Abstract
‘And would God she might see the inward parts of my heart where she should see a great jewel of honesty toward her locked up in a coffer of perplexity.’1 James’s plea about Elizabeth is made in a letter which seeks repeal of the English parliament’s recent petition for Mary’s execution. The remark is interesting, not least for the way in which it echoes the conceit of interiority found in the king’s poetry and political prose of the 1580s and 1590s. It proclaims an emotional ‘authenticity’ or purity, but one that is recondite or recalcitrant, ‘locked up’ or sealed from outward representation, as if in evocation of the Marian casket emblem. This contradiction underpins the king’s amatory writing where processes of revelation, identity and disclosure gain erotic, as well as political, investment. Jamesian eros is caught on two thresholds: between public, or published, and private representations of sovereign ‘selves’ and sovereignty; and between the notion of the text as an instrument of revelation and ‘truth’, and as a vulnerable embodiment of desire requiring a ‘protective’ or evasive shell. Protection or ‘shelter’ from mendacious and expedient interpretation was precisely what Marian eros had been denied. While the name of Mary was so securely fastened to the casket-sonnets, and the concept of an incontestable sovereign self inextricable from their expression of desire, ‘self-representation’ in Jamesian love poetry, by contrast, is unstable or unfixed. This is partly a consequence of the new literary culture of Jacobean Renaissance Scotland which, by the early 1580s, was emerging as a tightly knit, self-sustaining aesthetic court culture; poetic practice, to some degree, could become a courtly recreation, an art which grew out of a collaborative, coterie culture.
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Notes
‘Fail not to let her see all this letter’: in G.P.V. Akrigg ed., Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 75. Speculatively dated 27 November 1586; William Keith was one of James’s two London agents.
‘Heere shalt thou see clearlie, as in a glasse, the miseries of this wauering world’: ‘The Avthovr to the Reader’, The Furies, printed in His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises at vacant houres (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1591), sig. 3r; James Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1955), vol. 1, 98. Citations from James’s poetry are orthographically based on the first printed edition or, in the case of unpublished poetry, the most appropriate ‘copy text’ manuscript (all relevant manuscript sources are identified; where a manuscript text exists in two orthographic versions, Scots and Anglo-Scots, the former is usually preferred as, by inference, the earliest version); in citation of texts, reference is also made to Craigie’s two volume edition, abbreviated as STS to distinguish it from Craigie’s edition of the Basilikon Doron.
BL Add. MS 24195, f. 2r; STS vol. 2, 69, see note 22 below for detail of manuscript context. For readings of the erotic poems to date, see Murray F. Markland, ‘A Note on Spenser and the Scottish Sonneteers’, SSL, 1 (1966–7), 136–40 (139);
Antonia Fraser, James VI of Scotland and I of England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974; 1994), 52;
R.D.S. Jack, ‘Poetry under King James VI’, in Cairns Craig ed., History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), vol. 1 ed. Jack, 125–39 (128, 130);
Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature. Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 22–5;
J. Derrick McClure, ‘“O Phoenix Escossois”: James VI as Poet’, in Alisoun Gardner-Medwin and Janet Hadley Williams eds, A Day Estivall (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990), 96–111 (106–7). See also the newly published collection edited by
Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, Royal Subjects. Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002).
Robert Ashton ed., James I by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchison and Co., 1969), 148.
Essayes of a Prentise, ‘The twelf Sonnets of Inuocations to the Goddis’, sig. Aiiijr, ‘Sonnet. 2’, line 12, STS vol. 1, 9. This theory of artful illusionism is probably influenced by Quintilian’s theory of evidentia and the translation of the verbal into the visual or perceptual. See also Roderick J. Lyall, ‘James VI and the Cultural Crisis’, in Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch eds, The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 55 - 70.
Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), in discussion of The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (7).
Each MS is described respectively in Allan F. Westcott, New Poems by James I of England (New York: AMS Press, 1966), xi-xvi and Craigie, Poems, vol. 1, lxxi-vii. Bodley, 165 contains only two of the BL Amatoria texts, ‘as falcounis ar’ (ff. 43r-44v), and ‘if mourning micht amende’, later titled ‘A Dier at her M:ties Desyr’ (ff. 46r-v). These are each written on separate manuscripts and bound together with the other works, including the Lepanto and the Furies. There are interesting linguistic differences between the texts which show the later anglified revisions of original Scots orthography, suggesting a clear pre-1603 dating and the cultural sensitivity of post-Union linguistic affiliations.
The first Amatoria sonnet occasioned a ‘reply’ from Henry Constable (STS vol. 2, 225); see Joan Grundy ed., The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960) ‘Introduction’, 28–31, and Constable’s other two sonnets to James, one of which proclaims James’s poetic separation from ‘others hooded with blind loue’ (implying that profane love is an unfit sovereign subject; 140–1).
Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 14, also cites a likely imitation of the first Amatoria sonnet by Nicholas Breton in Stephen Powle’s commonplace book: ‘A passionate Sonnet made by the Kinge of Scots uppon difficulties ariseing to crosse his proceedinge in love and marriage with his most worthie to be esteemed Queene’.
Ibid., 92. For James’s arrangement of other noble marriages, see Mathew, James I (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967), 55.
The later metaphorical expansion into the image of the storm-tossed ship is also an emblematic image (in Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (Lyon, 1545), for example, signifying ‘Spes proxima’), as well as a popular petrarchistic conceit for erotic suffering. The Jamesian conceit of the court as bereft of its beautiful light is interestingly paralleled by Ronsard’s valedictory poetry to Mary herself: Fleming, 68, notes the similarity to the conceit of the lost ‘perle précieuse’ in the ‘Elégie sur le départ de la Royne d’Escosse’ but there is also another resemblance in the ‘Elégie a H. L’Huillier, Seigneur de Maisonfleur’ (1564): ‘Nous perdons de la court le beau Soleil qui luit’ (3), in Paul Laumonier ed., Oeuvres complètes, 20 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1914–75), vol. 12, 189.
See David Stevenson, Scotland’s Last Royal Wedding. The Marriage of James VI and Anne of Denmark (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1997).
See also the official documents transcribed in J.T.G. Craig, Papers relative to the Marriage of King James the sixth of Scotland with the Princess Anna of Denmark (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1828).
Sir James Melville, Memoirs of his Own Life (Edinburgh, 1827), 373.
6: 7–12; f. 6v, STS vol. 2, 70. The conceit suggests sexual possession (prefiguring the imminent sexual union within marriage?) but is especially redolent of Jupiter’s sexual possession of Ganymede, cupbearer to Zeus, who was carried off by an eagle, possibly Zeus in disguise. For the common Renaissance homoerotic interpretation of this, see James Sazlow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: homosexuality in art and society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); for another Jamesian variation on the conceit, see the Phoenix, 56–60.
For James’s other references to the idea of inspired furor (expounded in the French rhetorical treatises of Sebillet and du Mans which influenced James’s own, and poetically in, for example, Ronsard’s Hymne de l’Automne, XII, 46ff) see ‘A Sonnet on du Bartas’ (Add. 24195, f. 34r, the second Du Bartasian sonnet, STS vol. 1, 102), and the series of twelve mythological sonnets printed in the Essayes. Buchanan may also have been an influence: in particular, his Ptolemaic-based, cosmographical poetry, the Sphaera, to which James’s own cosmological sonnets (’Ad hoc creaturae destinatae sunt, vt in eis glorificetur Creator’, printed at the end of the Lepanto, and two ‘on Ticho Brahe’, Add. 24195, ff. 32r-v, STS vol. 2, 99–101), may be indebted. On the Sphaera, see Yasmin Haskell, ‘Renaissance Latin Didactic Poetry on the Stars: Wonder, Myth, and Science’, Renaissance Studies, 12. 4 (1998), 495–522.
For example, ‘Vpon occasion of some great disorders in Scotland’ (11–12), Add. MS 24195, f. 45r, STS vol. 2, 119: ‘In vaine descended I of Royal race/Which by succession made a king of me’. In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, James also identifies himself with Fergus, the Irish chieftain who subdued Scotland. For the political and constitutional uses of Scotland’s mythical sovereign past, see Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History, and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain’, in Mason ed., Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), 73–4.
See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1972 (first pub. 1953), on the mythological genealogy of Renaissance princes celebrated in ‘art and poetry [which] joined forces to attest the divinity of the sovereign […]’ (32).
For discussion of the 1569 portrait of Elizabeth depicting the queen winning the prize, see Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 150–1.
Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power. Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), 67, citing Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance.
The Boke named The Gouernour ed. H.H.S. Croft, 2 vols (London, 1883), vol. 1, 4. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38ff, offers a gendered interpretation of humoural theory as subversive of ‘a specifically masculine vision of social order and individual rationality’ (38).
Clare McManus, ‘Marriage and the Performance of the Romance Quest: Anne of Denmark and the Stirling Baptismal Celebrations for Prince Henry’, in L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the Wild (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 177–98, (181)
This kind of excusatio is used, for example, by Jehan Le Fevre: ‘For if some women are evil and perverse and abnormal, it does not necessarily follow that all of them are so cruel and wicked; nor should all of them be lumped together in this general reproach.’: Aleuin Blamires et al. eds, Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 193.
See Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
Kevin Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake eds, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 117–138.
On humoral imagery in James’s translation of Du Bartas’s La Premier Sepmaine, entitled the Furies, see R.D.S. Jack, ‘Imitation in the Scottish Sonnet’, Comparative Literature, 20 (1968), 313–28, and
Ian Ross, ‘Verse Translation at the Court of King James VI of Scotland’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 4 (1962), 252–67.
Another less frequent incarnation of James’s mythological roles as well as a common emblematic figure: see Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schoene, Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1967), 1610 for a variety of Orpheus emblems to which James might be alluding. In ‘The Translators Invocation’, in Poeticall Exercises, sig. 8r, there is an allusion to Orpheus: ‘(Alluring ORPHEVS) with his songs/he sweetlie doth inchaunt/The MVSES nyne to laue their leeds/That they before did haunt/And take them to his vulgare toung’ (21–5).
Allan F. Westcott (ed.), New Poems by James I of England (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 71.
CSP (Border), vol. 1, cited in David Moysie ed., Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland 1577–1603 (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1830), 55.
See further William Forbes-Leith, Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (Edinburgh: 1885), Esmé was favoured by John Leslie, the Bishop of Ross (chief pro-Marian reprentative), as a positive force for Catholic restoration in Scotland.
David Bergeron, James I and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 33, 37.
Ford, 106; on James’s triumphal entry into London in 1603, the phoenix iconography was deployed (‘Nova Felix Arabia Arch’); the newly created phoenix represented the new monarch succeeding Elizabeth, rising from her ashes; see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 10.
In Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1545), for example, of which James possessed a copy (‘Textbooks of King James’, in T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944–50) vol. 1, 535). NLS MS 2063, f. 103r, belonging to William Fowler, contains written and illustrated instructions for the phoenix emblem.
Margaret Swain, The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (Carlton: Ruth Bean Publishers, 1986), 63, 106; Mary adopted it as an emblem in her tapestry, perhaps ‘in memory of her beloved mother’ (63).
‘Fame puts her away and hides her in the fragrant rich bosom of the Arabian mountains, but she flies haughty through our own skies’ (12–14): translation from Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976) 330–1.
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© 2002 Sarah M. Dunnigan
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Dunnigan, S.M. (2002). Fables of Eros: James VI and the Revelation of Desire. In: Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932709_4
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