Marketing the self: versions of (in)gratitude in John Donne's verse epistles to his patronesses.

The essay concentrates on the textual strategies adopted by John Donne in some of his verse epistles to his patronesses in order to cover up his impatience towards the bond of gratitude he was bargaining with them according to the practice of social preferment. Ambiguity is the key-word of his poetics, one which is deeply aware of the stylistic rules imposed upon the servant-poet by the culturally-based norms set out in a long tradition of manuals of letter-writing, which underwent a significant revival at the end of the sixteenth century. Donne’s ingenuity in applying these rules to subvert the expected message of hyperbolic praise is here exposed. There emerges a picture of social transaction of power and identity which reshapes the ethical idea of gratitude, traditionally presented as a virtue – and as such re-proposed by Sir Thomas Elyot and Pierre de la Primaudaye, among others – into that of a ‘financial’ bond depriving the minion of his liberty – as Montaigne very shrewdly put it.