Mary Ellen Lamb, Garth Bond, and Steven W. May, eds. The Poems of William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke. New York/Toronto: Iter Press (Renaissance English Text Society), 2024. lxx + 288pp. ISBN 9781649591005. $61.95 paperback.
It is hard to imagine a better edition of William Herbert’s poetry than this, which has been scrupulously edited by three expert and experienced academics with a wealth of knowledge behind them. There is a substantial introduction; which contains a discussion of what Herbert’s poems are, the ways in which they circulated, how we might read and understand them, as well as an outline of Herbert’s life. The editors have paid close attention to the canon of Herbert’s poetry; questions of attribution are judiciously and carefully considered, and many issues resolved, others properly left open; the texts have all been carefully collated; there are abundant explanatory footnotes and textual notes; readings are considered, and sources evaluated. Indeed, so thorough is the edition that the poems occupy eighty-six pages of the book, while the apparatus weighs in with two hundred and seventy pages. Surely no one will ever work this hard on Herbert’s poems ever again and we should all be really grateful to have such an authoritative edition that will last for ages.
The question is whether these labors were worthwhile. I would answer with an emphatically positive “yes,” as we should always look to have the best editions we can have of writers who may supply readers now and in the future with pleasure, enlightenment, and instruction. However, I should also add that I think it is more than Herbert deserves. His gallant editors make as good a case for his significance and value as they can, but, for this reader, he is a poet who has produced one or two decent poems, buried in a host of verse that ranges from the mediocre to the grimly bad. I have just finished editing a book on “Bad Poetry” in the English Renaissance: if I had read Herbert earlier he would surely have featured in the collection as other, better poets are given a rough enough ride by both editors and contributors.
The introduction contains a thorough overview of Herbert’s biography. William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630) was the son of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, the nephew of Sir Philip Sidney, and the cousin of Mary Wroth with whom he had two children. He was part of one of the premier literary circles of early modern England (which really makes matters worse, as surely he had enough educated help to thrive in the literary world, especially since poets like Samuel Daniel and Abraham Fraunce were often in the household, with Daniel possibly acting as his tutor). Herbert, as the editors argue, was not interested in being a professional poet and did not publish any of his poetry or “distribute it in any purposeful way” (xxx): he was an amateur who wrote occasional poetry, his readers acting, it might be argued, as co-creators.
Herbert was taught at the family estate at Wilton by Hugh Sanford, who had collaborated with the Countess to produce her edition of her brother’s Arcadia (and who was one of the many figures excoriated by Thomas Nashe who was not a great friend of the Sidneys). He went to Oxford, leaving in about 1595, when he was presented with various marriage proposals, all of which fell through. The negotiations with the Carey family to pair him with their daughter, Elizabeth, failed “by his not liking” (xlv). Attempts to secure matches with Burghley’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Vere; Elizabeth Cecil, the widow of William Hatton; and the niece of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, all came to nothing: undoubtedly lucky escapes for the young women in question. Of the last aborted match Robert Sidney’s secretary, Roland Whyte, “concluded that he could not ‘find any disposition in the gallant young lord to marry’” (xlv).
Meanwhile, Herbert was sent to court to advance the family fortunes. Initially he seems to have been as inept at politicking as he was at securing a favorable marriage. The long-suffering Whyte wrote that he was a “continual courtier,” but “much blamed for his cold and weak manner of pursuing her Majesty’s favour,” and that “there is want of spirit and courage laid to his charge, that he is melancholy young man” (xlv). His family must have been tearing out their collective hair, but things started to pick up: he became livelier and was granted audiences with the queen, significantly cheering up Roland Whyte.
But it could not last. Like many a libidinous courtier he managed to secure the favors of one of Elizabeth’s maids of honor, which was never a terribly good move. Mary Fitton fell pregnant, although the baby was stillborn. Herbert acknowledged paternity but despite the queen’s pleas the rotter would not marry Mary. His refusal not only ended his hopes of a court career under Elizabeth but also saw him sent to the Fleet Prison. Writing to Robert Cecil from his family residence in London he was, as the editors state, “redolent with self-pity,” lamenting that his “miserable fortune” had deprived him of the queen’s beauty, and whining with quite an impressive lack of self-knowledge that his “fortune [is] as slavish as any man’s that lives festered in a galley” (xlvi). Unsurprisingly, despite extensive groveling, he found himself barred from court for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign.
When his father died in 1601 Herbert became Earl of Pembroke at the age of twenty and he was able to enter the House of Lords. Around this time he started to write the poetry that can safely be attributed to him. He was also able to spend time at the Inns of Court where he met Benjamin Rudyerd, with whom he exchanged debating poems. Through family and friends he was drawn to the circle of Queen Anne, and, after James VI and I succeeded Elizabeth, he seems to have become one of her favorites. He was also building up a power base in the House of Commons.
Although he married Mary Talbot in 1604, Herbert had a long-standing relationship with his cousin, Mary Wroth, who was trapped in an unhappy marriage to Sir Robert Wroth (the recipient of stern poetic advice from Ben Jonson). They had known each other since childhood, and were eventually to have twins in 1624, ten years after Robert Wroth’s death; however, their union undoubtedly predated their respective marriages. Pembroke was becoming well known for his inability to keep his codpiece laced up, a flaw noted by his contemporaries, and a facet of his life that has a bearing on his poetry. As the editors note, he “may have addressed a poem to one woman and then given it to another” (lvii): another bad idea. Even so, many of his poems complain about female inconstancy and the inability of women to love him as fully as they should do. As the editors rather slyly comment, “Pembroke surely judged [his poems’] success on the extent to which they evoked his desired effect upon the beloveds he addressed, at least as much as on their aesthetic qualities” (lviii). Occasional poetry indeed.
Other poems by Pembroke were clearly written as songs and played a part in musical culture at court in addition to his better-known role in licensing plays for the theatre. He continued to be an important and stabilizing political figure, especially after the death of Robert Cecil in 1612 left a power vacuum at court. Pembroke noted the powerful man’s demise with an epitaph, which for once in his poetry appears to have been heartfelt. Initially Pembroke’s Protestant faction was obscured by the triumphant Howard-led Catholic faction, which managed to propel Robert Carr to prominence as the king’s favorite. But, fortunately for Pembroke and his allies, the Overbury scandal put paid to Carr, and it was their man, Robert Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, he of the lovely legs, that then caught the king’s eye. Pembroke, showing rather more astute political sense than he had done as a young man, provided the new favorite’s clothes.
It was not to last. Pembroke turned against Buckingham, following the court split over the level of support given to the Protestant Palatinate and Buckingham’s role in the harebrained trip with Charles to secure the hand of the Spanish Infanta. Their feud lingered on but then, on 20 November 1628, Buckingham was assassinated. At about the same time Pembroke started to decline into ill-health and he died, probably of a stroke on 10 April 1630.
The volume contains forty-four poems of which twenty-four are considered definite attributions, three “on the edge of the canon,” and seventeen dubia, along with the poems to which Herbert was responding in poetic debates, and those to which he responded in turn. There are some high spots that I will note, but an awful lot of the collection reproduces the worst, tired elements of post-Petrarchan poetry:
When the resistless flames of my desire
Make Aetna of my heart,
And I engag’d, impart
The torments unto you, and press
For pity in this violent distress;
You sing & think I feign this fire.
Because one frown of yours can all control,
Wrong not my pains; you are the true
Higher part of my soul,
The lower tyrant is to me, and slave to you.
(41)
The poem may, of course, be a bit more subtle than I think it is. The line “You sing & think I feign this fire,” could indicate that it was set to music and was not to be taken too seriously, the singer and the audience enjoying a shared joke about the poet’s inauthentic feelings in a light musical form. Even so, the poem is suffused with cliches. The hot suffering of the lover who feels flames burning inside him like an active volcano, his desires tormenting him so that he has to demand relief from his chilly mistress; the supposed power of the beloved to bring him happiness or misery with a small facial expression; the glib flattery of his understanding of her healing power, as she can raise him up from his base cravings to the sublime Neo-Platonic union of minds (through letting him get his end away); and the plea for her not to underestimate the intense agony he is experiencing, can be found in much disposable European poetry written in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
More egregious still, surely, is a slightly longer lyric, “Why should thy look requite so ill,” a poem of dubious attribution, which is based on the trite paradox that “Beauty lies not in womens faces, but in their Lovers Eyes.” Pembroke compounds his literary sins with a concluding racist stanza:
If all others had been blind,
Fair had not been;
None thy Red and White could find
Fleeting, if thou wert unseen.
To touch white Skins is not Divine.
Ethiops Lips are soft as thine.
(65)
The lines are strikingly redolent with rather casually stereotyping prejudice, combining contempt for people with disabilities and for people of color. Of course, these are present to enable the author to make a fleeting joke praising his mistress’s beauty, the point being, I assume if I have read the poem correctly, that her beauty is so outstanding that only if all differences in appearance and sensory perceptions are removed will all be equal to her. Reading the poem with excessive piety may risk placing too much weight on its evident shortcomings; however, any kind of approach surely demonstrates that Pembroke would not willingly leave a cliché alone if he could make use of it.
This issue raises the question of who such poems were written for. Were they really addressed to women? If they were designed for public performance they either worked to cement the shared bonds of prejudice if the audience is thought to have been exclusively male; or, perhaps, they poked fun at male attitudes towards women, maybe not all that effectively. The same judgement might be made of another lyric, “While we dispute our liberty,” one that also places the male speaker in helpless thrall to his cruel mistress:
While we dispute our liberty
I have lost mine;
And which is worse, incline
To love the slavery:
Not the Great Charter, not the King’s-Bench can free
Me from the Chain, wherein my thoughts are tied:
For our dull Earth what care is had we seen,
Yet easily let our mind
Into more thraldom slide.
O that she were but kind!
To give for that a pledge;
There were my Law, and there my Priviledge.
(39)
The legal trickery of the poem casts the speaker as an unfortunate bound to a tyrannical mistress who cannot be saved by the most authoritative charter of existing laws (Magna Carta), nor the highest court in the land (the King’s bench that dealt with “any cases involving interests of monarch or matters not covered by other courts”) unless she grants him his rights (a document of privilege). This is clearly not a poem about Transatlantic slavery – even bearing in mind Pembroke’s poem about the woman of color – but about historical servitude in England and Europe. It is not entirely without wit, but is hardly a work of subtle and challenging thought, casting his mistress in a familiar Petrarchan light even as it explores the law to make its point. Given Pembroke’s involvement with the Inns of Court this would seem to be a poem written for the enjoyment of law students and lawyers, its pleasure, therefore, riding in its conceit – and the poet’s knowledge of the law – rather than its comment on gender relations.
Pembroke seems to write better when he responds to other writers, notably in his poetic duels with Benjamin Rudyerd, a prominent lawyer with literary interests (although one might often think it is Pembroke’s opponent who has the better of the exchange). After a series of tortuous conceits and witty metaphors hurled back and forth by the two poets, Pembroke draws their discussion of love to a sense of an ending:
But to conclude debate, whilst you are free,
You may make Love even what you list to be,
As those that will describe an unknown Land,
Place Cities, Rivers, Hills where none do stand;
Even so you deal with Love, and straight will know
How far he shoots, that never felt his bow;
One day you may, and then confess with me,
You love his Fetters more then to be free.
(25)
It is a familiar enough Renaissance paradox: love seems desirable to those who see it as a faraway land of pleasure, but once they have felt its power, they cannot return to the freedom they enjoyed previously and, in fact, they do not want to, realizing that the bondage love demands is preferable to any form of liberty. If a case is to be made for the general value of Pembroke’s poetry it is surely in such works, which, while not terribly original, are quite thoughtful and ingenious.
Pembroke’s poetry seems to work best in tandem with that of others and he inspired important responses from George Herbert and William Drummond of Hawthornden. Possibly his best poem – there is one other I will address after this one – was written in a poetic match with Mary Wroth. Both poems are extraordinarily bitter, angry works that may be evidence of a tempestuous relationship that had come to a nasty end; if not, they suggest that the couple were able to play out passionate roles for the sake of their art. Perhaps both versions of this narrative are true; maybe they were the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of their day. As the editors comment “in its expression of disagreeable emotions in an elegant meter ‘Why with unkindest swiftnes does thou turne’ is an extraordinary poem” (212). Indeed it is. The poem expresses the bitterness of a lover as his mistress leaves him, subjecting her to a relentless tirade against the wiles, deceits, and faithlessness of women:
Thou art malitious as incontinent and mightiest have mett with such a patient whose wronged virtue to just rage invited would have reveng’d, and in the dust delighted But I that have no gall where once I love And whom no great things under hevane can move Am well secur’d, from fortunes Weake Alarmes And free from apprehension, as from harmes. (55)
It is indeed a powerful attack, deeply misogynist and viciously clever and logical in delivery. In my reading of these densely allusive lines, the speaker suggests that his departing lover is so unreasonable, out of control, and spiteful, that she would have inspired a patient saint not only to take revenge on her but then also to delight in witnessing the destruction of her body after he had killed her. In contrast he has not allowed his former sweet love to turn to gall, and is now content to stay aloof from Fortune, free from worry and misfortune.
It is a bravura performance, and one wonders about the relationship between the art and the life, even as it confirms suspicions about Pembroke’s character. Wroth’s reply, included in the volume, is certainly a poem of more noble sentiment and at least as skillful a piece of writing:
soe I’le ty myself at Patience stake, Yf not then Memory continue still And tortur mee with your best prized skill, Whyle you deer solitarines accept Mee to your charge, whose many Passions kept In your sweete dwellings have thys Proffitt gained That in mor delicaacye none was pained Your rarnes now receave my rarer woe Which change, and love appoints my soule to knowe. (58)
His rage is countered by her reasoned sarcasm, demonstrating that the case of her malice and incontinence is exaggerated. There is a neat reversal of the personification of patience, transformed from Pembroke’s long-suffering patient lover who is betrayed by her, to the lady now promising to be patient and endure his wrath by tying herself to a stake (which surely refers to the public shaming of women targeted by men). The one benefit of his promise to stay away from others is that no one will be harmed as a result and all that will remain is the bitter memory of their failed relationship. He is alone in his uniqueness (“rarnes”) and she is suffering from his actions (“rarer woe”), the final line quibbling on the change in their status, as well as his inconstancy, a truth she realizes through her lost love for him. These are a striking pair of poems, amazing if they are based on real events, and still amazing if they are invented. They do, however, yet again show Pembroke as a man/poet who has an angry disrespect for women: a disrespect that is perhaps the most significant feature of his writing, and perhaps his life.
A more benign and, I think, rather successful poem is “Dear leave thy home and come with me,” one of the many responses to Christopher Marlowe’s lyric, “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love.” Pembroke’s is written, like the original, in rhyming quatrains of iambic hexameters. Pembroke’s version is certainly accomplished and elegant:
Dear leave thy home and come with me, That scorn the world for love of thee: Here we will live within this Park, A Court of joy and pleasures Ark. Here we will hunt, here we will range, Constant in Love, our sports wee’l change: Of hearts if any change we make, I will have thine, thou mine shalt take. (48)
The reversal in the second stanza is neat and witty: we will change our forms of pleasure just as we will exchange our hearts to signal our union. However, Pembroke’s version does not have the fragile and melancholy fantasy of Marlowe’s pastoral, whereby the reader knows that the escape from the world is always a fantasy, as Pembroke’s shepherd is as much real farmer as pastoral figure:
One Sun alone moves in the skye, Two suns thou hast, one in each eye; Onely by day that sun gives light, Where thine do rise, there is no night. Fair starry twins, scorn not to shine Upon my Lambs, upon my Kine; My grass doth grow my Corn and wheat, My fruit, my vines thrive by their heat. (49)
In Marlowe’s poem the lovers watch the shepherds working and the speaker tells the beloved that he can pull wool from the sheep to make her a pretty gown. In Pembroke’s poem the reader is aware of the reality of sheep and cattle farming, along with the production of vines, fruit, wheat, and grass, which the speaker assumes will thrive when exposed to the suns of his mistress’ eyes. Is this a cunning reversal? Or just a rather leaden variant on the given poetic theme? With Pembroke it is always hard to tell.
It is easy to see why so many poems included in this volume are either what the editors call “poems on the edge of the canon” (xiv) or poems of doubtful attribution. Many poems sound as if they might have been written by Pembroke, partly because his poetry clearly has a social aspect to it. He combines his writing with that of others, and many of his poems exists as part of a sequence of exchanges. Surely there are some in manuscript collections that may be by him which have been separated from their original companions. More significantly, perhaps, Pembroke’s output is hard to isolate because he writes such familiar poetry that it sounds like that of so many other poets, particularly the moderately talented aristocratic amateurs of the period. He has the rather tired misogyny of second-rate Petrarchan poets, along with the familiar imagery employed in facile sixteenth-century verse. When inspired by others he is often a much better poet, and when he really pulls out the stops he can be extraordinary (maybe only once), but in a manner that develops naturally from his pronouncements elsewhere.
The Poems of William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke is a splendid volume of great value to readers and scholars as it tells us so much about the nature of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century manuscript poetry. The result is not always edifying or inspiring – Spenser, Pembroke is certainly not – but the window on Jacobean court culture provided by these resolute and skillful editors is one we should look through with gratitude.
Andrew Hadfield
University of Sussex