Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 204
Milli mála 13/2021 203
But plaintes, nor praises, could faire Lycia moove,
Above my reach, she did her virtues raise.
And thus reply’d: False Scrawle, untrue thou art,
To faine those sighes, that no where can be found;
For half those praises came not from his heart:
Whose faith and love, as yet was never found.
Thy maisters lyfe, (false Scrawle) shall be thy doom:
Because he burns, I judge thee to the flame:
Both your attempts, deserve no better roome,
Thus at her word, we ashes both became.
Beleeve me (faire) and let my paper live:
Or be not faire, and so me freedome give.78
Fletcher’s unmovable, pyromaniac mistress not only spurns his
affections; she also seeks to destroy the vehicle of his desire by set-
ting the poem itself ablaze, a witty if not uncommon play on the
motif of erotic burning. What makes the sonnet important to my
argument is not its destruction, nor is it the Petrarchan idea of the
poet’s being tied up with the existence of his fragile text. Rather,
Fletcher’s sonnet brings to view the unreliability, uncertainty of its
own material practice. Licia burns his sonnet because, to her, it
represents a “false Scrawle:” the lover’s attempts to record his
“sighs” are dismissed as “untrue.” On the one hand, her doubts tap
into the reservations about poetic feigning derived from Plato’s
admonition against poets’ lies and the broader distrust of writing in
the West. The legal strain in the sonnet’s language, on the other
hand, may invoke the widespread anxiety about scribal forgeries
haunting Elizabethan culture.79 But Licia’s response also takes to
task, as a viable form of lyric existence, the capture of breath by
scriptive labour. For her, that the lover’s sighs are “fain[ed]” because
they “came not from his heart” is only part of the problem. His
“sighs” are too ephemeral, too transient to be preserved by ink and
paper: their elusive and uncontrollable nature resists crude reifica-
tion in writing, which puts pressure on Fletcher’s lyric project,
given the frequent association of lyric voice with sighing in early
78 Fletcher, Licia, F2v.
79 Gordon, “Material Fictions.”
DANILA SOKOLOV