Uncommon Tongues by Nicholson Catherine;

Author:Nicholson, Catherine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Unrestful Shepherd

Spenser’s pastoral narrative performs a similarly complex rereading of the literary significance of exile. For most sixteenth-century English rhetorical and poetic theorists, exile functions as a metaphor for the exclusion of the vernacular from the company of learned and eloquent tongues, and for the hardships vernacular speakers endure as a result of this exclusion. In The Pastime of Pleasure, Stephen Hawes identifies “elocucyon” with a process of purification that consigns the homely vernacular “to exyle”: separating “the dulcet speech / from the langage rude,” “the barbary tongue / it doth ferre exclude.”34 In The Boke named the Governour, Thomas Elyot makes the more literal point that if they wish to master the most rarefied arts, eloquence included, Englishmen must often endure exile, being “constrained … to leave our owne countraymen and resorte vs vnto strangers.”35

But for England’s Bible translators, who endured unpredictable and often violent reversals of fortune under the Tudors, exile bore a more complicated relation to eloquence, as it was often the necessary condition of writerly survival. William Tyndale concluded as a young man that “there was no place … in all England” for someone who believed as strongly as he did in the virtues of an English Bible, and the very name of the Geneva Bible betrays the fact that well into the sixteenth century this continued to be the case.36 Striking too is that Bible’s curious gloss of Psalm 137, whose well-known opening lines recall the Israelites’ refusal to sing during their exile from the promised land: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. / We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. / For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us [required of us] mirth, [saying], Sing us [one] of the songs of Zion.” The Israelites’ insistence that “the songs of Zion” belong to Zion alone would seem to make Psalm 137 a kind of sacred precursor to the lament of Meliboeus in Virgil’s first eclogue, with the same melancholy alignment of poetry and place, exile and silence; but the Geneva translators interpret it rather differently, as a mournful comment on the necessity of self-imposed exile from a people who have lost their way. Its opening plaint is glossed as a response not to the insults of foreign captivity but to the disappointments of home: “Even though the country [of Babylon] was pleasant,” the translators remark, “yet it could not stay [the Israelites’] tears” when they recalled “[t]he decay of God’s religion in their country,” which “was so grievous that no joy could make them glad, unless it was restored.”37 In other words, the roots of the Israelites’ silence lie not in Babylon but in Zion; exile is simply the literal expression of—or even a consolation for—a more profound and painful internal alienation. There is little in the psalm to support such a reading—on the contrary, the psalmist emphatically identifies his

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