Oxford and Invention as Licentia

A phrase selected by Puttenham as an example of an 'intollerable vice' in writing had been associated with the Earl of Oxford. This phrase was subsequently spoken by the affected courtier Amorphus in Jonson's _Cynthia's Revels_. Curiously, the phrase does not appear in full in the 1601 Quarto (while Oxford was alive) - but does appear in the 1616 and 1640 editions of Jonson's 'Works'.

 Jonson, _Cynthia's Revels_. 

AMORPHUS. And there's her minion, Crites: why his advice more than

Amorphus? Have I not invention afore him? Learning to better

that INVENTION above him? and INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVEL -- 

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Southern, Pandora (1584)

To the right honourable the Earl of Oxenford etc.

Epode

No, no, the high singer is he
Alone that in the end must be
And not every riming novice
That writes with small wit and much pain,
And the (God’s know) idiot in vain,

For it’s not the way to Parnasse,
Nor it will neither come to pass
If it be not in some wise fiction
And of an ingenious INVENTION,
And INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVAIL,
For it alone must win the laurel,
And only the poet WELL BORN
Must be he that goes to Parnassus,
And not these companies of asses
That have brought verse almost to scorn.

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Invention/Licentia:

Journal of Materia Medica, Volume 25, Issue 8 p.115

Without entering deeply into a metaphysical research about the difference between art and science, we can, we believe, satisfactorily solve this question. The point of difference between the two is NOT IN THE SUBJECT of either the one or the other, but in their FORM. Take poetry for instance. Is its subject, generally speaking, any way different from that of the sciences? Not in the least. Its enunciation is different. Poetry reflects upon the beauty of a sentence, where science aims only at its logic. Science wants only to be evident. The ambition of poetry is to be attractive. But the object of either is the same; it is somehow or other TRUTH. All the difference between art and science is, therefore, in the form of presenting their object. The scientist argues, exposes, and convinces.

And all the fictions bards pursue,

Do but insinuate what is true. – Swift

That is why there has been established what is called licentia poetica which gives a poet freedom to slight secondary points, if the condition to which he is bound down in his ‘insinuating what is true,’ the beauty of the form in which he tells it, requires a sacrifice of the sober stubbornness of simple facts. And be it ever so true that it is degrading to the utmost for poetry to be untrue, the art has nevertheless the license, in aiming at truth, to live and act in fictions.

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licentia f (genitive licentiae); first declension

1. a license, freedom, liberty
2. a liberty which one assumes; boldness, presumption
3. unrestrained liberty, dissoluteness, licentiousness, wantonness

 

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Jonson, on Shakespeare

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
STOP'D: sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said
of Haterius. His wit was in his own power;
would the RULE of it had been so too." 

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THE RESTRAINT OF INVENTION/LICENTIA --- /'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

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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Astrophil and Stella 1 – Philip Sidney

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;

Studying INVENTIONS fine her wits to entertain,

Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.

But words came halting forth, wanting INVENTION’S stay;

INVENTION, NATURE’S CHILD, fled step-dame Study's blows;

And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.

Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

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Venus and Adonis dedication - Shakespeare

But if the first HEIR of my INVENTION prove DEFORMED, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest.

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Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity

Michelle Martindale

…It is customary to begin discussion of the extent of Shakespeare’s classical knowledge with the opinions of Ben Jonson. So, for the sake of variety, let us open with some well-known lines by Milton, a devotee of Shakespeare but one who had no reason for partiality over the issue:

Then to the well-trod stage anon,

If Jonson’s learned sock be on,

Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,

Warble his native wood-notes wild. (L’Allegro, 121-34)

A careless reading of these lines, together with an anachronistic understanding of their key terms, has encouraged the picturing of Shakespeare as a purely spontaneous genius. In fact the distinction, which is not polemical, is between Jonson’s ‘learning’, that is his assiduous imitation of classical models and insistence on their superiority, and Shakespeare’s delight in a general ambience of English language and inspiration. The dominant contrast is not between Art and Nature, but between the classical and the ‘native’; and that contrast involves a pastiche of the characteristic styles of the two authors, not surprisingly in a poem devoted to literary parody and allusion. In the lines on Jonson, where the vocabulary has a plain, hard-edged, concrete quality, ‘sock’ Englishes a Latin metonymy (soccus, the slipper worn by comic actors, for comedy), and there may be a punning jest by which the ‘sock’ would be wither on stage or on Jonson’s foodt(cf. Jonson’s ‘Ode to Himself: On The New Inn’, 37; Horace, Ars Poetica, 80). The lines on Shakespeare use suggestive but somewhat unfocused metaphorical writing, with a distinct shift midway, as Shakespeare, first the child of a semi-personified Fancy, becomes a bird or rustic singer of the forest. ‘Sweetest’ hints at the Shakespearean style, described in his own time as ‘sugared’ and ‘sweet’; it was the Shakespeare of plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream whom Milton especially favoured, and Shakespeare is anyway treated here as a writer of comedy only. Since these complimentary lines are couched in Shakespearean terms, we should take the key words in something of their Shakespearean sense. IN particular, ‘fancy’ means imagination, and is not equivalent to ‘nature’, to which indeed it is sometimes opposed: for example in Antony and Cleopatra II.ii.200f. (‘O’er-picturing that Venus where we see/The fancy outwork nature’) fancy, man’s creative faculty, amounts almost to art, or at least to an aspect of art. That Shakespeare is “Fancy’s child’ does not mean that he is Nature’s child, untutuored and artless, but that he is a great exponent of the powers of the imagination. The passage thus has no bearing on the question of how much ancient literature Shakespeare had read, even if Milton is nodding, with some wit, at the tradition already established by Jonson.(…)

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Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Ed. Fiona Ritchie, Peter Sabor

That Shakespeare was Nature’s child, yet also in touch with the more sublime and mystical world of the imagination, encouraged poets to explore an aspect of their own art that they were increasingly coming to value. Perhaps it was Shakespeare’s power to charm and arouse, which was directly influential during this period [18^th Century], his example could help to define the concept of ‘genuine poetry’ that was emerging in mid-century criticism. This term, which valued authentic inspiration above formal mastery, was used by Joseph Warton tore-identify poetry with its original sources in the heart and imagination. For him, as both poet and critic, it was Shakespeare, a child of nature fostered by imagination, who represented poetry as a primal expressiveness. This idea underlies his picture of the infant Shakespeare capturing a fresh, instinctive voice out of the air. Published in the year of Pope’s death, it is a voice that will help change the style of English poetry in the decades to come:

On the winding Avon’s willow’d Banks

Fair Fancy found, and bore the smiling Babe

To a close Cavern: (still the Shepherds shew

The sacred Place, whence with religious Awe

They hear, returning from the Field at Eve,

Strange Whisperings of sweet Music thro’ the Air)

Here, as with Honey gather’d from the Rock,

She fed the little Prattler, and with Songs

Oft’ sooth’d his wondering Ears, with deep Delight

On her soft Lap he sat, and caught the Sounds.

Warton’s infant Shakespeare is in touch with the world of myth, but he is as much a Caliban as an Ariel. He represents the origin of poetry itself not as a heavenly inspiration but as a more localized nurturing, being attunded to ‘Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not’ (Tempest). This Shakespeare is no Homer or Milton, but a child with a natural responsiveness charmed by echoes from a place that is both beyond and yet around him.

Praising Caliban’s speech in The Adventurer (1753), Warton remarked: ‘The poet is a more powerful magician than his own Prospero: we are transported into fairy land; we are wrapped in a delicious dream, from which it is misery to be disturbed.’ This association of Shakespeare with an enchanted world just on the other side of consciousness left its imprint of eighteenth-century poetry in passages that evoke the atmosphere of Prospero’s island, the wood near Athens, Herne’s oad in Windsor Park, or the ‘blasted heath’ of Macbeth. The association of Shakespeare with  what Dryden referred to as ‘Airy and Earthy Spirits, and the Fairy kind of writing’ was confirmed by Joseph Addison in The Spectator (1712), who considered that Shakespeare ‘incomparably excelled all others’ in ‘the Faerie way of Writing, which…depends on the Poet’s Fancy, because he has no Pattern to follow, and must work altogether out of his own Invention’. Yet, although poetry of this kind, says Addison, normally ‘quite loses sight of Nature’, Shakespeare’s genius somehow manages to bridge the divide: ‘There is something so wild and yet so solemn in the Speeches of his Ghosts, Fairies, Witches, and the like Imaginary Persons, that we cannot forbear thinking them natural.’

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Dryden. Remarks on the Empress  of Morocco.

Postscript

Some who are pleased with the bare sound of verse, or thE rumbling of robustious nonsense, will be apt to think Mr. Settle too severely handled in the pamphlet; but I do assure the reader, that there are a vast number of errors passed by, perhaps as many, or more, than are taken notice of, both to avoid the tediousness of the work, and the greatness. It might have occasioned a volume upon such a trifle. I dare affirm, that no objections in this book are fruitless cavils: but if, through too much haste, Mr Settle may be accused of any seeming fault, which may reasonable be defended, let the passing by many gross errors without reprehension compound for it. I am not ignorant, that his admirers, who most commonly are women, will resent this very ill; and some little friends of his, who are smatterers in poetry, will be ready for most of his gross errors to use that much mistaken plea of poetica licentia, which words fools are apt to use for the palliating the most absurd nonsense in any poem. I cannot find when poets had liberty, from any authority, to write nonsense, more than any other men. Nor is that plea of poetica licentia used as a subterfuge by any but weak professors of that art, who are commonly given over to a mist of fancy, a buzzing of invention, and a sound of something like sense, and have no use of judgment. They never think thoroughly, but the best of their thoughts are like those we have in dreams, imperfect; which though perhaps we are often pleased at sleeping, we blush at waking. The licentious wildness and extravagance of such men’s conceits have made poetry contemned by some, though it be very unjust for any to condemn the science for the weakness of some of its professors.

Men that are given over to fancy only, are little better than madmen. What people say of fire, viz. that it is a good servant, but an ill master, may not unaptly be applied to fancy; which, when it is too active, rages, but when cooled and allayed by the judgment, produces admirable effects. But this rage of fancy is never Mr. Settle’s crime; he has too much phlegm, and too little choler, to be accused of this. He has all the pangs and throes of a fanciful poet, but is never delivered of any more perfect issue of his phlegmatic brain, than a dull Dutchwoman’s sooterkin is of her body.

His style is very muddy, and yet much laboured; for his meaning (for sense there is not much) is most commonly obscure, but never by reason of too much height, but lowness. His fancy never flies out of sight, but often sinks out of sight: - but now I hope the reader will excuse some digression upon the extravagant use of fancy and poetical licence.

Fanciful poetry and music, used with moderation, are good; but men who are wholly given over to either of them, are commonly as full of whimsies as diseased and splenetic men can be. Their heads are continually hot, and they have the same elevation of fancy sober, which men of sense have when they drink. So wine used moderately does not take away the judgment, but used continually, debauches men’s understandings, and turns them into sots, making their heads continually not by accident, as the others are by nature; so mere poets and mere musicians are as sottish as mere drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging any thing clearly.

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*Just rules restraining poetic rage – Dryden, Art of Poetry

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Jonson figured as suppressing 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..

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'Loose Thought is Free': Poetic License/Invention/Licentia

 Papers Complaint, compil'd in ruthfull Rimes Against the Paper-
spoylers of these Times. John Davies

...Another (ah Lord helpe) mee vilifies
With Art of Loue, and how to subtilize,
Making lewd Venus, with eternall Lines,
To tye Adonis to her loues designes :
Fine wit is shew'n therein : but finer twere
If not attired in such bawdy Geare.
But be it as it will : the coyest Dames,
In priuate read it for their Closset-games :
For, sooth to say, the Lines so draw them on,
To the venerian speculation,
That will they, nill they (if of flesh they bee)
They will thinke of it, sith loose Thought is free.
And thou (O Poet) that dost pen my Plaint,
Thou art not scot-free from my iust complaint
For, thou hast plaid thy part, with thy rude Pen,
To make vs both ridiculous to men.

(ll.47-62, Complete Works, vol. II, p. 75)

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Jonson, Speach According to Horace:

And could (if our great Men would let their Sons

Come to their Schools,) show 'em the use of Guns. 

And there instruct the noble English Heirs 

In Politick, and Militar Affairs;
But he that should perswade, to have this done
For Education of our Lordings; Soon
Should he hear of Billow, Wind, and Storm,
From the Tempestuous Grandlings, who'll inform
Us, in our bearing, that are thus, and thus,
Born, bred, allied? what's he dare tutor us?
Are we by Book-worms to be aw'd? must we
Live by their Scale, that dare do nothing FREE?

Why are we Rich, or Great, except to show

All LICENSE in our Lives? What need we know?
More then to praise a Dog? or Horse? or speak
The Hawking Language? or our Day to break
With Citizens? let Clowns, and Tradesmen breed
Their Sons to study Arts, the Laws, the Creed:
We will believe like Men of our own Rank,
In so much Land a year, or such a Bank,
That turns us so much Monies, at which rate
Our Ancestors impos'd on Prince and State.
Let poor Nobility be vertuous: We,
Descended in a Rope of Titles, be
From Guy, or Bevis, Arthur, or from whom
The Herald will. Our Blood is now become,
 PAST ANY NEED of Vertue.

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Soul of the Age! 

From The Poetics of Late Latin Literature ed. by Jas Elsner

Panegyric attracted similar criticism to poetry. As it was intended for pleasure, delectation,, and its aim was magnification and adornment, praise could be concerned with truth only marginally, and in response orators duly made a parade of their sincerity. In praising Valentinian, Symmachus rejects the fantastic exempla created by licentia poetarum. He selects instead his comparisons from history, which he saw as a more credible genre because less boastful, credamus histories minora iactantibus (or. 1.4-5) To write panegyric may have been to write in the higher generic style, maior stilus, but the very adjective implied exaggeration. Extollere aliquid in maius is to praise something beyond its deserts, and it is the phrase used by Mamertinus of the INVENTION of the Greek poets. Further, panegyric, laudation, was by definition prejudiced and so untrustworthy. Speaking of the Roman custom of honouring family tradition by laudations, Cicero decreed that encomia made the history of his time mendacious. From this conflict of interests arose the sensitivity which the orators handled poetry. The language with which they purported to weigh the evidence of the poets – ut poetae ferunt, licentia poetarum, fabulae poetarum – is that of grammarians and teachers and so gives didactic authority to their words. By rejecting the poetic fabulae and licentia, the orators implied that their speeches were serious and reliable. This concept is clearly  enunciated in Julian’s panegyrics. In his oration to Constantius, he head allowed that the Muse had given the poets unlimited licence to invent but acknowledged also that orators too could ‘range the power of words against the nature of facts.’ His second oration to Constantius is pointedly free from such licence. (or. 2.74D-75A):

These matters concerning the deeds of the emperor I have narrated in brief, adding nothing by way of flattery…nor dragging in and forcing similarities from afar, just as they do who explain the stories of the poets and who interpret them in persuasive words which allow them to created friction, starting from the smallest supposition…

In reality, using the myths of poets to create fictions of their own is exactly what the panegyrists did, and it was a characteristic of the trope that the truth the orator presented was as unlikely as the myth it replaced. (snip)

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The Concept of Poetic Invention in Sixteenth-Century England

RG Sumillera

...no one epitomizes better than Shakespeare the poet's liberation from any ties and forceful subjections, the lifting vigor of the poet's own invention, the growth and exploration through his poetic works of another nature (maybe even better than the known one), and the freely ranging of the zodiac of the poet's inventive wit. 

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Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, Lord Great Chamberlain of England, Viscount Bulbeck and Baron Scales and Badlesmere to the Reader -- Greeting.

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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Jonson, Cynthia's Revels

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

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jonson, _Timber_

Jam literæ sordent. - Pastus hodiern. ingen. - The time was when men

would learn and study good things, not envy those that had them.

Then men were had in price for learning; now letters only make men

VILE.

He is upbraidingly called a poet, as if it were a contemptible nick-

name: but the professors, indeed, have made the learning cheap -

railing and tinkling rhymers, whose writings the vulgar more greedily

read, as being taken with the scurrility and petulancy of such wits.

He shall not have a reader now unless he jeer and lie.  It is the

food of men' s natures; the diet of the times; gallants cannot sleep

else.

The writer must lie and the gentle reader rests happy to hear the

worthiest works misinterpreted, the clearest actions obscured, the

innocentest life traduced: and in such a LICENCE OF LYING, a field so

fruitful of slanders, how can there be matter wanting to his

laughter?  Hence comes the EPIDEMICAL INFECTION; for how can they

escape the CONTAGION of the writings, whom the virulency of the

calumnies hath not staved off from reading?

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Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, The Fountain of Self-Love

…The better race in Court

That have the true nobility, called virtue,

Will apprehend it as a grateful right

Done to their separate merit: and approve

The fit rebuke of so ridiculous heads,

Thos with their apish customs and forced garbs

Would bring the name of courtier in contempt,

Did it not live unblemished in some few

Whom equal Jove hath loved, and Phoebus formed

Of better metal, and in better mould. (5.1.30-39)

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Chapman, Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois


Clermont:

They are the breathing sepulchres of noblesse:
No trulier noble men, then lions pictures
Hung up for signs are lions. (2.1. l.154-156)

(snip)

A man may well
compare them to those foolish great-spleened camels
That, to their high heads, begged of Jove horns higher;
Whose most uncomely and ridiculous pride
When he had satisfied, they could not use,
But where they went upright before, they stooped,
And bore their heads much lower for their horns;
As these high men do, low in all true grace,
Their height being privilege to all things base.
And as the foolish poet that still writ
All his most self-loved verse in paper royal
Or parchment ruled with lead, smoothed with the pumice,
Bound richly up, and strung with crimson strings;
*Never so blest as when he writ and read
The ape-loved issue of his brain*, and never
But joying in himself, ADMIRING EVER,
Yet in his works behold him, and he showed
Like to a ditcher: so these painted men
All set on outside, look upon within
And not a peasants entrails you shall find
More foul and measled, nor more starved of mind.

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Alciato's Book of Emblems
Emblem 69
Self-love
Because your figure pleased you too much, Narcissus, it was changed into a flower, a plant of known senselessness. Self-love is the withering and destruction of natural power which brings and has brought ruin to many learned men, who having thrown away the METHOD OF THE ANCIENTS seek new doctrines and pass on nothing but their own fantasies.