Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Oxford's Fame Suppressed by the Academy

After reading and rereading everything I've been able to find on both the Italian 'Questione della Lingua' and the attempts to establish an English Academy at the end of James I's reign - and now I find that there is a trick to saying something absolutely contrary to common sense - without laughing. For it has grown to be a matter of common sense (a sense in common among English-speaking people), that Shakespeare was and is the greatest writer in the English language - so to suggest that he was rejected by a projected English Academy defies both reason and common sense.

Discretion. To Cut. To Discern. To sift out. To separate that which has become confused.


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Jonson, Cynthia's Revels


Cynthia: Dear Arete, and Crites, to you two
We give the Charge; impose what Pains you please:
TH' INCURABLE CUT OFF, the rest REFORM,
Remembring ever what we first decreed,
Since Revels were proclaim'd, let now none bleed.
Arete. How well Diana can distinguish Times,
And sort her Censures, keeping to her self
The Doom of Gods, leaving the rest to us?
Come, cite them, Crites, first, and then proceed.
(snip)
Then, Crites, practise thy DISCRETION.


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The word [discretion] was almost invariably used in Elizabethan England as a means of constructing social, cultural, or aesthetic difference. (David Hillman, Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the abuse of rhetoric).




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An English 'Question of the Language' and Language Regulation. Edmund Bolton's proposed 'Academ Roial' - and Senate of Honour. Jonson, Chapman, Drayton were proposed by Bolton as members. King James approved the project but it died with him. With Buckingham as its patron, it appears to have been 'in the air' during the period that the First Folio was collected and published. Interest in it died with James:


[Bolton's] 'earliest version of this proposal was directed to King James through the mediation of the Duke of Buckingham, to whom Bolton was distantly related; the pages reproduced in Plate 21 capture the spirit of the entire venture. The primary function of the new Academy - the proposal grandly, if somewhat vaguely promised - was to be the promotion of ORDER, DECORUM, and DECENCIE (words emphatically described in large upper-cased letters) and the suppression of Confusion and Deformitie. As Bolton's thoughts developed, he proposed more specific functions to the Academy: that it should control the licensing of all non-theological books in England, for example, keep a constant register of 'public facts', monitor the translation of all learned works, hold meetings every quarter and annually on St. George's Day. (Donaldson, Ben Jonson, a Life, p.366)



St. Georges Day. I could do a bit with that, I'm sure. : )
The tessera of Antilia: utopian brotherhoods; secret societies in the earlyseventeenth century ... By Donald R. Dickson


...About a decade later Edmund Bolton (1575-1633), an ardent antiquary himself, proposed that royal patronage be granted to an Academ Roial to be housed at Windson Castle and "encorporated under the tytle of a brotherhood or fraternitie, associated for matters of Honour and Antiquity." Matters of honor would be superintended by the upper circle of the academy, drawn from the Order of the Garter under the marshallship of George Villiers, then Marquis of Buckingham and Bolton's distant kinsman. Concentric to these would be a working group of scholars, termed the Essentials, who would have "the superintendencies of the review, or the review itself of all English translations of secular learning" and the power to authorize all non-theological literature. First broached in 1617, the design was advocated to parliament in 1621 by Buckingham and approved in 1624, but the death of James meant Bolton would have to win over Charles who did not share his father's scholarly interests.


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Daniel Defoe also proposed an Academy:

The Work of this Society shou’d be to encourage Polite Learning, to polish and refine the English Tongue, and advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language, to establish Purity and Propriety of Stile, and to purge it from all the Irregular Additions that Ignorance and Affectation have introduc’d; and all those Innovations in Speech, if I may call them such, which some Dogmatic Writers have the Confidence to foster upon their Native Language, as if their Authority were sufficient to make their own Fancy legitimate.


All of these terms appear in the war of words between Jonson and Shakespeare. From Jonson's perspective - Shakespeare 'deformed' the English Language, twisting it to suit his fancy. Poet-Ape's 'shreds' were a sign of Shakespeare's tendency to indiscriminately mix forms and language (mingle-mangle/soraismus) - unauthorized associations in Jonson's mind. (Honest Ben's concern with linguistic purity and his condemnation of Shakespeare's indiscriminate mixing would be the subject of Othello - where it would appear unmasked as a type of racism - the race of Shakespeare's mind and manners.)

Meaning of Desdemona: "ill-starred"


Ambisinister Droeshout engraving - mingle-mangle of forms. No symmetry, order or proportion (nonclassical).

Shakespearean 'affected language' (De Vere Argutis in Timber) was condemned. His tendency to wander unrestrained (beyond the bounds)of correct linguistic usage, his refusal to blot and 'polish and refine' his work until it could stand the test of the 'close cut nail'(Horace) were mocked (true/vere-filed lines). Shakespeare/Oxford's singularity and his faith in his own authority was ridiculed as self-love in Cynthia's Revels, where Oxford was figured as the monster of elegance Amorphus (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.) Amorphus was identified as a source of 'confusion and deformity' in Cynthia's court. Shakespeare/Oxford's courtly and fashionable speech were rejected by 'the Academy' who favored a 'purer', less ornamented style. Stylistic choices were thought to mirror ethical choices. Shakespeare's admirers were termed 'ignorant'- they 'wondered' at Shakespeare and applauded his faults because they did not possess learning and discretion themselves, easily gulled by the glittery surfaces and fine sounds of things. Barbarous Shakespeare warbled his woodnotes wild.

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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 if 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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mingle-mangle/macaronic language - Oxford

Teofilo Folengo

But to lose this book (O Lord, what a terrible loss), one would have lost a magnificent and very astute writer in many languages, because here the Latin language is woven, the Tuscan language is inlaid, the macaronic language is interlaced. And what is more, [here are] French, Spanish, and German, and even the language used by rascals can here do a good deed and find its place. But what is most important is that this marvelous language belongs to this author alone, and without him is cold, mute, full of mistakes, and wretched, and much worse than eating macaroni with no cheese topping.[29]


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Bolton to Buckingham (accompanying picture St. George with a leashed/trashed dragon):


To my Lord.
Thus saith the picture. Wise and powrfull Peer,
Things worthiest to bee (...) vouchsafe to hear.
The knight who rides return'd, and mounted high,
His each hand fill'd with charge of victorie,
Sainct GEORGE'S there, &; hear his glorious own,
Arm'd at all poincts, and by his arms well known,
Figures heroick worth, heroick fame.
The conquer'd dragon, which hee leadeth tame,
Of barbarousnesse no barbarous symbol is;
Which thou, brave Lord, shalt cu(..) as hee doth this,
If thou shalt tread the fresh triumphal path,
Which to thine hand the Muse here beaten hath.
In th'azure circle of the Garters Skye.
Thou GEORG dooest shine, starr of prime quantitie:
And thou, and hee the self same arms do bear,
Saving this more, thou gowlden? shells doost rear.
Pilgrims of (warr?) that noble note implies,
Such as of old against heavens enimies,
Drew English blades in sacred Palestine.
Thy bloud then leads thee into acts divine:
And such is this. For what can rather bee
Then honors arts from spoil, and clowds to free?
Fair is the way, most fruictfull is the end,
And heaven concurreth with the king thy freind.
But if the times no such high wonder brook,
Thou in this glass upon my (vowes?) mayst look;
And this rich emblem shall a witness bee,
For what rare ends my sowl doth honor thee.

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Holding/Restraining/Ruling Shakespeare's Quill with Learning:

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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...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.

Shackerley Marmion, Jonsonus Virbius

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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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Dis-Faming the Soul of a Fashionable Age:


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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St George (Heroic Virture) and the Dragon Perseus (Heroic Virtue) and the Medusa

Antoine Berman


A.W. Schlegel and Tieck, for example, translate Shakespeare faithfully but, as Rudolf Pannwitz has said, without going far enough 'to render the majestic barbarism of Shakespearean verse' [Pannwitz 1947:192]. This barbarism in Shakespeare that refers to things obscene, scatalogical, bloody, overblown...in short, to a series of verbal abuses...are aspects that the classical romantic German translation attempts to attenuate. It backs down, so to speak, before the Gorgon's face that is hidden in every great work. (Berman 1985: 93)


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Pope, Preface to Shakespeare:

8. It must be owned, that with all these great excellencies, he [Shakespeare] has almost as great defects; and that as he has certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse than any other. But I think I can in some measure account for these defects, from several causes and accidents; without which it is hard to imagine that so large and so enlightened a mind could ever have been susceptible of them. That all these contingencies should unite to his disadvantage seems to me almost as singularly unlucky, as that so many various (nay contrary) talents should meet in one man, was happy and extraordinary.




9. It must be allowed that stage-poetry, of all other, is more particularly levelled to please the populace, and its success more immediately depending upon the common suffrage. One cannot therefore wonder, if Shakespeare, having at his first appearance no other aim in his writings than to procure a subsistence, directed his endeavors solely to hit the taste and humour that then prevailed. The audience was generally composed of the meaner sort of people; and therefore the images of life were to be drawn from those of their own rank: accordingly we find, that not our author's only, but almost all the old comedies have their scene among tradesmen and mechanicks: and even their historical plays strictly follow the common old stories or vulgar traditions of that kind of people. In tragedy, nothing was so sure to surprise and cause admiration, as the most strange, unexpected, and consequently most unnatural, events and incidents; the most exaggerated thoughts; the most verbose and bombast expression; the most pompous rhymes, and thundering versification. In comedy, nothing was so sure to please, as mean buffoonry, vile ribaldry and unmannerly jest of fools and clowns. Yet even in these our author's wit buoys up, and is borne above his subject: his genius in those low parts is like some prince of a romance in the disguise of a shepherd or peasant; a certain greatness and spirit now and then break out, which manifest his higher extraction and qualities.



10. It may be added, that not only the common audience had no notion of the rules of writing, but few even of the better sort piqued themselves upon any great degree of knowledge or nicety that way; till Ben Jonson getting possession of the stage, brought critical learning into vogue. And that this was not done without difficulty, may appear from those frequent lessons (and indeed almost declamations) which he was forced to prefix to his first plays, and put into the mouth of his actors, the grex, chorus, &c. to remove the prejudices, and inform the judgment of his hearers...http://filebox.vt.edu/users/drad/courses/4165Docs/AlexanderPope.html
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'Tis better to be vile than vile esteem'd,
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost which is so deem'd
Not by our feeling but by others' seeing:
For why should others false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my ABUSES reckon up their own:
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad, and in their badness reign.

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Antony and Cleopatra

Octavius.

You may see, Lepidus, and henceforth know,

It is not Caesar's natural vice to hate
Our great competitor: from Alexandria
This is the news: he fishes, drinks, and wastes
The lamps of night in revel; is not more man-like
Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he; hardly gave audience, or
Vouchsafed to think he had partners: you shall find there
A man who is the abstract of all faults
That all men follow.
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Mongrel/mingle


Sidney, Defense of Poetry

...But, besides these gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, 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.

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The ACADEMY of Ignorance:

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, Discoveries

Censura de poetis. - Nothing in our AGE, I have observed, is more PREPOSTEROUS than the running judgments upon poetry and poets;  when we shall hear those things commended and cried up for the best writings which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never light his tobacco with them. And those men almost named for MIRACLES, who yet are so VILE that if a man should go about to examine and correct them, he must make all they have done but one BLOT. Their good is so entangled with their bad as forcibly one must draw on the other’s death with it. A sponge dipped in ink will do all:-

“ - Comitetur Punica librum

Spongia. - ” {44a}

Et paulò post,

“Non possunt . . . multæ . . . lituræ
. . . una litura potest.”

Cestius - Cicero - Heath - Taylor - Spenser. - Yet their vices have not hurt them; nay, a great many they have profited, for they have been loved for nothing else. And this false opinion grows strong against the best men, if once it take root with the IGNORANT.


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Hyperbolic Praise/Injudicious/Gross Diet/Gallimaufrey

Jonson - Putting the 'Comedy' back into 'Encomium':

To draw no envy, SHAKSPEARE, on thy name,

Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ;
While I confess thy writings to be such,
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise ;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right ;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance ;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron ; what could hurt her more ?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin: Soul of the age!
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage!
My SHAKSPEARE rise!

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Troilus&Cressida/Dryden to the Earl of Sunderland (on hyperbolic praise):

My Lord,


SInce I cannot promise you much of Poetry in my Play, 'tis but reasonable that I shou'd secure you from any part of it in my Dedication. And indeed I cannot better distinguish the exactness of your taste from that of other men, than by the plainness and sincerity of my Address. I must keep my Hyperboles in reserve for men of other understandings: An hungry Appetite after praise: and a strong digestion of it, will bear the grossnesse of that diet: But one of so criticall a judgement as your Lordship, who can set the bounds of just and proper in every subject, would give me small encouragement for so bold an undertaking.

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Quintilius/Jonson


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...


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The Heir of Oxford's Invention:

If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune's BASTARD be unfathered,
As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th' inviting time our FASHION calls:

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In Memory of Mr. William Cartwright.
John Berkenhead



...Thou didst not write
Warm'd by male Claret or by female White:
Their Giant Sack could nothing heighten Thee,
As far 'bove Tavern Flash as Ribauldry.
Thou thought'st no rank foul line was strongly writ,
That's but the Scum or Sediment of Wit;
Which sharking Braines do into Publike thrust,
(And though They cannot blush, the Reader must;)
Who when they see't abhor'd, for fear, not shame,
*TRANSLATE their BASTARD to some Other's NAME.*

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Upon Ben: Johnson, the most excellent of Comick Poets.



Mirror of Poets! Mirror of our Age!
Which her whole Face beholding on thy stage,
Pleas'd and displeas'd with her owne faults endures,
A remedy, like Those whom Musicke cures,
Thou not alone those various inclinations,
Which Nature gives to Ages, Sexes, Nations,
Hast traced with thy All-resembling Pen,
But all that custome hath impos'd on Men,
Or ill-got Habits, which distort them so,
That scarce the Brother can the Brother know,
Is represented to the wondring Eyes,
Of all that see or read thy Comedies.
Whoever in those Glasses lookes may finde,
The spots return'd, or graces of his minde;
And by the helpe of so divine an Art,
At leisure view, and dresse his nobler part.
NARCISSUS conzen'd by that flattering Well, (Cynthia's Revels/Narcissus)
Which nothing could but of his beauty tell,
Had here discovering the DEFORM'D estate
Of his fond minde, preserv'd himselfe with hate,
But Vertue too, as well as Vice is clad,
In flesh and blood so well, that Plato had
Beheld what his high Fancie once embrac'd,
Vertue with colour, speech and motion grac'd.
The sundry Postures of Thy copious Muse,
Who would expresse a thousand tongues must use,
Whose Fates no lesse peculiar then thy Art,
For as thou couldst all characters impart,
So none can render thine, who still escapes,
Like Proteus in variety of shapes,
Who was nor this nor that, but all we finde,
And all we can imagine in mankind.

E. Waller
















Thursday, November 1, 2012

Oxford, the Macaronic and A Frippery of Forms





Mortifying Extravagant and Erring Oxford and Arraigning his Vices of Form - Style is the Mark of the Mind


MORTIFY v 1: hold within limits and control
EXTRAVAGANT \Ex*trav"a*gant\, a. [F. extravagant, fr. L. extra
on the outside + vagans, -antis, p. pr. of vagari to wander,
from vagus wandering, vague. See Vague.]
1. Wandering beyond one's bounds; roving; hence, foreign.[Obs.]

The extravagant and erring spirit hies To his confine. --Shak.

2. Exceeding due bounds; wild; excessive; unrestrained; as,
extravagant acts, wishes, praise, abuse.

ARRAIGN \Ar*raign"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Arraigned; p. pr. &

vb.Arraigning.] [OE. arainen, arenen, OF. aragnier,
aranier, araisnier, F. arraisonner, fr. LL. arrationare to
address to call before court; L. ad + ratio reason,
reasoning, LL. cause, judgment. See Reason.]

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He doth learn to make strange Sauces,
to eat Anchovies, MACCARONI, Bovoli, Fagioli, and Caviare, because he [Amorphus] loves 'em;
Ben Jonson - satirizing fashionable and narcissistic courtiers in 'Cynthia's Revels'
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Oxford/Jonson - Authorship Problem reflects the differences in Oxford/Shakespeare's gallantry and Jonson's style/manners/mores that begin to coalesce along poles similar to the eighteenth century conflicts between the Macaronis and the John Bull-types. Oxford's mixing of English and European fashions, his sympathies with his continental counterparts and his extravagant humours and ornamented rhetoric caused anxiety in authors who were trying to articulate a more distinct English national character based on customary and  plain 'English' qualities and a neo-classical conception of virtue. Oxford was prejudicially dismissed as being too extravagant, too European and was thought to have provided a 'soft/mollis' model of self-loving aristocrat (see Amorphus in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels) - presenting a degenerate version of his noble ancestors. The elegance of his language and his manners were condemned as adulterated and impure, and he was marginalized as politically illegitimate due to his 'monstrous' nature. His singular fame was sacrificed on the altar of a new and severe conception of British Virtue thereby containing  a fashionable and corrupting influence.

(The 'Oxford' Affray, so to speak, prefiguring the Vauxhall Affray. Oxford and the Macaronis both sacrificed before the Temple of Virtue. Shakespeare sacrificed at temple of the Herbert brothers.)

Oxford/Amorphus/The Deformed - Maccaroni Club Material
Jonson - Beef-Steak Club!

Shakespeare's Sonnets - Witty poems of an Elizabethan Gallant - surveying his face in his mirror. (Men of Fashion accused of self-love, preferring their own fancies and ways before the graver paths of learning.)
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Yankee Doodle

"Yankee Doodle went to town, a-riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap and called it Macaroni."
http://blog.aurorahistoryboutique.com/fashionable-macaroni-club-of-18th-century-england-precursors-to-the-dandy-flaneur-and-the-metrosexual/
In England at the end of the 18th century a movement in fashion was finding its voice through young British aristocrats set on defining themselves apart from the average gentleman. A generation of young and world-wise aristocrats, young men whose custom it was to take the ‘Grand Tour’ of the great European cities of antiquity, returned to England wearing ostentatious clothing that remarked on their cultured travels. They had tasted the fashions in Italy and France at the end of the 1700’s and had returned celebrating and perhaps exaggerating these. It is thought that they themselves applied the name ‘Macaroni’ to their set or maybe the label was given to them but it is sure that a distinct style of dress and presentation came to be associated with the term.


The unofficial ‘Macaroni Club’ of young fashion-setters were the opposite of the staid, traditional, and older ‘Beefsteak Club’ of 18th century England. Whereas the prior generation was content with conventional formality and prided itself on its patriotism, the Macaroni’s were devoted to excesses in fashion and the general consumption of things and conferred great importance on their European experience. They wore their trousers tight and their waistcoats short and sported wigs of exaggerated pomp with curls dangling at their ears. They were also known to adorn their jacket lapels with flowers such as nosegay and to wear the narrowest of shoes that almost impaired their manner of gait. The Macaronis would carry canes embellished with tassels and have as accessories pocket watches and spy glasses and they chose to wear wigs of extreme proportions to further set themselves apart.

They came to be associated with excess frivolity, effeminacy, and were plausibly the last vestiges of a court culture that was invariably giving way to a mercantile and bourgeois class. The social and fashion elite of the aristocratic class were emblemized by the Macaronis and, so too, caricatured by them. The Macaroni fashion as a cultural indicator of elitist aspirations has seen itself revived in fashion history in the styles of the foppish dandy, the more literary flaneur, and, more recently, the ultra urban metrosexual male




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Cynthia's Revels, Jonson
Cupid: What's he, Mercury?

Mercury: A notable Smelt. One, that hath newly enter-
tain'd the Begger to follow him, but cannot get him to
wait near enough. 'Tis Asotus, the Heir of Philargyrus;
but first I'll give ye the others Character, which may
make his the clearer. 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. He is no
great shifter, once a year his Apparel is ready to revolt.
He doth use much to arbitrate Quarrels, and fights him-
self, exceeding well (out at a Window.) He will lye
cheaper than any Begger, and lowder than most Clocks;
for which he is right properly accommodated to the
Whetstone his Page. The other Gallant is his Zani, and
doth most of these Tricks after him; sweats to imitate
him in every thing (to a Hair) except a Beard, which is
not yet extant. He doth learn to make strange Sauces,
to eat Anchovies, Maccaroni, Bovoli, Fagioli, and Ca-
viare, because he loves 'em; speaks as he speaks, looks,
walks, goes so in Cloaths and Fashion: is in all as if he
were moulded of him. Marry (before they met) he
had other very pretty sufficiencies, which yet he re-
tains some light impression of; as frequenting a dan-
cing School, and grievously torturing strangers with In-
quisition after his grace in his Galliard. He buys a
a fresh acquaintance at any rate. His Eyes and his
Raiment confer much together as he goes in the Street.
He treads nicely like the Fellow that walks upon Ropes;
especially the first Sunday of his Silk-stockings; and
when he is most neat and new, you shall strip him
with Commendations.

 
  Macaroni (fashion)From Wikipedia

"The Macaroni. A real Character at the late Masquerade", mezzotint by Philip Dawe, 1773

"What is this my Son Tom? ", 1774A macaroni (or formerly maccaroni)[1] in mid-18th century England, was a fashionable fellow who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected and epicene manner. The term pejoratively referred to a man who "exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion" in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling. Like a practitioner of macaronic verse, which mixed English and Latin to comic effect, he mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, laying himself open to satire:

There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately [1770] started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.

The macaronis were precursor to the dandies, who far from their present connotation of effeminacy came as a more masculine reaction to the excesses of the macaroni.
(snip)

Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour had developed a taste for macaroni, a type of Italian food little known in England then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club.[5] They would call anything that was fashionable or à la mode as 'very maccaroni'.[6] Horace Walpole wrote to a friend in 1764 of "the Macaroni Club, which is composed of all the traveled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses." The "club" was not a formal one: the expression was particularly used to characterize fops who dressed in high fashion with tall, powdered wigs with a chapeau bras on top that could only be removed on the point of a sword.

The shop of engravers and printsellers Mary and Matthew Darly in the fashionable West End of London sold their sets of satirical "macaroni" caricature prints, published between 1771 and 1773. The new Darly shop became known as "The Macaroni Print-Shop".[7]

The Italian term maccherone, figuratively meaning "blockhead, fool" was not related to this British usage

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Macaroni: The term pejoratively referred to a man who "exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion" in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling. Like a practitioner of macaronic verse, which mixed English and Latin to comic effect, he mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, laying himself open to satire.

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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. (Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, III,ii)

******************************
..Life and Death of George Villiers, D. of Buckingham
Sir Henry Wotton (1642)

About the age of eighteen he travelled into France, where he improved himself well in the language, for one that had so little grammatical foundation, but more in the exercises of that nobility, for the space of three years; and yet came home in his natural plight, without affected forms, the ordinary disease of travellers.
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Macaronic language/Soraismus - disfiguring language
Oxford and Shakespeare's styles are both macaronic - critiqued as being made of shreds and pieces of forms rather than a 'whole piece'.
******************************
Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made my self a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is, that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely; but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays proved thee my best of love.
******************************

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 on 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 aftertimes
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.

Ben Jonson, ‘On Poet-Ape,’ Epigrams (1616), No 56.

***********************************
Oxford Traduced by Jonson and Friends:

Traduce \Tra*duce"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Traduced; p. pr. &

vb. n. Traducing.] [L. traducere, traductum, to lead
across, lead along, exhibit as a spectacle, disgrace,
transfer, derive; trans across, over + ducere to lead: cf. F.
traduire to transfer, translate, arraign, fr. L. traducere.
See Duke.]

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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. (Jonson, Discoveries)
Satirizing Oxford/Amorphus. Elizabethan gallants shared some characteristics with the eighteenth century Macaronis and drew dome of the same criticism. Droeshout is a disproportionate 'mingle-mangle' of a Figure and demonstrates the English genius for caricaturing a man's style:



(from Beaumont, Jonsonus Virbius)
But Vice he [Jonson]onely shew'd us in a glasse,

Which by reflection of those rayes that passe,
Retaines the FIGURE lively, set before,
And that withdrawne, reflects at us no more ;
So, he observed the like decorum, when
He whipt the vices, and yet spar'd the men ;
When heretofore, the Vice's onely note,
And signe from Yertue was his party-coate,
When devils were the last men on the stage,
And pray'd for plenty and the present age ;
Nor was our English language, onely bound
To thanke him for the Latin Horace found
Who so inspir'd Rome, with his lyrioke song,

Translated in the MACARONICKE toung,
Cloth'd in such raggs as one might safely vow,
That his Maecenas would not owne him now ;
On him he tooke this pitty, as to cloth
In words, and such expression, as for both,
Ther's none but judgeth the exchange will come
To twenty more, then when he sold at Home.
Since then, he made our language PURE and GOOD,
And to us speake, but what we understood ;
We owe this praise to him, that should we joyne
To pay him, he were paid but with the coyne
Himselfe hath minted ; which we know by this
That no words passe for currant now, but his ;
And though he in a blinder age could change
Faults to perfections, yet 'twas far more strange
To see how ever times, and fashions frame
His wit and language still remaine the same
In all men's mouths ; grave preachers did it use
As golden pills, by which they might infuse
Their heavenly phisicke ; ministers of State
Their grave dispatches in his language wrate ;
Ladies made curt'sies in them, Courtiers, legs,
Physicians bills ; perhaps some Pedant begs
He may not use it, for he heares 'tis such,
As in few words, a man may utter much.
Could I have spoken in his language too,

I had not said so much, as now I do,
To whose cleare memory, I this tribute send
Who dead's my wonder, living was my friend.

IOHN BEAUMONT,
BARONET.

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

macaronic



1611, form of verse consisting of vernacular words in a Latin context with Latin endings; applied loosely to verse in which two or more languages are jumbled together; from Mod.L. macaronicus (coined 1517 by Teofilo Folengo), from It. dial. maccarone (see macaroni), in

Allusion to the mixture of words in the verse: "quoddam pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum" [Folengo].

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Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England - Jenny C. Mann
Puttenham's English term for soraismus, the "mingle mangle," aptly expresses the problematic of neologizing: the borrowing of foreign words enriches the English vernacular while also alienating that vernacular from itself. Earlier English rhetorics also describe soraismus as a linguistic "mingling": Richard Sherry defines the figure as "a mynglyng and heapyng together of wordes of diverse languages into one speche," and Henry Peacham likewise describes the figure as "a mingling together of divers Languages." Puttenham's English term further identifies the figure's "heapyng" and "mingling" as a "mangling," a mixture that is also a mutilation or a disfigurement.


**************************
Shakespeare: Neologist

http://www.datehookup.com/content-an-online-guide-to-shakespeare-the-neologist.htm
A neologism is a word that has been created by the person speaking or writing it. The term comes from Greek. "Neo" means news while "-logism" refers to speech or thought. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, over 2,200 English words are neologisms from Shakespeare. This means that the first recorded reference to the word is found in a work by him. The words could have been in use before Shakespeare recorded them, though. Experts such as David Crystal, a linguist, believe that Shakespeare invented around 1,700 words himself. The other words may have been used in verbal communications or recorded on documents that have not survived to the present day.


Many of the words credited to Shakespeare are still in use in modern times. Around 50 percent of the neologisms used in his plays have the same meaning in contemporary times as they did in Shakespeare's day. Not every new word was a success, though. Some words, such as "anthropophaginian," which meant people-eater or cannibal, never became commonly used. Examples of words first created by Shakespeare and still in common use include "frugal," "horrid," and "obscene."

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Hamlet mocking the macaronicke:

OSRIC


The king, sir, hath wagered with him six Barbary horses, against the which he has impawned, as I take it, six French rapiers and poniards with their assigns—as girdle, hangers, and so. Three of the carriages, in faith, are very dear to fancy, very responsive to the hilts, most delicate carriages, and of very liberal conceit. OSRIC

The king has bet six Barbary horses, and he has prepared six French rapiers and daggers with all their accessories. Three of the carriages are very imaginatively designed, and they match the fencing accessories.

 HAMLET

What call you the carriages? HAMLET
What do you mean by “carriages”?

HORATIO
(aside to HAMLET) I knew you must be edified by the margin ere you had done. HORATIO
(speaking so that only HAMLET can hear) I knew you’d have to look something up in the dictionary before we were finished.

OSRIC
The carriages, sir, are the hangers. OSRIC
The carriages, sir, are the hangers—where the swords hang.

HAMLET

The phrase would be more germane to the matter if we could carry cannon by our sides. I would it might be hangers till then. But, on: six Barbary horses against six French swords, their assigns, and three liberal-conceited carriages—that’s the French bet against the Danish. Why is this “impawned,” as you call it?

*********************************
Mongrel/mingle
Sidney, Defense of Poetry


...But, besides these gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, 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.

Mongrel \Mon"grel\, n. [Prob. shortened fr. mongrel, and akin to
AS. mengan to mix, and E. mingle. See Mingle.]

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

Jonson, Discoveries


De orationis dignitate. ’Εγκυκλοπαιδεια. - Metaphora. Speech is the only benefit man hath to express his excellency of mind above other creatures. It is the instrument of society; therefore Mercury, who is the president of language, is called deorum hominumque interpres. {110a} In all speech, words and sense are as the body and the soul. The sense is as the life and soul of language, without which all words are dead. Sense is wrought out of experience, the knowledge of human life and actions, or of the liberal arts, which the Greeks called ’Εγκυκλοπαιδειαν. Words are the people’s, yet there is a choice of them to be made; for verborum delectus origo est eloquentiæ. {111a} They are to be chosen according to the persons we make speak, or the things we speak of. Some are of the camp, some of the council-board, some of the shop, some of the sheepcote, some of the pulpit, some of the Bar, &c. And herein is seen their elegance and propriety, when we use them fitly and draw them forth to their just strength and nature by way of translation or metaphor. But in this translation we must only serve necessity (nam temerè nihil transfertur à prudenti) {111b} or commodity, which is a kind of necessity: that is, when we either absolutely want a word to express by, and that is necessity; or when we have not so fit a word, and that is commodity; as when we avoid loss by it, and escape obsceneness, and gain in the grace and property which helps significance. Metaphors far-fetched hinder to be understood; and affected, lose their grace. Or when the person fetcheth his translations from a wrong place as if a privy councillor should at the table take his metaphor from a dicing-house, or ordinary, or a vintner’s vault; or a justice of peace draw his similitudes from the mathematics, or a divine from a bawdy house, or taverns; or a gentleman of Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, or the Midland, should fetch all the illustrations to his country neighbours from shipping, and tell them of the main-sheet and the bowline. Metaphors are thus many times DEFORMED, as in him that said, Castratam morte Africani rempublicam; and another, Stercus curiæ Glauciam, and Canâ nive conspuit Alpes. All attempts that are new in this kind, are dangerous, and somewhat hard, before they be softened with use. A man coins not a new word without some peril and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured. Yet we must adventure; for things at first hard and rough are by use made tender and gentle. It is an honest error that is committed, following great chiefs.

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

Exceeding the ordinary bounds - it was sometimes necessary he should be stop'd.
Extravagari - Wandering beyond bounds

Alexander Pope

...of all English Poets Shakespear must be confessed to be the fairest and fullest subject for Criticism, and to afford the most numerous, as well as the most conspicuous instances, both of beauties and faults of all sorts. (ibid. p. i)


*****************************
William Cartwright:

...Shakespeare to thee was DULL, whose best jest lyes
I'th Ladies questions, and the Fooles replyes;
Old fashion'd wit, which walkt from town to town
In turn'd Hose, which our fathers call'd the CLOWN;
Whose wit our nice times would obsceannesse call,
And which made Bawdry passe for Comicall:
Nature was all his Art, thy veine was FREE
As his, but without his SCURILITY;


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.

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

Macaroni - extravagant fashion

Much Ado about Nothing, Act III, Sc iii -


BORACHIO


Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this
fashion is? how giddily a' turns about all the hot
bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty?
sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh's soldiers
in the reeky painting, sometime like god Bel's
priests in the old church-window, sometime like the
shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry,
where his codpiece seems as massy as his club?

CONRADE

All this I see; and I see that the fashion wears
out more apparel than the man. But art not thou
thyself giddy with the fashion too, that thou hast
shifted out of thy tale into telling me of the fashion?

(snip)

Second Watchman


Call up the right master constable. We have here
recovered the most dangerous piece of lechery that
ever was known in the commonwealth.

First Watchman

And one Deformed is one of them: I know him; a'
wears a lock.

CONRADE

Masters, masters,--

Second Watchman

You'll be made bring Deformed forth, I warrant you.

******************************
Oxford - Adulterate language

Adulterate \A*dul"ter*ate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Adulterated;

p. pr. & vb. n. Adulterating.] [L. adulteratus, p. p. of
adulterare, fr. adulter adulterer, prob. fr. ad + alter
other, properly one who approaches another on account of
unlawful love. Cf. Advoutry.]

1. To defile by adultery. [Obs.] --Milton.
2. To corrupt, debase, or make impure by an admixture of a
foreign or a baser substance; as, to adulterate food,
drink, drugs, coin, etc.

The present war has . . . adulterated our tongue
with strange words. --Spectator.
Syn: To corrupt; defile; debase; contaminate; vitiate;
sophisticate.

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

Jonson - Timber
{Topic 67}} {{Subject: AFFECTED language}}

De vere argutis. - I do hear them say often some men are not witty, because they are not everywhere witty; than which nothing is more foolish. If an eye or a nose be an excellent part in the face, therefore be all eye or nose! I think the eyebrow, the forehead, the cheek, chin, lip, or any part else are as necessary and natural in the place. But now nothing is good that is natural; RIGHT and NATURAL LANGUAGE seems to have least of the wit in it; that which is writhed and tortured is counted the more exquisite. Cloth of bodkin or tissue must be embroidered; as if no face were fair that were not powdered or painted! no beauty to be had but in WRESTING and WRITHING our own tongue! Nothing is fashionable till it be DEFORMED; and this is to write like a gentleman. All must be affected and preposterous as our gallants' clothes, sweet-bags, and night-dressings, in which you would think our men lay in, like LADIES, it is so curious.

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

Wrest \Wrest\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Wrested; p. pr. & vb. n.

Wresting.] [OE. wresten, AS. wr?stan; akin to wr?? a
twisted band, and wr[=i]?n to twist. See Writhe.]
1. To turn; to twist; esp., to twist or extort by violence;
to pull of force away by, or as if by, violent wringing or
twisting.
2. To turn from truth; to twist from its natural or proper
use or meaning by violence; to pervert; to distort.



  Protestant Hamlet and his 'Damon' Horatio (classically-inspired ideal of male friendship - Essex and Southampton, Sidney and Greville?) contemptuously mocking fashionable gentleman (and political opposites) such as Oxford - those that are dismissed as mere 'seeming':
HAMLET


Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.
Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers-- if
the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me--with two
Provencal roses on my razed shoes, get me a
fellowship in a cry of players, sir?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwbB6B0cQs4

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Shakespeare 'seems' to shake a lance - Jonson

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. (Jonson, Discoveries)
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Satirical portrait of a Gallant - precursor to the Macaronis, fops, dandys - embodying soraismus.

Harvey, satire of the Earl of Oxford:
Speculum Tuscanismi

Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,
In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking, (note - wresting and writhing of the body)
With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward.
Large bellied Cod-pieced doublet, uncod-pieced half hose,
Straight to the dock like a shirt, and close to the britch like a diveling.
A little Apish flat couched fast to the pate like an oyster,
French camarick ruffs, deep with a whiteness starched to the purpose.
Every one A per se A, his terms and braveries in print,
Delicate in speech, quaint in array: conceited in all points,
In Courtly guiles a passing singular odd man,
For Gallants a brave Mirror, a Primrose of Honour,
A Diamond for nonce, a fellow peerless in England.
Not the like discourser for Tongue, and head to be found out,
Not the like resolute man for great and serious affairs,
Not the like Lynx to spy out secrets and privities of States,
Eyed like to Argus, eared like to Midas, nos'd like to Naso,
Wing'd like to Mercury, fittst of a thousand for to be employ'd,
This, nay more than this, doth practice of Italy in one year.
None do I name, but some do I know, that a piece of a twelve month
Hath so perfited outly and inly both body, both soul,
That none for sense and senses half matchable with them.
A vulture's smelling, Ape's tasting, sight of an eagle,
A spider's touching, Hart's hearing, might of a Lion.
COMPOUNDS of wisdom, wit, prowess, bounty, behavior,
All GALLANT VIRTUES, all qualities of body and soul.
O thrice ten hundred thousand times blessed and happy,
Blessed and happy travail, Travailer most blessed and happy.



'Tell me in good sooth, doth it not too evidently appeare, that this English Poet wanted but a good PATTERNE before his eyes, as it might be some delicate, and choyce elegant Poesie of good M. Sidneys, or M. Dyers (ouer very Castor, & Pollux for such and many greater matters) when this trimme geere was in hatching: Much like some Gentlewooman, I coulde name in England, who by all Phisick and Physiognomie too, Might as well have BROUGHT FORTH all goodly faire CHILDREN, as they have Now some ylfavoured and DEFORMED, had they at the tyme of their Conception, had in sight, the amiable and gallant beautifull Pictures of ADONIS, Cupido, Ganymedes, or the like, which no doubt would have wrought such deepe impression in their fantasies, and imaginations, as their children, and perhappes their Childrens children to, myght have thanked them for, as long as they shall have Tongues in their heades."
(snip)
Harvey continues writing to Spenser:

You knowe my ordinarie Postscripte: you may communicate

as much, or as little, as you list, of these
Patcheries, and fragments, with the two Gentlemen
[i.e., Sidney and Dyer]: but there a straw, and you love
me: not with any else, friend or foe, one, or other:
unlesse haply you have a special desire to imparte some
parte hereof, to my good friend M. Daniel Rogers:
whose curtesies are also registred in my Marble booke.
You knowe my meaning.

********************************
Soul of a Fashionable Age:

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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Making commendation a benevolence:

 I know not truly which is worse; hee that malignes all, or that praises all. There is as great a vice in praising, and as frequent, as in detracting" (Jonson, Disc. 1632-35).

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Jonson's Scorn - Shakespeare never struck the second heat nor corrected his own manners/humours:

Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
HIS ART DOTH GIVE THE FASHION; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame,
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made as well as born.

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Horace

‘Do you, O sons of Pompilius, condemn a poem which many a day and many a blot has not restrained and refined ten times over to the test of the close-cut nail’: Ars Poetica, II. 291-4

**********************************
Jonson/Horace/Horatio?

He that will honest be may quit the court: Virtue and sovereignty, they not consort.... (Jonson, Ungathered Verse 50)

*******************************
A phrase selected by Puttenham as an example of an 'intollerable vice' in writing had been associated with the Earl of Oxford. This phrase was subsequently spoken by the affected courtier Amorphus in Jonson's _Cynthia's Revels_. Curiously, the phrase does not appear in full in the 1601 Quarto (while Oxford was alive) - but does appear in the 1616 and 1640 editions of Jonson's 'Works'.


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 --



*************************************
soraismus


EtymologyFrom Latin, from Ancient Greek

Noun soraismus

1.(rhetoric) The awkward or humorous use of different languages mixed together, often using a foreign term incorrectly or in an inappropriate situation.

[edit] See also macaronic

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Barbarous language:

MACARONIC \mak-uh-RON-ik\ , adjective:


1. Composed of a mixture of languages.
2. Composed of or characterized by Latin words mixed with vernacular words or non-Latin words given Latin endings.

3. Mixed; jumbled.

noun:

1. Macaronics, macaronic language.
2. A macaronic verse or other piece of writing.

The tradition is even more significant in Folengo's Italian works and especially in his macaronic writings.

-- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World

The macaronic mode swivels between different languages. I believe Beckett chose French against English for similar reasons to those of Jean Arp in selecting French against German.

-- W. D. Redfern, French Laughter: Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier

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1611- Coryats Cramb, or his Colwort twise sodden, and now served with other MACARONICKE dishes as the second course to his Crudities, and The Odcombian Banquet, dished foorth by T. the Coriat, in praise of his Crudities and Cramb too.

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Francis Beaumont.


To my dear Friend,
M. BEN. JOHNSON,
Upon his FOX.

IF it might stand with Justice, to allow
the swift conversion of all follies; now,
Such is my Mercy, that I could admit
All sorts should equally approve the wit
Of this thy even work: whose growing fame
Shall raise thee high, and thou it, with thy name.
And did not manners, and my love command
Me to forbear to make those understand,
Whom thou, perhaps, hast in thy wiser doom
Long since, firmly resolv'd, shall never come
To know more than they do; I would have shown
To all the World, the Art, which thou alone
Hast taught our Tongue, the rules of time, of place,
And other rites, deliver'd, with the grace
Of Comick stile, which only, is far more,
than any English Stage hath known before.
But, since our subtile GALLANTS think it good
To like of nought, that may be understood,
Lest they should be disprov'd; or have, at best,
Stomachs so RAW, that NOTHING CAN DIGEST
But what's obscene, or barks: Let us desire
They may continue, simply, to admire
Fine Cloths, and STRANGE WORDS; and may live, in Age,
To see themselves ill brought upon the Stage,
And like it. Whilst thy bold, and knowing Muse
Contemns all praise, but such as thou wouldst chuse.

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Coryats Crudities:
The French word "crudité", which designates uncooked vegetables, originates in much the same way as the English word "crude," from Latin. The Latin word "crūdus" simply means raw. Later, it was refined to "crūditās", which means "undigested food" and then on to "crudité" in French.


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Southern, Oxford and Soraismus - Deforming or 'Mangling' the Language: 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, andapplied 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.

(note - first heir of my invention prove deformed)

I {w}ill freddon in thine honour.



¶3.22.8 For I will shake or quiuer my fingers, for so in French is freddon, and in another verse.

But if I {w}ill thus like pindar, In many discourses egar.
¶3.22.9 This word egar is as much to say as to wander or stray out of

the way, which in our English is not receiued, not these wordes calabrois, thebanois, but rather calabrian, theban [filanding sisters] for the spinning sisters: this man deserves to be endited of pety larceny for pilfring other mens devises from them andconverting them to his owne use, for in deede as I would wish every inventour which is the very Poet to receave the prayses of his invention, so would I not have a translatour be ashamed to be acknowen of his translation.

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A Good Poet is Born, not Made/Oxford's Invention INFANTED:

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.



Ode I Strophe 1
This earth is the nourishing teat,
As well that delivers to eat
As else throws out all that we can
Devise that should be needful for
The health of or disease or sore,
The household companions of man.
And this earth hath herbs sovereign
To impeach sicknesses sudden
If they be well aptly applied.
And this yearth spews up many a brevage
Of which, if we knew well the usage,
Would force the force Acherontide.
Brief, it lends us all that we have
With to live, and it is our grave,
But with all this, yet cannot give
Us fair renowns when we be dead,
And indeed they are only made
By our own virtues whiles we live.



(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.

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(Jonson ribbed for writing with small wit and much pain?)
Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art,

My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
HIS ART DOTH GIVE THE FASHION; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame,
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made as well as born.

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turn the same and himself with it - From Jonson's perspective Oxford/Amorphus's body and speech were an affected mingle-mangle - a collection of shreds rather than a judiciously forged and filed 'manly' and native body.


Outlaw Rhetoric, Jenny C. Mann (con't.)
Puttenham's English term for soraismus, the "mingle mangle," aptly expresses the problematic of neologizing: the borrowing of foreign words enriches the English vernacular while also alienating that vernacular from itself. Earlier English rhetorics also describe soraismus as a linguistic "mingling": Richard Sherry defines the figure as "a mynglyng and heapyng together of wordes of diverse languages into one speche," and Henry Peacham likewise describes the figure as "a mingling together of divers Languages." Puttenham's English term further identifies the figure's  "heapyng" and "mingling" as a "mangling," a mixture that is also a mutilation or a disfigurement. The term "mingle mangle" also showcases English's unique ability to make compound words, what Sidney calls "happy...compositions of two or three words together." Peacham's Garden of Eloquence (1577) acknowledges the potential specificity of the figure to the English vernacular, observing that "some think wee speake but little English, and that our speech is for the most parte borrowed of other languages, but chiefely of the Latine, as to the Learned it is well knowne." This reference to how "some" might disparage the English vernacular as a mingled tongue indicated how linguistic mixing registers as a kind of disfigurement perpectuated by the Engish language in particular. It also suggests that soraismus could be construed as a figure for the mixed English vocabulary.

In fact, many sixteenth-century complaints about the growing impurity of the english vernacular draw on the language of the English soraismus. Sir John Cheke advocated the preservation of the vernacular from the "mingle mangle," explaining in a preface to Sir thomas hoby's translation of Castiflione's Courtier (1561) that "I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed bi tijm, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt." Ralph Lever's The Art of Reason (1573) criticizes those who "with inckhorne termes doe change and corrupt the [mother tongue] making a mingle-mangle of their native speache," while the preface to Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (1579) similarly complains that writers who patch up "the holes [in our mother tongue] with peces and rags of other languages...have made our English tongue a gallimaufry or hodgepodge of al other speeches." Such comments often analogize a mingled English vocabulary to a mangled English nation, as we can see in the prologue to John Lyly's Midas (1592), which adopts the terms "mingle mangle" to deride the mixture of the native and the foreign in the English nation. The prologue explains that "Trafficke and travell hath woven the nature of all Nations into ours and made this land like a Arras, full of devise, which was Broadecloth...Time hath confounded our mindes, our mindes the matter; but all commeth to this passe, that what heretofore hath been e served in severall dishes for a feast, is not minced in a charger for a Gallimaufrey. If wee present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, for the whole worlde is become a Hodge-podge." These passages liken the mingled stock of the English vernacular to a bankrupt borrower in debt to foreign tongues, a plain garment patched with foretign fabric, and a mishmash of food served in a single dish. Such formulations identify the English vernacular - and in Lyly's case, the nation and even  the "whole worlde" - as soraismus, or the "mingle mangle."

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E.K. to "the most excellent and learned both Orator and Poete, Mayster Gabriell Harvey:

they patched up the holes with peces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the french, there of the Italian, every where of the Latine, not weighing how il, those tongues accorde with themselves, but much worse with ours: So now they have made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches.

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Outlaw Rhetoric, Jenny C. Mann (con't.)



Those worried complaints about the foreign contamination of the English language offer a counterargument to the project of English rhetoric, which aims to import the ornaments of classical rhetoric into the vernacular. As I have been arguing, the manuals respond to this problem by attempting to nativize rhetoric to the English countryside, where it would become the common property of all English speakers. Such arguments use the idea of a common rhetoric to create what Claire McEachern terms an "axis of identification" between the land, language, and people of England. Reading the above statements about the impurities of the mother tongue, it seems almost incredible that the mingled vernacular language could ever be successfully posited as having a "natural" connection to the English people and the English land. Yet despite the difficulty of adjudicating between the "native" and the "foreign" in the hodgepodge of English speech, and the intense interest in producing a linguistic standard that could make such a distinction, the figure soraismus entirely disappears from English rhetorics of the seventeenth century. I credit this disappearance in part to an increased confidence in the artistic capabilities of the English vernacular in the seventeenth century, by which time English had begun to extablish its own literary canon and shed many of its barbarous associations. Moreover, English writers became skilled in displacing the charge of barbarousness from their own, newly "artful" language onto other modes of expression, such as the speech of women and racial others.

After the turn of the seventeenth century, the "mingle mangle" no longer sseems to allude to the linguistic mixtures constitutive of the Englsih vernacular, and language reformers have acquired a different set of concerns about the relationship between language and nation. Sixteenth-century writers agree that the Engish language is 'barbarous,' but they disagree about how best to transform it into na eloquent language while also maintaing its "natural" connection to the English people and nation. Yet despite the seemingly intractable nature of this problem, the linguistic controversies of the mid-to late seventeenth century do not focus on the barbarousness of the vernacular, but instead debate the relative value of "plain" and "figured" language. It is easy to read such disputes as another iteration of the long-standing tension between the values of the natural and the artificial in linguistic practice, a tension that troubles the art of rhetoric from the classical period on. However, by the mid-seventeenth century this argument is no longer constrained by the core assumptions of the classical art of rhetoric, namely, that rhetoric is an agent of civilization and political stability. Instead, linguistic polemics often disparage the techniques of rhetorical eloquence as a source of civil unrest. In this new context, rhetoric itself become responsible for the mangling of the English nation.

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Paris Fashion: A Cultural History By Valerie Steele


...English aristocrats who wore ultra-French clothes did so, at least in part, to make a political statement: to differentiate themselves from wealthy merchants and lesser country gentlemen (who wore plain dark suits with excellent linen) at the same time that they associated themselves with their counterparts on the Continent. It is significant that Macaroni fashion appeared when the aristocratic oligarchy was at its most narrow and exclusive - and just as it was beginning to be challenged by liberal and popular movements.
A letter to Town and Country Magazine (November 1771) - a journal apparently read by merchants and country gentry - warned that macaroni aristocrats were, in effect, the tools of foreign tyranny:

Reflect upon the folly and extravagance of our present race of noblemen...of the circle at St James (that is, the Court)...it was the policy of the ministers of Louis XIV to make their language universal, in order to pave the way to universal monarchy: to the same end were their fashions propagated throughout Europe; and every country that has adopted them has, in proportion, become effeminate and vicious. To our lot have they fallen most amply, as every macaroni daily evinces.

The Macaroni was not merely "a minnikin, finicking French powder-puff.' To the extent that an Englishman became effeminate and weak, he became unable to resist foreign threats and might even admire European tyranny. Thus, an article in The London Magazine, or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer (April 1772) claimed that the Macaronis had brought home "only the vices and follies of a foreign country"; and the Macaroni Club was compared unfavorable with "the renowned Beef-Stake Club (sic) that took its denomination from Beef being the Englishman's great dish, and Beef and Liberty the objects of the institution."
During the eighteenth century, a growing sense of cultural nationalism emerged as one aspect of British patriotism. Britishness and foreignness were viewed in moral terms. For many merchants and country gentlemen it seemed especially insidious that an important and visible segment of the English aristocracy - who should have set the model for the rest of the nation - so wholeheartedly embraced Continental culture. Their infatuation with foreign tastes was seen as indicative of their moral decline - expressed frequently in these satires in terms of effeminacy, and occasionally of libertinism. The French, who were individually seen as being weak and effeminate, were conspiring to enslave the English by corrupting and weakening them.

A country led by a Macaroni elite and filled with would-be Macaronis was in no position to defend itself:

Whither are the manly vigor and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no: a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heros of Potiers and Agincourt...[The author ends by lamenting] that this nation, in the most perilous of times is to be defended by such things as these.
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Jonson
XI. — ON SOMETHING, THAT WALKS SOMEWHERE.


At court I met it, in clothes brave enough,
To be a courtier ; and looks grave enough,
To seem a statesman : as I near it came,
It made me a great face ; I ask'd the name.
A Lord, it cried, buried in flesh, and blood,
And such from whom let no man hope least good,
For I will do none ; and as little ill,
For I will dare none : Good Lord, walk dead still.

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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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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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Seneca


EPISTLE CXIV.

~CXIV+ ON STYLE AS A MIRROR OF CHARACTER

...In short, whenever you
notice that a DEGENERATE STYLE pleases the critics, you may be sure that character also has deviated from the right standard. Just as luxurious banquets and elaborate dress are indications of disease in the state, similarly a lax style, if it be popular, shows that the mind (which is the source of the word) has lost its balance. Indeed you ought not to wonder that corrupt speech is welcomed not merely by the more squalid mob but also by our more cultured throng; for it is only in their dress and not in their judgments that they differ. You may rather wonder that not only the effects of vices, but even vices themselves, meet with approval. For it has ever been thus: no man's ability has ever been approved without something being pardoned. Show me any man, however famous; I can tell you what it was that his age forgave in him, and what it was that his age purposely overlooked. * I can show you many men whose vices have caused them no harm, and not a few who have been even helped by these vices. Yes, I will show you persons of the highest reputation, set up as models for our admiration; and yet if you seek to correct their errors, you destroy them; for vices are so intertwined with virtues that they drag the virtues along with them.* (SNIP)

Some individual makes these vices fashionable - some person who controls the eloquence of the day; the rest follow his lead and communicate the habit to each other.

(note - communicate/infection - 'see thee in our waters yet appear')

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Soul of a Preposterous Age:
Jonson, Discoveries

Censura de poetis. - Nothing in our AGE, I have observed, is more PREPOSTEROUS than the running judgments upon poetry and poets; when we shall hear those things commended and cried up for the best writings which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never light his tobacco with them. And those men almost named for MIRACLES, who yet are so VILE that if a man should go about to examine and correct them, he must make all they have done but one BLOT. Their good is so entangled with their bad as forcibly one must draw on the other’s death with it. A sponge dipped in ink will do all:-

“ - Comitetur Punica librum

Spongia. - ” {44a}

Et paulò post,

“Non possunt . . . multæ . . . lituræ
. . . una litura potest.”

Cestius - Cicero - Heath - Taylor - Spenser. - Yet their vices have not hurt them; nay, a great many they have profited, for they have been loved for nothing else. And this false opinion grows strong against the best men, if once it take root with the IGNORANT.

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Quintilius/Jonson


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...

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Jonson, Timber


Decipimur specie. - There is a greater reverence had of things remote or strange to us than of much better if they be nearer and fall under our sense. Men, and almost all sorts of creatures, have their reputation by distance. Rivers, the farther they run, and more from their spring, the broader they are, and greater. And where our original is known, we are less the confident; among strangers we trust fortune. Yet a man may live as renowned at home, in his own country, or a private village, as in the whole world. For it is VIRTUE that gives glory; that will endenizen a man everywhere. It is only that can naturalise him. A NATIVE, if he be vicious, deserves to be a stranger, and *cast out of the commonwealth as an alien*.

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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

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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  Paris Fashion: A Cultural History By Valerie Steele
The fashion in men's attire changed as more and more people came to perceive sober male dress as being a reflection of patriotism (versus aristocratic cosmopolitanism), liberty (versus tyranny), country and city (versus Court), Parliament and Constitution (versus royal perogative and corruption), virtue (versus libertinism), enterprise (versus gambling, frivolity, and dissipation), and manliness (versus a fribbling, degenerate, exotic effeminacy).
Ultimately, Macaroni fashion seems to have been doomed by its association with values that were in the process of being rejected by English Society. The point is well made in a Gillray print of 1779 entitled Politeness, in which John Bull and a frog-eating Frenchman exchange insults. The Frenchman - delicate, richly dressed, and bewigged - can be read as a symbol of what the Macaronis stood for and identified with. He is rejected by British patriotism personified, John Bull, stuffed with beef and porter, plainly dressed, and proud of his liberties, was embraced by his countrymen as a symbol of themselves. The Macaroni was not merely a petit-maitre; he was part of rearguard defense of continental and courtly styles and values, destined to be routed by a plain-dressing John Bull.



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[The Earl of Oxford] was part of rearguard defense of continental and courtly styles and values, destined to be routed by a plain-dressing Bull Jonson.



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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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If my dear love were but the child of state,

It might for Fortune's BASTARD be unfathered,
As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th' inviting time our FASHION calls:

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In Memory of Mr. William Cartwright.

...Thou didst not write
Warm'd by male Claret or by female White:
Their Giant Sack could nothing heighten Thee,
As far 'bove Tavern Flash as Ribauldry.
Thou thought'st no rank foul line was strongly writ,
That's but the Scum or Sediment of Wit;
Which sharking Braines do into Publike thrust,
(And though They cannot blush, the Reader must;)
Who when they see't abhor'd, for fear, not shame,
*TRANSLATE their BASTARD to some Other's NAME.*
No rotten Phansies in thy Scenes appear;
Nothing but what a Dying man might hear.
(snip)
John Berkenhead

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1850: "Hawthorne and His Mosses" by Herman Melville


"Would that all excellent BOOKS were FOUNDLINGS, without father or
mother, that so it might be we could glorify them, without including
their ostensible authors."

“I know not what would be the right name to put on the title-page
of an excellent book, but this I feel, that the names of all fine
authors are fictitious ones, far more than that of Junius,-- simply
standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding SPIRIT of all
BEAUTY, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius. Purely imaginative
as this fancy may appear, it nevertheless seems to receive some
warranty from the fact, that on a personal interview no great author
has ever come up to the idea of his reader. But that dust of which our
bodies are composed, how can it fitly express the nobler intelligences
among us?”

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'Tis better to be vile than vile esteem'd,

When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost which is so deem'd
Not by our feeling but by others' seeing:
For why should others false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad, and in their badness reign.

**********************************
Wolsey - King Henry VIII
And for me,

I have no further gone in this than by
A single voice; and that not pass'd me but
By learned approbation of the judges. If I am
Traduced by ignorant tongues, which neither know
My faculties nor person, yet will be
The chronicles of my doing, let me say
'Tis but the fate of place, and the rough brake
That virtue must go through. We must not stint
Our necessary actions, in the fear
To cope malicious censurers; which ever,
As ravenous fishes, do a vessel follow
That is new-trimm'd, but benefit no further
Than vainly longing. What we oft do best,
By sick interpreters, once weak ones, is
Not ours, or not allow'd; what worst, as oft,
Hitting a grosser quality, is cried up
For our best act. If we shall stand still,
In fear our motion will be mock'd or carp'd at,
We should take root here where we sit, or sit
State-statues only.