Text

theses

This dissertation argues that Sir Thomas Wyatt’s and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey’s prison poems can be understood in a myriad of ways: as articulations of deep and abiding political and personal anxieties; as formal (sometimes mimetic) expressions of the suffocating limitations of incarceration; or as self-conscious continuations of prison poems (and of the profound prison tradition) which came before. But most importantly, these poems must be read as political performances, bids at self-representation, performances whose success or failure depended on the courtly audiences that consumed them. Both Wyatt and Surrey mobilized the humanist rhetorical traditions they learned as schoolboys to craft lines designed to garner the attention of influential members at court (maybe even Henry VIII himself). If the poems could not soften the heart of Henry VIII, they might, at the very least, serve to soften the hearts of the courtly members of their social circles. Their words, their lines, their pauses and repetitions, all represented well-crafted attempts to garner attention, to procure an audience, and to perform the prison and their virtuous behavior despite their troubles. Rooms of Invention maintains that although Wyatt’s and Surrey’s prison poems can be understood through multiple lenses, these poems must first be read as cultural and political performances composed to move the monarchical and courtly audiences that consumed them. While the first two chapters of this study focus on Surrey’s and Wyatt’s poems as they might have appeared (or as they sometimes appeared) in manuscript to their coterie readers, the third chapter focuses on what happened when Richard Tottel’s 1557 print miscellany Songes and Sonettes captured those poems in print. When Tottel’s Miscellany published both Wyatt’s and Surrey’s prison poems, the landmark publication revealed not only the poems of Wyatt and Surrey to a more general readership, but also the coterie community that had previously been allowed to read, revise, and re-circulate the poems in a privileged privacy. In other words, Tottel took Wyatt’s and Surrey’s performances public. Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes guided the way later poets, like Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618), John Donne (1572-1631), Richard Lovelace (1618-1657), and even Queen Elizabeth would imagine the poetic possibilities of incarceration.

ETD_10385

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-6tpb-rp97

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.