Table Of ContentJOHN DONNE
Literary Lives
General Editor: Richard Dutton, Senior Lecturer in English,
University of Lancaster
This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the
most widely read British and Irish authors. Volumes follow the
outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional
biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and
social contexts which shaped their writing. The role and status of
'the author' as the creator of literary texts is a vexed issue in current
critical theory, where a variety of social, linguistic and psychologic
al approaches have challenged the old concentration on writers as
specially-gifted individuals. Yet reports of 'the death of the author'
in literary studies are (as Mark Twain said of a premature obituary)
an exaggeration. This series aims to demonstrate how an under
standing of writers' careers can promote, for students and general
readers alike, a more informed historical reading of their works.
Published titles
Richard Dutton Cedric Watts
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE JOSEPH CONRAD
George Parfitt Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham
JOHN DONNE CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE
Forthcoming
Morris Beja Kerry McSweeney
JAMES JOYCE GEORGE ELIOT
Cedric Brown John Mepham
JOHN MILTON VIRGINIA WOOLF
Joseph McMinn Michael O'Neill
JONATHAN SWIFT PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Jan Fergus Leonee Ormond
JANE AUSTEN ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
James Gibson David B. Pirie
THOMAS HARDY JOHN KEATS
Kenneth Graham Felicity Rosslyn
HENRY JAMES ALEXANDER POPE
Keith Hanley A. E. Sharpe
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH T. S. ELIOT
Paul Hammond Barry Windeatt
JOHN DRYDEN GEOFFREY CHAUCER
J. R. de J. Jackson John Worthen
SAMUELTAYLORCOLERIDGE D. H. LAWRENCE
Alasdair MacRae
W.B. YEATS
John Donne
A Literary Life
George Parfitt
Reader in English Literature
University of Nottingham
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-0-333-42213-7 ISBN 978-1-349-19779-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19779-8
©George Parfitt, 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989
ISBN 978-0-312-03090-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parfitt. George A. E.
John Donne: a literary life I George Parfitt.
p. cm.-(Literary lives)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-03090-2
1. Donne, John, 1572-1631. 2. Poets, English-Early modern.
1500-1700-Biography. 3. Church of England-England-Clergy
-Biography. I. Title. II. Series. Literary lives (New York, N.Y.)
PR2248.P26 1989
821'.3-dc18
[B] 88-5981
CIP
For Jessica
Contents
Preface viii
1 1572-1601 1
Biographical Outline 1
II Aspiration 3
III The Pattern Revolved 7
IV Satire and Environment 13
v Poems and Women (i) 30
2 1601-1615 40
Biographical Outline 40
II Aspiration and Frustration 44
III Towards Ordination 54
IV Writings: Survey and Milieu 63
v Poems and Woman (ii) 72
VI Poems and God 88
3 101
161~1632
Biographical Outline 101
II Donne and Preaching 104
III Doctrine 110
IV Sermons as Product 115
v Depression and Death 121
An Appendix on Criticism of Donne's Writing 126
Notes 129
Bibliography 137
Index 139
vii
Preface
This is a short book and does not set out to deal even-handedly
with all aspects of Donne's life and work. It tries instead to
concentrate on examining selected aspects of this life and work in
the context of the times Donne lived in, and it seeks to emphasise
those features which are most alive in our times. This means, in
particular, emphasis upon the period between Donne's marriage
in 1601 and his ordination in 1615. The last period of his life and
its main literary product, the sermons, are treated more briefly
because they have limited interest now, for reasons which are
sketched in Chapter 3, while the treatment of the early years is
limited by the gaps in the surviving evidence.
I have made direct use of very little literary criticism of Donne's
work. This is mainly because, as suggested in the bibliographical
essay in the Appendix, much of what has been written is either
too heavily of the school of New Criticism to be of much use here,
or is concerned with literary tradition rather than with the type of
context which this series treats of. It should, however, be added
that my understanding of Donne's work has certainly been much
influenced over the years by earlier criticism.
I should like to thank the General Editor of the series, Dr
Richard Dutton, for asking me to write this volume and for his
help throughout its gestation. Also, my thanks, as always, to my
wife, Maureen Bell, for her patience and understanding at a time
when she has been busy with her own research and when our
small daughter has kept us both occupied.
George Parfitt
viii
1
1572-1601
There is a standard biography of John Donne, the author of
which, R. C. Bald, has drawn together what is known of Donne's
life and has supplemented the facts with his knowledge of the
relevant period, while remaining properly aware of what we do
not know.1 John Carey has written what might be called a
'spiritual biography', an account of 'the distinctive structure of
Donne's imagination'2 which uses cross-references between works
and life as well as between one work and another to define that
imagination. Other writers have, like Alan Sinfield,3 put less
weight upon Donne's individualism and more upon how he
relates to culture and society in his period. Here Carey's romanti
cism and liberalism give way to a more materialistic stress.
A book as short as the present one cannot hope to match Bald's
fullness; nor can it present the sort of critique needed to expose
Carey's serious limitations and to show how a materialistic enquiry
can avoid reductivism.4 It can, however, hope to be lucid while
indicating something of Donne's complexity and significance.
I BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
John Donne married Ann More in December 1601, when he was
around thirty years old and she was about sixteen. Although
popular belief is that our ancestors married young it was in fact
common for marriage to be delayed until the male was financially
in a position to support a wife. Moreover, despite Juliet, Ann
More was young for an Elizabethan or Jacobean bride.5 Donne's
marriage, as is widely known, was one of the decisive events of
his life, a life which, as we might expect, is lightly documented up
to this time. Bald's account of the first thirty years of Donne's life
occupies less than a quarter of his book, and much of this space is
devoted to the poet's ancestry and environment. An outline of
Donne's life up to 1601 can, therefore, be presented quite tersely.
1
2 John Donne
He was born in 1572. His father was a successful London
ironmonger who had been made a freeman of the Ironmongers'
Company, 'probably before the end of 1556'6 and who had married
Elizabeth Heywood around 1564. When Donne's father died early
in 1576, six children survived him and some six months after her
first husband's death Elizabeth remarried, the spouse being John
Syminges, a doctor who was several times President of the Royal
College of Physicians. It is perhaps worth remarking that this re
marriage did not involve a decisive social move upwards, as
might at first appear. Donne's father was a substantial business
man whose master, Thomas Lewen, had been a Sheriff of London
in 1537/8 and who left a considerable estate at his death, while
physicians in the sixteenth century were not of great social
standing.7
It is not surprising that the first decade of Donne's life is largely
blank now. Elizabethan record-keeping was primitive by our
standards; John Donne was only one of several children; and
Elizabethan children were not usually considered interesting in
themselves.8 We might, however, expect some references to his
schooling, if not from surviving records at least in later statements
by the poet himself or by contemporaries. But no such statements
survive and Izaak Walton tells us that Donne 'had his first
breeding in his Fathers house, where a private Tutor had the care
of him, until the tenth year of his age'. 9
What we call tertiary education began and ended sooner in the
sixteenth century than it does now, and in October 1584 John
Donne, with his brother Henry, went to Hart Hall, Oxford, where
he remained for about three years. This takes us to late 1587, but
then another blank occurs. We know that the poet entered Thavies
Inn in 1591 before going on to Lincoln's Inn in May 1592, where
he was based until at least late 1594. What, then, was Donne
doing between late 1587 and 1591? Walton claims that, 'About the
fourteenth year of his age [Donne] was translated from Oxford to
Cambridge; where ... he staied till his seventeenth year', 10 and if
this is true the gap is substantially accounted for. In itself, what
Walton claims is plausible enough, although Donne's name does
not appear in the defective Cambridge records.U But Walton also
speaks of Donne staying 'some years in Italy, and then in Spain'
and locates these years after 1597.12 This, however, is scarcely
possible (as we shall see) and it has been suggested that this
period of travel on the continent may have been between 1587
