Billy Budd, Captain Vere and Emerson's Challenge

 A year or so ago I contacted a knowledgeable Professor about the possibility of identifying Edward de Vere as the Italianate gentleman Signior Amorphus of Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels. My main piece of evidence was a line of poetry that had been written in an ode to De Vere regarding his 'invention' and how it was 'infanted with pleasant travaile' - a line that is also spoken by Amorphus in the 1616 Folio printing of Cynthia's Revels. He responded very kindly and during the course of our extremely brief exchange pointed me in the direction of 'The Phoenix and Turtle.'

It was not until the other day that I was actually able to see a facsimile copy of 'Love's Martyr' and see how it is arranged  upon the page - and even more importantly how it is arranged in relationship to the poem by John Marston that follows it.

 From the poem by Marston we learn that a 'wondrous creature' has arisen from the Turtle's sacrifice in the preceding Threnos. Since I was familiar with Shakespeare's Ovidian epigraph at the front of his Venus and Adonis

Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo

Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.

I quite easily could believe that what Marston was witnessing was the sacrifice of Edward de Vere's mortal body (what he owed to the Queen) and the ascension of William Shakespeare - the immortal part of the Earl of Oxford - the offspring of his mind and soul.


In my previous posting I wrote this:
Phoenix and Turtle- poem as ‘sacred technology’:
Turtle/Vere /Master of Courtship’s self-sacrifice mixes his 'mortal' ashes with his Queen and buries himself and his name in ‘Old Eliza’s Urn’. The unnamed poem referred to as The Phoenix and Turtle embodies the mystery of courtly love. The poem not only describes ideal love but *enacts* it as the loyal Turtle Dove/Queen’s Great Courtier sacrifices himself for his sovereign's sake at each reading/recitation.
Marston, the self-described astonished bystander,  draws our attention to the ‘wondrous creature’ arising out of the ‘Phoenix and Turtle Doves ashes’ – and then more narrowly-  ‘What strangeness is’t that from the Turtles ashes/ Assumes such Forme?
It appears to me that Marston is intuiting the wonderful  ascension of the of the Turtle’s ‘creature’ – that which has 'sprung forth' from the Turtle (creatus) . That ‘creature’ is that which is signified by the words William Shake-speare – the offspring, heir or 'mind' of the Turtle. This is Ovid’s ‘better part’ that ‘shall aspire’, after the author’s mortal body has fallen into the funeral fire. 

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...all his behaviours are printed, his face is another volume of Essays - Amorphus, Cynthia's Revels, Jonson


I am writing very quickly at the moment since I have to be somewhere else. However, the next thing that occurred to me was that the novella 'Billy Budd' describes the same arc(?) of thought that occurs in the Shakespeare/Marston poems. The sacrifice of the 'martyr to martial discipline' Billy, the occulted relationship between Billy Budd (Beauty) and Captain Edward Fairfax Vere (Truth) - and that wondrous conceit of the 'pinioned figure' ascending into the sky before falling into the deep -  oblivion, Lethe.

 
And then I had to leave off thinking about Billy Budd for a bit.


A day or two later I thought I'd better busy myself with the business of finding out whether or not Melville had access to the text of Love's Martyr. I learned that Emerson had proposed that the Academy of Letters should offer a prize for the person who could come closest to describing what exactly was going on in Shakespeare's poem.

Imagine. Fancy the reclusive Melville working on Billy Budd until the end of his life - wrestling with Shakespeare's great poem; and, given the name of his Captain, Edward Fairfax Vere, the Shakespeare authorship enigma, as well!

What relish is in this? How runs the stream?

Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.

Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep.

If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

 

This construction of Oxford/Shakespeare's bifold (?) monument (as presented in  'Love's Martyr' - an impressive display of loyalty at the time of the Essex rebellion - also explains Jonson's 'monument without a tomb' comments, and Milton's 'monument' of wonder and astonishment:

Marston, Love's Martyr

Then looke; for see what glorious issue brighter

Then clearest fire, and beyond faith farre whiter
Then Dians tier) now springs from yonder flame?
Let me stand numb'd with WONDER, neuer came
So strong amazement on ASTONISH’D eie
As this, this measurelesse pure RARITIE.
Lo now; th'xtracture of deuinest ESSENCE,
The Soule of heauens labour'd Quintessence,
(Peans to Phoebus) from deare Louer's death,
Takes sweete creation and all blessing breath.
What STRANGENESS is't that from the Turtles ashes
Assumes such forme?

Milton:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,

The labor of an age in pilèd stones,

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid   

Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,

What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thyself a live-long monument. 

and also the avian imagery in his L'Allegro:

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. 

So back to Billy (Baby) Budd/Shakespeare's Book - truly Fancy's Child.

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'Spiritualization' of Billy Budd (pre-ascension)


Billy Budd, Herman Melville

Chapter 24

Such was the deck where now lay the Handsome Sailor. Through the rose-tan of his complexion, no pallor could have shown. It would have taken days of sequestration from the winds and the sun to have brought about the effacement of that. But the skeleton in the cheekbone at the point of its angle was just beginning delicately to be defined under the warm-tinted skin. In fervid hearts self-contained, some brief experiences devour our human tissue as secret fire in a ship’s hold consumes cotton in the bale.

(snip)

Marvel not that having been made acquainted with the young sailor’s essential innocence (an irruption of heretic thought hard to suppress) the worthy man lifted not a finger to avert the doom of such a MARTYR to martial discipline.

Chapter 25

Billy stood facing aft. At the penultimate moment, his words, his only ones, words wholly unobstructed in the utterance were these--"God bless Captain Vere!" Syllables so unanticipated coming from one with the ignominious hemp about his neck-- a conventional felon's benediction directed aft towards the quarters of honor; syllables too delivered in the clear melody of a singing-BIRD on the point of launching from the twig, had a phenomenal effect, not unenhanced by the rare personal beauty of the young sailor SPIRITUALIZED now thro' late experiences so poignantly profound.

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Billy Budd as the 'peacemaker' - Dove? Venus' bird.
Billy's stutter - art made tongue-tied by authority?

Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."