ABSTRACT
Date and Context. 1590s? 1609–? The heroic epistle was most thoroughly exploited in English by Drayton, Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597, enl. 1598; Gr.), but Churchyard’s Shore’s Wife in the 1563 Mirrour for Magistrates, Daniel’s ‘Complaint of Rosamond’, published with Delia in 1592, Lodge’s ‘Tragicall Complaynt of Elstred’, with Phillis, 1593, Drayton’s Peirs Gaveston 1594, and Shakespeare’s ‘Lover’s Complaint’, printed with his Sonnets in 1609, are very close in genre, and allow of a wider period for Sappho’s composition. However, half a dozen or so possible echoes of Shakespeare’s Sonnets suggest that the author was an absorbent reader of the 1609 publication, with its related focus on same-sex love. D. in 1609 was writing elegies on Lady Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode, Divine Meditations, and verse-epistles to Lady Bedford: the content of Sappho makes it unlikely, therefore, to be his, as does its lack of poetic sophistication and sharp-minded wit. The frequent end-stopping makes Sappho unlike D.’s work, even pedestrian, as does the absence of any wit or unexpected reversal. The unparticularity of such phrases as ‘mighty, amazing beauty’ is also uncharacteristic. All references to same-sex lovemaking in D.’s undoubted poems, e.g., Fatal 38–41, are hostile: Sappho however, is made to concede only that the implicit narcissism of her passion (ll. 51–6) is a ‘loving madness’—heterosexual love was similarly disparaged. The references to ‘gods’ in ll. 15–18 as real living entities are also unlike D.’s more detached references (except for Perfume 65, and even that is in the past tense), though it may be argued that the poet is speaking as a classical persona. Sappho is not found in W or the Group I MSS supposed by Gardner ESS p. xxxii to contain the poems which were circulated as a distinct book of elegies. However, its inclusion in three MS traditions of D. collections shows widespread early belief in his authorship, and D. might have thought it so utterly paradoxical that one woman could gain sexual pleasure from another that this constituted sufficient ‘wit’ for his usual ironic love-elegy. He and his contemporaries may have judged the self-parody self-evident, as in the hyperbole of, e.g., Bracelet, Perfume, Pupil, Bed, Autumnal. R. Ellrodt, Etudes anglaises 20 (1967) 285–6, produces examples of Donnean usages which could as well argue imitation by an emulator as D.’s authorship—if they were specific to D., and some, such as emphatic use and repetition of ‘all’, occur in, e.g., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and employ a standard rhetorical technique.
