SOURCE: Kneidel, Gregory. “Reforming George Gascoigne.” Exemplaria 10, no. 2 (fall 1998): 329-70.

[In the essay which follows, Kneidel asserts that Gascoigne intentionally depicted himself in his writings as an internally divided individual.]

George Gascoigne returned to England from an undistinguished tour of military duty in the Low Countries to find that the publication of his A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) had created a minor scandal at court.¹ Designed to attract patrons and secure employment, this anthology of amatory verse, two translated plays, and the epistolary novella The Adventures of Master F. J. had in fact proven “perillous to [his] credite.”² Gascoigne then produced The Posies (1575), a revised and expurgated version of his Flowres, which ultimately did little to help him regain his footing at court.³ In 1576, after publishing his long verse satire The Steele Glas, Gascoigne's career seems to have changed course altogether. He began to translate flesh-hating moral diatribes. By the end of the year, he had secured from Lord Burghley a long-sought appointment as a foreign ambassador.⁴ Richard Helgerson extracts this moral from Gascoigne's life: “The lesson seems to be that only those who vociferously disdain the world can share in its riches, while those who delight in beauty and romance lose even the small share of worldly goods which they may have had.”⁵ (Or, as one of Gascoigne's favorite mottoes, suffused with the fashionable pathos of a Petrarchan lover, puts it, “Si fortunatus infoelix.”) In any case, Gascoigne did not long exemplify this rather discomfiting lesson; he died early in 1577.

That Gascoigne left (and fared better professionally after leaving) his mistress's “lovely nutbrowne face” to beat the Droome of Domesday has invited suspicion from admirers and critics alike. Did Gascoigne really experience what he calls the “reformation of [his] minde” (1:7)? Was his conversion from prodigality sincere? The assessment of Gascoigne's biographer, C. T. Prouty, is sympathetic yet inconclusive: While it may be “unwise to assume that all men are Machiavellis when they discuss their personal view of spiritual and ethical matters” and while we perhaps “should not at once accuse Gascoigne of hypocrisy,” even Prouty admits that ultimately he is in no position to say whether Gascoigne's repentance “was truthful and honest or mere subterfuge.”⁶ Helgerson, drawing out Stephen Greenblatt's notion of “histrionic impersonation,” detects a parallel between the “pattern of prodigality” that links the fiction and biographies of a generation of writers, the early Elizabethan prodigal poets, with the role-playing and self-dramatization of figures like More and Raleigh.⁷ More recently, critics have recognized Gascoigne's bold self-presentation as an important model for Edmund Spenser and the next generation of Elizabethan poets. At the same time, faith in Gascoigne's conviction has dwindled even farther. Arthur F. Kinney has intimated that Gascoigne's “vowed repentance” is “suspect” and Kinney approves of the view that, in tone at least, it borders on “an act of contempt.”⁸ Jane Hedley, in documenting Gascoigne's use of allegory, deems the dedicatory epistles to The Posies, epistles in which Gascoigne first proclaims his reformation, a “transparent piece of special pleading.” Daniel Javitch doubts that Gascoigne ever sought, as he would later claim, to display his “oratorical proficiency.” Rather, for Javitch, Gascoigne's rhetorical strategies are designed to display his “aptitude for indirection and hidden persuasion.” Finally, in the best discussion of Gascoigne's career since Prouty's biography, Richard C. McCoy observes that Gascoigne was “assuming the persona of a penitent prodigal in the mid-1560's” in poems that “predate his official reformation by ten years.” For McCoy, Gascoigne's late recourse to grim moralism points to his poetic emasculation, his “loss of authorial control” even as he made inroads at court.⁹

My contention is that neither sincerity (“he meant it” versus “he faked it”) nor theatricality captures the type of expectations Gascoigne's contemporaries had of him or the choices he had to make. Taking as my starting point Richard Lanham's observation that during the Renaissance “personality theory formed on the analogy of rhetorical theory,” I will argue that Gascoigne defended the unexpected reformation of his personality by invoking the rhetorical principle of decorum.¹⁰ I have chosen to examine decorum specifically through Renaissance theories of epistolary rhetoric. Gascoigne owed much to the epistolary form, but I have selected epistolary theory primarily because it lays bare the philosophical presumptions of decorum in a pragmatic, professional context. Epistolary theorists also delineate the mechanics of decorum with a clarity unequaled in the period's poetic treatises and courtesy books or, for that matter, in current historicist criticism.¹¹ Thus, in the first part of this essay, I will show that Renaissance epistolary theory constructed a notion of decorum as a negotiation between a truthful representation of the self and the decorous accommodation of the moral values and psychological propensities of an audience. To do this, an adept letter-writer had to shape each letter to respond to minute but measurable changes in the perceived relationship between the subject at hand, the recipient's character, and the sender's own character. As a result, epistolary rhetoric required of secretaries what I shall call ethical capacity: the capacity to conform one's character to a diverse range of audiences and subjects in accordance with the guidelines of decorous self-presentation.

So, while decorum demands self-knowledge, it also forces the writer to reform this known self to the exigencies of every specific rhetorical occasion. In other words, being decorous opens the writer up to the very charge of moral impropriety that Gascoigne faced during his lifetime and still faces today. In the second half of this essay, I will argue that Gascoigne responds to this charge by adapting a notion of decorum to an autobiographical narrative which underscores the ethical capacity he derives from his worldly experiences. The principle of decorum becomes a nexus where Gascoigne can, within the bounds of conventional rhetorical theory and of orthodox Protestant theology, conceptualize and announce his newly reformed self. Gascoigne's most characteristic rhetorical strategy is to arrogate moral authority precisely because he possesses and can articulate the conflicting character traits of a despondent Petrarchan lover, an off-target hunter, and a repentant prodigal youth. When he promises to serve the Queen “with a penne in my righte hand, and a sharpe sword girt to my lefte syde, in utramque paratum” (2:477) or chides himself for being an “olde babe,” Gascoigne intentionally depicts himself as internally-divided, as paradoxically opposed to himself. He does so, I will argue, first, to advertise the scope of his ethical capacity and his ability to be decorous in a variety of rhetorical situations; and second, to express in personal terms the paradoxical experience of spiritual reformation. For Gascoigne, the two objectives are deeply linked. In both cases, the principle of decorum regulates the process through which poems and letters and also moral selves get reformed—manipulated and reshaped as external circumstances change. This principled and integrated view of decorum, then, can help to resolve many of the apparent contradictions—his use of both a plain “poetical didacticism”¹² and allegorical “indirection”; his prematurely announced reformation; his defensive practice of reminding his readers of his youthful verse even when introducing his later, drearily moralistic translations—that recur in discussions of Gascoigne's poetry and of his poetic self-presentation. Moreover, this view of decorum as rhetorically and morally credible exposes one aspect of the intimate connection between the arts of discourse and Protestant theology. Once we understand how Gascoigne makes rhetorical and moral objectives compatible and complementary, we can reform our own critical evaluation of his life, work, and influence.

I

The authors of medieval artes dictaminis or letter-writing manuals were preoccupied with introductions.¹³ They divided the introduction into two parts, the salutation and captatio benevolentiae, or the securing of goodwill. The salutation in particular received an extraordinary emphasis. For example, over one-third of Rationes dictandi, published anonymously in 1135, some fifty years after Alberic of Monte Cassino published the first ars dictaminis, is given over to prescriptions of correct terms of address, even the correct disposition and inflection of these terms, for both sender and recipient according to their relative political, ecclesiastical, familial, and pedagogical status.¹⁴ At its extreme, this preoccupation with salutational formulations led to “highly schematized dictaminal works,” such as one manual which “provides not only basic epithets of address for ten levels of society (from Papa down to hereticos), but alphabetical lists of 142 verbi bona and 167 verbi mala for use in letters.”¹⁵ That “very often the largest part of the securing of goodwill is in the course of the salutation” reveals the rhetorical impetus of the strictly standardized forms and terms of address.¹⁶ In classical oratory, the same rhetorical objective was achieved by means of ethical argumentation, by lauding one's own or assailing one's opponent's good intentions and credibility. Without an opponent to disparage, however, letter-writing manuals construed the use of proper salutations as itself a recognition of precise social status and thus as evidence of good faith.

The need to secure goodwill is derived partially from the innate tension between an individual letter-writer's desire to modify highly-regimented medieval social structures and the social ideals of order and degree that official letters helped to establish. Thomas Kranidas discusses the same sort of tension in his brief compendium of formulations of decorum from antiquity through the seventeenth century.¹⁷ Plato, Kranidas argues, contributed the “idea of decorum as the harmony of ideally realized parts in an ideally realized whole. There is a double pressure, then, on each part; it must be ‘achieved’ in itself, but not beyond its function in a larger whole.”¹⁸ The carefully graduated salutations enumerated in the medieval ars dictaminis realized divinely-ordained social hierarchies by facilitating communication between the hierarchies' different ranks. Decorous salutations could, in theory, be devised that allowed decorous communication between a subject and a monarch, a heretic and the Pope. In an epistolary context, defying convention suggested a desire to transcend the sender's “function in a larger whole.” Hence, contentiousness was to be eschewed. This desideratum even compelled manual writers to codify an epistolary style. Many of the letter-writing manuals insisted that “the level of style is a function of the relative place of the correspondents in the social hierarchy.”¹⁹ But the epistolary formula for verbal rhythmic patterns known as cursus, which strives for melodiousness and heightened aural effects to appease any type of audience, quickly gained in popularity and could be applied in virtually any epistolary situation. As with salutational phrasings, the manual writers discouraged stylistic innovation and variation in favor of convention and compliance.

Moreover, decorum came to be equated with ethical persuasion since the other means of persuasion identified in classical rhetorical theory, argument by pathos and by logos, ill-serve the epistolary mode. Two factors uniquely accentuated in epistolary discourse—the distance between writer and recipient and the unalterability of an epistolary appeal—nullify the rhetorical potential of appeals to either pathos or logos. In his brief discussion of style, Aristotle remarks:

For popular speaking, we see, the style is in every way comparable to the painting of scenery in large. The greater the crowd, the more distant is the point of view; so that, in the speech and sketch alike, minute touches are superfluous, and blur the effect.²⁰

Here, a public speaker should use the “open hand” of persuasion on a “mixed” audience, marshaling a full range of stylistic and argumentative effects. His audience is farther away (literally and figuratively) from the speaker and thus more susceptible to rhetorical pyrotechnics, to grand gestures and visceral incitements to action. The recipient of a letter, however, is far away but hardly “mixed.” Consequently, pathos is rarely recommended, and sometimes discouraged, in the ars dictaminis. For example, Vives explains that, for an unjustifiable or embarrassing request, a letter writer should appeal to the natural and known benevolence of the recipient, yet “not in such a way as to seem that we wish to display our misfortune to excess and almost cry out that we are worthy of pity (miseriam), giving the impression that we are too weak and too helpless to bear our hardships.”²¹ In Erasmus's view, posited in his influential De conscribendis epistolis, the better strategy for a letter-writer is to adduce evidence of a benign, credible ethos: “[I]f our message is somewhat unpleasant … we shall attempt to capture [the recipient's] favour through the argument from persons.”²² He goes on to list dozens of epistolary ice-breaking techniques, ways of forging a contrived and expedient bond of friendship through art.

As for logos, or strictly logical argumentation, the peculiarly static nature of epistolary communication renders dependence on logic as risky as brazen emotional appeals. According to Aristotle, the “forensic style is more elaborate in detail; still more so the style intended for a single judge” (Rhetoric 1414a). A speaker should, in these cases, use the “closed fist” of logical demonstration. But a letter often cannot bear the scrutiny that dialectical reasoning invites. What is more, as Erasmus observes, while an orator can change his speech “on the spot,” “a letter, once delivered, cannot adjust to the mood of the reader, and a person who is offended by something in writing usually becomes more incensed on a further reading.”²³ A letter-writer must address a single judge or critic (even if the letter is later made public) without overemphasizing logical demonstration, and must negotiate the physical and spiritual distance between writer and recipient without the aid of overt pathetic appeals. (If a recipient is notoriously sentimental or rational, however, appeals to pathos or logos are appropriate.) Ethos becomes, if only by process of elimination, the overriding argumentative imperative of letter-writers.

While medieval and Renaissance letter-writing manuals alike overcame the inherent rhetorical limitations of epistolary communication by positing the efficacy of a decorous self, the means of demonstrating this self and of adhering to epistolary decorum changed considerably between the periods. The discovery of Cicero's familiar letters (Petrarch found Ad Atticum in 1345; Coluccio Salutati found Ad familiares in 1392), along with the recovery of important classical rhetorical treatises, “inaugurated a new epoch in the history of ars dictaminis in Western Europe.”²⁴ Ronald Witt has argued that this “new epoch” differs from its medieval predecessor in two ways, and each had a profound effect on the function of epistolary decorum. First, Renaissance letter-writing manuals gave more attention to persuasive techniques. Earlier theorists had often attempted to integrate classical rhetoric with epistolary technique, but with only limited success. “Only the salutatio identified [the letter] as a distinct genre”²⁵ from the oration, but the salutation was the most vital part of the letter. Some parts of an oration, like divisio, narratio, and refutatio, were omitted or greatly altered in most medieval artes dictaminis. But, as economic growth allowed for more social mobility and as feudal order began to disintegrate, manual writers embraced techniques of controversy for the purpose of persuasion. Letters became more properly rhetorical rather than contractual. Second, letter-writers now had classical precedents that allowed them to address a wider range of topics with a greater variety of styles to a larger number of possible recipients. In modifying the medieval ars dictaminis, Renaissance letter-writers paid heed to Petrarch's dictum: “Infinite are the differences between men nor are their minds any more alike than the shapes of their foreheads.”²⁶ Erasmus's opening remarks on the kinds of letters, in De conscribendis epistolis, echo Petrarch's sentiment: “To expect all letters to conform to a single type … is in my view at least to impose a narrow and inflexible definition on what is by nature diverse and capable of almost infinite variation.”²⁷

In an attempt to provide some guiding principles for confronting and managing the “infinite variation” (and to provide a standard by which peers and potential employers could judge their work), Renaissance theorists drew heavily and more directly on the aesthetic concept of decorum. For Angel Day, who published the first edition of his Erasmian The English Secretorie in 1586, producing a decorous self on command is the professional trademark. Speaking of the concerns whereby an “Epistle by aptness of wordes may be measured and composed,” Day concludes: “Hereon lyeth the chiefest waight & burthen of each mans discretion, whereunto oportunitye also seemeth a thing so necessary to be adioyned, as laboring the one perfectly, and attending the other circumspectly.”²⁸ Day's meaning here is itself (if perfectly measured) very circumspectly composed, but he seems to be asserting that a secretary's general sense of the aptness must be adjoined to a more insightful awareness of the rhetorical exigencies of a specific situation or “oportunitye.”

These two operations, measuring and composing, correspond roughly to the two definitions of a letter available during the Renaissance. Combined these two definitions point to the central tension in the Renaissance epistolography between the faithful representation of the letter-writer's mind with the decorous accommodation of the recipient's. Erasmus gives one definition, gleaned from Cicero's familiar letters: a letter “is a mutual conversation between absent friends.”²⁹ The small amount of attention paid to the epistolary form in classical times dealt primarily with finding a “plain” style suitable for such an amicable conversation. Ideals of friendship from antiquity onward held that a friend is another self. As a means of spiritually uniting separated friends, Erasmus asserts, “the epistolary form favours simplicity, frankness, humour, and wit.”³⁰ No decoration or pretense should veil the perfect measurement and communal appreciation of one another's virtues.

In the other definition, a letter is not a friendly reunion but an ambassadorial visit. As the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives writes, a “letter is a conversation by means of the written word between persons separated from each other. It was invented to convey the mental concepts and thoughts from one person to another as a faithful intermediary and bearer of commission.”³¹ Likewise, Day defines a letter “as a faythfull and secrete Ambassadour … of him from whome the foremost title hath had his direction and framing.”³² Since the letter was to function as a messenger and ambassador, Renaissance manual writers realized that a friendly rapport between writer and recipient does not necessarily exist. The temporal and spatial gap between the two signifies a gap in intimacy that decorum is designed to navigate. This idea of decorous convenience—of coming together, meeting, closing gaps—emerges in Puttenham's suggested synonyms for decorum: “we call it also comelynesse for the delight it bringeth comming towards us, and to that purpose may be called pleasant approche.”³³ (One thinks here also of Puttenham's numerous accounts of ineffectively executed embassies as examples of indecorum.) In fact, Vives, explaining why the writer must immediately outline his relationship to the recipient, remarks:

Frequently you must plead in excuse that you write as a complete stranger or as a mere acquaintance. … This must be made clear from the beginning, for it is a natural tendency that once the letter is opened and the writer's name is read, the recipient of the letter will wonder whether it is sent by a stranger or by someone not especially endeared to him, or by an enemy.³⁴

Vives's presumption that friends converse face-to-face in ordinary terms underlies this advice. Unless some indication of goodwill is extended immediately, “in his mind, [the recipient] condemns the writer right from the start for impudence, temerity, arrogance or insanity with the result that he does not so much repudiate the letter as conceive a dislike for its author.”³⁵ It seems that only enemies and petitioners, people you don't really want to hear from, send letters unexpectedly. Overcoming this reflexive distrust requires delicacy from the epistolary ambassador; by seeking to fabricate an familiar identification with the recipient, the sender compensates for not speaking in a more immediate fashion.

In effect, a competent secretary must satisfy the criteria of both definitions of epistolary self-presentation, friend and ambassador. “I see no reason,” concludes Day, “but he that can frame him selfe to the varietie of these [specific epistolary situations], may with greater facilitie reache unto the reste, the better to enhable him selfe hereafter if aduauncement draw him to it to become a Secretorie.”³⁶ Employment and privilege are the rewards, but how is a writer to fabricate a decorous self? Decorum regulates epistolary style by measuring the relationship of three variables: subject, recipient, and writer. Of the subject or “cause,” Day advises: “Needefull shall it be … that the cause be evermore measured according to the parties appearance, his credite or worthinesse, that the validitie therof be aunswerable unto the one & the others goodnesse or greatnesse.”³⁷ In reality, the cause of the letter is more or less predetermined, and its separation from the recipient's character is nominal at best. The first evaluation to be made is of the recipient's character. Initially, letter-writing manuals restrict this ethical evaluation to traditional topoi of praise: family background, “things,” deeds, education.³⁸ Cite a shared ancestry or a common alma mater, for instance, then dwell on it. Renaissance manual writers, confronting an increase in epistolary possibilities, went one step farther and demanded ethopoeia—“the necessity of adapting words and style to differences of age, sex, and rank.”³⁹ As book 2 of Aristotle's Rhetoric attests, “age, sex, and rank” were traditionally taken as crucial determinants of an individual's temperament. Epistolary decorum now concerned itself with individual psychology, not just social status.

Thus, the manuals require that a letter-writer understand the recipient's disposition, humors, and emotional traits, so as to conform the letter's length and style to them. On the length of a letter, Vives asserts: “It is very important that you adapt yourself [te accommodari] to the character of the one to whom you are writing and according to the nature of the material.”⁴⁰ Style is a more flexible component and hence the most efficient means of equating the sender's ethos with the recipient's. Vives's remarks on accommodating one's style are exacting and become representative of later Renaissance epistolary theory: “To a learned man, use a style more consonant with the ancient writers; to a busy man, be brief; to man of leisure, write in a sprightly manner; to a kindly person, be less anxious about detail; to a severe person, gloomy.”⁴¹ And so on. To recipients with less than admirable demeanors—a haughty, disagreeable, or dull-witted man—one must strive, as would a true friend, to compensate for and not to duplicate this trait (or perhaps the idea is to replicate what the recipient “thinks” he is like, reserved, not stern, frank, not unsophisticated). In any event, Vives's catalog intimates the importance of knowing one's recipient, because each ethos has a decorous style that corresponds to it. He goes on to counsel that when writing to “an uncertain friend,” whose character is unknown, one should

be more cautious, but in such a manner that he thinks he is loved and that you truly love him. This is the law of nature, this is what Christ commands, more valid than the law of nature, with the result that one who does not love in return will be deservedly condemned for ingratitude.⁴²

Vives invokes the ideal of love, under no less authority than Christ's great commandment, to give some religious teeth to the ideals informing the Ciceronian familiar letter. Vives intimates that God will revenge unrewarded and unappreciated decorousness.

This decorous accommodation of style operates rhetorically at an ethical level. As Kranidas remarks, “in its commonest Renaissance usage decorum … refer[s] to the depiction of character.”⁴³ The equation of ethos and style is classical in origin. Quintilian proclaims: “a man's character is generally revealed and the secrets of his heart are laid bare by his manner of speaking.”⁴⁴ Quintilian's statement had great currency during the Renaissance. Puttenham writes that “this continuall course and manner of writing or speech sheweth the matter and disposition of the writer's minde.”⁴⁵ Puttenham goes on to state the assumption underpinning the minute prescription of epistolary styles: “For if a man be grave, his speech and stile is grave: if light-headed, his stile and language also light.”⁴⁶ Style does not merely dress the matter of a speech, it reveals the “disposition of the writer's mind.”

Ultimately, then, in the process of advancing ethical arguments and of capturing goodwill, secretaries must both faithfully bare their thoughts as if to a intimate friend and accommodate the ethos of their letters' recipients as would a skillful ambassador. That is what being decorous is. Kenneth Burke calls this tactic the rhetoric of “identification or consubstantiality.” It is “perhaps the simplest case of persuasion”: “You persuade a man only insofar as you talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.”⁴⁷ But the disparity between, to use Day's terms, the perfect measurement of a situation and the circumspect composition of a letter explains why Burke recognizes bald flattery as a version of the rhetoric of identification. In the judgment of an impartial third party, a secretary's reliance on decorous accommodation can be taken as mere sycophancy or insincerity. Erasmus notes the fantastic demands that the rhetorical goal of variety places on the individual writer in the epistolary mode:

At the same time the style will also keep in mind the writer and not merely the recipient or the purpose for which it was sent. Therefore it will play the part of a Mercury, as it were, transforming itself into every shape required by the topic at hand, yet in such a way that amid great variety it retains one feature unaltered, namely that of being always refined, learned, and sane.⁴⁸

For Erasmus, the figure of Mercury represents the secretarial ideal during the Renaissance. But the messenger of the gods occupied an ambivalent place within Renaissance's discourse of rhetoric: Mercury was the god of eloquence, but also of deception and transgression.⁴⁹ In this duplicitous role, Mercury confirms Annabel Patterson's observation that at “no time during the Renaissance are aesthetics discussed in isolation from ethics, and any valid theory of imagination always carries with it the implicit context of moral action.”⁵⁰ Gascoigne's motto “Tam Marti quam Mercurio” is thus doubly ironic: his self-proclaimed failings as a soldier undermine his martial persona, and the complex cultural significance of Mercury casts the shadow of moral corruption upon his not inconsiderable poetic abilities.

As we shall see, in his efforts to overcome doubts concerning his sincerity and moral probity, Gascoigne exploits what Joel Altman calls “the marriage effected between moral reformation and sophistic argumentation” during the sixteenth century.⁵¹ Altman is speaking specifically about the moral implications of the rhetorical technique of disputatio in utramque partem, debating on each side of a given issue. This practice, ingrained into the thought patterns of English students throughout their training in rhetoric and dialectic, pretends to allow an orator to perceive better the probable means of persuasion. Aristotle, for one, argues that by understanding an opponent's argument, a rhetorician comes to a better understanding of the arguments at his or her disposal. Despite condemning sophistic rhetoric, Aristotle states:

In Rhetoric, and in Dialectic, we should be able to argue on either side of a question; not with a view to putting both sides into practice—we must not advocate evil—but in order that no aspect of the case may escape us, and that if our opponent makes unfair use of the arguments, we may be able in turn to refute them.

Rhetoric 1355a

In Quintilian's view, the skilled orator must not seek persuasion or a specific psychological effect, as such; the ideal orator is a good man speaking well. Although he elevates the ideal orator above the sophistic goal of persuasion at any cost, Quintilian does implicate the orator in a process of knowing the opposite of his goal:

the nature of virtue is revealed by vice, its opposite, justice becomes yet more manifest from the contemplation of injustice, and there are many other things that are proved by their contraries.

Institutio Oratoria 12.1.35

Altman, reflecting on the consequences of training students to be proficient in this skeptical discernment of truth and virtue, concludes: “Surely one result must be a great complexity of vision, capable of making every man not only a devil's advocate but also a kind of microcosmic deity … who can see all sides of the issue.”⁵² The project of the orator in classical rhetorical theory was to become just such a deity, but to use only those arguments that bring about good, good usually defined (in conservative rhetorics, at least) not as personal triumph but as public benefit. According to Aristotle, “we must not advocate evil”; according to Quintilian, the ideal orator will not abuse this epistemological advantage, because he seeks virtue and eloquence, not persuasion; and, according to Cicero, even though the fertile mind contains weeds as well as flowers, civic virtues like seemliness dictate that these weeds be, if not eradicated, at least concealed. In short, ancient rhetoricians, championing rhetoric against both sophistry's abuses and logic's criticisms, devised built-in, definitional restraints for their orators, whose personal virtues place them above the society they serve and preclude the possibility of demagoguery. They know evil; they do good. They do good so much the better because they know evil.

The influence of the practice of disputatio in utramque partem and the epistemological relativism behind it can be seen in Renaissance discussions of epistolary style and brevity. With its unique emphasis on stylistic effects, however, epistolary theory modifies this form of disputation, applying it to stylistic accommodation rather than the invention of arguments. For example, in the first chapter of De conscribendis epistolis, Erasmus writes:

There is no one more verbose than one who is inarticulate. For the sake of the pupils I wish to expose the folly of those charlatans who cloak their inability to speak with the word “laconic” though all the while they do not know what the words “brevity” and “abundance” really mean; yet both qualities belong to one and the same writer. For just as in Plato Socrates concludes that the best forger of lies is also the best teller of the truth, similarly no one will earn credit for brevity who cannot also express himself in a more ample style.⁵³

Erasmus himself draws the analogy between decorous brevity and honesty and thus between stylistic accommodation and quasi-sophistic deception. Furthermore, Erasmus contends that opposite styles, in effect, prove a letter writer's skill, thereby pointing to the presence of a third party (a humanist scholar or a potential employer, for example) who samples a single writer's epistolary output. Much as arguing both sides of a given issue demonstrates rhetorical ability, writing letters in opposite styles, now severe, now blithe, now terse, now verbose, advertises proficiency in epistolary rhetoric.⁵⁴

Moreover, decorum not only heralds the letter-writer's competence, it excuses her or his weaknesses. Patterson has commented that decorum was “on the tip” of every sixteenth-century poet's tongue “as an excuse for technical errors or clumsiness.”⁵⁵ Hence, Erasmus writes: “If [a letter] is somewhat verbose, we shall say that it was written either for an inquisitive person or a man of leisure.” He goes on to correlate several other styles with their appropriate characters and then concludes:

In short, whatever would not have escaped criticism in other forms of writing can be defended here either in consideration of the topic, or the person of the writer, or the character, condition, or age of the recipient. In fact, variation and unevenness of style and subject-matter which would merit condemnation elsewhere here have a peculiar charm.⁵⁶

As Erasmus recognizes, decorum, the tonic for poetic ineptitude, performs the same service as the letter-writer's ethos. Defects in a letter evince familiarity, confidence, and trust. Decorum justifies the promulgation of a variety of selves in letters, not all of them virtuous or upright in an absolute sense. The model is Cicero's familiar letters. Petrarch “wept at their revelation of Cicero's psychological nakedness, his failure to maintain philosophical detachment, his seduction by political life.”⁵⁷ The numerous styles and topics of Cicero's familiar letters belied his meticulously-groomed image as the consummate public statesman. Yet, all of his styles and all of the psychological states they denote are excusable, as long as the recipient is correctly chosen.

In Renaissance epistolary theory, then, the principle of decorum provided a method of measuring and coordinating a range of potentially conflicting styles to various types of recipients and subjects. “Framing” a persuasive ethos entailed replicating the recipient's ethos as closely as possible by delicately adjusting the variable components of a letter—even if this ethical accommodation meant employing, over time, inconsistent, even contradictory modes of speech. Furthermore, because of the deep-seated belief in the correspondence of external representation and interior moral state, aesthetic and rhetorical considerations could not be divorced from issues of morality. Just as style reveals the self, epistolary decorum regulates ethical and moral decision-making and self-presentation. The inference that can be made from these two observations—that some notion of decorum can be invoked to valorize ethical and moral “errors and clumsiness”—provides the foundation for Gascoigne's defense of his work and of the reformation (and employability) of his mind.

II

In an insightful article, Judith Rice Henderson has argued that, for humanists trained according to the precepts of Renaissance lettter-writing manuals, “letters were not trivial or informal or personal or even necessarily honest. … Letters were art.” As for the classical topos that a letter's style reveals the mind of its author, she observes: “The humanist did not bare his soul in his letters, even when he quoted the classical topos. Instead he presented an image, an ethos, of himself as he wished readers present and future to see him.”⁵⁸ I will argue in the second part of this essay, however, that George Gascoigne modifies his epistolary rhetoric in order to bare his soul, the soul of a regenerate Christian, to his audience. At important junctures in his poetic career, Gascoigne turns the convention of epistolary frankness into a means of moral self-representation and, in so doing, claims that the diversity of his worldly experiences make him more qualified to accommodate diverse audiences on moral and ethical topics.

Gascoigne, of course, did not publish a letter collection like the ones Professor Henderson examines. But the epistolary form was one of Gascoigne's favorites.⁵⁹ His novella, The Adventures of Master F. J., consists of verse and prose epistles, written mostly by F. J. during his ill-fated courtship of “a very fayre gentlewoman whose name was Mistresse Elinor.”⁶⁰ Interposed (in the original version of the story) are the comments of the intrusive narrator, G. T. The front matter for The Adventures—a series of letters explaining exactly how the novella came into G. T.'s possession, took the shape it did, and found its way to press—signals what some critics see as Gascoigne's overarching strategy of “indirection,” although I agree with Susan C. Staub that these letters playfully expose the artificiality of Gascoigne's invention more than they obscure the identity of the novella's real author.⁶¹ In the course of The Adventures, Gascoigne mentions some of the stock notions of epistolary rhetoric that I have just been discussing. For example, of Elynor's first, rather dispassionate letter to F. J., G. T. observes that “the stile this letter of hirs bewrayeth that it was not penned by a womans capacitie, so the sequell of hir doings may discipher, that she had mo ready clearkes then trustie servants in store.”⁶² After transcribing her next letter, more enticing than the first and written in a different hand, G. T. reveals that the first letter was in fact written by Elynor's unnamed secretary, the “ready” clerk who left for London after the first exchange. This secretary turns out to be F. J.'s rival for Elynor's affections and his return from London near the end of the novella sets in motion the demise of F. J.'s liaison.⁶³ Two years later, Gascoigne would rectify this negative depiction of secretaries: Phylotimus, one of the hard-witted yet virtuous younger brothers in Gascoigne's prodigal son play, The Glasse of Government (1575), exceeds his father's and schoolmaster's expectations by gaining employment as a “Secretarie unto the Palsegrave” (2:5). The other younger son, Phylomusus, becomes a “famous preacher in Geneva.” Presumably Phylotimus and Phylomusus hold equally virtuous offices.

But Gascoigne's indebtedness to epistolary rhetoric extends far beyond these fictional characters. In fact, epistles would best suit Gascoigne's need to explain, largely for the purpose of soliciting employment, both the method of his writing and the story of his reformation. “Gascoignes Woodmanship” (1:348-52) is perhaps his most celebrated poem. Addressed to Lord Grey of Wilton, who would later become Spenser's friend and patron, the poem takes Gascoigne's marksmanship (or lack thereof) as its primary conceit. Most interpretations of the poem concentrate on the first section, in which Gascoigne draws an analogy between his poor performance on a recent hunt with Lord Grey and his aborted forays into academics, legal training, and courtiership. These readings focus our attention on Gascoigne's use of allegoria and his ability to “turn an unpropitious occasion to his advantage” through his “rhetorical dexterity”⁶⁴ While I agree that the poem brilliantly displays Gascoigne's “rhetorical dexterity,” I think the emphasis on subtlety and on allegory is misleading if not inaccurate. The poem is a skilled piece of argumentation, but it is manifestly about Gascoigne, and its pleas for employment are overt. Moreover, good stretches plainly denounce contemporary vices. The poem is better understood, I think, in terms of decorum. In The Scholemaster, Roger Ascham asserts that as decorum

is the hardest point, in all learning, so is it the fairest and onlie marke, that scholars, in all their studie, must alwayes shote at, if they purpose an other day to be, either sounde in Religion, or wise and discrete in any vocation in the common wealth.

As Thomas M. Greene argues, this statement reveals “a continuum properly aligning style, thought, judgment, and action.”⁶⁵ Gascoigne's project, I will argue, is to show that he is capable of maintaining just such a continuum should Grey see fit to provide him with the opportunity.

The poem's first lines announce its three related topics:

My woorthy Lord, I pray you wonder not
To see your woodman shoote so ofte awrie,
Nor that he stands amased like a sot,
And lets the harmlesse deare (unhurt) go by.
Or if he strike a Doe which is but carren,
Laugh not good Lord, but favoure such a fault.

1-6

Gascoigne throughout the poem attempts to control what Grey sees and how Grey reacts to what he sees. Not the least important thing Grey sees is Gascoigne seeing or not seeing well. In the first section, on his shooting “so ofte awrie,” Gascoigne recounts his youthful misadventures as those of a third-person “woodman.” This “he” is Gascoigne's past. Gascoigne explains that he shot awry because “His eyes have bene so used for to raunge, / That now God knowes they be both dimme and darke” (15-16). Gascoigne quickly tells how, at the university, his “wanton wittes went all awrie” (20); during his legal training he “winked wrong, and so let slippe the string” (31); and at court he “much mistooke the place, / And shot awrie at every rover still” (35-36). By line 39 Gascoigne has effectively dispelled Grey's disbelief: “No wonder then although he shot awrie, / Wanting the feathers of discretion” (39-40). But the section does not end here. Gascoigne next offers images of himself that are more difficult to explain, and easier to wonder at. Gascoigne complains: “Yet more than them [i.e., the feathers of discretion], the marks of dignitie, / He much mistooke and shot the wronger way” (40-42). Here Gascoigne's task is to explain why he “mistooke” and chose the targets he did. Lines 59-60 hint that Gascoigne was right on target, but still shooting “awrie,” when he took a shot at becoming a prodigal and flattering courtier. The details of the lines 49-56 betray Gascoigne's intimate knowledge of the fop's trade.

With “But now” (61), however, the poem moves into the present of 1573. Gascoigne in his age has decided on a career in the military. He was, in fact, in the Low Countries on a military expedition when the poem was first published in his Flowers. Acknowledging the incongruity between his age and his current occupation, Gascoigne insists that he is still trainable, still worthy of Grey's patronage (69-72). To prove this thesis and to conclude the first section, Gascoigne lists not what he can do but what “he cannot”:

He cannot climbe as other catchers can.
.....He cannot spoile the simple sakeles man,
.....He cannot pinch the painefull souldiers pay,
.....He cannot stoup to take a greedy pray [i.e., rob a cohort]
.....He cannot pull the spoyle from such as pill
And seeme full angrie at such foule offense

73-84

—this catalog owes something to Sir Thomas Wyatt's poem “Myne own John Poyntz”; but Wyatt's moral outrage takes the form of “I cannot” statements. This contrast in pronoun choice indicates that the source of moral authority in Gascoigne's poem is not derived from a morally-centered self, but is that of a socially astute fictive third person, ever exposed to the scrutiny of potential critics and employers like Grey. Gascoigne thus depicts his own past before Grey's eyes as a (thinly veiled) vehicle for the censure of society's vices. Now, the most accurate marksmen are the least moral: “And nowe adayes, the man that shootes not so, / Maye shoote amisse, even as your Woodman dothe” (85-86). The “nowe adayes” puts Gascoigne's poem in the classical dies mali sunt tradition of moral satire. But it is also coordinated with the “But now” of line 61; the implication is that society has set up targets that the unscrupulous can easily tag but that the more mature Gascoigne finds repulsive. The focus of this first section thus shifts from Gascoigne's failings to society's. Gascoigne achieves this effect by differentiating between lacking “feathers of discretion” and hitting “marks of dignitie.” As the narrative progresses from Gascoigne's youthful past to Grey's present, Gascoigne as the “he” has presumably gained the moral authority that comes with “feathers of discretion.” Unfortunately, this discretion brings with it inhibitions against shooting at easily hit but morally reprehensible targets.

Gascoigne begins the poem's second section by again attending to Grey's perception of him: “But then you marvell why I lette them go, / And never shoote, but saye farewell foresooth” (87-88). The shift to the first person marks the transition from past, known failures to the present and near future. Why does Gascoigne refrain from shooting? Quite simply, he can't see straight. But again, the poem gradually transfers the blame for Gascoigne's blurred vision from himself to society. Reflecting on “youthfull yeares myspente,” Gascoigne confesses that

My mynde is rapte in contemplation,
Wherein my dazeled eyes onely beholde,
The blacke houre of my constellation.

93-95

Initially, cosmic forces are blamed for Gascoigne's fate, and his amazement replaces Grey's amused incredulity. But the apologetic line 97, “Yet therewithall I can not but confesse,” hints that he will soon start pointing fingers at others: “For thus I thinke, not all the worlde (I guesse,) / Shootes bet than I, nay some shootes not so well” (99-100). This claim is a reasonable “vayne presumption.” Frustration, not embarrassment or regret, now makes Gascoigne's “heart to swell” (98).

Implicitly invoking the analogy between woodsmanship and decorum, Gascoigne continues:

In Aristotle somewhat did I learne,
To guyde my manners all by comelynesse,
And Tullie taught me somewhat to discerne
Betweene sweete speeche and barbarous rudenesse.

101-4

The lines do not disclose exactly what subject or what book—on ethics, politics, poetry, or rhetoric—first instilled the value of decorum in Gascoigne. The lack of specificity is telling, however, for to Gascoigne's mind (as to Ascham's), the exigencies of decorum cross the boundaries between rhetoric, morality, and esthetics. “The craftie Courtiers” that Gascoigne names in the next lines disregard this continuum.

Yet can not these [courtiers] with manye maystries mo,
Make me shoote streyght at any gaynfull pricke,
Where some that never handled such a bow,
Can hit the white, or touch it neare the quicke,
Who can nor speake, nor write in pleasant wise,
Nor leade their life by Aristotles rule,
Nor argue well on questions that arise,
Nor pleade a case more than my Lorde Mairs mule,
Yet can they hit the marks that I do misse,
And winne the meane which may the man mainteyne,
Nowe when my mynde doth mumble upon this,
No wonder then although I pine for payne:
And whiles myne eyes beholde this mirrour thus,
The hearde goethe by, and farewell gentle does:
So that your Lordship quickely may discusse
What blindes mine eyes so ofte (as I suppose.)

109-24

As he did in the first section of the poem, Gascoigne here foists responsibility onto others who would divorce shooting properly from hitting the proper target. The two lines, “Yet can not these” and “Yet can they,” delineate Gascoigne's competitors' abilities. They cannot use decorum, whether this means speaking and writing “in pleasant wise” or following the Aristotelian ethical mean or arguing persuasively in court. The repetition of “nor” encourages us to consider these acts as connected, if not interdependent, projects. But Gascoigne frames this critique of their shortcomings with reminders that, indeed, they can “hit the white” and “hit the markes that I do misse” (112, 116). This injustice causes Gascoigne's mind to “mumble.” And even as he writes, even as his “eyes beholde this mirroure thus, / The hearde goethe by.” The irony is evident: the poetic mirror of Gascoigne's own devising blinds him to the passing herd. He is a victim both of feckless competitors for employment and of his own considerable powers of satiric description.

The next two lines, “But since my Muse can to my Lorde reherse / What makes me misse, and why I doe not shoote” (125-26), signal the transition to the poem's third section. More importantly, however, they force Grey to reflect once more on exactly what Gascoigne has been rehearsing for him. Gascoigne's youthful escapades dazzle Gascoigne's own eyes, yet he lucidly and vigorously sets the same images before Grey's eyes. By drawing Grey's attention to what “my Muse can to my Lorde reherse,” Gascoigne shows himself as a poet deftly giving form (via visual images and rhymed verse) to the same material that left him in debt and without employment. In short, Grey sees clearly how and why Gascoigne did and does not see clearly.

Critics often note that in the third section Gascoigne regains control over both “what occurs and what is signified.”⁶⁶ But Gascoigne has throughout the poem been asserting his ability to put images of what has occurred before Grey and to influence Grey's interpretation of them. Moreover, Gascoigne's most assertive statement, “Let me imagine” (127), can as easily be taken as a request as an exhortation. The logic of this last section, then, follows that of the first two as Gascoigne negotiates between deference towards Grey and a growing sense of poetic authority. First, Gascoigne describes an indecorous or unbecoming action, here the slaughter of a pregnant doe. Then, he hints that he himself might be to blame: “Some myghte interprete by playne paraphrase, / That lacke of skill or fortune ledde the chaunce” (133-34). He then names a different, transcendent cause—“I saye Jehova did this Doe advaunce, / And made hir bolde to stande before mee so”—all the while building his own moral authority (“I say …”). In the poem's first two parts Gascoigne finds himself hampered or distracted, even as he writes, by his biographical vignettes and his satiric description of “craftie Courtyers.” But now his sight is deflected with quite different results. The doe is held up as an image so

That by the sodaine of hir overthrowe,
I myght endevour to amende my parte,
And turne myne eyes that they no more beholde,
Suche guylefull markes as seeme more than they be;
And though they glister outwardely lyke golde,
Are inwardly but brasse, as men may see.

139-44

Again Gascoigne presents himself as affected by the image he himself has imagined. Previously, his wonder, frustration, and disgust led to social satire. Now he takes the image of the doe as a cause of his own reformation. He decides to “amende” his “parte” and to “turne” his “eyes.” The parallelism with “amende” hints that the decision to turn his eyes requires both moral and physical effort. Gascoigne is almost behind himself, manually redirecting his sight, his visual aim. He turns his eyes away from outwardly glistening marks, recognizing and dismissing their actual baseness. Here the passage verges on a rejection of outwardness, on a sort of contemptus mundi stance. But by making his perception common (or potentially common) to “men,” the tag phrase “as men may see” deflates the tone of moral superiority and reincorporates Gascoigne into the affairs of perceptive men. Gascoigne also hopes that “men may see” his own amendment and his own perceptiveness. Gascoigne's newly-realized usefulness contrasts with the pathetic worthlessness of the doe, whose lactating “teate” is proof that she is indeed carren (5) and unfit for consumption.

Finally, Gascoigne imagines the dying doe telling him:

                                                            olde babe now learne to sucke,
Who in thy youth couldst never learne the feate
To hitte the whytes whiche live with all good lucke.

146-48

These lines capture Gascoigne's almost paradoxical strategy for self-presentation.⁶⁷ Gascoigne is now an “olde babe” who must learn a simple, instinctual act, however nourishing or obsequious it may be. The parallelism of “now learn to sucke” and “couldst never learne … to hitte” reverses the chronological movement of the poem. In this final image of himself, Gascoigne has reverted, psychologically if not physically, back to his infancy. At one level, this ending substantiates McCoy's argument that courtly success entails a surrender of masculine power by Gascoigne. Yet the image of Gascoigne as an “olde babe” can be more positive. The phrase encapsulates Gascoigne's programmatic attempt to reform classical models of decorous self-representation according to the guidelines of Christian morality. He has transposed the notion of a puer senex, the youth old in wisdom. He has adopted a more Christian pose, the pose of an aged courtier who has become like a little child in accordance with Jesus's words in Matthew 18:3, “Truly, I say unto you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”⁶⁸ Throughout the poem, Gascoigne claims moral authority and rhetorical prowess for himself precisely because, not in spite, of his misspent and ill-fated youth. He even reminds Grey of his failures in the poem's last lines. “Olde babe” would suggest that Gascoigne can embrace in controlled verse apparently contradictory modes of self-presentation.⁶⁹ He can do both styles, and anything in between. He can embody the same sort of ethical capacity that Renaissance secretaries were expected to utilize for their employers.

Like Ascham, Gascoigne argues that one must understand how decorum links morality and rhetorical efficacy. Gascoigne differs from Ascham, however, in his attitude towards the value of poetic examples of immorality. For Ascham, the schoolmaster's duty is not “so moch, in teaching [his charges] what is good, as in keping them from that, that is ill.”⁷⁰ Similarly, Ascham takes a strong stance against experience: “Learning teacheth more in one yeare than experience in twentie”; he distinguishes sharply between his “example in yougth” and his “councell in aige.”⁷¹ Gascoigne, on the other hand, consistently dwells on and asks his readers to contemplate the errors of his youth. He wants to be seen reforming his youth, not refuting it. The reason, I think, is that Gascoigne is more interested in demonstrating his ability to accommodate a variety of audiences, including youthful ones, than in establishing his mastery of moral imperatives.

The three prefatory epistles appended to The Posies show Gascoigne undertaking the same project—polishing his reputation, resuscitating his fortunes at court, reiterating his hopes for employment—that had preoccupied him from the publication of his Flowres onward. In his epistle to the “reverende Divines,” Gascoigne takes up the task of valorizing experience and of explaining the interdependence of virtue and vice. As befits his audience, his style is subdued. He does, however, recognize the need to capture the goodwill of the “divines.” Compelled by the uneasy circumstances of his return from the Low Countries if not by the demands of epistolary convention, he addresses them in intimate terms, “My reverende and welbeloved” (1:4). He introduces the body of his argument with a preamble “too the ende I maye thereby purchase youre pacience” (1:4). Witty salutations and stylistic effects may not affect the sober divines. The structure of his argument is also rather legalistic and straightforward. First he lays out the five charges made against him; he then responds to them in order. But Gascoigne's epistolary rhetoric still revolves around making his ethos credible, and he strikes a proudly penitent pose throughout the letter. In his preamble, Gascoigne narrates the events of the publication of his Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, and then states that he has “learned that although there may be founde in a Gentleman whereby to be reprehended or rebuked, yet ought he not to be woorthie of reproofe or condemnation” (1:3, emphasis mine). Because his sins are not equivalent to his worth, Gascoigne can frankly own up to his misspent past. He vaunts, not the consistency or piety of his thought, but his ethical capacity and self-knowledge. The clothes make the man and Gascoigne is, by his own admission, wearing a “new patched cote” (1:8). Despite this self-effacement, Gascoigne anticipates that readers will question his sincerity: “For many a man which may like mine outwarde presence, might yet have doubted whether the qualityes of my minde had bene correspondent to the proportion of my bodie” (1:5). Gascoigne conceives of this objection in terms of decorum, in terms of the proportional representation of his mind and body. Answering this objection and explaining why he chose to republish, with only cosmetic changes, the work that brought him so much disrepute, he remarks “I must take the Foord as I finde it: Sometimes not as I woulde, but as I may” (1:6). This concession resembles the sort of frank ethical evaluation of self that the writers of medieval and Renaissance artes dictaminis insist upon for the sake of decorum. Gascoigne punctuates the prefatory epistles with such moments—“I persuade myself,” “I assure my selfe”—of introspection.

After the shock of the discovery of Cicero's familiar letters, Renaissance writers understood more clearly that classical decorum was a personal virtue demanding consistent, meticulous self-presentation. Cicero's insistence on the indivisibility of prudence and rhetorical efficacy depends upon the presumption that the orator's (if not the plebeian masses') fecund mind contains the “innate seeds of virtue”—hence his ability to perform virtuous actions despite adhering to skeptical beliefs about truth and virtue as ideals.⁷² Gascoigne, on the other hand, recognizes that “a generall reformation of maners were necessarie to be taught” (1:4). This reformation implies a prior deformation. Elaborating on his decision to conjoin the vain “flowers” with didactic “herbs” and “weeds,” Gascoigne writes that the latter “passing (cheeke by cheek) with the other, muste of necessitie persuade both the learned, and the light minded, that I could aswell sowe good grain, as graynes or draffe” (1:5). Here the language of fecundity and of separating “good grain” from “graynes of draffe” registers a scripturally-based evangelical mission.⁷³ Gascoigne highlights the shamefulness of his past experiences in order to demonstrate his spiritual progression (and underscore his productiveness). Unlike Cicero, the Christian orator must acknowledge the stain of original sin. Placed in a Christian context, the ethical evaluation that is necessary for decorum to be upheld involves a recognition of original sin, of one's own debased humanity, of the need for spiritual justification. The allowances given to the virtuous ideal orator in classical times now apply to a whole range of moral as well as ethical actions.

Gascoigne even cites one of the reverends' own number as a model for his own reformation.

But I delight to thinke that the reverend father Theodore Beza, whose life is worthily become a lanterne to the whole worlde, did not yet disdaine too suffer the continued publication of such Poemes as he wrote in youth. And as he termed them at last Poemata castrata, So shal your reverend judgements beholde in this seconde edition, my Poemes gelded from all filthie phrases, corrected in all erronious places, and beautified with addition of many moral examples.

1:6⁷⁴

Beza republished his youthful erotic poetry in 1569, some twenty years after he converted from Catholicism and well after he had established himself as a leading figure in Calvin's Genevan church. Beza defended his erotic verse by insisting that readers adhere to generic considerations, by rejecting any autobiographical or didactic claims for his nugae. But Gascoigne, clearly lacking Beza's extra-poetic credentials, wishes to do exactly the opposite. For Gascoigne, poems written for any occasion do indeed reflect the character of their poets. Only from this assumption can Gascoigne argue that he, like his poems, is now reformed. Instead of merely manipulating this knowledge of evil and vice for the good of his audience, he publicizes his experience with evil and vice as an inevitable prior condition to his regeneration. By conflating a version of individual spiritual regeneration with this secular, chronological development, Gascoigne is able to exploit the religious implications of being reformed. Stressing reformation over consistency, he grafts Protestant ideology onto the classical and epistolary ideal of comeliness in speech and behavior.

Gascoigne begins his next letter “To al young Gentlemen, and generally to the youth of England” with a sound strategy for securing their goodwill. First, he adduces a shared heritage: “Gallant Gentlemen, and lustie youthes of this my native Countrey.” This minimal link established, he then acknowledges the purpose of his letter: he is publishing the

Posies and rymes as I used in my youth, the which for the barbarousness of the stile may seeme worthlesse. … So that men may justly both condemne me of rashnesse, and wonder at my simplicitie in suffering or procuring the same to be imprinted.

1:9

As Gascoigne states it, the condemnation of his youthful verses on charges of “barbarousness of the stile” and the criticism of his rashness and simplicity in deciding to republish them—these are charges amounting to a condemnation of the ethos and style of a young man. Gascoigne's strategy, in this first paragraph, is to align his writing with the style typical of “lustie youthes.”

By the time Gascoigne confronts his accusers, he has subtly articulated the likeness of his ethos with that of his letter's recipient. Gascoigne never neglects this constructed sense of ethical similarity, and his terms of address—“lustie yonkers,” “my good gallants,” “my lustie Gallants,” “my yong blouds”—become increasingly colloquial, even possessive as the letter progresses. Having gained through accommodation some measure of goodwill, Gascoigne takes on his critics, dividing them into three sorts: “curious Carpers, ignorant Readers, and grave Philosophers” (1:10). Gascoigne doth “but very little esteeme the two first.” The “curious Carpers” do not comprehend the very concept of artistic decorum. Such a person “(being a simple Sowter) will finde fault at the shape of the legge: or if they be not there stopped, they wil not spare to step up higher, and say, that Apelles paynted Dame Venus verie deformed or evill favoured” (1:10-11). Apelles's painting of Venus was often invoked in discussions of artistic representation of divine excellence in human form. But Gascoigne combines this standard of artistic achievement with a proverb ascribed to Apelles by Pliny, “Let a shoemaker stick to his last,” reenforcing his argument that his critics lack the informed understanding upon which negative judgments, especially, must be based.⁷⁵ They “woulde seeme to see verie farre in a Mylstone.” The spatial metaphor helps to underscore the absence of proportionality and measuredness.⁷⁶ Next, the “ignorant Readers” misunderstand literary conventions and generic decorum. They fail to see that Gascoigne's “areignment and divorce of a Lover” was written “in jest,” that the debate between “maister Churchyard and Camell” was written as an allegory, and that “the noble Erle of Surrey” could assume the guise of a “Shepeherd” thanks to generic convention (1:11). “[T]hey take Chalke for Cheese,” wanting credit for being perceptive while poorly appraising contrary substances.⁷⁷

Gascoigne deals with these first two sorts of critics rather brusquely, quite as a lusty youth might. He allegorizes them and exaggerates their cavils; he acts as if he is sharing a joke with his friends: “Laugh not at this (lustie yonkers)” (1:11). He is less cavalier with the “grave Philosophers,” who find “just fault in [Gascoigne's] doings at the common infection of love” (1:11). The issue is one of propriety, morality, and poetic irresponsibility:

They wysely considering that wee are all in youth more apt to delight in harmefull pleasures, than to digest wholesome and sounde advice, have thought meete to forbid the publishing of any ryming tryfles which may serve as whetstones to sharpen youth unto vanities.

1:11-12

In his own defense, Gascoigne invokes first the ideal of natural variety and then the excuse of decorum. Perhaps his poems enjoyed particular favor among youths and perhaps his poems stirred “in all yong Readers a venemous desire of vanitie.” Conceding these points, Gascoigne nevertheless insists,

in all this discourse I see not proved, that either the Gardener is too blame which planteth his Garden full of fragrant flowers: neyther that planter to be dispraysed, which soweth all his beddes with seedes of wholesome herbes: neyther is that Orchard unfruitfull, which (under shew of sundrie weedes) hath medicinable playsters for all infirmities.

1:12

Gascoigne is using familiar metaphors. Images of natural botanical fecundity are as old as the rhetorical ideal of variety of thought and speech. Flowers and gardens appear as metaphors throughout the perennial debate over the relative superiority of art and nature. The medicinal analogy dates at least back to Plato's famous denunciation of rhetoric in the Gorgias.⁷⁸ In casting himself as a gardener, Gascoigne may have had Cicero's ideal orator in mind:

Nothing is more fruitful than the human mind, particularly one which has had the discipline of education. But just as fruitful and fertile fields produce not only crops but harmful weeds, so sometimes from these [topics] arguments are derived which are inconsequential, immaterial or useless. And unless the orator's judgment exercises a rigid selection among these, how can he linger and dwell on his strong points, or make the difficulties seem slight, or conceal what cannot be explained away, and even suppress it entirely, if feasible, or distract the attention of the audience, or bring up some other point which if brought forward can be established more easily than the one which he feels will stand in his way?⁷⁹

The role of discretion is prominent in both paragraphs. Faced with the variety of styles and argumentative strategies that occur naturally in the human mind, Cicero's orator needs the “rare judgment and great endowment” of discretion.⁸⁰ In De officiis, Cicero deems this process of decorous selection, the precondition to all discreet speech and behavior, to be one of four civic virtues. More pragmatically, “harmful weeds” impede the progress of a persuasive oration, they distract the audience, they distort the speaker's emphasis. “Rigid selection” must occur before the argument is laid out for an audience. Victoria Kahn contends that in

Cicero's view … the faculty of prudence is inseparable from the ideal practice of the orator. Both the orator and the prudent man are concerned with the domain of probability, and both know that they can only be effective in this domain by acting according to the rhetorical standard of decorum.⁸¹

Indecorum for Cicero is inexcusable; decorum for Gascoigne is the excuse. Gascoigne's gardener is all the more competent because he recognizes and utilizes nature's ineluctable variety. Decorum becomes less a matter of censorship and restraint than of targeting and accommodation. Gascoigne is being frugal and efficient by prescribing the most effective medicine for each type of reader. He enjoys the obvious advantage—the same one exploited by medieval notaries and Renaissance secretaries—of being able (or claiming to be able) to segregate his audience according to their psychological and spiritual needs. The “grave Philosophers” do not comprehend that, after this evaluation of an audience's needs has been made, a harmful matter prescribed decorously amounts to a virtuous action. “[A]s many weedes are right medicinable, so may you find in this none so vile or stinking, but that it hath in it some vertue if it be rightly handled” (1:13). All writing, if “rightly handled,” is edifying.⁸²

Gascoigne may have derived this view of poetry from Plutarch, who, in “On the Study of Poetry” from his Moralia, writes that poetry

is an imitation of the manners and lives of men, who are not perfect, pure, and irreproachable, but involved in passions, false opinions, and ignorance—though they often indeed improve themselves through their natural goodness.⁸³

Gascoigne shares Plutarch's conviction that all poetry which imitates properly can be instructive. Ugliness, Plutarch says, “cannot become beautiful, but imitation is commended if it achieves likeness, whether of a good or a bad object”; consequently, “we must accustom ourselves to commenting with confidence, and saying ‘wrong’ and ‘inappropriate’ as often as we say ‘right’ and ‘appropriate.’”⁸⁴ Young readers of poetry learn to recognize bad, and thus to avoid it in real life. In the course of representing his reformation, Gascoigne will depart from Plutarch. In the process of becoming a trustworthy guide for the proper study of poetry, Gascoigne presents himself as the “bad object” and, by adding Christian resonances to Plutarch's “ignorance” and “natural goodness,” he will insist that his moral ugliness can change and has changed.

Typically, then, Gascoigne does not claim to have excised offensive passages nor does he disavow his prodigal youth. Instead, he insists that at the time of their initial publication, these passages did not seem excessive.

For the most of them being written in my madnesse, might have yeelded then more delight to my frantike fansies to see them published, than they now do accumulate cares in my minde to set them forth corrected: and a deformed youth had bene more likely to set them to sale long sithence, than a reformed man can be able now to protect them with simplicitie.

1:13

Gascoigne's willingness to set forth “corrected” verses composed during his “deformed youth” actually proves that he is a “reformed man.” Throughout the prefatory epistles, Gascoigne deftly manipulates the multiple valences of the word “form” and its various cognates. In the Prologue to The Glasse of Government, Gascoigne posits the same antithesis in the same terms, although here the subject is genre and style, not moral identity. Contrasting sixteenth-century didactic literature to satiric drama in ancient Rome, he states:

Deformed shews were then esteemed much,
Reformed speeche doth now become us best,
Mens wordes muste weye and tryed be by touche
Of Gods owne worde, wherein the truth doth rest.

2:6

“Reformed speeche” is decorous and persuasive because it conforms to and is measured by the eternal truth found in God's Word. But this reformation can proceed by approximation or “touche” and not by any mathematical formulas or logical syllogism. In like manner, propriety of form bolsters the didactic claims of moral art and the moral artist. In Gascoigne's Posies, a reader and potential employer “may finde great diversitie both in stile and sense, so may the good bee incouraged to set mee on worke at last, though it were noone before I sought service” (1:14). Gascoigne repeatedly connects the praise of diversity with pleas for employment, thereby transforming past sins into future rhetorical success.

In the course of these epistles, the breadth of his experience, his poem's “diversitie both in stile and sense” and the didactic capabilities of his “Floures, Hearbes, and Weedes” take on a moral as well as ethical dimension. As we have seen, the sophistical method of arguing on each side of an issue, for which rhetoric was often condemned, not only entitles one to know of flowers and weeds, but to exploit this knowledge in argumentation. The fact that “both qualities belong to one and the same writer,” and the proximity of deception to truth and vice to virtue, led Gascoigne to elevate lived experience as a vital faculty to adjudicate between opposites. Thomas Sloane has discovered an iconographic connection during the Renaissance between fraud as Janus-faced rhetoric (which looks in opposing directions with its two heads) and prudence as a multi-faced, multi-generational portrait of one person (who looks forward eagerly in youth, backward sagely in old age, balancing both anticipation and reflection in the maturity of life).⁸⁵ Ascribed to one person and arranged chronologically, the styles that constitute the letter-writer's ethical capacity argue for the secretary's prudence: writing like a young person one day, an old person the next, the range of ethical impersonation spans the periods of an individual's intellectual development.

Even in his most apologetic moments, Gascoigne presents himself to potential employers in exactly the same fashion. For instance, in the dedicatory epistle to The Dromme of Doomes Day, Gascoigne relates how, heeding the advice of a friend who suggested that he take his spade to the ground of “either Devinitie or moral Philosophie,” he at last decided to take up “seryous travayle”:

And thereupon (not manye monethes since) tossyng and retossyng in my small Lybrarie, amongest some bookes which had not often felte my fyngers endes in xv. yeares before, I chaunced to light upon a small volumne skarce comely covered, and wel worse handled.

2:212

The Dromme, Gascoigne acknowledges, consists of translations, and this discovery in the library stands in for the “invention” that Gascoigne deemed so crucial to poetic process.⁸⁶ But the temporal progression of the passage circles back to Gascoigne's pre-poetic and pre-reformation stage. This “small volumne” is in fact something Gascoigne pored over (very thoroughly, it seems) some fifteen years earlier. Not exactly a new direction for Gascoigne. In the dedicatory epistle to The Tale of Hemetes the Heremyte, Gascoigne underscores the fact that he has translated the tale into four languages. Again, his emphasis is not on novelty or invention, but on form and decorum, on how the text is handled. (The “tossying and retossyng” of his library and the phrase “not often felte my fyngers” stress the repetitive and tactile nature of his task.) The book's physical condition exactly matches Gascoigne's moral condition: once “skarce comely,” it is made—thanks to some reforming by Gascoigne—into a decorous volume of moral instruction.

Thus, Gascoigne once again casts himself (or at least his reading habits) as an “olde babe,” returning to the texts of years gone by, but with the important difference that he can now handle or reform them more adeptly. Similarly, the chief difference between Gascoigne and the prefatory epistle's “lustie youthes” is that he is “a man of middle years; who hath to his cost experimented the vanities of youth, and perill passed them.” Gascoigne has experience. Experience, even immoral experience, turns out to be his greatest asset because examples are the best means of conveying a proper sense of decorum. Explaining his use of anecdotes of indecorous behavior to illustrate the virtues of decorum, Puttenham states: “I see no way so fit to enable a man truly to estimate of decencie as example.”⁸⁷ Contrasting examples to “a rable of scholastical precepts which be tedious,” Puttenham observes:

[O]lde memories are very profitable to the mind, and serve as a glasse to looke upon, and behold the vents of time, and more exactly to skan the trueth of every case that shall happen in the affairs of man. … In which respect it is alwaies said, one man of experience is wiser than tenne learned men, because of his long and studious observation and often trial.⁸⁸

Gascoigne often exhibited the powers of his memory: Gascoignes Memories consists of five poems that he composed extemporaneously after being given five different sententiae by five different friends (1:62-70). Each poem reveals Gascoigne's fertile wit, the numerous examples he can locate for each saying and also the decorum of style to subject he maintains in each case: “And thus this foolish jest, I put in dogrell rime, / Bicause a crosier staffe is best, for such a crooked time” (1:70). In The Glasse of Government, the schoolmaster Gnomaticus instructs his charges to “frame” his maxims on virtue and obedience in rhymed verse in order to “better imprint them in your memorie” (2:47). Gnomaticus's poetics savor of Gascoigne's: “terminations and ceasures,” that is, rhyme and meter, “serve for places of memorie, and help the mind with delight to carie burthens” (2:47-48). Gascoigne's and Puttenham's praise of the didactic superiority of “trial” and thus of memory reveals one inherent paradox in the application of decorum in writing, speech, and behavior. Although decorum rests upon abstract principles of order and harmony, although it had often been reduced to “scholastical precepts” such as formulaic salutations, without experience or instruction by example this conceptual understanding proves hopelessly inadequate. In this vein, Lawrence Manley argues that

like the moral and political arts, the arts of speech in sixteenth-century England witnessed the gradual displacement of the criterion of natural fitness by the idea that rectitude arises from the often arbitrary and unpredictable character of experience engendered by the power of human habit.⁸⁹

Gascoigne tries to convince the “grave Philosophers” that, while natural variety in and of itself may not be virtuous or fit, variety coupled with experience gives rise to an understanding of proportion and decorousness. Using this logic, Gascoigne arrogates moral authority on the premise that whoever has the most experience being indecorous is the best negative or cautionary example of decorous behavior. Hence, Gascoigne foists the responsibility for the use of his poems onto his young admirers. Any unfortunate consequences remain solely the fault of the student reader: “Beware therefore, lustie Gallants, how you smell to these Posies.” “Make me your myrrour,” he commands (1:14). In doing so, he strengthens the epistolary sense of ethical identification and poetic presentness or enargia to such an extent that he embodies the period's speculum malorum literature. He is at once appealing to the sympathy of a friend (“Please behave, I really need a job”) and underscoring the experiential differences between them.

Gascoigne further manipulates the logical connections between moral reformation, ethical accommodation, and decorous speech in the last prefatory epistle to The Posies, “To the Readers generally a generall advertisement of the Authour.” He faces the obvious challenge of capturing goodwill and demonstrating ethical credibility without being able to conform his argument and style to the particular psychological needs of his audience. This “advertisement” lacks some distinguishing formal characteristics of the other two epistles, notably salutational terms of address and the valedictory phrase, like “From my poore house at Walthamstow in the Forest the second of Januarie. 1575.” This type of valediction seems to signal the spatial and temporal distance that separates the recipient from the writer and that underscores the spiritual meeting of the minds that a letter is meant to achieve. The simple “Farewell” with which this last letter ends suggests that Gascoigne is not as far from his audience as in the other letters. His need to bridge this communicative space depends less on artful self-presentation than on the recognition of a condition shared by all of humankind, namely a depraved, postlapsarian spiritual estate. This is the common denominator—the need to be saved and to be persuaded to do good—and it is in this context that Gascoigne fully integrates Christian theology with epistolary decorum.

Gascoigne starts by adducing biblical warrants for the epistolary mercurial self. From Romans, he cites Paul's statement that “All that is written is written for our instruction” (1:15). This text bolsters the whole of Gascoigne's argument. Gascoigne fancies himself the humanist bee gathering literary nectar from all sorts of flora, all of which yield some positive didactic nectar. A bit later, he elaborates:

I am of opinion, that in every thing which is written (the holy scriptures excepted) there are to be founde wisedome, follie, emulation, and detraction. For as I never saw any thing so clerkly handled, but that therein might be found some imperfections: So coulde I never yet reade fable so ridiculous but that therein some morallitie might be gathered.

1:16

According to this humanist position, all writing is flawed but all writing also contains some “morallitie.” It is the reader's (or schoolmaster's) responsibility to gather it. But it is also the writer's responsibility to assist in the gathering through decorous accommodation. At the very beginning of the letter, Gascoigne again relies on Paul to prove the propriety of ethical accommodation for evangelical purposes.

[Paul] could (as it were) transform himself into all professions, therby to winne all kinde of men to God: saying that with the Jewes he became a Jew: with them that were under the law, he seemed also under the lawe: with the feeble, he shewed himselfe feeble. And to conclude, he became all things to all men, to the ende that hee might thereby winne some to salvation.⁹⁰

1:15

In addition to 1 Corinthians 9, Gascoigne could have also invoked St. Augustine, who, in his famous defense of Christian rhetoric in book 4 of On Christian Doctrine, asserts: “A certain kind of eloquence is more fitting for youth, and another is more becoming for old age; so much so that we should not call it eloquence if it is not appropriate for the person of the speaker.”⁹¹ The testimony of two of the Christian church's most famous converts and of the Reformation's central apostolic and patristic authorities demonstrates that “all is one if [the preacher] prove readie and well mouthed.” In case their examples seem too sacrosanct for him to imitate, Gascoigne notes the currency of this method of accommodating one's audience in Renaissance pedagogy. After mentioning the tactics employed by his “Schoolemaster”—“some schollers he woonne to studie by strypes, some other by fayre means, some by promises, some other by prayses, some by vainglorie, and some by verie shame”—Gascoigne concludes: “But I never hard him repent him that ever he had persuaded any schollar to become studious, in what sort soever it were that he woonne him” (1:15). The pedagogical ends justify the rhetorical means. One senses Gascoigne smarting a bit here: Paul was “all things to all men” and his “Schoolemaster” was “readie and well mouthed.” Why should Gascoigne alone be condemned for accommodating his audience?

In the rest of this brief letter, Gascoigne rehearses many of the same stock humanist arguments that he advances in the two previous epistles. He insists throughout that his goal has been to capture goodwill: “I have not ment heerein to displease any man, but my desire hath rather bene to content most men” (1:16). This statement shows Gascoigne self-consciously presenting himself and his abilities to potential employers. The nuanced repetition of his motives, not “to displease any man,” but “to content most men” (the figure is, in Puttenham's terms, an antitheton) alerts us to Gascoigne's desire both to appease the individual reader and, from the vantage point of someone surveying all of his works, to “frame him self” to a heterogeneous readership. This desire to accommodate his particular and general audience involves providing “the divine with godly Hymnes and Psalmes, the sober minde with morall discourse, and the wildest will with sufficient warning” (1:16). Gascoigne's poetic garden contains the remedy for all types of spiritual ills.

But, departing from Cicero, he insists that he not only knows these remedies, he has also tested them on himself throughout the course of his spiritual development. He sees no shame in owning up to the “wildest will” of his youth, nor to the fact that he has had to re-edit the poems produced during that period.

And by that it proceedeth, I have so often chaunged my Posie or worde. … And yet (as you see) I am not verie daungerous to lay my selfe wide open in view of the worlde. I have also sundrie tymes chaunged mine owne worde or devise. And no marvaile: For he that wandereth much in those wildernesses, shall seldome continue long in one minde.

1:17

Gascoigne is not exactly standing naked before God, but he is presenting himself to the judgment of his readers—“wide open in view of the worlde”—in a similar fashion: unabashed by his sinfulness and by his inconsistency, for, as he continues, “it were follie to bewayle things which are unpossible to be recovered, sithence Had-I-wist doth seldome serve as a blasone of good understanding.” With the biblical metaphor of wandering in the wilderness Gascoigne adds a spiritual dimension to his desire to negotiate the distance between himself and his readers, between his past and his future. Gascoigne finds the experience of the journey more edifying than its end because it appeals to more people, expresses more states of ethical and moral development. The self-knowledge required by decorum entails, for Gascoigne, a recognition of his wanton past; but, rather than concealing this past, he converts it into evidence of his ethical and now moral capacity, his ability to capture the goodwill of his audience by reforming himself to accommodate its ethical and moral needs. In making himself morally present and visible, he makes himself rhetorically useful.

To return briefly, then, to the original question of Gascoigne's sincerity: If he is being insincere, he is doing so in a complex, principled way. He can, at the very least, appeal to decorum to justify his poetic deviance, ethical capacity, professional ambitions, and even moral deficiencies; he can cite Beza and Paul as models; he can, it seems, lay himself “wide open in view of the worlde” and still be assured not only of his own spiritual estate but of his merit as a potential employee. Gascoigne does not claim to have experienced a conversion in the Pauline sense of being struck blind by God. His conversion occurs over time. Still, it is not his moral substance but his moral “form” and its prefixes—its “con-,” “de-,” and “re-”—that change. In these epistles and throughout his work, Gascoigne configures his humanist beliefs about decorum so that they operate consistently within literary, ethical, professional, and even moral discourses. He tracks in himself the moral development of Erasmus and Day's mercurial secretary. If his arguments are not brilliant, they are deployed in a thorough and ingenious fashion. And if Gascoigne can so completely integrate decorum into every facet of literary self-presentation, perhaps sincerity is too much, or simply the wrong thing, to demand.

Notes

1. C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1942), especially 78-84. All of the facts and dates about Gascoigne's life come from Prouty's biography. See also Ronald C. Johnson, George Gascoigne (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972).

2. George Gascoigne, Complete Works, ed. J. W. Cunliffe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907; reprinted New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), 1:3. All subsequent quotations of Gascoigne's work from this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text with volume and page number.

3. For a discussion of these revisions, see Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), chapter 3. Also see Felicity A. Hughes, “Gascoigne's Posies” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 37.9 (1997): 1-19. Hughes's interesting article came out too late for me to address it fully. Her thesis is that the “supposedly expurgated volume of 1575 is no ‘cleaner’ than the first and that it represents an attempt to brazen it out with the censors rather than placate them.” On this readings, it seems, Gascoigne's attitudes towards revising resemble those of Theodore Beza (see note 74 below), who bases his argument, at least, on a strong sense of decorum, that is, that certain kinds of writing are invariably appropriate in certain venues, for certain audiences, and by certain authors. Hughes's reading also accords, I think, with my argument that Gascoigne has a vested professional and moral interest in not hiding or erasing his past misadventures.

4. I use this term advisedly. Prouty insists that Gascoigne was an agent of Burghley's, not an ambassador. He rejects G. Ambrose's argument (made in “George Gascoigne,” Review of English Studies 2 [1926]: 168) to the contrary. Ambrose's claim is based on the letters that Gascoigne sent to Burghley and on “A Catalogue of English Ambassadors in Foreign Countries” found in a manuscript in the British Museum. Gascoigne's involvement in the affairs described in the letters is indeed limited to simple reportage. Upon whose authority he is included in the “Catalogue” I have not been able to discern. Nonetheless, Gascoigne's persistent pleas for employment all express a hope for more active participation in governmental affairs. The possibility that Gascoigne's office did not meet his expectations (at least by the time of his early death) is in keeping with the profound and often ironic sense of disappointment so frequently articulated in his work.

5. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 50.

6. Prouty, George Gascoigne, 83-84.

7. Helgerson explains the decision of so many writers in this period to turn from amorous, youthful verse to more serious, adult literary production (or to simple inactivity): “If the player speaks more lines or other lines than are set down for him, even if they win him some brief applause, he will eventually be regarded and will perhaps eventually regard himself with contempt. And if the play contains another part which allows him to express his repentance, he may well claim it as his own,” Elizabethan Prodigals, 4. See Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). For the supposed link between “histrionic impersonation” and Thomas More's sense of self, see Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chapter 1.

8. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 112-13; see also Charles W. Smith, “Structural and Thematic Unity in Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F. J.,” Papers on Language and Literature 2 (1966): 99-108.

9. Jane Hedley, “Allegoria: Gascoigne's Master Trope,” English Literary Renaissance 11.2 (1981): 152; Daniel Javitch, “The Impure Motives of Elizabethan Poetry” Genre 15.1-2 (1982): 229, 231; and Richard C. McCoy, “Gascoigne's ‘Poemata castrata’: The Wages of Courtly Success” Criticism 27.1 (1985): 32-33. Helgerson's emphasis on “histrionics” ill-suits Gascoigne: he was never really on center-stage at court (and when he was, he did not excel; see McCoy, 29-30). Furthermore, Javitch's distinction between courtly and oratorical proficiency effectively precludes the possibility of demonstrating rhetorical or epistolary proficiency. Gascoigne is endlessly requesting employment for his “pen” and he thought of himself very much as a writer. Hence, we need not doubt Gascoigne when he says he is publishing his writing and advertising his argumentative skills in the hopes of gaining employment (as opposed to simple preferment).

10. Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 161.

11. Seminal studies in the growing body of criticism that connects decorum to “social tropes” of courtly deference and dissembling include Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), and Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

12. For Gascoigne's plain style, see Yvor Winters, Forms of Discovery (Denver: Swallow Press, 1967), 15-19.

13. My understanding of medieval and Renaissance epistolography is derived primarily from: James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Ronald Witt, “Medieval ‘Ars Dictaminis’ and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New Construction of the Problem,” Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982): 1-35; and the many articles by Judith Rice Henderson, especially “Defining the Genre of the Letter: Juan Luis Vives's De conscribendis epistolis,” Renaissance and Reformation 7.2 (1983): 89-105; “Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing,” in Renaissance Eloquence, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and “Erasmian Ciceronians: Reformation Teachers of Letter-Writing,” Rhetorica 10.3 (1993). I have also benefited from the introductions to the various letter-writing manuals I will discuss.

14. Rationes dictandi, trans. James J. Murphy, in Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1-26.

15. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 259.

16. Rationes dictandi, 17.

17. My understanding of decorum has been strongly influenced by Wesley Trimpi's brilliant reconstruction of its origins as an aesthetic principle in Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and its Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Throughout, I have borrowed much of Trimpi's vocabulary for talking about decorum. See also Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), especially 193-240. This essay is, in one sense, an attempt to understand how decorum as an aesthetic principle gets transformed into a rhetoric imperative.

18. Thomas Kranidas, The Fierce Equation: A Study of Milton's Decorum (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 16.

19. Witt, “Medieval ‘Ars Dictaminis’ and the Beginnings of Humanism,” 12.

20. Aristotle, The Rhetoric of Aristotle 1414a, trans. Lane Cooper (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1932), 219.

21. Juan Luis Vives, De conscribendis epistolis (1536), trans. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 45.

22. Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis, trans. Charles Fantazzi, Collected Works of Erasmus 25 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 76. On the use of Erasmus's De conscribendis epistolis as a school text in England, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Less Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), chapter 38.

23. Erasmus, ibid., 74-75.

24. Witt, “Medieval ‘Ars Dictaminis’ and the Beginnings of Humanism,” 31.

25. Henderson, “Defining the Genre of the Letter: Juan Luis Vives's De conscribendis epistolis,” 93.

26. Quoted in Witt, “Medieval ‘Ars Dictaminis’ and the Beginnings of Humanism,” 29.

27. Erasmus, De conscribendis, 12. I should point out that, for pedagogical reasons, Erasmus does accept the traditional division of letters into the deliberative, judicial, demonstrative, and (the Renaissance's contribution) familiar types. He also adds to these four the scholarly letter, but his purpose in maintaining these definitions is solely heuristic.

28. Angel Day, The English Secretorie, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston, England: Scolar Press Limited, 1967), sig. A3r.

29. Erasmus, De conscribendis, 20.

30. Ibid.

31. Vives, De conscribendis, 20.

32. Day, The English Secretorie, A1r-v.

33. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 262.

34. Vives, De conscribendis, 29.

35. Ibid.

36. Day, The English Secretorie, A3r.

37. Ibid., B3v-B4r.

38. See, for example, Vives, De conscribendis, 29.

39. Kranidas, Fierce Equation, 24.

40. Vives, De conscribendis, 27.

41. Ibid., 35.

42. Ibid.

43. Kranidas, Fierce Equation, 35.

44. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.11.30, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1921-22). Martin Elsky discusses this notion in Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). See also Nan Johnson, “Ethos and the Aims of Rhetoric,” in Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, ed. Robert J. Connors et al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 98-114.

45. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 148.

46. Ibid., 149.

47. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 55.

48. Erasmus, De conscribendis, 19.

49. For Mercury's place in the Renaissance's “discourse of rhetoric,” see Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men's Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

50. Annabel M. Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 41. Other works exploring the nature of poetic decorum in the Elizabethan period include T. McAlindon, Shakespeare and Decorum (London: Macmillan Press, 1973); and Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947).

51. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 31.

52. Ibid., 43.

53. Erasmus, De conscribendis, 13.

54. Compare Horace's advice to writers of satire in his Satires 1.10: “You need a style which is sometimes severe, sometimes gay, now suiting the role of an orator or poet, now that of a clever talker who keeps his strength in reserve and carefully rations it out” (11-14). I quote from Horace, Satires and Epistles, trans. Niall Rudd, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).

55. Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance, 34.

56. Erasmus, De conscribendis, 19-20, italics added.

57. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 204.

58. Judith Rice Henderson, “On Reading the Rhetoric of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance-Rhetorik/Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 158, 155. On the rhetoric of humanist letter collections, see also Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

59. On Gascoigne's preference for the epistolary form, see Gordon Charles Harvey, “‘My Maistre & C.’: The Rhetoric of Epistolary Verse from Chaucer to Jonson” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1988), chapter 7. Harvey notes helpfully that Erasmus, in De ratione studii (1511), recommends that, aside from being trained in the various types of letters by using classical models, “students ‘should be regularly instructed to turn verse into prose and at different times prose into verse’” (216). (In The Glasse of Government, Gascoigne would have Phylomusus and Phylotimus memorize and assimilate Gnomaticus's precepts by putting them into rhymed verse, 2:54-58.) Harvey also argues that Gascoigne does not seem to have been influenced by classical, Horatian models of epistolary verse (253).

60. Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, ed. Charles T. Prouty, University of Missouri Studies 17 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1942), 51.

61. Susan C. Staub, “‘According to my source …’: Fictionality in The Adventures of Master F. J.,” Studies in Philology 87.1 (1990): 111-19.

62. Flowers, ed. Prouty, 53.

63. Angel Day's second, expanded edition of his English Secretorie (1599) reveals the tension between thinking of a secretary as a trusted, intimate friend (Day goes on at length about the “secret” and intimate nature of the employer-secretary relationship) and of a secretary as loyal servant (Day also narrates a heroic tale of a self-sacrificing secretary). The gender implications of the secretary's employment by Elynor are quite intriguing. Gascoigne wrote several poems with a female persona. One might think here of the hermaphrodite “Satyra” in The Steele Glas and of Gascoigne's description of his revised poems as “Poemata castrata.”

64. Hedley, “Allegoria,” 153. For Javitch, the poem “is an appeal for patronage not simply based on its subtle disclosure of the speaker's integrity, but by its implication that the speaker's masterful use of allegoria to make such veiled pleas on his behalf could be equally employed to advance the patron's own interests,” (“Impure Motives,” 231).

65. Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. J. A. Giles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 247. See Thomas M. Greene, “Roger Ascham: The Perfect End of Shooting,” English Literary Renaissance 36.4 (1969): 609-25. Aristotle uses terms from archery to discuss poetic and ethical decorum. See Janel Mueller, “The Mastery of Decorum: Politics and Poetics in Milton's Sonnets,” Critical Inquiry 13.3 (1987): 488.

66. Hedley, “Allegoria,” 155.

67. For the centrality of paradoxes to Reformation theology, see Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

68. Revised Standard Version. Elsewhere, Gascoigne achieves the same effect, again with distinctly Christian overtones: In the epilogue to The Glasse of Government, Gascoigne distinguishes between the man “Who falles on his face, [and] hath elbowes hands and all, / To save himselfe, and therewith eke to rise” and the man who falls on his back and “cannot rise againe in any wise” (2:89). Ironically, by reverting back to his infancy in the last lines of the “Woodmanship,” Gascoigne falls forward towards a second youth. He shows himself ever ready to rise and to be of use.

69. In his detailed structural analysis of “Gascoignes good morrow” and “Gascoygnes good night,” Roy T. Eriksen explains that many of Gascoigne's companion poems trace out a Christian narrative of “creation and salvation” and “imitate God's plan of regeneration”; Roy T. Eriksen, “Two into One: The Unity of George Gascoigne's Companion Poems,” Studies in Philology 81.3 (1984): 275-76. This structural pattern is also evident in the “Lover” poems, which proceed from an “anatomie” to a “divorce” to a “recantation.” In these companion poems, Gascoigne underscores the breadth of his experience, which is both progressive and cumulative. Even in individual poems, he deploys the rhetoric of authority derived from, not diminished by, conflict or contradiction. In his amorous poems, this rhetorical strategy takes the form of a Petrarchan lover who is healed and hurt, who lives and dies, who burns and freezes by the same stimulus and at the same time. But Gascoigne uses very much the same rhetorical strategy when redressing social ills or when discussing his own life. Nancy Williams has argued that Gascoigne was one of the first English writers to structure a poetic satire according to the guidelines of classical oratory. See Nancy Williams, “The Eight Parts of a Theme in ‘Gascoignes Memories: III,’” Studies in Philology 83.2 (1986): 117-37. Medieval satire operates by accretion: the satirist accumulates examples, piles them one on top of another (Gascoigne himself would use this form in long sections of The Steele Glas). But many of Gascoigne's poems conform to oratorical models that include division, refutation, and recapitulation. Williams is exactly right when she says that this “technical discovery” can be a “spiritual discovery” because, as in his “Woodmanship,” Gascoigne typically takes up his own life, his own moral shortcomings in much the same manner. He refutes his youth, but he never fails to address it. Only then is his self-presentation properly formed and illustrative of his rhetorical skills.

70. Ascham, English Works, 209-10.

71. Ibid., 214-15.

72. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 34.

73. Compare John the Baptist's prophecy in Matt. 3:12 and Luke 3:17.

74. Dogged by criticism from French Catholics and Protestants alike, Beza eventually renounced his juvenilia. His defense of his licentious verse rested upon Catullus's poem 16: “For the sacred poet ought to be chaste himself, though his poems need not be so,” “nam castum esse decet pium poetam / ipsum, verisulos nihil necessest,” Catullus, Tibullus, and the Pervigilium Veneris, ed. and trans. Francis Warre Cornish, Loeb Classical Library, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 22-23. See Kirk Summers, “Theodore Beza's Reading of Catullus,” Classical and Modern Literature 15.3 (1995). Beza, however, does not seem to have used the term “castrata,” which probably comes from Martial's epigram 1.35.14-15: “and don't try to emasculate my little books. There's nothing uglier than a neutered Priapus,” “nec castrare velis meos libellos. / gallo turpius est nihil Priapo,” Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), vol. 1, 64-65. Gascoigne may be making a bad pun on “castum” and “castrare.” I would like to thank Professor Summers for his help in tracking down these citations. For Beza's role in reforming the English church, see C. M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

75. For the anecdote about Apelles and the shoemaker and the genesis of the proverb “Ne sutor ultra crepidam,” see Pliny, Natural History 35.36.85, trans. H. Rackham, 11 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), vol. 9. It is perhaps not insignificant that Apelles had redone his painting after the shoemaker criticized Apelles's representation of the subject's sandals. Only when the shoemaker went higher did Apelles rebuke him. I would like to thank Professor Joshua Scodel for steering me to this passage. On Apelles in discussions of artistic representation, see Trimpi, Muses of One Mind, 143-62.

76. This phrase too has biblical echoes, especially of seeing the motes in others' eyes but not the beam in one's own, Matt 7:3-4 and Luke 6:41-2.

77. Compare Stephen Gosson's use of this phrase in his attack on his own hypocritical detractors: “and I looke for some like auditors in my Schoole, as of rancour will hit me, howsoever I warde, or of stomake assaile mee, how soever I bee garded; making black of white, chalke of cheese, the full moone of a messe of cruddes”; Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (1579), reprinted in Early Treatises on the Stage (Piccadilly: The Shakespeare Society, 1853), 7.

78. On the garden metaphor, see Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), chapter 1; and Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); on the physician metaphor, see Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), chapter 1.

79. Cicero, Orator 15.48-49, in Orator, Brutus, ed. and trans. H. M. Hubbell and G. L. Hendrickson. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

80. Ibid., 20.70.

81. Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance, 41.

82. Handling for Gascoigne connotes not just skill but repeated use and manual familiarity. Compare line 111 of “Gascoignes Woodmanship” in which he complains about “some that never handled such a bow” but who still hit the targets he misses. The idea of handling is important to Gascoigne's habit of thinking of poems and persons alike as reformable and virtuous because reformed. It seems to embrace both the medieval notion, to use the title of Robert Mannyng's fourteenth-century confession manual, of “handlying synne,” which instructed Christians on how to articulate and expiate their sins; and (although Gascoigne does not seem to have followed it) the Horatian notion (“versate diu,” Ars poetica 39) that the poet, like a craftsman, should refine and polish his poems before presenting them to the public.

83. Plutarch, “On the Study of Poetry,” trans. D. A. Russell, in Ancient Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 527. Sir Thomas Elyot advances similar arguments in The Boke Named the Governour, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), chapters 10 and 13.

84. Plutarch, ibid., 513, 527.

85. Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), chapter 1.

86. Gascoigne begins his Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse by asserting: “The first and most necessarie poynt that ever I founde meet to be considered in making of a delectable poeme is this, to grounde it upon some fine invention,” 2:465.

87. Puttenham, Art of English Poesie, 263. On Puttenham's didactic use of examples, see Victoria Kahn, “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

88. Puttenham, ibid., 264.

89. Lawrence Manley, Convention, 1500-1750 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 139.

90. For Paul's decorum, see Erasmus, Ecclesiastes, in Opera omnia 5.4-5 (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1969), 64-68.

91. Quoted in Kranidas, Fierce Equation, 26.