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157 Chapter Five Parody and Piety This final chapter begins with an observation: while the central liturgical text of the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer (first issued under Edward VI in 1549), prescribed the reading of the whole Psalter once per month, it did not make use of, or even refer to, the Peni­tential Psalms as a group. In the Reformed Tudor church, that is, the seven psalms were typically encountered only individually, as part of a sequential recitation of the 150 psalms at Matins and Evensong—a recitation that followed the nonchronological, or even antiteleological, order of the Book of Psalms.1 With this important liturgical detail in mind, literary historians might expect to find that interest (both clerical and lay) in the seven psalms declined in England over the course of the second half of the sixteenth century. But contemporary textual evidence suggests instead that the Penitential Psalms continued not only to provide inspiration for English writers but also to earn significant revenue for English printers and booksellers for many years. Indeed, if the shift away from rehearsing the Penitential Psalms as a group within a setting endorsed by the official church in England had 158 MISE RE RE M EI any direct effects on the habits of the producers—or the appetites of the consumers—of English religious texts, those effects seem to have been fairly subtle, and in some cases even at odds with one another. On the one hand, for instance, extant iterations of the seven psalms indicate that the customary framing of the series as a unified, coherent, penitential sequence, and the traditional association of that sequence with the myth of David and Bathsheba, both began to face challenges. Yet on the other hand, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets and musicians appear to have turned with renewed fervor to the age-old set, fashioning works based on the Penitential Psalms almost entirely within the long-standing interpretive tradition that I have called penitential hermeneutics. What I offer in this chapter, then, is a series of reflections on the sustained popularity of the Penitential Psalms in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.My concern is especially with the seven psalms as lyric poetry and song, and my aim is twofold: first, to uncover innovative, or modified, approaches to the established psalm sequence in the immediate wake of the Reformation; and second, to reveal an interesting reclamation of traditional exegetical and liturgical practices. In the first two sections of the chapter, I consider the metrical psalm translations of George Gascoigne and Sir John Harington. In these works, I argue, it becomes clear that by the end of the sixteenth century English poets had begun to experiment with the Penitential Psalms as vehicles for the expression not just of piety, or even of polemic , but also of personal forms of politics. In the third section of the chapter, I turn to a version of the Penitential Psalms designed to be sung by English Catholics: Richard Verstegan’s Odes. In imitation of the seaven penitential psalmes (1601). In several deliberate ways, I posit, this sequence once again calls upon the fundamental principles of penitential hermeneutics, enacting a reappropriation of the seven Penitential Psalms for fairly conventional religious purposes. Move Over, David, or, George Gascoigne’s De Profundis The liturgical abandonment of the Penitential Psalms by the evangelical Tudor church around the middle of the sixteenth century must Parody and Piety 159 be responsible, at least in part, for an unusual degree of lyric experi­ mentation with the series as a whole, as well as with its individual components , in the second half of the sixteenth century.2 Indeed, lyric renditions of the Penitential Psalms from the period are found not only in published works but also in unpublished diaries, verse anthologies, and commonplace books. Most of these retain all seven of the psalms in their original sequence. However, some explore, in great depth, the details of a lone psalm as it unfolds. Such is the case in A meditation of a penitent sinner, appended to a 1560 English translation by Anne Vaughan Lock of the Sermons of Iohn Caluin vpon the songe that Ezechias made after he had bene sicke.3 Here, a poet, purportedly a “frend”of Lock’s, provides a total of twenty-six sonnets based on the Miserere (the first five sonnets function as a preface, while the remaining twenty-one translate and amplify the psalm itself ).4...

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