Do we ever think about the fate of books? Only every once in a while when we come up against those works whose mere existence seems to defy all logic. Books that make us wonder not only what they say, but also why they were written, what obsession made them possible, and what need—whether intellectual or spiritual—justified the years of work that went into them.
We rarely find the answer on the first reading. Every essential book seems to lead to more questions than answers. Maybe this is because books tell us not only about their authors, but also about the age that produced them and the age that receives them. Today, these questions take on special resonance. We live at a time when literature seems obligated to constantly justify its own existence. We see frequent diagnoses on the paucity of reading, the predominance of the image, and the replacement of the book as our privileged means of understanding the world. Every so often, someone announces that a tradition many centuries old has come to an end.
Just a few weeks ago, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai stated in an interview with a Spanish outlet: “The whole world of literature is lost, it will disappear; at this time, I have no hope that it will survive as we know it. This is a farewell: goodbye, it was a wonderful story that lasted thousands of years, but now, goodbye. Many believe literature will survive heroically. They do not realize that, before writing, humanity already existed.” It is striking when, in the midst of these declarations of extinction, books appear whose existence seems to respond precisely to the opposite impulse: to save that which time has allowed to fall into oblivion. Such is the case of Robert Southwell: Jesuita, poeta y mártir by Braulio Fernández Biggs, the first study written entirely in Spanish on English poet Robert Southwell (1561-1596).
This publication also marks a publishing milestone: for the first time, all of Southwell’s extant poetry—almost seventy compositions—appears here in bilingual format with translations for readers of Spanish. This endeavor is surprising not only for its scale—nearly seven hundred pages, including the study itself, critical apparatus, and translations—but also due to the author at hand. Southwell was a Jesuit priest, poet, and martyr, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and a decisive figure in the development of English metaphysical poetry. Nonetheless, outside of academic circles, his name barely survives, having been eclipsed by later writers like John Donne and George Herbert, despite his profound influence on the English poetry of the late sixteenth century.
Fernández Biggs seems to be aware of this paradox. In the book’s prologue, he states that one of its purposes is to “remedy this… forgetting?” His hesitation is meaningful. He is not speaking simply of an unknown author, but rather of one whose disappearance from the canon raises a larger question: how can a body of work that was widely read and admired in its time—and that even influenced some of England’s best known writers—be lost?
To answer this question, we must return to the context in which Southwell wrote. Born in 1561 into a Catholic family in the county of Norfolk, just as Anglicanism was growing entrenched under Elizabeth I, he was educated by the Jesuits in Europe, ordained as a priest in Rome, and secretly sent back to England in 1586 to attend to its persecuted Catholics. For seven years, he dedicated himself to intense pastoral and literary work. Arrested in 1592, he was tortured, lived as a prisoner for almost three years in the Tower of London, and was executed in 1595. Paradoxically, his death cemented his prestige: his writings circulated broadly for decades after and helped to mold a poetic sensibility whose importance would only start to be fully recognized much later.
In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch notes that it is impossible for a biography to encompass an entire life. This is what Boswell attempts in his Life of Samuel Johnson: to meet the challenge of containing a life within a book through letters, conversations, and anecdotes, implicitly accepting that every biography is, in fact, a selection. Virginia Woolf, for her part, observes that every biography fluctuates between the documented facts and a personality that, inevitably, escapes us. But in this case, Fernández Biggs comes painstakingly close to achieving this goal. He succeeds in making sense, interpreting, and setting down on paper Southwell’s brief life—just thirty-three years—depicting it in the book’s very architecture, in the sum of its parts, where we bear witness to his thoughts, his silences, and his unrealized possibilities. Is this an academic volume, a biography, a work of religion, reference, or study? It is a little of them all, and it clearly shows the author’s personal stamp.
Fernández Biggs’ book does not limit itself to compiling, quoting, and reconstructing a life. It examines the political and religious context of Elizabethan England, studies Southwell’s poetry as well as his prose, analyzes his place within the metaphysical tradition, and dedicates a chapter specifically to his possible influence on Shakespeare. The result is much more than an intellectual biography: it comes together as the recovery of a writer whose absence leads us to inquire into the mechanisms of the literary canon and the ways in which a tradition decides, over time, who remains and who disappears. But there is also another dimension to this book: the construction of a writer’s life is, in this case, the construction of a saint’s life, and thus, inevitably, an approach to spiritual and religious life as well.
In the first chapter, “These New Made Treasons,” Fernández Biggs delves thoroughly—as he does throughout the book—into the historical period at hand: from the formation of the Society of Jesus, Mary Tudor, and the Counter-Reformation to the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. These matters are essential if we are to understand not only Southwell’s life but also the nature of his writing. Fernández Biggs observes: “It is important to pause and consider that Catholicism and its practices turned, at a specific historical moment, into a matter of high treason that thus merited death. England had ‘always’ been Catholic and had ‘always’ been a monarchy. How is it, then, that all of a sudden, Catholics were traitors? We are talking about religious beliefs that, while they may presuppose political positions, are much more than that. It is no surprise that Elizabeth hesitated at first: this was her people, her very own people.”
In this chapter and the next, which tells the story of Southwell’s life, it is revealed to us that this journey—this expedition into the energy of a different time—is not an entirely solitary journey for the writer: he engages in conversation with a multitude of voices. Fernández Biggs employs a bibliography and citations that, while not overwhelming, make up a vast ensemble: T.S. Eliot, Saint Augustine, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Samuel Johnson, John Milton, Peter Ackroyd, Sir Thomas Malory, the work of Eamon Duffy (very closely), and Virgil, to name just a few of those who share space with letters, court rulings, and documents from the era. But, unlike in certain other studies, where citations tend to interrupt the main storyline, here they are interspersed fluently, producing an accumulation of perspectives, echoes, and reconances that creates a vivid image of events that took place more than four hundred years ago.
This text has a remarkable ability to shift and change before our very eyes. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of a historical work, and at other times, when we delve into Father Robert’s biography, we find episodes worthy of a novel in which the tension grows as the authorities close in around his clandestine activities. The author puts the pieces together such that the mechanism draws us in, making us part of the persecution and the Catholic cause the Jesuits defended on the island. “It comes as no surprise that, along with their vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity, they should also vow to teach catechism. They were prepared to go anywhere in the world where there were souls to save.” The overall panorama is far from simple; the tension goes beyond personal experience. It permeates the continent in a clash of powers and suspicions, between loyalties and betrayals—to Rome and the Pope, to queen and country—with Spain as a looming menace and politics hovering above the whole scene. And in the middle of it all, amid Southwell’s evangelizing endeavor, his poetry began to emerge. After spending years on the continent, Father Robert began to recover his fluency in his mother tongue, in English. “And of all the weapons he learned to wield—and did in fact wield—his poetry is the best remembered.”
We can appreciate this confluence between the literary and spiritual dimensions of his work in the following excerpt from one of his most famous poems. It is crafted with deceptive simplicity, its religious imagery becoming almost material:
The Burning Babe
(excerpt)
Alas quoth he but newly borne in fiery heates I frye
Yet none approach to warme their hartes or feele my fire but I
My faultles brest the furnace is the fuell wounding thornes
Love is the fire and sighs the smoke the ashes shame and scornes
The fewell Justice layeth on and Mercy blowes the coales
The metall in this furnace wrought are mens defiled soules
For which as nowe on fire I am to worke them to their good
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my bloode
The texts he wrote as part of his mission—religious books of consolation, a meditative devotional text, a brief polemic treatise, and books of spiritual poetry—would circulate and become known as manuscripts, in print, and by word of mouth. These same texts are revisited in Fernández Biggs’ books, where they can be found compiled a few pages on, annotated and explained by the author. Here we discover that Southwell’s work corresponded wholly to his task as a priest: it remains within the context of his evangelizing mission. “Southwell’s poetry points to reconciliation and communion, but also, thusly, to a return to devotion, liturgy, and culture.” Remorse and the possibility of redemption, in his dramatic monologue of Peter—a traitorous Peter—also serve as an example of confession. His syntax reproduces the circular movement of pain through the senses and through thought, a physical mechanism we can see in action:
Saint Peters Complaynte
(excerpt)
My eye, reades mournefull lessons to my hart,
My hart, doth to my thought the griefes expound,
My thought, the same doth to my tongue impart,
My tounge, the message in the eares doth sound.
My eares, backe to my hart their sorrowes send:
Thus circkling griefes runne round without an end.
The nature of Fernández Biggs’ book, as I said, is ever-changing. It creates the sensation of pausing to observe the same phenomenon from different angles, and each of them amplifies the result: the conception of Southwell’s work, its circulation and reading, its place in the canon among the metaphysical poets, the historical moment and contemporary details; the streets of London, the theatre, the prisons of Southwark, the fairs. And, of course, speculation on Southwell’s possibile relationship with Shakespeare, in the most curious of all the book’s sections, where the author, without slackening his characteristic academic rigor, takes the liberty of theorizing on a possible (or, perhaps, very probable) influence and a meeting and a friendship, as longed-for as they are difficult to prove: “William Shakespeare would have shed tears on seeing his friend Robert Southwell in ‘love’s Tyburn, that hangs up simplicity’… And fallen silent, like all others, since no one shouted ‘traitor!’ as was customary.”
Fernández Biggs dares to lay bare all these possibilities, looking for clues in Sonnet 73: “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, / As the death-bed whereon it must expire, / Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” This effort leads us to wonder about the motives of the author, the compiler, the scholar who is behind this book, for this is where he sees fit to confess a personal interest in the matter: “I have dedicated the better part of my academic life to the study of the Elizabethan period, and especially to the conditions of enactment in London’s public theatres and Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic work itself (including translations of his works); and because Southwell’s life and work have left a very deep mark on me in recent years; this book, indeed, is clear proof of it.”
And this book’s clear proof does not encompass a life; rather, it propels said life toward our own times. It is not the reflection of a selection, but rather the configuration of a profound recovery that defeats silence and sheds light on the possibilities that emerge from the symbiosis between poetry and life. And the fate we sense in both—by means of spiritual reflection, the use of religious paradox, and the surprising, original images we find in Southwell’s work—is a path between reason and emotion, an intellectual exploration of the experience of faith, an attempt to understand suffering and prepare for death. To feel the fire. The presence of death in life, the possibility of justifying both through martyrdom:
I Dye Alive
(excerpt)
I live but such a life as ever dyes
I dye but such a death, as never endes
My death to end my dying life denyes
And life my living death no witte amendes
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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