by David E. Anderson
Contemporary readers often know John Donne only as the difficult metaphysical poet whose early erotic poems puzzled, then titillated (and still do) students in English literature survey courses.
"Come live with mee, and bee my love, / And wee will some new pleasures prove" run the famous opening lines of "The Baite." Or "The Canonization": "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love; / Or chide my palsie, or my gout." We know without knowing many phrases and thoughts from Donne's sermons and devotional poetry: "No man is an island"; "Death be not proud"; "Batter my heart, three person'd God." As with Shakespeare, they have entered the conversational world sundered and separated from their author and context.
It is not as Donne -- whose final years saw him as a popular preacher rather than a passionate poet -- would have had it. He liked to make a sharp distinction between the "Jack Donne" of the poetry and "Doctor Donne," the Anglican priest who served as dean of the prestigious St. Paul's Cathedral and preached the gospel to king and court. In a famous letter of 1623 to the Duke of Buckingham, Donne argued that poetry was "the mistress of my youth," while divinity was "the wife of my age."
The significant episodes that make up the general contour of Donne's life have been generally agreed upon since Izaak Walton's hagiography, the first version of which appeared in 1639, just eight years after Donne's death. It is mostly the motives and the meanings -- especially when it comes to religion -- that are in dispute. The lively, vivid new biography by John Stubbs, JOHN DONNE: THE REFORMED SOUL (W.W. Norton & Co.) is a welcome addition to Donne studies, especially in unraveling the riddle of religion.Donne was born in 1572 (the exact date is unknown) and was probably christened privately in a Roman Catholic ceremony. He was sent to Oxford in 1584 at age 12 to finish his education before turning 16, when he would have been obliged to take an oath of loyalty to the Reformed Protestant Church and to the queen as its head. In 1596, in a sign of civic loyalty if not yet full-bodied religious commitment, the politically ambitious Donne signed up as a volunteer for a preemptive expeditionary strike against Catholic Spain and sailed to Cadiz.
He became a secretary to a high-ranking court official, and in his twenties was considered a dashing, even rakish young man, a frequenter of the theater, a writer of witty, amorous verse that was privately circulated among his friends. His career appeared assured. Then he fell in love with Ann More, the ward and niece of his employer, and against all the social norms of the day, as well his own self-interest, he secretly married her in December of 1601. The marriage destroyed Donne's career, plunged the couple into poverty, and left him scrambling to repair his life, a process that took many years and was not fully resolved until he was finally convinced, in part by King James I, to take orders and become a priest in what was known then as the Reformed (Anglican) Church in January 1615.
Stubbs tells Donne's story with verve and style, bringing the characters sharply to life and succinctly navigating the complex cross-currents of religion, politics, and diplomacy that marked the volatile last years of the 16th century and the first decades of the 17th. He is weakest on Donne the poet, assuming too easily that Donne's early love poetry is rigidly autobiographical. Nor does he devote much energy to putting Donne in his aesthetic context or explaining the characteristics that marked what came to be known -- first derogatorily by Samuel Johnson and then more positively by T.S. Eliot -- as metaphysical poetry. One wishes that Stubbs might have explored in Donne's particular case Oxford scholar Helen Gardner's suggestion about the metaphysical poets in general: "The strength of the religious poetry of the metaphysical poets is that they bring to their praise and prayer and meditation so much experience that is not in itself religious."
But Stubbs is especially good on the evolution of the political aspects of Donne's religious views. Unlike British literary critic John Carey, who opened his 1990 study of Donne with the harsh finding that "The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic; the second, that he betrayed the faith," Stubbs develops a more balanced and nuanced view that does more justice both to the psychology of the man and the complexities of the age. The see-sawing of official religious persuasions and consequent persecutions -- Donne's illustrious ancestor Sir Thomas More (his maternal great-great-uncle) was a harsh and unremitting persecutor of Protestants until he met his own death as a resistant Catholic under Henry VIII -- kept the religious and theological waters roiled.
As Stubbs develops his portrait, he draws a Donne who is politically pragmatic and ambitious -- the kind of attitude for which Carey judges him a "betrayer" -- but also intellectually restless and, from a very early age, theologically inquisitive. He was never content with received wisdom. In his poem "Satyr III," Donne writes of Truth standing "On a huge hill / Cragg'd and steep," and "hee that will / Reach her, about must, and about must goe; And what the hill's suddenness resists, winne so."
According to Stubbs, Donne only gradually broke with Catholicism, and then mostly with what he came to regard as the politically corrupt claims of the papacy. In his later years, after ordination, he was nearly as uncomfortable with the extreme Puritan movement and its efforts to wipe out all vestiges of Catholicism, especially its ceremonies, and his language retains the habits of mind instilled by his Catholic upbringing. In Donne's first publicly published prose works, two satirical little books attacking Papist missionaries in Pseudo-martyr (1610) and the Jesuits in Ignatius His Conclave (1611), Stubbs argues that Donne signals "his disillusionment with the religious disputes of the day" and makes it clear he does not hold the English Protestant Church or the state responsible for the plight of Catholics. Rather, he blames Catholic militants, especially the Jesuits, for inciting people such as his brother Henry to commit illegal acts (Henry sheltered a Catholic priest, was arrested as a religious subversive, and died in 1593 in London's notorious Newgate prison).
"In effect," Stubbs writes, Donne "accused Papist elders such as his own uncle, Jasper Heywood, the leader of the Jesuit mission in the early 1580s, of holding impressionable consciences to ransom. He accepted neither the holiness of the Papist cause nor the sanctity of its supposed recent martyrs." In Pseudo-martyr, Donne argued, Catholics had options other than martyrdom, including swearing not to murder the king, a real possibility since 1570, when Elizabeth was excommunicated.
