"Unto the world's ear": Wyatt's Psalms Beyond the Court

Scholars have come to understand Thomas Wyatt's poetry strictly within the social context of the English court. Yet the fluid relationship between the coterie manuscript practices and wider print readerships that came into contact with Wyatt's paraphrase of the penitential psalms helps to situate his work within a broader interpretive milieu. The Penitential Psalms themselves bear out this context by dramatizing a desire to reach readers and listeners beyond the monarch. Wyatt's poem fashions an interlocutory, adaptable mode of address that displaces David's own voice and opens it to communal reception.