[In the following essay, Wooden examines John Suckling's love letters and contends that they demonstrate control, awareness, sophistication, and unconventionality.]

To our era as to his own, Sir John Suckling seems the quintessential Cavalier, “the greatest gallant of his time, and the greatest Gamester,” in John Aubrey's phrase.¹ Today, however, his reputation rests almost exclusively on the body of lyrical verse—witty, masculine, playfully irreverent—which was collected posthumously in Fragmenta Aurea (1646) and The Last Remains of Sir John Suckling (1659). But both of these volumes contained, in addition to the poetry, separate collections of Suckling's letters set off from the poems and provided with their own titlepage within each volume (“LETTERS To divers Eminent PERSONAGES: Written on several Occasions” in Fragmenta Aurea; “LETTERS TO SEVERAL PERSONS OF HONOR” in The Last Remains). While little read or esteemed today, these letters were very popular in their time (the volumes containing the letters went through seven editions in the seventeenth century, several more in the eighteenth) and combined with the poetry to establish the public perception of the author as Millamant's “natural, easy Suckling.” For despite the popularity of such letter-writing formularies as those of Angel Day or Henry Peacham or such miscellaneous collections of letters as Nicholas Breton's A Poste with a Packet of Madde Letters (1602), the appearance of Suckling's “Letters Fragrant and Sparking,” as Gerald Langbaine characterized them in 1691,² marked in 1646 the first collection by an eminent and titled literary figure to see print in the seventeenth century. Buoyed by Suckling's reputation as a wit and gallant, the letters rapidly became the model for epistolary style for the succeeding age.

The twenty-nine letters in Fragmenta Aurea, in addition to twelve first published in the Last Remains, are properly classified as familiar letters, that paradoxical Renaissance genre which like the sonnet sequence straddled precariously the public and the private modes, the literary and the intimate. The familiar letter, writes one authority on the subject, “was literary, and though it was in most cases written for and sent to the person whose name appears on the superscription, it was written with a larger audience in view and … found its way to that larger audience.”³ The familiar letter often used stock themes, such as persuading a friend to marry or dissuading him from it, admonishing and advising a son, daughter, or friend on life at court or in the city. These themes were popularized by writers such as Breton and his imitators and followed strategies laid down in popular epistolary guidebooks like Angel Day's The English Secretorie (1586), the best known and most influential of the group. For all the casual sprezzatura which informs Suckling's letters, they afford ample evidence of mere art and of Suckling's knowledge, and occasional direct use, of these earlier middle-brow formularies.⁴ The letters are not, then, intimate and confessional; while the sentiments they express may well be genuine, both the language and attitudes adopted in them depend primarily upon the familiar tradition within which Suckling wrote and the larger audience which it presupposes. Thus in the letters as in the poetry, the affectation of nonchalance is belied by evidence of careful craftsmanship, awareness of literary tradition and decorum, and even occasional indebtedness to specific sources. The creative tension in these letters, which arises from the combination of negligence and care, defines the Cavalier style and justifies the assertion of Dryden's Eugenius in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie that the era prior to the Restoration could “produce nothing so courtly writ, or which expresses so much the Conversation of a Gentlemen, as Sir John Suckling.”⁵

I would like to concentrate on the most notable group in the seventeenth-century collections of Suckling's letters: the amatory correspondence. It was this group which was chiefly imitated, for example in Edward Phillips' The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658), and accounted for the primary popularity of Suckling's letters. The modern critical appreciation of his amatory letters is slight, as witness W. H. Irving's description of them as filled “with compliments to women of the most vapid kind,” remarkable chiefly for their “phenomenal emptiness.”⁶ A closer study, however, suggests a careful control and an awareness of both social and literary decorum in conjunction with a more sophisticated underlying design than anything found in the merely formulary amatory epistles of the age. Thus while the view of women and love in Suckling's letters ranges across the full spectrum from the rapt adoration recommended by Angel Day and the other authors of letter-writing handbooks to the obligatory view of woman as sex object in witty letters to his fellow Cavaliers, in the letters to Mary Cranfield a more complex and mature view of women and the courtship procedure emerges. I believe these letters in particular provide the key to a proper reading of Suckling's amatory epistles and, perhaps, to their popularity and influence during the Restoration.

The amatory epistles in Fragmenta Aurea are found in three groups, all lacking a superscription by which the addressee might be identified. Modern scholarship, however, assigns them to two ladies: seven letters to Mary Cranfield, Suckling's cousin, and ten to a lady addressed as “Dear Princesse” or “Aglaura,” tentatively identified by Suckling's most recent editor, Thomas Clayton, as Mary Bulkeley. The ten “Aglaura” letters occur in the midst of the collection as a group in apparently chronological order, except for a pair of witty formulary letters modeled on Breton, arguing pro and con the consequences of marrying a widow (“chewed meat,” as Suckling calls her in the dissuasion letter). On the other hand, the letters to Mary Cranfield are treated in a different fashion. Although they all date from approximately the same period (1629-32), three stand at the beginning of the collection, with a formulary dissuasion from love separating the first two, but the remaining four are printed at the conclusion of the volume, as Nos. 24-27 of the thirty in the collection. The letters to Mary Cranfield have thus been separated so as to form a frame for the group of amatory epistles in the center of the collection. This order may have been the printer's or it may have been prescribed by the procurer of the letters, as seems to have been the case with those in the Last Remains. In this latter volume, the correspondence is arranged in chronological order apparently, as Thomas Clayton suggests, at the direction of Suckling's sister, Lady Southcot, who supplied them to the printer. Given the careful ordering of the letters in the Last Remains and the odd separation of the Mary Cranfield letters in Fragmenta Aurea, it seems possible that the order in Fragmenta Aurea was a deliberate and even dramatic attempt to frame one set of letters, the Aglaura ones, with another significantly different type, the Mary Cranfield letters. An examination of the letters in these groups suggests an explanation for this ordering.

The initial letters to Mary Cranfield which introduce us to Suckling as correspondent are essential to an appreciation of his attitude toward love and the courtship ritual of his day. In these early letters Suckling appears as a modern lover, capable of the standard effusions while yet aware of the limitations and artifices of convention in the relationship of suitor and beloved. In the Mary Cranfield letters, he broaches the view of courtship as a social game, in a larger society itself obsessed with games, and invites the lady to join him in both playing and mocking the love game.

The initial letter of Fragmenta Aurea catches the reader's attention with a clever opening: “Fortune and Love have ever been so incompatible, that it is no wonder (Madam) if having had so much of the one for you, I have ever found so little of the other for my self.”⁷ Suckling continues to elaborate the occasion of his letter (he has arrived in London only to find Mary removed to the country), assuring her that, although surrounded by the lovely ladies of the city, “the use that I shall make of that Sex now, will be no other then that which the wiser sort of Catholiques do of Pictures; at the highest, they but serve to raise my devotion to you: Should a great Beauty now resolve to take me in (as that is all they think belongs to it) with the Artillery of her eyes, it would be as vain, as for a Thief to set upon a new robb'd passenger” (p. 108). Although fulsomeness and ingenuity are the rule rather than the exception in seventeenth-century amatory epistles, the reader who perceives a facetious playfulness in both Suckling's language and protestations receives confirmation of his suspicions in Suckling's closing remarks, where, as so often in his poetry, he simultaneously reminds his mistress that there are others who would not spurn and have not spurned his suit and takes a swipe at fashionable Platonic love: “You (Madam) have my heart already, nor can you use it unkindly but with some injustice, since (besides that it left a good service to wait on you) it was never known to stay so long, or so willingly before with any; After all, the wages will not be high; for it hath been brought up under Platonicks, and knows no other way of being paid for service, then by being commanded more” (p. 108). Here Suckling has both flattered the lady and, by exaggerating slightly the form of the compliment and facetiously mocking the Platonic-Petrarchan tradition on which it draws, wittily directed attention to the artificiality of the courtship game where X number of compliments are rewarded by wages in the amount of Y.

The next amatory letter in Fragmenta Aurea moves beyond facetious playfulness to consider, in the polite tone decreed by decorum, the conflict between individual sensibility and intuition and the social code. It is a fruitful theme which inspired some of Suckling's finest poems such as “Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover” and “Love's Siege.” The apparent background to the epistle is that Mary Canfield has laid down the rules by which their courtship will be conducted, the approved Platonic-Petrarchan forms, and Suckling replies, recognizing the limitations and absurdities of the courtship ritual while nevertheless agreeing to play the game as directed. Suckling begins thus: “Though (Madam) I have ever hitherto beleeved play to be a thing in it self as meerly indifferent as Religion to a States-man, or love made in a privie-chamber; yet hearing you have resolved it otherwise for me, my faith shall alter without becomming more learned upon it, or once knowing why it should do so” (p. 108). The natural man will bend to social conventions, then, not because they are correct or morally fit but only because his lady would have it so. While all this may sound conventionally Petrarchan, it is not, for the natural man's doubts are not allayed; he will play the game, at his lady's request, without believing in its tenets, such as, he continues, “The losse of a Mistris (which kills men onely in Romances, and is still digested with the first meat we eat after it)” (p. 108). This attitude of skepticism toward the value and poses of the love game even while one plays it Suckling attributes to his mistress as well as to himself in the final paragraph of this letter: “And now, since I know your Ladyship is too wise to suppose to your self impossibilities, and therefore cannot think of such a thing, as of making me absolutely good; it will not be without some impatience that I shall attend to know what sin you will be pleased to assign me in the room of this: something that has lesse danger about it (I conceive it would be) and therefore if you please (Madam) let it not be Women: for to say truth, it is a dyet I cannot yet rellish, otherwise then men do that on which they surfetted last” (p. 109).

These initial amatory epistles establish the tone and condition the reader's response to those which follow. Here both suitor and mistress recognize the limitations and absurdities of the courtship ritual while yet agreeing to utilize it as the channel for their wooing. Such an attitude is relatively complex and presupposes a respect for the intelligence, tact, and good humor of the beloved. In the final group of letters to Mary Cranfield (Nos. 24-27 in Fragmenta Aurea), those placed at the conclusion of the volume, Suckling delivers the praises due her in the Petrarchan ritual while again gently mocking the social attitudes of Petrarchism. Thus in the final amatory letter in Fragmenta Aurea, Suckling returns to notice the discrepancy between his recent behavior and that called for by the courtship game. In noting his refusal to abase himself to the role of worshipper and acolyte, he writes: “But that I know your goodness is not mercinary, and that you receive thanks, either with as much trouble as men ill news, or with as much wonder as Virgins unexpected Love, this letter should be full of them. A strange proud return you may think I make you (Madam) when I tell you, it is not from every body I would be thus obliged; and if I thought you did me not these favours because you love me, I should not love you because you do me these favours. This is not language for one in Affliction, I confesse, and upon whom it may be at this present, a cloud is breaking; but finding not within my self I have deserv'd that storm, I will not make it greater by apprehending it” (p. 112).

In contrast to the Mary Cranfield letters, witty, masculine, complex, which open and close the Fragmenta Aurea, there is the large group of ten letters to “Aglaura” or “Dear Princesse” in the center of the volume. These letters are stuffed with vehement protestations and lavish compliments. Individual passages remind one that they are the work of a poet (“Abruptness is an eloquence in parting, when Spinning out of time, is but the weaving of new sorrow” [p. 139]), but for most of these letters such passages are too rare. Rather, the best consist of patterned and graceful compliments or old formulas reworked (e.g., to apologize for his delay in answering a letter, Suckling begins “My Dear Dear / Think I have kist your letter to nothing, and now know not what to answer. Or that now I am answering, I am kissing you to nothing, and know not how to go on!” [p. 138]). Although some are excessively given to rhetorical personification and needless amplification, these letters are generally competent, although there is little in this group one could not find just as readily in, for instance, the model amatory epistles of Angel Day's English Secretorie. This group, by and large quite conventional in both language and sentiment, seems unlikely in itself to have provoked the popularity of Suckling's letters.

Thus there are apparently two distinct and qualitatively different groups of amatory epistles in Fragmenta Aurea, one complex and individualistic, the other relatively simplistic and conventional. To lump them together indiscriminately as “vapid” (or under any other rubric) seems critically suspect. What is more, the order of the letters in the volume does not seem accidental. The Mary Cranfield letters are unchronologically divided to frame the conventional Aglaura letters. Thus the seventeenth-century reader of the Fragmenta Aurea collection first encounters the letters in which Suckling plays the modern lover, skeptical, masculine, witty. The courtship ritual here appears as an elaborate social game with set rules; but the two players, Suckling and his mistress, intend to use these love conventions, perhaps to explore and reinvigorate some of the more fossilized, without being bound to or by them.

The Aglaura letters, then, the reader views from this early perspective on the courtship game. While recognizing the limitations of convention, the lover nevertheless praises the mistress to the heavens. “For,” in the words of another Cavalier to his coy mistress, “lady, you deserve this state, / Nor would I love at lower rate.” The image of the Cavalier lover which arises from a reading of Suckling's amatory epistles is of a man who can accommodate his wooing to the sensibilities of his lady, be they conventional or extraordinary. Despite the greater number of the conventional letters, however, I believe their ordering reflects a desire to emphasize the more sophisticated and complex view of love, one calculated to appeal to the tastes of a new age. If this emphasis is intended, then the order in the Fragmenta Aurea volume is designed to set off the conventional letters as but one movement in a very sophisticated larger social ritual. Whether or not this conclusion is accepted, the recognition that through polished compliment and familiar poses Suckling is both playing and subverting the courtly love game requires that the style and content of these amatory letters be reassessed from a new perspective. Far from being a homogeneous or monotonous series, they are more complex, sophisticated, and unconventional than generally assumed, and these elements may well account for both their popularity and imitation in subsequent collections and anthologies and for Suckling's stature as “the prototype and model of the Court Wits of the Restoration.”⁸

Notes

1. Brief Lives, ed. Oliver L. Dick (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1957), p. 287.

2. Cited in The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. Thomas Clayton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. lxxii.

3. William H. Irving, The Providence of Wit in the English Letter Writers (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1955), p. 14. Additional useful background information on the familiar letter during the Renaissance may be found in K. G. Hornbeak, The Complete Letter-Writer in English 1568-1800 (Northampton: Smith College, 1934) and Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1942).

4. Both E. N. S. Thompson in Literary Bypaths of the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1914) and Thomas Clayton in The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works have demonstrated direct borrowings by Suckling from earlier formularies.

5. The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., XVII, Prose 1668-1691 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 14.

6. Irving, pp. 103-04.

7. The Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. Thomas Clayton, p. 107. All subsequent quotations from the letters refer to this edition with page reference cited in the text.

8. Thomas Clayton's judgment in The Works of Sir John Suckling, p. xxvii.