University of Virginia Library

II

A second and more important issue may be illustrated by the following statement introduced into a college textbook in 1962:

This unequivocal statement is evidently indebted to the establishment by Professor Fraser of an early date for the Bodleian fragment; previous writers had not been sure.[11] But were there really poems by Wyatt in this early Court of Venus?

The three fragments B, S, and F give us altogether fourteen lyrics, a verse prologue, and a pseudo-Chaucerian tale. The earliest, printed by Gybson, has one complete lyric, "Dryuen by dissyr," which Professor Muir

prints among Wyatt's "Doubtful Poems" (No. 228), and the closing ten lines of another. In the two leaves of S, printed by Copland, are five poems (two of them truncated) including Nos. 43, 66, 103, and ("doubtful") 226. Marshe's edition, F, gives us all five of the poems from S and seven more, two of which are known as Wyatt's (Nos. 52 and 177). "My own conclusion is necessarily conservative," says Fraser. "Five of the poems in the fragments are definitely Wyatt's [i.e. Nos. 43, 52, 66, 103, 177], three more are probably his [No. 226 and the two in B], and seven are of uncertain authorship. Of these seven, some or all may have been written by Wyatt too" (pp. 34-35). We must read "six" for "seven" to get the correct total of fourteen lyrics; these six then would be Nos. 224, 225, 227, "Fortune what ayleth the," "I may by no meanes surmyse," and "Now must I lern to faine." We are offered the suggestion that "the short-poem section of The Court of Venus editions may in fact have been devoted exclusively to Wyatt's poetry" (p. 34).

The table of F's contents given above will supply fuller details on the relation of F and S. Neither of the two lyrics in B reappears in S or F. But the fragmentary character of all three extant editions permits us to wonder what else they contained. To put the question in its extremest form: Was the entire Court — a name we apply to Fraser's composite edition — originally in each of the three? This question can be promptly answered in the negative. As we have noted, at least one later edition claims to be considerably augmented.

The statement that B, which was printed before 1540, contained work by Wyatt is true if either of the following is true: (a) that S is textually dependent on B for the Wyatt poems; (b) that Wyatt wrote "Dryuen by dissyr" and/or the other lyric, whose last ten lines are in B.

The first proposition rests entirely on circumstantial evidence. There is nothing at all common today between the fragments B and S. However, S has a great deal in common with F, which in turn has the same title as B and contains a "Prologue" which we have reason to suppose was also in B.[12] Noting that some of the printing types used by Gybson were later used by William Copland (pp. 5-6, 43), Fraser says, "I believe that Copland's source for the Stark poems was Gybson's book. Copland may have acquired this book fortuitously, or it may have come to him through Gybson himself" (p. 44). It must be said that the circumstantial evidence is fairly good. The Bodleian fragment begins with sig. E1. If all of sheets A-D were devoted to the Court lyrics, there were a good many poems, some of which may have survived in S. Still that leaves us a long way from any

positive assurance that the Wyatt lyrics in S came from B. Sometime after B a printer of the Court began to advertise "many proper Ballades . . . added . . . which have not before bene imprinted." To find this notice we must now look in F, but perhaps the lost title page of S had it too. Copland obviously wanted to emphasize the newness of his edition: the distinctive running title A Boke of Balettes is proof of that. The best explanation is that S did in fact contain a good deal of new material, some of which, perhaps, was poetry by Wyatt that became available in the years following his death in 1542. Until a complete copy of B is discovered we cannot conclusively disprove, but it is certainly going too far to affirm positively, that poems by Wyatt were in print before 1540.

To identify the author of the lyrics in B, arguments are presented based on similarities of style and on other sorts of evidence. The former, it seems to me, are valid only to corroborate an attribution for which the other evidence is also pretty strong. The attempts to identify the author of the first poem in B — a headless relic of which only ten lines remain — illustrate the inadequacy of stylistic evidence by itself. Fraser's statement that this poem is "probably" Wyatt's is based on two premises: "If Stark was a reprint of Douce, this poem was probably included in Copland's book of 1547-1549. If, further, one agrees with Mrs. Stopes . . . that the poems in Douce, on internal evidence, are probably the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt . . ." (p. 34).

For the other poem in B a stronger case is offered, based on its supposed similarity to a poem in the Devonshire MS., fol. 81v, in the midst of a section of "nearly 70 poems by Wyatt, copied neatly in one hand."[13] The version in D, a single rime royal stanza, follows:

Here is the version in The Court of Venus: Besides a reference to "the proof," the phrases "driven by desire" and "not like to speed" are all that these two versions have in common. If the second is Wyatt's "reworking" (p. 33) of the first, he effected a rather complete transformation. These two phrases may well have belonged to the stockpile of poetic clichés which enriched, or at least obliged, many a court poet. The presence in the Blage MS. of another poem beginning "Dryuyn to Desyre"[16] suggests that this is the case; further testimony to the existence of standardized and interchangeable parts is borne by a hitherto unnoticed parallel between two Court poems: "My fanzy alas doth me so bynd" (line 9 of the poem just quoted), "Alas her ioy doth [me] so bind" (line 3 of No. 227, F version). On an accumulation of many similar parallels current scholarship is erecting a new understanding of the methods of composition in the early Tudor court and even of the term "authorship" when applied to poems like these. In fact, it is questioned whether Wyatt was, in the modern sense, "author" of all the poems in the Egerton MS. which bear his name.[17] Surely there is little in the parallels cited to support the attribution to Wyatt of the poem in B.

There is another line of argument, however. When the poet writes ". . . to set affection./a great way alas aboue my degre" and "I loke alas alytell to hye," may it not be Wyatt referring to his quest of Anne Boleyn? Apart from the difficulties of being certain about either (a) the seriousness with which the poet intends this as an autobiographical allusion, (b) the social significance, as opposed to mere poetic diction, of "degre" and "hye," or (c) the facts of that episode in Wyatt's life, this might be a convincing argument; but those who advance it are curiously in disagreement. Professor Fraser says, "At the time of Anne's downfall in 1536, Wyatt perhaps attempted to efface his suddenly dangerous expressions from the poem" as it stood in the Devonshire MS., and B was the result (p. 43). This fits the chronology of D and B, but it turns our attention away from the very phrases in B that seemed so pointed. Mrs. Stopes, on the other hand, taking the B version to contain direct allusions which the politic Wyatt excised from the poem as it appears in D, reverses the chronological order.[18]

The safest conclusion, I believe, is that Nos. 159 and 228 are two different poems and we have no way of knowing who wrote the latter.[19]

To summarize: While it cannot be proved that there were no poems by Wyatt in print before 1540, the latest edition of The Court of Venus does not justify the opposite claim. The Wyatt poems in S were in print by 1547-1549, the earliest date of which we can be certain.

The statement that "Wyatt intended to publish a collection of his poems"[20] reflects an old conjecture[21] which may or may not be true: the evidence simply is not enough to constitute proof. Fraser offers his study as a contribution toward settling this question: "Since the Douce fragment was printed in the lifetime of Sir Thomas Wyatt, we must consider the possibility of Wyatt's having sanctioned the publication and even having supervised it himself" (p. 74). But he offers little real justification for being any more dogmatic about the matter than we were inclined to be previously.