Sunday, February 25, 2024

Worthy Sidney Unworthy Oxford

 Haec ego mente olim laeva, studioque supino, Nequitiae posui vana trophaea meae. 


SONNET 72 - Shakespeare


O, lest the world should task you to recite

What merit lived in me, that you should love

After my death, -- dear love, forget me quite,

For you in me can nothing worthy prove;

Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,

To do more for me than mine own desert,

And hang more praise upon deceased I

Than niggard truth would willingly impart:

O, lest your true love may seem false in this,

That you for love speak well of me untrue,

My name be buried where my body is,

And live no more to shame nor me nor you.

   For I am sham'd by that which I bring forth,

   And so should you, to love things nothing worth.


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nequitia (Latin)

Alternative forms

    • nēquitiēs

Origin & history

From nēquam ("worthless").

Pronunciation

    • (Classical) IPA: /neːˈkʷi.ti.a/

Noun

nēquitia (genitive nēquitiae) (fem.)

    1. A bad moral quality; idleness, negligence, inactivity, remissness; worthlessness; vileness, depravity, wickedness

    2. Lightness, levity, inconsiderateness.

    3. Prodigality, profusion.

    4. Profligacy, wantonness, roguery, lewdness.

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'The Sound of Virtue', Blair Worden

'Walsingham, writing against the Anjou match, intimates that Elizabeth's failure to 'depend' on God derives from a 'wavering' disposition. Basilius wavers too. His change 'with the wind' has many echoes in Sidney's ficetion, where time and again gusts of 'wind' sway characters into following fortune instead of virtue. Wind is a recurrent symbol of inconstancy, as when 'the inconstant people' of Iberia, faced with conflicting claims to the royal succession, 'set their sails with the favourable wind' of 'fortune'. The constant man, in Sidney's moral scheme and in the neo-Stoic scheme of his time, is inwardly indifferent to good or evil fortune, to the hollow ascendancies of chance. Subordinating passion, which if fortune's friend, to reason, which is virtue's, he is not swayed by the passions of hope and fear, which would lead him from virtue's path.The Duke of Anjou, that personification of inconstancy, is, Sidney tells the queen, 'carried away with every wind of hope'; so, in pursuit of the disguised Pyrocles, is Basilius, 'whose small sails the least wind did fill'; so, in the New Arcadia, is King Antiphilus, that 'weak fool', 'neither hoping nor fearing as he should', who is 'swayed...as every wind of passions puffed him', 'like a bladder swelled ready to break while it was full of the wind of prosperity'.

The Arcadia advises us that it is foolish, even wicked, to 'buil[d]...hopes on haps', to 'build...upon hope'. We saw that Sidney, with his party, wants the queen to 'build' upon virtue, for what is firmly 'built' will 'stand'. Wind, which blows impotently round the edifices of virtue, sweeps those of fortune away. Philanax explains to Basilius, and Sidney explains to Elizabeth, the strength of those who 'stand upon ' virtue: Musidorus, thralled to fortune, is reminded by Pamela of the frailty of persons who 'stand upon chance'.(p.138-9)

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Wind, which blows impotently round the edifices of virtue, sweeps those of fortune away.


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Publique Ill Example: 

Oxford appears UNNAMED as Sidney’s intemperate and insubstantial ADVERSARY in Greville’s _A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney_(originally published as _Life of Sidney_)


 Fulke Greville clearly identifies Oxford as a follower of fortune. For Greville, Oxford is the 'personification of inconstancy' in the same way that Sidney regarded Anjou. Significantly, Oxford remains unnamed in Greville's account, which is part of a program of erasing the names of the unworthy from history. As the mighty opposite to the godly Sidney, Oxford was largely excluded from the militant Protestant domain of virtue, and therefore it was necessary that this man of pride and inconstancy be 'swept aside'.


In his account, Greville stages the quarrel as Sidney's  active resistance to the 'tyranny' and wrongs inflicted upon him by Oxford. This is consistent with Sidney's familiarity with continental Protestant resistance theorists such as Languet and Du-Plessis-Mornay and demonstrates Sidney embodiment of their values. Sidney would be an advisor to his Prince (Elizabeth), but he also demonstrates right action and his virtuous mind by resisting the self-loving humours of the 'tyrant' Oxford. 

Greville writes:

'Tyrants allow of no scope, stamp, or standard, but their own WILL.'

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Greville, _A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney_

...And in this freedome of heart [Sidney] being one day at Tennis, a Peer of this Realm, born great, greater by alliance, and superlative in the Princes favour, abruptly came into the Tennis- Court; and speaking out of these three paramount authorities, he forgot to entreat that, which he could not legally command. When by the encounter of a steady object, finding unrespectiveness in himself (though a great Lord) not respected by this Princely spirit, he grew to expostulate more ROUGHLY. The returns of which stile comming still from an understanding heart, that knew what was due to it self, and what it ought to others, seemed (through the MISTS of my Lords PASSIONS, SWOLN with the WINDE of his FACTION then reigning) to provoke in yeelding. Whereby, the lesse amazement, or confusion of thoughts he stirred up in Sir Philip, the more SHADOWES this great Lords own mind was POSSESSED with: till at last with RAGE (which is ever ILL-DISCIPLINED) he commands them to depart the Court. To this Sir Philip temperately answers; that if his Lordship had been pleased to express desire in milder Characters, perchance he might have led out those, that he should now find would not be driven out with any scourge of FURY. This answer (like a BELLOWS) blowing up the sparks of EXCESS already kindled, made my Lord scornfully call Sir Philip by the name of Puppy. In which progress of HEAT, as the TEMPEST grew more and more vehement within, so did their hearts breath out their perturbations in a more loud and shrill accent. The French Commissioners unfortunately had that day audience, in those private Galleries, whose windows looked into the Tennis-Court. They instantly drew all to this tumult: every sort of quarrels sorting well with their humors, especially this. Which Sir Philip perceiving, and rising with inward strength, by the prospect of a mighty faction against him; asked my Lord, with a loud voice, that which he heard clearly enough before. Who ( LIKE AN ECHO, that still multiplies by REFLEXIONS) repeated this Epithet of Puppy the second time. Sir Philip resolving in one answer to conclude both the attentive hearers, and PASSIONATE ACTOR, gave my Lord a Lie, impossible (as he averred) to be retorted; in respect all the world knows, Puppies are gotten by Dogs, and Children by men. Hereupon those GLORIOUS INEQUALITIES of FORTUNE in his Lordship were put to a kinde of pause, by a PRECIOUS INEQUALITY OF NATURE in this Gentleman. So that they both stood silent a while, like a dumb shew in a tragedy; till Sir Philip sensible of his own wrong, the forrain, and factious spirits that attended; and yet, even in this question between him, and his superior, tender to his Countries honour; with some words of sharp accent, led the way abruptly out of the Tennis-Court; as if so unexpected an accident were not fit to be decided any farther in that place. Whereof the great Lord making another sense, continues his play, WITHOUT any ADVANTAGE of REPUTATION; as by the standard of humours in those times it was conceived.


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In his account of the Tennis court quarrel in his _ Life of Sidney_, Greville not only features Oxford as a 'tyrannical',  unworthy foil to the glittering virtues of Sidney; he also painstakingly details (justifies?) the reasons why Oxford's name and fame were deserving of oblivion. As the hereditary Recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon, he was perfectly placed to  participate in the ignominious backwater fame of the scurra 'Shakespeare'. Jonson assisted by providing the ambisinister Droeshout figure (incapable of 'correct' writing) and further deconstructed Oxford's literary fame with a mock encomium to 'Shakespeare' formed from a cloud of insubstantial, windy metaphors. Jonson's breathless departure from his normal character in the FF is intended to be a form of poetic justice - Nemesis/Jonson imitates Shakespeare's forma and figura thereby blowing Oxford up (presumably with his own piffle).

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Vanity/Trifles/Empty Mould:


Wind, which blows impotently round the edifices of virtue, sweeps those of fortune away.


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Sidney's worthy immortality 'stands' as an edifice of militant Protestant virtue. Oxford was swept away (or at best, immortalized with a fart).


"Who worship Fame, commit Idolatry,

"Make Men their God, Fortune and Time their worth,

"Forme, but reforme not, meer hypocrisie,

"By shadowes, onely shadowes bringing forth,

"Which must, as blossomes, fade ere true fruit springs,

"(Like voice, and eccho) ioyn'd; yet diuers things. -- Greville


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Greville, _Dedication_:



...Neither am I (for my part) so much in love with this life, nor believe so little in a better to come, as to complain of God for taking him [Sidney], and such like exorbitant worthyness from us: fit (as it were by an Ostracisme) to be divided, and not incorporated with our corruptions: yet for the sincere affection I bear to my Prince, and Country, my prayer to God is, that this Worth, and Way may not fatally be buried with him; in respect, that both before his time, and since, experience hath published the usuall discipline of greatnes to have been tender of it self onely; making HONOUR a triumph, or rather TROPHY OF DESIRE, set up in the eyes of Mankind, either to be worshiped as IDOLS, or else as Rebels to perish under her glorious oppressions. *Notwithstanding, when the pride of flesh, and power of favour shall cease in these by death, or disgrace; what then hath time to register, or fame to publish in these great mens names, that will not be offensive, or infectious to others? What Pen without blotting can write the story of their deeds? Or what Herald blaze their Arms without a blemish? And as for their counsels and projects, when they come once to light, shall they not live as noysome, and loathsomely above ground, as their Authors carkasses lie in the grave? So as the return of such greatnes to the world, and themselves, can be but private reproach, publique ill example, and a fatall scorn to the Government they live in. Sir Philip Sidney is none of this number; for the greatness which he affected was built upon true Worth; esteeming Fame more than Riches, and Noble actions far above Nobility it self.


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Trophy of Desire - Oxford Will/Desire


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Greville's 'Tomb':



FOLK GREVILL

SERVANT to Queene Elizabeth

Conceller to King James

Frend to Sir Philip Sidney.

TROPHAEUM PECCATI


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Rewards of Earth



REWARDS of earth, Nobility and Fame,

To senses glory and to conscience woe,

How little be you for so great a name?

Yet less is he with men what thinks you so.

For earthly power, that stands by fleshly wit,

Hath banished that truth which should govern it.


Nobility, power's golden fetter is,

Wherewith wise kings subjection do adorn,

To make man think her heavy yoke a bliss

Because it makes him more than he was born.

Yet still a slave, dimm'd by mists of a crown,

Let he should see what riseth, what pulls down.


Fame, that is but good words of evil deeds,

Begotten by the harm we have, or do,

Greatest far off, least ever where it breeds,

We both with dangers and disquiet woo;

And in our flesh, the vanities' false glass,

*We thus deceiv'd adore these calves of brass*.


Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke


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From The Oxford Handbook of Milton

Milton's 'manly' self-regulation:

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"'Haec ego mente' denounces the elegies, composed at Cambridge in 1626-9, as 'trifling memorials of my levity, which, with a warped mind and base spirit, I once raised.' "Seduced by the superficial attractions of such verse at Cambridge, Milton assures his readers that now 'my heart is frozen solid, packed around with thick ice'.

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Trifling Memorials of Levity - see To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare 

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Asa D. Olson

The Form of Selfhood: elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England (Dissertation 2018)


Introduction: A Worthless Genre 

Haec ego mente olim laeva, studioque supino, Nequitiae posui vana trophaea meae. 

These trifles are the empty monuments of my idleness that I set down, at one time, with silly reason and negligent fire. —John Milton’s Epigraph to his Elegiarum Liber, ll. 1-2 


The lines above conclude John Milton’s book of elegies as they are published in his 1645 Poems. Whether this epigraph’s opening lines refer to only the preceding poem (“Elegia Septima”) or the entire collection is a topic of contention; however, the reference to Milton’s subject of his nequitia stands out for several reasons. Milton uses the word with some contempt and is actually asserting his dutiful reformation of morals since his youth, but the word is one that the Roman love elegists Propertius and Ovid embrace in their own collections. In the opening poem of his second book of Amores, for example, Ovid declares himself to be “nequitiae Naso poeta meae,” “Naso, the poet of my wantonness” (Amores 2.1.2). Propertius likewise uses the word in his poem to Tullus, who invites him along on a journey for glory through arms (Prop. 1.6). Propertius rejects the honorable path for love, requesting from Tullus: “me sine, quem semper voluit fortuna iacere, / huic animam extremam reddere nequitiae,” “Give leave to me, whom fortune has always desired to lie in ruins, to surrender my dying breath to this worthlessness” (1.6.25-26). Even in the 9 extant lines of Gallus, the earliest of the Roman elegists, we find the word, seemingly attributed to his beloved Lycoris.  Nequitiae, in its prominence, is intricately entangled with the definition of elegy. It denotes, as my translations so far have shown, a variety of meanings, including idleness, wantonness, and worthlessness. It can reflect the elegists’ embrace of otium (idle leisure) over officium (duty), their preference for love over anything else, and their apathy toward modern values. Indeed, “value” is what is at stake in these examples, which declare the genre’s worthlessness and request that the reader decide whether these poems do indeed have any value. In Roman elegy, one frequent topos in which the question of “worth” is raised is the recusatio or the refusal to write in a higher genre, especially epic. Prop. 1.6, for example, engages with this issue when contrasting the soldier with the lover. This contrast between the soldier and lover is no far cry from the contrast of the poet of war and the poet of love, the subject of the subsequent elegy, Prop. 1.7. The idea in such poems is that the epic poet justifies his literary activity by performing some act of civic duty by writing about politics or history, especially in early imperial Rome when epic material had much to do with issues of nationhood and sovereignty. To some extent, the epic poet could be seen as engaging in a form of civic officium or at least otium negotiosum (a busy, justified sort of leisure). In elegiac recusationes, however, the poet usually rejects a request or opportunity to compose epic in order to continue writing elegies and pursuing love, whose subject (especially in contrast with epic) appears to be rather trivial. This contention between epic and elegiac utility is the subject of the first chapter of this dissertation, where I suggest a reason for the polemic’s prominence; however, this contention exists today too in literary scholarship. With all our attempts to disrupt notions of generic hierarchy and concepts of the canon, epic still maintains that privilege over elegy, and in studies of classical reception—the appropriation and 3 adaptation of ancient Greek and Roman texts—scholars still favor the politics of epic over all that elegy offers, at least as it pertains to early modern England.

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Steven May,_ The Elizabethan Courtier Poets_


The New Lyricism



During the 1570's a body of courtier verse emerged that revived the emphasis upon love poetry as it had been introduced to the Tudor court by Wyatt and Surrey. Upon this revitalized foundation, amorous courtier poetics developed without interruption to the end of the reign and beyond. Unlike courtier verse of the 1560's, the new lyricism modeled itself primarily upon post-classical continental authors, from Petrarch to the Pl?iade. Attention to the classics remained strong, of course, but the ancients were assimilated into the new poetics almost exclusively in the vernacular. The courtier's immediate experience is often reflected in this poetry, although the exact circumstances behind it cannot always be identified, nor does this later work necessarily grow out of actual experience. From a literary standpoint this is perhaps the most important shift away from the trends of the 1560's. Subsequent courtier verse placed a greater emphasis upon artifice in its treatment of occasional subjects, while it increasingly strayed away from real events as the most respectable inducements for writing poetry. The movement was toward fiction and the creation of poems to be valued for their own sake, not merely for their commemorative function. As courtier poets ventured anew into the realms of fiction, they made possible once again the creation of a genuine literature of the court. Progress toward a golden age of lyricism was slow, especially with regard to form and the technical aspects of composition, but the shift in direction occurred suddenly during the period between roughly 1570 and 1575.


Although Dyer has been considered the premier Elizabethan courtier poet, that is, the first to compose love lyrics there, the available evidence confers this distinction upon the earl of Oxford. His early datable work conforms, nevertheless, to one of the established functions for poetry practiced by Ascham and Wilson. IN 1572, Oxford turned out commendatory verses for a translation of Cardano's _Comfort_, published in 1573 by his gentleman pensioner friend, Thomas Bedingfield. This poem differs from earlier efforts of the kind not so much because it appeared in English (as had Ascham's verses for Blundeville's book), but because his verses are so self-consciously poetic. The earl uses twenty-six lines to develop his formulaic exempla: Bedingfield's good efforts are enjoyed by others just as laborers, masons, bees, and so forth also work for the profit of others. Oxford flaunts a COPIOUS rhetoric in this poem in contrast with the more direct, unembellished commendatory verses of his predecessors. His greatest innovation, however, lies in his application of the same qualities of style to the eight poems assigned to him in the 1576 Paradise of Dainty Devices, pieces that Oxford must have composed before 1575.


DeVere's eight poems in the _Paradise_ create a dramatic break with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court at that time...The diversity of Oxford's subjects, including his varied analyses of the lover's state, were practically as unknown to contemporary out-of -court writer as they were to courtiers.


Oxford's birth and social standing at court in the 1570's made him a model of aristocratic behaviour. He was, for instance, accused of introducing Italian gloves and other such fripperies at court; his example would have lent respectability even to so trivial a pursuit as the writing of love poetry. Thus, while it is possible that Dyer was writing poetry as early as the 1560's, his earliest datable verse, the complaint sung to the queen at Woodstock in 1575, may itself have been inspired by Oxford's work in the same vein. Dyer's first six poems in Part II are the ones he is most likely to have composed before his association with Philip Sidney. ...Yet even if all six (of Dyer's poems) were written by 1575, Oxford would still emerge as the chief innovator due to the range of his subject matter and the variety of its execution. ...By contrast, Dyer was a specialist...Dyer's output represents a great departure from courtier verse of the 1560's, and several of his poems were more widely circulated and imitated than any of Oxford's; still, the latter's experimentation provided a much broader foundation for the development of lyric poetry at court. (pp. 52-54)

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Bolton, Hypercritica

Among the greatest wants in our ancient Authours, are the wants of Art and Style, which as they add to the lustre of the Works and Delights of the Reader; yet add they nothing to the Truth; which they so esteemed, as they seem to have regarded nothing else. *For without Truth, Art and Style come into the Nature of Crimes by Imposture*. It is an act of high Wisdom, and not of Eloquence only, to write the History of so great, and noble a People as the English. for the Causes of things are not only wonderfully wrapt one within the other, but place oftentimes far above the ordinary Reach's of human Wit; and he who relates Events, without their Premisses and Circumstances, deserves not the name of an Historian; as being like to him who numbers the Bones of a Man anatomized, or presenteth unto us the Bare Skeleton, without declaring the Nature of the Fabrick or teaching the Use of Parts. (Bolton, Hypercritica)


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Judging Spectators

Peter Carlson

“It was well noted by the late L. St. Alban, that the study of words is the first distempter of Learning’, Vaine matter the second: And a third distemper is deceit, or the likenesse of truth: Imposture held up by credulity. All these are the Cobwebs of learning, and to let them grow in us, is either sluttish or foolish.” (Jonson, Discoveries)

In Bacon’s catalogue, Jonson sees and confirms his own distrust of linguistic masks. “Imposture held up by credulity” – which could serve as an abstract for the action of any of his plays – describes the process of mistaking a fiction for a reality” it is seeing what we wish to see rather than analyzing and judging. “imposture,” for Jonson, is the vice of theatricality, but if we can temporarily neutralize the negative thrust he has introduced, ‘Bacon’s phrase might describe the terms under which we enter any theater, that is, a willing suspension of disbelief. Jonson’s suspicion, then, extends to the most basic premises of his medium, and the inner antagonism generated by this doubt can dind release only in the continual and self-contradictory dialectic of self-justification and self- revelation; “hee is call’s a Poet…that fayneth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the truth. For, the Fable and Fiction is (as it were) the forme and Soule of any Poeticall worke, or Poeme”; but “nothing is lasting that is fain’d, it will have another face then it had ere long: As Euripides saith, No lye ever growes old.”


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English translation of Bolton's salute to Jonson in Volpone:

To Each University, Concerning Benjamin Jonson.


This man is the first, who studying Greek antiquities and the monuments of Latin theatre as an explorer, by his happy boldness will provide the Britons with a learned drama: O twin stars favour his great undertakings. The ancients were content with praise of either [genre]; this Sun of the Stage handles the cothurnus [i.e. tragedy] and the sock [i.e. comedy] with equal skill: Volpone, thou givest us jokes; thou, Sejanus, gavest us tears. But is any lament that Jonson's muses have been cramped within a narrow limit, say, you [universities], on the contrary: 'O most miserable [people], who, though English, know the english language inadequately or know it not at all (as if [you were] born across the sea), the poet will grow with time, he will transform his native land, and himself become the English Apollo.' 

E. Bolton

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Tyrants allow of no scope, stamp, or standard, but their own WILL (Greville):


Infected Will:

Sidney - Neither let it be deemed too bold a comparison to balance the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honor to the heavenly maker of that maker, who having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the work of that second nature, which in nothing he shows so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he brings things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam, since our erected wit makes us know what perfection is, but our infected will keeps us from reaching unto it.

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Infected Will - Shakespeare Sonnet 154:


The little Love-god lying once asleep,


Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,

Whilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep

Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand

The fairest votary took up that fire

Which many legions of true hearts had warmed;

And so the General of hot desire

Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed.

This brand she quenched in a cool well by,

Which from Love's fire took heat perpetual,

Growing a bath and healthful remedy,

For men diseased; but I, my mistress' thrall,

Came there for cure and this by that I prove,

Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.


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SONNET LXXVIII. -- Greville

THe little Hearts, where light-wing'd PASSION raignes,

More easily vpward, as all frailties doe;

Like Strawes to Ieat, these follow Princes veines,

And so, by pleasing, doe corrupt them too.

Whence as their raising proues Kings can create;

So States proue sicke, where toyes beare Staple-rates.


Like Atomi they neither rest, nor stand,

Nor can erect; because they NOTHING be

But baby-thoughts, fed with time-presents hand,

Slaues, and yet darlings of Authority;

ECCHO'S of wrong; SHADOWES of Princes might;

Which glow-worme-like, by shining, show 'tis night.


Curious of fame, as foule is to be faire;

Caring to seeme that which they would not be;

Wherein CHANCE helpes, since Praise is powers heyre,

Honor the creature of Authoritie:

So as borne high, in giddie Orbes of grace,

These Pictures are, which are indeed but Place.


And as the Bird in hand, with freedome lost,

Serues for a stale, his fellowes to betray:

So doe these Darlings rays'd at Princes cost

Tempt man to throw his libertie away;

And sacrifice Law, Church, all reall things

To soare, not in his owne, but Eagles wings.


Whereby, like AEsops dogge, men lose their meat,

To bite at GLORIOUS SHADOWES, which they see;

And let fall those strengths which make all States great

By free Truths chang'd to seruile flatterie.

Whence, while men gaze vpon this blazing starre,

Made slaues, not subiects, they to Tyrants are.

Monday, January 1, 2024

The Lineaments of the Droeshout Engraving

 Imitating Authors, Colin Burrow


The word forma [...] has a complex history. It appears in its earliest usages to have meant something like ‘mould’; hence it shares its genealogy in part with the Greek word tupos, as a term for a shape which can give rise to multiple instances of the same shape, and which gives rise in due course to our use of the term ‘type-faces’ to describe the mechanical reproduction of texts. But in Melanchthon’s usage it takes on some of the senses which we would now include within the word ‘form’ when it is used of a text. Given Melanchthon’s  preoccupation with the structuring of discourse, it is likely that he principally means by forma Cicero’s habitual methods of collocation, Cicero’s way of putting things together, or the structuring principles which underlie Cicero’s writing. (p.214).

(snip)

The association between the ‘form’ of a writer’s speech and his rhetorical ‘character’ is given a further tweak in Melanchthon’s later work. His final major statement about imitation came in a commentary on Quintilian. This was not published until 1570, a decade after his death. In the Commonefactio de imitatione appended to that commentary Melanchthon states that the imitator should hold an ‘Idea’ of Cicero in their mind (“Then the Idea of a certain pure and ancient orator will surround our soul, from which we should not depart far, even if we cannot straight away *express the lineaments* of one particular example’; [snip latin text]. This again recalls the Platonism of Cicero’s Orator (2.7-10), AND BY USING THE VERB ‘EXPRIMERE’, EXPRESS, PRINT OUT, Melanchthon suggests that the aim of imitation is to actualize the impress of a Platonic forma. By using that work ‘lineamenta’ – outlines, characterizing lines of a face – he may display his continuing debt to Pico’s letter to Bembo.

     Melanchthon elsewhere claims that an ‘idea’ derives from an act of intellection in which elements are taken from a range of instances, rather than being an abstraction which subsists in a supra-sensible world outside the mind. [...] The ‘idea’ of an orator is consequently in effect an abstract pattern of a rhetorician’s practice which is derived from observation of that practice. It is a mental conception of an orator as a particular way of ordering material, which can in turn be ‘expressed’ by another orator; and when positioned within Melanchthon’s earlier writing on imitatio it suggest that he came close to identifying forma with collocatio, or an author’s habitual practices of disposition and structure. (p. 216-217)

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Jonson, Every Man In:

Come,

wrong not the quality of your desert, with looking

downward, Couz; but hold up your Head, so: and

let the IDEA of what you are, be portray'd i' your Face, 

that Men may read i' your Physnomy, (Here, within

this place is to be seen the true, rare, and accomplish'd Mon-

ster, or miracle of Nature, which is all one.) What

think you of this, Couz?

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Imitating Authors, Colin Burrow

The passage at the very start of Book 10 of the Institutes in which Quintilian talks about the hexis, the habitual practices, of an earlier orator (a passage which had been missing from Petrarch’s manuscript of Quintilian)consequently was vital to post-Erasmian thinking about imitation in Northern Europe. In seeking to replicate the practice of an earlier author an imitator might also refine and express the *idea* of him which had been extrapolated from his practice, of which the dominant characteristic is his *forma*, the structure of his style at all levels, from the arrangement of the speech right down to the individual *kola* that make up his writing and his sequencing of rhetorical figures. Cicero has a particular way of putting things together, a kind of collocatio and, at a higher level, a particular kind of *cohaerentia* which gives rise to a particular kind of form – a ‘form’ which can be both abstracted from the works and imitated by a student who laboured to acquire a hexis analogous to that of Cicero. (p.217)

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A Speech according to Horace. --Jonson

(snip)

And could (if our great Men would let their Sons

Come to their Schools,) show 'em the use of Guns.

And there instruct the noble English Heirs

In Politick, and Militar Affairs;

But he that should perswade, to have this done

For Education of our Lordings; Soon

Should he hear of Billow, Wind, and Storm,

From the Tempestuous Grandlings, who'll inform

Us, in our bearing, that are thus, and thus,

Born, bred, allied? what's he dare tutor us?

Are we by Book-worms to be aw'd? must we

Live by their Scale, that dare do nothing free?

Why are we Rich, or Great, except to show

All licence in our Lives? What need we know?

More then to praise a Dog? or Horse? or speak

The Hawking Language? or our Day to break

With Citizens? let Clowns, and Tradesmen breed

Their Sons to study Arts, the Laws, the Creed:

We will believe like Men of our own Rank,

In so much Land a year, or such a Bank,

That turns us so much Monies, at which rate

Our Ancestors impos'd on Prince and State.

Let poor Nobility be vertuous: We,

Descended in a Rope of Titles, be

From Guy, or Bevis, Arthur, or from whom

The Herald will. Our Blood is now become,

Past any need of Vertue. Let them care,

That in the Cradle of their Gentry are;

To serve the State by Councels, and by Arms:

We neither love the Troubles, nor the harms.

What love you then? your Whore? what study? Gate,

Carriage, and Dressing. There is up of late

The ACADEMY, where the Gallants meet ——

What to make Legs? yes, and to smell most sweet,

All that they do at Plays. O, but first here

They learn and study; and then practise there.

But why are all these Irons i' the Fire

Of several makings? helps, helps, t' attire

His Lordship. That is for his Band, his Hair

This, and that Box his Beauty to repair;

This other for his Eye-brows; hence, away,

I may no longer on these PICTURES stay,

These Carkasses of Honour; Taylors blocks,

Cover'd with Tissue, whose prosperity mocks

The fate of things: whilst totter'd Vertue holds

Her broken Arms up, to their **EMPTY MOULDS**.

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Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels

Mercury: He that is with him is Amorphus

a Traveller, one so made out of the mixture and shreds

of forms, that himself is truly deform'd. 

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Jonson, Discoveries

In every action it behoves the poet to know which is the utmost bound, how far with fitness, and a necessary proportion, he may produce, and determine it...For, *as a body without proportion cannot be goodly*, no more can the action, either the comedy, or tragedy, without its fit bounds. 

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Jonson, Discoveries

DE SHAKESPEARE NOSTRAT[I].—I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand;” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their *ignorance* who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most *faulted*; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. “Sufflaminandus erat,” as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power: would the *RULE* of it had been so too.  


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De corruptela morum -- There cannot be one colour of the MIND; another of the wit. If the mind be staid, grave, and composed, the wit is so; that vitiated, the other is blown, and deflowered. Do we not see, if the mind languish, the members are dull? Look upon an effeminate person: his very gait confesseth him. If a man be fiery, his motion is so; if angry, 'tis troubled, and violent. So that we may conclude wheresoever manners, and fashions are corrupted, language is. It imitates the public riot. The EXCESS of feasts, and apparel, are the notes of a sick state; and the wantonness of language, of a sick MIND.


(Discoveries 1171) Jonson 


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Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England - Jenny C. Mann

...Although early English rhetorics use the ideal of a "common" English eloquence to dedicate their own productions in service of national unity, these critiques mobilize social division in order to disparage rhetoric as the province of the uneducated and effeminate.

Yet despite their confident repudiation of rhetorical ornament, these statements against figurative language nevertheless evince a worried tone. That is because the devices of rhetoric can so easily captivate the attention of those whom Eachard describes as "the common sort of people"; such "Metaphor-mongers" are easily mesmerized by speeches "bespangled" with "Glitterings". For advocates of the new experimental philosophy, this alluring rhetorical ornament threatens to turn all philosophy into mere romance. Parker outlines such an argument in a attack on the Cambridge Platonists, speaking in his other guise as a natural philosopher:

My next Accusation is, that instead of pure and genuine Reason, they abound so much with gaudy and extravagant Phancies. I that am too simple or too serious to be cajol'd with the frenzies of a bold and ungovern'd Imagination cannot be perswaded to think the Quaintest plays and sportings of wit to be any true and real knowledge. I can easily allow their Discourses the Title of Philosophical Romances, (a sort of more ingenious impertinencies) and 'tis with this estimate I would have them read: But when they pretend to be Nature's Secretaries...and yet put us off with nothing but rampant Metaphors, and Pompous Allegories, and other splended but empty Schemes of speech, I must crave leave to account them (to say not worse ) Poets and Romancers. True Philosophie is too sober to descend to these wildnesses of Imagination, and too Rational to be cheated by them. She scorns, when she is in chase of Truth, to quarry upon trifling gaudy Phantasms: Her Game is *things not words*.

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Jonson, Cynthia's Revels

P R O L O G U E.

IF gracious silence, sweet attention,

Quick sight, and quicker apprehension,

(The lights of Judgments throne) shine any where;

Our doubtful Author hopes this is their Sphere.

And therefore opens he himself to those;

To other weaker Beams his labours close:

As loth to prostitute their Virgin strain,

To ev'ry vulgar and adult'rate Brain,

In this alone, his Muse her sweetness hath,

She shuns the print of any beaten PATH;

And proves new ways to come to learned Ears:

Pied ignorance she neither loves nor, fears.

Nor hunts she after popular Applause,

Or fomy praise, that drops from common Jaws:

The Garland that she wears, their bands must twine,

Who can both censure, understand, define

What merit is: Then cast those piercing Rays,

Round as a Crown, instead of honour'd Bays,

About his Poesie; which (he knows) affords

Words, above action: MATTER, ABOVE WORDS. 


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Jonson, Discoveries

Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. *No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech*. Nay, it is likened to a man; and as we consider *feature and composition* in a man, so words in language; in the greatness, aptness, sound structure, and harmony of it. ”

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Jonson, Discoveries


De Poetica. - We have spoken sufficiently of oratory, let us now make a diversion to poetry. Poetry, in the primogeniture, had many PECCANT HUMOURS, and is made to have more now, through the levity and inconstancy of men' s judgments. Whereas, indeed, it is the most prevailing eloquence, and of the most exalted caract. Now the discredits and disgraces are many it hath received through men' s study of depravation or calumny; their practice being to give it diminution of credit, by lessening the professor' s estimation, and making THE AGE afraid of their liberty; and THE AGE is grown so tender of her fame, as she calls all writings aspersions.


That is the state word, the PHRASE OF COURT (placentia college), which some call PARASITES PLACE, the INN OF IGNORANCE.


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Disarticulating Fantasies: Figures of Speech, Vices, and the Blazon in Renaissance English Rhetoric

Grant Williams

 ...In his section on ornament, Puttenham suggests the process by which figures permit the subject to gain an illusory ascendancy over the self: they equip the writer or speaker with the means to burnish and fashion his language into a “style” (119), which amounts to nothing less than “the image of man [mentus character] for man is but his mind” (124). This argument about style being the image of the speaker/writer is a popular topos in Renaissance writing and finds its most lucid expression in Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries, a text, like Puttenham’s, which conjoins rhetoric with poetry. Quoting in the margin Vives’s terse expression “Oratio imago animi,” that is, “speech is the image of the soul,” Jonson asserts,

No glasse renders a mans forme or likeness, so true as his speech. Nay, it is likened to a man: and as we consider feature, and composition in a man; so words in Language: in the greatness, aptnesse, sound, structure, and HARMONY of it. (78)

The implications of this Renaissance topos are obvious: since style is the self, the instruments for shaping, controlling and beautifying that style – the figures – empower the individual to fashion his own identity.


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Jonson – on the Droeshout Engraving FF


To the Reader.

This Figure, that thou here seest put,

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,

Wherein the Graver had a strife

with Nature, to out-doo the life :

O, could he but have drawne his wit

As well in brasse, as he hath hit

His face ; the Print would then surpasse

All, that was ever writ in brasse.

But, since he cannot, Reader, looke

Not on his Picture, but his Booke.


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Intro Cynthia’s Revels, Ben Jonson


"Beware then thou render Mens

FIGURES truly, and teach them no less to hate their Deformities, than

to love their Forms: For, to Grace, there should come Reverence; and

no Man can call that Lovely, which is not also Venerable. (Ben Jonson, _Cynthia's Revels_) 


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Out of joint Figure:


Notes to Horace, Art of Poetry:


The word PRODIGIALITER apparently refers to that fictitious monster, under which the poet allusively shadows out the idea of absurd and inconsistent composition. The application, however, differs in this, that, whereas the monster, there painted, was intended to expose the extravagance of putting together incongruous parts, without any reference to a whole, this prodigy is designed to characterize a whole, but deformed by the ill-judged position of its parts. The former is like a monster, whose several members as of right belonging to different animals, could by no disposition be made to constitute one consistent animal. The other, like a landscape which hath no objects absolutely irrelative, or irreducible to a whole, but which a wrong position of the parts only renders prodigious. Send the boar to the woods, and the dolphin to the waves; and the painter might show them both on the same canvas.

Each is a violation of the law of unity, and a real monster: the one, because it contains an assemblage of natural incoherent parts; the other, because its parts, though in themselves coherent, are misplaced and disjointed.


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Greville, An Inquisition vpon Fame and Honour.


Who worship Fame, commit Idolatry,

Make Men their God, Fortune and Time their worth,

Forme, but reforme not, meer hypocrisie,

By shadowes, onely shadowes bringing forth,

Which must, as blossomes, fade ere true fruit springs,

(Like voice, and eccho) ioyn'd; yet diuers things.


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The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Richard Halpern


Looking back somewhat sourly on the culture of the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon wrote that it was marked by


An affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the Phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement…Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning…In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight.


What concerns Bacon here is not an imbalance within literary style but the proliferation of stylistic elegance throughout all of serious discourse. Paradoxically, the very autonomy of style allows it to colonize and dominate all other discursive functions; and as if to illustrate this peril, Bacon’s own language falls temporarily under the spell of style, succumbing to a delight in the “round and clear composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses.” This sudden access of eloquence is not a return of the repressed, however, but a witty tribute to the lures of a humanist tradition from which Bacon only halfheartedly tried to extricate himself.

     In assailing what one critic has called the “stylistic explosion” [Richard Lanham] of the sixteenth century, Bacon questions the values of the English literary Renaissance itself. Ciceronianism was only one small part of this movement, but more than any other it came to represent a mysterious addiction to style. Gabriel Harvey famously described his own bout with Ciceronianism in the confessional manner of a recovering alcoholic:


…..I valued words more than content, language more than thought, the one art of speaking more than the thousand subjects of knowledge; I preferred the mere style of Marcus Tully to all the postulates of philosophers and mathematicians; I believed that the bone and sinew of imitation lay in my ability to choose as many brilliant and elegant words as possible to reduce them into order, and to connect them together in a rhythmical period.

(snip)


It is no accident…that Erasmus, who reorganized the teaching of Latin around the concept of style, also wrote the first modern book of manners. De civilitate morum puerilium (1530) taught children the codes of civil behaviour as a natural complement to the achievements of “lyberall science”; social manners and literary style thus cooperated to produce a subject “well fasshyoned in soule, in body, in gesture, and in apparayle.” The cultivation of a good Latin style now appears as part of a larger process of “fashioning” subjects – a process that submits not only language but also manners, dress, and comportment to ideal of “exactness and refinement.” If it is clear that stylistic pedagogy is a form of social discipline, it is equally certain that discipline is becoming stylized. For in defining civility as “outward honesty of the body” (externum…corporis decorum), Erasmus transforms a set of social behaviours into a bodily image. The “well-fashioned” or civil subject is an aesthetic ideal that expands the concept of “style” to cover the whole range of social bearing. To produce a civil subject is to produce a “style” – of manners, dress, and discourse. And social style, like the literary style that is now a part of it, is developed not through obedience to rules but through the mimetic assimilation of models. Thus De civilitate supplements a juridical approach to manners – the prescription and proscription of behaviours – with an imaginary logic. (snip) p32



Wednesday, December 27, 2023

The Oxfordian Sublime and Silver Latin Poetry

 The Ovidian Sublime. Antiquity and After

Philip Hardie

Ovid gets just four index entries in James I. Porter’s monumental book on The sublime in antiquity. That, one might think, is not very surprising. ‘Ovidian’ and ‘sublime’ are terms which do not often appear in the same sentence. Nor is a positively valued sublimity one of the features which has been much enlisted in the rehabilitation, over the last half century, of Ovid as one of the greatest of Roman poets. The chief exception to this relative lack of interest in the Ovidian sublime has been the Phaethon episode in the Metamorphoses, on which more below.

To provide some contexts: Porter’s 2016 book is a massive manifestation of something that has been going on for some time, the diagnosis of sublimity in a range of Greek and Roman texts outside of pseudo-Longinus. More particularly, in the field of Latin poetry, sublimity is a quality or effect for which recent studies have looked to Lucretius, Virgil, Manilius, Lucan, Statius, and Silius Italicus, if rarely to Ovid. Yet that list of Latin hexameter poets is marked by the glaring absence of the name of Ovid, who, in other ways, is inextricably woven in to the development of the Latin hexameter tradition, from Republic to Empire.

      To use the terminology of the now outdated ages of metal scheme, the _Metamorphoses_ has often been seen as a late work of ‘Golden’ Latin poetry that anticipates, and is the model for, features of ‘Silver’ Latin poetry, in the matter of such things as rhetoric, spectacularity, descriptions of extreme violence, hyperbole, and paradox. A number of these features are rather negative labels for what, viewed in a more positive light, could be seen as sources of the sublime. For example, pseudo-Longinus takes hyperbole as productive of the sublime (9.5, 38), although a hyperbole taken too far can fall into the opposite of sublimity. One of the signs of Ovid’s interest in the sublime, and, I would suggest, his interest in an already well-developed literary-critical discourse on the sublime, is precisely his testing of the boundary between the sublime and the ridiculous, between hupsos and bathos, in the sense given to the latter word by Alexander Pope, in Peri Bathous, or the art of sinking in poetry (1727). The best analysis of Ovid’s knowing embrace of the puerility with which he is charged by later critics, in contexts that seem to demand a sustained grandeur, is Llewelyn Morgan’s article on ‘Child’s play: Ovid and his critics’. ‘Grandeur’ is a word used on several occasions by Morgan, in discussion of the younger Seneca’s charge that in his description of the Flood, Ovid reduces the magnitudo rei to pueriles ineptiae (NQ 3.27.13-15), but the words ‘sublime’ and ‘sublimity’ do not appear in his article. Nor does the name of Longinus, who comments that (Subl. 3.4) ‘while tumidity seeks to outdo the sublime, puerility (τὸ μειρακιῶδες) is the exact opposite of grandeur.’ Longinus observes of Isocrates’ use of hyperbole that (38.2) he ‘fell into unaccountable puerility through his ambition to amplify everything’ (ὁ γοῦν Ἰσοκράτης οὐκ οἶδ᾿ ὅπως παιδὸς πρᾶγμα ἔπαθεν διὰ τὴν τοῦ πάντα αὐξητικῶς ἐθέλειν λέγειν φιλοτιμίαν).


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Greene, Groatsworth:

"...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." 

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John Soothern, Pandora:

(snip)

...Amongst our well renowned men 

*De Vere merits a silver pen 

Eternally to write his honour*[…] 

And it pleases me to saye too, 

(With a louange, I protest true) 

That in England we cannot see, 

Anything like De Vere, but he. 

Onelie himselfe he must resemble, 

Vertues so much in him assemble. 



Friday, December 22, 2023

Hubris and Jonson's Castigation of Oxford

 


Jonson thought of himself as performing Nemesis:


Psychology Spot – Accessed December 22 2023


The ancient Greeks thought that overly arrogant and haughty people were attacked by hýbris. In fact, the goddess Hybris personified insolence and lack of restraint. Hybris was believed to spend much of her time among mortals, so it was not uncommon for her to “infect” them with her *bad manners*.

The Greeks used the word hýbris to refer to excess, pride and arrogance, but not those that are born from an irrational and unbalanced impulse, but rather a conscious attempt to transgress the limits imposed by society and the gods. 

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Wikipedia:

Hybris (/ˈhaɪbrɪs/; Ancient Greek: Ὕβρις means 'hubris') was a spirit (daemon) of insolence, violence, and outrageous behaviour. In Roman mythology, the personification was Petulantia who reflected the Greek conception of hubris. 

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Jonson *imitated/assimilated* his 'Master' Shake-speare in FF encomium:

Jonson, To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare 

(snip)

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,

From thence to honour thee, I would not seek

For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,

Euripides and Sophocles to us;

Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,

To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,

And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,

Leave thee alone for the comparison

Of all that *insolent* Greece or *haughty* Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

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Patrick Cheney
English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime


     ...Sources of the sublime identified by Longinus appear in Hotspur’s speeches : ‘great thoughts’; inspired emotion’; heightened figuration; ‘noble diction’; and elevated word-arrangement’ (Longinus, On Sublimity 8.1: 149). Naturally, the actor of Shakespeare’s lines would perform the noble diction and elevated word-arrangement with inspired emotion, taking the character’s – the author’s – own cue: ‘Oh, the blood more stirs.’ Hotspur’s ‘elevated…figures of speech’, too, represent great thoughts, for, in his defence of ‘honor’, he imagines himself TRANSPORTED: his imagination travels across the horizontal coordinates of ‘east unto the west’, ‘north to south’, and up the vertical coordinate of the moon and down to the ocean-bottom – the ocean being, for Longinus, one of the principal images of the sublime. [full fathom five] Such transport is the premier trajectory that the sublime tracks. In his 1589 Art of English Poetry, George Puttenham calls ‘Metaphora’ the ‘figure of transport’, because the word ‘metaphor’ means to carry across, ‘a kind of wresting of a single word from his own right signification, to another not of natural. But yet of some affinity or convenience with it’ (Vickers). Sublime transport is the ultimate figuration, and Hotspur speaks it.
‘Imagination’ is the word Shakespeare uses in line 198, when the father says of the son, ‘Imagination of some great exploit/Drives him beyond the bounds of patience’. Unlike Guiderius in Cymbeline, the idea of a ‘great exploit’ does not lead Hotspur into action but, like Arviragus – yet dangerously – into ‘imagination’, which Northumberland contrasts with the rational principle of ‘patience’. ‘Beyond the bounds’ is as succinct a definition of the sublime as we might wish to find.

Ben Jonson, on Shakespeare (~Timber)

‘I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov’d the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d: Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius. *His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it* had beene so too. Many times hee fell into those things, could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him; Caesar, thou dost me wrong. Hee replyed: Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause: and such like; which were ridiculous. But hee redeemed his vices, with his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned.’[1] 

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(profluens - flowing forth - 'fountain of self-love in Cynthia's Revels').

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Nemesis, Wikipedia:

The word nemesis originally meant the distributor of fortune, neither good nor bad, simply in due proportion to each according to what was deserved. Later, Nemesis came to suggest the resentment caused by any disturbance of this right proportion, the sense of justice that could not allow it to pass unpunished.

(snip)

Narcissus
Nemesis enacted divine retribution on Narcissus for his VANITY. After he rejected the advances of the nymph Echo, Nemesis lured him to a pool where he caught sight of his own reflection and fell in love with it, eventually dying.[15]
[note – Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels or Narcissus and the Fountaine of Selfe-Love - Amorphus/Oxford]

She is portrayed as a winged goddess wielding a whip or a dagger.[citation needed] In early times the representations of Nemesis resembled Aphrodite, who sometimes bears the epithet Nemesis.[citation needed]
As the goddess of proportion and the avenger of crime, she has as attributes a measuring rod (tally stick), a bridle, scales, a sword, and a scourge, and she rides in a chariot drawn by griffins.
The poet Mesomedes wrote a hymn to Nemesis in the early second century AD, where he addressed her:
Nemesis, winged balancer of life, dark-faced goddess, daughter of Justice
and mentioned her "adamantine bridles" that restrain "the frivolous insolences of mortals".

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Shackerley Marmion, Jonsonus Virbius


...Never did so much strength, or such a spell

Of Art, and eloquence of papers dwell.
For whil'st he in colours, full and true,
Mens natures, fancies, and their humours drew
In method, order, matter, sence and grace,
Fitting each person to his time and place;
Knowing to move, to slacke, or to make haste,
Binding the middle with the first and last:
He fram'd all minds, and did all passions stirre,
And with a BRIDLE GUIDE the Theater. 

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Holding/Restraining/Ruling Shakespeare's Quill:

From To the Deceased Author of these Poems (William Cartwright)
by Jasper Mayne

...And as thy Wit was like a Spring, so all
The soft streams of it we may Chrystall call:
No cloud of Fancie, no mysterious stroke,
No Verse like those which antient Sybils spoke;
No Oracle of Language, to amaze
The Reader with a dark, or Midnight Phrase,
Stands in thy Writings, which are all pure Day,
A cleer, bright Sunchine, and the mist away.
That which Thou wrot'st was sense, and that sense good,
Things not first written, and then understood:

Or if sometimes thy Fancy soar'd so high
As to seem lost to the unlearned Eye,
'Twas but like generous Falcons, when high flown,
Which mount to make the Quarrey more their own.

For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee Ben Johnson still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)

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The Arrogance and Insolence of Oxford – Letter Hubert Languet to Sidney:



Publique Ill Example: Oxford appears UNNAMED as Sidney's proud and intemperate ADVERSARY in Greville’s _A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney_(originally published as _Life of Sidney_)



...And in this freedome of heart [Sidney] being one day at Tennis, a Peer of this Realm, born great, greater by alliance, and superlative in the Princes favour, abruptly came into the Tennis- Court; and speaking out of these three paramount authorities, he forgot to entreat that, which he could not legally command. When by the encounter of a steady object, finding unrespectiveness in himself (though a great Lord) not respected by this Princely spirit, he grew to expostulate more ROUGHLY. The returns of which stile comming still from an understanding heart, that knew what was due to it self, and what it ought to others, seemed (through the MISTS of my Lords PASSIONS, SWOLN with the WINDE of his FACTION then reigning) to provoke in yeelding. Whereby, the lesse amazement, or confusion of thoughts he stirred up in Sir Philip, the more SHADOWES this great Lords own mind was POSSESSED with: till at last with RAGE (which is ever ILL-DISCIPLINED) he commands them to depart the Court. To this Sir Philip temperately answers; that if his Lordship had been pleased to express desire in milder Characters, perchance he might have led out those, that he should now find would not be driven out with any scourge of FURY. This answer (like a BELLOWS) blowing up the sparks of EXCESS already kindled, made my Lord scornfully call Sir Philip by the name of Puppy. In which progress of HEAT, as the TEMPEST grew more and more vehement within, so did their hearts breath out their perturbations in a more loud and shrill accent. The French Commissioners unfortunately had that day audience, in those private Galleries, whose windows looked into the Tennis-Court. They instantly drew all to this tumult: every sort of quarrels sorting well with their humors, especially this. Which Sir Philip perceiving, and rising with inward strength, by the prospect of a mighty faction against him; asked my Lord, with a loud voice, that which he heard clearly enough before. Who ( LIKE AN ECHO, that still multiplies by REFLEXIONS) repeated this Epithet of Puppy the second time. Sir Philip resolving in one answer to conclude both the attentive hearers, and PASSIONATE ACTOR, gave my Lord a Lie, impossible (as he averred) to be retorted; in respect all the world knows, Puppies are gotten by Dogs, and Children by men. Hereupon those GLORIOUS INEQUALITIES of FORTUNE in his Lordship were put to a kinde of pause, by a PRECIOUS INEQUALITY OF NATURE in this Gentleman. So that they both stood silent a while, like a dumb shew in a tragedy; till Sir Philip sensible of his own wrong, the forrain, and factious spirits that attended; and yet, even in this question between him, and his superior, tender to his Countries honour; with some words of sharp accent, led the way abruptly out of the Tennis-Court; as if so unexpected an accident were not fit to be decided any farther in that place. Whereof the great Lord making another sense, continues his play, without any advantage of reputation; as by the standard of HUMOURS in those times it was conceived.

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Insolence/Petulantia:

Ars Poetica, Horace

Mortal works must perish: much less can the honor and elegance of language be long-lived. Many words shall revive, which now have fallen off; and many which are now in esteem shall fall off,* if it be the will of custom*, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.

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Musophilus

Samuel Daniel

Power above powers ! O Heavenly Eloquence !
That with the strong rein of commanding words
Dost manage, guide, and master the eminence
Of men's affections, more than all their swords !
Shall we not offer to thy excellence,
The richest treasure that our wit affords?

Thou that canst do much more with one poor pen,
Than all the powers of princes can effect ;
And draw, divert, dispose, and fashion men,
Better than force or rigour can direct !
Should we this ornament of glory then,
As the unmaterial fruits of shades, neglect?

Or should we careless come behind the rest
In power of words, that go before in worth ;
Whenas our accent's equal to the best,
Is able greater wonders to bring forth ;
When all that ever hotter spirits express'd,
Comes better'd by the patience of the north.

And who—in time—knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
May come refin'd with the accents that are ours?

Or, who can tell for what great work in hand
The greatness of our style is now ordain'd?
What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command?
What thoughts let out ; what humours keep restrain'd?
What mischief it may powerfully withstand ;
And what fair ends may thereby be attain'd?



Sunday, December 17, 2023

A Sublime Counter-Jonsonian Author Figure


(October 21 2023, hlas)


 Idolatrous Italianate Ciceronians - Crows and Apes of Cicero:

Gabriel Harvey, Rhetor

On Art.

Can anyone be an artist without art? Or have you ever seen a bird flying without wings, or a horse running without feet? Or if you have seen such things, which no one else has ever seen, come, tell me please, do you hope to become a goldsmith, or a painter, or a sculptor, or a musician, or an architect, or a weaver, or any sort of artist at all without a teacher? But how much easier are all these things, than that you develop into a supreme and perfect orator without the art of public speaking. There is need of a teacher, and indeed even an excellent teacher, who might point out the springs with his finger, as it were, and carefully pass on to you the art of speaking colorfully, brilliantly, copiously. But what sort of art shall we choose? Not an art entangled in countless difficulties, or packed with meaningless arguments; not one sullied by useless [31] precepts, or disfigured by strange and foreign ones; not an art polluted by any filth, or fashioned to accord with our own will and judgment; not a single art joined and sewn together from many, like a quilt from many rags and skins (way too many rhetoricians have given this sort of art to us, if indeed one may call art that which conforms to no artistic principles). We want rather an art that is concise, precise, appropriate, lucid, accessible; one that is decorated and illuminated by precise definitions, accurate divisions, and striking illustrations, as if by flashing gems and stars; one that emerges, and in a way bursts into flower, from the speech of the most eloquent men and the best orators. Why so? Not only because brevity is pleasant, and clarity delightful, but also so that eloquence might be learned in a shorter time, and with less labor and richer results, and so that it might stand more firmly grounded, secured by deeper roots. For thus said the gifted poet in his Ars Poetica: "Whatever instruction you give, let it be brief." Why? [32] He gives two reasons: "So that receptive minds might swiftly grasp your words and accurately retain them." And indeed, as the same poet elegantly adds: "Everything superfluous spills from a mind that's full."


(snip)

But those annual whistles and shouts I hear indicate that almost all, or at least the greater part of my auditors are newcomers, who do not understand what they should do or whom they should imitate, but who nonetheless are captivated by the splendor of rhetoric, and seek to be orators. Therefore I will now, if I am able, reveal those things and place them all in their view, in such a way that they might seem to see them with their eyes, and almost hold them in their hands. In the meantime I pray you, most eloquent and refined gentlemen, either withdraw, if you like, or with the kindness that you've shown so far hear me as I recite some precepts so common as to be almost elementary. And from those whose tongues and ears Cicero alone inhabits, I beg forgiveness, if by chance I let drop in my haste a word that is un-Ciceronian. We cannot all be Longeuils and Cortesis: [9] some of us don't want to be. As for those who study more Latin authors, but only the best and choicest, and who to accompany Cicero, the foremost of all, add Caesar, Varro, Sallust, Livy, Seneca, Terence too, and Plautus and Vergil and Horace, I am sure they will be sympathetic to me. For reading as I do many works by many authors, sometimes even the poets, as Crassus bids in Cicero, I cannot guarantee that in so impromptu an oration I will not use a word not found in a Ciceronian phrase book.



But those little CROWS and APES of CICERO were long ago driven from the stage by the hissing and laughter of the learned, as they so well deserved, and at last have almost vanished; and I now hope to find not only eager and attentive auditors, but friendly spectators as well, not the sort who scrupulously weigh every individual detail on the scales of their own refined tastes, but who interpret everything in a fair and good-natured way. I too in fact wanted, if I was able--but perhaps I was not--to speak in as Ciceronian a style as the Ciceronianest of them all. [10] Forgive me, illustrious Ciceronians, if I ought not use that word in the superlative.


***************************************


Greene's Groatsworth:


With thee I ioyne yong Iuuenall, that byting Satyrist, that lastlie with mee together writ a Comedie. Sweete boy, might I aduise thee, be aduisde, and get not many enemies by bitter wordes: inueigh against VAINE men, for thou canst do it, no man better, no man so wel: thou hast a libertie to reprooue all, and none more; for one being spoken to, all are offended, none being blamed no man is iniured. Stop shallow water still running, it will rage, or tread on a worme and it will turne: then blame not Schollers vexed with sharpe lines, if they reproue thy too much libertie of reproofe.


And thou no lesse deseruing than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing inferiour; driuen (as my selfe) to extreme shifts, a little haue I to say to thee: and were it not an idolatrous oth, I would sweare by sweet S. George, thou art vnworthy better hap, sith thou dependest on so meane a stay. Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned: for vnto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleaue: those Puppets (I meane) that speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al haue beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all haue beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case that I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not: for there is an vpstart CROW, BEAUTIFIED with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to BOMBAST out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: & let those APES imitate your past excellence, and neuer more acquaint them with your admired inuentions. I know the best husband of you all will neuer proue an Usurer, and the kindest of them all will neuer seeke you a kind nurse: yet whilest you may, seeke you better Maisters; for it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subiect to the pleasure of such rude groomes.


In this I might insert two more, that both haue writ against these buckram Gentlemen: but let their owne works serue to witnesse against their owne wickednesse, if they perseuere to mainteine any more such peasants. For other new-commers, I leaue them to the mercie of these PAINTED MONSTERS, who (I doubt not) will driue the best minded to despise them: for the rest, it skils not though they make a ieast at them.


****************************************


Sidney , Defense


...But let this be a sufficient, though short note, that we misse the right use of the material point of Poesie. Now for the outside of it, which is words, or (as I may tearme it) Diction, it is even well worse: so is it that HONY-FLOWING Matrone Eloquence, apparrelled, or rather disguised, in a Courtisanlike PAINTED AFFECTATION. One time with so farre fet(ched) words, that many seeme monsters, but must seeme Straungers to anie poore Englishman: an other time with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a Dictionary: an other time with figures and flowers, extreemely winter-starved. But I would this fault were onely peculiar to Versefiers, and had not as large possession among Prose- Printers: and which is to be mervailed among many Schollers, & which is to be pitied among some Preachers. Truly I could wish, if at I might be so bold to wish, in a thing beyond the reach of my capacity, the diligent Imitators of TULLY and DEMOSTHENES (note - Tully/Cicero); Demosthenes, most worthie to be imitated, did not so much keepe Nizolian paper bookes, of their figures and phrase, as by attentive translation, as it were, *devoure them whole, and make them wholly theirs*. For now they cast SUGAR and SPICE uppon everie dish that is served to the table: like those Indians, not content to weare eare-rings at the fit and naturall place of the eares, but they will thrust Jewels through their nose and lippes, because they will be sure to be fine.


******************************

Sidney Sonnet II


Let DAINTY wits crie on the Sisters nine,

That, BRAVELY MASKT, their fancies may be told;

Or, Pindars APES , flaunt they in PHRASES FINE,

Enam'ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold;

Or else let them in statlier glorie shine,

Ennobling new-found tropes with problemes old;

Or with strange similes enrich each line,

Of herbes or beasts which Inde or Affrick hold.

For me, in sooth, no Muse but one I know,

Phrases and problems from my reach do grow;

And strange things cost too deare for my poor sprites.

How then? euen thus: in Stellaes face I reed

What Loue and Beautie be; then all my deed

But copying is, what in her Nature writes.


***************************************

Erasmus, “Apes of Cicero,” and Conceptual Blending

Kenneth Gouwens

(snip)


...the portrayals of apes even in the Adages of 1508 [note – Erasmus] could have done little positive for the animals’ image. In explaining the proverb “An ape is an ape, though clad in gold,” Erasmus retells Lucian’s story about an Egyptian king who taught some monkeys to dance, MASKED AND ATTIRED IN SCARLET. Initially compelling, the performance fell apart when a spectator scattered nuts before the apes, who ceased dancing and fought over them. (...) Another adage, “Hercules and an ape,” highlights a more insidious aspect of simian nature, the capacity to hoodwink: whereas “Hercules excels in strength,” the “ape’s power lies in sneaky tricks.” But if monkeys are ridiculous and tricky in and of themselves, in the 1508 edition they more often serve the purpose of holding the mirror up to human folly. Thus the proverb “A donkey among apes” is taken to describe how someone dull-witted falls in among “satirical and insolent people” who mock their hapless victim with impunity. More seriously, as one sees in the adage “An ape in purple,” the deception may consist in a veneer of cultured elegance that camouflages, albeit incompletely, a foulness beneath. The phrase can be applied, says Erasmus, to those “whose true nature, though they may be wearing very fine clothes, is obvious from their expression and character,” as well as “to those who have some inappropriate dignity thrust upon them, or when something nasty in itself is unsuitably decked out with ornament from some unconnected or external source.

.....Already in 1508, Erasmus occasionally likens apes to pseudo-intellectuals. Thus the adage “No [aged] monkey was ever caught in a trap” is “often applied to clever and slippery talkers who cannot be caught out.” Similarly, “a painted monkey,” which refers directly to an ugly old woman made up like a prostitute, can also illustrate and idea: for example, “if someone dresses up an immoral argument with rhetorical trappings so that it seems honest.” The two remaining images from 1508 point to the simian as unable even to approach the boundary that separates it from the human. Erasmus glosses “the prettiest ape is hideous” as referring to “things which are intrinsically defective, and by no means to be compared with even the lowest specimens of the class of things that possess any merit...” And “The tragical ape” appears to be practically a simulacrum of the human: “Ape, like manikin, is the word for what is scarcely a man and more like a pale copy of one...”

.....In subsequent expansions, Erasmus adds further shading to some of these adages, directing their thrust at scholars of the type lampooned in the _Ciceronianus_. Whereas in 1508 the gloss of “An ape in purple” ended with the observations “What could be more ridiculous?” the 1515 edition continues: “And yet this is a thing we quite often see in a household where they keep monkeys as pets: they dress them up with plenty of finery to look as much like human beings as possible, sometimes even in purple, so as to deceive people who do not look carefully or have seen nothing like it before...” Erasmus now ends the gloss by turning around the comparison: “How many apes of this kind one can see in princes’ courts, whom you will find, if you strip them of their purple, their collars and their jewels, to be no better than any *cobbler*!” Importantly, in this addendum Erasmus refers to apelike courtiers with the rare masculine form (simios), which he would use consistently when ridiculing “apes of Cicero” in the Ciceronianus.


****************************

Poetaster, Jonson


Caesar. We have, indeed, you worthiest friends of Caesar.

It is the bane and torment of our ears,

To hear the discords of those jangling rhymers,

That with their bad and scandalous practices

Bring all true arts and learning in contempt.

But let not your high thoughts descend so low

As these despised objects; LET THEM FALL,

With their flat grovelling souls: be you yourselves;

And as with our best favours you stand crown'd,

So let your mutual loves be still renown'd.

Envy will dwell where there is want of merit,

Though the deserving man should crack his spirit.

Blush, folly, blush; here's none that fears

The wagging of an ass's ears,

Although a WOLFISH CASE he wears.

Detraction is but baseness' varlet;

And APES are APES, though clothed in SCARLET. [Exeunt].


Rumpatur, quisquis rumpitur invidi! [MARTIAL – LET ENVIOUS POETS BURST]

*****************************


On Poet Ape – only Shakespearean sonnet in Jonson’s 1616 Epigrams


Poor POET-APE, that would be thought our chief,

⁠Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit,

From brokage is become so bold a thief,

⁠As we, the robbed, leave rage, and pity it.

At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,

⁠Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown

To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,

⁠He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own.

And, told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes

⁠The sluggish gaping auditor devours;

He marks not whose 'twas first: and after-times

⁠May judge it to be his, as well as ours.

Fool, as if half eyes will not know a fleece

⁠From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece!


****************************************

Amorphus/Oxford:



English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime – Patrick Cheney



In Cynthia’s Revels [or The Fountain of Self-Love], near the beginning of his career (first printed 1600), Jonson uses the word twice, both surrounding the figure of Amorphus, described by Mercury in Act 2, scene 3 as ‘a traveller, one so made out of the mixture and shreds of forms that himself is truly deformed’ (66-7). In other words, Amorphus is a figure of transport, and his composition, made up of ‘forms’ that are ‘deformed’, takes us into what we have previously described as Kantian territory. Amorphus is that sublime figure of form that has none (curiously akin to Marlowe’s Helen of Troy), accommodated to the Jonsonian public sphere, where Amorphus’ ‘adaptability and social versatility is a form of shapelessness which links the literal metamorphoses of Echo, Narcissus, and Acteaon, and the cultural ones of Asotus and others’ in the action of the play. (Rassmussen and Steggle).

In using the word ‘sublimated’, Amorphus stands before the Fountain of Self-Love, having just conversed with Narcissus’o ne-time beloved, the beautiful nymph Echo – who has just abandoned Amorphus – when Jonson’s figure of formless form steps forth to take the plunge: ‘Liberal and divine fount, suffer my profane hand to take of they bounties’. Intoxicated by ‘most ambrosiac water’, he broods why the beguiling feminine potency of the well should accept him but Echo turn her heel:


Knowing myself an essence so sublimated and refined by travel, of so studied and well-exercised a gesture, so alone in fashion, able to make the face of any statesman living, and to speak the mere extraction of language…; to conclude, in all so happy as even admiration herself does seem to fasten her kisses upon me; certes I do neither see, nor feel, nor taste, nor savour the least steam or fume of a reason that should invite this foolish fastidious nymph so peevishly to abandon me. (1.3.24-35; emphasis added)

Amorphus speaks the alchemical language of sublimity but adapts it to his personal identity – his ability to transport himself into a heightened state of ‘language’ that attracts the erotic ‘admiration’ of others – in an appropriately comical language of hyperbolic elevation.

Specifically, Amorphus engages in narcissism by vaunting his self-knowledge: ‘travel’ refines and ‘sublimate[s]’ his ‘essence’ into a quintessence of gold, and such sublimity underwrites his social and political theatre, during which he can ‘make the face of any statesman living’, as Jeremy Face will do to London citizens in the Alchemist. Sublime transport here is not transcendent but political and social, the Protean self enlivened, capable of adapting to exigency, endlessly. Self-consciously, Jonson makes comically sublime theatre out of a comically sublime theatrical character. We might even see here an impressive staging of the kind of comical hyperbole discussed by Longinus in On Sublimity, which is one form that the sublime can take: ‘acts and emotion which approach ecstasy provide a justification for, and an antidote to, any linguistic audacity. This is why comic hyperboles, for all their incredulity, are convincing because we laugh at them so much…Laughter is emotion in amusement’.

(snip)

Jonson’s linking of sublimity with a character named ‘Amorphus’ merits pause, because this agile figure looks like a photographic negative of Jonson himself. Without question, the author-figure in Cynthia’s Revels is Criticus (called Crites in the Folio edition), ‘the poet-scholar’ of “Judgement’ who ‘represents Jonson’s literary, philosophical, and ethical ideals’ (Bednarz, Shakespeare & The Poets’ War 159-60), and who becomes the play’s arch-enemy to Amorphus and the motley crew of corrupt courtiers, Hedon, Anaides, ad Asotus. According to James Bednarz, Amorphus is a figure who represents ‘Deformity’ and the ‘lack of true conviction’, and who becomes enamoured of a nymph who happens to be named Phantaste or ‘fantasy’ (159-600. In these terms, the project of the play is to ‘replac[e]…the rhetoric of “nature’ and “instinct” staged in Marston’s Jack Drum with the sterner interdictions of “art” and “judgement” in a larger “allegory of self-knowlledge’ (160). According to Bednarz, Marston had rejected Jonson’s rational, judgemental poetics in favour of one based on imaginative instinct, which Jonson then shows to be purged of cultural authority.

Nonetheless, as Rasmussen and Steggle write, Amorphus ‘prefigures Jonson’s later tricksters’ in being ‘at the centre of the play’s action due to his energy and inventiveness, both verbal and physical’. Rasmussen and Steggle go so far as to see Amorphus as akin to Jonson himself: ‘biographically Jonson is more like Amorphus than Criticus’, citing Jonson’s ‘experiences in foreign travel’ and his ‘natural charisma and drive’. Even ‘Amorphus’s weaknesses (lack of money and tendency to exaggerate) are close to those of Jonson;. Wisely, Rasmussen and Steggle caution against ‘claim[ing] that Amorphus “is” Jonson, or even to over-allegorize the tension between Amorphus and his nemesis Criticus’ (eds. 1:435); but they do help us see that the figure of Amorphus qualifies as a *sublime counter-Jonsonian author-figure*. (pp. 220-1)


*****************************

Horace, Art of Poetry 

Believe, ye Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of which, like a sick man’s dreams, are all vain and fictitious: ***so that neither HEAD nor FOOT can correspond to ANY ONE FORM.*** “ 

******************************

Jonson, _Cynthia's Revels_.


AMORPHUS. And there's her minion, Crites: why his advice more than

Amorphus? Have I not invention afore him? Learning to better

that INVENTION above him? and INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVEL --


*****************************

Southern, Pandora (1584)


SUMMARY: Ode to Oxford in John Southern’s Pandora, The Music of the Beauty of his Mistress Diana. The title page gives the publication date as 20 June 1584. The language of the ode was criticized by George Puttenham in Book III, Chapter 22 of his Art of English Poesy, published in 1589. Puttenham also accused Southern of plagiarism, saying: ‘Another of reasonable good facility in translation, finding certain of the hymns of Pindarus and of Anacreon’s odes and other lyrics among the Greeks very well translated by Ronsard, the French poet, & applied to the honour of a great prince in France, comes our minion and translates the same out of French into English, and applieth them to the honour of a great nobleman in England (wherein I commend his reverent mind and duty), but doth so impudently rob the French poet both of his praise and also of his French terms that I cannot so much pity him as be angry with him for his injurious dealing’.


To the right honourable the Earl of Oxenford etc.


(snip)


Epode


No, no, the high singer is he

Alone that in the end must be

Made proud with a garland like this,

And not every riming novice

That writes with small wit and much pain,

And the (God’s know) idiot in vain,

For it’s not the way to Parnasse,

Nor it will neither come to pass

If it be not in some wise fiction

And of an ingenious INVENTION,

And INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVAIL,

For it alone must win the laurel,

And only the poet WELL BORN

Must be he that goes to Parnassus,

And not these companies of asses

That have brought verse almost to scorn.


*************************************



Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie (1589)


CHAP. XXII.


Some vices in speaches and {w}riting are alwayes intollerable, some others now and then borne {w}ithall by licence of approued authors and custome. (snip)


Another of your intollerable vices is that which the Greekes call SORAISMUS, & we may call the [mingle mangle] as when we make our speach or writinges of sundry languages vsing some Italian word, or French, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Scottish, not for the nonce or for any purpose (which were in part excusable) but ignorantly and affectedly as one that said vsing this French word Roy, to make ryme with another verse, thus.


O mightie Lord or ioue, dame Venus onely ioy,


Whose Princely power exceedes ech other heauenly roy.


The verse is good but the terme peeuishly affected Another of reasonable good facilitie in translation finding certaine of the hymnes of Pyndarus and of Anacreons odes, and other Lirickes among the Greekes very well translated by Rounsard the French Poet,

&

applied to the honour of a great Prince in France, comes our minion and translates the same out of French into English, and applieth them to the honour of a GREAT NOBLE MAN in ENGLAND (wherein I commend his reuerent minde and duetie) but doth so impudently robbe the French Poet both of his prayse and also of his French termes, that I cannot so much pitie him as be angry with him for his iniurious dealing (our sayd maker not being ashamed to vse these French wordes freddon, egar, superbous, filanding, celest, calabrois, thebanois and a number of others, for English wordes, which haue no maner of conformitie with our language either by custome or deriuation which may make them tollerable. And in the end (which is worst of all) makes his vaunt that neuer English finger but his hath toucht Pindars string which was neuerthelesse word by word as Rounsard had said before by like braggery. These be his verses.


And of an ingenious INVENTION, INFANTED WITH PLEASANT TRAVAILE.


¶3.22.7 Whereas the French word is enfante as much to say borne as a child, in another verse he saith.


I {w}ill freddon in thine honour.



***********************************


1601 Quarto - Cynthia's Revels Or The Fountain of Selfe Love, Jonson


Act IV, Sc. V


Amorphus


And there’s her Minion Criticus; why his advise more then Amorphus? Have I not Invention, afore him? Learning, to better that Invention, above him? And Travaile.


*************************************


1616 Folio, Jonson


Act IV, Sc V


Amorphus


And there’s her minion Crites! Why his advice more then Amorphus? Have not I invention, afore him? Learning, to better that invention, above him? And infanted, with pleasant travaile ----


*************************************


1640 Folio, 'Works' Jonson


Amorphus


And there’s her minion Crites! Why his advice more then Amorphus? Have not I invention afore him? Learning, to better that invention, above him? And infanted, with pleasant travaile ----


************************************


ULYSSES-POLITROPUS-AMORPHUS - Cynthia's Revels



Politropus/Polytropus


Polytropos means much-turned or much-traveled, much-wandering. It is the defining quality of Odysseus, used in the first line of the Odyssey and at 10.330. As used by Hippias with respect to Odysseus (365b) it includes being false or lying and carries the connotations of wily and shifty. Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who wrote Socratic dialogues, also argued against the claim that Homer meant to blame Odysseus by calling him polytropos; Antisthenes claims that it is praise for being "good at dealing with men...being wise, he knows how to associate with men in many ways." See Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.121-24.


**************************************


Oxford and the Fountain of Self-Love:


Mario DiGangi, Male Deformities’: NARCISSUS and the Reformation of Courtly Manners in Cynthia’s Revels in Ovid and the Renaissance Body


...Narcissus himself [...] never even appears during the course of the play. however, the corrupting Fountain of Self-love, the emblematic source of narcissism introduced at the very beginning of the play, seems to be a permanent fixture at Cynthia's court, for no mention is made of its ultimate destruction or purification. for Jonson's audience, the survival of the symbolically cominant fountain of Self-love might well have presaged that narcissistic manners would continue to deform the individual bodies of courtiers as well as the collective body of the court. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can regard the Fountain's endurance as a sign of the ideological conflict over elite male comportment that would continue to be waged, in early modern England, as the legacy of Narcissus.

(snip)

By the time Jonson wrote Cynthia's Revels, the Narcissus myth had developed an extended, complex, cultural legacy. Traditional medieval and Renaissance moral commentaries on Ovid generally explained Narcissus's error as the 'folly of loving an IMAGE.' Arthur Golding's influential 1567 translation of The Metamorposes, for instance, moralizes the myth as a 'mirror' of VANITY and pride: 'Narcissus is of scornfulnesse and pryde a myrror cleere,/ Where beawties fading VANITIE most playnly may appeere.'


************************************


Alciato's Book of Emblems


Emblem 69


Self-love


Because your figure pleased you too much, Narcissus, it was changed into a flower, a plant of known senselessness. Self-love is the withering and destruction of natural power which brings and has brought ruin to many learned men, who having thrown away the method of the ancients seek new doctrines and pass on nothing but their own fantasies.


***********************************


The Arrogance and Insolence of Oxford – Hubert Languet to Sidney:


Publique Ill Example: Oxford appears UNNAMED as Sidney's proud and intemperate ADVERSARY in Greville’s _A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney_(originally published as _Life of Sidney_)


...And in this freedome of heart [Sidney] being one day at Tennis, a Peer of this Realm, born great, greater by alliance, and superlative in the Princes favour, abruptly came into the Tennis- Court; and speaking out of these three paramount authorities, he forgot to entreat that, which he could not legally command. When by the encounter of a steady object, finding unrespectiveness in himself (though a great Lord) not respected by this Princely spirit, he grew to expostulate more ROUGHLY. The returns of which stile comming still from an understanding heart, that knew what was due to it self, and what it ought to others, seemed (through the MISTS of my Lords PASSIONS, SWOLN with the WINDE of his FACTION then reigning) to provoke in yeelding. Whereby, the lesse amazement, or confusion of thoughts he stirred up in Sir Philip, the more SHADOWES this great Lords own mind was POSSESSED with: till at last with RAGE (which is ever ILL-DISCIPLINED) he commands them to depart the Court. To this Sir Philip temperately answers; that if his Lordship had been pleased to express desire in milder Characters, perchance he might have led out those, that he should now find would not be driven out with any scourge of FURY. This answer (like a BELLOWS) blowing up the sparks of EXCESS already kindled, made my Lord scornfully call Sir Philip by the name of Puppy. In which progress of HEAT, as the TEMPEST grew more and more vehement within, so did their hearts breath out their perturbations in a more loud and shrill accent. The French Commissioners unfortunately had that day audience, in those private Galleries, whose windows looked into the Tennis-Court. They instantly drew all to this tumult: every sort of quarrels sorting well with their humors, especially this. Which Sir Philip perceiving, and rising with inward strength, by the prospect of a mighty faction against him; asked my Lord, with a loud voice, that which he heard clearly enough before. Who ( LIKE AN ECHO, that still multiplies by REFLEXIONS) repeated this Epithet of Puppy the second time. Sir Philip resolving in one answer to conclude both the attentive hearers, and PASSIONATE ACTOR, gave my Lord a Lie, impossible (as he averred) to be retorted; in respect all the world knows, Puppies are gotten by Dogs, and Children by men. Hereupon those GLORIOUS INEQUALITIES of FORTUNE in his Lordship were put to a kinde of pause, by a PRECIOUS INEQUALITY OF NATURE in this Gentleman. So that they both stood silent a while, like a dumb shew in a tragedy; till Sir Philip sensible of his own wrong, the forrain, and factious spirits that attended; and yet, even in this question between him, and his superior, tender to his Countries honour; with some words of sharp accent, led the way abruptly out of the Tennis-Court; as if so unexpected an accident were not fit to be decided any farther in that place. Whereof the great Lord making another sense, continues his play, without any advantage of reputation; as by the standard of HUMOURS in those times it was conceived.


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Fulke Greville - Hereditary Recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon


Greville, _Dedication_


...Neither am I (for my part) so much in love with this life, nor believe so little in a better to come, as to complain of God for taking him [Sidney], and such like exorbitant WORTHyness from us: fit (as it were by an Ostracisme) to be divided, and not incorporated with our corruptions: yet for the sincere affection I bear to my Prince, and Country, my prayer to God is, that this WORTH, and Way may not fatally be buried with him; in respect, that both before his time, and since, experience hath published the usuall discipline of greatnes to have been tender of it self onely; making HONOUR a triumph, or rather TROPHY OF DESIRE, set up in the eyes of Mankind, either to be worshiped as IDOLS, or else as Rebels to perish under her glorious oppressions. Notwithstanding, when the pride of flesh, and power of favour shall cease in these by death, or disgrace; what then hath time to register, or fame to publish in these great mens names, that will not be offensive, or infectious to others? What Pen without blotting can write the story of their deeds? Or what Herald blaze their Arms without a blemish? And as for their counsels and projects, when they come once to light, shall they not live as noysome, and loathsomely above ground, as their Authors carkasses lie in the grave? So as the return of such greatnes to the world, and themselves, can be but private reproach, publique ill example, and a fatall scorn to the Government they live in. Sir Philip Sidney is none of this number; for the greatness which he affected was built upon true WORTH; esteeming Fame more than Riches, and Noble actions far above Nobility it self.


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Cynthias Revels, Jonson

Amorphus/Oxford:


He that is with him is Amorphus

a Traveller, one so made out of the mixture and shreds

of forms, that himself is truly deform'd. He walks

most commonly with a Clove or Pick-tooth in his

Mouth, he is the very mint of Complement, all his Be-

haviours are printed, his Face is another Volume of

Essayes; and his Beard an Aristrachus. He speaks all

Cream skim'd, and more affected than a dozen of wait-

ing Women. He is his own Promoter in every place.

The Wife of the Ordinary gives him his Diet to main-

tain her Table in discourse, which (indeed) is a meer

Tyranny over the other Guests, for he will usurp all

the talk: *Ten Constables are not so tedious*.


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Horace, Art of Poetry 

Believe, ye Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of which, like a sick man’s dreams, are all vain and fictitious: ***so that neither HEAD nor FOOT can correspond to ANY ONE FORM.*** “ 

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Sidney, Defence of Poetry


But, besides these gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither RIGHT tragedies nor RIGHT comedies (note - two left arms of the Droeshout), mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters, with neither DECENCY nor DISCRETION; so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained. I know Apuleius did somewhat so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in one moment; and I know the ancients have one or two examples of tragi-comedies, as Plautus hath Amphytrio. But, if we mark them well, we shall find that they never, or very daintily, match hornpipes and funerals. So falleth it out that, having indeed NO RIGHT COMEDY in that comical part of our tragedy, we have nothing but SCURRILITY, unworthy of any chaste ears, or some extreme show of doltihsness, indeed fit to lift up a loud laughter, and nothing else; where the whole tract of a comedy should be full of delight, as the tragedy should be still maintained in a well-raised admiration.


But OUR COMEDIANS think there is no delight without laughter, which is very WRONG; for though laughter may come with delight, yet cometh it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter; but well may one thing breed both together. Nay, rather in themselves they have, as it were, a kind of contrariety. For delight we scarcely do, but in things that have a conveniency to ourselves, or to the general nature; laughter almost ever cometh of things most DISPROPORTIONED to ourselves and nature.


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Sidney, Defense

But I have lavished out too many words of this playmatter. I do it, because as they are excelling parts of poesy, so is there none so much used in England, and none can be more pitifully ABUSED; which, like an unMANNERly daughter, showing a bad education, causeth her mother Poesy`s HONESTY to be called in question.


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Ben Jonson's Poems By Wesley Trimpi

...Jonson’s fundamental objection to the sonnet…is that it leads one to say more than one has to say in order to satisfy the form. The poet is obliged to use rhetorical figures, and his intentions becomes contradictory to that of the plain style. As the rhetorical figures and the form become more important, the range of subject matter decreases. The poet who seeks the grace and charm of the middle style will do well to utilize that grace which, according to Demetrius, “ may reside in the subject matter, if it is the gardens of the Nymphs, marriage-lays, love-stories” (On Style, 132), or “Petrarch’s long-deceased woes.” The freedom of the plain style to treat of any subject depends on it primary purpose, which is to tell the truth. Since the officium of the middle style is to delight (delectare), many subjects must be excluded, and the emphasis is no longer on content but on expression.


The conventional adjectives for rhetorical ornateness in poetry were “sugred” or “honied,” and each could be used as a equivalent for Ciceronian rhetoric itself. The term “sugred” was most often applied to sonnets, such as in the famous comment of Francis Meres on “the mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends.” Among the literary genres the epigram was often regarded as a corrective for the trite diffuseness of the sonnet. The salt of incisive wit was needed to preserve the poem, which otherwise might cloy and dissolve like candy. Sir John Harington contrasts the two sets of conventions in his epigram called “Comparison of the Sonnet, and the Epigram”:


Once, by mishap, two Poets fell a-squaring,

The Sonnet, and our Epigram comparing;

And Faustus, having long demur’d upon it,

Yet, at the last, gave sentence for the Sonnet.

Now, for such censure, this his chiefe defence is,

Their sugred taste best likes his likresse senses.

Well, though I grant Sugar may please the taste,

Tet let my verse have salt enough to make it last.


In terms of the poetic conventions the rhetorical controversy between Ciceronianism and Senecanism became one between a MELLIFLUOUS and a SINUOUS style.


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HONEY-TONGUED Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue,

I swore Apollo got them and none other;

Their rosy-tinted features clothed in tissue,

Some heaven-born goddess said to be their mother:

Rose-cheeked Adonis, with his amber tresses,

Fair fire-hot Venus, charming him to love her,

Chaste Lucretia, virgin-like her dresses,

Proud lust-stung Tarquin, seeking still to prove her:

Romeo, Richard; more whose names I know not,

Their SUGARED tongues, and power attractive beauty

Say they are saints, although that saints they show not,

For thousands vow to them subjective duty :

They burn in love, thy children, Shakespeare HET them ,

Go, woo thy Muse, more Nymphish brood beget them.


Epigrammes in the oldest Cut, and newest Fashion.

John Weever. 1599. Fourth Weeke, Epig. 22.


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Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,

Warble his native wood-notes wild. - Milton


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Thomas Bancroft (1639), Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs



118. To Shakespeare.


Thy Muses SUGRED DAINTIES seeme to us

Like the fam’d apples of old Tantalus :

For we (admiring) see and heare thy straines,

But none I see or heare those sweets attaines.


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Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning


There be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem VAIN which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use; and those persons we esteem vain which are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning--the first, fantastical learning; the second, contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. Martin Luther, conducted, no doubt, by a higher Providence, but in discourse of reason, finding what a province he had undertaken against the Bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the Church, and finding his own solitude, being in nowise aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his succours to make a party against the present time. So that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved. This, by consequence, did draw on a necessity of a more exquisite travail in the languages original, wherein those authors did write, for the better understanding of those authors, and the better advantage of pressing and applying their words. And thereof grew, again, a delight in their manner of style and phrase, and an admiration of that kind of writing, which was much furthered and precipitated by the enmity and opposition that the propounders of those primitive but seeming new opinions had against the schoolmen, who were generally of the contrary part, and whose writings were altogether in a differing style and form; taking liberty to coin and frame new terms of art to express their own sense, and to avoid circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness, and (as I may call it) lawfulness of the phrase or word. And again, because the great labour then was with the people (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, Execrabilis ista turba, quae non novit legem) [the wretched crowd that has not know the law], for the winning and persuading of them, there grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort; so that these four causes concurring--the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching--did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copy of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter--more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did STURMIUS spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the Orator and Hermogenes the Rhetorician, besides his own books of Periods and Imitation, and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge and Ascham with their lectures and writings almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo, Decem annos consuumpsi in legendo Cicerone [I have spent ten years in reading Cicero(ne); and the echo answered in Greek, One, Asine. Then grew the learning of the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copy than weight.


Here therefore is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter, whereof though I have represented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will be secundum majus et minus[more or less] in all timeAnd how is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men's works like the first letter of a patent or limited book, which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity; for words are but the images of matter, and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.


But yet notwithstanding it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution. For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of Plato also in some degree; and hereof likewise there is great use, for surely, to the severe inquisition of truth and the deep progress into philosophy, it is some hindrance because it is too early satisfactory to the mind of man, and quencheth the desire of further search before we come to a just period. But then if a man be to have any use of such knowledge in civil occasions, of conference, counsel, persuasion, discourse, or the like, then shall he find it prepared to his hands in those authors which write in that manner. But the excess of this is so justly contemptible, that as Hercules, when he saw the image of Adonis, Venus' minion, in a temple, said in disdain, Nil sacri es [Thou art no Divinity]; so there is none of Hercules' followers in learning--that is, the more severe and laborious sort of inquirers into truth--but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness. And thus much of the first disease or distemper of learning.


The second, which followeth, is in nature worse than the former, for as substance of matter is better than beauty of words, so contrariwise vain matter is worse than vain words; wherein it seemeth the reprehension of St. Paul was not only proper for those times, but prophetical for the times following, and not only respective* to divinity but extensive[5] to all knowledge: Devita profanas vocum novitates, et oppositiones falsi nominis scientiae.[Avoid profane novelties of terms and the oppositions of what is falsely called knowledge." I Tim. 6.20] For he assigneth two marks and badges of suspected and falsified science: the one, the novelty and strangeness of terms; the other, the strictness of positions,[7] which of necessity doth induce oppositions, and so questions and altercations. Surely, like as many substances in nature which are solid do putrefy and corrupt into worms, so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrefy and dissolve into a number of subtile, idle, unwholesome, and (as I may term them) vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness* and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality. This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen, who having sharp and strong wits and abundance of leisure and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby, but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work but of no substance or profit.


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Jennifer Richards


HOW CASTIGLIONE READ CICERO


...The questione della lingua is focused on a particular question: should the courtier imitate the literary greats, borrowing from them words already endowed with authority, or should he follow the promptings of his own talents, and employ the language of his contemporaries? [24] Notably, it covers ground already familiar to us from the earlier discussion of nobility: can courtly gracefulness be learned, or is it a property natural to the nobly born? For this reason, it contributes to our understanding of the relationship between art and nature so central to the nobility debate, and it also further aims to inculcate in us a practice of reading which is itself ennobling.


Throughout the discussion, Canossa is committed to the idea that all we need is talent and a willingness to adopt the contemporary linguistic idiom, but he needs to defend his position against an interlocutor, Fregoso, who champions the need for imitation. Castiglione seems to set up an argument in utramque partem which enables us to see both sides of the debate, and to choose the more persuasive one. However, the dialogue does not quite work like that. When Fregoso objects that Canossa's advice encourages the courtier to reproduce the solecisms of ignorant speakers, our speaker produces this confusing explanation: "Good usage in speech is born with men who have native wit, and, with teaching and experience, acquire good judgement, and in accordance with it, agree upon apt words whose quality they know from a certain natural judgement rather than from art or any rule" (87/68). [25]


This sentence seems to epitomise Canossa's disdainful refusal to teach us; it looks like a deliberate obfuscation. However, he is in fact following the example set by the dissimulating Antonius, and is showing, not telling us, the artificial causes of "natural" rhetorical skill (78-80/63-64). The questione della lingua is difficult to follow not just because it is meandering, contradictory and ambiguous, but because it offers a partial account of De oratore while relying on our knowledge of that text. [26]

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Sprezzatura - sprezzo - insolence

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Straying beyond Jonson's 'fit bounds'/custom:


Jonson, on Shakespeare


He was (indeed) honest, and of

an open, and free nature: had an excellent

fancy; brave notions, and gentle expressions:

wherein he flowed with that facility, that

sometime it was necessary he should be

STOP'D: sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said

of Haterius. His wit was in his own power;

would the RULE of it had been so too."


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Ruling/Restraining Shakespeare's Quill:


From 'To the Deceased Author of these Poems' (William Cartwright)

by Jasper Mayne


... For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.

In Thee Ben Johnson still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:

A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,

As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.

Thy Lamp was cherish'd with supplied of Oyle,

Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)


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John Oldham on Jonson

III.

Let dull, and ignorant Pretenders Art condemn

(Those only Foes to Art, and Art to them)

The meer Fanaticks, and Enthusiasts in Poetry

(For Schismaticks in that, as in Religion be)

Who make't all Revelation, Trance, and Dream,

Let them despise her Laws, and think

That Rules and Forms the Spirit stint:

Thine was no mad, unruly Frenzy of the brain,

Which justly might deserve the Chain,

'Twas brisk, and mettled, but a manag'd Rage,

Sprightly as vig'rous Youth, and cool as temp'rate Age:

Free, like thy Will, it did all Force disdain,

But suffer'd Reason's loose, and easie rein,

By that it suffer'd to be led,

Which did not curb Poetick liberty, but guide:

Fancy, that wild and haggard Faculty,

Untam'd in most, and let at random fly,

Was wisely govern'd, and reclaim'd by thee,

Restraint, and Discipline was made endure,

And by thy calm, and milder Judgment brought to lure;

Yet when 'twas at some nobler Quarry sent,

With bold, and tow'ring wings it upward went,

Not lessen'd at the greatest height,

Not turn'd by the most giddy flights of dazling Wit.

(snip)


V.

Sober, and grave was still the Garb thy Muse put on,

No tawdry careless slattern Dress,

Nor starch'd, and formal with Affectedness,

Nor the cast Mode, and Fashion of the Court, and Town;

But neat, agreeable, and janty 'twas,

Well-fitted, it sate close in every place,

And all became with an uncommon Air, and Grace:

Rich, costly and substantial was the stuff,

Not barely smooth, nor yet too coarsly rough:

No refuse, ill-patch'd Shreds o'th Schools,

The motly wear of read, and learned Fools,

No French Commodity which now so much does take,

And our own better Manufacture spoil,

Nor was it ought of forein Soil;

But Staple all, and all of English Growth, and Make:

What Flow'rs soe're of Art it had, were found

No tinsel'd slight Embroideries,

But all appear'd either the native Ground,

Or twisted, wrought, and interwoven with the Piece.


VI.

Plain Humor, shewn with her whole various Face,

Not mask'd with any antick Dress,

Nor screw'd in forc'd, ridiculous Grimace

(The gaping Rabbles dull delight,

And more the Actor's than the Poet's Wit)

Such did she enter on thy Stage,

And such was represented to the wond'ring Age:

Well wast thou skill'd, and read in human kind,

In every wild fantastick Passion of his mind,

Didst into all his hidden Inclinations dive,

What each from Nature does receive,

Or Age, or Sex, or Quality, or Country give;

What Custom too, that mighty Sorceress,

Whose pow'rful Witchcraft does transform

Enchanted Man to several monstrous Images,

Makes this an odd, and freakish MONKY turn,

And that a grave and solemn ASS appear,

And all a thousand beastly shapes of Folly wear:

Whate're Caprice or Whimsie leads awry

Perverted, and seduc'd Mortality,

Or does incline, and byass it

From what's Discreet, and Wise, and Right, and Good, and Fit;

All in thy faithful Glass were so express'd,

As if they were Reflections of thy Breast,

As if they had been stamp'd on thy own mind,

And thou the universal vast Idea of Mankind.

(snip)

XIII.

Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious Fame,

Content on gross and coarse Applause to live,

And what the dull, and sensless Rabble give,

Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,

Nor would'st that wretched Alms receive,

The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, sordid name:

Thine was no empty Vapor, rais'd beneath,

And form'd of common Breath,

The false, and foolish Fire, that's whisk'd about

By popular Air, and glares a while, and then goes out;

But 'twas a solid, whole, and perfect Globe of light,

That shone all over, was all over bright,

And dar'd all sullying Clouds, and fear'd no darkning night;

Like the gay Monarch of the Stars and Sky,

Who wheresoe're he does display

His sovereign Lustre, and majestick Ray,

Strait all the less, and petty Glories nigh

Vanish, and shrink away.

O'rewhelm'd, and swallow'd by the greater blaze of Day;

With such a strong, an awful and victorious Beam

Appear'd, and ever shall appear, thy Fame,

View'd, and ador'd by all th' undoubted Race of Wit,

Who only can endure to look on it.

The rest o'recame with too much light,

With too much brightness dazled, or extinguish'd quite:

Restless, and uncontroul'd it now shall pass

As wide a course about the World as he,

And when his long-repeated Travels cease

Begin a new, and vaster Race,

And still tread round the endless Circle of Eternity.


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Cartwright, William, Jonsonus Virbius


...Blest life of Authors, unto whom we owe

Those that we have, and those that we want too:

Th'art all so GOOD, that reading makes thee worse,

And to have writ so well's thine onely curse.

Secure then of thy merit, thou didst hate

That servile base dependance upon fate:

Successe thou ne'r thoughtst vertue, nor that fit,

Which chance, and th'ages fashion did make hit;

*Excluding those from life in after-time*,

Who into Po'try first brought luck and rime:

Who thought the peoples breath good ayre: sty'ld name

What was but noise; and getting Briefes for fame

Gathered the many's suffrages, and thence

Made commendation a benevolence:

THY thoughts were their owne Lawrell, and did win

That best applause of being crown'd within..


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Jonson

Author.

...But, they that have incens'd me, can in Soul

Acquit me of that guilt. They know, I dare

To spurn, or bafful 'em; or squirt their Eyes

With Ink, or Urine: or I could do worse,

Arm'd with Archilochus fury, write Iambicks,

Should make the desperate lashers hang themselves;

RHIME 'EM TO DEATH, AS THEY DO IRISH RATS

In drumming Tunes. Or, living, I could stamp

Their foreheads with those deep, and PUBLICK BRANDS,

That the whole company of Barber-Surgeons

Should not take off, with all their Art, and Plaisters.

And these my Prints should last, still to be read

In their pale Fronts: when, what they write 'gainst me,

Shall, like a Figure drawn in Water, fleet,

And the poor wretched Papers be imploy'd

To clothe Tabacco, or some cheaper Drug.

This I could do, and make them infamous.

But, to what end? when their own deeds have mark'd 'em

And that I know, within his guilty Breast

Each slanderer bears a Whip, that shall torment him,

Worse, than a million of these temporal Plagues:

Which to pursue, were but a Feminine humour,

And far beneath the Dignity of Man.


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Jonson/Nemesis/Invidia/Giving What’s Due

Oxford/Hybris/Petulantia/INSOLENCE/Outrageous Behaviour


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VOLPONE OR THE FOX


TO THE MOST NOBLE AND MOST EQUAL SISTERS, THE TWO FAMOUS UNIVERSITIES, FOR THEIR LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE SHEWN TO HIS POEM IN THE PRESENTATION, BEN JONSON, THE GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGER, DEDICATES BOTH IT AND HIMSELF.

Never, most equal Sisters, had any man a wit so presently excellent, as that it could raise itself; but there must come both matter, occasion, commenders, and favourers to it. If this be true, and that the fortune of all writers doth daily prove it, it behoves the careful to provide well towards these accidents; and, having acquired them, to preserve that part of reputation most tenderly, wherein the benefit of a friend is also defended. Hence is it, that I now render myself grateful, and am studious to justify the bounty of your act; to which, though your mere authority were satisfying, yet it being an age wherein poetry and the professors of it hear so ill on all sides, there will a reason be looked for in the subject. It is certain, nor can it with any forehead be opposed, that the too much license of poetasters in this time, hath much deformed their mistress; that, every day, their manifold and manifest ignorance doth stick unnatural reproaches upon her: but for their petulancy, it were an act of the greatest injustice, either to let the learned suffer, or so divine a skill (which indeed should not be attempted with unclean hands) to fall under the least contempt. For, if men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being the good poet, without first being a good man. He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good disciplines, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover them to their first strength; that comes forth the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human, a master in manners; and can alone, or with a few, effect the business of mankind: this, I take him, is no subject for pride and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon. But it will here be hastily answered, that the writers of these days are other things; that not only their manners, but their natures, are inverted, and nothing remaining with them of the dignity of poet, but the abused name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatic, or, as they term it, stage-poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy, all license of offence to God and man is practised. I dare not deny a great part of this, and am sorry I dare not, because in some men's abortive features (and would they had never boasted the light) it is over-true; but that all are embarked in this bold adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and, uttered, a more malicious slander. For my particular, I can, and from a most clear conscience, affirm, that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness; have loathed the use of such foul and unwashed bawdry, as is now made the food of the scene: and, howsoever I cannot escape from some, the imputation of sharpness, but that they will say, I have taken a pride, or lust, to be bitter, and not my youngest infant but hath come into the world with all his teeth; I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order or state, I have provoked? What public person? Whether I have not in all these preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? My works are read, allowed, (I speak of those that are intirely mine,) look into them, what broad reproofs have I used? Where have I been particular? Where personal? Except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon, creatures, for their insolencies, worthy to be taxed? Yet to which of these so pointingly, as he might not either ingenuously have confest, or wisely dissembled his disease? But it is not rumour can make men guilty, much less entitle me to other men's crimes. I know, that nothing can be so innocently writ or carried, but may be made obnoxious to construction; marry, whilst I bear mine innocence about me, I fear it not. Application is now grown a trade with many; and there are that profess to have a key for the decyphering of every thing: but let wise and noble persons take heed how they be too credulous, or give leave to these invading interpreters to be over-familiar with their fames, who cunningly, and often, utter their own virulent malice, under other men's simplest meanings. As for those that will (by faults which charity hath raked up, or common honesty concealed) make themselves a name with the multitude, or, to draw their rude and beastly claps, care not whose living faces they intrench with their petulant styles, may they do it without a rival, for me! I choose rather to live graved in obscurity, than share with them in so preposterous a fame. Nor can I blame the wishes of those severe and wise patriots, who providing the hurts these licentious spirits may do in a state, desire rather to see fools and devils, and those antique relics of barbarism retrieved, with all other ridiculous and exploded follies, than behold the wounds of private men, of princes and nations: for, as Horace makes Trebatius speak among these,

"Sibi quisque timet, quanquam est intactus, et odit."

And men may justly impute such rages, if continued, to the writer, as his sports. The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present trade of the stage, in all their miscelline interludes, what learned or liberal soul doth not already abhor? where nothing but the filth of the time is uttered, and with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms, such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, so racked metaphors, with brothelry, able to violate the ear of a pagan, and blasphemy, to turn the blood of a Christian to water. I cannot but be serious in a cause of this nature, wherein my fame, and the reputation of divers honest and learned are the question; when a name so full of authority, antiquity, and all great mark, is, through their insolence, become the lowest scorn of the age; and those men subject to the petulancy of every vernaculous orator, that were wont to be the care of kings and happiest monarchs. This it is that hath not only rapt me to present indignation, but made me studious heretofore, and by all my actions, to stand off from them; which may most appear in this my latest work, which you, most learned Arbitresses, have seen, judged, and to my crown, approved; wherein I have laboured for their instruction and amendment, to reduce not only the ancient forms, but manners of the scene, the easiness, the propriety, the innocence, and last, the doctrine, which is the principal end of poesie, to inform men in the best reason of living. And though my catastrophe may, in the strict rigour of comic law, meet with censure, as turning back to my promise; I desire the learned and charitable critic, to have so much faith in me, to think it was done of industry: for, with what ease I could have varied it nearer his scale (but that I fear to boast my own faculty) I could here insert. But my special aim being to put the snaffle in their mouths, that cry out, We never punish vice in our interludes, etc., I took the more liberty; though not without some lines of example, drawn even in the ancients themselves, the goings out of whose comedies are not always joyful, but oft times the bawds, the servants, the rivals, yea, and the masters are mulcted; and fitly, it being the office of a comic poet to imitate justice, and instruct to life, as well as purity of language, or stir up gentle affections; to which I shall take the occasion elsewhere to speak.

For the present, most reverenced Sisters, as I have cared to be thankful for your affections past, and here made the understanding acquainted with some ground of your favours; let me not despair their continuance, to the maturing of some worthier fruits; wherein, if my muses be true to me, I shall raise the despised head of poetry again, and stripping her out of those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form, restore her to her primitive habit, feature, and majesty, and render her worthy to be embraced and kist of all the great and master-spirits of our world. As for the vile and slothful, who never affected an act worthy of celebration, or are so inward with their own vicious natures, as they worthily fear her, and think it an high point of policy to keep her in contempt, with their declamatory and windy invectives; *she shall out of just rage incite her servants (who are genus irritabile) to spout ink in their faces*, that shall eat farther than their marrow into their fames; and not Cinnamus the barber, with his art, shall be able to take out the brands; but they shall live, and be read, till the wretches die, as things worst deserving of themselves in chief, and then of all mankind.

From my House in the Black-Friars,

this 11th day of February, 1607

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Shake-speare

O lest the world should task you to recite

What merit lived in me that you should LOVE

After my death, dear LOVE, forget me quite,

For you in me can NOTHING WORTHY prove;

Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,

To do more for me than mine own desert,

And hang more praise upon deceasèd I

Than niggard truth would willingly impart.

O lest your true LOVE may seem false in this,

That you FOR LOVE speak well of me untrue,

My name be buried where my body is,

And live no more to shame nor me nor you.

For I am shamed by that which I bring forth

And so should you, to love things nothing worth.