"None's Slave": Some Versions of Liberty in Donne's Satires 1 and 4

Abstract

His skeptical, exploratory temperament inspires not only a search for freedom but also, as its inseparable correlative, an inquiry into its meaning and worth. In his elegies and lyrics, Donne explores different ways to remain “free” in love and sexual relations. In Satires 1 and 4, the focus of this essay, Donne explores different modes of asserting his freedom against a corrupt court, an oppressive legal system, and potentially enslaving social bonds. 3 Donne’s poetic representations of freedom were galvanized by his engagement with infl uential but diverging treatments of freedom in ancient poetry and moral philosophy concerning liberty as “doing what one pleases” and the value and limits of free speech. Historians of early modern conceptions of liberty have tended to focus on explicitly political and religious texts in relation to constitutional and ecclesiological controversies. 4 They have accordingly neglected the various ethical and poetic traditions out of which an early modern writer like Donne could articulate new visions of liberty. 5 While the defense of a person’s “freedom to do as he likes” (to quote John Stuart Mill) has often been associated with modern liberalism, the formulation is ancient. 6 Justinian’s Institutes defi ned libertas as the “natural faculty” of “doing what one wishes” [quod cuique facere libet] unless “prohibited by force or law,” a defi nition adopted in Henry de Bracton’s thirteenth-century treatise, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, which remained an authoritative textbook on English law in the early modern period. 7 Yet early modern ethical discourse often followed ancient philosophers in denying that liberty was equivalent to simply doing as one pleases, which was rather an instance of immoral “license,” that is, an excess or abuse of liberty. 8 In Plato’s Republic, Socrates identifi ed doing just as one pleases as a form of license typical of democratic regimes, in which men confuse lawlessness with liberty.