The religious and moral poetry in the Elizabethan miscellanies

This dissertation investigates the moral and religious poetry included in the Elizabethan miscellanies: Tottel's Miscellany (1557), The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), The Flowers of Epigrammes (1577); A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591), The Phoenix Nest (1593), Arbor of Amorous Devices (1594), The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), England's Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602). The more than 350 religious and moral poems found in these miscellanies suggest the common moral and religious concerns of the age and tend either to be hortatory in tone and catechismal in style or to deal introspectively with the vicissitudes of existence. The large number of poems also indicates that the Elizabethans had a persistent need to read and to write about religious and moral subjects. This need may have developed in part from the instability of church dogma and authority during the English Reformation as well as from the reformers' and humanists' mutual insistence on individual responsibility. During the sixteenth century there was an impetus for an individual to form a personal relationship with God and to explore his own experience as part of the common experience of mankind.

This study of the religious and moral poetry included in the Elizabethan miscellanies indicates these common moral and religious concerns and shows these poems to have a remarkable consistency of theme: common concerns about virtue, vice, ambition, transience and

vi death are standard fare for poetry from the earliest miscellany to the latest. There are poems teaching about the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Other virtue poems admonish the reader to avoid the fluid, hypocritical relationships at court and to love chastely. Poems warning about the dangers of vice remind the reader about the insidiousness of pride, false friendship, and ambition. These poems also point out the vices of jealousy and lust endemic to love. A number of poems lament the wretchedness of an existence filled with temptations and seemingly controlled by the whimsical power of Dame Fortune according to the early miscellanies and by the irrational power of Love according to later ones. bEach miscellany includes poems discussing transience-the fickleness of nature, of women, of luck. These poems discuss the process of aging and the dominance of time. The final group of poems discussed from each miscellany concerns death. Especially the early miscellanies include epitaphs that immortalize the deceased by praising his virtues and exalting his deeds. Such poems actually teach about virtuous action. Other poems about death discuss the process of dying and suggest a fear of judgment. Most frequently these poems use death to make the reader pause in order to take stock of his own actions.

Although the religious and moral themes are consistent throughout the miscellanies, the tone and style of the verses differ. . Some verse-especially that contained in the early miscellanies, those published before 1590-is hortatory. As moral and religious poetry gradually moved away from theological and catechismal points to an

vii emphasis on themes that suggested personal experience and personal questioning, the tone became increasingly more personal. This poetry, most of which is included in the miscellanies published after 1590, has a fuller and more functional use of metaphor and frequently uses the pastoral motif. In these poems the poet suggests rather than preaches about the virtues of simplicity and humility. Even in religious poetry, there was eventually an emphasis upon delight as well as upon teaching.