Jane Donawerth
Book Review
Lady Margaret Douglas and Others. The
Devonshire Manuscript: A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry. Ed. and intro. by
Elizabeth Heale. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 19.
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (Toronto, 2012), xiii + 277. ISBN: 978-0-7727-2128-0. $31.95 (USD)
1> The Devonshire
manuscript, owned by Mary (Howard) Fitzroy (c. 1519-1555?) and later by her
friend and fellow-courtier, Margaret Douglas (1515-1578), reflects the interests
of elite women at the court of Henry VIII. Their hands identify the poems
they contributed to the manuscript. The manuscript is important for preserving
not only many poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt, the most popular Henrician court poet,
but also for providing evidence of women’s involvement in production and
circulation of poetry. For greater access, the poems are modernized in spelling
and punctuation. The ladies who contributed to the manuscript began their
careers at the court of Anne Boleyn, immersed in its pastimes. In 1536 this
idyllic life imploded when the Queen was accused of adultery, based on
inferences from the love poetry and reported flirtations at these
entertainments. Mary Shelton (c. 1513-1571), another contributor, was specifically
rebuked for her “ydill [idle] poeses” (p. 7). Poems were copied into the
manuscript, a quarto-sized blank book, during the 1530s and 1540s, with at
least one poem from the 1560s, and the binding is stamped with the initials “M.
F.” Poems were not only entered page-by-page but often inserted on blank pages
throughout.
2> Elizabeth Heale’s
introduction offers background on Anne Boleyn’s court, biographies of the three
principle users of the manuscript, an overview of the poems and manuscript
culture, a brief summary of scholarship, and a note on editorial principles. Biography
takes central stage. The first owner, Mary (Howard) Fitzroy, married the
illegitimate son of Henry VIII, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, in November
1533, when they were both fourteen years old. The book was perhaps a gift to
Mary from her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, himself a noted poet, and friend
of the Duke. The second owner, Margaret Douglas, was daughter of Henry VIII’s
sister, Margaret Tudor. Margaret Douglas married Matthew Stewart, Earl of
Lennox, in July 1544, but had been secretly betrothed to Lord Thomas Howard,
Mary Fitzroy’s uncle, whose hand appears in many poems. The third female contributor
to the manuscript was Mary Shelton, daughter of Sir Ralph and Lady Anne
Shelton, betrothed briefly to Thomas Clere in 1545, and married to Sir Antony
Heveningham after Clere’s death. There are also poems contributed by Sir Edward
Knyvet, brother-in-law of Mary Shelton and cousin of Mary Fitzroy, many
anonymous hands, and one later poem inserted by Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley,
Margaret Douglas’s oldest son, perhaps addressed to his future wife, Mary Queen
of Scots. The biographical background is essential to understanding not only
the playfulness of courtly verse, but also the “tragic consequences” (p.15).
Poem 8 by Margaret Douglas spells out Mary Shelton’s name by acronym and Mary
adds a sarcastic comment about its quality after it. The only poem in Mary
Fitzroy’s hand (Poem 81) is by her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and
probably addresses his wife during his military service in France. Poems 41 to
48 were probably written after Margaret Douglas’s secret betrothal, by herself
and her fiancé while both were in the Tower for their offense. Poem 175, by
Douglas, is a “testament” or fictional will, justifying death for love. Reading
the poems is like reading an early Japanese novel (i.e., Tale of Genji)—full of erotic play, biographical references, advice
on courtly conduct, and an edge of danger.
3> Heale’s
introduction emphasizes what the poems tell us about courtly culture and manuscript
production. Poems are copied randomly, often without attribution, and there is
some collaborative authorship. A full third of the poems are by Sir Thomas
Wyatt, but many are also passages copied from Thynne’s print edition of
Chaucer, which included poems we would not now attribute to Chaucer. Many poems
must have been copied from memory, since there are small variants. Copyists
also sometimes purposefully changed words in order to make them better fit a
woman’s situation (Poem 65). Both male and female authors and voices are
represented, suggesting that the court valued wit in both sexes. Some poems are
marked as songs; others answer another poem; and some seem related to the
controversy about women, as Richard Hattfield’s clever poem (Poem 26), praising
or blaming women depending on punctuation. The editor includes illustrations of
the hands of the manuscript collection (pp. 45-48).
4> One surprise is
how unified the manuscript seems, with poems by other courtly authors and even
excerpts from Chaucer (Poems 91 and 18, for example) fitting neatly together
with Wyatt’s Italianate themes of despairing love, witty unfaithfulness, and
eventual rejection of the world of youthful passion. Poem 56 by Wyatt, for
example, is characteristic of the intense self-involvement of these poems,
asking a beloved if she cannot love the speaker, may she yet “rue upon my
pain.” Poem 115, a dialogue, suggests why this poet might be chosen by female
compilers: a lover lectures his lady on appreciating his patience, and on patiently
waiting for him; she returns first scorn, and then rejection, remarking that
patience is easy now that she has traded him for someone faithful. Many of
Wyatt’s poems are variants on Petrarch or other Italian sources (as Poem 135,
featuring the metaphor of a ship seeking a haven), and others also draw on
Petrarchan sources--Poem 5, for example, full of tears and flames and decrying
the cruel mistress who requires a living death. Despairing love, the subject of
over half of the poems, is given a female voice in Poem 65, perhaps by Margaret
Douglas, about a lover who “is gone and slipped the knot,” leaving the lady to
mourn. Illicit love is voiced by both male and female speakers: in Poem 128 by
Wyatt, the speaker observes a lady sewing a sampler while he sings and wishes
he were the sampler (i.e., in her lap), hoping Cupid will “prick” her; in Poem
152, an adulterous female speaker exults that she wants for nothing because her
friend tries to please her, no matter what others think. The ending to the story
of despairing love in a court culture of arranged marriages is not happy
marriage, but repentance for youthful follies, voiced, for example, in Poem 138
by Wyatt, a farewell to love, and in the anonymous Poem 145, describing young
passion and repentance later. Rather than love figuring courtly ambition, the
desire for “place” or courtly ambition figures the arduous path of love (as in
Poem 21). The style, too, seems unified, the poems overall committed to
song-like structures and patterned language full of antithesis, paradox, and the
extreme repetition of classical rhetorical schemes. Wyatt’s “My hope, alas, has
me abusèd,” Poem 136, with its antithetical paradoxes of mirth and sorrow,
faithfulness and comfortlessness, is matched in other clever contributions,
such as Poem 29, in which each stanza repeats and plays with words to show the
lover does his lady’s will, unlike others whose “words for words in words
remain,” and Poem 171, in which a lover lives in denial of his beloved’s
betrayal: “I would it were not as I think,/ I would I thought it were not.”
5> Of special
interest are the poems attributed to Margaret Douglas and those in a female
voice. Poems 60 and 61 in Margaret Douglas’s hand, for example, first mourn the
change of a suitor, vowing never to trust again, and then counsel that the only
cure is forgetting—an impossibility for the heartsick. The editor suggests that
Poems 101 and 102 are a pair: the first by Margaret Douglas claims that her
audience would be in tears if she could depict her heart’s grief; the second by
Mary Shelton suggests that it’s better to counterfeit and cover grief. Female
voices wish for much the same as male voices in these poems: in Poem 9, a lady
vows to take a chance and trust, and in Poem 12, a brief version of the tale of
Isabella Whitney’s much later “Inconstant Lover,” a female cautions never again
to trust a man. Poem 105, in Margaret Douglas’s hand, tells a lady’s grief when
she sees her former lover across the room and steels herself not to give in
again, after which Mary Shelton has scribbled “hap have bidden/ my hap
a-wanting”—fortune has decreed that I’ll lack luck. Although many of the poems
in the Devonshire manuscript approach love with cynical good humor, overall,
the poems by both men and women concentrate (like current rock lyrics) on lost
joys and bleak futures. Margaret Douglas (Poem 83) and Mary Shelton (Poem 87)
both enter versions of the same poem that sees “joy decays” and mourns a future
of “weary days.”
6> This volume helps
us to revise our understanding of the ways that women were encouraged by court
culture and friends to read, perform, and author poems. The introduction gives
valuable background, and the annotations and index are superb. This is a volume
for every library and every scholar’s bookshelf.
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Jane Donawerth, Professor of English and Women’s Studies and
Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, has published on
Shakespeare, early modern women, Madeleine de Scudery, and science fiction by
women. She helped found the “Attending to Early Modern Women” conference, and
Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her latest book is Conversational
Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600 to 1900.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early
Modern Literature & Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Seven (2014): Genres & Cultures
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