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The Relation between Robert Southwell’s Neo-Latin and English Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

Brian Oxley
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Extract

Despite the importance attributed to Southwell in Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, his Latin poetry—overlooked in Leicester Bradner’s Musae Anglicanae and the subject of a solitary unsatisfactory discussion in Pierre Janelle’s Robert Southwell the Writer—has received little attention. Such neglect is not unusual. Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric—a spacious enough volume—disposes of Herbert’s important Latin collection Passio Discerpta in an endnote. This is despite a number of recent studies emphasising the position of Neo-Latin as a modern language alongside and correspondent with the vernacular, acting ‘as a sort of John the Baptist to the vernacular’, or ‘drinking from the same streams’. It is, I think, indisputable that Martz and Lewalski would have needed to modify their arguments had they taken the Neo-Latin poetry of Southwell and Herbert into account in their respective studies. Martz would have found some part of ‘meditative structure’ attributable to the conventions of Latin elegiac writing rather than to Ignatian meditation. Similarly, Lewalski would have had to qualify her description of so much poetry as ‘lyric’ had she considered its relation to Latin elegiac and epigrammatic writing.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , October 1984 , pp. 201 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1984

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References

Notes

1 Louis, Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954)Google Scholar; Leicester, Bradner, Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry 1500-1925 (London, 1940)Google Scholar; Pierre, Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer (London, 1935)Google Scholar.

2 Barbara, Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979), p. 462.Google Scholar

3 McFarlane, I. D., Renaissance Latin Poetry (Manchester, 1980), p. 1 Google Scholar. Pierre, Laurens, Musae Reduces, 2 vols (Leiden, 1975), II, p. 256.Google Scholar I have adapted M. Laurens’ actual words;… les nouveaux poètes puisent leur sève aux mêmes sources que les néo-latins’.

4 The Latin poetry is printed in The Complete Poems of Robert Southwell S.J., edited by the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (Blackburn, 1872), pp. 191–215. The best edition for the English poetry is The Poems of Robert Southwell S. J., edited by J. H. McDonald and N. P. Brown (Oxford, 1967).

5 Janelle’s identification is based on two assumptions; one wrong, and one doubtful. Firstly, the Celts who are seen mourning Margaret in the first fragment have no relation to the Scottish people. They are part of a list of grieving Spanish tribes. Secondly, the text makes it clear that the grieving is universal; Spain (and Italy) are representative of western nations, as Ethiopia and India are of eastern. The space given to Spanish grief is disproportionate as the poem stands, but it is possible that the lost part of the poem treated the grief of other nations. There is, then, no need to assume that Margaret is Spanish, whether by birth or adoption. Janelle concedes that a contemporary Margaret would be more plausible, but finds none with Scottish and Spanish connections. Rightly discarding these conditions, a suitable candidate appears in the person of Margaret of France. Virtuous, and popular, she fits the bill of a Catholic heroine and Southwell spent time in France (1576–1577) when the commemorative verse would have been still current.

6 Janelle, p. 131.

7 I have restored the punctuation found in the sole source of the Latin poetry, MS A.V.4. held at Stonyhurst College.

8 Schten, Carolyn A., ‘Southwell’s “Christs bloody sweat”: A Meditation on the Mass’, English Miscellany (Rome), 20, 1969, 75–80, p. 75Google Scholar.

9 [Diego de Estella], Hundred Meditations on the Love of God, translated (?) by Robert Southwell, edited by John Morris (London, 1873), p. 71, p. 77, p. 137. Nancy Brown suggested to me that Southwell was not the actual translator.

10 Saint Mary Magdalens Funeral teares (1616), reprint (London, 1971), p. 58.

11 Scaliger, J, C., Poetices libriseptem (Lyon, 1561), reprint (Stuttgart, 1964), p. 73.Google Scholar

12 John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan translated by Philip Caraman with an introduction by Graham Greene, London, 1951), p. 195.

13 Anthony, Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance (Fort Worth, 1984), p. 84.Google Scholar

14 Spiritual Exercises and Devotion 2nd. Edn. (London, 1974), p. 40.

15 An Epistle of comfort (1587–1588), reprinted (London, 1974), B64.

16 Fucilla, J. G., ‘Rhetorical Pattern in Renaissance and Baroque Poetry’, Studies in the Renaissance, 3 (1956), 23–48, p. 30, p. 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 James, Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy (New York, 1935), p. 50, p. 328.Google Scholar