This radically revisionist edition, as Michael Rudick himself admits, would scarcely have been possible without the pioneering work of Arthur F. Marotti, whose Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995) first made the case for the importance of “scribal publication” to the textual bibliographer. Marotti showed that medieval practices of manuscript circulation had continued unbroken long after printed books became widely available—indeed, well into the Restoration period—and argued that the surviving compilations, whether in private notebooks or more formal anthologies with a coterie readership, were neglected witnesses to the sociohistorical context and reception history of an extensive body of lyric poetry. Before Marotti’s work, editors had largely neglected scribal publication because, as they saw it, the texts involved were unreliable both in terms of readings and in attribution, furnishing evidence more of the construction of a poet’s image, and the interests of readers, than of what the poet might actually have written and intended. Michael Rudick argues not just that such evidence is important to our understanding of Sir Walter Ralegh’s poetry, but that, with a few exceptions, it is the only kind of evidence we have.

Ralegh (1554–1618) is a prime example of the poet as gentleman amateur. After a conventional education at Oxford and the Inns of Court, he began his maritime adventures at the age of twenty-four, captaining a ship in an unsuccessful expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Thereafter he pursued multiple careers as diplomat, member of parliament, courtier, landowner, soldier, and explorer. He served in the anti-Armada fleet in 1588 and the same year made the error of marrying without the queen’s knowledge or consent. When Elizabeth learnt of the marriage, an astonishing four years later, both Ralegh and his wife were temporarily imprisoned. He managed to climb back into the royal favor—resuming his parliamentary duties and undertaking further voyages—only to find himself falsely charged with high treason on the accession of King James in 1603. He was found guilty, but his death sentence was commuted, and he spent the next thirteen years in prison in the Tower of London, conducting scientific experiments and writing his grandly somber prose work, The History of the World (1614). He was released in 1616 to lead an expedition against Guiana, which proved such a failure that, on his return home, the death sentence of 1603 was revived. He was executed in 1618 at the age of sixty-four.

Any poetry which emerged from such a turbulent career was bound to be occasional, topical, and controversial, and so it proves. During Ralegh’s lifetime only a handful of pieces were printed, including four commendatory poems in friends’ books and the translations from classical poetry in The History of the World. There are only five items, addressed to Queen Elizabeth in her persona as Cynthia the moon-goddess, in the poet’s own hand. There is, however, no one authoritative manuscript or printed source to help us determine the Ralegh canon. Many attributions are dubious, or clearly false, aimed at discrediting him; many, too, date from long after his death. Rudick’s solution is to print poems in chronological order of their first ascription to Ralegh, whether in manuscript or printed form, between 1576 and 1618; he appends a checklist of posthumous attributions extending well into the seventeenth century. I will refer only to poems which are certainly by Ralegh or which can be assigned to him on good evidence.

Ralegh is, among other things, a fine poet of disappointment. In “The 21st and Last Book of the Ocean to Cynthia,” written circa 1592 as an act of reparation to the queen for his secret marriage, he can shape the regular iambics into something more biting and pointed:[1]

From fruitful trees I gather withered leaves
And glean the broken ears with miser’s hands,
Who sometime did enjoy the weighty sheaves.
I seek fair flowers amid the brinish sand.

Yet he could be more outspoken than this, as in “The Lie”:

Say to the Court, it glows
And shines like rotten wood.
Say to the Church, it shows
What’s good, but doth no good:
If Court and Church reply,
Give Court and Church the lie.

The barely contained rage which spits out the first two lines of this passage is remarkable. Notable in another way is the weary despondency of “Farewell to the Court”: “Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expired,/ And past return are all my dandled days” “Dandled,” with its suggestion of the cosseted child, is a marvelously surprising word.

In those days, Ralegh, like many another courtier, thought of poetry as a form of amorous dalliance and wrote some forgettable pastorals and pretty complimentary lyrics. He even addressed Elizabeth I in conventional plaintive terms (“Fortune hath taken thee away, my love,” where “Fortune” may be a coded reference to the Earl of Essex), which prompted her to reply: “Ah, silly pug, wert thou so sore afraid?/ Mourn not, my Wat, nor be thou so dismayed.”

The tone of affectionate teasing must have echoed hollowly in Ralegh’s prison cell. “The less afraid,” the queen’s poem concluded, “the better shalt thou speed.” This exchange may have suggested the anecdote, first found in Thomas Fuller’s Worthies of England (1622), that Ralegh scratched onto a window the words “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall,” to which Elizabeth wrote in reply, “If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.” It is all very well to say such things, when you are a monarch: knowing how to respond, when you are a subject, is more tricky.

If fall from grace was one wellspring of Ralegh’s poetry, impending death was another. “What is our life?,” one of his most celebrated poems, exists in some seventy manuscripts, with considerable textual variations, and was set to music unforgettably by Orlando Gibbons. The most authentic version, Rudick concludes, is this:

What is our life? A play of passion.
What is our mirth? The music of division.
Our mothers, they the tiring-houses

[dressing rooms] be,
Where we are dressed for time’s short tragedy.
Earth is the stage, Heaven the spectator is,
Who doth behold who here doth act amiss.
The graves which keep us from the parching

sun
Are as drawn curtains till the play be done.

This is not quite as trenchant as the version used by Gibbons, in which “Our mothers, they” becomes “Our mothers’ wombs,” and “time’s short tragedy,” “this short comedy,” after which the text reads:

Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the searching sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest:
Only we die in earnest—that’s no jest.

Gibbons gives “Thus march we, playing” a macabre briskness every bit as terrifying as the “March to the Scaffold” in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Whoever made these alterations and additions knew what they were doing. Still further versions have “scorching sun,” “Thus, playing, post we” or “run we,” and a weaker ending, “And then we die in earnest, not in jest.” These details illustrate the complexities with which Rudick has to deal: none can be shown to derive authoritatively from Ralegh, yet, since all appeared in his lifetime, none can definitely be assigned to someone else.

“Enough poems have been ascribed to Ralegh on the night before he died,” Rudick drily observes, “to have kept him versifying without pause.” Among these are “The Lie,” “What is our life?,” and the poem beginning “Give me my scallop shell of quiet,” which is of doubtful authenticity. The best candidate for the position of Ralegh’s poetic testament is this moving little piece:

Even such is Time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days:
And from which earth and grave and dust
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

The switch from quatrain to couplets gives an impression of inevitable foreclosure. Again there are significant variants in another text, including “pays us back” for “pays us but” and the stronger conclusion, “But from Time’s rage, the grave, and dust,/ My God shall raise me up, I trust,” which mimics the gradual reassembling of the resurrected body and adds a more intimate note of piety by substituting “My God” for “The Lord.”

The once standard view of Ralegh as an atheist and president of the mythical “School of Night” alluded to in Love’s Labour’s Lost is by now, one hopes, entirely discredited, but if not it will be decisively extinguished by this stimulating, though theoretically austere, edition. The smear tactics of Ralegh’s enemies fail before the evidence of the poems. Misfortune gave him an increasingly personal voice, which, even if minor, possesses haunting sonorities. He was ultimately called upon to lay down more than his cloak for his sovereign.

Notes
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1. Rudick follows his copy-texts for spelling and punctuation. I have modernized both for the convenience of the reader. Go back to the text.