Ralegh—no slug

Robert Nye

Sir Walter Ralegh Robert Lacey (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.00) Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Mart and His Roles Stephen J. Greenblatt (Yale University Press £2.95) John Aubrey reported that Ralegh's early life was ” turbulent and irregular." He was jailed for a week for fighting with the son of the Queen's illegitimate half-brother Sir John Perrot. Bound over to keep the peace, he was more interested in making other people keep theirs — a story goes that one evening in a tavern he silenced "a bold and impertinent fellow and perpetual talker" by sealing his beard to his moustache. The impression is of a hot, impatient, .tigerish person, hard as diamonds. "No slug," said Aubrey.

Biographers excite themselves upon this period, and upon the one immediately following when 'Captain Rawley ' (the raw bit bruising his enemies) interested himself in the highest favours only, and won Elizabeth's pleasure for a longish season. "See, the Knave commands the Queen," said one wit, watching them at their elaborate game of courtship. The fall came in 1592 when Ralegh's secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton brought down the Queen's fury on his head. Fall and fury did his verse a deal of good. It has sometimes been presumed that he wrote The Ocean to Scinthia in the Tower at the time Or this disgrace, but that is perhaps a melodramatic supposition and in any case there is no need to limit the figure of Scinthia to the Queen alone. One of the themes of the,poem could, indeed, be said to be the conflict between the way a man may win the world to win a woman's love and the way a woman may wish him to give it up again to prove that the love was for her and not for the world or the winning. Ralegh's position in the Tower in regard to Elizabeth Tudor is obviously relevant; but so is his position in his marriage in regard to Elizabeth Throckmorton. The Ocean to Scinthia is in any event crucial to what one thinks about Ralegh, or makes of him as a poet, or for that matter a man of action. Robert Lacey calls it "ragged and hasty" (page 144), and then "a feverish, unlicked piece of work "(page 184). Stephen J. Greenblatt, not so keen on lollipops and silver armour, reads it more carefully, and his commentary (pages 76 tp 198 nt Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles) should be studied by anyone to whom it has occurred that this poem is a masterpiece. Here is a key passage in Mr Green

blatt's argument: "As if reacting to a verse that relies on form almost at the expense of consciousness, Ralegh writes a poem that re

lies on consciousness almost at the' expense of form. Ocean to Cynthia seems to occupy that

strange interior space between a sensation and the expression of that sensation in words, forever arrested at the moment of coming into being." Precisely, and there is not so very much like it in point of achievement, licked or not, until

English poetry comes to The Waste Land, also, as we now know, a poem Of breakdown. Ralegh did not write to please a public; he wrote direct from his own complicated heart and mind, and his verse follows the move ments of both, with a sound like a life listening to itself live. Turn to his other supreme

moment in the English language — I mean The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage — and you will notice that a mixture of Traherne-like Innocence (silver mountains, nectar

fountains, saints with crystal buckets) and Donnish wit (" Seeing my flesh must die so soone/And want a head to dine next noone") Points to his affinity with other English poets; yet the peculiar bitter fact of the mixture puts him in a place of his own.

Robert Lacey's big rollicking biography Weaves one or two newly discovered facts — such as the will turned up at Sherborne in 1970, which mentions an illegitimate daughter — into the familiar tapestry of Ralegh's career. Despite reference in the preface to such scholars as D. B. Quinn and Agnes Latham, and to Pierre Lefranc's masterly Sir Walter Ralegh, Ecrivain (1968), this is really a book to be set beside Margaret Irwin's That Great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh (1960), belonging as it does to the secondary World of amateur enthusiasm rather than to biography or literary criticism proper. In that kind, I prefer Miss Irwin, who offers no vulgarities comparable to Mr Lacey's beginning of Chapter 6, "Walter's way with the ladies was legendary," or his opinion on page 18 that a priest can ever be said to have " held UP the mass" for a congregation to see. (The only way in which a priest may hold up the mass is by taking a long while about it. Mr Lacey means the Host. Elsewhere he believes that "the host was raised in its glittering chalice," also impossible.) A certain indifference to matters or Christian detail proves fatal When Mr Lacey tries to discuss the poems. Thus he follows M. Lefranc in believing that The Lie is not Ralegh's work at all, but to be attributed to "a Dr Richard Latworth, a cynical Puritan."

Whatever the connection between the followers of Antisthenes and Puritanism, I refer Mr Lacey to an appendix entitled "The Authorship of 'The Lie '," in Mr Greenblatt's volume, where he will find a thoroughly convincing demonstration that the poem is (a) by Ralegh, (b) not Puritan, (c) much better writ

ten than his own categories of understanding Will permit him to see. 'The Lie' is certainly not compounded of " simplistic adolescent Saws" as Mr Lacey thinks it is. (He repeats the 'simplistic ' down the same page, when he

quotes some appalling verses which are by the

unfortunate Latworth, so inept in rhythm that no one with half an ear for poetry could believe their author capable of 'The Lie.') Mr. Lefranc to be fair,.built his objection upon the Poem's ambiguity which is profound. Picking this up Mr Greenblatt adds: "There is little in the substance of 'The Lie' that could not be found in the works of Marston and Hall, of even Donne and Jonson, none of them Puritans."

Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles is altogether a more serious and thoughtful book than Mr Lacey's, a valuable contribution to comprehending Ralegh as man and as poet. Beginning with the execution scene, and noting how Ralegh contrived to be both the leading actor and his OW n stage manager (delivering. all the lines that have burned their way into popular Memory, and then giving final directions to the executioner, "What dost thou fear? Strike, mann, beginning as I say at the end, Mr Greenblatt ranges back over the career, Its peaks and depths, and tries to make sense of his subject's attempts to fashion his own identity as a work of art — a Renaissance undertaking if ever there was one.

Mr Greenblatt is good not only at demonstrating the manner in which tensions and Contradictions inspired Ralegh to his roleseeking and playing, but also at reading the Poetry in the light of this. Ralegh's verse

making, he suggests, was not just a matter of CPurtly gestures, but it does contain an obsessive interest in play and performance which can be related both to his own "dramatic sense of life" and to deep divisions between thought and action in his own nature. This reading is helpful especially in regard to The Ocean to Scinthia. Perhaps, as I have•suggested elsewhere, it ought to be read alongside Eliot's The Waste Land also in that it is a deliberate fragment, not just a splinter from a never-finished or never-written epic. Its fractured sense and burning obscurity consuming its own images as a bonfire its bones, are part of the intention; the way it is written, that is to say, is part of its " meaning ". Such complexity would not be beyond Mr Greenblatt's Ralegh, though it would be foreign to Mr Lacey's. Significantly, each book uses the Nicholas Hilliard portrait on its front cover, but on Mr Lacey's a lot of space is taken up by the pretty ruff, while on Mr Greenblatt's the designer has closed right in upon the eyes.

Robert Nye is a young English poet who has recently edited a selection of work by Ralegh for Fabers.