While it’s certainly a fun time sharing anecdotes about Ben Jonson, the Bookworms would like to bring you a more in-depth installment this time around, pertaining to contemporaneous but lesser-known poet George Wither. Courtesy of UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, we have access to a lovely copy of Wither’s most famous work, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne, featuring his poetry attached to 224 printed allegorical images. Our treatment will address the volume’s history, cover the book’s printing and current condition, and end with a full analysis of one of it’s emblem pages. With that in mind, let’s begin!
George Wither (1588-1667) was an Oxford-educated poet and satirist, born June 11th, 1588, in Hampshire. His first notable work was ‘Abuses Stript and Whipt’, a collection of satires, with several targeted at the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Egerton. George, in his very finite wisdom, opted to have this published while tendering his services at the Inns of Chancery, so it should not have come as a terrible shock when he was sentenced to a stretch in Marshalsea prison. His sentence was apparently shortened by his vocal loyalty to the crown, and he was released in 1615.
The next few years produced two things for Wither: a good deal of mediocre love poetry, and a burgeoning Puritan religious conviction. In the 1620s, his major projects were a hymnal, which was proposed and rejected as a fixture in the Church of England, and a set of poems, Britain’s Remembrancer, blaming the vice of the age for the plague of 1625. He also took a sideways shot at Ben Jonson’s ‘drunken conclave’, which he was obliged to print himself due to a disagreement with the Stationer’s Company.
In the early 1630s, he was hired by Henry Taunton to furnish verses for the prints of Crispin Van de Passe, resulting in the volume currently languishing in RB&SC. Emblemes is Wither’s best-known work, and is the strongly indicative of the political-religious paradox not only of his life, but of English culture at the time. Despite his Puritan sympathies, each of the folio copy’s four books, each with a series of dedications to various regal figures:
- 1st book: King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria
- 2nd book: Prince Charles then Prince of Wales and his brother James, Duke of York
- 3rd book: Princess Frances, Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, as well as her nephew, James, Duke of Lennox, etc.
- 4th book: Philip, Earl of Pembroke (‘Pembrooke’) and Montgomery, and Henry, Earl of Holland, etc.
Van de Passe deserves as much credit as Wither for the Emblemes, with his work being a fairly impressive example of etching (more on that in our forthcoming installment on the printing). The Dutch connection appears to have treated Wither well, so much so that he was able to publish a sequel to Britain’s Remembrancer in the Low Countries. As allpoetry.com (the wellspring of most of this information) describes it, “many of the poems rise to excellence” a summation which, having read several of his poems across the breadth of his work, I find rather suspect (‘Veil, lord, mine eyes till she be past’ and ‘I loved a lass’ are good for at least a couple of laughs apiece).
Wither’s poetic career (such as it was) seemed to dwindle after this, and he took on duties as a statesman and a military officer. While his political affiliation was described as Jacobean-Spenserian, fitting his earlier support for the crown, his religious ties to Puritanism began dividing his sympathies. While he served the Crown against the Scottish rebellions, he eventually allied himself with Cromwell. It appears that George couldn’t quite follow through, horribly mishandling the sale of the late Charles I’s personal effects in the first half of the 1650s and attempting to satirize Cromwell in the second. That this landed him in penury and not the gibbet is likely more of a testament to Cromwell’s character than his.
When the Restoration came about, Wither was jailed for three years for his short-lived role as an ermine-and-gilt auctioneer. He died ignominiously about a month shy of his 79th birthday, on May 2nd, 1667. (https://allpoetry.com/George-Wither)
Wither was not a critical darling in his day. Of surviving testaments to his work, George Gilfilan’s is the closest to praise, remarking that Wither was “a man of real genius, but seems to have been partially insane.” Possibly the most entertaining anecdote concerns Sir John Denham, a poet and aristocrat, who went so far as to save Wither’s life from Royalist soldiers, as “so long as Wither lived he himself could not be counted the worst poet in England.”(https://mypoeticside.com/poets/george-wither-poems#block-bio)
All in all, Wither was not a terribly accomplished poet and seemed a rather thorny personage, and most of his work was returned to the state of woodpulp (or ash) as a result. The place of Emblemes is a valuable period work, in consideration of the conflicting religious and political sentiments therein, and for the accomplished artwork. Next time around, we’ll take a closer look at some of this artwork, as well as the condition and provenance of our own copy.
Keep on wriggling in the free world,
The Bookworms