Nugent, Richard. Cynthia. Ed. Angelina Lynch. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010. 82 pp. ISBN: 978-1846821073. $39.95 hardcover.

Things are bubbling in Dublin. For Renaissance scholars, the year 2011 saw both the UNESCO-funded “Dublin: Renaissance City of Literature” conference, organized by Trinity College Dublin, as well as the first annual “Tudor and Stuart Ireland” conference, organized by University College Dublin.¹ For Spenserians, Andrew Hadfield’s substantial new biography of our Man (Oxford 2012) asks us all to pay more and careful attention to Spenser’s local, Dublin-based politics prior to and following his removal to the Munster Plantation in the late 1580s. Spenser was not just a rural bumpkin in Ireland but also a sophisticated civilian of two capitals. Other books written in the last generation have opened up new horizons for study of late-medieval and early modern Dublin in all disciplines in the humanities.²

The first modern edition of Richard Nugent’s Petrarchan sonnet sequence, Rich: Nvgents Cynthia. Containing Direfull Sonnets, Madrigalls, and passionate intercourses, describing his repudiate affections expressed in Loues owne Language (London: T[homas].P[urfoot]. for Henrie Tomes, 1604), published in Dublin by Four Courts Press, is part of this wave of interest in the arts and letters of that historic city and, more generally, early modern Ireland. Unfortunately, despite its timeliness and ample and well-thought-out “Introduction,” the volume lacks editorial care and quality.

Edited by Angelina Lynch while on a postdoctoral fellowship at University College Dublin (8) and with a substantial “Introduction” (pp. 9-45, approximately half the book) by senior Spenser and Joyce scholar Anne Fogarty (UCD), the book is the third published in a series, The Literature of Early Modern Ireland, under the general editorship of Andrew Carpenter (UCD). Preceding it were an edition of Faithful Teate’s collection of Puritan devotional poems, Ter Tria (1658; 2007) and another of the political play-a-clef by Henry Burkhead, Cola’s Furie (1646; 2009), both edited also by Angelina Lynch. After publication of Cynthia, the series moves on to works from the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The series therefore sadly bypasses Richard Stanihurst’s Aeneis (1582), a fascinating and innovative poem by another early modern Dubliner. This scholarly plum, a huge one, is ready to be picked by some foolish/ambitious young scholar or team of scholars with expertise in Latin, Irish, English, Spanish and Dutch.³Aeneis is an exciting read and important both to the reception of Virgil in English and to the development of and demise of English quantitative verse, of which Spenser was a key practitioner. Moreover, Aeneis is fraught with potential religio-political readings relative to Ireland, England, and Continental Europe that would complement those teasingly drawn out in this edition of Cynthia. Stanihurst and, apparently, Richard Nugent, author of Cynthia, spent extensive time on the Continent writing, and were part of literary “coteries” in the Dublin Pale that had porous and highly international boundaries: a situation that Spenser would have appreciated during his own years there.⁴

The Literature of Early Modern Ireland series also, quite clearly, focuses on early modern Irish literature in English in its aim to provide “authoritative editions of key texts” (according to Carpenter’s preface [p. 7]). Authoritative editions of early modern Irish texts in Irish, often with English translations and/or scholarly apparati, have been and continue to be published, and so editions such as Cynthia complement them and encourage us to understand English literature in the context of Irish cultural developments, and vice versa. This is especially true given recent work by scholars such as Mícháel Mac Craith on Petrarchan influences in Irish poetry of the period, in some cases mediated through English poetry introduced into Ireland.⁵ A new/old identification offered here of who Richard Nugent, the author of Cynthia, actually was, further highlights these connections: according to Fogarty, he was most likely the son of the English- and Irish-language poet and scholar William Nugent (1550-1625), an Oxford student (1571-3), rebel, son of the Baron Delvin of County Meath and brother-in-law of the earl of Kildare.⁶ The aristocratic tastes of both countries, aided by the English university experience, forged connections between the cultures and languages of both islands, as they always have.

Fogarty’s lengthy yet lively “Introduction” is in five main parts: “Authorship”; “The Old English and Problems of Allegiance”; “The Early Modern Sonnet Sequence”; “‘Cynthia’: The Poetics of Intertextuality”; and “Reading ‘Cynthia’ Politically.”

The first part, “Authorship,” makes a strong case that the author of Cynthia was not Richard Nugent (1564/5-1615?), son of the chief solicitor of Ireland and second baron of the Exchequer, Nicholas Nugent (d. 1582), as recently argued by scholars (most prominently by Colm Lennon in ODNB). Rather, Fogarty argues that the author was a different Richard Nugent (1574?-1604?), the son of William Nugent (see above), who was the nephew of Nicholas Nugent.⁷ (A third Richard Nugent, fifteenth Baron Delvin and nephew of William Nugent, is also discounted as the author of Cynthia; there were many Richard Nugents on the scene.) Fogarty’s identification is not entirely new, but it is freshly presented and bolstered; for example, the death of her Richard Nugent, ca. 1604, appears to be alluded to in the final poem in the sequence, also published in 1604. As a consequence, “The symbolic death faced by the repining Petrarchan lover is starkly displaced by actual mortality” (Fogarty 13). The entire sequence therefore takes on a memorial air and could even have been published at the instigation of the poet’s father, William, or by literary-minded friends such as Thomas Shelton (18).

Of particular interest to literature scholars, Fogarty’s Richard was closely acquainted with Dubliner Thomas Shelton (fl. 1598-1629), a dangerous political and military operator and the first translator into English of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Among the back matter, or “coda,” to Cynthia (Fogarty 15) is a verse epistolary exchange, or tenzone (called here “tensone”), between the author and various friends and relatives, including a poem by “Maister Thomas Shelton” praising one of the book’s madrigals. As Fogarty writes in part IV of her “Introduction” (“‘Cynthia’: The Poetics of Intertextuality”), the existence of the tensone is unique among “contemporary English volumes from the 1590s,” although it was, “above all, a feature of the early modern Italian and French sonnet” (Fogarty 32). The epistolary exchange thereby underscores the “political dimensions” of the sequence “and also reaffirms its Irish particularity,” while “advertis[ing] the breadth of learning of the author and foreground[ing] its kinship with the traditions of European humanism” (Fogarty 32). Nugent’s acquaintance with Shelton also “suggests in particular a link between the Nugents and transnational migrant Catholic communities of Counter-Reformation Europe, and the dissenting politics and urbane multiculturalism that they espoused” (Fogarty 15).⁸

This cultural hybridity as a basis for reading the conflicted loyalties on display in the sequence forms the subject of the second part of the “Introduction” (“The Old English and Problems of Allegiance”). Here Fogarty argues that the difficult and deeply divided political position of the (predominantly Catholic) Old English ethnic group of Ireland, and specifically the Pale, which included Nugent, can be read into the tormented allegiance that the speaker feels towards his idealized “cruel fair” (or “fierce fair” as he calls her, [75]), his beloved Cynthia, in the sequence. Cynthia, in this case, is not only a woman in Ireland (“the treasure that our Ireland hideth” [56]) but a stand-in for Queen Elizabeth of England in her celestial influence and waxing-and-waning powers (as she is in Spenser’s and Sir Walter Ralegh’s poetry, for example). “In the conflicted relations with state authority of the Nugent family, fealty was always in flux and subject to the demands of realpolitik. Such instability . . . may be seen to inform the emotional dynamics of Cynthia, as it explores the volatile relationship between the poet and his beloved and its ever-changing balance of power” (Fogarty 21). Fogarty argues that “The studied Petrarchan gamesmanship of unrealized desire has become inextricably bound up with an equally visceral and tragic scenario: that of political exile and dispossession” (41). Nugent’s voice is one of “hybridity, attachment and dislocation,” which nonetheless “attempts to achieve a reconciliation on a symbolic plane of political differences which in reality were proving increasingly problematic and divisive” (27), as pressures continued on the Catholic native Irish and Old English communities alike. Nugent’s sequence—no matter which Nugent wrote it—was written with memories of persecution of his own relatives fresh in his mind.

Part III of the “Introduction,” “The Early Modern Sonnet Sequence,” does an admirable and brief job discussing the history of the sequence from an English point of view, including attention to formal structures and Petrarchan motifs copied by the author (see also the discussion of the sestina on pp. 37-8). After a dedicatory sonnet (to the deceased Catherine Nugent, the “Ladie of Trymlestowne”), the sequence itself is divided into three sections. The first section has nineteen “sonnets” followed by five “madrigals,” a Petrarchan-style “Ballata” (according to Lynch’s notes, influenced by Petrarch’s Canzoniere 55) and a “[s]estina, translated out of Petrarc,” i.e., Canzoniere 22 (64). The second section has ten sonnets followed by a “Canzone” (modeled on Petrarch Canzone 325), then two more madrigals and three more sonnets. These are followed, in the third part, by seven more sonnets that comprise the tensone. A final, eighth sonnet in Italian closes the volume and indicates that the poet has left earthly concerns and advises Cynthia to forget her sorrows.

Part IV of the “Introduction,” “‘Cynthia’: The Poetics of Intertextuality” offers an overview of the very few critical discussions of the sequence to date,⁹ and continues the discussion of how function follows form. The sequence “uses the themes of temporality and mutability customarily highlighted by Renaissance sonnet sequences to give expression to a pervasive sense of devastating historical change and to articulate feelings of dispossession” (Fogarty 32); “The fracturing of poetic decorum fittingly mirrors the disorder of an inadmissable love suit” between the speaker and the beloved but unobtainable Cynthia (34). Fogarty’s critical sensitivity to symbols and themes is on fine display in this section, as in her perception that “the sonnets emphasize a complex set of correlations between different forms of envisioning through the repetition of an aggregate of images linked with seeing, the reflective properties of water and imagining” (35).

Fogarty is alert to connections with other authors. Nugent’s self-described “direfull” sonnets recall the “‘terrible’ or despairing sonnets composed by Gerard Manley Hopkins” while in Dublin (33).¹⁰ Fogarty finds a concrete Spenserian connection when, in the second sonnet of the second part, the speaker enters the “mansion of dispaire . . . [w]here that sad wight sat crosse-leg’d in his chaire” (66; Fogarty, “Introduction” 38; compare FQ I.ix.35). The introduction of an epic allegorical figure into a sonnet sequence with its own narrative trajectory and psychological potency confuses generic boundaries in exciting ways, and use of Spenser's Despair inevitably opens the door to politically inflected readings: how did Old English authors react to Spenser’s legacy of allegorizing Irish affairs in such characters?¹¹

Nugent also makes explicit reference to “Sydneys gentle sheepheard,” Musidorus, in the sixth sonnet of the second part (68-9), and “great Daniell” appears in the ninth sonnet of the first part (55-6). Nugent is a shameless name-dropper. Fogarty suggests that Daniel is valued by Nugent for his “directness and lack of embellishment,” and Sidney’s Musidorus for the sake of comparison to his own sad plight beaten down by misfortune (36). She also refers to possible links with the Cupid of Astrophel and Stella, with the Castle of Jealousy in the Roman de la Rose, with Ovid’s Daphne, and more (Fogarty 36-39). The psychological and political torment found in Ralegh’s Ocean to Scinthia is briefly referred to (44; see also 66) and one longs for further analysis.

The sequence’s “theme of displacement . . . [and] embryonic nationalism” finds parallels not only in Irish bardic verse but also in du Bellay’s Les Regrets (Fogarty 40). One of the better-known poems in Nugent’s sequence, the eleventh sonnet of the second part, conveys these themes poignantly:

Fare-well sweete Isle, within whose pleasant Bowres
I first received life, and liuing ayre;
Fare-well the soile, where grew those heau’nly flowres
Which brauely decke the face of my fierce faire;
Fare-well the place, whence I beheld the towres
With pale aspect, where her I saw repaire;
Fare-well ye floods, encreased by those showres
Wherewith mine eyes did entertaine despaire;
Fare-well cleare lake, which of art made the glasse
To rarest beautie, of mine ill the roote,
When she vouchsafes vpon thy shores to passe,
Blessing thy happie sand with thy faire foote;
Farewell faire Cynthia,¹² whose unkind consent
Hath caus’d mine euerlasting banishment. (75)

Of further note are Catholic elements that make this sonnet crackle with recusant energy: the Marian litany compares the Blessed Virgin to a garden, a flower, a tower and a glass/mirror, for example. Richard Verstegan employs all four symbols (as well as reference to “Cynthia”) in his “Epithets of our Blessed Lady” published in his Odes. In imitation of the Seaven Penitential Psalmes with Sundry other Poemes and ditties tending to deuotion and pietie (1601). Is Nugent really praising Queen Elizabeth or the “true” Virgin Queen she usurped, whom he found amply worshipped in exile on the Continent?¹³

The publication of Rich: Nugents Cynthia in London in 1604 may be linked to Nugent’s death in exile that year, as Fogarty suggests, but it also conveniently postdates the queen’s own demise, at a time of new beginnings when the English recusant community was wondering how tolerant the new monarch, the poet-king James, would be towards Catholicism. In this reading, Nugent’s recusant community hopes to replace the dead queen’s image with an older and newer, more powerful and spiritual one dressed in fashionable pastoral clothes as both consolation for past misery and hope for future happiness (“Catholicized” readings of Shakespeare’s The Winter's Tale spring to mind). The penultimate sonnet of the entire sequence, hence Nugent’s last (presuming he did not write the concluding sonnet in Italian, which itself invokes Cynthia and ends on the word “Paradiso”), stoically begins “Sweete is the life that clad in bare estate” and refers to fellow-devotion to “Flora Queene” of shepherds (81). It advocates pastoral retreat, mournful, loving memory, and a clear conscience: their acts are “harmlesse” (81). The mutinous plotting of the past by Nugent and Shelton, et al., either never was or won’t happen again.

Part V of the “Introduction,” “Reading ‘Cynthia’ Politically,” adeptly continues analysis of the sequence’s internal conflicts, arguing that

On one level, in declaring his tormented but undeviating love, the poet enunciates his loyalty to Cynthia, the English monarch, but also exposes her abuse and neglect of her subjects in Ireland. On another level, he recasts the malleable trope of the love for a sacral and all-defining female power and uses it to outline the lineaments of an Old English identity. His bond with Cynthia bespeaks his attachment to locality, involvement in the networks of power of the Irish Pale, investment in Gaelic culture and rootedness in the landscape of Westmeath. Subtly, the figure of a Diana-like ruler is commuted from an icon of imperial power into a symbol of Irish national belonging. She becomes indeed an archipelagic totem. (44)

While the discovery of the “landscape of Westmeath” is tenuous (the lakes in the sequence are nondescript; intriguing potential puns on the “Pale” do occur, however), Fogarty’s overall analysis of the sequence’s political and psychological drama is compelling.

Unfortunately, Fogarty’s rich “Introduction” is followed by a poor edition of the text. The problems begin with the title page (is the title properly “Cynthia . . .” or, as it appears in the original, “Rich: Nvgents Cynthia . . . ”?) and continue in the very brief editorial statement, “A note on the text” (46). We are told here that two extant copies of Cynthia exist (one in the Huntington and one in the British Library) but not if they are identical (Fogarty [9] tells us that they are, but she is not the textual editor of the volume). Lynch’s editorial practice, “as faithful as possible to the printed original” is sensible in part but arbitrary in others: “original spelling, capitalization and italicization have been retained” but not always first-word capitalization at the beginning of a line; and which “contractions have been expanded,” and why (46)? Could these at least have been listed in an appendix?

Most worryingly, “Some regularization of punctuation has been carried out silently” (46). Why? Is this limited, scholarly edition of 250 copies of an obscure poem really meant to be read by the average Joe on the street who needs help sorting out Tudor punctuation? If so, then the book should perhaps have been beefed up with a facing-page facsimile of the entire poem, as in Stephen Booth’s edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, so that both audiences (scholarly and public) can approach it at once.

I give two examples of why Lynch’s approach towards punctuation was a mistake (I refer here to the original in the Huntington, badly reproduced on EEBO). First, in Lynch’s edition lines 12-13 of the above sonnet, “Fare-well sweet Isle,” read

Blessing thy happie sand with thy faire foote;
Farewell faire Cynthia. (75)

In the original they read,

Blessing thy happie sand, with thy faire foote,
Fare-well faire Cynthia. (Rich: Nvgents Cynthia [1604] sig.
D1r).

We can quibble over replacing the comma with a semi-colon: at the very least, it interrupts the flow of verse, including the smooth alliterative descent of foot-falling f’s. Clearly erroneous is Lynch’s change of “Fare-well” to “Farewell” while retaining the original spelling, “Fare-well,” in lines 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 of the same poem: why not repeat the form for integrity’s sake? Removing the hyphen may also speed up the rhythm in reading.

More frustrating is the silent elision of the mid-sentence comma. To further tangle her risky maneuver, Lynch footnotes the line as follows:

‘ . . . with thy faire foot’: most likely a misprint of ‘with her faire foot.’ (75)

This does help us understand the literal meaning of the lines. But readers are aware that the central conceit of the poem is that Cynthia, metaphorically speaking, is also the landscape in question here; ergo, her foot is “thy” foot; it makes sense for the speaker in his rapture to confuse the two at the grammatical as well as conceptual level; the speaker may intend to confuse the grammar so as to reinforce the conceit. Confusion of syntax and mode of address (the third-person description of Cynthia suddenly shifts to second-person invocation, “thy”) also adds to the disoriented sense of being in a dream-like state. Since the narrative has been chopped up into a sequence of loosely connected sonnets, why not make the sonnets themselves choppy? Doing so reinforces what Fogarty, above, refers to as “The fracturing of poetic decorum” (34), where poetic decorum here is a deliberate fracturing of the subject, further evidence, if needed, of the poet’s own psychological distress.

The mid-sentence comma in the original version and repetition of “thy” reinforces the perception of deliberate confusion by emphasizing the parallel syntax and diction between the two sections of the line: thanks to the caesura, “thy happie sand” is more clearly the mirror image of “thy faire foote.” After all, the foot imprints itself in the sand, so the sand becomes the image of the foot. Last but not least, the mid-sentence comma simultaneously encourages the reader to separate the phrase “with thy fair foote” from the preceding phrase, “Blessing thy happie sand,” and instead enjamb it with the following phrase beginning the next line, “Fare-well faire Cynthia,” especially if the comma after “thy faire foote” is not replaced with a semi-colon (as Lynch does). Thus, Cynthia makes her farewell “with thy [her] fair foote,” which carries her away from the poet as swiftly as he departs her (and his) native sands. It stands to reason that the confusing phrase “thy faire foote” may be a misprint for “her faire foot,” but not most likely.

A second example of questionable editorial practice is found in the silent elision of many commas throughout the sequence, including from the ninth sonnet of the second part. I won’t tediously go into details here, but merely highlight changes to the powerful opening, “Oh whither runst thou thus mine angry pen? / Whither my bitter and respectlesse rimes?” (Lynch [ed.] 70). The original reads, “OH whither runst thou thus, mine angry pen? / Whither, my bitter, and respectlesse rimes?” (Rich: Nvgents Cynthia [1604] sig. C3r). As we can see, the somber, careful pace of the original version is created partly by comma placement, eliminated in the new edition. This is doubly disappointing since the lines appear to echo the opening of the famous lament for the martyred Edmund Campion, “Why do I use my paper inke, and penne, / and call my wits to counsel what to say,” probably by the Jesuit Henry Walpole, wherein commas help create the funereal pace of the opening lines and encourage meditation.¹⁴ The poems could thus be linked in recusant sympathy. Removing the commas from Nugent’s opening lines mutes the echo of Walpole and erases the more pensive tone, instead emphasizing a rush of anger, or a dribbling pen.

Other problems beset the edition: some footnotes feel reductive and others random. As gloss for the fourth sonnet of the first part (53), for example, why make reference to Sidney’s use of the Danae myth in Astrophil and Stella Sonnet VI, but not to other uses by other poets? Is the implication that Sidney’s poem is the key source here? Some notes are incorrect. It is the Battle of Issus, not “Issues” (49), and the vital dates of Thomas Shelton are (as in Fogarty) “fl. 1598-1629” (emphasis added, 15), not “1598-1629” (80).¹⁵

Further problems beset the transcription of a Latin passage quoted by Nugent as the volume’s epigraph, derived from Sophocles via Cicero. Lynch calls it “garbled” (48) but without explanation of how. It would be more helpful to give a clear (i.e., corrected) transcription and translation along with the original, and to better explain the provenance (and supposed garbling) of the text. Is the supposed garbling the fault of Nugent, or his printer, or an edition they used? This is particularly important since analysis of the epigraph features prominently in Fogarty’s “Introduction,” where the question of Nugent’s “memory” is raised in this regard (33-4). To compound the problem, Lynch's transcription of Nugent’s version is erroneous. The original reads “O multa dictu grauia: perpessu aspera. / Quae exantlato corpore atq; animo pertuli/ Feminea vi, femineo interimor vultu” (Rich: Nvgents Cynthia [1604] sig. [A1v]). Lynch’s edition reads “perpe u” (omitting the “ss”) and “Que” (omitting the “a”).

Likewise, the “Sonnet in Italian, made in commendation of the Authour, and Perswading Cynthia to leave her sorrow,” placed as the final poem in the sequence, is given rough treatment (81). Once again, a corrected transcription would be helpful to have (so as to clarify “haueangia dome,” in the original, as “havean già dome,” for example, and “Il or sente tuoi” as “Il or sent’ i tuoi”), and the translation omits “fiere” in the phrase “fiere voglie” (translated here as “desires,” but more accurately “fierce desires”). Finally, do the desires of the poet “tame” the golden tresses and face of the beloved, as in Lynch’s translation, or do her features tame his desires?¹⁶

Four Courts Press is to be commended for publishing such a slim and unusual book in such an attractive and readable format. As a limited edition of an obscure work, it is hard to see how the press could make much money off of it. Despite the volume’s editorial faults, to which one can add the lack of an index, Fogarty’s introduction is worth the price of the volume and is a significant contribution to early modern (including Irish, Dublin Pale, Spenserian, and sonnet sequence) studies. The book’s inclusion in the “Literature of Early Modern Ireland” series bolsters its number of publications and therefore strengthens this landmark development in early modern English-Irish letters.

Thomas Herron is Associate Professor of English at East Carolina University.