“To please and profit vulgar iudjements”: George Wither’s Didactic Project in A Collection of Emblemes (1635)

In his Collection of Emblemes (1635), George Wither, a notoriously controversial and prolific English poet and pamphleteer, claims to have composed his work mainly to make stern moral lessons more palatable to “common readers” through the use of beautiful engravings and a lottery game, which, or so he claims, was a necessary addition to the work to grab the attention of those who are both most in need of, and most reluctant to, being educated on such matters. If one looks beyond his patronising remarks, however, his didactic project appears to be much broader, and much more creative, than meets the eye, and seeks to endow the reader with the means to navigate complex philosophical concepts and to gain access to symbolic discourse, which, at the time, was still emblematic of strict social hierarchy, and the privilege of a select, usually aristocratic, few.