Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Haterius and Shakespeare Profluens, Plena Deo

Style Wars - Imitation and the Early Roman Empire

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Ben Jonson, on Shakespeare (~Timber)

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


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Haterius - Full of the God
flow'd with that facility - Shakespeare "Profluens/Superfluens"

Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality
James L Butrica, PhD

...Next we turn to Haterius himself, and what Seneca was trying to convey about him; this requires that we put him into two contexts, the historical and the literary.
By combining notices in the historian Tacitus (who puts his death in the year that we call 26 CE) and Jerome (who reports from Eusebius that he was nearly ninety at the time) we can put Haterius' birth in the range of 64-62 BCE; for a part of 5 BCE he served as one of Rome's two chief magistrates, having been appointed a consul suffectus ("substitute consul") by Augustus. His reputation was well established in his own day but (as Tacitus noted) did not last long beyond it. Seneca the Younger (nephew of Seneca the Elder) discusses him briefly at Epistule morales 40.10. The text is unfortunately corrupt, but Seneca was clearly contrasting two very different orators, Publius Vinicius, who plucked his words one by one as if dictating rather than talking, and Haterius, whose style he characterizes as cursus, or "running"; Seneca says that he wants a "sane man" to have nothing to do with Haterius' manner, for he "never hesitated, never left off, would begin only once, would stop only once." That impetuous, unhesitant forward rush was noticed by the emperor Augustus, who is quoted approvingly by Seneca the Elder as saying that Haterius noster sufflaminandus est, "Our friend Haterius needs to have a brake applied." In his obituary notice at Annals 4.61, Tacitus says that Haterius impetu magis quam cura uigebat, that is, excelled in his forward drive - IMPETUS is here a synonym of cursus - rather than any careful attention to detail, and sums up his distinctive characteristic as canorum illud et PROFLUENS, "that sonorousness and volubility," where PROFLUENS (lit. "flowing forth") again suggests his sheer momentum. Seneca the Elder, quoting him at Controversiae 1.6.12, likewise refers to "the usual cursus of his oratory" (quo solebat cursu orationis). At Suasoriae 3.7, Seneca relates an anecdote in which Haterius is one of several orators described by Gallio as Plena deo, "full of the god" (but with a feminine form of the adjective "full," generally taken as an allusion to Virgil's description of the inspired Sybil of Cumae in Book 6 of his Aeneid, though Virgil does not use the actual phrase). Thus, even without the specific reference in Seneca the Elder that is being discusses here, an image emerges of an orator easily carried away and lacking a sense of just when to stop.
Note - Seneca says he did not so much currere "run" as decurrere "run downward".
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(profluens - flowing forth - 'fountain of self-love in Cynthia's Revels').

Shackerley Marmion, Jonsonus Virbius


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

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

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"Oxford flaunts a COPIOUS rhetoric in this poem in contrast with the more direct, unembellished commendatory verses of his predecessors. His greatest innovation, however, lies in his application of the same qualities of style to the eight poems assigned to him in the 1576 Paradise of Dainty Devices, pieces that Oxford must have composed before 1575." (Steven May. _The Elizabethan Courtier Poets_)


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On Bacon, Ben Jonson
Scriptorum catalogus. —Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equalled to their empire. Ingenium par imperio. We have had many, and in their several ages (to take in but the former seculum ) Sir Thomas More, the elder Wyatt, Henry Earl of Surrey, Chaloner, Smith, Eliot, B[ishop] Gardiner, were for their times admirable; and the more, because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nico[las] Bacon was singular, and almost alone, in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s times. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr. Hooker (in different matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and in whom all vigor of invention and strength of judgment met. The Earl of Essex, noble and high; and Sir Walter Raleigh, not to be contemned, either for judgment or style; Sir Henry Savile, grave, and truly lettered; Sir Edwin Sandys, excellent in both; Lo[rd] Egerton, the Chancellor, a grave and great orator, and best when he was provoked; but his learned and able, though unfortunate, successor is he who hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. In short, within his view, and about his times, were all the wits born that could honor a language or help study. Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows backward; so that he may be named and stand as the mark and [Greek] of our language.

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James L Butrica (con't.)

Now the controversial statement, as introduced by Seneca, who has just mentioned Haterius' propensity (no doubt connected with his age) for "off-colour" vocabulary:

With the exception of this [i.e. his choice of inappropriate vocabulary], no one was either fitter for the schoolmen or more like them, but in his wish to speak only elegantly, only impressively, he would often fall into that sort of thing that could not escape mockery. I recall that , when he was defending a freedman who was being criticized for having been his patron's concubinus, he said: Immodesty is a reproach in the freeborn, a necessity in the slave, an obligation in the freedman." This became a source of jokes: "You're not performing your obligation to me," and "He's spending a lot of time with his obligations to him." For a while, immodest and obscene persons were frequently called "obliging" as a result. (4.10)

(snip)

However as the client had been a concubinus, Haterius naturally wanted to counteract the bad image being crafted by the advocate for the other side. Presumably the facts of the relationship were too well known for denial (and many not have been a source of shame to the participants); hence, for the sake ofhis client's reputation and even more for the success of his case, he needed to take something that was being presented as negative and turn it around into something positive, and the mockery resulted from the way he put this strategy into effect while also trying to create a striking effect in his usual manner. His comment was not "made to sound ridiculous"; it was inherently ridiculous...

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Jonson -  Many times hee fell into those things, could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him; Caesar, thou dost me wrong. Hee replyed: Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause: and such like; which were ridiculous.

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Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature
(ed. William J Dominik)
Style and Gender in Public Performance
Amy Richlin

...Considering how the forum served as the locus of the boy's transition to manhood, it is not surprising that the content of Roman oratory includes a consistent strain of invective in which rival orators impugn each other's masculinity. But these gender terms were also applied by Roman theorists to literary style itself. The logical link seems to be the principle talis oratio qualis vita (Seneca, Epistles 114.1): a man's style indicates his morals, and his morals will affect the way he speaks.
(snip)
Seneca's own father's collection of remembered speeches and anecdotes, a memoir as well as a handbook, shows how gender and style served as signs in the rhetorical scholae of the early empire. This book was written by the elder Seneca for his sons and expressly dedicated to them, again marking the importance of the training of sons by fathers. Seneca invokes at the outset Cato's definition of an orator; like Seneca, his model addressed his definition of an orator to his son and wrote a book of rhetoric dedicated to that son. Cicero wrote the Partitiones Oratoriae for his son Marcus, and the book is actually framed as a sort of dialogue, or catechism, the characters being 'Cicero' (that is, Cicero's son Marcus) and 'Father' (that is, Cicero). Seneca's three sons appear occasionally as the intended audience throughout his book; for example, at the end of Suasoriae 2.23, Seneca remarks that the style or Arellius Fuscus 'will offend you when you get to my age; meanwhile I don't doubt that the very vitia that will offend you now delight you'. This goes along with an idea voiced by Cicero that the Asianist style is both more appropriate to young men than to mature men and more admired by young men than by old men (Brut. 325-7).
The elder Seneca depict declamations in the scholae staged as verbal duels among the participants, exchanges of witty criticisms establishing and contesting a hierarchy - often gendered, as in one story about Junius Gallio (Suas. 3.6-7):

I remember [Junius Gallio and I] came together from hearing Nicetes to Messalla's house. Nicetes had pleased the Greeks mightily by his rush [of language]. Messalla asked how he'd liked Nicetes. Gallio said: 'She's full of the god.' [Seneca says this is a Virgilian tag.] Whenever he heard one of those declaimers whom the men of the scholae call 'the hot ones', he uses to say at once, 'She's full of the god.' Messalla himself, always used to greet him with the words, 'Well, was she full of the god?' And so this became such a habit with Gallio that it used to fall from his lips involuntarily. Once in the presence of the emperor, when mention had been made of the talents of Haterius, falling into his usual form, he said, 'She's another man who's full of the god.' When the emperor wanted to know what this was supposed to mean, he explained the line of Vergil and how this once had escaped him in front of Messalla and always seemed to pop out after that. Tiberius himself, being of the school of Theodorus, used to dislike the style of Nicetes; and so he was delighted by Gallio's story.

The story points to several features of the game as played in the scholae. First, a speaker's style is rejected by labelling him as a woman. The style of the original target, Nicetes, is associated with Greek declaimers in particular and said to be characterize by IMPETUS, a flood or rush of words. So the bad style is feminine, foreign and overly effusive. Second, the people involved range from Ovid's friends and patron to Augustus: this august circle is following, like sports fans, questions of style among declaimers ranging from the Greek Nicetes to the consular Haterius. Moreover, these fans are also players: Tiberius' team affiliation is noted here; Messalla appears repeatedly in Seneca, sometimes as a noted declaimer himself (Controv. 2 pr. 14), occasionally insulting another declaimer.

(snip)

Quintilian says that, as much as he admires Seneca's style, he had occasion to criticize it (10.1.125-6. 127)

when I was trying to recall [my students] from a corrupt style of speech, broken by all vices (corruptum et omnibus vitiis fractum decendi genus), to a more severe standard. Then, however, [Seneca] was practically the only author in the hands of young men...But he pleased [them] precisely for his vices...

If only Seneca had more self-control, Quintilian concludes, he might have enjoyed the 'approval of the learned rather than the love of boys (puerorum amore)' (10.1.130).
This modelling, as has been seen, is not peculiar to Seneca and his fans: style is seen above all as something that is passed on from older men to younger men. Seneca's sons like Arellius Fuscus; Alfius Flavus likes Ovid; teachers train students or ridicule them; young men have fun imitating noted speakers. Young men are said to have a weakness for the ornate style sometimes castigated as effeminate. Oratory, then, not only manifests gender attributes in itslelf but is a medium whereby older men seduce younger men - though in the word, not in the flesh.


To sum up: The forum was a place for activities that defined Roman male citizens; young men came there to begin their lives as adults and were there trained by older men. This was a time when their sexual identity was felt to be in jeopardy and , perhaps for theis reason, to them is attributed a predilection for a style felt to be effeminate. The 'effeminate' style was so called by Roman rhetoricians for multiple reasons: they found it even in prhrasing, styntax and use of rhetorical figures. Orators used imputations of effeminacy to attack each other's style in a world in which men's reputations were on the line while they vied with each other in public performance...

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Desiring Rome: Male Subjectivity and Reading Ovid's Fasti By Richard Jackson King


Ovid 'Full of Her God"
This model of divine inspiration metaphorically assimilates the poet-text to "woman" filled with semina and "pregnant." Ovid knew very well the humor, even "camp," of this gender slippage as Seneca the Elder demonstrates in his anecdote about Aurelius Fuscus (Sen. Suas. 3.5-7), the teacher or auditor of Ovid's declamations (Sen. Contr. 2.2.8). Fuscus once tried to impress Maecenas (literary patron and Augustus' trusted adviser) by producing discourse that reflected, Fuscus claimed, Vergil's plena deo,, "she full of the god," perhaps referencing the Sibyl in ecstasy in Aeneid 6.
Junius Gallio, a friend of both Seneca and Ovid (P.4.11), once went with Seneca to the home of M. Valerius Messalla (Corvinus, Ovid's patron), where they heard the Greek orator Nicetes speak suo impetu (cf. Germanicus' impetus, F.1.23; a god's in Ovid, 6.6). When asked his impression by Messalla, Gallio replied, plena deo, "she's full of her god," or "she's pregnant with her god." Then, whenever Gallio had heard a new "hot" declaimer (caldos; cf. Ovid's calescimus, 6.5), Messalla always asked him, "Was she full of her God?" The phrase became habitual for Gallio, who was caught off guard once at the home of Augustus where, after hearing the declaimer Haterius speak, Augustus asked for Gallio's opinion. This time he said, "He too was full of her god" (Suas. 3.7, et ille erat plena deo). The off-putting gender mixing (ille and plena) prompted Augustus to ask what he meant by the remark. Gallio explained the origin. `Ovid knew and used this conceptual mannerism. No Virgilian manuscript records plena deo as Seneca claims (Suas. 3.5), but Ovid thrice uses it, once in his tragedy, the Medea: "I'm carried here, there, alas, full of the god" (feror huc illuc, vae, plena deo). He uses it twice in the Fasti, both times describing Carmentis, model for Ovid's own vatic inspiration. At F.1.474 Carmentis' carmina are plena dei, "full of god." At F. 6.538, Carmentis herself "becomes full of her god" (fitque sui toto pectore plena dei). Finally, Fuscus, who started the expression, was Ovid's own rhetorical trainer (auditor). Gallio reported (Suas. 3.7) that "his friend Ovid" (suus Ovidius) liked the phrase very much (valde placuisse).


(note - impetus _ relation to Mars' spear
 - When Ovid says in Book 6 that a god in nobis, "inside me," causes visionary impetus or passion, when it prods, and he "becomes inflamed" or "warm" (calescimus, 6.5), the poet sexualizes external divine inspiration guiding his poetic production. Elsewhere in Ovid calesco describes sexual arousal. Here, Ovid gets hot when the god agitates or prods, agitante...illo, which again has a potential sexual meaning.
Moveover, Ovid suggests a Platonic sexual-agricultural metaphor, in which the god "Love" (in the Symposium) releases divine semina inside the poet. These seeds emerge a visionary, vatic discourses (impetus hic sacrae semina mentis habet, 6.6)...
(snip)

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Rght Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my vnpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde vvill censure mee for choosing so strong a proppe to support so vveake a burthen, onelye if your Honour seeme but pleased, I account my selfe highly praised, and vowe to take aduantage of all idle houres, till I haue honoured you vvith some grauer labour. But if the first heire of my inuention proue deformed, I shall be sorie it had so noble a god-father : and neuer after eare so barren a land, for feare it yeeld me still so bad a haruest, I leaue it to your Honourable suruey, and your Honor to your hearts content, vvhich I wish may alvvaies ansvvere your ovvne vvish, and the vvorlds hopefull expectation.



Your Honors IN ALL DUTIE,

William Shakespeare.

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In All Dutie/Haterius:

With this exception, no-one was better adapted to the schoolmen or more like them; but in his anxiety to say nothing that was not elegant and brilliant, he often fell into expressions that could not escape derision. I recall that he said, while defending a freedman who was charged with being his patron’s lover: “Losing one’s virtue is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity in a slave, a duty (officium) for the freedman.” The idea became a handle for jokes, like “you aren’t doing your duty by me” and “he gets in a lot of duty for him.” As a result the unchaste and obscene got called “dutiful” for some while afterwards.

I recall that much scope for jest was supplied to Asinius Pollio and then to Cassius Severus by an objection raised by him in these terms: “Yet, he says, in the childish laps of your fellow-pupils, you used a lascivious hand to give obscene instructions.” And many things of this sort were brought up against him. There was much you could reprove–but much to admire; he was like a torrent that is impressive, but muddy in its flow. But he made up for his faults by his virtues, and provided more to praise than to forgive: as in the declamation in which he burst into tears.


transl. Michael Winterbottom
http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2010/07/08/q-haterius-and-the-duty-of-a-freedman/


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But hee redeemed his vices, with his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned.’ - Jonson on Shakespeare

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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;

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Davies, Scourge of Folly

Of the staid FURIOUS POET FUCUS.

Epig. 114

Fucus the FURIOUS POET writes but Plaies;
So, playing, writes: that’s, idly writeth all:

Yet, idle Plaies, and Players are his Staies;
Which stay him that he can no lower fall:

For, he is fall’n into the deep’st decay,
Where Playes and Players keepe him at a stay.



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Rhodri Lewis:

...the visionary quality of the furor poeticus was by definition irrational, and easily contaminated by the threat of ‘enthusiasm’; as there was Restoration consensus that the civil wars had been the product of enthusiastic speech and writing, this contamination was fatal.Consequently, the imitative model of poetics – and with it, translation – came to have a new prestige and cultural importance as an antidote to such anxieties: in CONSTRAINING the poet’s FREEDOM to ERR, it was seen as doing important meta-literary work, and conferred an intrinsic mutuality on the literary enterprise:

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Constraining/Holding/Ruling Shakespeare's Impetuous Quill:

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

by Jasper Mayne

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

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Title: Q. Horatius Flaccus: his Art of poetry. Englished by Ben:
Jonson. With other workes of the author, never printed before Date:1640

...Those that are wise, a FURIOUS POET feare,
And flye to touch him, as a man that were
Infected with the Leprosie, or had
The yellow jaundis, or were truely mad,
Under the angry Moon: but then the boyes
They vexe, and careless follow him with noise.
This, while he belcheth lofty Verses out,
And stalketh, like a Fowler, round about,
Busie to catch a Black-bird; if he fall
Into a pit, or hole, although he call
And crye aloud, help gentle Country-men;
There's none will take the care to help him, then, For if one should,
and with a rope make hast
To let it downe, who knowes, if he did cast
Himselfe there purposely or no; and would Not thence be sav'd,
although indeed he could;
Ile tell you but the death, and the disease
Of the Sysilian Poet, Empedocles'
He, while he labour'd to be thought a god,
Immortall, took a melancholick, odd
Conceipt, and into burning Aetna leap't.
Let Poets perish that will not be kept.


He that preserves a man against his will,
Doth the same thing with him that would him kill.
Nor did he doe this, once; if yet you can
Now, bring him back, he'le be no more a man,
Or love of this his famous death lay by.
Here's one makes verses, but there's none knows why;
Whether he hath pissed upon his Fathers grave:
Or the sad thunder-strucken thing he have,
Polluted, touch't: but certainly he's mad;
And as a Beare, if he the strength but had
To force the Grates that hold him in, would fright
All; so this grievous writer puts to flight
Learn'd, and unlearn'd; holdeth whom once he takes;
And there an end of him with reading makes:
Not letting goe the skin, where he drawes food,
Till, horse-leech like, he drop off, full of blood.
Finis
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Tom O'Bedlam - Anonymous

With a host of FURIOUS FANCIES
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghostes and shadowes
I summon'd am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wild world's end.
Methinks it is no journey.