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Time and Place in Donne's Sermons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William Gifford*
Affiliation:
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N. Y

Extract

Certain of Donne's sermons can be fully appreciated only if we know a great deal more about their background than we usually do. The editors of his sermons have supplied brief descriptions, in many cases, of the circumstances in which the sermons were given but, except for certain obvious examples such as the Sermon of Valediction, did not have time to show how closely Donne's sermons, even those which are less celebrated, could be involved in the time and place in which they were delivered.The purpose of this paper is to call for a more serious in-depth approach to the backgrounds of many sermons by showing that such an approach can be of real value. Donne was a world made cunningly of elements in the sermons as well as the poems, and a large part of that world was his interest in the people and events around him. Often he succeeded in bringing those people and events into his art of preaching, and until his manner of doing so is examined his art goes unrecognized and one side of his complex mind will be unappreciated.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , October 1967 , pp. 388 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

Note 1 in page 388 The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George Potter and Evelyn Simpson (Berkeley, Calif., 1953–62). Parenthetical references in the text to volume and page numbers are to this edition. Valuable biographical and historical background to specific sermons appears in such articles as Stanley Johnson, “John Donne and the Virginia Company,” ELFI, xiv (1947), 127–138.

Note 2 in page 388 Herbert Grierson, ed., The Poems of John Donne (Oxford, [1912]), i, 391.

Note 3 in page 388 “Donne's Delivery,” Tennessee Studies in Lit., ix (1964), 40–41. William Mueller agrees that “most of his written sermons would take considerably more” than an hour to deliver (John Donne: Preacher, Princeton, N. J., 1962, p. 209).

Note 4 in page 388 Grierson, i, 393, 386.

Note 5 in page 389 The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), ii, 152, 299; John King, A Sermon At Paules Crosse (London, 1620), p. 10.

Note 6 in page 389 Certaine Sermons (London, 1637), Part ii, p. 117.

Note 7 in page 389 Diary of Walter Yonge, Camden Society (London, 1848), pp. 85–86.

Note 8 in page 389 Millar MacLure, The Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534–1642 (Toronto, [1958]), pp. 8, 13. Donne's sermons there become correspondingly shorter: 24 March 1617, 1457 ll.; 15 Sept. 1622, 1122 ll.; 5 Nov. 1622 (intended for Paul's Cross), 988 ll.; 6 May 1627, 679 ll.; 22 Nov. 1629, 784 ll.

Note 9 in page 389 Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (London, 1651), p. 174. The first of the six sermons printed in Donne's lifetime was entered on the Stationers' Register 46 days after it was given, but the others in less than half that time.

Note 10 in page 389 Donne, Sermons, i, 46. John Sparrow, following Gosse, read “reviewed” as “revised.” Donne, he thought, meant he had thoroughly revised those sermons of which he had kept only notes and “exscribed” fair copies of those he had previously written out (“John Donne and Contemporary Preachers,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, xvi [1931], 166); but one process seems intended.

Note 11 in page 389 Thomas Gataker, A Discours Apologetical (London, 1654), p. 37; Robert Harris, Two Sermons (London, 1628), sig. A4.

Note 12 in page 389 Donne, Letters, p. 305.

Note 13 in page 389 Sermons, v, Nos. 9 and 10 were one sermon, divided and enlarged like that at the Hague; iii, No. 1, was probably divided by Donne or his son (in, 391–392). Moreover, it seems expanded because it shares with the Hague sermon a habit of departing from the text to discuss moral issues in pungent and simple language (cf. ii, 288–298, iii, 53–54), and because its parts run to 893 ll., the longest of Donne's court sermons under James, where his average was 613 ll. (including ii, No. 9). Under Charles it was 738 ll. (including x, Nos. 6, 7), an odd jump occurring as soon as Charles came to the throne.

Note 14 in page 390 Sermons, ii, 237, 376. For another example, he omits to say that disputes over the nature of man's will rose, among Catholics, “even to the imputation of the crime of heresie upon one another”; and, before the Synod of Dort, “even to the drawing of swords” (ii, 237, 375). He simply withdraws these notes of controversy and bitterness.

Note 15 in page 391 Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI. Sermons (London, 1629), “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” sig. A2.

Note 16 in page 391 Dedication to “Abrahams Decease,” Certaine Sermons, Part il, p. 254.

Note 17 in page 391 The editors of Preston's Sermons Preached Before his Maiestie; and vpon other speciall occasions (London, 1630) tell us that certain sermons taken “from his mouth” at Lincoln's Inn had already been published (sigs. A3-A3V). Such sermons appear, for one place, in Preston's The New Covenant (London, 1629), whose editors in turn say “there was very little or no mistake in taking them from his mouth” (sig. A3). Gataker, Certaine Sermons, Part i, p. 173.

Note 18 in page 391 Sir Edwin Sandys and Sir Edward Coke, Commons Debates, 1621, ed. Wallace Notestein, et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1935), ii, 193,231.

Note 19 in page 391 Chamberlain, ii, 354; Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of James The First (London, 1849), ii, 241.

Note 20 in page 392 John Nichols, The Progresses … of King James The First (London, 1828), IV, 648, quoting Camden.

Note 21 in page 392 Sir Simonds D'Ewes, The Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London, 1845), i, 168–169.

Note 22 in page 392 Birch, II, 241; The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, vii (London, 1874), 228–229.

Note 23 in page 392 Journals of the House of Lords, iii, 73; 27 March 1621.

Note 24 in page 392 Calendar of Slate Papers, Venice, xvii, 19–21; Sir John Finett, Finetti Philoxenis (London, 1656), p. 77.

Note 25 in page 392 Commons Debates, 1621, ii, 6.

Note 26 in page 392 Grierson, i, 374, 387.

Note 27 in page 393 Bribery was almost an inevitable subject for assize sermons, but since William Yonger's assize sermon, The Vnrighteovs Ivdge (London, 1621), was given on 16 April, and since it was written in a vigorous tone of satire, it seems related even more directly to Bacon: it attacks judges who course “vp and downe in their Circuits and Iurisdictions abirding after money” and who grow rich “either by the confluence of their offices, or bribery of their places” (pp. 7, 16).

Note 28 in page 393 John Knox, “Godly Letter to the faithful in London, Newcastle, and Berwick,” 1554, quoted in John Bradford, Writings, Parker Society (Cambridge, Eng., 1848), p. 111.

Note 29 in page 394 Grierson, i, 394; Isaac Walton, The Lives, World's Classics (London, [1927]), p. 49.

Note 30 in page 394 Chamberlain, ii, 354; Birch, ii, 242. “The wicked judge will finally swallow down his bane” (Yonger, p. 16). Thomas Adams' satire more closely resembles Donne's: “Gentlemen in these cold Countries haue very good stomackes, they can deuoure (and digest too) three or foure plumpe Personages; in Italy, Spaine, and those hot Countries, … a Temporall man cannot swallow a morsell or bit of a spirituall preferment, but it is reluctant in his stomacke, vp it comes againe” —The White Devil, A Sermon Preached at Pavls Crosse (London, 1613), p. 14.

Note 31 in page 394 If, as the editors suggest, Sermons, iii, Nos. 12–15, were given in Trinity Term, 1621, further allusions to Bacon can be found there on pp. 261, 285–286. At least these sermons were not given in Trinity Term, 1620; No. 12 would be impossibly repetitious one week after iii, No. 5; another impossible repetition, concerning Mary Magdalen, appears in iii, pp. 138, 296, surely not said in the same place three weeks apart.

Note 32 in page 394 Chamberlain, ii, 360.

Note 33 in page 394 For some reason Edmund Gosse says that Donne conducted King's funeral (The Life and Letters of John Donne, New York, 1899, ii, 139), but Henry King, the Bishop's son, tells us that the “rites of Buriall” were given by Donne's friend Thomas Morton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (A Sermon Preached at Pavls Crosse, London, 1621, p. 72).

Note 34 in page 394 Hall, Works (Oxford, 1863), v; Sandys, The Sermons, Parker Society (Cambridge, Eng., 1841); Drant, Two Sermons (London, [1570?]), sig. B2; Pepys, The Diary, ii (London, 1899), 201; Playfere, The Whole Sermons (London, 1623), p. 117.

Note 35 in page 395 Henry Machyn, Diary, Camden Society (London, 1848), p. 33; entry for 3 April 1553. Machyn was a tailor and noticed clothes.

Note 36 in page 395 Pepys, ii, 201. See also John Stow, The Svrvay of London (London, 1618), p. 322; Playfere, p. 24.

Note 37 in page 395 Marbury, sig. A3V; Machyn, p. 131; Drant, A fruitfull and necessary Sermon (London, [1572]), sig. A4. He assumes that members of the Inns of Court, among other groups, are present (sig. F4V).

Note 38 in page 395 [Remembrancia] Analytical Index (London, 1878), p. 368.

Note 39 in page 395 Remembrancia, pp. 52–53 (for 1582 and before), p. 56 (for 1618); Machyn, p. 305.

Note 40 in page 395 Drant, A jruitjull and necessary Sermon, and Two Sermons, sig. G8V; Playfere, pp. 114–115; Downame, Abrahams Tryall (London, 1607), p. 65; Harris, True Religion in the Old Way oj Piety and Charity (London, 1645), sigs. A3-A3V.

Note 41 in page 395 Hall, v, 146; Harris, True Religion, p. 35.

Note 42 in page 395 A Sermon of Meeknesse (London, 1623), p. 55. The entire tradition, including the list of gifts, outlasted St. Mary Spital. See Joseph Butler's sermon on charity given on Easter Monday, 1740, to the lord mayor, aldermen, and governors of the London hospitals—Whole Works (London, 1852), Part,ii, pp. 194–209.

Note 43 in page 395 The subject was often treated at Paul's Cross. See, for example, Diary oj John Manningham, Camden Society (Westminster, 1868), pp. 57–58, 69–70, 85.

Note 44 in page 395 So Marbury defended his choice of another subject: “I presumed that they had entertained a perswasion that I affected soundnesse in deliuering Gods word” (sig. A3v). Stow seems to have been wrong in saying that the Spital sermons were, like the preceding Passion Sermon at Paul's Cross, “by appointment of the Prelates” (Svrvay, pp. 32–322). The Remembrancia contains, besides the dispute of 1616/17, several letters in which the lord mayor extended these invitations (pp. 367–369).

Note 45 in page 396 A Sermon Preached at St. Maries Spittle (London, 1634), p. 7. Chamberlain did not know when better Spital sermons had been given; perhaps the wet weather of the day on which Donne preached had kept him home (Chamberlain,ii, 433, 489; Finett, pp. 102–103).

Note 46 in page 396 The Victoria History of London, i (London, 1909), 326; for the whole matter see Christopher Hill, “The Tithes of London,” Economic Problems of the Church (Oxford, 1956), pp. 275–288.

Note 47 in page 396 Stow, pp. 321–322.

Note 48 in page 396 Hall, v, 123.

Note 49 in page 397 Joan Webber, Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donne (Madison, Wis., 1963), p. 167.

Note 50 in page 398 MacLure, p. 122.