SOURCE: “Self-Presentation in Carew's ‘To A. L. Perswasions to Love’,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter, 1986, pp. 97-106.

In the following essay, Hannaford discusses the complex dramatic pose of the speaker in Carew's “To A. L. Perswasions to Love.”

A concern for fashioning the self as a dramatic character or performer may be found in many seventeenth-century poets, and is insistently displayed in the poetry of Thomas Carew. The modes of personation characteristic of Carew's dramatic love lyrics create an assemblage of poetic activity recording the complexities of courtship rites and ceremonious social form in an increasingly skeptical and scientific age. These modes display Carew's profound awareness of the conflict between private personality and public role in a society which placed a high value on sociability (or good courtiership). Techniques of self-presentation both reflect and create a deliberative personality, one for whom Hamlet's “to be...