The Self in Early Modern Literature: For the Common Good

THREE

THREE “Ego videbo” ❖ Donne and the Vocational Self In a 1620 Lincoln’s Inn sermon Donne boldly impersonated Job’s voice in affirming the identity of the self at the resurrection. He, too, would stand face to face, person to person, before the resurrected Christ at the resurrection: “Ego, I, I the same body, and the same soul, shall be recompact again, and be identically, numerically , individually the same man. The same integrity of body, and soul, and the same integrity in the Organs of my body, and in the faculties of my soul too; I shall be all there, my body, and my soul, and all my body, and all my soul . . . Ego, I, the same person; Ego videbo, I shall see.”1 This confident voice spoke before familiar Lincoln’s Inn faces, including many members well acquainted with Donne’s personal history. First admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1592, he was appointed Master of the Revels in 1593. After ordination in 1615 and appointment as Divinity Reader at Lincoln’s Inn in 1616, he frequently preached there: 21 sermons written for that familiar audience still remain.2 That “same person” confidently 144 standing before them physically in time expected to see the resurrected Christ in eternity. The inference to be drawn by the members of this familiar Lincoln’s Inn audience is that they — as the “same persons” — could together physically join Donne and Job. Donne speaks to them here as a confident pulpit orator ventriloquizing the words of a biblical exemplar while filling his own vocational place. His text assumes that his body is seen in the pulpit and that his voice is heard by others, body and voice sealing Job’s promise of continuing physical identity after death. The pulpit performance dutifully incorporates Donne’s notion of the centered, inclusive, vocational “person” in whom others participate : “The person must actuate it self, dilate, extend and propagate it self according to the dimensions of the place, by filling it in the execution of the duties of it” (Sermons 8:178). It is a duty to incorporate an exemplar: “Be sombody, be like sombody, propose some good example in thy calling and profession to imitate” (8:180). Paul was his favorite exemplar, but there were others, like Job, incorporated in this vocational person confidently inviting the participation of others. Donne standing confidently before his Lincoln’s Inn audience does not surprise us when we recall his reputation as an orator in the “theater of preaching.”3 But the parallels between the pulpit and the stage as public spaces, and the preacher and the actor in relation to participating audiences4 provide us with more than just accidental interest if we pursue the informative parallels between Donne and Shakespeare’s fictive Hal/Henry, examined in my previous chapter. Donne takes on the exemplary model of Job; the player embodies the fictionalized, but historical royal person ; and, in both cases, members of the audience participate communally in these vocational persons. Following his coronation, the fictive Hal/Henry, dressed in royal robes and wearing his father’s crown, appears in public to pass judgment against Falstaff. In the new king we find a striking, if unexpected, parallel to John Donne, ordained four years before (1616) and wearing his priestly robe while preaching to his parishioners at Lincoln’s Inn (1620). The vocational parallel between Hal/Henry and John Donne is even “Ego videbo”: Donne and the Vocational Self 145 more striking and informative since the two men answer the call to their vocations after tainted beginnings, one as the ironic “heir apparent” to a usurper king, the other as an unsettled heir to maligned and illegal religious practices. At first, neither can answer the Protestant call to vocation, to the ready-made cultural role that stabilizes the self. But the same vocational principle that forms both the fictive and the real vocational “persons” contributes to the confident performance at Lincoln’s Inn. Readers of Donne’s works written before his ordination have not found this confident, unified sense of self integrated within a community of persons. Quite the contrary. Donne criticism has wrestled long and hard with unsettling elements in Donne’s biography and temperament that foster contradiction and indeterminacy in a variety of literary forms. This chapter will rest on Donne’s notion of the centered, vocational person, but...