Where Stephen Greenblatt famously described a Wyatt bent on forgetting, Susan Brigden's gripping biography of the poet, diplomat, and lover at Henry VIII's court ventures, instead, a Wyatt who is a “prisoner of memory” (1). Brigden's is a compelling and brilliantly sustained portrait of a memory-bound Thomas Wyatt (ca.1504–42): it encompasses the writer of love lyrics, in which past happiness is recalled from the vantage point of present pain, and the more mature, self-judging poet who paraphrased the seven penitential psalms—a poet mindful of guilty secrets and sins past, “remembering grief or some great dislocation” (483). In its very design, this biography cleverly recalls, in its second part, episodes or allusions or formative influences already discussed in its first, presenting them in a new light or giving them a fresh context.
Brigden carefully follows Wyatt—or rather, befitting sixteenth-century models of plural social selves, a series of Wyatts—through the documentary shadows and half-light that shroud his career. We begin with the “Young Wyatt” glimpsed among the knights defending the Castle of Loyalty at Henry's New Year celebrations in 1524–25 and the young man educated at the Middle Temple (the Inns of Court offering a liminal route to the royal court). Later, we encounter Wyatt as an “ardent player of the ‘game of love’ at court,” perhaps a lover who took the “terrible, incalculable risk” of “confessing a forbidden love” with Anne Boleyn to prevent the king's marriage to her (149–51). Elsewhere, “Depe Witted Wiat” and “Wyatt the Ambassador” are found, variously, at a climacteric of Renaissance diplomacy, when in 1527 he is captured by imperial troops in Italy, or on a series of failed ambassadorial missions to the court of Emperor Charles V during which he becomes “Disperatissimo” (most desperate), perhaps even overstepping the diplomatic authority bestowed on him by his king and incurring, in 1541, charges of treasonable conduct. Brigden's Wyatt inhabits the centers of court power, but he is also often found exiled from them or imperiled by them.
Meticulously, Brigden charts a restlessness that contended with the elusive ideal of quietness of mind, or the Roman virtue of constantia. It is a restlessness found even in the choice of words, especially given the Treason Act of 1534, Henry VIII's infamous “law of words.” As readers of his poetry, we are “suspended between two different meanings” (3). These poetic ambiguities have political analogues: Wyatt's capacity for doubleness, dissimulation, and subterfuge tallies with the courtier's indirection, the diplomat's discretion, and the orator's ambiguous expression, as celebrated by Quintilian—a model for Wyatt throughout his life, not least when imprisoned in the Tower in 1541 and writing for his life. Brigden delineates a Wyatt torn between the ideal of honest plain-speaking and guarded secrecy—between the conflicting imperatives of making “plain his heart” and fulfilling a “will to concealment” (36).
What sets this apart from other accounts of Wyatt's life—including another recent biography, Nicola Shulman's fast-paced Graven with Diamonds (London, 2011)—is the wealth of previously unknown documentary material that Brigden has assiduously unearthed from Europe's archives and carefully integrated into a coherent portrait of a notoriously self-occluding, evasive poet who refuses to be equated with his poetic speakers. Unsurprisingly, a fifth of her book comprises notes and bibliographic information. From these sources, Brigden reveals a full-bodied Wyatt at times unrecognizable from the sketchy outline in Kenneth Muir's Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963). Brigden's account corrects several long-standing misprisions about Wyatt's birth, education, and, most important, shifting allegiances. This is a biography that does not flinch from the unpalatable possibility that Wyatt not only prized friendship but also betrayed it—the possibility that Wyatt secured his release from the Tower in May 1536 (when Anne Boleyn was executed) due to “his willingness to depose against his friends” (284), or the possibility “that Wyatt's testimony from foreign courts had helped to condemn” Thomas Cromwell, his erstwhile friend, protector, and patron (535). Likewise, Brigden complicates the dated commonplace that Wyatt was Anne Boleyn's lover and committed to her evangelical circle, by revealing a Wyatt who remained for a long time close to the conservative circle around Henry's first queen, Katherine of Aragon (for whom Wyatt translated Plutarch's Quyete of Mynde). In addition, Brigden resists reductive religious categories: for all Wyatt's evangelical leanings and abhorrence of papal tyranny, even Wyatt's psalm paraphrases “admit the imputation of no unambiguous doctrine of salvation, adherence to no particular church order” (484).
Among its many strengths, this biography deftly interweaves Wyatt's poetry and poetic career within its wider biographical contexts. Brigden presents Wyatt as avant-garde, an experimenter in the demanding forms borrowed from Italy (Wyatt is notably the first “to English” the sonnet) or from classical Rome, and she traces Wyatt's handling of a poetic language partly inherited from Chaucer. Attuned to Wyatt's silences, Brigden reads between the lines, and also against an intertextual backdrop of literary tradition—scriptural, classical, and vernacular. For a primarily historical study of Wyatt's life, this book is laudably sensitive to the literary nuances of Wyatt's poetry—all the more so, because Brigden quotes from the largely unpunctuated scribal or holographic manuscripts and eschews the distorting filters of modern editorial interventions. The dogmatic claims about dates or places of composition that marred much twentieth-century scholarship on Wyatt's verse are sensibly resisted, in favor of a nuanced approach that positions this poetry in oblique relationship to a secret world. Reading his verse associatively, Brigden maps productive correspondences between Wyatt's life and his poetry: “Anguished moods and circumstances and anguished works need not be synchronic” (453). Not even the ostensibly confessional Wyatt who paraphrases the Psalms, using words such as “grace” and “just” freighted with controversial meaning in the new theology, prohibits easy associations between King David's spiritual plight and his own. Brigden's is a remarkably aesthetic, even formalist, reading: we are shown the slipperiness of Wyatt's pronouns, where “I” slides into “he,” or where “the inimical, treacherous ‘they’ are never named” (400); a Wyatt who adapts the English vernacular to the copiousness of ancient tongues and the sober wisdom of Plutarch's moral philosophy; a poetry steeped in recurrent image systems of “vayn indevour,” wearied minds, unfading scars, broken lyres, “wildness trapped and freedom captive” (73). In a subtle twist, Brigden fuses biographic and bibliographic interests, by placing Wyatt in a company of friends, fellow courtiers, and secretaries who copied and preserved his poetry. This prodigious book, an immense piece of scholarship, of literary no less than historical interest, will be the definitive biography of Wyatt for generations to come and will live long in the memory.
