"Before Words" : seeing and Privacy in Renaissance Poetry

Abstract

At the very start of his book Ways of Seeing, the art critic John Berger says: “Seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the world.” This paper will explore ways of being in the world through different ways of seeing portrayed in the texts of three English Renaissance poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Mary Wroth. In those texts in which seeing, though a threat to an order, leads to a positive vision of the private, there is an unavoidable depiction of the physical and its transgression, its violation; but when the text presents a condition rather than a physical space, when seeing rather than as transgression is defined as an aspiration, then the physical, in dilution, gives place to more discursive conceptions of the private.