My Frivolous Shakespeare, Rise!
Latin frīvolus (“silly, empty, trifling, frivolous, worthless”)
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For Jonson, as for Sidney the bad poet is an object of contempt, not worthy of the name, while the good poet is a worthy asset to the commonwealth, and should be treated accordingly. It is a contrast implied, and a role claimed for the poet, in the initial discussion of the fountain's water, and the invocation of Helicon, at the beginning of the play's main action. As James Bednarz has observed, 'through the coupling of poet and sovereign - Asper and Queen Elizabeth in _Every Man Out_, Criticus and Cynthia in _The Fountaine of Selfe-Love_ [Cynthia's Revels], and Horace and Augustus Caesar in _Poetaster_ - Jonson asserted that literary and political power were equal sources of moral authority. (Hester Lees-Jeffries)
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Court 'Wits' vs. the City Men of 'Understanding' and the Essex uprising. Sacrificing Fame/Shake-speare to distance Court and Queen from imputation of frivolity. see _Love's Martyr_, Chester and the immolation of the Turtle Dove.
Hollow Praise - Jonson raises a Frivolous and Foolish Monument to the Author at the front of 'Shakespeares' First Folio.
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I have discussed my identification of Oxford as Amorphus/The Deformed at length in this blog and on HLAS. This was a politically motivated attack based on 'style'. Oxford sacrificed his identity and immortal name at a time of intense political instability, reminiscent of Captain Edward Vere's sacrifice of Billy Budd during a time of mutiny aboard the man-o-war Bellipotent.
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Latin frīvolus (“silly, empty, trifling, frivolous, worthless”)
England’s Helicon – Hester Lees-Jeffries
...Some twenty-five years ago Margaret Tudeau-Clayton demonstrated Ben Jonson’s borrowing from the twelfth-century _Policraticus_ by John of Salisbury in his _Timber_, or _Discoveries_. Tudeau-Clayton considered a passage of some fifty-five lines, just over a third of the way through the _Discoveries_, organized by Jonson under the headings ‘Adulatio’, ‘Devita humana’, ‘De piis & probis’, and ‘Mores Aulici’ (‘flattery’, ‘of human life’, ‘of the upright and the good’, and ‘of the ways of courtiers’), showing that in this section, Jonson had drawn heavily on passages in the third book of the _Policraticus_. [...]Despite Tudeau-Clayton’s identification of this important source for Ben Jonson, little further work has apparently been done in assessing whether others of his works might also reveal traces of the _Policraticus_. There is one very striking example in particular, which dovetails neatly into the passage in _Discoveries_ discussed by Tudeau-Clayton, and which in turn perhaps suggests that Jonson was writing the Discoveries in some form as early as 1600. That example is, of course, _The Fountaine of Selfe-Love_ [Cynthia’s Revels], for in addition to drawing dramaturgically upon Peele’s use of the fountain in _David and Bethsabe_, it seems that Jonson drew more thematic aspects of the device in the play’s eponymous fountain, its central and controlling metaphor, from chapter 10 of Book 5 of the _Policraticus_.
Book 5 of the Policraticus is concerned with the ‘commonwealth’, and with the proper relationship between prince and subjects. Chapter 10 is entitled ‘of the flanks of the powerful, whose needs are to be satisfied, and whose malice is to be restrained’. By the end of the chapter, however, the focus is less on rulers’ potential for viciousness than on the capacity of courtiers to corrupt:
For who is it whose virtue is not cast aside by the frivolities of courtiers? Who is so great, who is so resolute, that he cannot be corrupted? He is best who resists for the longest time, who is strongest, who is corrupted least. For in order that virtue be unharmed, one must turn aside from the life of the courtier. He who said the following providentially and prudently expressed the nature of the court: ‘He departs from the court who wishes to be pious’. For this reason the court has been compared to the infamous fountain of Salmacis, which is notorious for weakening virility...
This obscure poetic fiction represents the likeness of the frivolities of courtiers, which weaken men by the debasement of their virility or pervert a retained likeness of virility. He who engages in the trifles of the courtier and undertakes the obligations of the philosopher or the good man is an hermaphrodite, whose harsh and prickly face disfigures the beauty of women and who pollutes and dishonours virility with effeminacy. For indeed the philosopher-courtier is a monstrous thing; and, while he affects to be both he is neither one, for the court excludes philosophy and the philosopher at no time engages in the trifles of the courtier. Yet the comparison dies not apply to all courts, but merely those which are mismanaged by a foolish will.* For whoever is wise drives away frivolities, orders his house, and subjects everything to reason*.
The image of the court as an enervating fountain is here a central and potent one, and attention is draw to it in the 1513 editions by the marginal note, ‘Curia comparatur fonti salmacis’ (the court compared to the fountain of Salmacis).
The fountain of Salmacis and the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus are not directly invoked by Jonson in the Fountaine of Selfe-Love in the same way that Narcissus and Actaeon are, but the effects of the play’s fountain are very similar. By the end of Act 2, when Amorphus the courier has reported the deliciousness of the fountain’s water to the rest of the court, there is
such a drought I’the Presence, wi[t]h reporting the wonders of this new water; that all the Ladies and Gallants lie languishing upon the Rushes, like so many pounded Cattle i[n] the midst of Harvest, sighing one to another, and gasping, as if each of them expected a Cock from the Fountaine, to be brought into his mouth; and (without we returned quickly) they are all (as a youth would say) no better than a few Trowts cast a shore, or a dish of Eeles in a Sand-bag (Cynthia’s Revels).
and by the beginning of Act 4, the water having still not been brought, the situation has not improved:
Phantaste: I would this water would arrive once our travayling friend so commended to us.
Argurion: So would I, for he has left all us in travaile, with expectation of it.
Phantaste: Pray Jove, I never rise from this Couch, if ever I thirsted more for a thing in my whole time of being a Courtier.
Philautia: Nor I, Ile be sworne; the very mention of it sets my lippes in a worse heate, then if he had sprinkled them with Mercury.
While the water here is to be drunk, rather than bathed in (as in the _Policraticus_ and, indeed, in the _Metamorphoses_), the names of the courtiers themselves suggest decadence, degeneracy, and enervation: in addition to Phantaste (‘Boaster’) [my note – Boaster or Fantast?], Argurion (‘Silver’, as in money), and Philautia (Self Love’) in the passage just quoted, the others are named as Amorphus (‘Deformed’), Asotus (‘Debauchee’ or ‘Prodigal’), Hedon (‘Pleasure’), Anaides (‘Impudence’), Moria (‘Folly’), Prosaites (‘Beggar, or ‘one who importunes’), Cos (‘Whetstone’), Morus (‘Fool’), and Gelaia (‘Laughter’). Of these, Amorphus is the central figure, and his name surely recalls the fate of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, as it can also be translated as ‘shapeless’ or even ‘one who changes shape’. The male courtiers in _The Fountaine of Selfe-Love_ are certainly stereotypically effeminate in their obsessions with clothes and their garrulousness, and it is implied that they have been corrupted by too much contact with women; they are therefore effeminate in the now obsolete sense of ‘devoted to women’.
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Distaff Oxford
Alexander and Campaspe (1584) : “Wil you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you shuld shake the speare with Achilles?”
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Reviewed work(s): Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxv+296.
Douglas Bruster
Cheney extends the significance of this biographical episode by reading it alongside the curious “Achilles” stanza in 1594’s The Rape of Lucrece (lines 1422–28).1 In this stanza, part of a larger sequence in which Shakespeare portrays Lucrece looking at a painting of Troy, Achilles is represented by “his spear, / Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behind / Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind” (lines 1424–26). Exploring Shakespeare’s fairly idiosyncratic attention to the spear of Achilles and its reputation for being able to both “kill and cure” (2 Henry VI 5.1.101), Cheney argues that this stanza in Lucrece is a particularly good example of a “signature” moment in Shakespeare’s works, a passage in which “Shakespeare signs his name to Achilles” (53) and in which—owing to its emphasis on an uncannily present-yet-absent figure—we can sense an emblem of Shakespearean authorship itself. To Cheney’s persuasive gathering of intertextual references for this interpretation one might add a line that his study overlooks, from John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe (1584) : “Wil you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you shuld shake the speare with Achilles?”2 If Shakespeare pushed the elements of his last name to their most playful extremes, then, he found the terms already in the Elizabethan air.
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Languet to Sidney, Nov 14, 1579
...Now I will treat you frankly, as I am accustomed to do, for I am sure our friendship has reached a mark at which neither of us can be offended at any freedom of the other. It was a delight to me last winter to see you high in favour and enjoying the esteem of all your countrymen; but to speak plainly, the habits of your court seemed to me somewhat less manly than I could have wished, and most of your noblemen appeared to me to seek for a reputation more by a kind of affected courtesy than by those virtues which are wholesome to the state and which are most becoming to generous spirits and to men of high birth. I was sorry therefore, and so were other friends of yours, to see you wasting the flower of your life on such things, and I feared lest that noble nature of yours should be dulled, and lest from habit you should be brought to take pleasure in pursuits which only ENERVATE the mind.
If the arrogance and insolence of Oxford has roused you from your trance, he has done you less wrong than they who have hitherto been more indulgent to you. But I return to my subject...
*footnote - The readers of Shakespeare and Scott are familiar with the language and manners of the Euphuists of Queen Elizabeth's Court. John Lilly's two books, "Euphues, the anatomy of wit," and "Euphues an dhis England," from which the Elizabethan school of Courtiers derived their name, were not published till 1581. (Steuart A Pears)
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_Policraticus_ , Tyranny and the Essex Rebellion
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England’s Helicon – Hester Lees-Jeffries
...It is of course significant for Jonson’s play as a whole, therefore, that the first part of the _Policraticus_’ alternative title, or subtitle, is ‘De Nugis Curialium’ (Concerning the frivolities of courtiers) for it is the corruptions and frivolities of courtiers that are exposed and satirized by Jonson. The other part of this alternative title is ‘et Vestigiis Philosphorum’, ‘and the Footprints of Philosophers’: Criticus, not surprisingly the voice of reason and virtue in the play, who is described in the Induction as ‘a retir’d Scholler’ and later dismissed by Hedon and Anaides as ‘a whoore-sonne Book-worme, a Candle-waster...poore Grogram Rascall...Dormouse’, is surely the philosopher whom John discusses, who is of the court yet apart from it in his comportment and concerns. If Jonson is indeed recalling this passage from the _Policraticus_ in its entirety, he is treading on dangerous ground: it would not do for Queen Elizabeth to have been invited to identify too closely with John's statement that ‘the court excludes philosophy and the philosopher at no time engages in the trifles of the courtiers. Yet the comparison does not apply to all courts, but merely those which are mismanaged by a foolish will. For whoever is wise drives away frivolities, orders his house, and subjects everything to reason.’ Cynthia’s loss of control over her court and its denizens is particularly shown in the way in which the false courtiers use language, and in the fact that it is a poet who is to be the agent of reform. Whatever part the courtiers’ linguistic excesses may have played in the ‘Poets’ War’, they, together with their trivial word games, riddles, and foolish songs, show the corruption of nothing less than the ‘Queen’s English’, a concept far less abstract in Jonson’s day than current usage might suggest. There was a close association in the Renaissance between the person of the monarch and the language of his or her realm, of which he or she was the patron. [...] According to Martin Elsky, ‘the linguistic responsibility asked of English Renaissance monarchs is well documented’. He has argued that
the force responsible for creating a society in which it is possible for a speaker to unite word and thing is the monarch, who is responsible for the political fortunes of his kingdom. The connection between morally disposed political power and the verbal health of a nation may have its origins among the Stoics, who held that the initial imposition of a name or thing occurs under a good king, and deteriorates as the moral virtue of the kings declines.
In _The Fountain of Selfe-Love_, Jonson figures the dislocation between court and state and monarch and court, and the disjunction between the false court and the ideal, exemplary one, through a debased, trivial, artificial language, which in turn reflects badly on the monarch. As Peter Womack has economically observed (a propos the couriers’ word games in Act 4) ‘Language is supposed to do honour to the mind it represents, as a royal court is supposed to do honour to the monarch it expresses: these courtiers profane both dignities, and each sacrilege is a metaphor for the other. Jonson offers a solution in the person of the scholar-poet-author. Perhaps, in the authorial figure of Criticus, he even questions the monarch’s right to control language as his play demonstrates the loss of that control.
The play in general, even without its apparent pro-Essex agenda (which is the subject of the next, and final, chapter) does tread on dangerous ground. The corruption and decadence of the couriers is shown primarily in the languishing after the waters of the fountain of self-love, but also (and far more pervasively) in their trivial and decadent language; they debase the very ‘Queen’s English’, and themselves pollute the waters of Helicon.
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Shake-speare
Sonnet LXXII
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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Shakespeare on Masculinity - Robin Headlam Wells
Masculinity was a political issue in early-modern England. Phrases such as ‘courage-masculine’ or ‘manly virtue’ took on special meaning. As used by members of the Sidney-Essex faction, and later by admirers of the bellicose young Prince of Wales, they signified commitment to the ideals of militant Protestantism. Diplomacy and compromise were disparaged as ‘feminine’.
Shakespeare on Masculinity is an original study of the way Shakespeare's plays engage with a subject that provoked bitter public dispute. Robin Headlam Wells argues that Shakespeare took a sceptical view of the militant-Protestant cult of heroic masculinity. Following a series of portraits of the dangerously charismatic warrior-hero, Shakespeare turned at the end of his writing career to a different kind of leader. If the heroes of the martial tragedies evoke a Herculean ideal of manhood, The Tempest portrays a ruler who, Orpheus-like, uses the arts of civilization to bring peace to a divided world.
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Edward de Vere to Robert Cecil, April 27, 1603-
...I cannot but find a great grief in myself to remember the mistress which we have lost, under whom both you and myself from our greenest years have been in a manner brought up and, although it hath pleased God after an earthly kingdom to take her up into a more permanent and heavenly state wherein I do not doubt but she is crowned with glory, and to give us a prince wise, learned and enriched with all virtues, yet the long time which we spent in her service we cannot look for so much left of our days as to bestow upon another, neither the long acquaintance and kind familiarities wherewith she did use us we are not ever to expect from another prince, as denied by the infirmity of age and common course of reason. In this common shipwreck, mine is above all the rest who, least regarded though often comforted of all her followers, she hath left to try my fortune among the alterations of time and chance, either without sail whereby to take the advantage of any PROSPEROus gale or with anchor to ride till the storm be overpast. There is nothing therefore left to my comfort but the excellent virtues and deep wisdom wherewith God hath endued our new master and sovereign Lord, who doth not come amongst us as a stranger but as a natural prince, succeeding by right of blood and inheritance, not as a conqueror but as the true shepherd of Christ's flock to cherish and comfort them.
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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.
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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).
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I had not told posterity this but for their IGNORANCE, who chose that circumstance to *COMMEND* their friend by wherein he most faulted -- Jonson on Shakespeare
Cartwright, to Jonson (in Jonsonus Virbius)
...Blest life of Authors, unto whom we owe
Those that we have, and those that we want too:
Th'art all so good, that reading makes thee worse,
And to have writ so well's thine onely curse.
Secure then of thy merit, thou didst hate
That servile base dependance upon fate:
Successe thou ne'r thoughtst vertue, nor that fit,
Which chance, and TH'AGES FASHION DID MAKE HIT;
EXCLUDING THOSE FROM LIFE IN AFTER-TIME,
Who into Po'try first brought luck and rime:
Who thought the peoples breath good ayre: sty'ld name
What was but noise; and getting Briefes for fame
Gathered the many's suffrages, and thence
Made *COMMENDATION* a BENEVOLENCE:
THY thoughts were their owne Lawrell, and did win
That best applause of being crown'd within..
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The *COMMENDATION* of good things may fall within a many, their approbation but in a few· for the most *COMMEND* OUT OF AFFECTION, selfe tickling, an easinesse, or imitation: but MEN iudge only out of KNOWLEDGE. That is the trying faculty. -- Ben Jonson
Ruling/Restraining/Holding Shakespeare's Extravagant Quill:
From 'To the Deceased Author of these Poems' (William Cartwright)
by Jasper Mayne
... For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee Ben Johnson still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
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Occulted Elizabethan 'Culture War' - Court and City
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The Making of the Subject of the Leviathan By Miloš Petrović
(...)Only that [English Literature] which is capable of registering even the slightest social wobble could make sense of—and communicate—changes in something so elusive as one’s conception and experience of oneself. That is why literature, with its deep layers of significance, is particularly suited to our analysis. More than the works of Hobbes or Locke, it is the plays and poetry of England that could grasp the subtlety of the important changes that were by the turn of the eighteenth century [seventeenth for Oxford/Court/Wit and Jonson/City/Sense] becoming as much proper to man’s inner life as they were to his dealings with others. What literature seemed to have registered this time around was, in fact, so dramatic that it would transform English literature itself, its codes and canons, as well as the social map of the land. This refers, most immediately, to those great disputes in England—the early eighteenth century culture wars—which were fought, among other things, at least on the surface of it, over the question of the essential element in a successful literary creation. Already in full sway by the end of the seventeenth century, these disputes involved the rebellious city of London on the one hand, which sought to define the essence of poetry in terms of “sense” (judgment, intellect, mind), and those grouped around the royal court on the other, who defended the older definition of poetry as essentially an expression of “wit” (fancy, imagination, or taste). The latter praised wit as “a capacity for wide-ranging speculation that soars above man’s necessities and desires… a flame and agitation of soul that little minds and men of action cannot comprehend.” They deemed it “the purest element, and swiftest motion of the brain,” “the essence of thoughts” that “encircles all things.” They saw in it genius—transcendent, inscrutable, unattainable by reason—as opposed to mere learning, a “grace beyond the reach of art,” a “radiant spark of heavenly fire,” the furor poeticus pure and simple. Like a “power divine,” which could be defined only negatively, wit was deemed the mysterious core of poetry. The critics of poetry founded on wit, on the other hand, condemned it as unwarrantably elitist. They read in it nothing but verbal ingenuity, emptiness wrapped in extravagant language, in ingenious metaphors, puns and paradoxes, in virtuosic turns of phrase, in epigrams, and replete with alliterations, anagrams, and acrostics: “nothing but the froth and ferment of the soul, beclouding reason and sinking rational pursuits into the miasma of fantasy,” an art “which pleased by confounding truth and deceiving men.” Florid, whimsical, and flamboyant, facetious and frivolous, smacking of airy sophistication and the desire to surprise and startle, in constant search of mystical resemblance, all “wit-writing” became suspect and was subjected to criticism as a likely enemy to all goodness and decency, let alone to true poetry. Such writing was said to disperse rather than comprehend. It profaned, it vulgarized, it thrived on obscenity. It produced false pleasure. It was excessive and lame, its only purpose being to amuse. It condescended, and those who practiced it wrote, as Samuel Johnson would later put it, “rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as Epicurean deities, making remarks on the actions of men, and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion.” This was clearly then, in the eyes of the rebellious city, not merely a war between two aesthetic conceptions, debating, say, the relationship between style and subject-matter, or art and morality, but more generally a war between ideas and mere words, between argument and elocution, reason and mystification, sense and nonsense, learning and mere posturing. Involving most of the leading literary figures of the time, and narrated famously by Daniel Defoe as a mockheroic account of a battle between Britannia’s warlike sons (“The Men of Sense against the Men of Wit, eternal Fighting must determine it…”), the rebellion of City against wit was seen by its protagonists as a necessary part of a wider moral reform and a defense of traditional English virtue undermined by aristocratic immodesty and dissoluteness. The divide between the poetic sense and wit was so deeply felt to be a symptom of a wider social divide and part of a profound change in the sensibilities of English society itself, that Defoe could, in the end, reduce its meaning quite simply to two alternative ways of ruling Britain (“Wit is a king without a Parliament, and sense a democratic government”), with one commentator calling it an outright war “between Cheapside and Covent Garden, between City and Court, between bourgeoisie and aristocracy.” This was the culmination of a long literary controversy, which at its core was fought over the sort of individual that was to stand at the center of English literature, not only as its subject, but as its generative principle, a principle of taste, an ideal, and a measure of right tone. More importantly, it was the ground upon which a much larger battle was being fought between different conceptions of what it meant to be an individual in the course of the seventeenth century. The struggle was over the sort of individual that ought to be the generative principle of not only the English society, but of any human society in general.
This struggle is the object of our present concern.
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A Speech according to Horace. --Ben Jonson
...And could (if our great Men would let their Sons
Come to their Schools,) show 'em the use of Guns.
And there instruct the noble English Heirs
In Politick, and Militar Affairs;
But he that should perswade, to have this done
For Education of our Lordings; Soon
Should he hear of Billow, Wind, and Storm,
From the Tempestuous Grandlings, who'll inform
Us, in our bearing, that are thus, and thus,
Born, bred, allied? what's he dare tutor us?
Are we by Book-worms to be aw'd? must we
Live by their Scale, that dare do nothing free?
Why are we Rich, or Great, except to show
All licence in our Lives? What need we know?
More then to praise a Dog? or Horse? or speak
The Hawking Language? or our Day to break
With Citizens? let Clowns, and Tradesmen breed
Their Sons to study Arts, the Laws, the Creed:
We will believe like Men of our own Rank,
In so much Land a year, or such a Bank,
That turns us so much Monies, at which rate
Our Ancestors impos'd on Prince and State.
Let poor Nobility be vertuous: We,
Descended in a Rope of Titles, be
From Guy, or Bevis, Arthur, or from whom
The Herald will. Our Blood is now become,
Past any need of Vertue. Let them care,
That in the Cradle of their Gentry are;
To serve the State by Councels, and by Arms:
We neither love the Troubles, nor the harms.
What love you then? your Whore? what study? Gate,
Carriage, and Dressing. There is up of late
The ACADEMY, where the Gallants meet ——
What to make Legs? yes, and to smell most sweet,
All that they do at Plays. O, but first here
They learn and study; and then practise there.
But why are all these Irons i' the Fire
Of several makings? helps, helps, t' attire
His Lordship. That is for his Band, his Hair
This, and that Box his Beauty to repair;
This other for his Eye-brows; hence, away,
I may no longer on these PICTURES stay,
These Carkasses of Honour; Taylors blocks,
Cover'd with Tissue, whose prosperity mocks
The fate of things: whilst totter'd Vertue holds
Her broken Arms up, to their EMPTY MOULDS.
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Shake-speare
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Loves Martyr - Chester
(snip)
Phoenix:
Why now my heart is light, this very doome
Hath banisht sorrow from pensive breast:
And in a manner sacrificingly,
*Burne both our bodies to revive one name*:
And in all humblenesse we will intreate
The hot earth parching Sunne to lend his heate.
(note – Phoenix calls upon Apollo to kindle the wood)
Phoenix:
O holy, sacred, and pure perfect fire,
More pure then that ore which faire Dido mones,
More sacred in my loving kind desire,
Then that which burnt old Esons aged bones,
*Accept into your ever hallowed flame,
Two bodies, from the which may spring one name.*
Turtle.
O sweet perfumed flame, made of those trees,
Under the which the Muses nine have song
The praises of vertuous maids in misteries,
To whom the faire fac’d Nymphes did often throng;
Accept my body as a Sacrifice
Into your flame, *of whom one name may rise.*
Phoenix.
O wilfulnesse, see how with smiling cheare,
My poore deare hart hath flong himselfe to thrall,
Looke what a mirthfull countenance he doth beare,
Spreading his wings abroad, and joyes withall:
Learne thou corrupted world, learne, heare, and see,
Friendships unspotted true sincerity.
I come sweet Turtle, and with my bright wings,
I will embrace thy burnt bones as they lye,
*I hope of these another Creature springs,
That shall possesse both our authority:*
I stay too long, o take me to your glory,
And thus I end the Turtle Doves true story.
