To the Reader.
REader, the discourses of this voyage (at the comming home of the Gentleman that was chiefe in it and his company into Eng|land) affoorded such pleasure to the hea|rers, by reason the accidents were strange and Nouell, that many way-laid the Nevves, and vvere gladde to make any booty of it to delight themselues, by vvhich meanes, that which of it selfe being knit together was beautifull, could not chuse but shevv vilde, beeing so torne in peeces. So that the itching fingers of gain laid hold vpon it, and had like to haue sent it into the world lame, and dismembred. Some that picke vp the crums of such feasts, had scrapt togither many percels of this Rushian commoditie, so that their heads being gotten vvith child of a Bastard, there was no remedy but they must be deliuered in Paules Church-yard. But I ta|king the truth from the mouths of diuers gentlemen that vvent in the Iourney, and hauing som good notes bestovved vpon me in vvriting, vvrought them into this body, because neither thou shouldst be abused with false reports, nor the Voyage receiue slaunder. I have done this vvithout consent either of Sir Tho. himselfe, or of those gentlemen my friends that deliuered it vn|to me: So that if I offend, it is Error Amoris to my Countrey, not Amor erroris to do any man wronge. Read and like, for much is in it vvorthy obseruation. Farevvell.*****************************
Some that picke vp the crums of such feasts, had scrapt togither many percels of this Rushian commoditie, so that their heads being gotten vvith child of a Bastard, there was no remedy but they must be deliuered in Paules Church-yard.
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Jonson, Ode to Himself
...Say, that thou pour'st them wheat,
And they will acornes eat :
'Twere simple fury, still, thy selfe to waste
On such as have no taste !
To offer them a surfeit of pure bread,
Whose appetites are dead !
No, give them graines their fill,
Huskes, draff to drink and swill.
If they love lees, and leave the lusty wine,
Envy them not, their palate's with the swine.
No doubt some mouldy tale,
Like Pericles ; and stale
As the Shrieve's crusts, and nasty as his fish—
Scraps out of every dish
Throwne forth, and rak't into the common tub,
May keepe up the Play-club :
There, sweepings doe as well
As the best order'd meale.
For, who the relish of these guests will fit,
Needs set them but the almes-basket of wit.
**********************************
In Memory of Mr. William Cartwright. (Cartwright/Race of Ben)
John Berkenhead
...Thou didst not write
Warm'd by male Claret or by female White:
Their Giant Sack could nothing heighten Thee,
As far 'bove Tavern Flash as Ribauldry.
Thou thought'st no rank foul line was strongly writ,
That's but the Scum or Sediment of Wit;
Which sharking Braines do into Publike thrust,
(And though They cannot blush, the Reader must;)
Who when they see't abhor'd, for fear, not shame,
*TRANSLATE their BASTARD to some Other's NAME.*
********************************
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.
********************************
Gabriel Harvey, Rhetor
On Art.
Can anyone be an artist without art? Or have you ever seen a bird flying without wings, or a horse running without feet? Or if you have seen such things, which no one else has ever seen, come, tell me please, do you hope to become a goldsmith, or a painter, or a sculptor, or a musician, or an architect, or a weaver, or any sort of artist at all without a teacher? But how much easier are all these things, than that you develop into a supreme and perfect orator without the art of public speaking. There is need of a teacher, and indeed even an excellent teacher, who might point out the springs with his finger, as it were, and carefully pass on to you the art of speaking colorfully, brilliantly, copiously. But what sort of art shall we choose? Not an art entangled in countless difficulties, or packed with meaningless arguments; not one sullied by useless [31] precepts, or disfigured by strange and foreign ones; not an art polluted by any filth, or fashioned to accord with our OWN WILL and judgment; not a single art joined and sewn together from many, like a quilt from many rags and skins (way too many rhetoricians have given this sort of art to us, if indeed one may call art that which conforms to no artistic principles). We want rather an art that is concise, precise, appropriate, lucid, accessible; one that is decorated and illuminated by precise definitions, accurate divisions, and striking illustrations, as if by flashing gems and stars; one that emerges, and in a way bursts into flower, from the speech of the most eloquent men and the best orators. Why so? Not only because brevity is pleasant, and clarity delightful, but also so that eloquence might be learned in a shorter time, and with less labor and richer results, and so that it might stand more firmly grounded, secured by deeper roots. For thus said the gifted poet in his Ars Poetica: "Whatever instruction you give, let it be brief." Why? [32] He gives two reasons: "So that receptive minds might swiftly grasp your words and accurately retain them." And indeed, as the same poet elegantly adds: "Everything superfluous spills from a mind that's full."
(snip)
But those little CROWS and APES of Cicero were long ago driven from the stage by the hissing and laughter of the learned, as they so well deserved, and at last have almost vanished; and I now hope to find not only eager and attentive auditors, but friendly spectators as well, not the sort who scrupulously weigh every individual detail on the scales of their own refined tastes, but who interpret everything in a fair and good-natured way.
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Ben Jonson, ‘On Poet-Ape,’ Epigrams (1616), No 56.
Poor Poet Ape, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e’en the FRIPPERY of WIT,
From Brokage is become so bold a thief
As we, the robbed, leave rage and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays, now grown
To a little wealth, and credit on the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own,
And told of this, he slights it. Tut, such CRIMES
The sluggish, gaping auditor devours;
He marks not whose ‘twas first, and aftertimes
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool! as if half-eyes will not know a fleece
From LOCKS of wool, or SHREDS from the whole piece.
************************************
Cynthia's Revels, Jonson (Amorphus/Oxford)
He that is with him is Amorphus
a Traveller, one so made out of the mixture and shreds
of forms, that himself is truly deform'd. He walks
most commonly with a Clove or Pick-tooth in his
Mouth, he is the very mint of Complement, all his Be-
haviours are printed, his Face is another Volume of
Essayes; and his Beard an Aristrachus. He speaks all
Cream skim'd, and more affected than a dozen of wait-
ing Women. He is his own Promoter in every place.
****************************************
No shred zone:
Frontispiece to Jonson's 1616 ~Workes:
Around the pediment of the frontispiece is carved the Horatian tag:
'singular quaeque locum teneant sortita decentem' -
'Let each style keep the appropriate place allotted to it'
*****************************************
Enervate \E*ner"vate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Enervated; p. pr. &
vb. n. Enervating.] [L. enervatus, p. p. of enervare, fr.
enervis nerveless, weak; e out + nervus nerve. See Nerve.]
To deprive of nerve, force, strength, or courage; to render
feeble or impotent; to make effeminate; to impair the moral
powers of.
Wesley Trimpi: In terms of the poetic conventions the rhetorical controversy between Ciceronianism and Senecanism became one between a mellifluous and a sinuous style.
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English Seneca? Sidneian Senecan closet drama/read by candlelight?
************************************
Before Prospero's Cell:
As you from CRIMES would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
************************************
Spenser, Tears of the Muses
"All these, and all that else the Comic Stage,
With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,
By which man's life in his likest image
Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced;
And those sweet wits which wont the like to frame
Are now despised and made a laughing game.
"And he the man whom Nature's self had made
To mock herself and truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under Mimic shade,
Our pleasant Willie, ah! is dead of late.
With whom all joy and jolly merriment
Is also deaded and in doleur drent.
"But that same gentle spirit from whose pen
Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow,
Scorning the boldness of such base-born men,
Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell,
Than so himself to mockery to sell."
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[Nashe's] Preface To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities is prefixed to Robert Greene’s Menaphon: Camillas alarum to slumbering Euphues in his melancholie Cell at Silexedra, London, printed by T. O. for Sampson Clarke, 1589.
To leaue these to the mercie of their mother tongue, that feed on nought but the crummes that fal from the translators trencher, I come (sweet friend) to thy Arcadian Menaphon, whose attire, though not so statelie, yet comelie, dooth entitle thee aboue all other to that temperatum dicendi genus which Tullie in his Orator tearmeth true eloquence. Let other men (as they please) praise the mountaine that in seauen yeares brings foorth a mouse, or the Italianate pen that of a packet of pilfries affoordeth the presse a pamphlet or two in an age, and then in disguised arraie vaunts Ouids and Plutarchs plumes as their owne; but giue me the man whose extemporall vaine in anie humor will excell our greatest Art-masters deliberate thoughts, whose inuention, quicker than his eye, will challenge the proudest Rethoritian to the contention of like perfection with like expedition.
***************************************
Southern, Pandora (1584)
SUMMARY: Ode to Oxford in John Southern’s Pandora, The Music of the Beauty of his Mistress Diana. The title page gives the publication date as 20 June 1584. The language of the ode was criticized by George Puttenham in Book III, Chapter 22 of his Art of English Poesy, published in 1589.
(snip)
Epode
No, no, the high singer is he
Alone that in the end must be
Made proud with a garland like this,
And not every riming novice
That writes with small wit and much pain,
And the (God’s know) idiot in vain,
For it’s not the way to Parnasse,
Nor it will neither come to pass
If it be not in some wise fiction
And of an ingenious INVENTION,
And INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVAIL,
For it alone must win the laurel,
And only the poet WELL BORN
Must be he that goes to Parnassus,
And not these companies of asses
That have brought verse almost to scorn.
************************************
Venus and Adonis title page - from Ovid's Amores:
Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.
Let base-conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses' [Castalian] springs.
************************************
Speculum Tuscanismi:
Not the like Lynx to spy out secrets and privities of States,
Eyed like to Argus, eared like to Midas, NOS'D like to NASO,
Wing'd like to Mercury, fittst of a thousand for to be employ'd,
This, nay more than this, doth practice of Italy in one year.
None do I name, but some do I know, that a piece of a twelve month
Hath so perfited outly and inly both body, both soul,
That none for sense and senses half matchable with them.
************************************
Noses good and bad:
Nasutum Volo, Nolo Polyposum: Ben Jonson and the Consociative Critic.
William Russell
- Abstract: The characteristic inconsistency of Ben Jonson's literary criticism derives, in part, from his idea of the critic, which centers upon charity, discretion, and a commitment to what he calls "consociation," a principle of cross- cultural discourse. Jonson himself exercises charity by hosting across his works a symposium of diverse critical voices. He exercises discretion, however, and defnes his idea of the critic, by distinguishing among that crowd between "nasuti" and "polyposi," critics good and bad. Yet discretion does not entirely shut down the diversity or the inconsistency that charity engenders. Both are sustained in the service of consociation, as Jonson broadly establishes the cultural relevance of literary criticism by bringing its knowledge to bear upon other spheres and vice versa, though not always in a controlled fashion.
Ars/Poet Made (Jonson) - Ingenium/Poet Born (Shakespeare Nostrat)
************************************
from Beaumont, Jonsonus Virbius)
...But Vice he [Jonson]onely shew'd us in a glasse,
Which by reflection of those rayes that passe,
Retaines the FIGURE lively, set before,
And that withdrawne, reflects at us no more ;
So, he observed the like decorum, when
He whipt the vices, and yet spar'd the men ;
When heretofore, the Vice's onely note,
And signe from Yertue was his party-coate,
When devils were the last men on the stage,
And pray'd for plenty and the present age ;
Nor was our English language, onely bound
To thanke him for the Latin Horace found
Who so inspir'd Rome, with his lyrioke song,
Translated in the MACARONICKE toung,
Cloth'd in such raggs as one might safely vow,
That his Maecenas would not owne him now ;
On him he tooke this pitty, as to cloth
In words, and such expression, as for both,
Ther's none but judgeth the exchange will come
To twenty more, then when he sold at Home.
Since then, he made our language PURE and GOOD,
And to us speake, but what we understood ;
**************************************
From Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia (1605):
...This falling away of them, the State so greatly blinded vpon (especially Peter Basman, whom I neither dare commend, nor will condemne, be|cause I am not studious in his arguments: and the answere from the Emperour) with the many con|tinually doubts of the issue, hastied the last breath of the once hoped-for Prince, as from him that (though an Fmperour, was much hoodwinck
These wicked instruments, the whole familie of the Godonoues, their adherents and factors, mak|ing a second (but no deuine) damned Iurie; these deiected and abiected, as not knowing how to trust any, they so distrusted themselues, like men betweene murdering others, and being massacred them selues; holding this their onely happinesse, that they were then onely myserable (Noblenesse yet esteeming any preferment felicitie, but Hono|rable imployment): As those whose vnmercifull greatnes gayned a pittifull commiseration, accoun|ting Securitie neither safetie, nor reward; Indeed they were like Beastes, that haue st
Oh for some excellent pen-man to deplore their state: but he which would liuely, naturally, or indeed poetically delyneare or enumerate these occurrents, shall either lead you therevnto by apoeticall spirit, as could well, if well he might the dead liuing, life-giuing Sydney Prince of Poe|sie; or deifie you with the Lord Salustius deuinity, or in an Earth-deploring, Sententious, high rapt Tragedie with the noble Foulk-Greuill, not onely giue you the Idea, but the soule of the acting Idea; as well could, if so we would, the elaborate English Horace that giues number, waight, and measure to euery word, to teach the reader by his industries, euen our Lawreat worthy Beniamen, whose Muze approues him with (our mother) the Ebrew signification to bee, The elder Sonne, and happely to haue been the Childe of Sorrow: It were worthy so excellent rare witt: for my selfe I am neither Apollo nor Appelles, no nor any heire to the Muses: yet happely a youn|ger brother, though I haue as little bequeathed me, as many elder Brothers, and right borne Heires gaine by them: but Hic labor, Hoc opus est.
I am with the late English quick-spirited, cleare-sighted Ouid: It is to be feared Dreaming, and thinke I see many strange and cruell actions, but say my selfe nothing all this while: Bee it so that I am very drowsie, (the heate of the Clymate, and of the State) will excuse mee; for great happinesse to this mightie Empire is it, or would it haue been, if the more part of their State aff
*************************************
Sir Thomas Smith's Voiage (1605):
[It] was but as the Poeticall FURIE in a Stage-action, compleat yet with horrid and wofull Tragedies: a first, but no second to any Hamlet; and that now Reuenge, iust Reuenge was comming with his Sworde drawne against him, his royall Mother, and dearest Sister, to fill vp those Murdering Sceanes;
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Venus and Adonis title page - from Ovid's Amores:
Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.
Let base-conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses' [Castalian] springs.
*************************************
Title: Q. Horatius Flaccus: his Art of poetry. Englished by Ben:
Jonson. With other workes of the author, never printed before Date:
1640
...Those that are wise, a FURIOUS POET feare,
And flye to touch him, as a man that were
Infected with the Leprosie, or had
The yellow jaundis, or were truely mad,
Under the angry Moon: but then the boyes
They vexe, and careless follow him with noise.
This, while he belcheth lofty Verses out,
And stalketh, like a Fowler, round about,
Busie to catch a Black-bird; if he fall
Into a pit, or hole, although he call
And crye aloud, help gentle Country-men;
There's none will take the care to help him, then, For if one should,
and with a rope make hast
To let it downe, who knowes, if he did cast
Himselfe there purposely or no; and would Not thence be sav'd,
although indeed he could;
Ile tell you but the death, and the disease
Of the Sysilian Poet, Empedocles'
He, while he labour'd to be thought a god,
Immortall, took a melancholick, odd
Conceipt, and into burning Aetna leap't.Let Poets perish that will not
be kept.
He that preserves a man against his will,
Doth the same thing with him that would him kill.
Nor did he doe this, once; if yet you can
Now, bring him back, he'le be no more a man,
Or love of this his famous death lay by.
Here's one makes verses, but there's none knows why;
Whether he hath pissed upon his Fathers grave:
Or the sad thunder-strucken thing he have,
Polluted, touch't: but certainly he's mad;
And as a Beare, if he the strength but had
To force the Grates that hold him in, would fright
All; so this grievous writer puts to flight
Learn'd, and unlearn'd; holdeth whom once he takes;
And there an end of him with reading makes:
Not letting goe the skin, where he drawes food,
Till, horse-leech like, he drop off, full of blood.
Finis
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Davies, Scourge of Folly
Of the staid FURIOUS POET FUCUS.
Epig. 114
Fucus the FURIOUS POET writes but Plaies;
So, playing, writes: that’s, idly writeth all:
Yet, idle Plaies, and Players are his Staies;
Which stay him that he can no lower fall:
For, he is fall’n into the deep’st decay,
Where Playes and Players keepe him at a stay.
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Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and FURY,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5
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Jonson
Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with RAGE
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.
*************************************
Furious Medeas:
George Marcelline, 1609
Who as he (James) went to Padan-baran, or towards Denmarke, to take a wife in the Royal house of the King, how cruelly was he assayled by FURIOUS MEDEAS, and his owne chiefe Ship foulded up in stearne Tempests? Contrary Windes did afflict it, beat and drive it every where, they excited and blew the Waves, which swelled, foamed, roared, and gaped with open mouths to swallow him. And as the winds wrastled on either side, against the Mast, the sayles, and the maine yard, behold, even in labouring (with al their might) to devoure him, they proved the cause of his happy escape, and with full sayles (through all the stormes) brought him to Port Loetus, in which place, al Scotland at his return, welcommed him with singular joyfulness.
From - Les trophees du roi Iacques I. de la Grande Bretaigne, France, et Irlande. Defenseur de la foy Dressés sur l'inscription seulement, de son aduertissement, à tous les rois, princes, & potentats de la Chrestienté; confirmés par les marueilleuses actions de Dieu en sa vie. Vouez, dediez, et consacrez au tres-illustre Prince de Galles. , A Eleutheres [i.e., printed abroad] : Anée embolismale, pour la Papauté, 1609.
Date: 1609
Bib name / number: STC (2nd ed.) / 17310 Physical description: [7], 42 leaves Copy from: British Library
The triumphs of King Iames the First, of Great Brittaine, France, and Ireland, King; defender of the faith Published vpon his Maiesties aduertisement to all the kings, princes, and potentates of Christendome, and confirmed by the wonderfull workes of God, declared in his life. Deuoted, dedicated, and consecrated to the most excellent prince Henry Prince of Wales. , [London] : Printed at Brittaines Bursse, [by *William Jaggard*] for Iohn Budge, and are there to be solde,
Date: 1610
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Kicking the stuffing out of Oxford's unexemplary body - humanist pedagogy attacking the 'spectacular Ar(t)istocratic body' (Julian Koslow)
****************************Jonson, Poetaster - after the exile of Ovid
To the body of their title, they add the inner spirit as well:
Yet, not to bear cold forms, nor men's out-terms
Without the inward fires and lives of men,
You both have virtues shining through your shapes
To show your titles are not writ on posts
Or hollow statues, which the best men are,
Without Promethean stuffings reached from heaven.
*****************************
Water/wine drinkers:
Crites: Nec placere diu, nec vivere carmina
possunt, quæ scribuntur aquæ potoribus.
*No song can give pleasure for long, nor can it last,
that is written by drinkers of water (Horace)
The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study By Steele Commager
...The confrontation of ars and ingenium was reproduced in the quarrel of the so-called "wine drinkers" and "water drinkers". As confidence in a definable source of poetic genius had faded, intoxication had become increasingly acceptable as a token of inspiration, until some Alexandrian writers boldly declared that the waters of the holy spring were now available as a bottled commodity. In the idea we may see a deterioration of the furor poeticus, a belief that poetic natures might be most felicitous when uninhibited by rational control. Anxious to give the theory a reputable, or, at any rate, and antique derivation, its proponents adopted Cratinus as their spirited ancestor. They could recall the story that he had died from the shock of seeing a wine cask shattered (Aristophanes, Pax), and they were careful to remind contemporaries that he had delared wine a "swift horse to the poet". By construing all praise of wine as a confession that the author wrote only when drunk, they might mount any poet upon the same Pegasus. Archilochus, Anacreon, Alcaeus, and Aristophanes were soon conscripted, while Sophocles' praise of Aeschylus for writing (...) was similarly vulgarized. The movement may have taken its impetus from protest against what seemed the affected precision of Callimachus and his school - "dry dogs" they were termed. Allimachus referred to Archilochus as "wine smitten", and Callimachus' followers seem to have maintained that mounting the Muses' chariot was only a more elegant confession of being on the wagon. The foolishness of the ensuing dispute was exceeded only by its acrimony. It passed down to the Augustans through such writers as Antigonus, Nicaenetus, and Antipater of Thessalonica, and Horace preserves a record of its vitality.
(Epistle 1.19.1-14)
If learned Maecenas, you believe old Cratinus, no poems written by water drinkers are able to please for long or to survive. Ever since Bacchus enrolled poets with his Fauns and Satyrs, the sweet Muses have generally smelled of wine in the mornings. Homer, by his praise of wine, is convicted of addiction to it; father Ennius himself never leaped forth to tell of battles unless he had drunk well. "I shall hand over the Forum and Libo's well to the dry and sober; the abstemious I shall prohibit from song." Once I had said this, poets did not cease to strive in drunkenness at night, and in reeking of wine by day. What? If anyone with fierce and savage aspect, barefoot and with scanty toga, were to imitate Cato, would he then be an example of Cato's virtue and morals?
This apostrophe to Maecenas - si credis - is not a Horatian credo. He is satirizing a popular attitude, not endorsing it, as is sometimes claimed. Cato's virtue is not available to those aping his costume. Why then should poetic genius be the reward of those reproducing only a fabled incoherence... Horace's own indulgence was at most an accident of his life, not an essential element of his creativity. The only thing poetic about poets, he held, should be their poetry. Though he did not join battle professionally with the (......), his sympathies with male sanos poetas are not discernible:
Because Democritus believes genius more blessed than wretched art, and excludes sane poets from Helicon, a good number do not cut their nails or beard, but seek out secluded spoets and avoid the baths. Indeed one can win the name and esteem of being a poet simply by never entrusting to the barber Licinus a head so incurable that even three Anticyras could not cure it.
His slave Davus' diagnosis of 'th'hysteric or the poetic fit" is a jibe at contemporary poetasters rather than an analysis of Horace's own habits,(...). Horace would have approved the spirit if not the scholarship of Dryden, who emended Aristotle's 'by a happy gift of nature or madness,' to 'by a happy gift of nature and not by madness.' The two Odes (C.2.19, 3.25) professing to be written in a Dionysiac frenzy are remarkable calculated, and no one to my knowledge has suggested that Horace's feet were ever incapable of treading a perfect line. (pp. 28 - 31)
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In Memory of Mr. William Cartwright. (Cartwright/Race of Ben)
John Berkenhead
...Thou didst not write
Warm'd by male Claret or by female White:
Their Giant Sack could nothing heighten Thee,
As far 'bove Tavern Flash as Ribauldry.
Thou thought'st no rank foul line was strongly writ,
That's but the Scum or Sediment of Wit;
Which sharking Braines do into Publike thrust,
(And though They cannot blush, the Reader must;)
Who when they see't abhor'd, for fear, not shame,
*TRANSLATE their BASTARD to some Other's NAME.*
*******************************
Jonson, then Cartwright Ruled Shakespeare's Quill:
From 'To the Deceased Author of these Poems' (William Cartwright)
by Jasper Mayne
...And as thy Wit was like a Spring, so all
The soft streams of it we may Chrystall call:
No cloud of Fancie, no mysterious stroke,
No Verse like those which antient Sybils spoke;
No Oracle of Language, to amaze
The Reader with a dark, or Midnight Phrase,
Stands in thy Writings, which are all pure Day,
A cleer, bright Sunchine, and the mist away.
That which Thou wrot'st was sense, and that sense good,
Things not first written, and then understood:
Or if sometimes thy Fancy soar'd so high
As to seem lost to the unlearned Eye,
'Twas but like generous Falcons, when high flown,
Which mount to make the Quarrey more their own.
For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee Ben Johnson still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
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Ben Jonson's Poems By Wesley Trimpi
...Jonson’s fundamental objection to the sonnet…is that it leads one to say more than one has to say in order to satisfy the form. The poet is obliged to use rhetorical figures, and his intentions becomes contradictory to that of the plain style. As the rhetorical figures and the form become more important, the range of subject matter decreases. The poet who seeks the grace and charm of the middle style will do well to utilize that grace which, according to Demetrius, “ may reside in the subject matter, if it is the gardens of the Nymphs, marriage-lays, love-stories” (On Style, 132), or “Petrarch’s long-deceased woes.” The freedom of the plain style to treat of any subject depends on it primary purpose, which is to tell the truth. Since the officium of the middle style is to delight (delectare), many subjects must be excluded, and the emphasis is no longer on content but on expression.
The conventional adjectives for rhetorical ornateness in poetry were “sugred” or “honied,” and each could be used as a equivalent for Ciceronian rhetoric itself. The term “sugred” was most often applied to sonnets, such as in the famous comment of Francis Meres on “the mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends.” Among the literary genres the epigram was often regarded as a corrective for the trite diffuseness of the sonnet. The salt of incisive wit was needed to preserve the poem, which otherwise might cloy and dissolve like candy. Sir John Harington contrasts the two sets of conventions in his epigram called “Comparison of the Sonnet, and the Epigram”:
Once, by mishap, two Poets fell a-squaring,
The Sonnet, and our Epigram comparing;
And Faustus, having long demur’d upon it,
Yet, at the last, gave sentence for the Sonnet.
Now, for such censure, this his chiefe defence is,
Their sugred taste best likes his likresse senses.
Well, though I grant Sugar may please the taste,
Tet let my verse have salt enough to make it last.
In terms of the poetic conventions the rhetorical controversy between Ciceronianism and Senecanism became one between a mellifluous and a sinuous style.
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Cynthia's Revels attack on 'spectacular aristocratic body' and their 'silly imitation/mirroring'.
Hamlet driven mad by humanist pedagological methods. Social consequences of Jonson's proposed 'consociation of offices' between Prince and Poet/Humanist Scholar.
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HONEY-TONGUED Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue,
I swore Apollo got them and none other;
Their rosy-tinted features clothed in tissue,
Some heaven-born goddess said to be their mother:
Rose-cheeked Adonis, with his amber tresses,
Fair fire-hot Venus, charming him to love her,
Chaste Lucretia, virgin-like her dresses,
Proud lust-stung Tarquin, seeking still to prove her:
Romeo, Richard; more whose names I know not,
Their SUGARED tongues, and power attractive beauty
Say they are saints, although that saints they show not,
For thousands vow to them subjective duty :
They burn in love, thy children, Shakespeare HET them ,
Go, woo thy Muse, more Nymphish brood beget them.
Epigrammes in the oldest Cut, and newest Fashion.
John Weever. 1599. Fourth Weeke, Epig. 22.
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Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting Quill
Commandeth Mirth or Passion, was but Will.
--Thomas Heywood
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Sidney , Defense
...But let this be a sufficient, though short note, that we misse the right use of the material point of Poesie. Now for the outside of it, which is words, or (as I may tearme it) Diction, it is even well worse: so is it that HONY-FLOWING Matrone Eloquence, apparrelled, or rather disguised, in a Courtisanlike PAINTED AFFECTATION. One time with so farre fet(ched) words, that many seeme monsters, but must seeme Straungers to anie poore Englishman: an other time with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a Dictionary: an other time with figures and flowers, extreemely winter-starved. But I would this fault were onely peculiar to Versefiers, and had not as large possession among Prose- Printers: and which is to be mervailed among many Schollers, & which is to be pitied among some Preachers. Truly I could wish, if at I might be so bold to wish, in a thing beyond the reach of my capacity, the diligent Imitators of TULLY and DEMOSTHENES (note - Tully/Cicero); Demosthenes, most worthie to be imitated, did not so much keepe Nizolian paper bookes, of their figures and phrase, as by attentive translation, as it were, devoure them whole, and make them wholly theirs. For now they cast SUGAR and SPICE uppon everie dish that is served to the table: like those Indians, not content to weare eare-rings at the fit and naturall place of the eares, but they will thrust Jewels through their nose and lippes, because they will be sure to be fine.
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A Remembrance of Some English Poets (1598), And
Shakespeare thou, whose HONEY-FLOWING vein
(Pleasing the world) thy praises doth obtain:
Whose Venus and whose Lucrece, sweet and chaste,
Thy name in Fame’s immortal Book hath placed.
Live ever you, at least in Fame live ever,
Well may the body die, but Fame dies never.
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Chapman, Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
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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Henry Chettle
Mourning Garment.
Nor doth the silver tongued Melicert,
Drop from his honeyed Muse one sable tear
To mourn her death that graced his desert,
And to his laies opened her Royal ear. (laies/Lays: songs, poems)
Shepheard remember our Elizabeth,
And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death. [Modernized English]
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Thomas Bancroft (1639), Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs
118. To Shakespeare.
Thy Muses SUGRED DAINTIES seeme to us
Like the fam’d apples of old Tantalus :
For we (admiring) see and heare thy straines,
But none I see or heare those sweets attaines.
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Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild. - Milton
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"Say They Are Saints Although That Saints They Show Not": John Weever's 1599 Epigrams to Marston, Jonson, and Shakespeare
William R Jones.
ABSTRACT
John Weever's 1599 poem to Shakespeare has frequently been used to support the case that Shakespeare was celebrated by his contemporaries. William R. Jones examines the language of the poem as well as its context (particularly Weever's role in the exchanges known as the Poets' War and in the 1599 ban on satire and epigram) to suggest that the poem deserves a more nuanced reading. Beginning with Weever's epigram to John Marston and Ben Jonson, Jones argues that Weever's apparently adulatory poems to these three playwrights in fact assert the moral deficiency of their works, consistent with Puritan anti-theatrical rhetoric.
(snip)
BIOGRAPHERS OF SHAKESPEARE have often numbered John Weever s sonnet to William Shakespeare in his Epigrammes in the oldest cut, and newest fashion (1599) among a triad of works demonstrating the universal admiration accorded to Shakespeare at the end of the sixteenth century.1 James Shapiro, however, calls attention to Weever's puzzling failure to name more than two of Shakespeare's plays in the poem ("Romea Richard; more whose names I know not"; line 9), concluding that "Shakespeare would not have been flattered" by such a clumsy tribute.2 Perhaps he was not meant to be. In his 1598 work Palladis Tamia, Francis Meres names no fewer than twelve plays by "mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare," as well as his sonnets and the two Ovidian poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrèce. Although he does not mention the plays, Richard Barnfield (the third contributor to the triad) praises Shakespeare's "hony- flowing Vaine," proclaiming that Venus and Lucrèce have earned Shakespeare a place in "fame's immortal Booke." Weever's epithet, "Honietong'd Shakespeare," because it directly echoes the laudatory language of both Meres and Barnfield, seems at first to join in the adulation.3 Here I suggest that the poem's multivalent language and contentious context (in particular, Weever's role in the Poetomachia, or Poets' War, and the influence of the Bishops' Ban)4 call for a more nuanced reading. Weever's poem emerges not as unalloyed praise but as a kind of rhetorical Janus, safely displaying the fashionable face of praise while simultaneously engaging with the anti-theatrical discourses of the period, a posture that also informs his later works, Faunus and Melliflora (1600) and The Whipping of the Satyre (1601). Weever defines himself in opposition to the vogue for licentious excess, particularly in drama and formal verse satire, an ideological position that doubtless helped the Epigrammes avoid the Bishops' Ban on the publication of satires, epigrams, and unlicensed histories and plays, issued on 1 June 1599. Weever's subtle critiques serve not only to mock those he judges to be negative moral influences (the avant-garde group of recently banned satirists representing the most egregious offenders) but also to proffer, even to enact, what he considers a more appropriate style of poetic wit.
(snip)
Meres's characterization of Shakespeare as harboring "the sweete wittie soule of Ovid " ( Wits Treasury, 281) is clear praise, and Weever's apparently laudatory epigram similarly foregrounds the Ovidian aspects of Shakespeare's work. Yet at the time, as Jonathan Bate argues, "ways of reading Ovid underwent radical transformation, as a newly unapologetic delight in the poetic and erotic qualities of the Metamorphoses came to compete with the predominant medieval practice of moralizing and even Christianizing them."24 Such a tension is evident in the dedication to Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses, where he admonishes the reader to seek the underlying moral lesson and not be "provoked to vice and wantonness."25 Heather James has broadened the picture beyond such polarizations, positing that intellectuals of the era were drawn to Ovid as the "counter-classical" love poet, in a self-conscious effort to transform the literary scene. Thus, just as the banned satirists had employed Juvenal as a means to distinguish their style from traditional modes, experimenters such as Shakespeare saw in Ovid, argues James, an alternative to the Horatian ideal of decorum. With the Ovidian narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrèce (1594), Shakespeare is signaling the choice to explore and to challenge conventional wisdom, to illuminate the "erotic possessions of the will," yet to revel in the power of the individual wit to reshape the world.26 The Ovidian was moral, literary, and political at the same time - and was as culturally dangerous as the Juvenalian mode in satire.
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Weever's poem emerges not as unalloyed praise but as a kind of *rhetorical Janus, safely displaying the fashionable face of praise* while simultaneously engaging with the anti-theatrical discourses of the period, a posture that also informs his later works.
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Sir Thomas Smith's Voyage into Russia (1605) - Anonymous
Oh for some excellent pen-man to deplore their state: but he which would liuely, naturally, or indeed poetically delyneare or enumerate these occurrents, shall either lead you therevnto by apoeticall spirit, as could well, if well he might the dead liuing, life-giuing Sydney Prince of Poe|sie; or deifie you with the Lord Salustius deuinity, or in an Earth-deploring, Sententious, high rapt Tragedie with the noble Foulk-Greuill, not onely giue you the Idea, but the soule of the acting Idea; as well could, if so we would, the elaborate English Horace that giues number, waight, and measure to euery word, to teach the reader by his industries, euen our Lawreat worthy Beniamen, whose Muze approues him with (our mother) the Ebrew signification to bee, The elder Sonne, and happely to haue been the Childe of Sorrow: It were worthy so excellent rare witt: for my selfe I am neither Apollo nor Appelles, no nor any heire to the Muses: yet happely a youn|ger brother, though I haue as little bequeathed me, as many elder Brothers, and right borne Heires gaine by them: but Hic labor, Hoc opus est.
I am with the LATE English quick-spirited, cleare-sighted Ouid: It is to be feared Dreaming, and thinke I see many strange and cruell actions, but say my selfe nothing all this while: Bee it so that I am very drowsie, (the heate of the Clymate, and of the State) will excuse mee; for great happinesse to this mightie Empire is it, or would it haue been, if the more part of their State aff
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Ovid, Amores
BOOK 1, ELEGY 15
Ad invidos, quod fama poetarum sit perennis
(To the envious, that the fame of poets lasts forever)
Envy, why carp'st thou my time's spent so ill,
And term'st my works fruits of an idle quill?
Or that unlike the line from whence I sprung,
War's dusty honours are refus'd being young,
Nor that I study not the brawling laws,
Nor set my voice to sale in every cause?
Thy scope is mortal, mine eternal fame,
That all the world may ever chant my name.
Homer shall live while Tenedos stands and Ide,
Or into sea swift Simois doth slide.
Ascreus lives, while grapes with new wine swell,
Or men with crooked sickles come down fell.
The world shall of Callimachus ever speak,
His art excell'd, although his wit was weak.
For ever lasts high Sophocles' proud vain,
With sun and moon Aratus shall remain.
While bondmen cheat, fathers be hard, bawds whorish,
And strumpets flatter, shall Menander flourish.
Rude Ennius, and Plautus full of wit,
Are both in Fame's eternal legend writ.
What age of Varro's name shall not be told,
And Jason's Argos, and the fleece of gold?
Lofty Lucretius shall live that hour,
That Nature shall dissolve this earthly bower.
Aeneas war, and Titerus shall be read,
While Rome of all the conquer'd world is head.
Till Cupid's bow, and flery shafts be broken,
Thy verses sweet Tibullus shall be spoken.
And Gallus shall be known from East to West,
So shall Licoris whom he loved best:
Therefore when flint and iron wear away,
Verse is immortal, and shall ne'er decay.
Let kings give place to verse, and kingly shows,
And banks o'er which gold-bearing Tagus flows.
Let base-conceited wits admire vilde things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses' springs.
About my head be quivering myrtle wound,
And in sad lovers' heads let me be found.
The living, not the dead, can envy bite,
For after death all men receive their right:
Then though death rakes my bones in funeral fire,
I'll live, and as he pulls me down, mount higher.
