Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (December 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=E9sum=E9s des Articles. * Popular Hermeneutics: Monstrous Children in English Renaissance Broadside Ballads. [1]. Helaine Razovsky, Northwestern State University. * Production Resources at the Whitefriars Playhouse, 1609-1612. [2]. Jean MacIntyre, University of Alberta. * "Ay me": Selfishness and Empathy in "Lycidas." [3]. Jean E. Graham, The College of New Jersey. Note: * Reflections on Milton and Ariosto. [4]. Roy Flannagan, Ohio University. Reviews: * Robert Weimann. Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse. Ed. David Hillman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. [5]. Anthony Johnson, =C5bo Akademi University. * Thomas H. Luxon. Literal Figures Puritan Allegory & the Reformation Crisis in Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. [6]. David Gay, University of Alberta. * Rebecca W. Bushnell. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. [7]. Charles David Jago, University of British Columbia. * Graham Parry. The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of The Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. [8]. F. J. Levy, University of Washington. * Simon Jarvis. Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725-1765. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996. [9]. Bryan N.S. Gooch, University of Victoria. * Susan Bennett. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. New York: Routledge, 1996. [10]. Robert Grant Williams, Nipissing University. * Garry Wills. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP / NY Public Library, 1995. [11]. Michael T. Siconolfi, Gonzaga University. * Naomi Conn Liebler. Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Rituals Foundations of Genre. New York: Routledge, 1995. [12]. Jeffrey Kahan. * Gordon Williams. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London and New Jersey: Athlone P, 1994. [13]. Douglas Bruster, University of Texas, San Antonio. * W. S. "A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter." Compact disk recording read by Harry Hill. Dir. Paul Hawkins. Text Ed. Donald W. Foster. Montreal: Concordia University, 1996. [14]. Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia. * Sir Thomas More. Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation. Eds. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams and Clarence Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. [15]. Romuald I. Lakowski. * Reviewing Information, Books Received for Review, and Forthcoming Reviews. 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R.G.S. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Abstracts / R=E9sum=E9s des Articles (Translations from English courtesy of Luc Borot, Centre d'Etudes et de R=E9cherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise, Universit=E9 Paul-Valery, Montpellier, France.) Popular Hermeneutics: Monstrous Children in English Renaissance Broadside Ballads. Helaine Razovsky, Northwestern State University. Production Resources at the Whitefriars Playhouse, 1609-1612. Jean MacIntyre, University of Alberta. "Ay me": Selfishness and Empathy in "Lycidas." Jean E. Graham, The College of New Jersey. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Popular Hermeneutics: Monstrous Children in English Renaissance Broadside Ballads. Helaine Razovsky, Northwestern State University. Popular English broadside ballads about monstrous children (the Renaissance term for deformed babies) reflect the use by their writers of principles of Reformation biblical interpretation. The ballads interpret the children as signs of God's wrath that should move people to repentance and reform. The interpretation itself is not uniquely Protestant; however, the use of hermeneutic principles to set forth the interpretation in popular documents is significant. These principles were consistently and widely disseminated as part of a movement among some Protestants to make biblical interpretation the responsibility of all individual Protestants. The use of these principles even in popular ballads about sensational subjects suggests that the nature and practice of interpretation was itself a popular subject. L'herm=E9neutique populaire: les enfants monstrueux dans les ballades populaires imprim=E9es de la Renaissance anglaise. Helaine Razovsky, Northwestern State University. Dans l'Angleterre de la Renaissance, les ballades populaires sur les enfants monstrueux (le terme employ=E9 =E0 la Renaissance pour les nourissons malform=E9s) refl=E8tent l'usage que font leurs auteurs de certains principes d'interpr=E9tation biblique caract=E9ristiques de la R=E9forme. Les ballades interpr=E8tent= ces enfants comme =E9tant des signes de la col=E8re de Dieu devant inciter les gens au repentir et =E0 l'amendement. Cette interpr=E9tation n'est pas en elle-m=EAme exclusivement= protestante; toutefois, l'usage de principes herm=E9neutiques dans des= documents populaires, dans le but de promouvoir un certain type d'interpr=E9tation, est significative. Ces principes =E9taient syst=E9matiquement et largement diffus=E9s dans certains milieux Protestants, dans le cadre d'un mouvement visant =E0 faire de l'interpr=E9tation biblique la responsabilit=E9 individuelle de chaque Protestant. L'utilisation de ces principes jusque dans des documents comme des ballades populaires sur des sujets =E0 sensations sugg=E8re que la nature et la pratique de l'interpr=E9tation =E9taient en elles-m=EAmes des sujets= populaires. Production Resources at the Whitefriars Playhouse, 1609-1612. Jean MacIntyre, University of Alberta. In 1608, the company of boy actors at the Blackfriars Theatre was shut down for performing a play (now lost) that mocked a project to mine silver in Scotland and, worse, made fun of King James. A letter from Sir Thomas Lake reports how the angry king had vowed that for this mockery the Blackfriars company "should never play more but should first beg their bread." But by 1608 the company's managers had repeatedly proved adept at protecting their investment, using "various aliases" (Shapiro 28) for what was really the same company: Children of the Chapel Royal in 1600, Children of the Queen's Revels in 1604, Children of Blackfriars in 1608, Children of Whitefriars in 1609, and in 1610 again Children of the Queen's Revels. The managers had also proved adept at shielding themselves from authority by various legal subterfuges, chiefly the transfer of responsibility. Henry Evans, who had "set up" the company, "was ordered to quit the Blackfriars management" over the impressment of Thomas Clifton, but "he evaded the decree by bringing new partners into the organization and leaving town" (Shapiro 25). When certain plays -- Daniel's Philotas, Marston, Chapman, and Jonson's Eastward Ho -- again brought authority down upon the management, the company continued under Edward Kirkham, Yeoman of the Revels since the 1580s, and Robert Keysar. But already financially embarrassed in 1608, when again in trouble, they agreed with the theatre's owner Richard Burbage to terminate their lease of Blackfriars. Soon after, Keysar disbanded the company, or at least gave the appearance of doing so. In 1609, however, some former Blackfriars players were reassembled by Keysar and the court musician Philip Rosseter to began playing at the Whitefriars theatre, recently vacated by the Children of the King's Revels, at least one of whom, William Barkstead, joined the Keysar-Rosseter troupe. In 1610 Rosseter secured a royal patent that restored to the Children of Whitefriars the name Children of the Queen's Revels, now managed by a syndicate including, besides Rosseter, the playwright Robert Daborne and two veteran actors, Robert Browne and Richard Jones (Chambers II, 54-56). Reconstructing a theatre and a troupe from the evidence in published scripts poses some risks, and more risks yet if the scripts are known to have passed to other companies before publication, or if the state of the text suggests foul papers, authorial editing, or other sources of corruption known to have affected play texts either before or after they reached the printing house. Nonetheless, when several plays written for two companies who used the same house require the same kind of stage spaces and show the same limitations on the use of those spaces, conjecture becomes more reliable. Enough of what we know about the physical building, limited though it is, fits the evidence of the plays. Les ressources des mises en sc=E8nes au th=E9=E2tre des Whitefriars de Londres, 1609-1612. Jean MacIntyre, University of Alberta. En 1608, la troupe th=E9=E2trale de jeunes gar=E7ons du th=E9=E2tr= e des Blackfriars de Londres fut ferm=E9e pour avoir jou=E9 une pi=E8ce (perdue =E0 ce jour) qui raillait le projet de creuser des mines d'argent en =C9cosse, et qui, pire encore, se moquait de Jacques Ier. Une lettre de Sir Thomas Lake rapporte comment le roi, en furie, jura que pour cette raillerie, les Blackfriars "ne joueraient plus avant d'avoir =E9t=E9 r=E9duits =E0 la mendicit=E9= ". Mais =E0 la date de 1608, les patrons de la troupe avaient eu =E0 plusieurs reprises l'occasion de manifester leur capacit=E9 =E0 prot=E9ger= leur investissement, par l'utilisation de "divers pseudos" (Shapiro 28) dissimulant ce qui =E9tait en r=E9alit=E9 la m=EAme troupe:= les Enfants de la Chapelle Royale en 1600, les Enfants des Menus Plaisirs de la Reine en 1604, les Enfants des Blackfriars en 1608, les Enfants des Whitefriars en 1609, et en 1610, =E0 nouveau les Enfants des Menus Plaisirs de la Reine. Les patrons avaient aussi manifest=E9 leur capacit=E9 =E0 se prot=E9ger des autorit=E9= s gr=E2ce =E0 divers subterfuges, principalement par le transfert de responsabilit=E9. Henry Evans, qui avait "=E9tabli" la troupe,= "re=E7ut l'ordre de quitter la direction de la troupe", lorsque Thomas Clifton fut enr=F4l=E9 d'office dans l'arm=E9e, mais "il contourna= le jugement en introduisant de nouveaux partenaires dans l'organisation et en quittant la ville" (Shapiro 25). Quand certaines pi=E8ces (la Philotas de Daniel, l'Eastward Ho! de Marston, Chapman et Jonson) attir=E8rent =E0 nouveau les foudres= de l'autorit=E9 sur la direction, la troupe passa sous la f=E9rule d'Edward Kirkham, Gentilhomme des Menus Plaisirs depuis 1580, et de Robert Keysar. Mais alors qu'ils =E9taient d=E9j=E0 dans les embarras financiers en 1608, quand ils se trouv=E8rent =E0 nouveau= en difficult=E9, ils s'accord=E8rent avec Richard Burbage, le propri=E9taire du th=E9=E2tre, pour mettre un terme =E0 leur bail= aux Blackfriars. Peu apr=E8s, Keysar proc=E9da =E0 la dissolution de= la troupe, ou du moins donna l'impression de le faire. En 1609, toutefois, Keysar et le musicien de cour Philip Rosseter rassembl=E8rent d'anciens acteurs des Blackfriars pour recommencer =E0 jouer au th=E9=E2tre des Whitefriars, r=E9cemment abandonn=E9= par les Enfants des Menus Plaisirs du Roi, dont l'un au moins, William Barkstead, rejoignit la troupe de Keysar et Rosseter. En 1610, Rosseter s'assura une patente royale qui restituait aux Enfants des Whitefriars le titre d'Enfants des Menus Plaisirs de la Reine, d=E9sormais dirig=E9s par un syndicat compos=E9, outre= Rosseter, du dramaturge Robert Daborne et de deux acteurs de grande exp=E9rience, Robert Browne et Richard Jones (Chambers II, 54-56). Suivant le t=E9moignage des scripts publi=E9s, la reconstitution= d'un th=E9=E2tre et d'une troupe pr=E9sente un certain nombre de= risques, et plus de risques encore s'il est connu que les scripts sont pass=E9= s auparavant entre les mains d'autres troupes avant leur publication, ou s'il est connu que l'=E9tat du texte laisse= deviner que des brouillons, des modifications de l'auteur, ou d'autres sources de corruption ont affect=E9 le texte des pi=E8ces soit= avant, soit apr=E8s leur arriv=E9e chez l'imprimeur. N=E9anmoins, quand plusieurs pi=E8ces =E9crites pour deux troupes ayant utilis=E9 la= m=EAme salle exigent le m=EAme genre d'espace sc=E9nique et manifestent= les m=EAmes limites dans l'utilisation de ces espaces, les conjectures deviennent plus fiables. Le peu que nous savons sur la mat=E9rialit=E9 du b=E2timent suffit cependant pour recouper le t=E9moignage des pi=E8ces. "Ay me": Selfishness and Empathy in "Lycidas." Jean E. Graham, The College of New Jersey. The multiple speakers and topics of Milton's "Lycidas," the deliberate and unreconcilable contradictions and ambiguities ofthe poem, are confirmed by linguistic analysis. According to Susumo Kuno's empathy theory, while speakers tend to express empathy toward themselves, numerous techniques are available to modify sentence structure and thus the natural selfishness of language. Arthur Palacas finds that paragrammatical structures-- structures outside the basic sentence--offer the speaker's evaluatory comments on the content of the basic sentences. Through basic sentence structure and paragrammatic commentary, the anonymous swain in "Lycidas" establishes empathy with himself, with Lycidas, with an ambiguous "we," and with various other subjects. The Pilot of the Galilean lake uses a paragrammatical structure similar to those of the swain, blurring the line between poem and "digression" without adding cohesion. The final eight lines of "Lycidas" introduce a "self-less" speaker empathizing solely with the swain and offering no paragrammatical evaluation. The very impersonality of this voice distances the reader from the consolation it offers. Thus the sentence structure of "Lycidas" provides an irreducibly plural text with multiple speakers, subjects, and meanings, accurately representing the complexity of human consciousness and the gap between human understanding and God. "Pauvre de moi": =C9go=EFsme et empathie dans le "Lycidas" de Milton Jean E. Graham, The College of New Jersey. Les locuteurs et les sujets multiples du "Lycidas" de Milton, les contradictions et les ambigu=EFt=E9s d=E9lib=E9r=E9es et= inconciliables de ce po=E8me, sont confirm=E9s par l'analyse linguistique. Suivant= la th=E9orie de l'empathie de Susumo Kuno, alors que les locuteurs tendent =E0 exprimer de l'empathie envers eux-m=EAmes, il existe= de nombreuses techniques pour modifier la stucture des phrases et en cons=E9quence l'=E9go=EFsme naturel du langage. Selon Arthur= Palacas, les structures paragrammaticales (les structures qui sont =E0 l'ext=E9rieur de la phrase =E9l=E9mentaire) fournissent les commentaires du locuteur sur le contenu des phrases =E9l=E9mentair= es. Gr=E2ce =E0 la structure des phrases =E9l=E9mentaires et aux= commentaires paragrammaticaux, le paysan anonyme de "Lycidas" instaure l'empathie avec lui-m=EAme, avec Lycidas, avec un "nous"= =E9quivoque, et avec une vari=E9t=E9 d'autres sujets. Le pilote du lac de= Galil=E9e utilise une structure paragrammaticale similaire =E0 celles du paysan, estompant la fronti=E8re entre le po=E8me et la= "digression" sans ajouter la moindre coh=E9rence. Les huit derniers vers de "Lycidas" introduisent un locuteur "sans moi" qui entre en empathie avec le seul paysan et n'offre aucune =E9valuation paragrammaticale. C'est l'impersonnalit=E9-m=EAme de cette voix= qui =E9loigne le lecteur de la consolation qu'elle apporte. De la sorte, la structure des phrases dans "Lycidas" produit un texte irr=E9ductiblement pluriel dot=E9 de multiples locuteurs, sujets= et significations, repr=E9sentant de fa=E7on ad=E9quate la complexit= =E9 de la conscience humaine et le foss=E9 qui s=E9pare de Dieu l'entendement humain. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Popular Hermeneutics: Monstrous Children in English Renaissance Broadside Ballads Helaine Razovsky Northwestern State University razovsky@ALPHA.NSULA.EDU Razovsky, Helaine. "Popular Hermeneutics: Monstrous Children in English Renaissance Broadside Ballads." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 1.1-34 . 1. Many types of single-sheet, or broadside, ballads from the English Renaissance present themselves as didactic works, despite a tendency toward sensationalism worthy of today's tabloid press.[1] Hyder Rollins identifies as the most numerous type the news ballad (A Pepysian Garland xi). Tales of monstrous children (the Renaissance term for deformed babies), an especially sensational type of news ballad, offer varied examples of how ballad makers produce spiritual revelation from sensational events. 2. Although modern critics usually classify such ballads as non-religious, these ballads suggest, first, that Reformation hermeneutic practices quickly filtered from theological circles into popular practice and the popular press and, second, that the nature of interpretation was itself of interest to popular audiences. (Following the Oxford English Dictionary, I distinguish between "hermeneutics" as a science or system of biblical interpretation and "exegesis" as the practice of it.) These broadside ballads offer one example of the widespread Protestant practice of unleashing the power of hermeneutics on objects and narratives other than the Bible; other examples include histories that read national experience typologically and Reformation conduct books that derive instructions for behavior from groups of related Bible verses. Acknowledging the diversity and ubiquity of this hermeneutical practice reinforces the importance of the Reformation in shaping English cultural history. These ballads offer exegetical models for the masses. 3. To cite a concrete example, a 1562 ballad about a "monstrous Chylde, borne at Chychester in Sussex," illustrates some aspects of these ballads, including the interpretation of the child as a text comparable to scripture. The ballad maker cites scriptural examples of warning signs of God's wrath (Noah, Lot) and then compares those texts to the Sussex birth and other such births of this time, human and non-human:[2] The Scripture sayth, before the ende Of all thinges shall appeare, God will wounders straunge thinges sende, As some is sene this yeare. The selye infantes, voyde of shape, The calues and pygges so straunge, With other mo of suche mishape, Declareth this worldes chaunge. (Lilly 202-3; long "s" modernized in this and all quotations) 4. Protestant hermeneutics is not unique in the representation of monstrous children as signs from God; the interpretation of deformity as a representation of moral depravity goes back to the early church fathers. Augustine, in The City of God, outlines a link between Cain, who was marked by God for his sin in killing Abel, and other monstrosities (Bandy 238). Only one of the broadsides about monstrous children mentions Cain (Collmann 186-87). Why is Cain not evoked as often as we might expect? 5. One reason may be that the monstrous children, although the result of sin, are not necessarily considered sinful in themselves. In fact, more than one of the ballads reads the monstrous child as itself sinless; for example, a 1562 ballad calls the baby "guiltlesse" despite his exhibition of "his parentes fault" (Lilly 28). A related reason may be a possible distinction between Catholic and Protestant readings of the story of Cain in Genesis. Luther's commentary on Genesis suggests that the mark placed on Cain by God may not have been a physical deformity: "It may have been that Cain's head and all his members constantly trembled . . ." (109). Sinfulness also exists in those without physical deformity. Associating a monstrous child with Cain militates against the interpreters' insistence that the child is a sign of more general sinfulness.[3] Finally, the Reformation shift from emphasis on allegorical biblical interpretation to emphasis on literal interpretation[4] may also help explain the relative lack of interest in Cain. The Reformers emphasize not the universal battle between good and evil, of which Cain's descendants or analogues comprise one side, but the monstrous child as yet another example of the word of God calling every individual to repentance and reform. 6. Yet two recent books on broadside ballads classify ballads about monstrous children as non-religious. Tessa Watt defines the religious broadside narrowly, according to whether the broadside title contains one of several key terms: "God, religion, the pope, or papists" (47); Natascha W=FCrzbach differentiates between religious ballads and "ballads of crimes and marvels" (67), although she does note that the "predominately moral-theological interpretation of prodigies in popular literature is clearly reinforced by the homiletic tradition . . ." (154). Despite both Watt's and W=FCrzbach's categorizations, these ballads of monstrous children are religious in their use of standard hermeneutic practices to interpret their subjects. Thus, they represent one of many signs that hermeneutic principles and practices had escaped overtly religious applications; in other words, every aspect of the world--from politics to the weather--could be interpreted using hermeneutic principles. The treatment of these births as texts suggests that the Reformation encouraged a sense of universal textuality. In other words, all Protestants were encouraged to interpret all aspects of God's creation just as they were encouraged to interpret the Bible. 7. In research, I have found fifteen broadsides about monstrous children from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dated from 1562 to 1687. We can not know how many different broadsides about monstrous children were originally produced, but the similarities of this group suggest that fifteen represents an adequate sampling.[5] This group interprets events that seem true or at least probable in some cases--including a number of cases of conjoined twins--and apocryphal in others, the best example of which is "The Lamenting Lady" (Rollins, A Pepysian Garland 124-131), who has every reason to lament a multiple birth of 365 babies. For my purposes, whether the broadsides use sensational news as an excuse for religious commentary or religious commentary as an excuse for sensational news is unimportant. The link itself is significant, because the link suggests that nothing is separable from religion. 8. These ballads present no new revelations; they reveal that bizarre--sometimes impossible--events are signs of widely accepted Christian beliefs. The ballad makers attach to tales of monstrous births interpretations that are derived from Reformation Protestant hermeneutic practice in both technique and content. Like Biblical commentaries, these broadsides generally follow a simple pattern of text and commentary. The text is composed of a woodcut of the monstrous child, usually shocking, and a description of the child's birth and monstrous nature (usually in prose), while the commentary is generally in the form of an interpretive ballad (with one exception in the sample of an all-prose broadside). 9. Most of these ballads are not as interesting aesthetically as they are culturally. The presentation is often rudimentary, but the implications are wide ranging. The following ballad stanza instructs readers that stories in the Bible and outside the Bible can be interpreted in the same way--in this case, the message is that abnormalities of "kynde," or species, always signify God's wrath: By readinge stories we shall fynde In Scripture and elles-where, That when suche thinges came out of kynde, Gods wrath it did declare. (Lilly 203) This verse is accessible to a child, but the reader or listener, whether child or adult, will learn not only the latest sensational occurrence but also how interpretation works. Any deviation from what was considered "usual" or "normal" was read as a sign of God's wrath and sometimes also a sign that the end of the world was imminent. 10. To classify ballads about monstrous children as religious rather than non-religious texts, we must recognize in these ballads hermeneutic principles as they were practiced in exegesis during roughly the first century of the English Reformation. The methodology of biblical interpretation in the English Renaissance is, perhaps surprisingly, something on which commentators of all Protestant sects agree. John Milton sums up the steps in biblical interpretation in On Christian Doctrine. Milton's list of steps includes "examination of the context; care in distinguishing between literal and figurative expressions; consideration of cause and circumstance, of antecedents and consequents; [and] mutual comparison of texts" (14.265). Although Milton's list is from the seventeenth century, it is a compact form of earlier lists of the same elements by popular Puritan theologians such as William Perkins and William Gouge. The steps of Protestant hermeneutics clearly have much in common with earlier Catholic hermeneutics, but the Reformation emphasis on literal interpretation is a crucial difference. Also different is the Reformation insistence that every Protestant should interpret for himself, opposed to the Catholic clerical monopoly on interpretation. Broadside ballads about monstrous children reflect both the elements of Protestant hermeneutics and the popular nature of hermeneutics after the Reformation. 11. One of the steps of Reformation hermeneutics, the "mutual comparison of texts," is crucial, both in interpretation of the Bible and in interpretation of Renaissance phenomena in relation to the Bible. As the sixteenth-century theologian Peter Martyr (Pietro Martire Vermigli) explains, "out of manie things severallie told, we understanding them to be alike, may gather thereby some profitable rule, to apply them to things generallie" (Vermigli I.49). In short, Protestants were encouraged not only to collate different scriptural texts as a way of understanding "that piece of scripture which is hard . . . by another part which is more plaine and easie" (Vermigli I.41), but also figuratively to collate scriptural texts with the texts of their lives. 12. A comparison of broadside ballads about monstrous children to Milton's list of hermeneutic steps reveals that the sample ballads illustrate the use of these hermeneutic principles. All of the broadside ballads read monstrous births as signs from God, reflecting examination of the context; all of the texts also read the monstrous births as figurative expressions of human sinfulness, thus distinguishing between literal and figurative expressions. All of the texts either explicitly or implicitly consider cause and circumstance by suggesting that either the parents' sins or all humanity's sins are embodied in the monstrous child. Only six ballads explicitly compare the text of the child to particular biblical passages (a seventh compares the child to monsters in Ovid's Metamorphoses), but all the texts could be said to practice "mutual comparison of texts," both by reading the child as a text in light of biblical passages linking monstrosity and sin and by comparing the text of the child's body to the text of the audience's lives. The ballads may seem like early examples of tabloid journalism, but they contain ample evidence of the extension of Protestant hermeneutics to extra-biblical "texts." 13. The sample ballads reveal that this subgenre offers a limited number of related, and often conjoined, interpretations of monstrous children. Three interpretations are attached to the children in these ballads, although each ballad does not contain all three: (1) the monstrous child embodies the sins of the parents (if unmarried), and constitutes a specific warning; (2) the monstrous child embodies the sins of the world (independent of the parents' marital state) and constitutes a general warning; (3) the monstrous child embodies the sins of the world (independent of the parents' marital state) and constitutes a lesson about the practice of interpretation. 14. The broader the interpretation of the monstrous child--as an embodiment of the sins of the world, not just the sins of the parents--the more clearly the child is a symbol of all humans. To Reformation Protestants, in comparison to unfallen humans or to angels or to the most unmonstrous of children, Jesus, humans are all "monstrous children." Although initially the monstrous child may seem different from the reader, ultimately the two are identified with each other. At the same time, however, the child represents the word of God and thereby is related to scripture. 15. Thus, the child is both sign and text, a way of speaking and the thing said, and therefore an exemplum for interpretation. In this way also the monstrous child is akin to Jesus, as the following quotation from the sixteenth-century Reformation theologian Theodore de Beze suggests: "Christe himself is so geven unto us to be the only teacher of that trew and native wisedome: as that he teacheth himself untoo us. For he is both the teacher and the thing that is taught" (F8v-F9r). De Beze's statement presents Jesus in the same light as the monstrous children of these ballads; both Jesus and the children are the teacher and the thing taught, the sign and what it signifies. 16. As noted above, these ballads display a range of options for interpretation. The number of details provided to create verisimilitude or a basis for interpretation varies dramatically, as does the explicitness of the hermeneutic principles displayed. In some cases, interpretation reflects the type of monstrosity. For example, in two cases writers interpret conjoined twins who face each other and apparently embrace as signifying the potential meaning of an embrace (Collmann 186-7, discussed below, and Rollins, The Pepys Ballads 3.288-90). In other cases, in which the interpretation is generic, any monstrosity could produce the same interpretation. 17. Ballads that interpret monstrosity generically are like boilerplate documents, composed of standard, interchangeable pieces and interpretations. The extreme case is that of two ballads (Lilly 201-4 and 63-66) from different years (1562 and 1564), attributed to different authors (Jhon D. and John Barkar), produced by different printers (Leonard Askel and Wylliam Gryffith), and yet sharing an almost identical stanza: 1562 1564 No caruer can, nor paynter maye, No caruer can, nor paynter The same so ougly make, then, As doeth itself shewe at The shape more ugly make, this daye, As itselfe dothe declare A sight to make the[e] the truthe; quake! A syghte to make vs quake! From a modern point of view, this is plagiarism, but the stanzas reflect the relative uniformity of interpretation represented in these ballads. 18. Four early Elizabethan ballads (1564-1568)--two about conjoined female twins and two about male deformed children--illustrate the range of interpretation, from generic comments on monstrosity to interpretations of particular monstrous manifestations. Two of the broadsides are relatively simple in their presentation and their interpretation. One, about conjoined twins born in North Hamptonshire ("The true fourme and shape of a monsterous Chyld," Collmann 113), presents first a prose description of the event that answers the questions a modern journalist would ask, followed by a three-stanza ballad about the necessity for interpretation of the human experience. The type of monstrosity is not significant in the ballad. The last sentence of the prose description introduces the ballad's generic didactic purpose: "[Various people can testify] that it [the monstrous child] is a Trouth and no Fable, But a warninge of/ God, to moue all people to amendment of lyfe" (Collmann 113). 19. The ballad itself highlights both the gift of sight as a tool for observation and interpretation and the power of these conjoined twins as a warning from God, who "can in secretes shew the signe" (Collmann 113). The "secretes" demand interpretation to reveal God's lesson. In the second stanza, the reader/listener is admonished: And we that lyue to see this wonder, howe The gase is geuen, to make this meruaile great, Let one by one that this beholdeth nowe, Be warned as the wonder giues conceate: To liue to mende the wonderous shape we see, Contrarie much, in all that ought to bee. (Collmann 113) The writer, W[illiam] Elderton, insists on the connection between the power to observe ("The gase is geuen, to make this meruaile great") and the necessity of translating into action the interpretation arising out of observation. In this case, the action required is living righteously, which includes the need to avoid premarital sex. The prose description states that the "Chylde was borne out of Wedlocke"; although the writer does not state the obvious remedy--marry before you have children--the audience readily could draw that conclusion. 20. A ballad about "a monsterous Chylde, borne in the Ile of Wight" in 1564 cites the nature of the monstrosity in the title--"a cluster of longe heare about the nauell" (Lilly 63), but this is also a generic ballad. Like the commentary about the North Hamptonshire conjoined twins, this ballad's commentary is not prompted by the type of monstrosity exhibited by the child: "All ye that dothe beholde and see this monstrous sight so straunge,/ Let it to you a preachyng be, from synfull lyfe to chaunge" (Lilly 65). It does move beyond the previous ballad, however, in urging the audience to see itself in the deformed child: For he that doth this shape beholde, and his owne state will knowe, Will make the proude pecocke so bolde, beare downe his tayll full lowe. (Lilly 66) The North Hamptonshire and Isle of Wight ballads present generic interpretations: monstrosity is a warning to reform sinfulness. The fact of monstrosity alone is interpreted, not the type of monstrosity. 21. A broadside more self-conscious in its application of hermeneutic principles is "The true discription of two monsterous Chyldren" (Collmann 186-7), which interprets the birth of conjoined female twins in Kent in 1565. Unlike the North Hamptonshire ballad (but like the Ile of Wight ballad), the Kent ballad sees the birth of conjoined twins not as a unique sign, but as one of a group of signs: "The Monsterous and vnnaturall shapes/ of these Chyldren & dyuers lyke brought/ foorth in our dayes . . . these days of our forgetfulnes of duty" (186). These signs are not merely a judgment against the parents of the conjoined twins (who are not identified by name and marital status), but "lessons/ & scho[o]lynges for vs all (as the word monster shewith)/ who dayle offende as greuoufly as they [the child's parents] do . . ." (Collmann 186; italics mine). According to this reading, all humans are monstrous. The Kent ballad reads all the signs as "callyng vs . . . to repen/taunce and correction of manners" (Collmann 186). 22. The 1565 Kent broadside refers to biblical passages, cited in the margins, in part to establish authority and in part to collate texts from the Bible with the text constructed from the birth of these conjoined twins. One biblical passage cited is the narrative in John 9 in which the disciples ask Christ whose sin is responsible for a man's blindness, to which Christ replies, according to the ballad writer, that the man is blind "to/ thend the glory of God myghte be declared on hym,/ and by him" (Collmann 186). This passage is also alluded to in another ballad ("The true discription of two monsterous children," Lilly 217-220). The choice of this passage highlights God's power as much as man's sin. 23. Although this author does not present specific details about the number of limbs or other physical anomalies of the twins, he interprets the physical relation of the twins to each other--their apparent embrace--as a sign that can be read in two ways: And sure to hym that considereth/ as he ought to do, the great decay of harty loue and/ charytie . . . and had vewed and behelde the/ two babes, the one as it were imbrasynge the other,/ and lenynge mouth to mouth, kyssyng (as you wold/ say, one another:) it myght seeme that God by them/ eyther dooth vpbraide vs, for our faulse dyssemblynge/ and Iudas condycyons & countenaunces, in freynd/ly wordes, couerynge Caynes thoughtes and cogy/tacions, or els by theyr semblaunte and example, ex/horte vs to sincere amytie and true frendshyp, voyde/ of all counterfeytinge, or els bothe. (Collmann 186-7) This interpreter's willingness to present two antithetical and yet consistent interpretations as either or both true (a practice also found in other popular works, such as beastiaries) suggests that the link between text and interpretation is not rigid. Either interpretation is acceptable as long as it reflects generally accepted Protestant theology. This particular broadside is revelatory of method as well as matter; it suggests that multiple interpretations, within certain limitations, will satisfy broadside writers and purchasers. 24. The same writer even anticipates that he may be charged with excessive interpretation: Neyther let any/ man thynke thys an obseruacyon ouer curyous, for/ as much as Christ him selfe hath by chyldren taught/ vs, that vnlesse we become lyke Chyldren, wee shall/ not come in the kyngdome of heauen. God make vs/ all chyldren in thys wyse, and perfect and well lerned/ men, to note and obserue to what ende he sendeth vs/ such sightes as these, that hereby (put in remebrauce/ the rather of our duties both to hym and our neygh/bours) we may atteyne to lyfe euerlastyng by Chryste/ our Lord. (187) This writer explicitly requires his audience to be both children and adults--in some sense, perhaps, to see themselves as both these children and the interpreters and reformers of them. In these broadsides, the monstrous child is a text. If the reader is identified with the child, however, then the reader becomes part of the text and must also read himself. Perhaps this should not be surprising considering that the Christian religion is built on paradox (e.g., the virgin birth, the need to die in order to live) and that these broadsides identify not only subjects of their narrative but also their audience as sinners who should reform themselves. 25. In the 1565 Kent ballad, the writer interprets not only the general notion of monstrosity, but also the particular monstrosity represented by these conjoined twins. A broadside ballad from 1568 about a single monstrous child born in Kent provides a sharp contrast to the generality of the North Hamptonshire and Isle of Wight ballads discussed earlier; its explicitness and particularity have more in common with the 1565 Kent ballad. The 1568 Kent broadside includes an explicit prose description of the deformities of the male child and then, in the ballad itself, ties each anatomical abnormality to a vice in the English population, as the first two stanzas illustrate: This monstrous shape to thee, England, Playn shewes thy monstrous vice, If thou ech part wylt vnderstand, And take thereby aduice. For waying first the gaspyng mouth, It doth full well declare What rauine and oppression both Is vsed wyth greedy care. (Lilly 195) The writer of this ballad identifies various sins he sees around him (greed, blasphemy, idleness, rebellion against authority) with various defects of the child; although the child is said to have been born to a mother who "played the naughty packe" (Lilly 194) and produced this child out of wedlock, all sinners in England are indicted. 26. Although these sample ballads may not exhaust the genre, they show that hermeneutic practice might lead either to generic or particularized interpretation, or to a combination of the two. This does not mean that misinterpretation was impossible; one ballad cites the mistaken interpretation of monstrous births by some people as a sign of approaching "good lucke" (Lilly 202). As noted above, however, standard interpretations apparently were never unacceptable as long as there was at least some connection between the text (monstrosity, in these cases) and standard Protestant biblical interpretations. 27. Despite what I am claiming to be hermeneutic practices at work in these ballads, most of those I have examined do not explicitly refer to the Bible. Therefore, the six that do are especially interesting. One broadside ballad of that year of monstrous births, 1562, about a child born in Sussex ("A discription of a monstrous Chylde," Lilly 201-204), explicitly compares biblical texts--the stories of Noah, Lot, and Moses--that support the contention that When God for synne to plage hath ment, Although he longe defarde, He tokens truly straunge hath sent To make hys foes afearde . . . . (Lilly 201) The ballad maker calls his text of the Sussex child a "signe" produced "by printing arte" that preaches to each observer, just as all the other monstrosities, including this child, are "tokens now sent foorth/ To preache the later daye" (Lilly 203). Thus, the ballad maker is taking on the work of translating the three-dimensional sign of the monstrous child's body into the two-dimensional sign of a printed text. The writer, then, may be comparable to a writer of scripture. 28. An apocalyptic broadside that uses monstrous children as only a single element in a larger picture is 1661's "News from Hereford" (Rollins, The Pack of Autolycus 81-6), which transplants from Bohemia to Hereford an older story[6] that ties the birth of 3 children--who prophesy as soon as they are born--to other astonishing phenomena. The broadside's full title is News from Hereford. OR, A wonderful and terrible Earthquake: With a wonderful Thunder-clap, that happened on Tuesday being the first of October, 1661. Shewing how a Church-steeple and many gallant houses were thrown down to the ground, and people slain: With a Terrible Thunder-clap, and violent Storms of great Hailstone, which were about the bigness of an Egg, many Cattel being utterly destroy'd as they were feeding in the field. Also the wonderful Apparitions which were seen in the Air, to the great amazement of the Beholders, who beheld two perfect arms and hands; in the right hand being grasped a great broad sword, in the left a boul full of Blood, from whence they heard a most strange noise, to the wonderful astonishment of al present, the fright caused divers women to fall in Travail; amongst whom the Clerks wife, one Margaret Pellmore, fell in labour, and brought forth 3 children, who had Teeth; and spake as soon as ever they were born, as you shall hear in the following relation, the like not known in any age. (Rollins, Pack 82-3) After presenting the tale in all its sensational detail, the ballad writer presents a simple and straightforward interpretation: What man is able in our England Land The meaning of these things to understand? It doth betoken anger great from God, How he will smite us with his heavy Rod. (Rollins, Pack 85) The writer insists that only prayer and repentance can prevent the commencement of wars (signified by the sword and the bowl of blood), sicknesses (signified by the children's words), and famine. This broadside is one of many of the whole genre of broadside ballads that present an apocalyptic interpretation of unusual events; the book of Revelation in the Bible is even alluded to in the broadside's voice from heaven that calls out: "wo, wo to man that draweth breath/ And the Inhabitants of all the Earth" (85; paraphrased from Revelation 12.12). 29. In this broadside ballad, monstrous children are part of an apocalyptic package, but they differ from the monstrous children presented in the earlier broadsides only in that they speak literally as well as figuratively--with words as well as their forms. However, figuratively the monstrous children in all of these broadsides speak, through the ballad writers, with the voice of God. These broadside ballads are just one of many media through which popular hermeneutics identified and interpreted the word of God and, therefore, placed the audience in the position of being both the text interpreted and the interpreters of that text. 30. One implication is that the writers of these broadsides assumed that anything is a potential text for exegesis using standard hermeneutic principles; therefore, the comparison of texts that is one step in the practice of hermeneutics means not simply comparison of Bible verses and/or of other graphic texts, but also of graphic texts and other objects. Broadsides are not the only medium through which "monstrous children" were read during the Renaissance. In an essay in an exhibition catalog, The Age of the Marvelous, Joy Kenseth describes collections of the rare, the exotic, and the marvelous that were common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were called cabinets of curiosities or "Kunst- und Wunderkammern (rooms of art and marvels)" (82). They were assembled not only by monarchs and aristocrats, but also by various professionals, including educators. These collections mixed the natural and the artificial, the ridiculous and the sublime, serving as visual representations of the variety of God's creation. The fact that children were taken to view these collections for pedagogical reasons (Kenseth 88) is a sign that the collections not only reproduced the variety of the world, but that they were seen as keys to understanding the world, as a way of fulfilling the Christian impulse to study God through his creation. Among the items Kenseth describes from such collections are "the preserved remains of infant Siamese twins" (90). 31. These "preserved remains," whether literal or figurative texts, affirm that during the English Reformation everything is a sign, and everything is readable in relation to the Bible. All texts are eventually traceable back to God, as the voice in the "News from Hereford" ballad reproduces the words of God in the Book of Revelation. For reformers and for some portion of the population, the world was a three-dimensional text. The source of this universal textuality is, of course, the Bible. Reading a set of conjoined twins as a text is no different from Paul's reading of his followers in 2 Corinthians: You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on your hearts, to be known and read by all men; and you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (3.2-3) An image from Revelation foreshadows the sign and text of the monstrous children: the word of God issuing as a sword from the mouth of the Son/Word ("and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword" [1.16]; "And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations" [19.15]). This sword issuing from the mouth of the Son/Word represents the same conjunction of text/deformity/warning that is embodied by the monstrous children. 32. The reading of these children might be illuminated by a passage in the gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus responds to a request from the Pharisees for a sign by comparing the text of the book of Jonah to his own life: . . . An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here. (12.39-41) In the Book of Jonah, the sailors who throw Jonah in the sea, where he is swallowed by the monstrous "great fish," believe that Jonah is the sinner, the monstrosity, just as the Pharisees see Jesus as the sinner, and thus the monstrosity. As the Word made flesh of the gospel of John, Jesus is the same type of monstrosity as the monstrous children of the broadside ballads, who are also the word made flesh. Just as the broadsides rely on paradox, the relation between the Word and the monstrous children is also paradoxical; although the monstrous children are like Jesus in being the word made flesh, they are opposed to his perfection in their imperfection. 33. In the essay "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Jacques Derrida describes a new form of interpretation as "the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity" (154). Perhaps Derrida's choice of monstrosity as the form of a new kind of interpretation is ironic in light of the interpretations practiced on the monstrous children of the broadside ballads; perhaps his choice is ironic in light of the association of the "word" in Revelation with monstrosity. Clearly, however, in these English Renaissance broadside ballads, monstrosity is a form of revelation attached to standard interpretations, and all the ballad writers represented in this sample--whether they wrote for monetary or spiritual reasons-- know and use the forms of contemporary Protestant hermeneutics. 34. The practice of interpretation in Reformation England is a more significant issue, finally, than monstrosity. The interest of these ballads--and others about monstrous fish, monstrous pigs, and other anomalies--seems to me heightened because monstrosity comes to stand for human sinfulness. But the most significant conclusion I derive from these ballads is that they present repeated and congruent examples of popular interpretation at work. They show that the standard Reformation system of biblical hermeneutics was part of the popular consciousness as early as the 1560s and that the system was used consistently in popular ballads for more than 100 years. They also suggest, through what we might call their discourse of meta-interpretation, that interpretation itself was a topic of interest to some broad segment of the public. Appendix: Broadside Ballads of Monstrous Children "The true reporte of the forme and shape April 1562 of a monstrous Childe borne at Muche Horkesleye" (Lilly 27-30) "A discription of a monstrous Chylde, May 1562 borne at Chychester in Sussex" (Lilly 201-4) October "The true description of a monsterous 1564 Chylde, borne in the Ile of Wight" (Lilly 63-66) "The true fourme and shape of a monsterous 1565 Chyld, Which was borne in Stony Stratforde, in North Hamptonshire" (Collmann 113) "The true discription of two monsterous 1565 Chyldren Borne at Herne in Kent" (Collmann 186-87) "The true discription of two monsterous April 1566 children . . . borne in the parish of Swanburne in Buckynghamshyre" (Lilly 217-20) "The true Discription of a Childe with June 1566 Ruffes, borne in the parish of Micheham, in the countie of Surrey" (Lilly 243-46) December "The forme and shape of a monstrous Child, 1568 borne at Maydstone in Kent" (Lilly 194-97) 1620(?) "The Lamenting Lady" (Rollins, Pepsyian Garland 124-131) 1637(?) "The two inseparable brothers" (Rollins, Pack 10-14) 1661 "News from Hereford" (Rollins, Pack 82-86) 1664 "Nature's wonder" (Rollins, Pack 140-45) 1677 "True wonders and strange news" (Rollins, Pack 191-94) 1677 "The world's wonder" (Rollins, Pack 195-99) 1687 "The wonder of this present age" (Rollins, Pepys Ballads 3.288-90) Notes 1. I wish to thank the members of my research group, Benay Blend, Karen Cole, Susan Newton, and especially Jean D'Amato, whose invitation to give a lecture eventually led me to this subject. 2. The decade of the 1560s produced an uncommon number of monstrous births. The introduction to one broadside collection notes that "The year 1562 . . . is recorded by the English chroniclers, such as Hollinshed and Stowe, as especially fertile in monsters" (Collection [generally and hereafter referred to as Lilly] xvi). 3. The scientific revolution was beginning to offer non- theological explanations for birth defects. French physician Ambroise Par=E9, in his On Monsters and Marvels (first published in 1573), does not mention Cain. At the beginning of his book, he lists thirteen causes of monsters, of which only three are direct acts of God; among the other causes he lists is too much seed, which he says Hippocrates cites as a cause of both multiple births and "a monstrous child having superfluous or useless parts" (8). 4. This shift is widely accepted; see J. W. Blench's Preaching in England in the late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964, 1-70) for examples. 5. Many broadsides are lost, probably forever. The difficulty of knowing how many broadsides were originally devoted to monstrous children is suggested by the following facts: Hyder Rollins's index of broadside ballads in the Stationers' Register includes 16 examples from the sixteenth century, of which only 5 are extant. (My search of the Stationers' Register suggests that Rollins's decision to exclude all citations that are not identified as ballads probably excluded some examples.) Carole Livingston's recent catalog of extant sixteenth-century English broadside ballads includes 9 about monstrous children; 3 do not appear in the Stationers' Register. Livingston believes that more than 4000 broadside ballads may have been produced between 1557 (the earliest year covered in the Register) and 1600, although the Register only lists about 2000 between those dates (32). An appendix lists the ballads and their sources. 6. The story behind "News from Hereford" is dated 1579 in a pamphlet cited in Rollins's The Pack of Autolycus (81) and was apparently relocated to Carlstadt, Germany, in a now lost broadside entered in the Stationers' Register on Feb. 13, 1606 (Rollins Analytical Index #517). Works Cited * Bandy, Stephen C. "Cain, Grendel, and the Giants of Beowulf." Papers on Language and Literature 9 (1973): 235-49. * A Collection of Seventy-Nine Black-Letter Ballads and Broadsides, Printed in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Between the Years of 1559 and 1597. London: Joseph Lilly, 1867. * Collmann, Herbert L., ed. Ballads & Broadsides chiefly Of the Elizabethan Period. [Research and Source Works Series 747]. New York: Burt Franklin, 1971. * de Beze, Theodore. A Booke of Christian Questions and Answers. Tr. A. Golding. London, 1572. * Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences." Twentieth- Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. Ed. K. M. Newton. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. * Kenseth, Joy. "'A World of Wonders in One Closet Shut.'" The Age of the Marvelous. Ed. Joy Kenseth. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1991. 80-102. * Livingston, Carole Rose. British Broadside Ballads of the Sixteenth Century: A Catalogue of the Extant Sheets and an Essay. [Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Vol. 1390]. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992. * Luther, Martin. Luther's Commentary on Genesis. Tr. J. Theodore Mueller. 2 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1958. * Milton, John. On Christian Doctrine. The Works of John Milton. Ed. Frank Allen Patterson. 18 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1931-1938. * Par=E9, Ambroise. On Monsters and Marvels. 1573. Tr. & ed. Janis L. Pallister. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. * Rollins, Hyder E., ed. An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries (1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London. Studies in Philology 21 (1924): 1-324. * ---, ed. The Pack of Autolycus or Strange and Terrible News Of Ghosts, Apparitions, Monstrous Births, Showers of Wheat, Judgments of God, and other Prodigious and Fearful Happenings as told in Broadside Ballads of the Years 1624-1693. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1927. * ---, ed. The Pepys Ballads. 8 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1929-32. * ---, ed. A Pepysian Garland: Black-Letter Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595-1639 Chiefly from the Collection of Samuel Pepys. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1922. * Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D. Ed. Edward Arber. 4 Vols. London: 1876; rpt. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967. * Vermigli, Pietro Martire. The commonplaces of the most famous and renowned Divine Doctor Peter Martyr, divided into foure principall parts: with a large addition of manie theological and necessarie discourses. 4 vols. Tr. Anthonie Marten. London, 1583. * Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. * W=FCrzbach, Natascha. The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550-1650. Tr. Gayna Walls. 1981; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Production Resources at the Whitefriars Playhouse, 1609-1612 Jean MacIntyre University of Alberta Jean.MacIntyre@UAlberta.CA MacIntyre, Jean. "Production Resources at the Whitefriars Playhouse, 1609-1612." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 2.1-35 . 1. In 1608, the company of boy actors at the Blackfriars Theatre was shut down for performing a play (now lost) that mocked a project to mine silver in Scotland and, worse, made fun of King James. A letter from Sir Thomas Lake reports how the angry king had vowed that for this mockery the Blackfriars company "should never play more but should first beg their bread." But by 1608 the company's managers had repeatedly proved adept at protecting their investment, using "various aliases" (Shapiro 28) for what was really the same company: Children of the Chapel Royal in 1600, Children of the Queen's Revels in 1604, Children of Blackfriars in 1608, Children of Whitefriars in 1609, and in 1610 again Children of the Queen's Revels. The managers had also proved adept at shielding themselves from authority by various legal subterfuges, chiefly the transfer of responsibility. Henry Evans, who had "set up" the company, "was ordered to quit the Blackfriars management" over the impressment of Thomas Clifton, but "he evaded the decree by bringing new partners into the organization and leaving town" (Shapiro 25). When certain plays -- Daniel's Philotas, Marston, Chapman, and Jonson's Eastward Ho -- again brought authority down upon the management, the company continued under Edward Kirkham, Yeoman of the Revels since the 1580s, and Robert Keysar. But already financially embarrassed in 1608, when again in trouble, they agreed with the theatre's owner Richard Burbage to terminate their lease of Blackfriars. Soon after, Keysar disbanded the company, or at least gave the appearance of doing so. In 1609, however, some former Blackfriars players were reassembled by Keysar and the court musician Philip Rosseter to began playing at the Whitefriars theatre, recently vacated by the Children of the King's Revels, at least one of whom, William Barkstead, joined the Keysar-Rosseter troupe. In 1610 Rosseter secured a royal patent that restored to the Children of Whitefriars the name Children of the Queen's Revels, now managed by a syndicate including, besides Rosseter, the playwright Robert Daborne and two veteran actors, Robert Browne and Richard Jones (Chambers II, 54-56).[1] 2. Reconstructing a theatre and a troupe from the evidence in published scripts poses some risks, and more risks yet if the scripts are known to have passed to other companies before publication, or if the state of the text suggests foul papers, authorial editing, or other sources of corruption known to have affected play texts either before or after they reached the printing house. Nonetheless, when several plays written for two companies who used the same house require the same kind of stage spaces and show the same limitations on the use of those spaces, conjecture becomes more reliable. Enough of what we know about the physical building, limited though it is, fits the evidence of the plays. 3. The Whitefriars Theatre had been built c. 1605 in the refectory of a former friary (Wickham II, 1 122-23; II, 2, 80) located between the Fleet River and the Temple. The space measured 85 feet by 35 feet, appreciably smaller than the Blackfriars house, which had been constructed in a hall 101 feet long and 46 feet wide (Smith 168).[2] Whitefriars scripts show that the stage had the same parts as other theatres, both indoor and outdoor: a platform accessed by two doors opening from the tiring room, a curtained discovery space, and an upper level. Because the stage was built in a smaller existing space than Blackfriars, the horizontal scale seems have been reduced so as to maximize space for the paying audience, leading to what the scripts suggest were distinctive modifications: a smaller platform, a proportionately wider discovery space, entry doors set at the very edges of the stage, and a reduced upper playing area. The title pages of two plays of the 1630s suggest what it may have been like. That of Messalina shows a discovery space almost as wide as the stage, with doors angled toward the sides and the above reduced to a curtained window, and that of Roxana a small stage, a curtain extending to the picture borders with no entry doors visible, and a pair of windows above.[3] More scenes in plays written for both the King's Revels and the Children of Whitefriars are set indoors than outdoors, and a number of these create interior realism with large pieces of furniture set up in the discovery space and employed for the action, as well as numerous smaller pieces carried onto the main stage by servant characters. 4. The King's Revels Whitefriars plays as a group should be more reliable evidence for the theatre space than those of the Queen's Revels since they were published soon after the company folded. Of the plays attributed to them, Thomas Middleton's The Family of Love had previously belonged to the disbanded Paul's Boys (Hillebrand 233-4). John Day's previous work had been for the larger and better staffed Rose, Curtain, Red Bull, and Blackfriars companies. Robert Armin's Two Maids of Moreclack was printed from possibly incomplete foul papers that indicate revisions made over a period of years.[4] Armin, experienced as an actor, was hardly so as a playwright, and did not have any other known connection with the King's Revels; his epistle in the quarto suggests that he had not written Two Maids for them. This play and others belonging to this company -- The Insatiate Countess (abandoned by Marston and completed by William Barkstead and others), John Mason's The Turk, Lording Barry's Ram Alley, John Day's Humour Out of Breath, Edward Sharpham's Cupid's Whirligig, and the anonymous Every Woman in Her Humour and The Dumb Knight -- were printed not long after the company folded. Not all these plays supply useful data about the theatre. Every Woman needs only the platform and two doors, and Cupid's Whirligig the platform, the doors and an arras for a character to hide behind. Both these could be played anywhere, even before a hall screen like that of the Middle Temple, if a curtain or carpet was suspended from the gallery above. All the playwrights but Armin and Day were gentlemen amateurs, though seemingly aware of how many actors and other resources they could call upon. 5. Several Queen's Revels plays have more complicated later histories than those of the King's Revels. These affect their reliability as evidence for the Whitefriars of their original performances. Jonson seems to have rewritten some parts of Epicoene before its publication in the 1616 Folio. Beaumont and Fletcher's The Scornful Lady (not certainly written for Whitefriars) was also printed in 1616, but may have been altered either for the Queen's Revels-Lady Elizabeth's amalgamation or the King's Men, for whom Fletcher had become house playwright not long after Shakespeare's retirement. Its only known court performance was on Twelfth Night 1642 at the Cockpit in Court by an unnamed company (perhaps the King's Men) for the twelve-year-old Prince Charles. The Queen's Revels played The Coxcomb at court in 1612, and the King's Men in March 1622 and November 1636, but it was not published until the 1647 Folio. It needs much slenderer resources than the King's Men possessed, suggesting either that they saw no need for alteration or that the Folio editors did not use their version but that of the combined Queen's Revels-Lady Elizabeth's companies whose principal actors are those named in the Folio (Bowers I, 263, 268). Chapman's The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois was a stage failure. Its most recent editor, Robert J. Lordi, thinks that Chapman reworked it as a reading text for the 1613 quarto (Chapman 424-25); it calls for offstage sound effects that seem not very feasible for an indoor theatre in a closely built-up neighborhood. 6. The best evidence for the Whitefriars playhouse, as well as for the makeup and resources of the company, is to be found in the plays of Nathan Field, who had been an actor with the Queen's Revels since at least 1601. The Insatiate Countess may have gone to the Queen's Revels in the same Whitefriars theatre with its principal reviser William Barkstead, who might have adapted it for his new company's actors, costumes, and properties but would not have had to change its use of the stage unless Keysar and Rosseter had undertaken significant alterations, an unlikely possibility. Both of Field's plays were written for his own company for performance at Whitefriars in their first and their third seasons in this theatre, possibly with guidance from Jonson. Better than the plays written for the King's Revels at the same theatre, and better even than Jonson's, Beaumont and Fletcher's, and Chapman's contribution to the Queen's Revels, they show the resources of theatre and company through an insider familiar for years with the skills of his fellow-actors and with the company's store of costumes and properties. Field, as an actor himself , would also have been most likely to take note of such matters of importance to the actor as entrance doors and the size and means of access to the discovery space and the above, and how long it would take to get from one of these to another. 7. Field's A Woman is a Weathercock, probably his first play, was staged in 1609-10 and printed in 1612, while his company was still at Whitefriars but before its amalgamation with Lady Elizabeth's Men, so that this play is most likely to give reliable evidence for Queen's Revels company and stage. Field's second play, Amends for Ladies, may not be quite so reliable for Whitefriars since it was not printed until 1618. The title page claims that it was played "at the Black-Fryers, both by the Prince's Seruants, and the Lady Elizabeths," a somewhat deceptive description since "at the Blackfriars" implies not the brief tenancy of these second-string companies at the short-lived Porter's Hall Theatre, but the prestigious King's Men with whom Field was by then acting. Nonetheless, allusions to plays performed in 1608-11 suggest that Amends was written no later than 1612. In Act II Mall Cutpurse visits the Seldomes' shop, a scene that copies that in which Moll visits shops and interacts with their keepers in The Roaring Girl (a Fortune play of 1611). Fee-simple has "a great mind to see long-megg and the ship at the Fortune" (II.i.152-53), though it is not clear whether this is one play (as it sounds to me), two plays, or a play and a jig (Field 276-7n). A drawer tells Well-tried and Fee-simple that "all the Gentlewomen [of a brothel] went to see a Play at the Fortune . . . they sup with the Players" (III.iv.24-27). Amends does not allude only to the Fortune. Old Count Fee-simple, "wrapt in furs," "looks like the Bear in the play" (V.ii.49), whether the one in the King's Men's revived Mucedorus or the one in their Winter's Tale. When the Widow Bright foils Bould's attempt on her virtue the scene resembles that in Lording Barry's Ram Alley in which William Small-shanks invades Widow Taffata's bedchamber; though no evidence exists for the transfer of Barry's play to the Queen's Revels, Field could have have seen the play, heard about the scene from Barkstead, or have read it in the quarto published early in 1611. More important, dialogue and stage directions that refer to casting, costumes, and properties indicate that, no matter what other company may later (if ever) have played Amends, the 1618 quarto represents the script of Whitefriars. 8. The Whitefriars plays for both Revels companies suggest that the above could easily accommodate no more than three actors and that access to it may have been awkward. In Ram Alley the above is used more than in other Whitefriars plays, but never calls for more than two characters at a time, almost always in some relation (by observing or addressing them) to others on the main stage. In Day's Humour Out or Breath a scene full of important information is played by three characters who leave the main stage and re-enter above. The entry direction for the final scene seems to indicate ample space for no fewer than eight characters -- Florimell, her Page, her lover Aspero, her father Antonio, Aspero's Page, a Messenger, and attendant Lords. But only Florimell, her Page, and Aspero speak, always addressing others on the main stage. Perhaps Day wanted Antonio and even Aspero's Page to be seen at the end even if not heard because they were important earlier in the play, but there is no need for the Messenger and the Lords; in fact the actors of these tiny parts may well have been needed for "Octavio, Julio, and others" who enter on the main stage near the end of the scene. This suggests that even if there were room above for five actors, only three were in a position to be heard either by actors below or the audience. No other King's Revels play (including The Family of Love) puts more than two characters above at a time, and their action there is limited to dialogue and hand gestures. 9. It seems to have taken at least a minute for actors to go between the above and the main stage. In Ram Alley twenty lines of dialogue occur between Boucher's exit below and his re-entry above. Twenty lines, plus an on-stage serenade, cover the time William Small-shankes needs to ascend, during which the actor must remove his cloak and doublet and pull his shirt loose so he can re-enter above "in his shirt." In Mason's The Turk, Borgias is to enter above and speak, accompanied by "the Senate" (mutes), then "Discend." After twenty-one lines by characters on the main stage and "A short flourish" Borgias and the Senate re-enter below. Later in the play Borgias and Timoclea enter "aloft" for a brief dialogue. Then Borgias "leapes downe" to characters below, but "discendit Timoclea," evidently through the tiring house, since after twelve lines of dialogue on the main stage, the direction "Enter Timoclea" indicates that she comes through a door. The Insatiate Countess also calls for business between the main stage and the above. Mendosa and his page enter "to the Lady Lentulus window"; she enters "at her window." After some dialogue "He throws up a ladder of cords, which she makes fast to some part of the window; he ascends, and at top falls" (III.i, SD). Either a stout hook was fixed to hold the rope ladder, or the window was a double casement divided by a bar sturdy enough to anchor the ladder so that the actor could control his fall.[5] This episode, like Borgias's leap from above in The Turk, shows that the above was not elevated so high as to endanger the actor with acrobatic skills who probably played both roles. Falls from the above are rare; the one in Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas may have been suggested by The Insatiate Countess. 10. The plays written for the Queen's Revels use the above very little, far less than their predecessors at Whitefriars. In Epicoene's Act IV an odd retroactive direction, "Haughty, Centaur, Mavis, Mrs. Otter, Epicne, Trusty, having discover'd part of the past scene above" (IV.vi, SD), suggests that they entered above to watch as Dauphine and Truewit expose the cowardice of Daw and LaFoole. During that scene both main-stage doors and the discovery space represent hiding places for three characters who repeatedly enter and exit from them, leaving only the above for the six ladies, but Jonson does not start a new scene, as he usually does when characters join others on stage, and editors of the play have to guess where to place their entrance. In practical theatre terms, if they are to watch the entire humiliation of Daw and LaFoole from above, there is not time for them to descend and enter on the main stage to begin Scene vi. Furthermore, having six actors enter above and then hastily exit while the scene was in progress would have distracted audience attention from the slapstick action below. Day, less skillful than Jonson, in Humour Out of Breath clumsily freezes main-stage action when he wants audience attention for actors above.[6] Barry either leaves the main stage empty during scenes acted above, or calls for interaction between characters on the two levels. Jonson's direction, in short, looks like a literary addition to the 1616 Folio, not like practical theatre. 11. In The Revenge of Bussy, use of the above is limited to one brief episode. "Charlotte [in man's apparel] appears aboue with Reuel and the Countess." After speaking one line "She gets downe" with some interference from Reuel. Only three full lines of dialogue separate this from the direction "Enter Charlotte below," but they are not accurate indications of the time she needs to descend, for a duel between Clermont and Montsurry has been in progress on the main stage before the three enter above and continues after Charlotte starts "downe." The wounded Montsurry's line, "I feele life for another vennie" (V.v.90) suggests that whatever time the actor of Charlotte needed to reach the main stage was to be covered by the fencing. The two characters above remain non-speaking onlookers of the main-stage action for sixty-five lines until Reuel tells the Countess "let's descend." Stage business while Charlotte "gets downe" may record Chapman's awareness of limited access to and from "above," but the forty lines between the exit "above" of Reuel and Countess and their reentry is more than adequate, unless each actor would need the minute or so twenty lines would take to speak to descend from the upper to the lower level and reach the proper stage door. 12. Field uses the above only in A Woman is a Weathercock, where Captain Pouts, a miles gloriosus, appears "aboue" to speak one line to Strange on the stage below. Having Pouts enter above avoids both theatrical and dramatic awkwardness. The stage door by which Strange entered represents the direction of his arrival. The other door represents that of Pouts's lodging house. The discovery space is unavailable because it is furnished for use in the next scene. Furthermore, having Pouts enter above lets him avoid a face-to-face meeting with a man whom he has previously insulted by his way of refusing his challenge to duel and who has told the servant of the house that he has come to renew the challenge. In Field's Amends for Ladies, the scenes in which the Widow and Bould (disguised as a woman) prepare for bed and in which Bould "in his shirt" and the Widow "undrest, a sword in her hand" enter "as started from bed" (IV.i, SD) might have been played above, but their probable inspiration, the Taffata-Smallshanks scenes in Barry's Ram Alley, were played on the main stage. It is unlikely that Field would set scenes incorporating not only dialogue and hand gestures but also vigorous physical action in a cramped upper level when the main stage was vacant. Neither The Coxcomb nor The Scornful Lady (if a Whitefriars play) makes use of the above. 13. Plays for both King's and Queen's Revels use the discovery space much more extensively than the above. The scripts belonging to both show that this area was spacious enough to hold large properties along with several actors, and was readily accessible from both the tiring house and the main-stage doors. Its use for important parts of scenes shows as well that the audience would have no trouble seeing what was happening within it. In Ram Alley, to represent the lawyer Throte's office it is to be fully furnished with "bookes and bags of money on a Table, a chaire and cushion" (ll. 426-7). Though the action spreads outward to the main stage, Throte sits in the chair to receive Boucher and Constantia and speaks of the cushion, so the audience would have been able to see it before he sat down. Though the money-bags are used only to signal that Throte practices usury, stage business makes use of the books. The Insatiate Countess begins with a discovery space tableau not unlike that of Throte's study: "The Countess of Swevia discovered sitting at a table covered with black, on which stands two black tapers lighted, she in mourning." Three male characters, Count Roberto, Guido, and Mizaldus, enter on the main stage, observe this tableau, and comment on it, then enter the discovery space as the Countess demands how they got in. After Guido and Mizaldus exit, Isabella and Roberto play a love scene and, still within the discovery space, enact their betrothal; as Isabella pledges herself to Roberto she puts out one of the tapers on the table, "due unto the dead" and he puts out the other. This shows that an extended scene in the discovery space must have been clearly visible and audible, and also that it could represent a locale different from that of simultaneous action on the main stage, the difference implied by the re-entry of Guido and Mizaldus through a stage door. That the scene was designed to seem like a play within a play is clear from Guido's comments: A player's passion I'll believe hereafter, And in a tragic scene weep for old Priam, When fell avenging Pyrrhus with supposed And artifical wounds mangles his breast, And think it a more worthy act to me Than trust a female mourning o'er her love. (I.i.120-25) 14. This indicates that the Countess and Roberto were to exit through the discovery space while Mizaldus and Guido remained on the main stage, which now represents a street on which the wedding parties of the feuding Claridiana and Rogero meet after entering through opposite doors "as from church from the bridal. They see one another and draw" (I.i.141, SD). 15. A speech by Truewit in Epicoene must be describing the actual appearance of the stage, presumably that at Whitefriars: Do you observe this gallery, or rather lobby, indeed? Here are a couple of studies, at each end one: here will I act such a tragicomedy between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Daw and LaFoole. Which of 'em comes out first will I seize on. You two [Dauphine and Clerimont] shall be the chorus behind the arras, and whip out between the acts and speak. (IV.v.25-31) This must mean that the doors opened onto the stage's inner corners, and that the discovery space therefore could extend across most of the stage's width as on the Messalina title page. If the discovery space at Whitefriars was proportioned to the same stage width as this, properties as large as those in Ram Alley, The Insatiate Countess, and Amends could easily be placed within it, and the audience would have no trouble seeing action there. 16. But why would Jonson call the entrance doors studies? It is not now as clear as it must have been in 1609 what sort of construction a "study" was, but it seems equivalent to "closet," a private enclosure built in or off an existing room, into which a person might lock not only private possessions such as books and papers but also himself. What "studies" means in theatre use does not seem fixed; in Doctor Faustus and Ram Alley "study" means the discovery space, which for the time represents a scholar's or lawyer's workroom. Both scenes require the prior arrangment of a chair and a table on which are spread books and other objects. But in Captain Thomas Stukeley (like Faustus a Rose play), young Stukeley's "study" in the Temple seems represented by a stage door, since his father unlocks it and exclaims at finding not the expected law books but weapons. The audience need not see these contents since what matters is Stukeley Senior's shocked response and his ensuing expostulation with his son. Jonson's scene resembles those in more recent bedroom farce, in which characters pop in and out of closets. Truewit uses theatrical language -- "act such a tragicomedy . . . the chorus . . . between the acts" -- similar to that of Guido in The Insatiate Countess. Both are commenting on action that amounts to a play within a play, even though what is happening is not fictional within the play's fiction as are "Solyman and Perseda" in The Spanish Tragedy and "The Mousetrap" in Hamlet. 17. Evidence from the building trades may help clarify what Jonson meant by "studies" in Epicoene. During the 1620s members of the competing Joiners and Carpenters Guilds disputed which guild was to do what kind of work with wood; in 1632, after eleven years of negotiation, a judgement apportioned the work; joiners were to build furniture assembled with dowels and/or glue and do interior finish carpentry, and carpenters were to frame and enclose buildings and make furniture assembled with nails. "Studies," window frames, and pillars might be built by either guild (Phillips 5-9; Alford and Barker 78-80). This suggests that "studies" were intermediate between cabinet making and construction work, equivalent to what a modern finish carpenter would be engaged to build. Perhaps Jonson meant not the theatre usage of Faustus and Ram Alley, the discovery space set up as a study, but rather the carpentry/joinery meaning of the word, a paneled enclosure within an existing room. To build a platform within the existing space of the Whitefriars refectory, set two such enclosures on it, then above and between them build an upper platform and hang curtains from it before and behind, seems the least costly way to create a stage that included all the familiar parts of a Jacobean private playhouse. 18. The way the doors and the discovery space are used in Weathercock and Amends indicates some complexity of access from both the main stage and the tiring house. In Weathercock Scudmore, disguised as a servingman, enters with a letter for Bellafront. Those already on stage tell him that "she is withdrawne" and that "that way leads to her" (III.ii.60-64), so she is not then visible. Scudmore, left alone on the stage, "passeth one door and entereth the other, where Bellafront sits in a Chaire, vnder a Taffata Canopie" (III.ii.68-69). Bellafront is not only "withdrawne" but asleep, so she is unlikely to have entered to sit in an on-stage chair while Scudmore is threading his way from the door of his exit to "the other." Her canopied chair sounds like a "state," not readily movable by the attendants who bring on furniture in other scenes, but set up in the discovery space to be revealed once Scudmore has passed from "one door" to "the other." Scudmore's entrance to Bellafront through "the other" door may indicate an exit through one stage door and re-entrance through the door opposite after the discovery space curtains have been opened, but could also mean a door into the discovery space within the door onto the stage. Scudmore and Bellafront play a long scene in which they perhaps advance from the discovery space to the main stage, but, as Ram Alley and The Insatiate Countess show, the scene could also have been played within the discovery space. The layout of the scene is essentially that of Dauphine and Truewit's humiliation of Daw and LaFoole in Epicoene, except that Jonson does not require the discovery space to be opened.[7] 19. Amends for Ladies uses the discovery space three times: to represent the Seldomes' shop (furnished with seats) in the second act and chambers furnished with a bed in the fourth and fifth. The interior of the shop is clearly distinguished by the action from the street where various customers assemble. Seldome at one point "walk's off at th'other end of the shop" while "Proud. sits by his wife," and Seldome is able to leave the shop to fetch things while other action is taking place in and before it. After this scene there is plenty of time to clear the discovery space and place a bed. This seems not to be visible during two domestic scenes between the Widow and Bould disguised as her chambermaid, though the first ends as the Widow says "Well, well, come to bed" (III.iii.125) and the second begins "Enter Widow vndrest, a sword in her hand, and Bould in his shirt, as started from bed (IV.i, SD). Field may have chosen not to show the bed for these scenes because making it visible might suggest that Bould's seduction ploy has succeeded, but he may also have decided to reserve it for its later use in the last scene. At any rate, the bed is shown for the first time in the second scene of Act IV, which begins with "Bould putting on his doublet as in Bould's chamber" and "Fee-simple on a bed," evidently within the discovery space. Immobilizing Fee-simple on the bed enables Bould and Well-tried to distance themselves as they hatch a plot against him. The bed is again to be used in another discovery scene in Act V In the play's final scene the bed is visual evidence for what a peeping observer has reported: that the Maid's willing and legal marriage to Ingen has been consummated. Her brother must therefore accept this marriage in place of the one with the aged Count that he has tried to force on her. 20. This scene shows the arrangement of the frons scenae in relation to the stage platform and the tiring room behind. As most of the characters are assembling in Lord Proudly's house for the Maid's wedding to the Count, a messenger brings her a letter from Ingen. After reading it she "Swoones," claims that she is dying, asks for a physician and a parson, and exits through one door with Grace Seldome, Wife, and Husband. Proudly and Ingen's brother exit through the other door, and return through this door with Ingen "like a Doctor" and the Parson. Grace, Wife, and Husband re-enter through the other door. The "Doctor" says he has "an ingredient/ About me, shall make her well I doubt not" (V.ii.126-26), and exits through the Maid's door with the Parson, who "shuts the doore" as he follows Ingen. Some thirty lines later, Proudly calls out an inquiry about the Maid, then "Looks in at the window" and exclaims "Z'oons. whats here?" (V.ii.163-65). Fee-simple gets to the window and describes to the rest "what's here": "the Parson joynes the Doctors hand & hers; now the Do. kisses her . . . [Omnes whoop. Now goes his gowne off, hoy-day, he has read breeches on. Z'oones, the Physition is got o'th top of her harke the bed creakes" (V.ii.166-67). At this point, "A curtaine [is] drawne, a bed discouer'd, Ingen with his sword in his hand, and a Pistoll, the Ladie in a peticoate, the Parson" (V.ii.164-82), a "discovery" needing much more floor space than the bed scene in Bould's chamber.[8] 21. These scenes in Amends suggest that at the rear of the stage two studies formed the sides of the discovery space and gave access from the tiring house to the stage platform. Between the studies there was a curtained-off space ample enough to hold a bed or other large property and several actors. Evidently it could be accessed from the tiring house through an opening wide enough to carry through large properties, whether closed with double doors like those in the Swan drawing or with more curtains. There may also have been doors at the sides leading into the studies, and access behind it (a stair or ladder) to the above. An arrangement like this would explain the puzzling stage directions in several of the King's Revels and Queen's Revels plays discussed above. 22. The Queen's Revels scripts are even more revealing about the actors and equipment belonging to the company. The scripts for the company's first two seasons can be played by fourteen actors, the maximum present in any one scene. Doubling is needed for very few short-term characters, often mutes, and none with many lines for the actor to memorize. Weathercock needs a tailor in the second scene of Act I, in Act III mute servants who fetch on chairs, wine, plate, and tobacco pipes, and in the last scene a mute parson. Whatever revision the 1616 Epicoene may have undergone, it, too, needs only fourteen actors (several fewer than an adult company could muster in 1609 or 1616), and like Weathercock needs to double only a few minor and mute parts. Though Beaumont and Fletcher's The Coxcomb has twenty-four speaking parts, many of these are short-term minor characters; it, too, needs only fourteen actors. Even The Revenge of Bussy could be played by fourteen if most of the mute extras -- soldiers, attendants, and the like -- were cut, and if actors had to double only those minor characters who have only a few lines.[9] By 1611, as Amends for Ladies shows, the company had increased to fifteen; though not all these need be the same individuals who had acted in Weathercock two years before, there is enough resemblance between the two scripts to suggest considerable carry-over of players. 23. Weathercock's many disguises, using mainly the outer layer of Jacobean dress -- gowns, jerkins, servants' livery coats, and the loose robes and caps of informal masquerade -- help create the illusion of more characters than the play actually has. Neville, a gentleman, offstage disguises himself as a parson with a gown and square cap or perhaps a surplice, then, again offstage, resumes his own shape. On stage he exchanges a masquing disguise for the vizard-maker disguise of his friend Scudmore (asking him to "helpe me a litle"[V.i.116] with the change). During the last scene he reappears "like the Parson" (after a real one has just left the stage), "puts off the Priests Weed, & has a Diuels robe vnder" (V.i.70), then "Slips off his Diuels weedes" to reveal his own clothes and thus his identity. Scudmore enters for the first time "halfe ready," exalted by Bellafront's love letter. Neville, having read the letter, tells him that Bellafront is about to marry Count Frederick; his speech shows that Scudmore has not been putting on more clothes while he reads: . . . prethee run not thus into the street, Come dresse you better, so: Ah! as thy cloaths Are like thy mind, too much disorder'd. (I.i.181-83) 24. When Scudmore next enters he is fully dressed "in Tawny," a color which especially signified the sadness of the forsaken lover (Linthicum 47). So clad he confronts Bellafront and her wedding party at the church door. Tawny was also a common color for liveries, so when a few scenes later Scudmore brings Bellafront a letter in the character of a servingman, he had only to replace his gentleman's doublet and cloak with a servant's coat. Toward the end of the play he disguises himself as the "vizard maker" who brings the false faces for Bellafront's wedding masque. On stage, he exchanges the vizard maker's clothes for Neville's masking attire. At the end of the play he reappears "like himself," as a gentleman, whether "in tawny" or some less significant color. 25. The merchant Strange's "habit /But speake[s] him Cittizen," visually distinguishing his class from those of the nobleman Frederick and the gentlemen Neville and Scudmore. Because Captain Pouts, a miles gloriosus in slops and whiskers, has slandered his bride, but refuses his challenge because he is a citizen, Strange puts on a buff jerkin to meet Pouts "like a soldier" who announces that Strange is dead. Still "like a soldier" he later shows Pouts a bloody ruff and a ring as evidence that the "soldier" has killed Strange. Sir Abraham Ninnie is mocked for his "round Breeches" (I.ii.367-68) and "those little Breeches" (IV.iii.52), unfashionable at a time of bombasted knee-length Venetians, and for his "verie thin" beard (I.ii.346). For part of the last scene all the young male characters wear masquing caps, gowns, and vizards. While several of these disguise changes were to be effected on stage, others call for quick changes in the tiring room. The disguising characters, all young men, were probably played by Field and others with the most practice in quick costume change. Furthermore, the garments needed for both normal and disguise costumes in this play had been used in the company's Blackfriars repertory, so if Keysar and his partners had hung onto these, they would not have needed to make many new purchases. 26. Descriptions in the dialogue of Weathercock show that Field had to accommodate a fair range of body sizes. Count Frederick is a "little man," Sir Innocent Ninnie is "that little, old, dri'de Neats tongue, that Eel-skin" (I.ii.145-46) and "a Needle in a Bottle of Hay" (I.ii.150), and his wife's serving maid Wagtail is a "pint pot" (II.ii.197). Field clearly wrote these parts for the smallest actors in the company. References to the bulk of Lady Ninnie relative to her husband and her maid suggest that she was created for a well-grown or fat boy. Captain Pouts comments that "she lookes like a blacke Bumbard" (I.ii.196-97), indicating large size and a black costume; a joke about her "backside" suggests that under his skirts this actor wore a well-stuffed bum roll, as does Sir John Worldly's concern that "one a'th'Chaires must be let out/ For her great ladyship" (V.i.61). A long stage direction at the beginning of Act V prepares for a some visual slapstick: "Enter 2. or 3. setting 3. or 4. Chaires, & 4. or 5. stooles. Musicke, in which time, enter Sir John Worldly [with others] my Lady Ninnie they seate themselues, Lady Ninnie offers at two or three Chairs; at last finds the great one," having first been unable to force her bombasted hips between the arms of others, a good reason for the other characters to "point at her and laugh" (V.ii, SD). 27. Both Epicoene and The Coxcomb could easily be cast from the same group of actors as Weathercock, although neither specifies the physical size of its characters as Weathercock does. Some of the characters in Epicoene do, however, suggest actor skills similar to those Field calls for. The trio of gallants, Dauphine, Truewit, and Clerimont -- rather than Jonson's more usual pair -- may have resulted from having three in the company (one probably Field himself) who would expect such roles. There are also three gallants in Weathercock, Scudmore, Nevill, and Strange. Jonson's pair of fools, Daw and LaFoole, parallel Weathercock's Sir Abraham Ninnie (like LaFoole a poetaster) and Count Frederick. Field's Sir Innocent Ninnie and Jonson's Morose are foolish old men, and Jonson's Captain Otter is not far removed from Field's miles gloriosus Captain Pouts; these roles look as if they were written for the same pair of actors. Both playwrights also exploit the number of actors who could play women of various ages -- five in Weathercock, plus a page, five in Epicoene plus the supposed woman at the end unmasked as "a gentleman's son that I have brought up this half year" (V.iv.183-84) to play the part of Morose's bride. (This may indicate how long a new apprentice was trained to act a woman.) The Coxcomb also has five women of different ages (one a bit part so its actor could double some other role), two old men, a trio of gallants, one of whom, like Field's Nevill, is given multiple disguises. The only approach to the miles gloriosus type of Otter and Pouts is the small part of the Tinker. These three plays suggest a certain amount of type-casting by the Queen's Revels, as does Amends for Ladies, where again there are five parts for women plus a male character who puts on a female disguise, a doddering old man like Morose and Sir Innocent, a trio of gallants, and a pair of fools. Field's business with four tavern roarers resembles the "drunken roarer" scene of The Coxcomb, and while such scenes no doubt drew upon a tradition of slapstick physical comedy, the fact that in both scenes four actors play these parts suggests some company specialization, as well as company continuity. 28. The only Queen's Revels play which does not entirely parallel the casting of the four comedies is the tragedy The Revenge of Bussy. Even so, this play supplies evidence for how many company members had fencing skills, for it is is the only Queen's Revels play that calls for more than one fencing display. In Act I Baligny brings Clermont's challenge to Montsurry, a quarrel involving others ensues, and breaks into a melee: "They all fight and Bal. driues in Mont" (I.ii.138, SD). In Act V the duel between Clermont and Montsurry which has been anticipated since Act I finally takes place, and appears to be orthodox stage fighting, with Montsurry repeatedly wounded and at last killed. Even so, like Field Chapman appears to assume that only a few Queen's Revels players had any fight skills and that only two could carry on a duel in a convincing way; though The Revenge of Bussy is full of military displays and even a stage battle, most of this involves sound effects, marching, and some running about the stage waving weapons. 29. Since Field was a company member, his requirements for swordplay are even more likely than Chapman's to show what his actors could do. In both of his plays characters threaten to fight, but the threats materialize only in a duel in Weathercock between Pouts and Strange when disguised "like a Souldier" (III.iv.15, SD). After a first bout, Strange comments "You fight as if you had fought before" and Pouts answers "you ward so well, I thinke you are one/ Of the Noble science of Defence" (IV.ii.103-06), that is, a professional fencer. The scene does not suggest mockery of the characters' fencing skills, so for these parts Field, like Chapman, must have had in mind two company members who had learned to handle stage weapons convincingly. Underwood and Ostler, if they spent any time at Whitefriars before joining the King's Men in 1610, and/or Field himself (perhaps as Strange) are possibilities for fencing roles.[10] In Amends characters often display weapons, but only use them when "Proud.[ly] stabs his sister. Ingen stabs Proud. in the left arme" (IV.iv.72-74). Four brothel roarers "fight" and fling stools and cups about but seem not to use weapons. Neither episode requires fencing skill. In the last scene the discovery space opens to show Ingen "with his sword in his hand, and a Pistoll (V.ii.180-81), and his brother at once draws to back him, but no weapon-play occurs. Possibly one or both the company's most skilled fencers had departed by the time Field wrote this play. 30. The Queen's Revels scripts contain much information about the company's costumes and properties. The Revenge of Bussy needs costumes for a French king and his courtiers more sumptuous than the four comedies require, needs that the company could have met if it retained its stock from Bussy D'Ambois at Blackfriars. These may have shown their age, perhaps contributing to the failure of The Revenge. The costuming for Epicoene must largely be inferred from what the dialogue says about the status and occasionally the appearance of the characters. For instance, that Dauphine, Truewit, and Clerimont are "gallants" and that Daw and LaFoole pretend to courtiership indicates costumes close to current fashion, as do Truewit's and Dauphine's comments on the elaborate dress of the Collegiates, Mistress Otter's talk of lost or spoiled finery, and references to Epicne's greater simplicity. Other particulars of costume come into dialogue. Morose enters wearing "a nest of nightcaps." As disguises Cutbeard puts on the cap and gown of a canon lawyer, and the "land and sea captain" Otter those of a doctor of divinity. The Coxcomb also requires costumes for gallants and an old gentleman. Its heroine Viola first wears a young gentlewoman's gown, hat, and ruff, which a tinker and his whore force her to strip off on stage, leaving her with a bodice or waistcoat and petticoat. This may have resembled the costumes of the two milkmaids and so, with an apron, would have been suitable when Viola enters their mistress's service. Scenes in the country require costuming for an elderly, old-fashioned country gentlewoman (perhaps played by the boy who played Lady Ninnie) and a country justice and his clerk. Dialogue refers to the on-stage wearers of blue servants' coats, a tavern drawer's apron, and the Irish footman's livery donned as a disguise by the coxcomb Antonio. The tinker and his whore could wear any tattered old costumes. Most of these costumes are similar to those required by characters of the same age, status, and function in Weathercock and Amends, although Field more often supplies explicit descriptions of what his characters wear than do playwrights not of the company. Weathercock shows that in 1609 the company owned clothing both fashionable and unfashionable for young and old gentlemen and gentlewomen, a devil's suit, a parson's gown or surplice (both used by Nevill), citizen's apparel for Strange, at least one pair of slops for Pouts as miles gloriosus, one or two buff jerkins or coats (one for Pouts, one for Strange's disguise as a soldier), servants' liveries in blue and tawny, a waiting maid's dress, and four "maskingsewtes antick" (Henslowe 201). One of the women laughs at Sir Abraham Ninnie's "round breeches" (I.ii.367-68) and another in a mock encomium says she is attracted by "those little breeches" (IV.iii.52), out of style for gallants by 1609. 31. In Amends not as many characters as in Weathercock disguise themselves, but Bould, Lord Fee-simple, and Ingen's brother Frank are all disguised as women at various points in the play. The Irish footman's costume from The Coxcomb seems to have been recycled for the Maid's disguise as a man. (The insistence that the Irish footboy is "little" may indicate that Antonio had been played by a small actor, but the fit of this costume would have been less important than that of long gowns which might trip someone on stage.) Because of their different marital status, the Maid, the Wife, and the Widow each need the headtires and other details of dress that discriminated unmarried, married, and widowed women. The tavern roarers of Act III could use either outdated "gallant" or worn "miles gloriosus" slops; the stage direction for their one scene, in a brothel, calls especially for "seuerall patches on their faces" (III.iv.2-3), signs of venereal disease, but also making the doubling of these parts less evident. The gowns for the physician and parson in Act V were probably those worn as disguises by Otter and Cutbeard two years earlier. New to the costume stock may have been the furs that wrap "the old Count," and whatever made the Maid "like a Bride" in the same scene (V.ii.1-2), this perhaps no more than a wig with the streaming hair traditional for virgin brides. Some of the costumes, especially for old men, may have been scaled down to fit children, but even in 1609 many of the company's "child" actors were in their late teens or, like Field himself, past twenty. In some roles these older actors, at least, might have drawn on their own wardrobes to augment company stock for young men. 32. Properties of many kinds appear in every Queen's Revels script, a number of these usable in more than one play: large properties such as a bed and a canopied "state," medium sized properties such as chairs and stools brought on by supernumeraries, and hand properties such as cups, weapons, papers and other portable objects that the actors themselves could carry. Field's plays indicate the availability of considerable domestic furniture. Directions in Weathercock mention "a Chaire, vnder a Taffata Canopie" (III.ii, 69-70) probably the same property as the "state" for King Henry in The Revenge of Bussy, and "3. or 4. Chaires, & 4. or 5. stooles," among them "the great one" (V.ii.1-5) for Lady Ninnie, enough seating for at least seven characters. Hand properties include not only the omnipresent letters, napery, and drinking vessels but Lady Ninnie's aqua vit=E6 bottle, a table book for the poetaster Sir Abraham Ninnie, and the purse the mercenary, wanton, and pregnant servant Wagtail is stitching when she and her lover plot how to make Sir Abraham marry her. Other small, cheap, and readily available properties are tobacco pipes, cups, knives, napkins, ropes, torches and cudgels, a willow garland, and rosemary for wedding favors. Sir Abraham enters from defeat in an offstage game "throwing downe his Bowles (III.iii.1); the "Capons Legge" (V.i.66) which he is "knawing" when he enters for the masque was probably a wooden property like the pies mentioned as properties in Richard Brome's The Antipodes. Like the napkins, playing cards, and keys that make Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness seem plausible, Weathercock's varied domestic furnishings give an illusion of reality to preposterous or farcical situations. 33. Epicoene and The Coxcomb do not call for anything like as much furniture as Weathercock, but use many of the same hand properties, among them napkins, cups, and stage weapons. Besides these Truewit has a horn, Cutbeard barber tools, and Morose a two-hand sword. People drink on stage from Otter's cups, so they must have been ordinary drinking vessels with covers (probably of painted wood) to represent Bull, Bear, and Horse. In The Coxcomb the "two Milkemaides, and Viola [enter] with pailes" (V.ii, SD), and the milkmaid Nan calls "this new pail a plaguy heavie one" (III.iii.1-2), a seemingly unnecessary detail perhaps explaining why one pail differed from the others. Antonio appears "like a Post, with a letter" and a horn, presumably the same used in Epicoene. Other properties are candles, letters, drinking vessels (most likely the same as in Epicoene and Weathercock), a key, a little casket, a broken glass, a cord and a knife. Even if Jonson's and Beaumont and Fletcher's scripts underwent later revision, these named properties are unlikely to have differed from those used at Whitefriars. In Amends the bed twice "discovered" suggests display of a new acquisition, and specifying "furs" for the old Count in the same scene may indicate the same. 34. Field had been with the boys of Blackfriars for nearly ten years when he became a playwright for their Whitefriars theatre, and so had the valuable inside knowledge of personnel and physical resources that even the most experienced outside dramatist could hardly share, even if his experience on the stage and in the tiring house taught him less about dramatic construction than about the theatrically effective moment -- a scene, a comic turn, transient business with costumes and properties -- and less about characterization than about how to exploit stage space, actors' bodies and costumes, and properties large and small. Amends and Weathercock rely on these physical resources more than the plays of experienced playwrights like Jonson, Chapman, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and relatively less on plot or language. Indeed, Chapman's claim in 1609 that "I see not myne owne Plaies" (265), if true, suggests that by 1609 he may have been indifferent to what could be done by a particular company on a particular stage, unlike Field who as a company member had to consider this all the time. 35. After Amends for Ladies, Field sometimes collaborated with other playwrights, in 1613 with Robert Daborne on one otherwise unknown script, and in the same year with Daborne, Philip Massinger and perhaps Fletcher on another, both perhaps for the newly amalgamated Lady Elizabeth's and Whitefriars companies. After acting with an unstable alliance of Prince Charles's, Lady Elizabeth's, and Queen's Revels companies, he joined the King's Men no later than 1617 as a star actor who occasionally contributed something to plays mainly the work of Fletcher and Massinger. He is not known to have written another complete play after 1611. His parts of the collaborative work indicate that he remained the same playwright of theatrical appurtenances that we see in Weathercock and Amends. This means that of all the plays written for the Whitefriars theatre, whether for the King's or the Queen's Revels, his remain the most valuable evidence for its physical features, as they do for the human resources of the company he wrote them for. Notes 1. It may have been through these former Admiral's Men that Henslowe became involved with the Whitefriars company. Both Browne and Jones had also had prior business dealings with Henslowe's son-in-law and business partner Edward Alleyn; in 1589 Jones sold his share of a company which included Browne and Alleyn, in 1592 appealed to Alleyn for a loan to get a suit out of pawn, and in the later 1590s turned to Henslowe to finance the purchase and embellishment of stage finery. It would hardly be surprising that when they were sharers in the Whitefriars and related companies, they would again approach Henslowe for financing, possibly through Alleyn as their former fellow. 2. Smith does not make clear whether his auditorium length of 66 feet was measured from the front of the tiring house or the edge of the stage; I am assuming the former, since it is reasonably certain that the audience was seated on "degrees" and "lords' rooms" on the sides of the stage as well as on benches facing it. 3. In the Messalina illustration four characters are seated above, two in each window, though the picture is scarcely realistic as there is no room for their bodies between the windowsills they lean on and the top of the arras below them. 4. Two Maids contains many directions for costuming, stage business, and even the actors' expressions, but the only scene which requires more than the stage platform is an on-stage burial and subsequent disinterment. In the Queen's Revels Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, Chapman directs "Ascendit Vmbra Bussi," suggesting that a trap would be available, and later in the act charcters talk of "the vault" and a stage direction reads "The gulfe opens" for the ascent of Clermont. But no other Whitefriars play for either company calls for a trap, and with minor textual changes the scenes in Two Maids and The Revenge of Bussy could be managed without one. In The Turk the tomb property used for Julia's supposed burial in Act I and Timoclea's "resurrection" in the scene that follows was set up in the discovery space. 5. The scene reverses Romeo's descent from Juliet's window, so movement by rope ladder between the upper level and the main stage was not confined to one small private playhouse. When the stage represented a ship and characters "ascended" to sight land or other vessels, a similar arrangement is probable. 6. In Humour Out of Breath, three characters surreptitiously exit during a main-stage game of blindman's buff. The game halts when the blind man asks "King's truce till I breath a little" (Day 465). Then the three who have left the game enter "on the upper stage" where their dialogue supplies important plot information. Only after their exit do "They renew Blind mans Buffe [sic] on the Lower stage" (467). 7. Jonson rarely uses the discovery space: probably in Volpone for the "shrine" where Volpone keeps his gold, only needed at the opening of the play, and then for the bed "thrust out" for the scenes in his chamber and drawn in for those set elsewhere. In writing The Alchemist, however, Jonson seems deliberately to have eschewed discoveries, perhaps because keeping the alchemical laboratory out of sight put the stress not on the physical but on the imagination of Subtle and Face's victims. Only at the end, when Lovewit says he has found a furnace, pots, and glassware, is it explicit that Subtle has engaged in practical alchemy in the unseen inner room. 8. Between his exit and discovery "in a peticoate" the actor playing the Maid has ample time to strip off his "bride" outer garments; Ingen also has time to remove his gown so as to appear in doublet and "red breeches" when the curtain opens. 9. It is uncertain whether the Whitefriars company of 1609-13 played The Insatiate Countess, begun by Marston and worked over by William Barkstead, Lewis Machin, and perhaps others for the soon-to-break King's Revels company. The extant quarto versions, with their confusion of character names and imperfect final scene, hardly represent a playable script, though its use of the discovery space and a window above suggests the same layout as that called for in Weathercock and The Revenge of Bussy. It is very unlikely that Keysar, Rosseter, and partners undertook to change the structure of the auditorium and stage of Whitefriars from what the King's Revels had left them. 10. Field did not reach the King's Men until he was in his late twenties. Jonson's 1616 actor-list for Epicoene names Field and seven others, but neither Underwood nor Ostler (Chambers II, 59). The testimony about Queen's Revels membership depends on Jonson's memory of who belonged to the company after some five years had passed, and on Cuthbert Burbage's memory after more than twenty. Works Cited * Alford, W.E. and T.C. Barker. A History of the Carpenters Company. London: Allen and Unwin, 1968. * Barry, Lording. Ram-Alley or Merrie-Trickes. Ed. Claude E. Jones. Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1952. * Bowers, Fredson, gen. ed. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966-. * Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1923. * Chapman, George. Plays: The Tragedies. Eds. Allan Holaday, et al. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987. * Day, John. Works. Ed. A.H. Bullen. [1881; reprinted with an introduction by Robin Jeffs] London: Holland P, 1963 * Field, Nathan. The Plays. Ed. William Peery. Austin: U Texas P, 1950. * Henslowe, Philip. Henslowe's Diary. Ed. R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1961. * Hillebrand, Harold Newcomb. The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. * Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson. Ed. Brinsley Nicholson and C.H. Herford. New York: A.A. Wyn, 1949. * Linthicum, M. Channing. Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. New York: Russell and Russell, 1936. * MacIntyre, Jean. Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres. Edmonton: U Alberta P, 1992. * Mason, John. The Turke. Ed. Joseph Q. Adams Jr. [1913] Vaduz: Kraus Reprints, 1963. * Marston, John, and others. The Insatiate Countess. Ed. Giorgio Melchiori. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. * Phillips, Henry Laverock. Annals of the Worshipful Company of Joiners of the City of London from A.D. 1497-1835. London, Privately printed, 1915. * Shapiro, Michael. Children of the Revels. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. * Sharpham, Edward. A Critical Old Spelling Edition of the Works. Ed. Christopher Gordon Petter. New York: Garland P, 1986. * Smith, Irwin. Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Its Design. New York: New York UP, 1964. * Steele, Mary Susan. Plays and Masques at Court During the Reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles. New Haven: Yale UP, 1926. * Sturgess, Keith. Jacobean Private Theatre. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. * Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963-72. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Ay me": Selfishness and Empathy in "Lycidas" Jean E. Graham The College of New Jersey graham@tcnj.edu Graham, Jean E. "'Ay me': Selfishness and Empathy in 'Lycidas'." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 3.1-21 . 1. The speaker of Milton's "Lycidas" has been the subject of much debate--debate concerning his identity, his principal topic, and his attitude toward that topic. Thus far, the critical conversation has been uninformed by current linguistic theory, which has the potential to further complicate a poem that many think requires no further complication. Why do it, then? On the one hand, the poem's many inconsistencies are obvious and frequently discussed; on the other, as Victoria Silver asserts in "'Lycidas' and the Grammar of Revelation," we all--even Stanley Fish--resist them, attempting to make sense of and thus erase the incoherence. Basing her claims on reformed theology, Silver argues convincingly that Milton planned the incoherence of "Lycidas," deliberately emphasizing the gap that always exists between semblance and truth, sign and meaning, and that he did so because it is in this gap that God operates. Besides Silver, I know of two others who accept the unreconcilable contradictions of "Lycidas": Elizabeth Hanson, who argues that "the poem denies its own ecstatically proclaimed end to the pain and anxiety which propel it" (70), and Russell Fraser, who reads the poem as a conflict between two poets, in which the "last two lines are only formally conclusive and suggest a different poet, still at odds with his material" (118). With its contradictions firmly grounded in Milton's theology and intuitive psychology of grief, it is not surprising that the poem resists our resistance, our attempts to close the gap. 2. Linguistic analysis confirms the unreconcilable contradictions and ambiguities of "Lycidas," particularly those of the poem's multiple speakers and subjects. Multiple voices and subjects coexist within the first 185 lines; as Paul Alpers writes, the speaker of the poem possesses "unusual openness and flexibility" as he "enact[s] . . . the play between monody and dialogue--sometimes taking heard voices into his own and sometimes producing voices attributed to others" (481). In addition to his interplay with other speakers such as Phobus, Chamus, and "the Pilot of the Galilean lake," the swain himself possesses at least two distinct voices: one commenting, reflecting, on the other. Furthermore, the Pilot's digression also contains a voice of commentary, which is similar but not identical to the swain's reflective voice. The last eight lines introduce an impersonal, third-person voice, which differs from all previous voices, and further complicates the poem. As Catherine Belsey queries, "Where now is the (authorized) voice of Lycidas?" (33). 3. Not only is "Lycidas" what Walter Schindler calls "a polyphony of voices," but a polyphony of subjects as well (37; cf. Judge 6). Although the final eight lines demonstrate a single focus on the swain, the first 185 lines concern multiple inter-related topics, including the swain, Lycidas, poetry, learning, and spiritual matters. Moreover, while some critics would agree with John Reesing that "Lycidas, whatever its universal implications may ultimately be, is in the first instance a poem about Lycidas," the majority have taken the subject of the poem as Milton himself, whether they judge this a good or an evil (21). Christopher Hill, for instance, argues that "Lycidas is ostensibly a poem about the tragedy of youthful death" but is really a means for Milton "to ask how important worldly success is, and to assess his own life in the light of King's death" (49- 50). Other proposed subjects of the poem include grief; the community of shepherds and Milton's "desire for companionship"; Christ; the church; death and rebirth; forgiveness; baptism; music; youth; homoerotic love transcended by God's eternal love; the tutor as surrogate father; and the poetical succession in which the mantle passes from Lycidas to the "mature consciousness" of the last lines (Bourdette; Davies 83; Frye 121; McLoone 79; Baier; Moore; Lieb; Watterson 50; Martz 547). I would group the possible topics of "Lycidas" into three categories: the speakers, the deceased, and the nonhuman. Many of the last are implied; they transcend the poem's syntax and are thus outside the scope of this discussion. 4. "Modern criticism has rejected the view that the poem's form is incidental to its meaning; the meaning of Lycidas is thought to reside in its elected form" (Johnson 69). Barbara Johnson thus summarized critical thought of the 1970's to introduce her article on the pastoral and grief, but her words are equally applicable to another aspect of the poem's "elected form": its grammar. Two recent linguistic theories concerning sentence structure affirm that the speaker and subject of "Lycidas" are deliberately multiple. One of these theories has been previously used in a discussion of literature (Tolliver's analysis, using Kuno's empathy theory, of "La novia fiel" by Pardo Bazan); otherwise, both have remained until now in the realms of speech and expository prose. 5. According to Susumo Kuno, syntax reveals the speaker's attitudes toward others. In Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy, Kuno defines "empathy" as "the speaker's identification, which may vary in degree, with a person/thing that participates in the event or state that he [/she] describes in a sentence," or as "a camera angle on x rather than y" (206). Kuno assumes that the sentence in its natural state is egocentric--that is, in the case of "Lycidas," that the uncouth Swain will empathize more with himself than with Lycidas. The speaker may still choose to limit the self-empathy; in literature, the writer makes this choice on behalf of the speaker. Language, argues Kuno, contains mechanisms which enable the speaker to limit or disguise self-empathy, mechanisms such as passivization: "Mistakes were made," rather than "I made mistakes." Similarly, the speaker may alter his or her syntactic bias toward others: consider the difference in empathy between "John hit Bill" and "Bill was hit by John." In the former, any bias is in John's favor, while the speaker of the latter probably sides with Bill. Another such mechanism is seen where John and Bill are brothers, and the speaker refers to Bill not by name but as "John's brother"; this last term "can be used to refer to Bill only when the speaker has placed himself closer to John than to his brother; the term . . . does not give Bill an independent characterization, but a characterization that is dependent upon John" (204). Kuno's rule for the latter method of altering empathy is the Descriptor Empathy Hierarchy, while passivization falls under his Surface Structure Empathy Hierarchy (207). 6. Empathy is further complicated by multiple topics within a single sentence. The "empathy relationships" within a sentence must be logically compatible, as stated in Kuno's Ban on Conflicting Empathy Foci; thus "John's brother was hit by him" sounds odd because "John's brother" declares the primary focus to be John, while the passive voice asserts a bias toward Bill (206-7). On the other hand, a grammatical sentence may contain uninterpretable empathy relationships. For instance, in "John and his brother talked to Mary about her sister," the speaker empathizes with John more than his brother and with Mary more than her sister, but gives no clues about the four other empathy relationships: between John and Mary, John and Mary's sister, John's brother and Mary, John's brother and Mary's sister (207-8). Further, a sentence may contain a hierarchy of empathy relationships, as in "John talked to his wife about her sister," where the speaker empathizes most with John and least with John's wife's sister (208). Finally, empathy may differ from sentence to sentence (Kuno's Transitivity of Empathy Relationships rule), so a discourse must be analyzed one sentence at a time (207). 7. Kuno posits several other grammatical rules governing empathy, including the Syntactic Prominence Principle, which states that the noun representing the person or thing receiving empathy tends to be found in a prominent position in the sentence. For instance, the speaker of the following sentence reveals a primary interest in Susan's presence when he or she makes "Susan" the left-most noun in the coordinate structure: "I wonder if Susan and Carol are coming to the meeting this afternoon." When the speaker includes himself or herself in the coordinate structure, however, the Modesty Principle dictates "Jill and I just can't agree on the first sentence of our business plan" rather than "I and Jill." Kuno argues that the latter version is more natural, while the former is "artificial," "taught repeatedly at the grade school level" (232- 33). Finally, Kuno's rule of Semantic Case Hierarchy states that "other things being equal, the more agentive or experiencer- like a role an NP [noun phrase] plays vis-a-vis the action/state represented in the sentence, the easier it is for the speaker to empathize with its referent" (238). According to this rule, the speaker of the sentence "Melissa showed Mary a picture of little William" expresses the most empathy with Melissa, the agent of the action as well as the noun in the most prominent position. Mary receives secondary empathy: she is not active, as she would be in "Mary looked at the picture of little William," but she is syntactically and experientially ahead of the absent William. 8. Although Kuno developed these rules using spoken English and Japanese, his theory is applicable to written discourse as well, with some modifications. Kuno's assumption of the natural egocentricity of the sentence will apply not to the author but to the narrator; as Kuno notes in passing, "[t]he total identification of the speaker with John or Bill . . . seldom occurs in conversations, but it occurs very often in narratives" (205-6). Furthermore, the Humanness Hierarchy (that the speaker empathizes more with the human than the nonhuman, and the animate rather than the inanimate) will not apply if the discourse employs personification. Finally, Kuno formulated his Ban on Conflicting Empathy Foci for spoken language rather than for Milton's compound sentences, each portion of which I have for the purposes of analysis treated as a single sentence. 9. The empathy at the level of the individual sentences of "Lycidas" is shifting, ambiguous, multiplicitous. For instance, the empathy of the first lines is with the laurels and myrtles, personified through apostrophe and made syntactically prominent by their representation as the initial nouns in the sentence: "Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more, / Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never-sere." The third line retains the empathy with these plants, but adds the speaker's self-empathy: "I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude." Here the speaker is the agent, but in the second sentence, "[b]itter constraint, and sad occasion deare" act upon him, "compell" him, suggesting personification. The speaker receives a lesser degree of empathy, as do the laurels and myrtles acted upon by the speaker, but still personified and addressed in "your season due": "Bitter constraint, and sad occasion deare / Compells me to disturb your season due." The third sentence introduces the speaker's empathy with Lycidas: "For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, / Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peere." Lycidas' name is the first noun in the sentence and the subject, and "peere" receives less empathy because it is dependent upon Lycidas. Furthermore, according to the swain, the peer does not exist, leaving Lycidas the sole "real" person of the sentence. The focus on Lycidas continues in the three succeeding sentences: "Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme" and "He must not flote upon his watry biere / Unwept." In the interrogative, the subject "who" is (not) acting, and Lycidas is the recipient of the (in)action, but the sense is that this "who" who will not sing does not exist anyway (like "his peere"); thus it would be difficult to see "who" as the agent or as the recipient of much empathy. In this sentence, Lycidas receives the most empathy, as he does in the following two sentences, where he is the subject and the agent. He is also the only animate being explicit in the sentences, since the hypothetical "who," now not weeping rather than not singing, is merely implied (by "[u]nwept"). The nonexistent unmourning shepherd implies the other shepherds, including the speaker, who are indeed grieving. When the mourning speaker makes the hypothetical non-mourner implicit, he himself becomes merely an implication of an implication, his personality modestly subsumed in the centrality of Lycidas. 10. Thus in one fourteen-line verse paragraph, the speaker of "Lycidas" has moved from empathy with personified laurels and myrtles to self-empathy to a strong and self-negating assertion of empathy with Lycidas. However, in the fifteenth line the empathy shifts once more, this time to the Muses, with whom the speaker demonstrates empathy through word order and agency: "Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well / That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring; / Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string." The Muses subsequently become a singular, male poet, although still the recipient of the strongest empathy: So may some gentle Muse With lucky words favour my destin'd urn And as he passes, turn And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud. (ll. 19-22) The "gentle Muse" is the agent of the proposed actions (favoring, passing, turning, bidding) and the subject of the sentence, but some empathy goes to the speaker as the recipient of these future honors. Lycidas has been notably missing from these lines, but now the speaker demonstrates empathy with "we," thereby joining the interests of "he" with those of "I." Thus we read "For we were nurst upon the self-same hill" (l. 23) rather than "I was nurst upon the same hill as Lycidas." The following sentences continue to focus on "we," as in "we drove a-field" (l. 27) and "our song" (l. 36). As Susan Snyder notes, Lycidas and the swain "are not really differentiated one from the other" (324)--at least not in this section of the poem. 11. The speaker's empathy continues to shift throughout the first 185 lines of "Lycidas," touching on the Angel and the personified Amaranthus, Jove and Neptune, Orpheus and his mother (yet another Muse). Furthermore, other voices incorporated into the swain's "monologue" exhibit the same multiplicity of focus. Phebus begins by speaking of Fame ("Fame is no plant that growes on mortall soil," l. 78), and switches to Jove as the source of fame, with a reference to the swain his speech addresses: "all- judging Jove: / As he pronounces lastly on each deed, / Of so much fame in heav'n expect thy meed" (ll. 82-84). Chamus pronounces a single line, as complex in empathy as it is succinct: "Ah! who hath reft . . . my dearest pledge?" (l. 107). His primary empathy appears to lie with the unknown "who" responsible for Lycidas' death, while "my dearest" expresses not only affection but Lycidas' dependence on Chamus, giving secondary empathy to Chamus himself. After the swain, Phebus, and Chamus, the Pilot's infamous "digression" is more explicable: if his primary focus is not Lycidas, he is not alone. In fact, in his only sentence mentioning Lycidas, he is more concerned with himself, as was Chamus: "How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain" (l. 113). 12. Sometimes the syntactic empathy is with an ambiguous term, further complicating the empathetic situation. For instance, in "Such, Lycidas, thy losse to shepherds eare" (l. 48), if "shepherd" is singular it must, logically, refer either to the swain or to a generic shepherd, but which? Furthermore, the previous use of "shepherd" was plural and referred to the entire company: "Thee shepherds, thee the woods, and desert caves / With wild thyme and the gadding Vine oregrown, / And all their echoes mourn" (ll. 39-41). Perhaps "shepherds eare" is not "shepherd's" but "shepherds'," giving the entire community of shepherds a joint ear as all grieve as one for Lycidas. Another source of confusion is "Fame is the spurre that the clear spirit doth raise" (l. 69). Not only is the identity of "the clear spirit" unclear--does it refer to the swain, to Lycidas, neither, or both?--but the sentence is torn between empathy for the (presumably human) spirit and "Fame," which is the first noun but not human unless it is personified, which is also unclear. Nor is the agent discernible from the syntax: who or what is doing the raising? The frequency of ambiguous structures and of shifts in empathy suggests that the swain is thus expressing his own confusion and conflicting emotions, and either his sense that other mourners are affected in a similarly complex manner or his grief-distracted unconsciousness of their apparent selfishness. 13. Thus far I have considered the basic grammar; the second linguistic theory concerns paragrammatic structures--i.e., structures outside the basic sentence, such as this one. They are "words, phrases, or clauses grammatical in their own right . . . but not integral to the grammar of the basic sentence" (Palacas 515). These structures are distinguished by their disconnectedness from the basic sentence--discontinuity in terms of phonetics, punctuation, syntax, and semantics. Drawing on examples from expository prose, Arthur Palacas argues in his "Parentheticals and Personal Voice" that paragrammatic structures (which include but are not limited to parentheticals) indicate the writer's more "private" thoughts, "second-order thoughts about, or evaluations of, other presented meanings" (509). For instance, in "The paper is marred by generality, I think, but for me it's saved, maybe just saved, by voice," William Coles evaluates his basic assertion, "The paper is marred by generality, but it's saved by voice," by adding the paragrammatical structures "I think," "for me," and "maybe just saved" (Coles 264, qtd. Palacas 511) These structures are separated from the basic sentence by commas (in the first and third instances); by intonation if read aloud (for example, a lowered intonation for "I think" and a raised in "for me"); by a "distinctively loose structural connection in the sentence, verging on the absence of any structural connection" (514); and by a similarly loose connection semantically: the first two comments express conscious subjectivity, while the third hedges, limiting the meaning of the basic sentence. Each of the three paragrammaticals represents "a recognizably self-editing function, wherein the author has self-consciously paused to evaluate what he has just expressed and offers a personal comment on it--an edit" which may sometimes be "perceived as an afterthought" (512). Alternatively, the author has used this syntactic strategy to deliberately project the appearance of self-editing, of reflecting on the basic sentence (515). In either case, Palacas asserts, "[b]y its nature, the reflective mentality is the more self-conscious and is the key to voice" (509-10). 14. The very presence of paragrammaticals in "Lycidas" creates an additional voice, an additional discontinuity in the text. Moreover, the paragrammatic structures comment in significant ways on the themes of the basic text; they tell us about the speaker and his concerns. In effect, they create a personality for the uncouth swain. While Palacas assumes that the speaker and the author are the same--"a reflective voice, the voice of a reflecting self, the author, reflecting on what he is saying" (512)--this assumption would clearly be inappropriate for more sophisticated writers, where paragrammatical structures may represent the voice of a narrator or character rather than the author. At the same time, Milton's paragrammaticals in the poem add the appearance of thought, feeling, subjectivity, so that the syntax encourages us to believe we are reading the reflections of a real person, encourages us to confuse author and speaker(s). 15. One of the concerns in the paragrammatic structures of "Lycidas" is Lycidas. In line 38, for instance, the swain repeats "now thou art gone," emphasizing Lycidas ("thou") and the loss ("gone"). More ambiguous is "Ah me" (l. 56; cf. "Ay me," l. 154): while an expression of grief, the pronoun focusses our attention on the feelings of the speaker, on "me" rather than "you" or "him." Furthermore, two successive paragrammatic structures suggest that the narrator is distressed by the youth of the victim: "dead ere his prime" and "Young Lycidas," in "For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, / (Young Lycidas!) and hath not left his peere" (ll. 8-9). The comments on youth seem applicable to the speaker as well as Lycidas, for the two swains are peers, "nurst upon the self-same hill." The nouns point to Lycidas, but when one young man asks how another young man can die, we suspect him to be conscious of his own mortality. Thus these paragrammatic structures reinforce the blurring between Lycidas and the uncouth swain already seen in the basic grammar. 16. A more serious instance of blurring occurs in the Pilot's speech concerning corruption among the shepherds. Although introduced by the swain with various paragrammaticals--"(reverend sire)," "(quoth he)," and "(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain)"--the Pilot's speech contains only one paragrammatical, "young swain," in: "How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain, / Enough of such as for their bellies sake, / Creep and intrude and climbe into the fold?" (ll. 109, 113-15). Since "young swain" echoes the uncouth swain's "young Lycidas," the shared concern with youthful mortality seems to make the digression more cohesive with the main text. But the speaker is the Pilot rather than the uncouth swain, so this "young" is the paternalism of an authority figure, not the self-identification of a peer. Furthermore, the Pilot's rewriting of "young Lycidas" as "young swain" brings ambiguity to the speech, since the poem contains two swains. So far, the Pilot is deprived only of Lycidas, but the unnamed swain is equally at risk. Rather than cohesion, the Pilot's paragrammar adds to the confusion of "Lycidas." 17. The impression left by both basic grammar and paragrammar is that the swain's sympathies are divided. He is simultaneously mourning for Lycidas and Lycidas' lost talent, and demonstrating an uncomfortable awareness that his own promise is mortal, vulnerable, and as yet unfulfilled. Linguistic analysis bears out the convictions of many critics that the uncouth swain is concerned about himself--as well as the convictions of other critics that the swain's real subject is Lycidas, God, poetry, or fame. 18. The final eight lines, in contrast to the preceding 185, seem cohesive, providing a single speaker and a single subject of empathy: the swain. Lycidas is no longer even mentioned, and the speaker is implicit, leaving the swain as the only human figure. The swain is also portrayed in a much more agentive role than previously: "Thus sang the uncouth swain . . . He touch d the tender stops . . . At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blew" (ll. 186, 188, 192). Thus the ending reinforces the selfishness of the swain, caring more about his own feelings and future than about his deceased companion. But the term "selfish" cannot apply here; this is not the swain speaking but a self-less speaker wholly occupied by concern with another. The speaker of these last lines has completely subverted the natural egocentricity of the sentence, as Kuno noted was possible only in narrative. William Oram (conflating the various voices of the poem) remarks aptly, "for the first time in the poem his concern for his friend appears completely unselfish" (61; cf. Zagorin 11). Moreover, these lines contain no paragrammatical structures, no reflective commentary on the basic sentence structure, so the speaker is apparently voice-less as well as self-less. To echo Fish with a different focus, this speaker, unlike all previous speakers in the poem, is very nearly anonymous. 19. Yet this narrator is indeed saying something--just not about himself/herself. This speaker has different concerns from the paragrammatical voices of the poem: neither death nor youth are mentioned, nor any grief expressed. The focus on the swain seems consistent with one of the many topics of the previous lines, but the attitude toward him has changed: the vision for the swain's future is now one of "fresh woods and pastures new" rather than of youthful promise lost. The voice of this narrator appears coherent and objective, unlike the confused and subjective "Ay me" voice, yet it is a voice. To cite Palacas once more, "one clear meaning of voice is actually a construction of multiple voices, including an objective-style voice and one or more pragmatically motivated subjective-style, reflective voices" (523). According to Palacas' theory, the main grammar is the "objective-style voice," which appears to present truth, and main grammar is all the last eight lines provide. Milton has replaced the complex narration of the swain--with its multiple concerns and digressions--with a single voice authoritatively proposing the poem's one true meaning. Moreover, it now appears that this voice has been quoting (and observing from a distance, like the Father in Paradise Lost) the uncouth swain, who has been a pseudo- or at best a sub-narrator. However, the mainstream, "objective-style" grammar of this voice is undermined by the voice of the swain, whose paragrammatic structures give him "personality." The voice of authority may seem trustworthy, but it is the swain's voice that seems genuine and, perhaps, likeable--revealing, also, a problem similar to that of Paradise Lost's Satan and fallen Adam appearing more interesting and sympathetic than the Father. We know nothing about the final narrator, not even whether to use a male or female pronoun, not even whether he/she had ever known or mourned Lycidas. 20. The anonymity of this narrator, the blank space where a personality might be, tempts many critics to fill the space with Milton's personality and experiences. Yet if "voice" is a sign of an author's presence in the text, these eight lines are the most removed from Milton. The only "real person" we meet in "Lycidas" is the swain, apparently reflecting on his first-order comments, offering us his "true" feelings: a muddle of despair, anger, selfishness, grief. To adapt the ambiguous phrasing of line 166, for Lycidas the swain's sorrow is not dead; although Lycidas is now "the Genius of the shore" (l. 183), his friends still mourn. I do not mean to argue that Milton intended to subvert the authority of the final narrator, but that the grammatical strategies which portray the swain as a convincing mourner inevitably give him the poem's most compelling voice. Moreover, that the swain's "personality" consists primarily of conflicting feelings about Lycidas' death accords well with the historical/biographical backgrounds of "Lycidas." As recently argued by Norman Postlethwaite and Gordon Campbell, textual and other evidence suggest that Milton respected Edward King's learning and experienced close friendship with him (79-80). Like the swain for Lycidas, Milton would have experienced for King the composite of emotions known as grief. 21. Linguist Susan Wright, in reviewing Kuno's book, commented that Kuno aims "to demonstrate that notions which have been considered to be non-syntactic (belonging to the area of performance rather than competence . . . ) can be described and rigorously applied in syntactic analysis" (554). At the same time, Kuno reports a wish to avoid reducing language to syntax alone; as he states in his conclusion, grammaticality is "very often the result of the interaction of numerous factors, both syntactic and nonsyntactic" (272). I would extend Wright's description, with this qualification, not only to Palacas' theory, but to my own approach. Much of the effects of "Lycidas," noted by others, are explainable in terms of the poem's syntax. Rather than making radically new claims I have primarily shown support for those readings which affirm the complexity and discontinuity of the poem, following the advice of Jonathan Culler: Poetry has complex effects which are extremely difficult to explain, and the analyst finds that his [sic] best strategy is to assume that the effects he sets out to account for have been conveyed to the reader and then to postulate certain general operations which might explain these effects and analogous effects in other poems. (125) Yet the poem transcends syntax. Linguistics can tell us what makes the poem incoherent, how the "speaker" is multiple, but not who the speaker is. Thus, for instance, I have been careful to use the poem's term "Pilot of the Galilean lake" rather than attempting to identify the Pilot as St. Peter, or as Pecheux argues, a combination of Peter, Moses, and Christ (238). The gap between sign and meaning, between semblance and truth, so evident in "Lycidas," ultimately defeats linguistic analysis--or defeats the ultimate linguistic analysis, at least. "Lycidas" fits Barthes' definition of "text" as opposed to "work": the text is "structured but off-centred, without closure"; it is not merely plural but "accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural" (1007). The irreducible plurality of "Lycidas" accurately represents the complexity and plurality of the human consciousness, and especially the human consciousness suffering the destabilizing pain of grief. Moreover, it embodies the indeterminacy of meaning, the distance between sentence structure and truth. Syntax cannot lead us to God. Note This article is a revision of a paper delivered at the Twentieth International Conference on Patristic, Mediaeval, and Renaissance Studies, Villanova University (Villanova, PA), 16 September 1995. I have analyzed and quoted "Lycidas" in the 1638 Justa Edouardo King facsimiles, but the alterations of other editions ("Ah me" to "Ay me" or parentheses to commas) do not materially affect the instances of grammar and paragrammar cited here. Finally, many thanks to Art Palacas, who provided useful commentary on a draft of my conference paper, after introducing me to Kuno's theory and his own. Works Cited * Alpers, Paul. "Lycidas and Modern Criticism." English Literary History 49 (1982): 468-96. * Baier, Lee. "Sin and Repentance in Lycidas." Philological Quarterly 67 (1988): 291-302. * Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." Image--Music--Text (1977). Repr. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 1005-10. * Belsey, Catherine. John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. * Bourdette, Robert E., Jr. "Mourning Lycidas: The Poem of the Mind in the Act of Finding What Will Suffice." 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Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. * Lieb, Michael. "Milton's 'Unexpressive Nuptial Song': A Reading of Lycidas." Renaissance Papers. Ed. A. Leigh Deneef and M. Thomas Hester. Raleigh, NC: Southeast Renaissance Conference, 1983. * Martz, Louis L. Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton's Poetry. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980. * McLoone, George H. "Lycidas: Hurled Bones and the Noble Mind of Reformed Congregations." Milton Studies 26 (1990): 59-80. * Milton, John. "Lycidas." Justa Edouardo King. 1638. Facsimile Text Society 45. Intro. Ernest C. Mossner. New York: Columbia UP, 1939. 20-25. * ---. "Lycidas." Justa Edovardo King: A Facsimile Edition of the Memorial Volume in which Milton's "Lycidas" First Appeared. 1638. Intro. Edward Le Comte. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1978. * Moore, John Rees. "Milton and the Life to Come." Shenandoah 31 (1980): 79-100. * Oram, William A. "Nature, Poetry, and Milton's Genii." Milton and the Art of Sacred Song. Eds. J. Max Patrick and Roger H. Sundell. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1979. * Palacas, Arthur L. "Parentheticals and Personal Voice." Written Communication 6 (1989): 506-27. * Pecheux, Mother M. Christopher. "The Dread Voice in Lycidas." Milton Studies 9 (1976): 221-41. * Postlethwaite, Norman, and Gordon Campbell. "Edward King, Milton's 'Lycidas': Poems and Documents. Milton Quarterly 28 (1994): 77-111. * Reesing, John. Milton's Poetic Art: A Mask, Lycidas, and Paradise Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1968. * Schindler, Walter. Voice and Crisis: Invocation in Milton's Poetry. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984. * Silver, Victoria. "'Lycidas' and the Grammar of Revelation." English Literary History 58 (1991): 779-808. * Snyder, Susan. "Nature, History, and the Waters of Lycidas." Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 323-35. * Tolliver, Joyce. "Knowledge, Desire and Syntactic Empathy in Pardo Bazan's 'La novia fiel.'" Hispania 72 (1989): 909-18. * Watterson, William Collins. "'Once More, O ye Laurels': Lycidas and the Psychology of Pastoral." Milton Quarterly 27 (1993): 48-57. * Wright, Susan. Review in Journal of Linguistics 24 (1988): 553-59. * Zagorin, Perez. Milton: Aristocrat and Rebel: The Poet and His Politics. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1992. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reflections on Milton and Ariosto Roy Flannagan Ohio University FLANNAGAN@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu Flannagan, Roy. "Reflections on Milton and Ariosto." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 4.1-16 . 1. We used to have a good piece of literary gossip about Milton and his supposed scribbles in a 1591 edition of Sir John Harington's translation of Ariosto. William Riley Parker, the great biographer of Milton, transmitted and endorsed the rumor. According to Parker, sometime around the year 1642, awaiting the return of his errant wife Mary Powell, Milton "had reread Sir John Harington's translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso" (Parker 251). 2. This sounds too good to be true. We would have Milton, awaiting the return of his estranged wife, perhaps reading Canto 28 over and over. Parker is referring to a marginal note in a copy of the 1591 edition of Harington, which he thought "almost certainly in Milton's hand" (884). The note, actually to be found at the end of Canto 46, reads "Questo libro due volte Io letto, Sept. 21. 1642" (Columbia ed. 18: 336). I have always wanted to believe that this book belonged to Milton and was written in it by him, but that bit in Italian had always seemed a bit touristy[1] to me -- why Italian, why that canto, and why should Milton boast about reading a book twice? John Shawcross, in 1963, denied that the spelling or the handwriting was Milton's.[2] Working independently, Sotheby's Peter Beal also listed the marginalia among "undoubtedly spurious" attributions.[3] Parker's gossip, as a consequence, should be disbelieved, though the same misinformation remains enshrined in the Columbia Milton and the Yale Milton, and critics are still citing it as truth; Mary Ann Radzinowicz, for example, does so (8).[4] Some mystery remains: the book, that 1591 copy of Ariosto in which Milton was supposed to have written, has disappeared so far as I know. Maurice Kelley saw it. The Reverend H. A. D. Surridge apparently bought it and reported on it in 1938 (Parker 861, 884), but no one knows anything of Surridge. When Gordon Campbell and Peter Beal went separately looking for the book, Campbell could not locate it. Beal reports that it is "privately owned in England."[5] With the witnesses of Shawcross and Beal, though, we can be assured that the hand in the margin was not Milton's. 3. As if this weren't confusing enough, Milton certainly did read the poet he called "Ariosto of Ferrara" (Of Reformation [Yale ed.] 1: 558), and in Of Reformation he himself translated two four-line sequences from Canto 34, from the English knight Astolfo's slightly sacrilegious voyage to the moon, where the lunatics who have lost their wits reside, where Astolfo is guided by St. John the Evangelist. Milton's translation is very close to that of Sir John Harington, in the two four-line passages from which he chooses to quote. So we can conclude that Milton did indeed read Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, probably in the original but certainly in Harington's famous folio. Thanks to John Shawcross and to Peter Beal, however, we know he did not scribble in that 1591 book. 4. Milton's comments in Of Reformation (dated May 1641) reveal his critical perspective on Ariosto. In bringing St. John to the Moon, Ariosto is culpable: "he feigns," says Milton, laconically ([Yale ed.] 1: 560).[6] Upon arriving at the episode dealing with Astolfo on the moon, Milton writes, a reader has to be "following the scope of his [Ariosto's] Poem in a difficult knot" (560). Ariosto, perhaps because he is taking a man to the moon as well as defaming the sanctitude of St. John, is considered to be feigning as a writer and composing knotty poetry or a knotty plot. Milton always uses the word feign pejoratively -- the same way he uses the word fable as a verb -- to put down writers who do not admit eternal Christian truths, whether they are the unenlightened ancient poets like Ovid, or modern Roman Catholic, romantic epicists like Ariosto. Pagans and Papists look alike. 5. Either the plot or the poetry itself of Orlando Furioso, Milton implies, is in a "knot." The more polite word that many modern critics use for Ariosto's intricate plotting is tapestry (Wiggins).[7] Milton seems to be on to something critically with that knot image, and he does not appear to use it in a complimentary way: a few pages later in Of Reformation he contrasts the "sober, plain, and unaffected stile of the Scriptures" with the "knotty Africanisms, the pamper'd metafors; the intricat, and involv'd sentences of the Fathers; ..." (568; emphasis mine). Milton apparently did not like tapestry plots or knotty styles. 6. We can add up the epithet "of Ferrara," the "feign" reference, and the "difficult knot" to indicate that Milton knew something of Ariosto's biography and possibly about his connection with the Este family in Ferrara (by 1641 Milton had been to Italy and come back); that he was highly suspicious of an Italian romantic epic's attempt to take an English knight to the moon; and that he considered Ariosto's plotting to be "knotty." 7. In 1642, when he published Reason of Church Government, Milton was still thinking of Ariosto, and the famous unobeyed injunction of Pietro Bembo to Ariosto that he should write in Latin rather than in his native tongue.[8] Milton expressed his opinion about his choice to write poetry in English, borrowing from Harington's life of Ariosto: For which cause, and not only for that I knew it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among the Latines, I apply'd my selfe to that resolution which Ariosto follow'd against the perswasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; . . . . ([Yale ed.] 1: 810-11) 8. Milton is certainly following Harington's "Life of Ariosto," included as an appendix to his translation of Orlando Furioso, very closely: . . . when Bembo would have disswaded him [Ariosto] from writing Italian, alledging that he should winne more praise by writing Latine, his answere was that he had rather be one of the principal and chiefe Thuscan writers then scarce the second or third among the Latines, adding that he found his humour (his Genius, he called it) best inclining to it.[9] Milton is making an implicit comparison between himself, as native vernacular poet writing beautifully in London English, and Ariosto, who made the same choice to write in the choicest Italian, the Tuscan dialect also used by Dante and Boiardo (at least in Berni's refacimento).[10] 9. Though Milton seems to have had a youthful infatuation with the poetry of Ariosto, Boiardo, Vida, DuBartas (through Sylvester), Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, he seems to have rejected the poetic styles and the subject matter of almost all of their works by the time he wrote Paradise Lost. But Tasso is not in this list. His epic theory gave Milton the underpinning for his own sage and serious epic poetry (Rhu 77-92; Brand 250-56), and Jerusalem Delivered was an example of serious elegance and eloquence -- even of hidden allegory (see Treip) -- that he could not ignore. But why was Ariosto to be relegated to the status of the writer of episodes that needed to be parodied, satirized (see Kantra), and discarded as part of the "tinsel trappings" that had, for Milton, infested romantic epic, causing him to reject King Arthur and the Matter of Britain as a subject and to choose instead the timeless and placeless history of Adam and Eve? 10. Following a method derived from Clark Hulse in his recent book (1-25), I would like to carry a tradition of illustration from Ariosto to Harington to Milton, in the posthumous 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, in order to indicate what Milton would have kept and what he would have rejected of Ariosto's method of constructing an epic.[11] 11. Two panels of illustrations, the first from the infamous Canto 28 in Harington's translation, show Harington's typical, lovable, "dirty" tricks. Being something of a professional rogue and mischief-maker,[12] Harington took Ariosto's illustration to Canto 28 and caused three obscene panels to be added to it, scenes of copulation that one hardly notices until one looks closely. Neither Milton nor his illustrators would think of posing Adam and Eve in this way. Although they are naked and make love, neither Milton nor his illustrators would let Adam and Eve's nudity in their love-making become prurient.[13] 12. Milton dropped what he considered to be trivial or titillative. His Adam and Eve do not carve their names on trees (see Lee), nor is Eve a flirtatious bolter like Angelica. The comedy in Paradise Lost is heavy by comparison with that in the Orlando Furioso -- it exists, as Tasso said it should, in the heavier forms of sarcasm or dark humor holding evil up to ridicule and scorn. There is very little of what appears to be gratuitous humor in Paradise Lost, perhaps some in that elephant who writhes his lithe proboscis to make Adam and Eve laugh, and perhaps some in the situation of Adam telling God why He doesn't need a mate, while Adam does. 13. In thinking for thirty years or so about Ariosto and Milton -- with or without believing that Milton made marginal comments in a specific edition of Harington's translation -- I keep returning to what Milton in his argument to book 3 first labeled the Limbo of Vanity. So on this windie Sea of Land, the Fiend Walk'd up and down alone bent on his prey, Alone, for other Creature in this place Living or liveless to be found was none, None yet, but store hereafter from the earth Up hither like Aereal vapours flew Of all things transitorie and vain, when Sin With vanity had filld the works of men: Both all things vain, and all who in vain things Built thir fond hopes of Glorie or lasting fame, Or happiness in this or th' other life; All who have thir reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful Superstition and blind Zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, emptie as thir deeds; All th' unaccomplisht works of Natures hand, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixt, Dissolvd on Earth, fleet hither, and in vain, Till final dissolution, wander here, Not in the neighbouring Moon, as some have dreamd; Those argent Fields more likely habitants, Translated Saints, or middle Spirits hold Betwixt th' Angelical and Human kinde: Hither of ill-joynd Sons and Daughters born First from the ancient World those Giants came With many a vain exploit, though then renownd: (440-65)[14] 14. What Ariosto had done with his moon inhabited by lost wits, Milton deliberately distorts into anti-Roman Catholic propaganda. Milton seems to be correcting Ariosto's moral misconceptions about what sorts of odd beings might be inhabiting worlds other than ours. The Limbo of Vanity is a parody of Ariosto's Moon of Lost Wits. Just as Milton's illustrators would change Harington's innocent prurience to serious cyclical depiction of the activities of Adam and Eve, Milton makes Ariosto serious and uses his own version of Ariosto's moon-wandering with which to make sardonic satire. Milton rises up against Italian religion and Italian false-hearted literature, to some extent betraying friends in Italy that he had kept contact with at least into the late 1640s (Parker, 934-35). To set the record straight, however, Milton never told his Italian friends such as Carlo Dati that he would not betray them on religious grounds. 15. The satire in the Limbo of Vanity narration in Paradise Lost is unique in the epic. It is obviously satire, it is propaganda, and it is out of place--except that it is in a Satanic setting, at a point in the epic when Satan is chaotically sailing through the air towards Earth. It associates the Roman Catholic Church that Milton had observed in action in 1638 with indulgences, relics, icons, abuses, much as Chaucer's depiction of the Summoner and Pardoner does. It makes the reader laugh abusively at the prospect of all those precious relics floating in air. 16. When I think, often, of what Milton might have received from Ariosto -- his equal in brilliance and poetic control -- I keep returning to the Moon of Lost Wits and the Limbo of Vanity. What Milton did to Ariosto's voyage is similar to Harington's manipulation of Ariosto's illustration: he took it away from Ariosto, put it into his own pocket, altered it, and corrected Ariosto's irreverence toward his own Roman Catholic religion with his, Milton's own, sardonic seriousness about his version of protestantism. Figure Ariosto (as viewed by Milton Milton) (as evidenced in practice in PL) Net Linear progression--avoidance of the snare Tapestry Chronology as represented in 1688 Folio illustrations Diffuse epic Focused and unified epic Frivolous and suspicious, for Moralistic and reverent irreverence Episodic (short Coherent (demands fit reader's attention span) concentration) "labyrinthine plenitude" (Shapiro 14) Spare ethic with words Rules to be broken Eternal truths to be maintained Nothing taken seriously (McNulty xi) Everything guided by God's providence Mirroring and doubling (Shapiro Ch. 5) Mirroring and doubling and echoing Moon of Lost Wits (OF 35.27&28) Limbo of Vanity Notes 1. "Touristy" in the sense of "devised in order to sell something." I have in mind icons such as the "Milton mulberry" at Christ's College, Cambridge, or the "Milton stepping stone" at Forest Hill, the site of the Powell family home, where Milton according to local rumor was either supposed to have gotten down from his carriage on his way to meet Mary Powell or where he was supposed to have stood while proposing. I have learned of these various local tourist landmarks firsthand while visiting both places. 2. Apparently Parker read his pupil Shawcross' article too late to influence him in the biography, though Parker (861) alludes to this article without ascribing it. 3. Beal (2: 80). 4. Gordon Campbell will correct Parker's assumption in the new and revised edition of Parker's biography, as he just has written me by electronic mail. In answer to my query if he had corrected Parker on the 1591 Ariosto, Gordon Campbell wrote me, "Yes, I corrected Parker. I don't know where it [the edition of Ariosto] is. Nor does Peter Beal, who was asked to look at it some years ago." Shawcross, however, wrote me that Beal did indeed see the book and independently reached the conclusion that the hand was not Milton's (letter of 19 February 1996). 5. Campbell (electronic mail note of 9 February 1996). Beal calls the Ariosto "undoubtedly spurious, despite elaborate claims made by earlier commentators" (80). 6. Since Harington uses the word "feign" in the context of what a poet does for a living in his own defense of poetry, in his foreword to his translation, Milton may be using Harington against Ariosto. See McNulty (4-5). 7. John Addington Symonds used the web and tapestry image to describe the plotting of Boiardo's Orlando Inamorato: "We might compare Boiardo's romance to an immense web, in which a variety of scenes and figures are depicted by the constant addition of new threads. None of the old threads are wasted; not one is merely superfluous. If one is dropped for a moment and lost to sight, it reappears again" (1: 406). McNulty (xli) prefers an architectural image. 8. The Yale editors (1: 810-11n71) cite Giovanni Battista Pigna, I Romanzi, n=E8 quali della Poesia & della vita del'Ariosto con nuovo mode si trata (Venice, 1554), who was actually one of Harington's sources for information about Ariosto's life (McNulty xlviii). Pigna was the first to notice the relationship between Ariosto's mad Orlando and Seneca's mad Hercules (Ascoli 55). 9. I quote from McNulty (571). The Yale editors make the connections between the two passages as well (Yale 1: 810-11n71). 10. See H.F. Woodhouse, Language and Style in a Renaissance Epic: Berni's Corrections to Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato" (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1982). Neil Harris concludes "To define the influence of the Orlando Innamorato on Milton (and the same is most likely true of Spenser) we must make our principal text Berni's refacimento" (86; Harris's argument is supported by information provided on pp. 71-87). 11. For quite a different perspective on "the possibility of deep and fundamental similarities between these two poems," see DiCesare xx-xxii. 12. In his notes to Book 41, Harington wrote "one end of my travell in this worke is to make my frends merie" (McNulty 480). 13. So far as I have been able to determine, [Image] Diane McColley's recent book on Milton's Eden and the visual arts does not mention prurience, or satire, or humor, in depictions of Adam and Eve in Paradise or out of it. But in an email message to me on March 1, Professor McColley pointed out that many of the seventeenth-century depictions of Adam and Eve have humorous elements, such as elephants copulating in Eden or an apparently drunken Adam and Eve after the Fall. These are elements that Milton played with: though his elephants don't copulate, they do a silly dance; and Adam and Eve do become intoxicated from the effects of eating the fruit. This illustration, from Book 9 of the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, is excerpted here with permission (and is available in complete form) from the Milton Quarterly internet site, . 14. The quotation from Paradise Lost is from my edition. Works Cited and Consulted * Ascoli, Albert Russell. Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. * Ariosto, Ludovico. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso: Selections from the Translation of Sir John Harington. Ed. Rudolf Gottfried. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963. * ---. Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington. Ed. Robert McNulty. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. * ---. Orlando Furioso (the Frenzy of Orlando): A Romantic Epic by Ludovico Ariosto. Ed. Barbara Reynolds. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1973. * Beal, Peter. Index of English Literary Manuscripts Volume II, 1625-1700. London: Mansell, 1993. * Brand, C.P. Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and his Contribution to English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1965. * Cavallo, Jo Ann. Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato: An Ethics of Desire. Cranberry, NJ: Associated UP, 1993. * Chesney, Elizabeth A. The Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1982. * DiCesare, Mario, ed. Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991. * Flannagan, Roy, ed. John Milton. Paradise Lost. New York: Macmillan, 1993. * Greene, Thomas M. The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1963. * Giammatti, A. Bartlett. The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. * Harris, Neil. Milton's 'Sataneid': The Poet and the Devil in 'Paradise Lost.' Diss. U Leicester, 1985. * Hughes, Merritt Y. "Milton's Limbo of Vanity." 7-24 in Amadeus P. Fiore, ed. Th'Upright Heart and Pure: Essays on John Milton Commemorating the Tercentenary of the Publication of Paradise Lost. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1967. * Hulse, Clark. The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. * Kantra, Robert A. "Miltonic and Other Utopians." 75-92 in All Things Vain: Religious Satirists and Their Art. University Park: Pennsylvania SUP, 1984. * Kates, Judith A. Tasso and Milton: The Problem of Christian Epic. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1983. * Lee, Rensselaer W. Names on Trees: Ariosto into Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977. * McColley, Diane Kelsey. A Gust for Paradise: Milton's Eden and the Visual Arts. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. * Marinelli, Peter V. Ariosto & Boiardo: The Origins of Orlando Furioso. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1987. * Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. [8 vols.] Ed. Don M. Wolfe, et al. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1953-82. * ---. The Complete Works of John Milton. [18 vols.] Ed. Frank Allen Patterson, et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1938. * Murrin, Michael. History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. * Parker, William Riley. Milton: A Biography. [2 vols.] Oxford: Clarendon P, 1968. * Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. Milton's Epics and the Book of Psalms. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. * Rhu, Lawrence F. The Genesis of Tasso's Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of Their Significance. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993. * Shapiro, Marianne. The Poetics of Ariosto. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988. * Shawcross, John T. "What We Can Learn from Milton's Spelling." Huntington Library Quarterly 26 (1963): 351-61. * Shumaker, Wayne. "Paradise Lost and the Italian Epic Tradition." 87-100 in Amadeus P. Fiore, ed. Th'Upright Heart and Pure: Essays on John Milton Commemorating the Tercentenary of the Publication of Paradise Lost. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1967. * Symonds, John Addington. Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature, in Two Parts. New York: Capricorn, 1964. * Treip, Mindele Anne. Allegorical Poetics & the Epic: the Renaissance Tradition to Paradise Lost. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1994. * Wiggins, Peter DeSa. Figures in Ariosto's Tapestry: Character and Design in the Orlando Furioso. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Weimann. Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse. Ed. David Hillman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. xii+244 pp. ISBN 0801851904 Cloth; 080185191 2 Paper. Anthony Johnson =C5bo Akademi University anthony.johnson@abo.fi Johnson, Anthony. "Review of Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 5.1-8 . 1. The reader of Robert Weimann's prodigious critical output in English and German -- which runs, excluding reviews, to some hundred and forty four books and articles over the last twenty years -- will be aware that a significant number of them, especially since the early nineteen-eighties, have been implicitly or explicitly concerned with the relation of authority to literature (particularly in the early modern period). For such a reader there is much that is familiar in the present work, since it comprises an expansion and reworking of a number of previous articles as well as the opening chapters of a book -- Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis: Autorit=E4t und Repr=E4sentation im elisabethanischen Theater (Berlin: Aufbau, 1988) -- representing, in all, a body of writing which -- both geographically and temporally speaking -- appears to owe more than a little of its acuity to the conditions of its own composition on both sides of the wall. 2. Readers unfamiliar with Weimann will quickly discover that they are in the presence of a formidable work by a formidable scholar. And if they are prepared to persist through the slippery terrain of the first thirty pages, with its dense rhetorical foliage and stylistic obliquity, they will find that the work opens onto a series of clearings -- or, perhaps (more aptly), unconcealments -- in which Weimann engages with two separate but interrelated issues: the rupturing of the authority structures of the middle ages by the Reformation; and the crises of authority that are engendered in early modern fiction (in part, at least), by this change. Hence the volume breaks into halves: one concerned with close readings of passages from Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII, Gardiner, Bancroft, Bacon, and "Martin Marprelate"; the other preoccupying itself (after an initial consideration of the Beowulf poet, Chr=E9tien de Troyes, and Malory), with chapters on the prose fiction of Erasmus, Rabelais, Nashe and Cervantes. 3. Within the context of such a work it soon becomes clear that Weimann's rhetorical strategy is not based on whimsy. Rather, it would appear that his prose, like that of Walter Benjamin (who is invoked on several occasions as a prolegomenon to some of the more illuminating observations), is designed to resist the easy binarisms and clich=E9s of mainstream American scholarly prose: an issue that is certainly germane to the subject of the book itself. For what is at stake in the volume (as the epilogue makes clear), is -- on one hand -- an attempt to embrace the new world of historical perceptions afforded to early modern studies by works such as Foucault's The Order of Things, and -- on the other hand -- a critique of the weaknesses and magisterial oversimplifications implicit in Foucault's view of the period. In particular, Weimann takes exception to what he sees as the reductivism of Foucault's "sixteenth century episteme," whereby early modern representation and interpretation could be comprehended, for the most part, within the terms of a four-fold figural pattern comprising "convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and the play of sympathies" (191). Despite its attractions, such a model, Weimann suggests, is simply not enough to account for the instability, resilience, hybridization and functional contrariness of sixteenth-century representations: not least, because it disregards (or minimizes) their involvement with "nondiscursive practices, with market relations and new technologies of distribution," as well as neglecting the importance of Geneva, Wittenburg, and Port Royal (191). Accordingly, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse draws attention to the open and disturbing questions of early modern culture, highlighting the contradictions, the unlikely bedfellows, and the paradoxes enmeshed in its world pictures. 4. Weimann's opening up of these questions is highly suggestive. Accepting the emergence of the centralized nation state as the arena for his investigations (at the same time as he rejects its self-legitimating claims as a monolithic source of power), his studies in the first half of the book concentrate on the contradictions inherent in the triangular relationship between discourse, authority and power. For Weimann, the sixteenth century offered a series of locations in which the mediaeval practice of subordinating the act of writing to a prior authority (mediated by ecclesiastical power), was progressively (though not systematically) challenged. Luther's elimination of the ecclesiastical middle ground between the self and "the Word as revealed in Scripture," collapsed potestas into auctoritas in a new way, enabling him, through a rhetorical appropriation (in the vernacular) of the carnivalesque guise of the fool, to consolidate a defiantly self-authorizing position (37). There was, however, a sense in which, for Luther, the resonances of such an act were contained by the consonance of the scriptural message with the revelations of the heart and a dualistic (neo-Augustinian) conception of the "two kingdoms" -- the spiritual and the mundane -- which allowed him to assert the freedom of the spirit (from a personal religious viewpoint), in tandem with an acceptance of the subordination of the flesh to the politics of the nation state. But for others the rift which Luther had helped to create was capable of generating unforeseen indeterminacies. In a deft analysis of Genevan cultural tensions in the 1540s and 1550s, Weimann shows how Calvin -- having reinforced the Latin collocation of potestas and auctoritas in an attempt to reconcile political and ecclesiastical ministration -- was plunged into a new "two-fold polemic" between the traditionalizing forces of the old church and the subjectivizing forces of the Anabaptists (for whom revelation was an unfinished process). Calvin's solution -- that revelation had been closed by the Scriptures and merely needed to be "sealed" by the testimony of the individual Spirit -- represented, of course, a compromise (as did his attempt to "fix" constructions of the Holy Spirit itself). And it is perhaps understandable that, from this point onwards, Weimann's text focuses increasingly on the pragmatic and the contingent -- Henry VIII's "politization" of religion; Gardiner's debate with the Duke of Somerset over the limits of authorisation (especially with regard to "printers, players and preachers"); or Bancroft's strategic navigation between Catholic and Puritan positions in an endeavour to reconcile the disparate views of his diverse congregation at Paul's Cross with the reactionary (yet enforceable) terms of the Elizabethan Settlement (75). In so far as any general tendency can be seen in all of this, it is that with the passing of time and a widening of the gap between modes of discourse and the traditional channels of legitimation it becomes possible to articulate an increasing repertoire of attitudes on an increasing number of subjects, both within and without the ecclesiastical sphere. Authority, as well as being repressive, may also be a creative and productive "aspect of power" (192). 5. By 1651, Thomas Hobbes (ignoring the mimetic precepts of tradition), could define acting in terms of the representation of words and actions owned by someone else: namely, the author (12); and there is a sense in which this observation sets the frame of orientation that guides the second half of the volume. For here, Weimann concerns himself with the isolation of a series of representative moments in which such a severance from traditional literary authority could be achieved. After three brief thumbnail sketches of authorial positions in the middle ages, he proceeds, in what appears to be the richest section of the book, to demonstrate the means by which the traditional discursive categories of allegory, chivalric romance, and (neo)classical rhetoric can be emptied out and reappropriated within the terms of the new author functions which were generated in the early years of the sixteenth century. Hence the Erasmian Praise of Folly, in an excellent reading by Weimann, homes in on the abgrund -- the abyss between what is said and what is meant -- intercepting the traditional lines of allegorical signification through an ironic inversion of the positions of Wisdom and Folly that resists any sort of easy solution or closure. Hence Rabelais, in his discussion of Gargantua's colours (white and blue) questions the authority behind their traditional symbolic meanings, opening the way for that "playful exploration of indeterminacy" (154) that is to become a constitutive element of much subsequent fictional prose. Hence Nashe, in The Unfortunate Traveller, mixes the modes of fabula and historia -- the "phantasticall" and the historical -- in a state of suspension that encourages an interrogation of the traditional distinctions between them. Hence Cervantes in the introduction to his Don Quixote, abrogates his own judgments on the Don in favour of the reader's opinion, thereby articulating a new aesthetic of reception in which the meaning of a text emerges as a function of the consumer's own readerly experience (188). 6. This, then, is Weimann at his best, producing a rhizomatic text packed with sharply realised close readings that (supported by powerful subterranean interconnections), is capable of suggesting the contours of imaginative change without succumbing to the dictatorial temptations of a grand narrative. Where the book is less successful is in its more schematic moments. The "radically foreshortened perspective" that Weimann offers on "preliterary patterns of narrative legitimation" (116), and the treatment he accords Anglo-Saxon and later medieval fiction suffers (by contrast with the closely contextualised dense readings that he supplies for early modern writers) from a lack of presentation space. Here, Weimann does not really do justice to the complexities of the cultures and historical contexts covered. For example, his comment that "Abbot Aelfric's clerical basis of legitimation seems deliberately to reject the almost diametrically opposed inclination in Beowulf to sustain an oral context as a strongly supplementary ground on which to validate what is represented," creates an uncomfortably steep gradient for comparison between a tenth-century ecclesiastic, an eighth-century secular poem, two vastly different social settings, and dissimilar positions for the evaluation of oral or textual legitimations (119). The transmission of Christian thought in Anglo-Saxon society was, of course, a highly textualised process, but a more telling contrast might have been to invoke Alcuin at this point. Or to take another example, the community of audience and teller (118), which is posited (via Ker's 1908 comment on "unity of sentiment") in connection with Beowulf could be quite easily questioned when the heterogeneity of cultural authority that is displayed in the poem itself (or lamented by the culturally displaced persons of the elegies) is taken into account. 7. What is at issue here is that rather than schematically perpetuating the stereotype of a monolithic middle ages in order to contrast it with the discursive diversity of the early modern period, Weimann may have done better to open out the former as a environment where the fluidity of manuscript transmission prevented the totalizing fixities of authoritative statement that became possible with the advent of print culture; where what Walter Ong has called the "structural amnesia" of oral culture could become a potent tool in the disregarding of unwelcome authoritative precedents; or where the troping of biblical texts within chants could alter their agency and, hence, undermine their stability. (In such a context the history of heresy; Bede's propagandistic construction of the Roman view of the church in his Ecclesiastical History; or Aelfric's battle of authority against the vernacular Bible also come to mind as suitable subjects for investigation.) In short, the sort of rhizomatic approach that Weimann has adopted toward the early modern period could be profitably extended backwards into a similar (though not, of course, identical) understanding of the history of the Western Church (with its correlative literatures). For here, too, is a tale of negotiation and instability (a major difference with the Renaissance, however, lying in the extent to which its construction of the illusion of a monolithic culture has been given credence by subsequent generations). 8. There is much, then, that this book has to offer for a reassessment of the past against which early modern sensibilities reacted. But for the moment the main thrust of Weimann's energy appears to have been taken up by looking ahead; and his forthcoming volumes on Shakespeare and on modern American fiction promise a welcome extension to the necessary but difficult project, outlined in the present book, of rethinking the role of authority and representation in the early modern imagination. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Thomas H. Luxon. Literal Figures Puritan Allegory & the Reformation Crisis in Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. xii+256pp. ISBN 0226497852 Cloth. David Gay University of Alberta dgay@pop.srv.ualberta.ca Gay, David. "Review of Literal Figures Puritan Allegory & the Reformation Crisis in Representation." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 6.1-5 . 1. Reformers rejected the Catholic practice of allegorical interpretation and insisted on the primacy of the literal sense of scripture. Why, then, would a Puritan like Bunyan write allegory at all? This fascinating question evades the searching scrutiny to which Thomas Luxon subjects it. As his title suggests, Luxon exposes tense contradictions at the core of Protestant hermeneutics. Puritanism, he argues, could not escape allegorical interpretation even in its attempt to affirm typology as the plane of the historically real because the maintenance of what Luxon calls Protestantism's "two-world ontology," based on the opposition of fiction and reality, depends upon the perpetual allegorizing of non-Christian "others." In the course of this well-argued analysis, Luxon identifies certain problems in Protestant allegory and hermeneutics particularly as they are practiced by Bunyan. 2. Luxon begins by historicizing his subject in the millenarian ferment of the seventeenth-century. The appearance of "pseudo-Christs," or persons claiming literally to be Christ, presents striking confrontations between religious radicals and authorities in ways that reveal "Protestantism's anxieties over symbolic modes of thought" (24). The case of James Nayler, punished with the savage literalism of branding for re-enacting Christ's entry into Jerusalem, is perhaps the most famous example. Cases involving women are more important to Luxon's argument because they emphasize relations between carnal birth and spiritual rebirth as a trope in Pauline theology. The treatment of women and birth as mere figures subsumed in a male spiritual telos and of Jews as incomplete prefigurations of a Christian reality are paradigmatic of the negative impact Luxon finds in Protestantism's relentless allegorizing of the "other". 3. Luxon challenges the tendency of modern criticism to assimilate the Reformation distinction between allegory and typology. Specifically, he challenges the idea that typology can be distinguished from allegory because the former deals with "historically real" persons and events. For Luxon, this claim to historical reality amounts to a euphemistic disguising of the Puritan commitment to allegorical modes of thought. The affirmation of typology may appear consistent with Puritanism's iconoclastic ideals, but any treatment of history as mere prefiguration relegates it to the status of a pseudo-reality. Ironically, Luxon argues, typology treats history "as God's fictional representation" of "something else that lies outside of history" (54), and is thus allegorical. He then analyzes Genesis narratives in a midrashic framework, sharing the conviction of other critics that the Old Testament narrative is more open to paradox, mystery, and diverse interpretations and less concerned to assimilate otherness than its Christian successors. 4. The final two chapters present important theoretical insights into what Luxon terms Bunyan's "anti-hermeneutics of experience." Situating Bunyan between his Quaker opponent Edward Burrough, with his emphasis on silence and inner light, and state authority as portrayed in Sir John Kelynge, who presided at Bunyan's hearing, Luxon considers Bunyan's concept of praying in the spirit, partly a political stance designed to resist the state-imposed script of the Book of Common Prayer, to be complicated by its desire to move from the representational medium of language to an experience of speaking in the spirit figured as spiritual rebirth. In an insightful critique of Stanley Fish's treatment of Pilgrim's Progress as a "self-consuming artifact," Luxon finds analogous traits between Bunyan's anti-hermeneutics of experience and Fish's critical approach with its emphasis on the reader's experience of the text. Luxon's readings of both parts of the Pilgrim's Progress call further attention to the "metaphysics of insiders and outsiders" (189) that he sees as germane to both allegory and typology. Allegory projects the corruptions of the insider onto the outsider who then may be anathematized. Luxon consistently probes this metaphysics and its consequences in Bunyan's time and suggests its implications for our own. 5. Luxon's book is strongly polemical in its concern for the intolerance that has often resulted from literalist hermeneutics. I share his concerns, but I would also acknowledge the potentially visionary side of typology, particularly as it afforded writers a framework for critical reflection on historical commitment and revolutionary action in the context of political defeat and disconfirmed or abandoned millenarian expectations. Luxon exposes certain metaphysical paradoxes in allegory's "two-world ontology," but allegory could also perform the political work of identifying and sustaining a persecuted community. Even so, Luxon has issued an important theoretical challenge to critical assumptions about the notion of the "real" in typology and allegory. His logical, scholarly, and uncompromising argument will stimulate and inform all students of Bunyan and the seventeenth century. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Rebecca W. Bushnell. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. xiii+210 pp. ISBN 0801483565 Paper; 0801432359 Cloth. Charles David Jago University of British Columbia dajago@unixg.ubc.ca Jago, Charles David. "Review of A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 7.1-10 . 1. Rebecca W. Bushnell's A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice is concerned with history. Specifically, the book shows that history is sometimes negated or replaced with ideological fictions in order to expedite political agendas. In such cases, this study suggests, the continuities between the cultural forms of the past and the present are lost. For Bushnell, it is precisely this perspective that has been subsumed in the recent, highly politicized debate surrounding humanism and the humanities. 2. Despite its title, A Culture of Teaching is not an overview of either humanism or humanist pedagogy. Rather, in keeping with its study of history, the text focuses on contemporary discussions of humanism and attempts to reframe them through "local readings" of early modern humanist theory and practice. Methodologically, Bushnell's practice of local reading is derived from anthropologist Clifford Geertz's conception of "local knowledge" and may be described as a close reading of culture that attempts to distance itself from preconceived theories of how culture works. 3. Without discussing Geertz in this forum, it is important to mention that Bushnell reacts against new historicist appropriations of Geertz's methods because she finds that these undermine the logic of local knowledge by fitting the local into a Foucauldian frame, "so that the saturation of power obliterates the disruptive effects of 'decentering' things"(22). Bushnell, who contends that "implicit in my method is the belief. . . that 'humanism' was never a coherent ideology, whether construed in the most general terms as a value system or in the narrower sense of an intellectual and pedagogical practice,"(14) maintains that to focus on the local means to "appreciate the multiple and contradictory possibilities of a historical moment"(22). Her brand of literary historicism, which foregrounds and leaves unresolved the paradoxes and contradictions of early modern humanist discourse, produces a study that revises both traditional and revisionist accounts of humanism by injecting skepticism and a restrained Derridean undecidability into the debate. 4. Bushnell's study of early modern humanism purports to describe "the unstable terms of rule, control and autonomy in humanist education"(181) and to suggest that "in both theory and practice early English humanist pedagogy . . . matched the heterogeneity of early modern society and politics"(19). The first chapter "Humanism Reconsidered," sets the stage for the close reading that follows by arguing that the culture of humanism needs to be read anew because its recent politicization has affected its interpretation in the scholastic community. In the following four chapters Bushnell studies the language of humanist discourse as it relates to the authority of the schoolmaster and the autonomy of the student; the nature of the child; knowledge and reading; and tradition. Each topic allows Bushnell to contest revisionary readings of humanism and to emphasize the problematics of reading humanism as a holistic cultural phenomenon. 5. In chapter two Bushnell revises Richard Halpern's Foucauldian reading of the practice of corporal punishment in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation . Instead of reading corporal punishment as reproducing the authoritarian practice of sovereignty on the body of the child, Bushnell recognizes a complex interplay between freedom and subordination in the classroom. Reading closely texts from Mulcaster, Ascham, Erasmus, and Valla, she points to unresolved "impulses in humanist pedagogy's opposition to corporal punishment in schools" and notes that although humanist pedagogy reproduced social and political authority it also offered "to form a free citizen, who learns in a free space of love, pleasure and play marked off from the political sphere and even from the family"(44). The chapter concludes with a compelling reading of the contumacious relationship between the young James VI and George Buchanan in which she shows how the prince was "fashioned paradoxically as a monarch with a subject's demeanor,"(62) and how Buchanan's schoolroom "was a place for oppositional thinking and politics at the same time that it was meant to fashion a king"(71). 6. In chapter three, "Cultivating the Mind," Bushnell contests Catherine Belsey's assertion that humanism produced a despotic conformity that "subsumed its birth in resistance to authoritarianism"(73). Bushnell contends that humanism generated both authoritarianism and resistance. Her argument is based on a close reading of early modern interpretations of the nature of the child, which is conducted alongside a fascinating parallel reading of the horticultural discourse of the period. Considering Erasmus in particular, she points out that humanism offered a double view of the child's nature that recognized both "an essential human nature and that each person is particular, with different inclinations or propensities that defy generation"(102). 7. In chapter four, "Harvesting Books," Bushnell contests Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine's representation of the humanist practice of reading in From Humanism to the Humanities as the monotonous memorization of classical texts and the slavish imitation of classical style. Bushnell offers an alternative picture of humanist practices of reading in which, rather than being read and memorized as a whole, parts of classical texts were appropriated for diverse uses. She argues that in early humanist practice "the point of reading a book was not to provide an "anatomy" or an understanding of its argument or structure; rather the end was a harvesting or mining of the book for its functional parts -- useful to borrow for the reader's own writing or to serve as practical conduct rules or stylistic models"(129). Reading the text as a whole, she notes, was a later manifestation of humanist practice that did not have its origins in humanism itself but was part of a larger trend of textual practice. 8. Chapter five, "Tradition and Sovereignty," reframes Richard Helgerson's "politicizing of humanist poetics" in Forms of Nationhood by complicating "his binaries of the gothic and classical, the medieval and the humanist, by re-examining the negotiation of history, authority, autonomy, and nature in the debate over formal innovation" (146). Close readings of Sidney's Defense of Poetry and George Buchanan reveals a double view that negotiates between the demands of imitation and originality. Considering James VI's The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Posie and Samuel Daniel's The Defence of Rhyme Bushnell shows that the concept of neoclassicism was not unified and might be put to various political ends. If neoclassicism challenged the legitimacy of authority by obviating tradition, it nevertheless could be equally well used to support authority. Similarly, though classical meter might have been associated with restraint, rhyme could impose a more severe discipline on the poet. For Bushnell, humanist discourse shows that terms such as "nature," "reason," and "tradition" were "Janus-faced" -- sometimes subverting, sometimes reinforcing, absolute rule. 9. Turning her attention to the schism in contemporary discussions of humanism and the humanities, Bushnell invites us to see the terminology and alliances of the opposing positions as less absolute than they may appear. Arguing that we have "not escaped the conflict between the assimilation of the past and creative autonomy implicit in early humanist poetics,"(182) she concludes that the contentions surrounding humanism today were imbedded in humanist educational practice "from the beginning"(185). 10. One may read this text as attempting to move humanism, both in its present and past manifestations, away from discussions of power -- discussions that have come to dominate discourse in the humanities since the influential work of Michel Foucault became incorporated into critical practice. Bushnell uses "local readings" to historicize early modern humanism in such a way that the highly politicized issue of power (possibly the very issue that, has split the humanities today) is neutralized. This strategy is apparent in her attempt to read Foucault out of early humanist practice while carefully preserving his cultural critique's power to generate cultural readings in later times. Power is present in this study only as a problematic term in relation to the local, historical reality of the complexities of humanist discourse. Thus, Bushnell, whose stated strategy is to decenter Foucault-inspired discourse by pointing to the binaries generated by the idea of power, creates her own binary between history and cultural criticism's use of theory. Theory is criticized as simplifying the complex relations of history by imposing foreign values upon it. Bushnell, however, fails to recognize that reading cultural criticism as history's other is itself a theoretical move; nor does she recognize that her method of local reading theoretically assumes that history is inherently a complex and shifting thing. Though her readings are powerful and will undeniably broaden our understanding of early modern humanism, her appeal to the micro-historicism of local reading does not appear to be a ready way of resolving the issue of power in either the study of early modern humanism or in the academy. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Graham Parry. The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of The Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. xi+382 pp. ISBN 0198129629 Cloth. F. J. Levy University of Washington flevy@u.washington.edu Levy, F.J. "Review of The Trophies of Time. English Antiquarians of The Seventeenth Century." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 8.1-5 . 1. In his Table Talk, John Selden notes that "The Reason of a Thing is not to be enquired after, till you are sure the Thing itself be so." Seldon illustrates his point with an anecdote about that great antiquary, Sir Robert Cotton: "'Twas an excellent Question of my Lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a Shoe, which was Moses's or Noah's, and wondering at the strange Shape and Fashion of it: But, Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it's a Shoe?" The story provides an excellent exemplar of the taxonomic impulse of seventeenth-century antiquarianism, and of what might go amiss when preconceived notions stood in the way of rational analysis. The same point might, after all, have been made about the efforts to decode Stonehenge: speculations about whether that great monument was Roman, Saxon or British depended on what the antiquaries believed about the engineering skills and sophistication of those ancient civilizations. 2. Such problems of taxonomy are part of Graham Parry's story of seventeenth-century antiquarianism; another part is the job of preserving the past against the efforts of those who, like the Puritans, saw the Catholic past as a standing invitation to a return to the horrors of Papistry. Thus William Dugdale, though perhaps the Grand Plagiary of David Douglas's English Scholars, 1660-1730, nevertheless remains one of Parry's heroes for his efforts to save church records of all kinds from the depredations set in motion in 1641. John Weever joins the antiquarian parade for a similar reason. So too does the great collector, Sir Robert Cotton. The Catholic exile, Richard Verstegan, made the Saxons into heroic ancestors of the English. John Selden and James Ussher (and perhaps Sir Henry Spelman) enter the book for their analyses of institutions. John Aubrey finds a place as a Baconian proto-archeologist, Aylett Sammes for setting the Phoenicians in motion on the stage of British history. Sir Thomas Browne, William Burton, Thomas Fuller have bit roles. But the book begins and ends with William Camden: the 1586 and 1695 editions of Britannia stand as the Pillars of Hercules, marking the boundaries Parry's book will not cross. 3. A bare listing of Parry's subjects poses the question: "what is antiquarianism?" Parry himself answers it by stating that the antiquaries pursued origins, but in so variegated a manner as to defy further limitation. Such a definition allows philologists to share honors with chorographers and field archeologists, but isn't altogether adequate for analyzing the contemporary distinction between antiquaries and historians. Camden, in his antiquarian Britannia, was willing to include historical information, but consistently refused to engage in extended historical narratives. In his discussion of Camden, Parry follows his subject's own definitions, and so omits the Annales, the history of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Applied to Dugdale, the same distinction allows Parry to omit A Short View of the Late Troubles in England. But why then discuss Cotton's little history of Henry III? Nor does Parry's definition provide much guidance in deciding which antiquarians to include, which to leave out. In practice, Parry gets round the problem by writing small, focused biographies of his chosen few, perhaps because the biographical mode best suits his elegant style. 4. Yet my pleasure in reading these accounts of the men who preserved the trophies of time was marred by recurring doubts. We know the seventeenth century as the age of the virtuoso, often an amateur, who managed to link interests in antiquities, art, history, genealogy, natural philosophy (and perhaps even the works of the poets and playwrights). The editions of Henry Peacham's Compleat Gentleman chronicle the virtuoso's rise; a biography of John Evelyn would serve to depict him in his hey-day. The antiquarian is part of this culture, but to understand how this works would require a much more comprehensive study, involving research into not only the acknowledged giants but also the larger number of men who published nothing and whose labors survive in manuscript or in the acknowledgments of their more assiduous friends. We need to know more about their religion, their politics, their social status, and the extent to which they felt their positions endangered. Most were conservative; some -- notably John Selden, whose later career is altogether omitted -- were not. We need to ask whether the fact that so few antiquarians ever brought their work to completion was really an accident, or whether that failure was somehow inherent in the "sociology" of the antiquarian project. The diffuseness of the materials had much to do with it, but so did the social status of many of the practitioners, for whom the act of collecting may well have been sufficient. As Parry himself points out, for many of them only a project like the new edition of Britannia could pry their collections loose. But all these objections may be seen as symptomatic of an underlying malaise. A group of biographies explains relatively little. To go further, to examine the conditions of antiquarianism -- in short, to follow the examples of Joseph Levine's Dr. Woodward's Shield and of the historians of seventeenth-century science -- Parry would have to analyze the operations of the community of antiquarians as well as its relationship to the larger social and scholarly community within which it was placed. To work out the lineaments of this culture of antiquarianism, however, would require the careful study of all the surviving manuscript correspondence and collections, whose importance Parry is careful to acknowledge but whose use he eschews. 5. Parry's book is one fit to take its place beside Douglas's deservedly famous English Scholars, which it much resembles (and a little overlaps). Both books are made up of biographies, both are learned, both engagingly written. Douglas has the advantage of having lived in an earlier, simpler age: a distinguished medievalist himself, he was exploring the heroic age of his own discipline. Parry is, to a much greater extent, looking at his subjects from the outside, and has the disadvantage of living in parlous times, when we have the gravest doubts about progress, and have come to believe in the social construction of knowledge rather than in heroes. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Simon Jarvis. Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725-1765. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996. xii+234 pp. ISBN 019818295 3 Cloth. Bryan N.S. Gooch University of Victoria. Bryan N.S. Gooch "Review of Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725-1765." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 9.1-6 . 1. Simon Jarvis' Scholars and Gentlemen is a welcome look at the fluid nature of eighteenth-century English bibliographical, lexicographical, and editorial practices; it comes to terms, in a cogent and detailed way, with the professional attitudes of the major participants and illustrates how different practices have produced quite different results. Indeed, as Jarvis properly points out (188), an understanding of scholarly purpose is essential in coming to grips with the direction of editing and textual work from the beginning of the century (when such effort was regarded by some as professional pedantry largely beneath the notice of gentlemen-scholars whose wider view had more to offer) to the latter half (when concern for philological minutiae could be seen to underpin more general judgement and when detailed editorial scholarship gained some respectability). Important in Jarvis' consideration is the notion that in providing apparently reliable editions of, say, Shakespeare, scholars were laying the anchors for English stylistic and lexicographical practice, as well as establishing a standard of procedure. What supports Jarvis' argument throughout the book is his own thoroughness, his extensive range of reference, and his careful documentation: he nicely demonstrates the principles he admires. 2. Following an introduction that not only sets out the focus and limits of the present study but also reveals Jarvis to be thoroughly conversant both with his primary material and recent scholarship, he plunges into the harmful dualism of the early years, marked by the conflict between the drudge and the gentleman, a world in which a gentleman might be a scholar but a scholar was not necessarily a gentleman, as distinguished not only by rank but by generalist interests. Here, of course, Richard Bentley is the prime example of the specialist, and Jarvis wisely does not minimise the acerbic nature of the debate that raged around the principles of classical and biblical scholarship. Challenges to received texts -- sacred or secular -- were viewed by many as not only unwelcome but unhealthy, and the battle as to what kind of view would prevail -- whether that of the lover of apparent minutiae or some other approach -- inevitably spilled over into the field of Shakespearean criticism. Here, too, the question was not just what text might be the fittest copytext, but also what changes (silent or noted) might be made, given applicable sets of principles with all their dangers of inconsistency, partiality/personal agenda, and simple misjudgment. And if one of the aims was to form a body of examples that would stand as models of style (how does one define/illustrate the best style?) surely Shakespeare could provide a substantial number, as well as, in the eighteenth-century's view, a quantity of infelicities (many of which could be conveniently blamed on players and compositors). 3. Jarvis takes a solid look at Alexander Pope's work (see Chapters 2 and 3), at his principles and results, noting Pope's reservations about minutiae (63), and brings into play Lewis Theobald's criticism that Pope somewhat neglected his editorial/annotational function. Indeed, while for some readers the focus might more properly fall on Pope here, I really do not see that one can discuss the latter without considering Theobald's objections even though Jarvis later, quite properly, concentrates on Pope's detractor. What works so well is Jarvis' sense of context, and his instinct for putting the bits together is entirely sound. Consider, for instance, Pope's dislike of Shakespeare's tendency to create verbs from nouns (not to be taken as an authority for modern-day, casual verbing); Theobald allows the practice (see 69), recognising that the notion of proper syntax has varied from era to era. The anonymous An Answer to Mr. Pope's Preface . . . (1729) is also considered (see Appendix 1), and as Jarvis' explanation of the details of Shakespearean editing continues, so does his expansion of the cultural context for his own discussion, and hence Pope's The Dunciad, Variorum (1729) and The New Dunciad (1742) have their place in the scheme. 4. Chapter 4 brings Theobald fully onto the stage and throws on him a rather better light than Pope's tinted glow ever allowed. Jarvis notes, for instance, Theobald's conviction that knowledge and specialisation are necessary if one is to engage in textual criticism (90), his concern for bibliographic, textual authority (95), his usually eclectic approach to his task (97-8), and his concern for improving the language (102). The discussion moves assuredly between general points and specific examples, and it is the latter, rightly, which clearly generate the former. 5. William Warburton's efforts (little regarded by some and ridiculed by others, though praised by Pope, Edward Gibbon, and Samuel Johnson) occupy Chapter 5. Warburton is given fair treatment, particularly his notion that elevated taste and scholarly detail could be brought together (111); the editor must be a specialist to be a good generalist (115). But contention did not disappear; Warburton's divergence from Thomas Hanmer (also a target in The Dunciad) and Theobald is apparent, and Jarvis enunciates Warburton's principles with clarity and economy before turning, in Chapter 6, to Samuel Johnson, first with respect to the Dictionary (1755), its precepts, and the notion of a national language, and then, in Chapter 7, with regard to his work on Shakespeare. Again the discussion is superbly detailed. While consideration of the Dictionary may seem digressive after the previous chapters' focus on Shakespearean textual issues, the truth is, I suggest, that one cannot really understand Johnson's editorial principles without coming to terms with his lexicographical tenets, his capacity for labour, the degree of his knowledge, his sense of his own capacities, and his tendency to inconsistency. But if inconsistencies are something of a Johnsonian joke (see the passage Jarvis quotes in which Johnson states that he includes, as examples, no passages from living authors except, as it were, on special occasions -- that is, when he wants to 132), the fact is, as Jarvis properly notes, when it comes to editing Shakespeare there are some slips 'twixt cup and lip. That Johnson saw himself as others regarded him, as a diligent professional, is certain (139). What he desired, ideally, was the realisation of a Warburtonian notion: a scholar with a capacity for particular and even minor detail as well as a far-ranging, general sensibility and judgment (141), yet, Jarvis claims, Johnson was reluctant to use his authority to redirect linguistic practice (151). Johnson was hesitant to dismiss the past out of hand, to banish archaisms without question; his own editing -- here Shakespeare is the example -- confirms his rather generous view of predecessors' work, and his inclusive approach -- "syncretic," as Jarvis would have it (see 159), and his eclecticism comes clearly into view in the details that are provided, as do other issues, including the problem of silent emendation. 6. Jarvis' concluding chapter, "Textual Criticism and Enlightenment," introduces the end-of-century friction between Joseph Ritson and Edmund Malone and brings the volume to a comfortable close. This is a book about literary and, more precisely, editorial history; it is also about social history and scholars and gentlemen whose work still concerns the academy today. Jarvis has performed his task admirably; for the care and wealth of detail, despite the occasional sense of repetition (cf. Chapter 7, 131-2, 135, 139, and 149) and a need, I suggest, for the expansion or clarification of the notes regarding collations (Appendix 2), the reader can be most grateful. The bibliography is, in itself, a useful source that students will value, and the index functions as it should. Scholars and Gentlemen is not a quick read, but it is, nonetheless, a rewarding one which will pay fair dividends even to those whose principal realm is not editorial practice. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Susan Bennett. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. New York: Routledge, 1996. 199 pp. ISBN 0415073251 Cloth; 041507326X Paper. Robert Grant Williams Nipissing University grantw@einstein.unipissing.ca Williams, Robert Grant. "Review of Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 10.1-4 . 1. Just when you thought that Shakespeare studies -- after the developments of post structuralism, gender studies, new historicism, and post colonialism -- could not be radicalized any further, Susan Bennett's Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past comes along to invigorate discussion of the post modern bard. Her work accomplishes a theoretical and critical vindication of performance by boldly undermining the assumption that a dramatic presentation of a Shakespeare play must remain faithful to a "source" text. What enables Bennett to release critical inquiry of Shakespearean performance from the stranglehold of the text is her emphasis on nostalgia, the desire for the past. She contends that the directorial duty to recreate the past, whether a fidelity to an original script or to an originary Renaissance, is not motivated by an innocent commitment to any previous culture, event, or person, but is driven by a nostalgia for that which is not possibly retrievable -- not only because the authentic or original past cannot be empirically accessed, but also because "authenticity" by definition exists in a privileged yet unapproachable imaginary time, forever distant from the present moment. In other words, nostalgia is driven less by an object of desire than by the insatiable process of desire itself. 2. More significantly, Bennett's argument has political ramifications. Nostalgia quite frequently -- though, as Bennett cautions, not exclusively -- plays into a right-wing agenda by promoting a stable past that in turn promotes stable political identities in the present. As in Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company world tours that present Shakespearean (re)productions, nostalgia gives a false sense of a homogenous English community on a national and even a global level. Thus the duty to recover the past in producing an "authentic" performance of a play harbours a conservative desire to bleed the performance of all contemporary political efficacy -- the ability to resist the hegemonic and to disrupt the bourgeois status quo. 3. In exploring performances that some deem unfaithful to Shakespeare, Bennett's study also considers the "emancipatory potential" (27) of performing nostalgia. She finds in numerous performances throughout the last decade a markedly queer nostalgia, that is, a use of the past that stages a "creative vandalism" (1) antagonistically opposed to the source text. Her entertaining and instructive analyses draw on a diversity of examples from theatrical "proliferations" of Lear -- such as Lear's Daughters by the Women's Theatre Group and The Tragedy of King Real by the Welfare State -- to cinematic meta-stagings -- such as Godard's King Lear and Greenaway's Propero's Books. Her analyses compellingly suggest that queer nostalgia shatters a monolithic past into counter-histories and thereby transgresses the hegemonic identity formations of the present. In effect, such performances, exemplified by Jarman's Edward II and Osment's This Island's Mine, permit contemporary transgressive desire to be staged openly rather than concealed behind a screen of conservative nostalgia. And in some cases, as in Welfare State's production of The Tragedy of King Real, a performance may lead to micro-political engagement with the community, resisting the globalization and standarization of desire. 4. As Bennett's study unfolds, the reader discovers that the imaginary past embodied by an authentic Shakespeare is not the only site that shifts. In both her theory and practice, the entire notion of performance also shifts its ground. In her theory, performance does not amount to a lackey-messenger bearing the script of the Shakespeare text. The performance becomes a performative in its own right, a dissident act of contemporary desire. As well, in her critical practice, she brings together so many diverse theatres of reference -- the domains of academic critic, reviewer, actor, director, spectator, and kitsch souvenir -- that the site of the Shakespearean performance cannot be confined to the physical stage or movie set. Performance as performative truly extends to numerous discourses of the past, including her own work, which in energy, scope, and wit is nothing less than a kind of performative criticism. But, by implication, the shifting site of performance challenges the leading role the text has played for so long in Shakespeare studies. And herein lies the radical nature of Performing Nostalgia. The latter part of her book is justified in gravitating toward postcolonial issues since the imperial relation of the past to the present, the colonizer to the colonized, and the master to the servant precisely replicates the traditional relation of the Shakespeare text to the Shakespeare performance. By trangressing the nostalgic reproduction of the text, performance emerges as a site of postcolonial interrogation, where cultural difference unsettles imperial identity. By going back not to repeat the past but to get somewhere else, a performance allows history to unthink its previous power relations and stage its contemporary desires. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Garry Wills. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP / NY Public Library, 1995. 223 pp. ISBN 019510290 Paper. Michael T. Siconolfi Gonzaga University siconolfi@gonzag a.edu Siconolfi, Michael T. "Review of Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 11.1-13 . 1. The paperback version of Wills' book on witches, Jesuits, and Macbeth has been printed cheaply -- not an auspicious omen. While there are many tidbits in this critical cauldron, there are also things that will never please. 2. It is difficult to know just how to interpret Wills, a genuine polymath "with attitude": classicist, conservative journalist, intellectual historian, adjunct professor, and former Jesuit. He has written on Nixon, Lincoln, and Jefferson, but that success has led him to have more confidence than he need have in dealing with untidy theatrical and political matters four centuries distant. His formidable skills do not consistently serve him well in this reworking of lectures for the New York Public Library. He often overreaches his material by trying to discern Shakespeare's intentions for "performable meaning." 3. Although trained in classics, Wills' tortuous explications of the text of Macbeth teeter on shaky editorial hypotheses. For example, he believes much of the Hecate material was regarded by the King's Men as Shakespeare's merely because of its inclusion in the Folio. Surely most modern editors, while granting that the King's Men may have regarded the material as traditional in the received text, would be less sanguine to the suggestion that Shakespeare either wrote or approved of these songs and dances. What seems more likely, of course, is that (as the Oxford editors have pointed out) Middleton revised the play if only to capture the courtly interest in the subject generated by the re-printing of James I's Demonology. 4. Moreover, Wills feels no scruples in revising traditional textual cruxes, dismissing, for example, Pope's emendation of Tarquin's "sides" to "strides," and inserting "sights" as justified because it is a "near-homophone." Nor is Wills plagued by self-doubt in altering punctuation -- always a dangerous area with which to tinker given the vagaries of its application by typesetters in general and the particularly sloppy work done on the text of the play in the first folio. Such tenuous revisions of punctuation are used to substantiate a somewhat tortuous reading of the porter scene. 5. Wills also tinkers, without much justification, with the traditional dating of not only Macbeth and its "revisions" but other so-called "Powder Plays" to reinforce his conspiratorial case. His reader is constantly driven to the inconveniently placed notes where the text is at one moment treated as canonical holy writ and at other times as something conveniently dispensed with. 6. It is difficult to discern for whom Wills is writing. He seems, at times, more the journalist as he breathlessly explains the Scottish play's "curse." Scholars, who might endure Wills' pedantic tendency to weigh down his prose with Latin adages, might also balk at his use of rather dated secondary material on the gunpowder treason and on governmental regulation of the drama such as W.J. Lawrence's Shakespeare's Workshop (1928) and V.C. Guildersleeve's Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (1908). But even veteran Shakespearean scholars would be hard pressed to recite "Poel's Rules" without some recourse to their reference books. 7. In his section on the Gunpowder Plot, Wills' method lurches toward anti-Catholic "eisegesis" rather than methodical exegesis in analyzing both texts and events. He argues, by way of limping analogy, that references to the Plot would be as accessible to Shakespeare's audiences as references to the "grassy knoll" would be to JFK conspiracy buffs. Several contemporary plays are mined for allusions that supposedly demonstrate that "plot" language lurked in every tavern and that Macbeth was embedded with code-words familiar to Jacobean audiences. But it does seem a bit of a stretch, for example, to link Macbeth's "The wine of life is drawn and the mere lees / Is left this vault to brag of" to the Powder Conspiracy: "Vault," Wills postulates, "was the 'grassy knoll' of Gunpowder writings . . . . Fawkes meant for the blood of the nation to be blown out of the upper hall of Parliament, leaving only the lesser breeds in the vault to inherit England." 8. But if political buzz-words lurk everywhere in Shakespeare's play, then it is curious that Wills does not find other major events embedded in the text as well. Just how far does one go with coded readings of the text? Are there codes to be found regarding the glut on the grain markets in 1605 and 1606 (another Jesuit plot?), or the conjecture that Judith Shakespeare's husband may have had distant connections with some of Guy Fawkes' sad co-conspirators? 9. The author fares somewhat better with his treatment of the English Jesuits and the Jacobean politics of religious conformity. He provides cogent analysis of the celebrated Jesuitical "equivocation" by comparing it with religious freedom and freedom from self-incrimination. But Jesuits are stereotyped as always skulking about political and moral back-alleys. Yet the virtual omission of the undercover work of Father Robert Persons, S.J., a skulker if there ever was one, is egregious even though he was hugely influential at the time. 10. It is surprising that Wills pays so little attention to the crafty agendas of earlier politicians like Cecil, Topcliff, and Walsingham. Indeed, some have called the Elizabethan/Jacobean era the "regna ceciliana" and with good reason. Wills also naively believes all of Sir Edward Coke's courtroom cant or Lancelot Andrew's pulpit posturing on Guy Fawkes. Furthermore, it is odd that someone with a penchant for political intrigues mostly ignores how Powder Day hysteria served the government's needs so conveniently: just who authorized the rental of the vault under the House of Lords that fateful November day and why? And just how did the prosecution of Fawkes' fringe group allay rumors about the new king being soft on Catholicism? 11. The sections dealing with witchcraft are less convincing in part because the reader never quite gets a clear definition of witches. Wills finds them everywhere. And one expects the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy to be brought in by the author's analogical method to conduct hearings on the omnipresent "witch menace. " But Wills fails to note that in spite of theological or political spin-doctoring or royal treaties on the subject, lurid witches, like sensational ghosts, filled ticket boxes on the Bankside. 12. Moments of brilliance do float up in this cauldron to reward the patient reader, especially the examination of equivocation, and the astute observation that Macbeth's language often blows "linguistic fuses." Moreover, Wills keenly observes, but does not develop, the idea that "governing was itself a form of theater in Shakespeare's day." 13. In the end, the book does what all criticism should do: it sends the reader back to the text to test these somewhat shopworn hypotheses as conjectured keys for unlocking the play. Yet most readers will come away from this book still believing that the play means what it more or less says it means and what the vast majority of its critics have believed it to mean over four centuries. The "wariness is all" when confronted with secret code-words based on highly selective and problematic stage performances of weird sisters or skulking Jesuits. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Naomi Conn Liebler. Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Rituals Foundations of Genre. New York: Routledge, 1995. xii+266 pp. ISBN 0415086574 Cloth; 0415131839 Paper. Jeffrey Kahan. vortiger@oydssee.net Kahan, Jeffrey. "Review of Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Rituals Foundations of Genre." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 12.1-9 1. In 1959, C.L. Barber launched a new awareness of Elizabethan social and communal concerns in his Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. More than 35 years later, Liebler has appropriated two-thirds of Barber's title, along with a significant amount of anthropological data, and used it as a springboard to discuss ritual and its social function in Shakespeare's tragedies. 2. Of course, time has marched on since Barber's study and with it so has our perspective. A major difference between Barber and contemporary critics is that the former believed that literary meaning was discernible in the study of patterns and unity, and that apparently esoteric meaning could be reappropriated with the right historical contextualization. Moreover, Barber, like so many critics of his generation, valued Shakespeare as the pinnacle of Western, if not human expression. Since that time, Shakespeare has lost his position as the soul of his age, not to mention our own. 3. Deconstruction, Marxism, Feminism and New Historicism have pushed New Criticism, Historicism and Genre Study off the critical map. The contemporary critic, raised on a heavy diet of Bristol, Greenblatt and Taylor, is encouraged to see literature as an intersection of historical, social conditions and politics. The study of pattern, unity and intention has been replaced or displaced by margins and faultlines. While this has yielded new insights into critical practice and ideology, studies of pattern and technique are generally viewed as quaint or old-fashioned. Liebler views this critical phenomenon as "costly"(3). 4. The attempt to bridge this critical divide is subtle. While believing that form and pattern are absolutely intrinsic to human expression, Liebler appropriates the commonly espoused ideological position that our knowledge and understanding of these expressions are entirely dependent upon the social factors that produce them. For example, she sees within Shakespeare's plays the outlines of the pharmakos as defined by Frye as "scapegoat" but also as expanded upon by Derrida to mean both remedy and poison. 5. Bringing this kind of argument to bear on Genre Study, Liebler notes that in both comedy and tragedy, "the constructed cultural values of the fictive community are invariably reaffirmed and reconsecrated, but in tragedy the management, alteration, or manipulation of those values is [sic] put to question"(8). Liebler cites various anthropological studies that discuss social rituals of separation, transition and reintegration, and, while applying careful caveats to differentiate between ritual and drama, she maps them onto Shakespeare's tragedies. 6. This combination of ideological awareness with anthropological and genre formalism yields an astonishing variety of rich contextualizations, rendered with clarity and insight. She sees within Richard II, Richard III, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Titus and Coriolanus, repeated patterns of marginalization in which the main characters of each play "do the work of victimage or sacrifice"(123). While these patterns are similar, Liebler's strands of explication are varied and complex. In her study of Richard II, she combines the myth of Cain and Abel, concepts of misrule, patterns of sun and rain as well as source materials and contemporaneous socioeconomic issues. In her discussion of Julius Caesar, she relates the play to rites of passage, Michaelmas, civil and ecclesiastical policies. In her discussion of Coriolanus, she draws upon anthropological data concerning folk plays about St. George and the dragon. 7. Undeniably, there is much here that is scholastically original and pedagogically useful. Nonetheless, her attempts at synthesis will doubtless solicit the standard sorts of counter-arguments. For one, her texts are highly selective. One wonders what Liebler would make of Antony and Cleopatra or Troilus and Cressida. Further, the book never deals with comic tensions within the selected texts. The choice of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, and the restriction of any discussion of the comic or "lowly" elements in Richard III and Hamlet is oddly reminiscent of the sixteenth and seventeenth century's attempts to "correct" Shakespeare's genre mixing. Purging any reference to the comic in Shakespeare's tragedies is curious in a critique that argues that Shakespeare's tragedies function nearly identically to the elements she omits. The author also avoids any discussion on how her paradigm redefines the darker elements in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor or the Problem Plays. No distinction is made between the histories and the tragedies. This is a common enough oversight but odd in a book devoted to genre study. 8. While many New Historicists may applaud Leibler's sensitivity to such culturally laden terms as "goodness," Marxists will be disappointed by her sometime confusion of "restorable authority" (167) and collective interest. Moreover, Liebler has a worrying tendency to refer to Shakespeare's audience as if it were uniform and heterogeneous. Performance critics will point out that her attempts to read even sections of the plays in terms of recognizable ritual and pattern render them nonsuspenseful. While this is a possibility, it is a possibility that raises profound social questions concerning Elizabethan entertainment and audience reception. 9. While some may see her attempts at synthesis as misguided, Liebler's book does successfully dust off and refurbish a long-neglected critical tool. Even those ideologically opposed to aspects of her approach will grudgingly admit the usefulness of many of her readings: no small feat in Shakespeare Studies. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Gordon Williams. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London and New Jersey: Athlone P, 1994. xvii+1616 pp. ISBN 0485113937 Cloth. Douglas Bruster University of Texas, San Antonio dbruster@lonestar.jpl.utsa.edu Bruster, Douglas. "Review of A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 13.1-6 . 1. One of the most distinctive aspects of early modern literature is its interest in sex. Subtle but unmistakable references to sex and the erotic treatment of the body permeate works of this era. Yet because "indecent" allusion was often euphemized or presented in slang, modern readers are sometimes asked to translate, even decode, sexual language. For various reasons, the otherwise indispensable Oxford English Dictionary devotes less attention to bawdy terms and phrases than we might wish, leaving many readers to turn to more recent (and generally less available) dictionaries. Among these reference works are Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and Shakespeare's Bawdy; James T. Henke's Courtesans and Cuckolds: A Glossary of Renaissance Dramatic Bawdy, and Gutter Life and Language in the Early Street Literature of England; and Frankie Rubinstein's controversial A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and their Significance. To this list we need to add Williams' Dictionary, a monumental three-volume lexicon of sexual references from texts of the early modern era. 2. By my estimation this Dictionary contains entries for nearly two thousand discrete words and phrases. Williams' declared intent is "primarily to establish certain image forms and verbal uses as a basis for evaluating such other examples as the user may encounter" (xiii). Hence his practice in glossing sexual terminology is to bring multiple quotations to bear upon a word or phrase, and the resulting entries are often essays in miniature. The title of the three volumes is somewhat more specific than its contents; the entries, sometimes traversing the 1520s through the 1740s, often take us to works earlier than Shakespeare and much later than the Stuarts. The word "literature" is also too narrow: Williams' bibliography features news pamphlets and verse dramas, and herbals as well as romances. Indeed, in addition to its historical sweep a great strength of this work is its embrace of material from a number of domains and sources. Such inclusiveness also extends to its definitions. Williams glosses words and phrases representing practices and actions (e.g. "stand," "possess," "fiddle"), body parts ("cod," "nose," "oyster"), objects ("alum," "lime," "merkin"), places ("Cheapside," "France," "Whitefriars"), individuals ("Aretino," "Phillips"), characters ("Cressida," "Maid Marian") and even books ( Aristotle's Problems). 3. Few people other than reviewers are likely to read this work from cover to cover. It will rest on library and scholars' shelves, occasionally retrieved to explain potential sexual meanings in passages. But a thorough reading reveals things that would not be apparent to the casual user, and, insofar as they speak to the work's accomplishments and utility, they bear disclosing here. 4. One remarkable feature of the Dictionary involves the historical distribution of its references. Perhaps owing in part to the shape of our literary canon, there are noticeable clusters of quotations here. By far the greatest proportion of its examples comes from 1600-1610 (with a marked build-up and equally marked decline during the 1590s and 1610s, respectively). Many of these references involve popular playwrights such as Middleton, Dekker, and Heywood -- something that may qualify Alfred Harbage's claim, in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, of a moral distinction between popular and coterie theatrical traditions. Likewise a lesser (but noticeable) concentration in the 1620s comes primarily from such dramatists as Massinger, Ford, and Fletcher. Works later than 1630 figure less prominently suggesting a decline in sexual references which is then reversed by texts of the late 1650s, the 1660s, and 1670s. After this period a much smaller cluster centering on the 1730s is noticeable. And while this distribution may say more about our reading habits than about the era itself, the depth of reference in this work suggests that its concentrations of examples describe real trends in early modern texts -- periods, respectively, of more free, and more constrained, expression. 5. But reading this work in its entirety also reveals shortcomings in the presentation of its findings. The layout of the entries on the page, for example, causes some confusion. Although headwords and cross-references appear in boldface, secondary meanings do not appear with the initial definition, are indented only slightly, and have no other eye-catching characteristic (such as boldface). A reader turning to the two-page entry on "milk" would learn at once that this word could refer to "semen (or the process of extracting it)," but might well miss the secondary definition "woman's spendings," on the following page, seventy-five lines after the primary gloss. Another problem is the sparse and sometimes arbitrary nature of cross-references. For example, "brothel" is defined as a "person involved in prostitution," but no references for synonyms of "brothel" as a location are provided, despite appearing with amazing regularity in the Dictionary itself. Likewise headwords are sometimes a guessing game: a reader interested in "bird" slang would have to turn to "avian imagery," and for "horse," to "equine images." Similarly, references to the "great bed of Ware" -- where unusual sexual encounters were said to occur -- are to be found not under "great" or "bed" or even "Ware," but under "assignation resorts." The preceding would perhaps be minor problems if the work featured an index of terms, but no such index is provided. Equally regrettable is the lack of a topical index where one might look up a body part, practice, orientation, object, place, or other category of interest. 6. Even a cursory glance at this work, however, will show its tremendous value to students of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century literature and culture. By deepening our understanding of sexual references in texts of this period, this dictionary promises to make Williams' name as familiar to textual editors as those of Tilley, Schmidt, Abbott, and Wing. But this admittedly serviceable Dictionary could easily have been made more useful to the scholarly community through closer attention to the needs of its readers. As things stand, it supplements rather than replaces its predecessors. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- W. S. "A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter." Read by Harry Hill. Dir. Paul Hawkins. Text Ed. Donald W. Foster. Montreal: Concordia University, 1996. Sean Lawrence University of British Columbia sean@unixg.ubc.ca Lawrence, Sean. "Review of A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 14.1-6 . 1. Donald Foster has initiated one of the few successful efforts to ascribe a "new" poem to Shakespeare. Foster has argued convincingly that the initials "W.S.," which serve as signature on an obscure poem from 1612, entitled "A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter," stand for "William Shakespeare." Foster amasses an impressive array of internal and external evidence for this ascription in his 1989 monograph, Elegy for W. S.: A Study in Attribution, though concluding modestly that "there is simply no way of knowing with certainty" (7). Since the publication of his monograph, however, he has subjected the text to more vigorous quantitative studies, particularly with the aid of the SHAXICON lexical database that provides a means of tracking Shakespeare's use of rare words through the canon and allows Foster to compare the elegy to contemporary texts contained within the Vassar Text Archive. On the whole, Foster's originality does not lie in the discovery of new bibliographical detail but rather in computer assisted applications of standard bibliographic procedures to vast numbers of texts. This is not to underestimate the importance of Foster's contribution. On the contrary, his application of established analytic strategies to extensive databases introduces a new rigour to bibliographical studies; moreover, such breadth allows for more subtle analyses than have hitherto been possible. His methods seem vindicated by the acceptance of "A Funeral Elegy" into recent and forthcoming editions of the complete works of Shakespeare compiled by David Bevington, G. Blakemore Evans, and Stephen Greenblatt. That these tools are not only reliable, but also broadly applicable across historical periods, was powerfully demonstrated by Foster's correct ascription of the anonymously published political satire on the American presidential election, Primary Colors, to journalist Joe Klein. In his confession and apology, published by Newsweek, even Klein had to admit that Foster had developed "a pretty good program" (76). 2. One of the most interesting, and (to a non-bibliographical scholar) accessible events in the debate over "A Funeral Elegy" was the release of a compact disk of the poem, read by Professor Harry Hill of Concordia University. Hill's effort represents the first recording ever made of this poem. The CD liner reprints the complete text, as edited by Foster who claims that "this is the first public reading of 'A Funeral Elegy' since it was received by the murdered man's brother John Peter in 1612." Moreover, both Foster and Rick Abrams (who chaired a panel of the Shakespeare Association of America on the "Funeral Elegy" in 1994 and who endorses the poem on the liner) claim that, in Abrams's words, "one thrills, in reading the Elegy to think that, at long last, Shakespeare speaks." 3. There have been other attempts to identify particular works or characters with Shakespeare's authorial voice: Prospero's epilogue and the poet of the sonnets both come immediately to mind; nevertheless, the Shakespeare who created any number of "persons" in his plays and even, it is sometimes argued, in his sonnets, should be equally capable of creating a persona bearing his own initials. While it must be emphasized that the liner comments made by Foster and Abrams are endorsements rather than critical apparatus, the hyperbole of the liner remains an unfortunate departure from Foster's modesty elsewhere. His recent article, for instance, rejects the elegy as "an aesthetically satisfying poem" (107) and builds its thesis almost entirely from rigorous textual and linguistic evidence. 4. One hopes that the quantitative rigour of Foster's methods will not lead him to overestimate his conclusions. There are still possible alternative contenders for the authorship of the poem. Foster's form of comparison has been criticized on the grounds that the texts of the Vassar Text Archive are not lemmatized (Gillespie). SHAXICON can find identical sets of letters, in other words, but cannot tell the part of speech constituted by the set of letters. It can count occurrences of (say) "killed," but cannot tell if it is being used as a participle. Foster's methods are innovative and exciting, but not infallible. There is a great deal more work to be done on this poem, and on computer-aided bibliographical studies generally. 5. The grandiose claims of the cover make it doubly unfortunate that the poet of the "Funeral Elegy" says so little that marks off his voice as original. The poem as a whole consists of a large number of Renaissance commonplaces. The following is typical: And as much glory is it to be good For private persons, in their private home, As those descended from illustrious blood In public view of greatness, whence they come. (133-136) I would by no means contend that these lines are not touching, or that they don't resonate; however, they express a theme common to a whole tradition of pastoral and other literature -- Wyatt's satires and Montaigne's essays for example. The poet writes that "I . . . by feeling it have prov'd / My country's thankless misconstruction cast / Upon by name and credit" (137-140). According to Laurence Stone, "When an Englishman in the early seventeenth century said, 'my country' he meant 'my county'" and thus the poet here expresses an alienation from his rural community (106). This comment is not interesting because it is a unique example of such alienation in the Renaissance, but because the authorship claim places it in the mouth of William Shakespeare. It might be more accurate to describe the passionate, unique and individual "voice" as a function of the cultural discourse that surrounds Shakespeare instead of saying that this poem represents a unique recording of authorial genius. Interest in the elegy seems to be a product of its association with a particular historical figure. Once one considers, even hypothetically, that this poem might be Shakespeare's, it assumes signification as well as significance. Read this text as an anonymous Renaissance poem (if at all possible anymore), and it fades back into insignificance. Perhaps this is the effect to which Foster alludes when he concludes his recent article by claiming that "what one gains by determining the authorship of a text is a motivation and a context for reading it, interpreting it, and debating it critically" (1092). 6. If one accepts a definition of the author as "a standard level of quality," this recording, unlike Foster's bibliographic and quantitative studies, does not contribute to a positive attribution to Shakespeare (Foucault 128). However, the recording is an extremely worthwhile project regardless of how one views the controversy surrounding its text. Harry Hill's rendition of this hitherto obscure Renaissance poem is excellent. The poem, which seems to lack coherence when read silently, is driven by a passionate intensity in this reading, more often denouncing detractors (often the deceased's, but mostly the poet's) than lamenting. While one still wonders whether the quality of this rendition is owed to the aesthetic properties of "The Funeral Elegy" or, alternatively, to Hill who performs a rendition so brilliant that it compensates for a second-rate poem, this recording may help to extend the poem to new audiences, and will certainly contribute to its study. One cannot fault either accomplishment. Works Cited * Foster, Donald W. Elegy by W. S.: A Study in Attribution. London and Toronto: Associated UP, 1989. * ---. "A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Best-Speaking Witnesses'." PMLA 111.5 (1996): 1080-1095. * Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. ed. Donald F. Bouchard. trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 113-138. * Gillespie, Patrick. Comment on SHAKSPER Electronic Conference. 7.214. Saturday, 16 March, 1996. * Klein, Joe. "A Brush with Anonymity." Newsweek. July 29, 1996. 76-77. * Stone, Laurence. The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sir Thomas More. Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation. Eds. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams and Clarence Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. xlvi+290 pp. ISBN 0521403189. Romuald I. Lakowski. usercong@mtsg.ubc.ca Lakowski, Romuald I. "Review of Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 15.1-7 1. The 1995 Cambridge edition of Utopia, edited by G. M. Logan, R. M. Adams and C. H. Miller, is the first since the Yale edition of 1965, edited by J.H. Hexter and E. Surtz, to include both the Latin text and an English translation. These two editions together with the French-Latin edition of Andr=E9 Pr=E9vost (Paris: Mame, 1978) constitute the only scholarly editions of the Latin text published in recent years. (Latin and English texts of Utopia are also available electronically in SGML format through the Oxford Text Archive Series, 2079 and 2080.) The strengths and limitations of the Cambridge edition (C), can perhaps best be illustrated by comparing it to the Yale edition (Y) and Pr=E9vost's L'Utopie (P). (Pr=E9vost's edition is currently available through the journal Moreana.) 2. To begin with, the Yale edition remains the standard critical edition of Utopia, based on the four earliest editions: Antwerp, 1516; Paris, 1517; and Basle, March and November 1518. Both the Yale and Cambridge editors chose (for reasons too complex to go into here) the March 1518 edition as the basis for their copytexts (see C, 270-7; Y, clxxxii-cxxiv; and P, 215-40.) However, the Cambridge edition lacks the scholarly apparatus of the Yale and Pr=E9vost editions, though it does include about 125 footnotes to the Latin text in a tiny but readable font, giving some of the principal variants and emendations to the text. There are also about 350 background notes to the English translation and introductory materials. Pr=E9vost's is not a critical edition, but rather reprints a facsimile of the November 1518 edition together with a detailed critical apparatus giving textual variants from the other editions. (There is also a facsimile of the 1516 edition available in the Scolar Press Facsimile Series.) 3. In presenting the Latin text, the Cambridge editors primarily had readers in mind who "are specialists in fields such as English literature or the history of political thought; that is, readers who have some Latin but are not Neo-Latin scholars"(C, xi). Unlike the Yale edition, the spelling of the Latin has been regularized and the text has been thoroughly repunctuated according to modern conventions. (Anyone familiar with the vagiaries of Renaissance punctuation can appreciate the benefits but also potential hazards in doing so.) Very helpfully, paragraphing has also been added to the Latin text to correspond to that of the English translation. As with the Yale and Pr=E9vost editions, line numbering has been added to the Latin text to aid citation. (For the Latin text, see C, xxxlii-xli; cf. Y, 579-82; P, 241-53.) 4. The English translation used in the Cambridge edition, made by R.M. Adams, was first published in the 1975 Norton edition of Utopia. A revised version of this translation, edited by G.M. Logan and R.M. Adams, appeared in 1989 in the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, and in 1992 in the 2nd edition of the Norton translation. This translation was again further revised and expanded (by including translations of the parerga from the early editions) for the current edition, incorporating many suggestions by Germain Marc'hadour, the director of the journal Moreana, to whom the Cambridge edition is dedicated, and by Clarence H. Miller, the current executive editor of the now almost-finished Yale edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, and who is also listed as one of the editors of the final edition. The Cambridge translation compares favourably with the translation of the Yale edition, and it is certainly one of the best modern English translations of Utopia available. The Yale translation, a revised version by E. Surtz of the first modern English translation of Utopia by G. C. Richards in 1923, was, in fact, rather heavily criticized by Miller and others when it first came out. (Later printings of the Yale edition incorporated many of Miller's suggested corrections.) Pr=E9vost's French translation also reads very well and it has become the standard French translation of L'Utopie since 1978. 5. In one respect at least the Cambridge edition is superior to both the Yale and Pr=E9vost editions. More's Utopia is described on its title page as a libellus or "handbook" and was in fact a rather slender little volume. The Cambridge edition can be described as (a rather largish) handbook in a way that most definitely cannot be applied to the rather massive tomes of the Yale and Pr=E9vost editions. The Yale edition has an introduction that is almost 200 pages long (Y, xv-cxiv) and over 300 pages of textual commentary (Y, 255-570), while Pr=E9vost's introduction is almost 300 pages long (P, 23-306), and his notes contribute another 175 pages (P, 647-723) to the heft of his L'Utopie. Pr=E9vost's edition, however, does include an immensely valuable detailed synopsis of the structure of More's Utopia (P, 279-306), lacking in the English language editions, and his literary theoretical discussion of "L'Utopie, Exp=E9rience existentielle" (P, 61-214, esp. 127-162) complements Hexter's highly influential "Utopia and its Historical Milieu"(Y, xxiii-cxxiv). By contrast G. M. Logan's introduction is admirably brief and unobtrusive (C, xvii-xxxiii), ideal for those students of More's Latin who find the bulk of the scholarly apparatus of the Yale and Pr=E9vost editions rather cumbersome. 6. The handling of the parerga, or introductory matters of the early editions contributed by various humanist friends of More and Erasmus, also seems less intrusive in the Cambridge edition, which follows the order of the March 1518 edition (C, 1-29, 250-69), as opposed to the Yale edition, which prints almost all the parerga before More's text (Y, 1-37, 248-53) in an order that doesn't exactly match that of any of the early editions. The Yale edition did make a valuable contribution in drawing attention to this hitherto neglected introductory material, but foregrounding it too much also risked confusing readers. The marginalia of the early editions, which in the Yale edition are typeset within indented boxes in the text, are printed in the margins of the Cambridge edition in a tiny hard-to-read italic font even smaller than that of the footnotes. In contrast, Pr=E9vost's translations of the marginalia, which are also printed in the margins, are quite readable. 7. The Cambridge edition contains a "Brief Guide to Scholarship" (C, xlii-xlvi), a bibliography (C, 277-84) and a short index (C, 285-90). Pr=E9vost's edition also has a bibliography of modern scholarship (P, 727-44), and a detailed index (P, 745-76) that includes definitions of key critical terms used in his introduction. This is a practice that I wish more literary theorists would follow. The Yale edition also includes a bibliography of primary sources (Y, 259-66) and an extensive index of names (Y, 589-629). (All the secondary works of modern scholarship devoted to Utopia, listed in the "Brief Guide" and the "Works Cited" sections of the Cambridge edition can also be found cited in my Bibliography of Thomas More's Utopia in EMLS 1.2.) Everything about the Cambridge edition, including the care taken over accidentals, indicates that it is a labour of love, incorporating the best fruits of modern Morean scholarship, and as such it deserves a place in the libraries of modern Utopia scholars, alongside the Yale and Pr=E9vost editions. Works Cited * Adams, R. M., trans. Utopia: A New Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975; 2nd rev. ed. 1992. * Logan, G. M., and R. M. Adams, trans. Utopia. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. * Pr=E9vost, Andr=E9, ed. L'Utopie de Thomas More: Pr=E9sentation, Texte Original, Apparat Critique, Ex=E9g=E8se, Traduction et Notes. Paris: Mame, 1978. (Moreana Special Offer, 1996). * Surtz, Edward, S.J., and J. H. Hexter, eds. Utopia. Vol. 4 of The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965. * Sir Thomas More's Utopia: Latin Text in Electronic Format. Converted to TEI form by Lou Barnard. Oxford Text Archive, 2079. . * Sir Thomas More's Utopia: English Text in Electronic Format. Converted to TEI form by Lou Barnard. Oxford Text Archive, 2080. . (There is also an ASCII version of the English text available.) |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reviewing Information, Books Ordered for Review, and Forthcoming Reviews Reviewing Information Books Ordered for Review 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 or received for review as of December 1996: o Blank, Paula. Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings. New York: Routledge, 1996. o Breight, Curtis C. Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. o Bristol, Michael. Big Time Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, forthcoming. o Bulman, James, ed. Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995. o Cook, Patrick. Milton, Spenser and the Epic Tradition. Brookfield, VT: Scolar P, 1996. o Donne, John. The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 8. The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions and Miscellaneous Poems. General editor Gary A. Stringer, Volume commentary William A. McClung. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995. o Grantley, Darryll and Peter Roberts, eds. Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture. Brookfield VT: Scolar P, 1996. o Grell, Ole Peter and Andrew Cunningham, eds. Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth Century England. Brookfield, VT: Scolar P, 1996. o Harvey, P. D. A. Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. o Hawkes, Terence. Alternative Shakespeare, vol. 2. New York: Routledge, 1996. o Holmer, Joan Ozark. The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard and Consequences. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. o Jardine, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare Historically. New York: Routledge, 1996. o Jehlan, Myra and Michael Warner, eds. The English Literatures of America. New York: Routledge, 1996. o Joughin, John. Shakespeare and National Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, Jan. 1997. o Kernan, Alvin. Shakespeare the King's Playwright. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. o MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. o Mucciolo, John M. Shakespeare's Universe: Essays in Honor of W.R. Elton. Brookfield, VT: Scolar P, 1996. o Murray, Jacqueline and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. o Owens, W. R. and Lizbeth Goodman. Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon. New York: Routledge, 1996. o Pritchard, R.E., ed. Lady Mary Wroth: Poems. Keele: Keele UP, 1996. o Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History. New York: Routledge, 1996. o Roberts, Peter. Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture. Brookfield, VT: Scolar P, 1996. o Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. o Smith, Peter J. Social Shakespeare: Aspects of Renaissance Dramaturgy and Contemporary Society. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. o Thompson, Ann. Women Reading Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. o Thompson, Craig R., ed and trans. The Colloquies of Erasmus. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. o Todd, Margo, ed. Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 1994. o Watkins, John. The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Forthcoming Reviews: o Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. o Burns, Edward, ed. Reading Rochester. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. o Carroll, William S. Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. o Cerasano, Susan and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. New York: Routledge, 1995. o Chedzoy, K., ed. Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing. Keele: Keele UP, 1996. o Chernaik, Warren. Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. o Dutton, Richard. Ben Jonson: Criticism, Authority, Authorship. New York: Macmillan, 1995. o Dutton, Richard, ed. Jacobean Civic Pageants. Keele: Ryburn Renaissance Texts and Studies, Keele UP, 1995. o Farago, Claire, ed. Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America. 1450-1650. Yale: Yale UP, 1996. o Fitter, Chris. Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. o Gregerson, Linda. The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. o Hamilton, Donna B., and Richard Strier, eds. Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. o Hinds, Hilary. God's Englishwomen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. o Howarth, David. Images of Rule: A Social and Political Analysis of English Renaissance Art. New York: Macmillan, 1995. o Lindley, David. The Trials of Francis Howard. New York: Routledge, 1995. o Maley, Willy. Edmund Spenser and Cultural Identity in Early Modern Ireland. New York: Macmillan, 1995. o Marotti, Arthur. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. o Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. o Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. o Parker, Douglas, ed. A proper dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. o Parker, Patricia. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. o Pugliatti, Paula. Shakespeare the Historian. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. o Warren, Austin. Becoming What One Is. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1995. o Woudhuysen, Henry. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. o Wright, Stephanie J., ed. Elizabeth Cary: The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry. Keele: Keele 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 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). --=====================_856539635==_--