Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (August 1996): Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------ This ASCII issue is derived from files used for the WWW edition of=20 EMLS, available online at ------------------------------------------------------------------ (c) 1996, R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS). Editor's Note: * A New Universal Resource Locator for EMLS. Articles: * Article Abstracts / R=82sum=82s des Articles. * "And shall I die, and this unconquered?": Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism. [1]. Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University. * New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputatio in Early Modern Manuscript Culture. [2]. Margaret Downs-Gamble, Virginia Tech. * England as Israel in Milton's Writings. [3]. John K. Hale, University of Otago. Note: * Reassessing the Use of Doubling in Marston's Antonio and Mellida. [4]. Jeffrey Kahan. Reviews: * Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz, eds. Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. [5]. Thomas Luxon, Dartmouth College. * Renaissance Women: Constructions of Femininity in England. Ed. Kate Aughterson. New York: Routledge, 1995. [6]. Carrie Hintz, University of Toronto. * Barbara L. Estrin. Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. [7]. Nathan P. Tinker, Fordham University. * Frank Lestringant. Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery. Trans. David Fausett. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. [8]. Garrett Sullivan, Pennsylvania State University. * Kim F. Hall. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. [9]. Bernadette Andrea, West Virginia University. * Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Ed. Anthony Parr. [Revels Plays Companion Library 10]. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. [10]. Eric Wilson, Harvard University. * David Fausett. Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse UP, 1993. Gabriel de Foigny. The Southern Land, Known. Trans. and ed. David Fausett. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse UP, 1993. [11]. James R. Burns, Oriel College, Oxford. * Margaret Aston. The King's Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. [12]. Andrew Stott, University of Hertfordshire. * Eric Sams. The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. [13]. Bryan N.S. Gooch, University of Victoria. * Howard B. Norland. Drama in Early Tudor Britain 1485-1558. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska P, 1995. [14]. James C. Cummings, University of Leeds. * Certaine Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, in the time of the late Queene Elizabeth of famous memory (1623). Ed. Ian Lancashire. [Renaissance Electronic Texts 1.1]. U of Toronto: Centre for Computing in the Humanities, 1994. [15]. Ronald B. Bond, University of Calgary. * Reviewing Information, Books Received for Review, and Forthcoming Reviews. Readers' Forum: Responses to articles, reviews, and notes appearing in this issue that are intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- EMLS: Masthead - Publishing Information, Journal Availability, Contact Addresses - - Editorial Group - - Submission Information - Publishing Information, Journal Availability, EMLS Contact Addresses EMLS (ISSN 1201-2459) is published three times a year for the on-line academic community by agreement with the University of British Columbia's English Department, and with the support of the University's Library and Arts Computing Centre. 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Editorial Group The EMLS Editorial Group is representative of the on-line academic community as a whole and includes scholars with wide-ranging interests and experience, from junior to well-established senior academics. Senior Editorial and Advisory Board: o Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester o Hardy M. Cook III, Bowie State University o Roy Flannagan, Ohio University o W. L. Godshalk, University of Cincinnati o Ian Lancashire, New College, University of Toronto o Graham Parry, University of York, England o Paul G. Stanwood, University of British Columbia Advisory Editors: o John Archer, University of New Hampshire o Richard W. Bailey, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor o Glenn Black, Oriel College, Oxford o Ronald Bond, University of Calgary o Luc Borot, Centre d'Etudes et de R=82cherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise, Universit=82 Paul-Valery, Montpellier, France o Douglas Bruster, University of Texas, San Antonio o Thomas Corns, University of Wales, Bangor o Peter Donaldson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology o A.S.G. Edwards, University of Victoria o Jane Finnan, University of Toronto o Antonia Forster, University of Akron o John K. Hale, University of Otago, New Zealand o Robert S. Knapp, Reed College o F.J. Levy, University of Washington o Lawrence Manley, Yale University o John Manning,University of Wales, Lampeter o Mark Morton, University of Winnipeg o Stephen Orgel, Stanford University o Milla Riggio, Trinity College, CT o Alan Rudrum, Simon Fraser University Editor: o Raymond G. 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All submissions must follow the current Modern Language Association Handbook, in addition to the following conventions used by Early Modern Literary Studies for ASCII text: bold text is indicated by tags which surround the text that is to appear in bold, likewise with italicized text, underlined text, and superscript; superscript is used for note numbers in the text, and notes themselves appear at the end of the document. A document outlining the representation of non-ASCII characters is available on-site or by request. Materials published in EMLS are =A9 R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS). For more information regarding submission of materials, send a message to Ed_Asst_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor's Note: A New Universal Resource Locator for EMLS Beginning with the current issue of EMLS (2.2), we will begin employing what is coming to be known as a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL). A PURL is a URL which points not directly to a location but, rather, points to a service which will redirect a WWW browser to the location being sought. More information about PURLs can be found on the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) PURL page, at . This action reflects thought on a number of concerns, most notably the strong desire that the pages of EMLS have a stable address (if not exact location) for purposes of access, linking, citation, and so forth. This desire, perhaps idealistic when one considers the nature of the medium in which EMLS publishes, is challenged by what is a very pragmatic concern: before the end of 1996, the local machine which hosts our server will be moving and, consequently, EMLS materials will move along with it. 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R.G.S. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Abstracts / R=82sum=82s des Articles (Translations from English courtesy of Luc Borot, Centre d'Etudes et de R=82cherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise, Universit=82 Paul-Valery, Montpellier, France.) ----------------------------------------------------------------- "And shall I die, and this unconquered?": Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism. Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University. Critical attention has often been drawn to Christopher Marlowe's choices of exotic, far-flung locations for the adventures of his heroes, and also to the ways in which Marlowe's fictional world intersects with actual Renaissance geographical discoveries and attitudes. Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Dido, Queen of Carthage are not only set abroad; they all dramatise (or, in the case of Doctor Faustus, pointedly allude to) that typical Renaissance act, colonisation. In this essay, I want to focus on two linked, and richly suggestive, elements of Marlowe's depiction of what it is like to travel "in another country"--the first is the plays' emphasis on female as well as male experiences and values and, the second, their reversal of the processes normally inherent in the possessing colonialist gaze--to make it clear that the alien object at which we think we stare in fact reflects us back to ourselves, and illuminates the stranger within us. "And shall I die, and this unconquered?": Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism. Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University. Les critiques ont souvent fait porter leur attention sur le fait que Christopher Marlowe choisissait pour les aventures de ses h=82ros des lieux exotiques et lointains, et aussi sur le fait que le monde des fictions de Marlowe recoupe des d=82couvertes et des attitudes g=82ographiques r=82elles de la Renaissance. En effet, non seulement Tamerlan, Le docteur Faust, Le Juif de Malte and Didon, reine de Carthage sont situ=82s =85 l'=82tranger, mais ils mettent aussi en sc=8Ane cet acte typique de la Renaissance, la colonisation --ou bien ils y font pr=82cis=82ment allusion, comme dans Le docteur Faust. Dans cet essai, je d=82sire me concentrer sur deux =82lements li=82s et amplement suggestifs de la description par Marlowe de l'exp=82rience du voyage dans "un autre pays", pour mettre en =82vidence le fait que l'objet =82tranger que nous pensons observer nous renvoie en r=82alit=82 un reflet de nous-m=88mes et met en lumi=8Are l'=82tranger qui est en nous. Les deux =82l=82ments concern=82s sont, premi=8Arement, l'accent mis par ces pi=8Aces sur les exp=82riences et les valeurs du voyage chez les femmes aussi bien que chez les hommes, et deuxi=8Amement la fa=E7on dont elles renversent les processus normalement inh=82rent au regard colonialiste possessif. New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputatio in Early Modern Manuscript Culture. Margaret Downs-Gamble, Virginia Tech. Thomas Fuller first related the legend that Sir Walter Ralegh used a diamond to etch the words, "Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall," on a window pane at Court where Elizabeth I could not fail to see them. As the story goes, the Queen answered Ralegh in rhyme with the corrective "If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all" (Fuller 261). More than a telling vignette of the insecurities of Court life, the narrative of this verse exchange serves to foreground the dialogic nature of poetic practice in the Renaissance. Because dialogue is in some sense circumscribed by the immediacy with which an exchange can occur, it should not be surprising that the flowering of dialogic verse occurred within a manuscript culture. But manuscript transmission alone does not account for the variety of practices evinced by early modern manuscripts. The forms of their communicative acts were determined by Renaissance emphases on rhetoric and dialectic. However ritualized the practice may appear, and however stylized, poetry served a primarily communicative function. New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputatio in Early Modern Manuscript Culture. Margaret Downs-Gamble, Virginia Tech. Thomas Fuller a =82t=82 le premier =85 rapporter la l=82gende selon laquelle Sir Walter Ralegh a utilis=82 un diamant pour graver les paroles "Que j'aimerais monter, si je ne craignais la ch=96te", sur une vitre de la Cour, =85 un endroit o=97 Elisabeth I=8Are ne pouvait manquer de les voir. Si l'on en croit l'histoire, la reine a corrig=82 Ralegh en lui r=82pondant en vers: "Si le coeur te manque, ne grimpe pas" (Fuller 261). Plus qu'une vignette r=82v=82latrice sur l'ins=82curit=82 de la vie =85 la Cour, le r=82cit de cet =82change de vers sert =85 mettre en avant la nature dialogique de la pratique po=82tique =85 la Renaissance. Du fait que le dialogue est en un certain sens d=82fini par la rapidit=82 avec laquelle l'=82change doit pouvoir se passer, il ne faut pas s'=82tonner que la floraison de la po=82sie dialogique s'est produite dans le cadre d'une culture manuscrite. En revanche, la transmission manuscrite ne peut =85 elle seule rendre compte de la diversit=82 des pratiques dont t=82moignent les manuscrits de la p=82riode moderne. La forme des actes de communication =82tait d=82termin=82e par l'insistance que la Renaissance faisait porter sur la rh=82torique et la dialectique. Quelle que soit l'apparence ritualis=82e, et m=88me stylis=82e, de cette pratique, la po=82sie remplissait au premier chef une fonction de communication. England as Israel in Milton's Writings. John K. Hale, University of Otago. By surveying Milton's use and non-use of certain biblical images, this essay records his loss of political innocence, and also something of his pluralism. In doing so, it shows in action his view of the relation between church and state. It charts his implied view of Isaiah Berlin's two concepts of liberty -- negative and positive, the absence of external constraints as opposed to spiritual fulfilment or self-realization -- to conclude that Milton favours the first for the sake of the second. He drew the corollary, that freedom mattered last as well as first. He was, in short, a more consistent thinker than is often acknowledged. I move toward these conclusions rather gradually, for two reasons. First, it is worth illustrating from the writings and speeches of Milton's contemporaries how much more moderate Milton's political imagery from the Bible was than that of many with whom he shared political and religious commitments. The imagery needs substantial quotation for the reader to recognise its dynamism, and to accept that it was used widely, not only by religious cranks and the weak-minded. Secondly, I survey Milton's own writing quite widely, not only to show where he does share the fervour of the sectarians but also to illustrate the degree to which he does not share it even though the occasion and subject might have seemed to suit such fervour. England as Israel in Milton's Writings. John K. Hale, University of Otago. En examinant l'usage ou l'omission de certaines images bibliques, cet article retrace sa perte d'innocence (politique), et aussi une part de son pluralisme. On montre =85 l'oeuvre sa conception de la relation entre l'=90glise et l'=90tat. En pr=82supposant qu'il partage la conception des deux concepts de la libert=82 selon Isaiah Berlin --la libert=82 n=82gative et la libert=82 positive, l'absence de contraintes ext=82rieures par opposition =85 l'accomplissement ou =85 l'=82panouissement spirituel-- on conclut que Milton pr=82f=8Are la premi=8Are au nom de la seconde. Il =82tablissait un corollaire selon lequel la libert=82 =82tait =85 la fois la derni=8Are et la premi=8Are chose qui comptait. C'=82tait un penseur plus coh=82rent qu'on ne le reconna=8Ct la plupart du temps. J'avance progressivement vers ces conclusions, pour deux raisons. Premi=8Arement, il importe d'illustrer par des exemples tir=82s des =82crits et des discours d'autres auteurs =85 quel point les images politiques que Milton tirait de la Bible =82taient plus neutres que celles de bien des gens dont il participait les engagements politiques et religieux. Il est n=82cessaire de citer un grand nombre d'exemples de ces images pour que le lecteur comprenne leur dynamisme, et accepte l'id=82e que leur utilisation =82tait tr=8As r=82pandue (et pas seulement chez les excentriques et les faibles d'esprit). Deuxi=8Amement, je me livre =85 un examen tr=8As large des =82crits de Milton, non pas simplement afin de montrer sur quels points il partage la ferveur des militants des sectes, mais aussi pour faire ressortir =85 quel point il ne la partage pas, bien que l'occasion et le sujet aient pu sembler le justifier. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- = =20 "And shall I die, and this unconquered?": Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism Lisa Hopkins Sheffield Hallam University L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk Hopkins, Lisa. "'And shall I die, and this unconquered?': Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 1.1-23 . 1. Critical attention has often been drawn to Christopher Marlowe's choices of exotic, far-flung locations for the adventures of his heroes, and also to the ways in which Marlowe's fictional world intersects with actual Renaissance geographical discoveries and attitudes. Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Dido, Queen of Carthage are not only set abroad; they all dramatise (or, in the case of Doctor Faustus, pointedly allude to) that typical Renaissance act, colonisation.[1] In this essay, I want to focus on two linked, and richly suggestive, elements of Marlowe's depiction of what it is like to travel "in another country"--the first is the plays' emphasis on female as well as male experiences and values and, the second, their reversal of the processes normally inherent in the possessing colonialist gaze--to make it clear that the alien object at which we think we stare in fact reflects us back to ourselves, and illuminates the stranger within us. 2. In the prologue to the first part of Tamburlaine the Great we are immediately informed of Tamburlaine's racial origin: he is a Scythian. In Elizabethan ideology, the term Scythian demarcated an absolute otherness, a being so sharply inferior to civilised Western man that his very membership of the same species was open to doubt:[2] it is, for instance, on the grounds of their supposed descent from the Scythians that Spenser effectively advocated genocide as the optimal attitude towards the Irish.[3] It is, therefore, perhaps surprising that the two lines which follow this fixing of Tamburlaine's racial identity proceed to describe him in terms which are by no means automatically negative: "Threatening the world with high astounding terms, / And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword."[4] In performing these two acts, he is demonstrating excellence in exactly the fields--linguistic and military--most highly privileged in the cultures of those same classical civilisations which first demonised the Scythians as other. Even more surprisingly, however, we are then expressly invited to "View but his picture in this tragic glass." What does the glass show--him, or us? 3. The image of the "tragic glass" suggests, above all, a mirror, and, as J.S. Cunningham points out, "effects of mirroring [are] germane to the Tamburlaine theatre."[5] One of the play's sources was George Whetstone's The English Mirror,[6] and the play is full of references to mirroring, imaging and reflecting.[7] Tamburlaine instructs Techelles to "Lay out our golden wedges to the view / That their reflections may amaze the Persians" (I.ii.139-40), and refers to "immortal flowers of poesy, / Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive / The highest reaches of a human wit" (V.ii.103-5); he also images the corpses of Bajazeth and Zabina as a mirror which reflects his own power (V.ii.415). It is only fitting that the play in its entirety should thus offer itself in its Prologue as glass to its audience, a fearful inversion of the customary Mirror for Magistrates. 4. If the play functions as a mirror, then what the audience will see in it is its own reflection; superimposed on the features of the barbarian Scythian will be those of the burghers and apprentices who frequented English playhouses[8]-- all the more obviously since, when it comes to the major aspect of his career, the depiction of his prowess in warfare, "the armies and tactics described in Tamburlaine are, except in a few superficial details, neither oriental nor early fifteenth century as historical realism would require."[9] Thus begins the astonishing process whereby the play forces us into a radical identification with what, in theory, we most condemn, and at the same time sharply critiques a fundamental aspect of English Renaissance culture, the colonial enterprise, by completely inverting the perspective from which it is viewed.[10] 5. Marlowe himself would have been aware of the development and ramifications of imperialist colonialism as practised by the English; as Thomas Healy remarks, Tamburlaine coincides almost exactly with the first edition of Hakluyt's Voyages, and the world the playwright depicts is typically that of the exoticism and abundance figured in travel narratives.[11] Marlowe's cousin, Anthony Marlowe, was the London agent of the Muscovy Company, and partly on the basis of this, Richard Wilson has recently argued convincingly for a close relationship between Marlowe's portrayal of Tamburlaine, particularly with regard to his weaponry, and the "Heliogabalus" and "right Scythian," Ivan the Terrible.[12] Moreover, Marlowe was, notoriously, a member of the circle of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was involved not only in the practice but also in the ideological apparatus of colonialism: Raleigh punned on the contemporary pronunciation of his own name as "Water" to insert himself into the mythology of Elizabeth I as a creature intimately bound up with the sea and with tides, governed by the queen herself whom he cast as "Cynthia," the moon goddess, controller of the tides. Raleigh also reveals an acute sense of the inherent gendering of power relations in the act of colonising, revealed not only in his choice of female names for the lands he claimed but also in his use of metaphors such as "Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead." Marlowe's own involvement with Elizabethan intelligence-gathering networks, whatever its actual nature may have been, would also have placed him at the forefront of attempts to implement Elizabethan foreign policy, so much of which hinged on relations with the archetypal colonialist power, Spain, which laid claim to large tracts of the New World. Closer to home, Spain was also running various Italian duchies as puppet states, and--as Doctor Faustus reminds us, and as Marlowe's own time in Flushing would have brought home to him--forcibly occupying the Netherlands. The main thrust of English foreign policy was to frustrate Spanish attempts to overrun or politically subjugate England. 6. That Marlowe was interested in the questions of colonialism, foreignness, and the relation of different nationalities to one another is suggested by the first of the heresies reported against him by Richard Baines: that "the Indians and many authors of antiquity have assuredly written above 16 thousand years agone, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within 6 thousand years."[13] Such an interest is also apparent throughout his work. All of his plays except one, Edward II, are set abroad--two, Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, in more than one country; and many of them also involve heroes, or other characters, who are foreign visitors or residents. The Massacre at Paris has two English lords and an English agent; Edward II ironically pits the foreign Gaveston against the equally foreign queen, and temporarily banishes Gaveston to that perennial site of colonial struggle, Ireland; The Jew of Malta boasts a whole complement of invading Turks as well as the inherently exiled Jew himself (the Knights themselves are also not indigenous inhabitants but of foreign origin); and Dido, Queen of Carthage features the man who in many ways can stand for the ur-coloniser, Aeneas. Running through all of these works is an concern with alienness, with the viability of normative perspectives, and with the problematics of the relationship between personal and national identities. And equally strongly running through all of them is a refusal to maintain the demarcation between the self and the other, the foreign and the domestic. As Emily Bartels argues, "what makes Marlowe's plays stand out . . . is that their foreign worlds are not only 'Englished'; they make a point of that Englishing."[14] 7. In the case of Tamburlaine, his Scythianness and, concomitantly, his otherness, is the one fixed element of a life during which we see him traverse countries and change from shepherd to king to corpse, and from bachelor to husband to widower. Wherever he goes, he is always racially different from those amongst whom he finds himself; his close lieutenant, Theridamas, is a Persian, and his wife, Zenocrate, an Egyptian, and thus even his three sons are only half-Scythian. We never see his parents: only Usumcasane and Techelles have been with him since the beginning, and they are dramatic nonentities--the only one of the three lieutenants to achieve a scene to himself is Theridamas, and then only when he features in the Olympia story. Indeed, one of the notable elements of Tamburlaine's career is the marked racial prejudice he consistently encounters, which leads both Persians and Turks to despise and prematurely dismiss him. It is perhaps partly in response to this that he embarks on his career of subjecting other lands to his dominion. 8. The means by which he does so exhibit significant parallels with the English colonial enterprise, as Richard Wilson observes: "it cannot be chance that Marlowe's epic of 'the rogue of Volga'. . . should project what Burghley described as "the great end of dealing with the Muscovite: discovery of a passage into Asia."[15] There are other similarities. One marked element of Marlowe's plays is the exuberant sprinkling of exotic, alien names--a feature strongly emphasised by Antony Sher's Tamburlaine in the most recent RSC production. They fill up the mighty line with rolling syllables which convey little but a sense of glamour. This would be very close to the English linguistic experience of the New World. In the vast majority of locations to which English explorers and traders ventured, they were not the first comers: the Spaniards, preceding them, had already exercised the privilege of Adam by allotting names, so that little opportunity remained for the imposition of a coherent English world-view on what they encountered. In Tamburlaine, this sense of an inability to order the world through language is pronounced, because the audience's inability to decode the myriad place-names, leading us to perceive them only as random collections of syllables, means that very few of them acquire any real solidity or sense of specific location. They blend into each other, and our sense of Tamburlaine's actual achievements is apt to melt away as we experience repetition rather than movement or progression: "nomenclature is ceaselessly revised,"[16] a process in which Tamburlaine himself will be fully participatory as he calls "provinces, cities, and towns, / After my name and thine, Zenocrate" (IV.iv.85-6). 9. An even more striking relationship between the imperialism of Tamburlaine and that practised by Marlowe's contemporaries, however, is their opposed goals. The first scene of the play offers an instance of a predatory world in which norms of exploitation and dominance have been reversed, as Cosroe laments: But this it is that doth excruciate The very substance of my vexed soul, To see our neighbours, that were wont to quake And tremble at the Persian monarch's name, Now sits and laughs our regiment to scorn; And that which might resolve me into tears, Men from the farthest equinoctial line Have swarm'd in troops into the Eastern India, Lading their ships with gold and precious stones, And made their spoils from all our provinces. (I.i.112-122) The change from quaking to laughter in Persia's neighbours has come close to effecting a similar change in Cosroe himself, who is on the verge of womanish tears at the thought of "Men from the farthest equinoctial line." A telling encapsulation of those whom the aliens find alien, this line also encodes a chilling suggestion of relativism into the colonial experience: the location of "the farthest equinoctial line" depends, on a round planet, on where one is standing. Since Cosroe's lament is immediately followed by Menaphon's advice that he should undertake "the curing of this maimed empery" (I.i.126) by the invasion of Greece, we may well imagine that, for Cosroe, "the farthest equinoctial line" is the one which he envisages when he looks towards Europe. We are, indeed, the Other's Other. 10. The reference to Greece is given added point by Meander's earlier classification of Tamburlaine as advancing on Persia "with barbarous arms" (I.i.42). Meander's unimpeachably Greek name underscores the original meaning of the word "barbarian" as one who speaks no Greek (though, ironically, Tamburlaine will very soon prove himself completely at home in deploying the discourse of Greek mythology and culture, while Mycetes will have to consult Meander about the legend of the dragon's teeth [II.ii.51-2].) The classical culture of the Persian court is again evident when Mycetes almost immediately afterwards terms Meander "a Damon for thy love" (I.i.50). Soon after, though, Mycetes adjures Meander to return "smiling home, / As did Sir Paris with the Grecian dame" (I.i.66), thus figuring his friend as a Trojan, and Menaphon's advice to Cosroe to invade Greece is coupled with an invocation of the Persian Cyrus, a subtle reminder that those who are so anxious to label Tamburlaine as a barbarian are in fact the literal descendants of those to whom that term was once most accurately applicable. It is not only the geographical coding of Otherness that is revealed as reversible; the very terms of civility and barbarism are here exposed as culturally relative, and the same game will be played when the Soldan of Egypt enters saying "Methinks we march as Meleager did" (IV.iii.1)--one man's Greek is another man's Egyptian. Moreover, the Soldan, like Meander earlier, sees Tamburlaine as "sturdy" (IV.iv.12), a word which, as Mark Thornton Burnett point out, encodes, for an Elizabethan audience, specifically English resonances, being habitually used for the description of English beggars.[17] Thus the Greekish Egyptian virtually forces us into a position of identification with Tamburlaine here in national terms (although his language would also work to underline the difference of Tamburlaine's "class" position). 11. English adventurers apparently saw themselves as moving from the civilised to the savage, enlightening the natives as they went. The language used to describe Tamburlaine here may make him briefly reminiscent of a wandering Englishman, but his epic journeys have a reversed teleology, for not only could the advance of a Scythian be read as a self-evident triumph of barbarism, but he also originates in the East--so radically demonised in English Renaissance culture--and advances steadily ever closer to the West: as he says, "So from the East unto the furthest West / Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arms" (III.iii.246-7), until his imminent death reduces him to mere speculation on "what a world of ground / Lies westward" (Part Two, V.iii.146-7). Before that, he has threatened to get very close to home indeed, "Keeping in awe the Bay of Portingale, / And all the ocean by the British shore" (III.iii.258-9). Interestingly, however, this is not presented in the play as a threat. The direct menace to Western civilisation is, as always embodied by the Turks, and they are disadvantaged by Tamburlaine's expansionism, since he diverts "the force of Turkish arms, / Which lately made all Europe quake for fear" (III.iii.134-5), and, particularly in Part Two, dramatically relieves the pressure on Christendom's beleaguered frontiers.[18] 12. As well as his open designs on "the British shore," Tamburlaine is also metaphorically associated with two crucial figures in the histories both of colonisation and of Britain. At an early point in his career, he directly compares himself with a previous invader of Britain when he says "My camp is like to Julius Caesar's host" (III.iii.152). Mention of Julius Caesar recurs in Doctor Faustus, where the beauties of Rome in fact turn out to depend in part at least on the conquered spoils "Which Julius Caesar brought from Africa" (III.i.43). 13. Doctor Faustus is a text which is saturated, paradoxically, in both the language of colonialism and the language of resistance to it. Faustus' initial desire for power is characterised precisely as a desire for physical dominion--"All things that move between the quiet poles / Shall be at my command"[19]--and he wants to "fly to India for gold" (I.ii.84), reminding us of the fabled wealth of the Indies which both fueled and motivated Spain's colonial expansion. Spanish aggression in the Low Countries, of which Marlowe's time in Flushing would have given him direct personal experience, bulks large in the play: Faustus resolves to expel Emperor Charles V's general, the Prince of Parma, from the Low Countries (I.ii.95), and the Emperor even makes a personal appearance, but when Faustus summons up for him the ghost of Alexander the Great our principal sense is of the ephemerality of conquest. This is radically multiplied in the B-text when Alexander is seen defeating the previously victorious Darius, just as we learn that Faustus means to expel Parma not from patriotism, but because he himself plans to "reign sole king of all our provinces" (I.ii.96), and to possess "the seigniory of Emden" (II.i.23). Faustus will become that which he seeks to defeat, an idea which is repeated in Valdes' enticements to him that he will be treated "As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords" (I.ii.123). Faustus, like Tamburlaine, dreams of mastering the map as he fantasises that "I'll join the hills that bind the Afric shore / And make that land continent to Spain" (I.iii.109-110). 14. But in another inversion, Faustus is himself the unwitting victim of an act of such colonisation, as the boundaries of the world-map are redrawn indeed and, at the head of his invading army, Mephistopheles can proclaim "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it" (I.iii.78), and explain that Lucifer also seeks to "Enlarge his kingdom" (II.i.40). Once again, as hell and earth dissolve and blur, as human motivation is revealed to be the same as diabolical, and as Faustus moves from opposition to the Spanish forces to the performance of conjuring tricks for the Emperor, the most pronounced sense is of a failure to maintain oppositions of difference, and of an inversion of the structuring polarities of civilisation and savagery. 15. The Prince of Parma, Alessandro Farnese, effectively shares a name with Ferneze, the Governor of Malta who bests Barabas. If Marlowe's first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, staged an originary moment of colonialism, The Jew of Malta represents the process as so far advanced that it is barely possible to identify a truly indigenous inhabitant of the much-invaded island of Malta. The Jew is multiply alien: as Barabas, he is the polar opposite of the Christianity which theoretically categorises Marlowe's own audience; as a Jew, he is radically demonised; as a denizen of Malta, he is seen in English eyes as belonging to the farthest fringes of the Christian world, constantly contaminated by contact with the Turk, and in the eyes of the indigenous inhabitants of the island as a suspect resident alien. His behaviour in the play apparently matches well with these stereotypes: he is a monstrous egotist, a mass murderer, crazed by the desire for money and power. Nevertheless, it is apparent not only that his villainy is easily matched by both his Turkish and his Christian opponents, but also that it has been taught to him specifically by a European, Machiavelli. Moreover, his plan for wiping out the convent is a direct parallel to a scheme proposed by another European, the same Richard Baines who was later to accuse Marlowe of atheism, who while a student at the English College at Rheims formed a plan to eliminate the entire seminary by poisoning its well.[20] Once again, the use of an alien environment and an alien protagonist serves only to throw into starker relief the internality rather than the externality of otherness.[21] 16. The second figure with whom Tamburlaine is compared is, significantly, Aeneas (V.ii.319). Marlowe had already depicted the activities of this ur-coloniser in Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play in which it is even more explicitly Europe which is being colonised, this time by an Asiatic Trojan.[22] Dido, which itself performs a sort of act of colonisation of Virgil's Aeneid, dramatises many of the archetypal processes of colonisation in general and of English Renaissance colonialism in particular: the coloniser's self-justification and sense of divine mission, the involvement with (and subsequent desertion of) a native woman, and the eventual eruption of violence. The traditional pattern of classical epic adventure voyage, on which the Aeneid itself is based, has its heroes radically modifying the environments which they encounter, almost always through violence: Polyphemus is blinded, the Harpies caged, the Gorgon beheaded. Dido, Queen of Carthage follows this pattern to the extent that a native--as so often, a female one--dies; the ending, however, is slightly unexpected, in that instead of the coloniser triumphing through superior skill and force and subduing the alien culture, he is himself altered by what he finds there, to the extent that by the end of the play the apparently daring adventurer turns tail and runs, not even daring to say farewell. Although this is the actual ending of the Dido and Aeneas story, and as such an inevitable given in Marlowe's choice of narrative, nevertheless the episode Marlowe has chosen to dramatise shows the ur-coloniser conspicuously failing in his role. 17. Firstly, he falls victim to that common fate of Renaissance explorers, landing in the wrong country. He then not only fails to subjugate it, but very nearly becomes subjugated in his turn, as we see him tempted by the most feared of all downfalls of colonisers, the urge to go native. His son--the emblem of his future--is immediately swept away by Dido to be brought up in her entourage; and he himself, in a bizarre and suggestive conceit, is to be dressed up in the clothes and ornaments of Dido's late husband Sychaeus, a dramatic drawing attention to what the woman wants. Aeneas' status as erotic object of Dido's possessing gaze is repeatedly underlined, as she tells her sister Anna "none shall gaze on him but I" (III.i.73) and affirms that "His glistering eyes shall be my looking-glass" (III.i.86). It is only divine intervention (again controlled by a female figure, his mother the goddess Venus) which eventually saves Aeneas, and which packs him off to Italy at the end of the play having gained precisely nothing and having forfeited both time and, I would imagine, the sympathy of the majority of the audience. This first of all colonial enterprises is seen in the most unglamourous of lights. 18. In the Tamburlaine passage, Philemus, after comparing Tamburlaine with Aeneas, goes on to figure the Arabian king as Turnus, resisting this Asiatic invader with designs on Europe. This doubly encodes a wave of westward invasion, since Aeneas' grandson Brut, celebrated by Layamon, would later arrive in Britain. Aeneas is the founder of Rome, and thus, in a major sense, the founder also of Marlowe's Britain--mythically, through Brut, and historically, both through the literal Roman conquest of the island and the metaphorical conquest of its literary allegiances by classical learning. To reveal him as inept is a damning reworking of a potent myth of origins; to cast Tamburlaine as an Aeneas overpowering the King of Arabia's Turnus is, once again, to show us a sharply focused image of the Scythian in the mirror. 19. Tamburlaine himself may be readily branded by many of those he encounters as a savage, but he is also seen to be related very closely to Marlowe's audience: indeed T.M. Pearce has argued that "he was Marlowe's conception of the soldier-poet or scholar-warrior in the mold of the Italian courtier described by Castiglione,"[23] and suggests that we should read him within the context of Humphrey Gilbert's scheme for "a military academy designed to provide England with young Tamburlaines."[24] Additionally, perhaps, his fondness for Zenocrate would serve to align him with the uxoriousness for which London citizens were soon to become so famous in comedy, and what seems his most fundamentally barbarous act, the stabbing of Calyphas, is, ironically, most easily understood within the cultural context of those arch-colonisers, and ultimate authorisers of Renaissance civilisation, the Romans: "its source . . . may be found . . . in the story of the Roman consul, Manlius Torquatus, who slew his own son for disobeying orders."[25] Even Tamburlaine's appearance would be familiar: not only would he be recognisably Edward Alleyn, but also, instead of the cloak which was normally the trademark of the Scythian, Tamburlaine sported the thoroughly Western garb of "a coat with copper lace" and "breeches of crimson velvet."[26] The very lists of names which apparently serve to signal Tamburlaine's exotic origins can serve equally to position him within the western epic tradition of the list. Moreover, the use of the signature "Tamburlaine" appended to the Dutch church libel, a virulently anti-immigrant poem found affixed to the wall of the Dutch churchyard, paradoxically positions Tamburlaine as an endorsement, indeed an embodiment, of English xenophobia. As suggested in the prologue, he is indeed the Scythian who is us: "Marlowe's eastern world is a mirror that transcends mere orientalism. What we see reflected, of course, are English privateers such as Hawkins: the founders of the so-called Honourable [Muscovy] Company."[27] 20. The westward trajectory of his travels, then, is not only not seen as menacing, but can function as an emblem for the narrative trajectory by which the apparently unbridgeable gap between Tamburlaine and his audience gradually shrinks throughout the plays. This is especially so in Part Two, where the Scourge of God is seen as a harassed single parent subject to illness and mortality; and by the end of his story his singularity and otherness have vanished as he falls prey to the most basic common denominator of all. The Scythian in the glass is us, and this is brought home by the speech of Theridamas in Part Two, when he tells Tamburlaine: I left the confines and the bounds of Afric, And made a voyage into Europe, Where, by the river Tyras, I subdu'd Stoka, Podolia, and Codemia; Then cross'd the sea and came to Oblia, And Nigra Silva, where the devils dance. (I.vi.80-85) Of all the curious place-names and exotic descriptions in the plays, I find this the most evocative; and yet this is in Europe (and also threatened by Theridamas, as the Canaries and Gibraltar have been by Usumcasane). Reversing the direction of the gaze has made Europe strange. 21. One way in which Europe is strange to most of the characters in the Tamburlaine plays lies in their conception of the continent as gendered. The normal gendering processes of the colonialist imaginary often proceed on an implied equation between feminisation and subjugation, casting the land as a feminine space to be "husbanded" by the incoming colonist: Raleigh named his colony Virginia.[28] In Tamburlaine Part Two, Orcanes specifically tropes Europe as a woman: she is "fair Europe, mounted on her bull" (I.ii.42). The bull who husbanded Europa was Jove, with whom Tamburlaine is so often compared, so that the allusion once more underlines the westward trajectory of his conquests; but it also underlines the plays' quiet but insistent interest in the intersection between colonialism and gender. Their use of foreign settings serves primarily to point up the similarities between those who are apparently opposites, and the principal means by which such similarity is established is to portray both sides as equally bad. There is, however, a group of striking exceptions to this general depiction of all parties as evil, and this is the plays' female characters. 22. Dido, Zenocrate, Olympia and Abigail are all distinguished by an apparently limitless capacity to love. Dido immediately establishes herself as the kindest of stepmothers in her devotion to young Ascanius; Zenocrate feels not only for Tamburlaine and for all three of her sons but for her father, her neglected suitor, and the virgins of Damascus, and Zabina, though haughty, is unshakeably loyal to her husband; Abigail loves Mathias and, even when she has lost all respect for her father, still refuses to betray him. Olympia is in some ways the most interesting of all, for not only is she devoted to her husband and son but, although she is a woman of Soria, her classical name is matched by her adherence to the values of classical civilisation, so highly privileged in the Renaissance, when with stoic fortitude she first kills her son and then unflinchingly engineers her own death. Even Faustus wants a wife, and reserves one of his most disinterested acts for the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt. 23. The plays' ventures into the countries of the other thus invert familiar norms in two ways: not only is the other fundamentally the same, but foreign women, usually perceived as doubly alien through their twin deviancies of race and gender, are presented to us as the repositories of the dual values of love and honour which are the keynotes of the two major influences on European thought, Christianity and classicism respectively. Just as the westward trajectory of Tamburlaine's conquering march runs counter to the normal logic of east-facing colonialism, so the narrative logic of these three plays locates civilised modes of behaviour only in the one place where the cultural prejudices of the audience would have made them least likely to look for it: the barbarian woman.[29] Notes 1. Although A Massacre at Paris is also set abroad, it, like Edward II, deals with civil war, rather than confrontations between different nations, and I shall therefore not be discussing it here. 2. For some interesting comments on the casting of the Scythians as other, see Stephen Greenblatt (Marvelous Possessions 124-5). 3. On the relation between Scythianness and Irishness here see Sales (56-7) and Hopkins. 4. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays (ed. J.B. Steane, 105). All quotations from the plays will be taken from this edition unless otherwise indicated. 5. Marlowe (ed. J.S. Cunningham, Tamburlaine the Great, "Introduction" 66). 6. See Thomas and Tydeman (90-2). For commentary on the use of mirror imagery elsewhere in Marlowe, see Summers; on Renaissance mirror theory in general, see Greenblatt (Shakespearean Negotiations 8). 7. Note also Stephen Greenblatt's discussion of the use of Scythians as mirroring figures in Herodotus, for "the discovery of the self in the other and the other in the self" (Marvelous Possessions 127). Greenblatt acknowledges his debt here to the work of Francois Hartog in The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. 8. Crewe comments that "Marlowe makes the 'Scythian'--i.e., the conventionally barbarous in Elizabethan terms--not merely oppose but paradoxically represent cultural norms, thus reestablishing a 'lost' or eclipsed state of perfection" (52). 9. See Kocher (207). 10. For comment on Tamburlaine as a text concerned with colonialism, see Belsey (29). 11. See Healy (44). Healy's chapter on "The World on the Stage" is very suggestive. Similar points about the relationship of Marlowe's work to actual travel are made by William Zunder (15). 12. See Wilson (47-8). 13. This is both quoted and discussed in Nicholl. 14. See Bartels (15). 15. Wilson (50). 16. Wilson (51). 17. See Burnett. 18. At the beginning of Part Two events draw nearer to us not only geographically but also chronologically: John D. Jump notes in his edition of the play that the historical episode of Christian treachery postdates this stage of Tamburlaine's career by about forty years ("Introduction" xiv). 19. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, I.ii.58-9). All further quotations from the play will be from this edition, and reference will be given in the text. The edition contains both the A-text and the B-text; unless otherwise stated, all my quotations are from the A-text. 20. Nicholl (124). 21. Stephen Greenblatt remarks that "despite all the exoticism in Marlowe--Scythian shepherds, Maltese Jews, German magicians--it is his own countrymen that he broods upon and depicts. As in Spenser, though to radically different effect, the 'other world' becomes a mirror" (Greenblatt, "Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play" 193). 22. Modern criticism (with the exception of Shepherd [95, 201-2]) has had little to say about the colonial implications of Dido, but Shakespeare was clearly alive to them when in his own treatment of the subject, The Tempest, he deliberately placed Claribel as the lone European in the capital city of "the Widow Dido." 23. See Pearce (18). 24. Pearce (22). 25. Kocher (223). 26. Nicholl (202). 27. Wilson (57). 28. See, for instance, Smith (71-6, 83), where Marlowe's Aeneas is briefly discussed. 29. For a suggestion that the figure of the foreign woman operates very differently, and as a marker of even greater strangeness than the foregin male, within a text which may also be identified as closely concerned with colonisation, see Relihan (174). Works Cited * Bartels, Emily C. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation and Marlowe. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. * Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy. London: Routledge, 1991. * Burnett, Mark Thornton. "Tamburlaine: An Elizabethan Vagabond." Studies in Philology 94 (1987): 308-23. * Crewe, Jonathan V. "The Theater of the Idols: Theatrical and Antitheatrical Discourse." 49-56 in Staging the Renaissance. Ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. London: Routledge, 1991. * Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991. * -----. "Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play." 193-221 in Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. * -----. Shakespearean Negotiations. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988. * Hartog, Francois. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. * Healy, Thomas. Christopher Marlowe. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994. * Hopkins, Lisa. "'Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might': Tamburlaine and the uses of Pastoral." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 35 (1996): 1-16. * Kocher, Paul H. "Marlowe's Art of War." Studies in Philology 39 (1942): 207-45. * Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Ed. J.B. Steane. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). * -----. Doctor Faustus. Ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993. * -----. Tamburlaine the Great. Ed. J.S. Cunningham. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1981. * -----. Tamburlaine the Great. Ed. John D. Jump. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1967. * Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. * Pearce, T.M. "Tamburlaine's "Discipline to his Three Sonnes": An Interpretation of Tamburlaine, Part II." Modern Language Quarterly 15 (1954): 18-27. * Relihan, Constance C. "The Geography of the Arcadian Landscape: Constructing Otherness, Preserving Europe." 115-31 in Narrative Strategies in Early English Fiction. Ed. Wolfgang Gortschacher and Holger Klein. New York and Salzburg: Edwin Mellen P, 1995. * Sales, Roger. Christopher Marlowe. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. * Shepherd, Simon. Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre. Brighton: Harvester, 1986. * Smith, Peter J. Social Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. * Summers, Claude J. "Sex, Politics, and Self-Realization in Edward II." 221-240 in "A Poet and a filthy Play-maker": New Essays on Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill and Constance B.Kuriyama. New York: AMS P, 1988. * Thomas, Vivien, and William Tydeman. Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources. London: Routledge, 1994. * Wilson, Richard. "Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible." English Literary History 62 (1995): 47-68. * Zunder, William. Elizabethan Marlowe. Hull: Unity P, 1994. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- = =20 New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputatio in Early Modern Manuscript Culture Margaret Downs-Gamble Virginia Tech margaret@vt.edu Downs-Gamble, Margaret. "New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputatio in Early Modern Manuscript Culture." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 2.1-33 . 1. Thomas Fuller first related the legend that Sir Walter Ralegh used a diamond to etch the words, "Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall," on a window pane at Court where Elizabeth I could not fail to see them. As the story goes, the Queen answered Ralegh in rhyme with the corrective "If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all" (Fuller 261).[1] More than a telling vignette of the insecurities of Court life, the narrative of this verse exchange serves to foreground the dialogic nature of poetic practice in the Renaissance. Because dialogue is in some sense circumscribed by the immediacy with which an exchange can occur, it should not be surprising that the flowering of dialogic verse occurred within a manuscript culture. But manuscript transmission alone does not account for the variety of practices evinced by early modern manuscripts. The forms of their communicative acts were determined by Renaissance emphases on rhetoric and dialectic. However ritualized the practice may appear, and however stylized, poetry served a primarily communicative function. 2. Wilber Samuel Howell insists that "Englishmen of these two centuries did not waste their time in the vain effort to deny poetry a primarily communicative function"; it was "considered to be the third great form of communication, open and popular but not fully explained by rhetoric, concise and lean but not fully explained by logic," instead containing "both characteristics at once" (Howell 4).[2] It is important that we reconsider early modern poetry as a communicative act within manuscript culture, because our tendency to distinguish it as art severs poetic language from its functional capacity. When modern scholars have considered the intertextuality of relatively autonomous print exempla of argumentative "answer" poems from Renaissance manuscript culture, such as Christopher Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd," Sir Walter Ralegh's "Nymph's Reply," and John Donne's "The Bait," they have lauded the "masculine" game of argumentation.[3] Print exempla, however, mark the end of this poetic, though not entirely masculine, game. 3. Thus, when J.W. Saunders observes, that "poetry was an instrument of social converse and entertainment," he inscribes the particular terrain of verse produced in Renaissance manuscript culture. As Saunders amplified his statement: Poetry could be used as a compliment or comment on virtually every happening in life, from birth to death, from the presentation of a gift to the launching of a war . . . Poetry was the medium of the communication of experience, the means for the resolution of personal syntheses and the expression of personal analyses. (509) That poetry was simultaneously communicative and dialogic was not entirely determined by the medium of transmission, however; Renaissance educational emphases on rhetoric and dialectic helped furnish the particular milieu conducive to poetic implementation of rhetorical imitatio and declamatio and dialectical disputatio in verse production. 4. Although no single rhetorical or dialectical practice monopolized Renaissance literary production, the influence of dialectical disputatio, as it was extracted from classical models and imposed upon early-modern minds, may well account for the flowering of various dialogic literary forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While we may immediately accept the pamphlet wars in Renaissance print culture as evidence of dialectical influence on early-modern discourse, and may even acknowledge the influence of dialectic on dramatic activity during this same period, we have not extended this understanding of cultural context in our examinations of poetry. Poetry studies have concentrated on the identification of rhetorical tropes and dialectical figures in the single and frequently published poetic products[4] without adequately considering rhetorical and dialectical influences on poetic practice in Renaissance manuscript culture. As Linda Woodbridge observes, "the Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages an almost aesthetic view of debate. Peter Ramus held the view that, in the words of Marlowe's Faustus, 'to dispute well [is] logic's chiefest end,'"--which is Christopher Marlowe's translation of Ramus's words, "Bene disserere est finis logices" from his Dialectica, (1576)[5]--"and the four debates . . .[in] The Courtier, if they end in enlightenment, begin as recreation" (Woodbridge 5). 5. Dialectical recreation, a consequence of dialectical education, governed poetic production as well,[6] in effect naturalizing verse arguments like those supposedly etched by Sir Walter Ralegh and Elizabeth I. More extensive verse conversations than that described above, extant in numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts, have been obscured by selective editing for particular authors. When we examine the manuscript collections from which our twentieth-century poetic authorities have been constructed, we can see that rhetorical and dialectical verse transactions were central to social converse in manuscript. 6. Although published texts have been thoroughly examined for rhetorical and dialectical devices as well as for evidence of the influence of rhetoric and dialectic upon style, we have not adequately considered that this distinctive "style," and, perhaps, even what we have considered the distinctive flowering of poetics in the Renaissance, may issue from an alien epistemology governed by an alien transmissional medium: manuscript. 7. While I do not intend by "alien" to imply an evolutionary model of textual mediation in which the technology of the press entirely replaced that of the scribe, the dominant transmissional medium was superseded, and it is important for us to attempt to understand manuscript culture through its own attributes rather than to continue to define it negatively. Therefore, when Ted-Larry Pebworth in "Manuscript Poems and Print Assumptions" provides us with the essential information that "the major feature of manuscript transmission" is "a lack of stability in canon, attribution, and text" we are simultaneously enlightened and bemused. This negative definition clarifies even as it problematizes our basic conceptualizations that insist upon characterizing by "lack" (3). 8. Manuscript culture knew not "intellectual property" or "author" as we, inhabitors of print culture, so clearly do. Our notions of propriety, authorship, and text are ours in part because of the technological advent of the printing press and resultant epistemological views. In manuscript culture, text and authority could be claimed or obscured by the flourish of a mightier pen. But before examining the artifacts that evince the peculiarities of transmissional activity, it is important for us to understand those rhetorical and dialectical influences significant to Renaissance textual creation. 9. Rhetoric and dialectic (or logic) were central disciplines in the Renaissance educational scheme. Rhetorical imitatio was understood as a tool of elementary rhetorical training, as the essential step in literary invention,[7] and, if not to us the sincerest form of flattery, at least the clearest indicator of some nebulous relationship between one writer and another. While rhetorical imitatio, as described by Ascham and Sturm, was primarily an elementary task set for beginning students to teach them to write like Cicero or other great orators, those who later chose to write like Petrarch, Ovid, or Catullus frequently resorted to the familiar process of imitating a recognizably great exemplar. Thus, one activity we often see in manuscript is clearly imitative. According to British Library Additional MS 19268 "A copie in imitation of" another verse complimented the "master" exemplar. On his {Mtrs} Walkinge in the Snowe I sawe faire Cloris walke alone when featherd raine came softly downe And Jove descended from his towre to Court her in a sylver showre the wanton snowe flew on her breast as lithe birds unto their nests but overcome in whitnes there for grief it thawed into a feare when fallinge on her garments hem to deck her froze into a gemme. W. Stroud A copie in imitation of the former I sawe faire Flora take the aire When Phabus shinde and it was faire the heavens to allay the scorching sun sent drops of raine which gently come the sunne retires ashamed to see that he was bar'd from kissing thee But Boreas then tooke such disdaine that soone he dryed those drops againe A cunninge trick but most divinne to change and mix his breath with thine H Hide (fols. 23r-23v) Poetic imitatio, if we may think of what occurs above in that way, does not digest and transform the model, and is hardly more than a copy of the exemplar. Imitatio, however, was not the only, nor even the most frequently practiced, method of poetic production in Renaissance manuscript culture. For, while Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1561) advised the commonplace when it insisted that the would be writer "take dylygente to folowinge [imitazioni], without the whiche . . . no man canne wryte well" (White 43), as this advice continues: "if Virgill had altogether folowed Gisiodus, he should not have passed him nor Cicero, Crassus nor Ennius, his predecessors. . . .And truly it should be a great miserye to stoppe without wading any farther then almost the first that ever wrote: and to dispaire, that so many and so noble wittes shall never find out any mo then one good maner of speach." (White 44) 10. If imitatio is the most basic endeavor of rhetorical training, declamatio is the more advanced rhetorical practice, deployed similarly by Renaissance speakers, prose writers and poets. Having copied a variety of exemplars, the intermediate student would then move on (first in study and later in poetic practice) to attempt transcendence of those models. The distinction was clearly competitive; however, the exercise, even the Art, was still based in rhetorical rather than dialectical practice. Renaissance people did, however, "dispaire," not only of the "noble wittes" of the ancients, but also of those of their contemporaries. Preserved in the British Library Egerton MS 2230 is a brief but telling conversation. Hang him he's fit for nothing butt his hearse That in this wittye age can scorne verse: Many would write but see mens witts soe rare That of theire owne they instantly dispayre:/ (f.47) Transcribed as found, the above verse appears as a single poem, but for the telltale colons--characteristic end pointing for this scribe. Whatever their outward appearance, these couplets constitute a lively verse exchange, and serve in miniature to illustrate the conversational nature of much manuscript verse. The terminal slash distinguishes this conversation from others in the book, but the scribe did not seek to preserve the separate elements of the conversation. Not imitatio, but rhetorical declamatio informs this exchange. The objective, the purpose, is clear. In the first instance, one poet urges hanging for the man who scorns verse. The more temperate second answers with his explanation that argues not scorn but "dispayre" as the rationale for poetic silence. The first couplet challenges and provokes; for this reason we may consider this initiating verse as the provocateur--someone begins the conversation. In its simplest form, as in this exchange, there is then an answer. These most basic elements, the provocative and answering verse, illustrate declamatory rather than imitative practice. If the first objective of the Renaissance writer was the successful imitation of a master, the second was mastery. 11. Thus, when Marlowe's Shepherd exclaims "Come live with me and be my love / And we will all the pleasures prove," Sir Walter Ralegh's Nymph answers rhetorical syllogism with rhetorical syllogism, and echoes, though not exactly, "These pretty pleasures might me move / To live with thee and be thy love" (3-4). Accepting Marlowe's premise, his pastoral setting, the proposed contest offered by his Shepherd, and the implicit, fictional dialogue, Ralegh's declamation answers the argument of Marlowe's verse in the voice of the Nymph addressed, challenging the argument but not the structure or topical scenario of Marlowe's verse. At only one point in Ralegh's declamatory answer does he seem to step beyond purely rhetorical practice, as the competitive poet appears to critique Marlowe's verse argument rather than merely "Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses / Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies" (13-14), to declare something more than cap and kirtle, possibly Marlowe's logic and argument, "in folly ripe, in reason rotten" (16). 12. As Thomas Elyot noted in The Booke Named the Governour (1530), They whiche do onely teache rhetorike, whiche is the science wherby is taught an artifyciall fourme of spekyng, wherin is the power to persuade, moue, and delyte, or by that science onely do speke or write, . . . ought to be named rhetoriciens, declamatours, artificiall spekers . . . or any other name than oratours. Semblably they that make verses, expressynge therby none other lernynge but craft of versifyeng, be nat of auncient writers named poetes, but onely called versifyers." (1.119-20, emphasis mine). Mastery of poetic, like mastery of prose or oratory, was the purview of philosophy,[8] learned through dedicated exercise and mastery of dialectic or logic. But as with prose dialectic, Renaissance dialectical poetic assumes a forum of activity in which the audience members are actively participating poets. This poetic forum is that which Arthur Marotti describes as a "coterie."[9] However, when we speak of "John Donne's coterie," we should keep in mind that "the very existence of a large body of dubiously or wrongly ascribed verse on the fringes of the Donne canon" that "attests to th[e] social dimension of his work" (Marotti xiii), like the existence of 4,000 non-authorial manuscript versions of verses we've attributed to Donne, tells us more about the "social dimension" than about "his work." In fact, the disruptive force of this evidence should de-center John Donne, as authoritative entity, in favor of these various loci of production. 13. Collective authorship is inherent to the coterie environment. Communal authority, however, does not spring consensually from any group. Rather, coterie verse production implies a negotiational forum, within which oppositional ideologies serve as correctives to each other. Like the Ralegh-Elizabeth I exchange, coterie verse production was neither neutral nor consensual, but dependent upon the successful execution of provocative verse--that is, verse written in order to elicit a response. From an understanding of this cultural environment, which promoted verse conversations, with characteristic corrective exchanges between collective authorities, we can examine, even ourselves interrogate, specific emissaries--the manuscript sources--for that "King," John Donne, "that rul'd as hee thought fit / The universall Monarchy of wit."[10] 14. Donne, like Ralegh and Elizabeth I, wrote poetry primarily within a chirographic, or manuscript, culture, the ramifications of which remain largely unexamined. The social dimension, that is, the manuscript transmission of rhetorically and dialectically framed verse, has been, until very recently, a minor concern for literary scholars, except insofar as this verse created editorial and critical problems. Thus, in The Disinterred Muse, Donne's Texts and Contexts (1980), David Novarr seems disconcerted by what might be considered an integral part of Renaissance poetic practice: the echo-line in Donne's verse "To Mr. Tillman after he had taken orders" and George Herbert's "The Church-Porch." Comparing lines in Donne's verse: "Would they thinke it well if the day were spent / In dressing, Mistressing and complement?" (29-30), with lines in Herbert's--"Flie idlenesse, which yet thou canst not flie / By dressing, mistressing, and complement" (79-80), Novarr concludes, "either that Herbert had seen Donne's poem in manuscript or that Donne had seen a draft of 'The Church-Porch' and had taken over one of its lines, a procedure so foreign to the way he worked that it is not likely he would have adopted it unless he expected Herbert to see what he had done" (111, emphasis mine). 15. We need only remember the opening lines of "The Bait" ("Come live with mee, and bee my love / And wee will some new pleasures prove" [Shawcross 82]) to question whether the "procedure" was "so foreign to the way [Donne] worked." Further, we find that in some manuscripts the reading of these first two lines of "The Bait" exactly replicates Christopher Marlowe's lines in "The Passionate Shepherd"--"Come live with me and be my love / And we will all the pleasures prove," to question how, in fact, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetic production "worked." This Renaissance strategy is more than a fictive or poetic pose; it is a rhetorical and dialectical signal of two simultaneous acknowledgments: firstly, that the writer is consciously engaged in discourse with another and, secondly, that the writer is aware of witnesses to the exchange. 16. Although the exact echoing of Marlowe's or Herbert's lines may be a more definitive poetic signal, serving to indicate to us now, as it did to the audience then, that the poems are elements in a verse conversation, the exact echoing can only conclusively be said to indicate involvement in the elementary practice of rhetorical imitatio. However, the revised echo which proves "some new pleasure" indicates yet more advanced practice--that of dialectical disputatio. Far from elementary, dialectical disputatio was confined to university curricula. While evidence of the influence of the rhetorical practices of imitatio and declamatio in the Renaissance are myriad, what has not been adequately examined is the influence of dialectical disputatio-- an activity unlike either imitatio or declamatio in its insistence on transmutation of the exemplar through engagement with the provocateur in disputation. 17. Whereas the nymph's itemized refutation of the shepherd inscribes a contest in which Ralegh transcends the argumentative model set by Marlowe's verse, Donne, though clearly involved in the same conversation, baits his own hook by transmuting the setting, the occasion, the premise, and the rhetorical arguments presented by both Marlowe and Ralegh. Donne's "new pleasure" is dialectical disputation. 18. Rejecting the mercantilism proposed by Marlowe, and accepted as an argumentative premise by Ralegh, Donne constructs a disputation in which the bait's natural attributes attract those who would more happily catch than be caught. Rather than involve himself in the spent dialogue between shepherd and nymph, Donne takes Marlowe's "shallow rivers" (7) and Ralegh's raging ones (6), to identify the "enamoured fish" that "Will amorously . . . swim / Gladder to catch [the bait], than [the bait is glad to catch] him" (11-12). If "the bait" described in Donne's verse is a female (the traditional assumption), then the mutuality of their entanglement is clear. However, if "the bait" is instead the "silken [poetic] lines" and "silver [rhetorical] hooks" of Marlowe's and/or Ralegh's verse, then Donne's complimentary jest is something else entirely. The "river" Donne constructs in his verse, "warmed by [the] eyes" of the poet he compliments, is filled with "enamored fish," other would-be poets, who would rather hook a poet with their versifying than be entangled by Marlowe's and, perhaps, Ralegh's. 19. Donne's verse becomes the occasion for Donne to chastise versifiers, those "others" he speaks of in lines 17 through 24, who "treacherously . . . beset" poor fish with" the "strangling snare" of their artificial rhetorical offerings (19-20). Donne's dialectical corrective verse, while intervening in the rhetorical conversation of Marlowe and Ralegh, uses the opportunity to distinguish the poet, "thou," who is loathed to be seen in the live bath of a school of fishy versifiers. Outshining both sun and moon, the poet's compliment "needs no" violent and traitorous "deceit," presumably that used by lesser versifiers, because "thou thyself art thine own bait." Excusing his own intervention in the poetic conversation, admitting his attraction to Marlowe's provocateur, Donne acknowledges his own complicity: "That fish that is not catched thereby / Alas is wiser far than I" (27-28). 20. Argumentative strategies, then, were not only applied at the initial stages of poetic transmission in manuscript, but can be considered to have been in large part the function of transmission--that is to say, "successful" transmission can be seen as a system in which the provocative verse elicited corrective responses. Thus "authorial control" is a contested space in which one text creates a forum expected to attract other authorities holding divergent views. 21. While we may be confident that, in the initial stage of transmission, Sir Walter Ralegh provoked a response from Elizabeth I, or Marlowe elicited one from Ralegh, in the absence of verse autographs we cannot be certain that a particular manuscript version is in any sense the authorial provocateur, or that it has, in fact, any canonical authority beyond a particular argumentative arena. The complexities of manuscript transmission have yet to be adequately explored. However, if disputatio as well as declamatio and imitatio governed poetic practice, then as the forum of contest expanded to include those not involved in immediate, localized exchanges, the poetic agenda and methodology would necessarily shift to accommodate the widened circle of participants. 22. As later poets, versifiers, and even scribes intervened to "correct" verse to correspond with their own socio-political realities, singular "authority" was irrevocably lost because of the compounded intentionalities manifest in the artifacts. As these variously authorized texts were later published, they became what Donne distinguished as a "dead carkasse" of singular authority--as is evident in the following example. 23. In the "new" if not "improved" second edition of Poems by J. D., (1635) two poems called "Elegie to Mris. Boulstred" were printed as two elegies by Donne written on the occasion of Cecelia Boulstred's death, and are separated in this edition by "Elegie on his Mistres," beginning "By our first strange and fatall interview" (269-70) and "Elegie," beginning "Madame / That I might your Cabinet my tombe" (271). Those familiar with this edition will no doubt remember that the latter of the two is "spurious" verse, since attributed to Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford,[11] one of Donne's patrons, whose relationship with Donne has long been recognized to have included verse exchanges.[12] As evidence of just such activity, Donne scholars from Herbert Grierson to Barbara Lewalski have cited the following epistle from the 1651 Letters to Several Persons of Honour as evidence of such activity: I have yet adventured so near as to make a petition for verse, it is for those your Ladiship did me the honour to see in Twicknam garden, except you repent your making; and have mended your judgement by thinking worse, that is, better, because juster, of their subject. They must needs be an excellent exercise of your wit, which speake so well of so ill: I humbly beg them of your Ladiship, with two such promises, as to any other of your compositions were threatnings: that I will not shew them, and that I will not beleeve them; and nothing should be so used that comes from your brain or breast. (67-68) Donne's letter indicates more than that he and Bedford indulged in the practice of exchanging verses. In asking for her verses, Donne requests those he has already seen, not a revision of them, unless she has already "mended [her] judgement by thinking worse, that is better, because juster, of their subject," unless Bedford has changed her dialectical position. He wishes to see her verses, because, Donne claims, they are "an excellent exercise of wit," significantly, because "they speak so well of so ill." Further Donne promises that with these as with any other of her "compositions" that "were threatenings," he will not "shew" them to others, or "beleeve" that the dialectical position taken in them indicates her actual stance on the subjects they argue. Donne seems to believe that she might already have "mended" her position, perhaps a revision prompted by his corrective reading--or writing. 24. Although we have no primary manuscript evidence of Donne answering Bedford's verse, if we consider a manuscript version of Donne's "Elegie on Mris. Boulstred," "Death I recant . . . ," from the O'Flahertie MS, we note that Bedford's verse, "Death be not proud . . . ," much like other answer poems appended to provocative verses in manuscript, is appended--and should at least be considered as a corrective. Not the "original" exchange, this example is significant beyond its possible evidence of Donne's having been corrected by Bedford. These poems have been transcribed together into this manuscript, indicating that the provocative verse and corrective answer were passed along together, though an organizer of this "indigested chaos" has demarcated one from the other-- facilitating, it would appear, print chaos (in the 1635 edition) from manuscript order. 25. When Donne intervened in the Marlowe-Ralegh conversation with the intention of correction, he inscribed a poetic practice neither new nor unique to him. Further, corrective intervention, as Bedford's response to Donne's elegy on Boulstred evinces, occurred even when the initial verse was not intentionally provocative. Donne's "Death I recant . . ." quite simply dwelled too long--for the first 36 lines--on the ultimate power of a personified Death. No one can Death's "Summons disobey." All are but a "dish . . . for Death to eate," and "In a rude hunger now he millions drawes / Into his bloody, or plaguy, or starv'd jawes." Bedford's corrective response in "Death be not proud . . ." disputes Donne's construction of a ravenous, all-powerful Death gobbling up his victims. While her verse addresses Donne's construct, she quickly refocuses the poetic discussion on the real subject at hand: the virtues of her cousin, Cecelia Boulstred. In her final eight lines, she clearly teaches Donne the error of his perspective: "Taught thus, our after stay's but a short night," urging him to "teach this hymne of her with joy, and sing / The grave no conquest gets, Death hath no sting." 26. Because Bedford's "Death be not proud" does philosophically "correct" Donne's "Death, I recant," and because the arrangement of these verses indicates that her verse "Death be not proud" was a corrective to this particular elegy, the manuscript evidence suggests that Donne may eventually have revised his argument--that he stood corrected--when he echoed her in the Holy Sonnet, "Death be not proud." 27. If we consider Donne's Holy Sonnet "Death be not proud" as a response to Bedford's corrective verse, the first lines are almost humorous. I do not mean that the verse itself, autonomous and disconnected from the conversation, is humorous, but that the conditions under which it may have been composed transform our view of the first lines in which "Death" should not be proud, because "though some"--some others, not he--"have called thee / Mighty and dreadfull . . . thou art not soe" (1-2). As if directly answering Bedford's request that he learn from her revisionary verse--"Taught thus, our after stay's but a short night"-- Donne notes that "One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally / And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die" (13-14). Bedford's dialectical corrective, while not proving any immediate "new pleasure" for Donne, does appear to have caused him to reconsider his initial position. 28. The impossibility of accurately dating these poems, or of establishing the order of their composition, will leave the question of the "origin" of the line "Death be not proud" for scholars to debate ad infinitum. However, the inadequate attention paid to manuscripts long allowed Bedford's verse to "pass" as Donne's. Grierson, the first (in 1912) to seriously consider manuscript attribution of this elegy to Bedford, nonetheless ignored the evidence of the arrangement and concluded, as have most subsequent scholars, that Bedford responded to Donne's Holy Sonnet "Death be not proud," and that she repeated his powerful line, not that he repeated hers. In instances in which a second verse answers and corrects another, we may have some opportunity of disentangling the provocative and corrective verse to observe the argumentation which was central to Renaissance verse production. However, in the case of transcriptions of interlinear argumentation, we may never even observe one single authority, much less extract one from another, especially as these authorities sustain further mutation by continued circulation in manuscript. Unlike these previously "invisible" arguments discoverable in Renaissance manuscripts, the remainder of Bedford's poetic activity may long since have been incorporated into the authoritative corpus of Donne or some other muscular versifier, not because editors and publishers of either the seventeenth- or twentieth-century conspired to incorporate her texts, but because the Renaissance poetic process obscured singular authority. 29. In the case of Renaissance manuscript collections, we may already be at many removes from the author, with the compiler serving as active disputant as well as authorizing-editor of these subjective "editions." Displacing these owner-compilers, we have attributed far too much to the rate of error among Renaissance scribes. Had we Helen Gardner's hypothesized Donne autograph collection, the X manuscript, scholars might be less interested in securing a limb for "Donne" or "Ralegh" or any other canonical authority from among these argumentative communities, and might instead consult the "textual witnesses" to these Renaissance practices for what they can tell us about their socio-political provenance. 30. Each of the more than 270 manuscript collections associated with John Donne was compiled by and for specific individuals in a particular time and place; each manuscript might, therefore, be considered "sensitively dependent upon the . . . conditions" of its compilation. Just as the notion of "sensitive dependence" in chaos theory describes rather than explains the "orderly disorder" of natural systems, if we examine manuscript books for evidence of poetic activity in particular contexts, we divert discussion away from elaborate rationales which attempt to neutralize anomalous phenomena, and focus investigation on textual artifacts as they trace dynamic poetic systems. We may well have dismembered the arguments of more than one political body in our attempts to build an authoritative print corpus for John Donne or myriad other manuscript poets, dressing the resultant chimera in literary motley, so we might call it 'King.' 31. Because we have too long ignored the expectations and practices of the scribal environment, we have approached its artifacts and their arguments only to the extent that they might be extracted for use in establishing our editorial, critical, and cultural authority. Argumentative discourse exerted a profound influence upon the site of poetic production, and, if we would examine this influence, we need to seek answers from those manuscripts formed within it, rather than from the "dead carkasses" of print, which according to Donne "present no mean" to "examine, control and expostulate" with them (Gosse 25, 107). 32. While Renaissance poetic activity cannot be described by any one poetical, rhetorical, or dialectical methodology, past scholars have established the extent to which prose, drama, and poetry were influenced by imitative practice. We have even begun to explore the extent to which Renaissance poetic relied upon a rhetorical sense of the declamatory involvement of a participatory audience. However, argumentative disputation, the ultimate goal in Renaissance education, the ultimate joy in Renaissance entertainment, has been excluded from our consideration of Renaissance poetic. 33. Although Marlowe may well have intended to elicit a response when he released his Shepherd's proposition to courtier-poets, Donne did not expect a response from Bedford when he wrote an elegy in honor of her dead relative; he, nevertheless, received one. Bedford's response was, in some sense, as predictable as Donne's. Her response, however, indicates that entertainment was at most a secondary consideration determining implementation of dialectical disputatio, because disputatio was the modus operandi for philosophical intervention. Notes 1. Stephen Greenblatt first pointed out the potential truth in this apparently apocryphal tale in his Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (58-59). Greenblatt also notes that there were only five poems which Ralegh published or allowed to be published with his signature or initials during his lifetime: the poem "in commendation of the Steele Glasse" (1576), the two sonnets in praise of The Faerie Queene (1590), the praise of the translation of Lucan's Pharsalia by Sir Arthur Gorges (1614), and "Conceipt begotten by the eyes," published in Francis Davidson, A Poetical Rhapsody (1602). It should be noted that four of the five are commendatory poems. In 1602, Ralegh presumably made the publisher of England's Helicon paste cancel-slips over his initials which had been subscribed to two poems. (190). 2. Howell, of course, alludes to the classical demonstration of Zeno, which passed through Cicero and Quintilian, to appear in every Renaissance logic, of which Wilson's The rule of Reason, conteinyng the Arte of Logique, set forth in Englishe is but one. Logique is occupied aboute all matters, and doeth playnly and nakedly setfurthe with apt wordes the summe of thinges by the way of Argumentacion. . . . Rethorique useth gay paincted Sentences, and setteth furth those matters with fresh colours and goodly ornamentes, and that at large. Insomuche, that Zeno beyng asked the difference betwene Logique and Rethorique, made answere by Demonstration of his Hande, declaring that when his hande was closed, it resembled Logique, when it was open and stretched out, it was like Rethorique. (fols. B3r-B3v) 3. Compare also these lines from Thomas Middleton's The Changeling (published 1653): "It could not be much more / Twas but one thing, and that she's a Whore" with Donne's epigram "Faustus:" "Faustus keepes his sister and a whore / Faustus keepes his sister and no more" as another possible example of the argumentative echo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 4. See especially the excellent study by Baumlin; but also Stein, Miner, Sloan, Leishman, Vickers, Tuve, and Wiggins. 5. Boas (16). 6. Boas observes that, "In the first play of the Cambridge 'Parnassus' trilogy, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, acted in or near the Christmas season, 1598-9, a St John's College dramatist represents the two students, Philomusus and Studiosus, after passing through the lands of Logic and Rhetoric, as being beguiled by the voluptuary Amoretto to pervert poetry into the instrument of sensual passion" (31), an indication that poetry was considered rather an instrument of Logic and Rhetoric. 7. Thomas Wilson's The Art of Rhetoric (1553) urges the "right wise man" with "Naturall witte" to remember that Rules were therefore given, and by much observation gathered together, that those who could not see Arts hid in an other mans doings, should yet see the rules open, all in an order set together: and therefore judge the rather of their doings, and by earnest imitation, seeke to resemble such [in] their invention. (White 39) 8. Elyot continues his exposition on poets in the following pages, insisting that "poetry was the first philosophy that was euer knowen" (1.121). 9. Arthur Marotti's John Donne, Coterie Poet was the first full-length study investigating the communal environment of coterie verse production. 10. Thomas Carew's "A Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne." Carew's use of the term "wit" here should be understood not only as an acknowledgement of Donne's verbal acuity, but also of Donne's argumentative abilities. One example of the significance of this understanding of the term is reflected in Ralph Lever's English logic, The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft, teaching a perfect way to argue and dispute was printed in London in 1573. Preceded as it was by the first English logic, Thomas Wilson's latinized Rule of Reason (1551), we are left to wonder whether "logic" and "dialectic" in the English language might instead have been called "witcraft" if Ralph Lever's volume had been published first. If those names be always accompted the best, which doe moste playnly teache the hearer the meanyng of the thyng, that they are appoynted to expresse: doubtlesse neyther Logicke, nor Dialect can be thought so fit an Englishe worde to expresse and set foorth the Arte of reason by, as Witcraft is, seeing that Wit in oure mother toung is oft taken for reason: and crafte is the aunciente English woorde, whereby wee haue vsed to expresse an Arte . . . (Lever 238-9) Though perhaps only a curiosity to students of Renaissance dialectic, Witcraft does provide pertinent contextualization for scribal culture, and the "wit"--that is, dialectic--which governed it. See John Kerrigan (311-50), for an investigation of Carew's own involvement in scribal culture. 11. I have chosen, hereafter, to use the title "Bedford" to refer to Lucy Russell. Whereas her husband was first shamed and fined for his involvement in the Essex rebellion, then, due to a fall from his horse (and, perhaps, to an intrinsic dislike of court life) continued to absent himself from circles of power and influence, the Countess was at the center of courtly intrigues and political decision-making in the Jacobean court. Further, as Ted-Larry Pebworth notes in his investigation of Bedford's letters, she signed herself "Bedford" (paper delivered at the John Donne Society, February 1994). In this, then, I follow Ben Jonson: "My Muse bade, 'Bedford write,' and that was she" ("On Lucy, Countess of Bedford"). 12. See Grierson (II, xx-xxv) and Helen Gardner (248-251) for their respective discussions on this particular verse, its attribution, and the influence of patronage on verse production. Works Cited * Baumlin, James S. John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1991. * Boas, Frederick S. Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1940. * Carew, Thomas. "A Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne." Poems by J. D. , with elegies on the authors death. London, 1633. * Castiglione, Baldasare. The Book of the Courtier. Sir Thomas Hoby, trans. London, 1561. * Donne, John. Poems by J. D., with elegies on the authors death. London, 1633. * -----. Poems by J. D. London, 1635. * -----. Letters to Several Persons of Honour. London, 1651. * Elyot, Thomas. The Booke Named the Governour. 2 vols. Ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft. New York: Burt Franklin, 1967. * Fuller, Thomas. The Worthies of England. Ed. J. Freeman. London: Allen and Unwin, 1952. * Gardner, Helen. The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets. Oxford: Clarendon UP, 1965. * Greenblatt, Stephen. Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles. New Haven: Yale UP, 1973. * Grierson, H.J.C. The Poems of John Donne. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1912. * Herbert, George. "The Church-Porch." In George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets. Ed. Mario Di Cesare. New York: Norton, 1978. * Howell, Wilber Samuel. Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700. Russell & Russell, 1961. * Kerrigan, John. "Thomas Carew." Proceedings of the British Academy 7 (1988): 311-50. * Leishman, J.B. The Monarch of Wit: An Analytic and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne. London: Hutchinson's U Library, 1951. * Lever, Ralph. The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft, teaching a perfect way to argue and dispute. London, [A. Bynneman], 1573. * Marlowe, Christopher. "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." From The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sixth ed. New York: Norton, 1993. * Marotti, Arthur. John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986. * Middleton, Thomas. The Changeling.. London, 1653. * Miner, Earl. "Wit: Definition and Dialectic." 118-58 in Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969. * Novarr, David. The Disinterred Muse, Donne's Texts and Contexts. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. * Pebworth, Ted-Larry. "Manuscript Poems and Print Assumptions." Paper Delivered at the Eleventh John Donne Society Conference, February 1994. * Ralegh, Sir Walter. "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd." From The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sixth ed. New York: Norton, 1993. * Ramus, Peter. Dialectica. 1576. * Saunders, J.W. "From Manuscript to Print, A Note on the circulation of Poetic MSS. in the Sixteenth Century." Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 7.5 (1951): 507-528. * Shawcross, John T. The Complete Poetry of John Donne. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967. * Sloan, Thomas O. "The Rhetoric in the Poetry of John Donne." Studies in English Literature 3 (1969): 31-44. * Stein, Arnold. John Donne's Lyrics: The Eloquence of Action. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1962. * Tuve, Rosemund. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1947. * Vickers, Brian. "The 'Songs and Sonnets' and the Rhetoric of Hyperbole." In John Donne, Essays in Celebration. London: Methuen & Co., 1972. * White, Harold Ogden. Plagiarism and Imitation During the English Renaissance: A Study in Critical Distinctions. Harvard Studies in English. 1935; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1973. * Wiggins, Elizabeth Lewis. "Logic in the Poetry of John Donne." Studies in Philology 42 (1945): 41-60. * Wilson, Thomas. The rule of Reason, conteinyng the Arte of Logique, set forth in Englishe. London, 1551. * -----. The Art of Rhetoric. London, 1553. * Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance, Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986. Manuscript Sources * Additional MS 19268. British Library. * Egerton MS 2230. British Library. * O'Flahertie MS. ("The Poems of D. J. Donne not yet imprinted finished this 12 of October 1632"). Harvard University, Houghton Library. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- England as Israel in Milton's Writings John K. Hale University of Otago, NZ John.Hale@stonebow.otago.ac.nz Hale, John K. "England as Israel in Milton's Writings." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 3.1-54 . 1. By surveying Milton's use and non-use of certain biblical images, this essay records his loss of political innocence, and also something of his pluralism. In doing so, it shows in action his view of the relation between church and state. It charts his implied view of Isaiah Berlin's two concepts of liberty--negative and positive, the absence of external constraints as opposed to spiritual fulfilment or self-realization--to conclude that Milton favours the first for the sake of the second. He drew the corollary, that freedom mattered last as well as first. He was, in short, a more consistent thinker than is often acknowledged. 2. I move toward these conclusions rather gradually, for two reasons. First, it is worth illustrating from the writings and speeches of Milton's contemporaries how much more moderate Milton's political imagery from the Bible was than that of many with whom he shared political and religious commitments. The imagery needs substantial quotation for the reader to recognise its dynamism, and to accept that it was used extensively, not only by religious cranks and the weak-minded. Secondly, I survey Milton's own writing widely, not only to show where he does share the fervour of the sectarians but also to illustrate the degree to which he does not share it even though the occasion and subject might have seemed to have suited such fervour. The Image of England as Israel in Other Writers [1] 3. The greatest of all crises for ancient Israel was the Exodus. "Exodus" means literally the "coming-out" from Egypt, but extends to the wanderings of the Israelites in the wilderness, before they crossed Jordan and entered the promised land of Canaan. They were led by Moses, who at Sinai brought them the Law which governed their lives thereafter. This normative crisis was used in England, by Parliament and Protestants generally, to image their own long struggle against King and Anglican bishops, to arrive at true Reformation. It was more than a rallying cry: on the contrary, it was their habitual, best image of where they thought God was leading their nation. 4. Beyond the Exodus metaphor, naturally, lay the subsequent story of Israel, including the figures of Joshua and Samson, the strife between prophets and kings, the struggle with idolatrous neighbours and world powers, the exile, the return, the desecration of the rebuilt Temple, and more. These also appear as images in the writings of the Civil War and after, alongside images of Exodus, though subordinated to it. All images so far interpret the present in terms of Israel's past. But by going to the prophetic books of the Bible, above all Daniel and Revelation, extreme Protestants could interpret England's present from Israel's future, the future to end all futures, as a millennial consummation of prophecy, in which they were fighting against the Whore of Babylon, Rome, and could expect a fifth and final Monarchy, that of the Messiah, to end the four known evil world-monarchies, of which the fourth was Rome. At this time, the lost tribes of Israel would be gathered. Jews, it was argued, should be readmitted to England in order to fulfil the preconditions of the Fifth Monarchy. The Imagery and the Political Groupings 5. Such strange reasoning had large practical implications. All Protestant groups shared Cromwell's reasoning, though agreeing on little else at that time (1653-6). The imagery of England as Israel, a chosen people, serves to distinguish one sect or pressure-group from another and also serves as a guide to the rapid changes in political climate. In fact, we may understand attempts to monopolize this image as wars of words among the factions, in which both the government of Cromwell and its opponents were belligerents. 6. Once Cromwell had become head of state, the image of England as Israel on Exodus under Moses acquired new force. Colonel John Spittlehouse's title spells it all out: "A Warning-Piece Discharged: Or, Certain Intelligence Communicated to His Excellencie the Lord General Cromwell . . . As also, A brief and full Parallel betwixt the History of Israel and our late and present Series of Affairs. In which Simile, Our present General is compar'd with Moses, as he was their Deliverer, Judge, and General . . ." (my emphases).[2] Spittlehouse's book works the parallel. Cromwell himself used the image memorably to his new Parliament in 1653: the Exodus is "the only parallel of God's dealing with us that I know. " He compliments England, but also himself as the Moses of this "only parallel," which guided not only his view of the past, but also his plan for the future, moving England "towards a place of rest." Yearning, or threatening, he repeated "I say, towards it." 7. Others who did not support him used the same parallel for leverage. Gerrard Winstanley, the Leveller, complained in 1649 that conquerors "to this day" are "killing the poor enslaved English Israelites."[3] In 1652, he said to Cromwell, "God hath honoured you with the highest honour of any man since Moses time, to be the head of a people, who have cast out an oppressing Pharaoh."[4] This flatters and attempts to influence Cromwell, while not quite equating him with Moses. But the image could also be used to humble. When Cromwell intervened in the vitriolic dispute of two sectarians, one of them recalled the words of two Israelites in Egypt whom Moses had tried to reconcile, "Who made thee a prince and a judge over us?"[5] This superb deflation not only showed Cromwell his intractability, but also it meant that they were all still in Egypt. 8. Nonetheless, Cromwell commanded the army, held the power, and was the only candidate to play Moses. Others had to justify themselves with different imagery. Some went no further than the earlier or subsequent history of Israel, with Cromwell as a Jacob or a Gideon. But his most vociferous critics (after the Levellers and Diggers had been crushed) were the Fifth Monarchy Men, under James Naylor. They believed that after four world empires would come the fifth, the rule of Christ through his saints at the end of time. To bring about this millennia, the self-appointed saints attempted to overturn all carnal institutions--parliaments as well as kings. The rule of the saints, "the new Israel," would follow. 9. So Puritans of every stripe used these images of the nation, or some part of it, as Israel. Since they had become the vocabulary of public debate, anyone who thought or spoke on politics had to use them.[6] Marvell's Poems, Political and Other 10. It was not only prose zealots who employed the imagery. Andrew Marvell, so aloof and elusive in some poems, manifests an attachment in other poems to precisely this "only parallel." 11. In "Bermudas" Marvell has his religious exiles sing praise to God "That led us through the watery maze"[7]--wittily changing the wanderings in the wilderness to perils on the Atlantic in a small boat. 12. "Upon Appleton House" compares mowers cutting a swathe to "Israelites / Walking on foot through a green sea"--making the Red one green.[8] This allusion is not serious, but in 1654 Marvell devotes some fifty lines of his poem on "The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C." to the apocalyptic imagery of Daniel and Revelation.[9] Here we meet the Whore and the Beast, and the need to welcome the Jews and so bring in the Last Days. He scorns the "lying prophecies" of the Fifth Monarchists, along with their plots, not as bigotry, but as misapplication. Cromwell is the one to fulfil "the holy oracles" (108). Or again (144), "If these the times, then this [Cromwell] must be the man." Clearly, Marvell is striving, like Spittlehouse, to win the millenarian parallel for Cromwell.[10] 13. When Marvell wrote a further panegyric for Cromwell upon his death, he reverted to the past of Israel. The Exodus figure looms large, but it is combined with allusion to Israel's subsequent exploits, as well. Joshua and David join Moses as the heroes whom Cromwell resembles: Joshua continues Moses' role and leads the chosen people into the promised land; David becomes Israel's greatest King (chosen, not born). Cromwell is compared with the three. They welcome him promptly upon his arrival in heaven. Preposterous as the compliments may seem, they are all apt. For instance, Cromwell like David loved music. As propaganda, they send precisely the right signal. 14. It would be curious, then, if Milton--who shared an office (both literally and metaphorically) with Marvell, and who shared a broad political and religious allegiance with Cromwell and his coalition -- were not to use similar imagery for his political praise-poetry. The main thrust of my paper examines so how this is so, and what explanations can be provided. Milton's Relation to This Imagery and to Its Other Users 15. Milton and Marvell worked together as translators in Cromwell's Foreign Office: in fact, Milton procured the job for Marvell. That neither makes their politics, nor their political vocabulary, identical but it does suggest a comparison. The painters' clich=82 of Cromwell and Milton as close colleagues, man of action and blind visionary respectively, is wrong.[11] Nevertheless, we must ask whether Milton ever adopted the language of his overlord that provided the ideological underpinnings for Milton's employment and, indeed, Cromwell's whole power base. If he did not, that would itself be a notable finding. 16. "Decorum" might provide a simpler explanation. This view would mean that the presence and absence of Old Testament imagery depended on the topic, occasion and genre chosen. If this were so, we might reason on the basis of my examples, that politicians making speeches would naturally use exuberant, simplistic imagery. Conversely, poets would be unlikely to employ such imagery in their private ruminations. The imagery, in other words, would become a major rhetorical tool in winning over an audience. It might bore a sophisticated audience, such as the poet himself. 17. The evidence of Marvell's work does not show him limiting Old Testament imagery to popular appeals; on the contrary, he uses the imagery for all sorts of occasions. It does not appear where we might expect it, nor is it absent where we could expect it to be avoided. Further, all these writers choose whether to speak or not, and what genre to use. Nevertheless, as occasion and genre do play some part in Milton's practice, I shall observe chronology and genre in exploring Milton's development. Premonitions: Milton's Verse before 1642 18. Before 1642 Milton's verse shows signs of becoming interested in the "only parallel." His two earliest English poems are translations of Psalms 114 and 136, both of them concerned with the Exodus, in which he amplifies the Biblical joy with his own. He returned to Psalm 114 again eleven years later, at the age of 26, rendering it into rousing Homeric hexameters. This is the psalm entitled "In exitu Israel de Egypto," "When Israel came out of Egypt." He records that he woke up with the Greek version ringing in his head, and that he knew not why or how.[12] Though one can only speculate that the "why" included a glimpse of its applicability to pre-revolutionary England, we must note the recurrence of his interest in the theme of Exodus. 19. Not only did Milton translate psalms of Exodus, but also in two poems written before 1642 he resorted to biblical imagery of divine intervention, one from the time of the Kings, and one from the gospels. In 1637 Milton called on the Lord to intervene in protecting his friend, the religious exile Thomas Young: "let God act now to scare away the armies of the Catholic enemy as once he drove away the Assyrian hosts!"[13] Then in 1637, in Lycidas, he imagines the intervention of St Peter, to punish the greedy clergy: The hungry sheep look up and are not fed . . . (125) so . . . that two handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more! (130-31) This (whatever its exact meaning may be) draws on gospel or apocalyptic imagery to express some new divine deliverance of God's people, a miraculous tribulation of the same kind and degree as the plagues on Egypt or the parting of the Red Sea. 20. Moreover, Milton looked back with satisfaction on this denunciation as prophetic, because in 1645 with hindsight he could declare, ". . . the Author . . . by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then in their height." Deliverance had come in the ousting of the bishops. The stage was set for Milton to identify the newly delivered English with the children of Israel. Milton's Prose of 1640-49 21. In his prose writings of the early 1640s Milton moved closer to the Exodus image we are considering. Of Reformation (1641) uses it to attack. The bishops, then still in situ, are "Egyptian taskmasters." Leaping to the other end of the Bible, from the past to the far end of the future, he imagines the people of England at the Last Day "to be found the wisest, soberest and most Christian people when thou, the eternal and shortly expected King, shalt open the clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world." He terms his image a "supereminence of beatific vision," a theophany or apocalypse of the end-time. In this work Milton ransacks the Bible for such hopeful, exhortatory images. 22. Animadversions, of the same year, sounds a similar note in terms drawn more exactly from Exodus: "When thou hast settled peace in the Church . . . then shall all thy Saints . . . triumph to thee, standing on the shore of that red Sea into which our enemies had almost driven us. . . should'st thou bring us thus far onward from Egypt to destroy us in this wilderness though we deserve." Soon he moves over to a more future-directed, apocalyptic imagery of God's chosen people: "thy Kingdome is now at hand, and [echoing Lycidas 131] thou standing at the dore. Come forth out of thy Royall Chambers, O Prince of all the Kings of the earth . . . take up that unlimited Scepter."[14] 23. In Areopagitica (1644), pleading now for liberty of expression as a means to Reformation, he envisions England as "fields ripe unto harvest," employing gospel imagery this time (John 4.35). Neither Exodus nor the Apocalypse are used as metaphors in this poem. He compares England to Samson, "a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks" (Hughes 745). Milton goes further when he recalls the Reformers Wycliffe, the Lollards, and Henry VIII: "God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of reformation itself: what does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?" (Hughes 743). The hyperbolic imagery closely identifies with the chosen people, even if Milton is also obvious trying to persuade Parliament to abandon censorship. Milton's Verse of the 1640s 24. Milton's poems of the 1640s are not numerous. They comprise one Latin ode, more psalm versions, and about ten sonnets. Despite the tremendous victories for Parliament and the cause of Reformation, he wrote no victory-odes or panegyrics, though in prose he enthused about the "reforming of Reformation itself." What is more, he wrote no more prose pamphlets until after the King's execution with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. 25. The Latin ode, Ad Rousium, is suggestive here. The ode is to Bodley's Librarian, John Rouse, and marks the end of the siege of Oxford. This was a huge victory for Parliament and its army under Cromwell, since Oxford had been the King's new capital. Yet what Milton celebrates is the end of hostilities, the resumption of civilized activities, like the reading of books. The poem is, in fact, about sending a replacement copy of his own poems to Bodley's Librarian. It imitates Roman poems exchanged between friends and family members who found themselves on opposite sides of civil wars, just as Milton and his brother Christopher did. In other words, the ode celebrates the resumption of non-partisan intercourse. 26. The Psalm translations are different, yet no more indicative of partisan views. Dated with unusual precision to "April 1648," they may be connected with public events. Suggestions have favoured either the Westminster Assembly, which wanted a new liturgy, meaning new metrical psalms, or else the anguish felt by Independents, re-arming for a second civil war because the Presbyterians were switching to the King's side. The first suggestion would suit psalms of Exodus, the second less so. Regardless, Psalms 80-88 "done into metre" very literally, with notes about the Hebrew, show neither trend. God's anger and the Exodus receive emphasis, yet not more than blindness, the cult of the Temple in Jerusalem, and a mixture of other themes. 27. The sonnets of 1640-50 are often political, though they were not made public in print. In one, written "when the siege was intended to the city" by the King's army, Milton bids the royalist officer who knocks at his house to spare it, as Alexander the Great spared the house of Pindar (Hughes 140). It is a witty appeal, relying on Greek allusions with no Israelite parallel whatever. Two more sonnets attack critics who break the "known rules of ancient liberty" (143). In these, the poet claims to have made the mistake of "casting pearls before swine"--a gospel, not a Hebraic, allusion. In the mightiest of these sonnets he assails the Presbyterians, as coercers of conscience: New Presbyter is old priest writ large. (145) The etymological wit depends, again, on a knowledge of Greek, not on Biblical allusion. On the way to this climax, Milton wishes that Parliament will curb the Presbyterians by "clipping their Phylacteries." Phylacteries, the little boxes holding quotations from the Torah worn on the forehead by pious Jews, provide an Old Testament reference, but not a favourable, normative one. Phylacteries, grown ostentatiously large, are denounced by Jesus as pharisaical. Milton's allusion is, after all, from a New Testament standpoint. 28. Most of these sonnets uphold liberty of worship for all as the prime aim of state policy. Gospel freedoms outweigh Hebrew fixities and forms. Milton had been badly hurt by the attacks on his divorce tracts, and by the Presbyterians' willingness to force consciences when they took power from the Anglican bishops. Does he merely not use the Israelite image, or does he actively forego it? Some absences are certainly due to occasion: one would not expect a triumphal Israelite image to be used in the ode, Rouse being either neutral or on the King's side. Other absences, however, do seem noteworthy, particularly in those psalms and sonnets addressing public topics. A pattern begins to emerge. Milton's Poems of the 1650s 29. A similar pattern emerges from the poems of the 1650s, with one great exception. The psalm versions of 1653 are as mixed, as before, in subject (in fact, they also focus on metrical experiment). The sonnets are addresses to Parliamentary leaders--Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane. All three praise the addressees, then urge them to stay vigilantly on course. The "course" in question is to preserve the cause of religion, meaning liberty of worship. The major image in each case is classical or New Testament, if not both. Israel is nowhere to be seen. 30. Israel's absence is, in fact, striking. If there is any one of these sonnets to public figures on public topics which might adduce the imagery of Israel and Moses on Exodus, it would be the sonnet to Cromwell himself (1652). Such imagery, however, is not found there. The imagery is Roman, Italian, contemporary, New Testament--in short, almost anything but Hebraic. If Milton's priority is to prevent a new Establishment of paid clergy, he could well have asked whether the spiritual leaders of Israel in Exodus served for cash. Instead, he addresses Cromwell in secular or gospel terms. 31. The volta reads: Help us to save free Conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose Gospel is their maw. (160-61) The gospel imagery is the same as in Lycidas, fifteen years earlier. But instead of the wolves being the Catholics, now they are the "hirelings," those Independent clergy who asked Parliament to set up a state-salaried, state-controlled ministry. Milton's image equates this with coercion, greed, and an end to toleration. He did not want a state church, nor conformity to a national religion. In other words, he was not just critical of that particular group (the Independents, now following the bishops and the Presbyterians in seeking to run a national church with gain to themselves). It was becoming hard for Milton to see how freedom of conscience could combine with any state religion. He was finding it equally hard to see any role for the cult of ancient Israel in his imagery. 32. One great exception to this reliance on New Testament liberty, above an idealized Old Testament unity, is Sonnet 18, "On the Late Massacre of the Piemontese." Compared with the earlier sonnets of advice to leaders, this is more heated and less reasoned, with a prophetic tone. The Catholic Duke of Savoy had brutally repressed the religious worship of the Waldensians, a sect of proto-Protestants in the Alps. His soldiers had thrown non-combatants, including mothers with babies, over the cliffs. The atrocity was unusually hideous and Milton was the one who put Cromwell's protests to Savoy and other European powers into Latin. Details of these despatches vivify the sonnet. Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd Saints, whose bones Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold, Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old When all our Fathers worship't stocks and stones . . . (167) In this case, the stronger feelings raise many Biblical images. They come from both Testaments, especially prophetic books or passages--Jeremiah, Daniel, Revelation, and Luke. But they come also from a gospel parable, and Tertullian (not to mention Greek myth, Virgil, and Petrarch). The array and force of convergent testimony are dazzling.[15] The sonnet abounds in voices of Israel grieving and denouncing. The implication is that the atrocities described are unholy: God must avenge them. This, at last, is the Hebraic vehemence we have been awaiting. 33. Nevertheless, the ending invites a closer look. What is a "Babylonian" woe? And how are the Waldensian survivors to "fly" it? 34. "Babylonian" explodes at the end like a cluster-bomb. It means "Roman," since the Papacy is blamed and the Roman church was often identified with the wicked Babylon of both Testaments. But it also means the Babylon of the Exile, beside whose rivers Israel lay down and wept (Psalm 137.1). Maybe the encouragement of that allusion expands into an apocalyptic, Fifth-Monarchy hope for the Last Days. If so, it is one of Milton's very few millennarian moments. 35. The choice of the verb "fly" is odd. A much more pugnacious choice could have been made, such as "end," "quench," or such. The Waldensians could "fly" the woe only by leaving their vulnerable homes, and going into exile. The poem is sometimes criticised for being impractical, but Milton envisages voluntary exile, for truth and liberty's sake. It is exactly what the family of his close friend, Charles Diodati, had done in leaving Lucca. It is also what pilgrims had been doing all century, to Holland, Germany, Massachusetts, and Bermuda. 36. Milton had kept the image of "coming out of" Babylon for this great occasion. (We need not object that Babylon and Egypt are not identical: metaphorically they are.) If the image is great, however, it is also disinterested. There is no suggestion in the poem that England is the promised land. Quite the reverse is true and the other sonnets show why. Milton's foreign office employment allowed him a renewed awareness of how the rest of Protestant Europe was faring. His prose studies of Dutch practices, and Arminianism elsewhere are a critique of his own country.[16] Milton's Prose of 1649-1660 37. Much of this prose was in Latin, addressed to Europe. It was hard enough to defend regicide before this audience, and out of the question to argue that the English were the chosen people. Milton concentrates on logic and law, with Biblical exegesis supporting him. Where he does wax fervid, as in the 1658 revised ending to his countrymen, he emulates Cicero (Pater Patriae). In the main, he keeps the rhetoric satirical. 38. In Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Milton argues that kings must uphold laws and obey them, too. There is a contract between governor and governed which, if broken by either side, incurs legal punishment. His terms are those of social contract, not sacred Covenant. 39. In 1651, Milton was commissioned by Parliament to write their answer to an alarmingly successful piece of royalist propaganda, the Eikon Basilike--the "Icon of the [dead] King." That "icon" purported to be the weeping of Charles I over his erring people, full of sorrowing forgiveness--like Jeremiah or Christ weeping over Jerusalem. It is arranged in layers, with sections of self-justification, followed by a Biblical pastiche of lamentation. Although it was a very one-sided sentimental work, people read it, loved it, and wept over it. Milton's method of reply was demolition, as his title Eikonoklastes shows ("Icon-Smasher"). He drove wedges between the biblical sanctities and the actual king. In short, he did not propose a rival Biblical parallel, but stuck to logic or else to his own side's version of the facts, with Charles as a "man of blood," and a quite disastrously bad ruler, as many of Charles's own side agreed. It seems Milton had recognised that the image of England as Israel was a two-edged weapon: Israel had a long tradition of kings, despite the Bible's own preference for "Judges" and prophets.[17] 40. Milton's position was different, though, at the end of the 1650s, during the crisis following the death of Cromwell in 1658. Milton, despite being blind, ill and in retirement, produced four prose works in one year. Two advocated a gospel policy against a prelatical one, on liturgy and on tithing. The fourth insisted on a basis of civil government grounded in law and reason, with no Biblical grounding at all. The third is much the most stirring, however, and it does use the Bible, including the "only parallel." Milton was either addressing different readerships, or trying any means to stave off the Restoration of monarchy. 41. His Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth has a tone of prophetic warning. The prophecy comes from throughout the Pentateuch, the gospels, Jeremiah, and climactically focusses on Exodus. Milton reproves the warring sects for building "no goodly tower of a commonwealth, to overshadow kings, but a tower of Babel."[18] (He contrasts the United Provinces, who have built more from less.) He says England is regressing to kingship despite Jesus' rebuke of certain disciples for wanting to "lord it over others, as the Gentiles do." This is a particularly dexterous hit, making the godly sectarians ungodly. Going back to the history of Israel, he compares the English to those who so resented the crimes of the sons of Eli the prophet that they wanted kings to rule instead of prophets, as if two bad apples proved all apples bad. He aptly mentions Aesop's fable of King Log and King Stork, as well, but the principal aim is to confute Protestant extremists with the Bible itself. 42. Jeremiah is cited denouncing King Coniah: "O earth, earth, earth . . . ." The allusion is truncated, and cryptic to us, but Milton may have thought that a single word to the wise would suffice, or broke off in a spirit of "absit omen." Jeremiah's full speech is filled with premonitions of exile and reprisal: "I will give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life [saith the Lord] . . . . And I will cast thee out . . . into another country . . . and there ye shall die. O earth, earth, earth, hear the Lord." Milton is warning the regicides and sectarians of what will follow on the King's return: particularly exile.[19] 43. Last, and most vehemently, Milton denounces those who for monetary reasons, like the murmurers of the Exodus, want to "return back to Egypt."[20] Let all sensible men, "though they seem now choosing a captain back for Egypt, . . . bethink themselves a little, and consider whither they are rushing." To want to go "back to Egypt"--to prefer slavery--is the ultimate shame for the people of Exodus. 44. Milton waited until late in the 1650s debate about polity before entering into it. In particular, he waited before trumpeting the Exodus analogue, but then he used the trumpet to blow a fine impassioned blast of rebuke, a fortissimo appassionato. 45. The army intervened yet again, called elections, and the new MPs invited the King back. Milton went into hiding for a time. He was silent on political topics for more than a decade. Conclusions for 1642-1660 46. From the above narrative I draw a number of inferences. They are presented as if looking back from 1660, moving from more to less recent. Then I look forward again to the sequel in Milton's life, and so, finally, to a more theoretical rationale of absence. 1. The Exodus parallel worked strongly for Milton in a crisis. In 1659 he could expect his fellow religionists to loathe a return to an "Egypt" of monarchy, bishops, and tithing. Its rhetoric was negative or deterrent, to shame them. As they had no agreed Moses, however, nor Aaron nor Joshua, no Law and no Ark, the parallel conveyed no information or guidance, only a vague revulsion. 2. Old Testament parallels had given trouble, since the King's side could use them, too, and with great effect. As with the first item, the parallel works most naturally when voicing the hopes of underdogs.[21] It preserves morale. Seeing that even Moses faced opposition and backsliding, however, and that England after Cromwell had no Moses, morale alone proved insufficient. 3. Protestantism was international, and Milton knew this well. To limit the new Israel to England was impossible to the sincere tolerationist. Commercial wars against the Protestant Dutch had probably helped to dampen the enthusiasm of the open-minded. 4. The full form of the analogy, England as Israel, appears more clearly in his early prose than in his verse of any period. It returns, as a rebuke, in his late prose. Prose genres may be simpler than verse ones and are certainly more unidirectional and advocative. Moreover, this would also help explain why many prose works omit the parallel as inappropriate to the particular topic, audience or occasion. The fact that Eikonoklastes does not answer in kind the parallelism of Charles with Jeremiah or Jesus tacitly concedes that the imagery is ambivalent, or suits the downtrodden better than the victorious. In any case, I have found no simple correspondence between medium or genre and the presence or absence of the Exodus image. 5. In poems, Milton employs New Testament imagery more than Old. Even pagan or vernacular images outweigh those of ancient Israel. This is especially evident in the sonnet to Cromwell. 6. Advocating liberty of worship predisposes the poet against the Israelite analogy, which in practice if not in principle also resisted universalization.[22] "Curse ye Meroz" became a favorite text with preachers to Parliament and its armies,[23] with the implication that those who do not advocate such liberty are accursed themselves. Saul ceased to be Samuel's choice because he was not thorough enough in exterminating a defeated people.[24] 7. Milton's political hopes of the early 1640s were rebuked in 1644 with the rancorous reception, attended by personal attacks, to his tracts on divorce. Similarly, when Presbyterianism sought religious uniformity and conformity, Milton realised that liberty of worship was likelier under a separation of church from state. Such separation was too moderate a doctrine to affirm the only parallel. Further reasons come to mind for the absence of the Exodus image. 8. Milton's historical studies, especially in the later 1640s when writing the History of Britain, confirmed this scepticism.[25] Something always went wrong, whether you looked at the history of Britain or England or Greece or Rome. Liberty was what mattered, and sins of self-interest always betrayed it. 9. In fact, the Old Testament told the same tale. Those among whom the image of a chosen people was strongest strayed the most often. Old Testament historiography makes its theme-song or chorus the "turning aside" of Israel and its leadership, its "walking to right or left" of the straight path, the way of the Lord. The "only parallel" may be encouraging for morale and rhetoric, but not for practical politics. 10. Did Milton come near to using this image so often, yet fully develop it only twice, because he found it a constrictive clich=82? If so, where he does use the clich=82 it measures the young man's hope in 1642, and in 1659 the older man's desperation. Beyond 1660 47. This summarizes the period of my survey, 1642-1660, but the remaining fourteen years of Milton's life saw his greatest writing. What do the three major poems have to say or imply about England as Israel? 48. It has become usual to read the prophetic books of Paradise Lost as an oblique comment on the failures of England's Protestants to achieve true Reformation, and to read Samson's indictments of betrayal by the leaders of his tribe and nation as another.[26] Certainly the emotions correspond, but why should we relate only these emotions of Samson with Milton's life circumstances? What about Samson's blindness, his wife, his hair-length, or his father's views on marriage-choices? To privilege the political part of a whole seems to me a narrowing to our own preoccupations. As for the prophetic books, we also narrow their scope to apply them to Restoration England; the whole purpose of Milton's change of theme, from the projected epic of Arthur or its Saxon successors to "Adam Unparadiz'd," is to universalise the theme. The parallel of Israel to England would restrict it. 49. Knowing that this argument will not convince readers who perceive that the prophesies of misery can be applied to Milton's own post-Restoration situation, I will elaborate. In 1667, Milton wanted readers. He got them. He got more in 1669 by adding explanations of his action and his medium. In 1674, converting ten books into twelve, he made his poem more Virgilian and epic. This direction of attention makes it less, not more, likely that he wanted his prophecies read as a cryptogram for his own situation.[27] 50. Paradise Regained ought to have precluded such psychobiographical discussion. The Messiah rejects the temptation of world power or liberating Israel from Rome (III.150-202). Milton appears to have chosen his topic to express the fact that temperance is personal integrity, and that this matters more than political activism. One need not argue that this poem is political and quietist in order to refute those who read the other two great poems as political and nostalgic for failed revolution. Rather, we should credit Milton with keeping his mind firmly on the moral and spiritual principles of each poem. All interiorize hope. Theorizing an Absence 51. "Absence" resists definition. The mere fact that it gets a name does not mean the name denotes anything (as "dog" or "tenure" do). It is more sensitive to context than most abstract nouns are, since it makes us ask what it is the absence of, and what the presence of that which is absent, would mean. It does not work in simple binary fashion, since an absence may be partial or intermittent. Absence may mean that something is self-evident or unthinkable, unknown or disregarded or ignored. Context is vital to defining an absence. 52. The definition of "absence" is more than mere logic-chopping. An absence of the image of England as Israel could mean Milton was simply not patriotic, being either hostile or indifferent to that sort of feeling. He was patriotic, however, expressing the feeling with other images. We seek, then, to explain the paradox, or puzzle, that a potentially strong, in fact absolute, image of national glory did not take hold of this poet even though he was eloquently patriotic, abandoning hope of European fame through Latin in order "to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect."[28] 53. This failure to deploy an image, this inaction, has something inherently problematic about it. If an inaction is outward and public, we can find both public and personal reasons for non-occurrence. How a conspiracy or assassination attempt never succeeded can be explained by security measures. Something which has not awoken a gifted imagination, or has not continued to engage it, is more difficult to perceive, let alone explain. Nonetheless, the intermittent is easier to probe than the wholly absent. Outward circumstances, known views and hopes, changing of genres along with altering occasions and audiences, all encourage speculation. 54. My question, why Milton makes no more use of the "only parallel," reveals very clearly certain things about Milton's intellectual, spiritual and practical life during the long mid-century crisis of rule: 1. I have been charting Milton's loss of political innocence. He adopted logic, not prophetic passion to combat the royal propaganda. Concurrently, Milton became more pluralist, choosing his mode of vision for each task, each political and polemical speech-act. Above all, he was driven by the wish to heed Greek and Roman principles and exemplars, as much as Old Testament ones. The sonnets in particular manifest this preference. 2. We have been witnessing the unfolding of a principle of separating church from state. The principle is seen not in public advocacy alone but in the poet's own sphere, his choices of topic, stance and imagery to express them. Here I might compare Milton with Cromwell. Cromwell's actions look erratic until one sees that he sought amongst many political forms for a way to uphold liberty of worship. A consistent principle stands behind his inconsistent actions. Milton's use of the only parallel, like his use of classical imagery, varies with his occasions and genre, but he does not swerve from belief in freedom of worship ("so that the hewn and scattered virgin Truth may be slowly re-membered by her sad friends"). 3. Milton favours what Isaiah Berlin calls "negative" liberty, the absence of external constraints, for the sake of Berlin's "positive" liberty, which consists in spiritual fulfillment or self-realization. Not only the events of the Interregnum but also his humanism and his historiography showed him that "positive" liberty, though attractive as a spiritual freedom, is narrow and coercive when vested in any small group of believers, and destroys both liberties for those who do not agree with the believers. Despite optimistic moments in his own epoch, he soon realised[29] that the day when all people, and all nations, share the same spirituality was a long, long way off. 4. He drew the corollary, that freedom mattered last as well as first. While many radicals advocate freedom only till they themselves win power, Milton advocated it whether in opposition or in power or in the internal "exile" of his last years. He was a more consistent, altruistic thinker than is often acknowledged. Notes 1. I am grateful for advice with the paper from Colin Davis, Neil Keeble, John Morrill, Janel Mueller, and David Reid. 2. "London, Printed for Richard Moone . . . 1653." By page 23 the parallel is being used to justify Cromwell ("Moses") making all major decisions, including the control of elections. 3. The True Levellers Standard (1649). 4. The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True magistracy Restored (1652). 5. Exodus 2.14. 6. Looking ahead to the Succession Crisis of 1681 and to Dryden's satire Absalom and Achitophel, we see how the imagery of parallelism continued, as did the power-struggle. Dryden won the fight to possess the parallel between Israel's King David and Charles II. 7. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell (l.6). 8. L. 390. 9. Ll. 110-58 with Margoliouth's note; also line 293. 10. This contestation of Biblical allusion is discussed by Mary Ann Radzinowicz. 11. It has a basis in the early biographies, nevertheless. "Milton" and "Cromwell" were the names of two Englishmen known to foreigners visiting London in the 1650s ("the only inducement of several foreigners that came over into England, was chiefly to see O. Protector, and Mr J. Milton," says John Aubrey [Hughes 1023]). Hughes' edition is used for the text of Milton wherever possible. 12. Epistulae Familiares VI, in Milton's Private Correspondence and Acadaemic Exercises (10). 13. Elegia Quarta, 113-122 (see Hughes' ed., 29). This work was first published in 1627. 14. Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1.706-07). 15. Hughes (168). 16. I discuss this sonnet more fully in "Milton's Sonnet 18 and Psalm 137" (91). 17. Samuel regretted being told by the Lord to anoint Saul king (1 Samuel 8). A similar antipathy to kingship and pining for the days of ad hoc "judges" (shophetim) recurs in the books of Kings. Kings are second best. 18. Hughes (884). 19. Hughes (808). The reprisals were thorough. One of the regicides fled to Massachusetts, and even there he lived the rest of his life in a cave in the country some ten or more years. 20. Hughes (898-99). The allusion is to Exodus 16.2-3: "And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness: And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger." See also Numbers 11.5. 21. The motif recurs in freedom songs, such as "Go down, Moses." 22. A principle is not held to be a moral principle unless it can be held and acted upon by all without carnage or self-contradiction. We all find unjust the acts that hurt us, but doubly so if those who inflict them could claim immunity from the same pain in the same situation. "Do as you would be done by." 23. Judges 5.23. This was a favourite text with the preachers urging Parliament or its armies to be more "thorough" with defeated opponents. The text was used by Clarendon to exemplify the utter inhumanity of some of the godly. 24. 1 Samuel 15. 25. The dating of the Digression on the Long Parliament has been disputed, but for my argument the date could have been any time: Milton's disenchantment with England's Parliament was continuous. 26. Paradise Lost XI-XII, especially XII. 485-552; and Samson Agonistes 240-76. The first passage covers all the years after Christ's Ascension, while the second stays close to Judges 15. 27. This paragraph uses material from my essay "Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, or Ten?" 28. The Reason of Church Government, printed 1642 (Hughes 668). 29. See Fixler (10): "The need to reaffirm the only possible course towards which Christian faith ought to be directed appeared the more urgent to Milton to the extent that he had once looked for the heavens to open. His apocalypticism was the condition out of which grew his preoccupation with the grand themes of his later poems, the justification of the ways of God to Man." Works Cited * Fixler, Michael. Milton and the Kingdoms of God London: Faber, 1964. * Hale, John K. "Milton's Sonnet 18 and Psalm 137." Milton Quarterly 29.3 (1995): 91. * -----. "Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, or Ten?" Philological Quarterly 74.2 (1995): 131-49. * Marvell, Andrew. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell. Ed. H.M. Margoliouth. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1952. 2 vols. * Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes New York: Macmillan, 1957. * -----. Private Correspondence and Acadaemic Exercises. Trans. Phyllis Tillyard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1932. * -----. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Volume 1. Ed. Don M. Wolfe. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953. * Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. "Forced Allusions: Avatars of King David in the Seventeenth Century." 45-66 in Literary Milton. Text, Pretext, Context. Ed. Diana Trevino Benet and Michael Lieb. Pittsburgh: Duqesne UP, 1994. * Spittlehouse, John. A Warning-Piece Discharged: Or, Certain Intelligence Communicated to His Excellencie the Lord General Cromwell . . . As also, A brief and full Parallel betwixt the History of Israel and our late and present Series of Affairs. In which Simile, Our present General is compar'd with Moses, as he was their Deliverer, Judge, and General. London, 1653. * Winstanley, Gerrard. The True Levellers Standard. London, 1649. * -----. The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored. London, 1652. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reassessing the Use of Doubling in Marston's Antonio and Mellida Jeffrey Kahan vortiger@odyssee.net Kahan, Jeffrey. "Reassessing the Use of Doubling in Marston's Antonio and Mellida." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 4.1-12 . 1. Scholars have long pointed out that doubling is a prime feature of Antonio and Mellida. The feature is even mentioned in the text. In the Induction to the play, the actor playing Alberto states that "The necessity of the play forceth me to act two parts: Andrugio the distressed Duke of Genoa, and Alberto a Venetian gentleman enamoured on the Lady Rossaline..." (Induction 21-24).[1] But recent scholars of the play are mistaken in believing that this isolated instance of doubling is proof of its widespread practice within the entire play. Moreover, the play's lack of doubling may yield valuable insights concerning Marston's company, the Paul's Children. 2. In a recent of the study of the Paul's Children, Realey Gair points out that the Antonio and Mellida begins with eight boys discussing their parts. According to Gair, "They must double some parts" (Gair, Children of St. Paul's 119). Although Gair gives no minimum requirement for staging the play, his use of the plural pronoun indicates that he presumes that doubling within the play is pervasive. Building upon Gair's work, Richard Fotheringham, concludes that the play can be staged with as few as 14 players, and offers what he believes is "proof" that the play is rife with doubling: In the Act II court scene nine of the fourteen characters present danced; at line 170 of Act V only twelve actors are present (Antonio and Andrugio are yet to enter) and only six characters dance (three masquers and three ladies). Nevertheless Duke Piero comments: "The roome's too scant: boyes, stand in there, close" (V, 1701); and three pages leave the stage. It is not surprising then to find that, as well as Antonio and Andrugio, three other entrances have to be made before the end of the play- those of the character Feliche and two coffin-bearers. Either Marston or the acting company included Duke Piero's request in order to make possible the performing of the play by a cast of fourteen. (Forthingham 25) While Forthingham does present some interesting ideas concerning scenes Marston might have written for the expressed purpose of giving Robert Coles (the actor playing Alberto/Andrugio) enough time to change costume, his theory that the actor playing Feliche must have played some other character is less defensible.[2] 3. I have tabulated each scene for doubling possibilities using only two, interlinking principles: (i) one actor must double the same part throughout; (ii) doubled characters cannot be on stage at the same time. Since an actor cannot be more than one character at a time, doubling is only possible among those characters who never meet.[3] [NOTE: Chart 1 is available in the WWW version of EMLS, at=20 . 4. As Chart 1 (above) indicates, almost all the characters meet each other in 1.1. and 5.2. This, of course, affects the minimum cast required to stage the play. Taking the above-mentioned constraints into account, staging Antonio and Mellida requires 19 players, performing the parts of 21 individual characters, not 14 as Fotheringham calculated. [NOTE: Chart 2 is available in the WWW version of EMLS, at=20 . 5. Forthingham's "proof" of Feliche's doubling in 5.2 collapses when the scene is studied in detail. As detailed in Chart 2, above, the scene begins with the entrance of Piero, Castilio, Forobosco, Mellida, Flavia, Rossaline, accompanied by two pages and a boy. At line 19, Balurdo enters, followed by yet another page at line 36. Balurdo exits at line 52, only to re-enter at line 87, accompanied by Galeatzo and Matzagente. It is then that Duke Piero comments: "The room's too scant; boys, stand in there, close" (5.2.88). Piero is saying that the room seems empty and he wants to fill it with bodies and activity. Piero's command is not, as Forthingham suggests, that the pages leave, but that Balurdo, Galeatzo and Matzagente should stay. The three pages and boy, in fact, exit only at the end of the scene. At 5.2.88, there are 13 actors on stage. As the scene progresses, no characters exit. In fact, even more characters come on stage. Feliche makes his entrance at line 157. This clearly demonstrates that Forthingham is incorrect. Feliche cannot be doubled with the three pages or the boy, because at this point in the scene, he is on stage with them. And yet more characters follow him on stage. Andrugio enters at line 166 and he is followed by Lucio and Antonio in the coffin at line 208. At this point, at least 17 characters are on stage.[4] 6. The uncertainty concerning the maximum number of actors on stage at this point stems from the stage direction at 5.2.208, which in Q1 reads, "Enter a cofin" (V, 1882). H.H. Wood simply repeated Q's stage direction unamended (60). Nonetheless, most modern editors agree that Lucio enters with the coffin and have amended this stage direction accordingly. However, they disagree as to whether he is accompanied. If Lucio entered unattended, the coffin must have been on a carriage or cart of some sort, which would explain Piero's reference to "that mournful hearse" (5.2.210). G.K. Hunter's Regents edition and Reavley Gair's Revels edition both opt for this interpretation, minimally amending the stage direction to a workable "Enter [Lucio with] a coffin" (Regents edition, 5.2.172; Revels edition, 5.2.186). However, this use of the word "hearse," while familiar to modern readers, only came into existence in 1650. According to the O.E.D., Marston would have understood the word to refer to an elaborate iron framework on which burning tapers were placed -- in other words, a sort of funeral candelabra. The hearse could be carried or mounted on the coffin. I believe Lucio entered, carrying a hearse with burning tapers, followed by attendants carrying the coffin. This would certainly have provided a powerful dramatic effect. My opinion is generally shared by former editors. Bullen has the stage direction "Enter a funeral procession, followed by LUCIO" (5.1.287); the Cambridge editors have "Enter [LUCIO and Attendants with] a coffin" (5.2.208). But we are left with the same problem: how many attendants carried the coffin? 7. If attendants do accompany Lucio, they are probably only two in number. While it is always difficult to measure the number of boys and mutes, what we today would call extras, the requirement of a forth or fifth page would not serve the purposes of staging this scene, nor any other in the play. My theory is, to an extent, reinforced by David Bradley's recent survey of doubling upon the English stage during the period. He notes that in most plays of the period "plural calls in stage directions may be satisfied with the appearance of two actors" (18). As in 1.1, this would bring the minimum cast requirement up to nineteen, four more than Forthingham deemed necessary. 8. The part of Lucio, a minor part, also allows for a great deal of doubling possibilities. There are 234 lines between the Painter's departure in 5.1 and Lucio's entry at 5.2.208. This leaves more than enough time for a leisurely costume change. If one follows Q and all subsequent editions, Lucio can also be doubled with Dildo or Catzo, two other pages who usually appear together. Neither page ever meets Lucio. But here I think we may be misled yet again by Q's vague stage directions. 9. Mapping out the entrances and exits, it strikes me as odd that Dildo and Catzo do not appear in 5.2, the scene in which the play's business is resolved. Instead, accompanying the major characters, we have directions for a "two Pages" (5.2.0). There are six good reasons to suppose that these two pages are Dildo and Catzo: (i) Dildo and Castilio are pages. The stage direction may simply refer to their function, rather than name; (ii) Dildo and Catzo are the only major characters not on stage. There is no thematic reason why the play would demand two nameless pages, rather than these often-seen characters; (iii) it makes good sense for both Dildo and Catzo to be on stage here, as their masters, Balurdo and Castilio, are also on stage for this penultimate scene; (iv) the fact that these two pages sing in 5.2 may be additional proof that they are, in fact, Dildo and Catzo. They would be ideally suited for these roles as the audience would have been aware of their singing talents, having heard them sing together at 2.1.61; (v) if the actors who sang these two songs stayed in character as Dildo and Catzo, the cast would save a costume change. Having two actors change costumes to come on as nameless pages serves no artistic purpose but does cause extra backstage business. I see no reason why Marston would want to create this extra business; (vi) hitherto, the play has only required one nameless page. Why should the last scene require three? This, however, may well be my own aesthetics forcing the issue. 10. While Chart 1 demonstrates that all the play's major characters did not double, it does allow for the likely possibility of two more minor doublings. For example, it is possible that the part of Painter was doubled, but with what other role? The character is on stage with Alberto, Balurdo, Feliche and Dildo. While this precludes doubling with these four characters, the text allows for the possibility of doubling the Painter any of the remaining 16 characters. Likewise, a character, called only "Page" in the text, enters at 5.2.36. The actor playing this role may well have been doubled as an attendant at different parts of the play. 11. While this new study of doubling in the play invalidates previous studies, the play's present unpopularity means it is unlikely we shall ever fully understand how doubling, or the lack of it, affects the play's tempo, structure, character development and visual appeal. Nonetheless, this study does raise some interesting speculations on the play's construction. Elizabethan playwrights were well-adapt at creating plots that allowed a limited cast to play a myriad of roles. For example, The Battle of Alcazar has 76 characters but requires only 30 players (Bradley 231).[5] While the acting ensemble for Antonio and Mellida had 19 players, Martson was content to create a play concentrating on a relatively small number of characters. The result is a play that has very few possibilities for doubling. Bradley, in his study of the plays of the period, concluded that in some instances playwrights wrote plays with specific casts in mind (20). Marston's play was indeed written especially for the Paul's Children and their theatre (Gair, "Introduction" 25). The play is full is self-conscious references to the company, playhouse and presentation (Gair, Children of St. Paul's 118-27). The newly reformed Paul's Children may have been limited by the theatrical experience of the cast.[6] It is possible that some players had had no previous theatrical experience at all. Players for the children's companies were selected for their singing, not acting (Gurr 51). Even the most theatrically experienced boy player would have had little doubling experience, for the practice of boys doubling roles was apparently fading and by 1600 had all but disappeared in adult companies (Bradley 44). It may have been illogical to ask inexperienced players to double roles. 12. By the same token, older, experienced players may have been given more stage time, though not necessarily leading roles. The few facts available concerning Robert Coles, who doubled as Andrugio and Alberto, seem to fit this pattern. In 1598, he was originally recruited as a chorister (Gair, Children of St. Paul's 199, n.24). Though only in his teens, he was too old for a main role, as his voice had begun to break (Gair, Children of St. Paul's 131-2). Nonetheless, as one of the older boys in the company, he may well have had a steadying influence upon his younger, less experienced colleagues. Robert Coles may well have doubled out of "necessity" but it was a necessity which may have been brought about by his company's inexperience, not finances. Notes 1. All citations, unless otherwise stated, are from The Selected Plays of John Marston (1986). My control text for this study was The History of Antonio and Mellida; The First Part (1602). I checked the text against the following: The Works of John Marston (1887); The Plays of John Marston (1934); Antonio and Mellida (1965); Antonio and Mellida (1991). I am grateful to Head Librarian Susan Brock and Assistant Librarian Kate Welch of The Shakespeare Institute for access to The Malone Society Reprint of the 1602 quarto. 2. Robert Coles, along with another actor, John Norwood, are cited in Q's stage directions at IV, 1288. Gair identified Robert Coles as the actor playing Andrugio/Alberto (Children of St. Paul's 199, n.24). Gair later modified his statement from a certainty to a likelihood. See his Revels edition, 4.1.28.In. 3. As simple and as straight forward as these rules seem, they can be misleading. For instance, Bradley's study points that actors were sometimes forced into interchanging or "dodging" roles. But even he notes that dodging was an abnormal stage practice (42,57). I am grateful to an anonymous EMLS reader for this and subsequent references to Bradley's text. Bradley's exception stems from cast limitations. Character "dodging" can also stem from conceptual doubling. In the 1990 RSC Comedy of Errors, Desmond Barritt played both Antiphuluses. Only in the last scene was another actor needed. Thus the fact that two characters are on at the same time in the last scene does not necessarily mean that they are played by two actors throughout. But this doubling of twins depends upon the recognizability of the actor as identical in both parts. The technical possibility of this doubling does not mean it was carried out in the play's original staging. While some scholars may see a logic in having one actor play both twins, no part in Antonio and Mellida overtly requires such conceptual doubling. 4. A cast of nineteen actors is well within the accepted limits: David Bevington calculated that an average company in the 1580s and 1590s consisted of 21.5 players (105); Giorgio Melchiori calculated the average Elizabethan company had a maximum total of 18 players (786); William Ringler, Jr., mapping all of Shakespeare's plays written up to 1599, concluded that a company of no more than 16 players were required (110-134). It should be noted that these critics differentiate between actors, apprentices and boys. I am merely interested in the overall number. I am defining a player, or actor as a person who assumes a role when on stage. 5. Bradley's calculation updates Greg's calculation of 26 players (Greg 69-84). Bradley argues that Greg's logic was circular. Nonetheless, Bradley does not dispute that doubling occurred in the play. 6. The company may have been reformed as early as 1597. Nonetheless, Marston's play may have marked the company's commercial debut and was therefore of considerable significance (Gurr 51). Works Cited * Bevington, David. From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of the Tudor Period. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1962. * Bradley, David. From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. * Fotheringham, Richard. "The Doubling of Roles on the Jacobean Stage." Theatre Research International 10 (1985): 18-33. * Gair, W. Reavley. "Introduction." 1-51 in John Marston. Antonio and Mellida. [The Revels Plays.] Manchester: Manchester UP; New York: John Hopkins P, 1991. * -----. The Children of St. Paul's: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553-1608. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. * Greg, W.W. Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar and Orlando. [Malone Society Extra Volume.] Oxford: Oxford UP, 1922. * Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642. [Third Edition.] Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. * Marston, John. Antonio and Mellida. Ed. G.K. Hunter. [Regents Renaissance Drama.] Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. * -----. Antonio and Mellida. Ed. W. Reavley Gair. [The Revels Plays.] Manchester: Manchester UP; New York: John Hopkins P, 1991. * -----. Antonio and Mellida & Antonio's Revenge. Ed. W.W. Greg. [The Malone Society Reprints.] London: Oxford UP, 1922. * -----. The Plays of John Marston. Ed. H. Harvey Wood. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934. * -----. The Selected Plays of John Marston. Ed. MacDonald Jackson and Michael Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. * -----. The Works of John Marston. Ed. H.H. Bullen. [Vol.1.] London: John C.Nimmo, 1887. * Melchiori, Giorgio. "Peter, Balthasar, and Shakespeare's Art of Doubling." The Modern Language Review 78 (1983): 777-792. * Ringler, William, Jr. "The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays." 110-34 in The Seventeenth Century Stage. Ed. G.E. Bentley. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. * Skiles, Howard. "Attendant and Others in Shakespeare's Margins; Doubling in the Two Texts of King Lear." Theatre Survey 32 (November 1991): 187-213. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz, eds. Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. viii+273 pp. Paper ISBN 0-691-00100-6. Thomas H. Luxon Dartmouth College Thomas.H.Luxon@Dartmouth.EDU Luxon, Thomas H. "Review of Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 5.1-7 . 1. This collection of astute and often entertaining essays proceeds on the assumption that Renaissance literature is, among other things, a psychoanalytic discourse (albeit pre- and, interestingly, proto-Freudian), and that its apparent preoccupations with "sexual identity, gender definition, doubling, ... voyeurism, memory, melancholy, the uncanny, even the unconscious" can fruitfully be read as early modern versions of modern and post-modern psychoanalytic preoccupations. It also recognizes that Freudian psychoanalysis is itself preoccupied with the Renaissance and its most famous figures -- da Vinci, Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Tasso (3). 2. Beginning with Marjorie Garber's elegant and highly amusing reading of The Changeling (male and female hysteria, castration anxiety, and faked orgasm) and ending with David Lee Miller's disturbingly moving meditation on the "specular son" in Ben Jonson's "best piece of poetrie," the essays are uniformly strong, original, and frequently path breaking (239). Most offer new modes of reading Renaissance texts and authors; some also push the boundaries of psychoanalytic categories as they are presently formulated. None indulge in simply reading early modern literature through psychoanalytic filters; rather they work hard at setting up a conversation between two related, but often quite different psychoanalytic modes -- the early modern and the modern. Most of them suggest new possibilities for reading Renaissance literature and also use those readings to sharpen and reformulate modern psychoanalytic discourses. 3. Because space and time are limited, allow me to focus briefly on just two essays that indicate new interpretive and analytic paths. 4. Regina Schwartz's "Through the Optic Glass: Voyeurism and Paradise Lost begins the complicated task of taking a longer and deeper look at "the clich=82s of voyeurism-as-aggression and exhibitionism-as-passivity" that have governed readings of "the male gaze" since Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (Screen 16 [1975]: 6-18). Paradise Lost, Schwartz reminds us, "is brimming with lustful eyes" (150), from the Galileo simile of Book 1, to Satan's temptations, Eve's dream, Adam's desire to penetrate the hidden secrets of the cosmos, and invocations of the problematics of both the narrator's and reader's oscillations between desiring gazer and desired object of the "Transcendental Voyeur," Milton's God (156). Acknowledging that there is plenty of fodder in the poem for the familiar reading of "Satan as voyeur/aggressor and Eve as exhibit/victim," Schwartz avails herself of more subtle Lacanian and Miltonic analyses of the gaze for reading those bits of the poem that cannot be forced into the "voyeurism-as-domination" model (153). If the gaze is always gendered (and read) as male, aggressively dominating, and fiercely subjective, then we will have trouble understanding Eve's persistently scopic agency, the narrator's complex desire to exhibit (and to see) himself as one both "denied the gaze" and privileged "to see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight," and God's own status as both primary and ultimate narcissist, "Transcendental Voyeur" and "Transcendental Exhibit" (157). Schwartz's essay points in some very promising directions in an effort to displace "the tired question of Milton's old-fashioned patriarchalism ... by another inquiry" (166). 5. Juliana Schiesari's "Libidinal Economies: Machiavelli and Fortune's Rape" offers not just a convincing reading of a scene from Machiavelli's fantasy life, but it also discovers the fascinating ways in which his anxieties about emergent capitalism and powerful women overlap and finally occlude each other. Each anxiety both signifies and represses the other in Machiavelli's remarkably transparent attempt to mystify his greatest fear -- that the rules of commercial exchange in the emergent capitalist order threaten to upset the political order he claims to have mastered. Schiesari allows us to ponder Machiavelli's "fear of a feminine symbolic order, one where the distinctions between political economy and sexual economy, subject of exchange and object of exchange, masculinity and femininity, are blurred" (178). She allows us to witness Machiavelli's attempts to displace this fear with a fantasy of violent virility and misogynist rhetoric about Fortuna's desire to be brutally mastered. One can almost watch the emergence of early modern masculinity as a remedy for Machiavelli's twin fears of powerful women and uncontrollable market forces. Unfortunately Machiavelli was hardly alone. 6. The collection as a whole exhibits the breadth and maturity psychoanalytic criticism has achieved in the rich field of early modern studies. These are some of the best recent essays on Renaissance literature and culture. And, taken together, these essays prompt a host of questions still unexplored, such as: how does linguistic structuralism come to replace or displace religion as the underlying structure or syntax of psychoanalytic thought? How does the early Puritan focus on "heart work" open up the region that Freud will later dub the unconscious? Is structuralism itself structured like a religion? 7. Other contributors include: Natasha Korda on Castiglione, Valeria Finucci on Ariosto's Orlando, Harry Berger on Spenser, Lynn Enterline on Petrarch and Ovid, William Kerrigan on As You Like It, and Elizabeth J. Bellamy on Virgil and Tasso. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Renaissance Women: Constructions of Femininity in England. Ed. Kate Aughterson. New York: Routledge, 1995. xv+316 pp. Cloth ISBN 0-415-12045-5; paper ISBN 0-415-12046-2. Carrie Hintz University of Toronto chintz@chass.utoronto.ca Hintz, Carrie. "Review of Renaissance Women: Constructions of Femininity in England." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 6.1-7 . 1. Those who study the history and writing of women in the early modern period find themselves faced with the challenge, both daunting and exhilarating, of working in discursive fields as diverse as medicine, law, theology, politics, labor history and social history. Kate Aughterson's book Renaissance Women: A Sourcebook , with 107 excerpts pertaining to women in the early modern period, seems designed to address this interdisciplinary imperative. The result is a varied collection of documents ranging from midwifery manuals, housekeeping guides, and letters from women preachers, to defiant prefaces from women playwrights. The collection also includes transcriptions of manuscripts, and hard-to-find printed materials, though these materials are often rendered inaccurately. 2. Some of Aughterson's remarks in the introductory section require close examination. The aim of the book, in Aughterson's own terms, is to present documents which "described, inscribed, circumscribed, and prescribed" women, and documents women produced that "resisted, inverted and challenged such scripts" (5). Aughterson offers the example of Katherine Stubbes, whose marital compliance places her firmly under patriarchal control, but whose zeal in religious disputation against Catholics and atheists grants her a powerful public voice. With this example, readers of the collection are instructed to find subversive elements in texts by women, who struggle (often in very creative ways) against the dominant ideology. 3. It is indeed rewarding to read the excerpts Aughterson provides in light of their subterranean messages. However, Aughterson's description of the anthology as reflective of women's struggles with prescriptive discourses does not reflect the range of documents in the collection, which includes genuinely conservative and mixed opinions. For example, the work of Margaret Cavendish is acknowledged to be contradictory; she articulates "varying positions in relation to constraints or otherwise upon women" (286). In the "proto-feminisms" section, both women and men articulate proto-feminist arguments. For example, Daniel Tuvil's Asylum venerisdraws on Plato to conclude that "women and man have in them the same aptitude and ability for the well managing of civil and military places, and it is exercise alone which begets dexterity in the one and the other" (270). Also notable are William Austin's 1637 Haec homo, which argues for women's legal and public liberties (277-279) and Poulain de la Barre's 1672 The woman as good as the man, of the equality of both sexes (289-290). It would have been preferable for Aughterson to refrain from associating all emancipatory documents with women in her opening remarks. 4. The introduction to the section devoted to Sexuality and Motherhood, makes vexing assumptions about "authentically female spaces," which seem to be limited to women's own writings about motherhood, and romantic love between women, "whether lesbian or not" (105). It seems overly optimistic to assume that women under patriarchy in the early modern period could establish an "authentic" female space, no matter how modest, without prior widespread social change. Aughterson acknowledges, for example, that maternity was "circumscribed...by the masculine discourse," yet somehow women "find a language for celebrating fecundity and maternal love, as well as their fears of childbirth" (105). Granted women's writing on maternity can subvert masculine ideology, but women's writing about love for men can be subversive as well. And how to regard the excerpt from Alexander Niccoles, who instructs husbands in 1615 to increase the knowledge of women "in good things," giving wives "certain assurance and testimony of thy love" so that she "may with hers again the more reciprocally equal thy affection" (124)? Perhaps the search for an "authentically" female space is suspect from the beginning. 5. In providing such a wide range of texts, Aughterson attempts to demonstrate that the debate on women extended a great deal farther than the notorious querelle des femmes which raged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, due to the number of extracts included in Aughterson's collection, and the wide time span of these materials (from the early sixteenth century to the late Restoration) there is not enough social context to show the movement of arguments, factions, alliances, pressures and opportunities which produced any given document. Introductory material is often too brief: in the theology section, for instance, the impact of the Protestant Reformation, humanism, and the English Civil War on women is dealt with in a few paragraphs. Without this information, it is difficult to fully evaluate these sources. 6. There are many errors and problems in transcription in this collection, many of which have been dealt with by Janis Butler Holm in a recent review (). One of many errors is the rendering of Margaret Fell's Women's Speaking Justified as Women's Preaching Justified. There are also several instances where Aughterson does not footnote her sources, including a section where she discusses literacy rates without explaining where her numbers come from. 7. The book, despite its drawbacks, could help scholars gain a toehold in early modern women's studies; enough of a sample of each text is provided to make further interdisciplinary work easier. But since these texts are not otherwise readily available, this anthology may be of greatest value as a teaching text, stimulating students to explore resonances between literary or historical authors and documents from the wider culture. The brevity of the excerpts might ease the difficulty of delving into primary documents for students. Since the excerpts are organized around the constraints on women from all directions, and women's struggle to speak and control their destiny, the text would certainly be useful in a class devoted to the discussion of the emancipation of women in the period, allowing students to move beyond Aughterson's own opinions and the limitations of her edition. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Barbara Estrin. Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. xiii+345 pp. Paper ISBN 0-8223-1499-1. Nathan P. Tinker Fordham University tinker@murray.fordham.edu Tinker, Nathan P. "Review of Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 7.1-5 . 1. The common critical heritage of the Petrarchan mode is the female as an object consumed by the authorial ego of the male poet as he formally, linguistically and poetically dismembers the body and identity of the pursued, but constantly refusing, woman. The female subject, in other words, does not fare well. Barbara L. Estrin's book, however, seeks to reconceptualize the Petrarchan tradition in terms of the subjectivity of the imagined woman. In attempting to construct the female subject of Renaissance love verse, she continually asks of Petrarch, Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell, "what about the girl?" This question elicits some surprising answers as Estrin posits three female identities that subjectify themselves through the poetry: Laura-Daphne, the traditional Petrarchan woman who denies sexuality; Laura-Eve, the woman who returns sexuality; and Laura-Mercury, "the woman who invents her own life by escaping configuration altogether" (9). 2. Estrin explains these three Lauras by an analysis of Paris Bordone's mid-sixteenth-century painting "A Pair of Lovers," a full-color print of which appears on the cover of the paperback edition of her book. In the painting, Daphnis and Chlo=EB sit in a bower, their heads together. Daphnis's left arm is behind Chlo=EB's back; his right hand, upon which lies Chlo=EB's left hand, appears to be pulling up her skirts. Cupid, laying a laurel wreath on Daphnis's head, flies above and slightly to the right of the lovers. For Estrin, the problem of this painting, ostensibly about love's victory, lies first in Cupid's wreath: "Why does the winged boy place a laurel wreath around Daphnis's head, when laurels are the consolation prize for thwarted love?" (1) This however is far less important than the configuration of the lovers' hands. If Chlo=EB is pushing Daphnis's hand away, denying sexuality, she is the traditional Petrarchan female. However, if she is pulling Daphnis's hand, drawing it "toward her sexual center" she is Laura-Eve who unwaveringly returns the lover's gaze or Laura-Mercury who initiates the sexual act and thus threatens the stability of the Petrarchan mode (7). By assessing the "multiplicities of gender position," "A Pair of Lovers," suggests Estrin, problematizes the genre of the painting, and thus the poetry she analyzes (5). As Estrin puts it, "something about the iconography is off" (5). 3. With this in mind, Estrin then moves into what can only be called a "close reading" of her male poets. I enquote "close reading" because, while her analysis is formalist and non-historical, it relies heavily upon the genre theory of Jean-Fran=E7ois Lyotard and the gender theory of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray with forays into Lacan, Greenblatt, and a host of other postmodern theorists and critics (this should come as no surprise as the book is part of the "Post-Contemporary Interventions" series edited by Stanley Fish and Frederic Jameson). Estrin begins with Petrarch, finding a "Laura who subverts Petrarchism" (41), one who eventually is able to speak for herself, the Laura-Mercury, and say "I am perhaps not who you think I am" (89), an espousal which engenders an "identity crisis that subverts the origin and forms of Petrarchan invention to make the poet appear as [Laura-Mercury's] invention" (89). For better or worse, Estrin assumes an enormous amount of knowledge of Petrarch on the part of her reader--keep a well-annotated copy of Rime Sparse nearby as you read. 4. The first two chapters of Laura on Petrarch and Wyatt reveal a certain sense of urgency as they lay the theoretical groundwork for the rest of the book, an urgency which occasionally manifests itself in somewhat awkward analogies. In completing her analysis of Wyatt's Psalms, for instance, Estrin says that "like the revisionist historians who deny Auschwitz, David makes sure there are no Lauras around to testify to his annexations" (122). Equating the imagined silencing of a poetic persona with the systematic revision of holocaust history seems, well, strained, to say the least. This is admittedly an extreme example but it does suggest the linguistic gymnastics Estrin occasionally employs. On the other hand, Estrin's prose often flows with an almost poetic lilt, evoking a self-referentiality that enlivens her complex and intricately reasoned argument. Of Donne's "Change," for instance, Estrin says: When [Donne] redefines change, the "I" calls it a sequence rather than a conversion. The woman, who in the opening sections was the single sea, here is numerous waters, and he, one of many banks. Earlier, the god fixation insisted on oneness; here the human opportunity is manifold: many waters; many banks; and, finally, many kisses. At first there was a clear barrier between land and sea. Here the borderline between sea and land is uncertain (217). Indeed it is in Estrin's reading of Donne that Laura is at its strongest. For Estrin, Donne essentially opposes Petrarchism as he "yield[s] up the culturally inscribed body and imagin[es] an Eve who frees both herself and the poet to 'do' the undefined 'rest.' When he imagines a poetic of satisfaction, the Donne of 'The Dreame' reinvents the dynamic of desire" (199). 5. Laura is a book that will no doubt raise the hackles of readers habitually bothered by postmodern criticism. However, the intellectual joy and energy with which Estrin leaps into her subject opens this text to its reader. It is a complex book, deeply infused with a sense of purpose: nothing less than the re-visioning (or "uncovering" to use her term, which she puns upon frequently throughout the book), of the Petrarchan tradition. As such, it is an important, perhaps essential, piece of scholarship in the current reassessment of Renaissance Petrarchism. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Frank Lestringant. Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery. Trans. David Fausett. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. xvii+197 pp. ISBN 0520-08871-9. Garrett Sullivan Pennsylvania State University gas11@psu.edu Sullivan, Garrett. "Review of Mapping the Renaissance World." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 8.1-5 . 1. The sixteenth-century Welsh cartographer George Owen once reported a parliamentary mishap involving what we would consider a misreading of Christopher Saxton's atlas. According to Owen, members misconstrued two pages of the atlas; unaware of the vagaries of scale, they assumed that the three counties represented on one sheet of the atlas took up the same amount of space as the single county pictured on the other. Consequently, that one county was taxed three times as much as were each of the others. This anecdote powerfully suggests not the cartographic illiteracy of sixteenth-century map readers, but the extent to which conventions of map-reading were in formation in the early modern period. It also foregrounds two topics central to Frank Lestringant's provocative account of the career of the sixteenth-century French traveller and map-maker, Andr=82 Thevet: the nature and implications of map reading (and map production), and the problem of scale. 2. While Owen's anecdote attests to an unfortunate strategic use of maps, Lestringant reads Thevet's work in terms of cosmography, a "grand synthesis" that encompassed what we would think of as cartography, geography, history, botany, and other disciplines that could be used to suggest "the admirable variety of the world" (129). Through the analysis of Thevet's maps and travel narratives, texts torn between a fascination with specific aspects of the cultures Thevet encountered and the desire to integrate those aspects into a global (or cosmographical) whole, Lestringant delineates the decline of cosmography and gestures toward emergent disciplines or practices that were suspicious of the former's "grand synthesis." In doing so, he intriguingly describes the tension between Thevet's maps and the contexts in which they were read -- for example, between Thevet's fragmented rendering, in atlas form, of a series of islands, and a ship captain's need for an itinerary, or "rutter," that would allow him to navigate those islands. Such an atlas, called an isolario, emerges out of a cosmographical tradition in which Thevet was steeped and which had its practical uses. However, Thevet's isolario also "interrupted the practical continuity of navigation, isolating from it vestiges that were scattered among so many island receptacles, closed on to themselves" (107). This example illustrates Lestringant's interest both in map-reading and in scale: the atlas not only fails to offer a navigator a rutter, it also attends to the local at the expense of the global. This latter problem represents for Lestringant a fundamental crisis in cosmography. Wed as it is to a hubristic (and potentially blasphemous) pursuit of an "eternal and ubiquitist knowledge" of the earth, cosmography must at the same time attend to minutiae, to every island and archipelago (130). In the face of both practical uses for geographic and topographic knowledge and an emergent empiricism, the global ambitions of cosmography seemed increasingly antiquated, and by the time of his death Thevet, the one-time cosmographer to the crown, was understood by many as trafficking in falsehoods. 3. For Lestringant, Thevet's ambitions and actions were shaped by the (cosmographic) problem of scale. What Lestringant says of Thevet's isolario is true also of his Brazilian travel narratives: "In his desire to affirm at all costs the unity of practical [or local] knowledge and global science, he managed to retain of the cosmos only a loose and indefinitely fragmented knowledge ..." (124). While Thevet's pre-ethnographic practice is informed by a desire to join local knowledge with global science, it also suggests a fascinating hybridization of European and Brazilian traditions and mythologies. For example, Lestringant shows how the myth of the "American Amazon," a "fourth sort" supposedly discovered by Thevet, attests not only to the European displacement onto the Other of anxieties regarding female agency, but also to the power of Brazilian myths of warrior women (79). (Interestingly, late in his career, Thevet attempts to discredit the Amazon legend that he had earlier promulgated, but Lestrigant shows convincingly how Thevet shores up that legend even as he attempts to undermine it). For Lestringant, what remains fascinating about Thevet is that while he adheres to the failing cosmographical project of integrating particulars into a whole (or, in this case, fragments of Brazilian culture into an overarching European context suited to the production of justificatory narratives for colonial exploitation), the particulars he describes assert their own authority and interest -- at some level they refuse integration. Thevet enacts the failure of cosmography even as he acts in its service. 4. What pleases me most about Lestringant's book is the implicit critique it offers of recent accounts of the cultural significance of maps. While many literary and cultural critics of this period have followed Richard Helgerson in understanding maps in terms of their complex and varied iconography -- consider, for example, John Gillies's recent book on Shakespeare and geography -- Lestringant situates maps in terms of specific reading practices. Moreover, his crucial articulation of the relationship between cosmography and chorography, an articulation which suggests the different uses for and readings of maps, hints at the variety of meanings that maps can produce. Sadly, much of this is underdeveloped. At times Lestringant fails to acknowledge the extent to which maps are ideologically shaped and charged. Consider his discussion of: . . . a general constraint that weighed on geography at the dawn of the modern age -- namely, that any given map was never established on entirely fresh ground, but always inherited from previous maps a not inconsiderable -- even a preponderant -- share of its information. Even in the best of cases it integrated new data into a received form or contour. (112) This formulation presupposes a modern map "established on entirely fresh ground," one that does not depend upon received forms. With new geographic discoveries come new, "accurate" maps whose formal features merely reflect or contain that accuracy. One could start by pointing out that Lestringant is simply wrong here -- map historians such as R. A. Skelton have traced representational continuities from maps of the classical era to those of the present, and J. B. Harley, among others, has convincingly shown the ideological nature of contemporary cartographic productions -- but this example also bespeaks a troubling positivism that runs throughout Lestringant's book and shows up in his intriguing discussion of experience. Thevet articulates his authority in terms of his experience of exotic lands; he has knowledge that his predecessors did not. Lestringant is right when he analyzes Thevet's strategic use of his experience. However, he fails to problematize or historicize that experience -- he seems to see experiential knowledge as transparent in its nature and meaning, and he doesn't consider the way in which such experience is shaped by cultural and ideological forces. 5. Lestringant would have benefitted from considering George Owen's example. Saxton's text, an "accurate" one usually touted as the first modern British atlas of England and Wales, was still open to a range of readings that emerged out of its semiotic multiplicity and the different uses to which it was put. Cosmography does not in any straightforward fashion give way to the representation or production of maps that are precise and univocal in their meaning, just as "inaccuracies" do not melt away before the transparent authority of experience, in any of its forms. Lestringant assumes that the fictions of cosmography were replaced by the facts of early modern empiricism, and that the false mapping of the Renaissance world was eventually supplanted by the truth of modern cartography. Nevertheless, his achievement is that he renders in a full and variegated fashion the rich complexity of a lost cosmographic imagination. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kim F. Hall. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. xiii+312 pp. Cloth ISBN 0-8014-3117-4; paper ISBN 0-8014-8249-6. Bernadette Andrea West Virginia University bandrea@wvu.edu Andrea, Bernadette. "Review of Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 9.1-5 . 1. Kim Hall's study of race and gender in the early modern period fulfills its promise of reconceptualizing the "black presence" in Renaissance England (primarily around the turn of the seventeenth century) as key to the development of a nation state and empire. In positivistic terms, Blacks, whom Hall situates as people of African descent dispersed by the transatlantic slave trade, constituted a minuscule population in early modern England; however, using poststructuralist paradigms, Hall demonstrates that blackness, yoked in a violent binary with whiteness, was absolutely constitutive for the formation of English identity on the cusp of its age of expansion. Surveying an impressively broad range of familiar and marginal literary and cultural texts -- travel narratives describing Africa; lyric poetry in the Petrarchan tradition (including paeans to literal dark ladies); Jacobean public and private theater; early seventeenth-century English women's writing; and visual artifacts featuring black people (royal cameos and servant portraits) -- Hall posits a "semiotics of race" that is both rhetorical and referential (5). Her central thesis emphasizes this symbolic/economic dialectic: "Tropes of blackness were discovered by white English writers (both male and female) to be infinitely malleable ways of establishing a sense of the proper organization of Western European male and female in the Renaissance: notions of proper gender relations shape the terms for describing proper colonial organization" (4). 2. As Hall points out, "the emerging racialized language of beauty" throws the dark side of English identity formation into relief: from the end of the sixteenth century, "fair" beauty relied on black "unsightliness" to define its features (182). This is a cultural dynamic utterly shaped by aristocratic and patriarchal investments: powerful white males used the "arbitrary distinctions in color" established by Petrarchan beauty standards "to lump all 'others' (male and female) into another, less valued, group" (182). Hall's most innovative claim follows from this observation: "the discourse of blackness is a gendered one" (130). More specifically, "racial difference is worked out in the competition between white female and black bodies in the language of 'fairness,' which similarly encompasses ideals of aesthetic value, economics, and class and gender hierarchies" (53). The aristocratic "exchange of women," for instance, enabled powerful men to pit women against each other as "black" or "white," with the black(ened) woman coded as unsuitable for perpetuating stainless aristocratic bloodlines. However, the normative white male subject was shaped by the same imperialist and patriarchal hierarchies that structured black people and women as subordinates. Though gendered tropes of blackness allowed male poets like Spenser to play with dark personas without staining their reputation (contrast the scandalized response to Queen Anne and her ladies' performance in The Masque of Blackness), the "white mask" of English patriarchal culture was undermined from the beginning by its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of blackness (211). 3. Hall's critical and political dilemma in this study consists of whether or not black feminist criticism -- and she identifies herself as a "black feminist/Renaissance critic" -- should concern itself with dead white men (254). Charting new critical ground at the crossroads of black feminist and Renaissance studies, Hall launches her study by deconstructing critical approaches to the "black presence" in English Renaissance literary culture that separate questions of aesthetics from those of racialized difference. Telling moments in this scholarship include the conventional assessment of Lysander's slurs against Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("Away, you Ethiop!" and "Out, tawny Tartar") as an aesthetic preference for "blondes" over "brunettes;" the standard evaluation of Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" sonnets as allegorical rather than referential; and the usual dismissal of Queen Anne's Masque of Blackness as an imitation within a long-standing dramatic tradition rather than a startling innovation with racialized import. Such critical moments, Hall argues, efface "the elements of race, sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery, which form a prominent set of 'subtexts'" to literary and cultural productions in the period (1). 4. Though she offers an innovative critical paradigm for reading the intersection of race and gender in early modern England, Hall may be faulted for drawing too strict a line between representations of and representations by black people of the era; we sorely need a method for reading the cultural agency of Blacks in early modern Britain (especially England and Scotland, though also Ireland and Wales) that does not mire itself in a positivist requirement for an authorial signature. She may also be charged with a susceptibility to the Manichaean Fallacy, a non sequitur which assumes that a black/white binary in the symbolic system of a culture necessarily translates into a societal division between "black" and "white" people premised on white supremacism (St. Clair Drake explicates this fallacy in Black Folk Here and There [1987]). Though Hall suggests a model whereby the traditional Christian binarism of black and white "becomes increasingly infused with concerns over skin color, economics, and gender politics" (2), she nevertheless tends to stress the blanket negativity of blackness in Western culture and to ignore positive evaluations, such as the high esteem in which Ethiopians were held by classical Greek and Roman cultures or the similar praise of black saints and black madonnas in medieval Christendom. Recognizing these distinctions allows us to specify the early modern period as a watershed in race relations grounded in the European innovation of a specifically racial slavery. An anti-racist politics requires this historical precision. 5. These objections detract little from the overall brilliance of Hall's work, which reveals an impressive breadth of scholarship and political commitment. Her precise delineation of the economies of race and gender during England's early involvement with global imperialism and racial slavery, enables us, still heirs to the early modern period's legacy of racial ascription and institutional racism, to work towards her ultimate goal: justice. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Ed. Anthony Parr. [Revels Plays Companion Library 10]. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. xii+330 pp. Cloth ISBN 0-7190-3746-8. Eric Wilson Harvard University ewilson@HUSC3.HARVARD.EDU Wilson, Eric. "Review of Review of Three Renaissance Travel Plays." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 10.1-6 . 1. Anthony Parr's Three Renaissance Travel Plays ushers the Revels Plays Companion Library into brave new worlds, clearing fresh critical ground under a banner of wondrous textual detail and marvelous editorial control. As more and more attention is paid to the discursive complexities of Europe's foreign encounters, Parr's volume provides a timely and significant intervention in this field of Renaissance cultural studies, furnishing new plots and glasses through which such dramatic horizons might be surveyed. In short, Three Renaissance Travel Plays telescopes our perspectives into the strange novelties and generic limits that early modern travel set for the early modern theater. 2. By selecting three Elizabethan and Jacobean plays that so variously hazard those adventurous waters, Parr frames the practices of Renaissance discovery as problems not merely of fantastic knowledge, but of genre, the forms through which such fantasies are distributed and produced. While more familiar plays like The Tempest have borne much of the scrutiny of recent critical debate, Three Renaissance Travel Plays broadens the lens, exhibiting the complex and conflicted crossings of narrative and theatricality in its dramatization of the Sherley brothers' infamous travails in the East. Beyond the pleasures of well-edited, modern spelling texts that have been relatively inaccessible until now (Three English Brothers not having been printed since the nineteenth century, and The Sea Voyage having only just appeared in the most recent installment of Bowers' weighty edition of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon), Parr's introduction and commentary stand as models of both originality and authority, documents that elaborate an intriguing tradition of "editorial bustle" (31) that he aptly locates in Hakluyt, Purchas, and the dramatists here at hand. 3. Indeed, a resistance to "hermeneutic purity" emerges as an valued asset not only to the "travel fictions" developed on the Renaissance stage (4), but to Parr's own editorial voice, a "flexible and resourceful" polyglot that trades at once in balanced caveat, tentative speculation, in wit and sensitive polemic (14). Time and again, easy binaries are patiently demonstrated to be rich with contradiction. The account of Three English Brothers, for example, notes the play's capacity to oscillate between "militant Protestant opinion" and a broader, more catholic appeal, even as its representations of Persians and Turks challenge a familiar orientalist collapse of cultural distinction. "While the fascination with the glamorous east was later to become a disabling orientalism," writes Parr, "arguably [Persia] was during the early modern period a positive alternative to views of Asia either as the home of barbarian hordes or of the hellish doctrine of Islam" (10-1). Such permeable boundaries are more generally manifest in Parr's subtle methods of critique, which begin, not so much by asking "what," but "how far and in what ways" resolutions are sought to the historical and imaginative relations here set to script (30). He argues centrally: In travel accounts, geographies, promotional literature for trading and colonial companies, and fictional writing that takes up their concerns, the primary task is to provide a way of seeing the unfamiliar; and while this is almost by definition of reconceiving the foreign in one's own terms, the process is not uniformly reductive (12). 4. For Parr, Renaissance travel plays bear a markedly dual investment in both "topicality and timeless adventure" (22). And his framing of this field of interest in a longer tradition of romance narrative is a welcome correlate to the radical epistemological shifts so insistently noted in recent narratives of this literary and cultural history. One of the true strengths of this critical edition is its capacity to catalogue coolly, and at the same time to query, the theatrical and historiographic routes that have enabled the re-discovery of these important Renaissance assays: There has been a tendency of late to emphasise the dark and equivocal side of European voyaging, and my account so far of The Sea Voyage certainly reflects this, though it also shows, I hope, that the impulse to interrogate the whole colonial project is not confined to modern cultural critics. However, the ending of the play also brings reconciliation and renewal, and like its companions in this volume turns the act of travel into one of auspicious discovery (28). 5. Somewhat less convincing, perhaps, is the schematic trajectory of "increasingly sophisticated response ... and the increasing refinement" of dramatic affect that Parr would locate in the thirty years between The Three English Brothers and The Antipodes (34). While careful to distinguish, for example, the "spontaneous feeling of cultural encounter" marked by Kemp's clowning in the former play, from Peregrine's "more calculated use of improvisation" in the latter, the argument that one "gives way" to its successor would seem to rest on an assumption that "a blander theatrical magic" of spectacle and broad characterization is necessarily less sophisticated than skeptical report or more evidently calculating critique (45, 31). The risks of theatrical venture in Stuart London certainly demanded a careful engagement with the desires of its audience, both traditionally conservative and avant-garde, a risk feelingly acknowledged in the Epilogue to the Queen's Men's Antipodes: "But on the waves of desp'rate fears we roam/ Until your gentler hands do waft us home." The conclusive couplet is at once conventional in tone, and at the same time unsure of the anticipated issue of its aesthetic course, a course keenly differentiated in Parr's account. But differentiation must be subtly plotted against historical development and temporal progress carefully distinguised from generic and institutional contingency (the difference between, for example, romanticized documentary and urbane satire, or the crucial differences in affect between the Salisbury Court theater and the Red Bull). Fixing such a path of progressive increase risks minimizing some of the material specificities of theatrical labor and reception that are so valuably adduced at other points (most notably in Parr's notes on the prospects of staging The Sea Voyage at the Blackfriars, important contributions in their own right). Audiences, like the plays they fund, can be generically promiscuous. 6. The plays are well chosen, however, to chart not only the multiple visions and venues of theatrical travel, but also the range of issues with which they are freighted; all three, for example, pivot around complicated notions of "the domestic," the emergence of "nation," the ways in which the travel play, in fact, forces the (re)production and return of the native. Questions of breeding and the gendered transmissions of cultural authority are especially pregnant in The Sea Voyage, as resident Amazons subject the shipwrecked protagonists to the strictures of a female commonwealth (in which men are kept only for breeding). In this accessibly modernized yet thoroughly annotated edition, in fact, Fletcher's play would teach marvelously as a provocative companion piece to The Tempest, its company prototype. By the same token, Brome's Antipodes gives a local habitation and a name to the world-upside-down obsessions of the Jacobean city comedies from which its satiric vistas emerge. But Anthony Parr's edition -- like the Revels Plays and Companion Library at large -- admirably highlights the forgotten wonders of these artifacts from the Elizabethan lumber room, artifacts needing perhaps only a good dusting and the proper frame in order to shine as magnificent entertainments in their own right. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- David Fausett. Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse UP, 1993. x+237 pp. ISBN 0-8156-2586-3. Gabriel de Foigny. The Southern Land, Known. Trans. and ed. David Fausett. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse UP, 1993. l+152 pp. Cloth ISBN 0-815625715. James R. Burns Oriel College, Oxford jburns@oriel.ac.ox.uk Burns, James R. "Review of Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land and The Southern Land, Known." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 11.1-7 . 1. In his recent monograph, Writing the New World, David Fausett provides a thought-provoking introductory and interpretive guide for readers of early modern utopias. By exploring a variety of movements that fostered the rise of utopias as a distinct and common literary genre, especially during the seventeenth century, Fausset draws attention to the inadequacy of purely literary studies of early modern utopias, and advocates a mixture of anthropological and historical methods of analysis. What makes his work a significant contribution to the study of real and imaginary travel books is its particular geographical focus. Many have discussed utopias and their significance, but few have paid attention to the importance of Australia in the imagination of utopists. While there is general agreement among critics that the rise of world commerce and travels of discovery made writings about real and imagined cities a familiar genre that was eagerly devoured by the reading public, not much has been made of the burgeoning number of reports from the Southern Hemisphere, or of the accounts of shipwrecks, maroonings, and discoveries which fueled the enthusiasm and imagination of readers and writers alike throughout seventeenth-century Europe. It is this attention to Terra Australis which makes Fausett's work most valuable, for he offers a convincing argument that Australia, or stories of travels to and near Australia, provided a rich resource for writers who wished to posit a world of imagined wonders. Its exotic and dangerous attributes, its forbidding reefs and unmapped shores, allured readers and provided fictional writers with what seems an unlikely means of establishing verisimilitude in their stories. In Australia, astonishing circumstances invite credence; wonder itself becomes a condition of plausibility. The more outlandish, horrifying, or astounding the tale, the more the reader finds her -- or himself engrossed in the story and compelled to accept the seemingly impossible. 2. Fausett, of course, does not suggest that seventeenth-century readers accepted these accounts ("true" and "fictional" alike) at face value, but he makes a convincing case for the reasons why writers chose to adopt Australia as a setting and the outlandish as a vehicle for laying out their utopic visions. To explain this, he turns to stories of seabound passages to the continent found in various travel accounts, particularly those "eyewitness" reports of mutinies and shipwrecks that caught the fancy of readers throughout Europe and that served to inspire later, purely "fictional," writers. Among the accounts, he tells of the wrecking of the Batavia in 1629 and the Vergulde Draek in 1656. In the case of the Batavia, its shipwrecked crew turned mutinous, murdered most of its male passengers, and "organised the rest into a castaway society based on sexism and brutality" (25). The Batavia story gained notoriety back in the Low Countries when members of the crew were discovered, tried, and either marooned or hanged. Accounts of the adventure included fantastic, scarcely credible details about the arrangement of the castaway society which provided later writers with fuel for the imagination. Such writers could model their own creations on "fact," enhancing their accounts with features which, as a consequence of the Batavia wreck, could not be accused of implausibility. 3. Fausett also uses the Vergulde Draek incident to explore the inherent difficulties presented by "true accounts," particularly as he compares several reports of the incident made by survivors, members of "search and rescue" teams sent to salvage its bullion, and other investigators. He describes notable discrepancies between accounts of the wreck and events in its aftermath, especially between the stories given by Schouten, Volkerson, and Leeman, who provide notably different descriptions of acts of treachery among the survivors; the wonders and marvels to be seen on Australia's west coast; and, significantly, what followed in the weeks after the wreck. That one account tells of a helpful hermit who lived along the coast and that another leaves him out entirely is just one of the notable differences Fausett mentions (108ff). The accounts of the Vergulde Draek differ so greatly, and each narrative incorporates so many fantastic elements that other overtly fictional accounts Fausett discusses, such as the Isle of Pines, seem almost credible by comparison. 4. The strongest vindication of Fausett's argument, however, is found in the second of his two offerings, The Southern Land, Known, the first complete English translation of Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre Australe connue (1676). Here Fausett has not only resurrected a minor classic of utopian literature (its only other English translation is based on a heavily bowdlerized French edition of 1692), but he has also shown how a Huguenot idealist used the largely unknown and uncharted land of Australia as an imagined setting to indulge his political and sexual preoccupations -- to create a brave new world filled with wonder and governed by an order at once alluring and terrible. From the outset, Foigny lures his reader into accepting the plausibility of his story by telling us that he came into possession of the manuscript in Livorno as its author lay on his death bed (4). In a port like Livorno, sailors would be expected to bring back fantastic tales of far-flung places and remarkable circumstances. Such is the story Foigny delivers, based on the text "left him" by Sadeur. 5. The tale itself is quite astounding: its narrator is an orphaned hermaphrodite, who finds himself shipwrecked on the coast of Australia, a land peopled by hermaphrodites who have arranged themselves into a curious society. Sadeur describes the landscape and climate of the new land, the social customs of the new people, as well as their religion, habits of exercise, education, and military arts. In chapter five, which was almost entirely cut from the 1692 edition, Sadeur discusses such issues as public nudity as a means of ridding people of dangerous preoccupations, male tyranny over women, and sexual equality. Despite his noble pretences in this chapter and throughout the work, it is clear that Foigny, who was run out of several French towns for bigamy and other sexual crimes, used the landscape and society of his Austral world to indulge imaginatively in less wholesome practices. We glimpse the sexual appetite that got the author in trouble when Sadeur discusses his participation in a battle against the Fundians and his attempt to rape two female prisoners of war (116-17). 6. In Sadeur's discussion of religion (chapter six), we see more clearly the influence of other travel writers, particularly Garcilaso de la Vega and his history of the Incas. Likewise, the Australian's daily "exercises" remind one of the practices to be found in the House of Solomon in Bacon's New Atlantis (chapter eight). In addition to these clearly borrowed elements, which Fausett points out in the introduction and in notes alongside the text, Foigny creates a unique mythology of human origins. While Thomas More includes similar descriptive passages in his Utopia, when Hythloday describes the rule of King Utopas and the golden age of his No-Place, Foigny creates a myth for the beginnings of his distinctively Australian Utopia. This mystical and troubling story suggests much about the mind of its creator. Sadeur's tale is a curious mixture of the plausible and implausible; Foigny uses Australia as a setting to explore an order that could not exist in the Europe he knew. Moreover, his work has the quality of unfinished thought: his escape from Australia (on the back of a great bird) takes him only as far as Madagascar. 7. The only critique I have to offer involves occasional editorial choices of phrase and idiom. Expressions like "the best laid plans of mice and men" in a utopian account of 1676 are unnecessary and interruptive (15). Yet, while there is the rare hiccup, more often than not Fausett deftly plays upon Foigny's language, especially in his translation of the passage where Sadeur describes the circumstances surrounding his birth at sea: "I was conceived in America and born upon the ocean, a too-telling presage of what I would one day become" (9). Here Fausett carries the sense of the original passage, which the bowdlerized 1692 edition radically changes (see note 3, page 9). In these lines, Sadeur describes his effort to turn himself from a man into a text, tracing at once his physical and literary origins; the passage also suggests the wealth of literary sources from which Foigny put together his portrait of the Austral world. This and other passages, as well as the numerous detailed notes added to the margins of the text, show Fausett to be a sensitive and capable translator and suggest that this work, and the commentary in his monograph, are suitable both for serious investigators of travel writing and teachers who wish to introduce students to the genre. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Margaret Aston. The King's Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. xii + 267pp. ISBN 0-521-48457X. Andrew Stott University of Hertfordshire A.M.Stott@Herts.ac.uk Stott, Andrew. "Review of The King's Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 12.1-5 . 1. Studies of English Renaissance art have traditionally noted predictable achievements: Holbein's unparalleled ability to capture a character and iconocize a king, the allegories of Elizabeth, the steady hand of Nicholas Hilliard, and. . . well not much else really, at least until the blessed arrival of Inigo Jones and Van Dyck hard on his heels. With the obvious exception of Roy Strong, art-historical monographs tend to compare the aesthetic production of the English Renaissance unfavourably to that of Italy and the Low Countries, and even Strong seemed to be interested only in the major show-pieces of English art. The problem is that Elizabethan and Jacobean art has suffered from the lack of a suitable framework for discussion -- a situation that has not been helped by the art-historical establishment. These days, the professional curator is as much scientist as humanist, bombarding the canvases in his or her charge with x-rays, infra-red reflectograms, and other devices designed to penetrate the surface and reveal something in the underdrawing that might offer insight into the process of creativity. These procedures summon shades, creating gestures at different angles as if to suggest frozen motion. The image becomes doubled, maybe even trebled, as more and more underpaintings are revealed. Rather than ironizing the concept of unique production, however, the results of these exercises often bolster a sympathetic idea of the master at work. In the case of Elizabethan and Jacobean art, a period short on masters in the conventional sense, the cleft that opens up between process and product could be used more profitably as a metaphor that emphasises the exceptional nature of this enigmatic, and predominantly anonymous, aesthetic period. 2. Margaret Aston's book constantly foregrounds the doubling of images as an object worthy of study in itself. Aston sees Elizabethan artworks as interventions in a cultural project that goes beyond aesthetics or the history of patronage. This is not a theoretical work that simply produces an art history, rather it seeks to interrogate visual culture, with all its borrowings, intertextual references and iconic iterations. Granted, however, the work reads like the choice offerings of a connoisseur inasmuch as it displays an encyclopedic knowledge of what might be considered the backwaters of English art, and attempts to trace the provenance of symbol and allegory. To read the book as a display of connoisseurship alone, however, would be to miss the invaluable point of this book, namely that the locus of English Renaissance visual culture is not to be found in the famous Armada or Rainbow portraits of Elizabeth, but in the deracinated and intertextual world of print culture, a world that seems without an authoritative iconic centre. Aston is Britain's foremost scholar of the Tudor and Jacobean reformation of images. Her 1988 volume, England's Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images, is an invaluable source for anyone wishing to study the complicated and often inaccessible politics of Elizabethan and Jacobeanvisual culture. Aston's most recent book, The King's Bedpost, consolidates this wealth of learning and fashions it into a completely different kind of discipline. 3. The King's Bedpost offers a wonderful piece of detective work around the famous portrait known as Edward VI and the Pope, owned by the National Portrait Gallery, London. This image of a young Edward flanked by his dying father and a gallery of attendant councillors, features a representation of the Pope with his chest emblazoned with the legend "All Fleshe is Grasse." He lies at the feet of the young king, after having apparently received a heavy cranial blow from an open Bible that reads "The Worde of the Lord Endureth for Ever." For years this group portrait has been dated at around 1547, contemporaneous with Edward's accession and the portrait's concomitant assertion of radical Protestant politics. Aston's motivation for this study stems from her discontent with this dating. She makes it her task to correct the error and find a more accurate date. She achieves this with exceptional authority, taking small clues from the iconography of the portrait and showing their (unquestionable) similarity to a wealth of other images produced in the Protestant nations after 1547. She constructs an argument with great skill, demonstrating that the portrait is, in fact, an amalgamation of several widely disseminated and readily available images (derived primarily from an ideologically motivated print culture) that have been "naturalized" by having the features of important English figures such as Edward, Somerset, and Cranmer imposed upon them. What these prototype images have in common, she shows us, is their subject matter, as they uniformly feature Old Testament characters who have in some way been involved in iconoclastic activity. Aston then proceeds to show that the painting was in fact a mid-Elizabethan propaganda piece, a collage produced by iconophobes who intended to evoke the memory of the fearless Protestantism of Elizabeth's male relations to firm up support in a time of religious uncertainty. It seems that the case has been accepted by the art-historical establishment -- the curators of 1995's Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530-1630 at London's Tate Gallery adopted the revised date of c.1568-71 for their exhibition. Indeed, the only way the hypothesis could be reasonably countered is if we found out that Aston had drawn all the pictures herself . 4. Aston does little in the way of speculative thought or theorizing on the cultural relevance of the material she uses in this book. The text is full of facts, yet leaves the conjunction between image and history completely unproblematized. But her focus on visual culture rather than art history allows the cultural importance of these images to speak for itself, and provides a much needed antidote to the claim that the aesthetic productions of the British Isles are the poor relations of their better known continental counterparts. The dominance of the latter view is not surprising considering that the cult of creative genius was itself started by a group of Italian artists who inaugurated their Acadamia del Disegno as an umbrella group to organize the lavish obsequies of Michaelangelo's funeral. The prime mover in this circle was Giorgio Vasari, whose semi-heroic prose biographies, The Lives of the Artists, Painters, and Sculptors, established a linear history of accomplished genius in Italian art that found its culmination in the "divine" Michaelangelo. English Renaissance art lacks these major figures, mainly because English artists still belonged to humble guilds rather than more dignified academies. "Limning" was a trade that put food on the table, and that same table would probably cost you more than a specially commissioned portrait. Even artists who had powerful patrons would spend most of their time painting decorative trompe l'oeil on walls rather than being "creative." As a result, most people would be hard pushed to name any Tudor and Jacobean artists other than Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac Oliver and George Gower. Aston's book forcibly shows that Elizabethan art operated according to a different set of terms than that of the Italians, allowing us to see the ways in which Elizabethan art prioritized the textual tissue of visual citation, reference, and immediate political impact above any pretentions to greatness. As such, the book represents one of the best attempts to date to discuss Elizabethan culture on its own terms. 5. Far from being a hindrance, the anonymity of English Renaissance art makes it all the more exciting. Indeed, its very fascination lies in those aspects that high-tech art history sublimates: the double exposure, and the referential, intertextual image that makes connections beyond the implied closure of its frame. Again, Aston is very strong on the relationship between word and image, a relationship in which text is as important as visual material, and indeed, given the censures of iconoclasm, is often privileged. While I accept that I may be reading this book against the grain, drawing theoretically motivated conclusions where perhaps none were intended, this can only be a good sign. I feel that this is a valuable academic work that lends itself to use by diverse groups with different interests. It shows us that in our only partially formulated quest to understand the apparent anachronism of English Renaissance visual culture we have been spending far too long looking in the wrong places. Visual culture cannot be understood simply as the sum total of signed paintings hung on walls, but rather is the complicated amalgam of all those productions designed to appeal to the eye, however they were transmitted. I think Aston has done us a service in this respect. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Eric Sams. The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1995. xvi+236 pp. Cloth ISBN 0-300-06129-3. Bryan N.S. Gooch University of Victoria Gooch, Bryan N.S. "Review of The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 13.1-5 . 1. Eric Sams' The Real Shakespeare constitutes a determined attempt to reconstruct the early part of the playwright's life. It shows Shakespeare not as a late developer but as an early starter who assiduously revised his work and who, in fact, was responsible for early dramas, including apparent source texts, not usually accepted as part of the conventional canon. Clearly the result of much work and contemplation of extant records and other details, The Real Shakespeare looks initially at biographical issues: a Roman Catholic Shakespeare leaves school, probably at the age of thirteen, to help with family farm chores, becomes involved (as a clerk) with the legal profession (hence the character of his hand-writing), marries Anne Hathaway (already pregnant), and departs soon after for London to escape the consequences (whipping, at the least) of poaching deer owned by the influential, anti-catholic Sir Thomas Lacy. In London, Sams asserts, Shakespeare makes his connection with the Shoreditch Theatre, working his way up the proverbial ladder as ostler, call-boy, prompter and soon becomes a Queen's Man far earlier than Schoenbaum et al. are inclined to allow (58). 2. Biographical issues, however, cannot be detached from literary matters (which particularly dominate the second part of the book), and Sams, in looking at the Bard's young life, also takes into account the work and comments of contemporaries (e.g., Marlowe, Greene, Nashe, Spenser, et al.), the Parnassus plays, and Willobie his Avisa (1594) before turning to the Sonnets, the association with the 3rd Earl of Southampton, and the problem of the dedication in the first edition. He then moves to a consideration of the "early style" and ascription of both the 1589 and 1603 (Q1) Hamlet to Shakespeare, as well as A Shrew (c.1588), The Troublesome Reign of King John (c.1588), the first part of the Contention...(1594), and The True Tragedies of Richard... (1595); also offered as possible candidates for canonical authority are Faire Em and Locrine (of which there is, indeed, pace Sams, p.166, a modern edition). Attention is also given to bad quartos and the matter of memorial reconstruction, source-plays, derivative plays, dating, "collaboration," so-called "stylometry," and handwriting (a script, Sams suggests, of a law clerk suggesting links to the hand of Edmund Ironside [c.1588]). Curiously, for this strongly argued book, which contends in a detailed way with the conclusions of much twentieth-century scholarship (references to contrary opinion are carefully included), there is no concluding chapter, and the reader is left to pull the threads together. However, by way of addendum, Sams provides a section headed "The Documents 1500-1594," 205 biographical details and citations in chronological order, which under-pin especially the reconstruction of the early (Schoenbaum's "lost") years; and a bibliography (with + and * marks denoting items which support or counter Sam's arguments). An index concludes the volume. 3. It is always important to review evidence for conventional knowledge, to challenge the validity of accepted views, and to suggest plausible solutions to bothersome problems. Yet, at times, the greater wisdom, unfortunately, lies in uncertainty, in being sure of what one can and cannot know, and in Shakespearean scholarship, the fields of speculation are rather broad. Given the available documentation, many readers will find some of Sams' arguments, while intriguing, still unconvincing and will prefer to rest with the more cautious approach of Schoenbaun, Vickers, Wells, and others. The academic community has not blindly or wilfully rejected solid evidence, and should not be reproached for what might appear, to some critics, to be tradition-bound precepts or unduly conservative empiricism. 4. Could Shakespeare have known about ostlers and law-clerks without being an ostler or a law-clerk? Probably? Did he write Locrine? Almost certainly not -- given the style, and if he did, why did he not revise it? If Shakespeare was the dedicated reviser Sams claims that he was, why did he not rework the questionable scenes in Titus and Pericles? Were all the source plays (e.g., King Lear and Famous Victories) really by Shakespeare? Doubt could enter here. Does revision necessarily or "normally" mean that the resulting work will manifest two separate styles? No, it does not; though the reference to the Brahms' piano trio (Op.8) on p.187 is interesting, it does not, I think sufficiently support the general point. And what is the difference between an "ordinary" reader of Shakespeare and other kinds of readers (105)? Is one to infer that academic readers and textual editors lose some sensitivity? 5. Certainly, Sams' The Real Shakespeare will shake the scholarly stage a little, which is not a bad thing. But I should guess that, when the tremors have subsided, many -- perhaps most -- of the props will be more or less where they were before and others, which would be nice to have -- some certainty about the early years, for instance -- will still be absent. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Howard B. Norland. Drama in Early Tudor Britain 1485-1558. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska P. xxix+394pp. ISBN 0-8132-3337-X. James C. Cummings University of Leeds engjcc@leeds.ac.uk Cummings, James C. "Review of Drama in Early Tudor Britain 1485-1558." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 14.1-7 . 1. In focusing on the major dramatic traditions prevailing between the reigns of Richard III and Elizabeth I, Howard B. Norland faces the difficult task of attempting to encompass a large variety of material from a highly transitional period. He does so by dividing the book into five parts comprising sections on "Popular Dramatic Traditions," "Contemporary Views of Drama," "The Secularization of the Morality," "The Development of Comedy," and "The Emergence of Tragedy." A total of twenty-three chapters survey drama ranging from saints' plays to Grimald's Archipropheta. Each chapter gives a brief and concise introduction to the individual works as well as attempting to understand them as distinct artistic expressions that "represent variations in the principal dramatic traditions in early Tudor Britain" (x). The fact that many of the chapters resemble short self-contained articles is not a coincidence since the chapters on folk drama, Erasmus, Vives, More, Redford's Wit and Science, Johan Johan, Udall's Roister Doister, and Grimald's Archipropheta have appeared in earlier forms in a variety of journals. 2. In dealing with "Popular Dramatic Traditions" in the first section, Norland starts by studying the only three extant British saints' plays. While some interesting ideas are presented concerning the Mary Magdalene and especially Beaunans Meriasek, unfortunately the highly idiosyncratic The Conversion of St. Paul is hardly discussed at all. The civic drama is explored through a typological and structural introduction to the cycles that allows some discussion of the anti-theatrical movement and, as in the following chapter on the pre-Reformation moralities, relies primarily on the Wycliffite Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. The final chapter of this section deals with the difficult topic of folk drama and, although a brief mention is made of the Records of Early English Drama project's earlier discoveries, the discussion does not capitalise on the contributions of their more recent volumes. The analysis of the structure of the folk plays must therefore rely almost entirely on the "extant texts of folk drama collected in the last two centuries" (59). 3. The second section on "Contemporary Views of Drama" begins by examining the reception of Donatus' commentaries on Terence and the manner in which their evolving republication inspired a variety of humanist views. The next three chapters detail the differing views of Erasmus, Vives, and More towards drama. Although the occurrence of repeated text in his descriptions of Erasmus' De ratione studii (cf. pp. 67 and 89) and a number of overlapping quotations (cf. pp. 67 and 84) are disturbing, these are undoubtedly an unintentional result of the previous publication of these chapters as separate entities. The final chapter of this section details the growth of the religious and political schism between the attitudes of the moralistic reformers and humanists through a well-summarised examination of anti-theatrical Reformation publications. 4. Norland's third and largest section presents "The Secularization of the Morality" by showing how moral self-reflection became a vehicle for religious and political propaganda. The first chapter of this section examines the changing role of the prodigal and notes that in educational interludes "the special appeal to children's interests faded and the adapted form catered to their parents' concerns and tastes" (160). This exploration of the educational aspect of the form of morality continues in Norland's discussion of Redford's Wit and Science, but begins truly to concentrate on the political nature of the moralities with the consideration of Skelton's Magnificence, Bale's King John, and the anonymous Respublica. The examination of the morality as a tool of political reformers is concluded by an investigation of Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates. 5. In the fourth section on "The Development of Comedy," Norland studies Fulgens and Lucres and sees Medwall as creating "a new and distinctive dramatic form" (242) through his combination of several dramatic traditions that make up "an elaborate comic context that mitigates his potentially radical position"(235). The section proceeds through a brief study of Calisto and Melebea to Johan Johan, both of which Norland sees as more developed and sophisticated than their respective sources. Following this is a discussion of Udall's Roister Doister that concentrates on his didactic use of the form and structure of Latin comedy. Gammer Gurton's Needle is also briefly surveyed and is read as an example of "a model of the integration of classical form with contemporary popular motifs" (291). 6. In his fifth and final section Norland traces the "Emergence of Tragedy" by beginning with Watson's Absalom. The structure and content of "this Christian tragedy modeled on Senecan form"(306) are concisely set forth before proceeding to Christopherson's Jephthah, which adopts "the language as well as the form of his Greek model [Euripides]" (307). While the first two authors of this section were Catholics, the final chapter concerns the Protestant Grimald's Archipropheta. This is of interest since Norland feels it is one of the first plays that "becomes a human tragedy, not a political statement or a religious lesson" (326). 7. Norland concludes the work by sketching a brief summary of the political and religious developments of drama that he has drawn throughout the book. The book is solidly grounded in primary source research, which is certainly admirable, but does not fully consider many of the more recent developments in the study of early drama. Out of the approximately 364 works cited, only about a dozen come from the decade prior to publication. Thus, the reader is left without a sense of the influence of current theoretical perspectives such as Gender Studies, New Historicism, and other critical approaches to dramatic texts. The book might have benefited had it incorporated a greater amount of social and urban history to contextualize the study of literary texts. Nevertheless, the book remains a valuable resource for those seeking introductory studies of the plays in question. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Certaine Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, in the time of the late Queene Elizabeth of famous memory. Ed. Ian Lancashire. [Renaissance Electronic Texts 1.1.] Toronto: U Toronto [Centre for Computing in the Humanities], 1994. . Ronald B. Bond University of Calgary rbond@acs.ucalgary.ca Bond, Ronald B. "Review of Certaine Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, in the time of the late Queene Elizabeth of famous memory." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996):15.1-9 . 1. To inaugurate the University of Toronto's Renaissance Electronic Texts series, Ian Lancashire, assisted by Si=E2n Meikle and Claire Smith, have prepared an old-spelling electronic edition of the two books of Tudor homilies, originally published in 1547 and 1563, respectively, and supplemented in 1571 by the fiercely polemical "Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion," commissioned by the government of the day as a direct response to the Northern Rebellion. These thirty-three sermons have long been recognized as important documents for the study of fledgling Anglicanism: indeed, they rank with the the Bible in English, the 39 Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer as foundational statements of English Protestant thought. The sermons have also played a leading role in what I will dare to call "cultural studies": because they were official sermons, sponsored by both the religious and the political establishments, and because they were prescribed for delivery throughout the whole of England, Sunday by Sunday, it has been assumed that they exerted considerable influence on Elizabethan culture generally, and its literary culture specifically. Among critics such as Alfred Hart, E.M.W. Tillyard, Peter Milward and Andrew Hadfield, the homilies have been used as touchstones of Elizabethan political, religious, social and ethical thought, and passages in the sermons have been invoked by these and other commentators as sources and analogues for ideas and phrasing in the writing of Shakespeare, Spenser, et al. 2. As an editor of the first book of homilies and the long sermon "against rebellion" (University of Toronto Press, 1987) and as the author of the entry on "homilies" for The Spenser Encyclopedia, I certainly welcome the appearance of the complete set of official Tudor homilies as an electronic edition. The Renaissance Electronic Texts (RET) series proposes to distinguish three formats for the old-spelling texts to be included in the series: a) the "plain" electronic text (the example currently available through the RET webpage is Raymond Siemens' version of Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabetical (1604) prepared in HTML by series editor Lancashire; b) the electronic edition, complete with introductory material and encoded in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), according to guidelines developed specially for the RET series as a whole; c) the critical electronic edition, which will provide a textual apparatus, in addition to introductory materials and the encoded text proper. The RET's homilies fall into the second category. It does not provide an apparatus criticus, but it does provide preliminary materials meant to orient the reader to the significance and the nature of the text presented. In this sense it is an electronic edition, not just an unadorned electronic text of the kind that detractors of the Internet sometimes complain about, with justification. In another sense, however, it would be proper to call this an electronic facsimile: when entering the text of the homilies, Lancashire has chosen to follow the facsimile reprint of the University of Kentucky copy of the 1623 edition (STC 13675), selected by Thomas Stroup and Mary Ellen Rickey for their 1968 reproduction in the Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints series (Gainesville, Florida). This 1623 volume, which neither Rickey and Stroup nor Lancashire subject to comparison with other copies, is far from being the editio princeps for either the first (1547) or the second tome (1563), although it does offer the first collected edition of all thirty-three sermons. 3. The preliminary materials supplied here offer the Internet reader a general orientation to the two books of homilies. A brief "introduction" identifies the collection of sermons as one of the four "pillars" of the English Reformation and as a book that "had a powerful, seminal effect" on English Renaissance literature. A "brief history of the homilies" canvasses the period from 1547, when Thomas Cranmer brought out the first book for Edward VI, to 1662, when Charles II directed preachers to employ the doctrine of the homilies in an effort to strengthen conformity in things religious. Another section describes what little is known and how much has been conjectured about the authorship of the individual sermons in the two books. There is also a highly selective bibliography of books and articles dealing in whole or in part with the homilies. No annotations appear here, though embedded within the textual encoding are expansions of some of the many references made by the homilists to the Bible and to the church fathers. 4. Readers unfamiliar with the homilies and the various contexts in which they have been situated by ecclesiastical historians and by literary critics will gain from these accounts an impression of why these sermons matter. But I would hesitate to recommend in all respects Lancashire's introductory observations to those eager to study the homilies and their impact seriously. The "introduction" itself contains several highly questionable claims. It is difficult to see how the homilies could be straightforwardly part of a Protestant programme that made "the individual's ability to read and to analyze text" the "sole gateway" to salvation (emphasis mine), when they were based on the biblical notion that "faith cometh by hearing" and since most who became acquainted with them would not have read them, but would rather have heard them. Given the imposition of the homilies on all but a very few preachers, it is also difficult to swallow the assertion that the homilies "render in plain English, simple thoughts about important subjects expressed by thoughtful sixteenth-century clergy who earned, by living itself, the right to say what they thought": it would be more appropriate to associate the homilies with the stifling of the expression of ideas than with its emancipation. Perhaps most unsettling to me are Lancashire's attempts to link the homilies with the major literary artefacts of Elizabethan and Jacobean England: "There are not more moving accounts 'Of good workes' or 'Of Christian love and charity' {sermon titles}. . . than Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is a casebook 'Against swearing and periury' and 'Of the declining from GOD'(1.7-8). Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy surely the most cheerful book on that subject ever written, exhorts us 'against the fear of death.'" Even those who do not subscribe to New Historicism will be made uncomfortable by these loose and vague comparisons. 5. The encoding of this particular text is explained both in a note on "The Electronic Edition" and in an Appendix, which lays out in detail, with illustrations drawn helpfully from the text of the homilies, the procedures developed for the Renaissance Electronic Texts series as a whole. The aim is to reproduce, through tagging, as many of the physical characteristics of the palpable book as possible. As Lancashire puts it, The text of the edition is unemended, although typographical errors are identified within tags when I have noticed them. All text in the folio including title-page, printer's business (running titles, signatures, catchwords, etc.) and marginalia, appears as found in the original book. The layout of each book is kept, including lineation, indentation, paragraphing and pagination, but this is managed normally by tagging rather than by trying to replicate the visual look of the text on screen. 6. Once one understands the intricacies of the tagging scheme (a combination of SGML standards and procedures from the Text-Encoding Initiative, on the one hand, with guidelines designed specifically for the challenges of presenting the early modern texts of the RET, on the other), the precision with which the electronic edition represents the 1623 edition in all of its bibliographical specificity becomes clear. Tagging provides information not only about formes and forme-work; it differentiates various fonts from one another; it positions marginalia exactly as they are located in the Rickey-Stroup facsimile of the 1623 edition. One of the extremely useful features of this edition is its inclusion of substance from both the "text" and the "book," the latter being a broader category, of course, than the former. The electronic edition furnished here is an edition conceived for bibliographers and scholars, not for the general academic reader. 7. Indeed, that reader, unless already accustomed to deciphering encoded electronic texts, will need to learn afresh how to read. This is an example--from the Homily on Obedience, number 10 in volume one--of what thorough encoding practice yields: AN 69
AN EXHORTATION concerning good Order and obedience to Rulers and Magistrates.

ALmighty>ft=3D"bll"> GODhath created and ap{\-} pointed all things in= heaven, earth, and waters, in a most= excellent and perfect order. In Heaven, hee hath appointed To decode the last five lines only, we learn that a paragraph begins

at the fourth level of the text division of the tenth homily of the first book, part one, line one (also described as line 3834 in the third level of the book division). After the initial A (set in font type "block"), the word "Almighty" appears in font type "black-letter" and the word following that, "GOD," appears in font type "black-letter lapidary" meaning that the compositor set it in black-letter type, spaced. The rest of the passage, moving to line 4 of the text of this homily (or line 3837 in the continuous numbering scheme used for the book) proceeds in regular black-letter type with the lineation and hyphenation shown. We are thus able to reconstruct the appearance of the material object we would confront if we were handling this exemplar of the 1623 edition. Bibliographers will note, however, that some useful data is missing: information about paper and watermarks is absent, for example, in the RET's transcription of the homilies. 8. Notwithstanding my admiration for the painstaking care with which the encoding has been done, I will mention several elements of this electronic "edition" that strike me as problematic. First, it must be noted that with respect to Document Type Definition (DTD), Lancashire simply abandons the field: "I leave it to the individual user to construct a DTD according to the single most important structure for the kind of analysis to be done. SGML does not permit the use of more than one structure at a time, although it does allow two structures to be simultaneously encoded." Second, one wonders why Lancashire, evidently following RET policy, has chosen not to comment editorially on the physical characteristics of the text he has encoded: in the "Homily on Obedience," for example, we find the first par of the running title that occurs on pp. 70 and 71 at "bkdv3n=3D"3871" ("The II. part of the Sermon") and its completion, several screens later, at "bkdv3n=3D"3923" ("of Obedience"); nothing draws the attention of the reader to the fact that this is patently a compositor's error: we are still in the midst of the first part of this sermon. Another troubling element of the edition has to do with inconsistencies in the handling of citations. For the sermons from the first book of homilies, the RET edition tracks citations from Augustine and other authorities to the works from which they come, properly titled and located in the Patrologia Latina or the Patrologia Graeca. A marginal reference to Chrysostom's sermon "de fide, lege, spiritu sancto" in the "Homily on Good Works," for instance, is expanded in the tag to a citation of "Pseudo-Chrysostom, De Fide et Lege Naturae 1 (PG 48.1081-82)". Here, as elsewhere when such expanded references occur, the RET edition of the homilies appears to rely, silently on the 1987 edition of the first book and the "Homily against Rebellion," where the relevant references to the PL and the PG for patristic quotations and allusions were made for the first time. When we come to citations that occur in homilies from the second book (for which no one has yet published information about where to look in the PL and the PG for quotations and their immediate contexts), the practice of the RET changes. In the "Homily on Common Prayer and Sacraments," for example, a marginal reference to "August. de sprititu & anima" appears within the citation tag simply as "Augustine, 'De Spiritu et anima'." 9. This edition of the homilies reveals the promise of serious editions of Renaissance texts on the Internet. Ian Lancashire (and his editorial board of over a dozen experts in Renaissance literature or computing in the humanities) deserve congratulations for initiating the Renaissance Electronic Texts series auspiciously. What needs to be sorted out now, I believe, is how to produce introductions (and perhaps annotations and commentaries) that match the high quality of the encoded texts: in the case of this facsimile edition, the text proper, presented in a malleable electronic form that holds great potential for attribution studies and other forms of advanced work on the homilies, is more impressive than the supporting material. What also needs to be sorted out is the vexed question of which Renaissance texts lend themselves most readily to electronic versions of the kind RET will be producing. On what criteria did RET choose Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) as the next text to appear in its series? |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reviewing Information, Books Ordered for Review, and Forthcoming Reviews Reviewing Information EMLS invites reviews of recent scholarly works--critical editions, commentaries, and theoretical, historical, literary, or interdisciplinary criticism which centres on sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English or related literary culture. We also encourage reports of all resources which are relevant to literary studies of the period, including those available exclusively in the electronic medium. Our aim is to publish reviews of a consistently high standard, which are both engaging and critically fair, written by a broad range of people at different stages of their academic careers with varied disciplinary backgrounds. Requests to review books listed below, or proposals for reviews of other new titles, together with a brief description of reviewers' academic qualifications, publications or research interests should be sent to the Review Editor at Review_Editor_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Books ordered for review as of August 1996: * Bulman, James. Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Donne, John. The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 8. The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions and Miscellaneous Poems. Gary A. Stringer gen. ed. William A. McClung volume commentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995. * Hamilton, Donna B., and Richard Strier, eds. Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. * Holmer, Joan Ozark. The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard and Consequences. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Kernan, Alvin. Shakespeare the King's Playwright. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. * Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. * Parker, Douglas, ed. A proper dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. * Parker, Patricia. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. * Pritchard, R.E., ed. Lady Mary Wroth: Poems. Keele: Keele UP, 1996. * Pugliatti, Paula. Shakespeare the Historian. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. * Smith, Peter J. Social Shakespeare: Aspects of Renaissance Dramaturgy and Contemporary Society. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Todd, Margo, ed. Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 1994. * Warren, Austin. Becoming What One Is. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1995. * Watkins, John. The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. * Wright, Stephanie J., ed. Elizabeth Cary: The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry. Keele: Keele UP, 1996. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Forthcoming Reviews: * Bennett, Susan. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Breight, Curtis C. Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. * Burns, Edward, ed. Reading Rochester. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Bushnell, Rebecca W. A Culture of Teaching Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. * Cerasano, Susan and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Chedzoy, K., ed. Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing. Keele: Keele UP, 1996. * Chernaik, Warren. Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. * Dutton, Richard. Ben Jonson: Criticism, Authority, Authorship. Macmillan, 1995. * Dutton, Richard, ed. Jacobean Civic Pageants. Keele: Ryburn Renaissance Texts and Studies, Keele UP, 1995. * Farago, Claire, ed. Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America. 1450-1650. Yale: Yale UP, 1996. * Fitter, Chris. Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. * Gregerson, Linda. The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. * Hinds, Hilary. God's Englishwomen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. * Howarth, David. Images of Rule: A Social and Political Analysis of English Renaissance Art. New York: Macmillan, 1995. * Jarvis, Simon. Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. * Liebler, Naomi. Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Lindley, David. The Trials of Francis Howard. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Luxon, Thomas. Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation. Chicago: U of Chigaco P, 1995. * Maley, Willy. Edmund Spenser and Cultural Identity in Early Modern Ireland. New York: Macmillan, 1995. * Marotti, Arthur. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. * Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. * Parry, Graham. The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. * Weimann, Robert. Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. * Wills, Garry. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. * Woudhuysen, Henry. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to articles, reviews, and notes appearing in this issue that are intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. (c) 1996, R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS).