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350 GeorgeWither 1588–1667 The oscillating pattern of Wither’s career established itself early on. The eldest of ten children in a prosperous Hampshire family, Wither entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1604, only to depart a year later due to financial difficulties at home. He seems to have moved to London shortly thereafter, probably first entering one of the Inns of Chancery and then in 1615 the Middle Temple. His literary career started conventionally enough in 1612 with elegies on the death of Prince Henry, but quickly veered into dangerous waters with the 1613 publication of Abuses stript and whipt, which ran through eight editions by 1617 but also landed Wither in prison for five months, probably on a libel complaint brought by the Earl of Northampton. He seems to have won his freedom by the unusual hair-of-the-dog tactic of writing another satire—and sending it to the King (published in 1615 as A satire: dedicated to his most excellent Majesty). It was also while in the Marshalsea that Wither began his much-praised pastoral eclogues—and his association with the literary circle of Jacobean Spenserians that included Donne’s friend, Christopher Brooke. These early poems were celebrated enough by 1620 to provoke a surreptitious edition, pretentiously called The works of Master George Wither of Lincoln’s Inn, gentleman; two years later, Wither published an authorized edition under the more modest title of Juvenilia. Soon after his release from prison, Wither started work on a new metrical translation of the Psalms to replace the lamentable Sternhold-Hopkins version that for a half-century had provided the only text for congregational singing. In 1619 he published a theoretical prolegomena (A preparation to the Psalter), followed by Exercises upon the first Psalm (1620) and Songs of the Old Testament (1621). In 1621, however, he also published Wither’s motto, a satire similar to Abuses and meeting a similar fate: after being questioned by the House of Lords, Wither was imprisoned, this time for nearly a year. Since the Lords did not normally deal with censorship cases, and since the Motto includes nothing flagrantly 351 George Wither offensive, all one can say with any certainty is that the work was felt to be gravely objectionable for reasons having to do with something other than its surface meaning.1 Whatever the grounds of his imprisonment, Wither regained his freedom in March of 1622. Then followed an astonishing reversal of fortune, for in 1623 King James granted Wither a fifty-one year royal patent for his forthcoming Hymns and songs of the Church and the right to have it bound with every future copy of the endlessly-reprinted SternholdHopkins Psalter: an unprecedented privilege that could have given Wither a comfortable income for life, but instead, alas, led to a decade of futile conflict with the Stationers’ Company, which refused to honor James’ patent or to print anything Wither wrote. Wither’s output over the next ten years is therefore rather slim: his 1625 account of the conflict, The scholar’s purgatory, which includes a very early defense of intellectual copyright, and the 1628 Britain’s remembrancer, which Wither apparently had to print by hand. Having made peace with the Stationers ca. 1634, he went on to publish A collection of emblems, ancient and modern—its several books dedicated to Charles, Henrietta Maria, and other members of the royal family and nobility—and a translation of the late fourthcentury Greek theologian Nemesius, this dedicated to Selden. Neither work prepares one for Wither’s decision, implicit in the dedicatory epistle prefacing his 1641 Hallelujah, to cast his lot with Parliament when the war broke out in 1642. Wither’s subsequent career continued its uneven path. It also betrays a process of increasing radicalization: in the mid-1640s he forged ties with Lilburne; after the regicide , he played a significant role in the making of the republican settlement; later he wrote pangyrics on Cromwell. The DNB describes his post-1642 œuvre as “garrulous and tedious,” frequently sinking to “imbecile doggrel”; David Norbrook’s more generous estimate locates the value of these later works in the way they “break down the barriers between prophecy, autobiography, satire, journalism, political philosophy, and lyricism, in response to a political crisis” (220). Wither’s radicalism survived the Restoration, and the last seven years of his life were spent in poverty and, often, prison. He was 78 when he died, and the author of over a hundred books. [\ Hymns and songs...

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