English Mercuries: Soldier Poets in the Age of Shakespeare

Chapter 6. John Harington’s Journey Home

125 6 John Harington’s Journey Home John Harington writes in his epigram “Of the wars in Ireland” that war “maketh all things sweet” (ln. 4).1 He plays on the “dulce bellum inexpertis” theme derived from Erasmus and developed earlier, as we have seen, by Gascoigne, but for Harington the line is less moralistic than ironic. Unlike for Erasmus and Gascoigne, war for Harington is sweet because it brings into focus the sweetness of living at home in a peaceful country, something one can never take for granted again having served in war: At home in silken sparvers, beds of down, We scant can rest, but still toss up and down: Here I can sleep, a saddle to my pillow, A hedge the curtain, canopy a willow. There if a child but cry, oh what a spite! Here we can brook three larums in one night. There homely rooms must be perfum’d with Roses: Here match and powder ne’re offends our noses. There from storm of rain we run like Pullets: Here we stand fast against a shower of bullets. Lo then how greatly their opinions err, That think there is no great delight in war: But yet for this (sweet war) I’ll be thy debtor, I shall for ever love my home the better. (lns. 11–24) Although this poem is in many ways a pampered court intellectual ’s recitation of the expected hardships of any war, it is also a war memoir by a very real soldier. Harington was a connected volunteer , as Donne was, who also followed Essex in hopes of turning his fortune and winning fame through military service. Harington nevertheless saw the worst of Elizabethan combat during his 126 English Mercuries six-month deployment to Ireland in 1599, the last and bloodiest campaign of Elizabeth’s war years. Unlike Donne, Harington was never able to parlay his military service into advancement as either a writer or a civil servant. Coming home would be the greatest hardship and disappointment of Harington’s career as a soldier and one he could not overcome. Like the other chapters in the book thus far, this one is about the way a man of letters represented his own experience in foreign war and used those experiences to negotiate his literary career afterward ; unlike the other chapters, however, this one focuses less on the poet’s representations of war than on his representations of returning from war and reintegrating into English society. The problems that attend this aspect of service in foreign war are well known to post-Vietnam generations, for whom the figure of the veteran unable to wrest normalcy from a complex of guilt, resentment , sadness, and post-traumatic stress has become iconic. We have seen in Churchyard’s forgotten soldiers and in Alarum for London’s Stump that the Elizabethan soldier also came home from war with a sense of being owed a debt society could not repay.2 Through Harington we can observe this problem in greater detail. John Harington is best known to posterity as the legendary inventor of the flush toilet, which supposedly bears his first name to this day. The source of this unhappy association (although I suspect Harington would find it amusing) is Harington’s book Metamorphosis of Ajax, a Rabelaisian scatological work (a “jakes” is a toilet in Elizabethan parlance) and self-proclaimed “new discourse upon a stale subject.”3 Harington’s greatest contribution to the literary Renaissance in England, however, was his translation of one of the most heroic and martial of sixteenth-century works, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Thanks in some part to John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad comes up in most discussions of the great literary accomplishments of the English Renaissance. Given the privileged place of the classical inheritance in Renaissance studies, Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses and Thomas North’s Plutarch usually find their way into such discussions as well. Less often do we place Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse in that company, and yet there are few books as important published in the English 1590s. John Harington's Journey Home 127 It gave to a society not widely fluent in Italian the complete text of one of the most admired works of the sixteenth century, which had hitherto circulated only in excerpted form in madrigals and other...