| The dissertation is a study of the different trends in the manipulation of the double audience (the ostensible and reading audience) in Renaissance love lyrics from Wyatt to Marvell. Three different patterns are noted. The first pattern, condemned by Sidney and associated with Surrey and other mid-century poets, is characterized by consideration for the actual rather than the ostensible audience as the principle of selection. The second, associated with Sidney, Wyatt, and the sonneteers of the nineties, is characterized by consideration for the ostensible audience as its basis for selection. The third, associated with seventeenth-century poets, is characterized by consideration for both audiences in a more complicated way: while the ostensible audience seems to be the single basis for selection, the poet actually incorporates material which implicitly addresses the real audience. That is, on the surface the lyric is directed toward the lady, but the address to the real audience on other levels breaks the dramatic frame, and consideration for the real audience is the predominant basis for selection. In the case of seventeenth-century lyrics, the use at times of both principles of selection often results, paradoxically, in inverting or undermining the very conventions the poem seems to use and uphold. The intent is to point up the distinction in poetic technique of poets, resulting from the differing literary and rhetorical theories and prosodic developments.;To isolate these trends, I have focused on the poets' characteristic uses of personae. To identify the speaker of a lyric and his stance toward his audience is, by definition, to identify the tone and allows analysis of how the poet manipulates his double audience. A close textual examination of the specific linguistic cues that a poem contains reveals the persona's attitude toward his audience and illustrates the poets' manipulation of conventions of the lyric tradition. |
