Whithorne’s account of his life and career is exceptionally full and detailed, and no straightforward analogues survive. Nevertheless, there are a number of career
4 Skura (2008) is particularly concerned with the relation of individual voices to genre conventions.
It appeared too late for me to be able to use in writing this chapter.
Narratives from the period that recount lives of social fluidity and struggle produced in both verse and prose. A striking example is the life-writing of the astrologer and physician Simon Forman. Forman’s sense of anxiety about his social status, and the sense of grievance that he repeatedly articulates against an establishment that fails to recognize and support him, are themes that are repeated over and over in the first-person writing of the period. Forman kept an annual diary that covers the years 1564 to 1602, composed two fascinating and circumstantial autobiographical poems in the form of psalms (one of them designed to be sung aloud) in thanksgiving after periods of local persecution and imprisonment in 1576 and 1579, and wrote, in 1600, an unfinished prose narrative of his life from his birth in 1552 to 1573.233 The unfinished prose narrative rehearses the first stages of a rags-to-riches story, told from the perspective of later commercial success with a lucrative London practice. In Forman’s prose life, God’s hand is clearly visible, enabling the authorial subject to triumph over threatening disaster. Describing a persistent childhood dream of overcoming great odds, Forman writes:
These visions God did show him in his youth to signify unto him his troubles in his riper years [...] Yet God, the only defender of all that be his, would never let him to be overthrown, but continually gave him always in the end the victory of all his enemies. And he overpassed all with credit, by the help of God, to whom be praise for evermore! Amen. (1947: 269)
Forman’s troubles included imprisonment and persistent opposition from more orthodox physicians who objected to his lack of formal education and unconventional methods (Traister 2001; Kassell 2005).
Forman’s lack of an established social identity is characteristic of sixteenth-century life-writers, but his writing is unusual in its sense of personal triumph and confidence. More typical are a series of career narratives, written in verse and printed in the middle years of the sixteenth century, in which the threatening failure and disgrace that lurk implicitly in Forman’s narrative overwhelm the authorial subject. In these narratives, virtue, effort, and enterprise bring no rewards. Thomas Tusser’s popular versified manual Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557) takes as its fundamental rationale the idea that virtuous effort and a willingness to learn will bring success, but the inexorably downward trajectory of the author's own life, first appended to the third edition in 1573, tells a very different tale. Shifting from place to place, from employment to employment, Tusser's resigned reflection on his own career contradicts the self-help ethos of his manual: ‘in world is set, ynough to get, | But where and whan, that scarsely can, the wisest tell’ (1984: 210).
George Gascoigne echoes the same theme in his poem ‘Gascoigne’s Woodmanship’, printed in A Hundred Sundry Flowers (1573). He moves from job to job, serially inept as courtier, soldier, and lawyer. The tone of his poem shifts between a comic presentation of his own incompetence and a sense of being the victim of recurring bad luck. Self-justification finally predominates, with Gascoigne, referring to himself in the third person, claiming to choose integrity over corrupt self-advancement:
He cannot climbe as other catchers can,
To leade a charge before himselfe be led,
He cannot spoile the simple sakeles man,
Which is content to feede him with his bread.
He cannot pinch the painefull souldiers pay,
And sheare him out his share in ragged sheetes.
Tusser and Gascoigne present themselves as men without a fixed place in society, unrewarded in spite of effort and virtue. Lack of reward and recognition also keeps Thomas Churchyard continually on the move as a soldier in two poems that construct a narrative around events in his own life, ‘A Tragical Discourse of the Unhappy Man’s Life’ in Churchyard’s Chips (1575) and ‘A Story Translated out of the French’ in A Light Bundle of Lively Discourses (1580). Churchyard’s life story is one of privation and imprisonment on continual campaigns, in Scotland, Ireland, France, Flanders, then back to France, only to find no home or recognition in England: ‘With labours long, in vaine we beat the ayre | [...] Small hoep [hope] in those, that sits in Golden chayre’ (1973: 63v).
Tusser, Gascoigne, and Churchyard present themselves artfully in verse to a print audience, and to the patrons, actual and potential, to whom the poems are also addressed, as deserving, active, and enterprising but unfortunate.234 They claim to be resigned to God’s dispensation, although social criticism makes itself clearly heard in Churchyard’s texts. The selves produced by these texts are typically socially unfixed, claiming to be gentlemen on the title pages of their books, but without a recognized place and calling to give them a stable identity or status. Such personae may well have exerted a powerful appeal to a literate, but socially fluid, London print market of young men and women trying to make their way in the world. In the cases of Forman and, as we shall see, Whithorne, writing in manuscript, there is the intriguing possibility that the ideal addressees are the authors themselves.235 For Forman and Whithorne, both of whom took a pleasure in having their portraits painted, the fashioning of a desired self is a lifelong work of art and effort, perhaps primarily for their own scrutiny and assessment.236
World History
