Influence works in odd ways. As long as I can remember reading Hamlet (which is a very long time) I remember being struck by the odd tone of Claudius' opening speech.  The mystery was solved as soon as I read the opening speech of the old Leir play:

THus to our griefe the obsequies performd
Of our (too late) deceast and dearest Queen,
Whole soule I hope, possest of heaue?ly ioyes,
Doth ride in triumph mo?gst the Cherubins;
Let vs request your graue aduice, my Lords,
For the disposing of our princely daughters,
For whom our care is specially imployd,
As nature bindeth to aduaunce their states,
In royall marriage with some princely mates:
For wanting now their mothers good aduice,
Vnder whose gouernment they haue receyued
A perfit patterne of a vertuous life:
Left as it were a ship without a sterne,
Or silly sheepe without a Pastors care;
Although our selues doe dearely tender them,
Yet are we ignorant of their affayres:
For fathers best do know to gouerne sonnes;
But daughters steps the mothers counsell turnes.
A sonne we want for to succeed our Crowne,
And course of time hath cancelled the date
Of further issue from our withered loynes
One foote already hangeth in the graue,
And age hath made deepe furrowes in my face:
The world of me, I of the world am weary,
And I would fayne resigne these earthly cares,
And thinke vpon the welfare of my soule:
Which by no better meanes may be effected,
Then by resigning vp the Crowne from me,
In equall dowry to my daughters three.
Skalliger.
A worthy care, my Liege, which well declares,
The zeale you bare vnto our quondam Queene:
And since your Grace hath licens'd me to speake,

The actor's memory, I suppose, transposing one opening speech with a keen sense of the abrupt "key change" and different tonality that the new speech achieves as it follows the ghostly opening. 

You probably have already seen the new ways of getting at EEBO TCP texts on the Oxford Text Archive (http://ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/) or Wolfgang Meiers' eXist showcase (http://showcases.exist-db.org/exist/apps/eebo/works/A05206.xml_1.2.3.1.7.html).

But if you haven't, it's worth checking out.  You can get the texts in various formats including epub. 

MM



From: Susanne Woods <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, July 10, 2015 at 10:33 AM
To: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Thomas Sackville and Edmund Spenser

Very nice, Jeff and Scott. There's a lot more to be done on the influence of M for M in the later 16th century. Does anyone know any other pre-Spenser narratives that were nearly as popular (not counting Chaucer, of course)?

Susanne

On Friday, July 10, 2015, Scott Lucas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Thanks to Jeff Dolven for drawing attention to the inspiration that Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” seems to have offered Spenser in his composition of The Faerie Queene. I don’t know of anyone who has done a systematic study of the connections between Sackville’s “golden verse” (as Spenser terms it in his dedicatory sonnet to Sackville in FQ) and Spenser’s own poetry. In the absence of such a study, the best reference I know of is Marguerite Hearsey’s edition of Sackville’s autograph manuscript of the “Induction” and “Henry, Duke of Buckingham,” which she titled The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham, including the “Induction,” or, Thomas Sackville’s Contribution to the “Mirror for Magistrates” (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1936). [This autograph MS is somewhat different from the version of the two poems William Baldwin published in the 1563 Mirror for Magistrates.]

 

Hearsey makes brief and scattered comments about points of contact between Sackville’s work and Spenser’s in her endnotes, and most of her observations concern archaic and archaic-seeming words both Sackville and Spenser used in their poems (e.g. “drear” as a noun, a word Sackville evidently coined; “distrain” to mean “tear apart,” etc.). She does, however, observe that lines 22-49 of Daphnaida are “distinctly reminiscent” of the opening of Sackville’s “Induction,” and she invites readers to compare Alcyon’s anguished swoon in ll. 540-553 of Daphnaida with Buckingham’s own in the midst of relating his betrayal by Humphrey Bannister in “Henry, Duke of Buckingham.” (In addition to Hearsey’s comments, it seems to me that the speaker’s helping up of Alcyon from both of his swoons in Daphnaida distinctly recalls Sackville’s own unusual assistance to the fainting allegorical figure of Sorrow in ll. 127-133 of the “Induction” as well).

 

I believe Bart Van Es has recently written an essay on how the Mirror authors’ literary use of the past to interpret contemporary politics influenced both the composition and early modern reception of The Faerie Queene. It should appear next year in a collection of essays on A Mirror for Magistrates edited by Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield. I don't think the piece will have anything to say concerning Sackville’s or any of the other Mirror authors’ formal influence upon Spenser’s poetry. Personally, I’d love to know more about Spenser’s employment of consciously archaic terms and constructions in FQ—did he adopt them directly from his reading of Chaucer, or was he strongly influenced by Sackville’s own celebrated adoption (and, at times, creation) of such terms and structures in his two Mirror contributions? I tend to agree with Jeff that Sackville's setting of mood, his flowing, regular verse (so unusual for "drab-age" poetry), his Chaucerian archaisms, and his allegorical figures in the "Induction" were likely more of an influence on Spenser than many scholars have recognized. 


 

Scott

 

 

Scott C. Lucas

Professor of English 

The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina

Charleston, SC  29409

 

(843) 953-5133

[log in to unmask]

 




On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Jeff Dolven <[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]> wrote:
David's great question prompts me to mention something I noticed a while ago, and have meant to send along to the list for comment: namely how much Sackville's Induction in the Mirror for Magistrates sounds like The Faerie Queene. The diction is archaic, there is a lot of alliteration, the verse is strictly regular, and the plot, such as it is, is full of allegorical personifications. Here's a sample likely to be suggestive to readers of Book I:

An hideous hole all vast, withouten shape,
Of endless depth, o'erwhelm'd with ragged stone,
With ugly mouth and grisly jaws doth gape,
And to our sight confounds itself in one.
Here enter'd we, and yeding forth, anon
An horrible loathly lake we might discern,
As black as pitch, that cleped is Averne:

A deadly gulf where nought but rubbish grows,
With foul black swelth in thicken'd lumps that lies,
Which up in the air such stinking vapours throws
That over there may fly no fowl but dies,
Chok'd with the pestilent savours that arise;
Hither we come, whence forth we still did pace,
In dreadful fear amid the dreadful place.

And first, within the porch and jaws of hell,
Sat deep Remorse of conscience, all besprent
With tears; and to herself oft would she tell
Her wretchedness, and cursing never stent
To sob and sigh; but ever thus lament
With thoughtful care as she that, all in vain,
Would wear and waste continually in pain.

The whole things is some kind of mix of Aeneid VI and allegorical dream vision. It strikes me as more atmospheric, less narrativized or argumentatively structured than Spenser’s poem: it is setting a mood (of horror, or something like that), preparatory to the political work of the Buckingham section. Sackville is not particularly using these resources to think with, the way Spenser will. But Spenser does seem to have learned so much from the sound of it - I don't know of anything closer to the idiom of what he would write in the 80s. A very cursory investigation suggests that the debt has been noticed, but not much commented on. 

Jeff


On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 7:00 PM, SIDNEY-SPENSER automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]> wrote:
There are 3 messages totaling 409 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. Spenser in the 1590s: was he more influential than influenced? (3)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 7 Jul 2015 20:02:39 -0400
From:    Anne Prescott <[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Spenser in the 1590s: was he more influential than influenced?

Interesting query, David--and that was indeed a stellar conference. What a
pleasure to see all those faces and nametags!
     I'd say that if he could find French writers (and it's clear he did)
that he'd not have a very hard time getting English books, if only when he
stopped by Cork or Dublin. Or sent his servants, or wrote to London for
what he had heard about. So: if French, then English. He could have gone to
Ireland with a box of French books, of course, but it's perhaps even easier
to imagine him hearing about Desportes from some friend or other, e.g., and
sending away for a copy (or borrowing it). I do understand about the
"isolation," but the Channel makes a nice highway past Wales, Cornwall,
Devonshire, etc. and to London or Calais, Antwerp, etc.  I have no idea
what the bookstore scene was in Dublin. (It's pretty good now!) Anne

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 6:25 PM, David Wilson-Okamura <[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Thank you, Jane Grogan, Thomas Herron, and Andrew Wallace for organizing
> last month's conference. There were a lot of participants, AND the level of
> papers was quite high. (These are two things that often occur in isolation,
> but seldom together.)
>
> Two of the best papers that I heard were Yulia Ryzhik, "Spenser and Donne
> Go Fishing: Courtship and Courtliness" and Richard Danson Brown , "Unfree
> Lines: Restraint in Spenser and Herbert," both in the session "Spenser
> among the Metaphysicals." After forty minutes, I was completely convinced
> that Donne and Herbert were both reading Spenser more eagerly than I had
> imagined. I already knew, from Rachel Hile's work, that Spenser's
> Complaints had an immediate impact on other poets; and Patrick Cheney has
> shown just how much of Marlowe is written in reaction to Spenser. I still
> think we're allowed to laugh when Spenser asks, "Who knows not Colin
> Clout?" but I suspect that a loud guffaw would have gotten you a sharp
> elbow in the ribs.
>
> Query: was Spenser influenced by his English contemporaries as much as he
> influenced them? For example, Brown (in his preface to the new rhyme
> concordance) argues that Spenser was influenced by the style of Harington's
> Ariosto (1591); that seems plausible. Who else? I've pictured him as
> insulated by the Irish Sea, not from culture per se (Ireland had a lot of
> that, as Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton have been showing) so much as
> from poetic trends in London. I don't think it's blasphemy to say that Our
> Guy didn't know, or didn't read, everything. But I don't want to exaggerate
> his isolation. What do people think about this?
>
> --
> Dr. David Wilson-Okamura        http://virgil.org
> [log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]
> Professor of English                 Virgil reception, discussion,
> documents, &c
> East Carolina University           Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude
> Fauchet
>

------------------------------

Date:    Wed, 8 Jul 2015 07:17:00 +0000
From:    [log in to unmask]);" target="_blank"> [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Spenser in the 1590s: was he more influential than influenced?

How should we think about "influence" within a vernacular language tradition?  When there's some transmission from another language (Latin or French, say) to English, we look for imitation or echoes or variation upon conventional themes.  And one can find some echoes of Sidney in Spenser, along with exploration of some Sidneian ideas.  I expect that Spenser participated in the manuscript circulation of poems within the Sidney circle, and he may have contributed more than the one sonnet that exists in MS collections, dating from the time before his relocation to Ireland.
But influence also operates, among 'strong' poets, within a determination to form one's own voice, to find one's own way, and Spenser must have gotten that message from Sidney just as Greville did.  We should think of how influence, and rivalry, operate among musicians.  Lee Konitz listened to Charlie Parker, and also to Lester Young, and set out early to sound nothing like Bird, and nothing like Lester either but he took a lot from Lester's example.  Then when Paul Desmond became popular sounding a lot like Konitz he thought about changing his sound entirely, so it couldn't be imitated. 

I'm sorry I missed the session devoted to Spenser among the Metaphysicals.  Did anyone discuss Donne's "Nocturnal upon St Lucies Day" with reference to Spenser's "Epithalamion"?
Among Spenser's slightly older contemporaries, I'd say that George Gascoigne was a major influence, early in Spenser's career.  He set the example of writing for the printing press, and as both a moralist and a self-aware craftsman with a distinctive voice.  I think both Harvey and Spenser saw him as a poet who could be beaten at his own game.  Probably Spenser saw Harvey in those terms too -- but in the time of their intimacy Harvey was considerably more versatile, more accomplished.
Jon Q



     On Tuesday, July 7, 2015 5:02 PM, Anne Prescott <[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]> wrote:


 Interesting query, David--and that was indeed a stellar conference. What a pleasure to see all those faces and nametags!
     I'd say that if he could find French writers (and it's clear he did) that he'd not have a very hard time getting English books, if only when he stopped by Cork or Dublin. Or sent his servants, or wrote to London for what he had heard about. So: if French, then English. He could have gone to Ireland with a box of French books, of course, but it's perhaps even easier to imagine him hearing about Desportes from some friend or other, e.g., and sending away for a copy (or borrowing it). I do understand about the "isolation," but the Channel makes a nice highway past Wales, Cornwall, Devonshire, etc. and to London or Calais, Antwerp, etc.  I have no idea what the bookstore scene was in Dublin. (It's pretty good now!) Anne

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 6:25 PM, David Wilson-Okamura <[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Thank you, Jane Grogan, Thomas Herron, and Andrew Wallace for organizing last month's conference. There were a lot of participants, AND the level of papers was quite high. (These are two things that often occur in isolation, but seldom together.)
Two of the best papers that I heard were Yulia Ryzhik, "Spenserand Donne Go Fishing:Courtship andCourtliness" and Richard Danson Brown, "Unfree Lines: Restraintin Spenser and Herbert," both in the session "Spenser among the Metaphysicals." After forty minutes, I was completely convinced that Donne and Herbert were both reading Spenser more eagerly than I had imagined. I already knew, from Rachel Hile's work, that Spenser's Complaints had an immediate impact on other poets; and Patrick Cheney has shown just how much of Marlowe is written in reaction to Spenser. I still think we're allowed to laugh when Spenser asks, "Who knows not Colin Clout?" but I suspect that a loud guffaw would have gotten you a sharp elbow in the ribs.
Query: was Spenser influenced by his English contemporaries as much as he influenced them? For example, Brown (in his preface to the new rhyme concordance) argues that Spenser was influenced by the style of Harington's Ariosto (1591); that seems plausible. Who else? I've pictured him as insulated by the Irish Sea, not from culture per se (Ireland had a lot of that, as Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton have been showing) so much as from poetic trends in London. I don't think it's blasphemy to say that Our Guy didn't know, or didn't read, everything. But I don't want to exaggerate his isolation. What do people think about this?
--
Dr. David Wilson-Okamura        http://virgil.org          [log in to unmask] of English                 Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &cEast Carolina University           Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet



------------------------------

Date:    Wed, 8 Jul 2015 07:41:49 +0000
From:    "Herron, Thomas" <[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Spenser in the 1590s: was he more influential than influenced?

Hi David -- thanks so much (I say sheepishly).

On pastoral themes:  start with Bryskett I say (you already have).  I find the recent discussions of co-authorship in the editorial jumble of the back matter to the CCCHA volume, as discussed by Patrick Cheney (in the Oxford Handbook, ed McCabe) and others incl. most prominently Elisabeth Chaghafi to be fascinating.

There's also Shakespeare, of course:  the possible influence of V+A on "Astrophel", for example, also in the CCCHA volume  [cf. Lethbridge (ed.) *Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites*; also A Kent Hieatt on "Shakespeare" in the SpEnc].  CCCHA the volume looking more and more like a polyseminal work, Sp's fantasized "Shepheards Nation" (CCCHA line 17) in Ireland AND England.    We can't know entirely who Colin Clout is if he includes more than one person:  "Colin Clouts".   Is the poem "CCCHA" itself a generic hodgepodge of borrowings from contemporaries, piped back and forth with the shepherd Raleigh (and others)?

Regards, --Tom

Thomas Herron
Department of English
East Carolina University
(252) 328-6413

Editor, Explorations in Renaissance Culture (published with Brill per 2015. More at www.brill.com/erc)
Writer/Director, Centering Spenser:  A Digital Resource for Kilcolman Castle
http://core.ecu.edu/umc/Munster/
________________________________________
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]] on behalf of David Wilson-Okamura [[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, July 07, 2015 6:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]);" target="_blank"> [log in to unmask]
Subject: Spenser in the 1590s: was he more influential than influenced?

Thank you, Jane Grogan, Thomas Herron, and Andrew Wallace for organizing last month's conference. There were a lot of participants, AND the level of papers was quite high. (These are two things that often occur in isolation, but seldom together.)

Two of the best papers that I heard were Yulia Ryzhik, "Spenser and Donne Go Fishing: Courtship and Courtliness" and Richard Danson Brown , "Unfree Lines: Restraint in Spenser and Herbert," both in the session "Spenser among the Metaphysicals." After forty minutes, I was completely convinced that Donne and Herbert were both reading Spenser more eagerly than I had imagined. I already knew, from Rachel Hile's work, that Spenser's Complaints had an immediate impact on other poets; and Patrick Cheney has shown just how much of Marlowe is written in reaction to Spenser. I still think we're allowed to laugh when Spenser asks, "Who knows not Colin Clout?" but I suspect that a loud guffaw would have gotten you a sharp elbow in the ribs.

Query: was Spenser influenced by his English contemporaries as much as he influenced them? For example, Brown (in his preface to the new rhyme concordance) argues that Spenser was influenced by the style of Harington's Ariosto (1591); that seems plausible. Who else? I've pictured him as insulated by the Irish Sea, not from culture per se (Ireland had a lot of that, as Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton have been showing) so much as from poetic trends in London. I don't think it's blasphemy to say that Our Guy didn't know, or didn't read, everything. But I don't want to exaggerate his isolation. What do people think about this?

--
Dr. David Wilson-Okamura        http://virgil.org          [log in to unmask]);" target="_blank"> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]);" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]>
Professor of English                 Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University           Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet

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End of SIDNEY-SPENSER Digest - 7 Jul 2015 to 8 Jul 2015 (#2015-4)
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