5 - Wyatt, Chaucer, Tottel: the verse epistle and the subjects of the courtly lyric

Summary

But ware, I say, so gold thee help and speed

That in this case thou be not so unwise

As Pandar was in such a like deed;

For he, the fool, of conscience was so nice

That he no gain would have for all his pain.

Be next thyself, for friendship bears no prize.

(Rebholz, The Complete Poems, CLI.73–78)

Much like Pandarus, Wyatt was a master of translation: a courtier advisor who had skillfully negotiated all (or nearly all) the ruses of duplicity, an interpres who, quite literally, came between the King and his ambassadors, while at the same time interpreting the writings of Latin satirists and Italian amorists for English coterie readerships. He has been much discussed of late in the environments of sexuality and power, as a player on that Henrician stage so compellingly imagined by Stephen Greenblatt, where the “anxieties, bad faith, and betrayals” of court service provoked the writing of a poetry that paradoxically – or dialectically, in Greenblatt's idiom – critiqued and advanced a career of courtiership. “Wyatt's poetry,” Greenblatt concludes, in an interpretation that has influenced a decade-and-a-half of critical response, “originates in a kind of diplomacy, but the ambassadorial expression is given greater and greater power until it intimates a perception of its own situation that subverts its official purpose.” It is a poetry that, he avers again, “at its best [is] distinctly more convincing, more deeply moving, than any written not only in his generation but in the preceding century.”