Sunday, June 15, 2014

Jonson Graceful and Idolatrous Praise of Shakespeare



 Holofernes
Twice-sod simplicity, his coctus!
O thou monster Ignorance, how deformed dost thou look!

--Love's Labour Lost

(Omitting yet another link to the 'deformed' Droeshout Engraving)

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When I wish to 'see' Oxford I do not look at the figure of Hamlet, but instead look to Amorphus of Cynthia's Revels. Jonson described Amorphus as 'the Deformed', and in his play sought to 'correct' certain deformations that had overtaken the English court.

Above all, Amorphus is a courtier. He is in his element in the court, and he is a very sociable individual. He is not in corners, arms wreathed, melancholic. As Jonson paints him, he is quite harmless - but very silly. Upper-class Twit of the Year silly. He has a number of habits that Jonson disapproves of. He appears to be a trendsetter - a man of fashion and 'spirit'. In the very first scenes we can see that Amorphus never behaves spontaneously, but plots out his verbal expressions and gestures in minute detail. He consults his 'store' of experience and fancy and then expresses himself according to his own will. He does not seem to consult moral exemplars or authoritative authors from the past, but relies on his own taste and discretion; which is for Jonson a sign of his inappropriate self-love. When he obtains a 'minion', he takes him aside and in greatest secrecy instructs him in the courtly arts of self-presentation, thus communicating his bad habits to others.

In these scenes, Jonson lifts the curtain on the mysteries of the sources of the courtiers' grazia and sprezzatura - exposing behaviours that are meant to appear 'naturally' graceful as studied and affected.  Any idea of an aristocratic 'je-ne-sais-quois' or  natural superiority is exposed as a sham. Sprezzatura is unmasked as its opposite - affectazione. And that 's what happens in Cynthia's Revels - all of the courtier's apparent graces and virtues are exposed as vices. (Jonson's section on 'affected language' in Timber is  titled 'De vere argutis' - perhaps an indication that Jonson was not above a pun himself?)

Shakespeare's Cleopatra decided to kill herself rather than see her greatness 'boyed' on stages in Rome.

 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' the posture of a whore.



Cynthia's Revels boyed Oxford's greatness in the posture of a ridiculous self-loving fool. And this public assault on Oxford's character was apparently witnessed and tolerated by Queen Elizabeth.


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Text from Original 1609 Quarto


Why didst thou promise such a beautious day,
And make me trauaile forth without my cloake,
To let bace cloudes ore-take me in my way,
Hiding thy brau’ry in their rotten smoke.
Tis not enough that through the cloude thou breake,
To dry the raine on my storme-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salue can speake,
That heales the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame giue phisicke to my griefe,
Though thou repent, yet I haue still the losse,
Th’offenders sorrow lends but weake reliefe
To him that beares the strong offenses losse¹.
Ah but those teares are pearle which thy loue sheeds,
And they are ritch, and ransome all ill deeds.

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What was Oxford's response to Jonson's attack? Cynthia's Revels was only one of the plays of the Poets' War, so there may be a number of answers to that question. Personally, I take the greatest interest in the relationships between Cynthia's Revels; Or, the Fountain of Self-love and Hamlet, but in James P. Bednarz's book about the Poets' War there is one passage about Twelfth Night that keeps returning to mind. In a chapter called 'Shakespeare at the Fountain of Self-Love' (ironic grimace) Bednarz writes/quotes:

An excellent account of the intertextuality of Cynthia's Revels and Twelfth Night is offered by Cristina Malcolmson, who identifies these plays as part of the "war of the theaters" and supports the opinion that their fundamental difference was the result of their obverse interpretaions of "self-love". After Jonson had valorized "allowable self-love" in Cynthia's Revels, Malcolmson contends, Sahekspeare mocked it in Twelfth Night by contrasting Viola and Malvolio. "Malvolio's 'self-love' satirizes Jonson's version of individual value not only as self-indulgent but as socially divisive, because it privileges censuring the faults of others and praising the self over the more difficult task of preserving the harmony of social relations." Shakespeare faults Jonson, Malcolmson continues, because he 'reproves those who would use...social fluidity for their own benefit or as an opportunity to reorder the traditional structure according to new ethical and plitical principles." "Such ethical and political blueprints," she concludes, "are simply fantasies of power." (Bednarz, p.185).

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 Male deformities’: NARCISSUS and the Reformation of Courtly Manners in Cynthia’s Revels in Ovid and the Renaissance Body

By Goran V Stanivukovic

Mario Digangi

(snip)

...In this essay I want to pursue such an analysis by focusing on Ben Jonson’s early comedy Cynthia’s Revels (1600), which offers particular insight into the social and political implications of the Narcissus myth for early modern English culture. Originally entered in the Stationer’s Register as NARCISSUS, or the fountain of self-love, this quirky satire of courtly manners represents Jonson’s ‘only extended use of Ovidian material.: Jonson’s uncharacteristic recourse to Ovidian subjects in Cynthia’s Revels suggests his recognition of the Narcissus myth’s theatrical viability as a vehicle for satire. While Narcissus never appears as a character in the play, the Narcissus myth provides Jonson with vivid material for exposing the transgressive bodily practices of unauthorized courtiers, especially through the character of Amorphous (“the deformed”), whose affected manners violate orthodox prescriptions for male aristocratic comportment. The play’s ridicule of courtly affectation thus accords with early modern interpretations of the Narcissus myth that primarily associate self-love not with homoerotic desire but with effeminate MANNERS: a clear sign of social, economic and political transgression. By contrast, the virtuously ‘masculine’ comportment of the true gentleman, according to a particular strain of early modern political ideology, justifies his status and exercise of power. Exposing illegitimate courtiers as effeminate narcissists, Cynthia’s Revels reveals the importance of an ideology of ‘civilized’ masculinity to early-seventeenth-century constructions of *political legitimacy*.
(snip)
Cursing the 'Fountain of Self-love' at which Narcissus died, Echo laments that

self-love never yet could look on truth
Bur with bleared beams; sleek flattery and she
Are twin-born sisters, and so mix their eyes
As if you sever one, the other dies.

Echo's anatomy of narcissism, which affiliates self-love with the quintessential courtly vice of FLATTERY, clearly applies to the social and political as well as the epistemological realm...
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Lecturing the Courtiers: Crites/Criticus/Jonson in Cynthia's Revels:


O vanity,
How are thy painted beauties doted on,
By light, and empty Idiots how pursu'd
With open and extended Appetite!
How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,
Rais'd on their Toes, to catch thy AIRY FORMS,
Still turning GIDDY, till they reel like Drunkards,
That buy the merry madness of one hour,
With the long irksomness of following time!
O how despis'd and base a thing is a Man,
If he not strive t'erect his groveling Thoughts
Above the strain of Flesh! But how more cheap,
When, even his best and understanding Part,
(The crown and strength of all his Faculties)
Floats like a dead drownd Body, on the Stream
Of vulgar humour, mixt with common'st dregs?
I suffer for their Guilt now, and my Soul
(Like one that looks on ill-affected Eyes)
Is hurt with mere intention on their Follies.
Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me:
Or is't a rarity, or some new object,
That strains my strict observance to this Point?
O would it were, therein I could afford
My Spirit should draw a little neer to theirs,
To gaze on novelties: so Vice were one.
Tut, she is stale, rank, foul, and were it not
That those (that woo her) greet her with lockt Eyes,
(In spight of all the impostures, paintings, drugs,
Which her Bawd custom dawbs her Cheeks withal)
She would betray her loath'd and leprous Face,
And fright th' enamour'd dotards from themselves:
But such is the perverseness of our nature,
That if we once but fancy levity,
(How antick and ridiculous so ere
It sute with us) yet will our muffled thought
Choose rather not to see it, than avoid it:
And if we can but banish our own sense,
We act our mimick tricks with that free license,
That lust, that pleasure, that security,
As if we practis'd in a Paste-board Case,
And no one saw the motion, but the motion.
Well, check thy passion, lest it grow too lowd:
"While fools are pittied, they wax fat and proud

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Fake Figures in the First Folio: Jonson praises/flatters Shakespeare after Shakespeare's own manner, exposing Shakespearean beautiousness as empty/airy forms. Enshrining a fake Figure.

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When Figure becomes Fashionable - generating linguistic confusion and therefore social confusion through the unrestrained use of rhetorical figures:

Peter Schwenger, Deceit in Appleton House

In Upon Appleton House, Marvell has taken advantage of the possible independence of ornament from subject matter to set up a conflict between the two that parallels the poem's explicit theme. Explicitly, he presents a conflict between the nature created by God and the the art created by man. Man's art is epitomized in the idea of the house, which fitly expresses man's ambitions toward and artificial world, this time ceated in his own image. But all art is suspect in this way, including the art of poetry itself. Poetry, like the house as it is characterized in Parthenieia Sacra, is "an artificious Plasme...made in spite of Nature, to vye with her." [Hawkins]. Appleton House is an exceptional house, praised because it is natural, plain, unassuming, and pure. But that praise is couched in a style that is the very opposite of these qualities: artificial, elaborate, overreaching, and curiously corrupt. Its corruption arrises from the nature of the ornamental metaphors of which it is wrought. Appleton House is praised for its perfect proportion; but an ambitious poet is encouraged to push his metaphors toward disproportion, since "the more unlike and unproportionable things be otherwise, THE MORE GRACE HATH THE METAPHOR." [Hobbes]. Each metaphor is, as Tesauro indicates, a sophisticated lie. And when applied to the natural subject, metaphors impose upon it a series of restless changes. They substitute bodiless FANCIES for the object itself, the poet's world for God's.

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Rise, MY Shakespeare! --Jonson
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(Schwenger, con't)

Close attention to the metaphors of the poem - to their progression, prevalence, density, and subtlety - will then provide us with a kind of index to the presence of deceit; and this will allow us to judge the ways in which the cross-current of deceit serves as commentary to the more explicit themes of the poem.

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Sweet Swan of Avon! (Close attention to the metaphors of the poem - to their progression, prevalence, density, and subtlety - will then provide us with a kind of index to the presence of deceit.) (and over-the-top flattery - NLD)


 TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED
MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US

by Ben Jonson

To draw no envy, SHAKSPEARE, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ;
While I confess thy writings to be such,
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise ;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right ;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance ;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron ; what could hurt her more ?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin: Soul of the age!
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage!
My SHAKSPEARE rise ! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room :
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportioned Muses :
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names : but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage : or when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time !
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm !
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines !
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please ;
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must I not give Nature all ; thy art,
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion : and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil ; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame ;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn ;
For a good poet's made, as well as born.
And such wert thou ! 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.
Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James !
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced, and made a constellation there !
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.

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Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made my self a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is, that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely; but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,

Blench \Blench\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Blenched; p. pr. & vb. n.
Blenching.] [OE. blenchen to blench, elude, deceive, AS.
blencan to deceive; akin to Icel. blekkja to impose upon.
Prop. a causative of blink to make to wink, to deceive.

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Milton, L'Allegro (Close attention to the metaphors of the poem - to their progression, prevalence, density, and subtlety - will then provide us with a kind of index to the presence of deceit.)

139: Or sweetest Shakespeare, FANCY'S child,
140: Warble his native wood-notes WILD.

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But know that in the Soule

Are many lesser Faculties that serve
Reason as chief; among these FANSIE next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private Cell when Nature rests.
Oft in her absence MIMIC FANSIE wakes
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,
WILDE WORK produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Som such resemblances methinks I find
Of our last Eevnings talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad.
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave
No spot or blame behind:

Milton, _Paradise Lost Book V_

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Fanciful \Fan"ci*ful\, a.


1. Full of fancy; guided by fancy, rather than by reason and
experience; whimsical; as, a fanciful man forms visionary
projects.

2. Conceived in the fancy; not consistent with facts or
reason; abounding in ideal qualities or figures; as, a
fanciful scheme; a fanciful theory.

3. Curiously shaped or constructed; as, she wore a fanciful
headdress.

Gather up all fancifullest shells. --Keats.

Syn: Imaginative; ideal; visionary; capricious; chimerical;
whimsical; fantastical; wild.

Usage: Fanciful, Fantastical, Visionary. We speak of
that as fanciful which is irregular in taste and
judgment; we speak of it as fantastical when it
becomes grotesque and extravagant as well as
irregular; we speak of it as visionary when it is
wholly unfounded in the nature of things. Fanciful
notions are the product of a heated fancy, without any
tems are made up of oddly assorted fancies, aften of
the most whimsical kind; visionary expectations are
those which can never be realized in fact. --

Fan"ci*ful*ly, adv. -Fan"ci*ful*ness, n.

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_Comus_, John Milton


745: COMUS. Why are you vexed, Lady? why do you frown?
746: Here dwell no frowns, nor anger; from these gates
747: Sorrow flies far. See, here be all the pleasures
748: That FANCY can beget on youthful thoughts,
749: When the fresh blood grows lively, and returns
750: Brisk as the April buds in primrose season.
751: And first behold this cordial julep here,
752: That flames and dances in his crystal bounds,
753: With spirits of balm and fragrant syrups mixed.

(SNIP)

837: LADY. I had not thought to have unlocked my lips
838: In this unhallowed air, but that this juggler
839: Would think to charm my judgment, as mine eyes,
840: Obtruding false rules pranked in reason's garb.
841: I hate when vice can bolt her arguments
842: And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.
843: Impostor! do not charge most innocent Nature,
844: As if she would her children should be riotous
845: With her abundance. She, good cateress,
846: Means her provision only to the good,
847: That live according to her sober laws,
848: And holy dictate of spare Temperance.
849: If every just man that now pines with want
850: Had but a moderate and beseeming share
851: Of that which lewdly-pampered Luxury
852: Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
853: Nature's full blessings would be well dispensed
854: In unsuperfluous even proportion,
855: And she no whit encumbered with her store;
856: And then the Giver would be better thanked,
857: His praise due paid: for swinish gluttony
858: Ne'er looks to Heaven amidst his GORGEOUS feast,
859: But with besotted base ingratitude
860: Crams, and blasphemes his Feeder. Shall I go on
861: Or have I said enow? To him that dares
862: Arm his profane tongue with contemptuous words
863: Against the sun-clad power of chastity
864: Fain would I something say;--yet to what end?
865: Thou hast nor ear, nor soul, to apprehend
866: The sublime notion and high mystery
867: That must be uttered to unfold the sage
868: And serious doctrine of Virginity;
869: And thou art worthy that thou shouldst not know
870: More happiness than this thy present lot.
871: Enjoy your dear wit, and gay rhetoric,
872: That hath so well been taught her DAZZLING FENCE;
873: Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.
874: Yet, should I try, the uncontrolled worth
875: Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits
876: To such a flame of sacred vehemence
877: That dumb things would be moved to sympathise,
878: And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and SHAKE,
879: Till all thy MAGIC STRUCTURES, reared so high,
880: Were SHATTERED into heaps o'er thy FALSE HEAD.


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Comus speaks:

162: Hail, goddess of nocturnal sport,
163: Dark-veiled Cotytto, to whom the secret flame
164: Of midnight torches burns! mysterious dame,
165: That ne'er art called but when the dragon womb
166: Of Stygian darkness spets her thickest gloom,
167: And makes one blot of all the air!
168: Stay thy cloudy ebon chair,
169: Wherein thou ridest with Hecat', and befriend
170: Us thy vowed priests, till utmost end
171: Of all thy dues be done, and none left out,
172: Ere the blabbing eastern scout,
173: The nice Morn on the Indian steep,
174: From her cabined loop-hole peep,
175: And to the tell-tale Sun descry
176: Our concealed solemnity.
178: In a LIGHT FANTASTIC round.

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This Side Idolatry:

 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’s 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, The Idolatrous Eye, (pp.162-163)


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The Idolatrous Eye:


Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one to SHOW
To whom all SCENES of Europe homage owe.

 Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a SIGHT it were
To SEE thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James !


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Cynthia's Revels, Jonson

 MERCURY. Why, Crites, think you any noble spirit,
Or any, worth the title of a man,
Will be incensed to see the enchanted veils
Of self-conceit, and servile flattery,
Wrapt in so many folds by time and custom,
Drawn from his wronged and bewitched eyes?
Who sees not now their shape and nakedness,
Is blinder than the son of earth, the mole;
Crown'd with no more humanity, nor soul.

CRITES. Though they may see it, yet the huge estate
FANCY, and FORM, and SENSUAL PRIDE have gotten,
Will make them blush for anger, not for shame,
And turn shewn nakedness to impudence.
Humour is now the test we try things in:
All power is just: nought that delights is sin.
And yet the zeal of every knowing man
Opprest with hills of tyranny, cast on virtue
By the light fancies of fools, thus transported.
Cannot but vent the Aetna of his fires,
T'inflame best bosoms with much worthier love
Than of these outward and effeminate shades;
That these vain joys, in which their wills consume
Such powers of wit and soul as are of force
To raise their beings to eternity,
May be converted on works fitting men:
And, for the practice of a forced look,
An antic gesture, or a fustian phrase,
Study the native frame of a true heart,
An inward comeliness of bounty, knowledge,
And spirit that may conform them actually
To God's high figures, which they have in power;
Which to neglect for a self-loving neatness,
Is sacrilege of an unpardon'd greatness.

MER. Then let the truth of these things strengthen thee,
In thy exempt and only man-like course;
Like it the more, the less it is respected:
Though men fail, virtue is by gods protected. --
See, here comes Arete; I'll withdraw myself. [EXIT.]

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 Nicolette Zeeman, _The Idol of the Text_

...Despite the literalists best efforts, they could not escape the capacity for language to create verbal 'images', or speaking pictures. In the 'Idol of the Text', Nicolette Zeeman concentrates on 'a particular figure seen in the imaginative text' , believing that, 'the idol is the underside of the notion that the imaginative text is like an image.'
"For a number of later medieval writers, including Chaucer, the figure of the idol is a means of focusing on problematic aspects of imaginative textuality and its contents. The idol articulates some of the difficulties of dealing with textual inheritance, the archive, and the 'authority'. '
(snip)
What is the idol in the Middle Ages? Contrasting idols with Christian signs in the semiotics of Augustine, John Freccero describes idols as 'reified signs devoid of significance', gods 'coextensive with their representations.'. The idol refuses to be read as part of a larger sign system, drawing attention only to itself and to its own malleable materiality. In this sense, although it is highly material, it is 'NOTHING' (I Corinthians 8:4). It exists in the mutable world only for itself and to be worshipped for itself. Idolaters foolishly worship idols despite the fact that they have made them: idols in turn, lure their worshippers in the direction of their own materiality, sometimes even rendering idolators themselves inanimate (Milton - reader turned to marble/astonement) -NLD)

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 Milton -- I sing the starry axis and the singing hosts in the sky, *and of the gods suddenly destroyed in their own shrines*. (Note - Gods coextensive with their representations - NLD)

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Gods coextensive with their representations:

 Shakespeare and the Poet's War - James Bednarz


Referring to _Every Man Out of His Humour_, James Bednarz writes:

"Thus perhaps only in the First Quarto Jonson applied personal topicality to a play whose structure was from the start anti-Shakespearean, as he added to formal innovation a parody of the man and his work. It is through this set of allusions (in what became the defining style of the Poets' War) that he *conjoined in anecdotal form the body of the poet with the body of his work*.
 

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The Wounded Cavalier







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 From a Poetics of Idolatry, Kenneth Gross_Spenserian Poetics_,







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 Shakespeare

 O! lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death,--dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove.
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart:
O! lest your true love may seem false in this
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
   For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
   And so should you, to love things nothing worth.

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In 1743, the 9th Earl of Pembroke was Henry Herbert, a fine scholar noted for his artistic and literary tastes. His father was also the grandson of Philip Herbert, husband of Susan de Vere, one of the Incomparable Brethren to whom Shakespeare's first folio was dedicated. It was Henry Herbert who commissioned an exact replica of Peter Scheemakers' statue of Shakespeare, which only two years before had been acquired for Westminster Abbey. This replicated statue is precise in every detail except one. The one exception is that the Abbey's Shakespeare is pointing to a scroll on which has been written lines taken from The Tempest (Act iv: sc 1) –


The Cloud-capp'd Towers, / The Gorgeous Palaces / The Solemn
Temples, / The Great Globe itself / Yea, all which it inherit / Shall
Dissolve; / And like the baseless Fabric of a Vision / Leave not a
rack behind.


It may, perhaps, be mentioned that a change of text has taken place within the penultimate line. This should read - And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, but the sense remains unaltered.

The Wilton Shakespeare, although identical in all other respects, has the poet's finger pointing to the same scroll, but upon which appears…the immortal lines taken from Macbeth:

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more:

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Signifying Nothing:

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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Mario DiGangi, Male deformities’: NARCISSUS and the Reformation of Courtly Manners in Cynthia’s Revels in Ovid and the Renaissance Body

...Narcissus himself [...] never even appears during the course of the play. however, the corrupting Fountain of Self-love, the emblematic source of narcissism introduced at the very beginning of the play, seems to be a permanent fixture at Cynthia's court, for no mention is made of its ultimate destruction or purification. for Jonson's audience, the survival of the symbolically cominant fountain of Self-love might well have presaged that narcissistic manners would continue to deform the individual bodies of courtiers as well as the collective body of the court. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can regard the Fountain's endurance as a sign of the ideological conflict over elite male comportment that would continue to be waged, in early modern England, as the legacy of Narcissus.

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Mario DiGangi, (con't.)

 By the time Jonson wrote Cynthia's Revels, the Narcissus myth had developed an extended, complex, cultural legacy. Traditional medieval and Renaissance moral commentaries on Ovid generally explained Narcissus's error as the 'folly of loving an IMAGE.' Arthur Golding's influential 1567 translation of The Metamorposes, for instance, moralizes the myth as a 'mirror' of vanity and pride: 'Narcissus is of scornfulnesse and pryde a myrror cleere,/ Where beawties fading vanitie most playnly may appeere.'

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SInne of ſelfe-loue poſſeſſeth al mine eie,
And all my ſoule,and al my euery part;
And for this ſinne there is no remedie,
It is ſo grounded inward in my heart.
Me thinkes no face ſo gratious is as mine,
No ſhape ſo true,no truth of ſuch account,
And for my ſelfe mine owne worth do define,
As I all other in all worths ſurmount.
But when my glaſſe ſhewes me my ſelfe indeed
Beated and chopt with tanned antiquitie,
Mine owne ſelfe loue quite contrary I read
Selfe,ſo ſelfe louing were iniquity,
   T'is thee(my ſelfe)that for my ſelfe I praiſe,
   Painting my age with beauty of thy daies,

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Male impersonators: men performing masculinity
By Mark Simpson

According to the Greek myth Narcissus was told by the blind seer Teiresias when he was a child that he should live to a great age if he never knew himself. Narcissus grew up to be a beautiful young man but proud and haughty. An embittered youth, unrequited in his love for Narcissus, cursed him to love that which could not be obtained. One day on Mount Helicon Narcissus caught sight of his own reflection 'endowed with all the beauty that man could desire and unawares he began to love the image of himself which, although itself perfect beauty, could not return his love.' Narcissus, worn out by the futility of his love, turned into the yellow-centred flower with white petals named after him.

The myth tells us something about the relation of modern man to his own image. Narcissus is not seduced by his reflection in any common pool - he glimpses and falls in love with his reflection on Mount Helicon, the sacred mountain where Apollo, Artemis and the Muses danced: the symbolic centre of the arts. His reflection is not one of nature but an idealized image refracted through man's art. Thus his image is 'endowed with all the beauty that man could desire' and he falls in love with it. And like nineties Western man, Narcissus finds that it is a love that 'could not be obtained'.

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Alciato's Book of Emblems

Emblem 69

Self-love

Because your figure pleased you too much, Narcissus, it was changed into a flower, a plant of known senselessness. Self-love is the withering and destruction of natural power which brings and has brought ruin to many learned men, who having thrown away the method of the ancients seek new doctrines and pass on nothing but their own fantasies.

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Of the period after the Restoration - David Norbrook writes (In _Writing the English Republic_):


"Forgetting was officially sanctioned: The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion banned 'any name or names, or other words of reproach tending to revive the memory of the late differences thereof'. This book is one attempt to counter that process of erasure, which has had long-term effects on English literary history and, arguably, on wider aspects of political identity.. In the short term, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion can be seen as an enlightened piece of legislation. Twenty years of bitter contention between and within families and social and religious groups needed oblivion to heal them. In the longer term, however, such forgetting has had it costs. Suppressing the republican element in English Cultural history entails simplifying a complex but intellectually and artistically challenging past into a sanitized and impoverished Royal heritage....The republic's political institutions 'continue to languish in a historiographical blind spot'; much the same applies to artistic culture (Norbrook pp1-2.)