^1. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), p. 351.

^2. Nancy Struever notes that “every historical insight implies a notion of the language of the protagonist or document in question as well as of the language of the historian himself…. The structure of language relates to the structure of knowledge and thus to the definition of historical reality” (The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetorical and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970], p. 3). For various explorations of the coincidence of the Active and the factual, see Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972); Kenneth Burke's work, esp. A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969); Erving Goffman's work; The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Angus Fletcher (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976), esp. Hayden White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” pp. 21–44; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973); and Prose Studies, a journal specializing in the analysis of nonfiction prose.

^3. Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, K. G., Vice-Chamberlain and Lord Chancellor to Queen Elizabeth, including His Correspondence with the Queen and Other Distinguished Persons, ed. Harris Nicolas (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), p. 252.

^4. This collection has an uncertain provenance, though its authenticity is widely accepted. The manuscript is entitled “Booke of Letters Receaved by Sir Christopher Hatton, Vice-Chamberlayne to the Quene's Majestie, from Sundry Parsons, and Procured by Him to Be Written in This Same Booke”; it was purchased in 1846 by the British Museum, where it is now Addl. MS. 13,891. Sir Harris Nicolas' edition of the Letter Book, cited in n. 3, provides the texts for this study. For further information on Hatton and his Letter Book, see E. St. John Brooks, Sir Christopher Hatton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), and Alice Gilmore Vines, Neither Fire nor Steel: Sir Christopher Hatton (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978). Much more work needs to be done before we can tell if the assumptions suggested by my analysis of the Hatton correspondence are true of courtly letter writing in general. Since the field is relatively untouched by analysis, these 350 letters seem a useful introductory sample.

^5. In the Renaissance otium and negolium signified leisure and business, content and discontent, even otiose rustication and “life at the top.” Both terms are multivalent. A letter of negolium may be significant self-defining labor or an expression of anxiety—or both.

^6. I use this term as Victor Turner does, to characterize the threshold state occupied during rites of passage, a state freed of the perspectival constraints of everyday identities and endowed with a temporary synthetic power of perception. Much could be done with this concept to unfold the powers and privileges of the literary arena. See “Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas,” in Drama, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 231–71.

^7. Katherine Gee Hornbeak, “The Complete Letter Writer in English, 1568–1800,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 15 (April-July 1934), i-xi, 1–50; Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Liverpool Univ. Press, Hodder and Stoughton, 1943); Branimir Marian Rieger, “The Development of the English Literary Letter, 1500–1640,” Diss. Univ. of Maryland 1973.

^8. For the identification of the author as I[ohn] B[rown], a Bristol merchant, see T. S. Wilson, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1959), p. 18. I owe this reference to Walter J. Ong's “Tudor Writings on Rhetoric, Poetic, and Literary Theory,” in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), p. 74.

^9. Day's book was published in two parts, the first in 1586, the first and second together in 1592. The former is available in a facsimile (London: Scolar, 1967); there is also a facsimile of the 1599 edition, including the second part published in 1592 (Introd. Robert O. Evans [Gainesville, Fla. : Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967]). Quotations in the text, identified by page number, are from the Scolar Press edition (1586). As Rieger observes, the Note of the Scolar Press facsimile specifies eleven editions without giving documentation; only eight are listed in the Short-Title Catalogue. See also Hornbeak, p. 28, and Robertson, pp. 19–20.

^10. Quentin Skinner traces the rise of hidden political commentary in medieval epistolary treatises (The Renaissance, Vol. I of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978], pp. 28–35). It would be interesting to see whether any influence from this tradition survives in such later treatises as Day's.

^11. Day specifies two main categories, the “special” letter and the “general,” or “familiar,” letter, which passes between friends for purposes of gossip or reflection. This latter sort has received much critical attention, since it later developed as a tool for philosophical speculation and character depiction. Hornbeak, Robertson, and Rieger are mainly concerned with the familiar letter. They analyze the tradition that later yielded the essay and the epistolary novel, starting with Breton's A Poste with a Packet of Mad Letters (1602), in which the letters begin to serve fictional purposes rather than practical ones. I do not treat this side of the history of epistolary writing.

^12. Wallace MacCaffrey, “Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics,” in Elizabethan Government and Society, ed. S. T. Bindoff, Joel Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams (London: Athlone, 1961), p. 95. I am indebted throughout to MacCaffrey.

^13. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Random, 1954), p. 32 (1358b).

^14. The Poetry of Robert Greene, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, Ball State Monograph No. 27, Publications in English No. 19 (Muncie, Ind.: Ball State Univ., 1977), p. 15.

^15. Lawrence Stone observes that

… the Court was now [c. 1561] regarded as the natural centre of the universe, whence, like ripples from a stone cast in a pond, civilization spread out in ever-diminishing intensity towards the remote manor houses of Wales or the Scottish borders. The Court was as essential to the good life as conceived by Castiglione as the City State to Aristotle. This ideal did not pass unchallenged in sixteenth-century England, for running parallel to it was a modified, anglicized version in which prime stress was laid on service to the Prince in either the court or the country, and in which piety and virtue played a larger part…. Nevertheless the enormous success of Henry Peacham's The Compleat Gentleman of 1622 with its eulogy of the Renaissance ideal sufficiently proves the enduring popularity of the courtly model. If many of the gentry were fascinated by the Court, the aristocracy were won over to it almost to a man, and it was only personal experience of the Court of King James and growing piety of a puritan temper which damped enthusiasm in the early seventeenth century. (The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1965], pp. 400–01)

^16. See, for instance, the letters on pp. 68, 97, 152, 183, 296, 386, and 443.

^17. It is worth remarking that for one who had “arrived,” the country, with its peace and quiet, often beckoned. But vacations still had to be explained at court, or at least cloaked by necessity, as Puttenham suggests in The Arte of English Poesie (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 305–06. Indeed, Francesco Guicciardini claims the beckoning itself is a face-saving invention. In the Ricordi he says, “Do not believe those who say they have voluntarily relinquished power and position for love of peace and quiet. Nearly always, their reason was either levity or necessity. Experience shows that, as soon as they are offered a chance to return to the former life, they leave behind their much vaunted peace and quiet, and seize it with the same fury that fire seizes dry or oily things” (Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi), trans. Mario Domandi [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1972], C17 [p. 44]). The issue of attendance and absence, although central to the Hatton correspondence, requires separate treatment for proper analysis.

^18. Stefano Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, trans. George Pettie and Bartholomew Young, The Tudor Translations, 2 vols. (1581, 1586; rpt. London: Constable, 1925), i, 121.

^19. Peter Berger observes that

… the difficulty of keeping a world going expresses itself psychologically in the difficulty of keeping this world subjectively plausible. The world is built up in the consciousness of the individual by conversation with significant others (such as parents, teachers, “peers”). The world is maintained as subjective reality by the same sort of conversation, be it with the same or with new significant others (such as spouses, friends, or other associates). If such conversation is disrupted (the spouse dies, the friends disappear, or one comes to leave one's original social milieu), the world begins to totter, to lose its subjective plausibility. In other words, the subjective reality of the world hangs on the thin thread of conversation. (The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion [Garden City, NY.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1969], pp. 16–17)

^20. Goffman, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City, NY. : Anchor-Doubleday, 1967), p. 91.

^21. The opportunities for major gain, though lurid, were few; MacCaffrey observes that gifts such as Leicester's £ 1,000 annuity “were reserved to the few, but they stimulated the imagination of lesser courtiers” (p. 119).

^22. My provisional assumption in this essay is that Mathew, Cox, Day, and others were trying to adapt to an epistolary format the courteous skills of influence that they already knew how to use in conversation. In such a fluid context, new deployments of old conventions naturally arise. While I think these uses are far from being mere attenuations of “real contact,” I prefer to bracket the enormous ontological questions about the relations between speech and writing that my subject raises. But I should note that the privileged status of the face-to-face interactional situation is a debated matter. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, for instance, believe that “the most important experience of others takes place in the face-to-face situation, which is the prototypical case of social interaction. All other cases are derivatives of it.” The factor underlying this valorization is the “plenitude of symptoms of subjectivity” present here (The Social Construction of Reality [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1967], pp. 2829). But others might now reply that this plenitude of “symptoms” is far from unmediated, that it presents not the truth or facts or reality but a dense system of conventions as opaque and alienated as any other text. My point in this essay is that, however wise it may be to disenfranchise conversation of its ontological or normative force, conversation remains historically prior to the datable rise of widespread literacy; hence the rise of the courtly letter to its established status in this period for this class. The status of conversation as an oral and artful phenomenon, and conversation's complex relations with oral “literature” and the pseudo-, quasi-, or meta-conversational business letter go well beyond the limits of this essay. But Walter J. Ong has blazed the historical and theoretical trail in his speculations on oral residue in written forms; his views parallel and complement my historicizing of the origins of these epistolary conventions. See his “Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style,” in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, pp. 23–47. The work of Searle and other discourse analysts ought also to be fruitful here.

^23. Quoted in MacCaffrey (p. 108) without identification, from the British Library's Lansdowne collection (57, No. 47).

^24. Mathew's predecessor, Thomas Wilson (familiar as the author of The Arte of Rhetorique), died on 16 lune 1581 (see the DNB). Within a month, it seems, Mathew had entered the race for Wilson's position. The epistolary record of the suit proper begins with Sir Thomas Heneage's letter to Hatton in support of Mathew on 30 July 1581 (p. 183). Heneage speaks for Mathew in the midst of a letter that thanks Hatton for helping to deal with Heneage's disgrace at court and makes other patronage recommendations to the vice-chamberlain:

Mathew was finally installed in the office on 31 August 1583; his letter of thanks to Hatton (p. 343) probably dates from that month. The next five letters have to do with mopping-up activities: more thanks to Hatton. discussion of favors to be done for Cox, and so forth.

The individual letters can be cataloged as follows:

Mathew to Hatton 22 Aug. 1578 p. 76

Heneage to Hatton 30 July 1581 p. 183

Mathew to Heneage 17 Sept. 1581 p. 191

Mathew to Cox 30 Sept. 1581 p. 204

Mathew to Cox 12 Feb. 1582 p. 232

Mathew to Cox 15 June 1582 p. 252

Mathew to Countess 23 July 1582 p. 255

Mathew to Cox 2 Nov. 1582 p. 278

Mathew to Hatton no date p. 298

Mathew to Cox no date p. 300

Mathew to Hatton 11 May 1583 p. 328

Mathew to Hatton no date p. 343

Mathew to Cox no date p. 355

Mathew to Cox no date p. 360

Mathew to Hatton no date p. 361

Mathew to Cox 27 Oct. 1584 p. 397

Mathew to Hatton no date p. 406

I have not uncovered any replies from Hatton or other relevant letters not preserved by Cox. My examination of the letters does not assume the completeness of the epistolary record.

^25. For biographical information on Mathew see the DNB article, from which the details of his career are quoted. See also Mervyn James, Family, Lineage, and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics, and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). There are two relevant dissertations, which I have not seen: Joseph Gavin, “An Elizabethan Bishop of Durham: Tobias Mathew, 1595–1606,” McGill 1972, and David Marcombe, “The Dean and Chapter of Durham, 1558–1603,” Univ. of Durham 1973. Part of Gavin's dissertation has been published as “Politics in the Elizabethan Church: The Appointment of Bishop Matthew, 1582–1595,” Canadian Journal of History, 9 (1974), 121–41.

^26. Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), p. 150. The second marginal note is quoted in Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), p. 160. Stern informs me in correspondence that because of a printer's error Sir Tobie Matthew, the son of the future dean (1577–1655), is incorrectly identified as the object of Harvey's reference. It is also worth noting, sheerly for pedantry's sake, that the younger Matthew (the second “t” is added in the DNB) was also the author-editor of a collection of exemplary epistolary specimens, mostly drawn from his own hand or that of his notable Stuart correspondents. It is called A Collection of Letters Made by Sr Tobie Mathews, Kt., … to Which Are Added Many Letters of His Own to Several Persons of Honour Who Were Contemporary with Him (1660 [Wing 1319], with new eds. in 1670 and 1692). Perhaps the son absorbed the father's epistolary self-consciousness.

^27. Hatton was among the prime movers in ecclesiastical patronage, which was granted by the queen mostly to lay courtiers, though she retained veto power. This fact raises the possibility that Mathew's suit for intercession with the queen may have been in part cosmetic; the post may have been effectively in Hatton's gift. The Heneage letter (p. 183) and Mathew's labors with other patrons (recorded by Gavin) argue against this supposition. But suits to Burghley might have used this tactic. Burghley was in some ways an ultimate arbiter of patronage; yet even he would not have been free to admit openly to making the queen's decisions for her, so the fiction of need for intercession would have survived even without the substance. For further treatment of this complex matter, see MacCaffrey; Gavin; and Rosemary O'Day, “Ecclesiastical Patronage: Who Controlled the Church?” in Church and Society in England: Henry VIII to James I, ed. Felicity Heal and Rosemary O'Day (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 138.

^28. Neville Williams, Elizabeth 1, Queen of England (1967; rpt. London: Sphere Books, 1971), p. 185.

^29. Bacon, “Of Suitors,” in his Essays (New York: Dutton, 1969), p. 149. Elyot, The Book Named the Go'vernour, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (New York: Dutton, 1962), p. 192.

^30. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528; trans. Thomas Hoby, 1561; rpt. London: Dutton, 1928), pp. 15–16. Day, “Epistle to the Courteous Reader,” The English Secretorie.

^31. Henry Peacham weighs the lack of connections similarly, though without Mathew's partisan sneer. In his Art of Living in London, he advises the newcomer to London to seek proper company: “If you cannot find such fitting for you, apply yourself to your friends, if you have any, or the friends of your friends. If you have not them neither (I speak to the meaner and more inferior), be sure that you take your lodging at least in some honest house of credit …” (The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel, Folger Documents of Tudor and Stuart Civilization [Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1962], p. 244).

^32. Ong, “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 9–21. Ong observes, “The practice of orienting a work, and thereby its readers, by writing it at least purportedly for a specific person or persons continues well through the Renaissance” (p. 18), adducing The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. The supplicatory letter partakes of a similar “addressedness,” to a person and a class context simultaneously.

^33. Delia Casa, Galateo; or, The Book of Manners, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1958), p. 57.

^34. Elizabeth regularly fostered such competition among her favorites, extracting personal and public service from their conflicts. See MacCaffrey, p. 108.

^35. It is worth noting Mathew's conscious use of euphuistic style. After presenting his main arguments, he adds that Cox may, if Cox thinks it appropriate, add certain euphuistic parallelisms and “descant with … cunning” on them. These expressions have a proverbial and quasi-logical force similar to Lyly's argumentative set pieces. Mathew uses them pragmatically, especially with attention to the decorum of the occasion. (I take this concern to be the force of “if you so think it good.”) He even manages to use the parallels to contradict the sense, as Lyly so often does. When he pleads that preferment go to “one that will depart from all he hath” rather than to “him that hath nought to leave,” he argues that wealth and position should confer desert; money should seek money, it seems. To then deprecate these images collectively as a “minute” and a “plain song” is to combine Lyly's overt artfulness with Castiglione's sprezzatura.

^36. Berger and Luckmann discuss this aspect of conversation:

The situation of correspondence, by distancing the conversational respondent and so reducing his or her input, heightens the presence-to-self that Berger and Luckmann note. But since that presence is no longer pre-reflective (as it is in speech) it can more easily become overtly alienated, creating the negative variety of “self-consciousness” that Mathew seems to feel. (The production of subjective identity through language should remind us that such subjectivity is hardly unmediated and “real.”)

^37. John Jewel suggests an oral variety of this phenomenon: “… in courts before a judge … if a speech becomes a bit too copious and fluent, [the judge] surmises some deceit to be underneath and snares to be laid for him.” See Hoyt H. Hudson, “Jewel's Oration against Rhetoric: A Translation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 14 (1928), 381.

^38. For a useful introduction to this issue, see Gary R. Grund, “From Formulary to Fiction: The Epistle and the English Anti-Ciceronian Movement,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 17 (1975), 379–95. The structures of bourgeois prose theory in this period deserve scrutiny for what they can tell us about the courtly style that bourgeois prose replaced.

^39. For a subtle consideration of these matters in the drama, see Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973).

^40. Puttenham notes a portrait of Hercules “where they had figured a lustie old man with a long chayne tyed by one end at his tong, by the other end at the peoples eares, who stood a farre of and seemed to be drawen to him by the force of that chayne fastened to his tong, as who would say, by force of his perswasions” (p. 154).

^41. I wish especially to acknowledge the assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded an earlier version of this study; my colleagues William Spengemann and Charles Young; and Sir John Neale's pioneering lecture “The Elizabethan Political Scene” (1948), rpt. in his Essays in Elizabethan History (New York: St. Martin's, 1958), pp. 59–83.