Patronage System in Renaissance England

Patronage System in Renaissance England

Whenever modern observers review literary works from the past, there is a real danger that contemporary values and perspectives will preclude any meaningful interpretation. Likewise, without recognizing why and when many of these works were written, it is difficult it discern the rationale for their creation, making any understanding of their context all the more difficult. Therefore, in order to gain a more robust perspective of these literary works requires a careful analysis of why and when certain works were crafted during these periods, and the literature of Renaissance England is no exception. For this purpose, this paper provides an overview of why, in "Self-Crowned Laureates," Richard Helgerson places English Renaissance writers within a patronage system that frequently influenced the content of their works. To this end, an analysis of Ben Jonson's poem "To Penshurst" and his "Masque of Blackness"; Aemilia Lanyer's poems "The Description of Cooke-ham" and "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum"; John Milton's masque "Comus," and Mary Wroth's "Urania" are conducted to determine what or why these works were written, as well as the specific patrons that provided these Renaissance writers with political or social favors or monetary remuneration in exchange for their services. An assessment of how women writers from this era frequently dedicated their writings to powerful figures is followed by an analysis of how the appeal to a patron authorized these writers to act and the manner in which these poets advance themselves socially through their art. A discussion of how class difference troubled or enhanced these writers is provided in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Richard Helgerson's "Self-Crowned Laureates." Generally speaking, this poem emphasizes a conflict between public and private roles for the poet that is one of the most compelling factors influencing how and why poets worked was to help them advance socially, while not ignoring the financial incentives involved. Furthermore, the pressure on the writers of the day were sufficiently severe to allow no one to rest on his or her laurels, but rather to continue to produce timely and topical works afresh for their patrons. For instance, in "Self-crowned Laureates," Helgerson maintains that "when the writer first appears before his audience, the pressure on self-presentation is greatest. To some extent, each beginning -- beginnings of individual works as well as beginnings of careers -- brings a renewal of self-presentational pressures" (cited in Weber at 359).

Absent from his analysis is the impact that these early works had on the ultimate political direction that emerged in response to them, as well as just how influential they could be in the process. In this regard, Matz (2000) agrees with Helgerson that he considers the patronage system "produces an ambivalence between public profit or private pleasure (or the idea that pleasure is private and the public profitable) in terms of larger social and cultural shifts" (138). Furthermore, the author suggests that, "This ambivalence is characteristic of Renaissance New Historicist criticism as a whole. Richard Helgerson's work in the early 1980s on the construction of the role of the poet... argues that even Spenser's serious bid for the authority of poetry ended in frustration, [but others] implicitly align Spenser's poetic project with the political project of Elizabethan power: the poet is returned to the political center" (Matz 9).

According to Matz, "Helgerson's stress on the mediating position of Spenser's poetry [is valid] since Helgerson sees that Spenser's claim to morally reform his readers is concerned from the start with questions of poetic authority, rather than subsequently developing out of the poet's response to the 'fact' of misbehavior at court in the 1590s" (p. 89). Nevertheless, Helgerson is primarily interested in Spenser's need to mediate between erotic pleasure and moral profit from the perspective of its implications for literary history ("the constricting conceptions of poetry during 'Spenser's age') instead of conceptualizing Elizabethan culture in terms of how it motivated a specific perspective of literature or of the poet. "When Helgerson does consider this issue," Matz adds, "he generally focuses on a more limited conflict between young prodigal poets who live wayward lives of pleasure and mature Elizabethan statesmen who profit the state" (89). Notwithstanding this type of influence, though, there were clearly other factors at play in the patronage system that indicate many writers were more interested in money and social advancement than any particular political agenda, although it is clear that some women writers of the day had some early views on their place in society to advance, and these issues are discussed further below.

Ben Jonson's poem "To Penshurst" and "Masque of Blackness." According to Briggs (1997), Jonson's poem "To Penshurst," "celebrates the hospitality and dignity of a great country house partly in terms of the absence of a ruthlessness or inhumanity that was becoming all too familiar elsewhere" (27). In an environment of impoverishment and deprivation, it was clearly in Jonson's best interests to make his patron appear as benign - and therefore positively virtuous - where cruelty and inhumanity were commonplace. In this regard, Briggs cites the following excerpt of "To Penhurst" in support: "And though thy walls be of the country stone, They are rear'd with no man's ruin, no man's groan, There's none that dwell about them wish them down" (ll 45-7). The fundamental cause of many of the problems in the Elizabethan communities during the period in which this piece was composed related to many of the same types of topics that are popular amongst blues and jazz artists today, such as high unemployment, high prices, low wages, changing patterns of landholding, and the "corresponding growth in size and wealth of towns" (Briggs 28). Like their counterparts today, Briggs suggests that "these were issues that the Elizabethans could have done little to control, even if they had understood it more clearly. The historian and Justice of the Peace William Lambarde identified it as 'the dearth of all things,' adding 'that the number of our people is multiplied, it is both demonstrable to the eye and evident in reason'" (Read 182 cited in Briggs at 28).

From Jonson's perspective, overpopulation was one of the most compelling issues facing the country at the time, and Malthusian predictions of doom were popular. According to Briggs, "As he supposed, the root of the problem was a demographic one. The population, which had remained effectively at a standstill during the fifteenth century, began to increase steadily and substantially in the sixteenth, progressing from about two and a half million at the beginning to over four million by the end" (28). The most probable explanation for this overpopulation was an increased resistance to the bubonic plague that had devastated Europe during the mid-fourteenth century, reducing the population by between 25 and 33% (Briggs 28). In sum, "Although the sixteenth century's rapid rise in population was out of line with the preceding and following centuries, it was part of a more general pattern of expansion over the millennium as a whole" (Briggs 28).

Therefore, because resources were already scarce by definition, any patron that was able to appear benevolent by a poet in this impoverished environment was on the fast track to Renaissance stardom, with the poets that could accomplish this task riding along on their coattails. In this regard, Hall (1995) suggests that when all was said and done, poets in the patronage system had more sway than many modern observers might suspect: "The poet is left as the final arbiter of 'fairness.' His word, like that of the Bridegroom, confers fairness, constancy, and value. This poetic sleight-of-hand is staged in Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness, where the audience is promised that the Ethiopian nymphs will be turned white" (115).

Aemilia Lanyer's poems "The Description of Cooke-ham" and "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum." Poets that are worth their salt are going to write for their audience, at least within a patronage system, and Lanyer was clearly no exception. According to Pebworth and Summers (2000), "Lanyer constructs a fictive circle of strong women "that functions as an alternative to the patriarchal structure"; Lanyer finds in Margaret Russell, Anne Clifford, and the women to whom she dedicated Salve Deus, "a virtue that is strength rather than merely endurance," and she portrays these women as being "distinctly heroic and independent, as dominant" (5). While the poet does not enjoy the presence or contact with these women, she is able to successfully conceptualize them as they would clearly like to be, as "a cohort of female Worthies worthy of the name of virtue, a circle calculated to elicit -- even in the absence of historical documentation -- admiration and assent" (Pebworth and Summers 5). This is a good example of how interests other than filthy lucre and social advancement drove some Renaissance poets to their work:

Indeed, one might find an emblem of that exclusion in the fact that 'The Description of Cooke-ham,' unlike its near contemporary 'To Penshurst,' is restricted to the grounds of the great house; it never penetrates to the warmth of the table and fireside celebrated by Ben Jonson. Yet, I suggest that while Anne Clifford succeeded in life -- she was at last able to join the fellowship at Penshurst and through long life and tenacity to reclaim her lands -- Aemilia Lanyer succeeds in an imaginative vision: out of marginality, out 'of absence, darkness..., things which are not,' indeed out of weakness, Lanyer creates in Salve Deus a remarkable community of strength, present more powerfully and enduringly in her fiction than in life itself. (Pebworth and Summers 46)

This fictionalization of such a "remarkable community" is one aspect of the rigors of life during this period in history that might escape a casual reader today, but the fact that Lanyer was able to craft such a work during such an otherwise bleak era suggests that she did in fact have some compelling reasons beyond money and fame that drove her work.

John Milton's masque "Comus." Because Europe was faced with a population boom, land was in short supply and food was scarce, chastity it would seem would be perceived as an increasingly valuable social trait. Likewise, it would be reasonable to posit that premarital sex was socially acceptable as long as no one knew, no issue resulted, and it was "not with my sister," but this did not stop the sly-tongued Comus from trying by using a lose-it-or-lose-it argument. In his essay, "Milton's Comus, Lines 743-44," Malpezzi (1995) reports that, "Comus attempts to seduce the virtuous Lady by using an argument from Nature: 'If you let slip time, like a neglected rose / it withers on the stalk with languish't head.' Yet while Comus allures, Milton encodes within the language of temptation the rationale for rejecting the proffered potion of Comus and his crew" (194).

As Comus reminds the Lady that life is short and beauty fades," Malpezzi adds, "his words reverberate with the echoes of numerous classical and Renaissance poems. Surely Milton's contemporary audience heard those words in the context of the biblically apocryphal but nonetheless morally sapient Book of Wisdom" (195). This emphasis on the virtues of resisting temptation was not a particularly popular topic during this period in history, though. According to Hunter (1983), Milton's masque Comus has not received a great deal of popular response since its original production at Ludlow Castle on the evening of September 29, 1634 for these two reasons: "The reason is not far to seek: in his play Milton exalts the virtue of chastity. Wondering what will protect from danger their sister, who is lost in the "wild wood" of the opening scene, the younger brother hears from his older sibling that she has "a hidden strength:... 'Tis chastitie, my brother, chastitie" (433-435 quoted in Hunter at 1). Furthermore, Milton maintains that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, no one, "Will dare to soyl her virgin purity"; therefore, at this point in the work, even the act rape holds no power over his older sister: "No evill thing... Has hurtfull power ore true virginity" (446-451), a statement that Hunter argues is "so at odds with the facts of life as to nonplus any audience. Even after the brothers learn from the Attendant Spirit Thyrsis that their sister has fallen under Comus's dread power, the older brother refuses to be overcome by the bad news" (Hunter 1). In the final analysis, Milton provides his audience with a solution to the arguments presented by Comus in the form of a powerful reminder concerning the manner in which spirituality could overcome even these powerful forces: "Milton's lines emblematize Christ crucified, the Rose of Sharon dying on the stalk of the Cross and with languished head surrendering his life for humankind" (Malpezzi 195).