The ‘wronged’ partner

This chapter assesses the situation of the wives and husbands of those involved in illicit relationships. Contemporary culture identified the cuckold as a figure of public ridicule; he was judged by an act in which he did not participate, and the legitimacy and inheritance of his children might be brought into question. For elite wives, philandering husbands brought into question their roles as authority figures. If the husband’s affair was with another member of the nobility or gentry, it might very directly undercut the wife’s position in courtly and regional society, as on the occasion that George Clifford, earl of Cumberland’s mistress acted as hostess to King James in 1603 when Clifford’s wife Margaret was herself present. The chapter considers the gendered concepts implicit within contemporary attitudes towards ‘the wronged spouse’, the cuckold derided by wider society and viewed as unable to exert control over his wife; or the ‘virtuous’, pious, long-suffering wife developed particularly in the works of Samuel Daniel. It sets this alongside the evidence for the accommodation of their situations by many, seen e.g. in the role of noble and gentry wives in property transactions and testamentary dispositions which involved bastard children and even mistresses.

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance

If maps are instruments of power, then it matters that in Renaissance Britain they were often found in the pockets of ordinary people. Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance demonstrates how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. It places chapbooks (“cheapbooks”) by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton into conversation with the portable cartography circulating in the same retail print industry. Domestic pocket maps were designed for heavy use by a broad readership that included those on the fringes of literacy. The era’s de facto laureates all banked their success as writers appealing to this burgeoning market share by drawing the nation as the property of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This book investigates the accessible world of small-format cartography as it emerges in the texts of the poets raised in the expansive public sphere in which pocket maps flourished. It works at the intersections of space, place, and national identity to reveal the geographical imaginary shaping the flourishing business of cheap print. Its placement of poetic economies within mainstream systems of trade also demonstrates how cartography and poetry worked together to mobilize average consumers as political agents. This everyday form of geographic poiesis was also a strong platform for poets writing for monarchs and magistrates when their visions of the nation ran counter to the interests of the government.

1. Poet and playwright

‘Poet and playwright’ explains that, in many regards, the single most important point about Shakespeare’s double life as poet and playwright is how fruitful this generic crisscrossing was for him artistically. His poems and sonnets have an earthy, psychological, and theatrical element to them rarely found among his more exclusively elite poetic contemporaries like Spenser and Samuel Daniel. Shakespeare wrote poems to connect with the elite and the financial rewards that might come from patronage. He wrote drama to survive. However, from the period 1593-1623, the narrative poems constituted an astonishing 40 per cent of all Shakespeare’s published works.

‘A l’apparir de la beltà novella/nasce un bisbiglio e ’l guardo ognun v’intende’: the arrival of Gerusalemme liberata in Elizabethan England

The first chapter focuses on the literary impact of the enchantress Armida’s arrival in the Italian poem, examining how the poets Abraham Fraunce and Samuel Daniel respond directly to canto 4 of Tasso’s epic. In The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the earliest example of English engagement with Gerusalemme liberata, Fraunce draws most heavily on this canto of the Italian poem, and particularly the descriptions of Armida, for his abundant rhetorical illustrations from Tasso’s work. The Complaint of Rosamond (1592) was the first English poem to engage with the figure of Armida herself, demonstrated in Daniel’s frequent allusions to Tasso’s enchantress in relation to his own spectral narrator, many of which have not been previously detected. The first chapter also examines the numerous English poetic responses in the first half of the 1590s to the celebrated song from a later amorous episode, the canto della rosa heard in Armida’s garden in canto 16, in translations and imitations by Robert Southwell, Spenser and Daniel, as well as allusions in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), to illustrate how swift and pervasive the impact of Tasso’s epic on late Elizabethan verse was.