George Herbert's The Country Parson and Stefano Guazzo's The Civile Conversation

I pray you tell mee what you thinke to bee the end and marke that wise and worthie men shoote at?

– Stefano Guazzo, The Civile Conversation¹

I have resolved to set down the Form and Character of a true Pastour, that I may have a Mark to aim at.

– George Herbert, The Country Parson²

The purpose of the courtesy book is to provide a model for behavior, a "mark" at which the courtier, prince, or (as we shall see) even the aspiring pastor, may aim. For George Herbert and Stefano Guazzo, reaching this mark involves more than the mere successful manipulation of appearances, although it does include fashioning appearances. For both of these authors, the appropriate shaping of the outer man has wholesome spiritual effects both upon one's inner self and the inner selves of others. In the following discussion, I attempt to establish a link between George Herbert and the Italian Renaissance courtesy author, Stefano Guazzo, and suggest that Guazzo's Civile Conversation may have served as an inspiration for Herbert's The Country Parson.

That George Herbert was familiar with the forms and strategies of the courtesy book has long been put forward and indeed has almost become a commonplace. As early as 1949, M.M. Mahood wrote that The Country Parson, "has the form and tone and, to a certain extent, the temper of Caroline courtesy-books."³ Marion White Singleton interpreted the poems of The Temple as the words of a courtier exposing the deeply corrupt, unactualizable pattern of courtliness, while trying to "recover . . . whatever ideal potentia it might still possess."⁴ Michael Schoenfeldt's Prayer and Power notes that both "The Church-porch" and the world of The Country Parson are "preoccupied by the rhetorical aspects of proper behavior," and he develops at length his thesis that "The Temple is itself a kind of spiritualized courtesy book."⁵ Ronald Cooley has recently observed that The Country Parson "seeks to address the deficiencies of both the old and the new clergy, using the method of criticism and exhortation through hyperbolic flattery that was a standard device of courtly literature."⁶ Cristina Malcolmson's recent biography of Herbert describes his early aristocratic influences and courtly coterie and identifies the speaker of many of Herbert's poems as "an upper-class man trained at the University and in the rituals of courtesy."⁷ Despite near universal agreement that Herbert knew and used the methods of courtesy literature, no specific courtesy author has been suggested as a real inspiration or influence upon Herbert, in particular, for his pastoral manual, The Country Parson. I believe that there is substantial evidence that points to Herbert's having read and admired Stefano Guazzo's Civile Conversation. Examining this connection may illuminate some motivations for and strategies in The Country Parson.

Herbert would have had easy access to Guazzo's work. Along with Castiglione's The Courtier and Della Casa's Galateo, Guazzo's Civile Conversation was one of the three great books of courtesy, translated from the Italian, that enjoyed immense popularity in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Morris Tilley describes Civile Conversation as "next to Castiglione's Courtier . . . probably the best known Italian book in England."⁸ By 1586 any Englishman wishing to make Guazzo's acquaintance could choose from three Latin translations, two French, the original Italian, a revised Italian, George Pettie's English translation of Books I through III and the Pettie-Young translation of Books I through IV (Lievsay, p. 57).

John Lievsay, in Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance, claims that "Guazzo and his work were thoroughly familiar to Elizabethan and Jacobean Englishmen" and supports it by producing an impressive list of literary references to Civile Conversation (pp. 53, 48-52). Early in the last century Sir Edward Sullivan provided a detailed study of parallels between Shakespeare's plays and the Pettie-Young translation of Civile Conversation. These parallels, Sullivan writes, "are so numerous, and are found so continuously through nearly the whole of Shakespeare's plays, that they cannot be accounted for on any rational...