Regarding my last post, Jonson's choice of the word 'hemisphere' in his FF encomium to Shakespeare has really been bothering me. Why 'hemisphere' to describe the region to which Shakespeare is 'advanced'? Why not heaven, firmament, vault, welkin? I'm always on the look-out for contrary meanings in the First Folio encomium, since I have long believed the poem executes a serious 'turn' into satire/anti-masque territory (to see thee in our waters yet appear - Shakespeare as a disease at the front of his own Folio? What's that about?). So, what IS a hemisphere?
I've been reading Margaret Tudeau-Clayton's 'Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil'. Despite my slow-speed summer reading style a few truly wonderful ideas have emerged, and I can (quite) confidently say that these ideas should inform how we read Jonson's praise of Shakespeare in the Folio.
Tudeau-Clayton writes that Jonson uses Virgilian authority throughout his corpus to furnish an authorizing 'ground' for his own language:
...The work done by the voice of Virgil, especially the more esoteric voice of the learned man's Virgil [in the Jonsonian corpus]...Furnishing a 'ground' - a defining and legitimizing origin - for a master/self voice, and the order of things it names, especially the new order under the new sovereign James, the learned poet's voice at the same time furnishes, with other learned discourse, a form of control - necessarily socio-political as well as authorial - working to produce, in the social places where it is deployed, a hierarchy between a privileged elite of insiders, who understand such discourse, and an unprivileged majority of outsiders, who do not, and who are therefore excluded at once from the authorial meaning of the text and from what it names, both rendered opaque mysterious objects - arcana. (Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil, p.115)
When I approach Jonson's First Folio poem I certainly include myself among the 'unprivileged majority of outsiders...who are therefore excluded at once from the authorial meaning of the text and from what it names...' Therefore, when Jonson writes that Shakespeare is 'advanced' in the hemisphere and made a constellation there - I imagine myself (and Jonson) both looking upward. Low (humble) looking up on high (exalted).
I think this is a critical mistake, though a common one.
Jonson is emphatically NOT one of the 'unprivileged minority of outsiders' and he writes this poem from a perspective that is emphatically different from my own. That of a (supposedly) 'rectified spirit':
In Poetaster, Virgil and his privileged homogeneous circle are precisely placed 'above', at the highest level of a Neoplatonic scale of being which underpins the play, Virgil, in particular, being identified at once as an embodiment of 'poor vertue' (v.ii.33), and, more specifically, as a 'rectified spirit' 'refin'd/From all the tartarous moodes of common men' (v.i.100 and 102-3: author's emphasis), refined, that is, from the material, impure - and Tartarean - moods motivating the 'common men' (and all the women) of the play, who are placed at the lowest level of the play's scale of being, the level closest to matter. The place of Virgil and his circle is the same as that occupied, in a well-known passage in Timber, by an elite of 'good men' identified as absolute 'Spectators' over 'the Play of Fortune' 'on the Stage of the world'. Indeed, Virgil is likened to a 'right heavenly body' (v.i.105, just as the good men are described as 'the Stars, the Planets of the Ages wherein they live' - images which underscore not only the absolute, transcendent place of these spectator figures, but their normative and regulatory function, their function, that is, as over-seers.
(Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil)
I suggest that when reading 'To the Memory of my Beloved Master' it is necessary to read from a corrected and informed 'Jonsonian/Virgilian' perspective (a 'point of proper perception' in Tudeau-Clayton's expression) - and Jonson's perspective is that of the transcendental over-seer: the absolute Spectator observing the Play of Fortune on the Stage of the World. From this perspective, the 'hemisphere' that Shakespeare is advanced (with)in is not the upper region inhabited by rectified (virtuous) spirits but the lower hemisphere - the Virgilian underworld - a gloomy and impure place/of darkness where Fame, Opinion and Ignorance hold sway. A place where flattery and ignorant praises (blind affection, seeliest ignorance) pass for current - the under-realm of the anti-masque. Shakespeare may have been beloved on earth, but it appears that he was either unable or unwilling to escape the muck of the material. Therefore, in Jonson's hierarchical universe of high and low, virtuous and vicious - an extravagant and unrepentantly low 'Shakespeare' cavorts in Tartarus.
These two worlds [that of the masque and anti-masque] are comprehended in Poetaster by the paired authorial figures, Horace and Virgil. For, while Virgil inhabits a 'main masque' universe of truth, unity and harmony 'above', Horace addresses and engages with - in order to regulate - the anti-masque universe of ignorance, folly and malice 'below'. It is to this universe 'below' that, in the note of Silenus with which we began, those who fail to understand Virgil's - and Jonson's - learned poetic discourse are said to be cast by 'their own ignorance of folly'. The exclusion which is performed by the turn from anti-masque to main masque thus mirrors the exclusion which is at once the condition of its 'proper' reception and an effect of its learned character. (Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil, 134-135.)
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David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life, p.232-3.
The placement of "The Famous Voyage" at the conclusion of [Jonson's]s Epigrams calls into question the upward trajectory of the sequence as a whole. The Oxford editors call it a "bad joke"; Wilson regards it as a symptom of Jonson's anal-erotic compulsions. Since the famous voyagers are themselves an example of failed transcendence - a final, hallucinatory image of two gallants who remain mired in the London underworld - the poem raises the issue of Jonson's ability to complete his personal odyssey.
In his parting tribute to William Roe, the last of his heroic exemplars, Jonson invokes the classic example of a successful descent-and-return"
This is that good AENEAS, past through fire,
Through seas, stormes, tempests: and imbarqu'd for hell,
Came back untouch'd. This man hath travail'd well.
Aeneas's safe passage through the underworld was a familiar image of the good man's ability to glean something of value from the basest regions of experience while keeping his virtue intact. Where Roe possesses this capacity to travel (or "travail") well, the protagonists of "The Famous Voyage" perform a burlesque of the Virgilian ideal as
they unfrighted passe, though many a privie
Spake to 'hem louder, then the oxe in LIVIE;
And many a sinke pour'd out her rage anenst 'hem;
But still their valour, and their vertue fenc't 'hem.
Jonson's personal enactment of the journey into the depths hovers somewhere between the mythic ideal and its scurrilous antitype. His conviction that comedy and satire should encompass the grossest aspects of everyday life led him into the nether regions of the city streets and the human anatomy. The record of his drinking bouts, his wenching, his quarrels, and his "cross business" in Paris, indicates that he did not always maintain the posture of the detached observer during his own excursions into the underworld. Yet Jonson believed (or wanted to believe) that he came back unscathed and transformed his vagrant moments into art: that he, like Roe, had the requisite inner stability "to know vice well, / And her blacke spight expell." In the words of the passage in Seneca from which he took his motto ("tanquam explorator") , Jonson "was wont to cross over even into the enemy's camp - not as a deserter, but as a scout." Whereas the protagonists of "The Famous Voyage" merely commute between the tavern and the brothel, the poet-narrator of Epigrams has gradually disengaged himself from this milieu.
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(it was sometime necessary he should be stop'd. - Jonson on Shakespeare)
William Cartwright:
...Shakespeare to thee was DULL, whose best jest lyes
I'th Ladies questions, and the Fooles replyes;
Old fashion'd wit, which walkt from town to town
In turn'd Hose, which our fathers call'd the CLOWN;
Whose wit our nice times would obsceannesse call,
And which made Bawdry passe for Comicall:
Nature was all his Art, thy veine was FREE
As his, but without his SCURILITY;
...Shakespeare to thee was DULL, whose best jest lyes
I'th Ladies questions, and the Fooles replyes;
Old fashion'd wit, which walkt from town to town
In turn'd Hose, which our fathers call'd the CLOWN;
Whose wit our nice times would obsceannesse call,
And which made Bawdry passe for Comicall:
Nature was all his Art, thy veine was FREE
As his, but without his SCURILITY;
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Antony and Cleopatra
Octavius.
You may see, Lepidus, and henceforth know,
It is not Caesar's natural vice to hate
Our great competitor: from Alexandria
This is the news: he fishes, drinks, and wastes
The lamps of night in revel; is not more man-like
Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he; hardly gave audience, or
Vouchsafed to think he had partners: you shall find there
A man who is the abstract of all faults
That all men follow.
Jonson has adapted these categories/binaries from classical sources. He pleads a Virgilian authority but his audacity is shocking. Shakespeare's refusal to concede to Jonson's borrowed authority has had real world consequences in that the author/book relationship has been deliberately subverted.
| De Shakespeare Nostrat - Jonson, Timber |
I REMEMBER the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their IGNORANCE, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most FAULTED; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on THIS SIDE IDOLATRY as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that SOMETIME it was NECESSARY HE SHOULD BE STOPPED. “Sufflaminandus erat,” as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the RULE of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him: “Cæsar, thou dost me wrong.” He replied: “Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause; and such like, which were RIDICULOUS. But he redeemed HIS VICES with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be PARDONED.
In Jonson's severe view, only Shakespeare could have done the work necessary to rectify both himself and his literary legacy, a task that Jonson defined as 'manly' and moral. In the world of Jonsonian binaries - Shakespeare took the easy path, the broad way. The left hand path. He has been immortalized in a spectacular, monumental form determined by Jonson. (My Shakespeare, rise!/Droeshout Dis-Figurement) Yet this is a fame that functions as an earthly prisonhouse - a place of restraint and control. There is no ascension here.
The earth covers him, the people mourn, Olympus holds him.
Olympus restrains 'Shakespeare' in Tartarus. Malvolio's revenge?
In Every Man in his Humour (performed 1598), this hierarchical binary opposition is articulated, even as it is worked for in the place of production, by a quotation from the Sibyl's description in Aeneid 6 of the few permitted to escape from the underworld into the upper air - 'pauci, quos aequus amavit/Juppiter' (lines 129-30, quoted in Every Man In, III,i, 21-2.) In Cynthia's Revels (performed 1600), the quotation recurs, translated, in a context which makes explicit what the spectator/reader of Every Man In must divine, that the description is to be understood in terms of the canonical Neoplatonic mediations of the Virgilian underworld as a description of the few permitted, on account of the 'merit' of their 'true nobility, called virtue', to escape from the Dis or Tartarus of contingent, material existence into an absolute, fixed and transcendent place 'above'. As we shall see, those who understand are granted, by virtue of their understanding, a means of 'grace', a means, that is, to escape from the multiple, particular heterogeneities of every man in his humour, to join the privileged homogeneous circle which the Virgilian voice in Every Man In both addresses and describes. (Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil, 116-117.)
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On the Famous Voyage - Jonson
No more let Greece her bolder fables tell
Of Hercules, or Theseus going to hell,
Orpheus, Ulysses: or the Latin muse,
With tales of Troy's just knight, our faiths abuse:
We have a Shelton, and a Heyden got,
Had power to act, what they to feign had not.
All, that they boast of Styx, of Acheron,
Cocytus, Phlegeton, our have proved in one;
The filth, stench, noise: save only what was there
Subtly distinguished, was confused here.
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True nobility/vera nobilitas. Nobles/Tempestuous Grandlings behaving badly.
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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high/low, light/dark - hierarchical binary opposition
Restraining SHAKESPEARE'S Quill (and Jonsonian-judgement's preeminence):
From To the Deceased Author of these Poems...William
Cartwright (note- of the Tribe of Ben)
Jasper Mayne
...And as thy Wit was like a Spring, so all
The soft streams of it we may Chrystall call:
No cloud of Fancie, no mysterious stroke,
No Verse like those which antient Sybils spoke;
No Oracle of Language, to amaze
The Reader with a dark, or Midnight Phrase,
Stands in thy Writings, which are all pure Day,
A cleer, bright Sunchine, and the mist away.
That which Thou wrot'st was sense, and that sense good,
Things not first written, and then understood:
Or if sometimes thy Fancy soar'd so high
As to seem lost to the unlearned Eye,
'Twas but like generous Falcons, when high flown,
Which mount to make the Quarrey more their own.
For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee BEN JOHNSON still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
Jasper Mayne
...And as thy Wit was like a Spring, so all
The soft streams of it we may Chrystall call:
No cloud of Fancie, no mysterious stroke,
No Verse like those which antient Sybils spoke;
No Oracle of Language, to amaze
The Reader with a dark, or Midnight Phrase,
Stands in thy Writings, which are all pure Day,
A cleer, bright Sunchine, and the mist away.
That which Thou wrot'st was sense, and that sense good,
Things not first written, and then understood:
Or if sometimes thy Fancy soar'd so high
As to seem lost to the unlearned Eye,
'Twas but like generous Falcons, when high flown,
Which mount to make the Quarrey more their own.
For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee BEN JOHNSON still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
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Ben Jonson - Bartholomew Fair
Book-Holder. How now? What rare discourse are you fallen upon, ha? Ha'you found any familiars here, that you are so free? What's the business?
Stage-Keeper. Nothing, but the understanding gentlemen o'the ground here, asked my judgement.
Book Holder. Your judgement, rascal? For wheat? Sweeping the stage? Or gathering up the broken apples for the bears within? Away, rogue, it's come to a fine degree in these spectacles when such a youth as you pretend to a judgement.
[Exit Stage-Keeper.]
And yet he may, i'the most o'this matter, i'faith: for the author hath writ it just to his MERIDIAN, and the SCALE of the GROUNDED JUDGEMENTS here, his play-fellows in wit...
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R Goodwin, ‘Vindiciae Jonsoniae’
Even so, these Gallants, when they chance to heare
Book-Holder. How now? What rare discourse are you fallen upon, ha? Ha'you found any familiars here, that you are so free? What's the business?
Stage-Keeper. Nothing, but the understanding gentlemen o'the ground here, asked my judgement.
Book Holder. Your judgement, rascal? For wheat? Sweeping the stage? Or gathering up the broken apples for the bears within? Away, rogue, it's come to a fine degree in these spectacles when such a youth as you pretend to a judgement.
[Exit Stage-Keeper.]
And yet he may, i'the most o'this matter, i'faith: for the author hath writ it just to his MERIDIAN, and the SCALE of the GROUNDED JUDGEMENTS here, his play-fellows in wit...
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R Goodwin, ‘Vindiciae Jonsoniae’
Even so, these Gallants, when they chance to heare
A new Witt peeping in THEIR HEMISPHERE,
Which they can apprehend, their clouded Braines,
Will Straight admire, and Magnifie his Straines,
Farre above thine;
though all that he hath done,
Is but a Taper, to thy brighter Sun;
Wound them with scorne! Who greives at such Fooles tongues,
Doth not revenge, but gratifie their wrongs.
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Denis O'Brien, Theories of Weight in the Ancient
World, 391-2.
…Aristotle tells us only how ‘most
people’ would speak of ‘up’ and ‘down’, if they agreed with himself: in a spherical universe, for Aristotle as for ‘the
majority’, the centre is ‘down’ and the circumference is ‘up’. But Aristotle
also tells us that ‘most people’ do not in fact recognise the universe as
spherical; they are conscious only of the HEMISPHERE above their heads. The
implication is pretty plainly that what most people in fact believe is that the
sky above their heads is ‘up’ and that the earth below their feet is ‘down’. It
is Aristotle ‘s happy conviction that once such people recognise that the sky
is part of a spherical universe they will call the whole of the circumference ‘up’,
and that the earth which now becomes the centre of a spherical universe they
will call ‘down’.
If , for the moment, we hold back from subscribing to this same
conviction, then the popular belief will be simply that the sky above our heads
is ‘up and that the earth below our feet is ‘down’; and this, I would suggest,
is what is implied by Plato’s ‘common error’, whereby ‘up’ and ‘down’ divide
the whole between them (cf. Tim.
62C5-8)
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The 'Monument Shakespeare' - a 'monument without a tomb':
STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST,
READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH
HATH PLAST
WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE:
WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE:
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The Oblivion of Ignorance.
1611 - Jonson to Pembroke in 'Catiline'
To the Great Example of H O N O U R and V E R T U E, the most Noble
W I L L I A M
E A R L of P E M B R O K E , L O R D C H A M B E R L A I N, &c.
M Y L O R D,
IN so thick and dark an IGNORANCE, as now almost covers the AGE, I crave leave to stand near your Light, and by that to be read. Posterity may pay your Benefit the Honour and Thanks, when it shall know, that you dare, in these Jig-given times, to countenance a Legitimate Poem. I must call it so, against all noise of Opinion: from whose crude and airy Reports, I appeal to that great and singular Faculty of Judgment in your Lordship, able to vindicate Truth from Error.
In these lines, Jonson publicly marks a 'point of proper perception.' Herbert is identified as one of the transcendent and virtuous light-givers - belonging to the privileged circle of understanding heads who can discriminate between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' poetic productions:
Furnishing a 'ground' - defining and legitimizing origin - for a master/self voice, and the order of things it names, especially the new order under the new sovereign James, the learned poet's voice at the same time furnishes, with other learned discourse, a form of control - necessarily socio-political as well as authorial - working to produce, in the social places where it is deployed, a hierarchy between a privileged elite of insiders, who understand such discourse, and an unprivileged majority of outsiders, who do not, and who are therefore excluded at once from the authorial meaning of the text and from what it names, both rendered opaque mysterious objects - arcana.(Tudeau-Clayton)
Soul of the Age! - The 'turn' in 'To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare'
Jonsonian masques typically enact a 'turn' between masque and anti-masque:
Jonson's declared object in publishing is 'to redeeme' 'the spirit' of the spectacle from such oblivion, which he describes as one of 'two common evills', the other being the censure of Envy. This redemptory gesture is done 'in dutie...to that Majestie, who gave (the spectacle)...authoritie and grace; and, (who)...deserves eminent celebration' (ibid.). Origin and end of the occasional spectacle, royal authority is in turn upheld - advertised as well as supported - by the published version, which supplies its textual grounds. The two forms of authority are implied to ground each other, as they are in the Virgilian scenes in Poetaster. the enemies are the same too: in the play, the 'common evils' of ignorance and envy, embodied in 'common men' oppose both the authors within it, especially Horace and Virgil, and 'the author' of it. As here too, these evils are associated with the universe of material and temporal contingency, which is the universe of the ignorant multitude, the body and occasional performance. In the play, the opposition of this universe to the universe of truth and transcendence, the secret and sacred place where the authority of the learned poet meets with the authority of the absolute monarch, is dramatised by the interruption of the scene of Virgil's reading, a moment which prefigures, if in inverted form, the structural pivot of the masque - the turn from anti-masque to main masque. though this turn is not made in the first masque, the introduction which frames and mediates the published version is informed by the structure of oppositional worlds the turn with articulate. This suggests how, as we shall now see, the masques come to stage the exclusion of those they identify as their own enemies as well as, more generally, the enemies of learned poetic discourse. (Tudeau - Clayton, p. 130)
In Jonson's poem 'To my Beloved Master William Shakespeare, Jonson begins the poem in his 'Virgilian, authorizing voice' - declaring that he is free of envy and providing a learned commentary on various types of ignorant praise. After declaring that Shakespeare is proof to even the worst praisers he enacts the turn from prophylactic commentary to satire and a convincing imitation of slavish flattery. I will begin. Soul of the Age. (An Age that Jonson had previously identified as Ignorant). Looking down from the transcendent perspective of the overseer Jonson surveys the Stygian gloom (dusky Dis) of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage of the world (scenes) - 'despairing day', identifying Shakespeare as a source of dis-ease (to see thee in our waters yet appear) and a site of ocular deception - a mount-bank gulling/taking audiences on the slimy 'banks' of Thames , 'seeming' to shake a lance -yet, in fact, simply playing to 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! Tartarean praise.
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Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to SHOW
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Eyes of Ignorance:
Jonson, Staple of News
For your own sakes, not his, he bade me say
Would you were come to hear, not SEE a play.
Though we his actors must provide for those
Who are our guests here in the way of SHOWS,
The maker hath not so. He'd have you WISE
Much rather by your EARS than by your EYES.
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Dis - the underworld figure of the negative or contrary - Tudeau-Clayton
The Droeshout as the Disruption of Form
The figure that was 'for gentle Shakespeare cut' has two left arms. Rectification is no longer possible. Error has been fixed and monumentalized. Dusky Dis is present - clearly the figure is a site of dis-proportion, dis-order, dis-temperature - the disruption of form(s). All of these dis-eases dance awkwardly in the dis-harmony of disfigurement. An anti-masque or Bartholomew Fayre figure. The Droeshout both signifies and enacts a disfiguration and 'dis-limbing'. An arraignment in picture/emblem of Jonson's disaffection.
Apparently sceptical of the Virgilian vision of order and virtue that Jonson had staked his own reputation upon, the author 'Shakespeare' is cast adrift amidst the 'confused noise of nature/history'. Jonson has reserved the 'liquid marble of his lines' for those he deems worthy of the true fame of virtuous/rectified spirits. (lines of liquid marble vs. the liquid excrement of Jonson's "The Famous Voyage".)
This side idolatry? Adjusted to a vertical axis, with Shakespeare as a median figure - idol of the ignorant Tartareans (looking up), object of derision for the virtuous (looking down). 'This side' - view from above, perhaps?
Those whom Jove loves.
.....This blindness [of critics] is, in part, due to the strategy of minimal indication which Jonson uses to preserve as arcana the canonical ground of the passage - its mediation as natural philosophy - and the implied structure of authority between learned insiders and ignorant outsiders. But it is also due to the discontinuities of history, which have virtually erased this mediation of the Virgilian text. The learned voice of Virgil thus excludes, in effect, not only the 'ignorant readers/spectators it works to exclude, but the learned readers of posterity, who are, ironically enough, explicitly included in a gesture made by Horace (...)Their exclusion bears ironic witness to the pressure of history to change and erasure in the very scene which asserts the immunity and transcendence of Virgil, his place above the 'underworld' of 'the Play of Fortune' and its ignorant and malicious false interpreters.
.....This opposition, between a transcendent, immune poet/voice above and ignorant and malicious interpreters below, is reiterated in representations of Poetaster and its 'author' in frames both outside and inside the play. (Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, 'Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil', p.152)
Apparently sceptical of the Virgilian vision of order and virtue that Jonson had staked his own reputation upon, the author 'Shakespeare' is cast adrift amidst the 'confused noise of nature/history'. Jonson has reserved the 'liquid marble of his lines' for those he deems worthy of the true fame of virtuous/rectified spirits. (lines of liquid marble vs. the liquid excrement of Jonson's "The Famous Voyage".)
This side idolatry? Adjusted to a vertical axis, with Shakespeare as a median figure - idol of the ignorant Tartareans (looking up), object of derision for the virtuous (looking down). 'This side' - view from above, perhaps?
Those whom Jove loves.
.....This blindness [of critics] is, in part, due to the strategy of minimal indication which Jonson uses to preserve as arcana the canonical ground of the passage - its mediation as natural philosophy - and the implied structure of authority between learned insiders and ignorant outsiders. But it is also due to the discontinuities of history, which have virtually erased this mediation of the Virgilian text. The learned voice of Virgil thus excludes, in effect, not only the 'ignorant readers/spectators it works to exclude, but the learned readers of posterity, who are, ironically enough, explicitly included in a gesture made by Horace (...)Their exclusion bears ironic witness to the pressure of history to change and erasure in the very scene which asserts the immunity and transcendence of Virgil, his place above the 'underworld' of 'the Play of Fortune' and its ignorant and malicious false interpreters.
.....This opposition, between a transcendent, immune poet/voice above and ignorant and malicious interpreters below, is reiterated in representations of Poetaster and its 'author' in frames both outside and inside the play. (Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, 'Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil', p.152)
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Munday translation of Amadis of Gaule, dedicated to Philip Herbert
Right honourable, according to the saying of Cicero, writing in the commendation of Histories, he avoucheth them to be the Treasure of things past; the patterne of those that are to come, and the picture of man's life; the touchstone of our actions, and the full perfecter of our honour. And Marcus Varro saith: They are the witnesses of Times, the light of Truth; the life of Memorie; the Mistresse of life; and the Messenger of Antiquitie. And in very deede (Noble Lord) Histories cause us to see those things without danger, which millions of men have experimented with losse of their lives, honour and goods, making many wise by others peril and exciting imitation of precedent mens virtues, only to reach the like height of their unconquerable happinesse.
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Munday translation of Amadis of Gaule, dedicated to Philip Herbert
Right honourable, according to the saying of Cicero, writing in the commendation of Histories, he avoucheth them to be the Treasure of things past; the patterne of those that are to come, and the picture of man's life; the touchstone of our actions, and the full perfecter of our honour. And Marcus Varro saith: They are the witnesses of Times, the light of Truth; the life of Memorie; the Mistresse of life; and the Messenger of Antiquitie. And in very deede (Noble Lord) Histories cause us to see those things without danger, which millions of men have experimented with losse of their lives, honour and goods, making many wise by others peril and exciting imitation of precedent mens virtues, only to reach the like height of their unconquerable happinesse.
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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.
**************************************
The Picture of Man's Life:
David Norbrook, 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.)
************************************
Jonson, Cynthia's Revels
Cynthia: Dear Arete, and Crites, to you two
We give the Charge; impose what Pains you please:
TH' INCURABLE CUT OFF, the rest REFORM,
Remembring ever what we first decreed,
Since Revels were proclaim'd, let now none bleed.
Arete. How well Diana can distinguish Times,
And sort her Censures, keeping to her self
The Doom of Gods, leaving the rest to us?
Come, cite them, Crites, first, and then proceed.
(snip)
Then, Crites, practise thy DISCRETION.
Cynthia: Dear Arete, and Crites, to you two
We give the Charge; impose what Pains you please:
TH' INCURABLE CUT OFF, the rest REFORM,
Remembring ever what we first decreed,
Since Revels were proclaim'd, let now none bleed.
Arete. How well Diana can distinguish Times,
And sort her Censures, keeping to her self
The Doom of Gods, leaving the rest to us?
Come, cite them, Crites, first, and then proceed.
(snip)
Then, Crites, practise thy DISCRETION.
*************************************
The word [discretion] was almost invariably used in
Elizabethan England as a means of constructing social, cultural, or aesthetic
difference. (David Hillman, Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the abuse of
rhetoric).
*************************************
Soul of the age!
Oldham, on Jonson
XIII.
Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious Fame,
Content on gross and coarse Applause to live,
And what the dull, and sensless Rabble give,
Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,
Nor would'st that wretched Alms receive,
The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, sordid name:
Thine was no empty Vapor, rais'd beneath,
And form'd of common Breath,
The false, and foolish Fire, that's whisk'd about
By popular Air, and glares a while, and then goes out;
But 'twas a solid, whole, and perfect Globe of light,
That shone all over, was all over bright,
And dar'd all sullying Clouds, and fear'd no darkning night;
Like the gay Monarch of the Stars and Sky,
Who wheresoe're he does display
His sovereign Lustre, and majestick Ray,
Strait all the less, and petty Glories nigh
Vanish, and shrink away.
O'rewhelm'd, and swallow'd by the greater blaze of Day;
With such a strong, an awful and victorious Beam
Appear'd, and ever shall appear, thy Fame,
View'd, and ador'd by all th' undoubted Race of Wit,
Who only can endure to look on it.
The rest o'recame with too much light,
With too much brightness dazled, or extinguish'd quite:
Restless, and uncontroul'd it now shall pass
As wide a course about the World as he,
And when his long-repeated Travels cease
Begin a new, and vaster Race,
And still tread round the endless Circle of Eternity.
**************************************
Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! - JonsonOldham, on Jonson
XIII.
Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious Fame,
Content on gross and coarse Applause to live,
And what the dull, and sensless Rabble give,
Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,
Nor would'st that wretched Alms receive,
The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, sordid name:
Thine was no empty Vapor, rais'd beneath,
And form'd of common Breath,
The false, and foolish Fire, that's whisk'd about
By popular Air, and glares a while, and then goes out;
But 'twas a solid, whole, and perfect Globe of light,
That shone all over, was all over bright,
And dar'd all sullying Clouds, and fear'd no darkning night;
Like the gay Monarch of the Stars and Sky,
Who wheresoe're he does display
His sovereign Lustre, and majestick Ray,
Strait all the less, and petty Glories nigh
Vanish, and shrink away.
O'rewhelm'd, and swallow'd by the greater blaze of Day;
With such a strong, an awful and victorious Beam
Appear'd, and ever shall appear, thy Fame,
View'd, and ador'd by all th' undoubted Race of Wit,
Who only can endure to look on it.
The rest o'recame with too much light,
With too much brightness dazled, or extinguish'd quite:
Restless, and uncontroul'd it now shall pass
As wide a course about the World as he,
And when his long-repeated Travels cease
Begin a new, and vaster Race,
And still tread round the endless Circle of Eternity.
**************************************
Rome/Egypt-Asiatic - Oxford traduced
CLEOPATRA
Sir, I will eat no meat, I’ll not drink, sir.
If idle talk will once be necessary,
I’ll not sleep neither. This mortal house I’ll ruin,
Do Caesar what he can. Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinioned at your master’s court,
Nor once be chastised with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me. Rather on NILUS' MUD
Lay me stark naked and let the waterflies
Blow me into abhorring. Rather make
My country’s high pyramides my gibbet
And hang me up in chains!
**************************************
Shake-speare
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.
************************************
Refer to Jonson's 'Tempestuous Grandlings' in his 'Speech According to Horace'
Jonson, The Masque of Lethe (or 'Lovers Made Men')
Lethe: Stay; who or what fantastic shades are these
That Hermes leads?
Mercury: They are the gentle forms
Of lovers, tost upon those frantic seas,
Whence Venus sprung.
Lethe: And have rid out her storms?
Mer. No
Lethe: Did they perish?
Mer. Yes.
Lethe: How?
Mer. Drown'd by Love,
That drew them forth with hopes as smooth as were
Th'unfaithful waters he desired them prove.
Lethe: And turn'd a TEMPEST when he had them there?
Mer. He did, and on the billow would he roll,
And laugh to see one throw his heart away;
Another sighing, vapour forth his soul;
A third, to melt himself in tears, and say,
O love, I now to salter water turn
Than that I die in; then a fourth, to cry
Amid the surges, Oh! I burn, I burn.
A fifth laugh out, It is my ghost, not I.
(snip)
Mer. I 'gin to doubt, that Love with charms hath put
This phant'sie in them; and they only think
That they are ghosts.
1 Fate: If so, then let them drink
Of Lethe's stream.
2 Fate: 'Twill make them to forget Love's name.
3 Fate: And so, they may recover yet.
(anti-masque)
Mer. See! See! they are themselves again.
1. Fate Yes, now they are SUBSTANCES AND MEN.
2. Fate Love at the name of Lethe flies.
Lethe. For, in Oblivion drown'd, he dies.
************************************
Ben Jonson, The New Inn
Lovel.
...i' the times of peace,
I waited on his [Lord Beaufort's] studies, which were right.
He had no Arthurs, nor no Rosicleers,
No Knights o' the Sun, nor Amadis de Gauls,
Primalions, and Pantagruels, public nothings;
Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister,
Sent out to poison courts and infest manners:
*************************************
Masque of Lethe (or Lovers Made Men), Jonson
Chorus: Return, return,
Like lights to burn
On earth
For others good:
Your second birth
Will fame old Lethe's flood;
And warn a world,
That now are hurl'd
About in tempest, how they prove
Shadows for love.
Leap forth: your light it is the nobler made,
By being struck out of a shade.
**********************************************
************************************************
Refer to Jonson's 'Tempestuous Grandlings' in his 'Speech According to Horace'
Jonson, The Masque of Lethe (or 'Lovers Made Men')
Lethe: Stay; who or what fantastic shades are these
That Hermes leads?
Mercury: They are the gentle forms
Of lovers, tost upon those frantic seas,
Whence Venus sprung.
Lethe: And have rid out her storms?
Mer. No
Lethe: Did they perish?
Mer. Yes.
Lethe: How?
Mer. Drown'd by Love,
That drew them forth with hopes as smooth as were
Th'unfaithful waters he desired them prove.
Lethe: And turn'd a TEMPEST when he had them there?
Mer. He did, and on the billow would he roll,
And laugh to see one throw his heart away;
Another sighing, vapour forth his soul;
A third, to melt himself in tears, and say,
O love, I now to salter water turn
Than that I die in; then a fourth, to cry
Amid the surges, Oh! I burn, I burn.
A fifth laugh out, It is my ghost, not I.
(snip)
Mer. I 'gin to doubt, that Love with charms hath put
This phant'sie in them; and they only think
That they are ghosts.
1 Fate: If so, then let them drink
Of Lethe's stream.
2 Fate: 'Twill make them to forget Love's name.
3 Fate: And so, they may recover yet.
(anti-masque)
Mer. See! See! they are themselves again.
1. Fate Yes, now they are SUBSTANCES AND MEN.
2. Fate Love at the name of Lethe flies.
Lethe. For, in Oblivion drown'd, he dies.
************************************
Ben Jonson, The New Inn
Lovel.
...i' the times of peace,
I waited on his [Lord Beaufort's] studies, which were right.
He had no Arthurs, nor no Rosicleers,
No Knights o' the Sun, nor Amadis de Gauls,
Primalions, and Pantagruels, public nothings;
Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister,
Sent out to poison courts and infest manners:
*************************************
Masque of Lethe (or Lovers Made Men), Jonson
Chorus: Return, return,
Like lights to burn
On earth
For others good:
Your second birth
Will fame old Lethe's flood;
And warn a world,
That now are hurl'd
About in tempest, how they prove
Shadows for love.
Leap forth: your light it is the nobler made,
By being struck out of a shade.
**********************************************
Jonson, The Forest
XI. —
EPODE.
Not to know vice
at all, and keep true state,
Is
virtue and not fate :
Next to that
virtue, is to know vice well,
And
her black spite expel,
Which to effect
(since no breast is so sure,
Or
safe, but she'll procure
Some way of
entrance) we must plant a guard
Of
thoughts to watch, and ward
At the eye and
ear, the ports unto the mind,
|
|
That
no strange, or unkind
Object arrive
there, but the heart, our spy,
Give
knowledge instantly,
To wakeful reason,
our affections' king :
Who,
in th' examining,
Will quickly taste
the treason, and commit
Close,
the close cause of it.
'Tis the securest
policy we have,
To
make our sense our slave.
But this true
course is not embraced by many :
|
10
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By
many ! scarce by any.
For either our
affections do rebel,
Or
else the sentinel,
That should ring
larum to the heart, doth sleep ;
Or
some great thought doth keep
Back the
intelligence, and falsely swears,
They
are base, and idle fears
Whereof the loyal
conscience so complains,
Thus,
by these subtile trains,
Do several
passions invade the mind,
|
20
|
And
strike our reason blind,
Of which usurping
rank, some have thought love
The
first ; as prone to move
Most frequent
tumults, horrors, and unrests,
In
our enflamed breasts :
But this doth from
the cloud of error grow,
Which
thus we over-blow.
The thing they
here call Love, is blind desire,
Arm'd
with bow, shafts, and fire ;
Inconstant, like
the sea, of whence 'tis born,
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30
|
Rough,
swelling, like a storm :
With whom who
sails, rides on the surge of fear,
And
boils, as if he were
In a continual
tempest. Now, true love
No
such effects doth prove ;
That is an essence
far more gentle, fine,
Pure,
perfect, nay divine ;
It is a golden
chain let down from heaven,
Whose
links are bright and even,
That falls like
sleep on lovers, and combines
|
40
|
The
soft, and sweetest minds
In equal knots
: this bears no brands, nor darts,
To
murder different hearts,
But in a calm, and
god-like unity,
Preserves
community.
O, who is he,
that, in this peace, enjoys
The
elixir of all joys ?
A form more fresh
than are the Eden bowers,
And
lasting as her flowers :
Richer than Time,
and as time's virtue rare
|
50
|
Sober,
as saddest care ;
A fixed thought,
an eye untaught to glance :
Who,
blest with such high chance
Would, at
suggestion of a steep desire,
Cast
himself from the spire
Of all his
happiness ? But soft : I hear
Some
vicious fool draw near,
That cries, we
dream, and swears there's no such thing,
As
this chaste love we sing.
Peace, Luxury,
thou art like one of those
|
60
|
Who,
being at sea, suppose,
Because they move,
the continent doth so.
No,
Vice, we let thee know,
Though thy wild
thoughts with sparrows' wings do flie,
Turtles
can chastly die ;
And yet (in this
t' express ourselves more clear)
We
do not number here
Such spirits as
are only continent,
Because
lust's means are spent :
Or those, who
doubt the common mouth of fame,
|
70
|
And
for their place and name,
Cannot so safely
sin : their chastity
Is
mere necessity.
Nor mean we those,
whom vows and conscience
Have
fill'd with abstinence :
Though we
acknowledge, who can so abstain,
Makes
a most blessed gain.
He that for love
of goodness hateth ill,
Is
more crown-worthy still,
Than he, which for
sin's penalty forbears ;
|
80
|
His
heart sins, though he fears.
But we propose a
person like our Dove,
Graced
with a Phoenix' love ;
A beauty of that
clear and sparkling light,
Would
make a day of night,
And turn the
blackest sorrows to bright joys ;
Whose
odorous breath destroys
All taste of
bitterness, and makes the air
As
sweet as she is fair.
A body so
harmoniously composed,
|
90
|
As
if nature disclosed
All her best
symmetry in that one feature !
O,
so divine a creature,
Who could be false to ? chiefly,
when he knows
How
only she bestows
The wealthy
treasure of her love on him ;
Making
his fortune swim
In the full flood
of her admired perfection ?
What
savage, brute affection,
Would not be
fearful to offend a dame
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100
|
Of
this excelling frame ?
Much more a noble,
and right generous mind,
To
virtuous moods inclined
That knows the
weight of guilt ; he will refrain
From
thoughts of such a strain,
And to his sense
object this sentence ever,
"Man may securely sin, but safely never."
|
But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the OOZY weeds about me twist.In Melville's Billy Budd, Captain Edward Fairfax Vere sacrificed 'natural beauty/idol of the common man' Billy for the sake of political order.
This thing of darkness/ Acknowledge mine
************************************
Herman Melville, Billy Budd
************************************
Herman Melville, Billy Budd
(But stay, I see thee in the [lower] hemisphere/ Advanc'd, and made a constellation there!)
IN THE time before steamships, or then more frequently than
now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable sea-port would occasionally
have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war's men or
merchant-sailors in holiday attire ashore on liberty. In certain instances they
would flank, or, like a body-guard quite surround some superior figure of their
own class, moving along with them like Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his
constellation. That signal object was the "Handsome Sailor" of the
less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies. With no
perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the off-hand
unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of
his shipmates. A somewhat remarkable instance recurs to me. In Liverpool, now
half a century ago, I saw under the shadow of the great dingy street-wall of
Prince's Dock (an obstruction long since removed) a common sailor, so intensely
black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood
of Ham . A symmetric figure much above the average height. The two ends of a
gay silk handkerchief thrown loose about the neck danced upon the displayed
ebony of his chest; in his ears were big hoops of gold, and a Scotch Highland
bonnet with a tartan band set off his shapely head.
It was a hot noon in July; and his face, lustrous with
perspiration, beamed with barbaric good humor. In jovial sallies right and
left, his white teeth flashing into he rollicked along, the centre of a company
of his shipmates. These were made up of such an assortment of tribes and
complexions as would have well fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis
Cloots before the bar of the first French
Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race. At each spontaneous tribute
rendered by the wayfarers to this black pagod of a fellow- the tribute of a
pause and stare, and less frequent an exclamation,- the motley retinue showed
that they took that sort of pride in the evoker of it which the Assyrian
priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful
prostrated themselves. To return. ----
This side idolatry
If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered,
As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.
***************************
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
Billy Budd - noble foundling:
'Yes, Billy Budd was a
foundling, a presumable by-blow, and, evidently, no ignoble one. Noble descent
was as evident in him as in a blood horse.' (Melville, _Billy Budd_)
1850: "Hawthorne and His Mosses" by Herman Melville
"Would that all excellent BOOKS were FOUNDLINGS, without father or
mother, that so it might be we could glorify them, without including
their ostensible authors."
“I know not what would be the right name to put on the title-page
of an excellent book, but this I feel, that the names of all fine
authors are fictitious ones, far more than that of Junius,-- simply
standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding SPIRIT OF all
BEAUTY, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius. Purely imaginative
as this fancy may appear, it nevertheless seems to receive some
warranty from the fact, that on a personal interview no great author
has ever come up to the idea of his reader. But that dust of which our
bodies are composed, how can it fitly express the nobler intelligences
among us?”
1850: "Hawthorne and His Mosses" by Herman Melville
"Would that all excellent BOOKS were FOUNDLINGS, without father or
mother, that so it might be we could glorify them, without including
their ostensible authors."
“I know not what would be the right name to put on the title-page
of an excellent book, but this I feel, that the names of all fine
authors are fictitious ones, far more than that of Junius,-- simply
standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding SPIRIT OF all
BEAUTY, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius. Purely imaginative
as this fancy may appear, it nevertheless seems to receive some
warranty from the fact, that on a personal interview no great author
has ever come up to the idea of his reader. But that dust of which our
bodies are composed, how can it fitly express the nobler intelligences
among us?”
***************************
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered,
As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.
***************************
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
