SOURCE: Tourney, Leonard D. “Joseph Hall and the Anniversaries.” Papers on Language and Literature 13, no. 1 (winter 1977): 25-34.

[In this essay, Tourney contends that Hall's prefaces to Donne's Anniversaries reveal that there was a contemporary critical understanding that Donne's eulogies were written to convey a didactic kind of meditation, to demonstrate praise of God, and to compose verse in the Petrarchan rhetorical tradition.]

The response of Donne's contemporaries to his two long and elaborate elegies on the death of Elizabeth Drury has been a recurrent issue among modern critics. Most have agreed with Sir Herbert Grierson that the poems were considered failures and have looked to Ben Jonson's censure of their blasphemy and extravagance for the causes of their unpopularity. O. B. Hardison has argued that the poems were successful, grounding his rebuttal on the fact that they were twice reprinted in Donne's lifetime, imitated, and on the unlikelihood that Sir Robert Drury would have commissioned a second poem had the first been widely condemned for its tasteless extravagance. More recently, Barbara Lewalski has made a similar point. Although unlike Hardison she finds the poems genuinely innovative, she asserts that because they “drew upon ideas, attitudes, and literary forms familiar to contemporary readers from Protestant theological works, meditations, and sermons, they found a fit and numerous, though not always fully comprehending, audience that shared Donne's theological assumptions and was receptive to his metaphysical wit and style.”¹

Contemporary response to Donne's Anniversaries is one of more than historical interest. A poet's audience and its expectations help shape the poet's text, and no critical approach to Donne can avoid at least trying to reconstruct the shared experience his poems represent. For the early seventeenth century, an age of very little practical criticism, such reconstruction is hard, and every sort of contemporary evaluation must be assessed. The purpose of this essay is to examine in detail the fullest and most perceptive contemporary response to the Anniversaries: Joseph Hall's “Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy” and “Harbinger to the Progress.”

Despite their conspicuous role as prefaces to the Anniversaries, Hall's poems have been largely ignored by Donne's critics and, when examined, they have often been misunderstood. Florence S. Trager supposed Hall wrote them to revenge himself on Drury and protest Donne's hyperbole.² Hardison, citing Hall to support his reading of the Anniversaries, nonetheless questions Hall's objectivity, supposing him still under the patronage of Drury and therefore biased. And Professor Lewalski, although admitting the poems perceptive, fails to explore fully Hall's qualifications as critic. There are, however, good reasons to think Joseph Hall more than adequately prepared to evaluate Donne's methods and his poems useful introductions to Donne's intention.

Little is known about the early friendship of Hall and Donne. Hall assumed the rectorship of Hawstead in Suffolk, a living as the gift of the Drurys, in 1601. He was then twenty-seven, a Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and an author of note, his Virgidemiarum having stimulated, if not initiated, a vogue for Juvenalian verse satire in the late fifteen-nineties. In his autobiographical memoir, he records an initial conflict with a Mr. Lyly, “a witty and bold Atheist,” also in the employ of Sir Robert.³ This man, R. C. Bald has conjectured, was William Lyly, husband of Donne's sister, Anne.⁴ If Hall knew Anne Lyly, he may have also met Donne during this same period. In any event, the fact that Hall was one of the recipients of Donne's cross-and-anchor seals at the latter's death in 1631 suggests their friendship was of long duration.

Hall left Hawstead to become rector of Waltham in Norwich in 1608, but although a disagreement occasioned his departure, he apparently retained no ill-will toward his former patron. The tone of an epistle written to the Drurys in 1608 is more than cordial, and no rancor is evident in Hall's later accounts of the separation. When Elizabeth Drury died in 1610, Hall, who would have known her during most of her brief life, had cause to share in the family's grief and to participate in her memorialization. He acted not only as “harbinger” for Donne's Anniversaries, but he may also have had a large share in seeing the second of the two poems through the press while Donne was abroad in 1613.⁵

Although less august and estimable a personage than Jonson, Joseph Hall had his own qualifications as critic. He had distinguished himself at Cambridge, had served two years as lecturer in Rhetoric, and the first book of his Virgidemiarum had been a survey of the late-Elizabethan literary scene, which as Arnold Davenport has observed is “remarkable clear-sighted.” According to Thomas Fuller, Hall had been noted at Cambridge for his “ingenious maintaining that mundus senescit.”⁶ Hall would have thus found in Donne's thesis that in the untimely death of Elizabeth Drury “the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented” a congenial thought. The future bishop of Norwich, learned, grave, and no mean literary craftsman himself, was more than adequately prepared to understand Donne's intention and to evaluate his success in praising the life and mourning the death of Elizabeth Drury.

Hall's poems are written in a style complementary to the great eulogies they preface. They praise Elizabeth Drury and, even more, Donne, but although occasional they are far from perfunctory. The first of Hall's poems, “To the Praise of the Dead,” offers both praise and consolation. It seeks to assuage grief for the most pathetic aspect of Elizabeth Drury's death, its prematurity, and to praise Donne's Anatomy for its most distinctive quality, its wit. Almost after Donne's own fashion, Hall's argument is a tissue of paradoxes, the intent to show Elizabeth's death a “gainful losse,” the method a witty application of the Christian doctrines of Grace and Immortality to the death of a young woman.

Hall first declares that the world is well dead since it has permitted Elizabeth's survivors to live to see this “world of wit” in Donne's poem; yet he questions how that world can be truly dead since Donne's Muse lives, serving to “informe a World; and bids it bee / In spite of losse or fraile mortalitie” (9-10).⁷ The various “worlds” of Hall's metaphor, with their seemingly illogical insistence on the continuance of life and their supposition that Donne's poem both announces the waning and reconstructs a “world” of sorts, mirror and endorse effectively the dominant image of the Anatomy: the old world destroyed at Elizabeth's death, the new world restored in her memorialization. At the same time, Hall's play on worlds indicates his awareness that Donne's mors mundi is figurative and capable of variation. Moreover, Hall's complex of conceits is a bold gambit. There is no preliminary lament and little direct consolation. Assured of the ultimate triumph over death of good men and women, Hall subordinates at the outset the pathos of Elizabeth's death to the moral utility of her praise. Elizabeth's death and Donne's wit, Hall affirms, are well-matched (18-21), and she could not have sought therefore a better time to die. While she lived, her modesty would have concealed her virtues; in death, praise may be freely and abundantly given.

Hall views praise as a reciprocal activity. In an important but difficult passage, he insists that he gives to Elizabeth only what she herself has given to him by being what she was; and what she was was the work of Grace:

Yet what wee give to thee, thou gav'st to us,
And may'st but thanke thy selfe, for being thus:
Yet what thou gav'st, and wert, O happy maid,
Thy grace profest all due, where 'tis repayd.
So these high songs that to thee suited bin
Serve but to sound thy Makers praise, in thine

[31-36]

Now Elizabeth sings “amid the Quire of Saints, and Seraphim” and with angelic skill. The goodness of her brief life presaged the part she bore “in those best songs / Whereto no burden, nor no end belongs” (43-44). Her “love-sick” parents need no longer weep. But those who have survived will keep her memory fresh in their songs until they too sing her “ditty” and “note” as disembodied souls.

Hall's poem builds from the simple theological premises of God as source and eternal life the reward of human virtue to a vision of praise as communal devotion, a medly of songs of men, departed souls, and angels magnifying God's glory. Grief has no part in such harmony, for like Donne's, Hall's theology prevents him from considering Elizabeth's death except sub specie aeternitatis; her virtues, from such a perspective, are not only admirable but instructive. Felicitously timed, her death has brought together “the cunning pencill, and the comely face” (18), the perfect match of subject and artist. Appropriately focused, Donne's response to her death leads mortals beyond her virtues to the divine adjuncts they mirror and to which, Hall strongly implies, mortals must aspire.

Although in the same style as Hall's first preface, “The Harbinger to the Progress” differs in tone and theme. Its rhetoric is more intimate in provenance: Hall shifts from the communal “we” to the more personal “I,” and his own manner is less aulic, more contemplative, and even affectionate. Reflecting Donne's own development from the systematic analysis of the world's moribundity to a meditation on the state of the virtuous soul after death, Hall similarly shifts perspective to make himself and his poem a third party to the communion of souls that Donne's Second Anniversarie enacts. Hall is not so much interested in the felicity of poet and his theme as in the great spiritual powers that permit Donne to transcend the upper limits of mortal contemplation: “Two Soules move here, and mine (a third) must move / Paces of admiration, and of love” (1-2). Hall's own self-effacement dramatizes the mortal norm and defines the spiritual limitations of Donne's audience. Although he wishes to join the movement of souls, he, along with the rest of mankind for whom he speaks, is excluded for “no soule (whiles with the luggage of this clay / It clogged is) can follow thee halfe way” (9-10). Elizabeth's soul speeds meanwhile beyond human ken; it is to Donne's credit that he follows her so far and fast:

So fast, as none can follow thine so fast;
So far as none can follow thine so farre,
(And if this flesh did not the passage barre
Hadst caught her) let me wonder at thy flight
Which long agone hadst lost the vulgar sight.

[20-24]

In the concluding lines of “The Harbinger” Hall alludes to Donne's plan to memorialize Elizabeth's death annually and endorses it, even though “more may not beseeme a creatures praise” (32). But there is no implication of censure here: “Still upwards mount,” Hall declares, “and let thy Makers praise / Honor thy Laura, and adorne thy laies” (35-36). If the saints in heaven know of human activities, they are best content with songs “which praise those awful Powers that make them blest” (42). Both the height of his praise and the altitude of his contemplative flight are justified in Donne's ultimate object: God's praise.

While Hall's poems are workmanlike and expressive, they are most valuable as criticism, for they not only demonstrate that Donne's contemporaries could approve of the Anniversaries, but that they could grasp much of their significance. Specifically, three insights emerge from Hall's reading of Donne's poems. First, Hall recognized that the Anniversaries were meditations, didactic and affective in purpose. Rather than deprecating Donne's intention to make the celebration of Elizabeth Drury an annual event, Hall encouraged it, identified himself with the project as co-celebrant, and by implication endorsed the idealization fundamental to Donne's conception of his human subject. To Hall, Donne's poems were felicitous religious exercises in which the poet demonstrated extraordinary ability to ferret out eternal meanings in quotidian events and make such meanings plain to the less enlightened.

Secondly, Hall understood Donne's aim to write for the praise of God. Both prefaces affirm this idea, almost to the point of redundancy, and there is no good reason to suppose this veiled criticism of Donne, as though Hall were prescribing rather than describing Donne's theme. Hall was an inveterate moralist, highly sensitive to literary indiscretion. In his verse satires (1:viii) he had attacked poets who promiscuously mix the sacred and profane, or handle sacred themes after the fashion of secular poets. Moreover, by 1610, Hall was a divine of sufficient prominence to be concerned with his reputation. If he had thought Donne's poems impious or profane to the least degree, he would hardly have tolerated them at all, much less written adulatory prefaces testifying to Donne's spiritual insight. It makes more sense to assume that Hall meant exactly what he said, that he and Donne shared the theological assumptions common to their age—that the source of human virtue is God; God is praised in the celebration of human virtue—and that Hall interpreted Donne's intention accordingly. If Donne is less explicit about his purpose than Ben Jonson or some modern critics would have preferred, perhaps as Hardison has suggested, these assumptions were too commonplace for utterance.⁸ In any case, while Ben Jonson was often eccentric in his literary judgments, Hall, conversely, has repeatedly been censured by his critics for the unoriginality of his conceptions.⁹ Surely the burden of proof rests with him who would assert Hall's interpretation to be exhortative rather than descriptive.

Finally, Hall identifies the provenance of Donne's rhetoric, the Petrarchan tradition. This seems a curious identification, since the Anniversaries and Canzoniere are so different in genre and style. Yet both Donne's elegies and Petrarch's sonnets memorialize a beloved lady who has died, who is a paragon of virtue, and who continues to exert a benign influence on both the poet and his world. Further, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Canzoniere were viewed not only as a prototype for the sonnet sequence, but as a compendium of exalted attitudes and sentiments compatible with religious devotion. Donald Guss has shown how thoroughly Donne's lyrics are imbued with Petrarchan attitudes and rhetorical devices; Hardison has drawn specific parallels between the Anniversaries and the Canzoniere (the new/old world conceit, contempt for the world, Augustinian self-analysis.)¹⁰ For Hall, however, the Petrarchan connection is specifically in the relationship of poet and his subject: Donne is to Elizabeth as Petrarch to Laura. Given the fame of Petrarch and his beloved, this is an extremely flattering analogy. It is also an important critical insight. For it suggests that Hall thought of the Anniversaries not as a unique experiment or variation, but as a poetic enterprise with honorable, even august, antecedents, in the very mainstream of Renaissance literature.

In the four years preceding the death of Elizabeth Drury, Hall was involved in a literary project that may further explain his favorable response to the Anniversaries. A man of great personal piety and contemplative habit, Hall made his private devotions public in 1605, in his Meditations and Vowes Divine and Moral, a collection of two hundred “homely aphorisms” on moral and religious themes (a third “century” was added in a subsequent edition). Encouraged by the public reception of his meditations, and even more convinced that a market existed for books reducing Christianity to practice, he published in 1606 his Arte of Divine Meditation, in which he reduced his practice to theory.

In his Arte Hall defines meditation as a “bending of the mind upon some spiritual object through divers forms of discourse, until our thoughts come to an issue” (6:48) and distinguishes between two kinds of meditation: the “extemporal” that fixes on the creatures and the “deliberate” that deals with a theme such as Christ's passion or Man's fallen condition. Both kinds of meditation, according to Hall, move the affections toward godliness and satisfy his criterion for successful meditation: the apprehension of truth by the emotions as well as the intellect. For the first kind of meditation, the extemporal, Hall provides no rule. Since its potential subject matter is no less extensive than the creation itself, its practice cannot be prescribed, and Hall devotes only a few pages to its discussion. Yet its practice is no less obligatory for the Christian. He observes that such meditation is ancient (he cites Solomon, the Psalmist, Jesus, and Augustine as practitioners) and the means by which the believer gains access to “the thought and discourse of that excellent order which God hath settled in all these inferior things” (6:49). Indeed, he insists that if the spiritual significance of sensible objects be overlooked, the creation itself is “half lost” (6:49).

The chief business of Hall's Arte, however, is the method of deliberate meditation. Essentially, Hall's program consists of three parts: an introductory prayer, the “deep and firm consideration of the thing propounded,” and a sequence of complaints, petitions, and commendations in which the matter of meditation is interiorized and the affections moved. For the reader's convenience Hall provides a diagram showing the various steps of contemplation and suggesting the increasing rigor of thought necessary to bring the meditation to issue. This program, Hall admits, is the work of an obscure and nameless monk, written more than a century before.¹¹ In fact, Hall owes his greatest debt to his Cambridge education, for although he consoles the unlearned reader with the assurance that “deep and firm consideration” follows the course of natural reason and that “we are all thus far born logicians,” his method of consideration follows essentially the heuristic of Ramist logic: a methodical excursus through the “places” of invention: cause, effect, definition, division.¹²

Hall's Arte established a pattern for Protestant meditation in England by providing an alternative to “methods” then in vogue on the Continent, especially Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. In Milo Kaufmann's words, Hall “skipped over the whole Ignatian tradition.”¹³ But while Hall played down the role of the imagination and the senses by omitting the Ignatian “composition of place” as essential prelude to meditation and while he substituted Ramist logic for the strict calendar of the Exercises, Hall's Protestantism is not exclusive. In the first place, he admits a great variety of subject matter. In discussing themes proper to meditation he observes: “We cannot go amiss so long as we keep ourselves in the track of divinity, while the soul is taken up with the thoughts either of the Deity in his essence and persons … or of his attributes, his justice, power, wisdom, mercy, truth; or of his works, in the creation, preservation, government of all things; according to the Psalmist, I will meditate of the beauty of thy glorious Majesty, and thy wonderful works” (6:58). Nor does Hall believe his method of invention indispensable. “I desire not to bind every man to the same uniform proceeding in this part. Practice and custom may perhaps have taught other courses, more familiar and not less direct. If then we can, by any other method, work in our hearts so deep an apprehension of the matter meditated, as it may duly stir the affections, it is that only we require” (6:62). And finally, for Hall method and theme are secondary to the results, as he explains in the first of his Meditations and Vowes: “When I set myself to meditate, I will not give over till I come to an issue. It hath been said by some, that the beginning is as much as the midst; yea, more than all; but I say, the ending is more than the beginning” (7:440).

Although Hall was prepared to allow variation in method and theme, he also provided cautions “that our meditations be not either too farfetched or savouring of superstition”:

Farfetched I call those which have not a fair and easy resemblance unto the matter from whence they are raised; in which case our thoughts prove loose and heartless, making no memorable impression on the mind. Superstitious, when we make choice of those grounds of meditation which are forbidden us, as teachers of vanity; or employ our own devices, though well-grounded, to an use above their reach; making them, upon our own pleasures, not only furtherances, but parts of God's worship; in both which our meditations degenerate, and grow rather perilous to the soul.

[6:50]

In light of Jonson's censure of the Anniversaries for their extravagance and impropriety, Hall's remarks are most enlightening. Clearly he approved of Donne's theme and methods in the face of the most discriminating reflections on meditative etiquette. Moreover, Hall's principles could well accommodate a “novel” theme, even if Donne's could be so classified. Legitimate matter for meditation, Hall insists, is bountiful and varied. “There is no creature, event, action, speech, which may not afford us new matter of meditation” (6:50).

Although, as Barbara Lewalski suggests, Donne may have known Hall's treatise, the Arte of Divine Meditation provides no code to the structure of the Anniversaries.¹⁴ It does, however, explain the premises of Hall's criticism. The Arte shows that by the time Donne “meditated” on Elizabeth Drury's demise, Joseph Hall was himself both a practitioner and theorist of meditation. He had standards for subject matter, a procedure for its “deep and firm consideration,” and criteria for success or failure, the emotional apprehension of the matter without which meditation was fruitless. Moreover, his theory was flexible enough to accommodate the variation he was to find in Donne's practice. His understanding of meditation admitted the diversity of the forms of discourse; he would have found the death of the world not only a suitable, but congenial, theme; and he would have seen the Ignatian invention of Donne's poem analogous to his own Ramist method. Most importantly, he would have been prepared to evaluate the Anniversaries as affective discourse, for to Hall no meditation is successful without a final union of thought and feeling.

Hall's Arte thus clarifies the evaluation of his prefaces and suggests their importance as criticism. Hall was well-qualified by education, temperament, and interests to evaluate the propriety and artistry of the Anniversaries. He had known Elizabeth Drury in the flesh, but he found Donne's praise of her soul neither absurd nor disrespectful; and although no “metaphysical,” Hall viewed the premises of Donne's poems as reasonable, even traditional, meditative topoi in general accord with his own theories of meditation. Moreover, Hall clearly understood the intention of the Anniversaries. Donne told Ben Jonson that he wished to express the idea of a woman, not woman as she was in reality—and that is the impression one gets from Hall. As far as the Anniversaries were concerned, Hall proved a better critic than Jonson.¹⁵

Notes

1. See Donne's Poetical Works, ed. Grierson (Oxford, 1912), 2:178, 186; Marius Bewley, “Religious Cynicism in Donne's Poetry,” Kenyon Review 14 (1952): 621-23; John Donne: the Anniversaries, ed. Frank Manley (Baltimore, 1963), pp. 6-8. Cf. Hardison, The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962), pp. 163-66; Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise (Princeton, 1973), pp. 307-8.

2. “Patronage of Joseph Hall and John Donne,” Philological Quarterly 15 (1936): 408-13.

3. “Observations of Some Specialities of Divine Providence,” The Works of Joseph Hall, ed. Philip Wynter, 10 vols. (Oxford, 1863), 1:xviii-xix. All quotations from Hall's prose are from this edition and are cited by volume and page in the text.

4. Donne and the Drurys (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 69-84.

5. On Hall's attitude toward his former patron, see The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1949), p. 274. The phrase ‘harbinger’ is Ben Jonson's, who told Drummond that Hall was “Herbenger to Donne's Anniversarie”: Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1925-52), 1:133. See also Robert C. Bald, John Donne—a Life (Oxford, 1970), p. 244.

6. Davenport, p. v.; Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England, ed. P. A. Nuttall, 3 vols. (London, 1840), 2:231.

7. Quotations from Hall's and Donne's poems are from Grierson's edition of Donne's Poetical Works, cited by line in my text.

8. As Hardison puts it, “Jonson's critical principles blinded him to techniques that other seventeenth-century poets used as a matter of course and that Hall understood perfectly in his prefatory poems.” The Enduring Monument, p. 170.

9. Audrey Chew observes, “If there is anything central to Hall's philosophy it is his conservatism … one finds little that is remarkable in the way of ideas.” “Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism,” PMLA 65 (1950): 1134. On the conventionality of Hall's views, see also Tom Fleming Kinlock (The Life and Works of Joseph Hall [London, 1951], p. 36) who notes that Hall “never expressed a single idea which some one greater than himself had not conceived long before he was born.” No matter how damaging such comments must be to Hall's reputation as a thinker, they suggest the unlikelihood that his response to Donne's poems was unique.

10. Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist (Detroit, 1966), pp. 46-61, 155-70; although Guss is concerned only with the lyrics, many of his generalizations about Donne's “Petrarchan” method would apply to his funeral elegies. Hardison, pp. 163-76.

11. Louis Martz (The Poetry of Meditation [New Haven, 1954], pp. 331-37) identifies the monk as Joannes Mauburnus whose Rosetum appeared anonymously in Basle, 1504, and in Paris, 1510, and compares Hall's “scale of meditation of an author ancient, but nameless” with the modus recolligendi of Mauburnus to prove Hall's debt to the Rosetum.

12. Ramism—the doctrine of the French scholar Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Rameé)—was essentially a revision of classical dialectic and rhetoric. In the Ramist scheme, invention or the technique of discovering content, was assigned to logic rather than rhetoric, and reduced to ten categories which accounted for the possible relations of subject and predicate in discourse. These categories or “places” were cause, effect, subject, adjunct, opposites, similitudes, name, division, definition, and testimony and correspond to the “principal places and heads of reason” in Hall's Arte. Like Ramists in general, Hall insists that his method is natural, accessible to every man, and a rich source of “feeling and copious matter to our meditation.” On Ramus and its influence in England, see Wilber Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956), pp. 146-281.

13. The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven, 1966), pp. 120-33. Kaufmann sees Hall's as the “central tradition in formal Puritan meditation.”

14. Pp. 82-83.

15. Research funds for this paper were provided by a University of Tulsa Faculty Research Grant.