ABSTRACT
In what has been commonly regarded as one of the earliest examples of ‘modern’ autobiographical writing in English – in the sense of a sustained life-narrative consciously designed with a beginning, middle, and end1 – Thomas Whythorne’s manuscript, written about 1576 and discovered in 1955, ‘lay[s] open unto you the most part of all my private affairs and secrets’, and is structured along the ‘ages of man’ divisions. The full title of Whythorne’s combined life story and collection of musical compositions is: ‘A book of songs and sonetts, with longe discourses sett with them, of the chylds lyfe, togyther with A yoong mans lyfe, and entring into the old mans lyfe. devysed and written with A new Orthografye by Thomas Whythorne, gent’. Whythorne not only modifies normal orthography – a quixotic attempt to produce a phonetic spelling, not a Pepysian encryption – but, more interestingly, he abandons the day-of-the-week, date and year chronology of the customary diary or journal. At a stroke he generates instead what appears as a more ‘novelistic’ narrative mode structured upon ‘events’, circumstantial and psychological, extended over large temporal units, and providing opportunities for cross-reference, reflection and didacticism. These temporal units are both familiar and ancient, deriving from the division of a life into ages: seven is the most common – by analogy, as St Augustine has it2, with the seven ages of world history, itself deriving from the seven days of creation – though the number can vary between four and ten: in his autobiography Whythorne, his life still of course in progress, has only three. The most familiar and resonant example of this schema is probably Jacques’s catalogue in As You Like It, sources for which, as for Whythorne’s device too, may be found in Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth (1534) or Marcellus Palengenius’s Zodiacus Vitae, translated by Barnaby Googe in 1565 and a well-known school text.3 The addition in Jacques’s speech of the theatrum mundi metaphor – ‘All the world’s a stage’ – reinforces Jacques’s own pessimism with an overarching determinism – men and women are ‘merely players’ and the successive parts they play are already assigned and written for them – which is consonant both with the dominant theological ethos of Calvinism of the time and Jacques’s particular brand of cynicism. Whythorne’s ages of a life can give rise to lengthy moral excursions, doggerel verses and accumulated biblical quotations on, for example, the subject of bringing up children. Yet the purpose of his approach is not so much to provide
opportunity for instruction but the solution to a technical problem, a means of constructing an autobiography that will liberate both author and reader from the metrics of the mere calendar entry. It is also made clear in Whythorne’s address to the reader on the first page of his manuscript that his subject, in this account of his ‘whole life to this day’, is time and its effects on the human personality: ‘When ye have considered of this hereafter written, ye shall perceive that as I have changed from time to time, by Time, so altered mine affections and delights’. Thus ‘time’ for Whythorne is the agency of growth, change and alteration, but its relation to inscription, the act of writing, is one that paradoxically allows for the capture of that change, making it available for recording and for retrospective consideration and perception. Whythorne’s other ingenious structural device or aide-memoir is to refer to the manuscript of his chronologically sequenced Songs and Sonnets in the ordering of his life story. The appearances of most of these many verses in his text are prefaced by phrases such as ‘wherefore to ease my heart I wrote as followeth’, or ‘whereupon I made this sonnet following’. His larger narrative moves successively through the age of childhood “from the infancy until fifteen”, the age of ‘adolescency’ (‘the first part of the young man’s age’ from 16 to 25), and the age of juventute from 25 to 39. According to some models, ‘old age’ began at 40, to others senectute began with the sixtieth year: Whythorne himself was about forty eight when he wrote the autobiography.4 His modern editor suggests that the use made of this framework is unique in early autobiographical practice, and is a significant example of Whythorne’s originality in the endeavour to construct a life.5 The life thus constructed is of course precisely that: a discursive artifact. Recent commentary on Whythorne has highlighted particularly the tension between his projected role as would-be courtier, writing and performing amorous ditties for female patrons, and his desire to appear as the moral gentleman – roles which reveal, it is argued, the uncertainty of his social situation as both employed tutor and gentleman musician.6 The emphasis here, however, is less on Whythorne’s sense of economic and social marginality and more on his characteristic tendency, as Anne Ferry describes it, ‘to see himself not as a unique individual but as a particular instance of the general condition of man’.7 To a sensibility like Whythorne’s – and in this he seems entirely representative of his age – the agency which constructs the life may appear to be the individual author but is in fact a combination of a series of social and moral generalities assembled from the Bible, ancient authors, and everyday proverbs, to whose collective injunctions and wisdom he, like everyone else he supposes, seeks to conform. And in shaping his life, the temporal process itself is always predominant, however ingeniously its musician author may appear to be beating time. A characteristic passage from Whythorne makes this point with great clarity. He is contemplating having a second portrait painted of himself now that he is twelve years older than his ‘last counterfeit’, and he notes how he ‘was much changed from that I was at that time, as by the long and fullness of my beard, the
wrinkles on my face, and the hollowness of mine eye’ – thoughts which provoke the following verse and commentary:
Who that will weigh, of ages all, Their change of shapes from time to time, What childish thoughts to younglings fall, As years wax ripe how they do climb, May well in mind this sentence call: As time doth alter every wight, So every age hath his delight.
