In March this year, I published the result of ten years of research: Silence: A Literary History. It does exactly what it says on the tin—traces silences, formal and thematic, across twelve centuries of English literary history. One of my inspirations was a book, Silence: A Christian History, published in 2013 by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor in the History of the Church here at Oxford. MacCulloch describes how he feels being gay has made him a better historian: from an early age, he has necessarily been attuned to non-verbal communication.
My own book contains many different kinds of silences, but it was important to me to capture something of MacCulloch’s experience. The chapter on Silence and Sex in Renaissance Love Poetry seemed the obvious place. After sections on tongue-tied lovers and silenced ‘coy’ mistresses, I have a section on same-sex desire. In this section, I wrote:
Same-sex desire is communicated in the literature of the early modern period via a language that is silent because it does not speak directly. I am not referring here to the kinds of puns and innuendo that are so blindingly obvious they have all the subtlety of a whoopee-cushion. To give an example: in The Affectionate Shepheard (1594) by Richard Barnfield, the shepherd Daphnis tells the ‘sweet boy’ Ganymede that if he goes out to shoot little birds with his bow and arrow, he (Daphnis) also has ‘a fine bowe, and an yuorie arrow’ to show him:
And if thou misse, yet meate thou shalt [not] lacke,
Ile [I’ll] hang a bag and bottle at thy backe.
It would be hard not to get the meaning of the meaty ‘bag and bottle’. And nor, by ‘silent language’, do I even mean the subtler coding which scholars, like Martin Green in The Labyrinth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1974), are able to decrypt through research into historical semantics.
The silent language I have in mind permits a literary work, even when the overt subject is heterosexual, to express a deep truth about same-sex desire. Such desire sometimes speaks in allusion (most often to classical literature), allegory, parallels (friendship, shared activities such as book exchange), displacement, cross-dressing, translation. Sometimes, it does not speak at all. Critically, it is difficult to specify. But if texts are read ‘with an eye to appreciating multiplicity and ambiguity’, in the wise words of Paul Hammond [in Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester, 2002], a way of reading emerges that respects both the elusive subject and the indirect ways of referring to it, that registers the possibilities of the unspoken without trying to pin them down.
This ‘silent language’ is what MacCulloch, from boyhood, grew adept at hearing. In all my research, the most poignant example of it I found was in a manuscript here in Oxford, in the Bod. The manuscript, which goes by the unlovely name of Bod. Ms. Don.c.24, is a collection of poems by Nicholas Oldisworth which he transcribed by hand in 1644.
The Oxford DNB tells us that Oldisworth, an Anglican clergyman and the nephew of Sir Thomas Overbury, was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. At Westminster, he became close friends with one Richard Bacon, who, according to the seller’s description of Oldisworth’s manuscript, ‘acted a woman’s part in some play before the King’ and, according to better attested sources, went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge and the English College at Douai (a catholic seminary), dying of the plague in 1636.
The Bodleian manuscript contains some 120 of Oldisworth’s poems written out in his neat handwriting, including a dedicatory epistle to ‘his dear wife’ Marie (whom he addresses as ‘Sweet Mall’) and eleven poems addressed to Bacon. ‘Oldisworth often writes without disguises,’ comments the poet’s editor, John Gouws, and, certainly, words such as ‘Embrace’, ‘Love’, ‘hearts’, ‘passions’ and ‘Desire’ indicate the speaker’s strength of feeling for Bacon.
But it is folio 74v that speaks the loudest. Below the title ‘On the death of his deare friend Master Richard Bacon’, there is an almost entirely blank page. Just a sweeping diagonal line in the bottom right-hand corner of the page—Oldisworth’s signature sign of completion—confirms that the absence is, in some sense, what he wanted to say.
Paul Hammond, who counters any suggestion that Oldisworth is writing in the tradition of classical amicitia (friendship) with an argument that the poems to Bacon are ‘strongly erotic’, describes the emptiness as ‘poignant’. Gazing on it in the dim light of Oxford’s Weston Library on a December afternoon, I found it enigmatic. Is it the expression of a grief too great to articulate? An oversight? A note-to-self to return to the subject? An acknowledgement of all the silences inherent in the relationship, including Bacon’s recusancy? A joke?
Please go and view it in the Weston. It seems important that this silent elegy be heard.
― Professor Kate McLoughlin
