SOURCE: Jentoft, C. W. “Surrey's Four ‘Orations’ and the Influence of Rhetoric on Dramatic Effect.” Papers on Language & Literature 9, no. 3 (summer 1973): 250-62.

The Earl of Surrey's modern critical reputation is a curious one: everyone knows about his poetry, but few have read it seriously, and fewer yet have read it approvingly. Its place in the development of English prosody requires a few paragraphs in any Renaissance survey, but its individual merits either go unnoticed or serve as foils to the very different virtues of poems considered more worthwhile. Its exclusion from serious consideration in the twentieth century has its origins in the rediscovery of the metaphysical poets by Grierson and Eliot and the related reassessment of Wyatt by Tillyard.¹ Unfortunately, the indirect effect of these studies, and others that followed, has been that Surrey's poetry, because it does not seem to resemble Donne's, as Wyatt's clearly does, is usually given patronizing credit as a useful link in the chain of literary history and then dismissed as “less valuable for its own sake than as an exemplar for the poets to come.”²

As for its individual qualities, J. W. Lever expresses the majority view when he says that Surrey “lacked Wyatt's power, perhaps inclination, to voice intimate experience.”³ Significantly, it is that inability that Douglas Peterson sees as “the obvious source of weakness in all fashionable Tudor verse”: “When a poem exists for the sake of ingenuity and ornament, when feeling in a poem is assumed and described rather than examined, the effect of the poem can only be static—the feeling at the end of the poem must remain qualitatively the same as it was in the beginning.”⁴ The description serves to summarize the major objections to Surrey's verse and also to lock it in its age; as Tillyard writes in a later essay, “Wyatt, … prophetic of Donne in the dramatic and introspective substance of his lyrics, extends beyond his age. Surrey, with less originality, is centrally of it.”⁵

To answer such objections, it is helpful to begin by pointing out the fundamental error of the survey-course attitude toward Surrey (or toward any minor poet of historical importance, for that matter): to borrow a statement that Lever makes about Wyatt, “we shall perhaps see our way more clearly if at the start we avoid any assumption of a necessary polarity between historical importance and poetic merit.”⁶ It would be unrealistic to quarrel with the designation of Surrey as a poet of his time; in fact his poetry demonstrates more clearly than most the intimate relationship between the theory and practice of composition in the sixteenth century—which is to say that it illustrates the influence of classical rhetoric on Renaissance poetry. The clarification of that influence is, I am convinced, the necessary beginning of any study of Surrey's poetry. With that as a focus, one can extend the examination to consider the more serious objections to his verse, particularly its lack of drama and “feeling.” My purpose here is to do both by showing how Surrey uses traditional rhetorical patterns in order to create four poems which can properly be called “dramatic orations”: “Good Ladies you that haue,” “O Happy dames, that may embrace,” “Geue place ye louers,” and “London hast thow accused me.”⁷

All four poems are modeled, with varying degrees of exactitude, after the structure prescribed for the oration in Greek and Latin rhetorics and those sixteenth-century handbooks influenced by them. The first three are considerably less impressive than “London,” and it is significant that at least part of the reason for that is their failure to satisfy as clearly the prescriptions for the oration. Nevertheless, like the “London” poem, they are “orations” in spirit as well as letter; for, in each of the four, Surrey presents a recognizable speaker addressing an identifiable group of listeners in a public situation. And the manner in which he provides the setting should begin to rebut the charge that his poetry lacks drama: the speaker is a persona, the situation fictitious; in each poem Surrey has placed a number of people on an imaginary stage, but he has given one of them a podium; the poems are not dramatic monologues, as are so many contemporary love sonnets; they are dramatic orations, in the same sense that the speeches of Brutus and Antony in the Forum scene of Julius Caesar are such, with the obvious difference that the events surrounding Surrey's orations are only implied in the speeches themselves.

In De Inventione, Cicero delineated three major kinds of oration, distinguishing them according to their aims: the demonstrative, the purpose of which was to praise a worthy person or to vilify an unworthy one; the deliberative, which was written (spoken) to persuade or dissuade; and the judicial, which was designed to determine, in a court of law, whether a thing was right or wrong. The aim of the oration was evidently the only element which determined its type, for the arrangement of all three was basically the same, with minor revisions made by followers of Cicero in the number of formal parts or in the manner in which a particular part functioned. Cicero, for example, divides the disposition of the address into six parts: exordium, narratio, partitio, confirmatio, reprehensio, and peroratio.⁸ In the Institutio Oratoria, however, Quintilian lists only five parts,⁹ while England's Thomas Wilson includes seven in The Arte of Rhetorique. Wilson says that the purpose of the exordium, or “entraunce,” is to gain the listeners' attention, either through “a plaine beginning, when the hearer is made apt to giue eare out of hande,” or a “priuie twining, or close creeping in, to win fauour with much circumstance, called insinuation.” In the narration, or “statement of facts,” “the matter must be opened, and euery thing liuely tolde, that the hearers may fully perceiue what we goe about.” “After our tale is tolde, and the hearers haue well learned what we meane,” continues Wilson, “the next is to reporte wherein the aduersarie and we can not agree, and what it is, wherein wee do agree”; this section is called the “division” (partitio). The proposition is a pithy statement of the whole argument of the oration. The confirmation is the argument and proof of the orator's contentions. In the confutation (Cicero's reprehensio) he refutes the arguments of his opponents by means of sound logic. The conclusion (peroratio) is “the handsomely lapping vp together, and briefe heaping of all that which was saied before, stirring the hearers by large vtterance, and plentiful gathering of good matter.”¹⁰ The number of parts in an oration is not as important as the presence of an order similar to Wilson's. Cicero himself had said that whether the speech contains four, five, six, or seven parts is of less consequence than that the general order he prescribes be the determinant of the structure.

“Good Ladies” and “O Happy dames” are companion pieces: in each, a lady is speaking to an audience of other ladies, telling of her sorrow at the absence of her lover—a situation, incidentally, which is unique among sixteenth-century love poems. In “Geue place ye louers,” a rather assertive knight is proclaiming to his rivals the superiority of his mistress to theirs. While each of the three speeches is demonstrative, and contains a clearly observable exordium and narratio, “Geue place ye louers” is the only one which carries oratorical structure through consistently to the end. But there are reasons for the differences, and the explanation of those reasons brings me to one of the purposes of this paper: applying search-and-destroy methods in order to show where Surrey succeeds and where he fails in following the prescriptions of the handbooks is less important than discerning to what degree his manipulation of convention contributes to the aesthetic effectiveness and the rhetorical-dramatic aim of each poem.

The differences between the “entraunces” of the first two poems exemplify the point. The opening of “Good Ladies” is that kind of extended exordium which Wilson called a “close creeping in”; unlike “O Happy dames,” which opens with a “plaine beginning,” the poem includes a few realistic details (“Stepp in your foote, come take a place,” “Lett them sytt still,” “sett your foot by myne,” 2, 4) which provide a brief setting. A similar difference can be seen in the contrasting appeals to pathos and ethos, Aristotle's terms for the speaker's appeal to the emotions of the audience and the audience's respect for the character of the speaker. Both ladies want their listeners to share their mournful mood, but the speaker in “Good Ladies” is less concerned with pleading for consideration than is the second speaker; she simply wishes to tell of her sorrow, while the second makes use of the rhetorical figure mempsis, which not only utters a complaint but also pleads for assistance (“help to fill my mourning voyce,” 7). The less pathetic attitude of the first speaker is also evident in her use of another figure of pathos, sarcasmus, when she distinguishes the two types of “Good Ladies” in her audience: those who “by their Lords / do sett but lytle pryce,” and those “whom love hath bound” (3, 5); her request that those of the first type sit still and listen even though they care little for their absent lords lends a dramatic touch (Lysistrata comes to mind) not present in the second poem. Furthermore, it contributes to the poem's ethos in encouraging audience identification; thus pathos contributes to ethos, a common occurrence in orations, as Sister Miriam Joseph points out.¹¹

The exordium of “Geue place ye louers” is only two lines long, and offers no appeal to either pathos or ethos. Instead of seeking emotional surrender from obviously hostile listeners, the knight boldly demands their attention. The bravado is typical of some of Surrey's best poems (“London,” for example), and it is interesting to find that only in “Good Ladies” and “O Happy dames,” also the only two in which his persona cannot be mistaken for himself, does he adopt a conciliatory attitude. But these poems gain added significance when one considers the rhetorical-dramatic stance of the persona in the particular poem. The speaker in “Geue place ye louers” is on the list, not the dais, and the purpose of his address is to argue that his lady is superior in beauty to the mistresses of his listeners; obviously he is more interested in the challenge than in ethos. The more effective rhetorical stance in such a situation is to attack immediately whatever arguments his opponents might have; thus he includes his propositio in his exordium, asserting in the standard imagery that the beauty of his mistress “passeth more” the beauty of theirs “Than doth the sonne, the candle light: / Or brightest day, the darkest night” (3-6). The joining of the two parts follows Quintilian's suggestion that “it is the function of the exordium not merely to excite the feelings … but to do all that is possible to show that our opponents' case is not deserving of them” (Inst. Orat., 2: 21).

The narratio in each of the three poems is clearly recognizable but is less interesting than the exordium. In the first two, it is a rehearsal of the reason for the lady's woe, the absence of her lord (“Good ladies,” 9-10; “O Happy dames,” 8-11). In the third it consists of the traditional rhetorical ploy which humbly confesses the speaker's helplessness in describing the particular beauties of his mistress (11-12), followed by an equally traditional protestation: “I coulde rehearse, if that I wolde, / The whole effect of natures plaint, / When she had lost the perfit mold” (13-15), after which, of course, he does just that, i.e., he presents the narratio that he considers completely obvious.

Although the classical structure of “Good ladies” and “O Happy dames” becomes clouded after their narrations, the quality which I call “rhetorical drama” intensifies. In each poem the lady tells of recurrent dreams in which she has imagined that her beloved is actually present. In “Good ladies,” the more detailed of the two, she creates for her listeners an imaginary visit from her husband in which she finds him playing “with. T. his lytle sonne” (19-20) and follows that with an imaginary dialogue in which her husband's warm concern for her causes necessary emotional release: “wheare with the heavie cares / that heapt are in my / brest / breakes forth and me dischardgeth cleane of all my / great vnrest” (27-28). The section comprises a dramatic situation within the larger rhetorical drama of the poem. The lady acts out her dreams, which become as a result a dramatic part of an oration in which she demonstrates for her audience the madness which the absence of her beloved causes. The drama is punctuated finally by a peroratio in which the speaker shouts an angry and pathetic apostrophe to the winds which both demands (“Ye wyndes I you convart / in chieffest of your rage,” 39) and pleads (“Do your good will to cure a wight / that lyveth in / distresse,” 42). “O Happy dames,” which is more general and less compelling in the description of the dreams, nevertheless becomes intensely dramatic in the last line when the lady objectifies for her listeners the mad combination of optimism and pessimism which she continually undergoes while her lord is gone: “Now he comes, will he come? alas, no no.”

“Geue place ye louers” is, on one level, certainly, a demonstrative, epideictic address; however, it differs from the other two in being more deliberative in aim: the speaker is attempting to persuade rather than gain sympathy. As persuasion it has, as one might expect, a tighter logical framework and a more consistent oratorical structure. I have already pointed out its exordium, propositio, and narratio; I suggest that it also contains a confirmatio, a refutatio, and a peroratio, all of which are concisely presented in the last six lines. To set up the confirmatio, or proof, Surrey has used the narratio as a logical premise: nature praised his lady above all others. With this premise as a base, then, he proceeds to his conclusion:

          Sith nature thus gaue her the prayse,
To be the chiefest worke she wrought:
In faith, me thinke, some better waies
On your behalfe might well be fought,
Then to compare (as ye haue done)
To matche the candle with the sonne.

[25-30]

Given the premise, the conclusion is obvious. He has confirmed his point and refuted the arguments of his adversaries; and he has included both confirmation and refutation in his “conclusion” (peroratio), which, to repeat Wilson, “is the handsomely lappying vp together, and briefe heaping of all that was saied before.”

Surrey's mastery of the art of rhetoric (if not poetry) in “Geue place ye louers” becomes even more apparent, finally, when one compares the poem to John Heywood's “Geue place you Ladies and be gone,” which the younger poet was undoubtedly imitating.¹² The major difference between the two poems, aside from Surrey's switching the sex of the listeners, is his replacing the rambling string of traditional comparisons at the end of Heywood's poem with concise, logical argument. It is tempting to suggest that Surrey changed the nature of the argument to fit the rhetorical-dramatic milieu of his poem: a (sixteenth-century) man speaking to men, after all, could be more confident of convincing his audience through logic than could a man speaking to women, just as he would be more inclined to get to the point without an extended “creeping in” at the beginning of his argument.

On 1 April 1543 Surrey, along with William Pickering and Thomas Wyatt the Younger, was brought before the Privy Council and charged with eating meat during Lent and with “lewde and unsemely manner of walking in the night about the stretes and breaking with stone bowes of certain wyndowes.” Edwin Casady marks the date of the offense as the evening of 19 January, when Surrey and his friends, having “eaten well and imbibed freely,” went out into the London streets in search of more exciting entertainments. Their main occupation seems to have been tormenting London citizens, and Casady reports that at least once they engaged in a brawl with some London apprentices. The ultimate victory of the trio in that encounter was assured by their use of the stonebow, a crossbow employing stones instead of arrows for missiles. Unfortunately, having run out of human targets, the young noblemen turned to shooting at windows, an offense which led to their arraignment before the Council. Wyatt and Pickering denied their guilt, but were convicted and sent to the Tower; Surrey, while claiming a license for eating meat, admitted his guilt in the stonebow incident, “submitting himselff therefore to suche ponisshement as sholde to them be thowght good,” and was committed to the Fleet.¹³

In “London hast thow accused me,” the poem he is said to have written while in the Fleet, Surrey defends his behavior of 19 January by attributing it to a highly religious motive: he was acting as “a fygure of the lordes behest” (21), striving to awaken London to a realization of her sins. He accomplishes this transformation by inventing, completely within the confines of a speech modeled on the structural prescriptions for the judicial oration, a miniature courtroom drama in which he reverses the role of his persona from that of humble defendant to prosecutor of those who would prosecute him. In thus elevating the direction of the poem from a defense of the ignoble pranks of an inebriated nobleman to a mock-heroic attack on the sins of a corrupt city, he establishes a basis in which rhetoric and drama work reciprocally toward the same end.

The poem's scene opens in the courtroom, and the reader is given to understand that the prosecutor has just stated his case, accusing the persona of breaking the windows of London citizens. Then the accused, rising to defend himself, opens his oration with the exordium: “London hast thow accused me / of breache of lawes the roote of stryfe.” While Quintilian advises against addressing anyone but the judge in an oration, he admits that “occasionally … some striking expression of thought is necessary in the exordium which can be given greater point and vehemence if addressed to some person other than the judge” (Inst. Orat., 2: 41). When one considers Surrey's intention to become accuser instead of accused, it is most appropriate that he begin with an explosive trochaic apostrophe aimed at his prosecutor. The difference is that he continues addressing London throughout the poem, a significant departure from the prescriptions for the judicial oration, but one justified by the dramatic effect that he is aiming for: he needs to transform the prisoner's dock into the preacher's pulpit so that he can accuse London herself (the “people”). It is also appropriate that he choose what Quintilian calls the “transferred exordium,” that type which is drawn from another speech (Inst. Orat., 2: 45), for the speech which has preceded his is very much a part of his own.

The next six lines of the exordium make use of two of the four devices suggested in the Rhetorica ad C. Herennium as helpful in making one's hearers well disposed. The first of these is discussion of oneself and discussion of one's adversary:¹⁴

within whose brest did boyle to see
so fervent hote thye dissolute lyf
that even the hate of syns that groo
within thie wicked walls so ryfe
for to breake forthe did convert so
that terrour could it not represse.

[3-8]

In speaking vehemently of the faults of his adversary, and thus stirring up immediate dislike of him (the figure exuscitatio), Surrey makes very clear that he has chosen the “plaine beginning” rather than the “close creeping in.” The earlier term for “creeping in” was the “subtle approach,” which the rhetoricians prescribed for one who has a weak case (Rhetorica, p. 17). Surrey the accused obviously wishes his audience to believe that he thinks enough of his case to use the “direct opening,” a device which is consistent with the mock anger he projects throughout the poem. As in “Geue place ye louers,” a “creeping in” in a poem which is assertively self-confident would be completely inappropriate.

The conciliatory gestures, if they can be called such, come in his portrayal of himself. A parenthetical qualifier (by which he explicitly affirms his belief that “breache of lawes” is indeed the “root of stryfe,” 2) fulfills Quintilian's advice that “the exordium may sometimes derive its conciliatory force from the person of the pleader … if he is believed to be a good man” (Inst. Orat., 2: 9)—in this case, no anarchist. His moving portrayal of his angry desire to “breake forthe” (reinforced by the alliteration of “brest” and “boyle”) shows this also and follows, as well, another piece of advice from Quintilian: “where we cannot deny the truth of facts that are urged against us, we must try to show that the purpose of the act was not what is alleged” (Inst. Orat., 2: 31).

It is in his narratio, however, that Surrey amplifies this procedure. He has been accused of breaking windows, but the crux of his defense lies in his reason for doing so. Quintilian suggests, further, that if the facts against one are true, he should restate those facts through the narratio “in a different way, alleging other motives and another purpose and putting a different complexion on the case” (Inst. Orat., 2: 91-92). Thus Surrey explains that because words would not suffice in making London's sinners realize their faults, he had to choose “vnknowen means” in order to express his “hydden bourden” (11-12). In the words of the author of the Rhetorica ad C. Herennium, one type of narratio occurs “when we set forth the facts and turn every detail to our advantage so as to win the victory” (p. 23). This is precisely what Surrey has done, and he excuses his unorthodox method of alarm with another parenthetical comment: “by wordes synce preachers knoo / what hope is left for to redresse” (9-10). The stonebow succeeded, where words could not, in making London listen.

It is permissible also to “make the statement of facts the opening of an incrimination of the other party” (Inst. Orat., 2: 63); Surrey takes advantage of this advice to further his condemnation of the city—and to issue a warning:

wherby it might appeare to the
from iustice rodde no faulte is free
but that all suche as workes vnright
in moste quyet are nexte ill rest.

[13-17]

The s-alliteration eloquently dramatizes the seething emotions behind Surrey's statement and makes his listeners recall his “boyling brest.” Line 17, moreover, serves as a transition to the next line: the quietness of the sinners is paralleled by Surrey's action against them, for it was “in secreat scylence of the night” that he rose up to warn them, the alliteration here connoting the sounds of silence rather than repressed emotion. But it again becomes a means for vehement expression four lines later, when he hints that God, “whose skourdge for synne the scryptures shew” (22), is similarly disposed toward the corrupt city. The prisoner's attempt to become the preacher has turned more ambitious; now the preacher becomes the prophet (“A fygure of the lordes behest,” 21), whose warning through the “sowndlesse rapp” (25) of his stones corresponds to—even rhymes with—the threatening “thonder clapp” (23) of God in a mock-heroic parallel with which he ends his “statement of facts.”

It is in the next section that the pattern of the classical oration seems to break down. There is no propositio as such, and no statement of the partitio before the proof. Surrey had authority for ignoring the propositio, for Quintilian had said that it is not always necessary, especially when the statement of facts has already included it (Inst. Orat., 2: 131), as “London”'s does. But the poet does not need to cite authority to explain the absence of a partitio. A formal enumeration of the points of disagreement, followed by the confirmatio, or point-by-point discussion of them, would be redundant. Surrey was obviously aiming at compactness at this point and thus includes his enumeration with his confirmatio in a rhetorical division of the genus, Sin, into its species, the Seven Deadly Sins (28-41). And even in the proof itself the virtue of compactness is evident: each of the sins is alloted two lines, no more. An examination of his treatment of one of the sins will demonstrate the success of his compression: “And ydle slowth that never wrought / to heaven his spirite lift may begyn” (34-35). The complete description of “slowth” is contained in the parenthetical “that never wrought,” which defines the nature of the sin as precisely as an emblem. And in the second line, the use of the word “lift” instead of the more usual “rise” expresses precisely the point that the slothful sinner must change his very nature if he is to reach salvation.

Related to the compactness of the poem is its coherence. My division of the exordium from the narratio, for instance, is far more artificial than Surrey's; instead of wasting lines in constructing a marked separation between the two parts, he joins them with “whiche” (9) and thus preserves the flow from one part to another. He does the same when he summarizes his statement of facts by using the word “this” (19) to refer back to the justification for his crime. Furthermore, the parallel construction of the final lines of his narratio with those of his confirmatio prevents creating a break between them: the periodic clause beginning “that as the fearefull thonder clapp” (23) runs smoothly into the series of similar clauses which make up the enumerative discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins. Finally, in arranging his list of the Sins, he saves gluttony (40-41) for last and thereby provides an easy transition to his refutatio, which begins with a reference to a related vice (“in lothsome vyce each droncken wight / to styrr to god this was my mynd,” 42-43) and begins a summary of earlier points, for purposes of refutation.

The refutatio itself lasts for only eight lines (42-49) and completely destroys the case for the prosecution in one line, when Surry at once admits the truth of the original charge and passes over it as unimportant: “thie wyndowes hadd done me no spight” (44), which snickers as it refutes. There remains only the final explanation of the true reason for his action: it was not against windows that he was shooting, “but prowd people that dread no fall” (49). The explanation follows explicitly the advice of the Rhetorica ad C. Herennium on the “Type of Issue”: “an Issue is Juridicial when there is agreement on the act, but the right or wrong of the act is in question”; in the refutation of an oration on a Juridicial Issue, the speaker must set forth the “Justifying Motive” (pp. 43, 51).

At this point the speaker breaks off and utters another emphatic single line: “endured [hardened] hartes no warning feel” (50). The rhetoricians would have called this apocarteresis, the figure of pathos by which the speaker casts away all hope. And it is the utter (rhetorical) hopelessness of trying to reach hearts of stone with mere pebbles that has caused the preacher's surrender to despair. The line functions as the dramatic climax of his oration: from his comic disavowal of hostility toward windows, his tone gains vehemence through most of the refutatio until, with an almost audible sigh, he resigns himself to being unheard; he then immediately launches into a bitter peroratio that begins with an angry apostrophe to the “shamelesse whore” and “menbre of falce Babylon” (51, 53) that London has become and ends with an apocalyptic prophecy of the effects of her sins (55-68) that echoes the imagery of the Book of Revelation. The change is sudden but not surprising, because the progression of the persona's mood is psychologically and dramatically sound. He had begun his transformation at line 3, when he changed from defendant to preacher and Christian soldier. By line 50 the reformer has surrendered to futile despair; but despair lifts restraints, and he becomes the angry prophet who, like Jeremiah, envisions the destruction of the people he has unsuccessfully exhorted to repentance.¹⁵

But the Book of Jeremiah also provides scriptural authority for using the bow: “Put yourselves in array against Babylon round about: all ye that bend the bow, shoot at her, spare no arrows: for she hath sinned against the Lord” (50: 14). And this verse recalls that the whole oration is about the poet's drunken target practice with a sixteenth-century slingshot. The ironic distance between poet and persona is the most prominent feature of the poem and is the key to one's appreciation of its success. The view that Surrey lacked the ability to “voice intimate experience” ignores the fact that satire is always serious and often personal. Specifically, it fails to consider how characteristic an expression of Surrey's social views the poem is. His biographers have consistently emphasized the disdain with which he held the middle class.¹⁶ It seems reasonable, then, to suggest that patronizing, mock-heroic irony is appropriate for the “London satire,” as the poem is often called.

The more serious criticism, that Surrey was incapable of writing dramatic poetry, is also undercut by the poem's irony. There is no difficulty in discerning the obvious distance between male poet and female persona in “Good Ladies” and “O Happy dames”—and perhaps an added irony if the personas are meant to represent Surrey's wife, as is generally assumed. But “London” is more successfully dramatic not only because of the vividness of its imaginary context and the progression of mood but also because of the ironic gap between the complete control of the smiling poet and the spontaneous combustion of the excitable persona. The relationship is not unlike that between Sidney and Astrophil or Shakespeare and the old, rejected suitor of the Young Man and the Dark Lady or Donne and the erratic speakers in the various Songs and Sonnets. The difference is that between rhetorical drama and the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” which was not the business of Renaissance poetry and certainly not the business of a poet so universally recognized as a man of his age.

Notes

1. I am referring to H. J. C. Grierson's edition of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1921); T. S. Eliot's famous review of that book, “The Metaphysical Poets,” first published anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 1921, pp. 669-70; and E. M. W. Tillyard, The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Selection and a Study (London, 1929).

2. Helen Morris, Elizabethan Literature (London, 1958), p. 23.

3. J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London, 1956), p. 45.

4. The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton, N.J., 1967), p. 97.

5. The English Renaissance: Fact or Fiction? (Baltimore, Md., 1952), p. 57. Views similar to those of the scholars already cited can be found in most studies of Renaissance poetry; they are too numerous to cite here.

6. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, p. 14.

7. My copy text for “Good Ladies” and “London” is Ruth Hughey, The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, 2 vols. (Columbus, Ohio, 1960); for “O Happy dames” and “Geue place ye louers,” I have used a photographic reproduction of the first edition of the Songes and Sonettes (5 June 1557). After some rather extensive textual investigation, I have found these to be more reliable than the latest edition of Surrey's work, Emrys Jones's Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Poems (Oxford, 1964); see Kenneth Muir's review of Jones's edition in Modern Language Review 60 (April 1965): 245. I should also mention that “O Happy dames” is ascribed to John Harington in the eighteenth-century collection of Haringtoniana, the Nugae Antiquae; however, Miss Hughey has presented a solid case for Surrey's authorship in The Arundel Harington Manuscript, 1: 22.

8. “De Inventione,” in De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica, trans. and ed. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 40.

9. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (London, 1921), 2: 9. Further references will be included in the text as Inst. Orat.

10. G. H. Muir, ed. (Oxford, 1909), pp. 99-114. Further references will be included in the text as Arte.

11. Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, 1947), pp. 393-94.

12. Hyder Rollins, ed., Tottel's Miscellany, 2 vols., 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 1: 155.

13. The information is recorded in Acts of the Privy Council, n.s., ed. J. R. Dasent, 40 vols. (London, 1890), 1: 104, and in Edwin Casady, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (New York, 1938), pp. 95-101.

14. Harry Caplan, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 15. Further references will be included in the text as Rhetorica.

15. Miss Hughey cites several biblical sources for this section of the poem in The Arundel Harington Manuscript, 2: 90.

16. In addition to Casady, see Edmund Bapst, Deux Gentilshommes-Poetes de la Cour de Henry VIII (Paris, 1891), and especially the latest biography, Hester Chapman, Two Tudor Portraits: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Lady Katherine Gray (London, 1960).