The Scandal of Sincerity - Esterhammer
“Sincerity”, as a critical concept, did not do very well in
the twentieth century. The New Critics, in particular, were unimpressed with an
interpretative criterion that seemed to emphasize authorial intention; to them,
‘Is the poet sincere?’ was ‘always an impertinent and illegitimate question’.
In philosophical terms, too, sincerity has been displaced and overshadowed
since Heidegger and Sartre by the notion of authenticity, which can be applied
to objects, works of art or human subjects, in the context of ontology,
epistemology or aesthetics. Although elusive, authenticity has proved an
effective an adaptable notion for what we recognize, in the mode of nostalgia
or desire, as a free ath truthful relation to the world.
Compared with the diffuse concept of authenticity, sincerity
has somewhat more specific critieria and a longer, if chequered, history. In
its modern usage, ‘sincerity’ can only be applied to human beings and human
action, and it always involves a relation between inward disposition and
outward expression. From the Latin sincer-us
‘clean, pure, sound’, it was originally applied to physical substances such as
wine or bodily fluids to mean ‘pure’ or ‘unmixed’. Taking on a figurative
meaning in religious literature during the seventeenth century, this notion of
purity came to be applied to the should and to a person’s disposition; a
‘sincere’ Christian, in the terms of the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘not
falsified or perverted in any way’, but, rather, ‘characterized by the absence
of all dissimulation and pretence’. With this idea of dissimulation, two very
important notions become attached to sincerity: that of correspondence between
(inner) reality and (outward) appearance, and that of not pretending or not
acting. Nowadays, the adjective ‘sincere’ can no longer be applied to water or
urine, but only to human forms of expression: a sincere promise, a sincere
apology, a sincere appreciation, or ‘sincerely’ at the close of a letter,
implying (at least by convention) a correspondence between what the letter
–writer actually feels and what he or she has written. (snip)
Casting Waters:
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a SIGHT it were
To SEE thee in our
waters yet APPEAR,
The notion of a ‘sincere intention’ is somewhat more
internalized, but even here the criterion of sincerity is only meaningful when
the inward intention can be tested against the resulting visible behaviour. One
can refer to a person as ‘sincere’, but this is an applied sense of the work
used when the persons disposition, as manifested in behaviour, is usually or always
seen to correspond with his or her verbal self-expression. At the beginning of
his insightful book Sincerity and
Authenticity, Lionel Trilling defines sincerity as ‘a congruence between
avowal and actual feeling’. The relevance of sincerity to verbal expression and
the public sphere is also reflected by his prominence in the Anglo-American
speech-act theory of J. L. Austin and, evn more, John Searle. *snip_
Intention, then, must be visible and readable in some
external manner – through speech, behaviour, gesture or facial expression – in
order for the standard of sincerity to come into play. To put it somewhat more
polemically, intention must be performed – and, as soon as it is, it enters the
realm of the socially determined codes and conventions by which speech-acts,
gestures and expressions are interpreted by others. Trilling makes the
interesting observation that ‘sincerity’ entered the English language during
the first third of the sixteenth century, which is also the epoch of the
‘sudden efflorescence of the theatre’. This paradoxical conjunction between the
sincerity and theatrically famously recurs with reference to Romanticism in
Matthew Arnold’s 1881 preface to the Poetry of Byron. Echoing Swinburne, Arnold
identifies ‘the splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength’
as the crucial attribute of Byron’s poetry – while, in the same breath, critiquing
the ‘affectations and silliness’ of the ‘the theatrical Byron’. Once again,
sincerity and theatricality appear oddly conjoined. By definition, sincerity is
anti-performative – ‘not feigned or pretended’, in the words of the OED - yet
an awareness of sincerity seems to arise amidst heightened theatricality. Hence
the scandal of sincerity: it is inimicable to performativity; however, it must
be read in or on the body, and through the semiotic systems by which body
language gets interpreted, and in that sense it is coextensive with
performance.
Samuel Daniel
THE Tragedie of Cleopatra.
AEtas prima canat veneres postrema tumultus.
1594.
To the Right Honourable, the Lady Marie, Countesse of PEMBROOKE.
...O that the Ocean did not bound our stile
VVithin these strict and narrow limmits so:
But that the melody of our sweet Ile,
Might now be heard to Tyber, Arne, and Po.
That they might know how far THAMES doth out-go
The musique of Declyned Italie:
And listning to our songs another while,
Might learne of thee, their NOTES to PURIFIE.[note- wood-notes wild]
O why may not some after-comming hand,
Vnlock these limits, open our confines:
And breake a sunder this imprisoning band,
T'inlarge our spirits, and publish our dissignes;
Planting our Roses on the Apenines?
And teach to Rhene, to Loyre, and Rhodanus,
Our accents, and the wonders of our Land,
That they might all admire and honour vs.
Wherby great SYDNEY & our SPENCER might,
VVith those Po-singers beeing equalled,
Enchaunt the world with such a sweet delight,
That theyr eternall songs (for euer read,)
May shew what great ELIZAS raigne hath bred.
VVhat musique in the kingdome of her peace.
Hath now beene made to her, and by her might,
VVhereby her glorious fame shall neuer cease.
********************************
THE Tragedie of Cleopatra.
AEtas prima canat veneres postrema tumultus.
1594.
To the Right Honourable, the Lady Marie, Countesse of PEMBROOKE.
...O that the Ocean did not bound our stile
VVithin these strict and narrow limmits so:
But that the melody of our sweet Ile,
Might now be heard to Tyber, Arne, and Po.
That they might know how far THAMES doth out-go
The musique of Declyned Italie:
And listning to our songs another while,
Might learne of thee, their NOTES to PURIFIE.[note- wood-notes wild]
O why may not some after-comming hand,
Vnlock these limits, open our confines:
And breake a sunder this imprisoning band,
T'inlarge our spirits, and publish our dissignes;
Planting our Roses on the Apenines?
And teach to Rhene, to Loyre, and Rhodanus,
Our accents, and the wonders of our Land,
That they might all admire and honour vs.
Wherby great SYDNEY & our SPENCER might,
VVith those Po-singers beeing equalled,
Enchaunt the world with such a sweet delight,
That theyr eternall songs (for euer read,)
May shew what great ELIZAS raigne hath bred.
VVhat musique in the kingdome of her peace.
Hath now beene made to her, and by her might,
VVhereby her glorious fame shall neuer cease.
********************************
And so sepĂșlchred in such POMP dost LIE, - Milton on
Shakespeare
********************************
Far pompo,
“showing off,” as an expression of an urban lifestyle and the rejection of all
“POMPE” as INSINCERE aptly describes the difference between Italian and English
culture, which is a topic in every English view of Italy. Such a view
always remains essentially that of an outsider: it inherently contains a form
of perception that always remains caught up in the perceiver’s mental schemata
which set the framework for interpreting what it perceives. What an
Englishman traveling to Italy sees is in the last analysis only a negative
image of what he is familiar with: it corresponds to “the perception of an
alien culture in terms of an upside-down version of one’s own”: - Andreas
Mahler
*******************************
Inverting Oxford:
Values aligned with 'theatrical' Southern European cultures (courtesy) rather than the more modern, Northern European 'sincerity' -- Othello rather than Hamlet.
********************************
Sincerity,
“Modernity,” and the Protestants
Webb Keane
...As a form of
self-understanding, the subject is likely to require some contrastive terms –
those objects against which its distinctiveness can be defined. Such “objects” may comprise not only material
things, but also institutions, rituals, social others, and the language one
shares with those others. For instance, we need look no farther than familiar,
sometimes trivial anxieties about plagiarism, quotation, cliché and
originality, truth telling, keeping one’s word, mimicry, and finding one’s own
voice, to find hints of how thoroughly language can trouble the boundaries of
the subject. The linguistic trouble with boundaries, the sense that
heteroglossia might pose a threat, however, is hardly confined to minor
questions of style and everyday ethics. Religious traditions abound with
worries about the slippery, corrupting, or deceiving effects of language (and,
signs, more generally) and efforts to control them (Keane 1997b). In many
cases, these worries center on the perceived external and material or objectlike
character of language. Early English
Puritans, for instance, considered rhetorically elaborate styles of language to
be “fleshly” distortions of God’s truth (Bauman 1983:2) Their insistence on
plain style and even silence seems to have been, at least in part, a response
to an intuition that language is external to that spiritual component defining
what is most valuable in the human person, that which would transcend the
material world. To the extent that their
worries about fleshly language articulate with their worries about other
aspects of the “external” world like showy clothing, the sforms of etiquette,
liturgical rites, architectural ornament, or religious icons, they are part of
a more general representational economy. As this article attempts to show,
LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY, that is, people’s assumptions about language (Kroskrity
2000) may be linked to ideas about material goods through their repective
implications for the presumed nature of the human subject.
The 17th-century
Puritans were not isolated in the reformist interest in words and their
relation to the material and social world. Their contemporaries, the scientists
who founded the Royal Society, promoted a “naked, natural way of speaking”
(quoted in Bauman 1983:2). They aspired to language so transparent that it would
do no more than refer to those things intended by its speaker, thus serving as
a proper vehicle for objectivity. This convergence of Puritan morality and
scientific objectivity at a particular historical moment, in a similar language
ideology, would seem to be no accident. In their conjunction, I suggest, we can
see themes that have come to be characteristic of some common ideas about the
proposed subject of modernity. Briefly put, this is the subject whose
distinction fro the domain of objects is produced not only in the norm of
sincerity, but also in its sharp distinction from material goods and in a
related aversion to the supposed excesses of ritual, idolatry, and even
courtesy – an aversion that the historian Peter Burke (1987:13, 2240) has suggested is characteristic of modern Europe.
******************************
Othello, Shakespeare
Iago - He [Cassio] hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly.
******************************
Protestant Sincerity? - Modern Inversions of Oxford's Character:
Contested
Reproduction: Genetic Technologies,
Religion, and Public Debate
John H Evans
…As anthropologist
Joel Robbins has argued, a “sincerity culture” is one of the linguistic
features of modernity. Indeed, this rise in the importance of sincerity in
communication – in place of earlier notions of honor and courtesy – first
occurred as a side effect of the Protestant Reformation. Robbins writes, “Expressing the truth about
one’s inner states in everyday conversation and conduct became a value in a way
that it had not been before…Protestantism could develop this emerging cult of
sincerity to an impressive extent, taking a nascent version of …a ‘sincerity culture’
and making it a cornerstone of modern views of the self, of social life,
and…language.” If this notion did originate in Protestantism – and its
historical origins are not important to us here – it has spread to be a general
belief held by the citizens on the modern United States. (p.168)
*******************************
Here Lies”: Sincerity and Insincerity in Early Modern
Epitaphs Onstage
Abstract
In early modern England, theatrical performance was charged
with undermining sincerity, while epitaphic writing was praised as upholding
it. Given that epitaphs and plays were perceived to occupy contrasting
positions with respect to the contemporary discourse surrounding sincerity, it
is striking how often epitaphs are invoked in the dramas of the period: the
preeminently “sincere” genre within the preeminently “insincere” genre. I
suggest that the epitaphic genre provided dramatists with an unexpected vehicle
for exploring the limits of sincerity; the repeated convergence of the two
genres provides a kind of mutual critique.
Donald Davie once contentiously claimed that sincerity, as a
category of poetic evaluation, was irrelevant for “nearly all the poetry that
we want to remember written in England between 1550 and 1780” (62).1 Yet we ought
to recall that the word ‘sincerity’ itself “enters the English language in the
sixteenth century” (van Alphen and Bal 2). The early modern era’s problematic
ideal of sincerity can be better appreciated by the semantic field to which it
was contrasted. That is, sincerity was posed as the antithesis to
hypocrisy, “flattering and fauning,” or “deceitfull” speech, as a 1649
sermon by Nicholas Lockyer asserts (5, 9).2 The
constitutive tension between sincerity and dissimulation is confirmed by a
series of early modern dictionaries that gloss “sincere” as “without dissimulation,”
or “no dissembler.”3
This antagonism even gets personified in Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of
London (1584), in which Sincerity, when introduced to Dissimulation (upon
Simplicity’s suggestion that he serve as a petitioner for him), responds
vehemently: “Dissimulation, out vpon him, he shall be no spokeman for me”
(l.543). The lexicon of feigning, disguise, and dissimulation was used to
criticize both the stage and the court (and, often conflated with these two,
women). Such criticism depends upon the dichotomy between internal feelings and
external expression, a gap that can only be overcome by a rigorous alignment
between both parts. Thus when discussing “Simplicity” (which “sounds the
same with sincerity, and therefore coupled together here … as Synonymas,
contemini, words of the same signification”), Lockyer holds that “this
terme is opposed to double mindednesse … and signifies an unity and identity between the heart and
tongue; what the tongue sayes, the heart really intends” (8, 7).
Nowhere was the disjunction between the heart (“the ultimate
locus of interiority” [Mazzio 63]) and the tongue perceived to be presented in
such an overt, even defiant manner as on the stage. Theatrical performance
itself was taken to be the exemplary problem within a more general
analysis of insincerity; the fact that critiques of courtiership and
ecclesiastical rituals often reverted to the vocabulary of the theatre confirms
its centrality within this debate. As Lionell Trilling posited, “it is surely
no accident that the idea of sincerity, of the own self and the difficulty in
knowing and showing it, should have arisen to vex men’s minds in the epoch that
saw the sudden efflorescence of the theatre”
Definition of sincere
sincerer; sincerest
1 a : free of dissimulation : honest
- a sincere interest
b : free from adulteration : pure
- a sincere doctrine
- sincere wine
2 : marked by genuineness : true
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Shake-speare
'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.
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.
*********************************
William Empson points out that 'honest' and 'honesty'
are used 52 times in Othello, writing that 'in Othello, divergent uses of
th(is) key word are found for all the main characters; even the attenuated
clown plays upon it; the unchaste Bianca, for instance, snatches a moment to
claim that she is more honest than Emilia the thief of the handkerchief; and
with all the variety of use the ironies on the word mount up steadily to the
end. Such is the general power of the writing that this is not obtrusive, but
if all but the phrases involving honest were in the style of Ibsen the effect
would be a symbolical charade. Everyone calls Iago honest once or twice, but
with Othello it becomes an obsession; at the crucial moment just before Emilia
exposes Iago he keeps howling the word out. (William Empson,
_Honest in Othello_)
********************************
Sincerity, Part I: The Drama of the Will from Augustine
to Milton
In the Reformation period, the age-old issue of the freedom
of the will with regards to human sinfulness continues to receive enormous
attention, and the two registers of sincerity—the moral and the
agonistic—continue to collapse in interesting ways as the individual’s
conscience takes on renewed theological consequence. Many consider the early
modern period to occasion the sorts of spiritual, political, economic, and
aesthetic conditions that are conducive to reimagining the importance of
inwardness, and such forms of inwardness are often described as combining
practice and doctrine (lex orandi, lex credendi), and thus combining
outwardness and inwardness. Magill, for instance, stresses how a turn to the
inward conscience, combined with new practices of personal Bible reading and
the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, fostered a “Protestant culture
of religious inwardness that emphasized feeling, reflection, and self-examination.”29 Charles
Taylor dwells on the related Protestant critique of Catholic practices that
synthesize metaphysics and classical ideas of hierarchy with Christian theology
(essentially, a Protestant opposition to Christian eudaimonia, arguably
in line with Scotus’s departure from intellectualism). Reformers contended that
this is a pattern of thought that funds forms of idolatry, where intellective
and material media were thought to carry too much of the weight of faith.30 Such
departure from Christian eudaimonia resulted in a growing recognition of
“the new spiritual status of the everyday,” an effort in Protestant and
Catholic territories to redeem daily living by focusing on God as the spiritual
end to everything, while avoiding prideful asceticism.31 In the
period surrounding the Protestant Reformation there was, thus, a dual pressure
both to search one’s inner conscience and to sanctify the outward habits of
life in a way that unambiguously respects the primacy of the conscience.
Protestants often described the sincerity of contrition as
un-searchably internal, but for this reason, and paradoxically, the purity of
outwardly visible practice accumulated new importance as a testimony to that
internal reality. Historians of early modern England have widely recognized a
consequent “ethos of plainness” emerging from this pious resistance.32 As David
Parry discusses in this issue, to speak “plainly” was to constrain oneself to
an ethic of directness and transparency. Yet perhaps the more pertinent social
effect of plain speaking was to rhetorically disavow oneself of
insincerity—where insincerity is characterized in part by unnecessary
complexity of thought and communication. A popular visual emblem for sinceritas
in Renaissance Europe is a heart being held or “proffered” by a hand, sometimes
the hand of a figure.33
The image works both to locate sincerity and to disembody it—a striking
illustration of the kind of psychological violence that might characterize the
need to perform what is instinctively internal. This is a period in which
sincerity was associated largely with purity, with coming from the right
source, from the heart, and associated also, if I can be allowed the phrase,
with being on the right side of history. A scan of the OED’s earliest
listed usages of “sincere” and “sincerity” reveals liberal uses of the
relatively new English word in vernacular translations from the Great Bible,
the Geneva Bible, and the King James Bible: “As newe borne babes desire the
syncere [Gk. áŒÎŽÎżÎ»ÎżÎœ]
mylke of the worde”; “Blessed are the vndefiled [margin. Or, perfect, or
sincere] in the way”; “Feare the Lord, and serue him in sinceritie, and in
trueth,” to list a few examples.34 Given the
effects of the printing press on disseminations of the vernacular scriptures
and prayer offices, it is likely that those who read about such “sinceritie”
and “trueth” knew well their polemical and political implications in movements
of reform, even when such movements are encased in rhetoric of the plain,
direct, sola, and sincere.
(snip)
What I’ve done is simply to reframe a familiar account of
the “classical” narrative patterns of Renaissance literature, in the vein of
early critics like T. E. Hulme or Harry Levin, as a history of sincerity. If
one way to describe the classical (i.e., ontological) narrative is as a
character overreaching, then, in the vocabulary of sincerity, we can describe
this character as transgressing the bounds of nature by representing herself as
someone she is not, where who she is
not a matter simply of “that within
which passeth show” but of the authority of nature, original sin, and final
judgment. Hence, Trilling’s observation that the early modern “villain”
typically combines maleficence with dissembling and duplicity, that is, with
insincerity. Just so,
morality and self-representation were continuously tied to one another through
the medieval and early modern periods. And yet the logics of morality and
self-representation began to war with one another, not to the ultimate end of
severing their connection but of amplifying the content of dramatic conflict.
Such villainous characters may believe that they are exercising agonistic yet
honest intentions, but their demise culminates with a recognition not only of
overreaching the scope of moral activity but of getting caught between opposing
views of self-coherence: to what extent am I responsible directly to my own
felt experience, and to what extent is experience itself shaped by a
misdirected will and thus subject to judgment?
(snip)
Taylor’s exploration of sincerity centers on a comparison of
two figures of (potential) conversion: St. Paul as depicted in two of
Caravaggio’s oil paintings, and Aaron, the moor villain from Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus. The three scenes are renderings of sincerity, or, rather, of
what a person will and can do when he is faced with the demand to prove his
sincerity, particularly his sincerity of conversion. Taylor finds common ground
between religious and legal discourses in the problem of providing and
appraising evidence of a subject’s sincerity, here defined as a “performance”
of the self. The content of a given performance of sincerity, she says, must
exceed “rational description and instrumental reason” because otherwise an act
of alleged conversion might simply be interpreted as reasonable given the
circumstances—e.g., interrogation, violence, judgment. For Taylor,
the instruments whereby sincerity is demonstrated must, paradoxically, be
invisible and therefore putatively natural to the subject and his examiners,
and this is accomplished by using the signifiers for the self specifically provided
by the examiners. Furthermore, she summarizes the paradox of sincerity as
between sincerity as performance, on the one hand, and the fact that a
performance is inherently insincere because it “provides an instrument that
makes it possible to represent an inner state upon the surface.”61 Thus,
“Whenever ‘sincerity’ names itself, it ceases to exist.”62 To perform
sincerity, then, is to reflect an authority’s semiotics for personhood, the
kind of personhood that is allowed the privilege of conversion, and, according
to Taylor’s examples, in the period of the Reformation such semiotics are
racial as well as religious.
w/Sincerity, Part I: The Drama of the Will from Augustine
to Milton
This paradox plays out in Taylor’s vivid comparison of the
two Paul conversion paintings that depict Paul as he is confronted and blinded
by Christ on his way to Damascus. Whereas the earlier Conversion of Saint
Paul (1600) is theatrical—in the sense of Fried’s coup de thĂ©Ăątre, a
spectacle that acknowledges the presence of viewers—showing a conspicuously Jewish
and elderly Paul extravagantly hiding his face and his circumcision, the later
version (1601) presents a calmer, younger, and Roman-looking Paul, gently
closing his eyes and resigning himself to conversion, ready to fight for the
Romans. Version 1 “is a scene of rape,” rendering Paul naked and pained.
“Version 2 is perhaps more suggestive of a seduction,” where Paul is clothed
and lying flatly on his back with his arms outspread and inviting.63 This second
version, with its Romanized Paul, arguably showcases a sincere conversion as
“inner submission to the will of God,” a concession to the imperialism of
sincerity in religious and racial semiotics. The earlier version, however, is
caught up in the violence—or what we’ve called the agonistic drama—of the
paradox of sincerity as inhering within the individual yet determined and
corroborated by objective standards (affectio iustitiae, or, turning
toward God).
Taylor uses the Caravaggio paintings as a heuristic for
reading Titus’s Aaron. She focuses on Aaron’s famous anti-confession, in
which, under duress, he admits to all of his accused crimes, and, “Ay, that I
had not done a thousand more.”64 While he
cannot expect any mercy himself, the life of Aaron’s child is on the line, but
he must know that naming so many additional offences, as he does, would lead to
something like the harsh and especially symbolic execution of the final scene.
What should we make, then, of Aaron’s willing and excessive confession? Is
Shakespeare simply representing his “black” character—the play never ceases to
remind the audience of this fact—as sincere merely by virtue of his race,
reflected in a degree of character flatness and legibility that has no choice
but to be sincere? Taylor says that the case is vehemently the opposite. “When
Aaron is held to account for his vile acts, the resolution [or the boast] that
defines his speech is that while he will confess, he will not renounce his
prior self.”65
He will not, like Paul in Version 2, become Roman. He rejects the Romans’
semiotics of sincerity and so owns his crimes but not their form of contrition.
Thus, Aaron exercises an extraordinary amount of will not in demonstration but
in defiance of the sincerity of conversion.
Taylor’s overarching point about sincerity is that early
modern art forms convey the “confounding of inner and outer” in an era that
increasingly externalized signs of sincerity.66 We might
identify this as the development of rhetoric and social codes for an
increasingly dramatized agonistic form of sincerity. Artists like Caravaggio
and Shakespeare, Taylor convincingly avers, aim to show how the inner self is
conceived outwardly and how outward expression always implies an already active
view of the inner self.
(snip)
Essentially, theater exposes how the “natural” and the
“self-evident,” within a plurality of sincerities, are contingent upon certain
structurings of will—as is the case with the medieval voluntarists and
intellectualists. And because such theatricality accompanies all performances
of sincerity, I suggest that its truth, its reliability, its negotiation of
happiness and justice, remain near the surface of the modern (re)turn to
sincerity that we locate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What
change, then, might occasion a more significant shift away from sincerity, a
shift characterized perhaps by a freedom from external constraint rather
than a freedom in constraint? I’ve tried to complicate this question. By
locating the roots of sincerity in Augustinian and Scholastic discussions about
the will, we can understand the early history of sincerity as a problem of
coherence, where the question becomes cohering with what? The self
cohering with God? Cohering with the nature of its own will, a faculty designed
by God and thus accountable to God’s justice? Or, in the post-Reformation
period, cohering with one’s experience, avowal, or feeling? I’ve argued that
the notion that sincerity is defined as the self cohering with itself—in the
form of affectio commodi, experience, or avowal—exists as a possibility
in the early modern period as well as the premodern period, but also that this
form of selfhood is always accompanied by (some may say “haunted” by) a
standard for moral action outside the self. The characteristics of this
external moral standard, whether described positively or by negation,
constitute the theology of sincerity.
Moreover, as these various perspectives on sincerity become
present in single contexts such as the writings of Luther, Shakespeare, and
Milton, we see the rhetoric of coherence (like the rhetoric of sincerity) being
used by power and blending with different expressions of identity.
Thematically, thus, the early modern period witnesses a drama of coherence,
incorporating into its literary themes an agonistic register of sincerity, the
very struggle to become sincere and to parse these interrelated questions. What
we see are cracks in the edifice of sincerity—cracks filled by political and
thematic possibilities—but no break, no absolute severance of the self from
theology where the self generates its own moral significance.69 Where,
then, is this break located, if it exists at all? And what would it take to
completely disintegrate the concept of self-coherence from the theological
tradition of moral agency that incubated it? Are modern and postmodern
performances of sincerity structurally distinct from the versions represented
in Shakespeare and Milton, or are they simply variants? Is there a more
definitive line to be drawn, or is modern authenticity really old sincerity in
disguise?
**********************************
From Echo and Meaning on Early modern English stages by Susan L Anderson
Music, Satire and Sincerity
You, two and two, singing a
palinode,
March to your several homes by
Niobe’[s stone,
And offer up two tears apiece
theron’
And after penance thus performed,
You become
Such as you fain would seem; and
then return,
Off’ring your service to great
Cynthia
The song is a palinode, a formal
recantation of their bad behaviour, which, when combined with music creates an
imagined quasi-magical performativity that turns intention into reality. The
(admittedly far from coherent) ending to the play inverts the process enacted
by Jonson’s masques whereby the true identity of masquing courtiers is
reflected in personations that valorise them as quai-gods, and the metaphorical
relationship between body and idea is literalized as much as possible. Echoes
of real identities frame the fictional roles taken on by persons well-known to
the audience, and vice versa.
*************************************
Shake-speare
Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
And I will comment upon that offense.
Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,
Against thy reasons making no defense.
Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill,
To set a form upon desired change,
As I’ll myself disgrace, knowing thy will;
I will acquaintance strangle and look strange,
Be absent from thy walks, and in my tongue
Thy sweet belovĂšd name no more shall dwell,
Lest I, too much profane, should do it wrong
And haply of our old acquaintance tell.
For thee against myself I’ll vow debate,
For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate.
*************************************
Now the matter depending in this sort, I find my state weak
and destitute of friends, for having only relied always on her Majesty I have
neglected to seek others, and this trust of mine, many things considered, I
fear may deceive me.
(snip)
Thus with a lame hand to write I take my leave, but with a
mind well disposed to hope the best of my friends till otherwise I find them,
which I fear nothing at all, assuring myself your words and deeds dwell not
asunder. (Oxford to Cecil, January 1602)
*************************************
The End of Courtesy?
THRENOS.
Beauty, truth, and rarity.
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.
Death is now the phoenix' nest;
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:--
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem, but cannot be:
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
***********************************
The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics
Hornsby, RA
Palinode
A poem or song of retraction; originally a term applied to a
lyric by Stesichorus (early 6th C. BCE) in which he recanted his
earlier attack upon Helen as the cause of the Trojan War. The palinode became
common after Ovid’s Remedia amoris, supposedly written to retract his Ars
amatoria. It is a frequent device in medieval and Renaissance love poetry,
including the Roman de la Rose. Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women is a palinode
retracting Troilus and Criseyde, and a character called Palinode appears in
Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender.
Any ritualistic recantation may loosely be called a palinode, even one in
prose, but the term palinodic form denotes a particular pattern in which two
metrically corresponding elements are interrupted by another pair of similarly corresponding
elements. The palinodic form may be represented as ABBA where the letters refer
to lines, stanzas, or strophes, and where ab makes a statement that b’a’
recants.
(snip)
Sincerity – Derived from Latin sincerus (clean or pure), the
word sincerity entered English in the early 16th c and briefly
retained the meaning of its cognate, so that, e.g., “sincere wine” denoted wine
that was undiluted. But William Shakespeare uses sincerity ixclusively to
indicate the absence of duplicity or dissimulation, and by 1600, the term had
assumed its modern connotations. It was
not until the end of the 18th century that sincerity became a valued
literary commodity. For William Wordsworth and the romantics, sincerity was an
indication of literary excellence since it emphasized the necessity of a
congruence between the poet’s emotion and his utterance. Matthew Arnold
ambitiously expanded the concept, adding to it a moral dimension, when he
claimed that the touchstone of great poetry was the “high seriousness which
comes from absolute sincerity.”
***********************************
Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance
Douglas F. Rutledge
“Because He was a Prince”: St. Leopold, Habsburg Ritual Strategies, and the
Practice of Sincere Religion at Klosterneuburg
Amelia Carr
On his deathbed, I n1576, the Habsburg ruler Maximilian II refused the
last rites, saying that his priest was in heaven. But during his lifetime, he
had built a special stall in the Augustinian convent of Klosterneuburg for
worship at the altar of St. Leopold, one of the least spectacular of saints,
albeit one of Maximilian’s ancestors. This rejection of one controversial
ritual and acceptance of another is the kind of inconsistency in religious
practice we take as evidence of a sixteenth-century crisis about ritual
behaviour, a crisis in which scepticism about the efficacy of acts and gestures
leads to a profound sense of disjunction, such that mere ceremony is a charade
of power, masking the real rules motivating effects.
The different social structures that emerge in this period have been
correlated to models adopted fom the social historians. Muir and Burke
suggest that Catholic, Mediterranean
cultures are theatre states, based on Honor and Ceremony and concerned with appearances,
while Northern, Protestant cultures are sincerity cultures, perhaps short on courtesy,
but strong on individual conscience and on verbalizing signifying intentions. According to traditional evaluation of the
emperor, Maixmilian II’s attendance to the cult of St. Leopold is the gesture
of the ruler of a theatrical state, and Maximilian himself can only be
considered weak, opportunistic, and politically motivated. Aside from moments
of authenticity in his youth and on his deathbed, Maximilian is usually
regarded as cynical and insincere.
(snip)
St. Leopold, son of Leopold the Fair, Margrave of Austria. In the eleven
hundred thirty-sixth year after the birth of our Lord Christ, on the fifteenth
day of Noember, he was virtuously separated from theis world, and buried at
Klosterneuburg, where he is held in great honor.
This minimalist inscription emphasizes only Leopold’s lineage and the
honor of his burial. Yet these are important cues that we must shift our frame
of reference to the courtly codes of honor.
Renaissance considerations of honor begin with the definitions offered by
Aristotle in the Ethics: “Honor is the prize of excellence (arĂȘte) and it is to
the good that it is rentdered.” More than fifty sixteenth-century Italian
treatises attest to both the urgency and the complexity of he subject, also
giving us a guide to Austiran manners, since the members of the Habsburg court
figured prominently in any discussion of nobility. Following Aristotle, these
sixteenth-century philosophers and ceremonialists conclude that honors are
external and include distinctions of rank bestowed, statues erected, and
compliments paid. In the worldview, mortal achievements are elevated and
conscience operates in the public arena. But a problem arises, as frequently
noted, in that honor depends more on those who confer it than on those who
receive it. Emphasis is placed on the perceptions and actions of others. One
could be honourable, but not honoured. Honor can be conferred and taken away –
hence, the elaborate code of insult and revenge. Honor is a matter of public
consensus. Honoring is a social act, which must be performed in conventional
ways so that it can be recognized by others. It is the center, then, of a
ceremonial, or theatrical, culture.
Yet for Christians, nothing is more transient than earthly reward. The
ethical structures that devolve from the values of an honor culture are usually
understood as deeply incompatible with Christianity, since the praise of men is
worthless in a value system determined by transcendent deity. For example,
Thomas a Kempis encouraged the devout to affirm to God that “all human glory,
all temporal honor, all worldly exaltation, compared to Thy eternal glory, is
but vanity and folly.” Eternity triumphs over fame.
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."
**************************************
Invention/Shake-speare – Nature’s
Child
**************************************
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'.
*************************************
soraismu
- (rhetoric) The awkward or humorous use of different languages MIXED together, often using a foreign term incorrectly or in an inappropriate situation.
*****************************
601 Quarto -
Cynthia's Revels, Jonson
Act IV, Sc. V
Amorphus
And there’s her Minion Criticus; why his advise more then Amorphus? Have I not Invention, afore him? Learning, to better that Invention, above him? And Travaile.
*************************************
1616 Folio, Jonson
Act IV, Sc V
Amorphus
And there’s her minion Crites! Why his advice more then Amorphus? Have not I invention, afore him? Learning, to better that invention, above him? And infanted, with pleasant travaile ----
Act IV, Sc. V
Amorphus
And there’s her Minion Criticus; why his advise more then Amorphus? Have I not Invention, afore him? Learning, to better that Invention, above him? And Travaile.
*************************************
1616 Folio, Jonson
Act IV, Sc V
Amorphus
And there’s her minion Crites! Why his advice more then Amorphus? Have not I invention, afore him? Learning, to better that invention, above him? And infanted, with pleasant travaile ----
************************************
Southern, Pandora (1584)
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
Made proud with a garland like this,
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.
No, no, the high singer is he
Alone that in the end must be
Made proud with a garland like this,
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.
*********************************
Beauty vs. Honesty in
Othello – Meg Harris Williams
…In Dr Meltzer’s
description, `sincerity’ does not apply to a particular emotion but to the
state of mind within which the emotions interact. It has to do with Wittgenstein’s
category of “meaning it”, and this in turn is integrally connected with the capacity
to experience beauty:
There is a qualitative aspect of sincerity
that has to do with richness of emotion. Clinical work
strongly suggests that this aspect of the
adult character is bound up with the richness of emotion characterizing the
internal objects. It can be distinguished from other qualities such as their
strength or goodness. It is different from their state of integration. It seems
perhaps most coextensive with their beauty, which in turn seems related to
capacity for compassion. (Sincerity[1994],
p. 205)
It also, says
Meltzer, has an `aspirational quality’. In this description of richness, without
(necessarily) corresponding strength or integration, we begin to see the
possibility of characters such as Othello and Cassio, in touch with and daily
governed by an inner ideal of beauty which may not have been tried and tested
but which encompasses all their potential for `meaning it’, for being
themselves -expressed by Othello as the place `where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no
life’ (IV.ii.58-9).
**********************************
Cecil Papers 251/28: Oxford to Cecil, [July 1600].
Although my bad success in former suits to her Majesty have given me cause to bury my hopes in the deep abyss and bottom of despair, rather than now to attempt, after so many trials made in vain & so many opportunities escaped, the effects of fair words or fruits of golden promises, yet for that I cannot believe but that there hath been always a true correspondency of word and intention in her Majesty, I do conjecture that, with a little help, that which of itself hath brought forth so fair blossoms will also yield fruit... And I know not by what better means, or when, her Majesty may have an easier opportunity to discharge the debt of so many hopes as her promises have given me cause to embrace than by this, which give she must, & so give as nothing extraordinarily doth part from her. If she shall not deign me this in an opportunity of time so fitting, what time shall I attend (which is uncertain to all men) unless in the graves of men there were a time to receive benefits and good turns from princes? Well, I will not use more words, for they may rather argue mistrust than confidence. I will assure myself and not doubt of your good office, both in this but in any honourable friendship I shall have cause to use you. Hackney.
Although my bad success in former suits to her Majesty have given me cause to bury my hopes in the deep abyss and bottom of despair, rather than now to attempt, after so many trials made in vain & so many opportunities escaped, the effects of fair words or fruits of golden promises, yet for that I cannot believe but that there hath been always a true correspondency of word and intention in her Majesty, I do conjecture that, with a little help, that which of itself hath brought forth so fair blossoms will also yield fruit... And I know not by what better means, or when, her Majesty may have an easier opportunity to discharge the debt of so many hopes as her promises have given me cause to embrace than by this, which give she must, & so give as nothing extraordinarily doth part from her. If she shall not deign me this in an opportunity of time so fitting, what time shall I attend (which is uncertain to all men) unless in the graves of men there were a time to receive benefits and good turns from princes? Well, I will not use more words, for they may rather argue mistrust than confidence. I will assure myself and not doubt of your good office, both in this but in any honourable friendship I shall have cause to use you. Hackney.
Oxford to Cecil, [May 1601?].
My very good brother, I have received by Henry Lok your most kind message, which I so effectually embrace that, what for the old love I have borne you which, I assure you, was very great; what for the alliance which is between us, which is tied so fast by my children of your own sister; what for mine own disposition to yourself, which hath been rooted by long and many familiarities of a more youthful time, there could have been nothing so dearly welcome unto me. Wherefore not as a stranger, but in the old style, I do assure you that you shall have no faster friend & well-wisher unto you than myself, either in kindness, which I find beyond mine expectation in you, or in kindred, whereby none is nearer allied than myself sith, of your sisters, of my wife only you have received nieces, a sister, I say, not by any venter, but born of the same father and the same mother of yourself. I will say no more, for words in faithful minds are tedious, only this I protest: you shall do me wrong, and yourself greater if, either through fables, which are mischievous, or conceit, which is dangerous, you think otherwise of me than humanity and consanguinity requireth.
Iago:
My very good brother, I have received by Henry Lok your most kind message, which I so effectually embrace that, what for the old love I have borne you which, I assure you, was very great; what for the alliance which is between us, which is tied so fast by my children of your own sister; what for mine own disposition to yourself, which hath been rooted by long and many familiarities of a more youthful time, there could have been nothing so dearly welcome unto me. Wherefore not as a stranger, but in the old style, I do assure you that you shall have no faster friend & well-wisher unto you than myself, either in kindness, which I find beyond mine expectation in you, or in kindred, whereby none is nearer allied than myself sith, of your sisters, of my wife only you have received nieces, a sister, I say, not by any venter, but born of the same father and the same mother of yourself. I will say no more, for words in faithful minds are tedious, only this I protest: you shall do me wrong, and yourself greater if, either through fables, which are mischievous, or conceit, which is dangerous, you think otherwise of me than humanity and consanguinity requireth.
Iago:
(I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin
And let him find it. Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ. This may do something.
The Moor already changes with my poison.
DANGEROUS CONCEITS are in their natures poisons
Which at the first are scarce found to distaste,
But with a little act upon the blood
Burn like the mines of sulfur.)
Cecil Papers 181/99: Oxford to Cecil, [January 1602].
Now, brother, I do not by these letters make challenge of
your words for, if you list to forget them, my putting in remembrance will be
bitter, and to small purpose. Only this now is mine intention, not to tell
any new thing, but that which is already known unto you. The matter, after it
had received many crosses, many inventions of delay, yet at length hath been
heard before all the judges…, but now time and truth have unmasked all
difficulties and I do understand the judges are, if they will be indifferent,
to make a good report to her Majesty. Yet (I know not by what unfortunate
star), there are so many disposed to withstand it as the truth, much oppressed
by the friends of the contrary part, is likely, if not wholly to be defaced,
yet so extenuated as the virtue thereof will be of little effect.
(snip)
Now the matter depending in this sort, I find my state weak
and destitute of friends for, having only relied always on her Majesty, I have
neglected to seek others, and this trust of mine, many things considered, I
fear may deceive me. Another confidence I had in yourself, in whom (without
offence let me speak it) I am to cast some doubt by reason as, in your last
letters I found a wavering style much differing from your former assurances, I
fear now to be left in medio rerum omnium certamine et discrimine which, if it
so fall out, I shall bear it, by the grace of God, with an equal mind sith time
and experience have given me sufficient understanding of worldly frailty. But I
hope better (though I cast the worst), howsoever, for finis coronat opus, and
then everything will be laid open, every doubt resolved into a plain sense. In
the mean season, I now, at the last (for now is the time), crave this brotherly
friendship that, as you began it for me with all kindness, so that you will
continue in the same affection to end it.
(snip)
I hope her Majesty, after so many gracious words which she
gave me at Greenwich upon her departure, exceeding this which I expect, will
not now draw in the beams of her princely grace to my discouragement and her
own detriment. Neither will I conceive otherwise of your virtue and
affection towards me now, at the end, than I apprehended all good hope and
kindness from you in the beginning. Thus with a lame hand to write I take my
leave, but with a mind well disposed to hope the best of my friends till
otherwise I find them, which I fear nothing at all, assuring myself your words
and deeds dwell not asunder.
Cecil Papers 99/150: Oxford to Cecil, 25, 27 April 1603.
…I cannot but find a great grief in myself to remember the
mistress which we have lost, under whom both you and myself from our greenest
years have been in a manner brought up and, although it hath pleased God after
an earthly kingdom to take her up into a more permanent and heavenly state
wherein I do not doubt but she is crowned with glory, and to give us a prince
wise, learned and enriched with all virtues, yet the long time which we spent
in her service we cannot look for so much left of our days as to bestow upon
another, neither the long acquaintance and kind familiarities wherewith she did
use us we are not ever to expect from another prince, as denied by the
infirmity of age and common course of reason. In this common shipwreck, mine is
above all the rest who, least regarded though often comforted of all her
followers, she hath left to try my fortune among the alterations of time and
chance, either without sail whereby to take the advantage of any PROSPEROus gale
or with anchor to ride till the storm be overpast. There is nothing therefore
left to my comfort but the excellent virtues and deep wisdom wherewith God hath
endued our new master and sovereign Lord, who doth not come amongst us as a
stranger but as a natural prince, succeeding by right of blood and inheritance,
not as a conqueror but as the true shepherd of Christ's flock to cherish and
comfort them.