CHATTERTON LECTURE ON POETRY

‘But I, that knew what harboured in that hed’: Thomas Wyatt and his posthumous ‘interpreters’

Dr Cathy Shrank, Reader in Tudor Literature, University of Sheffield

Wednesday 31 October 2007

In their elegies composed after Wyatt’s death in 1542, John Leland and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, seek to forge an equation between his poetry and his character, transforming him and his verses into moral exempla. In doing so, they are indicative of later trends of Wyatt editing and criticism, with their tendency towards biographical readings and frequent attempts (from Wyatt’s first editor, Richard Tottel, onwards) to fit his poems into a narrative. With their insistent use of the word ‘self’ and display of discretion (hinting at secrets behind the verse), it is perhaps inevitable that Wyatt’s poems have invited such interpretations, yet in this lecture I suggest that Wyatt’s works also resist biographical readings, thanks to their deliberate opacity, deployment of paradox, and extraction (in the case of his Petrarchan translations) from a biographical narrative which is forcefully set out in Wyatt’s likely source (Vellutello’s Il Petrarcha). Moreover, as Wyatt points out in his Defence, composed after he stood accused of treason in 1540, a plain style – for which Wyatt is habitually celebrated – is not necessarily any more sincere than ornamentation: both are ‘garments’ to be donned as occasion requires. This lecture consequently also argues that the virtues for which Wyatt is recurrently lauded – steadfastness, honesty, plain speaking – require re-examination in the light of contemporary understandings of these terms: the honesty which Wyatt articulates in his letters and poetry is informed by an awareness of the importance of ‘circumspection’, and constancy is (paradoxically) achieved by an ability to change.

Dr Cathy Shrank is the author of Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580 (Oxford University Press, 2004).  Her forthcoming work includes essays and articles on John Bale, Henrician dialogues about Purgatory, mid-Tudor sonnets, cheap print and the politics of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Lecture chair: Professor Ann Moss, FBA, Professor of French Emerita, Unviersity of Durham

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