Learning to Weep: Early Modern Readers Reading Saint Peters Complaint (1595)

Devotional weeping was serious business in early modern England. In an impressive array of bestselling print sermons and spiritual treatises, preachers and writers of varied religious persuasions exhort their hearers and readers to weep, sigh, and groan over their sins, and their audiences seem to have complied—or tried to comply—-with enthusiasm.¹

We are familiar with the idea that medieval and Counter-Reformation Catholics embraced bodily expressions of penitence, including intensive weeping, but early modern Protestants also emphasize the value of devotional weeping. The preacher and Marian martyr John Bradford is lauded in the preface to his Sermon on Repentance for entering into a prayerful trance during which tears would silently trickle down his cheeks, while a seventeenth century translator Lancelot Andrewes manuscript of personal prayers rhapsodizes on the “glorious deformitie” of Andrewes’ original manuscript that had been “water’d with His penitential tears.”²

Within these cultures of enthusiastically lachrymose piety, devout laypeople could sometimes exhibit deep angst over their own failures to weep. This is a recurring theme in the notebooks of the prolific Calvinist-leaning seventeenth-century tradesman Nehemiah Wallington, who, in the Folger’s MS V.a.436 describes agonizing over his inability to weep despite an afflicted conscience, but who seems to brighten up slightly as he notes “but then I wept because I could not weep.”³

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that when Robert Southwell’s lengthy, tear-drenched penitential poem Saint Peters Complaint burst on the scene in 1595 it became an instant and long-running bestseller, going through at least fifteen editions by 1640. The poem presents an affectively intense soliloquy in the voice of Saint Peter bemoaning his betrayal of Christ, dramatically expanding his penitential tears recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (“And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly,” Luke 22:61-62).

The Folger collection includes over a dozen copies of this early modern bestseller—some annotated by early modern readers—as well as examples of Southwell’s Italian source texts and later English imitators, offering fascinating insights into how Southwell’s most popular work fit into early modern readers’ efforts to weep and moan sufficiently over their sins. Together, these sources remind us of crossovers between early modern Catholic and Protestant devotional habits and offer a glimpse of the ways devout early modern people used their books to experience and express penitential sorrow.

It has often been remarked that the authorship and publication circumstances of Saint Peters Complaint seem like they ought to have given pause to devout Protestant book-buyers.  Southwell was a well-known Catholic recusant priest who had trained with the Jesuits in Rome in order to come back to England as a clandestine missionary, and he had been hunted down by English authorities and executed for treason almost immediately before the publication of Saint Peters Complaint in 1595. Many critics agree that Southwell’s authorship of the text was likely something of an open secret, citing in part the extent to which the publication timing of the text seems to capitalize on the notoriety of the author’s execution.⁴ Although Southwell’s name does not appear on the title pages of early editions, the initials “R” and “S” do appear on the highly decorated title page of William Leake’s 1609 edition, with the “S” somewhat cryptically intertwined with different letters on each side of the page.

When I initially examined this title page, I wondered if the central emblem—a globe surmounted by a winged, laurel-crowned skull, topped by an hourglass and a book opened to the text “I liue to dy/ I dy to liue”—could be a cryptic reference to Southwell’s martyrdom. Instead, it turns out that the printer William Leake used this emblem on nearly all of his title pages between 1602 and 1610, and McKerrow notes that it is a copy of Johannes Sambucus’ emblem In morte vita, found in the 1566 edition of his Emblemata, whose subject is the fame that lives on after the death of the man who has dedicated his life to study.⁵ Is it possible that Leake was aware of the resonances of his chosen printer’s device when it appeared between the initials of a recusant martyr on the title page of a book that includes shorter lyrics with titles like “I dye alive” and “Lifes deaths loves life”? The phrase “dye to live, live to dye” certainly has devotional rather than scholarly resonances in the prefatory materials to a roughly contemporaneous religious text featured in another Collation blog post: Mary Sidney’s translation of Philippe de Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death. Whether or not Leake intended his emblem to take on associations with martyrdom or the memento mori injunction, this title page makes such connections available to the reader and allows for an intensification of the poet’s spiritual authority as a martyr speaking from beyond the grave.

Despite its Catholic authorship, Southwell’s poem seems to have filled a deep need for sixteenth-century English Protestants who were nervous about the potentially idolatrous implications of placing invented words in the mouths of biblical figures but who still intensely desired affectively moving scripts for repentance.⁶ Part of the appeal of Saint Peters Complaint was the extent to which it called attention to itself as a voiced expression of personal remorse and, by extension, as a script a reader could use to stimulate their own repentant prayers and tears.

This emphasis on voice is evident in Southwell’s careful work to frame Saint Peter’s voice with a short prefatory poem, “The Author to the Reader,” in which he addresses the reader directly before the beginning of Saint Peter’s Complaint, which is spoken entirely in the voice of Saint Peter. The first stanza of the prefatory poem exhorts the reader to imaginatively enter into repentant self-examination using St. Peter’s sins as an example:

Deare eye that daynest to let fall a looke,
On these sad memories of PETERS plaints:
Muse not to see some mud in clearest Brooke,
They once were brittle mould that now are Saints.
Theyr weaknes is no warrant to offend,
Learn by theyr faults, what in thine owne to mend.

Southwell is careful to point out to his readers that the fact the saints were also sinful humans does not give his readers “warrant to offend” God but rather offers them examples of sins they can discern in themselves and “mend.” The poem in Saint Peter’s voice that follows serves as both an example and script of how one might “mend” one’s thoughts and actions through repentance.

Most early editions of the poem highlight this change of voice by placing “The Author to the Reader” directly facing the first page of Saint Peters Complaint and using an italic typeface for the prefatory poem and a roman typeface for the poem itself. While this is not uncommon printing practice, the effect is to make the voice of Saint Peters Complaint stand out boldly from the voice of the prefatory poem, mimicking the increased pitch and volume of lament (as opposed to instruction) as Peter bursts into repentant speech with the words “Launch forth my soule into a maine of teares[!]”

Southwell’s framing and intensification of Peter’s voice represents a departure from his source text, Luigi Tansillo’s Le Lagrime di San Pietro (176- 889q), first published in 1560 as the fragment Southwell probably worked from, and from other texts in the Italian “literature of tears” tradition, like Torquato Tasso’s Stanze del Sig. Torquato Tasso per le lagrime di Maria Vergine Santissima, & di Giesu Christo Nostro Signore (247425). These poems, while similarly affectively intense and tear-filled, are spoken in the voices of mediating narrators who invite their readers to weep with them as a response to the weeping of an exemplary biblical weeper.

Southwell’s use of the first-person voice in a religious lament was not necessarily original; a number of medieval religious lyrics offered scripts for devout laments on the Passion, often in the voice of the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene.⁷ But it seems to have been Southwell’s production of a first-person script for voiced repentance that particularly captured the imaginations of his later Protestant imitators. Two examples in the Folger collection include Thomas Collins’s 1610 The penitent publican: his confession of mouth. Contrition of heart. Vnfained repentance. And feruent prayer vnto God, for mercie and forgiuenesse (STC 5566) and William Lithgow’s delightfully titled The gushing teares of godly sorrow: Containing, the causes, conditions, and remedies of sinne, depending mainly upon contrition and confession (1640, STC 15709). While neither poem invokes the exemplary repentance of Saint Peter, both follow Southwell’s poetic form (decasyllabic sixains with an ABABCC rhyme scheme) closely or exactly, and both present a first-person performance of voiced repentance. Collins’s publican emphasizes the voiced and performative nature of his penitence in a way that sounds almost comical to modern ears, declaring at the outset:

On bended knees, and with a broken heart,
Eyes cast on earth, hands beating of my brest:
I come to act a penitentiall part,
Before th’almighty, who is pleased best
With sinfull soules, when they are thus addrest:

Lithgow, on the other hand, draws directly on the language of Southwell’s opening lines to open his poem. Where Southwell’s Saint Peter begins by exclaiming: “Launch forth my soule into a maine of teares,” Lithgow’s unnamed penitent exclaims, “Spring sweet coelestial Muse, launch forth a flood,/Of brinish streams, in cristall melting woes.”

Both of these imitations suggest that what their readers found most compelling about Southwell’s poem was the immediacy with which an affectively intense monologue helped them and their potential readers to “act a penitentiall part” by voicing and embodying another person’s repentance.

Evidence of the usefulness of Southwell’s poem for other would-be weeping penitents can be found in the annotations of early readers who marked up the text or adapted it to their own ends.  At least one early reader of Gabriel Cawood’s 1599 edition seems to have responded earnestly to Southwell’s framing of his poem as a script for self-examination and repentance, underlining in “The Author to the Reader” the line “Learn by theyr faults, what in thine owne to mend” and bracketing the second stanza’s emphatic reminders that the reader’s sins far outweigh Peter’s. This reader seems to apply both of these ideas to their reading of Saint Peters Complaint, marking with a curly bracket on the facing page the lines “Fly not from forreine euils, fly from thy hart: / Worse then the worst of euils is that thou art” as if to mark Peter’s self-abnegating words as their own.

The same reader, who thoroughly marks up the entire book, shows similar enthusiasm for passages on tears, starring Peter’s description of his penitential weeping at lines 769-771 (“Prone looke, crost armes, bent knee, and contrite heart,/ Deepe sighs, thicke sobs, dew’d eyes, & prostrate prayers,/Most humbly beg release of earned smart”) and underlining in the poem “Marie Magdalene’s Blush” Mary’s self-accusations and her declaration that tears must wash away her sins: “Faults long vnfelt doth conscience now bewray,/ Which cares must cure, and teares must wash away.”

Another reader of Cawood’s 1595 edition, whose annotations have at one stage been trimmed and washed or bleached out and can only be (partially) read under UV light has written in the margin of the poem “Lifes death loves life” two lines of what I take to be self-condemnatory self-reflection, although I am open to corrections and suggestions:

The text, as far as I can make out, is: “That I am [boeth?] Inemie [to] all goodnes/ ala [deletions] […ly?] foode[.]” Could the writer be commenting on their personal sinfulness and destiny as food for worms? Is this an attempt by the annotator to create their own couplet or the beginning of a new devotional poem as a readerly response to Southwell’s devotional poems?

We can see Southwell’s poem being integrated into embodied acts of domestic devotion in a differently vivid way in the Miscelanea. Meditations. Memoratiues of Elizabeth Grymeston, a relative of Southwell and another recusant whose printed devotions enjoyed some popularity amongst mainstream Protestants. Grymeston’s “Morning Meditation, with sixteen sobs of a sorrowful spirit” is prefaced by an editorial note (probably by her widower), noting that she used these meditations “for mentall praier, as also an addition of sixteen staues of verse taken out of Peters complaint, which she vsually sung & plaied on the winde instrument.” Grymeston weaves stanzas of Saint Peters Complaint between prose prayers directed to God, selecting stanzas from the poem that voice vehement self-reproach, remorse, lament, and hope in God’s mercy. The practice called for by the hybrid script she produces suggests alternations between spoken prose prayer and sung repentant lament.

The use of Grymeston’s meditations by a reader who makes short, penciled underscore marks throughout the text presents a slight puzzle. Pencil marks are difficult to date, though a penciled signature on the back flyleaf (below) looks early modern to me. Could these marks be related to the placing of stresses in vocal performance of the text?

Together, the myriad uses of Saint Peters Complaint witnessed by the Folger collections highlight the ease with which devotional materials and strategies could circulate between early modern Catholic and Protestant audiences. They show the extent to which acts of writing, whether notetaking, poetic composition, or rearrangement and recombining of existing text, could be considered forms of reading, embodied acts through which readers processed texts and made them their own. And, perhaps most importantly, they remind us that performance—vocal, musical, written, or all three—was the most important end goal of many early modern devotional texts, opening up a window onto the very active, embodied, and vocal world of early modern English devotional reading.