It is probably safe to say that Beth Quitslund knows The Whole Booke of Psalmes (WBP), or “Sternhold and Hopkins” as it is affectionately known, as well as anyone living. The Reformation in Rhyme will remain the standard study of this volume throughout the lifetime of anyone reading this review. Literary scholars have written on the WBP before, including Rivkah Zim, Ian Green, and me, as well as musicologists Robin Leaver and Nicholas Temperley, but within broader studies that discuss many other works and, often, over a long chronological span. Quitslund is the first to focus entirely on the WBP, from its origins in the tiny Certayne Psalmes of Thomas Sternhold (ca. 1549), through the many accretions to and recensions of the collection in the 1550s and 1560s, to the end of its Elizabethan heyday in 1603. More importantly, Quitslund is the first to consider in meticulous detail the actual contents of this vastly popular book. As one who has spent some time with these metrical Psalms myself, I can attest to Quitslund's fortitude in taking on this task. The WBP is not, to say the least, a gripping read, and though it was much beloved by English Christians for centuries, it also contained, as Quitslund notes, perhaps the most reviled poetry in early modern England. Quitslund acknowledges that “it is somewhat daunting to write a whole monograph about a work that has gained immortality chiefly as a punchline” (2).
Fun as it is to join in the mockery of WBP’s metrical “8 and 6,” this is to ignore its astonishingly persistent and wide popularity among all classes of people, as well as the considerable praise given to Sternhold in particular in the sixteenth century. Moreover, as Quitslund so ably reveals, a careful reading of the book, in its many incarnations, can tell us much more than that tastes in poetry change over time. Quitslund's first chapters focus on Sternhold's own publications, Certayne Psalmes and the expanded Al Such Psalmes that followed shortly after. She gives us a more complete picture of Sternhold and his role at the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI than we have had before, making the best case yet for dating his first book. If it appeared “between late 1547 and mid-1548,” as she suggests (28), then Sternhold really does seem to have let loose the flood of metrical Psalms that followed from 1549 on, as well as popularizing, if not inventing, the meter that in the sixteenth century bore his name (subsequently termed ballad or common meter). Reading Sternhold's verse paraphrases carefully in comparison with their sources, Quitslund shows him responding to the complex political and theological shifts in the late 1540s and early 1550s, both in his selection of individual Psalms and in his linguistic choices, especially when they deviate from his sources. In this respect, then, Sternhold seems more like his fellow psalmists, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, than one might have expected. They were more concerned with expressing personal devotion and individual circumstances than Sternhold seems to have been, but all three adapted the Psalms to their times, the oppression and religious conservatism of the aging King Henry and the subsequent embrace of Protestantism by his young son Edward. It was to Edward that Sternhold's first Psalms were addressed, as godly counsel and encouragement to the monarch, “singing truth to power” (45).
As these Psalms caught on like wildfire, the publisher, Edward Whitchurch, printed an expanded collection, including further Psalms by the now-dead Sternhold and still more by John Hopkins, a minor clergyman. Quitslund, again reading these texts more closely than others have, demonstrates that Hopkins was no mere copycat, introducing important variations in Sternhold's Meter (rhyming odd lines as well as even), and shifting the focus of the Psalms toward genuine “prayers for the community,” emphasizing the “corporate identity of God's people” (96). Thus, innovations in metrical Psalms reflected changes in English church history.
After the shocking early death of Edward VI and the succession of his Catholic half-sister Mary, English Protestants were forced to reassess their place in the providential plan: once again, metrical Psalms serve as a barometer of, as well as a means of expression for, Protestant self-identity. The Marian exiles in cities like Wesel, Frankfurt, and especially Geneva brought Sternhold's and Hopkins's Psalms with them. They enlarged the collection with their own translations, incorporated them into the liturgies of the Protestant exile churches, and ultimately turned what was originally an anthology of select Psalms into The Whole Booke of Psalmes (1562), the singing psalter of English men and women in church, at home, and even out of doors for the next century and a half. Quitlsund's detailed study of the growth of this volume is an informative history of English Protestantism in exile, including debates and schisms about liturgy, theology, and discipline in which metrical Psalms featured centrally –– quite naturally, since the same scholars that produced WBP, led by William Whittingham, also produced the Geneva Bible (1560), the most popular English Bible for the next century. Once again, though, Quitslund's study is most valuable in its detail, differentiating in form, content, and translation practice the particular contributions to WBP of John Hopkins, Thomas Norton, John Marckant and others. She also pays attention to the non-psalmic content of WBP, as well as the crucial role of publisher John Day in shaping the book and promoting its use as an alternative to the establishment Book of Common Prayer.
Quitslund concludes with chapters on the Elizabethan use of WBP, as it became a regular feature of the liturgy and a staple of domestic devotion, in a range of musical settings. One of her most original and important arguments is that Shakespeare's famous representation of psalm singing as a Puritan pastime is misleading and anachronistic; WBP was sung in parish churches across England by everyone, and there is no evidence outside Shakespeare's plays for their being particularly associated with hot Protestants, or weavers for that matter. My one regret about Quitslund's otherwise exhaustive study of WBP is that its essential musical settings get relatively short shrift. This promises to be remedied, however, in a scholarly edition of WBP forthcoming from Quitslund and Nicholas Temperley. The Reformation in Rhyme should be read by anyone interested in metrical Psalms and liturgical practice, but by all scholars of sixteenth-century English Protestantism as well.
