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Early modern autobiography,history and human testimony:The Autobiography of ThomasWhythorneAndy Mousley aa De Montfort University , LeicesterPublished online: 30 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Andy Mousley (2009) Early modern autobiography, history andhuman testimony: The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne , Textual Practice, 23:2,267-287, DOI: 10.1080/09502360902760265

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Andy Mousley

Early modern autobiography, history and human testimony:The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne

If we wanted to find out what it might have felt like to have lived at acertain time and place, then according to one popular way of understand-ing their value, autobiography and biography would be likely resources. If,for example, we wanted to know what it might have been like to have liveda working-class life in Newcastle-upon-Tyne between the two world warsof the twentieth century, we might turn to Jack Common’s autobiographi-cal novel Kiddar’s Luck (1951).1 Or, for an equally experientially richaccount of how geographical, cultural and linguistic exile was ‘lived out’by a twentieth-century emigre from Poland to Canada and thenAmerica, we might look to Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1998).2

Reaching further back in time – to a surprisingly neglected precursor ofautobiography as a form of writing3 – if we wanted an account of thefelt impact of social changes, including the changes wrought by earlymodern individualism, on someone aspiring to become ‘myn own man’,we might turn to the ‘autobiography’ (so-called by its twentieth-centuryeditor) of the sixteenth-century musician, servant, tutor, and one-timeentrepreneur’s assistant, Thomas Whythorne.4 Whythorne’s intriguingforay into the realm of autobiography is the eventual subject of thisarticle, eventual because autobiography has in recent years become as per-sistently implicated in post-humanist debates as it has remained, in at leastsome of its manifestations, a popular, humanist way of accessing history.Before we can reach Whythorne, and the ideas of life-writing pertinentto him and the early modern period, some of these debates and rival con-ceptions of autobiography need to be reconsidered.

‘The author manages to capture the very essence of exile experience’,writes Josef Skvorecky on the jacket blurb of Hoffman’s Lost in Translation,‘in beautifully human terms against a background of keen and searchingintellect’. The description continues: ‘This is how tens, perhaps hundredsof thousands of people felt in this century. Eva Hoffman speaks movinglyfor all of them’.5 As blurbs are written with the intention of maximising

Textual Practice 23(2), 2009, 267–287

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis

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DOI: 10.1080/09502360902760265

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the appeal of books, we can take this as an example of at least one kind ofpopulist conception of autobiography. This view, it should be said, hasnot always been exclusively populist: it has various philosophical and‘high cultural’ antecedents, as will become apparent. One aspect of this con-ception is that autobiography is understood as a reliable form of historicaltestimony (this despite the fact that the reliability of autobiography can bebrought into question via the equally commonplace charge that autobiogra-phy is ‘merely subjective’, merely one person’s view of events): ‘Hoffmann’,writes Skvorecky, ‘manages to capture the very essence of exile experience’. Asecond aspect is that autobiography is considered to be a special, ‘human’form of historical testimony which presupposes the existence of somethingprecisely called ‘the human’: Hoffman’s autobiography is written ‘in beauti-fully human terms’, claims Skvorecky. For all of autobiography’s gravitationtowards ‘“ipseity”’, as Jonathan Sawday calls it6 – towards the particularity ofthis person living in this place at this time – there is a presumed universality, apresumed human-ness, which allows us to register, amongst other things, thepsychological and emotional damage that can be inflicted upon humanbeings by social circumstances, such as the situation of exile in the case ofHoffman, for example. The presumption of universality can lead to a power-ful, ‘humanist’ reason for reading autobiography. Humanism can meandifferent things,7 but for the purpose of this essay, I shall take it to meanwhat it mainly signified within the Anglo-American tradition of nineteenth-and twentieth-century literary criticism: namely, a concern with the preser-vation, via the literary canon, of human values in a world where suchvalues were perceived to be under threat.8 The value of autobiography,from such a literary-humanist perspective, is that it can show how historytreated human beings and how they coped with this treatment; it can alertus to the de-humanisation to which historically determined human beingshave been subject and to which they have subjected each other.

‘Experience’ is another key word in Skvorecky’s description: ‘theauthor manages to capture the very essence of exile experience’. ‘Experi-ence’, here, denotes something deeper and richer than the mere recordingof historical facts and events. Laura Marcus in Autobiographical Discourses(1994) writes that the ‘category of “experience” has played a large part inbiographical and autobiographical criticism, and, arguably, in twentieth-century literary criticism more generally’.9 She cites Raymond Williamsand F. R. Leavis as key figures here, and, before them, the work of theGerman philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey. The value of auto-biography and biography, according to the criterion of ‘experience’, isthat they are forms of history-writing which give us more than ‘dry facts’or a description of faceless social forces. Autobiography instead putshuman flesh on the bones of historical narrative, it gives us the sensuouslylived experience, the embodied reality, and all that goes with embodied

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reality in terms of recognisable human emotions. Paul Hamilton inHistoricism (1996) comments that for the eighteenth-century philosophersGiambattista Vico and J.G. Herder, history ‘had to be understood as some-thing we are actively engaged in, like purposeful living, not external to, likethe phenomena rationalized by scientific investigation’.10 History filteredthrough autobiography gives us precisely this sense of human engagementand existential import. It is the human face of history projected byautobiography which allows for the kinds of multiple identification,across time and space, appealed to by Skvorecky. Finally, in Skvorecky’sjacket blurb, there is the closely related appeal to representativeness, toHoffman ‘speaking movingly’ for all exiled people.

All three aspects of this conception of autobiography have been per-sistently challenged in recent academic discussions of the genre. The refer-ential aspect of autobiography – its capacity to refer either to a history or ahuman self thought of as preceding language and interpretation – has beenquestioned by critics who have aligned themselves or been aligned withpoststructuralism (or deconstruction). Such critics have tended, as LauraMarcus writes in Autobiographical Discourses (1994), to erase ‘the differencebetween autobiography and fiction, or more broadly, between referentialand fictional discourse’.11 From this perspective, autobiography, like allwriting, is a ‘textual practice’, which constructs rather than simply reflectsreality, whether the reality in question is the autobiographer’s historicalreality or a supposedly transcendent human one. According to such ahard-line constructionist view, we do not have pure, unmediated accessto our pasts, as these like everything else are subject to rival interpretations.The autobiographical ‘I’ is not so much an omniscient narrator, an ‘auth-ority’ in relation to his or her experience and confident that the truth ofthat experience can be adequately captured in language, as an unreliableor semi-reliable narrator, who can only ever construct a version of a life.The same constructionist principle unsettles the existence of the humannature to which populist conceptions of autobiography have oftenimplicitly or explicitly appealed. According to the constructionist dictumthat nurture, not nature, is the primary determinant of human identity,there is no such essential thing as human nature, only culturally specificversions of it. Representativeness is also suspect, therefore, and merely away of crediting culturally specific ideas with a spurious universality. AsLynda Anderson in Autobiography (2001) puts it: ‘Insofar as autobiographyhas been seen as promoting a view of the subject as universal, it has alsounderpinned the centrality of masculine – and, we may add, Westernand middle-class – modes of subjectivity’.12

It would be foolish to dismiss such scepticism about human nature,universality and the referential capacity of autobiography, but it wouldbe just as foolish to dismiss the populist conception. Having lost

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intellectual credibility, the populist conception is in any case due for aca-demic rehabilitation,13 thanks to the recent ‘turn’ or ‘return’ to ethics inliterary studies,14 the resurgence of interest in the viability and variety ofhumanist thought15 and the concern with ideas of embodiment.16 More-over, if one component of humanism insofar as it has applied to literarystudies is that literature is, to use Mathew Arnold’s phrase, a ‘criticismof life’ and a guardian of human values,17 then arguably the variouskinds of cultural criticism which have become influential in literarystudies since the 1970s have never entirely jettisoned the basic humanistprinciple that life could be better than it is by being more ‘in touch’with human needs and humane ethical principles. To give a briefexample, from feminism: according to Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rain-sford and Tim Woods in The Ethics in Literature (1999), feminism has‘held the ethical high ground’ during the ‘vitriolic arguments betweenMarxists and poststructuralists’. They support this by suggesting that:

The notion that women are more moral than men has been around fordecades, based upon such patriarchal narratives of moral fantasy as an‘Angel in the House’, or the ‘Earth-Mother’. Nevertheless, much fem-inist argument continues to present the willingness to nurture and aready capacity for emotional involvement as being essential to ahumane moral stance in a world of injustice and alienation.18

Most feminists, Marxists and postcolonial critics would also claimthat their key concepts, such as alienation and class exploitation in thecase of Marxism, or hybridity and diaspora in the case of postcolonialism,or patriarchy in the case of feminism, are not simply ‘dreamt up’ theoreticalconstructs, but have their basis in real life. They may be masked by ideol-ogy (to use the concept of ideology in a simple sense to mean false con-sciousness), but they are nevertheless present at the level of livedexperience. One way to gain access to people’s lived experience is autobio-graphy. Autobiography may not provide pure, unmediated access to thisexperience, but to claim, from the opposite perspective, that it providesno or little access, is to deny the authority of the perspective of the‘insider’: it is to undermine the capacity of the person who lived outcertain conditions to say what those conditions were like and how theyaffected them as human beings.

The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne

Thomas Whythorne is a fascinating figure for a variety of historicallyspecific reasons. It is even tempting to claim that Whythorne existed at

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the very intersection of several key historical changes and conflicts. I shallbriefly identify some of these by way of a precursor to the ‘human’ story,told in the autobiography, of how these historical changes and conflictswere experienced.

Ben Jonson is usually credited with advancing the professional statusof the author, but 45 years before Jonson published, in 1616, an edition ofhis works, accompanied by a portrait promoting the authority of theauthor, Whythorne had done something remarkably similar, through hispublication of a collection of Songes, for three, fower and fiue voices, com-posed and made by Thomas Whythorne, gent (1571).19 Like Jonson’s latercollection, Whythorne’s was prefaced by an impressive-looking portraitof himself, encircled by Latin inscriptions. He published a second collec-tion of songs (with the music and words, as in the first collection) in1590.20 Whythorne is therefore a significant figure for the history of theprofessionalisation of authorship.21

For several other reasons, Whythorne is a historically intriguingfigure. In terms of the history of music and musicianship, for example,Whythorne commands attention, the 1571 book of songs according toRobert McQuillan being ‘the only printed collection of English songsbetween the fragmentary XX Songes of 1530 and Byrd’s Psalmes, Sonets& Songs of 1588’.22 The autobiography itself, which Whythorne probablyalso considered publishing at some point, is written using what Whythornecalls a ‘new Orthografye’ (p. 1), and is an early example of the perceivedneed to standardise the printed and written word. It is therefore implicatedin the shift from a predominantly oral to a predominantly literateculture.23 A further incentive for a historicist consideration of Whythorne’stext is the fact that the autobiography takes the form of an elaboration, orseries of elaborations, of a commonplace book, in which – as he explains –he periodically gathered together various moral adages on a given topic andthen versified them. Some of these verses found their way into the pub-lished collections of songs, and together with other songs and sonnetswritten during his several periods of employment in the households ofvarious gentlewomen, they act as mnemonics for past experiences. As a per-sonalised elaboration of a commonplace book, then, which shows in con-siderable detail how proverbs and adages gathered from a variety of sources(including other, printed collections of commonplaces) were utilised,Whythorne’s text is an intriguing document for historians of rhetoricand the commonplace tradition.24

Whythorne’s explanations of previously composed songs and sonnetsalso offer a rare, if not unique, example of an early modern poet describingthe genesis of his or her poetry. For years, critics have pondered the possibleautobiographical significance of sixteenth and seventeenth poetry, Shake-speare’s sonnets being the most notorious example. Whythorne discloses

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the relationship between poetry and personal circumstances, where otherRenaissance poets have kept critics guessing. That there was a closerelationship in Whythorne’s mind between poetry and worldly circum-stances is the principal argument of David Shore’s ‘The Autobiography ofThomas Whythorne: An Early Elizabethan Context for Poetry’ (1981).For Shore, the primary interest of the autobiography is what it revealsabout the occasional and practical nature of early Elizabethan poetry.‘There is no turning away in Whythorne’s poetry’, he writes, ‘from thepractical concerns of the moment.’ ‘To write a poem’, he continues, ‘isto turn toward those concerns, to grapple with them with a new sense offormal coherence’.25 Poems, according to this perspective, are not self-con-tained verbal artefacts, but ‘deuizd vpon common chaunces, and out ofworldly wurks’, as Whythorne himself put it in the preface to his 1571book of songs.26 This view of poetry accords with both the Renaissancehumanist principle that art can and should have a practical, educative func-tion and with more recent attempts by historically inclined critics to relatepoetry to social experience. In both cases, as well as in the case of criticsreading texts biographically, literature is not sealed off from life in an aes-thetic realm of its own. Whether ‘life’ is conceived in narrowly biographicalterms, in broader historical terms, or even more broadly in connection to‘life’ writ large as universal human needs and urges, the impulse in eachcase is the same: to maintain a mimetic function for literature. In historicalterms (the terms with which I am currently preoccupied), Whythorne’sexplanations of his poems not only disclose, pace Shore, certain earlyElizabethan attitudes to poetry as practical, occasional and relevantto life in a way that can be compared and contrasted with otherhistorically specific perceptions of literature’s ‘relevance’; because someof Whythorne’s explanations are of various veiled love poems, and thenegotiations of status which they enacted while working as a householdmusician and tutor, they can also be used to corroborate historicist analysisof the socioeconomic circumstances of early modern love poetry offered bysuch critics as Arthur F. Marotti.27

Finally – and of most relevance to this essay – there is Whythorne’sprecursory excursion into the genre of autobiographical writing. The sig-nificance of this excursion can be explored in different ways, dependingupon the model of autobiography we use to frame it. If, for example, theframe is autobiography understood in an exclusively historical sense as akey contributor to the (complex) evolution of individualism, rather thanthe literary-humanist frame outlined earlier (and developed in detailbelow), then Whythorne’s text can contribute significantly to our under-standing of early modern individualism. This is an important frameworkand one I want now to dwell on, as it feeds into, but does not wholly inter-sect with, the literary-humanist reading I shall subsequently offer.

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In part, the story which Whythorne tells of himself is a story of statusacquisition, the story of how he became, or tried to become, ‘myn ownman’ (p. 18). This is not a story, however, which Whythorne can easilytell, as the authority of the individual is in conflict with other modelsof authority. In attempting to achieve a status independently of theambiguous status he held as tutor, servant and unwilling (or so hemakes out) participant in various ‘games’ of love in the aristocratic house-holds in which he was employed, Whythorne exercised a considerabledegree of enterprise and initiative. As my outline of Whythorne’s histori-cal significance indicates, he was nothing if not resourceful, recycling pre-viously composed songs and sonnets for different purposes and differentreaders, and reinventing himself to a degree each time. The descriptionof his decision to publish a book of songs and sonnets demonstratesthis resourcefulness:

. . . I entended after þat tym to gyv my self wh_oly to þe profession

þerof [of music], and to n_on oþer. and bekawz I wold benefit and

profit my self the better þerwith I devyzed how I miht m_ak my

self to be known of many in þe shortest tym þat miht bee. andþen k

_am to my remembrans þat þer waz no better way for þat

purp_oz þen to sett and publish sum miuzik of myn own making

in print, and þen k_am also to my remembrans how þat in former

daiz I had m_ad many songs to be sung of .iij. iiij. and fyv parts, or

for voises (azwell az þat which I had m_ad to bee plaid on þe virginals

and luit) þe which þen I determyned to put in print.(pp. 173–4)

In his enterprising attitude to his own past creations, Whythorne approxi-mates a modern mind-set in which maximising one’s potential and enhan-cing one’s profile are held to be the keys to individualistic success. Prior tothe publication of his first collection of songs and sonnets (1571),Whythorne had had a brief taste, from c. 1562–4, of the world of com-merce, working as a business assistant to the successful London merchantWilliam Bromfield. During this time, Whythorne may have developed hisenterprise skills, this despite the distaste expressed in his autobiography formoney as the sole measure of virtue and happiness (pp. 139–40).However, his quasi-entrepreneurial flexibility of attitude towards his for-merly composed songs had a previous source in the flexible use which hestarted making from early on in his life of adages, proverbs, sententiaeand ‘plases’ (p. 10), as he sometimes calls them, gleaned from the Bibleand from other contemporary commonplace collections.28 And it is herethat we encounter one of the key cultural conflicts – to do with rival con-ceptions of authority – in which Whythorne was caught.

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The rhetorical culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,advanced by numerous published collections of commonplaces, has beenseen by several critics as an agent of social mobility or self-fashioning, touse Stephen Greenblatt’s influential term.29 Proverbs, writes FrankWhigham in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Cour-tesy Theory (1984), were ‘tools for dealing with different problems’ andtherefore contributed to an anti-programmatic, flexible form ofwisdom.30 This is manifested in Whythorne’s own selection of proverbsto suit his own purposes or to fit a particular situation. Yet Whythorneis sometimes discomforted by what he thinks might be seen as an over-opportunistic use of ‘plases’. On one occasion, when extracting gobbetsfrom the Bible to try to justify egalitarianism as a response to what he con-sidered to be unacceptable treatment of him by one of his gentlewomenemployers, he draws attention to this putative opportunism:

. . . I say to yow þat owr saviour Chryst saith in ,St. Liuks gospell,cap. vj. þe dissypl iz not ab

_ov hiz master. lykwyz hee saith ,in. St

Mathews gospell. cap. x. þat þe dissipull iz not aboov þe master, norþe serva,nt. aboov hiz lord. it iz enowh for þe dissypull þat hee beeas hiz master iz, and ,þat. the servant be az hiz l

_ord iz. how say

yow to þis? m_aketh not þis for my pur,p

_oz?. smyll ye? þ

_ez

wurdz I am suir I am suir be sp_oken generally, and þ

_erf,or. þey

do towch all agez and est_ats, wherf

_or I warrant yow þey be good

fo,r. such skoolma,ste.rz to t_ak hold on, wh

_oz skollerz will

seek to mizywz them.(p. 58)

The implication, here, is that the assertion of ‘my pur,p_oz’ is not sufficient

in itself. ‘My pur,p_oz’ needs to coincide with purposes and authorities

outside of the self, for example in books, such as the Bible, deemed to becanonical. Whythorne defers to an external textual authority, but recognisesa potential misfit between what the Bible says and what he wants it to say.The possibility of a self-interested appropriation of ‘plases’ is light-heartedlyadmitted – ‘m

_aketh not þis for my pur,p

_oz?. smyll ye?’ – then brushed

off in the twice-repeated claim (‘I am siur I am siur’) that ‘þ_ez wurdz . . . be

sp_oken’ not exclusively for his benefit, but ‘generally’.

Overall, Whythorne’s autobiography is illustrative of his purposes, hisintentions, his circumstances, his attempt to be his own man. And these areto an extent an end in themselves. The several self-portraits he had paintedof himself – ‘to see how tym doth alter’ people (p. 134) – reinforce thesame sense of the self being an object of interest and enquiry in its ownright. Yet such an interest is still couched in terms that point beyond‘self’, to some larger purpose or meaning. In justifying his third self-portrait,

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for example, done in around 1562, Whythorne considers general rather thanparticular reasons for having ‘kownterfetts to bee m

_ad’: one is so that people

‘may konsider with þem selvz how þe[i] owht to alter þeir kondisions, and topray to God þat a,z. þei do draw toward þeir long h

_om and end in þis

world, so þei may be þe m_or read,y. to dy in such sort az bekummeth

trew kristiens’; the other is so that ‘frendz’ and ‘childern’ will see ‘whatmaner of favour þei had’ and will be ‘þerby put in mynd þat if þei leftA goo,d. report of þeir vertewz behynd þem, þei may embr

_as and

follow the s_am’ (p. 134). The self-portraits thus encourage Whythorne to

look inwards, but looking inwards is inseparable from looking upwardsand outwards. Describing ‘the sacramental/analogical character of premo-dern thought’, Debora Shuger suggests that ‘nothing is simply itself,things are signs of other things and one thing may be inside another’.31 Ifto be ‘modern’ in Shuger’s terms is to treat things, including ‘selves’, as inde-pendent entities, and to be pre-modern is to exist within systems of interde-pendency, then Whythorne is simultaneously modern and pre-modern:modern because of his embryonic individualism, but pre-modern becauseof his discovery of the general within the particular, the macrocosmicwithin the microcosmic. Or, to put this point about Whythorne’s pre-modernity slightly differently, the self is not perceived by Whythorne as alaw totally unto itself, for it needs ratifying and grounding from elsewhere.The title of his autobiography in fact gives no indication whatsoever that thebook is going to be about him, for it is called ‘A book ,of so.ng,s andsonnet.ts, with lo,n.ge discoor,ses. s.ett with them, of the chyldslyfe, tog,y.ther with A young mans lyfe, and entring into the old manslyfe. devysed and written with A new Orthografye by Thomas Whythorne,gent ’ (p. 1). Despite the complete impersonality of the title, there is a per-sonal element in Whythorne’s verse preface to the book, but, again, the per-sonal element serves a larger purpose, of educating ‘yowthfull Imps’ in theways of the world:

. . . Mark now and I, to yow report will makeOf that which I, of late did vndertakeTo’ endyte & wryte, in prose, and eke in verswhich folloingly, I will to yow reherswherin young yowths, are learned lessons largeBy which they may, if lyke chaunce do them chargeThat hapt to :mee:, the better know to deallTherin, and so, it may be for their weall

(p. 2)

Having sought textual authorities, in the form of ‘plases’, which lie beyondthe self, Whythorne seeks to make of his own book a textual authority in its

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own right. He is going some way, therefore, towards individualising auth-ority, but not so much as to withdraw totally from received wisdom andgeneral purposes.32

What is also evident from the account given so far is that Whythorne’sautobiography stages a variety of different individualisms: entrepreneurialinitiative; non-conformity (for example, when he gathers ‘plases’ againsthierarchy in support of egalitarianism); self-promotion as author andeducator; and personalised spiritual reflections on the state of ‘myn ownkonsiens’ (p. 145). Early modern individualism, as has been arguedelsewhere, was not the singular phenomenon that some cultural historianshave treated it as,33 but a plural, contested one.34 Expressions and represen-tations of individualism ranged from the spectacular individualism of aTamburlaine, to the ‘healthy’ non-conformity of a Hamlet, to the icono-clastically ‘unhealthy’ non-conformity of Giovanni in John Ford’s ‘TisPity She’s a Whore (first published 1633), to the personalised relationshipwith God advanced by Protestantism. Whythorne’s autobiography,set alongside these other early modern representations of self, show usthat there is more to early modern individualism than the way it has some-times been characterised.

Autobiography as human testimony

I want now to consider what I take to be the principal value ofWhythorne’s autobiography, which is the human testimony that it givesto the various historical phenomena so far described. It is one thing toshow how Whythorne’s text is caught between different models of auth-ority, or between different models of individualism, but another to describehow these conflicting models were felt. The one entails the elaboration ofconcepts, while the other attempts to give an account of the experience ofthose concepts. ‘The most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying anypast period’, writes Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution (1961), isthe ‘felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a senseof the ways in which . . . particular activities combined into a way of think-ing and living’.35 Through his use of the phrase ‘felt sense’, with its evoca-tion of the universality of human feeling, Williams combines ahistoricalwith historical perspectives. It is the human face (the ‘felt sense’) ofhistory (‘a particular time and place’) with which Williams is concerned.If we allow it to by rehabilitating the concept of human testimony, auto-biography can give us a glimpse of this ‘felt sense of the quality of life’.

The difference between Whythorne’s poems and his subsequentexplanations of their genesis is striking. The poems are the end-productsof a process which the autobiographical explanations make known. The

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poems, read on their own, leave us at a distance from experiences, while theprose commentaries abolish that distance. We become ‘insiders’ in relationto Whythorne’s life and times – confidantes – to whom Whythorne routi-nely makes disclosures. One example, of many, of the difference between theverses and prose commentaries is a passage and poem dealing with the tran-sition from being engaged (c. 1545–8) as ‘servant and skoller’ (p. 13) in thehousehold of John Heywood, to trying to make his own way in the world:

when ,my tym of li.v,in.g with mas,ster H.aywood ,bef_or

re.her,sed w.as ended and finishe,d. I ,t.ook A chamberin London, and so det,er.mined to lyv of my self by teaching insuch sort az I had learned of him. þat iz to say by teaching of Muzik. . . Þhe which chainging of myn est

_at, browht mee oþer k

_ars þen I

waz trobled withal befor. for wh_eraz I waz bef

_or :but: trobled

with þe fear of tutorz and masters, I waz afterward brouht to h_av

A ,k._ar of myn own kreditt, and estimasion, with þe maintenans

þerof az of A m_aster and not az eiþer servant or skoller, and also

to keep myself withowt penury and need. when I waz A skoller,and A servant, my mynd waz þen as my st

_at waz, for þen I looked

no hier nor no furder, þen to the st_at þat I waz þen in, applieng

my self to my learning az A skoller, and seeking to content and topleaz my m

_aster az A servant. but when I k

_am to bee myn own

man, and þerwith a m_aster, my mynd began þen to chaing from

hiz former est_at. for þen I saw how I must seek to lyv of my self,

for þe which it behoved mee to cast :my witts: so many waiz,and þey being n

_ever trobled somuch þat way bef

_or, az I waz

almost at my witts end. wherf_or to eaz my mynd in þis perplexite

I wr_ot þus –

My tender yeerz er I owt wentI wisht

_ech day þei had byn spent

Thinking þat by my lyberteeMuch eaz and joy shuld kum to meeBut now I see, m

_or þen bef

_or

Þat yowth hath brouht of karz great st_or

Which to t_ak well and þeim digest

I think iz best to purchaz rest(pp. 18–19)

Whythorne supplies in his prose commentary the emotional reactions bywhich we recognise that a ‘real’, flesh and blood human being is on theend of the changes being described. Of course, the experience of havingto fend for oneself could be variously constructed: as opportunity, as

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release, as cause for anxiety, or a combination of these, but judging fromnumerous other, subsequent autobiographies dealing with the iconicallymodern theme of exile, there is probably a limit to the number of waysthat the experience of leaving the known for the unknown can be con-structed. For Whythorne, the experience mainly caused ‘perplexite’, result-ing in him being driven almost to his ‘witts end’.

Identification with a recognisable human predicament is much morelikely to occur in reading the prose commentary than it is in reading thepoem. Taken in isolation – as whoever might have read the unelaboratedcommonplace book would have taken the poems – the verse leaves us gues-sing as to its basis in any actual experience. The effect of the surroundingprose commentary is not only to embed the poem within a particular lifewith its own historically specific dilemmas, but also to enable us to recog-nise it as a ‘human’ response to these dilemmas. This and numerous otherpoems were written, Whythorne tells us here, to ‘eaz my mynd’; they werecomposed to achieve clarification and guidance in the face of the mixedblessing of ‘lybertee’. The poem is thus an ordering of an experience, thecomplications and anxieties of which are unravelled in the prose commen-tary. This and the numerous other ‘life guidance’ poems penned byWhythorne were in effect the friends and counsellors which he did notalways have in the itinerant and often insecure life he embarked on,having left the employment of John Heywood. I suggested earlier viaGreenblatt and Whigham that sententiae (or poems aspiring to the statusof sententiousness) can be seen as agents of social mobility, and consideredas purely linguistic phenomena encouraging a ‘portmanteau’ attitude towisdom, there is truth in this perspective. However, it takes an autobiogra-phy such as Whythorne’s to give us the more psychically charged picture ofa man left to his own devices and struggling to find patterns and guidelinesin a world that often seemed haphazard.

We would not be able to see such often trite poems in this broadly‘human’ way, were it not for Whythorne’s autobiographical elaborationsof them, for these give us access to the ‘raw’ experiences which promptedthe composition of poems ‘to eaz my mynd’. The prose commentaries alsorepeatedly address a ‘you’: ‘Now to return to my forsaid purp

_oz again. yee

sha,ll. vnderstand . . .’ (p. 10); ‘Bekawz þat I shewd you in þis Sonett. . .’ (p. 19); ‘By þis yee may perseyv . . . (p. 20). On the evidence of theverse preface to the book (discussed above), the ‘you’ would be taken torefer to ‘yee yowthfull Imps’ (p. 1), for whom the book is written as edifica-tion. However, it is probable that Whythorne’s commonplace book waselaborated at least twice, and that a first version was intended, not for apublic readership, but for the person he refers to at the start of the bookas his ‘good fre,nd’ (p. 2). The preliminary remarks to the friend strikean altogether more intimate note than the ‘public address’ to the ‘yowthfull

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Imps’ and form part of an exchange ‘of pryvat and secret affayrs past’,initiated apparently by the friend:

,My. good fre,nd. Recalling to mynd. my pro,my.se madevnto yow, I have heer sent yow the copies of s,uch so.ngs andsonett,s., as I have made from tyme to tyme vntill the wrytingheerof,. And. becaws that yow did impart vnto mee at owr lastbeing togyther, sum of yowr pryvat and secret affayrs past, & alsosum of the secret purposes and entents the which have lyen hiddand byn as it were entombed in yowr hart, I to gratifye yowr goodopinion had of me, do now lay open vnto yow the most of all mypryvatt affayres, and secrets accomplyshed from my childhoodvntill the day of the date hereof. the which as I do wryte vnto yowto gratyfye yow withall, so am I partlye enforced thervnto, becawsI do thinke it needfull, not onlye to shew yow the caws why Iwrote them, but also to open my secret meaning in dyvers of themaswell in words and sentences, as in the hole of the same, lest yowshuld think them to be made to smaller purpose then I did mean.

(p. 3)

This is intriguing. Who was the friend who took part in the exchange of‘pryvat and secret affayrs past’? And why did Whythorne feel ‘enforced’to explain his songs and sonnets ‘lest yow shuld think them to be madeto smaller purpose then I did mean’? Whythorne’s life and personal cir-cumstances threaten to recede here into a privacy, shared only it seemswith the good friend, to which we do not have access. Nevertheless, it istempting to make a few speculations, which expose another ‘human’story within Whythorne’s autobiography, this time in the form of aromantic – or perhaps more accurately – a ‘friendship’ narrative.

The last datable event in Whythorne’s autobiography is 1575, whenWhythorne’s time as ‘master of the miuzik’ of the Archbishop of Canter-bury’s ‘chappell’ (p. 255) ended due to Archbishop’s Parker’s death. Twoyears afterwards, in May, 1577, Whythorne married.36 This piece of infor-mation entices the suggestion that his songs and sonnets were first elabo-rated for the benefit of his future wife. This would explain the distancewhich Whythorne is keen to put between himself and some of his more‘risque’ – or so he worries they might seem – songs and sonnets. Thepoems written during his several periods of employment by various gentle-women contributed to some tortuously flirtatious games played betweenWhythorne and his employers/mistresses, games in which Whythorne’salready ambiguous status, as at once tutor and servant, was intensified.One poem, written to a widowed gentlewoman whom Whythorneevidently entertained the possibility of marrying, illustrates the nature

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of the flirtatious status negotiation in which Whythorne was on numerousoccasions implicated. These are the first three verses of the poem:

Misdeem mee not wyþout kawz whyAlþouh I talk familiarlyIf þus mery I sh

_uld not bee

Great pryd þei would þen judg in mee

I may keep that eevn all þe dayAltyms and howrz in honest wayAnd mean nothing az yee mistrustTo serv as thrall t’obey þeir lust

But wher þat my goodwill is bentI dar not shew lest I bee shentBut who shee iz þus will I saymy hart shee hath both nyht and day

(pp. 40–1)

In his explanation of this poem, Whythorne says that he made it ‘sumwhatdark and dowtfull of sens bekawz I knew not serteinly how shee wold t

_ak

it, not to whoz handz it miht kumen after þat she had read it’ (p. 41).The intricacies of interpretation of the poem are then elaborated byWhythorne:

if she wold t_ak it to be written to her self she miht best do it. and if

she me,nt. to t_ak it well, þen it waz lyk that shee wold keep it to

her self, but and if ,shee. wold not t_ak it to her self or in good

p_art, but wold skof þerat and shew it ,to. such whom she

thouht wold t_ak her part, yet it is so m

_ad as neiþer shee nor

n_o,n. oþer kowld m

_ak any great matter þerof, spesially, if I

miht h_av kum to þ,e. awnswering þerof

(p. 41)

Whythorne is quite frank about having been a gold-digger. He was notwilling to lose her ‘goodwill’, he says, because of the ‘kommodities þatmyht be gotten by such :A:

_on as shee :eiþer: by mariag or oþerwyz’

(p. 40). However, too explicit a profession of ‘love’ to the widow mighthave led to accusations of presumptuousness (or worse). Hence the needto write poems with cloudy messages, in response to the equally veiledmessages he says he was receiving from her.37

By way of justification of all this subtlety and subterfuge, Whythornewrites that ‘to dissembull with A dissembler waz no dissimulasion’(p. 40). It is defensive, half-apologetic comments of this kind which

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suggest that Whythorne is trying to distance himself from past ‘follies’ and‘dayngers’ (p. 4), as he puts it, for the benefit of someone – the good friend –with whom he wanted a more open, straightforward and committedrelationship. He is also rather touchingly keen to protest his chastity. Ofanother poem, written during the same period of employment, he writesthat: ‘Suspisiows headz wold think peradventiur þat so much friendshipaz I sp

_ak of in þe f

_orsaid song kold not bee, exsept A konjiunksion kopiulatyu

had had bin m_ad’, but, Whythorne reassures his reader, ‘I must say, and say

trewly, þat neyþer my hand nor any oþer part of myn did ons towch þat p_art

of herz wh_er the konjiunksion is m

_ad’ (p. 43).

Whether or not the good friend with whom Whythorne exchangedlife narratives was his future wife, it is evident that what he was aimingfor in writing the autobiography was intimacy and transparency. The ‘I’of his previously written love poems was evidently a performative ‘I’, a con-structed persona, whose relationship to Whythorne’s real motivations wasdeliberately obscured. By contrast, the later, autobiographical ‘I’ is an ‘I’who addresses himself sincerely – ‘I must say, and say trewly . . .’ – tohis good friend and no longer speaks in riddles. Time and again through-out the autobiography, Whythorne uses words and phrases that express hisdesire to make himself known and to be known: ‘I . . . do now lay open vntoyow the most part of all my pryvatt affayres’ (p. 3); ‘Þis f

_orsaid sonett I þus

wr_ot bekawz . . .’ (p. 49); ‘Now must I tell yow of an oþer ma,tter . . .’

(p. 98); ‘Heer to expl_an, and to m

_ak plain vnto yow my meaning . . .’

(p. 183). No doubt it is possible to read such professions of plainness asanother kind of performance – a textual ploy – and to question, as onekind of poststructuralist might, the existence of a ‘real’ self.38 But notwith-standing theories – and autobiographies – which show the self to be analways open structure or performance, it is possible, again from a lit-erary-humanist perspective, to see in Whythorne’s ‘sincerity’ a plea forcertain human needs to be met. From this standpoint, the plainnesscraved by Whythorne should be understood as a response to the obscurityinto which love and friendship had fallen in the past. This, combined withlong-term job insecurity and an ethos of individualism which was as muchforced upon him as chosen, led to a deep anxiety that nothing and no-onecould be relied upon. The only certainty for Whythorne was uncertainty:‘Ech thing iz not as seemz’ (p. 190), he writes in one of his later poems andthis perception that there is no solid ground to life and relationships is per-sistently echoed in other passages of the autobiography:

konsidering of evry thing þat I had past, how I had bin m,a.nytyms in h

_op of prosperite, and þen prezently owt of sekiurite, and

þen t,ost. from p_ost to piller, now vp, now down, by þe illiuzions

of flattering & fikk,l. fortewn, who wold never suffer me to be in

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quiet when I waz well, and i,n. prosperite, and did perseiv in whatk_as oþerz also w

_er in þat w

_er in such dyve,r.z est

_ats az I had bin

heer tof_or, I m

_ad þis sonett þerof az folloith . . .

(p. 173)

This was written about a ‘sonett’ composed just prior to Whythorne’sdecision to publish a first book of songs and sonnets. Looking back, viathe poem, at his existence up to this point, he concludes that his life hasbeen without any secure foundations, and with good reason, for jobs hadbeen impermanent, love and friendship had been part of a convolutedgame of status negotiation and the attempt to become ‘myn own man’ iso-lating as much as liberating. The two responses to this situation were topublish a book of songs and sonnets and, at some later stage, to write anaccount of his life for the ‘good fre,nd’.39 The former was an attempt toadvance his professional status as a musician by becoming dependent onthe book market rather than aristocratic employers, while the latter wasan attempt to re-build trust, intimacy and transparency. The writing of auto-biography, from this perspective, was less an assertion of individualism, thanan attempt, as suggested earlier, to make himself known and to be known ina world in which knowable selves and knowable communities were scarce.

The writing of the autobiography was also a way of producing narra-tive. It was a way, that is, of making sense, a means of finding meaning and ashape to existence in a society which did not give Whythorne any clear nar-rative. Retrospectively, Whythorne was able to identify turning points, ritesof passage, moments of crisis, that enabled him to construct some sort oftentatively meaningful narrative out of the chaos of the world in whichhe moved. The world, for Whythorne, was not inherently meaningful; itlacked what Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self (1989) calls an ‘onticlogos’.40 In such a situation, the discovery of the meaningfulness – or other-wise – of the world devolves upon individuals. This is not the entire truth ofthe matter in Whythorne’s case, for as we have seen he still relied upon exter-nal sources, such as commonplaces, canonical texts and, increasingly, God,to help him with the ‘human’ urge to find a significance to life which makeslife more than a mere succession of events. This, combined with the desire toinsert himself into a meaningful human community – albeit only a small‘community’ of two – make Whythorne’s autobiography an existentiallysignificant testimony to the times in which he lived.

History, continuity and discontinuity

It has become axiomatic to think of history in terms of difference anddiscontinuity. The significance of autobiography is from this perspective

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an index of the ‘modern’ significance attached to the individual – indivi-dualism and the emergence of ‘the subject’ being for many cultural histor-ians the hallmarks of modernity. Perhaps, though, it is better to think ofhistory in terms of both the continuity of human needs and the disconti-nuity brought about by historical change, for only then is it possible tocome to some ethical judgements about how history has treated humanbeings and accommodated their needs. Understood not only as a contribu-tor to the history of individualism, but as human testimony, autobiographyis as much about preservation as innovation. It is the place where historybecomes ‘remembrance’, where history is registered on the pulse ofactual, flesh and blood human beings. Of the ruminations on the natureof remembering in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936),Wesley Morris in ‘Of Wisdom and Competence’ (2000) writes that it isthe ‘body and not the mind that remembers pain and pleasure’. ‘Themind’, he continues

can only warp experience into myth, dreams, mere ideas or stories . . .Everything that is or has been or will be can be told, but life isremembered as pleasure and pain, not as event or tale. Memory isempty, but remembering is the lingering of experience, the temper-ing of sense as though pleasure and pain have written a message in ascript burned into flesh . . . Whatever stories we tell of good or evil,with whatever words we name specific differences, there is always thesense of pleasures and pains, the remembering of sensations whichgive corporeal foundations to our thoughts and expressions.41

An unadulterated constructionist argument might well take the view thattestimony of the kind described here depends upon the historical develop-ment of a particular view of human beings, as entities who not only live life,but ‘take it in’, experience it at some deep emotional and visceral level.Individualism might come into play here as well, and the sense to whichindividualism gives rise, that ‘my’ visceral experience of the world isinnately valuable and worthy of attention. However, the literary-humanistexplanation of autobiography developed in this essay is that human beingshave always had bodily, emotional and psychological needs of varioussimple and more complicated kinds and the extent to which the worldmeets these is always the stuff of actual or potential testimony. Ofcourse – not to become too ahistorical about all this – the existence ofwritten or oral testimonies to the pleasure and pain of living will dependupon the value which any given culture attaches to human experience.In a culture, for example, where religious concerns are thought to beincompatible with human ones – where the proper study of humankindis not humankind but God – then human experience will not be the

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overt subject of testimony. But to put the issue in these terms is still toretain a notion of the human that can always potentially act as a judge tohistory and the extent to which history has accommodated or annihilatedhuman needs.

De Montfort University, Leicester

Notes

1 Jack Common, Kiddar’s Luck (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, [1951] 1990).2 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (London: Vintage, 1998).3 The only other extended discussions of Whythorne’s autobiography of which I

am aware are: David Shore, ‘The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne: AnEarly Elizabethan Context for Poetry’, Renaissance and Reformation, 17.2(1981), pp. 72–86; David Shore, ‘Whythorne’s Autobiography and theGenesis of Gascoigne’s Master F. J.’, The Journal of Medieval and RenaissanceStudies, 12.2 (1982), pp. 159–78; Andrew Mousley, ‘Renaissance Selves andLife Writing: The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne’, Forum for LanguageStudies, 26.3 (1990), pp. 222–30; Katharine Hodgkin, ‘Thomas Whythorneand the Problem of Mastery’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), pp. 20–41; Elizabeth Heale, ‘Songs, Sonnets and Autobiography: Self-Representationin Sixteenth-century Verse Miscellanies’, in Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway andHelen Wilcox, eds., Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in EarlyModern English Texts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 59–75, pp. 68–73;Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse (London:Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), ch. 2.

4 The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford:Clarendon, 1961), p. 18. All subsequent references to this edition are givenwithin the text. As far as possible, I have retained Whythorne’s orthography,the rationale for and details of which he explains on pp. 4–6 of the autobiogra-phy. Thorns are reproduced here but I have not been able to reproduce yoghs.Dots beneath vowels to indicate the lengthening of vowel sounds are repro-duced, but his use of a dot above ‘y’ to lengthen the vowel sound has notbeen reproduced. I have also retained Osborn’s use of editorial brackets,glossed by Osborn as follows: ‘Square brackets enclose editorial insertions . . .Half brackets enclose Whythorne’s own interlinear additions, corrections, orsubstitutions. Angle brackets indicate lacunae in the text, supplied by editorialconjecture, many of them certain, most of them informed guesses, and a fewleft blank because no likely conjecture occurred to the editor’ (p. lxiv).

5 Hoffman, Lost in Translation, back cover.6 Jonathan Sawday, ‘Self and Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century’, in Roy

Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 29–48, at p. 30.

7 For work which discusses and/or exemplifies the variety of the humanisttradition, see David Goicoechea, John Luik and Tim Madigan, eds., The

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Question of Humanism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991); ComparativeCriticism, Humanist Traditions in the Twentieth Century, 23 (2001); MartinHalliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-HumanistDialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Richard Norman,On Humanism (London: Routledge, 2004); Diogenes, Emerging Humanisms,52 (2005).

8 For further discussion of the concept of literary humanism and its relationshipto other concepts of humanism, see Andy Mousley, Re-Humanising Shakes-peare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity (Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 2007), pp. 8–21.

9 Laura Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester Univer-sity Press, 1994), p. 136.

10 Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routedge, 1996), p. 41.11 Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses (1994), p. 179.12 Lynda Anderson, Autobiography (London, Routledge, 2001), p. 3.13 Some counter-perspectives to, or modifications of, the poststructuralist para-

digm already exist. Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, for example, writethat they want to ‘reclaim’ the ‘mimetic relationship between literature andlife’ and autobiography as a ‘significantly “historical” form of self-expression’:‘Introduction’ to Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Reading Lives:Autobiography, Biography, and Gender (Albany, NY: State University ofNew York Press, 1990), p. 2. Similarly, Paul John Eakin argues that ‘autobio-graphy is nothing if not a referential act’, adding, though, that ‘it is also andalways a kind of fiction’: Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Prin-ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 31.

14 For discussions of ethics in connection to literature, see Tobin Siebers, TheEthics of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Martha Nussbaum,Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Robert Eaglestone,Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 1997); Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, eds.,The Ethics in Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Jane Adamson,Richard Freadman and David Parker, eds., Renegotiating Ethics in Literature,Philosophy, and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, eds., Critical Ethics (Basingstoke: Mac-millan, 1999); Critical Quarterly, Special Issue: Against Transgression, 47(2005); Brian Stock, ‘Ethics and the Humanities: Some Lessons of HistoricalExperience’, New Literary History, 36 (2005), pp. 1–17.

15 See note 7 for work on humanism.16 For differently focused discussions of ideas of embodiment, see Terry Eagleton,

The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Wesley Morris, ‘OfWisdom and Competence’, in Revenge of the Aesthetic, ed. Michael P. Clark(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 136–56; Gail Kern Paster,Humoring the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); AmandaAnderson, The Way We Argue Now (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

17 Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism: First and Second Series (London: Dent,1964), p. 302.

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18 ‘Introduction: Literature and the Return to Ethics’, in Hadfield, Rainsford andWoods, eds., Ethics in Literature, p. 5.

19 Thomas Whythorne, Songes, for three, fower and fiue voices, composed and madeby Thomas Whythorne, gent (London: John Daye, 1571).

20 Thomas Whythorne, Duos, or Songs for two voices, composed and made byThomas Whythorne, Gent (London: Thomas Este, 1590).

21 For further discussion of Whythorne’s self-promotion as author, see Mousley,‘Renaissance Selves and Life Writing’, 228–9 and Heale, Autobiography andAuthorship, pp. 49–51.

22 Robert McQuillan, ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Whythorne, Songes for Five Voyces,ed. Robert McQuillan (Newton Abbott, Devon: Antico, [1571] 1999), p. ii.

23 There are some anomalies in Whythorne’s system, however. For example: ‘same’is spelt ‘sam’ (p. 34) and ‘s

_am’ (p. 118); ‘use’ as a verb is variously spelt ‘iuz’

(p. 43), yuz (p. 43) and ‘yoowz’ (p. 57); ‘words’ is spelt ‘wurdz’ (p. 58) and‘wordz’ (p. 103).

24 For discussion of the commonplace tradition and its connection to rhetoricaltheory and practice, see Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dia-logue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); Joan Marie Lechner,Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York: Pageant Press, 1962);Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Finding a Place: The Humanist Logic of Gatheringand Framing’, in her Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 12–38; Ann Moss,Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

25 Shore, ‘The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne’ (1981), p. 75.26 Thomas Whythorne, ‘The Praeface of the Aucthor’, in his Tenor, of songes, for

three, fower, and five voice (London: John Daye, 1571), Bodleian Library,Douce WW 62. The five parts were separately printed. The tenor part containsthe preface (which Whythorne reproduces on pp. 178–82 of the autobiography).

27 Arthur F. Marotti, ‘“Love is not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and theSocial Order’, English Literary History, 49 (1982), pp. 396–428.

28 Whythorne says (pp. 13–14) that he actually helped to produce the firstedition of John Heywood’s A Dialogue conteinyng the nombre in effect of allthe prouerbes in the Englishe tongue (1546) during his time of employmentwith Heywood from 1545 to 1548.

29 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1980).

30 Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of ElizabethanCourtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 27.

31 Debora Keller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1990), p. 11.

32 On the tension between Whythorne’s exemplary self and his otheridentities, see Mousley, ‘Renaissance Selves and Life Writing’ (1990),pp. 225–6, 227–8 and Heale, Autobiography and Authorship, pp. 46–7,pp. 52–56.

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33 See, as two influential examples, Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body(London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 25–40 and Catherine Belsey, The Subject ofTragedy (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 41–2.

34 For discussion of the tendency to homogenise (early modern) individualism andthe need to counteract this by supplying different descriptions of it, see AndrewMousley, ‘Hamlet and the Politics of Individualism’, in Mark ThorntonBurnett and John Manning, eds., New Essays on Hamlet (New York: AMSPress, 1994), pp. 67–82; Hugh Grady, ‘On the Need for a DifferentiatedTheory of (Early) Modern Subjects’, in John Joughin, ed., Philosophical Shake-speares (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 34–50. For other discussions of self-rep-resentation, subjectivity and/or individualism in the early modern period, seeGreenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning; Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardnessand Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995); Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, in Women and Litera-ture in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1996), pp. 209–33; Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan and DympnaCallaghan, Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Mascuch, Originsof the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); Rewriting the Self, ed. Roy Porter(1997); Anthony Low, Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from theMiddle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UniversityPress, 2003); Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik, eds., Represen-tations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Cambridge: CambridgeUnivesity Press, 2000); Debora Shuger, ‘Life-Writing in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland’, in Representations of the Self, ed. Coleman, Lewis and Kowalik(2000), pp. 63–78; Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 9 (January2002), http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls; Dragstra, Ottway and Wilcox, eds., Betray-ing Our Selves (2000); Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender inEarly Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

35 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1961]1965), p. 63.

36 Osborn gives this information in his introduction to Whythorne’s autobiogra-phy, pp. xlix– l.

37 For further discussion of this courtly game-playing see Mousley, ‘RenaissanceSelves and Life Writing’ (1990), pp. 223–4 and Heale, Autobiography andAuthorship, pp. 43–7.

38 For discussion of Whythorne’s autobiography in the context of the performa-tive tradition of ‘reformed prodigal’ narratives, see Heale, Autobiography andAuthorship in Renaissance Verse, pp. 41–3.

39 For an alternative consideration of the friend, as a literary device, see Shore,‘The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne’ (1981), pp. 80–1.

40 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989), p. 186.

41 Morris, ‘Of Wisdom and Competence’, in Clark, ed., Revenge of the Aesthetic,p. 151.

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