[In the following essay, Waller argues that in “Whoso list to hunt” “male selfhood” is achieved through the “denigration and exclusion” of women.]

I. AN OBSERVATION

Recently, at the University of California, San Diego, where I had been visiting, two “new historicist” Renaissance scholars spoke on two successive days. The first day Stephen Orgel presented a masterfully detailed historical account of the instability of the Shakespearean text. The next day, Jonathan Goldberg gave an equally impressive, imaginatively structured and researched presentation concerning Hamlet and Renaissance handwriting. A third new historicist, Louis Montrose, was in the audience of both lectures. His elegant synthesis of theoretical and archival historicizing, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” had just been published in the collection Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts.¹

This confluence of scholars put me in a taxonomic mood. Each has been identified, and has identified himself, as a participant in a new group or school whose common theme, Montrose explains, is “its refusal of traditional distinctions between literature and history.”² He goes on to say that this orientation is “new in resisting a traditional opposition of the privileged individual—whether an author or a work—to a world outside.”³ For a long time I had been puzzling over Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, the book often thought of as inaugurating this movement in Renaissance Studies.⁴ I had found the book captivating and maddening. I would find myself assenting to the explicit politics of the “voice” of the book while disagreeing vehemently with the readings it presented of texts I knew well—Book 2 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Othello, and the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt, to name the main ones. As it happened, I had already worked out my own close readings of two of the Wyatt sonnets Greenblatt discusses, and I could see in minute detail how my readings and his did not agree. I was already wondering, when I found myself in the same room with Orgel, Goldberg, and Montrose, why it was that although Greenblatt said he was interested in the same problems I was interested in—roughly, power, selfhood, and cultural imperialism—our results were so different. Finding myself in this distinguished company, each member of which, I might stress, has his own distinctive interests and modes of argumentation, I became aware that Greenblatt's and my particular missing of the minds might usefully be located within the larger frame of a comment on the new historicist project in general.

“History” is, of course, a tricky term, as Montrose fully acknowledges. It tends to answer only those questions that are asked of it, and it tends to assume the shape of the asker's desire.⁵ It was gradually coming clear to me on that memorable afternoon in La Jolla that my desire is different from what I deduce to be the desire of the new historicists. To be blunt, their own discursive practices bespeak a desire for, an investment or belief in, the epistemology of authority. Their modes of historicizing may be loose, the historical materials they unearth may be off-beat, unsystematically selected, and playfully arranged, but the effect they are after is one of grounding. Orgel's point was the instability of the Shakespearean text, but his proof consisted largely of historical documents, read as if they escaped the textual problematics whose inescapability they were supposed to demonstrate. In this way, Orgel could argue, and even seem to agree with, a theoretical point without allowing his own discourse to fall prey to the consequences of that point. To indulge in a pop cultural comparison, this stance is a little like that of Star Trek's Captain Kirk, mapping the universe from the relative safety of his Federation star ship, making occasional forays into the unknown, but always secure in the knowledge that Scotty can beam him up if he encounters any truly intransigent aporias. Shakespeare's texts are left to suffer their instability alone. Literature is not opposed to or distinguished from history, it is true. But it tends to become history—not a new history in which the historian's position as knower is represented as being just as historical and textual as the material under scrutiny, but the old kind which delivers “knowledge”—be it pro- or anti-Establishment.

I have a harder time spatializing the stances of Goldberg and Montrose. Goldberg's talk about some of the material characteristics of Renaissance handwriting was a welcome extension of theoretical discussions of “écriture.” His examples suggested that readability, in the sense of legibility, was not necessarily the first priority, or even a desired effect, in the play of calligraphic styles and genres to be found in the archives. Goldberg's performance implicitly denaturalized or “demythologized,” to use Roland Barthes' term, all technologies of writing, doing for the materiality of writing something akin to what Derrida has done for the philosophical idea of writing. Montrose, meanwhile, has published a cogent critique of Greenblatt's treatment of Spenser, and has himself suggested that the “new historicism” has something of the academic fashion about it, conceding that “the theoretical and methodological assumptions, principles, and procedures of such a project have yet to be systematically articulated.”⁶

There is a certain pathos, however, accompanying Montrose's theoretical statements about his own work and that of others. At one point he explains that to give themselves the sense that their own writing is “a mode of action” in “a system of higher education increasingly geared to the provision of highly specialized, technological, and preprofessional training,” new historicist critics may justifiably indulge in a little “anti-reflectionism.” Too much formal analysis may have led to a “nagging sense of professional, institutional, and political impotence.”⁷ You see what I mean about the desire for some kind of ground, the kind of ground that would legitimate the critic's authority in the context of a positivist setting? The trace of this desire for ground can also be seen in Goldberg's ingenious strategy of taking as his topic the material base of writing. Some threat is, momentarily at least, postponed. What is that threat? Montrose's candidate, as I have indicated, is what he calls “structuralist and poststructuralist formalisms.” In “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” he writes: “Current invocations of History … seem to me at least in part a response to (or, in some cases, merely a reaction against) various structuralist and poststructuralist formalisms that have seemed, to some, to put into question the very possibility of historical understanding and historical experience.”⁸ But whose historical understanding and historical experience has theory put into question? I would ask. And how did those “understandings” and “experiences,” or their written representations, come to be equated with “knowledge” in the educational establishment? What kind of history presents itself as a ground of or for stable meaning, and in doing so implicitly denies the possibility that the shape of your desire might not be the shape of my desire?

There are ways of living and writing historically in which the aporias of knowing do not present themselves as the occasion for pathos, or result in feelings of powerlessness, or, in any sense, suggest that history is inaccessible. As this volume and others testify, there is a second new development in Renaissance studies—a less magisterial, less “liberal” rewriting of early modern social, political, and literary practices.⁹ This work not only starts from explicitly ideological positions, usually foregrounding class, or gender, or both, but also assumes that to be historical is to be in motion. The motive for going to the archives, a vexed question in both Montrose's and Jean Howard's discussions of the new historicism, is not to thicken the description or to broaden, in a simple Euclidian sense, the field of inquiry.¹⁰ The motive, the desire, of this historical research is to demonstrate how our representations of the past move, how different they are depending upon what kinds of conceptual categories are or are not brought to bear on, what social categories are or are not included in, the analysis. Did women have a Renaissance?¹¹ How does a text by Rabelais exclude the feminine from the possibility of identity or presence?¹² The historian/critic shifts her own position (from excluded reader to dialogical writer) and enters a relationship, not to, but in a situation (so that the relationship becomes nonhierarchical—neither the past nor the present speaks for the other). In so doing she changes the situation itself (which becomes open, subject to still further change). Unlike the new historicists, she does not want the position from which she begins to be validated, and it would defeat the purpose of her performance if it were.

In short, the new historicism looks from here a lot like a flight, not only from theory, but also from the implications for historical thought of Marxism and feminism. Class- and gender-centered historiographies no less than deconstruction (and often with its help) are showing that the kind of knowledge for which new historicism seems to be nostalgic depends upon exclusivity, the privileged position of one class, race, or gender. The sense of powerlessness Montrose speaks of could be read as an accurate sign, not necessarily negative or unfortunate, that a political challenge to the discourses of intellectual authority is beginning to be felt. If the new historicists are indeed as concerned with the terrors of power as they say they are, they could use this occasion to see how they themselves have been shaped by the power/knowledge game which has for so long underwritten white, male privilege. Although no one wants to see him/her self as the class enemy, when reflection and analysis make us feel disenfranchised, we need to look at the conditions that allow us to feel entitled.

Let me emphasize that I do not mean to impugn the characters or the motives of any of the new historicists. But if, as it sometimes promises, this movement is to inaugurate a phase of politically oriented Renaissance scholarship, then the sooner its own ideological operations come under discussion, the better. The rest of this essay will focus on Stephen Greenblatt's book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the text which has catalyzed these reflections. In a counterreading of one of Greenblatt's selected texts, Sir Thomas Wyatt's sonnet “Whoso list to hunt,” and its Petrarchan “model,” “Una candida cerva” (“A white deer”), I will demonstrate how the selfhood Greenblatt has demarcated as his object of study—and, finally, as a kind of irreducible entity—leads to a symptomatic denigration and exclusion of woman. Greenblatt's text claims to be engaged in an analysis of upper-class English Renaissance male selfhood, critical of the ravages committed in the name of that selfhood, both privately—in the family—and publicly—in the New World, in Africa, and within British society itself. But in the heat of his readings, the critic more often simply identifies with that model of selfhood, romanticizing and reinscribing it within his own critical discourse. That is, his text repeatedly reinscribes as absolute the very concepts it also presents as rhetorical and political. The cognitive imperialism that it deplores, as I will illustrate, it also exercises. In doing so, I will also argue, Greenblatt's text becomes unselfconsciously sexist. It addresses a male audience whose empirical experience is called upon to ratify readings which are, in effect, heavily freighted ideologically. Essentially mimetic, these readings neglect the rhetorical operations of their texts—the rhetorical operations which underwrite both male and female selves. As one consequence among several, the positions of certain key female figures are not attended to. He thereby misses what could be a central—perhaps the central—source of insight into the fashioning of the elitist male self.

II. A HOMILY

The appeal of the book for me, and I am sure for many Renaissance scholars, lies in its contextual information and emblematic anecdotes. The six chapters, discussing respectively Thomas More, William Tyndale, Thomas Wyatt, Book II of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare's Othello, are generally introduced by an historical vignette or some other extraliterary, usually historical, speculation which eloquently signals the literary critic's overt politics. The chapter on Marlowe, for example, opens with the chilling tale of a merchant fleet which sets in at Sierra Leone, where the English seamen, after admiring a finely built and well-organized native village, set fire to it. (The U.S. in the Third World?) The chapter on Wyatt brings alive the pathologies of Henry VIII's absolutist court. (Modern American corporate life?) The chapter on Shakespeare's Othello is set up in terms of a story about how the Spaniards tricked some Bahamian natives into going to work in the mines of Hispaniola by promising to take them to the paradise that the natives' indigenous religion promised them after death. Here Greenblatt's point is that the Spanish see Bahamian religion, though not their own, as a manipulable construct, and, further, that the compulsion of their own creed is only strengthened by their contemptuous exploitation of an analogous symbolic structure.

But over and over again the politically engaged historian fails to be similarly vigilant toward his own treatment of self and other. Consider the following passage from Greenblatt's commentary on Sir Thomas Wyatt's sonnet, “Whoso list to hunt”:

The drama of the lyric is the passage from Petrarch's vision of the world to Wyatt's or rather to the vision we ourselves constitute on the basis of the poet's deliberately allusive self-representation. Of course, the effect is diminished if we are unfamiliar with the source, but it is by no means entirely lost, for the reader is in any case implicated in the sonnet's essential activity, the transformation of values. The poet twice addresses the reader as a potential hunter—“Whoso list to hunt,” “Who list her hunt”—both inviting and dissuading him, making him reenact the poet's own drama of involvement and disillusionment. We share the passage from fascination to bitterness, longing to weariness, and we do more than share: we are forced to take responsibility as translators in our own right. It is we, after all, who refuse to take noli me tangere in a religious sense, we who understand Caesar not as God but as an all-too-human protector, we who hear—as Wyatt's contemporaries may have done—Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII where there is only talk of a hind and her hunters. It is as if a whole mystical visionary ethos gives way before our eyes and under our pressure [sic] to a corrupt and dangerous game of power.

(149, emphasis mine, except where otherwise indicated)

Greenblatt's text here treats the historically remote personae of Petrarch's and Wyatt's poems similarly to the way the Spanish are said to have treated the Bahamians. The sonnet enacts a transformation of values, he says; Wyatt's world is different from Petrarch's. But somehow here in our contemporary world of twentieth-century academic criticism, we are not so uncomfortably subject to relativism. We know who we are, and where we stand. “We” know when to refuse to read noli me tangere in a religious sense, “we” know Caesar for what he is, and “we” hear the real historical reference behind what appears to be only a remark about the nature of the relationship between aristocratic males and their ladies. This is the language of imperial history, not of cultural criticism. The essentializing rhetoric suggests that twentieth-century readers have achieved what previous ages lacked, a perspective beyond contingency from which texts and events can be known absolutely. This apotheosis of the present as a position of privileged knowledge coincides with a remarkable disregard for the differences and divisions between positions in our own society. Coinciding with the essentializing rhetoric of the passage, there seems to be an assumption that the owner of this absolutist twentieth-century perspective is both male and heterosexual. The pronoun “he,” referring to the male reader implied by Wyatt's poem, is unselfconsciously elided with a “we,” referring to Greenblatt and his readers, who are decidedly not generically human, but stereotypically male: “The poet twice addresses the reader as a potential hunter—‘Whoso list to hunt,’ ‘Who list her hunt’—both inviting and dissuading him, making him reenact the poet's own drama of involvement and disillusionment. We share the passage from fascination to bitterness” (emphasis mine). In other words, Greenblatt's text not only exploits the Wyatt poem to enhance its own authority, but, in the bargain, obliterates the position of the female (or nonheterosexual male) reader. The two gestures, in fact, go together. The liberal guilt which Greenblatt so graciously wishes to share with his reader (“we are forced to take responsibility as translators in our own right”) does not undo the act of usurpation and colonization being perpetrated either on Wyatt's text or on the reader who does not identify with the thrills and disillusionments of the male traffic in women. On the contrary, the expression of guilt is one more indication that the critic wants his own position to be regarded as “natural,” as politically and epistemologically beyond question. (One feels guilty about that which one assumes one knows and controls.) To put the case conversely, Greenblatt's own rhetoric of critical mastery effectively delegitimates both the past in relation to the present and the female in relation to the male.

The strange mixture of insight and blindness Greenblatt so usefully identifies in the Spaniards' behavior toward the Bahamians shows up in modern dress throughout this book. It was difficult for me, on a first reading, to know whether to credit the one or the other. The passage I have quoted is more obviously objectionable than most of the text. The description of the Spaniards, on the other hand, is so astute and impassioned that one can hardly believe that the critic fails to grasp its application to himself—except, of course, there is Greenblatt's own illuminating example of the Spaniards to help us. I have finally decided that the issue lies in Greenblatt's disinclination to contextualize and relativize—to consider as an ideological construct—the critical ground from which he is operating. No matter how much he “knows” discursively about the ungroundedness of the “self-fashioner,” this knowledge remains compartmentalized, powerless to change the way he reads and writes—powerless, that is, to open up alternative conceptual fields in which the burdens and compulsions of one notion of selfhood could present themselves differently. To demonstrate what I mean, I will offer an alternative reading to one of the texts dealt with by Greenblatt—Wyatt's sonnet “Whoso list to hunt.” The differences between our readings, and the difference this makes in how these texts respond to the questions I share with Greenblatt about a model of male selfhood which is still with us, should show, not how much more disinterested my interpretive position is, but, on the contrary, what different literary histories can be generated from different sociological and ideological positions.

III. H(E)ARTS AND HINDS: TWO PORTRAITS OF MALE DESIRE

My sympathy deserts my own sex: I feel how very disagreeable it must be for a woman to have a lover like Wyatt. But I know this reaction to be unjust; it comes from using the songs as they were not meant to be used.

—C. S. Lewis (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 229, emphasis mine)

Whoso list to hount, I knowe where is an hynde,
          But as for me, helas, I may no more:
          The vayne travaill hath weried me so sore.
          I ame of theim that farthest commeth behinde;
Yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde
          Drawe from the Diere: but as she fleeth afore,
Faynting I folowe. I leve of therefore,
          Sins in a nett I seke to hold the wynde.
Who list her hount, I put him owte of dowbte,
          As well as I may spend his tyme in vain:
          And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain
There is written her faier neck rounde abowte:
          Noli me tangere, for Cesars I ame;
          And wylde for to hold, though I seme tame.(13)

From the arguably nonexemplary position of a female reader and teacher of Renaissance literature, Sir Thomas Wyatt's sonnet “Whoso list to hount, I knowe where is an hind” inscribes a very obvious absence. This absence is so obvious that when it is missed, or unselfconsciously repeated, I suspect that a nontrivial ideological operation is taking place. This textual effect, which is often repeated but rarely “seen” in the criticism of the poem over the last forty years, is none other than the denial of the position of any reader who is not male, heterosexual, and politically privileged.¹⁴ Or rather, if a position cannot be denied which was never implied, then a great many readers of this poem, be they sixteenth-century aristocratic or twentieth-century American women, contemplate an image of their own nonidentity or noncoincidence with themselves when they try to read themselves as readers of this poem.¹⁵ In the very act of trying to come into “being” as a reading self, a woman comes face to face with a kind of “nonbeing” when she tries to read herself in the story of the hunter/readers identified definitely and exclusively as male in lines 9 and 10 (emphasis mine):

Who list her hount, I put him owte of dowbte,
          As well as I may spend his tyme in vain.

The quotation with which the poem closes goes even further. This text, which at least thematically provides the ground or occasion for the lines that precede it, not only masculinizes the place of the reader, but also actively usurps the place of woman as speaker or writer, as producer of language, especially in its odd appropriation of the first person singular pronoun “I”:

          And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain
There is written her faier neck rounde abowte:
          Noli me tangere, for Cesars I ame;
And wylde for to hold, though I seme tame.

Though the lines in quotation marks are presented as inscribed by a male hand, and addressed to readers who are male, this unseen authorial hand—that of a Caesar who evidently wields considerable political and linguistic as well as sexual power—exploits the inevitability with which the shifter “I” refers to or suggests a speaking subject. The quotation thus implies the presence of a female self different and distinct from the male writer. The illusion generated by the poem, of a female speaker or writer describing herself, is, however, patently an effect of this male writing—a writing which, furthermore, would not even be visible to, let alone readable by, the figure it would appear, or attempt, to identify.

The question of how a female reader, or a feminist reader of any sex, might read a text that denies woman any place—whether that of reader, speaker, or writer—in its discourse draws me next to the relationship between the lines within quotation marks and the rest of the sonnet. The scandalously usurptive, proprietary “Caesar” named in these lines might make the male poet, to be inferred from earlier uses of the pronoun “I,” look good by comparison, despite the poet's displacement of woman as reader. But the illusion that there are two male figures here, and two texts, is itself a function of the same kind of gesture—really the same gesture—whereby a female subject was somewhat clumsily and ineffectually implied. More subtly, and conspicuously so, the poet's portrayal of himself as a reader of another man's text performs the same power play we see within the quotation. The subjectivity of an other is suggested by the image of a text authored by that other, while, in fact, that textual image is constituted in and by the text of the sonnet. What “Caesar” is made to do clumsily, the sonneteer appears to do exceedingly well, beating this ventriloquist's dummy of a Caesar at his own game.

The difference between this reading of Wyatt's Caesar and Greenblatt's reading provides a good illustration of the difference between reading rhetorically and reading mimetically or thematically. Greenblatt's Caesar is far more substantial than mine. He is treated, in fact, as if he, not the poet, were the poem's originary figure. “The poet's inner life,” Greenblatt comments, “… is shaped by the relation of Caesar and the object of desire” (150). Up to a point the thematic relationship between poet and Caesar seems, in fact, to be the inverse of what it is rhetorically. The sonneteer portrays Caesar as a powerful owner and protector of property, and the producer and inscriber of an ineradicable writing, while he presents himself as nearly impotent, his only capabilities (not unlike those of a literary critic) being to read and to quote. From the poet's thematically-stated position it is, of course, possible to ironize the figure of Caesar, and this he does with a vengeance, as I shall show in a moment. But in so directing the forces of irony against “Caesar,” the poet also reinscribes the hierarchy in which Caesar appears powerfully central while he, the poet, seems at first marginal and weak.

The means by which the (apparent) centrality of the figure of Caesar, though not the structure of centrism itself, is subverted by the lines in quotation marks may be described in any number of ways. One of the most economical would be to comment on the act or concept of quotation itself. Within the lines set off by quotation marks there is a citation from the Vulgate Bible which graphically (or typographically) as well as rhetorically suggests the impossibility of owning the medium—writing—in which Caesar's proprietary claim is made. The phrase that reads “Do not touch me” is neither untouchable nor sacred, although it has been used before in a sacred context. It occurs in John 20:17, where the risen Christ says to Mary Magdalene, “Noli me tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum” [Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father].¹⁶ The phrase has also been used by Wyatt's Caesar, whose use of the phrase to characterize the hind is an aspect of his own characterization by the poet. The poem, through its presentation of Caesar's appropriation of the words of the biblical Christ, arguably suggests that language belongs at once to no one and to everyone (provided that the everyone is male), implying that any sense of mastery coming from, mediated by, or directed toward language must be illusory. One may possess the power to place the Noli me tangere sign on a woman, but this will not prevent potential rivals from reading this sign as an allegory of its own highly contingent status, its dependence upon context, its lack of transcendental meaning. Similarly, the very fact that the poet (he claims) has succeeded in coming close enough to the deer to read the words on her collar might suggest that Caesar's power is not nearly as far-reaching and complete as the tone and deployment of his discourse might otherwise imply.

As for the thematic ironies which interpreters may discern in the poem's evocations of biblical and also Petrarchan contexts, no one critic could foresee and describe all of them. I will, nevertheless, play with a few. In John's Gospel, Christ says “Noli me tangere” not to signify that he is the private property of God and therefore not available or accessible to Mary Magdalene, but to warn her that his situation is one of ambiguity and transience. He is neither of this world nor of the next, at this point, but appears as a kind of afterimage of his historical incarnation—beyond history, but not yet beyond the problematics of signification. He is still subject to misappropriation and misunderstanding, as Mary's mistaking him at first for the gardener testifies. If the situation of Caesar's deer in Wyatt's poem shares any of these characteristics, Caesar betrays his own cause by calling the world's attention to them. Though he may think that he is claiming only that the status of his lady is not what it appears to be to her would-be hunters, his terms unleash questions about the transient and ambiguous status of any figure of the self—even, or especially, a theologically grounded one. The very possibility of ownership and private property in terms of which Caesar describes his relationship to his lady might seem, with reference to the Biblical text, illusory. The echo in “for Caesar's I am” of Matthew 22: 21—“Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's”—intensifies the irony of Caesar's proprietary claims.¹⁷ In this second biblical passage, the Pharisees, hoping to entrap Jesus into either defying Roman law or selling out Hebrew society, ask him whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. Christ takes a coin and asks, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” In other words, he asks his interlocutors to see the coin as an icon of Caesar's political and economic (but not spiritual) centrality rather than as an index of private wealth. Disrupting his antagonists' logic, he calls attention to the public, political structure underwriting what was being presented as private property so that the latter virtually disappears as an operable category. By so problematizing the system of reference and meaning upon which the circulation of money depends, he displaces money as measure or mediator of what the self has or is.¹⁸ If, then, the lady in Wyatt's poem resembles this coin, as her inscribed collar suggests she does, she may be read as connoting the contingency of Caesar's wealth and power, not to mention the coercive, but less than absolute, imperialistic, perhaps illegitimate political structure which underwrites that position. The image of the coin may also bring with it the suggestion that the lady has been in circulation—thus, in a different way, undermining Caesar's claim.

Two more points. As most commentators including Greenblatt mention, the poem is probably making reference to the relationship of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, Anne having probably been a lover of Wyatt's. If so, then the conflation of Christ's and Caesar's words in lines 11 and 12 may also allude to Henry's making himself the head of the English Church when the Pope refused him the divorce he needed to marry Anne. One more implication set in motion by Wyatt's Caesar's garbling of Scripture would then be that Henry's conflation of church and state amounts to a cynical and unconvincing usurpation. Yet another echo for the Renaissance reader might have been Plutarch's account of Julius Caesar's divorce from his wife Pompeia. She was rumored to have committed adultery, and though she was proved innocent, Caesar divorced her anyway, saying that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion. This echo registers the political irrelevance of the ambiguity between wildness or tameness in the Wyatt sonnet. Whether the female figure appears wild or tame, “free” or domesticated, her status depends upon the will of Caesar.

But before we become lost in admiration for the number and variety of ways in which this sonnet gets the better of the big, bad authority figure through what Greenblatt terms its “immense power of implication,” let us recall, as I noted earlier, that this is fake combat. Wyatt's Caesar is as much Wyatt's creation as Wyatt's Caesar's lady. We could also note that the central conceit of the poem—the hunt—still casts the poet in the role of aristocratic hunter and the beloved in the role of an animal to be hunted. As Helmut Bonheim has observed, the sonnet conveys the impression that certain members of the society in question “have a license to approach such game as the hind, whereas others lower down on the social ladder have none,” and, further, “that women are there to be hunted or possessed.” Both points, the poet's superior social status and the inferior status of the woman, are “matters which the poet seems to accept rather than grumble about.”¹⁹ Thirdly, and for me the most subtle and disturbing symptom of the ideological operation being performed in this sonnet, is the matter of the displaced woman reader.

Before showing that the poet's pursuit of the woman is no less fake than the apparent competition with “Caesar,” let me make a detour to Wyatt's Italian model, the sonnet from Petrarch's Canzoniere which begins “Una candida cerva.” Greenblatt, too, refers his reading of Wyatt to Petrarch's poem, but he treats Petrarch's project (very cursorily) as mimetically as he does Wyatt's. “Petrarch depicts an experience of illumination and loss” (146). I have argued at length elsewhere, however, that Petrarch's highly formal poetics resists any kind of narrative reading other than that of the story of its own writing.²⁰ Petrarch's persona, as I read “him,” is a self-proclaimed descendent of Ovid's Narcissus. He alternately displays and acknowledges the illusoriness of the kind of self that would be needed to ground the signifying processes which make the self “knowable”—the illusoriness, that is, of the operative model of selfhood that Greenblatt most often takes for granted. The figure of the self as an autonomous, self-identical, ontologically grounded being who knows what he sees and knows how he feels about it disintegrates again and again in the Petrarchan text, shown repeatedly to be as much an effect as a cause of its own reading and writing. Sonnet 190, “Una candida cerva,” provides a good example.

Una candida cerva sopra l'erba
verde m'apparve, con duo corna d'oro,
fra due riviere, all'ombra d'un alloro,
levando 'l sole a la stagione acerba.
Era sua vista sìdolce superba,
ch'i' lasciai per seguirla ogni lavoro:
come l'avaro che 'n cercar tesoro
con diletto l'affanno disacerba.
“Nessun mi tocchi—al bel collo d'intorno
scritto avea di diamanti et di topazi—:
libera farmi al mio Cesare parve.”
Et era 'l sol già vòlto al mezzo giorno,
gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi,
quand'io caddi ne l'acqua, et ella sparve.(21)

From the outset the poem suggests that the figure of the deer is just that—a figure (not a “mystical vision,” as Greenblatt describes it) that appears as a function of the configuration of two bodies of water, the shade of a laurel, and the lover's position in that particular landscape. By the end of the poem this figure has become so clearly a Narcissistic projection that when the sun reaches its zenith and the lover must lean out over the water to keep the image in view, he falls in, and the image disappears. Building up to this implosion of self and other are a number of rigorously conceived details which further elaborate the connection between the figurative status of the image of the beloved and the status of the self. The lover's desire, the given of the poem, defines him as a self that is wanting or lacking in some way. A self who desires, any self who acknowledges himself as a sexual being, cannot, strictly speaking, escape a fundamental instability. Such a self cannot “know” itself and the world in the totalizing way that Greenblatt so often assumes in his commentary because its own partiality implies, by definition, that there are other positions different from its own. As the French feminists have put it, all positions, all “selves,” are equally “castrated.”²² Only an imbalance in political power between the two sexes has arbitrarily designated the “phallus,” or the male position as the locus of truth, the site of a self-identical presence existing outside the relational play of difference. Woman in this schema, then, becomes not an “other” signifying the mutual otherness of male and female alike, but the “other,” the castrated one, existing in a hierarchical relationship vis-à-vis the male. This denial of relational difference, as feminists have further noted, requires that woman be treated not as herself a desiring being, but as an object. If she is fetishized as a possessable thing, her difference from the male can be, at least momentarily, neutralized as a source of “castration anxiety.”²³ The male's confrontation with the originary “otherness” that constitutes his position is thereby forestalled.

So is his confrontation with the figural, diacritically related status of both positions. This is the strategy that comes under scrutiny in the second quatrain of the sonnet, where the lover compares himself to a miser. The puzzling reference to a pleasure which “disembitters” (“disacerba”) the travail of the pursuit of the object signals the paradox of this mode of channeling desire, namely, that the object must never be fully obtained or the ruse will be revealed. It is the pleasure of the pursuit, the pleasure of feeling oneself always about to be completed, that matters. For the miser, as for the Narcissistic lover, actually possessing or coinciding with the image of desire, be that image money or woman, would block the self-transcendence which is being sought. The self that projects its own ontological lack as an objective, external object will not be any less lacking if or when that particular objectification of desire is obtained.

The writing encircling the neck of Petrarch's doe in the third quatrain acknowledges this paradox as concisely as Narcissus's lament, “Plenty makes me poor.”²⁴ Although the words, “Let no one touch me. It has pleased my Caesar to make me free,” are neither written nor read by the beloved, they are also not appropriative. They say that no one does or shall own her. Here are no rivals and no competing hunters, collaborating in the illusion that there is some external obstacle to the lover's desire. Instead, this writing within the writing of the poem suggests the incommensurability of the lover's desire and its object. What he wants he cannot have, not because of some circumstantial prohibition, but because it does not exist in the form in which he conceives it. Specifically, it is his writing which is problematic. The “shade of the laurel” within which, in the first stanza, this internal drama is said to take place (the phrase “all'ombra d'un alloro” ambiguously modifying either the position of the deer or the position of the lover, or both the one and the other) is the shadow cast by the poet's language, as Petrarch's multiple puns throughout the Canzoniere on the laurel as poetry and the laurel as the beloved make clear. Like the pool within which Narcissus sees the reflection which allows him at first to see what he takes to be the object of his desire, then to see “himself” (but a self which is constituted by that reflection), the lover's writing is the only ground of the images of both self and other at play in this poem. They are both equally figural, and there is no way, as the use of quotation marks around the words which are around the neck of the figural deer emblematizes, to get from the figural stratum within which such a desire could be conceived to a literal stratum within which it could be satisfied. There can only be figures within figures, writing upon writing that, beautiful and informative as they may be, ultimately resist the efforts of the self (itself a figural creature) to fix or break through to a stable, literal reality. The “I” referred to in the last line of the poem—“quand'io caddi ne l'acqua et ella sparve”—can only “fall” into the water (water having been established in the Canzoniere cycle as another of Petrarch's metaphors for writing). He does not attain sovereign selfhood (which requires the illusion of the literal), but allows the unraveling process inaugurated by the investigation of the status of one image, a male image of woman, to engulf the image of the male self as well.

Not coincidentally, the poem does not exclude the female reader. Or rather it excludes all readers—all readers who would try to read themselves as stable beings in relation to a stable, unproblematically referential text. Here the male lover/reader joins woman in that unread and unreadable limbo I claimed she was consigned to by the critic's disinclination to put his own signifying practices into question. However uncomfortable within the context of Western thought this limbo may be (and some readers have been made very uncomfortable by what they take to be Petrarch's “lack of assurance” or “volatility”²⁵), this (non)position has the advantage of making other, more “ordinary” discourses appear less than self-evident. Their ideological workings, in other words, become more accessible to analysis. And, to paraphrase a contemporary theoretician of ideology, when we are summoned by the persistence of sexual, class, and racial oppression, we need all the analytical help we can get.²⁶

The relatively simple point I want to make about Wyatt's sonnet is that, though it deploys a very similar unraveling process against “Caesar” (as we have seen), it stops short of implicating the poetic subject, the “lover,” in the indeterminacy of language. And the figure that operates rhetorically to insure the integrity of the male self is woman, defined as a nonhuman, nonself. Let me recapitulate. Greenblatt, as I have indicated, reads the poem mimetically, that is, as if it were descriptive rather than constitutive of a rhetorical situation. Although he claims to be concerned with the interrelationship of rhetoric and power, he does not look to the poem as an instance of rhetorical power playing, but as a record of the results of a preexisting power play—that of Caesar. The poet's position, he assumes, is what it is from the start of the poem and works itself out as a frustrated, but rich and interesting, suspension between a realistic rendering of individuality and the necessities of diplomacy, between “transcendentalism and cynicism” (146). The poet's political and sexual alternatives then appear to be either domination and possession or disengagement. Or when these two possibilities lead to an impasse, the goal becomes to attempt at least “a clear statement of its (the hunt's) hopelessness, its ‘vanity’” (147).

But these are not at all the goals and achievements of this poem's rhetorical strategizing. If it is read, not as a “witness to his (the poet's) continued obsession even as it records the attempt to disengage himself from it,” (147, emphasis mine), but as a performative gesture in its own right, then the plot and its outcome are very different. Both the shadowboxing with “Caesar” and the pursuit of the female figure work instead to create a male persona whose status over the course of the poem becomes more, rather than less, secure. The fetishized figure of woman is the linchpin of this rhetorical operation. Because the beloved is defined as a nonhuman, nonself who, at least potentially, can belong to someone, and because this fetishized figure of woman does not disappear by the end of the poem, the male self, which logically should have succumbed to the same ironization to which Caesar is subjected, remains intact. Or, to put the case more fully, the poem sets up a three-way situation involving the lover's relationship to a figure of absolute power, his relationship to male rivals of his own station, and his relationship to a female figure defined as an object. This situation, far from being problematic for the sovereign male self, includes precisely the elements necessary to the emergence of such a self.²⁷ Here is how the poem, as a “self”-producing artifact, works.

The king, Caesar, is set up as the chief obstacle to the poet's appropriation of the image of his desire. The would-be lover “knows” where to find the “hind,” but cannot capture her because another man, whose power is greater than his own, has prohibited it. The poet and the hunters, meanwhile, through their competition with the king for the power to “own” the image of sexual desire, serve as obstacles to the king's full possession of the authority which seems to block their way. In this curious round-robin of power and sex, the status, ontological as well as political, of all the male figures is heightened and reinforced. The hunters will hunt happily in vain, neither giving up nor succeeding in the hunt, deriving their status as contenders for sovereign selfhood from the status of the man who seems to stand in their way. Meanwhile, the king's claim to sovereignty will remain happily at risk as long as he has sexual and political rivals. In short, all the male figures are put in the best of all possible positions for maintaining the illusion of the stable, sovereign subject—that of having the image of desire within sight, but just out of reach or made slightly insecure, due to some external obstacle.

Note that the Wyatt persona is, therefore, dependent for its very existence upon what Greenblatt terms the poem's “impasse.” This kind of self can emerge at all only by neither succeeding nor leaving off the pursuit. Furthermore, this self depends upon maintaining the power structure of absolutism. Relative positions within the structure may be at stake, but never the structure itself. “Caesar” may be superficially ironized, but never done away with. In fact, the very brilliance of Wyatt's lover's challenge serves to enhance the prestige of the figure who evokes it.

The political economy of sovereign male selfhood is equally dependent upon reducing woman to the status of an object. Without the fetishized female, the political economy of sovereign male selfhood would fall apart. Without this reduction of woman, politics and ideology threaten to invade the self. Not just positions within a structure, but the structure which underwrites those positions would come into question. This means, of course, that the woman who makes the competitive male relationship, and hence the sovereign self, possible, is herself placed in a highly unstable, highly unflattering, perilous and powerless double bind. She is structurally required, only to be denied and despised, abused for her role in a dynamic not of her own choosing and out of which she stands to gain nothing. As Wyatt's address to an all-male readership implies, she is effectively banished from the company of selves. As his metaphor of the hunt underscores, she comes to be articulated as rightful prey for the fierce, insatiable appetites built into self-fashioning.

This reading of the poem hardly compels me to “share” or to “take responsibility for” the pathos of the Wyatt persona. What seems to me important about the poem is the brilliance with which it either masks or reveals (depending upon whether one reads it narratively or rhetorically) the interdependence of sovereign selfhood, a highly centralized, hierarchical, nondemocratic political structure, and misogyny. It is not just the conscious politics carried out by Greenblatt's “self-fashioners” but the political conditions necessary for the emergence and perpetuation of such a model of selfhood that readers need to attend to if the sins of the fathers are not to be visited upon their daughters and sons. When, instead, “the lady vanishes” as a subject from the text of the critic as well as from the text of the Renaissance writer, the critical text becomes complicit with the forces of absolutism and sexism whose sixteenth-century effects it deplores.

Notes

1. Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 303-40.

2. Though other critics and I include Jonathan Goldberg among the “new historicists,” I am also aware of the gravitation of his work toward a certain theoretical vocabulary, or I should say, vocabularies. One problem with his 1986 book, Voice Teminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen), is its lack of differentiation among such disparate and incompatible academic figures as Jacques Derrida, Stephen Greenblatt, Thomas Greene, Geoffrey Hartman, and Emile Benveniste. In addition, theoretical points are taken to be quite portable, as if they did not have everything to do with the specificity of their staging. One of the readers' reports from the University of Tennessee Press suggests that in a forthcoming essay on Macbeth Goldberg “seems much more an (apolitical) orthodox Derridean deconstructionist than a ‘new historicist.’” I cannot speak to the Macbeth article, not having read it, but in my lexicon “orthodox deconstruction” is an oxymoron, and the apolitical Derrida and Anglo-American invention. Based on the work I do know, my sense is that Goldberg's theoretical interests are subordinate to a desire to generate and participate in a discourse of “knowledge,” not compatible with Derrida's project.

   Edward Pechter also refers to Goldberg as a new historicist in his article “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA 102, no. 3 (May 1987): 292. pechter and I otherwise disagree. He criticizes new historicism as a version of Marxism; I am interested by instances in which some form of history writing works conservatively, against the grain of Marxist and/or feminist analysis.

   Jean E. Howard also refers to Goldberg as a new historicist. See her review, “Old Wine, New Bottles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1984): 236, and her article “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 13, where she also includes the work of Stephen Orgel under the new historicist rubric. Goldberg has, of course, written his own account of new historicism: “The Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay,” ELH 49 (1982): 514-42.

   As I hope the anecdotal informality of my opening signals, however, taxonomy is not fundamental to my argument about discourse and desire.

3. Montrose, 304. For an elaboration of the theoretical argument in this article see his “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 5-12.

4. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). Quotations from this volume will be cited by page number.

5. Montrose, in “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” warns that “History,” like “Power,” is a term “now in constant danger of hypostatization” (304). Jean E. Howard, whose excellent discussion of the new historicism is less explicitly feminist than mine, writes that “when a new historian looks at the past he or she is as likely as an old historian to see an image of the seeing self, not an image of the other” (16). I have substituted “desire” for “the seeing self,” but I think we both have Narcissus on our minds. See Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 13-43.

6. Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” 304.

7. Ibid., 332.

8. Ibid., 304.

9. See especially Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986) which, incidentally, includes essays by Goldberg, Orgel, and Montrose. Also the recent work of British and American Marxists, including Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984) and Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N. Y., Cornell Univ. Press, 1985).

10. Howard, 26 and 31.

11. I am referring of course to Joan Kelly-Gadol's article by that name in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

12. See Carla Freccero's “The Other and the Same: The Image of the Hermaphrodite in Rabelais,” in Rewriting the Renaissance.

13. This version of Wyatt's sonnet is taken from Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. K. Muir (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950). The modernized version Greenblatt quotes is not identified.

14. See, for example, Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and his Contemporaries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), who not only leaves out of account the poem's exclusion of the female reader, but has harsh words for Patricia Thomson's article, “Wyatt and the Petrarchan Commentators,” Review of English Studies 10, no. 39 (Aug. 1959), which, though equally impressionistic, characterizes the poem's sentiment as “arrogant and cynical” (225). For Southall, the poem represents an advance over Petrarch's poetics toward “a firm grip on reality” (90). In other words, like Greenblatt's reading, his naturalizes Wyatt's rhetoric. Thomson's does the same, universalizing her reactions without taking into consideration her own position as a female critic, but the sharp differences in their reactions to Wyatt's persona are suggestive of the importance of gender and other aspects of social position in reading regardless of the reader's own theoretical and political orientation. For Southall's discussion of “Whoso list to hunt,” see 86-91. See also his discussion of the sonnet in Literature and the Rise of Capitalism: Critical Essays mainly on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), 22-36. C. S. Lewis, with his customary acuity, feels that there is something “oppressive” and “suffocating” about Wyatt's address to women, but explains away his feeling with an argument about the use of the poems as songs to be “sung in a room with many ladies present.” He apparently considers the court women fully capable of defending themselves against the aggression of Wyatt's sonnets in the dramatic situation of a live performance, a presumption not borne out by recent social histories of the period. See English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 229-30. Thomas Greene in The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1982) speaks of the poem only briefly but includes a comment about its “refusal of illusions about the woman” (262), again naturalizing the poem's sexual politics. Only the non-Anglo-American critic Helmut Bonheim, who mentions having been made more politically aware by his students in the sixties, notes what he calls the “sociological relevance” of the poem. See my discussion of his conclusions below, p. 173. “Notes on a Sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Literatur im Wissenschaft 5 (1972).

15. Other Renaissance scholars have begun noting other canonical texts (and their canonical readings) that speak the exclusion of the feminine subject. Carla Freccero's work (see note 12 above) parallels in many ways my work with Wyatt.

16. All citations from Scripture are quoted from the Vulgate Bible. The edition used here is the Biblia Sacra, Vulgatam Clementinam, ed. Alberto Colunga and Laurentio Turrado (Salmantica: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1959). Passages are identified by book, chapter, and verse. The Latin text of John 20: 15-17 reads, “Dicit ei Iesus: Mulier, quid ploras? quem quaeris? Illa existimans quia hortulanus esset, dicit ei: Domine, si tu sustulisti eum, dicito mihi ubi posuisti eum; et ego eum tollam. Dicit ei Iesus: Maria. Conversa illa, dicit ei: Rabboni (quod dicitur Magister). Dicit ei Iesus: Noli me tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum.”

17. Ibid. The Latin text reads, “Reddite ergo quae sunt Caesaris, Caesari: et quae sunt Dei, Deo.”

18. Modern scholars have, in fact, stressed that the phrase from John is the present imperative (“Do not cling to me”). See R. Brown, The Gospel of John (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 1011-15, which argues that the reply of Jesus is to show that He has not come back the same; His presence from now on will be in a different mode, via the Spirit.

    There is a range of opinion on the Matthew passage. Some hold that it means one should obey Caesar and obey God. Others maintain that the saying is a witty evasion, which satisfies for the moment but on reflection can mean whatever one wants it to. A full discussion is found in F. F. Bruce, “Render to Caesar” in Jesus and the Politics of His Day, ed. E. Bammel and C. F. D. Moule (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 249-63. The coin is generally seen as representative of the socioeconomic power of Rome, but possibly of its religious power as well.

    My readings of both passages are my own. The poem seems to me to provoke, rather than to limit or try to regulate, such strong, not necessarily orthodox, readings. This provocation, I am arguing, is part of the poem's seduction. Irreverence can be, ultimately, if properly staged, fuel for sovereign selfhood.

19. Bonheim, 2.

20. See my Petrarch's Poetics and Literary History (Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980), especially the chapter on the Canzoniere, 27-104.

21. Quoted from Canzoniere, critical text and introduction by Gianfranco Contini and annotations by Daniele Ponchiroli (Turin: Einaudi, 1968). The following English translation is that of Robert M. Durling in Petrarch's Lyric Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), 336.

    A white doe on the green grass appeared to me, with two golden horns, between two rives, in the shade of a laurel, when the sun was rising in the unripe season.

    Her look was so sweet and proud that to follow her I left every task, like the miser who as he seeks treasure sweetens his trouble with delight.

    “Let no one touch me,” she bore written with diamonds and topazes around her lovely neck. “It has pleased my Caesar to make me free.”

    And the sun had already turned at midday; my eyes were tired by looking but not sated, when I fell into the water, and she disappeared.

22. I am thinking of the feminist students of Jacques Lacan and their use of his theory of castration; they include Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray especially. See also Shoshana Felman's commentary on Luce Irigaray in “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Diacritics 5, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 2-10.

23. This is an expansion of the French feminist discussion of castration as it has been applied to classic American cinema by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 13-14.

24. Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), bk. 3, l. 466. The Latin reads, “inopem me copia fecit.”

25. Greene, 101 and 100, respectively.

26. Andrew Parker, “Futures for Marxism: An Appreciation of Althusser,” Diacritics 15, no. 4 (Winter 1985), 71.

27. For a much fuller discussion of how individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment through the play of desire and identification, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's brilliant argument and extensive literary analyses in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), passim. See also Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” for a rhetorical reading of the poetic subject in passages from Spenser's The Faerie Queene in many ways parallel with my reading of Wyatt's poetic subject. Montrose's critique of Greenblatt's reading of Spenser usefully extends and elaborates several points of my argument. See especially his discussion of the difference it makes to the structures under discussion when the sovereign is a woman.

My thanks to Robert Doran, Jim Rothenberg, and especially Andrew Szegedy-Maszak for their timely editorial, scholarly, and electronic contributions to this project.