Abstract
The term ‘autobiography’ must come hedged with numerous qualifications when we are dealing with the sixteenth century. Terms such as ‘identity’ (in the sense of a distinctive personality) and ‘individuality’ do not begin to be used until the seventeenth century, while ‘autobiography’ and ‘individualism’ are nineteenth-century coinages.1 As the introduction to this volume points out, we can no longer accept Burckhardt’s famous pronouncement that man emerged in the Renaissance as a fully self-conscious ‘spiritual individual’ after a period in which he ‘was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation’.2 Such a simple model has been challenged on the one hand by those medievalists and historians who point to clear evidence of individualism and self-consciousness long before the Renaissance, and on the other by theorists who challenge all notions of a unitary essential self waiting to spring into full consciousness of its being.3
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Notes
For ‘identity’, see OED 2a; for discussion of such terms as ‘individual’ and ‘individuality’, see Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language. Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago, 1983) pp. 33–5; for ‘autobiography’, see Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969) p. 1.
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, transl. S.G.C. Middlemore (Oxford, 1945) p. 81.
See, for example, David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (New York and London, 1992) pp. 177–202, on the arbitrariness of the medieval/Renaissance divide; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989) especially pp. 131–2, for a history of the developing sense of the self in the West; and Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (New York and London, 1984) esp. p. xxvii and chs. 10 and 16.
For an essay which studies the influence of the mid-century miscellanies on Spenser and Sidney, and mentions their use of autobiography, see Germaine Wartenkin, ‘The Meeting of the Muses: Sidney and the Mid-Tudor Poets’, in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture. The Poet in His Time and Ours, ed. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore (London, 1984) pp. 17–33. For an earlier study of autobiographical poetry in this period, see Rudolph Gottfried, ‘Autobiography and Art: An Elizabethan Borderland’, in Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding. Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Phillip Damon (New York, 1967) pp. 109–34.
For a study of what she calls the ‘autobiographical assumption’ in troubadour lyrics, see Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge, 1990).
See Arthur Maroth, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, 1995) pp. 135–47. For the increasing privacy of reading habits in the sixteenth century, see Roger Chartier, ‘The Practical Impact of Writing’, in A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, vol. III, Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) pp. 124–5. For the social performance of Tudor courtly verse, see John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London, 1961).
For Petrarch, see Ivy L. Mumford, ‘Petrarchism and Italian Music at the Court of Henry VIII’, Italian Studies 26 (1971) 49–67, and for English Tudor verse, see Stevens, Music and Poetry pp. 127–32.
Whythorne’s manuscript was edited using Whythorne’s idiosyncratic orthography, by James M. Osborn as The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford, 1961). The following year Osborn edited a modern spelling edition with the same title, (London, 1962). When quoting from the Autobiography in this essay I shall use the modern spelling edition.
Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1928–9) II. 7–36. Quotations in my text will be followed in parentheses by volume and page references to this edition.
Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender. Authorship and Publication in the Renaissance (Ithaca, 1993) p. 97. See also Marotti, Manuscript, Print, pp. 215–17.
Daniel Javitch, ‘The Impure Motives of Elizabethan Poetry’, Genre 15 (1982) 225–8 (p. 225).
See, for example, ll.86 and 100, and the headnote in Sir Thomas Wyatt. The Complete Poems, ed. R.A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth, 1978) p. 439.
See Rollins (ed.) II. pp. 74–5 and the preceding discussion. Also Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford, 1964) pp. 108–9.
Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth, 1972) for example pp. 299, 307, 315.
Ibid., p. 316. For the contemporary taste for tournament imprese which Nashe mocks, see Alan Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London, 1987) ch. 5.
Michael Drayton, The Works, ed. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson and Bernard H. Newdigate, 5 vols (Oxford, 1931–41) II. 283.
Ibid. II. 287 (‘Tagus, farewell’ was ‘done by the said Earle, or Sir Francis Brian’).
Ibid., p. 111. On the well-known gentlemanly reluctance to print, see J.W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951) 139–64, but see the important modification of Saunders’ argument in Nita Krevans, ‘Print and the Tudor Poets’, in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghampton, NY, 1992), pp. 301–13.
Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London, 1988) p. 74.
See Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Toronto, 1989) poems 43–5, and George Turberville, Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567) And Epitaphes and Sonnettes (1576). Facsimile reproduction with an introduction by Richard J. Panofsky (Delmar, NY, 1977) pp. 348–74.
See the introduction by Richard J. Panofsky to The Floures of Philosophie (1572) by Hugh Plat, A Sweet Nosgay (1573) and The Copy of a Letter (1567) by Isabella Whitney (Delmar, NY, 1982).
Quotations from this poem are from the modernised edition in Women Writers in Renaissance England, ed. Randall Martin (London, 1997) pp. 289–302 (p. 289). Line numbers in parentheses following quotations are from this edition.
Osborne makes this point in the 1961 edition, p. liv. See also two articles by David R. Shore, ‘The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne: An Early Elizabethan Context for Poetry’, Renaissance and Reformation, 17 (1981) 72–86, and ‘Whythorne’s Autobiography and the Genesis of Gascoigne’s Master F.J.’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 12 (1982) 159–78.
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Heale, E. (2000). Songs, Sonnets and Autobiography: Self-representation in Sixteenth-century Verse Miscellanies. In: Dragstra, H., Ottway, S., Wilcox, H. (eds) Betraying Our Selves. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62847-6_5
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