Marotti 1986

Donne and the Conditions of Coterie Verse

"Beyond the uncertain circulation system involving loose papers, 'quires' of poems and large manuscripts of individual poets' work, two related practices, in particular, throw light on the system of manuscript literary transmission: the keeping of manuscript commonplace books of poetry (or of poetry and prose) and the related, markedly Elizabethan, phenomenon of the published poetical miscellany. The first is a holdover, albeit a socially respected one, from a pre-Gutenberg era, and is a custom that persisted well into the seventeenth century. Standing midway between manuscript-circulated verse and professional publications like The Works of Beniamin Jonson (1616), the second is part of the cultural transformation of the literature of social occasion into the (more aesthetically isolated) literature of a book culture." (5)

"there is a continuum from, rather than a sharp boundary between, the commonplace-book anthologies and those printed volumes that disseminated coterie literature to a wider readership" (7)

"Although published miscellanies clearly came into being as products of the information explosion caused by the invention of movable type, they actually presented themselves as a kind of compromise beween two coexistent systems of 'publication,' the circulation of literature in manuscript to restricted audiences and the printing of individual authors' works for different (narrow or wide) readerships." (7-8)

"We can see from both manuscript and printed evidence that poems, for example, were enclosed in letters, handed to people personally, read orally before select groups, given as gifts at times such as New Year's day, passed to women as complimentary trifles (like Ralegh's poem put into Lady Laiton's pocket), composed at the request of a mistress or at the challenge of a compeitor, written on set themes agreed upon by both authors and audiences, and designed as response or answer poems to other lyrics." (9)

"Most poems written by gentlemen-amateurs were ocasional in nature, their production and reception strongly involved with their biographical and social contexts. Whatever tis conventional literary features, such verse was attuned to the personal circumstances of the authors and to the social, economic, and political milieus they shared with their chosen audiences. Inevitably, contextual particularity was lost when such work passed to a wider audience both within and beyond the writers' own times." (10)

poems "as a kind of social currency" (12)

"Despite all this, the texts in manuscript and printed miscellanies lost touch with their original contexts, as the very act of anthologizing dislodged poems from their place in a system of transactions within polite or educated social circles and put them in the more fundamentally 'literary' environment of the handwritten or typographic-volume." (12-13)

"Authorship and original contexts both disappear in the 'new' text written, in effect, by the compiler. Such literary recontextualization, however, occurs in any formalist or ahistorical literary reading." (13)

in the manuscripts that include Donne's poetry, his poems are "frequently found in the company of that of other poets, many of whom were socially connected with him in some way" (17)

shared styles do not just show Donne's influence but "the sharing of certain styles of communication -- a fact underscored by the games of exchange and answer poetry in which Donne and his friends participated" (19)

"virtually all of the basic features of Donne's poetic art are related to its coterie character" (19)

"This negation or absence of discursive meaning is that condition toward which all Donne's writing moves -- not only his poems, but also his prose, especially his Sermons." (22)

"Donne's dream of communication was one in which the reader or audience or congregation repeated, or mirrored in their responses, the thoughts and feelings of the author who made the text. In the letters, as in the poetry, persona psychological struggles were used as a medium of communication with a sympathetic reader." (22)

"Donne's poems were products less of the study than of a series of social relationships spread over a number of years.

Donne as an Inns-of-Court Author

Bacon's 1597 Essays "can be looked on a a success manual for Elizabethan gentlemen, particularly for Bacon's Inns-of-Court colleagues" (29)

"While at Lincoln's INn and during that period before his employment with Sir Thoas Egerton, when he lived as a London gentleman and aspiring courtier, Donne tried his hand at various traditional and revived literary genres, viewing this writing as part of his social life, intending it for an audience of friends and acquaintances whose literary and sociocultural competence resembled his own. He composed epigrams, verse letters, formal satires, love elegies and libertine lyrics, and prose paradoxes -- all genres fostered by the social circumstances of the Inns and that male social group that developed out of this environment into those courtly and professional circles with which Donne was later connected." (35)

"In this context, Donne expected his audience to have the ltierary and social sophistication enabling them to contribute cocreatively to the dramatic and rhetorical realization of his poetic texts." (58)

"In his dramatic elegies, as well as in his lyrics, Donne, like Sidney, left much to the imagination, believing that his reader had the social literary, intellectual, an psychological sophistication necessary to fill out, from very few signals, the emotional drama of particular poems, an activity that was an essential preliminary to the perception of their ironies. Although we tend to regard such skills as part of the literary competence of readers generally, they were looked on in the Renaissance as the accomplishments of educated (courtly or satellite-courtly) gentlemen. Donne's chosen audience for his dramatic elegies and lyrics is only one example of a larger cultural phenomenon." (58-9)

"Difficulty, even magnificently unnecessary difficulty, was a valued commodity in the Inns-of-Court encironment, the opportunity to exercise an intellectual mastery that somewhat compensated for political and social vulnerability." (70)

"In their self-conscious fusion of genres and modes, their deliberate difficulty and complexity, their wittily problematical character, Donne's lyrics are often 'self-consuming artifacts' -- works that undo their own deceptive lines of development as they become virtual meta-poems, that is lyrics that are about the nature and process of writing certain kinds of verse and about the communicative relationship of poet and reader." (71)

some of Songs and Sonnets appear to have been "art songs" (88)

Donne as Young Man of Fashion, Gentleman-Volunteer, and Courtly Servant

"The rhetoric of some pieces assumes the context of a performance not simply for a sympathetic group of male peers but also for sophisticated women who could appreciate their wit and manner." (96)

"One finds in the verse and prose letters of the late nineties an extended exploration of disillusionment, set against the background of Donne's growing courtly involvement, both before and after his employment by Egerton." (113)

"At a time of uncertainty about his future, Donne looked back on the previous few years he spent as an Inns-of-Court gallant who occasionally wrote poetry as a period of a sinful waste of his talents. ... Especially in the verse letters to such friends as Christopher Brooke, Henry Wotton, and Rowland Woodward, he shared with coterie readers some of the conflicted feelings with which he acted on his ambitions in a world whose realities he and his audience clearly perceived." (114)

spent four years as one of Sir Thomas Egerton's secretaries (116)

"Poetic discussion of the merits and demerits of life in the Court, City, and Country was, thus, more than mere literary imitation or the recitation of intellectual commonplaces; it was, in its immediate context, the expression of individual responses to Elizabethan sociocultural codes. Donne and Wotton composed their poems from the point of view of educated, cultivated, ambitious courtly aspirants, as men who regarded the Country as a desert or region of exile, the City as a place for meaner pleasures and crass business dealings, and the Court, however dangerous or corrupt, as the social and political center of attraction. Both men were impatient and frustrated in their search for preferment." (120)

"As in the case of the earlier satires, the thematic center of the work is not the bad moral condition of the world or of the Court, but the shared political dissatisfaction of poet and audience." (130)

"What I would suggest is that, in the case of many of these poems, Ann was the intended primary audience and the lyrics were, therefore, one means of polite, but finally serious, social intercourse between lovers. In such pieces Donne extended his manner of plainspeaking honesty and affectionate intimacy from the all-male circumstances of much of his earlier verse to the context of an actual love relationship. ... I believe Donne never lost touch with his male coterie readership, even when he wrote lyrics for the woman he loved. It makes sense, therefore, to regard the poems of mutual love either as double-audience performances (for Ann and male friends) or as exclusively male-audience work -- the latter certainly the situation of 'The Extasie' and 'The Dissolution'." (139)

Donne as Social Exile and Jacobean Courtier

"These separation poems express affection in the context of a (rationalized) act of disengagement for which Donne made emotional reparation. Their witty ingenuity, manifested, for example, in the conceits of 'A Valediction: forbidding Mourning,' suggests that Donne was less comfortable in addressing his own wife than his intellectually elite male audience, a coterie readership with whom he established closer social contact shortly after his return from his travels." (178)

after James, tremendous increase in dedications; that level remained high; dramatic increase in dedications to the king for religious and controversial works, instead of literary and historical volumes ("historical works virtually disappear") (180)