John Donne: A Literary Life PDF
Preview John Donne: A Literary Life
JOHN DONNE Literary Lives General Editor: Richard Dutton, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Lancaster This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most widely read British and Irish authors. Volumes follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing. The role and status of 'the author' as the creator of literary texts is a vexed issue in current critical theory, where a variety of social, linguistic and psychologic al approaches have challenged the old concentration on writers as specially-gifted individuals. Yet reports of 'the death of the author' in literary studies are (as Mark Twain said of a premature obituary) an exaggeration. This series aims to demonstrate how an under standing of writers' careers can promote, for students and general readers alike, a more informed historical reading of their works. Published titles Richard Dutton Cedric Watts WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE JOSEPH CONRAD George Parfitt Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham JOHN DONNE CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE Forthcoming Morris Beja Kerry McSweeney JAMES JOYCE GEORGE ELIOT Cedric Brown John Mepham JOHN MILTON VIRGINIA WOOLF Joseph McMinn Michael O'Neill JONATHAN SWIFT PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Jan Fergus Leonee Ormond JANE AUSTEN ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON James Gibson David B. Pirie THOMAS HARDY JOHN KEATS Kenneth Graham Felicity Rosslyn HENRY JAMES ALEXANDER POPE Keith Hanley A. E. Sharpe WILLIAM WORDSWORTH T. S. ELIOT Paul Hammond Barry Windeatt JOHN DRYDEN GEOFFREY CHAUCER J. R. de J. Jackson John Worthen SAMUELTAYLORCOLERIDGE D. H. LAWRENCE Alasdair MacRae W.B. YEATS John Donne A Literary Life George Parfitt Reader in English Literature University of Nottingham Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-0-333-42213-7 ISBN 978-1-349-19779-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19779-8 ©George Parfitt, 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1989 ISBN 978-0-312-03090-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parfitt. George A. E. John Donne: a literary life I George Parfitt. p. cm.-(Literary lives) Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-03090-2 1. Donne, John, 1572-1631. 2. Poets, English-Early modern. 1500-1700-Biography. 3. Church of England-England-Clergy -Biography. I. Title. II. Series. Literary lives (New York, N.Y.) PR2248.P26 1989 821'.3-dc18 [B] 88-5981 CIP For Jessica Contents Preface viii 1 1572-1601 1 Biographical Outline 1 II Aspiration 3 III The Pattern Revolved 7 IV Satire and Environment 13 v Poems and Women (i) 30 2 1601-1615 40 Biographical Outline 40 II Aspiration and Frustration 44 III Towards Ordination 54 IV Writings: Survey and Milieu 63 v Poems and Woman (ii) 72 VI Poems and God 88 3 101 161~1632 Biographical Outline 101 II Donne and Preaching 104 III Doctrine 110 IV Sermons as Product 115 v Depression and Death 121 An Appendix on Criticism of Donne's Writing 126 Notes 129 Bibliography 137 Index 139 vii Preface This is a short book and does not set out to deal even-handedly with all aspects of Donne's life and work. It tries instead to concentrate on examining selected aspects of this life and work in the context of the times Donne lived in, and it seeks to emphasise those features which are most alive in our times. This means, in particular, emphasis upon the period between Donne's marriage in 1601 and his ordination in 1615. The last period of his life and its main literary product, the sermons, are treated more briefly because they have limited interest now, for reasons which are sketched in Chapter 3, while the treatment of the early years is limited by the gaps in the surviving evidence. I have made direct use of very little literary criticism of Donne's work. This is mainly because, as suggested in the bibliographical essay in the Appendix, much of what has been written is either too heavily of the school of New Criticism to be of much use here, or is concerned with literary tradition rather than with the type of context which this series treats of. It should, however, be added that my understanding of Donne's work has certainly been much influenced over the years by earlier criticism. I should like to thank the General Editor of the series, Dr Richard Dutton, for asking me to write this volume and for his help throughout its gestation. Also, my thanks, as always, to my wife, Maureen Bell, for her patience and understanding at a time when she has been busy with her own research and when our small daughter has kept us both occupied. George Parfitt viii 1 1572-1601 There is a standard biography of John Donne, the author of which, R. C. Bald, has drawn together what is known of Donne's life and has supplemented the facts with his knowledge of the relevant period, while remaining properly aware of what we do not know.1 John Carey has written what might be called a 'spiritual biography', an account of 'the distinctive structure of Donne's imagination'2 which uses cross-references between works and life as well as between one work and another to define that imagination. Other writers have, like Alan Sinfield,3 put less weight upon Donne's individualism and more upon how he relates to culture and society in his period. Here Carey's romanti cism and liberalism give way to a more materialistic stress. A book as short as the present one cannot hope to match Bald's fullness; nor can it present the sort of critique needed to expose Carey's serious limitations and to show how a materialistic enquiry can avoid reductivism.4 It can, however, hope to be lucid while indicating something of Donne's complexity and significance. I BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE John Donne married Ann More in December 1601, when he was around thirty years old and she was about sixteen. Although popular belief is that our ancestors married young it was in fact common for marriage to be delayed until the male was financially in a position to support a wife. Moreover, despite Juliet, Ann More was young for an Elizabethan or Jacobean bride.5 Donne's marriage, as is widely known, was one of the decisive events of his life, a life which, as we might expect, is lightly documented up to this time. Bald's account of the first thirty years of Donne's life occupies less than a quarter of his book, and much of this space is devoted to the poet's ancestry and environment. An outline of Donne's life up to 1601 can, therefore, be presented quite tersely. 1 2 John Donne He was born in 1572. His father was a successful London ironmonger who had been made a freeman of the Ironmongers' Company, 'probably before the end of 1556'6 and who had married Elizabeth Heywood around 1564. When Donne's father died early in 1576, six children survived him and some six months after her first husband's death Elizabeth remarried, the spouse being John Syminges, a doctor who was several times President of the Royal College of Physicians. It is perhaps worth remarking that this re marriage did not involve a decisive social move upwards, as might at first appear. Donne's father was a substantial business man whose master, Thomas Lewen, had been a Sheriff of London in 1537/8 and who left a considerable estate at his death, while physicians in the sixteenth century were not of great social standing.7 It is not surprising that the first decade of Donne's life is largely blank now. Elizabethan record-keeping was primitive by our standards; John Donne was only one of several children; and Elizabethan children were not usually considered interesting in themselves.8 We might, however, expect some references to his schooling, if not from surviving records at least in later statements by the poet himself or by contemporaries. But no such statements survive and Izaak Walton tells us that Donne 'had his first breeding in his Fathers house, where a private Tutor had the care of him, until the tenth year of his age'. 9 What we call tertiary education began and ended sooner in the sixteenth century than it does now, and in October 1584 John Donne, with his brother Henry, went to Hart Hall, Oxford, where he remained for about three years. This takes us to late 1587, but then another blank occurs. We know that the poet entered Thavies Inn in 1591 before going on to Lincoln's Inn in May 1592, where he was based until at least late 1594. What, then, was Donne doing between late 1587 and 1591? Walton claims that, 'About the fourteenth year of his age [Donne] was translated from Oxford to Cambridge; where ... he staied till his seventeenth year', 10 and if this is true the gap is substantially accounted for. In itself, what Walton claims is plausible enough, although Donne's name does not appear in the defective Cambridge records.U But Walton also speaks of Donne staying 'some years in Italy, and then in Spain' and locates these years after 1597.12 This, however, is scarcely possible (as we shall see) and it has been suggested that this period of travel on the continent may have been between 1587
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