Wyatt and Petrarch: Italian fashion at the Court of Henry VIII. (2024)

Sir Thomas Wyatt's translations and imitations of Petrarch mark the beginning of the English Renaissance encounter with Petrarchism as a literary movement. Wyatt removes or deemphasizes some important features of his originals, but takes others very seriously; some of the most striking results, as in "They flee from me," come when he brings expectations nurtured in the Petrarchan narrative of unconsummated desire to promiscuous sexual love and its aftermath.

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In the last years of the fifteenth century, an anonymous Venetian who accompanied his city's ambassador to England found himself looking for something that he was not finding among the inhabitants of that kingdom: "[...] although their dispositions are somewhat licentious [inclinati alla libidine], I never have noticed any one, either at court or among the lower orders, to be in love [sia alcuno innamorato]" (Sneyd 24). (1) The Venetian thought of two possible explanations: "[...] either that the English are the most discreet lovers in the world, or that they are incapable of love." He is, to be sure, speaking only of the men: "I understand it is quite the contrary with the women, who are very violent in their passions." The way he puts that, though, implies he is not writing from direct observation; female passion may have been reported but was not on display ("the English keep a very jealous guard over their wives"). The anonymous Venetian writer goes on to link this phenomenon to the way these people treat their children, and thinks it a flaw in the national character: "il poco amore degli Inglesi."

The diagnosis tells us at least as much about Italy as it does about England. (2) The innamorato was evidently by this time an established figure in the Italian public landscape. You would expect to know him when you saw him; he might be discreet about the details, but he would not be concealing his affective state behind any cover that a knowing observer would not be expected to penetrate. Being in such a state and recognizing it in others were important components of civilized existence, and the subject of some of the best known products of Italian culture:

 Se 'n solitaria piaggia rivo o fonte, se 'nfra duo poggi siede ombrosa valle, ivi s'acqueta l'alma sbigottita; et come Amor l'envita or ride or piange or teme or s'assecura, e 'l volto, che lei segue ov'ella il mena, si turba e rasserena et in un esser picciol tempo dura: onde a la vista uom di tal vita esperto diria: "Questo arde et di suo stato e incerto."RVF 129.4-13

(If there is on some solitary slope a river or spring, or between two peaks a shady valley, there my frightened soul is quieted; and, as Love leads it on, now it laughs, now weeps, now fears, now is confident: and my face, which follows wherever my soul leads, is clouded and made clear again, and remains but a short time in any one state; and at the sight anyone who had experienced such a life would say: "This man is burning with love and his state is uncertain.")

By the end of the fifteenth century Petrarch's vernacular poetry had become the focus of a larger complex of cultivated social life whose evolution is itself intimated in these lines: the passion that isolates the lover becomes the object of acknowledgment and empathy in select others. Petrarch is drawing on Ovid, who is in comparison almost cynical: "ut uoto potiare tuo, miserabilis esto, / ut qui te uideat dicere possit 'amas'" (Ars amatoria 1.737-38; to get what you're after, be pitiful, so that whoever sees you can say, You're in love). Petrarch elaborates this advice into something melancholy and picturesque, which becomes in time the aesthetic for a community of those who are or would be thought expert in such a life.

That aesthetic is at the center of Italian cultural prestige in the Renaissance, and one of the peninsula's major exports. The lack which the Venetian visitor registered may or may not have had something to do with the emotional lives of actual individuals; it unmistakably had to do with the low profile of Italianate culture in the England of Henry VII, and with the absence of any trace of the international literary phenomenon that had elsewhere begun to manifest itself under Petrarchan inspiration. We may link the supposed low incidence of love among the English to another perplexity the Venetian visitor records: "They are gifted with good understandings, and are very quick at everything they apply their minds to; few, however, excepting the clergy, are addicted to the study of letters" (Sneyd 22). The spread of Petrarchist love poetry is entwined with the growth of a secular reading public and is indeed one way of tracking its growth; the Venetian's observation on this score is probably true.

Some thirty years later the picture is different; the most famous evidence is the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, a body of work that includes some two dozen English versions of poems from Petrarch's Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, and a comparable number of translations from more recent Italian and French poets writing under Petrarch's unmistakable influence. These poems include the first known sonnets in English. As a project, this seems to have been largely one man's doing; other poetry composed in Wyatt's vicinity (other than that of the Earl of Surrey, who was clearly following Wyatt's lead) shows few traces of overtly Italianate borrowing. The inspiration for Wyatt's effort is often attributed to his ambassadorial service on the continent, though developments at home would have been sufficient to explain his interest, and indeed make it almost inevitable. The accession of Henry VIII in 1509 changed the tenor of the English court; the figure he presented in 1515 to a new delegation from Venice seemed bright with erotic promise: "the handsomest potentate I have ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fine and bright [bianchissimo vivacissimo], with auburn [biondi scuri] hair combed straight and short, in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful, that it would become a pretty woman [staria ben ad una bella donna]" (Brown 1:86). Aspects of Italian fashion had already found their place; the Venetians discovered at court the Brescian musician Zuan Piero, "to whom this King gives 300 ducats annually for playing the lute," and with whom the ambassador's secretary played an impromptu duet on the clavicembalo (Brown 1:80). Piero was the first of several Italian musicians who can be placed at Henry's court. We have no information about any particular program they performed there, but it would be surprising if lyrics by Petrarch were not on the playlist; numerous poems of his had by then been set to music and figured prominently in the usual Italian repertoire. At least seven of the poems Wyatt translated were so treated, including the popular RVF 121, "Or vedi, Amor," for which no fewer that 18 settings survive. Wyatt enters his English version first in his personal collection, the Egerton manuscript: "Behold, Love, thy power how she despiseth." The last poem to be inserted into Petrarch's sequence, it becomes in effect the start of English Renaissance literature's encounter with Petrarch's sequence and its offspring.

That start is in certain ways a diminishment, depriving the imported material of some of what one might have thought would make it most attractive, especially within an aspiring Renaissance court:

 Or vedi, Amor, che giovenetta donna tuo regno sprezza et del mio mal non cura, et tra duo ta' nemici e si secura. Tu se' armato, et ella in treccie e 'n gonna si siede et scalza in mezzo i fiori et l'erba, ver me spietata e 'ncontr'a te superba.RVF 121.1-6

(Now see, Love, how a young woman scorns your rule and cares nothing for my harm, and between two such enemies is so confident. You are in armor, and she in a mere robe with braided hair is sitting barefoot amid the flowers and the grass, pitiless toward me and proud toward you.) (5)

 Behold, Love, thy power how she despiseth, My great pain how little she regardeth. The holy oath whereof she taketh no cure Broken she hath, and yet she bideth sure Right at her ease and little she dreadeth. Weaponed thou art and she unarmed sitteth. To thee disdainful her life she leadeth, To me spiteful without cause or measure.Wyatt 1.1-8

Even as it takes longer to say what it has to say, the English poem removes almost all visual and circ*mstantial information from the original. The picture of the woman in the landscape is gone, the casual dress and loose hair reduced to "unarmed." Nor is there an English word to correspond to giovenetta or even donna: we know she is a woman only from the pronoun. This is not to remove her from the poem; quite the contrary, the emotions which the speaker attributes to her--the pride and spite behind her indifference to him--now fill the poem all the more completely. What has been taken out is anything to explain the speaker's own longing, any presentation of the woman as an object of desire. The category of decor for which Petrarchism is usually so famous, the precious objects used to praise parts of the woman's body, is barely in evidence anywhere in Wyatt, and time and again his adaptations curtail the visual drama of the original:

 Una candida cerva sopra l'erba verde m'apparve con duo corna d'oro, fra due riviere all'ombra d'un alloro, levando 'l sole a la stagione acerba.RVF 190.1-4

(A white doe on the green grass appeared to me, with two golden horns, between two rivers, in the shade of a laurel, when the sun was rising in the unripe season.)

In Wyatt this entire quatrain shrinks to a single line: "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind" (11.1). Lewis's observation on another site has general relevance: "Wyatt (perhaps not for purely aesthetic reasons) has, so to speak, turned down the lights of the Petrarch" (326-27).

In both this last example and the one that occasions Lewis's remark (29.1-4, alongside RVF 269.1-4), part of what vanishes is the symbolic lynchpin of Petrarch's entire sequence: the laurel. In neither of these cases need its disappearance imply deliberate thought on Petrarch's central trope, the coincidence of erotic and literary ambition, though another text of Wyatt's does. In a generally close translation of the penultimate canzone of the sequence (Wyatt 73), where Reason is called upon to decide whether Love has done the speaker more good than harm, Wyatt omits the passage in which Love describes his gift of poetic fame:

 Si l'avea sotto l'ali mie condutto ch'a donne et cavalier piacea il suo dire; et si alto salire il feci che tra' caldi ingegni ferve il suo nome, et de' suoi detti conserve si fanno con diletto in alcun loco; ch'or saria forse un roco mormorador di corti, un uom del vulgo!RVF 360.110-17

(I had so carried him under my wings that his speech pleased ladies and knights; and I made him rise so high that among brilliant wits his name shines, and in some places collections are made of his poems; who now would perhaps be a hoarse murmurer of the courts, one of the mob!)

This part of Love's case largely disappears into the gap between Wyatt's sixteenth and seventeenth stanzas (between lines 112 and 113); a trace survives as a brief addition at a later point:

 [...] da volar sopra 'l ciel li avea dat'ali per le cose mortali, che son scala al Fattor, chi ben l'estima.RVF 360.137-39

(I gave him wings to fly above the heavens through mortal things, which are a ladder to the Creator, if one judges them rightly.)

 I gave him wings wherewith he might fly To honour and fame and, if he would, farther By mortal things above the starry sky.Wyatt 73.128-30

Even here we are not told that the honor and fame would be due to the lover's achievement as a poet. Wyatt declines to give voice to the specifically laureate ambition that is one of the key marks distinguishing Petrarchan love from its near relatives. In this context, the sole appearance of a laurel in Wyatt's poetry, in his translation of Psalm 37, looks like a considered judgment on that ambition:

 I have well seen the wicked sheen like gold, Lusty and green as laurel lasting ay; But even anon and scant his seat was cold.Wyatt 266.97-99

There is a history of uncertainty about the tree here; identifying it as the bay tree is the work of sixteenth-century scholarship, and it so appears in the Coverdale, Geneva, and King James Bibles. Wyatt's contribution is the golden sheen, which adds a concentrated burst of Petrarchan color, but in a lurid and menacing light. The kind of decor that Wyatt works to cull from his love poetry serves his turn here as an object of moral outrage: the badge of a perverse aspiration to the wrong kind of immortality.

Wyatt's usage is consistent with an absence that Ferry notes in his borrowings from the continent: "Even in 'There was never ffile' [Wyatt 32], Wyatt does not explicitly identify his speaker as a poet, or present him in the act of writing verses [...]. Nor elsewhere in Wyatt's sonnets, either translated or original, is the speaker identified as a poet-lover" (92-93). For a Petrarchist, this is a momentous absence. When a poem in the Devonshire manuscript considers what "some readers" might make of "this book" (177.9, 28)--in a manner that has prompted comparisons to RVF 1--those references are themselves evidence against Wyatt's authorship. His poems were circulated in written form and had readers, but the performative self-consciousness on view in poetry that we can be sure is Wyatt's is almost never literary. (6) He never uses the word "poem"; his compositions, when he refers to them, are songs, and on occasion he presents himself in them as a singer and lutanist:

 My lute, awake! Perform the last Labour that thou and I shall waste, And end that I have now begun; For when this song is sung and past, My lute, be still for I have done.Wyatt 109.1-5

We do not know that Wyatt actually performed in those roles. If he indeed did not, his assumption of them is in a way all the more interesting as the fictional appropriation of a still foreign Italian manner--a manner that very possibly mediated his own first encounter with Petrarch's texts. Such an encounter would correspond to some contemporary understandings of how those texts were indeed first presented (Stevens 281), but in fact would have placed them in a significantly un-Petrarchan or at least pre-Petrarchan situation: one like that of the troubadours, their eyes not on a distant audience to be reached by writing but on a present audience waiting to be entertained in the here and now. I suspect the role of singer attracted Wyatt in great part because of the way it implied that kind of context.

As with the troubadours, the available information does not allow us to be much more specific. Scholars are thrown back on their own imaginative powers, with results that do not always age well: "The whole scene comes before us. [...] We are having a little music after supper" (Lewis 230). Greenblatt confronted this picture with an influential jibe that has set the tone for a good deal of subsequent discussion but is just as obviously a kind of historical mythmaking: "conversation with the king himself must have been like small talk with Stalin" (136-37). The real failure of imagination in Lewis's picture is not so much the benign glow he gives to the courtly scene as the generalization with which he shortcircuits his own argument: "In that atmosphere all the confessional or autobiographical tone of the songs falls away. [...] The song is still passionate: but the passion is distanced and generalized by being sung" (230). Repeated intimate performances among people who see each other all the time are far more likely to acquire just the opposite weight, a complicated sense of relevance to the lives and especially the affections of the people involved. In Wyatt's case we are encouraged to see things this way by the vehemence with which he can insist that what he is doing with his lute is conducting a conversation, responding to particular actions on someone else's part:

 Spite asketh spite and changing change And falsed faith must needs be known. The faults so great, the case so strange Of right it must abroad be blown. Then since that by thine own desert My songs do tell how true thou art Blame not my lute.Wyatt 94.22-28

The lute--the word itself an Italian import--is perhaps the closest thing in Wyatt's work to the Petrarchan laurel, a symbol for the artistic ambition that accompanies his erotic desire; here, however, he goes out of his way to insist in an un-Petrarchan spirit that it has no independent power of its own but is strictly subservient to his own intent in holding up his end of this conversation:

 Blame not my lute for he must sound Of this or that as liketh me. For lack of wit the lute is bound To give such tunes as pleaseth me. Though my songs be somewhat strange And speaks such words as touch thy change Blame not my lute. My lute, alas, doth not offend Though that perforce he must agree To sound such tunes as I intend To sing to them that heareth me. Then though my songs be somewhat plain And toucheth some that use to feign Blame not my lute.Wyatt 94.1-14

In the longest poem in his sequence Petrarch links the displacement of speech by song--"volendo parlar, cantava sempre" (RVF 23.62; "wishing to speak, I sang always")--to his fatal inability to move Laura with his poetic voice:

 [...] ne mai in si dolci o in si soavi tempre risonar seppi gli amorosi guai che 'l cor s'umiliasse aspro et feroce.RVF 23.64-66

([...] nor was I ever able to make my amorous woes resound in so sweet or soft a temper that her harsh and ferocious heart was humbled.)

He writes as if making his song sweeter or softer might finally reach her, but he knows that will not be the case; the price his poetry pays for beauty is effectiveness as speech. Wyatt imagines no such negotiation for his songs. His lute is simply one of his tools for speaking to those that hear him.

Such a conviction may be sensed in many of Wyatt's lyrics. I think it helps explain the disappearance of the woman's image from "Behold, love." Though he keeps the fiction of addressing Love rather than the woman, Wyatt's poem has, more than Petrarch's, the force of a complaint that she is meant to hear; painting a picture of her beauty would be for the benefit of others, and beside the point as far as persuading her is concerned. Translating RVF 206, Wyatt explicitly changes the woman from third-person object (to whom Love is supposed to speak on the poet's behalf) to second-person addressee, and builds the poem to a righteous appeal that is very much in the spirit of "Blame not my lute" but corresponds to nothing at all in the Italian:

 Then that that ye have wrought Ye must it now redress. Of right therefore ye ought Such rigour to repress. And as I have deserved, So grant me now my hire. Ye know I never swerved; Ye never found me liar.77.37-44

In its very rudeness (which begins with the poem's opening line: "Perdie, I said it not"), this disposition is part of what makes Wyatt's lyrics courtly in the original sense of that term--lyrics showing the abrasions of life at court, of frequent close encounters within a small circuit. Petrarch's life and work were shaped by the repeated withdrawal from such encounters, and he has Love list among the benefits of poetic fame that it allowed him to avoid becoming "un roco / mormorador di corti" (RVF 360.116-17; "a hoarse murmurer of the courts"). Petrarchism as a literary movement, though, seeks out the courts of western Europe as if they were its natural home, and that tense environment exerts its pressure on the dynamics of erotic reverie. The lyric soliloquy feels appreciably more like direct speech in a dramatic occasion.

The metamorphosis of one of Petrarch's most imitated set of poems displays the process with particular clarity. Laura has removed a glove, and the poet now holds it; the sight of the exposed hand and the possession of an article of Laura's clothing are sources of unaccustomed pleasure:

 O bella man che mi destringi 'l core e 'n poco spazio la mia vita chiudi, man ov'ogni arte et tutti loro studi poser Natura e 'l Ciel per farsi onore, di cinque perle oriental colore, et sol ne le mie piaghe acerbi et crudi, diti schietti soavi: a tempo ignudi consente or voi per arricchirme Amore. Candido leggiadretto et caro guanto che copria netto avorio et fresche rose: chi vide al mondo mai si dolci spoglie? Cosi avess'io del bel velo altrettanto! O inconstanzia de l'umane cose, pur questo e furto, et vien chi me ne spoglie.RVF 199

(O beautiful hand that grasps my heart and encloses in a little space all my life, hand where Nature and Heaven have put all their art and all their care to do themselves honor, neat soft fingers, the color of five oriental pearls, and only bitter and cruel to wound me: to make me rich, Love now opportunely consents that you be naked. White, light, and dear glove, that covered clear ivory and fresh roses: who ever saw in the world such sweet spoils? Would I had again as much of that lovely veil! Oh the inconstancy of human life! Even this is a theft, and one is coming who will deprive me of it.)

This is unusually specific narrative action for Petrarch, though many of the details of what happened are obscured by the very intensity of the lover's response. A decent guess is that Laura dropped the glove inadvertently and the lover picked it up and held it for only a few minutes before giving it back. Subsequent details imply that the one who came to ask for it was Laura herself, though no dialogue is reported; the last poem in the episode expresses retrospective regret at having readily granted her request, and goes as far as a fantasy of vendetta:

 Ne mi riede a la mente mai quel giorno che mi fe' ricco et povero in un punto ch' i' non sia d'ira et di dolor compunto, pien di vergogna et d'amoroso scorno che la mia nobil preda non piu stretta tenni al bisogno et non fui piu costante contra lo sforzo sol d'un'angioletta, o, fuggendo, ale non giunsi a le piante per far almen di quella man vendetta che de li occhi mi trae lagrime tante.RVF 201.5-14

(Nor does that day, which made me rich and poor at the same time, ever come to mind without my being moved with anger and sorrow, full of shame and amorous scorn that I did not hold my noble spoils more tightly when it was needful, and was not more constant against the force of a mere angel, or, fleeing, did not add wings to my feet and take vengeance at least on that hand which draws from my eyes so many tears.)

But the revenge in question--which itself would have consisted simply in fleeing the scene--is what did not happen, and none of the words in anger now stirring were spoken at the time. An observer would probably have witnessed an exchange polite to the point of near meaninglessness.

There are things in this vignette that interest Wyatt. He makes the octave of the first poem the starting point for one of his songs:

 O goodly hand Wherein doth stand My heart distressed in pain! Fair hand, alas, In little space My life that doth restrain!Wyatt 140.1-6

For three stanzas he stays close to the original, going against his own grain in reproducing some Petrarchan preciousness ("Nature did lend / Each finger's end / A pearl for to repair" 16-18). Having done so, though, he turns the poem into a song of Wyatt's again with the thing that Petrarch avoids, an appeal to the woman in the here and now:

 Consent at last, Since that thou hast My heart in thy demesne, For service true On me to rue And reach me love again.Wyatt 140.19-24

The idiom is that of a feudal contract negotiation; if she will not grant his first request he has a second:

 And if not so Then with more woe Enforce thyself to strain This simple heart, That suffereth smart, And rid it out of pain.Wyatt 140.25-30

Make it right or end it. The man wants the woman to know that he needs a decision.

In that spirit Wyatt has no use here for the keystone of the Petrarchan episode: the glove. Laura's glove is a trivial object that acquires importance because the larger situation cannot change. Unable either to possess Laura or to cease desiring her, the poet could imagine contenting himself with what he might conceivably possess, a fetishized surrogate--though the point of the episode is that even this he cannot hold on to. The woman's glove does interest Wyatt, however, when it figures in a more confrontational scenario; he is shown the way by his favorite Petrarchist:

 A che minacci, a che tanta ira e orgoglio? Per questo non farai che 'l furto renda. Non senza causa la tua man dispoglio, rapir quel d'altri non fu mai mia menda. Famme citar davanti Amor, ch'io voglio che la ragion de l'uno & l'altro intenda: lei il cor mi tolse & io gli ho tolto un guanto, vorro saper da te se un cor val tanto.Serafino, strambotto 415

(What's the point of threatening? what's the point of such anger and haughtiness? You will not this way make me give back the theft. Not without cause did I despoil your hand; that I stole this from someone was not my crime. Have me summon here Love, whom I want to judge the case of the one and the other. She took my heart, and I took a glove; I will want to know from you if a heart is worth that much.) (8)

Petrarch leaves it unsaid how he came into possession of the glove; Serafino's speaker went and took it, and boasts of his rightness in doing so. The addressee shifts in the course of the poem from the woman to Love, but we sense no withdrawal from the site of conflict; rather, Love is the judge who will settle this now. The heightened aggression is one of the distinguishing marks of Serafino's generation of Petrarchan imitators; Wyatt turns to them almost as often as he turns to Petrarch himself. Even when we know Wyatt's eyes are on Petrarch, Serafino can be a presence; the change of addressee from Love to the woman in "Perdie, I said it not" is anticipated by a strambotto of Serafino's based on the same original (412). With the strambotto on the glove, Wyatt reproduces the verse form and translates fairly closely:

 What needeth these threnning words and wasted wind? All this cannot make me restore my prey. To rob your good, iwis, is not my mind, Nor causeless your fair hand did I display. Let Love be judge or else whom next we meet That may both hear what you and I can say: "She took from me an heart and I a glove from her. Let us see now if th'one be worth th'other."Wyatt 40

Wyatt's most significant contribution is "or else whom next we meet," which if anything improves the original on its own terms: "Wyatt, in adding this, gets the appropriate spirit, almost the social environment, perfectly" (Thomson 232). Not only does the lover not flee the confrontation, but it takes place in a populated world in which others might show up and become part of the scene.

Contemporary Italian poetry had models for even more summary judgement in the matter of male-female courtship; a madrigal by Dragonetto Bonifacio caught Wyatt's attention:

 Madonna, i' non so far tante parole: o voi volete o no. Si voi volete, oprate al gran bisogno il vostro senno, che voi sarrete intesa per un cenno. E si d'un, che sempre arde, pur ve dole, un presto si o no li rispondete. Si serra un si, io scriverovvi in rima: quando che no, amici come prima: voi cercherete un altro amante, et io, si non posso esser vostro, sarro mio.(qtd. by Percopo 220) (10)

(My lady, I do not know how to make long talk. Either you are willing or not. If you are willing, apply your wits to this important business, for you will be understood just with a gesture, and if you feel any pain for one who burns forever, answer him with a prompt Yes or No. If it will be a Yes, I will answer you in verse. If it's No, friends as before; you will seek another lover and I, if I cannot be yours, will be my own.)

Wyatt passes up an opportunity to refer to himself as a writer of poetry, but otherwise embraces the poem and translates with evident relish:

 Madam, withouten many words Once I am sure ye will or no. And if ye will then leave your bourds And use your wit and shew it so And with a beck ye shall me call. And if of one that burneth alway Ye have any pity at all Aunswer him fair with yea or nay. If it be yea I shall be fain. If it be nay friends as before. Ye shall another man obtain And I mine own and yours no more. Wyatt 96

The clarity of the reasoning at the end makes the speaker's goal comparably clear: this is a seduction poem, and what is being sought is the woman's sexual consent. The centerpiece of the argument is a respect for her freedom of choice, but it is also the unproblematically sexual character of the request that makes possible the brusque confidence of the conclusion: if your answer is No, I will have no trouble moving on. That confidence is perhaps the most significantly anti-Petrarchan feature of the poem. The only thing that links the Italian poem in any meaningful way to Petrarchism is the reference to the speaker's perpetual ardor in 1. 5--a reference that if not exactly contradicted is given a new meaning by the last lines: I may burn always, but not necessarily for the same object. Petrarchan passion survives as part of the seducer's advertising, which even he does not necessarily expect to be taken at face value. The slightly cynical style of this is answerable to the libidinousness of Renaissance courts generally and of Henry VIII's in particular. A knowingness about love's brevity hangs over many of Wyatt's lyrics, and it is easy to suppose their place in a life of courtly promiscuity in the late 20s and early 30s. Bonifacio's madrigal would appeal as a jeu d'esprit that clarified the reality of that life while disabling some of the hypocrisies attending it. Petrarchan devotion would be one such hypocrisy.

Yet the Petrarchan moment in "Madam withouten many words" is not just part of the joke. In the Egerton and Blage manuscripts the poem comes with the woman's reply, in which she takes offense at such light wooing and seizes on the profession of Petrarchan ardor as one that ought to be true:

 For he that will be called with a beck Makes hasty suit on light desire, Is ever ready to the check And burneth in no wasting fire.

That being the case, "Content you with 'Nay' for you get no more." (11) We have no way of knowing whether Wyatt wrote the reply himself, though its inclusion in his own manuscript indicates some degree of authorial sanction; and there are reasons to think that the middle two lines of the proposition to which the woman is responding are meant to supply a lilt rather than just set up the punchline. We are dealing here with one of the areas of Petrarchan convention which appears to have actively attracted Wyatt--an attraction which takes on particular meaning in view of the lengthy list of conventions which he seemed comparatively uninterested in bringing into English.

Two of the Petrarchan sonnets which Wyatt chooses to translate occupy most of their length simply listing ways to spot an innamorato:

 If in my visage each thought depainted, Or else in my sparkling voice lower or higher Which now fear, now shame, woefully doth tire, If a pale colour which love hath stained [...]Wyatt 13.5-8 (12)

Such display presents a ready target when Petrarchism becomes an object of fun, but I sense no mockery of it in Wyatt. Quite the contrary, the exaggeration affirms the speaker's seriousness, as can be seen with special clarity when the un-Petrarchan nature of the situation is most evident. A sonnet late in the Egerton manuscript opens as if it were another adaptation of the same Petrarchan original as that behind the one just cited--

 If waker care, if sudden pale colour, If many sighs, with little speech to plain, Now joy, now woe, if they my cheer distain, For hope of small, if much to fear therefore, To haste, to slack my pace less or more Be sign of love [...]

but in the middle of the second quatrain begins to break some important rules:

 [...] then do I love again. If thou ask whom, sure since I did refrain Brunet that set my wealth in such a roar, Th'unfeigned cheer of Phyllis hath the place That Brunet had. She hath and ever shall. She from myself now hath me in her grace. She hath in hand my wit, my will, and all. My heart alone well worthy she doth stay Without whose help scant do I live a day.Wyatt 28

The speaker's insomnia and pallor come in the wake of successfully ending his love for one woman and falling in love with another--the kind of willful change of affections ("I did refrain / Brunet" suggests direct and decisive action on the lover's part) whose impossibility is one of the reigning principles of Petrarch's story and one of the most popular protestations of his imitators. Those imitators do nevertheless come at times to the same pass Wyatt has reached here, and have interesting things to say when they do; Ronsard and Gaspara Stampa are notable examples (Braden, Petrarchan Love 111-14; 127-28). In Wyatt's case the rationality of the change is obvious. Brunet's effect on his life was destructive, while everything about Phyllis suggests a happy ending: not only is she a more worthy object of admiration ("unfeigned cheer" looks back to a capacity for deceit on the other woman's part), but his love for her is already reciprocated with badly needed care and affection. This happy ending moves us so far from Petrarchan precedent that the Petrarchan opening looks in retrospect strangely incongruous: the rhetoric of erotic despair is offered as evidence of the speaker's commitment to a woman who is nothing but good for him. By the end of the poem one would guess that he now sleeps quite well and has plenty of blood in his cheeks.

I take that incongruity to be largely unintentional, a by-product of biographical reality. This poem is one of the most specific in its reference to the facts of Wyatt's life. The previous love has the same hair color as Anne Boleyn, and that identification is clinched by the original reading of 1. 8 in the Egerton manuscript: "Her that did set our country in a roar." Phyllis is surely Elizabeth Darrell, Wyatt's mistress during the last six years of his life, remembered in his will. Wyatt's passion for Anne Boleyn, very likely the latent subject of other poems of his, would have been a much more appropriate occasion for Petrarchan suffering, especially if that passion was indeed unconsummated. (13) It would also make sense for his love for Darrell to inspire such suffering in times of forced absence--and indeed Wyatt's translation of one of Petrarch's canzoni of distant longing becomes, with a little tweaking, a lament for his separation from her during his posting to Spain. But in "If waker care" there is no separation--the woman's intimate emotional support for the man is happening in the present, on a daily basis--and the sonnet's first five lines constitute a hasty version of one of the most complicated metamorphoses that Petrarchism is called upon to perform: its evolution into the poetry of successfully mutual love. Later in the century, Spenser will require an entire sequence to enact that evolution (see Braden, "Pride, Humility"). Wyatt, early in the century, effects an often incautious generalization of the Petrarchan symptoms to a wider range of erotic experience, as if Petrarchan rhetoric were the language of love pure and simple. That often unsatisfying generalization is part of Wyatt's legacy to English Renaissance poetry, and possibly played a role in making England so slow to produce a real Petrarchan sequence on the continental model.

There is a seriousness to Wyatt's incaution, though, and the incongruities of "If waker care" are consistent with the seriousness we can detect behind "Madam, withouten many words." Petrarchan ardor is a possibility of extravagant emotional commitment that is also governable by choice, a choice which is itself a response to what the object of desire is minded to do. Wyatt's love poetry is marked both by the capacity, indeed longing for such extravagance, and by what can seem like a cold respect for the logic of choice in this matter. In that logic we feel the presence of the populated world around his lyrics, where questions of love merge with all the other questions that need answering. On more than one occasion, Wyatt can make us unsure whether he is talking about love or about human relations generally; the explicit or implicit plea in many of his poems will do for both: I will treat you as you treat me, and if you are minded to be faithful we can create a site of stability in a shifting and treacherous world. The second poem in the Egerton manuscript sets the tone:

 What vaileth truth or by it to take pain, To strive by steadfastness for to attain To be just and true and flee from doubleness, Sithens all alike, where ruleth craftiness, Rewarded is both false and plain? Soonest he speedeth that most can feign; True meaning heart is had in disdain. Against deceipt and doubleness What vaileth truth?Wyatt 4.1-9

We are not told for sure until the next stanza that this is a love poem, and no first person pronoun is ever used. The Petrarchan conclusion, however, is previewed in 1. 7, and we may identify the speaker with the lover there being disdained. What is set against this lady's disdain is not her lover's pitifulness or even the strength of his desire but the truth of his heart. He maintains this truth in a world of endless duplicity; modernized spelling obscures a linkage between truth and troth, keeping one's word. His declaration of his feelings is also a pledge, and one that he has stood by; his courtship has been one of striving by steadfastness. That the woman has not responded in kind makes her of a piece with the corrupt world that surrounds them both.

Reading through Wyatt's collected lyrics, one encounters versions of this posture on almost every page. The repeated declarations of aggrieved righteousness have not helped Wyatt with modern readers: "Poor Wyatt seems to be always in love with women he dislikes. [...] I feel how very disagreeable it must be for a woman to have a lover like Wyatt" (Lewis 229). Greenblatt is aggressively diagnostic:

The single self, the affirmation of wholeness or stoic apathy or quiet of mind, is a rhetorical construct designed to enhance the speaker's power, allay his fear, disguise his need. The man's singleness is played off against the woman's doubleness--the fear that she embodies a destructive mutability, that she wears a mask, that she must not under any circ*mstances be trusted, that she inevitably repays love with betrayal. The woman is that which is essentially foreign to the man, yet the man is irresistibly drawn into relations with her. (141-42)

So analyzed, the gender contrast implies an unfriendly sense of Wyatt's "manliness": "The qualities that seem to evoke this term are sarcasm, the will to dominate, aggression toward women, concern for liberty and invulnerability and hence resistance to the romantic worship of the lady, a deliberate harshness of accent and phrasing, and [...] a constant and unappeasable restlessness" (154). (15) We can divine in Wyatt's love poetry personality traits that could play an unreckoned role in its habitual unsatisfaction.

Even Yvor Winters, the least compromising twentieth-century advocate of Wyatt's righteous plain speaking, thinks he is sometimes too much:

 It was my choice, it was no chance That brought my heart in other's hold, Whereby it hath had sufferance Longer, perdie, than reason would. Since I it bound where it was free, Methinks, iwis, of right it should Accepted be.93.1-7

Winters finds this argument "curious and unreasonable"; from the woman's point of view, it "might well seem arrogant" (11). We have evidence that this might be the reaction of a woman in Wyatt's circle; in the Devonshire manuscript Mary Shelton annotates a complaint about her own unjust treatment of a prospective lover ("Who would not rue to see how wrongfully / Thus for to serve and suffer still he must", 210.24-25) with a deft and logical response that is a small poem in its own right: "undesired fancies / require no hire." (16) You cannot obligate me with service I have not asked for.

Yet Wyatt's bold sense of entitlement is not merely one male poet's moment of excess. The extremity of "If was my choice" clarifies something often implied but not quite said; it makes explicit a rationale central to fin'amors and the traditions descending from it, of which Petrarchism is not on this point the most relevant. In Hull's formulation:

[...] poets insist upon bonds of knots, servitude or pain. These bonds knit lovers to women who do not actively cooperate, who may indeed be absent, unaware, or even dead [...]. But the association must be manufactured: fortunately it can be created abstractly and without the active participation of the woman. If he does not have her, but she possesses him [...] he can invert that possession and have her because she has him. He is overwhelmed, therefore she is his conquerer. Her serves her, therefore she is his owner. He is ridden by her, therefore she is his mistress. He is restrained by her, therefore she is his chains. He is wounded by her, therefore she is his torturer. (118)

For courtship so conducted, poetry plays a role different from that of Petrarchan memorialization in the indefinite future:

Out of his private pain the poet creates a relationship, and validates it by making it public. [...]. Not only does he publish the behavior he projects upon [the beloved], but the publication itself may make his projection real, whether or not she succumbs to guilt. If she denies him a relationship she is by that fact engaged in a relationship with him--it's called cruelty--and everyone knows it. (Hull 119)

The most exhilarating claim that poets traditionally make for themselves is the godlike power of creation ex nihilo, of bringing something into existence where there had been nothing. Love poetry like Wyatt's looks to such creation in a less abstract mode than the theory usually has in mind, the contribution of new reality to the erotic and social network in its immediate neighborhood.

If the woman herself is not convinced but third parties are, and if she persists in her indifference despite the resulting pressure, we are moving in the direction of the Petrarchan laurel, whereby the poet hopes for vindication, or at least empathy, from a more and more distant readership. But that movement is one we have seen Wyatt resisting; and in comparison with other possibilities his love poetry, I think, distinguishes itself by keeping the woman's response central: what she does at the end of the poem will make all the difference, will determine whether an ostensibly seductive argument will indeed seduce. We of course (who are not the ones being seduced) are not usually in a position to make that call. The state of Wyatt's poems as we have them returns us to a problem presented by the poems of the troubadours; without more in the way of narrative context or at least definitive ordering, readers outside the original circle in which the poems functioned can in most cases only guess where things are headed. Guessing is both appropriate and inevitable, but should not be too hasty, especially with an argument such as that in "It was my choice." Shelton's seemingly decisive reply is not necessarily decisive in lived experience; we are not dealing just with literary convention but with the enduring lore of European eroticism, which knows that things can in fact work this way. Benjamin Constant's testimony is relevant: "There are few women who can remain indifferent to my way of being obsessed and dominated by them" (Wood 211). (17)

When it does work this way, the sensation is extraordinary--like a dream coming true. I invoke that simile at the prompting of Boccaccio, who in his Ameto and his Fiammetta gives it narrative form as a way of moving a Petrarchan love story to an un-Petrarchan consummation: a character in the grip of a powerful erotic dream wakes to the amazing truth of physical love with a very real beloved (Braden, Petrarchan Love 69-70). Petrarch's first imitator, Boccaccio is remembering Laura's dream visitations in the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta; Petrarch reports nothing sexual in these encounters, but Laura's presence and willingness to speak, in contrast to the shadowy and uncertain character of almost all other encounters with her, make these moments of privileged intensity. In lyric Petrarchism, where the possibilities for sexual success remain much more constrained than in prose narrative, imitators develop the dream poem as one of the premier sites for such success. So vivid is the experience that some poets will affirm its value even in waking reality:

 Se 'l viver men che pria m'e duro e vile, ne piu d'Amor mi pento esser suggetto, ne son di duol, come io solea, ricetto, tutto questo e tuo don, sogno gentile.Pietro Bembo, Rime 89.1-4

(If life is less hard and vile to me than before, and I no longer repent at being Love's subject, and I am not the receptacle of pain that I used to be, all this is your gift, gentle dream.)

Indeed, it can be the occasion to celebrate the powers of illusion: "Le bon sommeil ainsi / Abuse par le faux mon amoureux souci. / S'abuser en amour n'est pas mauvaise chose" (Ronsard, Sonnets pour Helene 2.23.12-14, "Kind sleep thus deceives my amorous care with falsehood. To deceive oneself in love is not a bad thing").

Wyatt comes to no such conclusion. Dreaminess is an element which he can be observed editing out of his Petrarchan borrowings; among the things that disappear from "Una candida cerva" is the final tercet, in which the rest of the poem is framed as a kind of visionary trance:

 Et era 'l sol gia volto al mezzo giorno, gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi, quand'io caddi ne l'acqua et ella sparve.RVF 190.12-14

(And the sun had already turned at midday; my eyes were tired by looking but not sated, when I fell into the water, and she disappeared.)

Wyatt's deer is not a noontime hallucination but lightly allegorized reality, the inspiration not for reverie but urgent advice: "Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt" (11.9). Where Wyatt does entertain erotic dreaming as an alternative to his own unhappiness, it involves no revising of his failure:

 Let me in bed lie dreaming in mischance, Let me remember the haps most unhappy That me betide in May most commonly, As one whom love list little to avance.Wyatt 33.5-8

The happy dreaming is of the success of others:

 You that in love find luck and abundance And live in lust and joyful jollity, Arise for shame, do away your sluggardy, Arise, I say, do May some observance! [...] Rejoice! Let me dream of your felicity.Wyatt 1-4; 14

The way the audience is defined means that these dreams will be true ones.

When a more conventional version of the Petrarchist erotic dream occurs in Wyatt, it is recounted with an arresting vehemence:

 Unstable dream, according to the place, Be steadfast once or else at least be true. By tasted sweetness make me not to rue The sudden loss of thy false feigned grace.Wyatt 27.1-4

There is nothing like Bembo's gratitude to his sogno gentile. Wyatt is angry, and his anger is inclusive and layered. Later in the poem it includes the implication that the dream had the power to bring the woman to the speaker's bed, to make the dream come true as it does in Boccaccio, and decided not to. The soberest complaint is that the dream is a "false feigned grace"--the illusion of a pleasure that is not in fact taking place--but that reproach is knit with anger at the "sudden loss" of this unreal joy. These two sources of bitterness are refracted in the appeals with which the poem opens. Either let the dream be true--presumably a dream in which the woman is, as she is in reality, absent, and hence a dream with no deceitful sweetness--or let it last. These are the two ways in which dreaming could be assimilated to Wyatt's key virtues of truth or steadfastness. Usually treated by Wyatt as virtual synonyms, those two qualities here mark contrasting possibilities, intriguingly ranked: truth is the second choice ("at least"); an untrue dream that would endure is the first.

That is about as close to a Petrarchan embrace of the unreal as Wyatt comes, and the poem of course offers no encouragement in thinking that the appeal could be answered, that such a dream could be stable. We may associate Wyatt's reticence on this point with a general lack of color and risk in his work, and feel a love poet should show more of both. Yet Wyatt's greatest and most mysterious poem--a poem without which we would not be as interested as we are in the others--does so, in a few brief but indelible strokes that take much of their drama from his general habit of restraint. "They flee from me" pivots on an extravagant assertion about sexual love and the world of dreams.

I do not think justice has been done to that poem's key line: "It was no dream: I lay broad waking" (Wyatt 80.15). A dream would be the inferior state; a firm stand on the side of the real is what we would expect from Wyatt. Yet the affirmation has to be made because the experience could be mistaken for a dream, that state in which things happen that do not happen elsewhere:

 Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better, but once in special, In thin array after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall And she me caught in her arms long and small, Therewithal sweetly did me kiss And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"Wyatt 80.8-14

There are few references to women's clothing and the female body anywhere in Wyatt, and nothing like this. Even when he seizes a woman's glove and exposes her hand, the foreground is still that of male banter and complaint. Here the falling of the gown and the sight of those shoulders and arms effectively renders him speechless; the words he remembers being said are not his. Line 15 implies that the vision should make us think of the kinds of things that happen in a dream poem; the Bannatyne manuscript supplies a Scots version of the poem Wyatt may have had in mind:

 Hir hair wes lyk the oppynnit silk. Ane mantill of luve our me scho spred, And with hir body quhyt as milk Vnto my bed scho maid a braid. Softly talkand, to me scho said, Be ye on sleip? And I said nay. Hir chirry lippis to me scho laid, Bot quhen I walknyt scho wes away. Than in my armes I did hur brace, With gudly wordis scho said to me, O ser, how lyk ye this solace? Content ye this? Tell me, quod sche. I said, maistres, yes verrelie. No thing to pleiss me bettir may Nor with yor persone evir to be. Bot quhen I walknyt scho wes away.286.16-31 (18)

Even if it is not a window to Wyatt's specific source, the Scots poem allows us to see how extreme a claim Wyatt is making. One speaker remembers saying he was awake while he was actually dreaming; he now knows that that conviction is no guaranty of its own truth. Wyatt's contrary affirmation has to my knowledge no parallel in late medieval lyric; you can find its like in Constantin Cavafy addressing Mark Antony in his moment of desolation:

 Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these."The God Abandons Antony" 11. 9-11

Calling what has been lost a dream, an illusion, is the lesser response.

What has been lost is in the first accounting the world of promiscuous excitement and gratification recalled in the first stanza:

 They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themself in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range Busily seeking with a continual change.Wyatt 80.1-7

There are many women in the speaker's memory of sexual pleasure. That memory is out of key with Wyatt's usual stance of proud fidelity, but the indeterminate multiplicity of those lost partners helps set the dreamlike quality unique to this poem, as Stein writes: "[...] the heart's desire being fulfilled by a stealthy grace appearing as easily as thought" (39). That ease has much to do with a reversal of expected roles: the male speaker the passive one, the female the predator. Yet when they close, the roles reverse again: the seeming predators "put themself in danger / To take bread at my hand" (80.5-6). The gender politics of this has troubled critics; Greenblatt sees in the speaker's behavior "the almost infantile passivity that is the other side of manly domination" (152), and traces a thread of male aggression running through the apparent reversals. The strain in reading the scene this way shows, I think, in Greenblatt's paraphrase of what is happening in 11. 5-6, that "wild creatures are induced to place themselves in submissive postures" (151). To find a submissive posture you have to read "danger" in a specially restricted way, (19) and one that interferes with the more obvious emotions motivating the creatures to take this risk: hunger for the food being offered and trust in the one who is offering it. (You also have to be obtuse about the dynamics of animal taming.) Eagerness to detect and expose an aberrant erotic paradigm can misrepresent the sweetness in the speaker's memory, where sexual love is the common ground on which hunting and waiting dissolve into each other and tension turns into pleasure. This is not some special perversity of Renaissance court life but simply Venus at work: would-be partners skillfully finding their way to mutual satisfaction.

What might make one think it was a dream, however, is not so much the sweetness as the way it disappeared; the main force of 1. 15 is directed at the fugitive character of the remembered happiness. If it was a dream, it was bound to end, and soon; to assert that it was real is to assert that it had something sterner to it, some capacity for steadfastness. In that sense, the first stanza, dominated by references to flight, is effectively conceded to the world of dreams; but there is no fleeing in the second stanza, and it is this special instance that calls forth the speaker's bold affirmation. Yet even as he makes it, the scene of leavetaking returns to him, and the poem moves to its uneasy conclusion:

 But all is turned thorough my gentleness Into a strange fashion of forsaking. And I have leave to go of her goodness And she also to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served I would fain know what she hath deserved.80.16-21

We seem to be hearing an oblique report of a conversation in which the lovers agreed not to continue their affair, though it is an agreement to which the speaker acceded without really assenting or even understanding. "I have leave to go of her goodness" recalls her own statement of how things were to be, a statement which she phrased as a gesture of magnanimity. That gesture was mirrored by his own "gentleness": his final act of passivity was not to argue with her, not to tell her why she should stay. Phrasing it the way he does--"all is turned thorough my gentleness"--initially puts the blame for their parting on himself, but he ends asking about her share and its consequences: "I would fain know what she hath deserved." If it was not a dream, it did not have to end, and it is therefore someone's fault that it did.

The last stanza is of course awash in ironic bitterness; "kindly" is deeply sarcastic, "gentleness" not much less so. The speaker's own profession of responsibility is darkly shaded, and there is no question where he would like to place the real guilt. The last line has a menacing bass to it, as Estrin remarks: "[...] a bullying and vague threat figured by the poet's inability to find the words to say or the form to express his rage" (94). Yet that inability also compromises the menace; usually Wyatt has no trouble finding words for his anger, but here it is muted and smoky rather than confident and aggressive. Whoever revised the poem for Richard Tottel's miscellany at mid-century felt the tone needed clarifying, and changed the conclusion to something cruder and easier to categorize: "But since that I unkindly so am served, / How like you this, what hath she now deserved?" The second-person pronoun gives the poem an addressee, and the speaker now feels he is in a company that can endorse his sense of outrage. The speaker in the original, it seems to me, genuinely does not know the answer to his posed question, cannot say to what tribunal the woman might be answerable. His uncertainty makes the brave claim of 1. 15 all the more extravagant and isolated.

We do not know what we do not know about the encounter recalled in the second stanza; the way is open for second guessing, according to Friedman: "The lady's words can be triumphant, cynical, knowing, suggestive--they may represent many feelings other than affection, loyalty, passion, or the dream of true love which the narrator goes on to insist was no dream" (9). Almost any way our imaginations elect to play the scene will be conditioned by the accurate implication of the first stanza, that there is something inherently capricious and evanescent about sexual interest, that it has a nearly limitless capacity for moving on; it may be sufficient to assign the woman no more malevolence than an acceptance of that fact. That acceptance would itself be good grounds for saying to her lover, as Greenblatt imagines her doing, "Dear heart, what did you expect?" (151). The man somehow got it into his head that this time was different, and cannot believe she did not feel so herself; but she shows no signs that she did, and for all practical purposes there is an end on it. He passionately wants to defy that condition without having any real idea of what it would mean or take to do so.

Four centuries of erotic literature, transmitted to Wyatt with a new sense of authority as Petrarchism, though reaching him through other channels as well, provided him with models for the proud and opulent sustenance of one-sided desire. There are poems of his, such as "It was my choice," in which that heritage speaks with almost unparalleled confidence. In "They flee from me," though, that confidence cannot find its footing in territory that the tradition generally and Petrarch most decisively avoids: the aftermath of sexual love. There has been in this case, and in many others, no disdain on the woman's part; desire has been gratified, and the question is what happens next. We might think that Wyatt would have found literary precedent more suitable for his purpose in Ovid; yet though it is reasonable to think that the Amores would have been on his reading list, and source hunters sometimes think they can be sighted in the distance, (20) they play no major role in his poetry. What he responded to in Petrarch and his kin is something he could not have found in Ovid's love poems, a dream of constant devotion transcending circ*mstance, and he bestowed that dream on the circ*mstance most significantly absent in Petrarch. In places, such as "If waker care," the result is an interesting, perhaps beguiling category mistake; in "They flee from me," it is a baffled romantic extremity not quite like anything that European love poetry had yet seen.

The University of Virginia

Works Cited

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Bonanno, Vincenzo. Serafino l'Aquilano e Sir Thomas Wyatt. L'Aquila: Marcello Ferri, 1980.

Braden, Gordon. Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

--. "Pride, Humility, and the Petrarchan Happy Ending." Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 123-42.

Brown, Rawdon, ed. and trans. Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII. 2 vols. London: Smith Elder, 1854.

Cavafy, C. P. Collected Poems. Ed. George Savidis. Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.

Crewe, Jonathan. Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Einstein, Alfred. The Italian Madrigal. Trans. Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949.

Erasmus, Desiderius. Opus epistolarum. Ed. P. S. Allen et al. 12 vols. 1906-58. Rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Estrin, Barbara. Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994.

Ferry, Anne. The "Inward" Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Frankis, P. J. "The Erotic Dream in Medieval English Lyrics." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 57 (1956): 228-37.

Friedman, Donald M. "The Mind in the Poem: Wyatt's 'They Flee From Me.'" Studies in English Literature 7 (1967): 1-13.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Harrier, Richard. The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.

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Hughey, Ruth, ed. The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry. 2 vols. Columbus, OH: U of Ohio P, 1960.

Hull, Elizabeth M. "The Remedy of Love." Hellas 6.1 (1995):101-26.

Ives, G. W. Anne Boleyn. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Lerer, Seth. Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954.

Mumford, Ivy L. "Petrarchism and Italian Music at the Court of Henry VIII." Italian Studies 26 (1971): 49-67.

--. "Petrarchism in Early Tudor England." Italian Studies 19 (1964): 56-63.

Nelson, C. E. "A Note on Wyatt and Ovid." Modern Language Review 58 (1963): 60-63.

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Ritchie, W. Tod, ed. The Bannatyne Manuscript Written in Tyme of Pest 1568. Scottish Text Society. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1928-34.

Ronsard, Pierre de. Les Amours. Ed. Henri Weber and Catherine Weber. Paris: Garnier, 1993.

Serafino dall' Aquila. Die Strambotti. Ed. Barbara Bauer-Formiconi. Munich: Fink, 1967.

Sneyd, Charlotte Augusta, ed. and trans. A Relation, or Rather a True Account, of the Island of England. 1847. Rpt. New York: AMS, 1968.

Southall, Raymond. The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and his Contemporaries. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964.

Stein, Arnold. "Wyatt's 'They Flee from Me.'" Sewanee Review 67 (1959): 28-44.

Stevens, John. Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court. London: Methuen, 1961.

Thomson, Patricia. Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1964.

Warnicke, Retha M. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Winters, Yvor. Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English. Chicago: Swallow, 1967.

Wood, Dennis. Benjamin Constant. London: Routledge, 1993.

Wyatt, Sir Thomas. The Complete Poems. Ed. R. A. Rebholz. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.

(1) Other quotations in this paragraph are from the same page; I make small adjustments in Sneyd's translation. The report is dated 1500; the visit appears to have taken place 1496-97.

(2) Erasmus, visiting England for the first time in 1499, received a different impression. He was struck both by the beauty of the women he met (he calls them nymphae) and by the frequency with which they found occasion for kissing him (Erasmus 1:239). His experience and expectations would of course have been very different from those of the Venetians.

(3) The possible exceptions are worth listing, though trying to pin them down involves one in the insoluble question of the Wyatt canon. The relevant poems are unattributed in their original sites and have at one time or another been ascribed to Wyatt by later editors (and are cited here by their numbers in Rebholz). A poem in the Park-Hill manuscript (163) derives from RVF 84; a poem in the Devonshire manuscript (176) adapts RVF 135.1-15; an English strambotto in the Blage manuscript (162) translates a poem in that form by Serafino (46); a poem in the Devonshire and Blage manuscripts (174) is a version of a canzone from Bembo's Asolani ("Voi mi poneste in foco"). Harrier considers the first of these probably by Wyatt, but disallows the others (22, 38, 52-54, 73). A sonnet near the major Wyatt group in the Arundel manuscript compares the speaker and his lady to Petrarch and Laura, and may conceivably date from Wyatt's time (poem 93 in Hughey). There are two unattributed sonnets in the Devonshire manuscript (156, 157) and three in the Blage manuscript (158, 159, 160); Harrier attributes none of these to Wyatt (53, 64-65). Other traces of interest in Petrarch within the court of Henry VIII are collected by Mumford, "Petrarchism in Early Tudor England"; the evidence is exiguous, though it does include Catherine Parr's personal copy of the RVF.

(4) On the musician's identity and the information that follows, see Mumford, "Petrarchism and Italian Music."

(5) Durling's translation has been slightly altered.

(6) Only twice in the love poetry: when Wyatt complains to a woman who has torn "The weeping paper that to you I sent / Whereof each letter was written with a tear" (125.3-4); and when, writing from abroad, he imagines the woman receiving the poem as a letter: "When she hath read and seen the dread wherein I sterve, / Between her breasts she shall thee put; there shall she thee reserve" (76.97-98--translating RVF 37, though this particular imagining is Wyatt's addition). Elsewhere, he seems to conceive of his satires as verse letters, and in one of them makes the genre explicit: "I thought forthwith to write, / Brian, to thee" (151.8-9). In another satire Wyatt characterizes his own life as one of literate leisure: "But here I am in Kent and Christendom / Among the Muses where I read and rhyme" (149.100-01). Adapting RVF 269 as a lament for Cromwell, Wyatt inserts a reference to writing where again there is none in Petrarch: "What can I more but have a woeful heart, / My pen in plaint, my voice in woeful cry" (29.10-11). The most serious exception to the rule here would be "My pen, take pain a little space" (208), which appears without attribution in the Devonshire and two other manuscripts; the poem bears a close relationship to "My lute, awake," possibly that of parody. Because of the poem's location in the Devonshire manuscript, Harrier thinks "there would have to be an unusually strong argument" on other grounds to attribute it to Wyatt, and finds such argument wanting (44). The pattern here seems to me sufficiently pronounced to make this a point where the question of authorship in the Wyatt canon bears on questions of interpretation. Seth Lerer relies heavily on poems of uncertain attribution to advance an argument about "problems of text and reader" that he thinks are thematized in Wyatt's work: "[...] all writing is a form of a defense: a constant process of revision and rescription, of rereading and collating, that leads to a governing appreciation of the slippages of language [...]" (190, 189). I think the evidence suggests that, quite the contrary, Wyatt was less interested than his mostly anonymous colleagues in the Devonshire manuscript and elsewhere in writing about writing.

(7) See the negative conclusions of Stevens (132-38). The absence of positive testimony fits with what strikes him as the unconvincing quality of the musical references in Wyatt's poetry: "He blames his lute, or not, as the fancy takes him, but never talks about it in the way of a man who really understands and cares for it" (134). In general Stevens argues against the myth of "a tradition of courtier-poets singing extempore to their lutes, comparable to the Italian," which seems to him to involve projecting an Elizabethan image back on "a French-Burgundian court culture, still distinctly un-Italianate" (138).

(8) All translations unattributed in Works Cited are my own.

(9) The best discussion is still Thomson (209-37); see also Bonanno.

(10) Percopo's text derives from a dictionary of literary Tuscan published in 1536; it is in one particular ("li" rather than "mi" in 1. 6) closer to Wyatt's version than the text published with a musical setting in Phillipe Verdelot's first book of madrigals (ca. 1535).

(11) For the text quoted just above, see the notes to Rebholz's edition of Wyatt (409). An Italian reply to Bonifacio's poem (Einstein 178) finds another way to disable the man's fantasy of cheerful cooperation: "Moneta, signor mio, non piu parole, / se 'l dolce frutto del mio amor volete" ("Money, my lord, no more words, if you want the sweet fruit of my love"); that being the case, "basta con la borsa far un cenno" ("it is enough to make a gesture with your purse").

(12) Translating RVF 224; see also 17, translating RVF 134.

(13) There is a fresh canvass of the available evidence, poetic and otherwise, in Ives, who finds nothing to disturb the likely conclusion "that she and Thomas flirted together with increasing seriousness on his part but with little more than courtly convention on hers" (97).

(14) Warnicke (64-66) is even more skeptical of any real affair between the two. Wyatt 76, from RVF 37. The poem is subscribed "In Spain" in the Egerton manuscript, and toward the end, in the final version of a much revised line, Wyatt inserts what is almost certainly a reference to Henry's responsibility for keeping him where he is: "At other will my long abode my deep despair fulfils" (88). Wyatt alters the conclusion of the poem as well to strengthen the speaker's expectation that the lady will read and treasure what he is writing. Wyatt also appears to have been separated from Darrell in the last year of his life, again by Henry's doing; with his usual solicitude for the sanctity of other people's marriages, the king is said to have insisted that Wyatt leave Darrell and reconcile with his wife as a condition for being freed on the charges that sent him to prison in 1541.

(15) Greenblatt's portrait of Wyatt is repainted in a more mannered style by Crewe: "[...] the figure of the crafty strongman (almost a contradiction in terms) need be no more than the effect of a sophism whereby any palpably crafted/crafty simulation of weakness, emasculation, or abjection must 'logically' imply its opposite. [...] It is through this sophism that the constant presence and integral selfhood of the strongman, neither fashioned nor fashionable within a narcissistic order of image-making, can be implied, and so regularly is it implied in Wyatt's poems that it can virtually be called a distinctive Wyatt-effect" (28-29). Part of this effect is "an openly sadomasoch*stic brutality non uncommonly regarded as Wyatt's special contribution to Petrarchanism" (33). Estrin analyzes the role of gender in Wyatt in a similar spirit, but to a different conclusion, where the feared female presence is finally dominant: "[...] she prompts the poet to distrust the nets of form that Petrarch uses to idealize Laura as his influence [...]. In admitting his inability to materialize anything, Wyatt dissociates himself from the male power complex" (146).

(16) My modernization of the text as reported by Heale: "ondesiard fansies / requier no hiar" (43). The second word is reported by others as "sarwes" (Harrier 23; Southall 17). The (unattributed) poem to which this is a response makes the acrostic SHELTUN with the first letters of each stanza; its presence in the Devonshire manuscript secures it a place in editions of Wyatt, but no serious claims for his authorship have been made.

(17) From a diary entry for 7 September 1814. The woman of the moment, Juliette Recamier, turned out to be one of the few, but Constant's experience was sufficient to give the remark authority as a generalization.

(18) Ritchie 3:308-09; I normalize spelling and punctuation somewhat. "Nor" in 1. 30 should probably be "Bot." The possible connection with Wyatt was first noted by Frankis (235-36). We have no further information about this particular poem, but the manuscript has a good deal of rewritten English material from earlier periods; a few pages earlier (entry 283) is a Scots version of Chaucer's Cantus Troili (itself a translation of RVF 132).

(19) I assume Greenblatt is taking "danger" in the archaic sense related to its derivation from dominium, "Power of a lord or master" (OED 1); this gloss appears in a number of modern editions, and is invoked by other critics (Stein 34). This usage is current in the sixteenth century, though the more natural phrasing would be "in my danger." Wyatt's other uses of "danger" and related words fit best with the modern sense, "Liability or exposure to harm or injury" (OED 4). In one instance "danger" is associated with "thraldom," but as part of a list that also includes "painful life" and "dolour" (90.10-11); see also 152.771, 182.16, 64.2 ("To danger myself"), 73.49 ("dangerous distress," translating Petrarch's "pericol presente" [RVF 360.53]), and 27.5 ("such a dangerous case"). The point of "They flee from me," of course, is that none of the remembered women did in fact submit themselves to the speaker's dominium.

(20) See Nelson. The most compelling connection he draws is between the second stanza of "They flee from me" and Amores 1.5, a noontime sexual encounter that may feel like a dream but was blessedly and unambiguously real; Ovid's poem may itself have been a model for the erotic dream poems in Petrarchism.