Shifting images of Virtue in the 'nasty-nineties':
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Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Reflections on the French Revolution.
...We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
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Oxford's fame was 'cast into the mire' by 'learning' - and his fame was trashed by ill-tempered attacks such as the satire 'Cynthia's Revels'.
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Bolton to Buckingham (accompanying picture St. George with a leashed/trashed dragon):
To my Lord.
Thus saith the picture. Wise and powrfull Peer,
Things worthiest to bee (...) vouchsafe to hear.
The knight who rides return'd, and mounted high,
His each hand fill'd with charge of victorie,
Sainct GEORGE'S there, &; hear his glorious own,
Arm'd at all poincts, and by his arms well known,
Figures heroick worth, heroick fame.
The conquer'd dragon, which hee leadeth tame,
Of barbarousnesse no barbarous symbol is;
Which thou, brave Lord, shalt cu(..) as hee doth this,
If thou shalt tread the fresh triumphal path,
Which to thine hand the Muse here beaten hath.
In th'azure circle of the Garters Skye.
Thou GEORG dooest shine, starr of prime quantitie:
And thou, and hee the self same arms do bear,
Saving this more, thou gowlden shells doost rear.
Pilgrims of (warr?) that noble note implies,
Such as of old against heavens enimies,
Drew English blades in sacred Palestine.
Thy bloud then leads thee into acts divine:
And such is this. For what can rather bee
Then honors arts from spoil, and clowds to free?
Fair is the way, most fruictfull is the end,
And heaven concurreth with the king thy freind.
But if the times no such high wonder brook,
Thou in this glass upon my (vowes?) mayst look;
And this rich emblem shall a witness bee,
For what rare ends my sowl doth honor thee.
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Ben Jonson - Reason and Learning's attack on courtly nobility in Cynthia's Revels. Ridicules Oxford/Amorphus' courtly manners as evidence of self-love, vanity and affectation. Figures courtiers as effeminate lightweights unworthy of the name of statesmen.
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Beginning of an anti-court party? (later to be known as Whigs?)
Jonson, Discoveries
De Poetica. - We have spoken sufficiently of oratory, let us now make a diversion to poetry. Poetry, in the primogeniture, had many PECCANT HUMOURS, and is made to have more now, through the levity and inconstancy of men' s judgments. Whereas, indeed, it is the most prevailing eloquence, and of the most exalted caract. Now the discredits and disgraces are many it hath received through men' s study of depravation or calumny; their practice being to give it diminution of credit, by lessening the professor' s estimation, and making THE AGE afraid of their liberty; and THE AGE is grown so tender of her fame, as she calls all writings aspersions.
That is the state word, the PHRASE OF COURT (placentia college), which some call PARASITES PLACE, the INN OF IGNORANCE.
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Jonson
I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to
Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never
blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a
thousand. Which they thought malevolent speech. I had not told
posterity this, but for their IGNORANCE, who choose that circumstance
to commend their friend by, wherein he most FAULTED...
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Hamlet - Oxford's riposte to Cynthia's Revels during the War of the Poets. Ben's purge. A tragi-comical satire shadowing the proceedings of a type of Jonsonian 'learned' prince whose self-loathing and fatal neglect of the sensibilities of others resulted in the destruction of the Danish court. In Cynthia's Revels Jonson trashed the reputation of the courtly 'king of courtesy' Edward de Vere, portraying him as the ridiculously affected and self-loving courtier Amorphus in his literary mirror. In Hamlet we see a Prince who displays all the hallmarks of being educated by a scholar similar to the soliloquy-loving Crites/Criticus (Horace/Horatio?) of Cynthia's Revels, and who is confirmed in his belief that all courtesy is mere show and affectation. Hamlet's scholarly and 'rational' contempt for native tradition and courtly manners destabilizes Denmark. His uncouth behaviour and lack of manners (from a courtly perspective) are true to his mythic predecessors Amlodi/Amleth/Brutus. Even the 'murderer' Claudius shows more care for his country and fellow Danes, more civil conversation and more diplomacy than the 'bloody' martialist Hamlet. Horatio/Horace/Crites/Jonson 'silent' and self-contained virtue provides no check to Hamlet's excesses - a form of flattery in itself. Hamlet favours secrecy and soliloquy over conversation/dialogue. Jonson's portrayal of Oxford/Amorphus as self-loving is countered by an expose of Jonson's favourite image of the 'centred self' as the 'self-centred' prince whose anti-social idealism destroys the leading families of Denmark. Hamlet's misguided mistaking of Fortinbras' aggression and ambition for manly virtue and action causes him to recklessly dispose of Danish sovereignty in the most unprincely act of all.
The speeches regarding the responsibilities of a Prince - that he cannot 'carve' for himself, and the dependence of the realm on the safety of the monarch are ignored as Hamlet materializes one of Jonson's favourite tropes - the theatre of one - sacrificing all of the reality and variety of Denmark for the claustrophobic ideal of the judicious 'one'. How can a prince, on whom the safety of so many rests, choose the idea of the 'judicious theatre of one' over the reality of a whole kingdom of souls - whatever their relative worth?
There is a certain paranoia to be seen in isolated consciousnesses that believe in a world of 'being and seeming' - the refusal to accept things at face value, to allow things to be as they appear. In Cynthia's Revels Crites/Jonson sounds very much like a sceptical and scholarly Hamlet observing and cataloguing the vices of the court - both Crites/Criticus and Hamlet believe that pleasant social surfaces conceal corrupted private essences and that they are the the discerning ones who can judge of the true state of things. Therefore innocent Ophelia is revealed to be a wanton; the loyal counsellor and loving father Polonius is perceived to be a pandar and a toady; loyal subjects and friends Rosenkrantz and Guildensterne are sycophants and flatterers and for his adoring mother he reserves the most unsavoury imagery and unauthorized imaginings of all.
Salvador de Madariaga, whose account of Hamlet's brutal treatment of Rosenkrantz and Guildensterne I intend to transcribe in full at some point, fully develops the idea of a self-centred Hamlet. It is this idea that I am linking to Jonson's favorite image of the ethical 'centred self' and the way these ideas are explored and opposed in Cynthia's Revels and Hamlet. Salvador de Madariaga claims that Hamlet's reality does not extend 'beyond his own skin', and that for Hamlet, others exist only as 'objects' and 'listening tools'.
At every point in history there has been someone who declared that the world has never been so corrupt. In the case of a private individual, the amount of damage inflicted upon society is necessarily limited. In the case of a king or a prince, the effects could be catastrophic. Extracting ancient ideas of virtue, masculinity and leadership from classical texts (patriarchy/Ghost?) also drew forth unresolved bloody and destructive effects; and the ghostly father in full armour, who loved to smite and who demanded blood revenge, looks alarmingly Old Testament from here.
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' Senecan' Sidney (Ur-Hamlet?):
The opposition of Christ and Satan in Paradise Lost is in the same
was, as John Steadman has argued, the difference between image and
idol, the “eikon and the eidolon of heroic virtue.” The Son is the
image of the Father’s glory; Satan, in his “Sun-bright chariot,” is
the false appearance or phantasm of that image, the “Idol of Majesty
Divine”. His fallen legions, left free to wander the earth after the
Fall, will inaugurate the history of idolatry in the shape of “various
Idols through the Heathen World”, and their polluted rites will become
the type of Catholic mis-devotion and of the political idolatry of the
Stuart court. This distinction between idol and icon, which Steadman
traces back through Bacon’s critique of the “idols” to Plato’s
Theatetus and The Sophist, also set the terms of the debate in Italian
criticism between Mazzoni and Tasso – the one maintaining that poetry
is “phantastic,” a sophistical art of fallacious appearances only, the
other that poetry is “eikastic,” an art of likeness and probability
related to dialectic and more directly reflecting the truth it images.
The topic is epitomized in Sidney’s Apologie, where it is illustrated
by analogy with the sister art of painting:
“For I will not denie, but that mans wit may make Poesie (which should
be Eikastike, which some learned have defined, figuring foorth good
things) to be Phantastike: which doth, contrariwise, infect the fancie
with unworthy objects. As the Painter, that shoulde give to the eye
eyther some excellent perspective, or some fine picture, fit for
building or fortification, or containing in it some notable example as
Abraham sacrificing his Sonne Isaack, Judith killing Holofernes, David
fighting with Goliath, may leave those, and please an ill-pleased eye
with wanton shewes of better hidden matters.
An idolatrous poetry infects the fancy and pleases the eye. An
eikastic poetry illuminates the desire for “good things.” It too can
appeal to the eye, but as Sidney’ notable examples suggest – all of
them Old Testament histories, often represented in Protestant art,
against which no charge of idolatry could be levered – its highest aim
is to move the soul to virtuous action, *to the sacrificing, killing,
and fighting performed by the faithful in response to God’s word*.
(Ernest B. Gilman, (pp.162-163)
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Shakespeare on Masculinity
Robin Headlam Wells
Masculinity was a political issue in early-modern England. Phrases such as `courage-masculine' or `manly virtue' took on a 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 Shakespeare took a sceptical view of the militant-Protestant cult of heroic masculinity*. Following a series of portraits of the dangerously charismatic warrior±hero, Shakespeare 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.
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The Fortunes of the Courtier
Peter Burke
Chapter 6
What made the traditional critique of courts particularly sharp in the mid-sixteenth century was its association with anti-Italian sentiments, and Italophobia in reaction to the Italophilia associated with the Renaissance, a backlash against what the critics called the 'aping' of foreign ways. This was a very different discussion of imitation from the literary debate discussed in an earlier chapter. Thus a Frenchman denounced 'les singeries des Italiens', while an Englishman vilified 'The English Ape, the Italian Imitation, the Footsteps of France'.
(snip)
This anti-Italian backlash seems to be linked to the rise of the culture of sincerity described a few pages back, with the *northern Europeans rejecting the culture of performance they associated with the south*. In France, the poet Pierre Gringore said in the early sixteenth century that 'there is nothing worse that an Italianized Frenchman. In Germany at much the same time, the humanist Jacob Wimpheling issued the warning 'Beware of a bald red-headed man and an Italianized German.' , as if the latter too was a contradiction in terms. Alternatively, 'An Italianized German is a devil incarnate'. It was an adaption of this last version, 'Inglese italianato e diavolo incarnate', which became proverbial in Elizabethan England (it was quoted by Roger Ascham in the 1560's, by John Lyly in 1580 and by Robert Greene in 1591)
According to one English writer, William Rankins, whose stereotypes were close to those of Guilpin, Italy was full of 'Machavillians' who 'undermine by policy, practice covertly, cloak cunningly.' Again, Greene, in his Quip for an UPSTART Courtier (directed against Gabriel Harvey, and perhaps, via Harvey, at Castiglione), described Italy as the home of 'a multitude of abominable vices', including 'vainglory, self-love, sodomy and strange poisonings'. This was the world of John Webster's Duchess of Malfi and other revenge tragedies which were often set in Italy and generally ended with a heap of corpses on the stage.
The vices of Italy, as foreigners perceived them, were often associated with courts in particular. Thus the Calvinist printer Henri Estienne, denouncing what he called the 'italianization' of the French language, put the blame on the court, the courtiers and their 'courtisanismes'. Ascham went so far as to describe Italy as 'Circe's court', (note - See Milton's _Comus_ - NLD) where the companions of Odysseus were turned into swine. The association of courts with Italy was underlined by the visibility of Italian princesses abroad, notably Bona Sforza, wife of Zygmunt I of Poland, and Catherine de' Medici, wife of Henry II of France. After the massacre of French Protestants in 1572, for which they held Catherine to be responsible, the association between Catholicism, Italy, courts and murder seemed self- evident. (Chapter 6, pp. 106 - 114)
(Hamlet -ends with an ironic heap of Northern European corpses on the stage)
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Tennis Court Quarrel – argument over precedence or Sidney’s
iconoclastic attack on 'true' nobility?
Thomas Moffett – in the Noble Man – would later eulogize Sidney as an
exemplar of true nobility in a book dedicated to William Herbert in
Jan (?)1594.
From Moffett's _Nobilis_ or_ A View of the Life and Death of a
Sidney_, dedicated to WILLIAM HERBERT:
"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 honorable had also forsaked; 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. (Nobilis, Moffett, p.82)
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Paul Hammer _The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political
Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585-1597_.
...More than intellectual conceit lay behind Essex's characterisation as the heroic figure of Aeneas in his correspondence with Antonio Perex during 1595:
This analogy between Essex and Aeneas is very telling. Aeneas was particularly celebrated for his pietas, both towards the gods and towards his own ineluctable fate. In broad terms, the quality of pietas was appropriate for Essex because of the importance of his religion. However, the connotations of performing a duty owed to fate is also very illuminating. The clear implication of this analogy is that, like Virgil's hero, Essex was ultimately fated - predestined, in Calvinist terms - to draw his country to a glorious new future. Yet Aeneas's triumph was only painfully achieved and the very resort to this analogy in late 1595 powerfully evokes a sense of Essex's own feeling of thwarted destiny at that time. This is underlined by allusions to Elizabeth as Juno. By this analogy, Elizabeth's actions in 1595 seemed to Essex and Perez like those of Juno - spiteful and futile attempts to forestall a destiny which even a goddess of her power could not avoid.
Footnote:
In addition, it should be noted that Aeneas was also associated with the 'BRUTUS myth' of English history. According to this non-classical legend, England was seeded with the heroic blood of Troy by the arrival of Aeneas's great-grandson, Brutus.
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Proto-Hamlet
The closest myth is Roman: the story of Junius Brutus, legendary founder of Rome, follows a similar pattern of murder and revenge. Brutus' father and brother are killed by his uncle Tarquin*; Brutus feigns stupidity to save himself and ultimately overthrows the tyrant, founding the Roman republic. The Scandinavian name "Amleth" and the Latin "Brutus" both have the same meaning ("dull," or "foolish").
*The Tarquins In Roman tradition, the Tarquins were an Etruscan family that ruled Rome from ca.657 to ca.510 B.C. The revolt that deposed the last Tarquin was brought about by his son's rape of Lucrece and her subsequent suicide--a subject Shakespeare chose for a long narrative poem.
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Blair Worden:
It was the goal of Toland, Hollis and their followers [radical Whigs] to reclaim the regicides [executioners of Charles I] from Tory calumny and to demonstrate the integrity of their motives and conduct. They compared them to heroes of ancient Rome, especially Brutus and Cassius, the slayers of Julius Caesar. But there was a difference. The regicides, as they themselves had proclaimed, had not resorted to the lawlessness of assassination. They had tried the king in open court, where they had demonstrated, as they believed, the illegal course of his rule.
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Jonson, Cynthia's Revels
Cynthia: Dear Arete, and Crites, to you two
We give the Charge; impose what Pains you please:
TH' INCURABLE CUT OFF, the rest REFORM,
Remembring ever what we first decreed,
Since Revels were proclaim'd, let now none bleed.
Arete. How well Diana can distinguish Times,
And sort her Censures, keeping to her self
The Doom of Gods, leaving the rest to us?
Come, cite them, Crites, first, and then proceed.
(snip)
Then, Crites, practise thy DISCRETION.
Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude. --Burke
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After the events of the French Revolution, the Whig party were effectively removed from power for over a generation:
Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Reflections on the French Revolution.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Paras. 125–149
I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the triumph, has borne that day, (one is interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well) and that she bears all the succeeding days, that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race, and becoming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage: that, like her, she has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace; and that, if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand. 125
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness. 126
This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this, which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws to be subdued by manners. 127
But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. 128
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide; and if the people are by any chance, or in any way, gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny. 129
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place. These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states:—Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto. There ought to be a system of manners in every nation, which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely. 130
But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honour, and the honour of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle. 131
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly, taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume, that, on the whole, their operation was beneficial. 132
We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude. 1
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I know not SEEMS --Hamlet
Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakspeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well torned and true filed lines;
In each of which he SEEMS to shake a lance,
As brandisht at the eyes of ignorance. -- Jonson on Shakespeare
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Judicio pylium, GENIO SOCRATEM, arte maronem - Shakespeare monument
Courtly `Deception':
Assumed Simplicity and the Critique of Nobility: Or,
How Castiglione Read Cicero
by JENNIFER RICHARDS
...This perceived elitism of sprezzatura, Saccone suggests, is intergral to its classical source: Socratic eironeia or understatement, as discussed by Aristotle in book 2 of Nichomachean Ethics. Aristotle's attitude to this gesture is ambivalent. On the one hand, he identifies eironeia as blameworthy because of its insincerity. Indeed, along with alazon (boastfulness or exaggeration), it flanks the virtuous mean of aletheia (truthfulness). Yet, Aristotle also allows that "if a frank and truthful man were obliged to deviate from the truth, he should have recourse to understatement in preference to exaggeration," because the former "seems to have more grace" and an "elegant effect." With this weak rejection of eironeia, Saccone suggests, Aristotle betrays "an attitude to class values that we must call aristocratic," and a rationale for Castiglione's attachment to sprezzatura. Understatement gives the courtier credit in the eyes of a popular audience (57-59). Canossa explains sprezzatura by recalling the example of two famous orators:
And I remember having read of some excellent orators... who endeavoured to make everyone believe that they were ignorant of letters, and, dissembling their knowledge, gave the impression that their speeches were made very simply, as if they had been prompted by nature and truth rather than study or artifice. (64/53)
So persuasive and widely accepted are these accounts of the role of sprezzatura in courtly display that there seems little point in challenging them, particularly since Javitch and Saccone offer such brilliant analyses of Fregoso's take on this dissembling figure in book 2. But each speaker in Il cortegiano offers us something different to think about, and consequently we need to be prepared to accommodate conflicting views. The gesture of sprezzatura or courtly "disdain" is inherently ambiguous. It can mean an aristocratic arrogance (as Saccone detects), but, conversely, it can also imply a modest or humble demeanour.
I suggest that Canossa and Fregoso offer conflicting perspectives on sprezzatura and different examples. Canossa's allusion to those two famous orators, for example, helps us to understand an alternative source for sprezzazura and a rather different reading of the elitism of book 1, one which is more inclusive and critical of the kind of "mysterious" courtliness of Fregoso. This different conception is exemplified in the sprezzatura that characterises his conversational style, rather than being carried over to the discussion in book 2. The two orators alluded to by Canossa are Crassus and Antonius, the main speakers of Cicero's De oratore and, in different ways, both practitioners of the Socratic understatement which Saccone saw as a source for sprezzatura. Cicero, however, views this form of irony much more positively than Aristotle. Antonius practises sprezzatura when he claims only to be able to teach us about his "own practice" (consuetudine) in rhetoric, not "an art which [he] never learned" (1.208). Onl y, in this text it is identified as a form of Socratic irony, dissimulatio or, as it is translated in the Loeb edition, "assumed simplicity" (2.270) and "pretended ignorance" (2.350). [10] In De oratore it is no elitist gesture: Antonius's refusal to teach draws our attention quietly to the importance of practise to the excellent orator in two senses. The first sense is straightforward enough: the orator must practise his skills repeatedly so that they become second nature to him. However, the second sense is more oblique: for Antonius teaches us that such "practise" can also take the form of familiar and witty conversation (sermo), just as Cicero employs for De oratore itself.
(snip)
...Of course, Antonius's promise to share his "personal views" is no simple volte face. Despite making this promise Antonius continues in book 2 with his original deception. Not only is his initial insistence that he is "not going to speak of an art which [he] never learned, but of [his] own practice" (1.208) shown to be misleading (it becomes obvious that he is a careful student), but he continues to downplay the extent of his effort. When he is asked by Catulus whether his knowledge of commonplaces proceeds from "some likeness to that godlike genius," Aristotle, or from the fact that he has "perused and learned those very maxims," Antonius temporarily drops his mask. He explains that he understands well that "a speaker would be more pleasing and acceptable to a nation like ours if he were to show, first, as little trace as possible of any artifice, and, secondly none whatever of things Greek" (2.152-53). A few lines later Antonius repeats this advice in relation to the study of philosophy: "I do not disapprov e of such pursuits, if kept within limits, though I hold that a reputation for such pursuits, or any suggestion of artifice, is likely to prejudice an orator with the judiciary: for it weakens at once the credibility of the orator and the cogency of his oratory" (2.156). Finally, he will be exposed as a dissembler by his antagonist: "I am delighted," Crassus declares, "to see you at last known as a master of the theory [of rhetoric], finally unmasked and stripped of the veil of your pretended ignorance [dissimulatio]") (2.350).
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The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, Chapman
Clermont:
I over-tooke, comming from Italie,
In Germanie a great and famous Earle
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;
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...
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English Travellers of the Renaissance by Howard
Page 22 of 98
Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, famous for his rude behaviour to Sir Philip Sidney, whom he subsequently tried to dispatch with hired assassins after the Italian manner,[131] might well have been one of the rising generation of courtiers whom Ascham so deplored. In Ascham's lifetime he was already a conspicuous gallant, and by 1571, at the age of twenty-two, he was the court favourite. The friends of the Earl of Rutland, keeping him informed of the news while he was fulfilling in Paris those heavy duties of observation which Cecil mapped out for him, announce that "There is no man of life and agility in every respect in Court, but the Earl of Oxford."[132] And a month afterwards, "Th' Erle of Oxenforde hath gotten hym a wyffe--or at the leste a wyffe hath caught hym--that is Mrs Anne Cycille, whearunto the Queen hath gyven her consent, the which hathe causyd great wypping, waling, and sorowful chere, of those that hoped to have hade that golden daye."[133] Ascham did not live to see the development of this favorite into an Italianate Englishman, but Harrison's invective against the going of noblemen's sons into Italy coincides with the return of the Earl from a foreign tour which seems to have been ill-spent.
(snip)
The quickening of animosity between Protestants and Catholics in the last quarter of the sixteenth century had a good deal to do with the censure of travel which we have been describing. In their fear and hatred of the Roman Catholic countries, Englishmen viewed with alarm any attractions, intellectual or otherwise, which the Continent had for their sons. They had rather have them forego the advantages of a liberal education than run the risk of falling body and soul into the hands of the Papists. The intense, fierce patriotism which flared up to meet the Spanish Armada almost blighted the genial impulse of travel for study's sake. It divided the nations again, and took away the common admiration for Italy which had made the young men of the north all rush together there. We can no longer imagine an Englishman like Selling coming to the great Politian at Bologna and grappling him to his heart--"arctissima sibi conjunxit amicum familiaritate,"[152] as the warm humanistic phrase has it. In the seventeenth century Politian would be a "contagious Papist," using his charm to convert men to Romanism, and Selling would be a "true son of the Church of England," railing at Politian for his "debauch'd and Popish principles." The Renaissance had set men travelling to Italy as to the flower of the world. They had scarcely started before the Reformation called it a place of abomination. Lord Burghley, who in Elizabeth's early days had been so bent on a foreign education for his eldest son, had drilled him in languages and pressed him to go to Italy,[153] at the end of his long life left instructions to his children: "Suffer not thy sonnes to pass the Alps, for they shall learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy, and atheism. And if by travel they get a few broken languages, that shall profit them nothing more than to have one meat served on divers dishes."
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After the Revolutions
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Antony and 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
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ th’ posture of a whore.
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The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 23 May 1601, with the title NARCISSUS the Fountain of Self-Love. It was published in quarto later that year by the bookseller Walter Burre, under the title The Fountain of Self-Love, or Cynthia's Revels.
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Hamlet's penchant for 'holding the mirror' up to the vices of others is also a marked Jonsonian characteristic. Jonson 'held the mirror' up to Oxford/Amorphus in Cynthia's Revels - 'boying Oxford's greatness' [Children of the Chapel] in a critique of Oxfordian courtesy and sociability:
Upon Ben: Johnson, the most excellent of Comick Poets.
Mirror of Poets! Mirror of our Age!
Which her whole Face beholding on thy stage,
Pleas'd and displeas'd with her owne faults endures,
A remedy, like Those whom Musicke cures,
Thou not alone those various inclinations,
Which Nature gives to Ages, Sexes, Nations,
Hast traced with thy All-resembling Pen,
But all that custome hath impos'd on Men,
Or ill-got Habits, which distort them so,
That scarce the Brother can the Brother know,
Is represented to the wondring Eyes,
Of all that see or read thy Comedies.
Whoever in those Glasses lookes may finde,
The spots return'd, or graces of his minde;
And by the helpe of so divine an Art,
At leisure view, and dresse his nobler part.
NARCISSUS conzen'd by that flattering Well,
Which nothing could but of his beauty tell,
Had here discovering the DEFORM'D estate
Of his fond minde, preserv'd himselfe with hate,
But Vertue too, as well as Vice is clad,
In flesh and blood so well, that Plato had
Beheld what his high Fancie once embrac'd,
Vertue with colour, speech and motion grac'd.
The sundry Postures of Thy copious Muse,
Who would expresse a thousand tongues must use,
Whose Fates no lesse peculiar then thy Art,
For as thou couldst all characters impart,
So none can render thine, who still escapes,
Like Proteus in variety of shapes,
Who was nor this nor that, but all we finde,
And all we can imagine in mankind.
E. Waller
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Shakespeare
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed
Beated and chopp'd with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
'Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
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beated and chopp'd with tanned antiquity
Age or castigated with the writings of ancient authors?
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John Beaumont , Jonsonus Virbius
...Twas he that found (plac'd) in the seat of wit,
DULL grinning IGNORANCE, and banish'd it;
He on the prostituted stage appears
To make men hear, not by their eyes, but ears;
Who painted virtues, that each one might know,
And point the man, that did such treasure owe :
So that who could in JONSON'S lines be high
Needed not honours, or a riband buy ;
But VICE he only shewed us in a GLASS,
Which by reflection of those rays that pass,
Retains the figure lively, set before,
And that withdrawn, reflects at us no more;
So, he observ'd the like DECORUM, when
*He whipt the vices, and yet spar'd the men* :
When heretofore, the Vice's only note,
And sign from virtue was his party-coat;
When devils were the last men on the stage,
And pray'd for plenty, and the present age.
Beware then thou render Men's Figure's truly -- Jonson
Ambisinister and disproportionate Droeshout Figure figures the vices of Shakespeare's counter-classical style.
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Jonson, Cynthia's Revels and the Elizabethan Style Wars:
TO THE SPECIAL FOUNTAIN of MANNERS, The Court.
Thou art a Bountiful and Brave Spring, and waterest all the Noble Plants of this Island. In thee the whole Kingdom dresseth it self, and is ambitious to use thee as her Glass. *Beware then thou render Men's Figures truly*, and teach them no less to hate their Deformities, than to love their Forms: For, to Grace, there should come Reverence; and no Man can call that Lovely, which is not also Venerable.
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Hamlet, the Gravedigger, and Indecorous Decorum
Maurice Hunt
...Hamlet's and Horatio's reactions to the gravedigger's little song are revealing. Hamlet is a true Sidneyan in his insistence upon DECORUM. "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, the 'a sings at gravemaking?" Gravediggers, in Hamlet's opinion, should be consistently grave, especially when they are about their mystery. Hornpipes and funerals should not be mixed in Hamlet's tragic world. His neoclassical attitude perhaps derives from his profound disappointment over his mother's unseemly and hasty remarriage. He has heard Claudius, with oily art, exclaim:
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife:
It was the marriage mirth disturbing the solemnity of his father's funeral that partly alienated Hamlet and helped solidify his philosophy of decorum, which is succinctly phrased in his advice to the Player about suiting "the action to the word, the word to the action". Hearing the gravedigger happily sing of love in the midst of death, Hamlet assumes that the Clown, like Claudius, has "no feeling of his business." The word "feeling" in this context is ironic. Hamlet of course means "Has this fellow no proper understanding of his somber role in society?" The gravedigger does have a "feeling" here - an affection for a beloved that Hamlet overlooks in his judgment. Like Sir Philip Sidney, Hamlet will not admit the tragicomic view of life.
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Jonson
He is loth to make Nature afraid in his Plays, like those that beget TALES, Tem-
pests, and such like Drolleries, to mix his head with
mens heels ; let the CONCUPISCENCE of JIGS and Dances,
reign as strong as it will amongst you:
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POLONIUS
This is too long.
HAMLET
It shall to the barber’s, with your beard.—Prithee, say on. He’s for a JIG or a TALE OF BAWDRY, or he sleeps. Say on. Come to Hecuba.
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John Oldham on Ben Jonson
V.
Sober, and grave was still the Garb thy Muse put on,
No tawdry careless slattern Dress,
Nor starch'd, and formal with Affectedness,
Nor the cast Mode, and Fashion of the Court, and Town;
But neat, agreeable, and janty 'twas,
Well-fitted, it sate close in every place,
And all became with an uncommon Air, and Grace:
Rich, costly and substantial was the stuff,
Not barely smooth, nor yet too coarsly rough:
No refuse, ill-patch'd Shreds o'th Schools,
The motly wear of read, and learned Fools,
No French Commodity which now so much does take,
And our own better Manufacture spoil,
Nor was it ought of forein Soil;
But Staple all, and all of English Growth, and Make:
What Flow'rs soe're of Art it had, were found
No tinsel'd slight Embroideries,
But all appear'd either the native Ground,
Or twisted, wrought, and interwoven with the Piece.
VI.
Plain Humor, shewn with her whole various Face,
Not mask'd with any antick Dress,
Nor screw'd in forc'd, ridiculous Grimace
(The gaping Rabbles dull delight,
And more the Actor's than the Poet's Wit)
Such did she enter on thy Stage,
And such was represented to the wond'ring Age:
Well wast thou skill'd, and read in human kind,
In every wild fantastick Passion of his mind,
Didst into all his hidden Inclinations dive,
What each from Nature does receive,
Or Age, or Sex, or Quality, or Country give;
What Custom too, that mighty Sorceress,
Whose pow'rful Witchcraft does transform
Enchanted Man to several monstrous Images,
Makes this an odd, and freakish Monky turn,
And that a grave and solemn Ass appear,
And all a thousand beastly shapes of Folly wear:
Whate're Caprice or Whimsie leads awry
Perverted, and seduc'd Mortality,
Or does incline, and byass it
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Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely: but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays proved thee my best of love.
Now all is done, have what shall have no end:
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confined.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
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Figuring Virtue:
Shake-speare
SCENE XIV. The same. Another room.
Enter MARK ANTONY and EROS
MARK ANTONY
Eros, thou yet behold'st me?
EROS
Ay, noble lord.
MARK ANTONY
Sometimes 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.
EROS
Ay, my lord,
MARK ANTONY
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,
As water is in water.
EROS
It does, my lord.
MARK ANTONY
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony:
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
I made these wars for Egypt: and the queen,--
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine;
Which whilst it was mine had annex'd unto't
A million more, now lost,--she, Eros, has
Pack'd cards with Caesar, and false-play'd my glory
Unto an enemy's triumph.
Nay, weep not, gentle Eros; there is left us
Ourselves to end ourselves.
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Burke
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
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'Tory' Dragon/Oxford, 'Whiggish' Sidney/Brutus and England's 'Controlled' Revolutions:
http://www.historytoday.com/blair-worden/execution-charles-i-king-dead-long-live-crown
...The restored monarchy exploited that sentiment and kept it alive. Signatories of Charles I's death warrant were dragged through the streets to hideous executions at Charing Cross or Tyburn. Cromwell's corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and exposed on a pole to public derision. The date January 30th was set aside for perpetual lamentation in the calendar of the Church of England, which required congregations to acknowledge God's mercy in freeing the land 'from the unnatural rebellion, usurpation and tyranny of ungodly and cruel men, and from the sad confusions and ruin thereupon ensuing'. In each church the minister was either to read from official homilies against disobedience to kings or 'preach a sermon of his own composing against the same argument'.
In the later 17th century, Tories turned January 30th into what their enemies called a 'general madding-day', on which seditious doctrines were excoriated. Sermons recalling Charles's execution would arouse annual excitement and debate until far into the 18th century and denunciations of the regicide would survive in the Church's liturgy until far into the 19th. The great battles of Tory and Whig, and then of Tory and Liberal, turned on memories of the Civil Wars to an extent that can startle our own time, when politics have become so much less politically and historically informed.
Until the Victorian age, when the balance of public sympathy swung in favour of the Roundhead cause, the Tories won the argument. Mainstream Whigs were as eager to bury the memory of the regicide as Tories were to preserve it. Though their own programme was, in fact, close to that of the parliamentarians of 1642, the Whigs found their historical pedigree tainted by the coup of 1649.
Yet on the radical fringe of the Whig party there were brave spirits who answered the Tories back. In the 1690s the deist John Toland and others portrayed the overthrow of James II in 1688 as a missed opportunity to reassert the principles of 1649. In the mid-18th century the regicide was commemorated by writers led by the antiquary Thomas Hollis, who commemorated 'that famous piece of justice,' in which 'we have great cause to rejoice'. He financed the publications of handsomely produced books saluting the event and exported them to the European mainland. He also sent them to America, where they may have had a more profound influence than in England.
Hollis' endeavours were heightened by the accession in 1760 of George III, who in the early years of his reign was widely seen as another Charles I in the making. Enthusiasts for the regicide chose their ground carefully. They distanced themselves from the biblical zeal of Charles's judges, which with the decline of Puritanism had come to look like seditious cant. They did not argue for republican rule. But they praised the courage of the regicides in asserting, at such risk to themselves, the principle that rulers are answerable to their subjects and in bringing a tyrant to justice. The warning to George was clear.
It was the goal of Toland, Hollis and their followers to reclaim the regicides from Tory calumny and to demonstrate the integrity of their motives and conduct. They compared them to heroes of ancient Rome, especially Brutus and Cassius, the slayers of Julius Caesar. But there was a difference. The regicides, as they themselves had proclaimed, had not resorted to the lawlessness of assassination. They had tried the king in open court, where they had demonstrated, as they believed, the illegal course of his rule.
The pleas of the radical Whigs failed. Even in the 19th century the regicide remained a troubling memory. It is not a comfortable one even now. The king's death and the creation of the republic fractured the continuity that has otherwise been the proud characteristic of the English constitution. They induced an enduring mistrust of radical institutional change. If Charles I had not been executed, would we still have a monarchy now?
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The relation of Hamlet's providence to that of John Calvin (e.g., Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 1, chapter 17, written some forty years before Hamlet), is a delicate one. If you believe, as Calvin and the Puritans did, that everything you are and do comes directly from the hand of God, then it is possible, even probable (though perhaps not necessary), to end up with Hamlet's arrogant self- divinization. The structural flaw in Calvin's providence was kept from doing serious damage by Calvin's own doctrine of sin, which fully applied to the redeemed. Hamlet enjoyed no such protection from the pride that surfaces in act 5. Much of the destructive mischief in our world today is perpetrated by born-again Hamlets, convinced that everything they do-even their killing-is God's will. -- William Hamilton
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Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That's Out of Joint
Lee Edelman
...For Hamlet remains a question posed to the concept of the human whose normative shape it nevertheless imposes on us all. Let us call it, then, a "questionable shape" (1.4.24), this human that emerges from the putative inwardness of Hamlet's habitual questions, his restless returns to the site of non-knowledge [End Page 164] where obsession, perhaps even madness, becomes the template for human consciousness and the human becomes the ghost of a query-"To be, OR not to be"-between whose terms it finds itself poised and by which, from the outset, it's poisoned. The venom in its ears is "or," which bestows on Hamlet's most famous oration a ration of Horatian rationality that aims, by means of scholastic dispute, to establish a ground to stand on through the logical parsing and limitation of terms that distinguishes one from another. But in Hamlet's world, in Elsinore, there's something else in "or": a fetishization of difference to which the prince of puns is heir, a primal irrationality lodged at the origin of "or," something fully as unheimlich as Hamlet, who proves to be blind to it in himself but spots it at once in the gravedigger's reasoning, that mode of perverse literality so clearly the double Hamlet's own. "How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us" (5.1.126-27), Hamlet exclaims.
The "or" of categorical thinking thus would forestall equivocation by installing, instead, the logic that distinguishes Hyperion from a satyr, preserving the order of nature from threats of monstrosity and confusion, from "uncle-father and aunt-mother" (2.2.358), from incestuous ecstasy and corruption, from the lust that occasions everything "carnal, bloody, and unnatural" (5.2.325). To affirm this order of "or" that keeps what is from being undone, the dead King's spirit walks by night, enlisting his son as a soldier pledged to defend the sexual norm: "Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damnèd incest" (1.5.82-83) is the injunction he imparts. And Hamlet understands full well, like any moral zealot, that he's charged not just to treat the symptom but to wipe out the very disease. "The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!" (ll. 189-190). And "set it right" means "set it straight," since "out of joint," as the Oxford English Dictionary notes with specific reference to this line, bespeaks a state "disordered, perverted, out of order, disorganized,"48 like the "unweeded garden / That grows to seed" (1.2.135-36) in an earlier soliloquy, or like Hamlet himself when Ophelia, making use of a horticultural metaphor after Hamlet has called her a whore, paints him as the "form and feature of blown youth, / Blasted with ecstasy" (3.1.158-59). Derived from the Greek for "put out of place," this "ecstasy," marking the distance from reason at the root of all passionate attachment, recognizes the irrational cathexis that motivates Hamlet's absolute distinctions, the undoing of which leaves time out of joint-perverse, disordered, out of place-which is also to say, ecstatic from Hamlet's own ecstatic viewpoint.
Made by paternal command a sort of disease to assail the diseased-"like the hectic in my blood he rages" (4.3.67), Claudius muses to himself-Hamlet may be the "mould of form" (3.1.152) for the modern human being, but only insofar as it, like him, is a monster of normativity, incapable, for all the self-consciousness we as his scions gladly grant him, of seeing how much he gets off on the luxury of his antiluxurious discourse. Repelled not just by "country matters" (3.2.105) but also by matter as such, he looks to master matter by riding a raging torrent of words through which his passion (out-of-joint, displaced, made spiritual or intellectual) comes in hot and steady bursts to castigate passion's slaves. Laced with a rancid misogyny, Hamlet's outbursts vilify sex with the prurience of delirious disgust. He links the unkemptness of "grow[ing] to seed" which properly names the cessation of flowering on the development of the seed itself, to the condition of being possessed, taken over, by things that are "rank and gross" (1.2.136); that representation seems anodyne when compared with his acid precision in evoking what he calls "compulsive ardour": "to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty" (3.4.76, 81-84).
Disdaining the putrid carrion that is all he recognizes in flesh, Hamlet dismisses life and sex as equally excremental. "[W]e fat ourselves for maggots" (4.3.23), he notes, and traces the course of Alexander's dust to find "it stopping a bung-hole" (5.1.188-89). He may pray for sublimation-"O that this too too solid flesh might melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew" (1.2.129-30)-and imagine himself as standing apart from any earthy appetite-"I eat the air" (3.2.85), he jests-but his mind is drawn to dirt and stench with what we must call a vengeance. His revulsion in the face of embodiment, redoubled at the very thought of sex, leads him beyond the paternal charge to root out "damnèd incest," even to the point of decrying conception and demanding "no more marriages" (3.1.146-47). Fanning the flames of Hamlet's loathing for all "That flesh is heir to" (l. 65), the Ghost, to which Hamlet is heir as well, leaves Hamlet, as son, asunder: torn between the enforcement of sexual norms to repair what is out of joint and the extravagance of his passion for enforcing those norms, which exceeds all normative bounds. By being too much his father's child, he would have no children be fathered; defending too well the institution of marriage, he would have no marriage at all.
Stricken by this excess of filial passion for the reassertion of norms, Hamlet is truly "too much i'th' sun" (1.2.67) too much, that is, his father's son, for his brief against breeding not to breed, as he claims the sun does, maggots-the maggots, I mean, that taint his mind as it feasts on decay and corruption, leaving Hamlet as much out of joint as the time, as perverse as his father's restless ghost, that thing that violates nature's bounds to condemn violations of boundaries, refuting in advance the order of "or" he returns from the grave to [End Page 166] defend by mocking the very distinction pronounced in "To be, or not to be." The inwardness, construed as psychic depth, for which Hamlet provides the model, responds, therefore, to the impossible task he confronts as his father's child: to live from the outset an after-life as ambassador of the dead without, in the process, becoming a mere ambassador of death.
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Hamlet - To be or not to be
Oxford/Shakespeare - I am that I am
Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost which is so deemed
Not by our feeling but by others’ seeing.
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own;
I may be straight, they they themselves be bevel.
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown,
Unless this general evil they maintain:
All men are bad, and in their badness reign.
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Positions: Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That's Out of Joint
Edelman, Lee
Slavoj Zizek notes while glossing the Lacanian death drive:
Death is the symbolic order itself, the structure which, as a parasite, colonizes the living entity. What defines death drive in Lacan is this double gap: not the simple opposition of life and death, but the split of life itself into "normal" life and horrifying "undead" life, and the split of the dead into "ordinary" dead and the "undead" machine. The basic opposition between Life and Death is thus supplemented by the parasitical symbolic machine (language as a dead entity which "behaves as if it possesses life of its own") and its counterpoint, the "living dead" (the monstrous life-substance which persists in the Real outside the Symbolic). This split which runs within the domains of Life and Death constitutes the space of the death drive.
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Saying No to the Ghost - Oxford as an Ambassador of Life
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old;
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true despite thy scythe and thee.
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Elizabethan Sacrificial Culture of Virtue:
Forget Hamlet
Carla Freccero
Abstract
This response to Lee Edelman's "Against Survival" wonders why Hamlet is taught in high school English classes and thinks about possible non-normative responses to the play, both suicidal and homicidal, suggested by the reading Edelman provides. In occupying the spectral place of the father by lending his phenomenal immateriality to Horatio to become the "voice" of the dying voice, Hamlet inaugurates something like what Jacques Derrida calls the "fratriarchy," the rule of brothers who, in endlessly dreaming the demise of patriarchy, conceal their own dream of patriarchal rule...
(snip)
There's another lesson Edelman notices in Hamlet: off the others, too. This is the obscene enjoyment of the law, to use Slavoj Žižek's way of translating Jacques Lacan. Hamlet takes out his firearm of moral righteousness and guns them all down, the stinky sticky meat, the human sheep / cattle / chickens / pigs we slaughter for our matter-transcending sustenance. When this happens in a high school we tend to call it Opheliac—think Brenda Ann Spencer, in her madness, proclaiming "I don't like Mondays," or Eric and Dylan shooting others and then killing themselves in Columbine, one of poor Ophelia's delirious rhetorical flowers. It's madness, in other words, without the ration of Horatian rationality that Hamlet boasts when he reprimands the queen for her mistake in calling him ecstatic: "Ecstasy? / My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time,/ And makes as healthful music" (3.4.130-32). But we also "know," don't we, that it's often Hamletic, the targeting of the (racially, sexually, politically) perverse enemies of tea-party rectitude ("Lay not a flattering unction to your soul / That not your trespass but my madness speaks" [ll. 136-37]).
Off them, then off yourself, is that the lesson then? Does Hamlet teach us to be suicide bombers? After all, this is a sacrificial culture, where the injunction is to sacrifice the meat of oneself—and one's jouissance, Edelman would add—in exchange for transcendence, subjectification, entry into the order of the Symbolic and so signification. For Jean-Joseph Goux and Luce Irigaray, it's the sacrifice of the penis that accords (symbolic) phallic power in an archaic scene of phallocracy.5 For Herbert Marcuse, it's the being-for-death—death as an ontological necessity—required in war and by the state of members of the polis, the sacrifice of the individual for the nation and ultimately for civilization itself.6 For Jacques Derrida, it's the sacrificial structure that goes by the name of carnophallogocentrism, eating and being eaten by the other, the sublime and symbolic ingestion (of words, concepts, the "body of Christ") and expulsion (of words, breath) that nevertheless leave a material trace elsewhere.7 During the Vietnam war Andrea Dworkin argued, as Edelman does, that the fathers ask their sons to submit in their stead, to offer themselves up sacrificially to honor the cult of their aging patriarchy (and for her this is most definitely a patriarchal order of things).8 Abraham raises the knife to slay Isaac, submitting to the commandment of his father. In Hamlet, it looks like an accident, and yet overtaken as this young man is by his "excess of filial passion for the reassertion of norms" (166), he too must submit to death construed as necessity, the (metaphysical) culmination of his life lived backward. Hamlet, like Romeo, must die. Juliet, Ophelia, and even Gertrude are just so much collateral damage. Small wonder then, when faced with the predicament of an ancient (and now dead, as Edelman notes) model of heroic (unfathered) subjectivity and of the (impossible) filial duty to preserve that model—"prevented by the power that grants us permission to be" (168)—some sons prefer to set. This is a "no" that is not and cannot be redeemed, an abject nonsignifying or signifiable remainder in the project of reproductive futurism, an abortion rebaptized as selective reduction so that others may survive.
And yet, as Edelman points out, Hamlet does occupy the spectral place of the ghost, his father, when he lends his phenomenal immateriality to Horatio to become the voice of the dying voice, the specter of a specter, the one who speaks from the dead prince's mouth. If Hamlet can be said to inaugurate something, I would venture that it is the order of brothers, the "fratriarchy" that dreams the demise of patriarchy and thus conceals its own patriarchal dream of rule. Here is a kingdom purged of the fathers, purged too of the one who was charged with extirpating and obeying them and thus of the guilty predicament that accompanies such purges. The rational order of Horatian oratory instrumentalizes the spectral injunctions of father and son and, in enjoining the dead to rest, erects a fraternal order in place of the paternal one. Perhaps.
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Demanding Oxford's sacrifice of himself as the price of FAME (aka transcendence, subjectification, and entry into the order of the Symbolic and so signification).
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Gabriel Harvey:
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?
