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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Thomas Wyatt's writing regularly engages the tensions underlying early-sixteenth-century humanist rhetoric. While works such as his 1527 rendition of Plutarch's the Quyete of Mynde and his 1541 Defence on charges of treason tend to convey a humanist confidence in the persuasive power of language, his most haunting and famous poems portray language very differently: as a corrupt human creation unable to communicate the inner self to others and consequently helpless to establish human bonds or human community. This essay seeks to demonstrate, by focusing on Wyatt's three epistolary satires, how the mature poet strives to reconcile, through the creation of a more indirect and "parodic" mode of rhetorical persuasion, his pessimistic poetic vision with the more rationalistic and optimistic goals of Erasmian humanism.
I
Emphasizing the accomplishments of Renaissance humanists runs the risk of downplaying what could be called the "dark side" of humanism: a continuous recognition, on the part of the movement's own proponents, that one of humanism's greatest goals--the attainment of rhetorical eloquence--is not in itself praiseworthy. Both the classical and Christian rhetorical traditions from which Renaissance humanism springs evidence a similar concern. In Plato's Gorgias Socrates calls rhetoric a subspecies of flattery, an accusation that haunts rhetorical theory throughout antiquity and finds new vigor in the Christian tradition's depiction of Satan as the father of lies. From the perspective of the early-sixteenth-century humanists whose milieu is the focus of this essay, the nagging association of rhetoricians with flatterers was especially troubling. Since the humanist movement (under the able leadership of Erasmus and abetted by a masterful use of the printing press) was achieving its most widespread political, religious, and educational influence during this period, there was much at stake in rooting out evil flatterers from the body politic and replacing them with their antitypes: trained humanist orators and counsellors.
Yet although much humanist spleen was vented in the early sixteenth century, as in other epochs, attacking the vice of flattery, the flatterer is notoriously difficult to capture or define. Despite the oft-repeated humanist truism (stressed even by that borderline humanist, Machiavelli) that flatterers are the curse of a commonwealth, humanist rhetoricians were no more capable than their classical or patristic predecessors at laying down guidelines to distinguish the speech of flatterers from that of honest men. The metaphor for flatterers employed by the humanist writer Thomas Elyot in The Boke Named the Governour ("wormes [that] do brede moste gladly in softe wode and swete" [172]) conveys concisely both the danger of the flatterer's poison, invisible to both eye and ear, and the consequent tendency of Renaissance writers to fall back upon adjectival, rather than substantive, descriptions of the type. (1) In fact, to Elyot, the flatterer's disguise is so impenetrable that he may be immune even to the most rigorous efforts of humanists to expose and shame him. As Elyot bluntly puts it:
Injurie apparaunt and with powar inforced, eyther may be with
lyke powar resisted, or with wisdome eschued, or with en[t]reatie
refrained. But where it is by craftie engynne imagined, subtilly prepared,
covertly disembled, and disceytefully practysed, suerly no
man may by strength withstande it, or by wisdome eskape it, or by
any other maner or meane resiste or avoyde it. (186)
It should come as no surprise that Renaissance humanists found the issue of flatterers so vexing. After all, flatterers are rhetoricians themselves and can adopt the stances of selfless honesty and virtue as compellingly as any humanist can. It is inevitable that no humanist "performance of conviction" (the concept is Kenneth J. E. Graham's) can ever preclude the possibility of a superbly hollow imitation of the same. Flattery, as the ancients and Christian fathers suspected, is highly resistant to rhetorical attack, whether that rhetoric takes the form of intense proclamations of one's own honesty or vivid denunciations of the sins of others.
Ultimately, humanist frustration at the continued presence of flatterers in positions of influence might be read as a self-directed anxiety resulting from the inability of humanists to distinguish their own most proficient skill, that of persuasiveness, from simple flattery. Such frustration is visible in the immoderate punishments early-sixteenth-century humanists contemplate administering to flatterers. Perhaps because flatterers are so difficult to detect, Erasmus recommends that people be dissuaded from becoming flatterers in the following manner:
if some one is convicted of any other capital offense, still let him be
punished on the charge of corrupting the mind of the future prince
by malicious flattery. (195)
Erasmus's willingness to fabricate accusations (and consequently compromise concepts of law, justice, and honor he elsewhere cherishes) emphasizes the extremity of the threat he sees posed by this particular sin. More dramatically, in The Boke Named the Governour, Elyot proposes (in a rare outburst of cruelty excised from later editions of the work) that one who breaks a promise suffer the Sarazan penalty:
that is to have a longe stake thrast in the secrete partes of his body,
wheron he shall abide dyenge by a longe space. (288)
Since, for Elyot, the difference between a flatterer and an honest counsellor is in the end a distinction between one whose inner and outer selves are separated as opposed to unified, his projected punishment offers a certain poetic justice; the intrusion of the instrument of punishment into the flatterer's "secrete partes" is an appropriate way to destroy the hideous private space wherein a flatterer would hide his deep deceit.
II
No early-sixteenth-century texts convey the psychological condition of an environment enthralled by dissimulation and flattery better than the poems of Thomas Wyatt. At the center of his poetry he places repeatedly an image of the poet as a man suffering perpetual anguish as a result of having been seduced and betrayed by others. Usually these others are his cruel mistresses, but in the context of the court of Henry VIII (where as has been frequently noted, love and politics could not be separated), difficulties in love could swiftly become far more dangerous political intrigues. Wyatt himself may have discovered this early on if the circumstantial evidence pointing to his involvement with Henry VIII's future queen, Anne Boleyn, is to be believed. In terms of Wyatt's poetry, Thomas Hannen has shown that a Wyatt poem like "What Vaileth Truth" (Rebholz, 72) takes as its purview both love and politics simultaneously:
What vaileth truth or by it to take pain,
To strive by steadfastness for to attain
To be just and true and free 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 deceit and doubleness
What vaileth truth?
Deceived is he by crafty train
That meaneth no guile and doth remain
Within the trap without redress
But for to love, lo, such a mistress
Whose cruelty nothing can refrain.
What...
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