Читать книгу We British: The Poetry of a People - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 16

William Shakespeare led a famously opaque life, leaving only scattered clues to his own existence. If he was a soldier, we’ve never heard about it. He wasn’t a magistrate, or a public preacher, or an active courtier. He lived privately, and he wrote and acted and amassed some money – and that’s about it. The same wasn’t true of many of the other great Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. Though some poets had always lived around the frills of power – Chaucer is an obvious example, and so are Dunbar and Wyatt – it’s really in this period that we see the most public poets of all, poets of action and engagement in public life. Sir Walter Raleigh, sea dog, explorer, courtier and finally the victim of royal politics, was also heavily engaged in the brutal and bloody English suppression of south-west Ireland. An even greater poet, Edmund Spenser, fought with Raleigh against the invading Spanish and Italian troops in Ireland, and tried to settle there. Both men were involved in a notorious massacre of papal soldiers who had surrendered at Smerwick; both believed that Catholic Ireland had to be suppressed by extreme force in order to secure Protestant England. In both cases the very notion of what it is to be British becomes hopelessly entangled with Tudor politics.

Edmund Spenser was regarded in his day as the most gloriously talented of British poets, Shakespeare excepted; and although he was London born, no English poet has been more closely associated with Ireland during one of its bloodiest periods. The so-called ‘Munster Plantation’ involved an attempt to settle Protestant gentry and farmers in what had been the domains of the powerful Desmond family, who led a spirited Catholic revolt against Tudor rule. Spenser was happy to take other people’s land, and apparently disdained the Gaelic culture of the island; he was eventually burned out of his family home at Kilcolman during the long-lasting 1590s rebellion led by Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone and known as the Nine Years War. Spenser’s verse tells us directly little or nothing of the events that shaped his life: The Faerie Queene is a lengthy and complex allegory championing the reign of Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty, through cod-medieval language and courtly imagery. It does contain, however, passages which are moodily resonant and which seem to capture the tones of Munster in these murderous times:

That darkesome cave they enter, where they find

That cursed man, low sitting on the ground,

Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;

His grieisie locks, long growen and unbound,

Disordred hong about his shoulders round,

And hid his face; through which his hollow eyne

Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound;

His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine,

Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dine.

His garment naught but many ragged clouts,

With thornes together pind and patched was,

The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts;

And him beside there lay upon the gras

A drearie corse, whose life away did pas,

All wallowd in his owne yet luke-warm blood,

That from his wound yet welled fresh alas;

In which a rustie knife fast fixed stood,

And made an open passage for the gushing flood.

This feels, I think it’s safe to say, as if it were written by a man who may have taken part in the Massacre of Smerwick. Much more typical of Spenser’s golden eloquence is his famous marriage hymn, written for himself, which shows why his influence on English poetry has lasted so long. It begins like this:

Calme was the day, and through the trembling ayre,

Sweete breathing Zephyrus did softly play

A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay

Hot Titan’s beames, which then did glyster fayre:

When whom I sullein care,

Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay

In Princes Court, and expectation vayne

Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away

Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne,

Walkt forth to ease my payne

Along the shore of silver streaming Themmes,

Whose rutty Banke, the which his River hemmes,

Was paynted all with variable flowers,

And all the meades adorned with daintie gemmes,

Fit to decke maydens bowres

And crowne their Paramours,

Against the Brydale day, which is not long:

Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.

The mastery of rhythm, the self-consciously archaic language and the repopulation of British landscapes with classical figures proved addictive for later generations of English poets. For better or for worse, that’s what ‘Spenserian’ means.

The Devonian freebooter, founder of the colony of Virginia and ruthless soldier Sir Walter Raleigh was a less considerable poet than Spenser, though his story of vaulting ambition, pride and vertiginous descent is even more dramatic. For his peers he was clearly charismatic, and if poetry can be charismatic then so too is Raleigh’s. He is famous above all for his poems of regret, having lost the favour of Queen Elizabeth. He would eventually be executed by her successor James I at the age of sixty-four after many years languishing in the Tower of London. His poem ‘The Lie’ is, for my money, the most splendidly sod-you-all verse ever written, from a dangerous man who sees through all that’s worst in his society:

Go, soul, the body’s guest,

Upon a thankless errand;

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

Say to the court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church, it shows

What’s good, and doth no good:

If church and court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others’ action;

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

Tell men of high condition,

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they once reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honour how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favour how it falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in overwiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and schools reply,

Give arts and schools the lie.

Tell faith it’s fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity

And virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing –

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing –

Stab at thee he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.

It’s the kind of poem one can imagine being roared in a tavern by a group of Renaissance wits. And indeed, there is a legend that it was Sir Walter Raleigh himself who founded the famous drinking club at the Mermaid Tavern in London’s Cheapside, where most of the key dramatists of the Jacobean period gathered – though perhaps not Shakespeare himself. There is a roughness to the Raleigh poem, a crudeness which these days we associate more with the Restoration, but which was certainly part of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean world of poetry. You can find it in many of the dramatists, but also in the verses of the first working-class London poet we remember. John Taylor was a ‘waterman’ who ferried all classes up and down the River Thames, and across it to see plays at Southwark. He was the nearest thing Renaissance London had to a cabbie. His verses aren’t exactly sophisticated, but if you want to know what London sounded like in the early 1600s, they are essential. He knew all too well the seedier side of life, and was scathing about his fares:

Look how yon lecher’s legs are worn away

With haunting of the whore house every day:

He knows more greasy panders, bawds, and drabs,

And eats more lobsters, artichokes, and crabs,

Blue roasted eggs, potatoes muscadine,

Oysters, and pith that grows i’th’ ox’s chine,

With many drugs, compounds, and simples store;

Which makes him have a stomach to a whore.

But one day he’ll give o’er when ’tis too late,

When he stands begging through an iron grate.

Similarly, some of the serving wenches we glimpse in the background of Shakespeare’s tavern scenes are well known to the water poet:

A lusty wench as nimble as an eel

Would give a gallant leave to kiss and feel;

His itching humour straightway was in hope

To toy, to wanton, tally, buss and grope.

‘Hold sir,’ quoth she, ‘My word I will not fail,

For you shall feel my hand and kiss my tail.’

Bad behaviour in Jacobean times led not only to begging but to hanging, and the monthly executions at Tyburn provided Taylor with another subject:

I have heard sundry men oft times dispute

Of trees, that in one year will twice bear fruit.

But if a man note Tyburn, ’twill appear,

That that’s a tree that bears twelve times a year.

I muse it should so fruitful be, for why

I understand the root of it is dry,

It bears no leaf, no bloom, or no bud,

The rain that makes it fructify is blood.

I further note, the fruit which it produces,

Doth seldom serve for profitable uses:

Except the skillful Surgeons industry

Do make Dissection of Anatomy.

It blooms, buds, and bears, all three together,

And in one hour, doth live, and die, and wither.

Like Sodom Apples, they are in conceit,

For touched, they turn to dust and ashes straight.

Besides I find this tree hath never been

Like other fruit trees, walled or hedged in,

But in the highway standing many a year,

It never yet was robbed, as I could hear.

The reason is apparent to our eyes,

That what it bears, are dead commodities:

And yet sometimes (such grace to it is given)

The dying fruit is well prepared for heaven,

And many times a man may gather thence

Remorse, devotion, and true penitence.

And from that tree, I think more fools ascend

To that Celestial joy, which shall never end.

Among the Mermaid drinkers, and Taylor’s clients, were Ben Jonson and John Donne, both of them very different men from Raleigh, and poets who – unlike the loquacious cabbie – were important public figures.

Jonson was no more nobly born than Shakespeare. He was a native Londoner, whose father-in-law had been a brickmaker, and while formidably intelligent and well educated, he seems to have had a thick brick chip on his shoulder all his life. But he was politically astute, and rose to be a key figure in the court of James I. His great comedies, Volpone and Bartholomew Fair, give us the sound and stench of Jacobean London with a specificity that goes beyond even Shakespeare. By common consent he’s a much less great playwright, whose characters can seem merely gorgeously decorated cardboard cut-outs, representative of vices and virtues, the too-obvious children of medieval drama. Still, he was a wonderful poet.

Because we all like our history neat, it’s easy to forget that so-called periods or chapters or ages overlap and bleed into one another. Thus, in what we now call the ‘Renaissance’ or early modern period, there is plenty of medievalism still lively and present. A great example of this is the rollicking Ben Jonson poem from one of his less well-known plays, in which the devil is invited to dinner and feeds upon a well-seasoned banquet of Jonson’s contemporaries:

His stomach was queasy (he came hither coached)

The jogging had caused some crudities rise;

To help it he called for a puritan poached,

That used to turn up the eggs of his eyes.

And so recovered unto his wish,

He sat him down, and he fell to eat;

Promoter in plum broth was the first dish –

His own privy kitchen had no such meat.

Yet though with this he much were taken,

Upon a sudden he shifted his trencher,

As soon as he spied the bawd and the bacon,

By which you may note the devil’s a wencher.

Six pickled tailors sliced and cut,

Sempsters and tirewomen, fit for his palate;

With feathermen and perfumers put

Some twelve in a charger to make a great sallet.

A rich fat usurer stewed in his marrow,

And by him a lawyer’s head and green sauce:

Both which his belly took up like a harrow,

As if till then he had never seen sauce.

Then carbonadoed and cooked with pains,

Was brought up a cloven sergeant’s face:

The sauce was made of his yeoman’s brains,

That had been beaten out with his own mace.

Two roasted sherriffs came whole to the board;

(The feast had been nothing without ’em)

Both living and dead they were foxed and furred,

Their chains like sausages hung about ’em.

The very next dish was the mayor of a town,

With a pudding of maintenance thrust in his belly,

Like a goose in the feathers, dressed in his gown,

And his couple of hinch-boys boiled to a jelly.

A London cuckold hot from the spit,

And when the carver up had broken him,

The devil chopped up his head at a bit,

But the horns were very near like to choke him.

The chine of a lecher too there was roasted,

With a plump harlot’s haunch and garlic,

A pandar’s pettitoes, that had boasted

Himself for a captain, yet never was warlike.

A large fat pasty of a midwife hot;

And for a cold baked meat into the story,

A reverend painted lady was brought,

And coffined in crust till now she was hoary.

To these, an over-grown justice of peace,

With a clerk like a gizzard trussed under each arm;

And warrants for sippits, laid in his own grease,

Set over a chafing dish to be kept warm.

The jowl of a gaoler served for fish,

A constable soused with vinegar by;

Two aldermen lobsters asleep in a dish.

A deputy tart, a churchwarden pie.

All which devoured, he then for a close

Did for a full draught of Derby call;

He heaved the huge vessel up to his nose,

And left not till he had drunk up all.

Then from the table he gave a start,

Where banquet and wine were nothing scarce,

All which he flirted away with a fart,

From whence it was called the Devil’s Arse.

This is recognisably a satire on the England of the 1620s, and yet its brutal, rollicking spirit is Chaucerian. Jonson was a man of very many voices. He took his classical heritage far more seriously than did Shakespeare; at his best he can be shockingly direct, as in his heartbreaking poem about the loss of a young son. We know that the death of children was a common, almost routine, part of early modern life. Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died at the age of eleven, probably of the plague. Memories of him may dance through some of the great plays, but Shakespeare, characteristically, never addressed his loss directly. Jonson did.

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.

Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon ’scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,

And, if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.

For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

Earlier on, we heard Shakespeare’s ferocity about sexuality in one of his extraordinary sonnets. Jonson, also the author of some of the sweetest love poems in English, can be just as direct: ‘doing’ means exactly what you suspect it does.

Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;

And done, we straight repent us of the sport:

Let us not then rush blindly on unto it,

Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it:

For lust will languish, and that heat decay.

But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday,

Let us together closely lie and kiss,

There is no labour, nor no shame in this;

This hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never

Can this decay, but is beginning ever.

Although Jonson was a poet of the city, his work on dramatic masques and his huge fame brought him many courtly and noble connections; and he is the master of a kind of poetry, and indeed a sensibility, which runs through English life in particular from the Tudor period to our own day. The so-called ‘country house poem’ was a very particular and artificial confection: the poet oils up to the landowner by suggesting that his land willingly and desperately gives itself to him. The oaks wish to be cut down to provide, the deer are all too keen to be sliced up into venison steaks, and so on. It’s a conceit at once charming and completely ridiculous. Jonson’s pioneering poem ‘To Penshurst’ was written to compliment Sir Robert Sidney, the Earl of Leicester, on his estate in Kent. Jonson paints a picture of a harmonious countryside, of plentiful order and moderation, which has the lush vividness of a Rubens landscape, and whose sensibility uncurls all the way down to Downton Abbey. It’s ridiculous, idealised, and yet it bites into something in the English psyche too:

The lower land, that to the river bends,

Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed;

The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed.

Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops,

Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copse,

To crown thy open table, doth provide

The purpled pheasant with the speckled side;

The painted partridge lies in every field,

And for thy mess is willing to be killed.

And if the high-swollen Medway fail thy dish,

Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish,

Fat aged carps that run into thy net,

And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,

As loath the second draught or cast to stay,

Officiously at first themselves betray;

Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land

Before the fisher, or into his hand.

Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,

Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.

The early cherry, with the later plum,

Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;

The blushing apricot and woolly peach

Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.

And though thy walls be of the country stone,

They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan;

There’s none that dwell about them wish them down;

But all come in, the farmer and the clown,

And no one empty-handed, to salute

Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.

Some bring a capon, some a rural cake,

Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make

The better cheeses bring them …

Jonson’s enormous and capacious talent fathered an entire school of poets – the so-called ‘tribe of Ben’. His rival and friend John Donne influenced only a few others. His was an odder, knottier and more intense genius, though today, perhaps because of that, he is far better known. Donne can perplex modern readers because he is both a great poet of love and eroticism, and a great religious poet. At times the two seem to mingle, apparently without curdling. But an urgent, vivid belief in God and redemption coexisted in an argumentatively religious society with equally urgent, vivid and profane urges. Donne wrote about sex and love in his youth, and then about Christ and the Church as he aged, but he wasn’t two men. All through his life he was able to deploy a kind of intellectual avidity, a nervy restlessness that tore at whatever he was doing and thinking. This famous example may be the greatest poem about lovemaking ever written. He’s urging his mistress to rip her clothes off: