SOURCE: Daly, Peter M. “The Arbitrariness of George Wither's Emblems: A Reconsideration.” In The Art of the Emblem: Essays in Honor of Karl Josef Höltgen, edited by Michael Bath, John Manning, and Alan R. Young, pp. 201-34. New York: AMS Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Daly suggests that Wither's comments on the emblems in his collection underestimated the influence of his sources and minimized his own understanding of their complexity.

Critics from Rosemary Freeman (1948) to Michael Bath (1989), Charles Moseley (1989) and Richard Cavell (1990)¹ have tended to lend credence, if in differing measure, to George Wither's comments about his emblems. Authorial statement has thus coloured the critical reception of the emblems. Wither's comments have been seen as suggesting an arbitrary relationship between word and image, or thing and meaning, which, in Bath's view “comes close to sabotaging the credibility of the whole emblematic enterprise.”²

In assessing Wither's emblems, Rosemary...