essay by Brian Charles Clark
Donne’s poetry reflects his life in liminal times. Medieval worlds were being wrenched into new configurations due to changes in ways of doing science, religion, and politics. Donne was particularly caught between two sets of changes, in the Church—now churches—and in what was becoming the modern legal profession. Satyre II is a snapshot of the birth of the legal profession, and heralds all the lawyer jokes to come, as well as the suspicion of professionalism that has always wafted around “men” who “practise for meere gain,” whose “repute” is “Worse then imbrothel’d strumpets prostitute” (62-64); “And they who write to Lords, rewards to get, / Are they not like signers at doores for meat?” (21-2).
Coscus is the named target of the poem (cf. 40), but is likely a strawman or effigy rather than a real lawyer, as “the name was often contemporaneously used for a court pleader” (Shawcross, 255). “Coscus’s abandonment of poetry for the law” (Corthell, 27; cf. lines 43-4) rouses Donne’s ire with his “words, words, which would teare / The tender labyrinth of a soft maids eare” (57-8). He who twists the ancient and venerable rhetorical arts for personal gain “is worst,” for he “doth chaw / Others wits fruits, and in his ravenous maw / Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue” (25-7). Donne offers an example of such “Bastardy” and “Symonie” (74, 75; cf. Shawcross, 256) in the controversion (cf. 101) of land: “Peecemeale he gets lands, and spends as much time / Wringing each Acre, as men pulling prime” (85-6). Since men played a lot of the card game primero in Donne’s time (Corthell, 28), the stakes are high in terms of time and shady dealing. “But when he sells or changes land, he’impaires / His writings, and (unwatch’d) leaves out, ses heires” (97-8). By omitting the crucial words “the land will not devolve upon the new owners’ progeny but will default to the law” (Shawcross, 256).
The Inns of Court “had always served a dual purpose; as Sir John Fortescue noted in the fifteenth century, they were called Inns of Courts ‘because the students in them, did there, not only study the Laws, but use such other exercises as might make them the more serviceable to the King’s Court” (Corthell, 25, quoting from Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969], 9). Thus, “That onlely suretiship hath brought them there, / And to every suitor lye in every thing, / Like a Kings favorite, yea like a King” (68-70).
If “the main occupation of the Satires is hate” (Carey, 63), it is no wonder the Inns and the products issued therefrom are Donne’s targets here. Giving the poem a historical reading, it is hard to believe that “hate” was Donne’s only motive for writing Satyre II. “Donne was” an impressionable and idealistic “19 when he entered Thaves Inn”, and the Inns themselves were “a kind of liminal place where they [the young students of law] could make the passage from parental control to the larger social circle where they would assume their occupational identities” (Corthell, 26). Thus it is difficult to agree with Carey’s blanket statement that “Donne’s anger is bred from thwarted ambition” (63) alone. There is also, as we would say today, a Christological impulse at work here: “Good workes as good, but out of fashion now, / Like old rich wardrops; but my words none drawes / Within the vast reach of th’huge statute lawes” (110-112).
As a tenant in the house of English I have a tender spot in my heart for the histories of the words I live with. Many of the histories of our words are tenuous, at best, while others form thick tendons of literature. The prolific descendants of the Indo-European root forms of *ten- have given rise to tenacious tendril-like histories that, in Modern English, tend to stem from the Latin verbs tendere, meaning “to stretch”, and tenere, “to hold.” These few opening sentences give the tenor of many of the *ten- words we regularly use: tenant, tender, tenuous, tendon, tenacious, tendril, tend, and tenor. [OED, Am.Her.Dic.]
