Afterword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
We are accustomed to think of the Reformation, and especially of the seventeenth-century's further development of reform, as a turning away from communal identification toward a growing conception of privacy. We teach our students that the journey from Chaucer and the Gawain poet to Sidney, and then from Sidney to Herbert and Donne, represents an inward turning. Scholars such as Wendy Wall and Patricia Fumerton have linked coterie poetry to the English aristocracy's growing desire for seclusion, and Barbara Everett's description of the situation under the Stuarts tallies with her sense that sonnets are “cabinet poetry”:
Post-Tudor England saw the discovery of the formal private life, the projection on to the forms of society itself of the impulses of civilized inwardness. In the seventeenth century England becomes a country of high-walled gardens and collectors' cabinets. Its gentlemen hang their houses with muffling silk and with silencing Turkey carpets; its ladies read romances and write letters. Its finest aristocrats withdraw from the capital and make of their estates a “college in a purer air.” The King himself is an amateur and a collector, who seeks to keep not only his Court but even his country as his private property.
(“Shooting of the Bears,” 66)If we think of Petrarchism simply in terms of men's appropriative impulses, it fits Everett's pattern.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan NarrativeConditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell, pp. 210 - 211Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998