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William Alabaster:Rhetor, Meditator, Devotional Poet—I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Robert V. Caro S.J.
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Extract

IT has been commonplace in the literary criticism of the past thirty years to acknowledge the influence of the Counter-Reformation devotional tradition on English metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. The sonnets of William Alabaster, a little known recusant poet writing just before the dawn of the century, provide an early example of this influence. Even when Alabaster does not rise above his craftmanship, his poems offer insights into the cultural equipment and habits of mind of the age in which he lived, revealing how meditation could vivify rhetorical invention, injecting it with feeling and passion and transforming the persona of a lyric poem into a dramatic speaker.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , May 1988 , pp. 62 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1988

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References

Notes

1 See, e.g., Louis, L. Martz The Poetry of Meditation, 2nd ed. (New Haven, 1962), pp. 2–3 Google Scholar et passim. First published in 1954, Martz's work corroborated views on the influence of Ignatian meditation on the poetry of John Donne expressed by Helen, Gardner in John Donne: The Divine Poems (Oxford, 1952). See her Introduction, pp. 1–lv Google Scholar.

2 Story, G. M. and Helen, Gardner eds., The Sonnets of William Alabaster (London, 1959).Google Scholar With one exception, Alabaster's sonnets were unpublished during his lifetime. The early twentieth-century acquisition by Bertram Dobell of a manuscript containing forty-three of the poems, announced in The Athenaeum, No. 3974 (December 26, 1903) p. 857, focussed favourable attention on Alabaster, but it remained for Story and Gardner over half a century later to complete the textual and other scholarly work necessary for a complete and definitive edition of Alabaster's English poems. I follow their numbering of the sonnets and cite the numbers in parentheses following quotations.

3 The Latin text of The Spiritual Exercises was approved by Pope Paul III in 1548. I follow the practice of capitalizing but not italicizing when reference is to the Ignatian sequence of Spiritual Exercises made or given but not specifically to the printed book.

4 Wright's book has been issued in a modern reprint, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana, 1971). Originally published at London in 1601, The Passions of the Minde appeared in a revised and augmented edition in 1604, and subsequent editions or reprints were issued in 1620, 1621, and 1630. Sloan's reprint is a facsimile of the 1630 text but includes prefaces and other material to align it with the 1604 edition.

5 Quoted in Rope, H. E. G. ‘William Alabaster's Conversion’, The Venerabile, 14 (December, 1948) p. 9.Google Scholar Rope's article is based on, and contains lengthy excerpts from, a 1598 MS. in the archives of the English College in Rome, which he has determined is Alabaster's holograph.

6 Ibid., pp. 9, 10.

7 Quoted in Foley, 1, p. 66.

8 The best account of Wright's career is in Theodore, A. Stroud ‘Father Thomas Wright: A Test for Toleration’, Biographical Studies, 1 (1951) pp. 189–219.Google Scholar

9 Pollen, J. H. ‘William Alabaster, a Newly Discovered Catholic Poet of the Elizabethan Age’, The Month, 103 (April 1904) p. 247.Google Scholar

10 Letter from Henry Garnet to Robert Persons, October 8, 1597, quoted in John, Gerard ‘Contributions towards a Life of Father Henry Garnet, S. J.’, The Month, 91 (April 1898), p. 366.Google Scholar

11 Letter from Richard Percival to Sir Robert Cecil, September 22, 1597, in H.M.C., Hatfield, 1, p. 394.

12 H.M.C., Hatfield, 8, p. 394.

13 Quoted by Rope, p. 10

14 ‘… saepe sermonem habui, licet numquam de rebus quae ad controversias magnopere spectarent, erant enim congressus nostri velitationes quaedam eminus, et quasi e longinqus; non ut verum fatear, licet ille tarn in philosophiae quam in theologiae scientia me tantum superaret ut eo pro magistro uti possem, ita tamen superbiam insolescebam …’ The Latin translation of Alabaster's account of his conversion appears to have been made by Fr. Robert Persons, S. J., rector of the English College, Rome, in 1598. The MS. has the descriptive heading ‘De Conversione Gul.mi Alabastri ad fidem Catholicam opusc.m P. Rob. Personii ex Anglico in Latinum idioma translatum’, and is listed thus in Paul, Oskar Kristeller Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Vncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts in Italian and Other Libraries, 2 (London, 1967) p. 565.Google Scholar According to the description, Persons was responsible for the original work, rather than for the translation into Latin.Rope, p. 2, has shown, however, that the original is in Alabaster's own hand. The confusion apparently originated with Father Greene, who added descriptive headings to the Latin and English MSS. in 1697. There was never any doubt, though, about Persons’ concern to preserve the account of Alabaster's conversion, and almost certainly it was he who made the translation. At least on microfilm, the Latin version, although incomplete and with unnumbered leaves, is more legible than the holograph. The quotation here and those below are from ch. 4.

15 Quodam die in mensa eiusdem domini Wright, conspexi librum quemdam anglice conscripturn quern librum, Deo ita disponente, conversionis meae causa eo loci possitum esse arbitror …’

16 Quoted in Foley, 1, p. 67.

17 The Disposition or Garnishment of the Soul, 1596 (reprinted 1970 as no. 36 in the series English Recusant Literature, 1558-1640, ed. D. M. Rogers) sig. A7‘-D2’.

18 Winthrop Papers, I, (Boston, 1929) p. 71.

19 H.M.C., Hatfield, 7, p. 394.

20 ‘fatebatur sese papistam’; Winthrop Papers, 1, p. 71.

21 ‘… ibique multum temporis ponebam in secretis quibusdam et familitatibus, iter Deum animamque colloquijs … interna mentis commentatione ac meditatione voluntatem meam … cum divina coniungens …’; ‘remissum devotionis ardorem excitare aut … accensum … conservare vellem’.

22 Sonnets, p. xiv.

23 See John, Gerard The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman, 2nd ed. (London, 1956) p. 140.Google Scholar

24 Wilbur, Samuel Howell Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (New York, 1961) p. 7.Google Scholar

25 Quoted by Howell, p. 164.

26 Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) p. 288.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., pp. 290-91.

28 Howell op.cit., pp. 109-110.

29 Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue, p. 296.

30 Thomas, O. Sloan ‘The Crossing of Rhetoric and Poetry in the English Renaissance’, in The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry, ed. Sloan and Raymond B. Waddington (Berkeley, 1974) p. 226.Google Scholar

31 The phrase is borrowed from Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966) p. 275.Google Scholar Yates contrasts the Ramist rejection of corporeal similitudes as cultivated in the traditional memory arts (part of rhetoric) with the championing of occult memory systems by Giordano Bruno and his followers. Wright's Passions of the Minde strikes a middle course between Ramist and Brunian extremes.

32 For analysis of Wright's book and commentary on its significance, I rely heavily on Thomas O. Sloan's discussion in the essay cited in note 30 above, as well as in ‘A Renaissance Controversialist on Rhetoric: Thomas, Wright's ‘Passions of the Minde in Gencrall’, Speech Monographs, 36 (1969) pp. 38–54;Google Scholar ‘Rhetoric and Meditation: Three Case Studies’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1971) pp. 45–58;Google Scholar and the Introduction to his modern reprint of Wright's book. Quotations from The Passions of the Minde are from Sloan's reprint and are cited in parentheses in mv text.

33 H.M.C., Hatfield, 8, p. 395.

34 The similarity is striking between Wright's amplification of the motive of benevolence, and the first point proposed in the Contemplation to Attain the Love of God at the conclusion of the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius asks the exercitant ‘to recall to mind the blessings of creation and redemption, and the special favours I have received’. The passage continues: ‘I will ponder with great affection how much God our Lord has done for me, and how much He has given me of what He possesses, and finally, how much, as far as He can, the same Lord desires to give Himself to me according to His divine decrees. Then I will reflect upon myself, and consider, according to all reason and justice, what I ought to offer the Divine Majesty, that is, all I possess and myself with it’ (Luis J. Puhl, S. J., trans., The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius [Westminster, Md., 1962| paragraph 234).

35 Wright summarizes and schematizes ‘for memories sake’ (p. 256). Like Ramus, he makes logicalorder, rather than places and images, the chief instrument of memory; yet elsewhere (e.g., pp. 192-93, in his discussion of amplification) he is quite traditional in recommending images and similitudes asa means of moving the passions.

36 ‘Stinting’ should not be understood here in the parsimonious sense of cutting short or restraining; it means, rather, apportioning or appointing definitely. Cf. OED, where the present passage in Wrightis cited as an example of this secondary meaning.

37 See note 32.

38 Sloan, ‘Crossing of Rhetoric and Poetry’, p. 233.

39 For the correlation of dramatic qualities with metaphysical style, see, in addition to the works by Martz and Gardner cited above (note 1), Helen, Gardner ed., The Metaphysical Poets (London, 1961) pp. xxvi–xxvii;Google Scholar Lowry Nelson, Jr. Baroque Lyric Poetry (New Haven, 1961) p. 11 Google Scholar & passim.; and Leonard, Unger ‘Donne's Poetry and Modern Criticism’ in The Man in the Name (Minneapolis, 1956) pp. 82–86.Google Scholar

40 Sloan, ‘Crossing of Rhetoric and Poetry’, p. 234.