Marquis examines the second edition of Richard Tottel's "Songes and Sonettes" to determine what persuaded Tottel to publish an arrangement of poems radically different from his first edition printed only eight weeks earlier.

Copyright University of North Carolina Press Spring 2000

I

THAT Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes (1557) is one of the most significant texts in the mid-Tudor period of English literature has never been disputed. Its remarkable popularity, especially during the latter half of the sixteenth century, is traced by Hyder E. Rollins's early twentieth-century edition of Tottel's Miscellany (15571587).1 Most modern readers are unaware, however, that Songes and Sonettes appeared in two very different arrangements in 1557. Rollins bases his text on the arrangement of the first edition, published 5 June 1557, and not the radically revised second edition, published eight weeks later, 31 July 1557, which became the standard for at least eight Elizabethan editions.2 Only a little more than thirty years later, Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589) treats it as a source for the major types of English verse.3 Biographical material on Surrey and Wyatt is added in the eighteenth century and the fictional narrative of Geraldine is foregrounded in the early nineteenth century,4 but the order and arrangement of the first edition is not reproduced until the Collier edition of 1867, followed by Arber's edition in 1870 and Rollins's in 1929. These editions have been so influential that the Scholar Facsimile Press texts are based on the first edition.5 The unavailability of the second edition in the twentieth century has prevented modern readers from understanding what the Elizabethans read when they read Songes and Sonettes.6

Though the poems were not numbered in Tottel's editions, Rollins provides a scheme based on the first edition: Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey's poems commence the text, z-36; then poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, 37-127; those by Nicholas Grimald, 128-167; the ones by "Uncertain auctours," i68-261; and finally, two clusters of poems by Surrey, 262-265, and Wyatt, 266-271. Rollins annexes the new poems to the second edition out of their prescribed order and numbers them 272 to 310. The second edition differs from the first in many important respects: (i) Thirty-nine new poems by "Uncertain Auctours" were added and the entire section moved from the final position in the 5 June text to the penultimate position. Though Tottel's editor could have simply attached these new poems to the end of the existing text in the 5 June edition, he did not. He inserted them into the "uncertain auctours" section, irregularly interspersed with poems from the first edition. (ii) Thirty poems by Nicholas Grimald were suppressed, while his ten remaining poems were transferred to the end of the book and his initials substituted for his name at the beginning of the group. (iii) Four poems by Surrey and six by Wyatt, which stood at the end of the first edition, were injected into the main collections of those authors` poems7 If one tallies the number of changes in the arrangement of poems in the four authorial sections, close to 50 percent of Songes and Sonettes was altered in the eight weeks between the publication of the two editions.8

No modern critic has examined the second edition of Tottel's Songes and Sonettes closely or commented on it extensively, and yet it must be seen as the most influential version of Songes and Sonettes in the Elizabethan period. A rereading of this text could help modern critics solve one of the nagging problems of sixteenth-century literature: what persuaded Tottel to publish an arrangement of poems radically different from his first edition printed only eight weeks earlier? If he were not in some way concerned with textuality, with how the book was presented to the reader, he would have incurred less expense by replicating the first edition and attaching the new poems to the end. But certain editorial principles were applied to the second edition that are absent in the first edition. To ignore this fact is to deprive the second edition of the serious reading that it deserves, and to acknowledge its importance is to move beyond the suggestion that Tottel exercised the printer's prerogative to compile random selections of mid-Tudor verse merely for purposes of exploiting an anticipated market. Moreover, no collection in the early modern period equals this one for its gathering of poets affected by the radical cultural transformations of the mid-Tudor period. As Hyder Rollins reminds us, Tottel's Songes and Sonettes was published amid the Marian counter-Reformation, when English dissenters were tortured and burned in the streets where booksellers sold their wares.9 An analysis of the 31 July text also allows us to examine how the edifor selects, arranges, and repositions the lyric voices of these poets who contributed directly or indirectly to the great literary and political transformations of the period.

By 1557, Tottel was an experienced and successful printer. In 1553, three years after he began to publish out of his own shop in Fleet Street, the Hand and the Star, he had secured the patent for printing English books on common law, which he kept throughout Mary Tudor's reign and well into the Elizabethan period. He quickly became one of the leading members of the Company of Stationers when it received its royal charter in 1556. Part of his prosperity came from the theological markets created by Protestant printers-Richard Grafton, John Day, Edward Whitechurch, and others-who were put out of business when Mary Tudor ascended the throne.10 He published Richard Smith's A Bouclier of the Catholic Faith (1554), dedicated to Mary I, as well as John Lydgate's Fall of Princes 0554) and Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure (1555), two works previously printed by Protestant printers. He also co-produced the Catholic Thomas Mores Works in the same year as he released Songes and Sonettes, and he published Surrey's translations of books 2 and 4 of Virgil's Aeneid. On Elizabeth's ascension in 1558, Tottel quickly published The Passage of our Most Drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth Through the Citie of London to Westminister the Day Before Her Coronation. As a printer, he negotiated a successful career by shifting affiliation between church and state.

Though we know who published Songes and Sonettes, we do not know who edited the text. Was it Tottel, or did he procure "learneder help" as he did a year earlier in his 1556 publication of The Great Charter?11 H. J. Byrom observes that 1557 was Tottel's busiest year, making it highly unlikely that he had time to revise Songes and Sonettes;12 Christopher A. Knott has recently claimed that Nicholas Gri-mald was the editor, but no evidence is provided to substantiate the claim.13 One might assume that whoever edited the text preferred to remain anonymous, perhaps because of the Marian policy against the publication of seditious literature. During the period from February 1556 to February 1557, no fewer than three government inquiries, independent of the usual ecclesiastical bodies operating in each diocese, were established with a mandate "To enquire concerning all heresies, heretical and seditious books and all conspiracies against the King and Queen . . . with power to seize such books and writings.."14 An analysis of the contents of Songes and Sonettes might reveal just how close this text was to qualifying for what in 1557 could be considered objectionable or even seditious. Who compiled the anthology, then, might not be as important as how it was compiled and then revised. In the Grimald section, for example, 40 percent of the poems in the first edition have as their subjects historical figures, mostly personal acquaintances of the poet. At least three poems are in praise of Damascene Audley of the great Staffordshire family by whom Grimald was likely befriended in his pre-Marian days, when he preached in the impressive country church. At least five poems are devoted to the Seymour sisters, Jane, Margaret, Katherine, and Elizabeth, the daughters of Edward Seymour, the infamous Duke of Somerset. Only one poem praises a figure from Mary's court, Lord Mautravers, who died in Brussels in 1556 from a fever while employed as ambassador to the King of Bohemia. A cursory glance at the historical figures named in Songes and Sonettes as a whole reveals a similar bias towards pre-Marian persons who had played significant roles in the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI, including Edward Somerset, who, as Lord Protector of the young Edward, had attempted to force Mary to comply to reforms in the church.15 Does the rearrangement and omission of poems in the second edition amplify or erase a political and religious bias present in the first edition? In the revised Grimald group, for example, nine out of the ten poems remaining from the first edition are translations from Theodore Beza's Poemata Juvenilia, published in 1548.16 Yet there is not a simple shift in the two editions from the political to the poetic, for Beza was an active participant in the Reformation. As John N. King points out, "as Calvin's chaplain and continuator of Marot's French Psalter, Beza was a sanctioned neo-classical model for the Protestant poet."17 Perhaps, then, the revisions to the second edition do not eliminate a partially concealed political statement in the first edition, but attempt to make it more subtle?

The anthologic genre had been identified long before the sixteenth century as an appropriate vehicle for cultural and political commentary. Recent scholarship has shown that the classical Latin compilations of Statius and Martial, and to a lesser extent, of Propertius, Catullus, and Tibullus-which were the staples of English schoolboys in the early sixteenth-century humanist revival-often comprise numerous lyric poems that criticize the changing social and historical context of the Roman empire.18 In her analysis of how specific ideological assumptions toward the state are revealed by Roman poets, Elaine Fantham points out that since words were the "chief political weapon" in lyric compilations, hidden layers of meaning are often discovered in close rereadings of the texts. "Infinite varieties of arrangement" emerge between "individual poems separated from each other" and draw upon "the pleasures of comparison and contrast, expectation and surprise."19 Also part of the literary heritage of mid-Tudor lyric compilations, medieval manuscripts that comprise multiple texts also reveal organizing principles that show that the "whole book" has much to say about the cultural "moment of its inscription."20 Many previously neglected features in medieval manuscripts provide silent commentary on the culture from which the text emerges. As Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel argue, numerous features of a manuscript-including its ink and script of a text, the quality of its paper, its size, its layout, the arrangement of each volume, its gathering and binding, how it is subscribed, its colophon, the collection of works among which it is preserved, and the nature of its variants when it is copied by scribesprovide information on the cultural and political milieu of a text, its readers, and its purpose as conceived in the mind of the author who composed the text and the scribe who compiled it with other texts: "Beyond transmitting basic information about a given text, these features speak to us about its social, commercial and intellectual organization at the moment of its inscription."21 Commonplace books, in which students compiled fragments of literary works, were also important in the early sixteenth century as reservoirs of new humanist learning. Fragments of lyric poems, for example, or excerpts from prose tracts and spiritual treatises, often reveal the bewildering concerns of lyric voices decrying the vagaries of politics, religion, and culture and emphasize the struggle between virtue and vice encountered in the lives of early modern individuals. These books, Ann Moss suggests, map the moral extremes of Renaissance culture, the strategies of persuasive thinking and the methods of transmitting knowledge: "The order suggested for organizing the common-place book," she argues, "presupposes a universe of knowledge and moral activity in which everything is loosely connected by association of ideas, by similarity and difference."22

One advantage of publishing an anthology of lyric poems has always been its capacity to accommodate a variety of genres and themes to appeal to a wide readership. Once the poems are arranged, the lyric voices speak for themselves, leaving virtually no trace of editorial presence, and thus little room for potentially dangerous recriminations. The rhetorical device foregrounded in such an arrangement is the prosopopoeia, which is defined by Abraham Fraunce in The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) as "a fayning of any person, when in our speech we represent the persona of anie, and make it speake as though he were there present . . . an excellent figure, much used of Poets, wherein wee must diligently take heed."23 Tottel's editor introduces the method of reading his text in the preface to the reader in both editions. Here he claims that his text is testimony to the fact that the English "tong" is capable of achieving the technical and verbal accomplishments of Latin and Italian verse.24 "Tong" is a metaphor that refers not only to prosody but to suasoria, to declamatory speech. Songes and Sonettes is thus full of voices whose task it is to provide the reader with "profit and pleasure,' as the editor suggests further into the preface. As important as the individual voice is in specific poems, so too are the dramatic verbal relations between the voices in clusters of poems, and as we stand back from the text, the discordia concors in the tonal variations of the entire architectural score.25 One sees and hears various thematic strains in the songs, sonnets, epigrams, epitaphs, pastorals, satires, and so on. The development of different topoi, organized according to the principles of variation provides "a plastic quality" which is "a source of pleasure for the reader."26

Standing back for a moment, we can also see from a historical perspective that Songes and Sonettes is part of a broader interest in collecting which pervaded Europe during the sixteenth century. As Krzysztof Pomian argues, collecting reached its zenith in Europe from 1550 to 1750, with a flourishing of sorts from 1556 to 1560 when 986 collections of classical artifacts and antiquities are recorded.27 In literary collections one often finds clusters of interiorized narratives where debates are held between opposing ideologies of gender, politics, history and aesthetics.28 An analysis of the arrangement of lyrics in Songes and Sonettes might reveal whether such narrative debates emerge in the architecture of that text. A glance at Tottel's text tells us that all but one of the four authorial sections begins with a Petrarchan debate in which male fantasies of fulfillment are challenged and contested by an opposing feminine ideology. A reading of the poems that follow these Petrarchan sections seems to suggest that the failure to persuade the beloved-which is seen as no less than a problem of the arbitrary nature of language-is followed by skeptical analyses of the current state of politics, history, and religion. Finally, Tottel's editor seems to provide a text that examines its own pretensions toward formal composition and interrogates the humanist ideology from which they emerge. Each section of the compilation appears to examine humanist claims about the nature of the mind, its mnemonic ability to learn from the past, and its potential to influence the future. What follows in this paper is a preliminary analysis of the whole text of the second edition of Songes and Sonettes. I do not aspire to a definitive reading of the cultural significance of this work, but seek only to provide enough evidence to stimulate further discussion.

II

In the 5 June edition, Surrey's poems are arranged in two groups: i to 36 and 262 to 265. In the 31 July edition, poems 262 to 265 are interwoven with the closing poems of the first group. The first thirty poems in the revised text draw upon the narrative trajectory of Petrarch's Canzoniere, from the lover's anticipated fulfillment to his beloved's cruel rejection of him. The conflict can be traced in the development of the excusatio, a linking device which provides various explanations or excuses for writing. Petrarch's excuse in the opening poem of the Canzoniere is that if one reads his compilation, one will understand how love has affected him.29 In contrast, Surrey's first poem in Songes and Sonettes begins in medias res; his beloved is alive and he still has a chance to persuade her of his love. He appeals to her with the hope that his "carefull song" will "print in [her] hart some parcell of [his] tene [i.e., grief (sig. AiiV). In the subsequent poems, the narrative of the affair from the innamoramento, the moment of falling in love, to the commiato, the farewell to love, provides a skeletal framework for poems that anatomize the subject of love. Writing poetry is the only means by which the lover can hope to evoke his beloved's sympathetic response to his plight. In poem 4, Surrey's lover admits that though he "can by roate the tale" he would tell, "oft the words come furth awrie of him that loveth well" (sig. AiiiV). His beloved's beauty sends him into a spin in sonnets 8 and g, her fickleness in 12 and 13, and by poem 18, which is titled by the editor "Complaint of a diyng lover refused upon his ladies injust mistaking of his writing,' the poet proves himself entirely inadequate as writer. He seems simply to have been unprepared. "Unhappy hand,' he says, "it had ben happy time for me, / If, when to write thou learned first, unjoynted hadst thou be" (sig. BivV). What advantage being "unjoynted" would have provided is never clearly explained, though we do see that in the final poems in this Petrarchan cycle the persona becomes increasingly anxious that his beloved should see his constancy in love, even though she prefers not to satisfy him. As poem 3o announces, "The faithful lover declareth his paines and his uncertain joyes, and with only hope recomforteth somwhat his wofull heart" (sig. Diii).

The concern for physical and spiritual reconciliation between the lovers in Surrey's poems is replaced by issues of survival in the community. The farewell to love in poem 24 is soon followed by two translations on the "mean estate" where the personae remind us that a wise man is patient, never extreme, always moderate, and never lost to love (sig. DiiiV Div). A cluster of poems follows, numbers 33-37, where Wyatt's contribution as a poet to the human community is contemplated. His psalm translations are considered, and epitaphs and elegies on his death are cited (sig. DivV-EiV). Surrey reveres Wyatt as a poet and a moralist but deplores the vicious and corrupt Henrician culture that his poems describe. In his praise of Wyatt's psalms, Surrey asks, "What holy grave? what worthy sepulture / To Wiattes Psalmes should Christians then purchase?" (sig. DivV). The answer, of course, is that something should be purchased for Wyatt, but instead his praises have been left unsung. What occurs in these poems, according to William Sessions, is Surrey's proclamation that Wyatt is a "new English poet" whose work should inspire poets in the latter half of the sixteenth century to invent new genres and new texts regardless of their own personal "marginalization and martyrdom."30 In the rearranged cluster of encomia in the second edition of Songes and Sonettes, Surrey defines the forces of cultural disintegration that choose to ignore Wyatt's voice and allow the human community to sink further into tyranny.

No regenerative vision is offered in Surrey's poems as they are arranged in the 31 July edition of Songes and Sonettes. The conspicuous absence of a Petrarchan ending, with its long hymn to the Virgin Mary, emphasizes the religious and political difference between the Italian quattrocento and mid-Tudor England: whereas the former is characterized by the confidence that even the most exacting analysis of the personal and social dimensions of interiority must lead to reconciliation with God, the latter is marked by the individual's alienation from the spiritual and secular community in which he exists. Tottel's editor shapes the ideological trajectory in the second edition of Surrey's poems to emphasize that the integrity of the "inward self" as it is manifested in language is neither understood nor appreciated. The only legitimate response to this situation, in Surrey's poems, is to exploit the capacity of personal desire to provide endless variations of the fantasy of fulfillment and to lament the consequences of its denial. In the final poem in the Surrey section, the persona remains fully committed to the immediate pleasure of love, regardless of its proven transience.

A similar movement from private longing to public despair occurs in Wyatt's poems, the second authorial group in Songes and Sonettes. These are divided into generic clusters: first, a section of translations of Petrarchan sonnets (42-56), then an assortment of epigrams and short narrative poems of irregular length (59-133), and finally the satires (134-136) and concluding elegy. The excusatio topos links these generic clusters when the issue of writing assumes greater importance as a recurrent concern. Initially, the lover justifies his composition as an attempt to relate his passion to his beloved, but by poem 53 he admits that his "unkind tongue" has failed him (sig. FiV). In poem 7o, he recognizes that since his sorrowful state makes him write sorrowful songs, he can expect no pity from his beloved (sig. Giii-GiiiV). He then transforms his passion for speech in poem io8 into a need to retell the story to himself as a mnemonic device: "I wyll return,' he says, "my plaint thus to repeater / For, there is nothing els, so toucheth me within" (sig. Kiii). This most authentic experience serves to justify the pain he feels: "So shall mine eyes in pain accompany my hart, / That were the guides, that did it lead of love to fete the smart" (sig. Kiii). By the end of poem io8, the lover is certain that his beloved will put his song between her breasts for safekeeping after she reads it (sig. KiiiV). In poem io9, however, he is outraged that she has destroyed his work: "Suffised not (madame) that you did teare, / My woful hart, but thus also to rent: / The weping paper that to you I sent" (sig. KiiiV). Finally, in the satires to John Poins and Fraunces Bryan, poems 135 and 136, writing is considered a public performance before a fictional audience. The persona's voice here is detached and contemplative, not torn by passionate outbursts. Writing is bound to the expression of human value. "My Poyns," he says in poem 135, "I can not frame my tune to fayn: / To cloke the truth, for praise without desert / Of them that list all vice for to retaine" (sig. MiiV).

In the latter section of Wyatt's poems as they are arranged by the editor of the 31 July edition of Songes and Sonettes, the personae reflect the anxious internal condition of a self-conscious mind that is characterized by self-denial, retreat, and mental exhaustion. Eventually the lyric voice admits that the language of love is a rhetorical game with political stakes which the poet is encouraged to play for the entertainment of his reading audience. Finally, however, Wyatt's persona rejects the advertised but blatantly corrupt humanism of the treacherous Henrician court. In a series of self-proclaimed acts of subversion, the persona withdraws from the community to live in isolation. "I am here," he says in poem 135, "in kent and christendome: / Among the Muses, where I reade and ryme" (sig. MiiiV). The concluding poem, the "song of Jopas,' extends the dimension of language by situating it in an astrological context: the persona considers the difference between the individual and the universe. The song includes a series of mathematical images that attempts to explain and justify the process of individuation, which though aberrant and even destructive in the social sphere of human relations, is absorbed as part of a larger cosmic phenomenon. But it proves impossible to locate the final coordinates of the individual "self" on the Ptolemaic map of the planetary system, and thus the "song" of Jopas remains unfinished. The reader is left contemplating the enormous gap between the self, the cultural community from which it withdraws, and the physical world in which both are located. The final "unfinished" song is perhaps the ultimate statement of the failure of the humanist claim to understand, articulate, and improve the relation between self and community (sig. Ni-NiV).

In the poems that follow, those by "uncertain authors,' the individual's relation to the community comes under closer scrutiny. The section is arranged according to neither gender nor genre, as are the poems of Surrey and Wyatt. Instead, the "uncertain authors" provide a virtuoso performance of the classical principles of variation in which thematic threads are interwoven through irregularly arranged poems. For example, the opening group of five poems, numbers 138 to 142, includes five different topoi: a Petrarchan love poem, an elegy on the death of master Devorox, an exhortation on the mean estate, a comparison of life and death, and a tale of Pygmalion (sig. Niv-NivV). As one reads further, an increased tension in many of the lyric voices is sensed. The lover defines himself in terms of the Petrarchan conventions in short staccato-like cycles of innamoramento and commiato. The excusatio is used to justify the lover's attempt to persuade his beloved to satisfy his desire, "to perce her hart, that she may pitie [him]" (sig. NiiV), as the poet concludes in poem 138, but by poem 249, he acknowledges himself a failure as a writer when he complains that his "ungentle writing had displeased his Lady" (sig. Ccii). In this section, multiple lyric voices subject the world to close analysis and find that it is only a parody of the human community towards which they aspire. Out of the 134 poems in the "Uncertain Auctours" group, about 29 percent are Petrarchan poems of unrequited love, and another 14 percent consist of tales of failed love. Another 14 percent of the poems in this group employ the topos of contemptus mundi as they describe in graphic detail the mutability of the world. In poem 234, for example, the poet claims that much in the world "is amisse: J Hope is nye gone to have redresses / These daies ben ill, nothing sure is" (sig. Aaiv). Another ii percent condemn slanderous tongues and cruel women, with at least half of the fourteen poems engaging in misogynist condemnations of women in general. The subversive observations interspersed throughout this section evoke the anxious tenor of life in mid-Tudor England: clusters of topoi appear with no apparent order and then disappear, only to return in outline, providing the subtext for later poems. The ideological conflict in the closing lyrics of this section is evident in the increasing number of question-and-answer poems. There is no suggestion here, however, that the answers resolve anything, or that a cycle of love will begin again, as in the Surrey section; nor is there a retreat into derisive irony, as we find in Wyatt's satires of the court. As the title of the section suggests, everything is "uncertain." The world is winding down, unraveling into chaos, a grotesque image of what it could have been. In the end, there is a strong sense that no matter how vital the world could be, it will never be as it was.

There is, however, a structural and ideological difference in this section that is not found in the Surrey and Wyatt groups. It is as if the editor recognizes that a subversive text is only as good as the alternative it valorizes. Thus, an image of what the world was emerges in this section and appeals powerfully to the mid-Tudor memory. In the midst of the repetitive portrayal of unfulfilled desire and failed communication, a number of elegies articulate a nostalgic strain that acts as a counterpoint to profound despair. These elegies, approximately twelve in total, praise the moral integrity of figures largely from the court of Henry VIII and Edward VI 3' Their prominence in the revised text suggests that the editor attempted to provide a series of portraits whose educative potential could inspire readers to virtuous action. The elegies work in conjunction with approximately twenty-three encomia which praise historical personages who exemplify great virtue.32 The poems portray nostalgically the climate of a pre-Marian world infused by a myth of stability. As moral exempla, these lyrics accumulate in effect to form a sympathetic impression of virtuous action against which we may judge the self-interested and abhorent qualities of various mid-Tudor regimes. The poems are pivotal in that they recall the political criticism of Surrey and the social criticism of Wyatt, yet provide a positive alternative to personal despair and social hypocrisy.

In the final section of Tottel's revised Songes and Sonettes, however, the editor discards positive moral exempla and provides a closure that is shockingly apocalyptic. We recall that thirty poems by Grimald are withdrawn and the ten remaining moved to the end of the entire collection, following the "uncertain authors." Most of the poems omitted are either personal poems of praise for virtuous ladies or epitaphs and elegies on virtuous men. In other words, the excised poems are exempla of figures who could have had an educative influence on readers. If the ten remaining poems had been left lodged between the long Wyatt section and the even longer section by the "uncertain authors,' they would have been all but invisible; to streamline them and place them at the end of the compilation ensures that they provide the last word on a collection of poems with enormous stylistic range and thematic magnitude. In the eight-week interval between the first and second editions, Tottel's editor modified and condensed the ending of Songes and Sonettes so that a focused thematic closure emerges in which lyric voices lament the moral degradation of the community and applaud the heroic martyrdom of those who resist its barbarism to the end.

Grimald's final ten poems recall the dominant themes of the preceding poems: the catalogue of the muses in poem 271, which begins the group, provides a summary of the various lyric genres used by the personae in the preceding poems. Calliope evokes a stately style; Clio is solemn; Thaley, comical; Melpomen speaks "with Tragicall sowndes"; Terpsichor and Erato are dancers; Polymnie is the orator; and finally Uranie, the most universal of the muses, observes the heavens (sig. Ffi). The catalogue, like the "sayings" of Musonious in poem 272-, introduces the question: what kind of poetry will persuade the reader to pursue "noble virtue?" The consequences of pursuing virtue are exemplified in the allegory of "vertue" in poem 273: careless of life's pleasures, she embraces the pain that comes with disciplining the "mindes rage"; only then can she "teach" the reader "aboue the starres to flye." Virtue is exclusive in that there is no other way to immortality: "I onely cannot dye" (sig. FfiV). Instruction begins in poem 274, where the reader is urged to "keep measure," especially in the matters of the heart: "worship not ]oue with curious fansies vain, / Nor him despise: hold right atween these twain" (sig. Ffii). Neither worship nor disdain requires the detachment from the world that is encouraged in poems 275 and 276, where regardless of our choices, life is defined by its negation. The painful deprivation in the former poem is answered at every turn by the abundance of the latter, and still, life is denied. Regardless of the path trodden or the race run, we choose between "no life, or soon to dye" (sig. Ffii). To make sense of this contradiction, we recall "Vertue's" claim in poem 273 to teach immortality by treading on death, so that the "I" "cannot die." Death is subjugated, rendered powerless, by identifying its ubiquitous presence in life, which in turn elevates the importance of "Vertue's" ability to rise above the stars into the immortal world.

The panegyric in 277, "Of frendship,' is a celebration of a classical virtue which if realized infuses the community with stability: "eche house, eche towne, ech realm flourishes with stedfast loue" (sig. FfiiV). The virtue of friendship answers the contemptus mundi theme in the preceding poems of the second edition. It instructs the reader in how to eliminate friction from life without resorting to forceful oppression. After all, friendship is a "heavenly gift,' like grace, and therefore is superior to human passion: "In bodies lust, man cloth resemble but base brute: / True vertue gets, and keeps a fiend, good guide of our pursute." It also realizes the eternalizing potential of "Venue" (poem 273) in its catalogue of great friends who have become immortalized: "No terme of time, no space of place, no storme it can deface" (sig. FfiiV). If Tottel's editor had concluded Songes and Sonettes with this praise of the virtue of friendship, the reader would have been left with a positive exemplum as model for action in the mid-Tudor world; but he did not. The final poems of the revised second edition provide a closure in which the virtue of friendship falls prey to political corruption. The elegy on Zoroaster's death in poem 278 is remarkable for the strength and clarity of its narrative, which describes a scene of ritualized violence that seems to eliminate any doubt about what action is required as a response to political corruption.33

In the execution of both Zoroaster and Cicero in poems 278 and 279, we see what John Foxes Acts and Monuments shows repeatedly a few years later in the vivid deaths of the Marian martyrs: that by embracing death with courage and dignity, one portrays the "triumph of faith."34 In the midst of the fray between the Egyptians and the Greeks, Zoroas, to whom the heavens are revealed "as his book,' defies his fate by advancing in the hope of slaying Alexander, who chooses not to fight because he knows Zoroaster contains the lore of the muses.35 The great commander announces that he will never marr the "lodge of lore,' or "the Muses mansion" in Zoroaster, because that would only eliminate wisdom, poetry, and thus learning from the world. But Zoroas embraces martyrdom when he wounds Alexander and is cut to pieces by the Greek soldiers: "Wherewith a whole rout came of souldiers stern, / And all in pieces hewed the silly seg" (sig. Ffiv). His martyrdom assures him eternal honor: he is set free "from dark oblivion of devouring death" (sig. FfivV).

The violent destruction of the prophet-poet in poem 278 is linked by the connective, "therefore,' in poem 279, which tells of the banishment and death of Cicero, the great rhetorician. There is also a structural connection in that both poems are written in blank verse and share a mutual thematic concern for the glory of martyrdom. This poem describes Cicero's political assassination, when state swordsmen slay their master and betray his friendship. Like Zoroas, Cicero knows that the fates call for his death: "Sayl on, shape course / To the next shore, and brying me to my death." His country will repay him for saving it from "civill sword" by putting him to death. When the "sacred senate prince" sees the men approach, he recognizes his enemies among the ensigns "with drawn swoord" (sig. FfivV). "What might he doo,' the narrator asks, run, ask pardon, or try defend himself: "should he with wordes attempt to turn the wrath / Of tharmed knyght, whose safegarde hee had wrought?" (sig. Ggi). His age and his love for his country forbid it, and he turns to meet his fate. Cicero chooses the most honorable path, according to Nicholas Ridley, a celebrated martyr who, prior to the Marian reign, was Grimald's superior, before his own execution at the stake in 1555.36 Cicero has been forewarned that "Jove desires a neew heavensman to make," but he believes that he will not die in vain. "Slea mee: yet all thofspring to coom shall know / And this deceas shall bring eternall lyfe" (sig. Ggi). He then bares his throat, and after some delay, Herennius slays him. After the death of Cicero, as had happened also after the death of Zoroas, "the latine Muses, and the Grayes, they wept." We are left with the final image of Pitho, the goddess of persuasion, accompanying Cicero as he departs the earth "ne will no more return" (sig. GgiV). Cicero, the great rhetorician whose persuasive style influenced generations of early modern poets and educators, is described finally departing from earth, while the senseless flock of warriors look on in silence.

The closing poems in Songes and Sonettes provide a bleak statement on the humanist initiative to build a more civilized society, which is perhaps appropriate for a culture that has undergone the cruel and arbitrary inflections of Tudor tyranny. In the context of 1557, the suppression of Grimald's poems of personal praise for pre-Marian figures who exemplify virtues of friendship eliminates a sense of communitas from the 31 July text.37 Gone is the nostalgia for the community of individuals whose virtue was reflected in their patterns of action. These potentially dangerous poems are replaced in the 31 July edition with a more linear focus that urges the reader to admire and appreciate the courageous resolve of classical figures who choose the honorable path of martyrdom. If one cannot live in friendship in this world-"sins nothing is more kindely for our kinde" (sig. FfiiV)-one must appreciate those who are willing to die for their beliefs.38 Tottel's editor also anticipates John Foxes Acts and Monuments (1563), which emphasizes the triumphs of faith of the Protestant martyrs and the sense of "holy joy" which sometimes descends upon them in the moments preceding their death.39 We see in the deaths of both Zoroaster and Cicero the calm assurance of immortal life. Their suffering is a secular dramatization of the passion, death, and ascension of Christ.40 Grimald's translation of these two poems continues an earlier interest in martyrology apparent in his Oxford dramas, Archipropheta (1546-47), on the life of John the Baptist, and the lost Protomartyr, thought to have dramatized the life of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr.41

The revised edition of Songes and Sonettes, however, does not end with a note of despair, but with a reaffirmation of the role of the poet in relation to the community. The editor concludes with a final epigram, poem 280, which celebrates the immortality of Cicero and the immutability of art. The epigram reads as follows:

For Tullie, late, a toomb I gan prepare: When Cynthie, thus, bad mee my labour spare: Such maner things becoom the ded, quoth hee: But Tullie hues, and styll shall bee.

(sig. GgiV)

Out of the violence and death caused by political treachery, the betrayal of friendship, and the abuses of love, we are provided with the short, quiet statement that poetry matters: Tully lives in his letters, in his theories of rhetoric, and paradoxically, because he was betrayed by the community he tried to civilize. The final poem reminds us of what we may have forgotten amid the numerous lyric complaints about the impossibility of making ourselves understood and the apparent failure of poetry as an agent of social change. The thought and spirit of Cicero were alive during the sixteenth century, perhaps more so than at any other time after his death. But the difficulties involved in attempting to revive his voice, or any other poetic voice attempting to contribute to the construction of a civilized human community, seem overwhelming. Indeed, in spite of the humanist endeavor in the early sixteenth century to inculcate classical ideals in the young through the study of the Latin authors, mid-Tudor culture seems to have become even more vicious and chaotic. Certainly, parallels can be drawn between the execution of Zoroaster and that of Surrey in 1547, and Cicero's murder and Grimald's brush with public execution at the stake shortly after Mary assumed the throne in 1553. It is no coincidence, then, that in the fifth year of Mary's reign, Tottel published a text in which the final poems are meditations on martyrdom. It is a suitable closing gesture to a world in which there is so little civility. In this ritual act of violence the poet's voice as prophet and cultural critic is immortalized by the society which he has criticized and helped to sustain.

Looking again at the generic collage of Tottel's Songes and Sonettes, one might suggest that the lyric voices deplore the volatile and socially unstable world from which they are trying to liberate themselves. In the end, the quest for fulfillment leads not to recantation, as in Petrarch, but to a deeply complex and bitterly ironic outcry against politics and personal censorship which sets the stage for the culturally critical works of the later Elizabethan period. Understanding the literary and historical subtext of Tottel's work sensitizes us, then, to larger political issues which may be evident in the numerous single-authored anthologies of the Elizabethan world. Googe's Ecloges, Epitaphs and Sonnets (1563), Turbervile's Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songes and Sonettes (1567), Gascoigne's Hundreth Sundrie Flowres 053) and Posies (1575), and Sidney's Certain Sonnets (i58i) all have strong intertextual links to the ideological struggle in Tottel's text. We should now examine the semantic power of the lyric voice in these poems and determine whether, like their prototype, they contest and subvert the imperatives of history and culture and underline the importance of the "new poet" in defining the integrity of early modern concepts of the self. We should also explore the published anthologies by noncontributing editors, such as Clement Robinson's A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1566), Robert Edward's A Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), and Thomas Proctor's A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578) 4z I suggest that we will find in these collections not random aggregations of miscellaneous poems, but sites of negotiation between the forces of culture and politics which trace the evolution of the concepts of interiority and textuality in the early modern world.

St. Francis Xavier University