An article I read this week that I
found interesting was “Caroline Culture: Bridging Court and Country?,” by J.C.
Robertson from Washington University, St. Louis. In this article, Robertson
strives to challenge the ways that scholars have traditionally looked at
Jacobean culture. Robertson argues that, while many see Jacobean culture as
insulated and alien from the “country” culture of the common man, in fact court
culture found its way into more of the mainstream than scholars might like to
admit (404). Similarly, he argues that the “country house” poem, the greatest
indication that scholars have for an innocent, unpolluted English Presbyterian
countryside, does not really support anything of the sort (392). Firstly,
Robertson cites, these country house poems are free from agricultural labor and
“demonstrate … their own distance from the countryside” (392). Secondly, they “defined
such households’ virtues less through contrasts with urban standards than
against the actions of more exploitative estate-owners: the idealized country
houses were exceptional” (292). These observations, added with the fact that
James I actually encouraged his courtiers to spend extended amounts of time in
the countryside (393), discredit the idea that there was a huge split between “court”
culture and “country” culture: those who wrote about the country spent much
time at court, and those who wrote about court spent much time in the country.
It is only natural that the two would blend a little bit.
This article made me think a lot about Amelia Lanyer’s “To Cookham,” an example of a country house poem. In class, we discussed how Lanyer’s poem is different from many other country house poems because of the way that it does not praise Cookham outright for most of the poem, and also because it vacillates between prelapsarian and postlapsarian views of Cookham. Something about this entire poem is melancholy—even when Lanyer is praising Cookham at the very beginning, she brings up Philomela in the 31st line, a symbol of an experience gone wrong (1437). We spoke in class about Lanyer using the melancholy tone to communicate that some of her memory is leaving her, but I wonder if her use can also be seen as a realization that the country life is not as perfect as it may be portrayed to be. While Lanyer might not have meant to discredit the country and the peace it was supposed to bestow, the fact that she uses in the country in her poem in this complex, imperfect way shows that she is more focused on communicating her own experience than extolling the graces of the country. The country is merely a backdrop for her point. In “To Cookham,” then, the country is used more as a symbol to play with and use, not an actual place to be praised literally. Similarly, perhaps other country house poems like “To Penshurst” are more about the idea of a perfect, Edenic location than the actual existence of a morally superior countryside. This is certainly what Robertson is arguing when he says that the authors of country poems showed that they never actually understood the countryside (392). Their writing was never about the place, really—it was about a place being used as a symbol. Thus, perhaps those divisions between "court" culture and "country" culture, as shown in literature, aren't about the court and the country at all. If so, though, why are these tropes being used? What purpose do they serve?
This article has certainly been useful to my own thinking, and I would say that it would be useful for anyone who was trying to get a nuanced sense of what the Jacobean relation between the court and the countryside really looked like, perhaps if they were looking at rhetoric. I am not sure that that is true for anyone else, however. At any rate, I’ll attach the bibliography information below for anyone who might be interested.
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