Polemic and paradox in Robert Southwell's lyric poems

   I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set
   a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a
   daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be
   those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more
   than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more
   than me is not worthy of me; and who does not take his cross and
   follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it,
   and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt. 10:34-39)

The volatility and the potential for political change of the situation in England contributed to the uncertainties of Catholic existence. England's national identity was in the process of being shaped in the contest between Protestants and Catholics, and even within the Protestant and Catholic communities. The shifts in the religious position of the state made the question of the definition of treason a live and explosive one. The theological closeness-they were after all reliant on the same texts and tradition, no matter how differently they interpreted these--of all the sides involved meant that a language at once sinuous and compressed was required to access all the facets of the situation at the same time.

That the pressures of the historical situation made paradoxical the experience of English Catholics is evident. The multiple, punning, sophisticated linguistic techniques of a Baroque style were able to accommodate more easily the pressures of this paradoxical situation. Such a style was able to articulate the twists by which Catholics could become foreigners in their own land, English history could appear to be alienated from itself, God could become man, friend be foe, bread become Christ, suffering glory. Southwell's combination of these paradoxes, his use of habits of typological connection, and his amalgamation of these with a vernacular, indigenous style present an art, and a poet, formally, politically, theologically conscious, deliberate, and able. (66)

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Notes

(1.) See appendix I in Robert Southwell, An Humble Supplication to her Maiestie in Answere to the Late Proclamation, ed. R. C. Bald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 59.

(2.) Ibid., 60.

(3.) Ibid., 62.

(4.) Ibid., 63.

(5.) Ibid., 64.

(6.) Ibid.

(7.) Ibid., 65.

(8.) Ibid., 40.

(9.) Ibid., 4.

(10.) Ibid., 31.

(11.) Ibid., 33.

(12.) "Epistle unto His Father," in Robert Southwell, S.J., Two Letters and Short Rules of a Good Life, ed. Nancy Pollard-Brown (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973), 6-7.

(13.) Robert Southwell, An Epistle of Comfort to the Reverend Priests and to the Honourable, Worshipful, and other of the Lay Sort, Restrained in Durance for the Catholic Faith, ed. Margaret Waugh (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1966), 29.

(14.) F.W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell (New York: Twayne, 1996), 106.

(15.) Ibid., 134.

(16.) John J. Larocca, S.J., "Popery and Pounds: The Effect of the Jesuit Mission on Penal Legislation," in The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits; Essays in Celebration of the First Centenary of Campion Hall, Oxford (1896-1996), ed. Thomas McCoog, S.J. (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1996), 263.