Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness. (Reviews).

Peter DeSa Wiggins, Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness

Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. viii + 174 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 0-253-33814-X.

Peter DeSa Wiggins states: "The purpose of this study is to show that Donne's quest for a political career in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean regimes could produce poetic performances of subtlety and originality" (2). He goes to explain that he will "demonstrate that The courtier constituted a paradigm structure within which Donne could retain his critical detachment, maintain the highest standards of poetic excellence, and at the same time write a poetry of ambition designed to advance his political interests" (2). Thus, Wiggins seeks a middle ground between those scholars who see Donne as "an alienated radical aloof to profane matters and those who insist that he was quite the opposite, an ambitious conformist using poetry, as Jonson suggests, in order to crash the establishment" (1). Wiggins argues that Donne does use his poetry to crash the establishment, but that by working in the context provided by Castiglione, Donne is able, indeed required, to critique the establishment and to show his detach ment from it.

Both the content and the influence of Castiglione are important to the argument, for Wiggins uses The Courtier to establish criteria for judging Donne's intentions and his effectiveness. After the introduction, each chapter develops a quality (or code or move as Wiggins calls them) from The Courtier and shows how that quality is put to use in Donne's poetry. The qualities drawn from The Courtier are neither arbitrary nor necessary; that is, there is a strong textual basis for each quality isolated, but others (particularly other early modern readers) might have found different central issues. As Peter Burke makes clear in The Fortunes of the Courtier (Pennsylvania UP, 1995), The Courtier took on many meanings in the century following its publication. The codes that Wiggins deduces from the text are useful tools in exploring Donne's poems, but must finally be justified from Donne, not Castiglione. The value of Wiggins' argument, then, depends heavily on his analyses of individual poems, using the codes as a m eans to explore possible meanings. It is here that the book has its greatest strength; the analyses are original, incisive, and persuasively presented.

Each chapter explores a few important poems by means of the codes under consideration. The first chapter investigates the Satires in light of "disabused mentality," that is a detached awareness of the shortcomings of the establishment even as one supports it and seeks to improve it. Wiggins makes a strong case for the links between the satires and Donne's aspirations for a career in government and provides convincing evidence for the unity of the satires expressing a developing awareness. The second chapter applies the notion of "provocative play" to make the case that in most of Donne's poems the reader is an active and necessary participant in the action. This view is most persuasively illustrated by analysis of the problematic Elegy VII. Wiggins' analysis justifies his conclusion that the poem "gives the Impression of being part of a spontaneous dialogue taking place in the heat of conflict and the reader has the pleasure of witnessing the speaker become step by step more and more ensnared in the trammels of his faulty argument and his false position" (86). The third chapter presents sprezzatura or the concealment of art and concludes with the consideration of "A Nocturnal upon S. Lucies Day." The poem is seen as a palinode or rejection of the poetic efforts to transcend death and loss. The fourth chapter investigates poems in light of "discerning insincerity," the balancing of sincerity and casuistry, or acknowledged artificiality. Wiggins has the strongest arguments here for the centrality of the cultural code both in Castiglione and in Donne. His comments on the poems benefit from the accumulated codes that have been presented and are gathered into this culminating quality.

The book successfully explores Donne in the cultural context of the court and his aspirations to courtly success. Wiggins shows how Castiglione provides both the language and the ideas for the acknowledged artificiality of the courtier's work and, for Donne, the poet's work as well.