Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Oxford and the Epic Spear of Achilles

Edward de Vere - The course of English political history forbids him characterological integrity.
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Reviewed work(s): Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxv+296.


Douglas Bruster

Cheney extends the significance of this biographical episode by reading it alongside the curious “Achilles” stanza in 1594’s The Rape of Lucrece (lines 1422–28).1 In this stanza, part of a larger sequence in which Shakespeare portrays Lucrece looking at a painting of Troy, Achilles is represented by “his spear, / Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behind / Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind” (lines 1424–26). Exploring Shakespeare’s fairly idiosyncratic attention to the spear of Achilles and its reputation for being able to both “kill and cure” (2 Henry VI  5.1.101), Cheney argues that this stanza in Lucrece is a particularly good example of a “signature” moment in Shakespeare’s works, a passage in which “Shakespeare signs his name to Achilles” (53) and in which—owing to its emphasis on an uncannily present-yet-absent figure—we can sense an emblem of Shakespearean authorship itself. To Cheney’s persuasive gathering of intertextual references for this interpretation one might add a line that his study overlooks, from John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe (1584)  : “Wil you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you shuld shake the speare with Achilles?”2 If Shakespeare pushed the elements of his last name to their most playful extremes, then, he found the terms already in the Elizabethan air.

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That Wondrous Elizabethan Air:

As many Oxfordians have noted, Edward de Vere was famously compared to Achilles in an 1578 Latin address by Gabriel Harvey, an aspiring laureate-type scholar.


http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/essays/harvey.html
Harvey's Speculum Tuscanismi, to be found in a letter to Edmund Spenser, emphasizes Oxford's effeminacy. This adds an extra dimension to understanding the satirical and adversarial nature of the Latin address - Harvey appears to be offering Oxford the choice of Achilles :  heroic fame or a comfortable life - but he also suggests a feminine passivity in the face of a martial call to action (English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough/ ...throw away the insignificant pen, throw away bloodless books, and writings that serve no useful purpose).

Homer and Ovid had figured this effeminate dallying as Achilles plucking a lyre. Another famous image for unmanly idleness is 'distaff' Hercules - the hero effeminized by his association with women; and this is the image that is evoked in John Lyly's (Oxford's secretary) play 'Alexander and Campaspe' in the phrase:
"Wil you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you shuld shake the speare with Achilles?”


The idea of the effeminized hero was also 'in the air' in Elizabethan times - presumably Oxford refused to participate in the politicization and glorification of male violence (heroic fame/epic genre) and thus became a target for the contempt of the militant Protestant faction at court - Harvey as Leicester's client was one of a number of writers engaged in the refiguration/disfiguration of Oxford's noble image - Harvey's suggestion of a 'mollis' and reticent Oxford is most likely an outgrowth of Spenser's lust/luxury-loving and languid Verdant, the noble youth who 'hung up his arms' and chose to idle away his time in the Bower of Bliss. Harvey's opinion of  the extravagance and affectation of 'womanish' Oxfordian style became evident in his Speculum Tuscanismi, published in 1580 in Three Familiar Letters.

'Gallant' Oxford:

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,
With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward.

Oxford's affected personal style and manner described above apparently extended to an equally elaborate rhetorical style:

"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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Ben 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.

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Sidney's Musidorus in Arcadia:
"this effeminate love of a woman doth so womanize a man that (if
he yield to it) it will not only make him an Amazon, but a launder, a
distaff-spinner, or whatsoever vile occupation their idle heads can
imagine, and their weak hands perform."

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Sidney's Womanish Man
Mark Rose

Idleness was understood to be the first shaft that 'Cupide shootethinto the hot liver of a heedlesse lover', so in desiring to give in toidleness the prince is only proving true to type. Distaff Hercules was the conventional image for just such a condition of effeminate idleness induced by passionate love. The distaff itself was an old symbol of idleness, and Sindey would have read in Amyot's Plutarch:

...that men given to idle luxury are like Hercules 'au palais royal de la royne de Lydie Omphale, vestu d'une cotte de demoiselle, se laissant souffletter & tresser aux filles & femmes de la Royne'.

'WIL you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you should SHAKE the SPEARE with Achilles?" asks a character in Lyly's Campaspe. Barnaby Rich states that lascivious women have made 'valiant men effeminate, as Hercules'. And Robert Burton uses 'Herculean Love' as an uncomplimentary epithet for passionate love. Sidney's own contempt for distaff Hercules is clear from the Defence of Poesie:

So in Hercules, painted with his great beard, and furious countenance, in a womans attire, spinning, at Omphales commaundement, it breedes both delight and laughter; for the representing of so straunge a power in Love, procures delight, and the scornefulness of the action, stirreth laughter. (iii. 40)

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distaff side/spear side

http://wordsmith.org/words/distaff.html

DISTAFF
MEANING:
adjective:
Of or relating to women.
noun:

1. A staff for holding flax, wool, etc. for spinning.
2. Women considered collectively.
3. A woman's work or domain.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old English dis- (bunch of flax) + staef (stick).

NOTES:
A distaff is a staff with a cleft for holding wool, flax, etc. from which thread is drawn while being spun by hand. In olden times, spinning was considered a woman's work, so distaff figuratively referred to women. Distaff side (also spindle side) refers to the female side of a family. The corresponding male equivalent of the term is SPEAR SIDE (also sword side).
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(section added June 30 2013)
Shakespeare on Masculinity - Robin Headlam Wells
Shakespeare on Masculinity is an important and original study of the way Shakespeare's plays engage with a subject that provoked bitter public dispute. Robin Headlam Wells argues that Shakespeare took a sceptical view of the militant-Protestant cult of heroic masculinity. Following a series of brilliant portraits of the dangerously charismatic warrior-hero, Shakespeare turned at the end of his writing career to a different kind of leader. Plays receiving close readings include The Tempest, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Coriolanus.
(snip)
Masculinity was a political issue in early-modern England. Phrases such as ‘courage-masculine’ or ‘manly virtue’ took on special meaning. As used by members of the Sidney-Essex faction, and later by admirers of the bellicose young Prince of Wales, they signified commitment to the ideals of militant Protestantism. Diplomacy and compromise were disparaged as ‘feminine’.
   Shakespeare on Masculinity is an original study of the way Shakespeare's plays engage with a subject that provoked bitter public dispute. Robin Headlam Wells argues that Shakepseare took a sceptical view of the militant-Protestant cult of heroic masculinity. Following a series of portraits of the dangerously charismatic warrior-hero, Shakepseare turned at the end of his writing career to a different kind of leader. If the heroes of the martial tragedies evoke a Herculean ideal of manhood, The Tempest portrays a ruler who, Orpheus-like, uses the arts of civilization to bring peace to a divided world.

(Edward de Vere to Robert Cecil, April 27, 1603)- ...I cannot but find a great grief in myself to remember the mistress which we have lost, under whom both you and myself from our greenest years have been in a manner brought up and, although it hath pleased God after an earthly kingdom to take her up into a more permanent and heavenly state wherein I do not doubt but she is crowned with glory, and to give us a prince wise, learned and enriched with all virtues, yet the long time which we spent in her service we cannot look for so much left of our days as to bestow upon another, neither the long acquaintance and kind familiarities wherewith she did use us we are not ever to expect from another prince, as denied by the infirmity of age and common course of reason. In this common shipwreck, mine is above all the rest who, least regarded though often comforted of all her followers, she hath left to try my fortune among the alterations of time and chance, either without sail whereby to take the advantage of any prosperous gale or with anchor to ride till the storm be overpast. There is nothing therefore left to my comfort but the excellent virtues and deep wisdom wherewith God hath endued our new master and sovereign Lord, who doth not come amongst us as a stranger but as a natural prince, succeeding by right of blood and inheritance, not as a conqueror but as the true shepherd of Christ's flock to cherish and comfort them.


************************** Droeshout Figure - Nabokov observed its two left arms in 'Bend Sinister' -  'two left arms' - figure is ambisinister, 'wrong' in both hands - but also of effeminacy? Two arms distaff side?

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To take advantage of all idle hours - Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis
(grave)r labour - epic destiny linked to death

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In the following dedicatory epistle Arthur Golding suggested that Oxford should aspire to become a 'Christian' Achilles - apparently this hopeful wish had not yet been achieved:


...What remayneth then, but that your Lordship framing your selfe according to the rule of Gods most holy word, should hie you apace to the atteinment of the true honour and immortall glory, by subduing sinne, the world, and the Devil, the Hectors that cannot bee vanquished but by a christen Achilles, and by your good guyding bring many unto Christ, that in the end you may receive the rewarde of true and perfect blissednesse, even the everlasting salvation of the sould, which is the faire Helen for whose safetie it behooveth all good men too endure, not tenne yeeres warre, but continuall warre all their life long. To the furtherance whereof, God hath by householde allyance lincked unto your Lordship a long experienced Nestor: whose counsaile and footsteps if you folowe, no doubte but you shall bee bothe happie in your selfe, and singularly profitable to your commonwelth:
October 1571, Arthur Golding. Dedicatory Epistle to Calvin's Commentary on the Psalms of David)

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Arthur Golding to Edward de Vere (Epistle Dedicatorie,  Psalms):

...I beseech your Lordship consider how God hath placed you upon a high stage in the eyes of all men, as a guide, patterne, insample and leader unto others. If your vertues be uncounterfayted, if your religion should be sound and pure, if your doings be according to true godlines: you shal be a stay to your cuntrie, a comforte too good men, a bridle to evil men, a joy to your friends, a corzie to your enemies, and an encreace of honor to your owne house. But if you should become eyther a counterfayt Protestant, or a perverse Papist, or a colde and careless newter (which God forbid) the harme could not be expressed which you should do to your native Cuntrie. For (as Cicero no lesse truely than wisely affirmeth and as the sorowfull dooings of our present dayes do too much certeinly avouch) greate men hurt not the common weale so much by beeing evil in respect of themselves, as by drawing others unto evel by their evil example...

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According to militant Protestant legend, Hamletish Philip Sidney (a much more suitable dedicatee for Calvin's version of David's Psalms?) embraced his heroic destiny and death and was enrolled accordingly in the pantheon of British heroes (even though Queen Elizabeth reportedly said his death was a wanton waste, and the death of a common soldier. In other words, nothing glorious.)

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Sidney as the picture of 'True Nobility":
From Moffett's _Nobilis_ or_ A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney_,

dedicated to WILLIAM HERBERT: Jan 1594 (?)

"A few, to be sure, were observed to murmur, and to envy him so great preferment; but they were men without worth or virtue, who considered the public welfare a matter of indifference- fitter, in truth, to hold a DISTAFF and CARD WOOL AMONG SERVANT GIRLS than at any time to be considered as RIVALS by Sidney. For no one ever wished ill to the honor of the Sidney's except him who wished ill to the commonwealth; no one ever for forsook Philip except him whom the hope that he might at some time be honourable had also forsaken; and no one ever injured him except him for whom virtue and piety had no love. He was never so incensed, however, by the wrongs of malignant or slanderous men but that at the slightest sign of penitence the heat of his disturbed spirit would die down, and he would bury all past offenses under a kind of everlasting OBLIVION. (p.82 Nobilis (The Noble Man), Moffett)

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Author: Peacham, Henry,


Title: Minerua Britanna or A garden of heroical deuises furnished, and adorned with emblemes and impresa's of sundry natures, newly devised, moralized, and published, by Henry Peacham, Mr. of Artes.

Date: 1612

Vis Amoris. [Figure: ]

ALCIDES heere, hath throwne his Clubbe away,
And weares a Mantle, for his Lions skinne,
Thus better liking for to passe the day,
With Omphale, and with her maides to spinne,
To card, to reele, and doe such daily taske,
What ere it pleased, Omphale to aske.

That all his conquests wonne him not such Fame,
For which as God, the world did him adore,
As Loues affection, did disgrace and shame
His virtues partes. How many are there more,
Who hauing Honor, and a worthy name,
By actions base, and lewdnes loose the same.


Quicquid amor iussit, non est contemnere tutum,
Regnat et in superos ius habet ille Deos.
(It is not safe to despise what Love commands. He reigns supreme, and rules the mighty gods - Ovid, Heroides)
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In this stanza, part of a larger sequence in which Shakespeare portrays Lucrece looking at a painting of Troy, Achilles is represented by “his spear, / Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behind / Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind” (lines 1424–26). Exploring Shakespeare’s fairly idiosyncratic attention to the spear of Achilles and its reputation for being able to both “kill and cure” (2 Henry VI  5.1.101), Cheney argues that this stanza in Lucrece is a particularly good example of a “signature” moment in Shakespeare’s works, a passage in which “Shakespeare signs his name to Achilles” (53) and in which—owing to its emphasis on an uncannily present-yet-absent figure—we can sense an emblem of Shakespearean authorship itself. (Bruster)

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an uncannily present-yet-absent figure

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(Added July 29 2015)
Author: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  ]
Title: Poems: vvritten by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent
Date: 1640 
Achilles his concealement of his Sex in the Court of Lycomedes.


NOw from another World doth saile with joy,
A welcome daughter to the King of Troy,
The whilst the Gr[...]cians are already come,
(Mov'd with that generall wrong 'gainst Islium:)
Achilles in a Smocke, his Sex doth smother,
And laies the blame upon his carefull mother,
What mak'st thou great Achilles, teazing Wooll·
When Pallas in a Helme should claspe thy Scul[...]?
What doth these fingers with fine threds of gold?
Which were more fit a Warlike Shield to hold.
Why should that right hand, Rocke or Tow containe,
By which the Trojan Hector must be slaine?
Cast off thy loose vailes, and thy Armour take,
And in thy hand the *Speare of Pellas shake*.
Thus Lady-like he with a Lady lay,
Till what he was, must her belly bewray,
Yet was she forc't (so should we all beleeve)
Not to be forc't so· now her heart would grieve:
When he should rise from her, still would she crie·
(For he had arm'd him, and his Rocke laid by)
And with a [...]ft voyce spake: Achilles stay,
It is too soone to rise, lie downe I pray,
And then the man that forc't her, she would kisse,
What force (Delade[...]a) call you this? 

Pelias hasta – spear of Achilles (shaft grown on mount Pelion)

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 Spear of Pellas, not Pallas:
Pelian spear
Greek - A huge weapon made from an ash tree. Grown on Mount Pelion. Only Achilles was capable of using this spear which was said to have healing properties. In some lore, occasionally called Pelian spearPeleias,PeleiasPeliasPeliasPeliasPeliasPelias,Pel(e)ias or Pel(e)ias.
--spear given by Chiron?
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 Pēlias, adis, f. adj., that comes from Pelion: Pelias hasta, the spear of Achilles (because its shaft came from Pelion), Ov. H. 3, 126: pinus, the Argo, Stat. Th. 5, 335.

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Benson Frontispiece
"This Shadowe is renowned Shakespear's?"

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'Cheney argues that this stanza in Lucrece is a particularly good example of a “signature” moment in Shakespeare’s works, a passage in which “Shakespeare signs his name to Achilles” (53) and in which—owing to its emphasis on an *uncannily present-yet-absent figure*—we can sense an emblem of Shakespearean authorship itself. (Bruster)

The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature

David M. Posner

... In the discussion in book II, section 11, of masquerade (“lo esser travestito”) [in The Courtier], and of its great utility for showing of one’s true (noble) identity through disguising it, Castiglione emphasizes that the success of the courtier’s performance is determined by the audience reaction, and particularly by whether or not the audience “si diletta e piglia peacere” (“is delighted and pleased”). Control of that reaction, through controlling the pleasure experienced by the beholder, thus becomes paramount. This pleasure arises not from the audience’s experience of the showing forth of some Truth, a la Cicero, but rather from its being deceived. Castiglione shows that the essence of the courtier’s performance is a kind of multi-layered deception, in the form of a performed concealment – a concealment that pretends to be the opposite, to be an intentionally incomplete concealment that instead reveals, with a wink and a nudge, the “truth” behind its supposedly consensual pretense. Through performing "con abito disciolto,”: in a disguise meant to be seen into, the performer invites the audience to feel as though it is in on the joke. The audience’s pleasure arises from its accepting that invitation, from being fooled into believing that , rather than being fooled, it is seeing beyond the mask (representing e.g. a pastor selvatico, a peasant) to the “real” (i.e. noble) visage underneath. The precise locus of this pleasure, as Castilione makes clear, is the tension between what is actually seen and what is artfully hinted at, without however being revealed in what Bacon will call the “Naked, and Open day light” of Truth. Nor could that shadowy something-hinted-at ever be thus revealed, as it is neither presence nor substance, neither essence nor Truth, but rather the reflection of the desire of the beholder, at the very moment of “l’animo…(chi)…corre ad imaginar…” (“the mind which rushes to imagine”). In this specular performance, there is always something more – Castiglione’s “molto maggior cosa” – than can be seen, or indeed be present; the desire for that shadowy cosa is the delectation proper to this masquerade, and it is the eliciting of that desire that is the object of the courtier’s performance.

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And hong their conquered armes for more defame - Spenser, Faerie Queene

The cumulative refigurations and disfigurations of the courtier Oxford's noble image (Verdant, idle Achilles, 'distaff' Hercules, Harvey's womanish man, Amorphus, Monsieur D'Olive, Comus) bring to mind Antony. Antony was a noble warrior/lover who saw his own name and reputation refigured/disfigured and spoke eloquently of his loss:

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Shakespeare's Troy: drama, politics, and the translation of empire
By Heather James

... When Antony accepts that he has lost control of his own self-representation, he experiences his failure as radical anamorphosis into empty "signs" indefinitely subject to refiguration by the artful viewer:

Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapour sometime, like a bear, or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,
They are black vesper's pageants...
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water...

now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape...

Antony is unshaped only when he fully accepts the Augustan view of himself as the Roman hero emasculated by foreign enchantress. In fact, he precipitates his figurative undoing by rousing and manipulating his own nebulous anxieties - themselves produced by the imminence of his political and ideological defeat by Caesar - until he generates enough unmotivated rage against Cleopatra to cast her off as a "triple-turn'd whore" (4.12.13). Overcome by the "Roman thoughts" that have dogged him since the battle of Actium - Scarus asserts that he 'never saw and action of such shame;/ Experience, manhood, honour, ne'er before / Did violate so itself" (3.10.22-4) - Antony censures her for her affairswith Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. Antony is scarcely kinder to himself, as he recoils from his nonchalant willingness to let Cleopatra drink him under the table and then strap on Philippan - the sword with which he defeated Julius Caesar's assassins - while she dresses him in her "tires and mantles" (2.5.22-3). He is far from the state of mind that encouraged a playful identification with Cleopatra's eunuchs: when Antony first enters the play he is anticipated as the "bellows and fan/ To cool a gipsy's lust" (l.1.9-10), and then appears, as if to ratify the image, in the company of her ladies, attendants, and "Eunuchs fanning her." He appears to accept the view of himself and Cleopatra canonized by Vergil's derisive comment on Aeneas, dandied up in Dido's wealthy attire, as a semivir or "half-man," and Horace's more lurid vision of Cleopatra plotting against the empire with her contaminated herd of half-men... Above all, Antony acknowledges the Roman myth most often invoked to summarize his failings: Hercules unmanned by Omphale, humiliatingly discovered in her clothes


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Cleopatra:

Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors
Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o' tune: the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present 3660
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the posture of a whore.

(Oxford saw his greatness 'boyed' in Cynthia's Revels - some squeaking Amorphus)
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Cleopatra/Asiatic?


Asiatic Style:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_style
The Roman perspective: Up to CiceroThe first known use of the term is in Rome, by Cicero in the mid-first century BC. It came into general and pejorative use for a florid style contrasting with Atticism, which it was held to have corrupted. The term reflects an association with writers in the Greek cities of Asia Minor. "Asianism had a significant impact on Roman rhetoric, since many of the Greek teachers of rhetoric who came to Rome beginning with the 2d cent. B.C.E. were Asiatic Greeks."[3] "Mildly Asianic tendencies" have been found in Gaius Gracchus' oratory, and "more marked" ones in Publius Sulpicius Rufus.[4]




Cicero (Brutus 325) identifies two distinct modes of the Asiatic style: a more studied and symmetrical style (generally taken to mean "full of Gorgianic figures"[5]) employed by the historian Timaeus and the orators Menecles and Hierocles of Alabanda, and the rapid flow and ornate diction of Aeschines of Miletus and Aeschylus of Cnidus. Hegesias' "jerky, short clauses" may be placed in the first class, and Antiochus I of Commagene's Mount Nemrut inscription in the second.[6] The conflation of the two styles under a single name has been taken to reflect the essentially polemical significance of the term: "The key similarity is that they are both extreme and therefore bad; otherwise they could not be more different."[5] According to Cicero, Quintus Hortensius combined these traditions and made them at home in Latin oratory.



Cicero himself, rejecting the extreme plainness and purism of the Atticists, was attacked by critics such as Licinius Macer Calvus for being on the side of the Asiani; in response he declared his position as the "Roman Demosthenes" (noting that the preeminent Attic orator would not have qualified as Attic by the strict standards of the oratores Attici of first-century Rome).[7] Thus Cicero professed a mixed or middle style (genus medium; Quintilian 12.10.18: genus Rhodium...velut medium...atque ex utroque mixtum) between the low or plain Attic style and the high Asiatic style, called the Rhodian style by association with Molo of Rhodes and Apollonius the Effeminate (Rhodii, Cicero, Brutus)

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Gentlemen these days give themselves rather to become BATTALUS KNIGHTS (effeminate Men) rather than Martiall knightes, and have better desire to be practised in the carpet trade than in real virtue. (Barnabe Rich, 1578)
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Gabriel Harvey and Oxford


http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/harvey101.htm
 In 1578 the Queen visited Cambridge, accompanied by the whole Court. Harvey met the procession at Audley End, presented verses written in their honor.

The following address, in Latin, was presented to Lord Oxford (trans. by Ward).

An heroic address to [Oxford], concerning the combined utility and dignity of military affairs and of warlike exercises.

This is my welcome; this is how I have decided to bid All Hail!
to thee and to the other Nobles.
Thy splendid fame, great Earl, demands even more than in the case of others
the services of a poet possessing lofty eloquence.
Thy merit doth not creep along the ground,
nor can it be confined within the limits of a song.
It is a wonder which reaches as far as the heavenly orbs.
O great-hearted one, strong in thy mind and thy fiery will,
thou wilt conquer thyself, thou wilt conquer others;
thy glory will spread out in all directions beyond the Arctic Ocean;
and England will put thee to the test and prove thee to be native-born ACHILLES.
Do thou but go forward boldly and without hesitation.
Mars will obey thee, Hermes will be thy messenger,
Pallas striking her shield with her spear shaft will attend thee,
thine own breast and courageous heart will instruct thee.
For long time past Phoebus Apollo has cultivated thy mind in the arts.
English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough.
Let that Courtly Epistle 1 —
more polished even than the writings of Castiglione himself —
witness how greatly thou dost excel in letters.
I have seen many Latin verses of thine, yea,
even more English verses are extant;
thou hast drunk deep draughts not only of the Muses of France and Italy,
but hast learned the manners of many men, and the arts of foreign countries.
It was not for nothing that Sturmius , 2 himself was visited by thee;
neither in France, Italy, nor Germany are any such cultivated and polished men.
O thou hero worthy of renown, throw away the insignificant pen, throw away bloodless books,
and writings that serve no useful purpose; now must the sword be brought into play,
now is the time for thee to sharpen the spear and to handle great engines of war.
On all sides men are talking of camps and of deadly weapons; war and the Furies are everywhere,
and Bellona reigns supreme.

Now may all martial influences support thy eager mind, driving out the cares of Peace.
Pull Hannibal up short at the gates of Britain. Defended though he be by a mighty host,
let Don John of Austria come on only to be driven home again. Fate is unknown to man,
nor are the counsels of the Thunderer fully determined.
And what if suddenly a most powerful enemy should invade our borders?
If the Turk should be arming his savage hosts against us?
What though the terrible war trumpet is even now sounding its blast?
Thou wilt see it all; even at this very moment thou art fiercely longing for the fray.
I feel it. Our whole country knows it.
In thy breast is noble blood, Courage animates thy brow, Mars lives in thy tongue,
Minerva strengthen thy right hand, Bellona reigns in thy body, within thee burns the fire of Mars.
Thine eyes flash fire, thy countenance shakes a spear;
who would not swear that ACHILLES had come to life again?

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In the above text Harvey evokes the image of a potentially heroic figure sunk in idleness, apparently rejecting the exhortation to military exercise and the call to glory. Achilles would eventually choose a short but glorious life, thereby becoming the preeminent western epic hero - but judging from Harvey's Speculum Tuscanismi Oxford didn't buy into the epic and heroical fate Harvey sketched out for him. Oxford apparently chose the long life that ended in obscurity.

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

"It is not the first time that I have preferred a Gentleman of deeds before a Lord of words:" -  Pierces Supererogation (1589)

******************************
Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (p.46-8)


We have further evidence for thinking that Shakespeare’s spear of Achilles is not simply proverbial but Ovidian. First of all, Ovid thinks of Achilles as the antithesis-figure to his own elegiac art. In Amores 2:1, one of the five programmatic poems in his inaugural sequence, Ovid explains why he writes love elegy rather than epic, and asks, ‘Of what avail will it be to me to have sung of swift Achilles?’ In another of the programmatic poems, Amores 2.18, Ovid further explains his refusal to write epic (recusatio): ‘While you, Macer, are bringing your poem to the time of Achilles wrath and clothing the conspiring chiefs with the war’s first arms, I dally in the slothful shade of Venus, and tender Love is bringing to naught the lofty ventures I would make’. From the outset of his career, Ovid presents himself as a counter-epicist, and he puts himself into competition not merely with the great epic authors, Homer and Virgil, but also with the best of the Achaeans, whom Ovid imagines as a metonymic figure for the epic genre. Rather than freeing his verse from epic, Ovid interleaves epic into elegy through an authorial fiction about the two genres, and he uses the West’s first epic hero as the figure for his interleaf.

Ovid can do so because Achilles is the consummate epic warrior as elegiac lover. The Iliad opens with Achilles’ dispute with Agamemnon over his coveted slave-girl Briseis – a dispute that turns out to have disastrous consequences for the Greeks, because it motivates Achilles to withdraw from the battle. When Agamemnon sends Odysseus and Diomedes to retrieve the sullen warrior,

They found Achilleus delighting his heart in a lyre clear-sounding, splendid and carefully wrought, with a bridge of silver upon it, which he won out of the spoils when he ruined Eetion’s city. With this he was pleasureing his heart, and singing of men’s fame. (Homer, Iliad)

This original portrait of Achilles as an Apollonian poet-figure delighting, `delighting his heart’ through lyre-playing and ‘singing of men’s fame’, turns out to be significant to the tradition we are tracing.

For instance, in the Heroides Ovid presents Briseis writing a letter to Achilles, and she imagines him just as Odysseus and Diomedes find him in the Iliad, albeit not in the company of Patroclus (as Homer narrates) but in an imagined embrace with another girl:

You are wielding the plectrum, and a tender mistress holds you in her warm embrace! And does anyone ask wherefore do you refuse to fight? Because the fight brings danger: while the zither, and song, and Venus, bring delight. Safer it is to lie on the couch, to clasp a sweetheart in your arms, to tinkle with your fingers the Thracian lyre, than to take in hand the shield, and the speare with sharpened point…Ye Gods forfend! And may the spear of Pelion go quivering from your strong arm to pierce the side of Hectore [validoque, precor, vibrata lacerto /transeat Hectoreum Pelias hasta latus!] (Ovid, Heroides 3.113-26; emphasis added)

Ovid turns the solitary Homeric lyre-player into a lyre-playing lover, and presents Briseis trying to inspire Achilles to activate the military weapon that will performs the key action of the entire Trojan War: the killing of Hector, breaker of horses. For Ovid, the spear is a figure for action; his verb for that action, ‘vibrata’ comes from the Latin vibrare, meaning to ‘brandish’ or ‘shake’. As Homer primally narrates it in Book 22, ‘Achilleus was shaking/ in his right hand’ the ‘pointed spear…with evil intention toward brilliant Hektor’, and when Achilles spies vulnerability in Hector’s armor, ‘in this place/ brilliant Achilleus drove the spear as he came on in fury’. (22.325-6)
(snip)
Shakespeare’s favourite poet took considerable interest in Achilles’ spear, putting it to specific use no fewer than eight additional times – the last seven representing the spear’s power to wound and heal.(p.46-8)

******************************
Wound and Heal/Virtue and Vice:

Dedication to Oxford by George Baker in 'The composition or making of the moste excellent and pretious oil called oleum magistrale' (1574)

...In the meane time among infinit tokens: this is one espetial signe of your honours heroicall minde, that is in courage, activitie and Chivalry, you your self seek to expresse ACHILLES and other noble personages, so also your honor doth hartely imbrace all suche as excel in any worth vertue, whether it be to commend and adorne her with her semly colours as Homer, or to attend like handmaids on her as Hipocrates or Galen with their needful art of Chirugiry...

****************************
http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/essays/harvey.html
Andrew Hannas, Gabriel Harvey and the Genesis of "William Shakespeare":

Harvey's description occurred in a 168-line poem composed in dactylic hexameter verses which he styled an Apostrophe ad eundem (Apostrophe to the same man, i.e. De Vere), printed in Gratulationis Valdinensis Liber Quartus (The Fourth Book of Walden Rejoicing), London, 1578, in September. The Latin words in question end line 40 and begin line 41:


. . . vultus

Tela vibrat . . .
(snip)
As treated thus far, Tela is taken as the accusative plural of the neuter noun, telum. The e is long, the a short, hence Tela for metrical conformity to the dactylic foot. Similarly, vultus is treated as the nominative singular of the masculine noun, vultus. That is, vultus is the subject, tela the direct object, of the verb vibrat. (If the grammatical tedium rings of the sort parodied in Love's Labour's Lost, bear in mind the notorious pedantry of Harvey. The points are key in appreciating the wordplay.) Again, as treated thus far, vultus/Tela vibrat could be rendered, on the basis of 16th-century lexicography, as:


(Thy) countenance shakes "missiles",
or even
(Thy) will shakes "missiles",

where "missiles" is the most generic equivalent I can enlist, avoiding "spears", for the idea of "all things that may be throwne with the hand." I am surmising that Harvey chose Tela (missiles) as a weakened form of "spears" because he had in mind another word Tela, metrically identical but quite different from telum-as-thing-thrown. This other word tela is a noun in the feminine, nominative, singular, defined in Thomas:

Tela--A web of cloth: also any enterprise, busines, or worke.

Here Tela would become the subject of vibrat:

(Thy) web/enterprise shakes,

with, in turn, vultus now shifting to the accusative plural (the genitive singular is possible, but I think less likely) as the direct object of vibrat:

(Thy) enterprise shakes countenances/wills.


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

Lyric
Lyric \Lyr"ic\, Lyrical \Lyr"ic*al\, a. [L. lyricus, Gr. ?: cf.


F. lyrique. See Lyre.]

1. Of or pertaining to a lyre or harp.

2. Fitted to be sung to the lyre; hence, also, appropriate
for song; -- said especially of poetry which expresses the
individual emotions of the poet.

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Oxford as preeminent lyric poet:

Steven May, _The Elizabethan Courtier Poets_

The New Lyricism

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

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

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

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

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"that famous poet who TAKES his name from “shaking” and “spear”:


An Unnoticed Early Reference to Shakespeare

Fred Schurink

IN a recent article in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Douglas Bruster noted that in the second edition of Thomas Vicars's manual of rhetoric, Xeipaγωγia, Manuductio ad artem rhetoricam (1624, first edition 1621), the author introduced a list of outstanding English poets...If readers would like to find out more about the subject, however, he recommends they consult Bartholomaeus Keckermann's Philippo-Ramaeum rhetoricae systema (1605) and especially Charles Butler's popular rhetorical manual, Rhetoricae libri duo (first printed in 1597 under the title Rameae rhetoricae libri duo). In the latter, he continues, Butler ‘lists certain poets whose measures and wit our countrymen have praised and of whom our England boasts, perhaps not without cause: Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and George Wither’. Vicars then goes on to say that he personally enjoys reading Drayton most and offers two brief English poems in praise of him, supposedly written after having been inspired by Drayton's extremely popular Englands Heroicall Epistles... (1597).
(snip)

What Bruster fails to mention, and what seems to have escaped the attention of scholars of English literature so far, is that in the third edition of the manual, published in 1628, Vicars added a short passage in which he punningly alludes to Shakespeare's name. The reference is included directly after his mention of the other English poets, and runs as follows: ‘To these I believe should be added that famous poet who takes his name from “shaking” and “spear”, John Davies, and my namesake, the pious and learned poet John Vicars.’ The passage expressing Vicars's enthusiasm for Drayton's poetry which followed in the previous edition is retained. Perhaps under Vicars's influence, Charles Butler, on whose text Vicars had originally modelled his discussion of the English poets, then also included Shakespeare's name in his list in the 1635 edition of Rhetoricae libri duo (in place of Chaucer's). (snip) Vicars's punning allusion to Shakespeare, while reflecting his characteristic fondness for wordplay,10 also suggests that he was a familiar figure to readers of the manual. This is confirmed by the fact that Shakespeare is the only author in Vicars's list who is called ‘famous’ (‘celeber’)...Certainly, the term ‘poeta’, which Vicars uses in reference to Shakespeare, could denote a dramatist as well as a poet in the strict sense of the word. Vicars does not, however, use any of the available qualifiers to make it clear that he is specifically referring to Shakespeare as a playwright (as Charles Butler did, for example, when he spoke of him as one of the ‘Poëtae scaenici’, ‘tragicus comicus historicus Guilielmus Shakspeare’). Notes and Queries53 (1): 72-75. ****************************

Not epicus!

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Another laureate-type poet who associated the figure of Achilles with Oxford was George Chapman. In his 'Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois' Chapman prefaced his description of Oxford with an account of the proud and intemperate Achilles that informs both Clermont's description of his meeting with the Earl of Oxford and Chapman's extraordinary decision to stage an eyewitness account of the Earl of Oxford's person (the image of a proud and intemperate Oxford also informs Fulke Greville's account of Oxford's tennis court encounter with Sidney in Greville's 'Life of Sidney', although in that text Oxford remains unnamed.):
http://bringingdeformedforth.blogspot.ca/2011/07/chapmans-justification-of-destruction.html


When Homer made Achilles passionate,
Wrathfull, revengefull, and insatiate15
In his affections, what man will denie
He did compose it all of industrie
To let men see that men of most renowne,
Strong'st, noblest, fairest, if they set not downe
Decrees within them, for disposing these,20
Of judgement, resolution, uprightnesse,
And certaine knowledge of their use and ends,
Mishap and miserie no lesse extends
To their destruction, with all that they pris'd,
Then to the poorest and the most despis'd?25
(snip)
I over-tooke, comming from Italie,
In Germanie a great and famous Earle85
Of England, the most goodly fashion'd man
I ever saw; from head to foote in forme
Rare and most absolute; hee had a face
Like one of the most ancient honour'd Romanes
From whence his noblest familie was deriv'd;90
He was beside of spirit passing great,
Valiant, and learn'd, and liberall as the sunne,
Spoke and writ sweetly, or of learned subjects,
Or of the discipline of publike weales;
And t'was the Earle of Oxford: and being offer'd95
At that time, by Duke Cassimere, the view
Of his right royall armie then in field,
Refus'd it, and no foote was mov'd to stirre
Out of his owne free fore-determin'd course.
I, wondring at it, askt for it his reason,100
It being an offer so much for his honour.
Hee, all acknowledging, said t'was not fit
To take those honours that one cannot quit. (Revenge, III, iv, lines 84-104)

Oxford's Achillean list of virtues (heroic) is, however, is qualified by an Achillean display of pride and intemperance (incivility):

Ren. Twas answer'd like the man you have describ'd.

Clermont. AND YET he cast it onely in the way,105
To stay and serve the world. Nor did it fit
His owne true estimate how much it waigh'd;
FOR HEE DESPIS'D IT, and esteem'd it freer
To keepe his owne way straight, and swore that hee
Had rather make away his whole estate110
In things that crost the vulgar then he would
Be frozen up stiffe (like a Sir John Smith,
His countrey-man) in common Nobles fashions;
Affecting, as't the end of noblesse were,
Those servile observations.


Ren. It was strange. 115


Clermont. O tis a vexing sight to see a man,
OUT OF HIS WAY, stalke PROUD as HEE WERE IN;
OUT OF HIS WAY, to be officious,
Observant, wary, serious, and grave,
Fearefull, and passionate, insulting, raging,120
Labour with iron flailes to thresh downe feathers
Flitting in ayre.

Ren. What one considers this,
Of all that are thus out? or once endevours,
Erring, to enter on mans RIGHT-HAND PATH? (note - Droeshout figure, ambisinister, error/ignorance)

Clermont. These are too grave for brave wits; give them toyes;125
Labour bestow'd on these is harsh and thriftlesse. (snip)

******************************
Author: Baker, George, 1540-1600.


Title: The composition or making of the moste excellent and pretious oil called oleum magistrale

...Such is the strength that the observation of good lawes doth bring to commonwelths, such fruites, kindely braunches (not degenerating from a vertuous stock) od yeeld, such commodyties proceed from vertue, and contrary effects from contary causes as may appear in those same Lacedemonians which afterwards by degeneration were brought to the like thraldome...
(snip)
Which example (Right Honorable) I wish to be marked of all noble families and famous Cities, that therin they may consider that by vertue they are preserved and by degeneration they fall.

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



Oxford's Shakespeare's England Troy: drama, politics, and the translation of empire

By Heather James

It is no coincidence that Oxford Antony comes to act out the very roles he fears will come to define him...in the Jacobean Augustan future of England Rome: his crisis of identity anticipates the ideological accounts already setting in to construe his reputation in political and literary history. The course of English Roman political history forbids him characterological integrity: Oxford Antony is doomed "sometimes, when he is not Oxford Antony," to come "too short of that great property/ Which still should go with Oxford Antony". He recognizes that literary-political history will continually unshape him and dislimn him until he is as "indistinct/ As water is in water."

*****************************
Oxford's literary fame - His name was writ in water

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

THIS GRAVE CONTAINS

ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF
A YOUNG ENGLISH POET
WHO
ON HIS DEATH-BED
IN THE BITTERNESS OF HIS HEART
at the malicious power of his enemies
desired these words to be engraved
on his tomstone

"HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME
WAS WRIT IN WATER"

FEB 24 1821

*************************
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

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

Billy in the Darbies

by Herman Melville

Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay
And down on his marrow-bones here and pray
For the likes just o' me, Billy Budd. -- But look:
Through the port comes the moon-shine astray!
It tips the guard's cutlas and silvers this nook;
But 'twill die in the dawning of Billy's last day.
A jewel-block they'll make of me to-morrow,
Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end
Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly --
O, 'tis me, not the sentence they'll suspend.
Ay, Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up to
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.
On an empty stomach, now, never it would do.
They'll give me a nibble -- bit o' biscuit ere I go.
Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;
But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,
Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!
No pipe to those halyards. -- But aren't it all sham?
A blur's in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.
A hatchet to my hawser? all adrift to go?
The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?
But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
But -- no! It is dead then I'll be, come to think.
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

**********************************
"indistinct/ As water is in water."

"I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist."


http://www.gradesaver.com/billy-budd/study-guide/short-summary/

The court convicts Billy. He is hanged the next morning. Before he dies, he seems as beautiful as a vision; none of the sailors can look away from him. Billy cries out "God bless Captain Vere!" and the crew echoes him, as they would have echoed anything Billy said. The light of dawn touches him, making him appear like some kind of divinity as he dies. His body, miraculously, is untouched by any of the spasms that mark hanging deaths.


Some time afterward, Vere is fatally wounded in battle. Before he dies, he is heard murmuring Billy Budd's name.

As for the spar from which Billy was hanged, the sailors keep track of its location. Though they know nothing of the secret facts of Billy's case, they all instinctively know that he was innocent. A piece of the spar, to them, is like a piece of the Cross. The novella finishes with a song composed by one of the sailors from Billy's watch. Called "Billy in the Darbies" ("Billy in Irons"), it has Billy waiting for execution and imagining being a corpse dropped down into the sea. The final image of the book is the song's haunting final line. Billy, in chains and awaiting death, imagines himself at the bottom of the sea. He asks for his chains to be loosened, adding, "I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist."

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

PROSPERO


Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

*************************
Alonso, The Tempest

O, it is monstrous, monstrous:
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i' the OOZE is bedded, and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded
And with him there lie mudded.

(Son, Book, Heir of my Invention, Foundling)

***************************
Billy Budd - noble foundling - 'Yes, Billy Budd was a foundling, a presumable by-blow, and, evidently, no ignoble one. Noble descent was as evident in him as in a blood horse.' (Melville, _Billy Budd_)  

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?”

************************
Billy Budd/Spirit of Beauty/Foundling - Oxford/Shakespeare's Heir/Book/Foundling
Captain Edward Vere sacrifices Billy Budd (Beauty)/Drowns his Book

***********************
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:
It fears not policy, that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-number'd hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.

************************
In Memory of Mr. William Cartwright
...Nor were these drunken Fumes, 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

************************
...nor have I time
To give thee hallow'd to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffin'd, in the OOZE;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
And e'er-remaining lamps, the belching WHALE
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corpse,
Lying with simple shells. (Pericles)

************************
William Shakespere (anagram) Is like a Sperm Whale! : )

***********************
Prospero to 'Spirit' Ariel, Tempest
  Thou dost, and think'st it much to tread the OOZE
Of the salt deep,
To run upon the sharp wind of the north,
To do me business in the veins o' the earth
When it is baked with frost.

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

Henry V - Archbishop of Canterbury

She hath been then more fear'd than harm'd, my liege;
For hear her but exampled by herself:
When all her chivalry hath been in France
And she a mourning widow of her nobles,
She hath herself not only well defended
But taken and impounded as a stray
The King of Scots; whom she did send to France,
To fill King Edward's fame with prisoner kings
And make her chronicle as rich with praise

As is the OOZE and bottom of the sea

With sunken wreck and sunless treasuries.

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


Verdant - Faerie Queene, Spenser

The young man sleeping by her, seemd to bee
Some goodly swayne of honorable place,
That certes it great pittie was to see
Him his nobilitie so foule deface;
A sweet regard, and amiable grace,
Mixed with manly sternnesse did appeare
Yet sleeping, in his well proportiond face,
And on his tender lips the downy heare
Did now but freshly spring, and silken blossomes beare.

His warlike armes, the idle instruments
Of sleeping praise, were hong vpon a tree,
And his braue shield, full of old moniments,
Was fowly ra'st, that none the signes might see;
Ne for them, ne for honour cared hee,
Ne ought, that did to his aduauncement tend,
But in lewd loues, and wastfull luxuree,
His dayes, his goods, his bodie he did spend:
O horrible enchantment, that him so did blend.

The noble Elfe, and carefull Palmer drew
So nigh them, minding nought, but lustfull game,
That suddein forth they on them rusht, and threw
A subtile net, which onely for the same
The skilfull Palmer formally did frame.
So held them vnder fast, the whiles the rest
Fled all away for feare of fowler shame.
The faire Enchauntresse, so vnwares opprest,
Tryde all her arts, & all her sleights, thence out to wrest.
(snip)
But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue,
Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse,
But that their blisse he turn'd to balefulnesse:
Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface,
Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse,
Their banket houses burne, their buildings race,
And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place.

(snip)

Then led they her away, and eke that knight
They with them led, both sorrowfull and sad:
The way they came, the same retourn'd they right,
Till they arriued, where they lately had
Charm'd those wild-beasts, that rag'd with furie mad.
Which now awaking, fierce at them gan fly,
As in their mistresse reskew, whom they lad;
But them the Palmer soone did pacify.
Then Guyon askt, what meant those beastes, which there did ly.

Said he, These seeming beasts are men indeed,
Whom this Enchauntresse hath transformed thus,
Whylome her louers, which her lusts did feed,
Now turned into figures hideous,
According to their mindes like monstruous.
Sad end (quoth he) of life intemperate,
And mournefull meed of ioyes delicious:
But Palmer, if it mote thee so aggrate,
Let them returned be vnto their former state.

Streight way he with his vertuous staffe them strooke,
And streight of beasts they comely men became;
Yet being men they did vnmanly looke,
And stared ghastly, some for inward shame,
And some for wrath, to see their captiue Dame:
But one aboue the rest in speciall,
That had an hog beene late, hight Grille by name,
Repined greatly, and did him miscall,
That had from hoggish forme him brought to naturall.

Said Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,
That hath so soone forgot the excellence
Of his creation, when he life began,
That now he chooseth, with vile difference,
To be a beast, and lacke intelligence.
To whom the Palmer thus, The donghill kind
Delights in filth and foule incontinence:
Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind,
But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues and wind.

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Verdant - luxury/lust/intemperance

Speculum Tuscanismi - Harvey

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.

Gallant \Gal"lant\, a. [F. gallant, prop. p. pr. of OF. galer to

rejoice, akin to OF. gale amusement, It. gala ornament; of
German origin; cf. OHG. geil merry, luxuriant, wanton, G.
geil lascivious, akin to AS. g?l wanton, wicked, OS. g?l
merry, Goth. gailjan to make to rejoice, or perh. akin to E.
weal.
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Chapman, Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois:

When Homer made Achilles passionate,
Wrathfull, revengefull, and insatiate15
In his affections, what man will denie
He did compose it all of industrie
To let men see that men of most renowne,
Strong'st, noblest, fairest, if they set not downe
Decrees within them, for disposing these,20
Of judgement, resolution, uprightnesse,
And certaine knowledge of their use and ends,
Mishap and miserie no lesse extends
To their destruction, with all that they pris'd,
Then to the poorest and the most despis'd?25

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William Shakespeare (anagram) I shape warlike males ((by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons by hand) (2002)

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(Added July 29 2015)
Author: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  ]
Title: Poems: vvritten by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent
Date: 1640 
Achilles his concealement of his Sex in the Court of Lycomedes.


NOw from another World doth saile with joy,
A welcome daughter to the King of Troy,
The whilst the Gr[...]cians are already come,
(Mov'd with that generall wrong 'gainst Islium:)
Achilles in a Smocke, his Sex doth smother,
And laies the blame upon his carefull mother,
What mak'st thou great Achilles, teazing Wooll·
When Pallas in a Helme should claspe thy Scul[...]?
What doth these fingers with fine threds of gold?
Which were more fit a Warlike Shield to hold.
Why should that right hand, Rocke or Tow containe,
By which the Trojan Hector must be slaine?
Cast off thy loose vailes, and thy Armour take,
And in thy hand the *Speare of Pellas shake*.
Thus Lady-like he with a Lady lay,
Till what he was, must her belly bewray,
Yet was she forc't (so should we all beleeve)
Not to be forc't so· now her heart would grieve:
When he should rise from her, still would she crie·
(For he had arm'd him, and his Rocke laid by)
And with a [...]ft voyce spake: Achilles stay,
It is too soone to rise, lie downe I pray,
And then the man that forc't her, she would kisse,
What force (Delade[...]a) call you this? 

Pelias hasta – spear of Achilles (shaft grown on mount Pelion)

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Pelian spear
Greek - A huge weapon made from an ash tree. Grown on Mount Pelion. Only Achilles was capable of using this spear which was said to have healing properties. In some lore, occasionally called Pelian spearPeleias,PeleiasPeliasPeliasPeliasPeliasPelias,Pel(e)ias or Pel(e)ias.
--spear given by Chiron?
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 Pēlias, adis, f. adj., that comes from Pelion: Pelias hasta, the spear of Achilles (because its shaft came from Pelion), Ov. H. 3, 126: pinus, the Argo, Stat. Th. 5, 335.

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Benson Frontispiece
"This Shadowe is renowned Shakespear's?"