“Quietnesse of Minde” A Theatre for Worldlings as a Protestant Poetics

Abstract

Jan Van Der Noot’s A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), the poems for which were translated by an adolescent Edumnd Spenser, has been generally ignored by Spenserians. However, the prose commentary that accompanies this work is a remarkable piece of rhetoric that teaches us how to read the poems of A Theatre and in so doing suggests the lineaments of a poetics rooted in Van Der Noot’s Reformed Protestantism. Van Der Noot states that his intention is to move the reader from vanity to spiritual knowledge. This concern with dispositions of the will encourages the reader to consider the speakers of the poems in the Theatre. In other words, the poems are dramatic monologues which explore spiritual states. The speakers of the Petrarch “Epigrams” and the Du Bellay “Sonets” (the first two groups of poems) are worldlings ensnared in illusion. The speaker of the four apocalyptic “Sonets” on the other hand, is the Christian visionary, St. John, whose visions are an allegory of conversion. Van Der Noot’s extensive commentary on these final four sonnets is notorious for its virulent antipapal polemic, but this polemic has been misunderstood. For Van Der Noot, Rome is a metonymy for a spiritual condition: Rome is his allegory of vanity, and vanity is overcome not with violence (though Van Der noot does not necessarily eschew violence) but with the Word, which engenders faith and “quietnesse of minde” in the faithful.