Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital
and the Shakespearean Stage
By Kenneth S. Jackson
(…) Slack situates the movement to reorganize charity and
social welfare in the poor laws alongside the general “regulation of manners
which is such a striking feature of parliamentary activity between 1580 and
1660…” Ideas of charity that had once bound communities together, including
beggars and vagrants, were changing: “There was the increasing use of the
paradigm of the body politic, not to bind together a varied social whole, but
to show the damage which untreated disease, disorder or decay in any one member
might do to the rest: *the diseased members should be cut off*. We might point
also to the growing interest in civility and refinement of manners which can be
traced in the same period.” The cultural pressures at work here, in short, were
not just affecting the poor. It was, as Slack suggests, as if, faced with a
growing and increasingly uglier urban world, “social boundaries were being
redrawn and proper, respectable society being newly and more tightly defined.
The “machinery of the poor law was not designed as an economic regulator, but
as a moral, social and political one. (p.54)
********************************
Jonson, Cynthia's Revels
Cynthia: Dear Arete, and Crites, to you two
We give the Charge; impose what Pains you please:
TH' INCURABLE CUT OFF, the rest REFORM,
Remembring ever what we first decreed,
Since Revels were proclaim'd, let now none bleed.
Arete. How well Diana can distinguish Times,
And sort her Censures, keeping to her self
The Doom of Gods, leaving the rest to us?
Come, cite them, Crites, first, and then proceed.
(snip)
Then, Crites, practise thy DISCRETION.
**************************************
Cynthia: Dear Arete, and Crites, to you two
We give the Charge; impose what Pains you please:
TH' INCURABLE CUT OFF, the rest REFORM,
Remembring ever what we first decreed,
Since Revels were proclaim'd, let now none bleed.
Arete. How well Diana can distinguish Times,
And sort her Censures, keeping to her self
The Doom of Gods, leaving the rest to us?
Come, cite them, Crites, first, and then proceed.
(snip)
Then, Crites, practise thy DISCRETION.
**************************************
The word [discretion] was almost invariably used in
Elizabethan England as a means of constructing social, cultural, or aesthetic
difference. (David Hillman, Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the abuse of
rhetoric).
***************************************
Jonson, on Shakespeare
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our WATERS yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, [Mountbank]
That so did TAKE Eliza and our James!
*****************************************
{{Topic 54}} {{Subject: mass taste}}-Jonson, Timber
Vulgi expectatio.
333 Expectation of the Vulgar is more drawne,
and held with newnesse, then
334 goodnesse; wee see it in Fencers, in Players, in Poets, in Preachers, in all,
335 where Fame promiseth any thing; so it be {{new}} [[now]], though never so naught,
336 and depraved, they run to it, AND ARE TAKEN. Which shewes, that the only
337 decay, or hurt of the best mens reputation with the people, is, their wits
338 have out-liv'd the peoples palats. They have beene too much, or too
339 long a feast.
334 goodnesse; wee see it in Fencers, in Players, in Poets, in Preachers, in all,
335 where Fame promiseth any thing; so it be {{new}} [[now]], though never so naught,
336 and depraved, they run to it, AND ARE TAKEN. Which shewes, that the only
337 decay, or hurt of the best mens reputation with the people, is, their wits
338 have out-liv'd the peoples palats. They have beene too much, or too
339 long a feast.
*****************************************
Shakespeare
Macbeth
Come, sir, dispatch.—If thou couldst, doctor, cast
Come, sir, dispatch.—If thou couldst, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
******************************************
Flawed Inventio:
Thorello
A new disease? I know not new or old,
But it may well be called poor mortals' plague,
For like a pestilence it doth infect
The houses of the brain. First it begins
Solely to work upon the fantasy,
Filling her seat with such pestiferous air
As soon corrupts the judgment, and from thence
Sends like contagion to the memory --
Still each of other catching the infection,
Which, as a searching vapor, spreads itself
Confusedly through every sensive part
Till not a thought or motion in the mind
Be free from the black poison of suspect.
Ah, but what error is it to know this,
And want the free election of the soul
In such extremes! Well, I will once more strive,
Even in despite of hell, myself to be,
And shake this fever off that thus shakes me.
************************************
Lie with her! lie on her! We say lie on her, when
they belie her. Lie with her! that's fulsome.
--Handkerchief--confessions--handkerchief!--To
confess, and be hanged for his labour;--first, to be
hanged, and then to confess.--I tremble at it.
Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing
passion without some instruction. It is not words
that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips.
--Is't possible?--Confess--handkerchief!--O devil!--
they belie her. Lie with her! that's fulsome.
--Handkerchief--confessions--handkerchief!--To
confess, and be hanged for his labour;--first, to be
hanged, and then to confess.--I tremble at it.
Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing
passion without some instruction. It is not words
that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips.
--Is't possible?--Confess--handkerchief!--O devil!--
Falls in a trance
Work on,
My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught;
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach.
My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught;
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach.
***************************
The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the
Development of ...
By Joel B. Altman
In such plays as Gammer
Gurton’s Needle, The Supposes, Mother Bombie, and The Comedy of Errors, we have witnessed a developing acknowledgment
that human wit, for all its inventive power, has its limitations. In July and Julian, The Bugbears, and All Fools,
the emphasis is just the reverse: here, there is a tendency to celebrate wit
for its sheer virtuosity and, in Chapman expecially, a danger (always implicit
in the cultivation of rhetoric) that wit will become detached from its moral
base. Ben Jonson discriminates the matter more finely. For him, the inventive
faculty is both an instrument of knowledge and of morality, and consequently
the “supposes” arrived at through the exercise of invention are neither comic
manifestations of epistemological limitation nor ironic, though satisfactory,
accommodations to unpleasant reality. The validity of a “suppose” lies entirely
in its relation to reasonable truth. This is because Jonson’s dramas are
concerned with the secular world of probability, and in the Ciceronian
tradition assume that a well-reasoned view of truth is an adequate guide to the
moral life. Jonson’s concern with the relation of invention to truth was
lifelong; in Every Man in His Humour (1598), he examines the problem carefully
for the first time, drawing upon both the latin and native traditions to create
a comedy with a new humanistic standard.
Not unexpectedly, the central question of the play is
formulated in self-consciously literary terms. Which is more valuable in the
education of a young man, Jonson asks, poetry or experience?
Myself was once a student and, indeed,
Fed with the self-same humor he is now,
Dreaming on naught but idle poetry;
But since, experience hath awaked my spirits,
And reason taught them how to comprehend
The sovereign use of study.
Dreaming and poetry, reason and experience. These are the
initial antitheses upon which the inquiry is based.
(snip)
The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the
Development of ...
By Joel B. Altman
The most complex exemplum encountered by Prospero and
Lorenzo is Thorello, the would-be cuckold. What makes him especially
interesting is the coexistence within his soul of an awareness that his
fiction-making is a malady, along with a corresponding inability to stop
himself from indulging in it. He is an incorrigible hypothesizer. Jonson offers
a detailed anatomy of Thorello’s FLAWED INVENTIO in his agonized auto-consultationes. Notice how, in the
following passage, he creates a false scenario by proceeding from the actual
circumstance – the physical proximity of the gallants and his wife – and uses
the commonplace that beauty wars against chastity to transform that proximity
into a proof of potential cuckoldry. Then, assuming the truth of this
potentiality – that his wife and the gallants share a mutual desire for one another
– he reasons that all they lack is time and opportunity, which he vows not to
allow them:
Why, 't cannot be, where there is such resort
Of wanton gallants and young revelers,
That any woman should be honest long.
Is't like that factious beauty will preserve
The sovereign state of chastity unscarred
When such strong motives muster and make head
Against her single peace? No, no. Beware
When mutual pleasure sways the appetite,
And spirits of one kind and quality
Do meet to parley in the pride of blood.
Well, to be plain, if I but thought the time
Had answered their affections, all the world
Should not persuade me but I were a cuckold.
Marry, I hope they have not got that start;
For opportunity hath balked them yet,
And shall do still, while I have eyes and ears
To attend the imposition of my heart.
My presence shall be as an iron bar
'Twixt the conspiring motions of desire.
Yea, every look or glance mine eye objects
Shall check occasion, as one doth his slave
When he forgets the limits of prescription.
From this soliloquy, the familiar forensic technique of
adducing probably proof from place, person, motive, commonplace, time, and
occasion – and of imposing a certain color over the whole – has been
transformed into a subtle instrument for the portrayal of character. Jonson
shows us not only the mind drawing elements of proof from both actuality and
his own storehouse of sententious truths, but also the leaps it must take under
the compulsion to confirm such proof. This compulsion is rendered the more
vivid by the color Thorello unconsciously uses – the transparent imagery of
frustrated sexual desire through which he expresses his intention to prevent
the realization of his own scenario. The speech is a devastating expose of
false rhetoric, in which the advocate reveals himself more than he knows.
The gulls whom Prospero and Lorenzo encounter, then, are not
merely exempla engaged in comic consilia, but more particularly,
creators of bad fictions. Their fictions are bad because *their inventive
faculty serves their passions*, and thus is out of touch with the facts that
reason might reveal – in particular, those facts pertaining to themselves.
*************************************
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 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 ----
*************************************
John Southern to Earl of Oxford (Pandora, 1584)
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, (see Amorphus, Cynthia's Revels)
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.
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, (see Amorphus, Cynthia's Revels)
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.
***************************
ULYSSES-POLITROPUS-AMORPHUS - Cynthia's Revels
Politropus/Polytropus
Polytropos means much-turned or much-traveled, much-wandering. It is the defining quality of Odysseus, used in the first line of the Odyssey and at 10.330. As used by Hippias with respect to Odysseus (365b) it includes being false or lying and carries the connotations of wily and shifty. Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who wrote Socratic dialogues, also argued against the claim that Homer meant to blame Odysseus by calling him polytropos; Antisthenes claims that it is praise for being "good at dealing with men...being wise, he knows how to associate with men in many ways." See Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.121-24.
Politropus/Polytropus
Polytropos means much-turned or much-traveled, much-wandering. It is the defining quality of Odysseus, used in the first line of the Odyssey and at 10.330. As used by Hippias with respect to Odysseus (365b) it includes being false or lying and carries the connotations of wily and shifty. Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who wrote Socratic dialogues, also argued against the claim that Homer meant to blame Odysseus by calling him polytropos; Antisthenes claims that it is praise for being "good at dealing with men...being wise, he knows how to associate with men in many ways." See Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.121-24.
*********************************
From Gabriel Harvey, Latin Address at Audley End – to the Earl of
Oxford
For long time past Phoebus Apollo has cultivated thy mind in the arts.
English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough.
Let that Courtly Epistle, more polished even than the writings of Castiglione himself
witness how greatly thou dost excel in letters.
I have seen many Latin verses of thine, yea,
even more English verses are extant;
Thou hast drunk deep draughts not only of the Muses of France and Italy,
But hast learned the MANNERS of many men, and the arts of foreign countries.
It was not for nothing that Sturmius, himself was visited by thee,
Neither in France, Italy, nor Germany are any such cultivated and polished men.
English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough.
Let that Courtly Epistle, more polished even than the writings of Castiglione himself
witness how greatly thou dost excel in letters.
I have seen many Latin verses of thine, yea,
even more English verses are extant;
Thou hast drunk deep draughts not only of the Muses of France and Italy,
But hast learned the MANNERS of many men, and the arts of foreign countries.
It was not for nothing that Sturmius, himself was visited by thee,
Neither in France, Italy, nor Germany are any such cultivated and polished men.
**********************************
Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie (1589)
CHAP. XXII.
Some vices in speaches and {w}riting are alwayes intollerable, some others now and then borne {w}ithall by licence of approued authors and custome. (snip)
Another of your intollerable vices is that which the Greekes call Soraismus, & we may call the [mingle mangle] as when we make our speach or writinges of sundry languages vsing some Italian word, or French, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Scottish, not for the nonce or for any purpose (which were in part excusable) but ignorantly and affectedly as one that said vsing this French word Roy, to make ryme with another verse, thus.
O mightie Lord or ioue, dame Venus onely ioy,
Whose Princely power exceedes ech other heauenly roy.
The verse is good but the terme peeuishly affected Another of reasonable good facilitie in translation finding certaine of the hymnes of Pyndarus and of Anacreons odes, and other Lirickes among the Greekes very well translated by Rounsard the French Poet,
&
applied to the honour of a great Prince in France, comes our minion and translates the same out of French into English, and applieth them to the honour of a GREAT NOBLE MAN in ENGLAND (wherein I commend his reuerent minde and duetie) but doth so impudently robbe the French Poet both of his prayse and also of his French termes, that I cannot so much pitie him as be angry with him for his iniurious dealing (our sayd maker not being ashamed to vse these French wordes freddon, egar, superbous, filanding, celest, calabrois, thebanois and a number of others, for English wordes, which haue no maner of conformitie with our language either by custome or deriuation which may make them tollerable. And in the end (which is worst of all) makes his vaunt that neuer English finger but his hath toucht Pindars string which was neuerthelesse word by word as Rounsard had said before by like braggery. These be his verses.
And of an ingenious INVENTION, INFANTED WITH PLEASANT TRAVAILE.
CHAP. XXII.
Some vices in speaches and {w}riting are alwayes intollerable, some others now and then borne {w}ithall by licence of approued authors and custome. (snip)
Another of your intollerable vices is that which the Greekes call Soraismus, & we may call the [mingle mangle] as when we make our speach or writinges of sundry languages vsing some Italian word, or French, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Scottish, not for the nonce or for any purpose (which were in part excusable) but ignorantly and affectedly as one that said vsing this French word Roy, to make ryme with another verse, thus.
O mightie Lord or ioue, dame Venus onely ioy,
Whose Princely power exceedes ech other heauenly roy.
The verse is good but the terme peeuishly affected Another of reasonable good facilitie in translation finding certaine of the hymnes of Pyndarus and of Anacreons odes, and other Lirickes among the Greekes very well translated by Rounsard the French Poet,
&
applied to the honour of a great Prince in France, comes our minion and translates the same out of French into English, and applieth them to the honour of a GREAT NOBLE MAN in ENGLAND (wherein I commend his reuerent minde and duetie) but doth so impudently robbe the French Poet both of his prayse and also of his French termes, that I cannot so much pitie him as be angry with him for his iniurious dealing (our sayd maker not being ashamed to vse these French wordes freddon, egar, superbous, filanding, celest, calabrois, thebanois and a number of others, for English wordes, which haue no maner of conformitie with our language either by custome or deriuation which may make them tollerable. And in the end (which is worst of all) makes his vaunt that neuer English finger but his hath toucht Pindars string which was neuerthelesse word by word as Rounsard had said before by like braggery. These be his verses.
And of an ingenious INVENTION, INFANTED WITH PLEASANT TRAVAILE.
***************************************
In his perceptive review of MM Mahood's Shakespeare's
Wordplay GK Hunter makes the provocative suggestion that there is a book to be
written, 'a Romantic and moving tale of love and hate between the Bard and the
Word - Shakespeare's verbal vision of evil, when words cease to mean what they
say.' Although such a publication is still to emerge, when it does a notable
chapter will surely be devoted to Othello, the play which perhaps more than any
other 'words' us. In Othello language itself is made a Janus. Words are
inverted, perverted, and ultimately even rendered meaningless, and with the
corruption of the real worth of language comes that of the honour and honesty
in the nature of the men who hear and speak it. (Catherine M. Shaw. 'Dangerous
Conceits Are in Their Natures Poisons': The Language of Othello)
**************************************
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.
***************************************
Othello, Shakespeare
Iago:
**************************************
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.
***************************************
Othello, Shakespeare
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.)
*******************************
Jonson - Poetaster
...This 'tis, that STRIKES ME SILENT, *SEALS MY LIPS*,
And apts me rather to sleep out my time,
Than I would waste it in contemned strifes,
With these VILE IBIDES, these unclean Birds,
That make their Mouths their CLYSTERS, and still purge
From their hot entrails. But, I leave the MONSTERS
To their own fate. And, since the Comick Muse
Hath prov'd so ominous to me, I will try
If Tragœdie have a more kind aspect;
Her favours in my next I will pursue,
Where, if I prove the pleasure but of one,
So he judicious be; He shall b' alone
A Theater unto me:
And apts me rather to sleep out my time,
Than I would waste it in contemned strifes,
With these VILE IBIDES, these unclean Birds,
That make their Mouths their CLYSTERS, and still purge
From their hot entrails. But, I leave the MONSTERS
To their own fate. And, since the Comick Muse
Hath prov'd so ominous to me, I will try
If Tragœdie have a more kind aspect;
Her favours in my next I will pursue,
Where, if I prove the pleasure but of one,
So he judicious be; He shall b' alone
A Theater unto me:
***************************
Honest Ben/Honest Iago:
OTHELLO
Ay, ’twas he that told me on her first.
An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sticks on filthy deeds.
*****************************
Jonson - On the Famous Voyage
...Back, cry'd their Brace of Charons: they cry'd,
No,
No going back; on still you Rogues, and row.
How hight the place? A Voice was heard, Cocytus.
Row close then Slaves. Alas, they will beshite us.
No matter, Stinkards, row. What croaking Sound
Is this we hear? Of Frogs? No, Guts Wind-bound,
Over your Heads: Well, row. At this a loud
Crack did report itself, as if a Cloud
Had burst with Storm, and down fell, ab Excelsis,
Poor Mercury, crying out on Paracelsus,
And all his Followers, that had so abus'd him:
And, in so shitten sort, so long had us'd him:
For (where he was the god of Eloquence,
And subtilty of Metals) they dispense
His Spirits, now, in Pills, and eke in Potions,
Suppositories, Cataplasms, and Lotions.
**************************************
No going back; on still you Rogues, and row.
How hight the place? A Voice was heard, Cocytus.
Row close then Slaves. Alas, they will beshite us.
No matter, Stinkards, row. What croaking Sound
Is this we hear? Of Frogs? No, Guts Wind-bound,
Over your Heads: Well, row. At this a loud
Crack did report itself, as if a Cloud
Had burst with Storm, and down fell, ab Excelsis,
Poor Mercury, crying out on Paracelsus,
And all his Followers, that had so abus'd him:
And, in so shitten sort, so long had us'd him:
For (where he was the god of Eloquence,
And subtilty of Metals) they dispense
His Spirits, now, in Pills, and eke in Potions,
Suppositories, Cataplasms, and Lotions.
**************************************
David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life, p.232-3.
The placement of "The Famous Voyage" at the conclusion of [Jonson's]s Epigrams calls into question the upward trajectory of the sequence as a whole. The Oxford editors call it a "bad joke"; Wilson regards it as a symptom of Jonson's anal-erotic compulsions. Since the famous voyagers are themselves an example of failed transcendence - a final, hallucinatory image of two gallants who remain mired in the London underworld - the poem raises the issue of Jonson's ability to complete his personal odyssey.
In his parting tribute to William Roe, the last of his heroic exemplars, Jonson invokes the classic example of a successful descent-and-return"
This is that good AENEAS, past through fire,
Through seas, stormes, tempests: and imbarqu'd for hell,
Came back untouch'd. This man hath travail'd well.
Aeneas's safe passage through the underworld was a familiar image of the good man's ability to glean something of value from the basest regions of experience while keeping his virtue intact. Where Roe possesses this capacity to travel (or "travail") well, the protagonists of "The Famous Voyage" perform a burlesque of the Virgilian ideal as
they unfrighted passe, though many a privie
Spake to 'hem louder, then the oxe in LIVIE;
And many a sinke pour'd out her rage anenst 'hem;
But still their valour, and their vertue fenc't 'hem.
Jonson's personal enactment of the journey into the depths hovers somewhere between the mythic ideal and its scurrilous antitype. His conviction that comedy and satire should encompass the grossest aspects of everyday life led him into the nether regions of the city streets and the human anatomy. The record of his drinking bouts, his wenching, his quarrels, and his "cross business" in Paris, indicates that he did not always maintain the posture of the detached observer during his own excursions into the underworld. Yet Jonson believed (or wanted to believe) that he came back unscathed and transformed his vagrant moments into art: that he, like Roe, had the requisite inner stability "to know vice well, / And her blacke spight expell." In the words of the passage in Seneca from which he took his motto ("tanquam explorator") , Jonson "was wont to cross over even into the enemy's camp - not as a deserter, but as a scout." Whereas the protagonists of "The Famous Voyage" merely commute between the tavern and the brothel, the poet-narrator of Epigrams has gradually disengaged himself from this milieu.
The placement of "The Famous Voyage" at the conclusion of [Jonson's]s Epigrams calls into question the upward trajectory of the sequence as a whole. The Oxford editors call it a "bad joke"; Wilson regards it as a symptom of Jonson's anal-erotic compulsions. Since the famous voyagers are themselves an example of failed transcendence - a final, hallucinatory image of two gallants who remain mired in the London underworld - the poem raises the issue of Jonson's ability to complete his personal odyssey.
In his parting tribute to William Roe, the last of his heroic exemplars, Jonson invokes the classic example of a successful descent-and-return"
This is that good AENEAS, past through fire,
Through seas, stormes, tempests: and imbarqu'd for hell,
Came back untouch'd. This man hath travail'd well.
Aeneas's safe passage through the underworld was a familiar image of the good man's ability to glean something of value from the basest regions of experience while keeping his virtue intact. Where Roe possesses this capacity to travel (or "travail") well, the protagonists of "The Famous Voyage" perform a burlesque of the Virgilian ideal as
they unfrighted passe, though many a privie
Spake to 'hem louder, then the oxe in LIVIE;
And many a sinke pour'd out her rage anenst 'hem;
But still their valour, and their vertue fenc't 'hem.
Jonson's personal enactment of the journey into the depths hovers somewhere between the mythic ideal and its scurrilous antitype. His conviction that comedy and satire should encompass the grossest aspects of everyday life led him into the nether regions of the city streets and the human anatomy. The record of his drinking bouts, his wenching, his quarrels, and his "cross business" in Paris, indicates that he did not always maintain the posture of the detached observer during his own excursions into the underworld. Yet Jonson believed (or wanted to believe) that he came back unscathed and transformed his vagrant moments into art: that he, like Roe, had the requisite inner stability "to know vice well, / And her blacke spight expell." In the words of the passage in Seneca from which he took his motto ("tanquam explorator") , Jonson "was wont to cross over even into the enemy's camp - not as a deserter, but as a scout." Whereas the protagonists of "The Famous Voyage" merely commute between the tavern and the brothel, the poet-narrator of Epigrams has gradually disengaged himself from this milieu.
***************************
Cartwright, William, Jonsonus Virbius
...Blest life of Authors, unto whom we owe
Those that we have, and those that we want too:
Th'art all so good, that reading makes thee worse,
And to have writ so well's thine onely curse.
Secure then of thy merit, thou didst hate
That servile base dependance upon fate:
Successe thou ne'r thoughtst vertue, nor that fit,
Which chance, and TH'AGES FASHION DID MAKE HIT;
*Excluding those from life in after-time*,
Who into Po'try first brought luck and rime:
Who thought the peoples breath good ayre: sty'ld name
What was but noise; and getting Briefes for fame
Gathered the many's suffrages, and thence
Made COMMENDATION a BENEVOLENCE:
THY thoughts were their owne Lawrell, and did win
That best applause of being crown'd within..
...Blest life of Authors, unto whom we owe
Those that we have, and those that we want too:
Th'art all so good, that reading makes thee worse,
And to have writ so well's thine onely curse.
Secure then of thy merit, thou didst hate
That servile base dependance upon fate:
Successe thou ne'r thoughtst vertue, nor that fit,
Which chance, and TH'AGES FASHION DID MAKE HIT;
*Excluding those from life in after-time*,
Who into Po'try first brought luck and rime:
Who thought the peoples breath good ayre: sty'ld name
What was but noise; and getting Briefes for fame
Gathered the many's suffrages, and thence
Made COMMENDATION a BENEVOLENCE:
THY thoughts were their owne Lawrell, and did win
That best applause of being crown'd within..
****************************
Art hath an Enemy called Ignorance - Jonson
Jonson on Shakespeare:
I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour
to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted
out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they
thought a MALEVOLENT speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their
IGNORANCE, who choose that circumstance to COMMEND their friend by, wherein he
most FAULTED...
***************************
SENECA
EPISTLE CXIV.
~CXIV+ ON STYLE AS A MIRROR OF CHARACTER
...In short, whenever you notice that a DEGENERATE STYLE pleases the critics, you may be sure that character also has deviated from the right standard. Just as luxurious banquets and elaborate dress are indications of disease in the state, similarly a LAX STYLE, if it be popular, shows that the mind (which is the source of the word) has lost its balance. Indeed you ought not to wonder that corrupt speech is welcomed not merely by the more squalid mob but also by our more cultured throng; for it is only in their dress and not in their judgments that they differ. You may rather wonder that not only the effects of vices, but even vices themselves, meet with approval. For it has ever been thus: no man's ability has ever been approved without something being pardoned. : ) Show me any man, however famous; I can tell you what it was that his age forgave in him, and what it was that his age purposely overlooked. * I can show you many men whose vices have caused them no harm, and not a few who have been even helped by these vices. Yes, I will show you persons of the highest reputation, set up as models for our admiration; and yet if you seek to correct their errors, you destroy them; for vices are so intertwined with virtues that they drag the virtues along with them.* (SNIP)
Some individual makes these vices fashionable - some person who controls the eloquence of the day; the rest follow his lead and communicate the habit to each other.
EPISTLE CXIV.
~CXIV+ ON STYLE AS A MIRROR OF CHARACTER
...In short, whenever you notice that a DEGENERATE STYLE pleases the critics, you may be sure that character also has deviated from the right standard. Just as luxurious banquets and elaborate dress are indications of disease in the state, similarly a LAX STYLE, if it be popular, shows that the mind (which is the source of the word) has lost its balance. Indeed you ought not to wonder that corrupt speech is welcomed not merely by the more squalid mob but also by our more cultured throng; for it is only in their dress and not in their judgments that they differ. You may rather wonder that not only the effects of vices, but even vices themselves, meet with approval. For it has ever been thus: no man's ability has ever been approved without something being pardoned. : ) Show me any man, however famous; I can tell you what it was that his age forgave in him, and what it was that his age purposely overlooked. * I can show you many men whose vices have caused them no harm, and not a few who have been even helped by these vices. Yes, I will show you persons of the highest reputation, set up as models for our admiration; and yet if you seek to correct their errors, you destroy them; for vices are so intertwined with virtues that they drag the virtues along with them.* (SNIP)
Some individual makes these vices fashionable - some person who controls the eloquence of the day; the rest follow his lead and communicate the habit to each other.
*******************************
Iago’s Envious/Passionate Inventio
The Race of Shakespeare’s Mind and
Manners
*****************************
*****************************
Iago's Clyster:
Purgation, Anality, and the Civilizing Process
Ben Saunders
In this essay I will elaborate a hermeneutic strategy that builds on the hints provided by Iago's attraction to verbal figures of purgation, evacuation, and oral/anal substitution and displacement, as witnessed in this passage. By attending to the neglected (waste) matter of bodily purgation and regulation in this play, I hope not only to say something about early modern anality but also to broaden our sense of its relation to a historically emergent racist vocabulary. In the process I will expand on the (by-now) commonplace notion that Othello generates a good deal of its aesthetic effect, and emotional affect, through "a black/white opposition" that is "built into the play at every level." Assuming the centrality of a related opposition between civilization and barbarism, which I find reinscribed and deconstructed throughout the text, I will suggest that the process of ideological invention whereby "civilized" man is distinguished from his "barbaric" other emerges in Othello quite literally from the sewer. In this account, Iago represents not only a portrait of the villain as anal-retentive artist but also as the Shakespearean figure who expresses the (disavowed) centrality of lower- body functions to the production of "civilized" Christian masculinity-- and who therefore also best reveals the violent, disciplinary force that is the (again, disavowed) foundation of that "civilizing" process.
(snip) "I cannot imagine any spectator leaving Othello feeling cleansed."Edward Pechter
An excretory précis of the plot of Othello therefore runs as follows: Iago talks shit, pumping pestilence into Othello's ear, literally filling Othello's head with shit, until he believes that his love object smells like shit, and comes to feel that he has actually been smeared with shit--shit that can be washed away only with Desdemona's blood. Then, upon killing her, Othello discovers that he has not removed the stain but has rather become the very substance that soils: along with everything else he touches, Iago has turned Othello into shit.
(snip)
To conclude by returning briefly to the "clyster-pipes" that initially inspired my inquiry: these pipes may now look more unpleasant than ever, though in the context of the foregoing arguments, their invocation is perhaps less startling. For the entire text of Othello can be read as in some sense the result of Iago's investment in violent evacuation and purgation. Iago--who restores the "natural" order in terms of normative homo-social and racially pure power relations--might even see his actions as analogous to those of the early modern physician, restoring health to what he would consider a diseased body politic, clogged as it is with unhealthful foreign excrements that have risen from the lower extremities, where they belong, to positions of power and authority: "Work on, / My medicine, work!" he cries, as the fit seizes Othello and drives him to his knees (4.1.44-45). He hatches a plot to expunge Venetian society of everything he associates with lower-body functions: women, people of color, sexual desire. Iago's "monstrous birth" is no baby, then, but rather a tremendous evacuation--the inevitable and horrific consequence of a "diet of revenge." And the complete success of Iago's enema is attested to when this masterful shitmonger has nothing left to say: "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word" (5.2.300-301). The clyster has done its work. Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, and Roderigo lie dead, and Iago is . . . empty. Silent. Purged. But Iago's sadistic drives have already exposed the civilized impulses toward order, control, and cleanliness, impulses that provide one linguistic matrix for modern racism, as rooted in a series of paradoxical disavowals and denials: the obsessive need for order that itself produces chaos; the tremendous appetite to deny appetite; the consuming passion to be free of passion; the excessive desire to eliminate all excess; the overpowering lust to banish lust. Shakespeare has personified the civilizing process in Iago, an anal-retentive proto-racist poet devoted to the terrible logic of the purge.
Purgation, Anality, and the Civilizing Process
Ben Saunders
In this essay I will elaborate a hermeneutic strategy that builds on the hints provided by Iago's attraction to verbal figures of purgation, evacuation, and oral/anal substitution and displacement, as witnessed in this passage. By attending to the neglected (waste) matter of bodily purgation and regulation in this play, I hope not only to say something about early modern anality but also to broaden our sense of its relation to a historically emergent racist vocabulary. In the process I will expand on the (by-now) commonplace notion that Othello generates a good deal of its aesthetic effect, and emotional affect, through "a black/white opposition" that is "built into the play at every level." Assuming the centrality of a related opposition between civilization and barbarism, which I find reinscribed and deconstructed throughout the text, I will suggest that the process of ideological invention whereby "civilized" man is distinguished from his "barbaric" other emerges in Othello quite literally from the sewer. In this account, Iago represents not only a portrait of the villain as anal-retentive artist but also as the Shakespearean figure who expresses the (disavowed) centrality of lower- body functions to the production of "civilized" Christian masculinity-- and who therefore also best reveals the violent, disciplinary force that is the (again, disavowed) foundation of that "civilizing" process.
(snip) "I cannot imagine any spectator leaving Othello feeling cleansed."Edward Pechter
An excretory précis of the plot of Othello therefore runs as follows: Iago talks shit, pumping pestilence into Othello's ear, literally filling Othello's head with shit, until he believes that his love object smells like shit, and comes to feel that he has actually been smeared with shit--shit that can be washed away only with Desdemona's blood. Then, upon killing her, Othello discovers that he has not removed the stain but has rather become the very substance that soils: along with everything else he touches, Iago has turned Othello into shit.
(snip)
To conclude by returning briefly to the "clyster-pipes" that initially inspired my inquiry: these pipes may now look more unpleasant than ever, though in the context of the foregoing arguments, their invocation is perhaps less startling. For the entire text of Othello can be read as in some sense the result of Iago's investment in violent evacuation and purgation. Iago--who restores the "natural" order in terms of normative homo-social and racially pure power relations--might even see his actions as analogous to those of the early modern physician, restoring health to what he would consider a diseased body politic, clogged as it is with unhealthful foreign excrements that have risen from the lower extremities, where they belong, to positions of power and authority: "Work on, / My medicine, work!" he cries, as the fit seizes Othello and drives him to his knees (4.1.44-45). He hatches a plot to expunge Venetian society of everything he associates with lower-body functions: women, people of color, sexual desire. Iago's "monstrous birth" is no baby, then, but rather a tremendous evacuation--the inevitable and horrific consequence of a "diet of revenge." And the complete success of Iago's enema is attested to when this masterful shitmonger has nothing left to say: "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word" (5.2.300-301). The clyster has done its work. Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, and Roderigo lie dead, and Iago is . . . empty. Silent. Purged. But Iago's sadistic drives have already exposed the civilized impulses toward order, control, and cleanliness, impulses that provide one linguistic matrix for modern racism, as rooted in a series of paradoxical disavowals and denials: the obsessive need for order that itself produces chaos; the tremendous appetite to deny appetite; the consuming passion to be free of passion; the excessive desire to eliminate all excess; the overpowering lust to banish lust. Shakespeare has personified the civilizing process in Iago, an anal-retentive proto-racist poet devoted to the terrible logic of the purge.
*******************************
Robert Hornback, Black Face Folly:
when Edgar in King Lear (1605) disguises himself as
the natural fool Tom o’ Bedlam, he too draws on such an allegorical association
when he blackens his face: ‘My face I’ll grime with filth’ (II.iii.9), with
‘grime’ meaning, according to the OED, ‘To cover with grime, to
blacken, befoul’.1
************************************
A Globe of Addle Gallants: (addle/Filth)
Author: Holland, Abraham, d. 1626.
Title: Naumachia, or Hollands sea-fight Date: 1622
A Caveat to his Muse
Title: Naumachia, or Hollands sea-fight Date: 1622
A Caveat to his Muse
(snip)
You deem it a matter of high worth
To have a fame among 'em: New come forth:
And thinke your chiefe felicity is marr'd
If you be not perch't up in Paules Church-yard
Where men a farre may know you in a trice,
By some new-fangled, brasse-cut Frontispice.
Such book's indeed as now-dayes can passé
Had need to have their FACES made of BRASSE.(note - refer to Droeshout engraving)
To have a fame among 'em: New come forth:
And thinke your chiefe felicity is marr'd
If you be not perch't up in Paules Church-yard
Where men a farre may know you in a trice,
By some new-fangled, brasse-cut Frontispice.
Such book's indeed as now-dayes can passé
Had need to have their FACES made of BRASSE.(note - refer to Droeshout engraving)
Is it not then sufficient for you
To stay at home among the residue
Of better sisters: where my dearest Will, (my note - Will Browne?)
And other friends would praise and love thee still:
Him and my other harts-halfes I account
Intire assemblies, and thinke they surmount
A GLOBE of ADDLE Gallants: I averre
One judging Plato worth a Theater.
To stay at home among the residue
Of better sisters: where my dearest Will, (my note - Will Browne?)
And other friends would praise and love thee still:
Him and my other harts-halfes I account
Intire assemblies, and thinke they surmount
A GLOBE of ADDLE Gallants: I averre
One judging Plato worth a Theater.
***********************************
William Cartwright:
...Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lyes
I'th Ladies questions, and the Fooles replyes;
Old fashion'd wit, which walkt from town to town
In turn'd Hose, which our fathers call'd the clowne;
Whose wit our nice times would OBSCEANNESSE call,
And which made Bawdry passe for Comicall:
Nature was all his Art, thy veine was free
As his, but without his SCURILITY;
...Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lyes
I'th Ladies questions, and the Fooles replyes;
Old fashion'd wit, which walkt from town to town
In turn'd Hose, which our fathers call'd the clowne;
Whose wit our nice times would OBSCEANNESSE call,
And which made Bawdry passe for Comicall:
Nature was all his Art, thy veine was free
As his, but without his SCURILITY;
*************************************
Moors and Natural Fools:
Moor’s Coat, “Muckender,” and “Moros”
Hornback, Robert
...Given the wealth of evidence of associations between
blackface, natural fools, and Moors, I am suggesting that Burbage in blackface
as Othello, especially, as we shall see, in light of Shakespeare’s deployment
of other emblems of natural folly, would have been quite as likely to call to
mind the now-lost natural fool tradition of comic abuse on the Renaissance
stage as the now more familiar association with evil. In addition, other
obvious emblems of natural folly, such as the Moor’s standard stage apparel,
would have reinforced associations between Othello and the abject, scapegoated
natural fool. In “The Device of the Pageant,” for instance, Peele refers simply
to a character “apparelled like a Moor, “ suggesting that Moors had a
conventional, recognizable stage costume. But how were stage Moors
traditionally apparelled? As is so often the case, Shakespeare’s contemporary
Phillip Henslowe’s detailed records are an invaluable source for recovering
Renaissance theatre practices: Henslowe’s list of properties includes a “Mores
cotte,” referring to the flowing, ankle-length aljuba traditionally worn
by Moors. (snip) That Othello too would actually have worn a Moor’s coat is
underscored, I believe, by the emphasis on his essential strangeness, his
exotic otherness and obvious lack of complete assimilation when he is
characterized as “pagan”, “ Barbary” (i.e., “Barbarian” ), “rude”, “stranger”
associated with exotic “Egyptian” magic: he is, in short, emphatically an
“extravagant and wheeling stranger? Of here and everywhere”. The Moor’s coat
would obviously have signalled this sensational, “extravagant” otherness.
What is significant about Othello’s likely appearance in Moor’s
coat is that in Henslowe’s records “we find that the fool’s gown, the Moor’s
flowing aljuba, and the Levantine and Scythian caftan were all classed
as coats.” Thus the English translated and transformed the long ankle-length
Moorish gown into both their own idiom and their own more familiar fashion of a
long coat or petticoat – a garment traditionally worn in England only by women,
small children, and, most importantly, fools.
(snip)
Then main point I want to add to our understanding of
Shakespeare’s long-recognized use of allegory in Othello, therefore, is that in
his use of emblems of folly Shakespeare toys with audience expectations by
inviting laughter at the outset to make it complicit in Iago’s abuse of
Othello. Part of Shakespeare’s rationale in deploying allegorical emblems of
natural folly, I argue, then, was apparently to implicate his audience in what
Brooke has termed the “horrid laughter” characteristic of Jacobean tragedy – “a
nightmare of complicit participation in which even the normally gently will
occasionally find themselves, disgustingly involved.” Many commentators have
noted that, by provoking and frustrating a desire to prevent the horror of the
impending tragedy, the play functions in part as a “theatrical punishment of
the observers.” On the Renaissance stage, this was partly the case because
Shakespeare was able to draw on allegorical associations with “naturals” to
fool his audience, intitially, into approving of and consenting to Iago’s abuse
and scapegoating of Othello. Othello’s role as Moorish alien and resemblance to
the natural fool invited the audience to join in the abuse, or at least
solicited their passive approval.
In Othello’s character Shakespeare thus created a striking
palimpsest of stereotypes, of Moor and natural fool, since both Moors and
naturals were stereotyped as deviant/different outsiders, and as irrational,
lusty, and gullible. Whether we trace such fundamental stereotypes to
ethnicity, or, as I have, to the historically parallel tracition of the abject
natural fool, it is important to recognize that such stereotyping is part of
intolerant “normative” humor, which ridicules and excludes the different and
the supposedly deviant Other in order to bolster or define conservative social
norms. Othello is constructed as both alien and other – a “Barbary”,
“stranger”, an “extravagant and wheeling stranger /Of here and everywhere” –
and as socially transgressive in his marriage to the white Desdemona […] In
addition, in his role as “blackface clown,” Othello plays the “abject-clown
function” not merely of the butt of charivari but, more broadly, the
traditional, historical role of the natural fool, who is laughed at and abused
because he is constructed as physically or mentally different or deficient as
well as socially transgressive. The multi-faceted construction of Othello as
the butt of normative comedy “encourage[s] a kind of complicity within the
audience” as it “solicits…a participatory endorsement of the action.”
Therefore, in Othello Shakespeare explores the “horrid” potential of normative
humor by making his audience complicit in ‘the brutal jeering laughter of
triumphant sadism enjoying the torture and destruction of a victim.'
(nsip)
It is also remarkable that, far from merely serving as comic
relief, a distraction or break from the tragedy for the supposedly insensitive,
unrefined “groundlings,” as neoclassical critics and the modern descendants
have often overtly or implicitly assumed, the comedy in Othello was originally
directly germane to provoking sympathy and awaking a painful self-knowledge in
the audience members that they had been fooled into laughing at sadism.
*************************************
Iago:
Iago:
The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by th' nose
As asses are.
*************************************
Jonson on Shakespeare:
He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free
nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein
he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be
stopped. “Sufflaminandus erat,” as
Augustus said of Haterius. His WIT was in his own power; would the RULE of it
had been too…
*************************************
Amorphus/Oxford/Painted Face:
Jonson, _Cynthia's Revels_
AMORPHUS. Can you help my COMPLEXION, here?
PER. O yes, sir, I have an excellent mineral FUCUS for the
purpose. The GLOVES are right, sir; you shall bury them in a
MUCK-HILL, a draught, SEVEN years, and take them out and wash them,
they shall still retain their first scent, true Spanish. There's
ambre in the umbre.
MER. Your price, sweet Fig?
PER. Give me what you will, sir; the signior pays me two crowns a
pair; you shall give me your love, sir.
MER. My love! with a pox to you, goodman Sassafras.
PER. I come, sir. There's an excellent diapasm in a chain, too,
if you like it.
AMO. Stay, what are the ingredients to your FUCUS?
PER. Nought but sublimate and crude mercury, sir, well prepared
and dulcified, with the jaw-bones of a sow, burnt, beaten, and
searced.
AMO. I approve it. LAY IT ON.
PER. O yes, sir, I have an excellent mineral FUCUS for the
purpose. The GLOVES are right, sir; you shall bury them in a
MUCK-HILL, a draught, SEVEN years, and take them out and wash them,
they shall still retain their first scent, true Spanish. There's
ambre in the umbre.
MER. Your price, sweet Fig?
PER. Give me what you will, sir; the signior pays me two crowns a
pair; you shall give me your love, sir.
MER. My love! with a pox to you, goodman Sassafras.
PER. I come, sir. There's an excellent diapasm in a chain, too,
if you like it.
AMO. Stay, what are the ingredients to your FUCUS?
PER. Nought but sublimate and crude mercury, sir, well prepared
and dulcified, with the jaw-bones of a sow, burnt, beaten, and
searced.
AMO. I approve it. LAY IT ON.
*********************************
Fucate:
Etymology
Artificially coloured; falsified, counterfeit.Painted;
disguised with paint, or with false show.
Painted; disguised with paint; hence, disguised in any way; dissembling.
In fu*cate, v. t. [L. infucatus painted; pref. in in + fucare to paint, dye. See {Fucate}.] To stain; to paint; to DAUB.
Painted; disguised with paint; hence, disguised in any way; dissembling.
In fu*cate, v. t. [L. infucatus painted; pref. in in + fucare to paint, dye. See {Fucate}.] To stain; to paint; to DAUB.
**********************************
Daubed Over:
STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST,
READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH
HATH *PLAST*
WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE:
WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE:
**********************************
Jonson, Timber
{{Topic 40}} {{Subject: imposture}}
Impostorum fucus.
195 Imposture is a specious thing; yet never worse,
then when it faines to
196 be best, and to none discover'd sooner, then the simplest. For Truth and
197 Goodnesse are plaine, and open: but Imposture is ever asham'd of the light.
196 be best, and to none discover'd sooner, then the simplest. For Truth and
197 Goodnesse are plaine, and open: but Imposture is ever asham'd of the light.
************************************
Beauty's Poisonous Properties. By: Pollard, Tanya,
Shakespeare Studies
…As the multiple stagings of this threat suggest, anxieties
about the dangers of cosmetics reflect as well on early modern concerns about theatricality.
In the light of pervasive and insistent identifications between face-paints and
the theater, playwrights who depict cosmetics as fatal poisons can be seen as
indicting their own medium, suggesting that fears about the contaminating force
of art were not limited to the theater's opponents. Also routinely described as
poisonous by its detractors, the theater, like facepaints, is understood
as both duplicitous and corrosive, unsettling the relationship between interior
and exterior. The link between artistic dissimulation and harmful effects on
the body and soul points to magical ideas about the *dangerous efficacy of
signs*. In the case of poison, epistemological havoc--the unreliability of
appearances as indicators of reality--can translate directly into bodily
vulnerability, and even death. Embodying and fusing together various levels of
contamination, anxieties about cosmetics and painted bodies call attention to
early modern assumptions about the inseparability of external from internal, of
material from immaterial, with implications for the powers and perils of the
theater.
**********************************
Fucus/paint
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.
*********************************
Cecil Papers 181/99: Oxford to Cecil, [January 1602].
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. And so I will end, these things only desiring you to remember, that you may know I do not forget how honourably you dealt with her Majesty at what time you first moved her, showing how, out of nothing to her (for so in manner it was found), if by mine industry I could OF THIS NOTHING make something, she should yet give a PROP AND STAY to my house.
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. And so I will end, these things only desiring you to remember, that you may know I do not forget how honourably you dealt with her Majesty at what time you first moved her, showing how, out of nothing to her (for so in manner it was found), if by mine industry I could OF THIS NOTHING make something, she should yet give a PROP AND STAY to my house.
***********************************
SENECA
EPISTLE CXIV.
~CXIV+ ON STYLE AS A MIRROR OF CHARACTER
...In short, whenever you notice that a DEGENERATE STYLE pleases the critics, you may be sure that character also has deviated from the right standard. Just as luxurious banquets and elaborate dress are indications of DISEASE in the state, similarly a LAX STYLE, if it be popular, shows that the mind (which is the source of the word) has lost its balance. Indeed you ought not to wonder that corrupt speech is welcomed not merely by the more squalid mob but also by our more cultured throng; for it is only in their dress and not in their judgments that they differ. You may rather wonder that not only the effects of vices, but even vices themselves, meet with approval. For it has ever been thus: no man's ability has ever been approved without something being pardoned. Show me any man, however famous; I can tell you what it was that his age forgave in him, and what it was that his age purposely overlooked. * I can show you many men whose vices have caused them no harm, and not a few who have been even helped by these vices. Yes, I will show you persons of the highest reputation, set up as models for our admiration; and yet if you seek to correct their errors, you destroy them; for vices are so intertwined with virtues that they drag the virtues along with them.* (SNIP)
Some individual makes these vices fashionable - some person who controls the eloquence of the day; the rest follow his lead and COMMUNICATE the habit to each other.
EPISTLE CXIV.
~CXIV+ ON STYLE AS A MIRROR OF CHARACTER
...In short, whenever you notice that a DEGENERATE STYLE pleases the critics, you may be sure that character also has deviated from the right standard. Just as luxurious banquets and elaborate dress are indications of DISEASE in the state, similarly a LAX STYLE, if it be popular, shows that the mind (which is the source of the word) has lost its balance. Indeed you ought not to wonder that corrupt speech is welcomed not merely by the more squalid mob but also by our more cultured throng; for it is only in their dress and not in their judgments that they differ. You may rather wonder that not only the effects of vices, but even vices themselves, meet with approval. For it has ever been thus: no man's ability has ever been approved without something being pardoned. Show me any man, however famous; I can tell you what it was that his age forgave in him, and what it was that his age purposely overlooked. * I can show you many men whose vices have caused them no harm, and not a few who have been even helped by these vices. Yes, I will show you persons of the highest reputation, set up as models for our admiration; and yet if you seek to correct their errors, you destroy them; for vices are so intertwined with virtues that they drag the virtues along with them.* (SNIP)
Some individual makes these vices fashionable - some person who controls the eloquence of the day; the rest follow his lead and COMMUNICATE the habit to each other.
*****************************
Shakespeare
O, for my sake do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew’d;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysell, ‘gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.
O, for my sake do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew’d;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysell, ‘gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.
********************************
Jonson, Discoveries
Censura de poetis. - Nothing in our AGE, I have observed, is more PREPOSTEROUS than the running judgments upon poetry and poets; when we shall hear those things commended and cried up for the best writings which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never light his tobacco with them. And those men almost named for MIRACLES, who yet are so VILE that if a man should go about to examine and correct them, he must make all they have done BUT ONE BLOT. Their good is so entangled with their bad as forcibly one must draw on the other’s death with it. A sponge dipped in ink will do all:-
“ - Comitetur Punica librum
Spongia. - ” {44a}
Et paulò post,
“Non possunt . . . multæ . . . lituræ
. . . una litura potest.”
Cestius - Cicero - Heath - Taylor - Spenser. - Yet their vices have not hurt them; nay, a great many they have profited, for they have been loved for nothing else. And this false opinion grows strong against the best men, if once it take root with the IGNORANT. Cestius, in his time, was preferred to Cicero, so far as the ignorant durst. They learned him without book, and had him often in their mouths; but a man cannot imagine that thing so foolish or rude but will find and enjoy an admirer; at least a reader or spectator. The puppets are seen now in despite of the players; Heath' s epigrams and the Sculler' s poems have their applause. There are never wanting that dare prefer the worst preachers, the worst pleaders, the worst poets; not that the better have left to write or speak better, but that they that hear them judge worse; Non illi pejus dicunt, sed hi corruptius judicant. Nay, if it were put to the question of the water- rhymer' s works, against Spenser' s, *I doubt not but they would find more suffrages; because the most favour common vices, out of a prerogative the VULGAR have to lose their judgments and like that which is naught.*
Poetry, in this latter age, hath proved but a mean mistress to such as have wholly addicted themselves to her, or given their names up to her family. They who have but saluted her on the by, and now and then tendered their visits, she hath done much for, and advanced in the way of their own professions (both the law and the gospel) beyond all they could have hoped or done for themselves without her favour. Wherein she doth emulate the judicious but preposterous bounty of the time' s grandees, who accumulate all they can upon the parasite or fresh-man in their friendship; but think an old client or honest servant bound by his place to write and starve.
Censura de poetis. - Nothing in our AGE, I have observed, is more PREPOSTEROUS than the running judgments upon poetry and poets; when we shall hear those things commended and cried up for the best writings which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never light his tobacco with them. And those men almost named for MIRACLES, who yet are so VILE that if a man should go about to examine and correct them, he must make all they have done BUT ONE BLOT. Their good is so entangled with their bad as forcibly one must draw on the other’s death with it. A sponge dipped in ink will do all:-
“ - Comitetur Punica librum
Spongia. - ” {44a}
Et paulò post,
“Non possunt . . . multæ . . . lituræ
. . . una litura potest.”
Cestius - Cicero - Heath - Taylor - Spenser. - Yet their vices have not hurt them; nay, a great many they have profited, for they have been loved for nothing else. And this false opinion grows strong against the best men, if once it take root with the IGNORANT. Cestius, in his time, was preferred to Cicero, so far as the ignorant durst. They learned him without book, and had him often in their mouths; but a man cannot imagine that thing so foolish or rude but will find and enjoy an admirer; at least a reader or spectator. The puppets are seen now in despite of the players; Heath' s epigrams and the Sculler' s poems have their applause. There are never wanting that dare prefer the worst preachers, the worst pleaders, the worst poets; not that the better have left to write or speak better, but that they that hear them judge worse; Non illi pejus dicunt, sed hi corruptius judicant. Nay, if it were put to the question of the water- rhymer' s works, against Spenser' s, *I doubt not but they would find more suffrages; because the most favour common vices, out of a prerogative the VULGAR have to lose their judgments and like that which is naught.*
Poetry, in this latter age, hath proved but a mean mistress to such as have wholly addicted themselves to her, or given their names up to her family. They who have but saluted her on the by, and now and then tendered their visits, she hath done much for, and advanced in the way of their own professions (both the law and the gospel) beyond all they could have hoped or done for themselves without her favour. Wherein she doth emulate the judicious but preposterous bounty of the time' s grandees, who accumulate all they can upon the parasite or fresh-man in their friendship; but think an old client or honest servant bound by his place to write and starve.
|****************************
LAX Style:
*****************************
LAX Style:
Lax: Open, Loose, not careful enough, not strict enough
*********************************
'Loose Thought is Free':
Papers Complaint, compil'd in ruthfull Rimes Against the Paper-
spoylers of these Times. John Davies
...Another (ah Lord helpe) mee vilifies
With Art of Loue, and how to subtilize,
Making lewd Venus, with eternall Lines,
To tye Adonis to her loues designes :
Fine wit is shew'n therein : but finer twere
If not attired in such bawdy Geare.
But be it as it will : the coyest Dames,
In priuate read it for their Closset-games :
For, sooth to say, the Lines so draw them on,
To the venerian speculation,
That will they, nill they (if of flesh they bee)
They will thinke of it, sith loose Thought is free.
And thou (O Poet) that dost pen my Plaint,
Thou art not scot-free from my iust complaint
For, thou hast plaid thy part, with thy rude Pen,
To make vs both ridiculous to men.
(ll.47-62, Complete Works, vol. II, p. 75)
*********************************
'Loose Thought is Free':
Papers Complaint, compil'd in ruthfull Rimes Against the Paper-
spoylers of these Times. John Davies
...Another (ah Lord helpe) mee vilifies
With Art of Loue, and how to subtilize,
Making lewd Venus, with eternall Lines,
To tye Adonis to her loues designes :
Fine wit is shew'n therein : but finer twere
If not attired in such bawdy Geare.
But be it as it will : the coyest Dames,
In priuate read it for their Closset-games :
For, sooth to say, the Lines so draw them on,
To the venerian speculation,
That will they, nill they (if of flesh they bee)
They will thinke of it, sith loose Thought is free.
And thou (O Poet) that dost pen my Plaint,
Thou art not scot-free from my iust complaint
For, thou hast plaid thy part, with thy rude Pen,
To make vs both ridiculous to men.
(ll.47-62, Complete Works, vol. II, p. 75)
***************************************
Iago/Tricky Slave
IAGO
Why, there’s no remedy. 'Tis the curse of service.
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to th' first. Now sir, be judge yourself,
Whether I in any just term am affined
To love the Moor.
*****************************
Tom O'Bedlam:
With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet will I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet will I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
*********************************
Restraining/Ruling Shakespeare's Quill:
From To the Deceased Author of these Poems...William
Cartwright
Jasper Mayne
For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee BEN JOHNSON still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
Jasper Mayne
For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee BEN JOHNSON still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
*****************************
Jonson, Underwoods
XLII. — THE MIND OF THE FRONTISPIECE
TO A BOOK.
From death and dark oblivion (near the same)
The mistress of man’s life, grave History,
Raising the world to good and evil fame,
Doth vindicate it to eternity.
Wise Providence would so : that nor the good
Might be defrauded, nor the great secured,
But both might know their ways were understood,
When vice alike in time with virtue dured :
Which makes that, lighted by the beamy hand
Of Truth, that searcheth the most hidden springs,
And guided by Experience, whose straight wand
Doth mete, whose line doth sound the depth of things ;
She cheerfully supporteth what she rears,
Assisted by no strengths but are her own,
Some note of which each varied pillar bears,
By which, as proper titles, she is known
Time's witness, herald of Antiquity,
The light of Truth, and life of Memory.
The mistress of man’s life, grave History,
Raising the world to good and evil fame,
Doth vindicate it to eternity.
Wise Providence would so : that nor the good
Might be defrauded, nor the great secured,
But both might know their ways were understood,
When vice alike in time with virtue dured :
Which makes that, lighted by the beamy hand
Of Truth, that searcheth the most hidden springs,
And guided by Experience, whose straight wand
Doth mete, whose line doth sound the depth of things ;
She cheerfully supporteth what she rears,
Assisted by no strengths but are her own,
Some note of which each varied pillar bears,
By which, as proper titles, she is known
Time's witness, herald of Antiquity,
The light of Truth, and life of Memory.
