Have What Shall Have No End

Laesa Imaginatio, Edward de Vere and Othello

Hamlet - Imagination infected by the fancies of Northern European humanist scholars.

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Horatio/Horace/Jonson

HORATIO

A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,

A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,

The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead

Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets

As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,

Disasters in the sun, and the moist star

Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands

Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

And even the like precurse of feared events,

As harbingers preceding still the fates

And prologue to the omen coming on,

Have heaven and earth together demonstrated

Unto our climatures and countrymen.

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Laesa Imaginatio, or Imagination Infected by Passion in Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies

Werner Von Koppenfels

The Case in Point of Infected Imagination:Othello

The protagonist of one Shakespearean love tragedy, it is true, loudly and before the highest witnesses claims the immunity of his warlike nature to this debilitating passion:

Othello

No, when light-wing’d toys

Of feather’d Cupid seel with wanton dullness

My speculative and offic’d instruments,

That my disports corrupt and taint my business,

Let housewives make a skillet of my helm, (I.3.268-72)

So much hubris must go before a fall, which it announces by way of dramatic irony, and which will actually take place as a visual shock in 4.1. There we see Othello literally overthrown by the sexual fantasies Iago’s words have sadistically implanted in his mind. He loses not only is manly but also his manlike carriage, writhing on the ground in a fit that Iago diagnoses as epilepsy or falling sickness (line 43). Iago cynically assumes the role of a doctor who notes with satisfaction the effect ofhis well-dosed drug: “Work on, /My medicine!” (4.1.11-15) But what he administers is the poison, not the antidote – a black parody of the true physician like Burton, whose analysis of love melancholy is the same time a therapeutic offer.

Burton calls jealousy “a most violent passion…, an unspeakable torment, a hellish torture, and infernal plague,” raging especially among Africans and Italians, for “southern men are more hot, lascivious, and jealous than those as live in the north” (III. 264). With characteristic animation he goes on to describe the symptoms of an imagination attacked by jealousy: “strange gestures of staring, frowning, grinning, rolling of eyes, menacing ghastly looks, broken pace, interrupt precipitate half-turns” (III,280) – as if he were coming straight from a performance of Othello. The following relation seems to be aimed directly at Desdemona’s intercession for Cassio: ‘at home, abroad, he is still the same, still inquiring, maundering, gazing, listening…Why did she smile, why did she pity him, commend him?...a whore, a whore, an arrant whore…” (III, 281).

Within the canon of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Othello is the classical case of laesa imagination, a corruption of fancy induced by jealous love that will probe a sickness unto death. The stages of this disease are dramatized as an inescapably fatal process, and at the same time as a diabolic manipulation of the hero by his hidden antagonist – the prehistory, the initial moment presented with tremendous compression in 3.3. the gradual overpowering of Othello’s mind and soul, and the deadly conclusion. An essential aspect of Othello’s status as an exotic outsider in overcivilized Venice is, from the very beginning, his noble and expansive use of imagery, which gives a seductive quality to his speech. When asked by the Duke to reveal the magic tricks that won Desdemona’s heart, his witchcraft turns out to have been a natural art of rhetoric whose native urgency appealed directly to the listener’s fancy: “She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear/ Devour up my discourse” (1.3.149-50).

To Iago this inner realm of emotional linguistics, this interface of adventuring and imagination in his master, is a hostile territory asking to be occupied and devastated; for it expresses a kind of nobility that he perceives as a negation of his own being. When talking to his follower Roderigo he dismisses Othello’s high rhetoric as a distortion of reality, mere high-flown “conceit” in the twofold sense of arrogance and swollen metaphorics: “Mark me with what violence she first lov’d the Moor, but for bragging and telling her fantastical lies” (2.1.222-24). Iago’s cynicism is an anti-imaginative, though by no means realistic, outlook – his own obsession with corrupt sexual fantasies being too much in evidence. He is bent on “untuning” the Othello music, on taking down his master’s high erotic imagination (I’ll set down the pegs that make this music,” 2.1.200) in order to turn this amorous idealism, so profoundly alien and menacing to his nature, into his own vision of “goats and monkeys.” Iago’s imagination, as far as we can tell, is naturally corrupt, i.e., fundamentally distinguished from Hamlet’s or Lear’s erotic disillusion which is the result of intense suffering.

In Othello the close connection between imagination and imagery is made use of as a dramaturgic point. The “monster in thy thought,” the “horrible conceit,” whose half-hidden outline Othello discovers in his ensign’s mind, as soon as Iago’s poison has begun to affect his vision (3.3.107; 115), makes itself felt like some foreign matter in his mind. “Dangerous conceits are in their nature poisons” (3.3.326), is Iagon’s knowledgeable comment. His quasi Pavlovian expertise in stimulus and response causes his victim repeatedly to fall into a frenzy, in response to certain words calculated to unleash his murderous rage. The way Othello regards and treats his wife as a whore, first in front of the Venetian ambassador and next in the “intimate” scene following, shows him as the object of his own “horrible conceit,” which shortly afterwards will drive him to the complementary acts of murder and suicide. In the first case a man alienated from himself destroys his own better self in the guise of the woman he loves, while in the second one he condemns and executes the slanderer and miscreant within himself: “a malignant and a turban’d Turk” (5.2.353). The final cure of his laesa imagination is a lethal operation performed on his own body.

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Conceit, which is Dangerous -- Edward de Vere, Letters

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.

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Sidney's Superpower - the Delusion of Penetration (shared by Hamlet):

 Fulke Greville singled out Sir Philip Sidney's fastidiously DISCRIMINATING spirit for special praise: "he piercing into men's counsels and ends, not by their words, oathes, or complements, all barren in that AGE, but by fathoming their hearts and powers, by their deeds and found no wisedom where he found no courage, nor courage without wisdome, nor either without honesty and truth" The Life, Greville

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Cynthia's Revels and Hamlet:

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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Apheleia/Ophelia?

Jonson - Cynthia's Revels

 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? 

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Ophelia/Soul/Poetry/Beauty/Best and Understanding Part

Hamlet

GERTRUDE

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them.

There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,

And mermaid-like a while they bore her up,

Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element. But long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

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Aphelia (Greek, "plainness") is a rhetorical term that refers to the plainness of writing or speech. It is used to explain or teach rather than to entertain or elicit an emotional response.

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APHELEIA

Apheleia is the fourth virgin introduced by Cupid/Anteros as part of the First Masque at Cynthia's revels. She is a "mute character" and is finally discovered to be Moria in disguise. According to Cupid/Anteros, Apheleia is a nymph as pure and simple as the soul, she appears in white, and symbolizes Simplicity. She emerges without folds, plaits, colors, or ornament. Her emblem is blank and the motto reads "omnis abest fucus" (this lacks all color), alluding to Cynthia's purity. Apheleia's symbol suggests that Cynthia is pure and immortal. At the end of the revels, when Cynthia orders the characters to unmask, Apheleia appears as Moria, who is punished together with the other nymphs and gallants.

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Fucus/Oxford/Man in Hue


Jonson vs. Jones - Poetry the 'soul' of the masque - scenery the 'body'/appearance

Picture/Painting/Appearance - 'Looke Not on his picture but his book' - Jonson, Shakespeare First Folio

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. -- Jonson, To my Beloved Master

Shakespeare/Fucus - How something is said
Jonson - What is being said
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 Painted Extravagance, Divine Inspiration

 Davies, Scourge of Folly
Of the staid furious Poet FUCUS.
Epig. 114

Fucus, the furious Poet writes but Plaies;
So, playing, writes: that’s, idly writeth all:
Yet, idle Plaies, and Players are his Staies;
Which stay him that he can no lower fall:
For, he is fall’n into the deep’st decay,
Where Playes and Players keepe him at a stay.

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Amorphus/Oxford/Shakespeare/Fucus

Defining Society: The Function of Character Names in Ben Jonson’s Early Comedies

Mark Anderson

…Even the women’s choice of their male consorts provides a moral message: Phantaste chooses Amorphus to indicate “fanciful deformity,” (snip)

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 Edward de Vere - Great Officer of State during Essex Rebellion

Melville – Billy Budd, ch. 22

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarkation few will undertake tho' for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing namable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.

Whether Captain Vere, as the Surgeon professionally and privately surmised, was really the sudden victim of any degree of aberration, one must determine for himself by such light as this narrative may afford.

That the unhappy event which has been narrated could not have happened at a worse juncture was but too true. For it was close on the heel of the suppressed insurrections, an aftertime very critical to naval authority, demanding from every English sea-commander two qualities not readily interfusable--prudence and rigour. Moreover there was something crucial in the case.

In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending the event on board the Indomitable, and in the light of that martial code whereby it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places. In a legal view the apparent victim of the tragedy was he who had sought to victimize a man blameless; and the indisputable deed of the latter, navally regarded, constituted the most heinous of military crimes. Yet more. The essential right and wrong involved in the matter, the clearer that might be, so much the worse for the responsibility of a loyal sea-commander inasmuch as he was not authorized to determine the matter on that primitive basis.

Small wonder then that the Indomitable's Captain, though in general a man of rapid decision, felt that circumspectness not less than promptitude was necessary. Until he could decide upon his course, and in each detail; and not only so, but until the concluding measure was upon the point of being enacted, he deemed it advisable, in view of all the circumstances, to guard as much as possible against publicity. Here he may or may not have erred. Certain it is, however, that subsequently in the confidential talk of more than one or two gun-rooms and cabins he was not a little criticized by some officers, a fact imputed by his friends and vehemently by his cousin, Jack Denton, to professional jealousy of Starry Vere. Some imaginative ground for invidious comment there was. The maintenance of secrecy in the matter, the confining all knowledge of it for a time to the place where the homicide occurred, the quarter-deck cabin ; in these particulars lurked some resemblance to the policy adopted in those tragedies of the palace which have occurred more than once in the capital founded by Peter the Barbarian.

(snip)

"But something in your aspect seems to urge that it is not solely the heart that moves in you, but also the conscience, the private conscience. But tell me whether or not, occupying the position we do, private conscience should not yield to that imperial one formulated in the code under which alone we officially proceed?"

Here the three men moved in their seats, less convinced than agitated by the course of an argument troubling but the more the spontaneous conflict within.

Perceiving which, the speaker paused for a moment; then abruptly changing his tone, went on.

"To steady us a bit, let us recur to the facts.--In war-time at sea a man-of-war's-man strikes his superior in grade, and the blow kills. Apart from its effect, the blow itself is, according to the Articles of War, a capital crime. Furthermore-"

"Ay, Sir," emotionally broke in the officer of marines, "in one sense it was. But surely Budd purposed neither mutiny nor homicide."

"Surely not, my good man. And before a court less arbitrary and more merciful than a martial one, that plea would largely extenuate. At the Last Assizes it shall acquit. But how here? We proceed under the law of the Mutiny Act. In feature no child can resemble his father more than that Act resembles in spirit the thing from which it derives--War. In His Majesty's service--in this ship indeed--there are Englishmen forced to fight for the King against their will. Against their conscience, for aught we know. Tho' as their fellow-creatures some of us may appreciate their position, yet as navy officers, what reck we of it? Still less recks the enemy. Our impressed men he would fain cut down in the same swath with our volunteers. As regards the enemy's naval conscripts, some of whom may even share our own abhorrence of the regicidal French Directory , it is the same on our side. *War looks but to the frontage, the appearance*. And the Mutiny Act, War's child, takes after the father. Budd's intent or non-intent is nothing to the purpose.

"But while, put to it by these anxieties in you which I can not but respect, I only repeat myself--while thus strangely we prolong proceedings that should be summary--the enemy may be sighted and an engagement result. We must do; and one of two things must we do--condemn or let go."

"Can we not convict and yet mitigate the penalty?" asked the junior Lieutenant here speaking, and falteringly, for the first.

"Lieutenant, were that clearly lawful for us under the circumstances, consider the consequences of such clemency. The people" (meaning the ship's company) "have native-sense; most of them are familiar with our naval usage and tradition; and how would they take it? Even could you explain to them--which our official position forbids--they, long moulded by arbitrary discipline have not that kind of intelligent responsiveness that might qualify them to comprehend and discriminate. No, to the people the Foretopman's deed, however it be worded in the announcement, will be plain homicide committed in a flagrant act of mutiny. What penalty for that should follow, they know. But it does not follow. Why? they will ruminate. You know what sailors are. Will they not revert to the recent outbreak at the Nore? Ay. They know the well-founded alarm--the panic it struck throughout England. Your clement sentence they would account pusillanimous. They would think that we flinch, that we are afraid of them--afraid of practising a lawful rigour singularly demanded at this juncture lest it should provoke new troubles. What shame to us such a conjecture on their part, and how deadly to discipline. You see then, whither, prompted by duty and the law, I steadfastly drive. But I beseech you, my friends, do not take me amiss. I feel as you do for this unfortunate boy. But did he know our hearts, I take him to be of that generous nature that he would feel even for us on whom in this military necessity so heavy a compulsion is laid." 

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A Shakespearean Critique of Emerson in Melville’s Pierre: Metaphor as Smokescreen and Enthusiasm

Peter A. Yacavone

Soochow University

…Pierre achieves a very similar insight, I suggest, as he meditates upon the conventional trope of sadness attached to a lone pine-tree, observing that ‘sadness’ therefore seems older and stronger than pleasant flowers. Pierre again has his vision of Isabel’s face: “Oh, tree, the face the face!” (Melville, 1995, p.41). This vision as a sense-memory and in its virtual aspect as uncanny phantom, is called up without Pierre’s entirely willing it, for he is beginning to sense that there is a form of sexual willing distinct from what he has understood as will. “Is grief a self-willed guest that will come in?” So far, however, there is no real challenge to Emersonian doctrine. Pierre’s mentality still operates through the regime of predictable metaphoric associations: Lowering pine, dark face, mournful face, etc. He is only entertaining the thought that his aestheticized cosmos must be seasoned with grief to remain pleasurable at all: “Is grief a pendant to pleasure?”

This leads, however, to further scepticism: Pierre begins to speculate that although he know ‘grief’ as an idea, through poetic associations, he has certainly never felt it. “Grief; - thou art a legend to me…art still a ghost story to me. I know thee not, --do half disbelieve in thee’. He finds he can only speak analogically, and intuits another and deeper grief, a “ghostly” and affective “knowing” that perhaps belongs to people with different experiences (such as Isabel), but which has not revealed itself in Pierre’s environment. “Grief’ for Pierre is a mere label without content. That is why Pierre cannot experience it.

This begins the severing of what Emerson has tied. Pierre knows something of the ‘grief’ he has never felt, but his ability to use the word fails to cover the lack of affective experience. One might transform and even create affection through the labelling of language; but are there not experiences that one cannot create without the influence and external force of appearances? Melville’s Charlie Noble develops something like this critique in The Confidence Man: “There is no bent of heart or turn of thought which any man holds by virtue of an unalterable nature or will.” Melville’s interest in experience without will, will without language, and language without real experience (e.g. ‘grief’) all escape the linguistic determination of experience and therefore anticipates the radical  separation entailed by theories such as that of Ellis. Is Emerson’s philosophy of metaphor trapped in a linguistic determination that cannot withstand such an analysis? For if impulse can be experienced and acted upon in some pre-linguistic form, then where is the centrality of language, and metaphor, to sensory and affective experience? If, contra Freud, our ‘unnamable’ and indescribable impulses and reactions to stimuli do not necessarily operate analogically, then how is the language of metaphor empowered to put us in contact with some more ultimate reality?

For Pierre, the concept ‘grief’ amounts to a half-empty place-holder, a surface screen which, at the very least, reveals a virtual absence of what Pierre senses could or should be present: an emotion that he genuinely cannot remember having. In Isabel’s face, metaphor suddenly invokes the phantom of what is not, or may not be. Deleuze has written of crystalline images (and tropes) that replace their objects, both destroying and creating them, but at the precipice of Pierre’s fall, Melville’s literary metaphors, whether viewed a modernstic crystal signs or as an extravagant growth of conventional literary language, seem to be inadequate to the task of replacement. A phantom is left behind where Emerson demands a tight correspondence of inguistic sing and referents (to the benefit of the sign and its creative mastery). There should be no significant sense of anything ‘left out’ or behind.

But here, metaphor becomes a kind of smokescreen, to cite a practice associated with Native Americans (a population of whom inhabited Saddle Meadows before Pierre). Smokescreen ought to communicate what Deleuze (1986) following Peirce, agrees to call a “natural” relation between signs: the presence of smoke indicates the presence of fire, and so forth. However, smokescreen carries the sense of a more abstract, self-abnegating relation: it conceals whatever may be hidden behind it. Smokescreen signifies a relation that is unknown and is in principle unknowable. Looking backwards, we can see that even Pierre’s foaming enthusiasm for love, nature, and Lucy in the garden may itself fulfill the function of (temporarily) concealing the image of Isabel’s face, which becomes manifest at that very climax of Pierre’s ecstasy. The face, intriguingly, appears not to Pierre at that moment, but to Lucy, and uncanny metonymy that allows Melville to reinforce his point about language and not simply about Pierre’s unconscious (with its facile, romantic longings for a ‘safe’ experience of grief).`

Does the sense of metaphor as a smokescreen necessitate that Pierre’s enthusiasm is a hollow sham, as many critics have argued? That would be to go against the grain of the author’s intentions. If language is made fragile by what escapes its net, this does not render it impotent, just as metaphor is no less intense and desirable for being short-lived. Pierre’s time at Saddle Meadows is evidently fulfilling; Melville’s point is that it is simply not sustainable.

Why is it thus? What Melville’s experiment with the Emersonian “Adam early in the morning” (Whitman, Leaves of grass) seems to have finally taught him is that Emerson describes the best of all possible modes of living – if you can keep it! Emerson sees his own writing as truth in action, a mode of living through creative synthesis, while every other mode of living is more or less a pernicious distraction. For Melville, however, it remains on l a privileged mode of living for certain individuals in certain situations. The inevitable social implications of such a contention, however, would seem to rest, for Melville, on the deeper linguistic implications we have suggested. It seems a dreadful ‘fact’ to Melville that although our symbol-making capacity at its best can provide some pragmatic and optimal truths to live by, it does not furnish a correspondingly complete and inviolably ‘optimal’ reality to live in. If truth, according to Emerson is a matter of the will’s troping of nature in order to actualize our powers of mind, Melville’s use of ‘truth’ in Pierre is constantly associated with unwanted knowledge and experience (e.g. Isabel’s letter): images and texts occasioning the ‘actual’ experience of grief. Therefore, there must always be a double standard for ‘truth,’ as Plinlimmon argues in the discourse of 19^th century metaphysics rather than that of signification. Nor can language and other symbols bring and hold these two ‘truths’ together: and this is tantamount to saying, as Pierre later does, that the very notion of truth is inherently misleading and inherently unfulfilling. Melville’s mature understanding of truth remains an actuality that is inscrutable, unrepresentable even at the height of our symbolic powers; it remains radically ‘elsewhere’, like the phantom image of the face. “I own thy speechless, nameless power” cries the Emersonian quester, Ahab, at the crucial moment: is this not what he is taking a stab at?

What constitutes this evidently dreadful reality, this “palsied universe that Melville is literally unable to name? The symbolic may assist us in our attempts to try and survive a threatening universe, but it scarcely represents that universe. Actuality, experienced as the gap between trope and being-in-the-world, always evades such attempts at capture. In this sense, Pierre expresses indiscernibility, or the very critique of the linguistic signifier that Deleuze finds at the heart of modernism. Indeed, contra John Taggarts’ (1989) view, language itself may be inseparable from the very ‘threat” and inscrutability” that Melville so often invokes.

Nevertheless, we may glean from Pierre, that this brute actuality that challenges idealism is not rightly understood as purely ‘transcendental’, but, far from being beyond experience, is something that, like grief, is commonly manifested within experience, and is discovered in its more specified effects as that which accompanies and embraces the downfall of a Melville protagonist, whether linked to temporal passage (Pierre) or to the force and contingency of events (Moby-Dick). The alterity of this elemental reality consist only in the face that it denies representation; this is no doubt why any truth that remains discernible after Pierre’s fall is in the form of the non-verbal, silent, gestural powers of Isabel, whose erotically compelling guitar manifest “the utter unintelligibleness, but infinite significances of the sounds…” (Melville, Pierre)

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Ambisinister Droeshout Engraving/Jonson's 'Oily/Unctuous' Painted Encomium

left-handed Synonyms

Synonyms

artificial, backhanded, counterfeit, double, double-dealing, double-faced, fake, feigned, hypocritical, insincere, lip, mealy, mealymouthed, phony (also phoney), pretended, two-faced, unctuous

Antonyms

artless, candid, genuine, heartfelt, honest, sincere, undesigning, unfeigned

Near Antonyms

direct, forthright, frank, heart-to-heart, open, plain, straightforward

Related Words

affected, assumed,  claptrap, contrived, forced, mechanical, put-on, simulated, strained, unnatural;

empty, hollow, meaningless;

deceitful, devious, dishonest, false, untruthful;

facile, glib, superficial;

bogus, sham;

facetious, jocular, tongue-in-cheek;

canting, pharisaical, pious, sanctimonious, self-righteous, simon-pure

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 Memory Sanctions:

The Art of Forgetting - Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture
Harriet I. Flower

...Memory has a shape, a space, and a cultural meaning. In other words, there is a specific what, where, and how to memory. Just a societies remember differently, so also do they forget differently. Editing and erasure take place within the context of each community's culture of writing, or archives, or images, and of monuments. A forgetting, or lack of commemoration, is defined by the local expectations of what might have happened if memory had been cultivated, either according to or even beyond the accepted norms of the community. Roman erasures can, therefore, only really be read in a Roman context. Cultural memory defines both the individual and the city. In this sense, memory is literally political, for it belongs to the polis. The meaning of memory is its effect within its own particular political community. The polis or political community, in turn, needs a memory story to explain its identity and past. Whatever the historicity of the details in this memory story, its existence is essential to the functioning of the community in the present.
(snip)

The function of sanctions within the community...helps to explain the profound shame that memory sanctions represented for members of the Roman elite. The class of officeholders (nobiles) were defined in terms of recognition during life and in terms of memory after death. Commemoration was the distinguishing mark of politically elite rank. Hence, if commemoration was limited or banned, the nobiles stood to lose their identity and status. Their loss compromised not just the present and future, but also the past, including their connection with their ancestors and with the prestige of their family. The citizen whose memory had been targeted wa removed from the collective memory of the polis. As the Roman senate put it, when it imposed memory sanctions on CN. Piso in A.D. 20, by his suicide Piso had tried to remove himself from punishments he feared the senators would impose, punishments that were worse than death. In what follows I argue that we should try to understand this assertion in a Roman context. The price of these additional punishment was considered so high in terms of public status that it became irrelevant to ask who might still hold onto or cherish a personal memory of the affected individual. Such personal recollections would now only reaffirm how far the person had fallen from a previous position of prominence and recognition. This social background explains how only the political elite who enjoyed the privilege of public commemoration after death. The remembrance of ordinary citizens was in most cases of little concern to those in power and was represented (whether accurately or not) as having no political impact.

At the same time, sanctions must be read a political rhetoric, rather than as mere statements of fact; the reflect a claim on the part of the powerful to impose a narrative and to control the past. Such a claim may or may not be valid or even be put into practice in a consequent way; sometimes it might be little more than an assertion or expression of hope. At this distance in time, the effects of sanctions, especially as measured throughout the Roman Empire, are nearly always hard to gauge. Official sanctions, the subject of this study, were communicated from the top. Audiences for these political statements were varied and included both internal and external groups. Thus reception must always have been a factor, both immediately and in the long term. Did most people understand the messages sent out from Rome and, if so, did they agree with them? The answers varied across time and space. Dialogue could often be dynamic and was not limited to an immediate reaction to the first news of disgrace and political change.

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Billy Budd, Melville, Ch.30

Some few weeks after the execution, among other matters under the head of News from the Mediterranean, there appeared in a naval chronicle of the time, an authorized weekly publication, an account of the affair. It was doubtless for the most part written in good faith, tho' the medium, partly rumor, through which the facts must have reached the writer, served to deflect and in part falsify them. The account was as follows:-

"On the tenth of the last month a deplorable occurrence took place on board H.M.S. Indomitable. John Claggart, the ship's Master-at-arms, discovering that some sort of plot was incipient among an inferior section of the ship's company, and that the ringleader was one William Budd; he, Claggart, in the act of arraigning the man before the Captain was vindictively stabbed to the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath-knife of Budd.

"The deed and the implement employed, sufficiently suggest that tho' mustered into the service under an English name the assassin was no Englishman, but one of those aliens adopting English cognomens whom the present extraordinary necessities of the Service have caused to be admitted into it in considerable numbers.

"The enormity of the crime and the extreme depravity of the criminal, appear the greater in view of the character of the victim, a middle-aged man respectable and discreet, belonging to that official grade, the petty-officers, upon whom, as none know better than the commissioned gentlemen, the efficiency of His Majesty's Navy so largely depends. His function was a responsible one, at once onerous& thankless, and his fidelity in it the greater because of his strong patriotic impulse. In this instance as in so many other instances in these days, the character of this unfortunate man signally refutes, if refutation were needed, that peevish saying attributed to the late Dr. Johnson, that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

"The criminal paid the penalty of his crime. The promptitude of the punishment has proved salutary. Nothing amiss is now apprehended aboard H.M.S. Indomitable."

The above, appearing in a publication now long ago superannuated and forgotten, is all that hitherto has stood in human record to attest what manner of men respectively were John Claggart and Billy Budd.

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 (Billy Budd - Illiterate/Primitive)

Billy in the Darbies - Melville

Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay
And down on his marrow-bones here and pray
For the likes just o' me, Billy Budd.--But look:

through the port comes the moon-shine astray!
It tips the guard's cutlass and silvers this nook;
But 'twill die in the dawning of Billy's last day.
A jewel-block they'll make of me to-morrow,
Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end
Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly--
O, 'tis me, not the sentence they'll suspend.
Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up too
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.
On an empty stomach, now, never it would do.
They'll give me a nibble--bit o' biscuit ere I go.
Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;
But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,
Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!
No pipe to those halyards--but aren't it all sham?
A blur's in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.
A hatchet to my panzer? all adrift to go?
The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?
But the Dansker he has promised to stand by the plank;
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
But--no! It is dead then I'll be, come to think.--
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
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 these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair.

I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

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Definition of sham

1 : a trick that deludes : hoax

• feared that the deal was a sham

2 : cheap falseness : hypocrisy

• saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant
• —Oscar Wilde

3 : an ornamental covering for a pillow

4 : an imitation or counterfeit purporting to be genuine

5 : a person who shams

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Shakespeare - Sonnet 72
 
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.

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Nabokov - 1924 
Shakespeare

Amid grandees of times Elizabethan
you shimmered too, you followed sumptuous custom;
the circle of ruff, the silv’ry satin that
encased your thigh, the wedgelike beard – in all of this
you were like other men… Thus was enfolded
your godlike thunder in a succinct cape.
Haughty, aloof from theatre’s alarums,
you easily, regretlessly relinquished
the laurels twinning into a dry wreath,
concealing for all time your monstrous genius
beneath a mask; and yet, your phantasm’s echoes
still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor,
his anguish; Falstaff’s visage, like an udder
with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear..
You are among us, you’re alive; your name, though,
your image, too – deceiving, thus, the world
you have submerged in your beloved Lethe.
It’s true, of course, a usurer had grown
accustomed, for a sum, to sign your work
(that Shakespeare – Will – who played the Ghost in Hamlet,
who lives in pubs, and died before he could
digest in full his portion of a boar’s head)…
The frigate breathed, your country you were leaving,
To Italy you went. A female voice
called singsong through the iron’s pattern
called to her balcony the tall inglesse,
grown languid from the lemon-tinted moon
and Verona’s streets. My inclination
is to imagine, possibly, the droll
and kind creator of Don Quixote exchanging with you a few casual words
while waiting for fresh horses – and the evening
was surely blue. The well behind the tavern
contained a pail’s pure tinkling sound… Reply
whom did you love? Reveal yourself – whose memoirs
refer to you in passing? Look what numbers
of lowly, worthless souls have left their trace,
what countless names Brantome has for the asking!
Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder,
you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!
No! At the destined hour, when you felt banished
by God from your existence, you recalled
those secret manuscripts, fully aware
that your supremacy would rest unblemished
by public rumor’s unashamed brand,
that ever, midst the shifting dust of ages,
faceless you’d stay, like immortality
itself – then vanished in the distance, smiling.

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phantom

Middle English fantosme, fantome, from Anglo-French fantosme phantasm

Wikipedia
In Classical Greek, the word Lethe literally means "oblivion", "forgetfulness", or "concealment". It is related to the Greek word for "truth", aletheia (ἀλήθεια), meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment".

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A Shakespearean Critique of Emerson in Melville’s Pierre: Metaphor as Smokescreen and Enthusiasm

Peter A. Yacavone

Soochow University

Silencing metaphor: Isabel’s story

...Gabrielle observed that “the face of Isabel frees [Pierre] from a literary existence”, but Isabel fulfills a more important function even that this, for it is her voice – and body – that frees Pierre from language itself. Melville’s prose style is altered completely when he takes on the broken, repetitive, paratactic voice of Isabel in Books VI and VII, to relate her (barely comprehended) history. Gone, almost completely, are even the most conventional literary tropes, for Isabel has never learned them; “I have no tongue to speak with thee” Further:

Now I began to feel strange differences. When I saw a snake trailing through the grass…I said to myself, that thing is not human, but I am human…And so with all things…I cannot speak coherently here…All my thoughts well up in me…I cannot alter them…speech being sometimes before the thought…There I was; just as I found myself in the world; there I was…The farmer scarcely ever spoke to me…the young girls began to stare at me; the bewilderings of the old starings of the …solitary old man and woman by the cracked hearth-stone…in the desolate, round, open space…now returned to me; and the green starings and the serpent hissings of the old cat.

Isabel’s speech is functionally equivalent to ‘image’; whereas young Pierre’s voice has been mediated by poetic associations. Isabel reduces language to only it s barest essential; and this directness and minimalism is sublime in contrast to Pierre’s cheerful mediocrity. There is metaphor here, but derived entirely from the physical and natural relations that Isabel surmises from sense experience (e.g. the snake-like cat) and the few labels, such as “human,” that she has half-learned from adults. Isabel’s sublime, because “so entirely artless” language tries, doubtfully, to represent the world through recollection-images and some semblance of logic, but only reopens the fissures in which representation fails to attain its subject and the temporal gaps that render narration impossible. This does not matter, for her incantatory speech, like her music, gestures, and body, has a communicative power of a different kind, a power outside of language, akin to the majestic power which Emerson attributed to “savages” whom, he believed, had only rudimentary language (which Melville captured so effectively in the tattooed Queequeg). Isabel’s analogous ‘fullness” of being derives from sounds without settled meanings, yet full of affective power – including that conveyed by her memorable shriek. The degree to which that power is outside of the linguistic deformation that results from the imposition of general categories and the acquisition of vast webs of culturally-acquired symbolic associations is the degree to which it seems to be able to capture the actual, the true, and consequently the limits of ‘truth’. But is this a ‘truth’ worth having? Does it belong, properly, to civilized life?