Donne's Somerset Epithalamion and the Erotics of Criticism

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Writing to James I for restitution of his forfeited estates, disgraced Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester and Earl of Somerset, cites John Donne to effect that the goodness of God is not so much acknowledged by us in being our Creator, as in being our Redeemer.' The king, who, in his own words was, after God, Somerset's creator,2 redeemed his life and eventually a portion of his estates but was neither able nor willing to buy back his reputation, and that of Somerset's protege, Donne, has never put off transferred tarnish. Donne's political courtship of Somerset bore fruit in epithalamion on his patron's wedding to divorced countess of Essex; it is a poem whose merit has been consistently gauged in light of its subjects' lives, and editors and critics have rarely failed to take Donne to task for his connection with protagonists. Their spleen is an index to subversion of aesthetic by sexual values in literary criticism, at its height among Victorians, but continuing in ferocity through present century. Neither murder of Overbury, of which Somerset was plausibly not guilty,3 nor passion between Somerset and Lady Essex seems adequate to account for continuing deprecation of this poem and its author on basis of historical circumstances surrounding its composition. Somerset was central figure in five erotic triangles, four of them in part homosexual.4 In suppression of direct reference to central role of homoerotic behavior in Somerset's career, and in displacement of homophobic feelings into overwrought accounts of supposed adulteries and homicides of famous pair, lies bad faith at heart of critical tradition on Somerset epithalamion. Edward II and Piers Gaveston were fortunate in having a memorialist, Marlowe, capable of placing their relationship within romantic context