The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 2: The Elegies.(Review)

Gary A. Stringer, editor The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 2: The Elegies. Indiana University Press, 1046 pages, $69.95

After the detail of these thousand pages, with their exhaustive bibliographical analyses, lists of textual variants, and summaries of critical opinion, we are left pretty much where we were in the first place in regard to Donne's Elegies. Allying themselves with the view, expressed over recent years by such scholars as Arthur Marotti and Harold Love, that "scribal publication" functioned alongside the printed book as an important and legitimate means of textual transmission in the seventeenth century, the editors persuade us that the Westmoreland manuscript, in the hand of Donne's long-standing acquaintance Rowland Woodward, is the best copy-text and that its ordering of the seventeen poems is probably authorial. They are rightly cautious about dating any of the poems more firmly than to somewhere in the 1590s, a few possibly later. Unfortunately, being compilers rather than initiators of critical discussion, they have no independent answers to the most perplexing questions: how confident can we be about the tone of any of these poems, and the degree of seriousness to be accorded them?

What are we to say, for example, when confronted with the opening lines of "The Comparison"?(1)

 
   As the sweet sweat of roses in a still, 
   As that which from chafed musk cat's pores 
      doth trill, 
   As the almighty balm of th'early east, 
   Such are the sweat drops on my mistress' 
      breast. 
   And on her neck her skin such lustre sets, 
   They seem no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets. 
   Rank sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles, 
   Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils. 

"My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun" looks milksop stuff beside this: it carries anti-Petrarchanism to Swiftian extremes. Our first instinct is to be simply disgusted, but, consulting the commentary, we find various critics asserting that Donne is merely employing rhetorical tropes, that he is parodying imitations of Petrarch, that he is criticizing the evasiveness of conventional praise of physical beauty, that his attractive mistress and his rival's ugly one are in fact the same woman seen from different aesthetic perspectives, that the poem is culpably misogynist, and that, on the contrary, it is proto-feminist in its exposure of the reductiveness of idealized female beauty. Disgust, it seems, is too naive; once we understand the literary tradition and cultural milieu to which the poem belongs, proper appreciation will follow. But where, amid this babble of voices, shall wisdom be found?

"Elegy" in the Renaissance could include pastoral, funerary, and didactic poetry as well as the paradoxical and often scabrous love-poem, descending principally from Ovid, to which Donne's elegies seem to belong. The 1590s were a boom time for Ovidian poetry in English, witnessing, among other items, Marlowe's translations of the Amores (banned in 1599, when many copies were publicly burnt), his Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare's narrative poems and sonnets--for which he was compared to Ovid by Francis Meres in 1598. The earlier, humanist emphasis on the morally edifying qualities of classical literature had given way, by this stage, to a racier and more lascivious curiosity. Donne, as a young man about town and, like his scribe Woodward, a member of Lincoln's Inn, might feel this was a profitable strain to exploit--the fashionable tone at the Inns seems to have been the classic undergraduate one of witty and smutty flippancy. The speaker of Donne's elegies often reminds us of Iago, reducing love to "a lust of the blood and a permission of the will"; it has often been suggested (albeit unprovably) that the Shakespeare play which most resembles these poems, Troilus and Cressida, was performed at one of the Inns.

Intriguingly, in Elegy II, "On his Mistress," Donne may allude to some of Shakespeare's plays. The situation, in which the girl proposes to flee her parents' wrath disguised as a page-boy accompanying her lover, recalls Julia's stratagem to follow Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona, while the closing mention of a nurse who is startled out of bed at midnight by the girl's fears for her lover's safety evokes Romeo and Juliet. The biographical criticism of a bygone age debated whether the addressee of this poem, as of many others, was Donne's future wife Ann More, and, if so, applauded her bold cross-dressing proposal ("Here was a wife fit for a poet!"--George Gilfillan, 1860), but we assume, perhaps wrongly, that the literary borrowings make a basis in fact much less likely. The speaker is not enthusiastic about his lady's suggestion: