Many early Tudor courtiers composed lyrics that circulated in manuscript or scribal copies. Strongly influenced by Italian and Italianate poetry, these “Courtly Makers,” as Richard Tottel dubbed them, helped change the shape of English poetry. Their tradition of circulating manuscripts seemed to yield early on to highly edited printed volumes where poems were often smoothed and modified to fit a taste and style different from a preceding generation. Modern editions, of course, consult the diverse manuscript versions of the poems in an effort to produce and comment on a stable, authorial version of the text. It is just such textual stability that Chris Stamatakis seeks to question in his monograph. He focuses directly on the process of producing and sharing the manuscripts — a process he sees as open and unending. He contends that Wyatt’s work, and that of his contemporaries, was part of an ongoing scripting and rescripting, of echoing and turning the works of others in a form that would be answered or turned again by others in the community of readers. Thus the individual content of any piece needs to be understood as part of a continuous process of rewriting and repurposing. So it is no surprise that Stamatakis’s notion of “deep-witted” Wyatt is distinct from that of many other readers of the poems. Wyatt, he argues, plays (a word that appears with great frequency in this text) with an exhausted Petrarchan tradition to show his wry and mischievous ability to riff on the original. And that playing is, in fact, the real content and true wit.

The book itself begins with a long prologue and a chapter on early Tudor literary practice. Here Stamatakis outlines his theoretical claims: that meaning is multiple, uncertain, and mediated by readers; that these texts are meant to engage a specific set of readers; that the process of reading and rewriting helps forge a social and political community. Words may be unstable and polyvalent, but the interactive turning of those words is the real locus of meaning and value.

The second chapter, a close look at the Penitential Psalms as rendered by Wyatt and other early translators, is probably the strongest section of the book. Here Stamatakis’s careful look at rhetorical nuance opens up not only Wyatt’s translations, but others brought to bear. He neatly explores the way Wyatt’s translations mimetically trace the underlying process of conversion emphasized in the biblical text. As he says, the translation’s periphrastic rescription “places a similar emphasis on the sinner’s ability, if not duty, to trope sin into a restored text” (95). The scholarly attention he gives The Psalms should prompt additional studies of these underexamined works. The following chapter joins Wyatt’s letters with the satires, finding them rhetorically of a piece. These letters and verse epistles fit neatly with the notion that language is performative and seeks to elicit a practical response, not just in words but also in deeds. The satires, he argues, are not actually satiric, but instead epistles offering a playful hand in friendship, a hand that expects the reader to hand back an equally playful response as an act of textual friendship.

When the last chapter and lengthy epilogue address Wyatt’s lyrics, the ludic, the coy, the wry, and the mischievous take center stage. Wyatt, we are assured, only toys with the tired topoi of amatory verse. He uses the conventional complaints of Petrarchan poetics to engage readers and poets in a dialogue that creates a community of “playful social conversation” where everyone demonstrates “lexical dexterity and guile” by rescripting traditions with “effortless artistry and cunning” (191). Thus the poems are best understood as a form of social bonding, shaping a world where knowing nudges and winks provide the underlying substance of the text. So rhetorical transformation and Heraclitan change become Wyatt’s central themes and techniques; endings are the beginnings of yet another text. Rhetoric is all. But rhetoric need not be confined to witty reworking of conventions; it could also illuminate Wyatt’s serious and original deployment of the tropes of his poetic predecessors in a way that made them modern, vital, English — explaining why those traditions continued to engage poets for at least a century.