Monday, September 8, 2014

Marlowe's Edward II and the Corrupting Italian Style

 Edward II, Marlowe - *Registered* July 6 1593
Venus and Adonis - *Registered* 18 April 1593



Piers Gaveston:
Music and poetry is his delight;
Therefore I'll have Italian masques by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay.
Sometime a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive tree
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by,
One like Actaeon, peeping through the grove,
Shall by the angry goddess be transformed,
And running in the likeness of a hart
By yelping hounds pulled down and seem to die.
Such things as these best please his majesty. 
Marlowe, Edward II
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 Amanda Bailey, Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England


...Scholars have looked to the continent for antecedents for Edward and Gaveston's love affair, notably the relationship between Henry III and his favourite Epernon, yet no one has offered a sustained investigation of Gaveston's Italianness. This critical lacuna is especially surprising since Gaveston's foreign aesthetic serves as the centrepiece of a shifting constellation of offences, all of which involve his cavalier rejection of the codes of deference constituting court culture. In keeping with Holinshed's account of the relationship between Edward and his favourite Piers Gaveston in the Chronicles, Marlowe depicts Gaveston, in the words of Holinshed, as 'so high in his doings' and disdainful of the peers. Yet Holinshed makes no mention of Gaveston's attire. He neither identifies Gaveston as wearing foreign clothes, nor associates him with impertinent practices of dress. Marlowe, however, revises and updates Holinshed's version of events by attending to Gaveston's sartorial sensisbility, which he politicizes by identifying as the sign of an irreparable rift in Edward's court. While those who exhibited aspects of the Italian vice may not have been a source of dissent in the fourteenth-century court of the real-life Edward, those who distinguished themselves as 'marvelous monsters' in 'fashion' and 'condition' were of great concern to members of the late sixteenth-century court of Elizabeth.
Marlowe avoids any one-to-one correspondence between the courts of the fictional Edward and the actual Elizabeth, but certain new modes of display on parade at the late sixteenth-century English court inform Marlowe's representation of Edward's milieu. In the final years of Elizabeth's reign, as John Stow notes in his Survey of London, the queen's court was no longer reagarded as an isolated enclave as it had been in previous eras. (pp. 79-80)

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Wikipedia:
 On Southampton's 16th birthday, 6 October 1589, Lord Burghley noted Southampton's age in his diary, and by 1590 Burghley was negotiating with Southampton's grandfather, Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montague, and Southampton's mother, Mary,  for a marriage between Southampton and Lord Burghley's eldest granddaughter, Elizabeth Vere, daughter of Burghley's daughter, Anne Cecil,  and Edward de Vere. 17th Earl of Oxford. However the match was not to Southampton's liking, and in a letter written in November 1594, about six weeks after Southampton had turned 21, the Jesuit Henry Garnet reported the rumour that 'The young Erle of Southampton refusing the Lady Veere payeth £5000 of present payment'.

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Southampton's disdain?- Southampton eventually married Essex's cousin Elizabeth Vernon:



 T O   T H E   R I G H T   H O N O R A B L E
Henrie VVriothesley, Earle of Southampton,
and Baron of Titchfield.

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

Your Honors in all dutie,
William Shakespeare.

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Amorphus/Oxford:

 ‘Male deformities’: Narcissus and the Reformation of Courtly Manners in Cynthia’s Revels
in Ovid & 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.

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Amanda Bailey, Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England

The true subject of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy Edward II is not a king failing in the duties of his office but a court overtaken by 'the infection of foreign style.' The symptoms of the sickness contaminating Edward's realm are those  'abhominable vices' that members of Marlowe's audience associated with the Italianified Englishman, namely, 'vaineglory, selfelove, and Sodomie.' Even in the most vital period of cultural exchange between England and Italy, the cultivation of an Italian sensibility was perceived, both on and off the Elizabethan stage, as a blessing and a curse. Late sixteenth-century Italy was the centre  of classical learning, mercantile activity, and artistic innovation. It was also the site of political intrigue, courtly idleness, and erotic temptation. Young men travelled to Italy to perfect the courtly graces of Castiglione, yet, as one contemporary warned, 'few young travellers have brought home [from Italy] sound and safe, and (in a word) English bodies.' In the eyes of some, Italy's Mediterranean climate had a corrosive effect even on young men's minds. As one early modern dramatic character exclaims:

Brother, I fear me in your travel you have drunk too much of that Italian air, that hath infected the whole mass of your ingenious nature, dried up in you all sap of generous disposition, poison'd the very essence of your soul, and so polluted your senses that whatsoever enters there takes from them contaion, and is to your fancy represented as foul and tainted, which in itself perhaps is spotless.

(snip)
In Edward II, no figure is more closely associated with the telltale signs of the Itallian vice - 'the art of epicurising, the art of whoring [and ] the art of Sodomitrie' -  than Piers Gaveston...
...Yet despite the attention scholars have devoted to Gaveston's inapppropriate exhibitionism, analyses of the source and the effects of the power wielded by someone who promotes outrageous display presuppose that the aesthetically unconventional is 'either grossly unintelligible or grossly immoral.' Such readings ignore the polay's awareness of the otency of aesthetic defiance and thus fail to illuminate how sexual and stylistic excess are linked in theis play and what is at stake in their overlay.

(snip)

Unlike the English masque, which in the hands of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones adhered to Aristotelian principles of mimetic coherence and classical rules of symmetry, the spatial rhetoric of Gaveston's masque emplys the stylistic elements of maneria, the cinquecento artistic trend in Italian architectural and visual arts characterized by ornamentation, hybridity, and artifice. Maneria was a visual mode characterized by 'the ruthless dethronement of aesthetic doctrines based on principles of order, proportion, balance, and economy of means,' and entailed a rejection 'of rationalism and naturalism in the rendering of reality.' An oppositional form that irreverently reninscribed that to which it was reacting, the key components of a mannerist aesthetic were defiance, exaggeration, and insincerity. Art historian Arnold Hauser explains that his aesthetic may be discerned by its 'piquancy,'by which he means a predilection for 'the strange, the overstrained...the pungent, the bold, [and] the challenging.' Its virtuosity lay in its 'compulsive deviation from the normal, ' since the mannerist work of art, Hauser emphasizes, is 'always a piece of bravura, a triumphant conjuring trick, a firework display with flying sparks and colors.' Anticlassical and antinatural  'mannerism' is not normative,' insofar as it demonstrates an unapologetic flamboyance that does not seek to mask its stylistic exuberance.

--from Amanda Bailey, Flaunting
Chapter 4. 'The Italian Vice and Bad Taste in Edward II'.

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Jonson, FF Encomium

 Mount Bank:

 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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Soul of the Age:
Jonson, Alchemist

To the Reader

If thou beest more, thou art an understander, and then I trust thee. If thou art one that takest up, and but a pretender, beware of what hands thou receivest thy commodity; for thou wert never more fair in the way to be COZENED, than IN THIS AGE, in poetry, especially in plays: wherein, now the concupiscence of dances and of antics so reigneth, as to run away from nature, and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that tickles the spectators.

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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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 Nathaniel Baxter acrostic poem (1606) to Susan Vere (married to 'incomparable brethren' brother Philip Herbert)

Valiant whilom the Prince that bare this mot [motto],
Engraved round about his golden Ring:
Roaming in VENICE ere [before] thou wast begot,
Among the gallants of th’Italian spring.

Never omitting what might pastime bring,
Italian sports, and Siren’s melody:
Hopping Helena with her warbling sting,
Infested th’Albanian dignity,
Like as they [it] poisoned all Italy.

Vigilant then th’eternall majesty
Enthralled souls to free from infamy:
Remembring thy sacred virginity,
Induced us to make speedy repair,
Unto thy mother everlasting fair,
So did this Prince beget thee debonaire.


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Cynthia's Revels, Jonson


Amorphus/Oxford. ... (emphasis on expression - manner over matter)


For, let your Soul be as- sur'd of this (in any rank, or profession whatever) the
more general, or major part of Opinion goes with the
Face, and (simply) respects nothing else. Therefore
if that can be made exactly, CURIOUSLY, exquisitely,
thorowly, it is enough.

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Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
Letter to Bartholomew Clerke 1571

Dedication in Latin to Bartholomew Clerke's Translation of The Courtier (1571/1572)

... For what more difficult, more noble, or more magnificent task has anyone ever undertaken than our author Castiglione, who has drawn for us the figure and model of a courtier, a work to which nothing can be added, in which there is no redundant word, a portrait which we shall recognize as that of a highest and most perfect type of man. And so, although nature herself has made nothing perfect in every detail, yet the manners of men exceed in dignity that with which nature has endowed them; and he who surpasses others has here surpassed himself and has even out-done nature, which by no one has ever been surpassed. Nay more: however elaborate the ceremonial, whatever the magnificence of the court, the splendor of the courtiers, and the multitude of spectators, he has been able to lay down principles for the guidance of the very Monarch himself.

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Chapman on Oxford:

the most goodly fashion'd man
I ever saw; from head to foote IN FORME
Rare and most absolute;

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The Absolute Courtier in Castiglione:

In Saccone's reading [of Castiglione's Courtier], Cesare's move places the emphasis of the remainder of the discussion on the 'Aristotelian middle ground between two exceptional conditions,' the 'absolute perfection' of those who are 'perfectly endowed by nature' and the imperfection of 'the absolutely ungifted.' But I think it does something more complex and intereting. It relegates the ascriptive ideal of natural perfection to the background as a reality possessed by a lucky few, and leaves it standing as a real ideal to be imitated by the less fortunate majority, which may include not only klutzy patricians but also clever arrivistes. To reiterate that grazia is a grace beyond the reach of art just before the account of sprezzatura is to make deficiency in grazia the enabling condition of ideal courtiership. The ideal courtier is not the absolute courtier. The latter is a rara avis, though a real one; his grazia is fully embodied, 'organic,' and inalienable, the transcendent state of self-possession to which others may aspire but can never attain. The ideal courtier is being imagined by the interlocutors as a simulacrum necessitated by the failure of the ascriptive ideal, which is also a physiognomic and logocentric ideal. The portray a typified abstraction (a schema, an Idea) that may be copied and copiously replicated in rule-governed acts of reincorporation through which the actors transform faces and bodies into signs of the perfect mental and psychic grace denied them by nature. Sprezzatura is envisaged as the false lookalike that threatens to displace grazia.

absolute courtier - the original
ideal courtier - the image

The Absence of Grace - Sprezzatura and  Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books
Harry Berger, Jr. (p.17)

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Jonson, _Every Man in his Humour_

COME,
wrong not the quality of your desert, with looking
downward, Couz; but hold up your Head, so: and
let the IDEA of what you are, be portray'd i' your FACE,
that Men may read i' your Physnomy, (Here, within
this place is to be seen the TRUE, RARE, and accomplish'd MONSTER, or
MIRACLE of Nature, which is all one.) 

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Shakespeare

'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 though 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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 No, I am that I am --
The latter [the absolute courtier] is a rara avis, though a real one; his grazia is fully embodied, 'organic,' and inalienable, the transcendent state of self-possession to which others may aspire but can never attain. 
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 Amanda Bailey, Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England

Scribbled in Inigo Jones's sketchbook are his dismissive comments about the contintental trend in art and architecture that promoted artifizioso over sprezzatura. Disapproving of the hyperbole of maniera, he argues that just as 'outwarly every wyse man gcarrieth a graviti in Publicke Places...so in architecture, ye outward ornaments oft [ought] to be sollid, proporsionable according to the rules, masculine and unaffected . Aiming to create visual forms that would inculcate in their onlookers 'virtues of sobriety' and the desire to lead a 'well-ordered life,' Jones strove to produce forms 'purged of all the licentious ornament of Michelangelo and his mannerist followers.' Not surprisingly, he devoted his energies to reining in the court masque, which as a theatrical genre served as the 'most comprehensive manifestation of mannerism' on the continent. Even though intermedio were in high fashion at the Medici court, where grand spectacles offered audiences a smorgasbord of visual marvels through the presentation of opulent stage costumes and elaborate scenery, Jonson and Jones collaborated to tame the disruptive elements of this 'audacious' art form. In the 1611 masque Oberon, The Faery Prince, for instance, Jonson transforms the satyr Silenus, and obese older man with a penchant for young boys, into a harmless pedagogue and master of the revels. Along similar lines, the young boys, who are described as bejewelled with fairy bracelets, pearls, garlands, ribbons, and posies, do not stand out as objects of decadent desire but become seamlessl absorbed into the conventional symbolism of the masque. (p.85)

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 Jonson, Discoveries

DE VERE argutis. - I do hear them say often some men are not witty, because they are not everywhere witty; than which nothing is more foolish. If an eye or a nose be an excellent part in the face, therefore be all eye or nose! I think the eyebrow, the forehead, the cheek, chin, lip, or any part else are as necessary and natural in the place. But now nothing is good that is natural; RIGHT and NATURAL LANGUAGE seems to have least of the WIT in it; that which is WRITHED and tortured is counted the more exquisite. Cloth of bodkin or tissue must be embroidered; as if no face were fair that were not POWDERED or PAINTED! no beauty to be had but in wresting and WRITHING our own tongue! Nothing is fashionable till it be DEFORMED; and this is to write like a gentleman. All must be affected and preposterous as our gallants' clothes, sweet-bags, and night-dressings, in which you would think our men lay in, like LADIES, it is so CURIOUS.

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Jonson, Timber

(In the difference of wits, note 10)

Not. 10.--It cannot but come to pass that these men who commonly seek to do more than enough may sometimes happen on something that is good and great; but very seldom: and when it comes it doth not recompense the rest of their ill. For their jests, and their sentences (which they only and ambitiously seek for) stick out, and are more eminent, because all is sordid and vile about them; as lights are more discerned in a thick darkness than a faint shadow. Now, because they speak all they can (however unfitly), they are thought to have the greater copy; where the learned use ever election and a mean, they look back to what they intended at first, and make all an even and proportioned body. [note - refer to Droeshout engraving - NLD]
The true artificer will not run away from NATURE as he were AFRAID of her, or depart from life and the likeness of truth, but speak to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlanes and Tamerchains of the late age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers. He knows it is his only art so to carry it, as none but artificers perceive it. In the meantime, perhaps, he is called barren, dull, lean, a poor writer, or by what contumelious word can come in their cheeks, by these men who, without labour, judgment, knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred before him. He gratulates them and their fortune. Another age, or juster men, will acknowledge the virtues of his studies, his wisdom in dividing, his subtlety in arguing, with what strength he doth inspire his readers, with what sweetness he strokes them; in inveighing, what sharpness; in jest, what urbanity he uses; how he doth reign in men's affections; how invade and break in upon them, and makes their minds like the thing he writes. Then in his elocution to behold what word is proper, which hath ornaments, which height, what is beautifully translated, where figures are fit, which gentle, which strong, to show the composition manly; and how he hath avoided faint, obscure, obscene, sordid, humble, improper, or effeminate phrase; which is not only praised of the most, but commended (which is worse), especially for that it is naught.

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The symptoms of the sickness contaminating Edward's realm are those  'abhominable vices' that members of Marlowwe's audience associated with the Italianified Englishman, namely, 'vaineglory, selfelove, and SODOMIE.'-- Amanda Bailey, Flaunting

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Cinaedus

Amy Richlin --

 Effeminate actio repels him (Quintilain) Inst. 4.2.390: 'They bend their voices and incline their necks and flail their arms against their sides and act sext (lasciviunt) in their whole style of subject matter, words and composition; finally, what is like a monstrosity (monstro), the actio pleases, while the case is not intelligible.'
 In an extended passage (2.5.10-12), he [Quintilian] complains that 'corrupt and vice-filled ways of speaking' (corruptas et vitiosas orationes) find popular favour out of the moral degradation of their audience; they are full of what is 'improper, obscure, swollen, vulgar, dirty, sext, effeminate' (impropria, obscura, tumida, huilis, sordida, lasciva, effeminate). And they are praised precisely because they are 'perverse' (prava). Instead of speech that is 'straight' (rectus) and 'natural' (secundum naturam), people like waht is 'bent' (deflexa). He concludes with a lengthy analogy between the taste for such speech and admiration for bodies that are 'twisted' (distortis) and 'monstrous' (prodigiosis) - even those that have been 'depilated and smoothed', adorned with curled hair and cosmetic, rather than deriving their beauty from 'uncorrupted nature' (incorrupta natura). 'The result is that is seems that beauty of the body comes from bad morals.'
  The bad body, in Quintilian's book, is that elsewhere associated with the cinaedus [catamite]; bad speech is effeminata, good speech is 'straight' and natural, tallying with the common assertion that the actions of the cinaedus are 'against nature'. The effeminate body stands both by metonymy and synecdoche for the kind of speech that Quintilian rejects; bad speech is both like such bodies and produced by such bodies.


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Gabriel Harvey gives us the Earl of Oxford's style:

Speculum Tuscanismi:

Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,
In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking,
With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward.
Large bellied Cod-pieced doublet, uncod-pieced half hose,
Straight to the dock like a shirt, and close to the britch like a diveling.
A little Apish flat couched fast to the pate like an oyster,
French camarick ruffs, deep with a whiteness starched to the purpose.
Every one A per se A, his terms and braveries in print,
Delicate in speech, quaint in array: conceited in all points,
In Courtly guiles a passing singular odd man...


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 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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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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The symptoms of the sickness contaminating Edward's realm are those  'abhominable vices' that members of Marlowwe's audience associated with the Italianified Englishman, namely, 'vaineglory, selfelove, and SODOMIE.'-- Amanda Bailey, Flaunting

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Disorderly Love:
Sodomy Revisited in Marlowe’s Edward II
Jonathan Crewe 


...Following Foucault, most critics have accepted sodomy as the historically appropriate term for discussing early modern sexual relationships between men. Everyone since Foucault has been at pains to emphasize that term did not definitively or exclusively designate male-male relationships. Not only could it encompass illicit sexuality between men and women, but also forms of disorderly verbal conduct entailing no sexual activity. Some have noted that the term masculine love coexisted with sodomy and have speculated about its currency as an alternative designation. It appears prominently in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis.3 Whatever its classical or biblical provenance may be, however, the term masculine love occurs rarely in early modern English texts, and does not appear to offer a particularly consequential, idealizing alternative to sodomy.4 Evidently, sodomy remained the governing term.
In the early modern English field, another landmark publication was Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982), which argued, inter alia, that sodomy (linked to bestiality under English law) could encompass heterosexual adultery.5 The term designated a perceived threat to sexual, hence political, order rather than same-sex relations exclusively: atheism and sedition were typically linked to sodomy in denunciations or legal charges. The discourse and practice of same-sex relations may have varied more significantly on the continent than in England during the sixteenth century, both as regards the humanistic philosophies of same-sex attraction and as regards the representation of same-sex relations between women. Antisodomy laws were unevenly formulated and enforced among different European principalities.6 Nevertheless, the discourse of sodomy remained the dominant one.

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Disorderly Love:
Cynthia's Revels, Jonson --

 Amorphus. No, as I am vertuous (being altogether un-
travel'd) it strikes me into wonder.
   Asotus, I do purpose to travel, Sir, at spring.
   Amo. I think I shall affect you, Sir. This last speech
of yours hath begun to make you dear to me.
   Aso. O God, Sir, I would there were any thing in
me, Sir, that might appear worthy the least worthiness
of your worth, Sir. I protest, Sir, I should endeavour
to shew it, Sir, with more than common regard, Sir.
   Crites. O, here's a rare motley, Sir.
   Amo. Both your desert, and your endeavours are
plentiful, suspect them not: but your sweet disposition
to travel (I assure you) hath made you another my-self
in mine Eye, and struck me inamour'd on your Beauties.
   Aso. I would I were the fairest Lady of France for
your sake, Sir, and yet I would travel too.
   Amo. O, you should digress from your self else: for
(believe it) your travel is your only thing that rectifies,
or (as the Italian says) vi rendi pronto all' attioni, makes
you fit for action.

   Aso. I think it be great charge though, Sir.
   Amo. Charge? why 'tis nothing for a Gentleman
that goes private, as your self, or so; my intelligence
shall quit my charge at all times. Good faith, this Hat that
hath possest mine Eye exceedingly; 'tis so pretty, and
fantastick: what? is't a Beaver?
   Aso. I, Sir, I'll assure you 'tis a Beaver, it cost me
eight Crowns but this Morning.
   Amo. After your French account?
   Aso. Yes, Sir.
   Cri. And so near his head? beshrow me, dangerous.
   Amo. A very pretty fashion (believe me) and a most
novel kind of trim: your Band is conceited too!
   Aso. Sir, it is all at your service.
   Amo. O, pardon me.
   Aso. I beseech you, Sir, if you please to wear it, you
shall do me a most infinite grace.
   Cri. 'Slight, will he be prais'd out of his Cloaths?
   Aso. By Heaven, Sir, I do not offer it you after the
Italian manner; I would you should conceive so of me.
   Amo. Sir, I shall fear to appear rude in denying your
courtesies, especially, being invited by so proper a di-
stinction: may I pray your Name Sir?
   Aso. My name is Asotus, Sir.
   Amo. I take your love (gentle Asotus) but let me
win you to receive this, in exchange —
   Crit. They'll change Doublets anon.
   Amo. And (from this time) esteem your self, in the
first Rank, of those few, whom I profess to love. What
make you in company of this Schollar, here? I will
bring you known Gallants, as Anaides of the Or-
dinary, Hedon the Courtier, and others, whose Society
shall render you grac'd and respected: this is a trivial
Fellow, too mean, too cheap, too coursecoarse for you to
converse with.

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 ‘Male deformities’: Narcissus and the Reformation of Courtly Manners in Cynthia’s Revels
in Ovid & 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.

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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.

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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.