Two Views of Wythorne
THE publication of this book is something of an event. Mr. Osborn claims to have given us 'a new Tudor poet and the earliest "modern" autobiography in English.' (`Modern' is intended to circumvent the inconvenient Margery Kempe.) As a poet, alas, Whythorne is dreadful, the drabbest of the drab. And the autobiography in which the poems are set will interest the social historian more than the lover of literature. Whythorne writes in a simple, phonetic spelling which gives much information about sixteenth- century pronunciation. He will also fascinate the psychologist and the historian of English morals. Whilst his contemporary, Benvenuto Cellini, records duels and amorous exploits, Whythorne records prudent avoidance of quarrels with social superiors and hair's-breadth escapes from the
advances of his employers' wives. The first Englishman whose self-revelations have survived might have served as a model for Joseph Andrews. Whythorne speculates endlessly on the motives of these indefatigable ladies: do they really want to seduce him, or are they only trying to make him look ridiculous? He never seems to have tried the direct way of finding out.
Whythorne thus has some of the less attractive qualities traditionally ascribed to Puritans. His morality was almost entirely prudential. He had no sense of humour. When he tells the story, probably a chestnut even then, of the man who scared away a pack of starving wolves by playing the bagpipes, this was to illustrate the power of music, not the horrors of bagpipes. Yet Whyt- horne was a professional teacher and composer of music, and a passionate propagandist for his art. His book should hammer one more nail into the legend that Puritanism killed music in Eng- land. Whythorne, on the contrary, feared that music was becoming too popular. It should be a career for gentlemen: yet since the dissolution of the monasteries had reduced the number of steady jobs it was losing its snob appeal. 'The rascal and off-scum of that profession,' who `do make it common by offering it to every Jack,' ought to be prosecuted as vagabonds. The title of musician should be restricted to those who pass an examination in musical composition. A most unattractive man: but an important historical document.
CHRISTOPHER HILL
Whythorne now proves to have written out his life story three times at least : this account of his first forty-seven years, in prose, includes a short verse life. He emphasises such episodes as his life among the academics at Cambridge, where he lived as music master to William Brom- field; and the management of the elder Bromfield's large mercantile affairs in London, while Bromfield served in foreign wars. As Whythorne moved from one service to another —serving-man, tutor, clerk, Master of Music— three widows, two wives, a housekeeper. a serv- ing wench and several other females pursued the handsome musician with blandishments ranging from a poem left in his gittern strin to a mock wedding ceremony (or joining hands by a priest), from which he hastily wit drew. These amorous perplexities form the main line of the story and do not fit with the preface's claim that the work is meant to instruct 'youth- ful imps.' The curious orthography—suggesting that of Shakespeare's schoolmaster in Love's Labour's Lost—might, however, serve to support it; so might Whythorne's free use of proverbs. In the opening of the work, Whythorne addresses a 'friend' who has been promised all his songs and sonnets, for which the Life serves as a kind of frame. Because the friend had imparted both secret and private affairs of the past and some secret plans for the future, therefore Whythorne also sets out his own private affairs and secrets, ending with plans for further compositions. An offering of songs and sonnets, and a story of hopes, fears, sicknesses and love adventures ending in 1576 suggests that the recipient might be Elizabeth Stoughton, who married Whythorne on May 5, 1577. The book begins with an account of how children should be reared, and draws to an end with a series of verses on 'the happy day.' True, the verses do not refer directly to a wedding day; and the reader is sometimes addressed as Sir, which supports the preface. Yet the writer's mingling of self- advertisement, self-revelation and simple in- struction; the way the story builds. up. to the climax of Whythorne's life—Master. of Music to Archbishop Parker at Lambeth, and then tails off into pious platitudes—all this is what a middle-aged wooer might offer a young and rather strait-laced spinster. The reader was clearly no scholar, for all Italian words are translated, and even such characters as Zephyrus, Diana and Apollo are explained.
It seems to me likely that the collection was made as a love offering, and that it was after- wards adapted to serve as a teaching manual. Some later fragments imply that Whythorne kept the manuscript all his life, but he did not carry his story past the point where it joined with Elizabeth Stoughton's. Of her we learn from the editor that she lived in the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and that within three months of Whythorne's death she had married again, thus proving once more her superiority to all the other widows of the narrative.
M. C. BRADBROOK
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