Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England

By William Russell

The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word “critic” began, for the first time, to suggest expertise in literary judgment. Yet the conspicuously ambivalent attitude of these critics toward criticism—and the persistent fear that they would be misunderstood, marginalized, scapegoated, or otherwise “branded with the dignity of a critic”—suggests that the position of the critic in this period was uncertain. In Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England, William Russell reveals that the critics of the English Renaissance did not passively absorb their practice from Continental and classical sources but actively invented it in response to a confluence of social and intellectual factors.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644531921

Book preview

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

© 2020 by William M. Russell

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2020

978-1-64453-190-7 (cloth)

978-1-64453-191-4 (paper)

978-1-64453-192-1 (e-book)

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: Aristole with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt, 1653. (Purchase, special contributions and funds given or bequethed by friends of the Museum, 1961, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

For Lauren

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: Branded with the Dignity of a Critic

1. Gosson, Sidney, and the Experience of the Critic

2. Harvey, Nashe, and the Comedy of Criticism

3. Ben Jonson and the Consociative Critic

4. Puttenham, Carew, and the Closed Critic

Coda: Yet Thus Let Me Say

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING THIS BOOK HAS been a self-reflexive project, at times distractingly so. But of all the strains that resonated, none was more welcome than the insistence of Renaissance critics that the value of criticism lies in its social dimension. In my eyes, the book is a testament to the people who helped me write it. I am glad for the opportunity to thank them here.

Thanks to my teachers: Andrew Campbell, my greatest teacher; Paul Anderer, Julie Crawford, Steven Marcus, Edward Mendelson, Nelson Moe, and Edward Tayler at Columbia; and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Darryl Gless, Ritchie Kendall, Megan Matchinske, and Michael McVaugh at UNC-Chapel Hill. I can never sufficiently thank Reid Barbour and Jessica Wolfe, to whom I owe All that I am in arts, all that I know. Since first welcoming me as a prospective student, they have been my steadfast mentors, champions, and friends. I would be lost in this field without them. Thanks to Sara Mack for teaching me to read Ovid and Virgil and for the cherished memories of the Sunday afternoons we spent reading those poets together. Finally, thanks to the late James Winn, who was a mentor to me for over twenty years and who took time out of retirement, in the wake of a cancer diagnosis, to review this manuscript. I will forever be honored by his investment in me and my work.

Thanks to my friends, who have helped me think through this project and, from time to time, to stop thinking about it: Mike Abel, Betsy Carens, Tim Carens, Brendan Colthurst, Dino Copses, Gary Crunkleton, Megan Crunkleton, Rudi Heinrich, Shayna Howell, Travis Howell, Dan Keane, Seth Kotch, Scott Lucas, Doug Marvin, Dustin Mengelkoch, Natalie Mengelkoch, Anne Olivar, James Renovitch, Jon Rick, Jonathan Ryan, Meg Scott-Copses, Jonathan Sircy, Nathan Stogdill, Joe Wallace, Randall Williams, and Philip Winn.

Thanks to the three fantastic department chairs at the College of Charleston who supported me in my work, Scott Peeples, Myra Seaman, and Trish Ward; to my colleagues in the English Department, who make me feel lucky to work there; and to those colleagues across campus who helped me, directly or indirectly, with the book: Rich Bodek, Allan Borst, Terry Bowers, Devin Byker, Tim Carens, Christian Coseru, Lindsey Drager, Mike Duvall, Julia Eichelberger, Susan Farrell, Bryan Ganaway, Sheridan Hough, Joe Kelly, Bret Lott, Cassie Thomas, and Chris Warnick. And thanks to my students, in particular Ebby Bowles, Michael Casamento, Aaron Clark, Phoebe Doty, Valerie Keller, and Sophie Naughton.

Thanks to the other scholars who offered encouragement and guidance along the way: Erin Ashworth-King, Robert Erle Barham, Chris Cobb, Bill Engel, Ed Gieskes, Evan Gurney, Susan Harlan, Rachel Hile, Denna Iammarino, Marc Jackson, Kimberly Johnson, Margaret King, Roger Kuin, Tom Luxon, Tricia McElroy, Dan Moss, Mike Parker, Anne Lake Prescott, Beth Quitslund, Ernie Rufleth, Yulia Ryzhik, and Andy Shifflett. Special thanks to Michael Thomas, a constant supporter of my work who carefully reviewed this manuscript at a crucial juncture. Thanks to the organizers and participants of the annual meetings of the Renaissance Society of America and the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference for providing me with a supportive community and an opportunity to share my research.

Thanks to the librarians at the College of Charleston, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and UNC-Chapel Hill, and in particular to the Interlibrary Loan staff at the College, who have worked tirelessly for years to fulfill my every request.

Research for this project was supported by fellowships from the College of Charleston, the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. A post-tenure sabbatical at the College allowed me to finish it. I am grateful to these institutions for their support.

Thanks to Julia Oestreich, the editorial board of the University of Delaware Press, and the anonymous reviewers they recruited, whose support inspired me and whose detailed feedback helped me indispensably in revision.

Thanks to Oxford University Press and to the editors of Renaissance Papers and Studies in Philology for allowing me to reproduce previously published material here. An earlier version of the introduction’s brief history of Renaissance literary criticism was published as Literary Criticism, in Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Margaret King (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), www.oxfordbibliographies.com. And earlier versions of the first half of chapter 1 and chapter 3 were published as Experto Crede: Stephen Gosson and the Experience of the Critic, Renaissance Papers (2009): 21–36 and Nasutum Volo, Nolo Polyposum: Ben Jonson and the Consociative Critic, Studies in Philology (Fall 2012): 642–70.

Thanks, above all, to my family: to my wife, Lauren, who is my best friend, most trusted advisor, and least flattering critic; to my sons, Owen, Leo, and George, all of whom were born in the course of this project and who give me purpose in all things; to my brothers, John and Brad Russell; to my parents, Henry and Lynn Russell; and to the extended Russell and Hunt families.

Henry, my dad, was diagnosed with brain cancer in December 2018 and died in May 2019, as I was preparing this manuscript for publication. He taught me, along with my mom, to love art and to work hard. So he’s here, on every page. Thanks, Dad, for everything.

INTRODUCTION

Branded with the Dignity of a Critic

IN 2003, STANLEY WELLS reported to readers of the Times Literary Supplement the discovery of a long-lost work of Elizabethan literary criticism called The Model of Poesy . Written in 1599 by William Scott, then a student of law at the Inner Temple, the treatise remained in manuscript, having never been published. Wells described it as a major addition to the considerable corpus of Elizabethan literary criticism. ¹ He admired its display of learning and independence of thought. He noted the numerous references to contemporary English writers that set it apart from earlier works of Elizabethan criticism. ² And he speculated that for modern readers, the most interesting of these references would be those to Shakespeare, whose lines, from Lucrece and Richard II, Scott examines with unprecedented critical precision. William Scott, Wells concluded, may with justice be called Shakespeare’s first serious critic. ³ It is a distinction that might have made Scott himself uneasy, and this book explores the reasons why.

Gavin Alexander’s edition of The Model of Poesy has filled out our understanding of Shakespeare’s first serious critic. In a meticulous introduction and commentary, Alexander details Scott’s thoughtful engagement with continental critics such as Julius Caesar Scaliger and Giovanni Antonio Viperano and classical critics such as Cicero, Quintilian, and Aristotle, whose Poetics receives a more thorough and intelligent reading in the Model than anywhere else in sixteenth-century English criticism.⁴ Like Wells, Alexander draws our attention both to the scholarliness of the treatise and to the independence Scott achieves as a critic through his unique, well-judged, and potent synthesis of his sources.⁵ Also like Wells, he draws our attention to the Model’s many references to English writers, including, remarkably, English critics such as Philip Sidney and George Puttenham,⁶ for whom literary criticism had remained, just a few decades earlier, an almost exclusively European enterprise.

These observations place the Model in a formative moment, and its discovery serves as a welcome reminder of the importance of that moment to the history of English criticism. For it was then, in the decades surrounding the turn of the seventeenth century, roughly from the posthumous publication of Roger Ascham’s Schoolemaster in 1570 to the posthumous publication of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries in 1640, that these and other writers laid the foundations of English critical discourse in a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics addressed not to scholars but to general readers, and to practising writers.⁷ Though the fate of Scott’s manuscript, which was secreted away soon after its composition, limited its role in this development, the Model nevertheless compellingly suggests that by 1599 young scholars like Scott were increasingly aware of, attracted to, and engaged in English literary criticism, both formally and informally, in writing and in conversation. The terms, topoi, and texts that defined the field, such as it was, had become familiar. So too had the distinctively cosmopolitan character that emerged from the attempts of English critics to ply, in English, the concepts of classical criticism intertwined with the criticism of the wider European Renaissance.

The origins of Renaissance literary criticism can be traced to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century defenses of poetry, such as that provided by Boccaccio in the last two books of the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri (c. 1360), and discussions of language and literary imitation beginning with Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1302–5).⁸ Humanism, with its revival of classical rhetoric and promotion of the status of literature, generated new and urgent interest in the critical issues raised by these works, while the recovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts opened new avenues into them, fueling drawn-out debates between Italian humanists over Latin style, the relative merits of Latin and the vernacular, and the imitation of Cicero.⁹ Above all it was the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics, the work at the heart of Scott’s Model, that caused criticism to flourish in the cinquecento in a profusion of critical treatises and in lectures, dialogues, and debates that spanned the universities, courts, and academies of Italy.¹⁰ Latin translations of the Poetics by Giorgio Valla in 1498 and Alessandro de’ Pazzi in 1536 led to a series of commentaries extending to comprehensive theories of poetry, such as that expounded by Lodovico Castelvetro in the Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (1570). The poetics of Horace, Aristotle, and Plato were fused and pitted against each other in totalizing artes poeticae, such as Antonio Sebastiano Minturno’s De poeta (1559) and Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem (1561), and in practical debates over vernacular works such as Dante’s Commedia, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.¹¹ The influence of Italian criticism spread swiftly to France, where Joachim Du Bellay drew on Italian discussions of imitation and language to advance the cause of the Pléiade and recast French poetry in a classical mold,¹² and to England, where it was uniquely inflected by English culture and by the character of individual English critics like Scott.¹³

Tying together these separate strands is a common set of texts and topoi, including the defense of poetry in moral and social terms, the definition of poetry in rhetorical and philosophical terms, the defense of the vernacular, the systematization of the poetic genres, and the distillation of poetry into what Puttenham calls an art and Scott a model.¹⁴ Yet from Italy to England, the real interest of Renaissance literary criticism lies not in the texts and topoi critics hold in common but in the kind of independence that Wells and Alexander mutually admire in Scott: that is, in the eclectic, unanticipated, and often ingenious ways in which individual critics adapt and synthesize those texts and topoi to suit what the title page of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries calls their peculiar Notion of the Times.¹⁵

All of this has been surveyed and studied in detail in enduring works of scholarship on Renaissance literary criticism, its humanist origins, and its development in Italy, France, and England.¹⁶ Critical treatises of the period have been anthologized.¹⁷ Major figures including Scaliger, Castelvetro, Du Bellay, Sidney, and Puttenham have received sustained attention, and their works have been translated and annotated in scholarly editions.¹⁸ Monographs have been dedicated to topoi such as the defense of poetry and imitation.¹⁹ Throughout, the focus has fallen squarely on what we might call the ideas of criticism—theoretical concepts from mimesis to the marvelous—and their negotiation. Yet there is another idea under negotiation in Scott’s Model, and in English Renaissance criticism at large, an idea that in practice precedes and contains the ideas of criticism yet remains relatively unaddressed by modern scholars: the idea of the critic.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, as English criticism grew in visibility and integrity, another development was occurring within the word critic itself—the word that Wells and Alexander use to describe Scott—which first began to suggest, in addition to its pejorative sense of indiscriminate carping, an honorary sense of expertise in literary judgment.²⁰ It is significant that the first citation the Oxford English Dictionary provides for the word used in this sense comes from Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605), not just because it shows Bacon ceding expertise to Critiques, albeit skeptically, in a work explicitly concerned with the structure of knowledge but also because it begins to establish the breadth and impact of what amounts to an extensive dialogue carried out in this period on the idea of the critic. Factoring in the many direct statements made on what Ben Jonson loftily calls the office of a true critic or censor,²¹ such as Jonson’s own description of the learned and charitable critic in the Epistle to Volpone (1607), as well as the even more plentiful indirect statements made through critical performances, portraits, and caricatures, such as Jonson’s own shapeshifting performance in the Discoveries, his portrait of Crites in Cynthia’s Revels (1600), and his construction across his works of that critical bête noire, the polyposus (see Chapter 3), this metacritical dialogue extends beyond critical treatises like the Model and critics like Scott to encompass a wide variety of English texts and writers.

The dialogue also extends beyond the word critic. Attending to the use of that word in Renaissance England forces us to confront an anachronism at the heart of the history of criticism, an anachronism conspicuously indulged not just in the title of this study but in the titles of many anthologies and studies, such as G. Gregory Smith’s Elizabethan Critical Essays and J. W. H. Atkins’s English Literary Criticism: The Renascence, which assemble and address a diverse set of texts that would in most cases be more precisely described as works of rhetoric or poetics rather than works of criticism. Employed in its novel literary sense, the word critic had a narrower meaning then than it has now, and what the character writer Thomas Overbury called Criticisme in the seventeenth century in fact constituted just one controversial component of the multifarious field of discourse that Atkins called criticism in the twentieth.²² In other words, criticism was not limited to Criticisme in Renaissance England. Fully apprehending the dialogue on the critic therefore demands that we distinguish between modern and early modern uses of the word critic without limiting our investigation to the latter.

As Gavin Alexander notes in his commentary to Scott’s Model, the use of the word critic to denote the literary critic was new at the time of Scott’s writing and, as I have suggested, evocatively so.²³ It was also rare, and the work it connoted was usually limited to judgment and correction, activities traditionally associated with the grammarian.²⁴ In equating the Italian Crítico with the English Criticke, whose role he defined as judging mens acts and workes written,²⁵ the translator John Florio followed the Tudor humanist Thomas Elyot, who sixty years earlier, in 1538, had defined the Latin Criticus as he that iudgeth the actes or warkes that men do write.²⁶ In 1578, the lexicographer Thomas Cooper, building on Elyot’s dictionary, similarly defined the Latin Crítici as judges of poems, such as the grammarians Aristarchus and Aristophanes were (Poematum iudices, quales Aristarchus & Aristophanes Grammatici fuerunt).²⁷ These archetypal grammarians, who influentially appeared side by side in the tenth book of Quintilian’s first-century Institutio oratoria, reappeared in early modern works of criticism such as Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), where they represent "those ancient critics, who were judges of poems" (ces anciens critiques juges des poëmes).²⁸ Though Du Bellay invoked the proverbial censoriousness of these critics contrastively, as Ben Jonson later would,²⁹ so as to disclaim it and cast in relief his own practice as a critic, the invocation nevertheless served to reinforce the dominant sense of the critic as a grammatical judge and of criticism as grammatical judgment.

Scaliger, despite his contempt for the grammarian, reinforced that dominant sense, too, by presenting his famous comparison of Homer and Virgil in the fifth book of the Poetices under the heading Criticus, which at once established criticism as an essential component of his comprehensively rhetorical cast of poetics and maintained a distinction between criticism and poetics by specifically assigning to the criticus the judgment of works written. Breaking in the English word, Bacon limited the role of the critic to a broad but strictly grammatical domain, specifying the five parts of critical knowledge as the true correction and edition of authors, the exposition and explication of authors . . . in annotations and commentaries, the elaboration of historical context, some brief censure and judgment of authors, and the disposition of studies.³⁰ As late as the 1640s, we find Jonson using the words critic and censor interchangeably, and Thomas Browne using the word Criticke as a synonym for Grammarian.³¹

The long history of the word critic, its cognates, and its roots has been shaped by what the classicist Andrew Ford describes as academic rivalries.³² Ultimately that history leads us, through the Greek verb krinó (to separate, put asunder, distinguish),³³ back to the judges or kritai of poetic contests in Archaic Greece. Even up to the fourth century BCE, however, when the development of poetics as a branch of philosophy significantly extended and elevated the expertise associated with literary judgment, the Greeks continued to denote such expertise with three fluid and overlapping terms: kritikos, grammatikos, and philologos. It was in the third and second centuries, in Hellenistic Alexandria, with the refinement of literary judgment, or kritai, by the head librarians of the Royal Library, chief among them Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace, that their preferred term grammatikos took precedence over kritikos. Yet in that same era, Crates of Mallos, head librarian of the rival library at Pergamum, styled himself a kritikos precisely to oppose his methods to those of the Alexandrian grammarians. It was Crates who inspired the Romans to use their word criticus as he had used kritikos, and as Elyot and Cooper would later define it. But the word never lost its foreign flavor on Roman tongues.³⁴ Though Horace used the word criticus, he preferred iudex,³⁵ and that preference was shared by his imitators and inheritors in Renaissance England. Indeed, the words critic and criticism never once appear in those pillars of English Renaissance criticism, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (c. 1580) and Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), though words built on iudex, such as judge and judgment, do.

Crates’s opposition to the Alexandrians finds a distant echo in the late sixteenth century, when humanists such as Joseph Justus Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, and Justus Lipsius exploited the unexhausted potential of the term criticus in extending the domain of criticism beyond literary judgment, as Jean Jehasse has shown in La Renaissance de la critique.³⁶ But the history of the word critic in Renaissance England doesn’t quite fit this pattern. Though Sidney, Jonson, and other English writers, in undertaking what modern scholars call criticism, often took pains to distinguish that work from what they perceived as the more narrow, limited, and censorious work of the grammarian, and even, in certain cases, to extend the authority of what modern scholars call the critic beyond literature to other areas of culture, they did not enlist the word critic as a wedge in this effort as deliberately as Crates and the humanists had in the cases of the words kritikos and criticus.

They did, however, recognize that the purposes and achievements of those continental and classical critics or judges from Aristotle to Scaliger, whose works they sought to imitate and adapt to their peculiar Notion of the Times, were not limited to the judgment of works written. And they meanwhile considered for themselves the scope appropriate to the field of discourse those models represented, which I will call, for convenience, criticism, and the authority appropriate to its agents, whom I will accordingly call critics. Though the word critic then lacked the flexibility, capacity, and currency of the word as we now use it, and though it lacked the polemical charge its roots and cognates carried at other times and in other places, changes in the way the word was used, and the ambivalence it assumed as a result, nevertheless reflect the changes wrought by the broader dialogue surrounding this field and its agents, or what I have elected to call the idea of the critic: that is, the role assumed by or on behalf of the more or less specialized theorist and judge of literature and drama.

As Scott’s Model registers the defining features of English Renaissance criticism, it also registers, at a deeper level, the defining features of this metacritical dialogue. Scott worries about how his censure of poets such as Sidney might cause him to be perceived: "And here because for illustration I am forced to bring instances of errors, I must entreat not to be branded with the dignity of a critic for culling out the imperfections of our best writers, because I have not had—and I repent me not that I have not had—leisure to read the trivial vulgar poets."³⁷ With that ambivalent phrase—"branded with the dignity of a critic—Scott suspends the idea of the critic between the honorary and pejorative senses of the word in 1599. His entreaty not to be so branded meanwhile betrays a daunting awareness, shared by other critics of the period, that to assume the role of the critic was similarly to suspend oneself between the dignity conferred upon it by Sidney, Scaliger, and the critics of classical antiquity and the vitriol heaped upon it by the vast majority of English writers, who everywhere inveighed against those notable Pirates in this our paper-sea, those sea-dogs, or lande-Critikes, monsters of men, if not beastes rather than men.³⁸ The manner of criticism mattered as much as or more than its ideas to these writers, who tended to dismiss critics on that basis, reducing them, as John Florio does here, to beasts or monsters or to proverbial figures of bad judgment such as the pedant or the detractor, whose dispraise could be easily overcome, or transformed into just commendation," as Sidney says of the charges laid against poetry in the Defence.³⁹

At once inspired and intimidated by the paradigm-shifting idea of the critic evoked by Sidney’s Defence, and cowed by the possibility of either being thought presumptuous for attempting to approximate it or monstrous for failing in that attempt, Scott retreats in this passage from the role he is, in fact, already playing. The reluctance he exhibits surfaces elsewhere in the Model, as when he deferentially refers his readers to those more absolute critics, Sidney and Scaliger.⁴⁰ More to the point, it surfaces throughout English Renaissance criticism, where writers commonly claim to have been forced into playing the role of the critic and, even as they play it, to disavow it and refer their readers elsewhere. William Webbe, in his Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), hopes that his simple iudgement of English Poetrie will stirre vppe some other of meete abilitie to bestowe trauell in this matter.⁴¹ Later, he readily defers to E. K., the built-in critic of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), deeming him one of better iudgment then my selfe.⁴²

The question of status that unnerved these critics has plagued their legacy in the history of criticism since Samuel Johnson first proclaimed John Dryden the father of English criticism at the end of the eighteenth century.⁴³ The tenacity of that claim can be gauged by the number of histories of criticism that begin after the Restoration.⁴⁴ Even scholars like Paul Cannan, who have challenged this account by historicizing the terms critic and criticism and beginning their histories earlier in the seventeenth century, must concede that until well past 1700, an identifiable discipline of criticism simply did not exist in England: what criticism was, who should practice it, and why it was worth practicing, were all open questions.⁴⁵ Yet these open questions, Cannan argues, only underscore the importance of this earlier period to our understanding of the development of English criticism.⁴⁶ And, as we have seen, they didn’t save William Scott from the threat of branding. They appear not so much to have denied Scott and his contemporaries the status of critics as to have made them acutely self-conscious about claiming that status, or having it claimed on their behalf.

In Renaissance England, the idea of the critic was developed in tandem with the idea of what E. K. calls the new Poete and often, as in the case of The Shepheardes Calender, in the same text. The marked novelty of both roles meant that any writer who assumed them, however reluctantly, assumed ipso facto the added responsibility of inventing them—of finding out apte matter for their construction⁴⁷—often in opposition to other, more familiar roles that threatened to thwart their invention. To discount English Renaissance critics as critics because they failed to live up to an idea they were in the process of inventing is not merely to commit an anachronism; it is to overlook the extent to which the idea of the critic is always sui generis, always provisional, continually under negotiation, and dynamically responsive, now as in the symposia of ancient Greece,⁴⁸ to the idea of the new Poete. We stand to gain more by reading individual critics according to the terms by which they themselves construe the idea of the critic.

In addition to the