SOURCE: Carlson, Norman E. “George Wither—Dead at Last!” Michigan Academician 1, no. 1-2 (winter 1969): 191-95.

[In the following essay, Carlson discusses Wither's controversial career as a satirist who aimed much of his invective at lawyers.]

When, on May 2, 1667, George Wither died, after devoting at least fifty-five of his seventy-nine years of life to the publication of his poetic, prophetic, satiric, and choleric works in verse and prose, perhaps a slight tremor of relief shook England. However, one group of men, the lawyers, probably had mixed emotions which included some regret, for Wither had been good for their business. Exactly how good it is impossible to say, but examination of Court of Chancery documents can give us some notion.

In the eighteen years between 1643 and 1661 Wither was involved in no fewer than eleven separate chancery actions;¹ at least twenty-five documents, each the work of a lawyer, relevant to these actions, survive, and more have obviously either been lost, or await discovery. We must also keep in mind that the Court of Chancery was in the seventeenth century a kind of appeals court, pleas being made to it in the hope of a decision based on “equity and good conscience” rather than on the very strict principles of common law courts. Hence several of the chancery suits involving Wither were preceded by suits at common law, each with its own varieties of legal service.

It would take many pages to explicate fully those eleven chancery actions; suffice it to note that seven of the eleven actions concerned royalist or Church estates which Wither was either awarded possession of or allowed to purchase during the interregnum, two others resulted from his appointments to governmental jobs during the same period, and the final two found creditors of his at the beginning of the Restoration trying to force him to pay relatively small sums of money he owed them. At the risk of being not altogether fair to Wither, I shall let one of the poet's chancery foes have the final word on his legal activities; one Thomas Cradock, an officer of the ecclesiastical court at Winchester, told the Chancery that he had demanded Wither to sign a “Release of Errors” not only because it was “fitt and vsuall in such cases,” but also “because he heard that the Complt as he himselfe hath sett forth in his bill was a troublesome letigious person.”²

Wither, however, was more than a “troublesome letigious person”—he was also a writer, and if we can allow the polite fiction that lawyers wailed in their ale at the passing of this source of revenue, perhaps we can also entertain the notion that some thin-skinned lawyers accustomed to keeping up with the minor verse of the day pronounced the words “George Wither—Dead at Last” with joyous relief.

Though received opinion has it that, in the self-contradictory words of one current anthology, “At some point in the 1620's Wither's talent seems to have run dry,” that “the poems he continued to pour forth throughout the rest of his long life are monotonously didactic and have little interest for the modern reader,”³ there are occasional oases in the desert of Wither's later verse, in a few instances inspired by his legal entanglements. Though I am not one generally given to the sentiment that passionate involvement of and by itself makes for good writing and reading, in Wither's case it appears evident that tangling with a subject he felt strongly about brought some satiric life to otherwise dull works.

Wither's first jibes at lawyers, which appeared in Abuses Stript and Whipt early in the century, apparently before he had any personal experience in the courts, were fairly conventional, echoing complaints that Edward Hake, Marston, and Joseph Hall had made in satiric work; one passage describing the devious and prolonged course a legal action could take exhibits Wither at something less than his sharpest:

These [lawyers] make the Lawes almost to none effect;
Their Courses are so wondrous indirect.
To them they favour, they Delayes can grant,
Though Iustice her due expedition want.
Sometimes vpon one matter we may see,
That sundry Iudgements shall pronounced be:
Now, there's a Motion granted, next day crost,
So fee and labour's to no purpose lost:
And still the Client shall be so deluded,
That when he hopes all's done, there's nought concluded.
Nay, though we heare the vtmost sentence past,
Which by all course of Law should be the last,
Why then, I say (though all seeme wholly ended)
Yet may the Execution be suspended:
And for some trifle, to the poore mans terror,
Be cald in question by a Writ of Error.
So that the Right oft yeelds vnto the stronger
When poore mens purses can hold out no longer.(4)

There is little originality in the content of these lines; moreover, the absence of metaphor and the regularity with which every couplet but one arrives at its full step suggests something less than the poet forging his lines at white heat.

The plague of 1625 provided material for Wither's ominous Britain's Remembrancer (1628) in which the legal profession, as one of the nation's ills, naturally merited the poet's attention. One short passage strikes an ironic note that a reader could wish for more of:

The Innes of Court I entred; and I saw
Each Roome so desolate, as if the Law
Had out-law'd all her Students; or that there
Some fear'd arrestings, where no Sergeants were.(5)

One aspect of Wither's treatment of lawyers in Britain's Remembrancer is somewhat unusual: he focuses his critical attack on the Court of Chancery. By his own account this specific attack results from personal experience; having witnessed an agreement between two men, he came under attack in a Chancery Bill of Complaint from a man who wanted to invalidate the bargain. Though the sharpness of the short “Inns of Court” passage is missing, the use of detail in Wither's account redeems the following lines somewhat:

Forsooth, he makes me party in the cause;
A pitifull complaining Bill he drawes;
Wherein his learned Counsell did devise
Such Combinations, and Conspiracies,
Such Plots, such Practices, and such large tales,
Of Promises, of Bargainings, of Sales,
And such like Heathnish stuffe: and his pretence,
Was worded out with so much impudence;
That, surely, whosoever came to see
That peece of Chauncery, supposed me
A very cheating rascall: or, that I
(At least) was privy to some knavery. …(6)

Familiarity with Chancery Bills of Complaint persuades one of the aptness of Wither's adjective “pitifull” here—and almost without exception those Bills do tell “large tales” of “combinations” (a much favored 17th-century legal word) and “conspiracies.” The rhythm of the passage, with its run-on lines and occasional strong caesuras, might be the effect of haste rather than art, but its interest, at least for modern ears, is there nevertheless. Similarly, the ironic anti-climax of the final lines. …

… supposed me
A very cheating rascall: or, that I
(At least) was privy to some knavery. …

though slightly out of character for Wither, and hence one suspects possibly accidental to some degree, concludes the passage effectively.

During the later period of his life, when he was so frequently engaged in legal action, Wither had something to say about law and lawyers in at least seven of his varied publications. I should like to call attention to two passages from that period which suggest there was poetic life in the old boy yet, sparked by his legal entanglements. The first occurs in A Suddain Flash Timely Discovering, Some Reasons wherefore, the stile of Protector, should not be deserted by these Nations, with some other things, by them very considerable. It appeared in 1657, when Wither was embittered by his troubles but still was three years from financial disaster:

I wonder, any man can stand in awe
Of Swords and Guns, who feels the plague of Lawe;
And, would not rather be devoured twice
By Lions, than once eaten up with Lice.
Should I illustrate (which, my private wrong
May, peradventure, force me to e're long)
The sad discoveries which I have made
Since first that Gangreeve [sic], I, upon me had;
By what impertinent vexatious wayes,
Costly devices, or undue delayes,
The Suits of wronged Clients forth are spun,
More than twice twenty years, and yet not done;
By what excessive Fees (twice or thrice tooke)
Without one Line writ down, or one word spoke,
And, at how dear a rate they sometimes buy
A Vain hope, which augments their misery;
How, Motions, Orders, and Reports beget
Each other, till their brood grows Infinit;
And, how some Registers, put out, or in,
Those words, which may another Round begin,
(Though they who heard the Judges Order, thought
The Cause, would thereby to an end be brought)
You would suppose (and might suppose it well)
The Courts we toyl in, were some Rooms in Hell
And, that, we had imposed on us
The never ending Plague of Sysiphus,
Who, up a Steep hill, rowled with great pain
A Weighty Stone which still rowl'd down again.(7)

The notion that lawyers were parasitical was hardly a startling one in 1657; nevertheless, the manner in which Wither moves at the beginning of this passage from “Swords and Guns,” through “Lions,” to the emphatic “once eaten up with Lice” levels the charge with unusual force. Mention of specific abuses (“The suits of wronged Clients forth are spun, / More then twice twenty years, and yet not done;”) builds to another metaphor, the appropriateness of which is unquestionable:

… Motions, Orders, ad Reports beget
Each other, till their brood grows Infinit:

The effective climax of the passage depends not so much on the allusion to Sisyphus as on the manipulation of sentence structure and word order; Wither pushes his “Weighty Stone” of a sentence up 134 words of introductory subordinate clauses, rests for four lines, makes a final effort in which two displaced prepositional phrases make an otherwise easy relative clause into hard labor to reach a caesura (“Who, up a Steep hill, rowled with great pain / A Weighty Stone,”), then plunges the whole thing down in three lightning iambs (“which still rowl'd down again.”) Sound and sense indeed!

Finally, a passage from Speculum Speculativum, written, according to Wither, on June 13, 1660, or immediately following Chales II's restoration, records the cynical despair to which Wither's troubles had driven him:

If then, we should to this conclusion draw,
Be govern'd by the Letter of the Law;
That, in it self, is grown so questionable,
So like a Nose of Wax, so variable,
And so uncertain made, as Lawyers please
To make them speak for their advantages
Who most advantage them; that, we shall there
Continue as unsettled as we were,
Till we are certain in what sense to take them;
Which will not be as long as Lawyers make them,
Who take more care to drive their own ends on,
Then to provide that Justice may be done.(8)

I am not sure how many different ways we can twist that ”Nose of Wax” to make it yield metaphorical sense, but it creates a vivid sense of the mingled contempt and despair that characterize the elderly poet's attitude toward the law and the lawyers.

Thus an examination of Wither's verse with attention to passages on a single large subject—the law—suggests that although in his earliest work—and occasionally at other times in his career—he merely presented complaints conventional in the satiric verse and prose of the century, his personal experiences sometimes influenced his work and freed it from conventionality. If the result was not usually excellent poetry, it was at least criticism more convincing than that of the typical satire. More importantly, in one passage of twenty-eight lines from A Suddain Flash, Wither fused his facts and his fury into poetry that is a “suddain flash” in the murkiness of its surroundings. Wither did in little what Milton had done on a grand scale in Areopagitica—translate personal grievance into literature.

Notes

1. All of these legal tangles are set forth in detail in my unpublished dissertation, “George Wither: ‘A Troublesome Litigous Man’” (Rutgers, 1962). One case is considered in my article “George Wither and his Creditors,” N & Q, n.s. XIV (1967), 333-336.

2. Chancery Proceedings, C10: 94/68.

3. Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke, eds., Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York, 1963), p. 802.

4. As reprinted in Part I of Wither's Juvenilia (Manchester: Spenser Society, nos. 9-11, 1871), pp. 198-199.

5. Britain's Remembrancer, 2 pts. (Manchester: Spenser Society, nos. 28-29, 1880), p. 215.

6. Ibid., p. 377.

7. As reprinted in Miscellaneous Works of George Wither, Second Collection (Manchester: Spenser Society, no. 13, 1872), p. 25.

8. As reprinted in Miscellaneous Works of George Wither, Fifth Collection (Manchester: Spenser Society, no. 22, 1877), p. 65.