In 1616 Ben Jonson had published his own magisterial and monumental 'Workes'. His volume was judiciously set out and painstaking revised, and fully furnished with glosses to guide and assist the Reader towards correct interpretations. Jonson the humanist left us with a exemplary volume, one that he intended should stand as a model for after-ages to peruse and assimilate according to their own capacities.
That 1616 has been celebrated and mourned as the 400th year of Shakespeare's Death rather than the 400th anniversary of the publication of Jonson's immortal labours would most likely have disappointed Jonson, but I do not think he would have been surprised. He had already prepared reams of material that chastised the folly and ignorance of popular opinion and taste, and in own opinion, often expressed, nothing was too gross or absurd for the tastes of the masses. And he had plenty of precedents to prove that it had been so for all time.
In Shakespeare's First Folio a bitter Jonson would farce Shakespeare's ignorant praisers with a gross diet of the most bombastic and parasitical flattery imaginable - but for the matter of Shakespeare's praise? Airy nothing would sustain them for almost 400 years. And the Droeshout engraving, that brazen head with two left arms?What right thinking reader would choose to model himself after such a Figure - who would emulate such a ridiculous head?
Four hundred years later we have our answer. And it is not just the nut-crackers of the Globe - it has become the World. And I think it has something to do with Love, but it also has a lot to do with figurations of power. Britain is a nation under intense strain, and it requires the sweet and delightful sounds of its national poet as much as ever. Shakespeare is a generous and serviceable fabric, and can be cut into any useful shape.
“Ten thousand honours and blessings on the bard
who has gilded the dull realities of life with innocent illusions”
A Little Touch of Ovid - Beloved Counter-Epicist
Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship
(p.46-8)
We have further evidence for thinking that Shakespeare’s spear of Achilles is not simply proverbial but Ovidian. First of all, Ovid thinks of Achilles as the antithesis-figure to his own elegiac art. In Amores 2:1, one of the five programmatic poems in his inaugural sequence, Ovid explains why he writes love elegy rather than epic, and asks, ‘Of what avail will it be to me to have sung of swift Achilles?’ In another of the programmatic poems, Amores 2.18, Ovid further explains his refusal to write epic (recusatio): ‘While you, Macer, are bringing your poem to the time of Achilles wrath and clothing the conspiring chiefs with the war’s first arms, I dally in the slothful shade of Venus, and tender Love is bringing to naught the lofty ventures I would make’. From the outset of his career, Ovid presents himself as a counter-epicist, and he puts himself into competition not merely with the great epic authors, Homer and Virgil, but also with the best of the Achaeans, whom Ovid imagines as a metonymic figure for the epic genre. Rather than freeing his verse from epic, Ovid interleaves epic into elegy through an authorial fiction about the two genres, and he uses the West’s first epic hero as the figure for his interleaf.
Ovid can do so because Achilles is the consummate epic warrior as elegiac lover. The Iliad opens with Achilles’ dispute with Agamemnon over his coveted slave-girl Briseis – a dispute that turns out to have disastrous consequences for the Greeks, because it motivates Achilles to withdraw from the battle. When Agamemnon sends Odysseus and Diomedes to retrieve the sullen warrior,
They found Achilleus delighting his heart in a lyre clear-sounding, splendid and carefully wrought, with a bridge of silver upon it, which he won out of the spoils when he ruined Eetion’s city. With this he was pleasureing his heart, and singing of men’s fame. (Homer, Iliad)
This original portrait of Achilles as an Apollonian poet-figure delighting, `delighting his heart’ through lyre-playing and ‘singing of men’s fame’, turns out to be significant to the tradition we are tracing.
For instance, in the Heroides Ovid presents Briseis writing a letter to Achilles, and she imagines him just as Odysseus and Diomedes find him in the Iliad, albeit not in the company of Patroclus (as Homer narrates) but in an imagined embrace with another girl:
You are wielding the plectrum, and a tender mistress holds you in her warm embrace! And does anyone ask wherefore do you refuse to fight? Because the fight brings danger: while the zither, and song, and Venus, bring delight. Safer it is to lie on the couch, to clasp a sweetheart in your arms, to tinkle with your fingers the Thracian lyre, than to take in hand the shield, and the speare with sharpened point…Ye Gods forfend! And may the spear of Pelion go quivering from your strong arm to pierce the side of Hectore [validoque, precor, vibrata lacerto /transeat Hectoreum Pelias hasta latus!] (Ovid, Heroides 3.113-26; emphasis added)
Ovid turns the solitary Homeric lyre-player into a lyre-playing lover, and presents Briseis trying to inspire Achilles to activate the military weapon that will performs the key action of the entire Trojan War: the killing of Hector, breaker of horses. For Ovid, the spear is a figure for action; his verb for that action, ‘vibrata’ comes from the Latin vibrare, meaning to ‘brandish’ or ‘shake’. As Homer primally narrates it in Book 22, ‘Achilleus was shaking/ in his right hand’ the ‘pointed spear…with evil intention toward brilliant Hektor’, and when Achilles spies vulnerability in Hector’s armor, ‘in this place/ brilliant Achilleus drove the spear as he came on in fury’. (22.325-6)
(snip)
Shakespeare’s favourite poet took considerable interest in Achilles’ spear, putting it to specific use no fewer than eight additional times – the last seven representing the spear’s power to wound and heal.(p.46-8)
We have further evidence for thinking that Shakespeare’s spear of Achilles is not simply proverbial but Ovidian. First of all, Ovid thinks of Achilles as the antithesis-figure to his own elegiac art. In Amores 2:1, one of the five programmatic poems in his inaugural sequence, Ovid explains why he writes love elegy rather than epic, and asks, ‘Of what avail will it be to me to have sung of swift Achilles?’ In another of the programmatic poems, Amores 2.18, Ovid further explains his refusal to write epic (recusatio): ‘While you, Macer, are bringing your poem to the time of Achilles wrath and clothing the conspiring chiefs with the war’s first arms, I dally in the slothful shade of Venus, and tender Love is bringing to naught the lofty ventures I would make’. From the outset of his career, Ovid presents himself as a counter-epicist, and he puts himself into competition not merely with the great epic authors, Homer and Virgil, but also with the best of the Achaeans, whom Ovid imagines as a metonymic figure for the epic genre. Rather than freeing his verse from epic, Ovid interleaves epic into elegy through an authorial fiction about the two genres, and he uses the West’s first epic hero as the figure for his interleaf.
Ovid can do so because Achilles is the consummate epic warrior as elegiac lover. The Iliad opens with Achilles’ dispute with Agamemnon over his coveted slave-girl Briseis – a dispute that turns out to have disastrous consequences for the Greeks, because it motivates Achilles to withdraw from the battle. When Agamemnon sends Odysseus and Diomedes to retrieve the sullen warrior,
They found Achilleus delighting his heart in a lyre clear-sounding, splendid and carefully wrought, with a bridge of silver upon it, which he won out of the spoils when he ruined Eetion’s city. With this he was pleasureing his heart, and singing of men’s fame. (Homer, Iliad)
This original portrait of Achilles as an Apollonian poet-figure delighting, `delighting his heart’ through lyre-playing and ‘singing of men’s fame’, turns out to be significant to the tradition we are tracing.
For instance, in the Heroides Ovid presents Briseis writing a letter to Achilles, and she imagines him just as Odysseus and Diomedes find him in the Iliad, albeit not in the company of Patroclus (as Homer narrates) but in an imagined embrace with another girl:
You are wielding the plectrum, and a tender mistress holds you in her warm embrace! And does anyone ask wherefore do you refuse to fight? Because the fight brings danger: while the zither, and song, and Venus, bring delight. Safer it is to lie on the couch, to clasp a sweetheart in your arms, to tinkle with your fingers the Thracian lyre, than to take in hand the shield, and the speare with sharpened point…Ye Gods forfend! And may the spear of Pelion go quivering from your strong arm to pierce the side of Hectore [validoque, precor, vibrata lacerto /transeat Hectoreum Pelias hasta latus!] (Ovid, Heroides 3.113-26; emphasis added)
Ovid turns the solitary Homeric lyre-player into a lyre-playing lover, and presents Briseis trying to inspire Achilles to activate the military weapon that will performs the key action of the entire Trojan War: the killing of Hector, breaker of horses. For Ovid, the spear is a figure for action; his verb for that action, ‘vibrata’ comes from the Latin vibrare, meaning to ‘brandish’ or ‘shake’. As Homer primally narrates it in Book 22, ‘Achilleus was shaking/ in his right hand’ the ‘pointed spear…with evil intention toward brilliant Hektor’, and when Achilles spies vulnerability in Hector’s armor, ‘in this place/ brilliant Achilleus drove the spear as he came on in fury’. (22.325-6)
(snip)
Shakespeare’s favourite poet took considerable interest in Achilles’ spear, putting it to specific use no fewer than eight additional times – the last seven representing the spear’s power to wound and heal.(p.46-8)
*********************************
Gabriel Harvey, Latin Address to the Earl of Oxford - (Exhorting the Idle Hero to Exemplary Action)
“O thou hero worthy of renown, throw away the
insignificant pen, throw away the bloodless books, and writings that serve no
useful purpose; now must the sword be brought into play, now is the time for
thee to sharpen the spear and to handle great engines of war…
Thine eyes flash fire, thy countenance shakes a spear; who would not swear that Achilles had come to life again?
*********************************
Reviewed work(s): Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Patrick
Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxv+296.
Douglas Bruster
Cheney extends the significance of this biographical episode by reading it alongside the curious “Achilles” stanza in 1594’s The Rape of Lucrece (lines 1422–28).1 In this stanza, part of a larger sequence in which Shakespeare portrays Lucrece looking at a painting of Troy, Achilles is represented by “his spear, / Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behind / Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind” (lines 1424–26). Exploring Shakespeare’s fairly idiosyncratic attention to the spear of Achilles and its reputation for being able to both “kill and cure” (2 Henry VI 5.1.101), Cheney argues that this stanza in Lucrece is a particularly good example of a “signature” moment in Shakespeare’s works, a passage in which “Shakespeare signs his name to Achilles” (53) and in which—owing to its emphasis on an uncannily present-yet-absent figure—we can sense an emblem of Shakespearean authorship itself. To Cheney’s persuasive gathering of intertextual references for this interpretation one might add a line that his study overlooks, from John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe (1584) : “Wil you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you shuld shake the speare with Achilles?”2 If Shakespeare pushed the elements of his last name to their most playful extremes, then, he found the terms already in the Elizabethan air.
Douglas Bruster
Cheney extends the significance of this biographical episode by reading it alongside the curious “Achilles” stanza in 1594’s The Rape of Lucrece (lines 1422–28).1 In this stanza, part of a larger sequence in which Shakespeare portrays Lucrece looking at a painting of Troy, Achilles is represented by “his spear, / Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behind / Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind” (lines 1424–26). Exploring Shakespeare’s fairly idiosyncratic attention to the spear of Achilles and its reputation for being able to both “kill and cure” (2 Henry VI 5.1.101), Cheney argues that this stanza in Lucrece is a particularly good example of a “signature” moment in Shakespeare’s works, a passage in which “Shakespeare signs his name to Achilles” (53) and in which—owing to its emphasis on an uncannily present-yet-absent figure—we can sense an emblem of Shakespearean authorship itself. To Cheney’s persuasive gathering of intertextual references for this interpretation one might add a line that his study overlooks, from John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe (1584) : “Wil you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you shuld shake the speare with Achilles?”2 If Shakespeare pushed the elements of his last name to their most playful extremes, then, he found the terms already in the Elizabethan air.
*********************************
Sidney's Womanish Man
Mark Rose
Idleness was understood to be the first shaft that 'Cupide shootethinto the hot liver of a heedlesse lover', so in desiring to give in to idleness the prince is only proving true to type. Distaff Hercules was the conventional image for just such a condition of effeminate idleness induced by passionate love. The distaff itself was an old symbol of idleness, and Sidney would have read in Amyot's Plutarch:
...that men given to idle luxury are like Hercules 'au palais royal de la royne de Lydie Omphale, vestu d'une cotte de demoiselle, se laissant souffletter & tresser aux filles & femmes de la Royne'.
'WIL you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you should SHAKE the SPEARE with Achilles?" asks a character in Lyly's Campaspe. Barnaby Rich states that lascivious women have made 'valiant men effeminate, as Hercules'. And Robert Burton uses 'Herculean Love' as an uncomplimentary epithet for passionate love. Sidney's own contempt for distaff Hercules is clear from the Defence of Poesie:
So in Hercules, painted with his great beard, and furious countenance, in a womans attire, spinning, at Omphales commaundement, it breedes both delight and laughter; for the representing of so straunge a power in Love, procures delight, and the scornefulness of the action, stirreth laughter. (iii. 40)
Mark Rose
Idleness was understood to be the first shaft that 'Cupide shootethinto the hot liver of a heedlesse lover', so in desiring to give in to idleness the prince is only proving true to type. Distaff Hercules was the conventional image for just such a condition of effeminate idleness induced by passionate love. The distaff itself was an old symbol of idleness, and Sidney would have read in Amyot's Plutarch:
...that men given to idle luxury are like Hercules 'au palais royal de la royne de Lydie Omphale, vestu d'une cotte de demoiselle, se laissant souffletter & tresser aux filles & femmes de la Royne'.
'WIL you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you should SHAKE the SPEARE with Achilles?" asks a character in Lyly's Campaspe. Barnaby Rich states that lascivious women have made 'valiant men effeminate, as Hercules'. And Robert Burton uses 'Herculean Love' as an uncomplimentary epithet for passionate love. Sidney's own contempt for distaff Hercules is clear from the Defence of Poesie:
So in Hercules, painted with his great beard, and furious countenance, in a womans attire, spinning, at Omphales commaundement, it breedes both delight and laughter; for the representing of so straunge a power in Love, procures delight, and the scornefulness of the action, stirreth laughter. (iii. 40)
************************************
Moffett's _Nobilis_ or_ A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney_,
dedicated to WILLIAM HERBERT: Jan 1594 (?)
"A few, to be sure, were observed to murmur, and to envy him so great preferment; but they were men without worth or virtue, who considered the public welfare a matter of indifference- fitter, in truth, to hold a DISTAFF and CARD WOOL AMONG SERVANT GIRLS than at any time to be considered as RIVALS by Sidney. For no one ever wished ill to the honor of the Sidney's except him who wished ill to the commonwealth; no one ever for forsook Philip except him whom the hope that he might at some time be honourable had also forsaken; and no one ever injured him except him for whom virtue and piety had no love. He was never so incensed, however, by the wrongs of malignant or slanderous men but that at the slightest sign of penitence the heat of his disturbed spirit would die down, and he would bury all past offenses under a kind of everlasting OBLIVION. (p.82 Nobilis (The Noble Man), Moffett)
dedicated to WILLIAM HERBERT: Jan 1594 (?)
"A few, to be sure, were observed to murmur, and to envy him so great preferment; but they were men without worth or virtue, who considered the public welfare a matter of indifference- fitter, in truth, to hold a DISTAFF and CARD WOOL AMONG SERVANT GIRLS than at any time to be considered as RIVALS by Sidney. For no one ever wished ill to the honor of the Sidney's except him who wished ill to the commonwealth; no one ever for forsook Philip except him whom the hope that he might at some time be honourable had also forsaken; and no one ever injured him except him for whom virtue and piety had no love. He was never so incensed, however, by the wrongs of malignant or slanderous men but that at the slightest sign of penitence the heat of his disturbed spirit would die down, and he would bury all past offenses under a kind of everlasting OBLIVION. (p.82 Nobilis (The Noble Man), Moffett)
*************************************
Fulke Greville (Recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon), _Life
of Sidney_:
...Neither am I (for my part) so much in love with this life, nor believe so little in a better to come, as to complain of God for taking him [Sidney], and such like exorbitant worthyness from us: fit (as it were by an Ostracisme) to be divided, and not incorporated with our corruptions: yet for the sincere affection I bear to my Prince, and Country, my prayer to God is, that this Worth, and Way may not fatally be buried with him; in respect, that both before his time, and since, experience hath published the usuall discipline of greatnes to have been tender of it self onely; making HONOUR a triumph, or rather Trophy of desire, set up in the eyes of Mankind, either to be worshiped as Idols, or else as Rebels to perish under her glorious oppressions. Notwithstanding, when the pride of flesh, and power of favour shall cease in these by death, or disgrace; what then hath time to register, or fame to publish in these great mens names, that will not be offensive, or infectious to others? What Pen without blotting can write the story of their deeds? Or what Herald blaze their Arms without a blemish? And as for their counsels and projects, when they come once to light, shall they not live as noysome, and loathsomely above ground, as their Authors carkasses lie in the grave? So as the return of such greatnes to the world, and themselves, can be but private reproach, publique ill example, and a fatall scorn to the Government they live in. Sir Philip Sidney is none of this number; for the greatness which he affected was built upon true Worth; esteeming Fame more than Riches, and Noble actions far above Nobility it self.
...Neither am I (for my part) so much in love with this life, nor believe so little in a better to come, as to complain of God for taking him [Sidney], and such like exorbitant worthyness from us: fit (as it were by an Ostracisme) to be divided, and not incorporated with our corruptions: yet for the sincere affection I bear to my Prince, and Country, my prayer to God is, that this Worth, and Way may not fatally be buried with him; in respect, that both before his time, and since, experience hath published the usuall discipline of greatnes to have been tender of it self onely; making HONOUR a triumph, or rather Trophy of desire, set up in the eyes of Mankind, either to be worshiped as Idols, or else as Rebels to perish under her glorious oppressions. Notwithstanding, when the pride of flesh, and power of favour shall cease in these by death, or disgrace; what then hath time to register, or fame to publish in these great mens names, that will not be offensive, or infectious to others? What Pen without blotting can write the story of their deeds? Or what Herald blaze their Arms without a blemish? And as for their counsels and projects, when they come once to light, shall they not live as noysome, and loathsomely above ground, as their Authors carkasses lie in the grave? So as the return of such greatnes to the world, and themselves, can be but private reproach, publique ill example, and a fatall scorn to the Government they live in. Sir Philip Sidney is none of this number; for the greatness which he affected was built upon true Worth; esteeming Fame more than Riches, and Noble actions far above Nobility it self.
Author: Shakespeare, William,
1564-1616. ]
Title: Poems: vvritten by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent
Date: 1640
Title: Poems: vvritten by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent
Date: 1640
Achilles his concealement of his Sex in the
Court of Lycomedes.
NOw from another World doth saile with joy,
A welcome daughter to the King of Troy,
The whilst the Gr[...]cians are already come,
(Mov'd with that generall wrong 'gainst Islium:)
Achilles in a Smocke, his Sex doth smother,
And laies the blame upon his carefull mother,
What mak'st thou great Achilles, teazing Wooll·
When Pallas in a Helme should claspe thy Scull?
What doth these fingers with fine threds of gold?
Which were more fit a Warlike Shield to hold.
Why should that right hand, Rocke or Tow containe,
By which the Trojan Hector must be slaine?
Cast off thy loose vailes, and thy Armour take,
And in thy hand the *Speare of Pellas shake*.
Thus Lady-like he with a Lady lay,
Till what he was, must her belly bewray,
Yet was she forc't (so should we all beleeve)
Not to be forc't so· now her heart would grieve:
When he should rise from her, still would she crie·
(For he had arm'd him, and his Rocke laid by)
And with a [...]ft voyce spake: Achilles stay,
It is too soone to rise, lie downe I pray,
And then the man that forc't her, she would kisse,
What force Deidameia call you this?
****************************
Dragonish:
Shakespeare's Troy: drama, politics, and the translation of empire
By Heather James
... When Antony accepts that he has lost control of his own self-representation, he experiences his failure as radical anamorphosis into empty "signs" indefinitely subject to refiguration by the artful viewer:
Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapour sometime, like a bear, or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,
They are black vesper's pageants...
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water...
now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape...
Antony is unshaped only when he fully accepts the Augustan view of himself as the Roman hero emasculated by foreign enchantress. In fact, he precipitates his figurative undoing by rousing and manipulating his own nebulous anxieties - themselves produced by the imminence of his political and ideological defeat by Caesar - until he generates enough unmotivated rage against Cleopatra to cast her off as a "triple-turn'd whore" (4.12.13). Overcome by the "Roman thoughts" that have dogged him since the battle of Actium - Scarus asserts that he 'never saw and action of such shame;/ Experience, manhood, honour, ne'er before / Did violate so itself" (3.10.22-4) - Antony censures her for her affairswith Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. Antony is scarcely kinder to himself, as he recoils from his nonchalant willingness to let Cleopatra drink him under the table and then strap on Philippan - the sword with which he defeated Julius Caesar's assassins - while she dresses him in her "tires and mantles" (2.5.22-3). He is far from the state of mind that encouraged a playful identification with Cleopatra's eunuchs: when Antony first enters the play he is anticipated as the "bellows and fan/ To cool a gipsy's lust" (l.1.9-10), and then appears, as if to ratify the image, in the company of her ladies, attendants, and "Eunuchs fanning her." He appears to accept the view of himself and Cleopatra canonized by Vergil's derisive comment on Aeneas, dandied up in Dido's wealthy attire, as a semivir or "half-man," and Horace's more lurid vision of Cleopatra plotting against the empire with her contaminated herd of half-men... Above all, Antony acknowledges the Roman myth most often invoked to summarize his failings: Hercules unmanned by Omphale, humiliatingly discovered in her clothes.
*********************************
...What remayneth then, but that your Lordship framing your
selfe according to the rule of Gods most holy word, should hie you apace to the
atteinment of the true honour and immortall glory, by subduing sinne, the
world, and the Devil, the Hectors that cannot bee vanquished but by a
christen Achilles, and by your good guyding bring many unto Christ, that
in the end you may receive the rewarde of true and perfect blissednesse, even
the everlasting salvation of the sould, which is the faire Helen for
whose safetie it behooveth all good men too endure, not tenne yeeres warre, but
continuall warre all their life long. To the furtherance whereof, God hath by
householde allyance lincked unto your Lordship a long experienced Nestor: whose
counsaile and footsteps if you folowe, no doubte but you shall bee bothe happie
in your selfe, and singularly profitable to your commonwelth:
October 1571, Arthur Golding. Dedicatory Epistle to Calvin's Commentary on the Psalms of David)
October 1571, Arthur Golding. Dedicatory Epistle to Calvin's Commentary on the Psalms of David)
********************************
Chapman, Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois:
When Homer made Achilles passionate,
Wrathfull, revengefull, and insatiate15
In his affections, what man will denie
He did compose it all of industrie
To let men see that men of most renowne,
Strong'st, noblest, fairest, if they set not downe
Decrees within them, for disposing these,20
Of judgement, resolution, uprightnesse,
And certaine knowledge of their use and ends,
Mishap and miserie no lesse extends
To their destruction, with all that they pris'd,
Then to the poorest and the most despis'd?
When Homer made Achilles passionate,
Wrathfull, revengefull, and insatiate15
In his affections, what man will denie
He did compose it all of industrie
To let men see that men of most renowne,
Strong'st, noblest, fairest, if they set not downe
Decrees within them, for disposing these,20
Of judgement, resolution, uprightnesse,
And certaine knowledge of their use and ends,
Mishap and miserie no lesse extends
To their destruction, with all that they pris'd,
Then to the poorest and the most despis'd?
********************************
Arthur Golding to Edward de Vere (Epistle Dedicatorie,
Psalms):
...I beseech your Lordship consider how God hath placed you upon a high stage in the eyes of all men, as a guide, patterne, insample and leader unto others. If your vertues be uncounterfayted, if your religion should be sound and pure, if your doings be according to true godlines: you shal be a stay to your cuntrie, a comforte too good men, a bridle to evil men, a joy to your friends, a corzie to your enemies, and an encreace of honor to your owne house. But if you should become eyther a counterfayt Protestant, or a perverse Papist, or a colde and careless newter (which God forbid) the harme could not be expressed which you should do to your native Cuntrie. For (as Cicero no lesse truely than wisely affirmeth and as the sorowfull dooings of our present dayes do too much certeinly avouch) greate men hurt not the common weale so much by beeing evil in respect of themselves, as by drawing others unto evel by their evil example...
...I beseech your Lordship consider how God hath placed you upon a high stage in the eyes of all men, as a guide, patterne, insample and leader unto others. If your vertues be uncounterfayted, if your religion should be sound and pure, if your doings be according to true godlines: you shal be a stay to your cuntrie, a comforte too good men, a bridle to evil men, a joy to your friends, a corzie to your enemies, and an encreace of honor to your owne house. But if you should become eyther a counterfayt Protestant, or a perverse Papist, or a colde and careless newter (which God forbid) the harme could not be expressed which you should do to your native Cuntrie. For (as Cicero no lesse truely than wisely affirmeth and as the sorowfull dooings of our present dayes do too much certeinly avouch) greate men hurt not the common weale so much by beeing evil in respect of themselves, as by drawing others unto evel by their evil example...
*********************************
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.
*********************************
The COMMENDATION of good things may fall within a
many, their approbation but in a few· for the most
COMMEND OUT OF AFFECTION, selfe tickling, an easinesse, or
imitation: but MEN iudge only out of *KNOWLEDGE*. That is the trying faculty.
-- Jonson
I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour
to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted
out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they
thought a MALEVOLENT speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their
IGNORANCE, who choose that circumstance to COMMEND their friend by, wherein he
most FAULTED... -- Jonson on Shakespeare
*********************************
Jonson and the Judicious Suppression of Fame:
Cartwright, William, Jonsonus Virbius
...Blest life of Authors, unto whom we owe
Those that we have, and those that we want too:
Th'art all so good, that reading makes thee worse,
And to have writ so well's thine onely curse.
Secure then of thy merit, thou didst hate
That servile base dependance upon fate:
Successe thou ne'r thoughtst vertue, nor that fit,
Which chance, and TH'AGES FASHION DID MAKE HIT;
Excluding those from life in after-time,
Who into Po'try first brought luck and rime:
Who thought the peoples breath good ayre: sty'ld name
What was but noise; and getting Briefes for fame
Gathered the many's suffrages, and thence
Made COMMENDATION a BENEVOLENCE:
THY thoughts were their owne Lawrell, and did win
That best applause of being crown'd within..
...Blest life of Authors, unto whom we owe
Those that we have, and those that we want too:
Th'art all so good, that reading makes thee worse,
And to have writ so well's thine onely curse.
Secure then of thy merit, thou didst hate
That servile base dependance upon fate:
Successe thou ne'r thoughtst vertue, nor that fit,
Which chance, and TH'AGES FASHION DID MAKE HIT;
Excluding those from life in after-time,
Who into Po'try first brought luck and rime:
Who thought the peoples breath good ayre: sty'ld name
What was but noise; and getting Briefes for fame
Gathered the many's suffrages, and thence
Made COMMENDATION a BENEVOLENCE:
THY thoughts were their owne Lawrell, and did win
That best applause of being crown'd within..
*****************************
Jonson and the Judicious Suppression of Fame:
From To the Deceased Author of these Poems...William
Cartwright
Jasper Mayne
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)
Jasper Mayne
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)
*****************************
Jonson and the Judicious Suppression of Fame:
Jonson, Underwoods
XLII. — THE MIND OF THE FRONTISPIECE
TO A BOOK.
From death and dark oblivion (near the same)
The mistress of man’s life, grave History,
Raising the world to good and evil fame,
Doth vindicate it to eternity.
Wise Providence would so : that nor the good
Might be defrauded, nor the great secured,
But both might know their ways were understood,
When vice alike in time with virtue dured :
Which makes that, lighted by the beamy hand
Of Truth, that searcheth the most hidden springs,
And guided by Experience, whose straight wand
Doth mete, whose line doth sound the depth of things ;
She cheerfully supporteth what she rears,
Assisted by no strengths but are her own,
Some note of which each varied pillar bears,
By which, as proper titles, she is known
Time's witness, herald of Antiquity,
The light of Truth, and life of Memory.
The mistress of man’s life, grave History,
Raising the world to good and evil fame,
Doth vindicate it to eternity.
Wise Providence would so : that nor the good
Might be defrauded, nor the great secured,
But both might know their ways were understood,
When vice alike in time with virtue dured :
Which makes that, lighted by the beamy hand
Of Truth, that searcheth the most hidden springs,
And guided by Experience, whose straight wand
Doth mete, whose line doth sound the depth of things ;
She cheerfully supporteth what she rears,
Assisted by no strengths but are her own,
Some note of which each varied pillar bears,
By which, as proper titles, she is known
Time's witness, herald of Antiquity,
The light of Truth, and life of Memory.
Fool! as if half eyes will not know a fleece From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece? --Jonson, On Poet-Ape
