Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt

King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn on a deer hunt; Image via Wikipedia

The more I read about Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt, the more I love it!

I’m a fan of the Anne Boleyn story anyway. I enjoy almost anything about her, and knowing that this poem is supposedly about her makes it especially enticing! Whoso List to Hunt is an adaptation of Petrarch’s Rime 190, but it is much, much different.

In Petrarch’s Rime 190, the speaker sees a beautiful deer and pursues her. The poem ends with the narrator falling in the stream and the doe being gone when he comes back up. He also notes that she’s wearing topaz and diamonds.

In Wyatt’s version, his “doe” (or supposedly, Anne Boleyn) is dressed with diamonds only, a point addressed in this analysis in the Guardian. Topaz represents chastity. This doe has entertained suitors, it sounds like, and has maybe even entertained the speaker before, and therefore she is not worthy of the topaz.

But she’s not entertaining suitors anymore. She is owned, as this analysis points out, by the owner of the land. Women are property, don’t forget, and once the lord of the land, King Henry VIII, claimed his prize, no one else was allowed (or would dare) to touch her.

The point of the speaker’s chase is moot, he says, using this line: “Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.” Pursuing her may be his desire, but it will get him nowhere.

The final couplet is “‘Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.” In other words, Don’t touch me. I belong to King Henry. And even though you think I am but a meek doe, I am entirely too much of an animal for you to handle.

Anne Boleyn’s fire is captivating to me; her determination to get the throne was unstoppable, and she was undeterred by her critics. It’s good to be favored by the most powerful man in the country, but when he changes his mind and the dictator-king becomes paranoid, falls in love with his mistresses and blames his one-time love for not producing a son, it’s horrendous. And he disposed of her the way we today would ditch spoiled leftovers. Her ambition cost Boleyn her life.

Whoso List to Hunt is about a time before Boleyn experienced real nastiness, when she was just becoming out of reach for other men and was the apple of the king’s eye. Boleyn’s story was tragic; she wasn’t innocent, of course, but she was chewed up and spit out. She produced England’s greatest queen, and yet she did not get to see her progeny succeed. She is one of the reasons I adore British royalty, history and literature. So thank you, Sir Thomas Wyatt, for this lovelorn reminder of Boleyn’s beauty and vulnerability.

 

Wyatt and Surrey’s translation of Petrarch’s Rime 140

Image via Wikipedia

Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, both translated the same poem, sonnet 140 from Petrarch‘s Rime.

Both Wyatt and Surrey had terrifically interesting lives and were very wrapped up with British royalty. Wyatt was rumored to have had an affair with Anne Boleyn before her marriage to King Henry VIII, and he was imprisoned twice by the tyrant for alleged treason. His connections got him out both times. Henry supposedly planned to marry Wyatt’s wife (she would have been Wife #6) even though Wyatt was still married to her. (That guy could get away with ANYthing!)

Surrey was actually executed by Henry’s order. Oh, if only Surrey’s execution-by-decapitation date had been set for 10 days later, no telling what masterpieces he might have created. The young man (only 29 or 30) was sentenced to a beheading by King Henry VIII, who died Jan. 28, 1547, nine days after Surrey’s execution. Surrey’s father’s execution date was scheduled for Jan. 29, 1547; he outlived Henry VIII and therefore was blessed with a stay of execution.

Back to the poetry translation: It takes much more educated minds than mine to dissect the differences between Wyatt’s and Surrey’s versions. This article explains that Wyatt’s verse was much rougher and more forced than Surrey’s smooth rhyme. Wyatt also veered from Petrarch’s rhyme scheme. However, Wyatt and Surrey are known as “Fathers of the English Sonnet.” According to Wikipedia, Wyatt introduced the sonnet into English and Surrey gave the English the rhyming meter and the division into quatrains that now characterizes Shakespearean sonnets.

In Surrey’s translation, love seems to me to be the poet’s ruler. Listen to these words he chooses:

• Love, that doth reign
• within my captive breast
• clad in the arms
• he fought

And in Wyatt’s, it seems that love is more the poet’s guest:

• love that in my thought doth harbor
• keep his residence
• campeth

Another difference is that Wyatt maintains the question at the end, as Petrarch asked it. Wyatt’s version is:

What may I do, when my master feareth,

But in the field with him to live and die?

Surrey removes the question posed by Petrarch and instead declared:

For my lord’s guilt thus faultless bide I pain,

Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove

This link provides both translations side by side, along with Petrarch’s original and with a literal translation of Petrarch’s original. What do you see as the differences?

 

The History of King Richard III

Image via Wikipedia

I read this excerpt from Sir Thomas More‘s The History of King Richard III right after I read Utopia. I planned to blog about it, but I felt so uneducated about the excerpt to blog intelligently about it. I looked up Jane Shore, Edward IV’s mistress, and didn’t find much. And I didn’t get anything from the excerpt. So I decided to come back to it.

It turns out that in the end of the excerpt, More explains why you won’t find much in history on Jane Shore: “…some shall think this woman too slight a thing to be written of and set among the remembrances of great matters, … Her doings were not much less, albeit they be much less remembered, because they were not so evil.” OK, More, you win. I’m interested now!

I re-read it today and feel like I have a clearer sense of it. I’m sure I don’t “get” it, but I got more out of it this time. With the Norton Anthology proclaiming The History of King Richard III as “the first ‘history’ in English that has any claim to be English literature,” I don’t know why the editors chose this excerpt that seems to have very little to do with Richard.

However, it does show Richard III’s cruelty in his treatment of Jane Shore because she was a mistress of his enemy. The excerpt shows her fall from grace. According to the text, she once was the following, under Edward IV’s reign:

• worshipfully friended
• honestly brought up
• very well married
• proper
• fair
• delighted men not so much in her beauty as in her pleasant behavior
• proper wit
• merry in company
• ready and quick of answer
• neither mute nor full of babble

But now, under Richard III, after he “spoiled her of all that ever she had … and sent her body to prison,” More described her thusly:

• old
• lean
• withered and dried up
• nothing left but rivelled skin and hard bone
• beggarly condition, unfriended and worn out of acquaintance

The text says Jane Shore was still alive when More composed The History and that he “holds her forth as a remarkable example of the caprices of fortune.” In fact, her rise and fall reminds me much of that of Anne Boleyn, once so desired by the king to the point that he would cast aside his wife, his daughter, his standing with the people as well as with the church to have her, and yet later she was so despised by him that he’s feasting and merry-making with other ladies while Boleyn’s head is being chopped off in front of the people. My, the mighty how they fall…

One beautiful line in this excerpt: “For men use if they have an evil turn to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good turn, we write it in dust.”