“The Scope of Mine Intent”: Reading for the Author in George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and Posies

Abstract

One way we read now—linking a book to its author’s character or life story—while long assumed to originate in the Romantic era, emerges much earlier, in Renaissance philological practice, with roots reaching back to ancient rhetorical and grammatical theory. This biographical stance, first refined into critical method by humanist editors exploring the interpretive application of ancient authors’ personal histories, eventually finds literary use by early modern poets themselves. George Gascoigne, the most enterprising and versatile figure among England’s first generation of would-be professional poets in the vernacular, cannot pass up the opportunity to profit by the hermeneutic promise of this author-centric technique of reading. At every turn in his playful poetry collections of 1573 and 1575, Gascoigne invites speculation about (mostly his own) authorship to provoke—and frustrate and redirect—the reader’s textual experience. This essay explores the central role of Gascoigne’s self-referential rhetoric, particularly in the prefatory letters to the two collections, where, to promote his writings and career, Gascoigne works to establish the fiction of a governing ethical design for each collection. More broadly, Gascoigne’s example affords us a glimpse of the underacknowledged richness of life writing’s interpretive valence in early modern practice. [D.P.]