Wheels of Fortune

In 1635, a strange volume appeared from the London printshop of Augustine Matthews. The shop had previously produced editions of Thomas Middleton and John Webster, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, John Donne and William Shakespeare, but this book was different. Across more than 200 pages, the poet George Wither wrote lyrics to accompany around 200 complicated, occult, idiosyncratic woodcuts made two decades earlier by the Dutch engraver Crispijn van de Passe, whose illustrations were popular in England. The volume Matthews printed stands as the most exquisite example of the most Renaissance of literary forms: the emblem book.

A Collection of Emblems is largely forgotten today, as is the emblem genre itself, which has no exact corollary in contemporary literature. Wither’s book is not the first of the genre, but along with Francis Quarles’s Emblems, printed the same year, it’s arguably the most stunning. Emblem books, popular through the 16th and 17th centuries, were intended to illustrate a spiritual or moral truth, although readers were expected to tease out meanings for themselves. As the art historian William S. Heckscher has explained, “The picture must not try to illustrate the motto, and vice versa. The two elements rather must complement one another as in a happy marriage.” The image was often described as the body of the emblem, while the poem was its soul.

Consider van de Passe’s picture of an owl, the great familiar of the wise goddess Athena, sitting atop an open book. True to its bibliographic nature, Wither titles the image with a rhyming couplet: “By Studie, and by Watchfulnesse, / The Jemme of Knowledge, we possesse.” Both that invocation, and the 30-line poem that glosses the owl’s portrait, expand on that theme, and act as an invitation to the book that Wither’s hypothetical reader holds: “That open-booke, on which the Owle is perch’d / Affords a Morall, worthy to be search’d.” Wither writes that if knowledge “be your desires, this Emblem view; / And, marke how well the Figures, counsell you.” The owl promises initiation into a fraternity, Wither suggests, of all those who “seek a place, in Wisdomes Academ.” And in a kind of proto-postmodernism, Wither implies that his book—the very one his reader holds—is a book of wisdom in which image and word, flesh and body, are unified, offering knowledge to whoever reads it.

 

“[M]odern critics have been willing to grant … emblem writers only the distinction of the second rate,” writes the scholar Ernest B. Gilman, who notes that in “English studies we are likely to read” authors like Wither “if at all, as a duty.” Gilman adds that while emblem books have long been the subject of scholarly curiosity, their aesthetic importance has mostly been ignored. Acknowledged as a transitional step between medieval allegory and the clever conceits of 17th century poetry, emblem books also influenced more sophisticated verse, including the shape-poems of George Herbert, which were formatted to mimic the subjects of the poems. Like many of his peers during the 17th century, Wither drew from continental and Catholic precedents, despite being a Protestant. The scholar Huston Diehl explains that the emblem book was an ecumenical genre, “popular not only with … humanists, but with Protestants, who used it to advance their reformed theology, and Jesuits, who adopted it as a weapon in the counter-reformation.” Informed by mythology, hermeticism, allegory, and theology, the emblem book was part poetry and part puzzle, a genre that reflected the Renaissance enthusiasm for image and magic.

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Wither was born in 1588, a month before both Walter Raleigh and inclement weather routed the Spanish Armada off English coasts; he died almost eight decades later, in 1667. He lived through the reigns of four monarchs and one interregnum. He fought for the Parliamentarian cause, disputed in issues both political and religious (changing his mind several times), was imprisoned for his satires, and established a reputation as a brilliant poet, even though he is obscure to most readers today. He’s categorized, if at all, among those pastoral, spiritual, Protestant poets influenced by Edmund Spenser—such as geography-obsessed Michael Drayton and the Fletcher brothers (both Phineas and Giles).

Wither compiled A Collection of Emblems at a time when the symbiotic relationship between picture and poem was in vogue. This affection was born, in part, from a cultural misunderstanding of how language and image were once connected, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese characters. The 15th century Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote a formulation that could be the credo of the emblem genre: he claimed that the Egyptians “did not use individual letters to signify mysteries, but whole images of plants, trees, and animals; because God has knowledge of things not through a multiplicity…. But rather as a simple and firm form of the whole thing.”

Existing at the confluence between the medieval and the Renaissance, and Catholicism and Protestantism, the emblem tradition borrowed from a hodgepodge of influences. Alchemical, astrological, classical, gnostic, and mystical symbolism pervade the genre; references both pagan and Christian run through volumes such as Wither’s, as well as in collections by the Italian humanist Andrea Alciato, the French poet Guillaume de La Perrière, and the Flemish painter Otto van Veen, among several others. In A Collection of Emblems, Wither luxuriates in van de Passe’s skulls, flaming hearts, and strange beasts. Chief among van de Passe’s favorite type of image, and by proxy Wither’s, are those that could be classified as part of the memento mori tradition.

 

This image is titled with a rhyming couplet: “This Ragge of Death, which thou shalt see, / Consider it; and Pious bee.” Wither follows that with a 30-line poem that expands on the ever-popular Renaissance theme whereby penitents were asked to reflect upon evidence of their own mortality, the better to encourage genuine contrition. This emblem harkens back to popular books such as The Dance of Death (1538), by the German artist Hans Holbein, or to the more general theme of vanitas images prevalent between the 15th and 18th centuries, which asked viewers to consider the transient nature of earthly pleasures in light of eternity. Wither’s poem asks the reader, even if they may be “Cloth’d, so proudly, wherefore does thou goe? / Why dost thou live in rioutous Excesse?”

The emblem is enmeshed in grotesquerie; we are to “marke what Vglinesse” which “Stares through the sightlesse Eye-holes, from within … and what Gastlinessse, / That horrid Countenance doth seem to grin.” Wither’s sectarian allegiances veered toward the Puritan, but emblem books borrowed heavily from medieval Catholicism, though both traditions are oriented toward eternal things, even while our fallible bodies are mired in the transitory. Wither demands that libertines and aesthetes “Behold this Emblem; such a thing was hee / Whom this doth represent as now thou art; / And, such a Fleshlesse Raw-bone shalt thou bee, / Though, yet, thou seeme to act a comelier part.” The ugliness of the hyphenated “Raw-bone” and “Eye-holes” reminds us of inviolate truths: we’re fallen creatures made of meat, and stripped of our clothes, stripped of our very flesh, there is a radical egalitarianism whereby “all men must become / Such bare Anatomies” so that “having seene the same / Plucke downe that Pride which puffs thy heart so high.”

Memento mori images were a popular reminder of life’s mutability; representations of fortuna were another, part of a long tradition of imparting a Christian theological message concerned with the vagaries of human experience. Consider the following emblem:

 

Wither describes the rack upon which the unfortunate nude man is bound as the “never-standing-Wheele / Of everlasting-Tortures, turneth round, / And, racks the Conscience, till the soule doth feele / All Paines, that are in Sense, and Reason found.”

Wheels were common in representations of fortune, with the circular motion reminding proud humans that whoever is up now will later find themselves down. In The Consolation of Philosophy (circa 524 CE), Boethius poses a rhetorical question: “What place can be left for random action, when God constrains all things to order?” Literal constraint seems to be the curse for the tortured man in the emblem, and from that back-breaking image Wither imposes Christian providentialism and Protestant predestination onto an ancient symbol. His introductory couplet evokes Eden’s fall: “By Guiltines, Death entred in, / And, Mischiefe still pursueth Sinne.”

There’s some cheekiness in the depiction of fortune’s wheel splintering the spine of that Everyman, for Matthews’s edition of A Collection of Emblems contains literal wheels in addition to pictures of them. Scholar Katherine Koller notes that the last leaf of the volume contained “two large wooden engravings; at the center of each a movable pointer is fixed.” The first engraving is of a circle divided into 56 segments, of which 50 correspond to emblems in the book, while the remainder are designated as blanks. The second engraving is divided into four parts, for each of the four major sections of A Collection of Emblems. By spinning the movable pointers according to Wither’s detailed instructions, readers are able to locate poems for moral purposes (depending on the sentiments of the reader). Wither notes that his audience may be “informed of their Dangers, or Duties, by the way of an honest Recreation, before they be aware.” He emphasizes that “this Recreation, will be as harmlesse as any, if it be used according to my Intentions.” With great pains, he underscores that his emblem book should not be used as an “Oracle, which could signifie, infallibly, what is divinely allotted”; rather, its purpose is to serve “onely for a Morall Pastime.”

 

Books with intricate movable sections and flaps already had a venerable history by the 17th century, dating back to the manuscript experiments of the medieval Catalan mystic Ramon Llull in the late 13th and early 14th century. Indeed, early modern print was a “multimedia experience for the reader,” to quote the scholar Tamara A. Goeglein. While Wither’s contribution to the form wasn’t unique, Koller explains that his “game was apparently very popular.” But Wither has harsh words for readers who held a “secrete entertaining of such a Fantasie” that the emblem book could act as Sibyl, writing “that none but Children, or Ideots may be tollerated to be so foolish.”

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Whether as prophecy or poetry, divination or didacticism, Wither’s emblem book embodies a strange type of literary technology. Postmodern theorists have written about “aleatory literature,” that is, writing that asks for the reader’s input, and in which chance, fate, and fortune can lend themselves to plots not predestined by the author. (The Oulipo writers in 20th century France also championed aleatory strategies.) A book of poetry whose movable dial advises how the book itself should be read might strike contemporary readers as radical even today. A Collection of Emblems is exemplary as aleatory poetry that reads the reader as much as the reader reads it. The experience of reading the book, and interpreting it, will vary depending on the order in which each person approaches it. By definition, the experience is closer to the Taoist scripture of the Tao-te Ching than to Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Heckscher explains that this tradition must be understood in light of “books on alchemy, fortune-telling books, mythological compendiums, hieroglyphic bibles … religious tracts … masonic charts or monitors, and, last but not least, the iconologies.” If critics have largely overlooked Wither for four centuries, perhaps it’s because they don’t understand how to read him anymore.

Wither’s verse points forward to a postmodernism that didn’t fully emerge until the 20th century. There is profound radicalism in both the emblem book’s illustrations and in the invitation to understand the poems themselves as living texts. Wither rejects that which is static and embraces pagan themes of fortune and mutability; his verse contends with what it means to be an individual, a person in whom competing and often hidden claims to identity fight just beneath the surface. If such a perspective seems foreign to the rationalism of the century after Wither’s death, then it seems wholly congruent with the affectations of the 20th century, during which the power of the unconscious was a matter of received wisdom.

Diehl explains that “Rather than eliciting veneration or reverence,” Wither’s emblems “function as signs, motivating the reader to seek beyond the literal, to recall and contemplate what they represent.” Far from being a gimmick, the wheels in the back of Wither’s volume are an example of form imitating content, for the great theme of A Collection of Emblems is the complexity of the human psyche: the body and the spirit, the sacred and the profane, the base and the holy exist in tandem in each of us, just as an emblem is defined by its union of image and word. An “emblem requires its reader to move between symbolic pictures and figurative language to comprehend its moral or religious idea,” Goeglein writes.

The popularity of emblem books, on both the continent and in Britain, and among all social classes, coincided with the origins of Tarot, although both were later dismissed as supernatural. Diehl argues that the “emblematic image stimulates the reader to seek what is absent and invisible; it thus serves as an intermediary between the physical and the spiritual worlds.” When the “reader at first confronts picture and motto which seem unrelated,” she eventually “discovers a rhetorical relationship.” In the process of that discovery, she “moves from the apprehension of the visual image to a recognition of an unseen truth.”

Examine two van de Passe images that depict humans: the first shows a noblewoman in a stiff, ruffled dress holding a mask in front of her face:

 

The second shows a gentleman in pantaloons, Elizabethan collar, and wide-brimmed Dutch hat impaling a wild pig reared on its haunches:

 

Per Wither’s interpretation, both images are about conflict. The former seems to be a moralizing castigation of vanity as embodied by a woman who is a “youthfull vizard … Shee’s of an Edition, by her Eye.” With all of the implied misogyny that a Puritan such as Wither could bring to bear, such must we read this emblem as passing judgment on cosmetics. A more subtle interpretation, suggested by the poem and by the image itself, broadens out from a denunciation of artifice through makeup to other forms of duplicity. Wither reads the mask not just as a costume, but as representing the complete assemblage of actions, behaviors, and words people use to hide that which is “inwardly deform’d.”

The gap between the woman’s face and her mask is a vacuum of sorts, a space into which she can fashion herself in a manner that hides her true feelings and intentions. This is the area in which people can “chuse their words, and play well acted parts, / But, hide most loathsome projects in their hearts.” More than boorish didacticism about cosmetic powders made from lead, mercury, and vermillion, Wither is writing metaphorically of human duplicity, in which “A Heart, that in Religious formes, diguiseth / Prophane intentions; and arrayes in white, / The coale-blacke conscience of an Hypocrite.” If that emblem presents the implied conflict between how people wish to be seen versus what they’re actually like, then the boar hunter dramatizes the conflicts that occur when the human heart is at odds with itself.

Van de Passe’s image “exprest / A Man, incountring with a Salvage-beast,” but in Wither’s gloss it would be a mistake to read any of this as literal, for “That ugly Bore (wherewith the man in strife / Here seems to be) doth meane a Swinish-life, / And, all those beastly Vices, that assay / To root becoming Vertues quite away.” The emblem of the gentleman and the boar depicts not hypocrisy, but the inner conflict of the divided self, where the “harmefull fury, of this raging Bore … It get within you; and at last, appeare / More prevalent, then your defences are.” Wither’s poem is about the unintended sin, the human propensity for fallenness, whether it’s to addiction, lust, or other vices. True to his Protestant convictions, Wither offers a sort of serenity prayer against the base swine of human appetite, for he requests that the Lord may “come to helpe us, therefore, in this Fight; / And, let us be inabled in thy might.” Such is the nature of man’s dual existence that Wither suggests only a higher power can liberate our friend in the emblem from the boor.

Wither existed between the Reformation and the Renaissance, Protestantism and humanism. His idiom was classical and Christian, pagan and puritanical. He drew images and metaphors from Rosicrucianism, the Cambridge Platonists, astrologers, and Tarot. If any figure most embodies the era, it’s arguably the fool, with all of the fate, fortune, human frailty, and foibles that the jester symbolizes. The rhetoric of such a character appears everywhere, from Erasmus’s humanist classic The Praise of Folly to Protestant arguments about human fallibility. Jesters are popular in Wither’s book as well, such as in an emblem that depicts a fool peering out from his circular frame. There’s something unnerving in the jester’s gaze; here, for the first time in the book, an emblem returns your stare. The image also expresses the nature of aleatory literature itself; the jester peers at the reader just as the book promises to peer into the reader’s future or soul.

 

With his vacant stare and ass-eared coxcomb, the jester, the fool, the clown is an apt representation of the world’s folly. This was a common Renaissance theme: humility masking itself as cynicism. Wither wrote that for jesters, the “World is much for Shewes … the substance of the shadow, they have sought.” In his circular frame, the fool is a mirror for us; Wither’s emblems are a mirror for the soul. If Wither’s theme was the complexity of the human psyche, then a corollary to that complexity is how we often hide from each other, and from ourselves. The promise of Wither’s emblem book is thus no mere game or gimmick, no simple “Curiosities … Sophistries, and superficial showes.” Whether by verse or spinning pointer, Wither’s emblems break a mind out of its strictures, to open experience to fortune and to encounter our true selves, whether we’re fools or not.