Chapter 7. Transgression in Potentia

This chapter examines the systematic ways in which Thomas Wyatt creates the potential for what can be termed a transgressive hermeneutics of his translations, and of his poetics more generally. The chapter refutes the political allegoresis of Wyatt’s poems by previous critics by adopting the Aristotelian principle of potentiality and actuality as a model whereby we, the readers, are made responsible for the act of transgression, not Wyatt himself—that is, we actualize the transgression for which Wyatt provides the potential. This semantic responsibility is illustrated by Wyatt’s statement in his 1541 Defence that “yt is a smale thynge in alteringe of one syllable ether with penne or worde that may mayk in the conceavinge of the truthe myche matter or error” and that “No man can beleve you that I mente yt as you constere yt, or that I spake yt as you alledge yt.” As part of this examination, the chapter discusses how Wyatt adapts the late medieval triangulated form of translatio to his own methods of post-Petrarchan imitatio.