Praedatrix Praeda Fit Ipsa Suae: Mary Magdalen, Federico Borromeo And Henry Constable's Spirituall Sonnettes

Abstract

THERE EXISTS, in Harleian MS. 7553 of the British Library, a set of seventeenSpiritual1 Sonnettes to the honour of God and hys Sayntes by H. C..In his 1812 edition of the manuscript, Thomas Park attributed these poems to the Elizabethan courtier-poet and later recusant Henry Constable on the grounds of the ‘regular Italian structure, and the sainted names of those addressed’.’ Three years later, in hisHeliconia,Park substantiated his attribution by reference to Constable's known Roman Catholicism and to a recantation found at the end of his secular sonnet cycleDianain Dyce MS. 44: ‘When I had ended this last sonet and found that such vayne poems as I had by idle houres writ did amounte iust to the climatericall number 63, me thought it was high tyme for my follie to die and to employe the remnant of my wit to other calmer thoughts lesse sweet and lesse bitter’. The Dyce manuscript-like the Harleian-is not in Constable's own hand, and one scholar has recently thrown doubt on the authenticity of the recantation. Nevertheless, theSpirituall Sonnetteshave without question continued to be considered as Constable's following Park's broad biographical and stylistic outline. The Harleian manuscript appears to date from the early years of the seventeenth century, and this has been assumed to be the likely date of composition for the sonnets as well.