address. In these cases, poems can become a gifting, a giving counsel, a gratuity
we might say, but never gratuitous; in other words, imitation is not merely a
form offlattery but its commemorative function also appeals to a strong social
sense of community of minds across time and space. Renaissance poetry is
frequently a very social genre. Events are commemorated, the lost are me-
morialized, opponents are satirized, and friends are invited to supper in witty
ways or entertained by a friend’s diverting verses. Now, this may seem rather
counter-intuitive to us. Lyric poetry especially, we’re told, is the genre of
extreme, intense subjectivity. It’s the most internalized, interior form of
literary expression. It is immediate and intimate. Well, and so it is, and yet,
for all that, we underestimate Renaissance poetry if we are ignorant of or
otherwise misunderstand its social dimensions and thereby overlook some of
the great delights, dramas, and critical complexities to be derived from study-
ing the poetry of this period. We can take delight in the poems themselves, but
also in the habits that encourage their composition, i.e. the audience to whom
they were directed, and most of all the authors who recorded their passion and
fellowship and joys and doubts and fears and griefs so memorably and with
the durability that they themselves could never have imagined.
COLLABORATIONIn the context of Renaissance scholarship and poetry, collaboration is not
quite a synonym for co-authorship, although some examples that approximate
co-authorship do come to mind.The Sidney Psalter, for instance, is tradition-
ally thought to have beenfirst begun by Philip Sidney and then completed by
his sister Mary, although very likely in many dimensions it was an ongoing
sibling literature project. At the very least, thefirst psalms attributed to Philip,
as scholars have found, do show signs of revision by his surviving sister. On a
lighter note, and still involving Philip Sidney, we have sonnets by him and his
friend and fellow poet Edward Dyer that, while not strict collaborations,
exhibit signs of literary exchange and gamesmanship by friendly poets. Walter
Rowley’s poems and praise of his friend Edmund Spenser’sThe Fairy Queen
provide another example of these friendly verses. In a different spirit,
collaboration is also evident in Rowley’s world-weary riposte to Christopher
Marlowe’s‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’, or in John Donne’s more
conceited—and by that I meanfiguratively elaborate—response to Marlowe,
although Donne probably was conceited, too, as a young man. We could also
mention Donne’s more conceited shifting of Marlowe’s pastoral setting from a
poem about shepherds to a piscatorial orfisherman’s watery context.
At this point we have clearly strained our sense of collaboration, but in the
context of Renaissance humanism and poetry I think the word almost begs to
180 Brett Foster