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William Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life. Oxford UP, 1999. xii + 448 pp., 23 illustrations, ISBN 0-19-818624-X, £60, $95.
For over fifty years, the standard biography of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, has been that of Edwin Casady (New York: MLA, 1938; Kraus Reprint, 1966), a circumstance owing in part to the underappreciation of Surrey's poetry in our time, in part to Casady' s biography's being on the whole a good one. Sessions attested to the latter point himself, when in his 1986 study of Surrey's verse (vol. 429 in the Twayne's English Authors Series) he relied almost exclusively on Casady for his first chapter's biographical sketch (1-19). But it was already perceptible in his Twayne book that Sessions realized that a different sort of biography than Casady's was a crucial next step to a deeper appreciation of Surrey's life and works, if not of Tudor literary history. Sessions' claim, for example, that Surrey had sought "a civic and communal purpose for his art," based on the understanding that "his work was new, original, completely modern," and "capable of changing his English world" (20), contradicted Casady's view that for Surrey "writing poetry was a literary exercise," merely "a 'polite accomplishment'" (42). Yet Sessions' analyses of Surrey's poems could not very well demonstrate his point, due to limited space and to the inadequate record of Surrey's "life of the mind."
With Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey, Sessions has written the book that provides that record, and much more. It is, as he says, "a 'cultural' biography," a work of political, social, intellectual and literary history that not only accounts for Surrey's "personal origination in a period of massive historical displacement," but that also documents the "extraordinary generational force" of Surrey's life and writings throughout the Tudor period (ix). It is thus an ambitious, sprawling biography with several aims: defining the historical and cultural influences that shaped Surrey's sense of himself in his world; recounting Surrey's various social roles as noble heir, courtier, soldier, and poet; analyzing Surrey's written and reported words, his actions, his portraits, his home, as "public texts"; and tracing Surrey's legacy in the century following his death, from his canonization in Tottel's Miscellany to the...