[In this essay, Eriksen examines the typological form of “Gascoignes De Profundis,” lauding its innovative qualities.]

Gascoigne's translation of the penitential Psalm 130 provides an early and hitherto unnoticed example of an attentiveness to typological shape and pattern that we more readily associate with George Herbert, or in a rather more rudimentary form with the metrical psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney. As Louis L. Martz has observed, ‘Sidney's translation of the Psalms represents … the closest approximation to the poetry of Herbert's Temple that can be found anywhere in the preceding English poetry’, an observation which was qualified somewhat when John Rathmell pointed out that Martz's ‘remark applies equally well to his sister's share in the work’.¹ It is the aim of this article to argue that Gascoigne's employment of a complex eleven-line stanza with an artful pattern of long and short lines is not simply the product of ‘curious’ art: this particular pattern is to be related to a contemporary mode of rhetorical and numerological composition and to the view put forward by St. Augustine that Psalm 130 (Vulgata 129) is designed to enact, as it were, the re-establishment of concord between the despairing sinner and a merciful God.

George Gascoigne (1539-77) was an innovator in nearly everything he turned to. His list of merits is long: he wrote the first English novel, he translated the first Greek tragedy into English, he wrote the first English prose play, he composed the first treatise on English metre, and so on. His poetry is equally innovatory, although its quality varies almost as often as his stanza forms and rhyme schemes. In spite of his important role as a pioneer, it is regrettable that Ronald C. Johnson's words are still valid: ‘Of all the writers of the sixteenth century, George Gascoigne … is perhaps the least understood and is certainly the most underrated’.² And though it is true that Gascoigne's contribution to the English novel has been more adequately appreciated in recent years, his poetry is still greatly underestimated.³

‘Invention’ is the keyword behind all of Gascoigne's literary endeavours and it is especially true of his poetry. He opens his discussion of poetry in Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English by stating that

The first and most necessarie poynt that ever I founde meete to be cōsidered in making of a delectable poeme is this, to grounde it upon some fine invention.⁴

The term ‘invention’ as Gascoigne employs it here relates not merely to a theme or a conceit, but to an entity which combines both theme and form. We will see this when reading Gascoigne's caution against ‘rime without reason’. ‘My meaning’, he writes, ‘is hereby that your rime leade you not from your first Invention, for many wryters when they have layed the platforme of their invention, are yet drawen sometimes (by ryme) to forget it, …’ (my italics).⁵ If we understand him correctly, every invention (or theme) is first to receive a form (or platforme) which is capable of expressing its inner rationale. This is the very same impulse that we find reflected in the incredibly rich variety of stanza forms of the ‘Sydneian psalmes’,⁶ or indeed in the stanza form of ‘Gascoignes De Profundis’.

The stanzaic pattern he decided on for Psalm 130 consists of eight iambic pentameters, two iambic dimeters, and a concluding iambic pentameter (10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-4-4-10)—eleven verses in all. Gascoigne was obviously pleased with his invention, judging by the fact that he used it in three different poems and also by his own somewhat self-important gloss on it:

This Ballade, or howsoever I shall terme it, … hath great good store of deepe invention, and for the order of the verse, it is not common, I have not heard any of like proporcion. …⁷

In the case of ‘Gascoignes De Profundis’, this kind of ‘uncommon’ proportion anticipates what George Puttenham later was to term ‘ocular proporcion’, which arises when a poet ‘by his measures and concordes of sundry proportions doth counterfait the harmonicall tunes of … Musickes’,⁸ but Gascoigne also exploits other types of rhetorical schemes when devising his ‘deepe invention’. An initial sign of his intention to employ special artifice is given in a prefatory sonnet,⁹ where he promises to ‘frame’ his weary Muses ‘To write some verse in honour of [God's] name’ (12-13). (To ‘frame’ here means to invent an artful metrical and stanzaic pattern.) Despite the occasional infelicities of Gascoigne's unashamedly simple and homely diction, the highly conscious artifice of this pattern is already evident in the psalm's opening stanzas:

1.

From depth of doole wherein my soule doth dwell,
From heavy heart which harbours in my brest,
From troubled sprite which sildome taketh rest,
From hope of heaven, from dreade of darksome hell,
O gracious God, to thee I crye and yell.
My God, my Lorde, my lovelye Lord aloane,
To thee I call, to thee I make my moane.
And thou (good God) vouchsafe in gree to take,
This woefull plaint,
Wherein I faint.
Oh heare me then for thy great mercies sake.
Oh bend thine eares attentively to heare,
Oh turne thine eyes, behold me how I wayle,
Oh hearken Lord, give eare for mine availe,
O marke in mind the burdens that I beare:
See howe I sink in sorrowes everye where,
Beholde and see what dollors I endure,
Give eare and mark what plaintes I put in ure.
Bende wylling eare: and pittie therewithall,
My wayling voyce
Which hath no choyce,
But evermore upon thy name to call.

(1-22)

The first indication that Gascoigne did indeed desire to ‘frame’ his verse is the use of anaphora in the opening lines (1-4 and 12-15), the many alliterations (‘depth of doole … soule doth dwell’ [1]); ‘From hope of heaven, from dreade of darksome hell’ [4]), and the unusual stanza form. The anaphoric opening may have been suggested by Wyatt's thrice repeated ‘from’ (1-3) in initial position which characterizes the first terzina in his version of the psalm:

From depth of sinne and from a diepe dispaire,
From depthe off deth, from depth off hartes sorow,
From this diepe Cave off darknes diepe repayre,
The have I cald o lord to be my borow

(664-7)¹⁰

The particular stanza form which Gascoigne chose may on the other hand have been inspired by Italian experiments with extended sonnets, as practised for example by Ariosto and Tasso. The latter's spiritual dialogue ‘Dove rivolgi, o lusinghier fallace’ consists of four quatrains, where each displays the same variation between eleven and eight-syllable verses (11-8-8-11). In two instances the reduction in verse length and the subsequent return to a full hendecasyllable emphasize the expressed idea of changed appearances (9-11 and 15-16): thus the ideas of transformation (‘Deh mutiamo sembianti’) and of dying (‘Hoggi languisce, e more’) coincide with the shorter couplets.¹¹ In this manner Tasso introduces into his devotional poetry formal effects which earlier poets like Ariosto and Tansillo had exploited in their love lyrics. The rhyme-scheme, the introductory sonnet, and the variation between long and short lines in Gascoigne's psalms all suggest that he, too, was familiar with these formal effects.

The surprising and clever use of the dimeter couplets (e.g. 9-10 and 19-20) is further evidence of his concern with such invention. Gascoigne uses the radical reduction in verse length to emphasize what the words say. When the poet speaks of fainting (9-10), the verses, too, fail to reproduce the full pentameter pattern established in the first eight lines. However, when he invokes God's ‘great mercies’ (11, my italics) in the first stanza's concluding line, Gascoigne appropriately re-establishes the full pentameter as a kind of prosodic tribute to God's greatness. Similar instances of mimetic verse manipulation occur also in the second, sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas.

Gascoigne's choice of an eleven-line stanza seems a highly conscious one, judging by the connotations of this number and by its implicit connection with Psalm 130 (Psalm 129 in The Vulgate). In the standard Renaissance handbook on the meaning of numbers in Scripture, Mysticae numerorum significatione liber (1585), Pietro Bongo explains that eleven ‘is said to be the number of sinners and penitents’ (my trans.).¹² The basis of this interpretation, he tells us, is Psalm 11 and Psalm 129 (in The Vulgate), the latter being the eleventh psalm of degrees.¹³ Bongo quotes the authority of Augustine five times and Bede as many as six times in support of this attribution, but he also offers a purely mathematical explanation: Eleven is evil, he says, simply because it exceeds the perfect number ten.¹⁴

Gascoigne builds his eleven-verse stanza on the number of syllables in each line (pentameter and dimeter), so that each stanza consists of three unequal groups of eighty, eight, and ten syllables. These ‘harmonious’ numbers may be said to temper the disharmony implied by eleven. This kind of number lore seems pointless and even ludicrous today, but as many recent studies have shown numerological composition was a highly respected technique during the middle ages and in the Renaissance, particularly in religious poetry.¹⁵ Given the firm link between Psalm 130 and the number eleven in patristic thought, it is certain that some such numerological jeux d'ésprit are part of Gascoigne's ‘deep’ invention as he created this particular stanza. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Wyatt, too, chose a total of eleven units in his terza rima version of this psalm. But to put the balance right, we must not forget that Gascoigne used the same stanza and the same rhetorical effects in one of his most cheeky poems. In ‘A Mooneshine Banquet’ (8-11) he utilizes the variation in verse length to give added weight to the moon's ‘eclipse’, when F. J. narrates the moon's reaction to his mistress's beauty:

For when she spied my Ladies golden rayes,
Into the cloudes,
Hir head she shrouds,
And shamed to shine where she hir beames displayes.

(A Hundred Sundry Flowres, p. 236)

The concentration of such formal artifice in ‘Gascoignes De Profundis’ clearly indicates that we here witness a literary masterpiece in the original sense of the word, that is, a poem written in order to prove the poet's command of his medium. Gascoigne's acute attention to form seems curiously at odds with his studiously simple and often monosyllabic poetic diction.

Gascoigne was particularly fond of monosyllables and in his Certayne notes of Instruction he found it fit to ‘forewarne … that you thrust as few wordes of many sillables into your verse as may be’ (p. 468). ‘The more monasyllables that you use’, he continues, ‘the truer Englishman you shall seeme’, adding the view that ‘wordes of many syllables do cloye a verse’ (p. 469). This preference is apparent in ‘Gascoignes De Profundis’, where sixty-seven out of eighty-eight rhymewords are monosyllabic. The poem contains only three words of four syllables (all of non-‘English’ derivation). An obvious case is the occurrence of ‘contin(u)allye’ (coupled with the trisyllabic ‘co(n)fidence’) in stanza five:

My soule desires with thee to be plaste,
And to thy worde (which can no man deceyve)
Myne onely trust,
My love and lust
In co(n)fidence contin(u)allye shall cleave.

(51-5)

Following upon basically regular iambic verses, which as it were express by their rhythm (in the two dimeters in particular) the firm faith of the persona, the final verse expresses the idea of continual ascent. Its polysyllabic words could be said to deviate from the metrical and rhythmical pattern of the preceding, mainly monosyllabic, short lines. The idea of continuity is reinforced by the prominent alliterations in the final lines and perhaps also by the transitions from diphthongs and low-pitch vowels (in the dimeters) to a cluster of high-pitch vowels in the concluding pentameter. These elements all concur to form a striking pattern of metaphoric sound. The careful transitions from short to long verse, from iambics to a freer rhythm, from low to high pitch, prove that, at his best, Gascoigne was a master choreographer in full command of the ‘dance of his words’—to borrow Professor J. E. Stevens's happy phrase.¹⁶ Of course, Gascoigne does not surround all of his polysyllables with such artifice, but a lot can be said for his choice of ‘attentively’ (12) and of ‘plenteouslye’ (85), as well.

The psalm's final stanza presents a climactic example of Gascoigne's rhetorical skill. This is the eighth time he repeats his harmonious stanza pattern (80 + 8 + 10 syllables), but on this occasion he adds an extra ‘musical’ touch:

Hee wyll redeeme our deadly drouping state,
He wyll bring home the sheepe that go astraye,
He wyll helpe them that hope in him alwaye:
He wyll appease our discorde and debate,
He wyll soone save, though we repent us late.
He wyll be ours if we continewe his,
He wyll bring bale to joye and perfect blisse,
He wyll redeeme the flocke of his electe,
From all that is
Or was amisse,
Since Abrahams heyres did first his Lawes reject.

(78-88)

As we observe, Gascoigne changes the established pattern of four initial anaphoras to as many as eight (78-85), and he draws further attention to his invention by introducing a chiasmus: the three first words of lines one and two are repeated in inverse order in lines seven and eight (‘redeeme’ [78], ‘bring’ [79], ‘bring’ [84], and ‘redeeme’ [85]). This is a small-scale variant of the ‘symmetrical design’ Gascoigne used when ordering the narrative phases in The Adventures of Master F. J., as shown by A. Anderau.¹⁷

Anaphoras were sometimes compared to the musical repetitions referred to as ‘reports’.¹⁸ Gascoigne's own comments about the relationship of his poetry to music would therefore seem to support the view that the anaphoras in ‘Gascoignes De Profundis’ were intended to function ‘musically’: In The Grief of Joye (1576), he confesses to having often wanted to ‘tune (his) words’, being so captured by music ‘that some reporte, continually dyd ring, / Within (his) eares, and made (him) seeme to singe’ (IV, xxi, 1 and XXIV, 6-7).¹⁹ We shall probably never discover evidence showing exactly how the ‘verie sweete notes adapted vnto’ Gascoigne's psalm²⁰ may relate to the anaphoric lines of the eighth stanza, but we do know that his anaphoras are made to sing ‘continually’ in eight consecutive verses. However, more important than a possible numerical allusion to the harmonious number eight is the ratio of 2:1. Gascoigne creates this proportion by doubling the number of anaphoras when he passes from stanza seven to stanza eight. This sudden and unsuspected increase, suggests, I would argue, that he deliberately wanted to create a structural expression of the diapason, the proportion inherent in the octave. The key, as it were, to this ‘deep’ diapason is found in Augustine's seminal ‘Enarratio in psalmo cxxix’.

Judging by Gascoigne's reference to ‘Austine’ in The Grief of Joye (IV, xvi, 7), he was aware of the fact that Augustine had favoured the higher kind of music which is inherent in the creation, God's carmen pulcherrimum (De civ. Dei, XI, xviii). Augustine's preference for such Pythagorean-Platonic musica speculativa may well have caused Gascoigne to award him the affectionate epithet ‘a dreaming dadd’ (IV, xvi, 6). However this may be, it is interesting to note that Augustine constantly employs musical terminology when he discusses theology, as for example in his ‘Enarratio in psalmo cxxix’, where he stresses the point that man must love his enemy and harmonise his mind and actions with the word of God. The crucial word is harmonise, concordare in Latin, as appears in the following:

lex caritatis … in via non deserit comitem, comes fit ei quem ducit in via. Sed concordandum est cum adversario, dum es cum eo in via. … Est enim sermo Dei adversarius tuus, quamdiu cum illo non concordas. Concordas autem, cum coeperit te delectare facere quod dicit sermo

(cap. iii, 1891-2; my italics)²¹

This passage shows how Augustine, a former professor of rhetoric, uses carefully constructed chiastic phrases to underline the central idea of concord between man and the deity. The chiastic phrasing harmonises the words of his own sermo with the idea it conveys (/sermo/concordas/concordas/sermo/). Gascoigne puts forward exactly the same idea in his De Profundis, where he admonishes the repentant to ‘feede styll upon his worde,/ And put your trust in him with one accorde’ (VII, 4-5). And as we have just seen, he constructs two chiastic patterns in the very stanza which states that ‘he wyll appease our discorde’ (VIII, 4; italics added). But where does the diapason come into this? Even though the transition from discorde to accorde here involves converting two into one, Augustine is more explicit than Gascoigne's terminology suggests.

When discussing how God annuls sins of the past and raises the dead through the intervention of his son, Augustine refers to the miracles of Christ. Lazarus and the little girl are born anew, he tells us, when Christ reverses the pattern inherent in the human life-cycle: For they who had been born once, had died twice, that is, in body and soul semel nati sunt, sed bis mortui sunt; ix, 1895). Augustine explains this theological use of the diapason at length in his De trinitate, IV, ii, referring his example back to Pythagoras's well-known experiment with the monochord. I quote the Latin text:

Merito quippe mors peccatoris veniens ex damnationis necessitate soluta est per mortem iusti venientem ex misericordia voluntate dum simplum eius congruit duplo nostro. Haec enim congruentia (sive convenientia vel concinentia vel consonantia commodius dicitur quod est unum ad duo), in omni compaginatione vel si melius dicitur coaptatione creaturae valet plurimum. Hanc enim coaptationem, sicut mihi occurrit, dicere volui quam graeci ἁρμον ίαν vocant. Sed hoc ut demonstretur longo sermone / opus est; ipsis autem auribus exhiberi potest ab eo qui novit in regulari monochordi.

(IV, ii, 164-5; my italics)²²

The musical basis of this theology of proportion, used also in Augustine's ‘Enarratio in psalmo cxxix’, would be apparent to Gascoigne who would have no difficulty in identifying the ideas involved, nor to exploit them poetically. He could rely on the authority of ‘Austine’ that the consonantia … unum ad duo, expressed the mystery of redemption. The various verbal parallels between Augustine's commentary on Psalm 130 (129) and ‘Gascoignes De Profundis’ suggest that Gascoigne may have been familiar with it,²³ and so do the prominent and unexpected formal changes in the final stanza of his version of the psalm.

The first of these changes, the eight anaphoras (78-85), creates a strong visual pull to ‘the top left’ which almost threatens to divide the stanza into two unequal parts of anaphoric and non-anaphoric verses. Gascoigne's countering of this threat is subtle: in the stanza's chiastic central verse (‘He wyll be ours if we continewe his’; 83) he initiates a sound pattern which counterbalances the increase in anaphoras. Stanza eight has four rhymes (a-b-b-a-a-c-c-d-c-c-d), compared to five in the preceding seven, which allows the four c-rhymes (‘his’ [83], ‘blisse’ [84], ‘is’ [86], and ‘amisse’ [87]) to create a strong pull to ‘the bottom right’, as it were. Hence eight anaphoras (78-85) relate to four identical rhymes (83, 84, 86, and 87) in the proportion of 1:2.²⁴ The unity of the stanza in terms of sound is ensured by the fact that both anaphoras and rhymes (homeoteleuton) respectively begin and end with the same vowel sound (i [ē]), as in the thematically crucial line: ‘He wyll be ours if we continewe his’ (83), which by way of its rhetoric illustrates how God encompasses and protects the faithful. Moreover, the same sound (ē), and indeed one of the same words (‘his’), reappears almost in rhyme-position in lines eighty-five and eighty-eight so as to emphasize, as it were, the idea of consonance and unity. We also note that the final rhyme of the psalm (‘electe’/‘rejecte’) is subsumed under this euphony. Thus the combination ‘perfect blisse’ (84) could be said to concord in terms of sound with ‘his electe’ (85) and with ‘his Lawes rejecte’ (88). A series of sibilants in the poem's last line seals up this well-tuned finale, by picking up the s-sound from the preceding rhymes. All these formal manipulations seem especially designed to capture the movement from disharmony and despair to hope and harmony on the thematic level.

In terms of theme Gascoigne has elaborated considerably upon The Geneva Bible version of this psalm, at the same time adding some ideas from Augustine's ‘Enarratio in psalmo cxxix’, most notably Augustine's musico-theological imagery and the concept of a typological cycle of redemption: ‘The law of love giveth forgiveness to sins, blotteth out the past, warneth concerning the future’ (IV, 64). The latter is reflected in Gascoigne's last verses in ‘De Profundis’ (for which there is no source in the original psalm) where the poet declares his belief in God's redemptive power in times past, present, and future:

He wyll redeeme the flocke of his electe,
From all that is
Or was amisse,
Since Abrahams heyres did first his Lawes rejecte.

(85-8)

In this artfully inverted passage, he uses the three tenses—the future (‘He wyll redeeme’), present (‘all that is’), and past (‘was amisse’)—in that order, to illustrate how God's love heals and ‘comely doeth … order all things’ (Wisdom, 8. 1). A last finesse that calls to mind Machaut's famous motet (i.e. ‘Mon commencement est ma fin, et ma fin est mon commencement’) is Gascoigne's reference in the psalm's last verse to the biblical past as ‘first’. Thus Gascoigne's fin is not merely his own commencement, but that of all fallen men.

It is only in the last stanza that the explicit agreement or analogy is made between the fate of the Old Testament ‘electe’ (85) and that of all Christians (‘we’), an agreement which reveals a typological mode of thinking. It has been carefully prepared for, however, by the constantly changing points of view. Thus the psalm opens with two stanzas which focus on the individual (‘I’). In stanzas three and four it moves on to the society of all fallen men (‘we’). It returns to the concerns of the individual in stanzas five and six, and finally concludes with two stanzas on the Old Testament ‘chosen sheepe’ (69), and the type of the universal church of God (stanza eight). This typological interpretation is wholly in the spirit of Augustine and the gloss in The Geneva Bible: The psalmist, so the gloss explains, ‘sheweth to whome the mercie of God doth apperteine: to Israel, that is, to the Church, and not to the reprobate’.²⁵

In this manner ‘Gascoignes De Profundis’ can be seen to progress through stages of ever increasing explicitness; it begins by considering the distress of the individual repentant sinner (i-ii), who is moved to admit that his place is among all sinners, but that God's mercy extends to all who believe in Him. Stanzas five and six focus on the persona's itinerarium mentis in Deum: ‘My soule … / In confidence continu(a)llye shall cleave’ (55), whereas the two final stanzas (vii-viii) celebrate the realization that Christians are as much God's chosen people as was the ‘broode’ (68) of Abraham: ‘He wyll redeeme the flocke of his electe, / From all that is, / Or was amisse, / Since Abrahams heyres did first his Lawes rejecte’ (85-8). It may well be that it was this almost Herbertian sensitiveness to the typological dimension, delivered in highly sophisticated and well wrought verse, that attracted Mary Sidney to ‘Gascoignes De Profundis’.²⁶ For Gascoigne's remarkable attempt to fashion a poetic form capable of rendering the inner rationale of the penitential psalm marks a first decisive step in the development towards Herbert's superbly refined ‘pictures’ of spiritual conflict.

Notes

1. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in the English Religious Lyric of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London, 1954; revised ed. 1962), p. 273; and John Rathmell, The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke (New York, 1963), p. xii.

2. Ronald C. Johnson, George Gascoigne (New York, 1972), p. 5.

3. See for example Robert P. Adams, ‘Gascoigne's Master F. J. as original fiction’, PMLA LXXIII (1958), 315-26, and Alfred Anderau's challenging study George Gascoignes The Adventures of Master F. J.: Analyse und Interpretation (Bern, 1966).

4. The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, 2 vols., ed. by J. W. Cunliffe (Cambridge, 1907-10), I, 465.

5. Works, I, 469.

6. John Rathmell, The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, p. xvii.

7. The Aduentures of Master F. I., in A Hundred Sundry Flowres (London, 1573; Scolar Press reprint: Menston, 1970), p. 238.

8. The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), ed. by Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936; rpt. 1970), II, x (pp. 85 and 84).

9. The sonnet occurs in A Hundred Sundry Flowres (1973), p. 373, but without ‘the translated Psalme of De Profundis' though it is announced. The psalm obviously belongs together with the thematically similar hymns, ‘Gascoignes good morrow’ (pp. 368-71) and ‘Gascoignes good nyghte’ (pp. 371-2), printed immediately before the announced translation.

10. See Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. by Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thompson (Liverpool, 1969), p. 20.

11. I quote from Luigi Tansillo ed altri, Le Lagrime di S. Pietro … con nuova giunta (Genova, 1587), p. 165 v (sig. V 3v). See also Ariosto's ‘La bella donna d'un si bel foco’, where the octave has the same rhyme scheme as Gascoigne's first eight lines; in Rime di M. Lodovico Ariosto (Vinegia, 1560), p. 21 (r-v).

12. Pietro Bongo, Mysticae numerorum significatione liber (Bergamo, 1585), ‘De numero XI’, ‘Ideo numerus peccatorum, & paenitentium dicitur’ (p. 16).

13. Bongo, ‘De numero’, ‘… in gradu vndecimo collocatus (gloss: Psal. 129 Beda) Propheta Regius paenitentia se satisfactione prosternit’ (p. 16).

14. Bongo, ‘De numero XI’, ‘Omne n. peccatum est vndecinarium, quia dum perverse agit, praecepta decalogi transit’ (p. 16). He quotes Beda in Luc. c. 3 on this point: ‘Vndecimus autem numerus denarij transgressionem significat’.

15. It suffices to mention only a few of the important articles which have appeared since 1970: Maren-Sofie Røstvig, ‘The Influence of Biblical Exegesis Upon Theories of Literary Structure’, in Silent Poetry, ed. by Alastair Fowler (London, 1970), pp. 32-72, and by the same author ‘Canto Structure in Tasso and Spenser’, Spenser Studies, I, 177-200, ed. by Patrick Cullen and Thomas P. Roche (Pittsburgh, 1980); Thomas P. Roche, ‘The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch's Canzoniere’, SP, LXXXI (1974), 152-72; Jerry Leath Mills, ‘Spenser and the Numbers of History: A Note on the British and Elfin Chronicles in The Faerie Queene’, PQ, 55 (1976), 281-7 and ‘Prudence, History, and the Prince in The Faerie Queene, Book Two’, HLQ, 41 (1978), pp. 83-101; Mother M. Christopher Pecheux, ‘“At a Solemne Musicke”: Structure and Meaning’. SP, LXXV (Summer, 1978), No. 3, pp. 331-46; and Sibyl Lutz Severance, ‘“Some Other Figure”: The Vision of Change in Flowres of Sion, 1623’, Spenser Studies, II (1981), 217-28 and ‘“To Shine in Union”: Measure, Number, and Harmony in Ben Jonson's “Poems of Devotion”’, SP, LXXX (Spring, 1983), No. 2, pp. 183-99.

16. ‘The Old Sound and the New: An Inaugural Lecture’, (Cambridge, 1982), p. 21.

17. George Gascoignes The Adventures of Master F. J.: Analyse und Interpretation (Bern, 1966), pp. 76-80.

18. See Gregory G. Butler, ‘Music and Rhetoric in Early Seventeenth-Century English Sources’, The Musical Quarterly, LXVI, i (1980), pp. 57-8. Butler quotes Henry Peacham the younger, The Compleate Gentleman (1622): ‘Yea, in my opinion no rhetoric more persuadeth or hath greater power over the mind (than music); nay, hath not music her figures, the same which rhetoric? What is a revert but antistrophe? her reports, but sweet anaphoras? …’ (p. 331). A similar but less precise connection was made by the elder Peacham in The Garden of Eloquence (1577), who praises ‘Figurative Flowres, both of Grammer and Rhetorick … such as delight the eares as pleasant reports, repetitions, and running poyntes in Musick’ (sig. A ii v; my italics).

19. Works, II, 551. The fourth song, ‘The vanities of Activityes’, deals with music in stanzas 13-28 (pp. 550-3).

20. A Hundred Sundry Flowres, p. 372.

21. Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by D. E. Dekkers and I. Fraipont (Turnholti, 1956), in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, XL, 1891. In an English rendering the passage reads: ‘the law of love … forsaketh not its companion by the way, becometh a companion to him whom it leadeth on the way. But it is needful to agree with the adversary, whilst thou art with him in the way. … For the Word of God is thine adversary, as long as thou dost not agree with it. But thou agreest, when it has begun to be thy delight to do what God's Word commandeth’; Expositions on the Book of Psalms, 6 vols, trans, by Members of the English Church (Oxford, 1847-57), VI, 64.

22. Stephen McKenna translates this passage as follows: ‘For the death of the sinner, which deservedly comes from the necessary condemnation of God, has been taken away by the death of the Just Man, which comes from His will to show mercy, while His single death corresponds to our double death. This correspondence, agreement, consent, or whatever other word may be appropriate for describing how one is joined to two, is of the greatest importance in every fitting-together of the creature, or perhaps it would be better to call it, in every co-adaptation of the creature. It just now occurs to me, that which I mean by this co-adaptation is what the Greeks call harmonian. … It would require a long treatise, however, to prove this, but one familiar with the subject can demonstrate it to the ear itself on a properly-adjusted monochord’ (my italics); The Trinity (Washington, 1960; rpt. 1970), pp. 133-4. Even though the translator plays down the musical terminology, the musical basis of the argument is quite evident.

23. I am here referring to the idea of sinking in a sea of sorrows (ii, 5), which Gascoigne repeats in the penitential poem ‘Dan Bartholomew's libell of request to Care’: ‘In depth of hell I drowned was indeed’ (ii, 4); Works, I, 118. The source is Augustine's commentary on Psalm 130 (129), 1-3 (Expositions, VI, 61-2), where he refers to Jonah and the whale. When Gascoigne refers to God's punishment and ‘what sinnes are daylye done’ (iii, 2), he closely reproduces Augustine on verse 5: ‘He therefore considering how many minute sins man daily commiteth, … heeds how many they be’ (Expositions, VI, 66). Other echoes are discussed on pp. 306 and 308-9.

24. A similar ‘ocular’ diapason is of course found in the final three verses of each stanza, where the two short verses are followed by a single long verse. Sibyl Lutz Severance discusses related structural uses of the diapason in her thoughtful study ‘“To Shine in Union”: Measure, Number, and Harmony in Ben Jonson's “Poems of Devotion”’, SP, LXXX (Spring, 1983), No. 2, pp. 183-99. An early example of such musica speculativa is the play on the proportion 3:2 (diapente) in Philippe de Vitry's motet ‘Garrit Gallus-In nova fert-Neuma’, where different verse lengths are important. See the discussion by James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relation between Poetry and Music (New Haven and London, 1981), pp. 107-110.

25. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, Milwaukee, and London, 1969), p. 263 (v).

26. The influence comprises choice of stanza, rhetorical ornament, rhyme-words, and of diction, as I argue in a forthcoming article entitled ‘Gascoigne's and Mary Sidney's Versions of Psalm 130’.