25 It is possible that Wyatt was sent to France and Italy (in 1526-1527) when Henry first became infatuated with Anne as a means of removing a potential love rival. As Susan Brigden argues “Foreign embassy might be a kind of exile, a way of keeping political opponents away from court” (1996, 5).

26 As a Catholic apologist Harpsfield’s account must be read guardedly. However, as Eric Ives argues, “[t] he fact that writers have agendas according to their religious alignments does not, however, make them valueless to the historian. The test is, did they have access to real sources of information?” (2005, 51).

27 In his Defence, Wyatt, responding to charges of papistry by Bishop Bonner and Dr Simon Heynes, claimed that “I thynke I shulde have more adoe with a great sorte in Inglande to purge my selffe of suspecte of a Lutherane then of a Papyst” (Muir 1963, 195-96). On Wyatt and Protestantism see Brigden (2012, 450-65).

Auteur

University of East Anglia
Is Senior Lecturer in late medieval and early modern English literature at East Anglia University. His previous monograph, Chaucer and Petrarch (Brewer, 2010), is the first book-length study of the relationship between two of the most influential poets of the 14th century. He is the co-editor of Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), of Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Ashgate, 2013), and is also working on his forthcoming monograph, Wyatt Abroad: The Power of Translation and the Translation of Power (Brewer, 2014).

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