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Irony in Donne’s Biathanatos and Pseudo-Martyr

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

Dennis Flynn
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Extract

The most insistent theme in Donne's writings is his sometimes trivial obsession with suicide and martyrdom. From his ‘Paradoxes’ to his last sermon this theme runs through his prose, and it is no less a constant preoccupation of his verse. That the Jacobeans in their melancholy were obsessed with death has often been observed; but Donne's obsession was a special one, a quintessence of Jacobean melancholy, distilled in him by a special circumstance of his life: he had been born a Catholic. Donne's personal rebellion against the trend of religion in his society was a lifelong struggle within him, though the seed of his rebelliousness grew in his words and deeds to be a trifling thing. This seed had been nurtured by his mother, who lived all her long life a stubborn Catholic, almost outliving her apostate son. She reared him to be a soldier for the Old Faith, bringing him into association with hunted and martyred priests, as if by their example he might learn to savour death. Somehow, this strange education led Donne not into the path of righteous fidelity, but to a bemused fascination with death by self-murder, a cavalier irony that is one of the hallmarks of his style.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , January 1973 , pp. 49 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1973 

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References

Notes

1 “Donne's Catholicism, as a creed and a code of action, can have gone not very far beyond his majority; but as an influence, it wrought upon him to the end of his life of fifty-eight years.… Donne's quiet conscience may be, to some, one of his mysteries’ (Louise Imogen Guiney, ‘Donne as a Lost Catholic Poet’, The Month, 136 ([1920], pp. 12, 18).

2 Quoted in Bald, R. C., John Donne: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 201.Google Scholar

3 Edmund, Gosse, The Life and Letters of Dr John Donne, 2 vols (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), 2, 125.Google Scholar

4 Biathanatos (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), p, 20.Google Scholar

5 Bald, p. 342.

6 ‘Where in The Nature, and the extent of all those Lawes, which seeme to be violated by this Act, are diligently surveyed.’ Thus the book is described as examining the laws against suicide rather than suicide itself. Donne is very cagey.

7 Juvenilia, ed. Bennett, R. E. (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1936).Google Scholar

8 Biathanatos, title-page.

9 Evelyn, Simpson, ‘Two Manuscripts of Donne's Paradoxes and Problems ’, PES, 3 (1927), 136.Google Scholar

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., p. 137.

12 Biathanatos, ‘Authors cited in this Booke’.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 19.

16 Ibid., p. 18.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 19.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 22.

22 ‘Not that I pretend a particular Answer to every Thing which he has said; they who peruse that Treatise will find that this is not necessary.’ (An Essay concerning self-murther [London, 1700], p. 41.)

23 Biathanatos, p. 112.

24 ‘But how lose it? not sure by destroying the thing itself; a Man may surrender any thing to the right Owner, which is lent him, and, provided it be in good Condition, be no longer accountable for it; but Self-killing is destroying Life, and destroying is certainly a very strangeway of surrendering’ (An Essay concerning self-murther, p. 51).

25 ‘These two Words End and Good are of too large and doubtful a Signification; that which conduces to our ends, and is good to us, does not always accomplish the Law of Self-Preser-vation.... But there are many other Ends of humane actions, as many as we have Passions and Appetites, which become not only unworthy of our Reason, but destructive of our Life’ (Ibid., p. 77; cf. Biathanatos, pp. 49-50).

26 Biathanatos, pp. 50-51. Adams comments: ‘The Martyrology (as he calls it) follows consisting chiefly of Thieves, Minions, Gladiators. As to the Causes of this Fortitude which he mentions here... how the killing of ones self upon the account of Ease, Love, nay Fear too, shou'd be Instances of Fortitude is very strange’ (An Essay concerning self-murther, p. 208).

27 Ibid., p. 315; cf. Biathanatos, pp. 30-32.

28 A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 170.Google Scholar

29 Gosse, 1, 263.

30 Ignatius His Conclave, ed. Healy, T. S. (Oxford: The Claredon Press, 1969), p. xiv.Google Scholar

31 Bald, pp. 157-8.

32 The Progress of the Soul (New York: Apollo Editions, 1969), pp. 148-9. Hughes also notes the continuing debate over the seriousness of Biathanatos. He quotes George Williamson (‘The Libertine Donne’, PQ, 13 [1934], 286), describing the book as an important and serious stage in Donne's spiritual development; Rosalie Colie (Paradoxia Epidemica [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966], p. 40), who stresses the mockery in the book; and Joan Webber (Contrary Music [Madison, Wise: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963], pp. 5, 11), who takes a view somewhere between these extremes. Hughes himself compares Biathanatos to the Fool's burlesques in King Lear, pointing out that every one of the logical fallacies specified by Aristotle in his Rhetoric seems purposely to have been executed in Biathanatos’, ‘a feast of misrepresentation... offered with pedantic unction, the debater insisting that he will proceed “without any disguising, or curious and libellous concealing” but none the less swinging off into parentheses and divisions which nearly succeed in hiding the issue at hand’ (p. 153). However, even Hughes is inclined to limit the presence of satirical intent to Biathanatos. For his view of Pseudo-Martyr see The Progress of the Soul, pp. 164-5, and below n. 61.

33 Ibid., p. 156.

34 A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, p. 178.

35 T. S. Healy reviews the vexed question of Donne's relations with Morton and concludes that their association was probable (Ignatius His Conclave, pp. 168-73).

36 Bald, p. 216.

37 Ibid., pp. 216-17.

38 Ibid., p. 218.

39 Pseudo-Martyr, ‘An Advertisement to the Reader’.

40 Quoted in B. N. De Luna, Jonson's Romish Plot (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 234.

41 An Answere to the Fifth Part of Reports (St Omers, 1606), ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, part 4. The Coke-Persons dispute is discussed in Clancy, T. H., Papist Pamphleteers (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1964), pp. 107–24.Google Scholar

42 A Treatise Tending to Mitigation towards Catholike-Subjects in England (St Omers, 1607), p. 10.Google Scholar

43 Clancy, p. 121.

44 Pseudo-Martyr, ‘A Table of the Chapters handled in this Booke’.

45 Ibid., ‘An Advertisement to the Reader’.

46 Ibid., pp. 3, 7, and 8.

47 Ibid., ‘An Advertisement to the Reader’.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 The Courtier's Library, ed. Evelyn, Simpson (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1930), pp. 45, 61.Google Scholar

51 Ibid., pp. 44, 58. A. E. Malloch first observed this relation between Pseudo-Martyr and The Courtier's Library in his article ‘Donne's Pseudo-Martyr and Catalogus Librorum Aulicorum, MLN, 70 (1955), 174-5.

52 Pseudo-Martyr, ‘An Advertisement to the Reader’.

53 Ibid., p. 15.

54 The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed, Charles, M. Coffin (New York: The Modern Library, 1952), p. 288.Google Scholar

55 Pseudo-Martyr, p. 30.

56 Ibid., p. 17.

57 Ibid., p. 20.

58 Ibid., p. 27.

59 Ibid., pp. 34-35.

60 Ibid., p. 29.

61 Ibid., p. 34.

62 The phrase is Evelyn Simpson's in A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, p. 190. Simpson remarks that, except for ‘very few “purple patches”,’ the book ‘has lost its interest for modern readers’ (p. 187). In the same vein, she quotes Augustus Jessopp as having earlier pointed out that ‘only a mono-maniac’ would read Pseudo-Martyr through (p. 179). Jessopp elsewhere wrote, ‘The tone of the book, when compared with that of almost every theological treatise of the same period, is strikingly calm and gentle; but with such a tender avoiding of all that might irritate [?], there is no shrinking from a thorough examination of the question in all its bearings’ (see Jessopp's edition of Donne's Essays in Divinity [London, 1855], p. xxxiv). For Hughes, who is sensitive to Donne's satire in Biathanatos, Pseudo-Martyr seems a ‘splendidly argued brief in defence of the Oath of Allegiance’, with a ‘largely irenic approach to the problem of nonconformity by the Catholic recusants’ (The Progress of the Soul, p. 164). On the supposedly irenic tone of Psuedo-Martyr, Healy writes, ‘That it is a charitable work filled with irenic sweetness, is something of an exaggeration’ (Ignatius His Conclave, p. xviii, n. 2).

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., p. xxiv.

65 Fitzherbert, p. 104.

66 Ibid., p. 106.

67 Ibid., p. 107. Simpson holds that Fitzherbert's critique is undeserved (A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, pp. 190-1). Bald believed that Fitzherbert was mistakenly talking about Ignatius His Conclave: ‘the description simply does not fit Pseudo-Martyr' (Bald, p. 220, n. 1).

68 Pseudo-Martyr, p. 377.

69 Ibid., pp. 377-80.

70 Fitzherbert, p. 91.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid., p. 96.

73 Ibid.

74 Pseudo-Martyr, ‘An Advertisement to the Reader’.

75 Ibid., p. 14. The passage stands uncorrected in the table of contents.

76 Fitzherbert, p. 86.

77 Ibid., p. 106.

78 Bald, p. 226.

79 Ibid.

80 That established views of Donne's deep respect for the King at this period of his life should be reassessed is suggested in my article, ‘The Originals of Donne's Overburian Characters’, The Bulletin of the N. Y. Public Library (soon to be published).

81 Clancy, pp. 110-11.

82 Healy, pp. 172-3.

83 Ibid., p. xxvi.