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This book attempts to interrogate the literary, artistic and cultural output of early modern England. Following Constance Classen's view that understandings of the senses, and sensory experience itself, are culturally and historically contingent; it explores the culturally specific role of the senses in textual and aesthetic encounters in England. The book follows Joachim-Ernst Berendt's call for 'a democracy of the senses' in preference to the various sensory hierarchies that have often shaped theory and criticism. It argues that the playhouse itself challenged its audiences' reliance on the evidence of their own eyes, teaching early modern playgoers how to see and how to interpret the validity of the visual. The book offers an essay on each of the five senses, beginning and ending with two senses, taste and smell, that are often overlooked in studies of early modern culture. It investigates Robert Herrick's accounts in Hesperides of how the senses function during sexual pleasure and contact. The book also explores sensory experiences, interrogating textual accounts of the senses at night in writings from the English Renaissance. It offers a picture of early modern thought in which sensory encounters are unstable, suggesting ways in which the senses are influenced by the contexts in which they are experienced: at night, in states of sexual excitement, or even when melancholic. The book looks at the works of art themselves and considers the significance of the senses for early modern subjects attending a play, regarding a painting, and reading a printed volume.
. Herrick, however, does imagine all five senses to enable ‘physical invasion of the body’. In ‘The Argument of his Book’, he provides a partial table of contents for Hesperides (1648), his collection of over 1400 poems. The things emphasized at the midpoint of the verse catalogue are liquids and sensual objects: ‘I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece | Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-Greece’ (ll. 7–8).3 Throughout Hesperides, Herrick sings of things that enliven the senses, and he describes sensation as a process of absorption or consumption. For instance
In the poetic collection Hesperides (1648), Robert Herrick includes the brief verse ‘To his booke’, in which he addresses his own literary creation, and reflects on its potentially unhappy afterlife in the hands of readers and critics: If hap it must, that I must see thee lye Absyrtus-like all
Ralph Knevet's Supplement of the Faery Queene (1635) is a narrative and allegorical work, which weaves together a complex collection of tales and episodes, featuring knights, ladies, sorcerers, monsters, vertiginous fortresses and deadly battles – a chivalric romp in Spenser's cod medieval style. The poem shadows recent English history, and the major military and political events of the Thirty Years War. But the Supplement is also an ambitiously intertextual poem, weaving together materials from mythic, literary, historical, scientific, theological, and many other kinds of written sources. Its encyclopaedic ambitions combine with Knevet's historical focus to produce an allegorical epic poem of considerable interest and power.
This new edition of Knevet's Supplement, the first scholarly text of the poem ever published, situates it in its literary, historical, biographical, and intellectual contexts. An extensive introduction and copious critical commentary, positioned at the back of the book, will enable students and scholars alike to access Knevet's complicated and enigmatic meanings, structures, and allusions.
years after composition, with the accession of Charles I in between. Parrot writes in the preface, It is now almost two yeares expired when (living in the Country that long Vacation) I wrote these Epigrams, and Epitaphs adjoining, which then, nor since I would consent (nor was it fit indeed they should bee published) till now on times more prosperous opportunity.5 Sheer desperation from falling on hard times (as I suggested was possible with Percy in Chapter 5) may also explain a movement into print: Herrick’s epigrams (and other poems) were published as Hesperides
scattered through the Hesperides , to the extent that the symposiastic scene of alcohol-fuelled and convivial song becomes not only a recurrent motif but an implicit metaphor for Herrick’s volume. Some of these poems describe habitual or future gatherings with living friends, some look back nostalgically to ‘lyrick feasts’ hosted by Ben Jonson, now dead, many involve the recitation of Anacreon or Horace (whose Odes also contain anacreontic and symposiastic songs) as well as newly made verse, and in some – as here – it is hard to distinguish the living guests from the
. For us, in half a century, India blooms The garden of Hesperides, and we Placed in its porch, CALCUTTA, with its tombs And dazzling splendors, towering peerlessly, May taste its sweets, yet bitters too there be Under attaractive seeming. Drink again The frothy draught, and revel joyously; From the gay round of
inhabitants of the ancient islands of the Hesperides. According to Oviedo, who first proposed this theory in the 1530s, the Hesperides of the ancient writers were controlled by the Spanish, being named after the twelfth king of Spain, Hespero. 49 Oviedo backed up this theory by employing a number of examples which illustrated this custom of naming territories after their leaders: ‘the Romans of Romulus, their king, built the city of Rome’ and ‘the Alexandrians of Alexander the Great, their king, built that city of Alexandria’. 50 Unfortunately for Oviedo, his
of circulation. Their relative neglect in this study is, I hope, somewhat made up for by a number of excellent studies that have focused on Jonson’s epigrams of praise.27 Similarly, my relative neglect of Herrick stems from both the date of Hesperides (1648), lying just beyond the range of my focus, and the fact that his volume has been admirably treated as an epigram book by Ann Baynes Coiro.28 Other worthwhile epigrammatists – T homas Campion in Latin, John Davies of Hereford and Thomas Bancroft in English – h ave not been given the attention they deserve
(Toronto: Iter Inc. and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014) Ezell, Margaret J. M., ‘The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History’, English Literary Renaissance, 38 (2008): 331–55 Hutton, Sarah, ‘Hester Pulter (c. 1596–1678): A Woman Poet and the New Astronomy’, Etudes Epistémè, 14 (2008): 77–87 Marcus, Leah, ‘Herrick’s “Hesperides” and the “Proclamation Made for May” ’, Studies in Philology, 76.1 (1979): 49–74 Marcus, Leah, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday