csuf e211 british literature to 1760 spring 08

English 211 Home Page

2008-05-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

Welcome to E211, British Literature to 1760

Spring 2008 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. I will post two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading, but I encourage you to read the entries as your time permits. While they are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors and in arriving at paper topics and studying for the exam. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections is Abrams, M. H. et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vols. 1ABC. 8th. ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Package 1 ISBN 0-393-92833-0. The other required texts are as follows: Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. Oxford University Press, USA; 2nd edition. 2001. ISBN-10: 0192840320. ISBN-13: 978-0192840325. Shakespeare, William. Much Ado about Nothing. Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington Square Press, 2004. ISBN-10: 0743482751. (ISBN-13: 978-0743482752).

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

week 16

2008-05-07T09:10:00.000-07:00

Please check back in future. I will be posting material on this author as soon as time permits. In general, I am doing a thorough upgrade of my notes this semester, and will be posting this optional reading in a timely manner as we go through our syllabus.

week 15

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week 14

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Week 13, Alexander Pope

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Notes on Alexander Pope

Neoclassical Premises (ca. 1650-1789)

(a) Social commitment and desire for continuity in response to Civil War’s deep divisions (1642-1649).

(b) an inclination to categorize experience, nature, and literature into “kinds.”

(c) appreciation of satire; satire is a robust art form during the eighteenth century.

(d) importance of probability; thus the use of analogy as a literary figure: the two terms of the comparison both illuminate each other but remain distinct.

(e) the prevalence of moral categories—neoclassical art is often didactic.

(f) fondness for classical precedent.

(g) obedience to ordinary English grammar .

(h) categorizing the appropriate types of speech for appropriate subjects: epic for high subjects, lyric for love poetry, etc.

(i) importance of mirroring nature in art (mimesis): art should follow nature, not proclaim itself independent.

(j) skepticism about language—another reason for analogy: metaphor tends to collapse the two terms of comparison: man = pig, etc. The worry is that language can hide truth and nature just as easily as it reveals or honors them.

(k) stress on art’s utility and capacity to give pleasure (the Horatian imperative that art should be utile et dulce, useful and pleasant). Literature must both please and teach, with emphasis on the latter function.

Pope’s Era: The Neoclassical Age of Queen Anne and the Hanoverian Georges

Pope’s ideas about the value of art derive from Horace, a silver-age poet and urbane critic. Horace’s era (he lived from 65-8 BCE, covering the reign of Augustus 27BC-14 CE following the Civil War and assassination of Julius Caesar) accords well with the reign of Queen Anne in Great Britain (1702-14) and then the Hanoverian Kings George I-III (1714-27, 1727-60, 1760-1820). Alexander Pope lived from 1688-1744. The perceived need was for continuity and calm after the turmoil of the English Civil War in the 1640’s and the Puritan Rule of Cromwell in the 1650’s. Throughout the eighteenth century, that’s what many British citizens looked for in their rulers and in their literature.

This is an age in which the predominant theory of art is mimetic, meaning that readers and critics expect literature to offer them a judicious and ethically sound representation of life. And the point of such mimetic art is to influence morals for the better: as Horace had said, good art is both utile and dulce, useful and delightful. The point is that people respond emotionally to eloquence and beauty, and emotion can temper the severity and callousness of reason. It would be a mistake to think of the eighteenth century as purely an “Age of Reason”—that’s taking a motivated exaggeration at face value. After all, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume said that “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Sentiment, properly directed and educated, was just as important as reason in this age, whatever contemporary critics claim the romantics said about their predecessors’ “overemphasis on reason” at the expense of the universal passions that bring humans together.

Eighteenth-century language theory tends towards classification—rather a scientific model of language, one distrustful of metaphor and flights of fancy. Horace made fun of the furor poeticus, and the eighteenth century is similarly distrustful of placing too much value on poetic genius and originality for the sake of originality. Imagination and language are wonderful things, but they need restraint and education to temper them into fine instruments that produce excellent works of art. The Baconian distrust of “idols” (errors due to the peculiarities of the individual and to the needs of the collective, as well as the tendency of perception to slide from raw accuracy into the dull comfort of abstractions) reigns in eighteenth-century notions of language.

Still, we need not think of this horizon of expectations as implying an insatiable appetite for pompous “poesy,” though second-rate poets may lapse into that kind of adherence to mere formal elegance. Pope himself makes fun of anyone who lards on the elegance too thick. In an era of refined art, taste and restraint are everything—one must know what to omit as well as what to include, and when an acceptable tendency becomes a travesty. Calling fish “the finny tribe” is a ludicrous abuse of the tendency to categorize individual things, sacrificing whatever is “fickle, freckled, who knows how” (Hopkins) for the sake of dull comprehensibility. The same goes for the “breeze” that “whistles through the trees” like clockwork. What an abomination against nature and poetry! In his “Essay on Criticism, Pope mocks both tendencies—abstractionism and hollow rhyming that imposes a false order on the beautiful variety of nature.

Epic Conventions and Mock Epic

When Samuel Johnson says, “nothing can please long except just representations of general nature” (nature here meaning both the environment and human nature), he speaks for a whole century’s worth of critics, readers, and audiences. Well, we might think that in such a Silver Age where decorum, observation of refined rules, maintenance of tact and restraint, are nearly everything, something as rough and rude as, say, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or satire in general would be out of place, but that isn’t the case. Satire was a favorite kind of literature during the eighteenth century, and that is where Pope’s mock epic The Rape of the Lock comes into view.

A mock epic, of course, mocks the conventions and aims of epic by adhering to them, with a significant change in subject matter. In order to understand mock epic better, we should consider what an epic is. The genre is easy to define formally: “the epic is a long narrative poem involving heroic figures in the performance of heroic deeds, usually extended over a wide geographical area; it is written in a heroic or grandiose manner” (Norton and Rushton). Here are its major conventions:

1. Hero: a mythical or historical figure, usually national.
2. Subject matter: heroic deeds, battles, long journeys.
3. Verse: elevated, lofty, “heroic”; the best known device is epic simile—see PL I.331-343, 351-355, 761-798.
4. Action: intermixture of supernatural elements/ figures with human characters.
5. Place: world-wide, even cosmic, scale.
6. “Comic,” not “tragic”: the hero is successful in his exploits.
7. “Objective” poet: but consider the “Miltonic aside.”

Some of the minor conventions are as follows:

1. Invocation to the muse: PL I.1-26 and elsewhere. “Hail, Muse!” &tc.
2. Starting in medias res, as when the Odyssey begins with Odysseus having almost finished his wandering.
3. Narratives of events that transpired before the poem: “flashbacks.”
4. Formal or “set” speeches like Satan’s to his fallen legions in Paradise Lost, Books 1-2.
5. Processions of characters, as in Paradise Lost 1.376-505; catalogs of events or things. (Milton dwells on geography, etymology, and the origin of various human practices, including artistic genres.

In addition to all of the above, epic has a serious ethical purpose—it labors within the culture from which it comes, trying to affect that culture for the better: it has a cultural task. Homer wrote about the exploits of Odysseus and the wrath of Achilles, probably hoping to infuse into his own difficult times the ancient heroic virtues and the resilience of an earlier age. Virgil wrote about the sad but fortunate fall of Troy —the Trojan Aeneas had to see his city destroyed so he could sail to Italy and found a city, Lavinium, setting in motion the events that would lead to the establishment of the Roman Republic and then the Empire. And Milton wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to men,” but perhaps most immediately to reassure dejected fellow Puritans that God had not abandoned them.

Mock epic is similar to satire, and it, too, might be said to have a task. One reason to satirize and mock is that the satirizer may be speaking for and to people who feel that they have little power, at least for the time being, to change things for the better. (I suppose that’s the charge running through Jon Stewart’s mock-newscasts on Comedy Central, or Stephen Colbert’s deadpan imitation of a bloviating conservative pundit. Such mockery may not exactly send people into the streets with French-Revolutionary fervor, but it’s powerful in its way because it encourages an alternative sensibility and way of understanding events alongside the official channels in the news and political realms, meaning not only politicians but those who cover them in the various “serious” media outlets. (The fact that I’ve put quotation marks around the word “serious,” thereby calling it into question, is an effect of the kind of satire I am discussing: i.e., how seriously should we take supposedly serious or official accounts of why certain domestic and foreign policies are being pursued?) But in Pope’s case, perhaps the poet is just responding to a need for his culture to examine its tendencies lest they become empty exaggerations. Mock-epic may serve as a warding-off gesture, a warning that today’s happy conformity—a society with lots of “shiny happy people holding hands” and mostly accepting the same fundamental assumptions about themselves, their government, and the world at large—might well be tomorrow’s stale, real-life parody. Perhaps conformity itself soon becomes morbid me-too-ism (a lame excuse for healthy existence), or generates excesses in the other direction (rebelliousness, that is), so it needs to be questioned frequently and searchingly.

That’s a serious social task to ascribe to mockery and satire. I think it’s the one most appropriate to Pope: he speaks as a man of letters to those whose assumptions he mostly shares. His Catholicism in a deeply Protestant country makes him something other than a simple adherent to neoclassical taste and political values. His traditionalism is somewhat self-conscious, I should think—he’s not the kind of aristocratic brute who absorbs his values from the nice thick beefsteak he gnaws every evening and the good wine with which he washes it down. As the Norton introduction says, Pope is the first man of letters to make a comfortable living by writing—his father was a prosperous merchant, and Pope lifted himself into even more polite society by means of literary skill. Moreover, he belongs early in the tradition we may trace down to Wilde and then the Modernists—artists of great culture and learning who fear the effects of mass culture both upon society at large and, more narrowly, upon the arts. But on the whole, Pope fits into the Horatian tradition that says art’s mission is to render in a decorous manner what the public already believes, and to influence and gently uplift the reading public’s manners and morals.

Notes on The Rape of the Lock

What Pope does in The Rape of the Lock is reflect humorously on the elaborate quality of gender relations in his day. He makes fun of the era’s assumptions about female virtue—in the poem, the language of commodification and ethics seem to go together, and the male superiority posited by the honor code is made to appear ridiculous. A woman’s position in Pope’s time was complex—women were hemmed in by all sorts of constraints, yet they were very important in symbolic terms. The image of the female was central to notions of domesticity and morals, her beauty bodying forth the goodness of the social order itself, rather like the courtier’s grace signifying the sovereign’s legitimacy and rightness in earlier times, in the Renaissance Courts of Europe and England.

Dedication to Mrs. Arabella Fermor

2514. Pope makes fun of modern triviality, but as a critic he maintains a balance of view regarding the quarrel of the ancients and moderns. Ancient epic, after all, sometimes makes trivial things seem important, deflating human pretensions. Homer certainly does that. As for the addition of Rosicrucian supernatural machinery, Pope’s use of such trappings is hardly dismissive; rather, I suppose he is emulating Milton’s angelic hosts and “devils to adore for deities” of Paradise Lost.

Canto 1

1-12: Prelude
13-26: Morning; Belinda asleep; Ariel; Belinda dreams of a young beau; Ariel speaks
27-114: Ariel’s address; the sylphs take charge of Belinda; picture of the beau monde; the game of sex
115-20: Belinda wakes
121-48: The toilet

2515-16. From line 67 and following, honor is a wispy thing, a tactical affair rather than a sacred virtue. We can’t escape the “war between the sexes,” the poem seems to be telling us, and women, it’s suggested, tend to be flighty and vain when it comes to love matters.

2517. Belinda is warned of a “dread event” (109) by Ariel, her guardian Sylph. But her thoughts flow to material things lying around her, a glittering and reflective environment. At lines 125-26, there’s a hint of Eve’s innocent narcissism in Paradise Lost: “A heavenly image in the glass appears; / To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears.”

Canto 2

001-018: Belinda rises from her toilet: her beauty
019-028: Belinda’s locks
029-046: The Baron desires Belinda’s beauty
047-052: Belinda secure
053-072: Ariel gloomy and anxious, summons his battalions
073-136: Ariel’s speech
137-142: The sylphs await events

2520. The Rosicrucian spirits take their stations. At lines 90-92, Pope echoes Milton’s invocation in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, redefining the proper subject of epic, suiting the subject to the form. At lines 106-09, the narrator equates honor with a china jar, and these lines offer a series of disjunctive references. It’s hard to take honor too seriously when we see it placed adjacent to such trivial objects, and the verse form reinforces the conflation-effect: “Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade, / Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball” The stopping-points in these lines, the caesuras, drive home the point.

Canto 3

001-018: The setting of Hampton Court
019-104: The “Battle” of Ombre
105-124: Taking coffee: the Baron gets an idea
125-154: THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
155-160: Belinda’s horror
161-178: The Baron’s triumph; the glories of steel

2521-23. To Hampton Court we go, as if the place were heaven or Olympus. At lines 19-22, Pope’s epigrammatic style sums up the truth of a fifty-page sociology paper on the justice system: “wretches hang that jurymen may dine.” At lines 25 and following, the epic battle for Belinda’s heart: a game of Ombre (http://webpages.shepherd.edu/maustin/ombre/ombre.htm). Such games are, like chess, bound up with strategy, and are a surrogate form of chivalric containment of violence. Perhaps there’s an implicit criticism of modern love here, but it could also be that Pope aims at something more uplifting. It is human to “methodize” nature, to set up rules and conventions, and so long as they remain rooted in human nature, all is well. We live in societies so that we may be “to advantage dressed.” These are phrases from Pope’s “Essay on Criticism.” Love is civil, elaborate, and involves strategy and deferral of desire. So in this sense, a game like Ombre, with its complex rules and competitive spirit, is a good figure for erotic pursuits.

2523-24. Belinda’s scissors give the Baron his chance. The chivalric references in the passage introduce ambivalence about the event that will soon transpire. Ariel’s power dissipates because he knows Belinda isn’t, perhaps, so dead-set against the Baron as she professes herself. So the trappings of deferral and civility must give way. For the moment, however, they give way to high wrath, almost Achilles-like wrath. But that too, it’s fair to suggest, is just another kind of delay.

Canto 4

001-010: Belinda’s sorrow
011-088: Umbriel visits the Cave of Spleen; obtains the bag and vial from the Goddess
089-094: Belinda in the arms of Thalestris
095-120: Thalestris’ speech
121-130: Sir Plume: demands the Baron return the lock
131-140: The Baron refuses
141-146: Belinda renews her grief
147-176: Belinda’s speech

2525. The lock has now been seized, and Umbriel goes to the underworld, or here the Cave of Spleen. Just as Odysseus and Aeneas had to communicate with the underworld to complete their journeys, so Belinda’s love can only be accomplished or won with a journey to the bottom of it all: melancholy, stormy passion. Umbriel makes sure that she will be afflicted with Ill Humour.

2528. Sir Plume the beau plays the role of Collatinus, the injured husband of Lucretia. But his stake in the action is rather general, a matter of principle, as signified by a rap on the snuffbox.

Canto 5

001-008: Belinda’s speech has no effect; Clarissa prepares to speak
009-034: Clarissa’s speech
035-074: The beaux and the ladies fight
075-102: Belinda and the Baron fight: Belinda’s victory
103-112: Belinda demands the lock, but it is missing
113-150: The apotheosis of the lock

2529-30. Clarissa’s grave lesson is “she who scorns a man must die a maid.” But fierce Thalestris wins out against this privileging of merit over looks and manners. Clarissa speaks around line 30 to the “hemmed in” status of eighteenth-century women, their power came from manipulating men within a complex set of fules. Women were expected to give in and yet maintain the important ideal of chastity.

2531-32. No way will Belinda recover her lost lock of hair, which symbolizes female honor. But neither will the Baron keep it as a trophy to gloat over. So there has to be an apotheosis, where the material lock becomes a poetic symbol of feminine honor. Art here helps to maintain civility in the necessary “war” between desire’s deferral and its satisfaction.

Notes on Eloisa to Abelard

The poem is genuinely medieval in sentiment—strong passions are constrained by convent walls and barbarous guards of honor. Eloisa and Abelard have become disembodied voices, confined to what they can write at long distance. They have no direct contact. Eloisa remains defiant, refusing fully to sublimate her erotic passion for Abelard into spiritual adoration of Christ. Her defiance is risky since she won’t give up an inappropriate love interest, one that the situation would seem to demand she put behind her. And she is quite self-conscious on this dilemma. What’s striking about the poem is how it manages, thanks to Pope’s virtuosity, to be both elegant and genuinely emotional: it isn’t easy to write love poetry in heroic couplets, but Pope has done it.

General Notes on Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

Nature: nature is structured like the human mind, and it operates in a rational and stable way. The ancients based their works upon nature, so studying Homer is like going back to nature, both in the sense of “human nature” and the physical environment. Literary and social rules are not merely prescriptive; they are instead based on the close observation of nature—that’s why we should follow them, and why we should value the ancients. Not to hold them in high regard merely shows that we have gone astray from what Dr. Johnson will later call “just representations of general nature.”

Imitation: Notice the predominance in the eighteenth century of certain mimetic figures: mirror, speech as dress, ornament. What is to be dressed and finely decked out with words is “nature,” human nature, or the social and political hierarchy. These are already solid and “there.” The point is to make them memorable and attractive. In this way, poetry is a species of elegant rhetoric, whose point is to reaffirm the belief that our ways and understandings are right. “Whatever is, is right,” as Pope says. Neoclassical critics generally support the principle of hierarchy underlying the social order, so they can conceive of a genial, erudite critic who does justice to the work itself and helps a broader public (gentlefolk, not Dickensian kitchen scullions and street-sweepers) understand the work’s complexities to as great an extent as possible. Such a critic serves the text and the public. Some modern cultural theories, by contrast, betray an anxiety that culture is either a top-down ideological control mechanism or an exercise in commercial vulgarianism: bread and circuses, “infotainment,” etc.

Analyzing the relationship between author/work/public and criticism demands consideration of art’s cultural value: does literature reflect an already held value system and merely dress or adorn it? Or is it a shaping force, a creator of culture, rather than a passive storehouse of normative ideas and aesthetic images? We can see art as establishing and maintaining consensus, or as tearing it down in favor of something new. It seems reasonable to say that it has done all these things and that critics, depending on their political and social leanings, have responded in very diverse ways. Some critics see themselves as guardians of culture—highbrow watchdogs, one might say—while others see themselves as unmasking texts’ claims to normative status with regard to social and political ideals, and still others claim they’re more or less operating in a politics-free zone where they should strive to “see the object as in itself it really is” (to borrow Matthew Arnold’s phrase) or work with a literary text entirely on its own terms (the New Critics of the 1930s-50’s in America). But even staking out a claim for the legitimacy of “apolitical” or “formalist” analysis is itself a political gesture since it means the critic is consciously refraining from or arguing against certain kinds of interpretation of a more political bent—today’s “cultural studies,” for example, would hardly be sympathetic to the notion that works of art exist in an autonomous realm independent of life’s other dimensions.

From the eighteenth century onwards, the notion of a “public” and even of several levels of public readership, from the low to the high, becomes an issue. We see the rise and fall of the man of letters and the advent of what George Gissing describes in New Grub Street as hack journalists and critics churning out pablum for a quarter-educated public. Pope isn’t facing this crass commercialization of art to the lowest common denominator. But you can see in his admonitions that critics should know their limits a flicker of anxiety that criticism may be starting to pander to a paying public that has its own not-so-well-considered ideas about what is worth reading. (Samuel Johnson, too, will later betrays much the same anxiety: who is going to be reading all those newly published novels? Mostly young and impressionable ordinary people, he fears.) Modern artists have sometimes tried to turn this relationship to a powerful public into a positive thing, but to varying degrees the attempt can require ceding ground on old claims surrounding art’s power to change individuals and even entire societies. Some further questions and observations:

1. Are literary authors superior to critics, and if so, on what grounds should we say that they are?

2. Is critics’ task to explain the text, or might they be best advised to add to, supplement, or go beyond it, perhaps using it as a springboard for their own observations? Or are all of those things good in their own way? Moreover, many contemporary theorists assert an independent right to do what they do, and don’t see themselves as simply serving as assistants to artists or explicating “primary texts.” What does that assertion imply about criticism’s role, and about the traditional notions that art exists innocently as an autonomous realm or that it merely adorns a culture’s values?

3. To what extent should literary authors and artists be familiar with criticism about their own work, or, more broadly, with the critical tradition as a whole? Is an artist likely to be better for being a critic, or would that just get in the way of artistic creation? What examples can you think of to illustrate both tendencies? Name a few literary or other kind of artists who seem not to have been interested in criticism, and a few who have doubled as critics in their own right.

4. Rejecting the responsibility of the explicator-critic to make texts accessible to a broad public narrows the critical function more or less to academic circles. Is that an entirely bad thing? Why or why not? Might it not be said that there is much of value that the public can’t appreciate that nonetheless shouldn’t be hounded out of existence, or that sometimes authors or entire schools of art become popular only long after their own time, and go nearly unregarded while they are still “in the making”? But what about the counter-charge that the arts (and criticism) shouldn’t be so distant from the needs and sensibilities of “ordinary people” that they lose all social impact? What happens to art if it becomes thought of as the product of marginalized, specialized labor rather than as something vital in which everyone has an interest? Is that where we are now in terms of how we think about art, or is the situation less bleak than that?

Page-by-Page Notes on “An Essay on Criticism,” Part 1

2497/441. “Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss” (6) and “In poets as true genius is but rare, / True taste as seldom is the critic’s share” (11-12). Pope values criticism for the same reason Horace does—the tasteful critic takes note of the best work (work possessed of genius) and makes it available for public appreciation and emulation by contemporary authors. But criticism quickly becomes a self-referential, self-perpetuating industry, one almost detached from its object. Bad critics pander to a vulgar public—Pope himself make his living as a writer, so he must have understood why other critics might be tempted to do that.

2498/442. “Be sure yourself and your own reach to know, / How far your genius, taste, and learning go” (48-49). As Pope writes at the beginning of the second epistle of his “Essay on Man,” “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is Man.” Here at lines 46-49 is the lesson adapted for critics, who can’t just spin literary rules from their own heads, or presume to be experts in what they really don’t understand. The great author of classical times isn’t to be condemned because he does something the critic can’t process. Homer and Virgil constitute an external, transhistorical, universal set of standards to which critics must conform their sensibilities: taste is intricately tied to education. Even the erudite person has limits, a “point where sense and dullness meet,” and must begin with frank acknowledgment of those limits, lest the public be misled by vain obscurantists about the true value of a given work. This line of thinking seems reminiscent of Socrates’ distrust of squirrelly rhapsodes like Ion who suppose they are the masters of every craft because they can talk about them fluently. But unlike Plato, Pope seems to think the practice of criticism can rise to the live of a genuine craft; it need not be considered mere dilettantish twaddle about “copies of copies of copies.”

2298/442-43. “Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, / One clear, unchanged, and universal light…” (70-71). Nature is “the source, and end, and test in art” (73). Mind and nature work analogously; the world follows Reason, and is an intelligential order, so that to study the world around us is to study something that operates in accordance with principles we should be able to grasp. The artist and critic help us appreciate the intelligibility of the natural order, the compatibility between mind and nature.

2499/443. “Those rules of old, discovered, not devised, / Are Nature still, but Nature methodized…” (88-89). Neoclassical authors such as Pope are careful to insist on selection from nature: Nature must be “methodized” in the sense that we must intelligently derive appropriate rules for human conduct from it. Pope does not suggest that authors should “copy” nature in the lowest sense. This carefulness is partly due to the moral (pragmatic) demand of neoclassical criticism: art should teach by delighting. But it is also an Aristotelian requirement to derive the universal significance from the particular instance. The rules are themselves rooted in nature, so conventions are natural to humanity, not mere extrinsic ornaments or ungrounded artifice. (Another way to gloss the term “artifice” is to say that it’s fine so long as it is rooted in nature, not totally independent of it.) Pope points to ancient Greece as a time when critics, artists, and the people had forged the right relationship

2500/445. “When first young Maro in his boundless mind / A work to outlast immortal Rome designed, / Perhaps he seemed above the critic’s law, / And but from Nature’s fountains scorned to draw; / But when to examine every part he came, / Nature and Homer were, he found, the same . . .” (130-35). Homer was a great observer of human nature and of the natural environment and its processes, so to derive the rules for epic from him is to derive them from nature itself. Virgil, in essence, went to Homer as a critic and was inspired by that artist’s universal, transhistorical excellence to write his own excellent epic, one appropriate to his own time and place, which was Augustan Rome.

2500-01/445. “Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, / And rise to faults that critics dare not mend. . .” (152). Such a great wit or artist, says Pope, may “snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, / Which, without passing through the judgment, gains / The heart . . .” (155-57). He’s probably alluding to Shakespeare above all: when Shakespeare seems to violate the rules of good drama, we should most often credit him with the genius it takes to make new rules based on seeing something in human or physical nature that nobody has ever seen before. A person with such a gift must be granted wide latitude, and “rules” must never be applied so prescriptively that they keep us from appreciating a work of genius. Moreover, sometimes what may appear to be a flaw shows its true virtue when viewed from a distance, from a different perspective; this is something we must watch out for in reading Homer, who, Pope famously says, is never mistaken: “Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream” (180).

Page-by-Page Notes on “An Essay on Criticism,” Part 2

2501-02/446. “A little learning is a dangerous thing” (215). Pope is against mediocrity for the same reason as Horace: art should reflect our society and values to us elegantly; that is the meaning of decorum. Otherwise, we end up with Plato’s demagogues and critics and artists pandering to the lowest common denominator. In that case, art would not exert any shaping power, and we would be on a degenerative arc with respect to the ancients. At the bottom of 2502, Pope insists we must know the whole work, not just the parts; we should note “the joint force and full result of all” (246).

2505/447. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed; / Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, / That gives us back the image of our mind” (297-300). True wit does not get itself a raised podium or become its own order of things; the intellect’s glory doesn’t consist in departing radically from what common humanity thinks but rather in expressing something common in a fine, appropriate manner. Some eighteenth-century authors distrust words and wittiness because they tend to get in the way of truth and “things as they are,” but judiciously crafted language dresses or adorns nature to advantage. Just as fashion succeeds only when it knows the body well, so art must accord with human nature and with the order of things. Moreover, the notion that words clothe thought implies that thought itself refers to a stable order of things prior to language. The emphasis is on coherence, on building and maintaining consensus. True wit is like nature in that both give us back a proper image of our minds. The term “wit” is an important one in eighteenth-century literature; in faculty psychology, the “inner wits” are imagination, fantasy, and memory, which process and recall sensory data, and judgment and common sense or sensus communis. But more broadly, as the OED explains, the term means “The seat of consciousness or thought, the mind,” and in the plural, “intellectual powers.” The last-mentioned is the meaning that best fits Pope’s usage in line 297: true intelligence or right-thinking.

2504/448. “But true expression, like the unchanging sun, / Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon; / It gilds all objects, but it alters none. / Expression is the dress of thought…” (315-18). Language should clarify things and “gild them,” but it should not change the object or lead us away from just appreciation of it. Felicity lies in apprehending the order of things, and in expressing that order attractively. The Victorian critic Matthew Arnold would later call for critics to “see the object as in itself it really is”—a statement that seems neoclassical in its reassertion of human values as solid, factual, and real.

2504-05/450. “But most by numbers judge a poet’s song, / And smooth or rough with them is right or wrong” (337-38). Pope, though a great employer of the heroic couplet and the elegant phrase, doesn’t reduce poetry to rhyme or smooth meter; as he says, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense” (365). Milton, too, in his preface to Paradise Lost, had rejected the notion that rhyme and such devices were essential to poetry; rhyme, he said, was “no necessary Adjunct to true Ornament” in a poem—especially a long one with a complex subject to develop. Pope also writes that “Some foreign writers, some our own despise; / the ancients only, or the moderns prize…” (394-95) and that a fine critic will “At every trifle scorn to take offense” (386). Pope does not simply say the ancient authors are better: the category true-false does not reduce to old-new in this regard, and neither is carping and nitpicking an appropriate way to proceed. Such behavior merely shows the critic to be petty and inhumane. Conversely, what’s needed is not blind partisan advocacy of an author’s merits but instead judicious, constructive remarks: “For fools admire, but men of sense approve” (391).

2508/454. “Nor in the critic let the man be lost! / Good nature and good sense must ever join; / To err is human, to forgive divine” (523-25). The goal for criticism generally is to improve public taste and promote an intelligent consensus in social and moral affairs, in so far as art touches upon them. The phrase “the public” implies a degree of democracy—it’s starting to matter in Pope’s day what an increasingly broad public thinks about various issues, even if democratic reforms will have to wait until the nineteenth century. Since the function of the critic is to inform the public’s taste and morals, the critic must behave in a civil manner. Later, in Part 3 (lines 631-32), Pope says that pride is the main fault of intellectuals, thus continuing a thought that he had voiced earlier: “But where’s the man, who counsel can bestow, / Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?” Sir Philip Sidney had described the way to move people towards virtuous action along similar lines: they must have enough humility to see that it’s their job to please the public and move its members towards virtuous action. Art shouldn’t be about self-aggrandizement, and neither should criticism. That is a typical 18th-century notion, too—literature is said to better than philosophy because it has broader appeal. If critics are authorities, they are benevolent ones, not tyrants because genuine consensus cannot be achieved by tyrannical or destructive means.

Week 12, Aphra Behn

2008-04-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave

Narrator Describes Surinam (Guiana) in South America (2183-85)

The slave trade had long been carried on by the Portuguese and the Arabs, and then the English got into it and did not abolish such human trafficking until March 1807, when Lord Grenville’s Whig administration dealt it a fatal blow. Slavery itself was fully abolished in England only in 1833, while in the American South it was taken down even later, when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 during the Civil War. At the story’s outset, we hear that the natives of Dutch Guiana are not to be enslaved. The West Indies are described as almost prelapsarian, a paradisal place. The narrator says that the English deal with the natives almost as equals because they are useful: they know their own land and can help the settlers. So African people are brought in to work the cane fields. The Englishmen use cunning and economic calculation in dealing with the people of other lands: they size up the natives and consider how best to use them. Supposedly, at some point Aphra Behn herself may have been in Surinam, so she must have understood the slavery issue well. The story she tells is fiction, but there’s considerable realism in its description of relations with the natives of Surinam and its characterization of the African slave trade.

Oroonoko’s African Homeland, Coramantien (2186-2200)

In order to make Oroonoko an exotic and yet familiar figure, the narrator describes him as having European-like features. His skin is ebony or polished jet, but his facial features are like those of a Caucasian. He is “Afropean,” we might say. He is also characterized as a Renaissance-style prince, and he had been given a French tutor. Coramantien culture is hardly “primitive,” and it’s clear that there have been interrelations between the Africans in the text and the Europeans. Oroonoko himself has had dealings with the English slave-trader who subsequently enslaves him.

The King seems unable to control his passions, while Oroonoko possesses more restraint. Throughout his disagreement with the King over Imoinda, he plays his cards close to his chest. See 2191 bottom: “he showed a face not at all betraying his heart.” This quality will serve him well later in Surinam. But in Coramantien or Ghana he makes one serious mistake, or at least an accident occurs: Imoinda falls by accident into his arms, and he doesn’t refrain from embracing her. This event angers the King, who values Oroonoko as a fine warrior and feels dependent on his skill in that capacity. So the King sells Imoinda into slavery but doesn’t tell Oroonoko because he needs him to fight Jamoan. Oroonoko takes his own disfavor in an Achilles-like way, sulking in his tent and avoiding the fight.

Oroonoko’s Enslavement, Sea Voyage to Surinam (2200-04)

The text determines for us the manner in which Oroonoko is heroic: Oroonoko decides that he should go out to meet death in the noblest way, and he captures Jamoan and makes a friend of him. The kind of heroism he exhibits will be put to the test in the second part of the story, where he won’t be as free to act the way he does at this early point. He will retain his royalty, but as a “royal slave,” he will not be given the scope necessary for successful heroism. After the fight he returns to camp, and the King lies about Imoinda, saying he has had her killed. An English ship appears, and we hear that Oroonoko has had prior meetings with the captain. His relationship with this slaver isn’t meant to drag the Prince down to a less heroic status since his royal birth probably meant that he had the right to sell others into slavery. But the captain’s dishonesty is foreign to Oroonoko, so the Englishman succeeds in enslaving him and forcing him to undergo the dreadful passage that so many African people suffered in subsequent years—millions probably died and were tossed into the sea because of the inhumane living conditions during the passage. The supposed justification for enslaving African people, by the way, was not well developed before the nineteenth century, when abolitionists challenged American slavery as a moral evil. But opposition to slavery was not unknown, either—it’s clear that Aphra Behn’s narrative weighs heavily against the practice in that Oroonoko seems superior to his captors. When a hunger strike begins on board the ship at sea, the captain again deceives the Prince into diffusing the explosive situation. Oroonoko is stripped of his delusion that the white men are honorable, and part of his heroism will later show itself in his becoming wise to the fiendish dishonesty of the white men.

Oroonoko’s Captivity as “Caesar” in Surinam (2203-16)

Once in Surinam, Oroonoko shows himself to be cagey and bold. He is renamed “Caesar” after the erudite and militarily capable Roman Julius Caesar. In one sense, it’s an honor to be renamed Caesar, but in another the name indicates the transgressiveness of a superior man like Oroonoko, who must be brought down by upholders of the status quo. He will be struck down as Caesar was. The text captures Oroonoko’s strangeness; a man who is a king (a Caesar) and yet feared and disrespected because he’s a slave. In this situation, his options to shape his own fate are limited—there seems to be the potential for dramatic action, but the protagonist cannot fulfill that potential due to circumstances.

Oroonoko decides to plan his rebellion when Imoinda becomes pregnant. But the men Oroonoko persuades to make the rebellion with him are unworthy of him, and they desert him without hesitation, even turning on him after the battle is over. Imoinda shows herself a fitting match for Oroonoko—she wounds the scurrilous Governor General Byam. After being captured, Oroonoko knows that he must seek revenge against Byam and that as a consequence Imoinda will be punished, so when he recovers, he kills her with his own hands.

Oroonoko’s Rebellion in Surinam (2216-26)

The narrator’s sympathies are with Oroonoko. She consistently describes him as a great prince. But at the same time, she is implicated in the English colonial project. Her father was to have been the governor of a province, but he died during the sea passage to the New World. Her safety is with the English. The narrator helps to protect Oroonoko after his capture, and later on she and Trefly (who had bought Oroonoko when he first arrived in Surinam) do everything they can to convince him to go on living even after he has killed Imoinda and wounded himself gravely. But why would they want him to survive after all this? It seems as if the best thing would be to assist him in dying—he needs a sword, not medical care. The narrator doesn’t fully enter into Oroonoko’s heroic sensibilities. At the end of the tale, the narrator does a fine job of showing how savage the English could be. Oroonoko is executed at the same post where Governor-General Byam had him whipped. He suffers a variation on the English punishment for traitors, which often included castration and dismemberment. The English scarcely recognize Oroonoko as a human being, but he preserves his dignity in the teeth of savage retribution, calmly smoking his pipe and defying his executors to the bitter end.

Week 10, John Milton

2008-03-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

Notes on John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Introduction to Milton

An industrious youth, studious and earnestly Protestant, Milton wanted to write a great national epic, with Spencer as his predecessor. From the late 1620s through the 1630’s, he wrote pastoral and other poetry, such as Arcades and Comus (1634). Milton was a bourgeois, and his father was a successful scrivener. Milton went to Cambridge , made a grand tour of Europe in 1638-39, and three years later the Civil War broke out, an event that changed Milton ’s life profoundly. Archbishop William Laud had driven him away from the Church of England, and now Milton wrote in favor of the Puritan cause, against Bishops, in favor of divorce, and for a free press (1644, Areopagitica.)

His personal life was a sad one; his young wife Mary Powell left him soon after the marriage, only to return and die in childbirth 1652. That is the same year in which Milton went blind. He married Catherine Woodcock in 1656, but she died in 1658. he married the third time to Elizabeth Minshull in 1663, and Elizabeth outlived Milton . After the Restoration in 1660, Milton experienced some financial hardship, but by 1667, he nonetheless published Paradise Lost in 10 books (the 12-book version came out in 1674). In 1671, he published Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.Paradise Lost is a work written in sadness and disillusionment. The author’s millenarian hopes had been crushed—there was to be no immediate Rule of the Saints, and his own time no longer seemed to be ushering in Christ’s return at the Last Judgment. Ordinary people preferred theaters, bowling and the semi-Catholic and elegantly dissolute Charles the second, along with his “Protestant whores.” This would be egg on any Puritan’s face, but Milton had kept a high profile. So how was he to deal with the fall of the Puritan cause and the return of the Stuart Kings? It became necessary to tie historical developments into the persistent consequences of the Fall. England had, after all, fallen away from what had seemed to be history-making progress in religion, politics, and civil society.

The Structure of Paradise Lost

1-2 :: 11-12. Permanent Fall of Satan versus the Fortunate Fall of Adam and Eve. 1-2 are a parody of classical epic’s militarism—set speeches, hosts, power-grabbing leaders. Satan is cast as Agamemnon and as an Asiatic despot. In 11, Michael will give Adam a panoramic view of the future, so that in his exile he will retain hope for his offspring. Satan doesn’t understand “the vision thing,” and he has a vested interest in not understanding God’s linear time.

3-4 :: 9-10. Adam and Eve converse, and we find out about the relationship between heaven and earth, which by 9-10 will have to be renewed. Satan makes his adventurous trip to earth through Chaos, and tempts Eve. God sets forth prophecies.

5-6 :: 7-8. Narration of events in Heaven, explanation of Adam and Eve’s place in the created order. WAR IN HEAVEN and its consequences = 5-8 as a block. Christ is a Warrior, God’s terrible aspect, in 5-6, and he is the Creative Word in 7-8. God is inscrutable, but Christ the intercessor makes him manifest, expressing the inexpressible.

Introduction to Books 1-2

Problem: we have two sets of givens—our experience of an evil world, and the idea that at the creation everything was perfect. How did the change occur? Milton will draw on a grand multi-part myth cycle to explain things:

1. Creation and 2. The Fall. Milton will link these first two logically; Genesis provides a brief text without full justification, or at least without much explanation.

3. Redemption. Christ offers to atone for humankind’s original sin, re-forging a connection or path between the human and the divine. Milton ’s poetical problem is how to deal with the extremely long Old Testament history that must go by—why does it take so long for Christ to return? Michael’s Book 11 panorama justifies this length in terms of poetic structure.

4. Anno Domini. This is the time from the Annunciation to the Apocalypse. But when will the latter occur? Milton compresses the waiting time.

Things to Watch For

Eyes, Ears, Understandings

God
Christ
Good Angels such as Raphael, Abdiel, and Michael
Adam and Eve Unfallen
Adam and Eve Fallen
The Narrator, aided by Urania/Holy Spirit
Fallen Us, Fit Audience Though Few

Significant Texts and Structures

The Bible, Old Testament and New Testament
Classical Epic and All Other Genres
Christian Epic and Literature (Tasso, Ariosto, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare)
The Great Chain of Being (Raphael’s “Bright Consummate Flow’r”)
Theology and Philosophy
Science—Bacon, Galileo, etc.
Current Events and Opinions—English Civil War, Rule of Saints, Stuart Restoration
Narrator’s personal situation (closely parallels that of isolated, endangered Milton )

Risks to Keep in Mind

Narrator : may aspire without proper inspiration and authority: Satanic self-sufficiency, desire to rewrite and even replace Biblical narrative as well as all other literature (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, etc.). Is the narrator’s heart continually “upright and pure”?

Us : siding with Satan the Rebel with a False Cause; mere literary appreciation of text’s complexity and beauties as “dead letter”—i.e. failing to interpret PL spiritually; not fitting ourselves into the story or applying stern lessons to ourselves. We may fail to be, in Stanley Fish’s phrase, “surprised [continually] by sin”—an effect that many of Milton ’s dramatic descriptions and narrations are clearly meant to create. In this regard, the work as a whole resembles a strong, varied sermon—it must be appliedto members of the congregation.

Some Modes of Showing and Telling

Example: Christ, Abdiel, Raphael and Muse as poets describing heavenly things, etc.

Demonstration: The War in Heaven—demonstrates to rebel angels God’s omnipotence and serves as vehicle for Christ’s dramatic elevation.

Celebration: Prayer and Song, as in Eden Adam and Eve chant orisons unpremeditated.

Concrete Description (allegory included): Narrator and Raphael able to do this, bearing in mind the limits of speech as a conveyance for heavenly things.

Vagueness: Strategic vagueness to remind us how to interpret the poem’s concrete descriptions.
Oratory: Public set-piece speeches by God, Christ, Satan, Adam, others. Satan is the first “politician” (in the bad sense, not the good Aristotelian one wherein politics helps us pursue the good life).

Narration: recountings “situate” prior and higher things and events temporally and spatially, in terms that the fallen eye and understanding can encompass. This is due not to God’s need, but ours, and even to that of unfallen Adam and Eve. Main justifications for history as unfolding occur in Books 7 and 11: the Annunciation of Christ, Adam’s Panoramic Vision of Human History as Granted by Michael--the Fortunate Rise of Christ and Fortunate Fall of humankind. Exclusion and differentiation lead to still greater unity and coherence.

Places to arrange: Heaven, Hell, Chaos, Unfallen Earth, Fallen Earth, Narrator’s Study.

Book-by-Book Notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost, Books 1-4

General Comment: Regarding the claims of Milton’s epic to retell parts of the Bible, we might refer to “the doctrine of things indifferent,” which suggests that if something isn’t discussed in the Bible, people are free to invent, opinionize, and so forth. Milton would probably agree that the basic articles of belief and conduct necessary to make it to heaven aren’t particularly difficult to comprehend, so authors are free to extrapolate from or elaborate on the Scriptures. The text’s truth-status is certainly something Milton must defend in Paradise Lost since he can’t rely sincerely on an argument like that of Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote in his “Defense of Poesy” that a poet shouldn’t be accused of falsehood since “ he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth: for . . . to lie, is to affirm that to be true, which is false.” Milton is, after all, extrapolating from the Scriptures, and it’s obvious that he considers his text “inspired” by a Christian Muse. But there is a long tradition of defending the use of metaphor and figurative language in the Bible (carried on by no less than Augustine, Aquinas, among others) as a necessary form of accommodation, and Milton would probably say that his own stories based on Biblical events are just such a form of accommodation to help fallen human beings understand their predicament.

Book 1

1-26. In his initial invocation, the narrator will take his readers all the way back to the beginning of things, back to “man’s first disobedience.” Milton’s text shows a strong interest in getting back to the origin or source of things, events, tendencies, words, stories, and just about everything else he can find time and scope to investigate. The narrator calls his muse Urania, but indirectly invokes the Christian God, or “the Holy Spirit” as a creative, illuminating power. At 15-16, the narrator claims that there will be “no middle flight” in this book—nearly every major human thought-system and historical cycle is to be subsumed into Paradise Lost, there to be given its place within the Christian order and narrative. Homer, Virgil, and all other great literary artists of pagan times may be considered honorable predecessors whose work to some extent prefigures Milton’s, but it’s clear that we are to understand them as having written about what Milton, in a famous line from Book 1, calls “devils to adore for deities.” The narrator prays at line 18 for the “upright heart and pure” that should prove a fit vessel for the task to be accomplished. Blindness—and of course Milton had gone blind by the time he began to compose Paradise Lost—is an early theme in the epic, one that will recur more than once in the books ahead. The compensation for physical blindness, the narrator implies, is inward illumination about spiritual matters.

36. The first sin, according to the narrator, was pride. This sin involved Satan’s desire to upset the fixed, just hierarchy of God, an ethereal and yet real order that Satan (ever the bad interpreter) mistakes again and again for something merely material.

54-75. At this point, we are treated to the first “elegiac moment”; Satan suffers from “the thought / Both of lost happiness and lasting pain.” There will be many more such moment, some perhaps less illegitimate than others, but none fully deserving of pity. Milton seems to have learned much from Shakespeare’s handling of his tragic heroes, and while Satan may not have a “Fool” of the same kind that King Lear has by his side throughout most of his sufferings, he carries his own “inner Fool” with him at all times.

The line “no light but rather darkness visible” (60) is deliciously absurd, but that’s because the narrator needs to render something of the strangeness and absurdity of Hell itself. This is perhaps our first look at Milton’s important strategy of accommodating heavenly things to more understandable earthly ones. Hell, as Milton’s narrator describes it, is a crazy composite “place”; it burns with a bizarrely negative light, and although it is a prison (a place of stagnation), there’s literally “no rest for the wicked.”

80-94. The elegiac quality of Satan’s opening words here is hard to miss; in essence, he tells the first rhetorical lie to Beëlzebub, whose aid he courts with chivalric sentiment.

95-124. Satan’s rhetoric is absurd here, as it will prove to be throughout Paradise Lost. Milton’s Devil is always equating himself with God and making bogus political claims. While he obviously covets the role of absolute dictator over the fallen legions, he sets himself forth as an angel whose peers “democratically” chose him as their leader. Christ’s declared advancement is seen as mere favoritism on the Father’s part, and as one of my UC Irvine professors used to say, Satan suffers from a serious case of “injured merit.” In a word, he feels slighted and can’t see why the Son has any more right than he, Satan, has to sit at the right hand of God the Father. The battle is described as having taken place on a literal plane, a “field,” and the outcome is characterized as dubious. It makes no sense to ask defiantly, “What though the field be lost?” (105) when one’s defeat is total and extends infinitely beyond any physical, containable dimensions. God’s power, in Milton’s order of things, is absolute and infinite; it cannot be countered with anything but laughable results. And there is a great deal of this sort of humor in Paradise Lost. Well, Satan needs to enlist sham reasoning in the service of his perpetual illusions and confusions. He seems eternally astonished at the plain truth of God’s justice and order, and he chooses instead to ally himself with chaos and cover-up. Following Satan’s speech, Beëlzebub evidently doubts the force of what Satan has said—what if, he asks, the “field” is more than just one battle, and what if things really can keep getting worse and worse?

156-91. In reply to Beëlzebub, Satan is ready with some more speedy words; he sets the devils’ tasks as those of un-creation, negation, inversion, chaos-making, and in general the frustration of Providence (God’s plan).

195-210. Here is the first of Milton’s excellent “observer” similes: this one describes the bulk of Satan as similar to that of the Biblical Leviathan or a great whale that a Norwegian captain might stumble upon in the dark of night, and mistake for an island. The purpose of similes in Milton is generally fourfold: it may refer us back to a former state of things; offer an historical parallel (Red Sea, Egyptian chivalry, Biblical times, etc.); bring other epics into the mix (Homer refers to leaves and bees metaphorically; and so does Milton); or refer to Eden and the wilderness thereof. In the present simile, we see the strangeness of what the narrator is trying to describe to us—its proportions and dimensions are too huge for our senses to take in, which may produce a disorienting effect. The simile itself doesn’t try to reduce Satan to a level easily taken in; rather, it reproduces the “original” sense of disorientation implied.

242-70. Satan offers another elegiac perspective on his situation, taking his farewell in thought of the “happy fields” he had formerly known. Some of his most memorable lines occur in this little speech: “The mind is its own place,” he insists at line 254, and then goes on to sum up his position on the angelic fall: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” (263). This is why British romantics such as Byron and Shelley praise Milton’s Devil—they see him as the ultimate rebel with a cause: opposing God’s allegedly tyrannical rule over adoring slaves. Shelley’s “Essay on the Devil and Devils” takes this view about as far as it can go since he proclaims that Satan is “morally superior” to the God against whom he rebelled. This is what he writes in the essay: “Nothing can exceed the grandeur and the energy of the Devil as expressed in Paradise Lost. . . . Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy—not from any mistaken notion of bringing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity but with the open and alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.” ( Shelley’s Prose. Ed. David Lee Clark. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988. 267.)
But the same romantics probably also understood that Milton would scarcely ratify their interpretation: Satan’s claims are about as dubious as claims can be: the mind is not independent in the way Satan claims, as Milton would surely say, and neither is reigning over a territory of utter desolation better than praising the Almighty in Paradise.

283-94. Although Milton uses the ancient Ptolemaic system of astronomy, he is aware of the discoveries of Galileo (1564-1642), whose name is associated with his predecessor Copernicus (1473-1543), whose “heliocentric” theory helped initiate the modern Scientific Revolution. The narrator likens Satan’s shield to the moon as viewed through Galileo’s telescope.

315-30. Milton borrows here and elsewhere from classical epic’s standard portrayal of the haranguing captain inciting his men to courageous exploits with a mixture of insults and inspirational language: “Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” (330).

365-521. At the command of their leader, the rebel angels rise from the burning lake and begin to wander about the realm of Hell, giving the narrator an opportunity to trace the lineage of the world’s “devils to adore for deities” (373). The goal in cataloguing these pagan gods is partly to get to the source of mythological and historical confusion. Hell accounts for a great deal of the wrong kind of human diversity in that its bad angels spread out over the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, Britain, and nearly everywhere else on the globe. (By “bad diversity,” I mean the kind that stems from fiendishly clever variations on wicked and selfish acts, not the kind that stems from God’s generous decree in Genesis that humans and all creatures should “be fruitful and multiply.”) Moreover, the catalogs so full of names and places underscore the deceptiveness of fallen language, which multiplies confusion along with its many terms for things.

587-621. Satan surveys his great host in a moment of epic grandeur. Again we see his divided psyche, in which what may be genuine pity for the fallen coexists with cruel determination to forge a rival empire dedicated to the frustration of God’s cosmic order. Satan towers above the other rebel angels, and we are told that some of his old beauty still survives, in an “excess / Of glory obscured” (593-94). Milton must, of course, play up the epic dimensions and persona of Satan, lest his epic become much less interesting—Satan must, after all, be greater than an earthly Achilles or Aeneas, mustn’t he? But at the same time, the narrator will keep twinning his sublime descriptions of Satan with passages casting the hellish hero as a posturer and deployer of devious rhetoric and “smoke-and-mirrors” visual spectacles.

622-62. Satan takes stock of the situation for his host, blaming God for the catastrophe they’ve suffered because he advanced Christ as the Crown Prince and then put down the envious rebels with strength they never knew he had. The charge, then, is that God deviously “concealed” the true dimensions of his power, and in effect tempted the angels to defy him—in Satan’s view (if, of course, we are to suppose that he really believes what he says), God set them up for a fall. Satan is issuing what we might call a terrorist’s manifesto; he waffles somewhat on the question of confronting God again directly on the so-called “field of battle,” and insists that in any case the bad angels can wage asymmetrical warfare against this sublimely powerful foe. However, as always in Milton’s scheme of things, Satan doesn’t see that God’s power is not merely physical; it is moral and spiritual, and therefore cannot truly be opposed.

670-751. In this segment, the narrator belittled human pretensions to grandiosity and opulence: the devils set to work on their infernal palace, mining the necessary metals and other materials as they go, with a speed that would astonish the most proficient human engineers and architects. This whole passage is a reminder that much human industry amounts not so much to intelligence as to fiendish cleverness stemming from a desire to rival God or simply achieve an illegitimate independence from him. What the devils do in Hell, we might say, is the archetype of the building of the Tower of Babel in Genesis.

775-98. In the concluding segment of Book One, the narrator’s multiple similes describe the devils as they prepare for their “great consult[ation].” The narrator allows a pretense of grandeur, orderliness, and democratic assent into his description, only to take it all back in a spirit of mockery at their shape-shifting grotesqueness and, ultimately, inessentiality. We are told that the devils shrunk themselves down to “smallest forms” (789), but we hear subsequently that “far within / And in their own dimensions like themselves” (792-93) some of the highest angels (if I read Milton correctly here) take their seats and begin the meeting. But what exactly are these true dimensions? The point we are to derive, it seems, is the Augustinian one that says evil, correctly understood, simply does not exist; it lacks ontological stability because authentic beings are grounded (and freely recognize that they are grounded) in God.

Book 2

30-42. Satan puts forth a false principle of egalitarianism, claiming that no one in Hell will claim “precédence.” But he is exactly the sort of despot Milton himself had long been on record as despising.

43-105. Moloch is the Devils’ Achilles-like fighter; he declares for open warfare, not guile. As far as he is concerned, nothing could be worse than the present situation. At line 65, he sounds like the first spokesman for the “military-industrial complex.” Milton chastises ancient epic’s glorification of war for war’s sake and uncontrolled wrath, the “oulomenos mēnin” of Achilles. This kind of anger differs from God’s righteous wrath in the Hebrew Scriptures.

106-228. Next Belial offers his opinion. Possessed of more savvy than Moloch, he realizes that things actually could get worse and that God’s powers are not of the almost purely material kind that some of the angels attribute to Him. If God is omniscient as well as omnipotent, it also makes no sense to suppose, says Belial, that the bad angels will be able to trick him or hide anything from him. Belial therefore counsels that the fallen host play a waiting game; perhaps God will remit some of their punishment if they stay out of his sight for a long time. Still, this advice is no better than a variation on Satan’s mistake: how can one be “out of sight, out of mind” when the perceiver is God?

229-83. Mammon then takes his turn, and he offers a Nimrod-like pan: the devils should stay in Hell and concentrate on building up their empire. He believes that they can achieve a level of splendor rivaling God’s Heaven and even that in due time, they will become accommodated to the fiery element of their new abode.

299-416. Beëlzebub now steps in and plays “spin doctor,” extrapolating from Satan’s earlier thought that it might serve best to seek out earth and ruin whatever “next big thing” God has planned for the cosmos. The whole speech is carefully staged, and leads to a portentous request for a volunteer: who will be so bold and skilful as to make his way out of Hell and fulfill the task specified?

430-85. Satan sets himself forward as the princely devil for the job. His bold exploit will lead the bad angels on to their new dream of building and maintaining a rival empire against God, by any means necessary. Satan’s speedy response has effectively “prevented all reply” (467), and so with Beëlzebub’s help he is able to cement his position as Hell’s great dictator and heroic champion, receiving the clamorous acclaim he seeks upon the conclusion of his speech.

506-628. The “Stygian council” breaks up now that the necessary decision has been made, and the rebel angels split up into separate groups according to their various inclinations. They participate in games and practice arts—Olympian-style contests at 530, recitation of heroic epic at 546ff, and philosophical and theological debate at 557-65. Hell has its explorers, too, as we find at 570, and they begin to trace the stunning geography of the “dismal world” into which their sin has thrown them. Lines 614-28 offer a remarkable description of this place, with its “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, / A universe of Death,” all seen, we must presume, in the eerie “darkness visible” mentioned back in Book 1.

629-889. This segment presents the famous meeting between Satan and his “daughter” Sin, along with their offspring, Death. Sin is described with Spenserian visual dimensions at line 645 and following, and at first Satan fails to recognize either his old lover or his son Death, when the latter appears and threatens to sting his father. As usual, Satan is blind to the consequences of his actions, calling Death “execrable shape” at line 681. At 727, Sin shows a strange affection for Satan, and dissuades him from harming Death, as he seems set on doing, and she similarly warns her son not to harm his father. This is truly the first “dysfunctional family,” fraught with violent regard and incestuous relations. When Satan still cannot recognize Sin, she recounts for him the story of her birth, which Milton has evidently borrowed from the Greek myth of Athena springing fully grown from the head of Zeus. Sin sprang from Satan’s head just at the point when he was about to declare his bold plan in council to rebel against God’s tyrannical rule. The lady now reveals a Satan-like sense of “injured merit,” believing that she is now deprived of that favor which her father and lover had formerly granted her. At 774, in what seems to be a parody of Saint Peter’s reception at the hands of Christ of the Key to Heaven, Sin says that after the rebel host fell, she was given the key to Hell’s portal, “with charge to keep / These gates for ever shut” (775-76). At 792, Sin recounts how she was raped by her son Death, and the union produced myriads of “yelling monsters” that surround her always and return at will to the womb, there to gnaw her innards. This is Milton’s grotesquely Spenserian figure for the incestuous relationship between sin and death. By line 815, Satan has come to realize that this hideous pair are his natural allies, fitting instruments of the revenge he seeks against God. He will set them free as if they were two attack dogs, and Sin obligingly obeys her father. Her recognition of him and her support for his plan are ironic, considering the disloyalty Satan has shown for God.

918-67. The Gates of Hell now opened (not to be shut again until the Last Judgment), Satan beholds the great space he must cross for a time, and then embarks on his Odyssean voyage through Chaos. The narrator describes this passage in somewhat comic terms: we see Satan falling, tumbling, and stumbling through the empty space, only advancing, the narrator reminds us, at the sufferance of God. He is ill at ease and off balance throughout his “heroic” voyage, dependent on the will of the very Power he means to oppose.

968-1010. Satan manages to convince Chaos and Night, and the dread Powers surrounding their throne, that he means them only good. Theirs, he promises, will be the “advantage,” while he seeks only “revenge” (987). They agree without much ado, and Satan is able to make his way forwards.

1024-55. Sin and Death follow their father, building after his tracks the great bridge that will speed the passage of the bad angels back and forth from hell to earth, there to tempt mankind. Book 2’s final passage offers a panoramic vision of the “empyreal Heav’n” and the beautiful new “pendent world” (1052) next to its moon. Satan’s mind, however, is dark with revenge—he has not come merely to behold this magnificent sight; he has come, so he thinks, to destroy it utterly if he can, or at the very least to spoil it for the better part of its inhabitants.

Book 3

1-55. The invocation at the beginning of the third book, with its Petrarchan extremes and genuine pathos, is perhaps the most intimate and moving of any in Paradise Lost. The narrator will soon describe the consequences of the fall, but at this point the issue for him is the consequences of that fall for him personally. He is blind, and what compensation can there be for so terrible a deprivation? He feels a duty to cultivate the spiritual insight that can alone make up for such loss, and asks for help from “holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born.” God obliges him, and the narrative moves on. The narrator links himself with ancient seers who have shaped history, and brings the story down to the level of a brief, individual human situation (his own) in the present time. Milton had implored God at the beginning of the first book, “what is dark in me illumine,” and here in the third book we are reminded of the difficulty in accommodating heavenly things to earthly understandings and reassured of the narrator’s confidence in his ability to do so: “So much the rather thou celestial Light / Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence / Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (51-55). We are moving from darkness and chaos to the realms of light, and the narrator prays to be freed for a time from Satan’s and his own painful way of knowing things as a fallen man. Milton would have been quite aware of his predecessor Dante’s wonderful achievement in characterizing heaven as a place of pure energy and light in the Paradiso, and Paradise Lost must venture into the same region.

79-134. God begins to speak to his Son. Some have said that he sounds almost petulant at times, but the logic is Milton’s own: “reason is but choosing,” as the author had written in “Areopagitica.” God says of mankind, “whose fault? / Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me / All he could have; I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (96-99). As for the old argument about God’s omniscience and omnipotence making him responsible for the evil others do, God says, “if I foreknew, / Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, / Which had no influence on their fault” (117-18). The idea is that God did not compel either the rebel angels to disobey or Eve and Adam to sin; he simply knew that they were going to make the choices they in fact subsequently made. Not everyone finds this argument convincing, but it’s the one Milton himself evidently means to make. At line 129, we see that God is by no means a full-on predestinarian: to humankind he offers grace, while Satan he views as a lost cause: “The first sort by their own suggestion fell, / Self-tempted, self-depraved: man falls deceived / By the other first: man therefore shall find grace . . .” (129-31).

144-66. The Son replies to the Father, showing concern for the latter’s reputation: wouldn’t allowing mankind to be utterly lost amount to a victory for the rebel angels? Wouldn’t it be a profoundly decreative act, whereas God is all about creative generosity? The Son’s reverential tone marks a change from the tone of the heroic epic we heard in the first two books to a more reverential tone; as the editors point out, what the Son says sounds a lot like Abraham’s pleadings with God not to destroy the people of Sodom.

167-216. God explains to the Son and the angels that redemption is indeed possible and part of the plan. At line 180, we are told that man will be “By me upheld, that he may know how frail / His fall’n condition is, and to me owe / All his deliv’rance, and to none but me” (180-82). This line may seem to have a bit of the Hebrew Scriptures’ “jealous god” in it—it’s the kind of statement against which Shelley takes radical aim in his prose.

217-73. God explains that for the redemptive potential to come into its own, a sacrifice will be necessary: “death for death” (212). Even the good angels want no part of this demand, and the Son alone shows the “active virtue” Milton had praised highly in “Areopagitica”: “Behold me then, me for him, life for life / I offer, on me let thine anger fall; / Account me man . . .” (236-38). We may remember the infernal parallel to this scene, where Satan alone rises to the challenge of finding a way out of hell. Well, does the Son seem to be less than equal with God the Father here? Or is Milton just accommodating the dialog to our limited understanding? He has an obvious dramatic problem here: how do you represent a dialog between perfect beings, two members of the Trinity? Well, you have to make them sound like entirely separate beings.

317-43. God prophecies (infallibly, of course) about End Things or eschatological matters: Christ will return a second time and judge the living and the dead, while the world “shall burn, and from her ashes spring / New Heav’n and earth, wherein the just shall dwell . . .” (334-35). In the end, “God shall be all in all” (341) and the Son will be able to put away his scepter. The assembled hosts are told that they must “Adore the Son, and honor him as me” (343). Well, we might ask, why doesn’t this all happen sooner? Why must there be such a long detour? In terms of Paradise Lost as a narrative, the eschatological scheme implies a linear progression towards the last things, but that isn’t a scheme the epic itself can follow. The difference or detour on the way “there” from “here” Milton treats as the effect of sin and as part of God’s providential design.

344-417. The hosts comply, and sing hymns first to the Father and then to the Son, his “Divine Similitude” (384). Radiant imagery prevails, with the Father called a “Fountain of light, thyself invisible / Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sitt’st / Throned inaccessible . . .” (375-77). The narrator announces a shift in his subject matter at the end of this segment: “Hail Son of God, Saviour of men, thy name / Shall be the copious matter of my song / Henceforth . . .” (412-14).

418-587. The narrator performs a rather cinematic “cut” to Satan with the word “Meanwhile.” The Arch-Fiend surveys the region later to become known as the Paradise of Fools. But the narrator undermines Satan’s grand perspective of “Jacob’s ladder” to the heavens (510) by reminding us of various ridiculous delusions, sins, and pridefulness. We hear of the friars with their false doctrines about how to get to heaven, false rituals, and so forth: “Then might ye see / Cowls, hoods and habits with their wearers tossed / And fluttered into rags; then relics, beads, / Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, / The sport of winds . . .” (489-93). Satan himself is on a quest to hold divided empire: in essence, he is a Manichean who believes in his own substantiveness in opposition to God. But in due time “The stairs were then let down” (523) and a way into Paradise is thereby opened for Satan, whereupon we shift with a perhaps conquistador-themed observer simile to the magnificent sight that unfolds before the Fiend, sparking his “wonder” and “envy” alike—at least for a moment, whereupon he makes his landing on the sun. And who should he espy there but a radiant angel that turns out to be Uriel.

588-742. When he sees Uriel, Satan knows he must begin his career as an Ovidian shape-shifter, so he presents himself as an innocent cherub on vacation from heaven, just a fine young angel who burns with the desire to see and know more about the universe God has made. And the deception works: Satan turns Uriel’s kindness into weakness for, as Milton says, “neither man nor angel can discern / Hypocrisy” (682-83). Satan is at least free to make his way down to earth, and lands on Mount Niphates in Assyria.

Book 4

1-113. Milton does a fine job at the beginning of this book with regard to preventing our perspective from unifying with Satan’s or our sympathies from his way. That’s the risk an author always runs when dealing with a powerful villain whose understanding of and control over the situation seems to be greater than those of anyone else around. Readers find it hard to side with dupes, to put the matter bluntly. But the narrator makes sure to characterize Satan as a stage villain—one who is lucid enough to understand the nature of his error and so stubborn that he would rather persist in his villainy than repent. Why did Satan rebel? His own explanation is, “Ah wherefore! he deserved no such return / From me, whom he created what I was / In that bright eminence” (42-44). Satan knows this intellectually, but evidently he cannot accept it spiritually or emotionally: “Be then his love accursed, since love or hate, / To me alike, it deals eternal woe” (69-70). His situation is hopeless by his own admission: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (75). Even if restored to his former place, he would rebel again, and humanity’s creation only rubs salt into his wounds. This being so, he decides upon a strategy of depraved inversion: “Evil be thou my good; by thee at least / Divided empire with Heav’n’s King I hold / By thee . . .” (110-12).

131-287. Taking the form of a ravenous cormorant, Satan alights on the Tree of Life (194-96) next to the Tree of Knowledge, and surveys “A happy rural seat of various view” (247).

288-355. “Two of far noble shape erect and tall . . . .” In this portrait of the first couple, that they are differently ranked is not in question: the narrator says that they are “Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed” (296). They are different, but there’s reciprocity between them: mutuality and “meet conversation” reign. Adam is somewhat like Puritan husband—he is minister, teacher, and guardian to his mate. The Garden of Eden isn’t a regimented place, and neither is the relationship rigid. Instead, there’s a gentle symmetry or complementarity between Adam and Eve.

356-410. Satan views this “gentle pair” (366), and is at first stunned by their innocence and beauty. As always, Satan is deeply divided and in an unhappy dialog with himself. We see that his private compassion is divided from his sense of duty as leader of the bad angels: “public reason just, / Honor and empire with revenge enlarged / By conquering this new world, compels me now / To do what else though damned I should abhor” (389-92). The narrator’s denunciation of this ploy is right on the mark—he calls this alleged “necessity” nothing but “the tyrant’s plea” (394). Satan has an empire to administer, and constituents to satisfy and keep in line, and as far as he is concerned, nothing must be allowed to stand in his way.

411-39. Adam’s conversation with Eve shows that for him, material objects hint at the creation’s source; his “necessity” is only this generous supposition: “needs must the Power / that made us, and for us this ample world / Be infinitely good . . .” (412-14). Adam and Eve are not yet subject to the same sad way of learning that Satan is—he learns only by making mistakes and paying the price for them, and is then continually surprised at what should be obvious to him about his situation and state of error. The upshot of Adam’s lecture to Eve is something like the first pastoral: “let us ever praise him, and extol / His bounty, following our delightful task / To prune these growing plants, and tend these flow’rs, / Which were it toilsome, yet with thee were sweet” (436-39). Adam shows us his unfallen Puritan work ethic: he and Eve are to complete God’s labor of creation.

440-91. When in Book 9 Adam recounts to Raphael his own memories of his first moments, we find that the first thing he did was look up instinctively to seek his maker. Eve provides an innocent contrast to this later story when (at 449-91) she recalls her own first moments. She has Adam’s inductive and inferential capacities, but seems to need some help in realizing them. If Eve is a bit narcissistic, her narcissism is of the healthy sort. She is drawn by her “reflection” in the pool to find out who she is and where she belongs. Ovid’s Narcissus was a selfish lad who refused his gifts of love to a young maiden, and he pined away with “vain desire” (Eve’s phrase) after the maiden cursed him. Eve is moved by an innocent excess of desire to seek Adam; she is charitable, not guilty of cupidity. At 480, Adam and Eve engage in an innocent version of the Ovidian erotic chase; Eve is nothing like one of Wyatt’s courtly ladies, “wild for to hold.” As so often, Milton strips away the fallenness of a literary motif or genre, taking us back to its source in charitable feeling, an outpouring of positive emotions to achieve a worthy goal. We can see Eve’s potential for spiritual and linguistic development. Adam will teach her to pray and look up rather than down. He needs her. As in Renaissance literary theory, “Reason” needs the complementarity of the imagination, which is responsible for dealing with images. Eve hardly seems rebellious at this point since she professes satisfaction with her choice to yield to Adam, as the Creator (Christ in that capacity, as the Father’s “effectual might”) suggested she should: “follow me, / And I will bring thee where no shadow stays / Thy coming . . .” (469-71), and evidently agrees with the doctrine of male superiority. Adam is the possessor of “manly grace / And wisdom” (490-91), and in Milton’s order, these things make him Eve’s mentor.

505-35. Satan has been taking all this in, and he finds much to be optimistic about: the Tree of Knowledge seems to him a “Suspicious, reasonless” (516) hindrance, or at least he will be able to sell it to them that way, stirring within them “more desire to know” (523) about the universe. What has God been keeping back from them, indeed? He sees a chance to provoke envy in Adam and Eve, and to convince them to aspire beyond their current place in the created order: the same temptation to which he himself succumbed.

539-609. Gabriel warns Uriel that the bad angel is up to no good, and promises to find him no matter what shape he may have assumed.

610-775. Eve flatters Adam with the first dawn song or aubade, beginning “Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, / With charm of earliest birds . . .” (641-42). I think we are to take this fine poem as spontaneous prayer, a source of poetry. There’s no hint of John Donne’s complaint against the “Busy old fool, unruly sun” in Eve’s song. She asks Adam a question about astronomy: “But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?” (657-58) And of course Adam responds with a perfectly proper pre-Copernican explanation: the stars “have their course to finish, round the earth” (661). It would not be good, he suggests, if night reigned perpetually, and the starshine has its own beneficence quite aside from their service to humankind. The narrator steps in with a classical allusion likening innocent Eve to Pandora, and warns that Eve’s gifts will turn out “O too like / In sad event” (715-16). Then comes Milton’s usual “sex-positive” outlook as the first couple retire for the evening: “who bids abstain / But our destroyer, for to God and man?” (748-49)

776-1015. Gabriel’s lieutenants discover Satan “Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve; / Assaying by his devilish art to reach / The organs of her fancy, and with them forge / Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams . . .” (800-03). This act—which the narrator describes in almost erotic tones—is Satan’s way of setting the stage for the temptation to come in Book 9. Eve’s strange, ominous dream will be revealed in Book 5, and in it Satan (in his own shape rather than as a serpent) will promise her that the forbidden fruit’s virtue will make her a goddess. Eve will find the dream disturbing, but all the same her appetite has been whetted, both materially and in the sense of unlawful aspiration beyond her place and limitations. From 823 onwards, Satan brazenly defies his Gabriel and the other discoverers, of whom he seems to have no fear at all, believing himself once more than their match, at least if God hadn’t tipped the scales against him. But God again “tips the scales,” and we are told that Satan “fled / Murmuring” from the scene. But his work for the present is done. In Books 5-6, Raphael recounts for Adam and us how God had Satan in derision during the War in Heaven, and he warns Adam and Eve not to transgress, effectively preventing us from letting them off too lightly. Books 7-8 will demonstrate God’s creative power. We move from fear in Books 5-6 to a sense of wonder and reverence for the creation in Books 7-8. Structurally, this unit of Books 5-8 helps to “justify” God’s ways, partly because we are drawn to appreciate both God’s tremendous power and righteousness and the generosity of his creation of the world. Books 9-12, as a unit, will have to do with loss and compensation for what has been lost: history records the consequences of Adam and Eve’s mistake and losses in the Garden of Eden, while Adam will be granted a vision of that history that yet offers redemption, turning the fall, ultimately, into a fortunate one.

Week 09, John Donne and Ben Jonson

2008-03-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

General Notes on John Donne’s Poetry

Donne’s meter is often rough, as was Wyatt’s—and just as deliberately. He’s often intent on capturing the movements of thought and feeling, which of course don’t always move smoothly. Neither are they easy to separate—emotion can be processed by the intellect in Donne, and vice versa.

That last comment reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s theory of how, after Donne’s time in the C17, and therefore after metaphysical poetry’s vogue, a certain “dissociation of sensibility” set in. Literary artists, the notion goes, could either think or feel, but they couldn’t do both. In very general terms (though Eliot doesn’t say much on this point), we would have to blame the advent of modern living for this development: technology, urbanity in the arts, a kind of artificiality that suited the new post-English Civil War consensus. It’s easy to see how someone like, say, Alexander Pope superficially fits into this paradigm, though we do him an injustice here since he was good at conveying passion in structured verse. In any case, the idea is that a high degree of “division of labor” set in with regard to the mind’s faculties, just as a more complex and diversified economy demands specialized, partial kinds of labor from its workers. This is well before the Industrial Revolution in the later C18, but it’s still accurate because Donne’s time was one of intense expansion and exploration. England was becoming a world power from Elizabeth’s time onwards.

Just as intellect and passion go together in Donne, so do the sacred and the profane or secular. Donne’s career follows a predictable enough arc: frustration in hopes for courtly preferment, an intense love life with some rough patches, and at last settling into the godly role he played so well as a prominent minister in the Anglican Church. You might say Donne went from sinner to near-saint. But the poetry he wrote as a younger man defies easy distinctions between sacred and profane; it’s also true that the “Holy Sonnets” contain a lot of manifestly erotic allusions and figures.

The tone with both God and love objects is intimate, a direct address with lots of self- questioning. The God of Paradox, the “Metaphorical God,” as Donne calls him in the prose, commands us to speak. This is why Donne sees no problem in being so frank with his God—it is all part of the process of understanding Him, or at least of coming to terms with one’s inability to understand God. Donne sees salvation as something one has to work at, whatever his ideas about the availability of unmerited Grace. Poetry is one way to do that, and the Holy Sonnets, while, intensely personal, are also dramatizations of Donne’s spiritual struggles for the benefit of others.

Poem-by-Poem Notes on John Donne

“The Flea”

The flea is a pseudo-Ovidian poem, and Donne is mocking Petrarchan hyperbole as an avenue for praising a lady. And since we are dealing with lovers (not a married couple), “honor” is more of less a jest here. The speaker dramatizes a sex game—we get a sense of spoken rhythm, with rhyme as part of the “rules” of the poem and the argument. There’s an implied mock-argument, with opportunistic references to a sacred union, promptly dropped or modified when the lady rejects it. We don’t see Wyatt’s disillusionment and confusion, but instead Donne offers us a playful and yet precise variation on an old erotic theme. In the end, as it’s easy to discern from his biography, Donne takes marriage seriously, even if it isn’t the point in this poem.

“The Good Morrow”

The poem doesn’t describe a courtly relationship based on fear, but rather genuine “seeing” and “possessing,” without any betrayal. Concrete instances of love prevail over artificiality or vague talk about essences. Here, we ‘‘begin’’ with actual possession. The poem’s tone is confessional, which isn’t in accord with ordinary sonnet conventions. At the same time, the poem has formal dignity, thanks to its stanzaic patterning. Donne is both intellectual and emotional at the same time, just as T.S. Eliot (in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) says. In this poem, the speaker arrives at a clear statement about the value of the lover’s private universe, which subsumes the world. Of course, the poem ends with an “if-then” clause, not with certainty. The “if” may point us towards the more permanent strategy of marriage, rather than to this temporary “perfection” of soul. There is, as one of my professors at Irvine points out, an implicit awareness of the time frame that the poem has temporarily annulled.

“The Canonization”

This is another argumentative poem; it accosts and dismisses knaves who oppose love, turning the tables on their claims. The Saints (canonized “lovers” of Christ) are patterns of sacrifice. A pun on “die” as orgasm accompanies a more idealistic claim that the poem will immortalize its subject in its stanzas or “pretty rooms” ( stanze). Others will approve of the immortalization and perpetuate the original couple’s love with the help of this formal poem. The lovers create the pattern, and the verse only reflects it. There’s a reference to the Phoenix legend—alchemy and the miraculous. The “proof” Donne offers here is super-rational, and the fancy images are the “evidence” he enlists. The poem doesn’t leave the concept of hierarchy in tatters—countries, towns, and courts can reestablish their authority by begging a pattern from “above,” from the lovers.

“The Sun Rising”

The poet revises Petrarchanism in that the distance between the two lovers disappears. Love knows its own value, and it dismisses the outside world. The speaker peers out at the sun, admonishes it, and proclaims the bedroom an alternate world. Just as there’s only one story (the Bible), so there’s only one significant location. But there’s a struggle here—this poem is based on a traditional theme in French Troubadour poetry, the “aubade” or dawn song, in which a lover curses the dawn for making the lovers part.

“A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day”

Saint Lucy was martyred in 303 A.D., perhaps blinded first. The poem is decreative; it deforms and cancels out the creation to describe the speaker’s mental state. It’s as if Donne’s speaker goes back to the phase of pre-creation, becoming an un-Adamed self. He makes a motion towards St. Lucy—we gain access to negative imagination, in preparation for Lucy’s appearance at the Apocalypse. Is this poem bidding farewell to love poems? There seems to be no way back to lighter fare such as “The Good Morrow” and “The Canonization.” But this nocturnal shows Donne’s lifelong obsession with the soul’s progress, with its relation to the world as a whole, a collectivity. Donne and Herbert take an Augustinian route with respect to death and the world: death is the way and the answer; we shouldn’t cling to this world, which will, after all, go up in flames when the Last Day comes.

“A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning”

The compass is a metaphysical conceit here. Samuel Johnson defines that device as “a surprising image that brings together different ranges of experience.” What does this conceit allow Donne to accomplish? He can resolve the poem’s problem (parting) with a firm, precise image—a concession that turns out not to concede much, or anything. Donne also refers often to alchemy—the refining of base metals to transform them into gold and silver. The connotation of spiritual trial and purification in alchemy is obvious. He also likes optical metaphors and images—things reflected from the eye, or from eye to eye. For example, tears are described as storm raindrops. Ptolemaic cosmology is another source of metaphysical conceits.

“The Ecstasy”

The poem’s contemplation of the body debunks Bemboist Neo-Platonism. In this case, sexual and spiritual love need not be kept separate. In fact, in Donne’s poetry they require each other, and must mix in alchemical fashion. Refer to Aristophanes’ speech about love in Symposium. As so often, we find poets using Plato as a biased witness in favor of their own arguments. “Ecstasy” is a device made possible by the union of two bodies. So how is it that we can even hear the speaker?

“Good Friday, 1613—Riding Westward”

The Ptolemaic system is used here to suggest selfish humanity’s skewed perspective. We follow our own paths, not that of faith as enjoined by God. The human condition is weak; we are “carried along” towards death, work, etc. To turn to the east means turning towards the central spectacle of Christianity: Christ on the Cross atoning for human sins. But that is not an easy sight to behold. The words of the poem undercut themselves since the poem’s central fact isn’t words, it’s something to see. The correctional language at the end is quite strong, and to “turn one’s face” would be to die, to look upon the face of God. Jesus’ career teaches us how to die, so in that regard the poem works as a memento mori. (Copernicus lived from 1473-1543; Galileo from 1564-1642.)

“Holy Sonnet 14”

All the old sexual imagery is here, but it serves a different purpose. Donne moves to religious poetry without apparent contradiction or recantation. He never saw erotic love as shameful anyhow. Here, though, he wants to demonstrate an extreme state of spiritual enlightenment or awareness. Violent apprehension is part of religious experience.

“Holy Sonnet 17”

Donne’s wife Anne died in 1617. He treats God as jealous, as in Exodus 20.

“Meditation 4” (It is too little to call man a little world….)

This meditation emphasizes our dependence on God, our incompleteness; Donne toys with the Renaissance idea of each human being as a “microcosm” containing within himself or herself something of all the other creatures and realms. But Donne moves beyond this notion since, if given too much scope, it might encourage prideful self-sufficiency and materialism rather than a sense of spiritual responsibility. Thus the “doctor” metaphor—some of the simplest creatures know how to treat their own wounds, but we do not, and must “send for” the physician. Some of Donne’s language may echo that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as when the sermonist writes, “What’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust? What’s become of his soaring thoughts . . . ?” Hamlet says to his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “What a piece of work is a / man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in / form and moving, how express and admirable in / action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a / god!” (2.2.303-07) He says all this only to bring the whole “majestical roof” (301) down on our heads, reminding us that we are but the most refined dust in the cosmos, a “quintessence of dust” (308). The “Gravedigger” scene may offer Donne some ideas as well, what with Hamlet’s melancholy musings on Yorick’s skull and “Great Alexander” turning to clay, etc.

“Meditation 17” (Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill . . .)

This famous meditation is taken up in part with how to prevent Church ceremony and symbolism from lapsing into mere formalism; the everyday concerns of life tend to break the connection between spiritual truth and symbolism. Nearly every day (especially when some contagious disease is ravaging the community), the bell tolls for the imminent passing of one or more members of the Church, and Donne’s two metaphors (that each person is one chapter in God’s book and that each person is a piece of earth connected to the mainland) reinforce the solidarity of every person with every other in the Christian community he addresses. And since the opening device is the mention of tolling bells for the dying, Donne’s meditation is also in part a memento mori, a reminder of the perpetual nearness of death. In this sense, we are all, to borrow a line from the villainous Richard III, “very grievous sick . . . and like [i.e. likely] to die” (4.2.56, 62).

“Expostulation 19” (My God . . . thou art a direct God, may I say a literal God)

Medieval and Renaissance Christian typology demands that we begin with the literal level of things and events, and (accepting their literal truth as our foundation) proceed to interpret them at successively more spiritual levels, from the allegorical to the moral to the anagogical. Aquinas and Dante Alighieri categorize the four levels as follows: 1) the literal or historical level, which is simply the event itself. 2) the allegorical level, which relates the literal event to events in the New Testament. 3) the moral level, which explains the abstract moral lesson to be drawn from the literal event. 4) the anagogical level, which relates the literal event to heavenly things. So, too, Donne follows tradition when he begins by invoking the directness and literal truth of God’s Word in the Scriptures. But then, the rest of the Expostulation develops the idea that God is also the greatest of poets because he is “a figurative, a metaphorical god too” (1278), both in the Scriptures and in the process of history. Donne invokes the diversity of people’s understandings, and argues that while one person may value mainly the most literal aspects of the Bible, another may be moved far more by the “majesty” of the words in the text, i.e. by the eloquence and beauty of great passages. Both responses are good since the Bible speaks to different readers at different levels. The argument Donne makes is perhaps a bit risky in that some might be offended with the notion of God’s being “figurative,” as if he were forced to resort to literary devices rather than just say the thing outright. But Donne’s point seems to be that God’s understanding so far transcends the ordinary that such metaphoricity and figurative quality as we find in the Bible is there out of generosity. After all, what does metaphor do but help us get hold of spiritual truths by means of things we understand most readily? (A metaphor compares something difficult to understand or abstract with something easy to understand or perceive, as in Burns’ famous lines, “O, my love is like a red, red rose, / That is newly sprung in June. O, my love is like the melody, / That is sweetly played in tune.”) On the whole, Donne casts God in the role of a poet whose words draw fallen humanity towards the truth. What bridges the gap between our fallen understanding and the Truth? Well, faith; that is what the Bible, in the view of Donne and many other writers, is designed to do, by various means.

Notes on Ben Jonson

I will add notes as time permits....

Week 08, William Shakespeare

2008-03-12T09:03:00.000-07:00

Notes on William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing

Act 1, Scene 1

This play is determined to make light of everything, as we can see from the outset. The male characters are just returning home from some nondescript war, only to find they must fight new battles in the cause of love. Even before Benedick catches sight of Beatrice, she is already mocking his valor in front of anyone who will listen: “But how many hath he killed? For indeed I promised to eat all of his killing” (44-45). As Leonato says, “There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her; they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them” (61-64). Beatrice tries to paint him as an object of ridicule: “I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick, nobody marks you” (116-17). And Benedick, in turn, claims that Beatrice is the only woman in the world who is not in love with him.

Benedick himself is aware that he is of two minds concerning women—something he reveals when Claudio asks him for advice about Hero. He can offer “simple true judgment,” or play the tyrant to all womankind. Of course, Benedick’s simple judgment turns out to be tyrannical enough—he is absurdly perfectionist about them. To both Claudio and Don Pedro, Benedick explains that he simply will not enter the fray when it comes to love, neither trusting nor mistrusting women but simply refusing to have any serious dealings with them. Don Pedro is not impressed with this line of reasoning, and insists that he will one day see Benedick “look pale with love” (247). I think Don Pedro shares Shakespeare’s sense of love’s power as something that simply cannot be denied except at great cost. What we will see in this play is the light-hearted side of the truth Shakespeare states darkly in Sonnet 129: “none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” The complete sonnet goes as follows:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Don Pedro agrees to help the naïve, inexperienced Claudio by wooing Hero in his name. We need not make too much of this, except perhaps to say that Claudio really hasn’t fought his own battle here, which may in part account for the ease with which Don John’s villainy will fool him in the next act: he really doesn’t know Hero in the deepest sense, but is in love with a romantic ideal.

Act 1, Scene 2

Leonato’s brother Antonio seems to have heard a garbled account from Borachio of the conversation between Claudio and Don Pedro; he tells Leonato that the Prince himself means to woo Hero rather than that the Prince is going to do Claudio’s wooing for him.

Act 1, Scene 3

Don John is the illegitimate brother of Don Pedro, and is an unhappy, superfluous man in the felicitous social order of Messina. He had lately been in rebellion against his brother, who promptly forgave him. But Don John needs enemies. He really has nothing much to do except to make trouble for everyone else. He seems to be constitutionally depressed, and paradoxically revels in his own unhappiness: “There is no measure in the occasion that breeds, therefore the sadness is without limit” (3-4). Now here’s a man whose grief has no trace of what T. S. Eliot would call an “objective correlative.” His political grievance is that his brother has all the power, but that hardly seems to be a sufficient reason for Don John’s non-Messina state of mind. Revealingly, his watchword is “seek not to alter me” (37), and nobody with that attitude could fare well in a comedy. So when Borachio enters with the alleged news that “the Prince should woo Hero for himself, and having obtain’d her, give her to Count Claudio” (61-64), Don John immediately sees potential for mischief; he feels that the young man has been given honors lately far beyond his desserts. Jealousy is the law of Don John’s being, apparently.

Act 2, Scene 1

Beatrice offers Leonato a comically exclusive explanation of why she still has no husband: “He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him…” (36-39). This is all very logical, but Beatrice is playing the goddess Diana in her lighthearted way—following this advice would rule out any man whatsoever.

Well, Beatrice and Benedick have been publicly raking each other over the coals for some time, but it is a one-on-one meeting that really begins to change things between them. As Oscar Wilde would say, give someone a mask and you will get the truth. That is just what happens when Benedick, in disguise, dares to ask Beatrice what she thinks of him, and he hears “Why, he is the Prince’s jester, a very dull fool; only his gift is in devising impossible slanders” (137-38). As we soon see, this comment strikes home with Benedick. he exclaims, “But that my Lady Beatrice should know me, and not know me!” (203-04) and is still worked up about it when he converses with Don Pedro afterwards around lines 239-61. Beatrice, he insists, gives him no peace of mind.
Around line 164, Don John sets his plot in motion, telling Claudio that the Prince is wooing Hero himself. Claudio believes this lie without hesitation, being able to marshal only the truism, “Friendship is constant in all other things / Save in the office and affairs of love” (175-76). With this sentence, he dismisses Hero. Soon, however, at least this misunderstanding is cleared up by Don Pedro himself, who is able to report that he has won Hero for Claudio.

After asking Beatrice if she will marry him and finding her pleasantly unwilling, Don Pedro declares to Leonato that they really ought to bring the interests and Benedick together—he enlists Hero in deceiving Beatrice, while he and his friends will take care of deceiving Benedick. And it’s clear that Don Pedro thinks this would be quite an accomplishment: “If we can do this, Cupid is no longer an archer; his glory shall be ours, for we are the only love-gods” (384-86). So there are good plots and bad plots in this comic play—deception is a good thing if it helps bring two lovers together.

Act 2, Scene 2

Meanwhile, Borachio and Don John are at work effecting their wicked designs. This plot turns upon mistaken identity: while Don Pedro and Claudio are induced to look on, Borachio will dally with the maid Margaret, calling her Hero while she calls him by his own name. (As the editors point out, there seems to be a slip at line 44; it makes no sense that Margaret would call Borachio Claudio.)

Act 2, Scene 3

Benedick sums up his perfectionist attitude with the declaration, “till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace” (28-30). In Benedick’s presence, Balthazar sings a song aimed foremost at ladies: “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, / Men were deceivers ever,” etc. This song may be a clue to what really underlies Beatrice and Benedick’s hesitation. But it’s also interesting in its urging to turn passionate lamentation into cheerful nonsense: “be you blithe and bonny, / Converting all your sounds of woe / Into hey nonny nonny” (67-69). Now that would be true liberation, we might suppose—but of course a comedy of manners with a strong love-plot can’t grant the main characters such freedom from the imperative of erotic attraction. Well, Don Pedro and Claudio and Leonato play their parts to perfection, giving out that Claudio had told him Beatrice was enamored of Benedick. Don Pedro even throws in the barb that Benedick ought to realize he is unworthy of so fine a woman. Benedick is profoundly impressed by all of this: “They say the lady is fair; ‘tis a truth, I can bear them witness; and virtuous; ‘tis so, I cannot reprove it” (230-32). And at long last he gives in to the dictates of society: “the world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married” (242-44). As so often, people only desire what they know others find worthy of desire.

Act 3, Scene 1

Beatrice is similarly impressed with the report that Benedick is in love with her, and casts away her hesitations so enthusiastically as to make it seem she was never serious about them: “Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much? / Contempt, farewell, and maiden pride, adieu!” (108-09) She is more open to the experience of love than we (or she, perhaps) had thought.

Act 3, Scene 2

Don John is up to his devious tricks again, this time proclaiming to Claudio in supposed confidence that Hero is not what the young man thinks she is: “the lady is disloyal” (104). And Claudio, naïve as he is, believes the older man, though with potentially graver consequences than Benedick’s crediting of Don Pedro because of his white beard. Claudio will humiliate Hero in public, right at the moment when they are to be married, if he finds that she is disloyal. This is unattractively ostentatious, to say the least.

Act 3, Scene 3

Constable Dogberry enters the play here with Verges, both uttering one confused line after another, as when Dogberry says to the first watchman, “To be a well-favor’d man is the gift of fortune, but to read and write comes by nature” (14-16). Dogberry is a malapropist who prides himself on being a man of means and an upholder of authority: “you are to bid any man stand, in the Prince’s name” (25-26). And he is a constable, after all, so he bears responsibility for a part of the realm’s safety. He has trouble making himself understood, yet thanks to his two vigilant watchmen, he helps to expose Borachio and Don John’s plot against Hero. One thing that marks the Constable’s character is charity: as he says, “I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any honesty in him” (63-64).

Act 3, Scene 4

Beatrice and Margaret exchange pleasantries as they wait the arrival of Hero’s wedding to Claudio. Margaret notes the change in both Beatrice and Benedick.

Act 3, Scene 5

Dogberry and his companion acquaint Leonato with the arrest of Borachio and Conrad. But they are so prolix that Leonato becomes impatient to be off to the wedding, and misses his chance to learn about the details of the plot against Hero.

Act 4, Scene 1

Claudio behaves cruelly towards Leonato and Hero, shaming her in front of the entire wedding party: he says that Hero is “but the sign and semblance of her honor” (32). At this point, he seems incapable of telling the difference between a flesh and blood human being and an abstract category. Of course, Don Pedro is also thoroughly taken in and believes he is an eyewitness to Hero’s shameful conduct. Leonato is so distraught that he is almost ready to strangle his own daughter, and talks of suicide. But Beatrice, Benedick, and Friar Francis know better. Benedick says outright that the villain must be Don John, while Francis cooks up a scheme whereby Hero will disappear and everyone will be told that she has died. The extreme suppositions, the rashness, of Claudio and his supporters must be cured with a show of extremity of another sort. As Francis says, this plan will instill remorse in those who have been so quick to condemn Hero.

Beatrice and Benedick at last confront each other face to face, and declare their love. It takes a bit of talking to get there, and Beatrice demands that Benedick “Kill Claudio” (289) to prove his loyalty to her. At first he refuses—the male social bonds are very strong in this play, as we can see from the ease with which the men band together and take one another’s word for holy writ—but gives in without much prodding: “Enough, I am engag’d, I will challenge him” (331-32).

Act 4, Scene 2

Dogberry is astonished when he hears the details of what Borachio and Conrade have done in the service of Don John, and is determined to make it known. Don John himself has departed the scene. But above all, Dogberry is upset that Conrade has called him an ass; this insult jars with his own rather high estimation of himself: “I am a wise fellow, and which is more, an officer, and which is more, a householder, and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to, and a rich fellow enough. . .” (80-84).

Act 5, Scene 1

Leonato and Antonio at first make a show of dealing with the wrong done to Hero by violence, but even before Dogberry exposes Don John’s plot at the end of the scene, they have set forth a very different solution: Leonato pronounces, “My brother hath a daughter, / Almost the copy of my child that’s dead, / And she alone is heir to both of us. / Give her the right you should have giv’n her cousin, / And so dies my revenge” (288-92).

Act 5, Scene 2

Now comes a comic scene in which Benedick first talks to Margaret and is forced to confess that he “was not born under a rhyming planet” and that he “cannot woo in festival terms” (40-41). In truth, neither he nor Beatrice is capable of conforming to stereotypical love language or conduct. Once they realize they are in love, they are free to return to their battle of wits, though in a more affectionate manner. As Benedick says, “Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably” (72).

Act 5, Scene 3
Claudio must show remorse for the supposed death of hero, and to facilitate this Leonato has arranged a nighttime ceremony. Claudio reads from the scroll the epitaph lines, “Done to death by slanderous tongues / Was the Hero that here lies” (2-3).

Act 5, Scene 4

And one more thing he must do: marry a woman he supposes to be the daughter of Leonato’s brother Antonio. This promised, Hero is free to unmask herself. Leonato explains, “She died, my lord, but while her slander lived” (66). Beatrice and Benedick discover that they have been duped into declaring their love, but in the end it really doesn’t matter. They are able to go forwards with their marriage with their usual sarcastic flourish. Benedick claims to take pity on Beatrice, and for her part, she says she will marry him “to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption” (95-96).

Benedick now insists he cares nothing “for a satire or an epigram” (102). He is determined to be married, and now will hear nothing against the institution. His conclusion? Simply that “man is a giddy thing” (108). He even recommends marriage as medicine for Don Pedro, who seems to be the only sad person present. Finally, we hear that Don John has been captured, but Benedick says thought about him can wait until tomorrow.

What is the “nothing” about which there is so much ado? Well, I suppose it’s female chastity and male honor. Not that Shakespeare really would have wanted to tear these concepts down altogether—he has good things to say about them elsewhere. But one can lean on them too heavily—and it’s always dangerous to “lean on” notions so liable to be misunderstood as hollow shells lacking substance, as a cover for narrow-mindedness, inexperience, and insecurity.

Extra: Notes on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

Justice must be seen to be done – that’s a concession to men’s fallen condition. The staging of justice, then, is part of Shakespeare’s concern. Mostly the play teaches moderation and humility, although the paradox is that it seems these things are sometimes best taught by resorting to extremes. Even virtue can be too extreme – Angelo is too extreme in his “virtuous” application of the law, and when he runs into an extremely good woman in Isabella, he pays the penalty for his hubris.

The Duke is at first a good Machiavellian prince – he knows that it is, if possible, better to be loved than feared. He therefore delegates his less pleasant functions to Angelo and Escalus. This is an admission of human nature's frailty – the Duke's kindness, as he later says, has allowed people to get out of hand.

Shakespeare's usual point-counterpoint structure shows up early -- we go from the absolutist Duke's pronouncements to the seamy underbelly of Vienna in the person of Mistress Overdone, Lucio, and others. Since Overdone's is the world's oldest profession, it's hard to see how this is the kind of corruption that's going to be cleaned up by a zero-tolerance campaign. Such economies of sin may shift locations, but they don't go away. Times Square is now cleaner after Mayor Giuliani, but that probably doesn't mean there is less vice in NYC, at least on the whole. It has simply dispersed elsewhere and perhaps become less visible. In other words, we're dealing more with aesthetics than with moral progress. Claudio's bid for rescue must go through the rascal Lucio to reach the angelic Isabella.

At the end of Act 1, scene 2, the problem seems to be that while Isabella tried to excuse her brother's fault and say it was only common fallen human nature, she conforms to the conduct rules of a saint. A moral absolutist, she excuses herself from sinning to save her brother.

Rhetoric was a very important branch of learning and a vital practice during the Renaissance. But in this play, rhetoric is up against primal human tendencies. Isabella speaks virtuous words and sets forth noble sentiments to convince Angelo, but that is not what gets to him. He hears the words, but it is the unbearable combination of virtue and physical beauty that does him in. Her words do not function in the context she wishes they would. Angelo, as well, finds that beating around the bush will not serve him -- he must say what he wants in the ugliest and bluntest possible way, or the virtuous Isabella simply cannot understand him.

The inefficacy of persuasion shows in the beginning of the third act as well -- the Duke (disguised as a priest) instantly makes Claudio ready for death, which resolve lasts about 10 minutes.

Act 3, scene 2 has to do with how difficult it is for virtue to be constantly recognized in a sinful world. The Duke is slandered in his absence. At the end of that act, the Duke declares that he finds it necessary to employ "craft against vice." In other words, the world is imperfect, so you must use imperfect means to deal with injustice. One problem is that the Duke seems already to have known of Angelo's faithless behavior towards Marianna -- which means that it was hardly a good idea to give Angelo power.

Isabella forgives Angelo for the sake of the wronged Mariana, and, when the Duke at last reveals that Claudio is still alive, he is free to let Angelo wed Mariana, setting right the wrong he did her.

On the whole, what the play suggests is that divine justice is tempered with mercy, so human administration of justice had better keep with that rule -- even the judges are "guilty" of sin, after all. Shakespeare says this often -- "treat all men after their deserts, and who shall 'scape whipping?" (''Hamlet.'') But I think the problem the Norton editors are pointing to is that the ending seems overly forced -- marriages come from nowhere and set everything right, with even the villain (Angelo) getting married rather than executed. But then, I suppose we could just say that the Duke's marriage offer doesn't come from nowhere; it could be played so that he's just been waiting to see if Isabella would soften a little – absolutism isn't sanctioned in this play. It's a lesson the Duke has learned, and Isabella has to show she understands it, too. And in Claudio's case with Juliet, marriage overcomes the sin – a human institution makes it possible for two people to live charitably rather than sinfully, even if they aren't exactly saints. Part of the play's darkness or confusing quality lies in the Duke's acting like God; he behaves as if providence is his alone, and in fact he causes some pain along the way.

Further Notes

As Dr. Johnson says, Shakespeare at times makes us fond of rascals – they are, if not exactly honored, at least part of the comic universe. The Duke may have been too lenient, so now he calls upon a man who turns out to be too severe – in this instance, extremes won't balance the situation. But what we get is a gentler version of Cesare Borgia's scheme to avoid becoming hated by his people – in ''The Prince,'' Machiavelli recalls how Cesare appointed a cruel governor to establish order in one of his holdings, and then when the man had done his work, Cesare allowed him to be cut in half in the public square. Well, there is vice and then there is "crime" – the purveyors of vice make up a whole counter-economy in this play; Lucio, Pompey, and Mistress Overdone have their place, and one might say they are a necessary evil.

Lucio is, after all, instrumental in the scene in which Isabella tries to persuade Angelo by fair words and means. Isabella is inexperienced, and doesn't understand that sometimes virtue must, in a wicked world, resort to a trick or two to get itself advanced. Of course, Lucio seems to be in love with lies for the sake of lies. How does a virtuous man like the Duke protect himself against such rogues? People are dependent on sight and sound – on appearances and impressions – and this is a play in which the Duke is determined that his people should ''see'' justice being done. This need to make justice's operation manifest is risky in that it leads to extreme applications for the sake of "making an example" of wrongdoers like Claudio. It's almost as if the Duke (at first) believes absolute order and justice can be established in Vienna, whereas the truth of the matter is much messier than that, and the fact that some of the other characters don't really follow his dictates may be in part what brings this fact home to him. The Duke can't arrange all affairs to his liking, and there is no perfection under the sun. Barnabas the villain is a good example – he refuses to cooperate and make himself ready to die, and justice must not be reduced to savagery, so his execution must be postponed.

Isabella's claim that authority has about it a "medicine" that tends to keep the governors within bounds also seems naïve, but it's worth considering for the assumptions it makes about human nature and the power of conscience. While Angelo stands for the ''Old Testament'' notion of pardoning sinners only after you have cut them down, Isabella sets forth the argument for clemency in a textbook manner, even if that manner is not without passion. In sum, the "saint" has tempted another saint. Angelo thought that law and justice were strictly impersonal, a matter of reason and logic, but it turns out that administering the law calls for charity, which is something we arrive at only by means of considerable self-searching. In a sense, the law is always personal – the abstract standards may be necessary in the name of fairness, but it is human beings who must ''apply'' the law. Angelo's desire for Isabella tugs at his will, which in turn misinforms and warps his faculty of reason. To borrow a phrase that Stanley Fish applies to Milton 's method in ''Paradise Lost,'' Angelo finds himself "surprised by sin."

As for the play's moral resolution, not everyone finds it satisfactory, but perhaps it's asking too much that it should be "satisfactory." The ending may be somewhat forced, and it lacks the "resort to and return from the green world" movement of other Shakespeare comedies – for example ''As You Like It.'' The play's tempering of justice by means of hasty marriages retains something of the brittleness shown by Angelo in his overapplication of it. Some of the marrying seems more like punishment than charity. To what extent do any of the characters ''change'' – comedy is generally, after all, about personal and societal transformation and regeneration. But perhaps the Duke's sudden commutations and solution mirror the grander ones God made for the whole of humanity – this divine redemptive process is, after all, often described as sudden, and it's unmerited as well. It may be that the demand placed on Shakespeare to prepare us elaborately for the play's resolution is, in the context of this play about justice, misplaced. There is much abrupt illogic and "feeling" in the charitable administration of justice, so why demand the representation of an elaborately logical process whereby justice will be achieved?

Week 07, Christopher Marlowe

2008-03-05T09:02:00.000-08:00

Notes on Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

As I learned when studying medieval and Renaissance literature years ago, the old morality plays represented “mind” as a group of abstract qualities, with “will” being a central character or agent because that is the faculty responsible for making moral choices. As drama developed, complex character began to reabsorb such abstractions. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus shows a transition from the morality scheme to something more modern: the good and bad angels aren’t central to the play, and Faustus is a complex character. Still, the play shares the ethical concerns of morality plays. What follows is adapted from what I learned years ago from lectures by Professor Edgar Schell at UC Irvine.

A question for modern readers of Marlowe’s masterpiece might be whether Faustus is a sympathetic and even heroic figure, almost a Renaissance Prometheus who dares to know things that are forbidden to ordinary mortals. That kind of reading certainly makes sense if we are talking about Goethe’s later version of the same legend. If that were so, we might arrive at a reading in which Faustus’ downfall is ironic, i.e. in which it is caused not by sinfulness but instead by intellectual and imaginative superiority defying the natural limits of a universe inadequate to such deeply human gifts. But that may not be the best way to read Marlowe’s working of the Faustus legend.

His play begins with Faustus already an amazing learned man now seeking necromantic, godlike power. At 1.1.61, we hear that “a sound magician is a demigod.” Does the furtherance of civilization, or the pursuit of excellence on the part of an individual, require sacrilege and suffering? As an old professor of mine points out, we may not see what the big deal is—after all, we have what Faustus wants: a multiplicity of goods and wondrous information technology. We take it for granted that we can communicate with somebody on the other side of the world without delay; we travel by air and look down at the earth from 40,000 feet and think little of it. So does he sell his soul for the modern world? Does he have to violate the limits of medieval Christian culture in order to achieve his ends?

Marlowe himself, as a pre-Romantic author, probably saw the play not as high tragedy but rather as moral comedy. The personifications (“the good angel,” “Lucifer” etc.) that define the quality of Faustus’ actions in morality-play fashion have a Brechtian alienation-effect, formally distancing the audience from the protagonist. Doctor Faustus isn’t so much a hero as an object of moral reflection. The text tells us how to interpret Faustus’ actions: it condemns him as an Icharus who violates Nature’s laws and ends up looking foolish, not heroic. The “form of Faustus’ fortunes,” then, is comic or satiric. It may well be asked why a radical like Christopher Marlowe would follow such a conventional scheme. That’s hard to say, other than that he was a working playwright who wanted to make money, not political statements. Then, too, as Professor Edgar Schell points out, the text we are reading is hardly definitive: Philip Henslowe records payment of 4 £ to Ralegh and Bird for substantial revisions, so we don’t have the play as Marlowe wrote it in 1592. (Subsequent editions appeared in 1604 and 1616.)

Structure:

1) Scenes I-VI. Faustus makes his pact. Neatly delineated and analytical, time moves slowly. Breakdown: i—decision; ii—comic; iii—pact; iv—comic; v—Mephostophilis returns and Faustus reconsiders.

2) Scenes VII-XI. Faustus enjoys his powers abroad and at Wittenberg . 24 years go by rapidly. Elizabethan lyric structure involves an opening proposition, an arbitrary middle since imagination fills out proposition until we return to prove it.

3) Scenes XII-XIII. Consequences. We return to a slow time frame—one hour takes much space now.

Examine the relationship between scenes 3, 4, 5. First Faustus makes his bargain, then we have a comic scene with Robin the Clown, and then Mephistopheles reinforces the bargain.

Serious and comic scenes alternate throughout the play, though two serious scenes from v-vi suggest that something may be missing.

In scene 4, Robin is proud of turning a bad bargain into a supposedly good one. His “good” bargain, however, has only been sauced up. One can expect a big smile from either Robin or the audience, the same broad smile with which Mephistopheles must have greeted Faustus’ terror at the success of his Latin conjurations.

In scene 3, Mephistopheles is so ugly that Faustus cannot stomach his appearance. Like Robin, Faustus cannot accept his bargain raw. Robin, then, acts as a parodist of his master and clarifies the tone appropriate to the latter’s conjurations and to his fear at their success. Like King Lear with his Fool, Faustus is never alone at the height of his folly; there is no room for self-pity or our pity. This “shadowing” technique is similar to that of commedia dell’arte, in which il dottore’s pretentious claims are shown wrong, and he’s followed by a servant-clown who mocks his actions and dress. Parody and repetition clarify the true nature of Faustus’ bargain.

Faustus’ defects show in other ways, too. Near the beginning, Marlowe makes the doctor demonstrate the quality of his mind through this syllogism: the wages of sin is death (Romans vi.23); all men sin (John viii); therefore, all men die. On this basis, Faustus concludes that the study of divinity is a waste of time. But how can one fail to notice that his premises are false? He misreads the texts and suppresses the qualifying clauses that offer grace to sinners. Therefore, Faustus is not “learned” at all—he has committed a vulgar intellectual error, and despairs of God’s grace because he cannot imagine that it has been offered. (Some scholars claim Calvinism is at the root of this common problem, but let’s leave that aside.) Robin parodies this chop-logic just as he mocked Faustus’ terror. All in all, then, Marlowe’s play seems more like self-deception than a real tragedy. This initial self-deception is repeated throughout the play.

When Faustus goes to sign his contract and finds that his signature-blood has congealed, Mephistopheles distracts him with illusions. Faustus believes neither in hell nor in the devil’s confessions about his own crimes. Moreover, when he asks for a wife, Mephistopheles, realizing that providing one would involve a sacrament, furnishes him with other things—books and paramours.

When Faustus becomes dangerously disillusioned, Lucifer and Beëlzebub appear with a circus act starring the Seven Deadly Sins. Why do the devils appear? Faustus is not really praying; rather, he is arguing with Mephistopheles, so he is fair game for another diversion. One can see how far Marlowe’s “hero” has fallen by the fact that Lucifer’s display of banal, everyday sins delights his soul. Faustus, who once dreamed of infinite power, is now contented with trivial sensuality.

Note that all of Marlowe’s frames for and representations of Faustus show the steady degradation of his soul. By the second half of Doctor Faustus, the protagonist himself is putting on the banal shows. He has made no substantial gains. He has seen only illusions, and we do not see any of the text’s alleged visual splendors. We see only Faustus’ vulgar jokes and showmanship. Perhaps really seeing Homer sing would have been worth one’s Renaissance soul, but the point is that Faustus sees only illusions.

The last distraction for Faustus is one that he has explicitly asked for as a distraction: Helen of Troy. The play’s comic force comes from its demonstration of Augustine’s doctrine that evil does not exist. The old man has offered Faustus one last chance to repent, but the latter instead asks Mephistopheles to torment the man. Then he asks for Helen explicitly as a distraction. As she is now, however, Helen is nothing but a destroyer of civilizations and souls. Note that when Faustus uses the familiar Elizabethan figure concerning the exchange of souls during kissing, it plays against him—he really is going to lose his soul.

What does Helen look like to the audience? Aristotle says that tragedy deals with events inspiring pity and fear and that to inspire such emotions, the protagonist, described as “one like ourselves,” must suffer an undeservedly harsh misfortune. Macbeth follows this prescription in that the emphasis is not on the murder of Duncan but on its psychological consequences for Macbeth. Macbeth, even if we cannot agree with his act, is “like ourselves” because we see things through his eyes. But is Faustus like us? Do we see Helen as he does? We look at Faustus as he misperceives everything that happens in the play. When he sees Helen, he asks, “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” What should we make of this ambiguous phrase? This calls for reflection. Does the play seek to reproduce only the surfaces of things, or does it seek rather to reveal their underlying moral reality? What does Helen look like?

By the play’s end, Faustus simply cannot repent—he has no soul to save and wants only to avoid this fact. How could Marlowe write such a play? Well, conventional form has great force. He illustrates the conventional Christian idea that “Sin, by custom, grows into nature.” That is why the old man’s entreaties at the play’s end fail. In sum, although Aristotle says that in tragedy one need not share the protagonist’s values but must simply see things from his point of view, it seems clear that we do not see things from Faustus’ point of view, so the play would be better described as a moral comedy than as a tragedy.

Week 06, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Ralegh, Thomas Hariot

2008-02-27T17:05:00.000-08:00

Notes on Edmund Spenser.

Even Queen Elizabeth I is said to have complained that Spenser wrote in an anachronistic style. But it’s a splendidly anachronistic one, as the stately, elaborately structured “Epithalamion” or wedding song shows: 1 introductory stanza, 10 stanzas as pre-wedding unit (3-4-3 subunits), 2 Wedding Stanzas: the ceremony proper, 10 stanzas as post-wedding unit (3-4-3 subunits), 1 brief concluding stanza, for a total of 24. The poet first invokes the Muses to memorialize the wedding, tells them to awaken the nymphs who will attend the bride, and so forth. The bride appears, and the poet sets forth her virtues. A celebration follows and the poem shifts towards the evening and ceremonializes the consummation of the wedding. Finally a call for silence is made to the woods, and Diana is invoked (felicitous birth) and Juno (reproductive genius). The woods are continually urged to “answer” and “echo” to the poet’s utterance and do his bidding. Nature, the springtime, must bless the union just as the gods do and participate in the couple’s union. The woods shelter and amplify the poet’s words, picking them up and sending them back to him. Procreation is at base simply a necessity if society is to continue, but the poet dignifies it and renders it decorous, and he calls on nature to help him accomplish his task by harmonizing with his words.

Poets have always had a special regard for the natural world and its powers, of course, and have long intertwined them with the virtues of art. Ovid and Theocritus are sophisticated classical examples, but the impulse is at least as old as Homeric epic. When we invoke “nature,” we should be mindful that this concept hasn’t always meant the same thing to people as it generally does today. To us, in the age of global warming and endangered ecosystems, nature may seem fragile, something to be protected, even though it still has plenty of ways of showing us who’s really in charge. That attitude is fairly new, I should think, and doesn’t go back beyond the Industrial Revolution. In Spenser’s time, as in most other eras before the 20 th-21 st Centuries, the natural world had its delights but could also manifest itself as ferocious and pitiless: I doubt that people were able to forget for a moment that nature was both, as Shelley says in keeping with the Hindu pantheon, “destroyer and preserver” of human life. A great deal of poets’ energy might, therefore, go towards allying themselves with the more benign forces of nature and setting up their words as a hedge against its destructive powers. Ceremony—including the language arts—was important to people in Spenser’s time in a way that it’s hard for us to make contact with now, and this importance shows in a poem such as the “Epithalamion,” which aims to ward off the violence of nature and harness its positive energies, its beauty and fertility, for human good. Spenser’s speaker is more than an observer: he expresses his hopes, he describes, he memorializes, and he commands that certain actions be taken on his behalf and on the behalf of his bride-to-be. This poem amounts to what one of my former professors at Irvine calls “idealizing eroticism,” or spiritualizing what is otherwise basically “animal sexuality.” That’s what the entire courtly love system seems designed to do: it transforms potentially threatening impulses into something more or less controlled and positive, something useful (though not always tame, as we can see from the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Malory, and others) to the task of civilization.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sir Walter Ralegh.

917-18. In “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” the female speaker sees beyond the Shepherd’s pastoral annihilation of time—everything is subject to change and to the vicissitudes of time and opinion. She understands that his high words are situational. This poem winks at pastoral of Marlowe’s sort, and calls its idyllic bluff.

918-19. “What is Our Life?” This is a dark poem featuring the common metaphor that “all the world’s a stage.” The only thing we do “in earnest” is the one thing that we can’t really experience, in the common understanding of that term: we die once and for all.

918. “Ralegh to His Son.” Ralegh’s poem is more threatening and bitterer than Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 to “the fair young man,” which begins “They that have power to hurt, and will do none…” (1070). Ralegh’s poem seems designed to frighten the addressee into behaving well and not, as in Shakespeare’s sonnet, to encourage sensitive introspection.

919-20. “The Lie.” There’s religious piety and privileging of soul over body to be found in Ralegh, but in this poem, the escape from mortal life is not an untroubled one. The speaker couldn’t act on his own advice during his life, so he passes it on to those who will survive him. Is the price of honesty death? On the whole, Ralegh’s poetry is more cynical and declarative than the experimental style of Sir Thomas Wyatt. In “The Lie,” Ralegh denounces the gap between what people should do in their various offices and what they actually do; the gap between what they say and what actually motivates their actions. At the heart of everything lies corrupt self-interestedness, the very opposite of charitable dealings with our fellow human beings. Things and activities are turned from their proper purposes.

921. “Farewell, False Love.” This poem professes a need to renounce “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” but of course (as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129), this is the hardest thing to do, particularly in the corrupted courtly setting of Ralegh’s experience. Ralegh always seems to understand the Petrarchan conventions (otherworldly, unattainable love objects, extreme passions, etc.) as posing and game-playing. There’s more bitterness in his love poetry than delight. The extremes lead to philosophical reflections on death and decay.

921-22. “Methought I Saw the Grave Where Laura Lay.” Ralegh was a friend and patron to Edmund Spenser, and he describes his epic dedicated to Queen Elizabeth as the summation of the Petrarchan and chivalric literary tradition.

922-23. “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk.” In this exchange between Nature and Love, Nature creates what Love has asked her to create, but this new being has “a heart of stone.” Then Time comes in and destroys what has been created. As usual, Ralegh credits nothing with permanence or comforting softness: the heart’s desires are set against cold, hard reality, and the latter is bound to win sooner or later. The medieval Christian strain of melancholy is very strong in Ralegh’s poetry: it’s as if he’s determined to invoke the strongest feelings only to tell us not to take them too seriously because, after all, nothing lasts.

923-26. Guiana. This is promotional literature similar to what we can find in Hariot. Ralegh describes Guiana as something like El Dorado, a new world where people can “live large,” as we would say, rather than be frustrated in Europe by the law of diminishing returns, where even a prodigious helping of ambition and courage has come to yield only the pittance Hamlet accords the men who fight for Fortinbras in Poland:

Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell…. (4.4.46-52)

Here in Guiana, men from the tired Old World can renew themselves in a land of endless promise of gain in any area of life we would care to mention: commercial, military, political, etc. Commerce takes center stage in Ralegh’s attempt to convince Elizabeth to support his colonial scheme.

Page-by-Page Notes on Thomas Hariot.

939. Hariot says in his Report on Virginia that the main goal is to instill “fear and love” in the native population. The tone is Machiavellian: inspiring love is good, but if that’s not attainable, fear will serve the purpose. The best combination would be love and fear. Hariot is brutally frank about the possibilities, and makes little attempt to dissemble about his goal of subjugating the natives.

940-41. Hariot points out that the natives of Roanoke Island are by no means lacking in ingenuity, which, he thinks, is promising because it may allow European settlers to “bring them to civility” and to the Christian religion. He describes Algonquins’ religion—they are polytheists who believe in an afterlife.

942-43. Hariot says that the European visitors’ technology convinced the natives that they were almost gods. Ominously, whenever the visitors left a town where they had not met with kind treatment, the natives began to die. This effect—no doubt the effect of something like smallpox—Hariot again suggests is promising in that the natives may soon be brought to love and obey.

On the whole, Hariot’s selection is clearly intended as what we might call promotional literature. His assumption is apparently that European ways are so obviously superior and so impressive to the native Algonquins as to make assimilation of them very likely. With hindsight, of course, we know things didn’t go so smoothly; the first few colonies set up on Roanoke did not fare well at all, and the subsequent history of European settlement in what would become “the Colonies” is anything but smooth or painless.

Week 05, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Elizabeth I, Sir Philip Sidney

2008-02-20T17:08:00.000-08:00

General Notes on Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder.

Renaissance humanism tends to treat the individual as a type, a collection of virtues, after the manner of Aristotle. Our own modern sense of the individual as unique and autonomous would be somewhat foreign to them, even though it’s fair to say that the Renaissance has long fascinated people because of the strong personalities we find during that era—it’s an age of worldly popes and even worldlier rulers. Consider Machiavelli’s Cesare Borgia, Benevenuto Cellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and other remarkable individuals.

Wyatt will probably seem to most readers very modern in his sensibilities—he is a Renaissance political figure trying to deal with his own emotions, states of mind, and confusions about his position in the court of Henry VIII. His lyric speaker is often fragile, confused, or threatened. A courtier must behave in an exemplary way, but what are the rules? There are some, but they appear to change based on powerful players’ individual desires. You can read Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier for an idealized version of the court, but Wyatt is in the thick of the real thing. He focuses on personal events—on his thoughts and emotions, and his relationships with women.

“If you would seem honest, be honest” is his advice to his son in a letter. But the court of Henry VIII is all about artifice. Sidney the courtier-poet will later define the literary arts as “feigning notable images” of moral virtue and vice to move readers towards virtuous action. But the Court’s artifice is about more immediate political objectives. It’s hard to maintain a position when one lives in a world that places a premium on the competitive manipulation of appearances, right down to the things one says about oneself, one’s sovereign, and others as well as the clothing one wears and the manners one exhibits. In Castiglione/Hoby’s The Courtier, the point of being a courtier is to embody, and to body forth, the goodness and grace of the sovereign. Outward appearances, as any good Neo-Platonist would say, mirror the inward goodness of a person’s soul, and the courtier is the king’s outward appearance, somewhat as Christ is God’s Word made Flesh and (a phrase from Milton) his “Effectual Might.” The Renaissance in both England and on the Continent is a materialistic, competitive age that still convincingly speaks the language of a profoundly Christian ethical and symbolic universe. It would be a mistake to think of someone like Niccolo Machiavelli as an atheist (though we can’t be so sure about his hero Cesare Borgia). The period is rife with conflict between the spiritual and the worldly, but it dismisses neither dimension and in fact blends them in fascinating ways. Victorian poet Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues may be eccentric renditions of Renaissance voices, but all the same they don’t seem far off the mark.

Henry VIII was the Sun around which his officials and courtiers revolved. To work for Henry was mainly to exalt his rule, and secondarily to do his bidding in official and unofficial affairs. It wasn’t that anyone considered Henry illegitimate or unworthy to rule, but rather that centralization of power increasingly required exalted claims about how the ruler came by his right to rule. By James I’s time in the early C17, the full divine right theory of rulership would supplement dynastic birth as the justification for sovereignty. That same theory would prove to be partly responsible for the troubles of James’ son Charles I with the Puritan faction that eventually executed him during the Civil War of the 1640’s.

Many courtiers came from aristocratic backgrounds, but did not have the liquid wealth to maintain themselves in such lordly status, so as the age of absolutism moved along, once-independent courtiers gravitated towards a place at court. With Henry VIII, the movement to centralism in government approached completion; he reigned from 1509-47, and 1534 saw him copy Martin Luther’s Reformation, except that in Henry’s case, splitting off from the Catholic Church had more to do with marital troubles and with a desire to avoid sharing power and revenue with the Church than with deeply-rooted spiritual conflicts.

Thomas Wyatt’s biography is quite interesting. In 1520, as a young man of 17, he married Elizabeth Brooke. She apparently turned out to be unfaithful, and of course Wyatt anguishes much in his poetry over this problem. At 23, he went to Italy and France as a diplomat. He got into trouble with Henry in 1536 over Anne Boleyn and was sent to the Tower of London , but was subsequently pardoned and became ambassador to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s Court on the Continent. He got into trouble again in 1538 on a treason charge, and was later arrested on the charge in 1541, but was let off again so long as he agreed to reinstate his wife (he had a mistress named Elizabeth Darrell from 1536 to his death, and had become estranged from his wife), but he died in 1542, so he didn’t live long enough to enjoy his return to favor.

With a biography like that, a man may be forgiven his desperate search for constancy, honesty, and truth as opposed to self-interested manipulation and sham in the name of religion and political authority. Wyatt sought fidelity in love and friendship, but fidelity wasn’t easy to find. He never says it was, either—that’s one of the beauties of his poetry, isn’t it? It rings true to Wyatt’s own struggles, and doesn’t whitewash his complicity in courtly and romantic intrigue. Erotic pursuits of the sort in which Wyatt may have become entangled and about which he wrote poetry were part of the political and courtly scene, part of what it meant to be a courtier. Orwell’s 1984 characterizes sex as inherently political, but it’s hardly the first instance of such a notion: sex has had a political dimension at least since the days of Antony and Cleopatra, and no doubt the same was true long before their time, too.

What is the value of lyric poetry for Wyatt? Lyric poetry allows him to assume and explore an honest role, a way to be honest and not just to seem that way. The hope is that by taking on a lyric voice, the poet can attain clarity about the erotic, spiritual and political matters that trouble him. It’s customary for us as descendants of the romantics to consider lyric poetry both expressive and cathartic: the soul escaping on the wings of language, as it were. In a Wordsworthian ode such as “Tintern Abbey,” we expect that our speaker will eventually arrive at what has been called an “affective resolution” to the problems that plague him—the loss of creative power, of a once-sustaining connection to nature and other human beings, etc. The best romantic poetry never oversimplifies such problems or claims that imagination conquers all or that language is a transparent medium of expression. Nonetheless, it is generally optimistic about expression’s capacity to deal with the problems of the autonomous self. But in Wyatt’s case, although there may be an initial hope that a hard-won clarity of mind and perception will allow the speaker to solve his troubles in real life, or at least to set up a kind of pastoral refuge from the maelstrom of court life, that hope is likely to be frustrated, and the poem is likely to register such frustration and reflect upon it. Metapoetically, Wyatt tends to admit the failure of his lyric utterances to set him free—free, that is, from complicity in the treacherous and hostile world that he describes. Art may be wish-fulfillment, as Freud claims in his essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” but sometimes artists are well aware that fulfillment of their wishes isn’t possible, even in fiction or poetry. To attain clarity on some dilemma, or to rehearse one’s difficulties in dramatic or poetical fashion, is not necessarily to slip out of them.

The meter of Wyatt’s poetry is purposefully rough, not smooth the way his later editors in Tottel’s Miscellany make it. He’s trying to capture difficult turns of intellect and emotion, so perfectly smooth verse might work against the psychological realism many readers find attractive about Wyatt’s poetry. The same is partly true of John Donne, whose phrases are often elegant and memorable, but whose meter isn’t always uncomplicated or regular.

Life of Sir Thomas Wyatt

1503—Born at Allington Castle in Kent
1509—Accession of Henry VIII
1516—Probably entered Saint John’s College , Cambridge University
1516—Served as “Sewer Extraordinary”
1520—Married Elizabeth Brooke
1521—Son born
1524—Made Clerk of the King’s Jewels
1525—Made an esquire of the royal body
1525—Estranged from wife
1526—Brief embassy to France
1527—Brief embassy to Venice
1528-1530—Served as the high marshal of Calais
1530—Returned to court to resume his place as esquire of the royal body
1532—Became commissioner of the peace in Essex
1532—Came under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell
1534—Involved in a “great affray” with the sergeants of London and briefly imprisoned
1534—Henry VIII acknowledged “Supreme Head on Earth” of the English church
1536—Formed an attachment to Elizabeth Darrell, his lifelong mistress
1536—Fall of Anne Boleyn
1536—Imprisoned in Tower with 5 other suspected lovers of Anne, but released and rusticated, and then a few months afterward, was made Sheriff of Kent and led soldiers to quell an uprising.
1537—Made ambassador at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V
1538—Returned to England
1538—Charged with treason but cleared
1539—Another diplomatic mission to Charles V’s court
1540—His patron, Cromwell, was executed
1541—Arrested and imprisoned on the 1538’s charges of treason
1541—Pardoned under conditions of his wife’s reinstatement
1542—11 October, died of fever on his way to meet and escort to London the Spanish envoy

Notes on Thomas Wyatt’s Poems.

“The long love…” (594); “Whoso list to hunt” (595); “My galley” (597); “Divers doth use” (598); “Madam, withouten many words” (599); “They flee from me,” both versions (599-600); “My lute, awake!” (600-01); “Forget not yet” (601-02); “Blame not my lute” (602-03); “Who list his wealth and ease retain” (603-04); “Mine Own John Poins” (604-06).

“The long love that in my thought doth harbor.”

A “conceit” is a sustained metaphor. In this poem, Love is said to be a warrior, and the metaphor extends throughout the sonnet. The “banner” is the poet’s blush, and so forth. The contradiction is that soldiers are supposed to be strong, aggressive, and disciplined, but the speaker here is shy and in a weakened position thanks to his lady’s displeasure. The final line “Good is the life ending faithfully” simply asserts an ideal about fidelity as a virtue, but it doesn’t rescue the speaker from his dilemma. It isn’t a bold Petrarchan declaration. Body and soul are at war in this poem—the lover’s physical advances, though they are natural enough, have not been kindly received. The speaker is a fellow soldier serving his commanding officer, Love. He can’t abandon him, and so is left in a muddled state since Love is in retreat. The poem as a whole is a reflection upon “courtly love” within courtly politics; there are rules of engagement in courtly love, and in fact the whole medieval code of eroticism seems to offer a way of containing and directing an otherwise chaotic, powerful passion towards spiritual ends. Courtly love idealizes eroticism, but such gestures invite critical reflection because lovers know instinctively that erotic impulses are not easily blended with spiritual ideals or the conflicting imperatives of courtly place and politics.

“Whoso list to hunt.”

Love here is a dangerous erotic pursuit, as in Ovid and the real court. The deer in Wyatt’s poem is not mild and meek; she (if, as the editors suggest, “she” is Anne Boleyn) belongs to someone else (Henry VIII). There is something of Ovid in Wyatt’s love poetry, even though the Renaissance man seems not to approve of Ovid’s frank characterization of sex as a competition in which both men and women may participate, if not necessarily on the same level. Generally, (Ovid’s women can escape the clutches of divine or human males only by metamorphosing into permanently unattainable objects in the natural world.)

The difficulty in defining or pinning down a slippery love object shows in the conflicting references Wyatt makes. Consider the line “touch me not.” The Norton editors point out that Wyatt has followed Petrarch’s poem “Una candida cerva” and that the line refers to the inscription around the neck of Caesar’s deer. But it also refers to The Gospel According to John, 20:15-17: “Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” In the Vulgate Bible of Jerome, the key line runs “ noli me tangere nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum.”

Wyatt is responding to John 20:17 , Petrarch, and the expectations of the times for love poetry. He cannot disregard these things. Does he give us a half-beatified lady such as Dante’s beloved Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura? Wyatt’s deer wears diamonds, which may signify some trace of heaven and purity. She is untouchable, rather like Christ is to Mary Magdalene. Wyatt’s speaker may be acknowledging the potential for a spiritualized reading of his erotic pursuit, but for the most part that pursuit seems frankly sexual, and the poem has a bitter, exhausted quality.

Petrarch’s sonnets are a model for those of Wyatt, but the two poets differ markedly. Petrarch’s poems are self-conscious and announce metaphor as metaphor. His poet-speakers live in the land of symbols. He often uses the laurel tree in this respect, and makes an absolute distinction between the heavenly and the earthly. The allusion to John in “Una candida cerva” refers to Christ at a halfway point between death and transfiguration. When Petrarch’s speaker tries to follow, he falls into a river. In his version of the poem, Wyatt emphasizes instead the speaker’s bitterness at failing to attain his material object. The poem is partially secular, and the idea of transcendence does not figure as heavily as it does in Petrarch’s sonnet. The reader, however, may not fully agree with the male speaker’s frustrated point of view since the “hind” has not done anything to deserve condemnation. The male speaker has simply “come in last” in the race or hunt for her affection. We should not suppose that the hind would be indignant about being hunted—indeed, the diamonds she wears may suggest that she is well paid for her role in the hunt. In sum, while Petrarch, almost like a medieval allegorist, dramatizes the agonizing gap between the human and the divine, Wyatt evidently prefers to focus on the wildness of the love pursuit even when it takes place in the labyrinthine environment of Henry VIII’s court. Well, the body of Anne Boleyn is real and attractive, but the speaker “seeks to hold the wind” thereby, and seems frustrated because he has been captured by her power as an object of the court.

“My galley.”

I would suggest reading also Spenser’s “Sonnet 34” from Amoretti, which, like Wyatt’s poem (as the editors say), translates Petrarch’s Rima 189. Wyatt’s effort seems more self-accusatory and tortured than Spenser’s rendition. Wyatt’s poem apparently aims to capture the anguish of Petrarch’s sonnet very closely. The meter seems deliberately rough, and suits the subject.

“Divers doth use.”

The speaker contextualizes his situation (he’s lost his lover to fickleness) by referring to the mistaken strategies of other men. His resolution is as follows: “I will not wail, lament, nor yet be sad, / Nor call her false that falsely did me feed, / But let it pass . . . .” He apparently wants to make a distinction between calling his lady “false” and claiming that it is women’s nature to be pleased by frequent “change.” It’s hard to miss the bitterness here, but the point seems to be that the speaker means to rehearse it and let it go, contenting himself with a judgment that more or less takes the moral sting out of what has happened between him and his ex-lover.

“Madame, Withouten Many Words.”

Language is an important part of courtly love games, which depend upon deflection and deception concerning the erotic instinct. Love is dangerous, especially for a woman, who stands to lose much by giving in to her suitors. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril, as Oscar Wilde would say; he also says it is dangerous to remain at the surface. That is a very apt way to describe the courts of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. So the speaker says the woman should leave aside her jests and use her mind, her “wit.” In the manuscript version, odd punctuation marks—“&, {.}”—indicate a nod or shake of the head, things outside the immediate scope of words. In the madrigal by Dragonetto Bonifacio upon which Wyatt has based his poem, the speaker says “un bel si” (that is, perhaps, a nod) will earn a poem, while “un bel no” (a simple “no”) will grant both parties their freedom. Originality of expression, incidentally, was not a primary concern during the Renaissance any more than it ever had been before. Invention and personal detail certainly come into play, and a poet like Philip Sidney may “swear by the blackest brook of hell” that he is “no pickpurse of another’s wit” in his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, but romantic-style uniqueness and inward essence are not imperatives in this age. For a Renaissance poet, the self is represented as conforming to a publicly understood pattern.

Stylistically, this poem turns on emphatic, counterpointing phrases—read it with feeling, as something like a one-sided dialog, and it’s easy to see what I mean. Shakespeare’s verse has the same emphatic quality; his style may be “sugared,” but his lines often turn on sharp contrast between word and word, idea and idea. In the present poem, the idea seems to be, as we would say in our coarse manner, “Cut the bull—are you going to give me what I want or not? If so, great—if not, we’re both free spirits.” Speech and action are in conflict in this battle with a courtly lady that doth protest and jest too much and too long. The speaker seems tired of the rituals of pursuit and courtship. They’re dangerous anyhow—as with his interest in Boleyn. Even the “cruel mistress” in Petrarch is an ideal, and the speaker isn’t pursuing an airy ideal at this point in the conversation with a potential lover.

“They Flee from Me.”

The pattern of the stanzas is rhyme royal, ABAB BCC. The speaker has had many affairs, and now finds that the tables have been turned on him. The lady also is free to “use new-fangleness.” The speaker is baffled; he suffers from moral confusion over the rules of love and finds the situation strange. People who step outside this game tend to be losers—i.e. while they sit around reflecting on things, the next round has already begun. The word “kindely” may be ironic—it means both “rudely” and “in kind.” In any case, the male figure in this poem deserves such rude treatment. Rather like Ovid, Wyatt here represents the male and the female alike as devious. The sonnet is full of tonal complexities, and its irregular lines and double stresses make it subtler still. Wyatt often uses conversational rhythm, as we can tell from intimate phrases like “dear heart.” The speaker’s idealistic expectations cause him to become disillusioned. He is forced to recognize the distinction between the tameness of court life and the animality of love. The need for secrecy is great, and makes things all the better when he is ensnared in love. The point is not even to achieve clarity about his passion, perhaps, but to “set it out there” in all its rawness. He’s exploring an emotional state. This poem is also about power relations—about sex and the court. Chivalric relations are imaged partly in terms of wildness and animal behavior. The theme of hunting applies to the realm of lust, which involves a degree of violence. In this poem, we find role reversal because the woman seems to be in charge. She says, “how do you like it?” We know that Wyatt sought constancy underneath fine courtly appearances, the enforced civility, the rules and roles of courtly life. But love leads only to “newfangleness.” As in King Lear later on, when chivalry and whatever extends beyond need are stripped away, human beings consider themselves nothing more than “poor, bare, forked animal[s].” Shakespeare makes clear that it is not satisfying to return to that level, at least not for long. One must come in from the storm.

“My lute, awake!”

The speaker—or rather the singer in this case—commands his lute to accompany him one last time, not to woo the intransigent Petrarchan lady but rather to announce that the quest has ended. Stanza 6 seems important in that it threatens the lady with a refusal of expression in her old age, just as she has refused to acknowledge the singer’s own earnest expressions to win her heart. He projects his bitterness far into the future, while claiming his present heartaches have come to an end. The verb tenses seem rather playful here, in that the singer keeps uttering the present perfect “I have done” in various senses while the song continues. But I think the general effect is to suggest that he really is done, at least by the final stanza: “My lute be still, for I have done.”

“Forget Not Yet.”

The main device in the poem is to be found in the final line, “Forget not this,” which differs from the final line of the other stanzas, “Forget not yet.” The “this” would be the poem itself, I believe. It is nicely rhythmic, and not among the poems by Wyatt that capture an anguished or confused mind: the speaker’s aim is clear: to remind the lady of his steadfastness in the face of long adversity.

“Blame Not My Lute.”

The lute is the speaker’s lyric voice, and the question here is, “why not just be honest in matters of love? Circulate the truth and let the chips fall where they may.” The speaker draws sustenance, if not comfort, from his own experiences with courtly women, and finds new “strings” with which to make his honest music. Well, in a broader context, anyone who does that risks offending others, and consequences might ensue. The same seems true of Wyatt’s courtly reflections more generally—circulating them amongst his fellow courtiers was a point of honor and built up his reputation, but it probably entailed some risk, too. “Freedom of the Press” wasn’t the reigning idea about literature or indeed about non-fiction prose in Tudor times. What if Henry read what you wrote and didn’t like it, or considered it insulting or threatening? Sometimes, as in this poem, Wyatt’s structured verse plays against the psychological realism and freedom of thought he aims for, which creates a worthwhile tension between the two imperatives (freedom and structure or formal correctness). Lyric has always been at least partly a vehicle for self-expression, for exploring moods and states of mind. Sappho is exemplary in this regard—she is a social poet, a public voice, but that lyric voice is also exploratory and expressive. Well, Wyatt is suggesting that the function of courtly poetry is not simply to pander to the regime in power or bolster one’s standing. He seems really to believe in the ideals of honesty and fidelity, though he’s painfully aware of being compromised by his function in life. How he responds to that dilemma says much about him.

“Whoso list his wealth and ease retain.”

The allusion to Seneca says much—the Greek and Roman gods are all power; they just do what they want. Henry VIII is the “god” who sends thunder out from his throne, striking down those closest to him and those at a distance. As Anne Boleyn is, so might we be.

“Mine Own John Poins.”

This poem examines the respective merits of the active and the contemplative life. The Renaissance felt the pull of both the Platonic philosophy urging withdrawal and the Aristotelian view urging engagement. Here, though, the speaker’s idleness and reflectiveness are enforced: in 1536 Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower with five other suspected lovers of Anne Boleyn, but then he was released and rusticated, and a few months afterward was made Sheriff of Kent and led soldiers to quell an uprising. Now he is at home and has time to reflect and to offer some honest criticism of life at court. The most frustrating contrast in such a setting is the one between seeming and being: everyone is acting a part People go around pretending to be good, wise, holy, concerned for the realm’s welfare, and so forth, while in fact their activities revolve around self-aggrandizement, the satisfaction of lust, and other unworthy things. Worse yet, the players know what’s going on, but are compelled to cover up the sham with pretty lies. See also William Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s fine poem “So cruel prison how could betide” (610-11). The two poems would make for a good comparative paper.

Notes on Queen Elizabeth I.

From “The Passage of Our Most Dread Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth through the City of London . . .”

688-90. Elizabeth became queen when she was 25 years old, in 1558, and reigned for 45 momentous years. It is always difficult to get a sense of the real person behind all the pageantry of rulership, but in this ceremonious description of Elizabeth’s coronation day some flashes of her personality seem to shine through: from the outset, the Queen was possessed of a strong will and a sharp intellect. She was erudite and clear-headed, and had a superb sense of the showmanship necessary to the maintenance of power. Her reported conduct on this important first day of her reign shows a keen understanding of the need to express thanks and loyalty to English commoners, a graceful manner in all public actions, and piety without ostentation in religion. This last-mentioned item was all the more necessary because of Mary’s strict rule from 1553-58—Elizabeth’s predecessor was determined to return England to the Catholic fold, and spared no severity in trying to achieve her goal. Elizabeth was a solid Protestant, but she tried to avoid the worst kinds of persecution against those who held to the Catholic faith, and seemed more or less satisfied to keep the lid on England’s simmering religious disagreements. Most of Elizabeth’s subjects no doubt were pleased with her ascension to the throne, as if a current of fresh air had just swept into the land.

From “A speech to a Joint Delegation of Lords and Commons, November 5, 1566.”

692-94. This excerpt is evidence of a remarkable will and intellect. Elizabeth, now around 33 years old, was under great pressure to marry and bear children, and thereby settle the difficult issue of who would succeed to the throne after her. But Elizabeth didn’t relish giving any of her power to a man, and never married as she said she would. Her words are indomitable, acerbic, and forbidding: she reminds those who would now advise her that some of them once took the side of Jane Grey’s faction against her and Mary, placing them both in great peril. The bottom line, Elizabeth says, is that she “will never be by violence constrained to do anything” and that she is no sheltered weakling but rather a shrewd and practical individual: “I thank God I am indeed endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place of Christendom” (694). When a prince speaks with such force and clarity, her subjects had best just pipe down and leave the matter of the succession to her.

“A Letter to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, February 10, 1586.”

696. Elizabeth is clearly enraged at her close companion Dudley, with whom she seems to have had a stormy relationship until his death from an illness in 1588 (the year in which England fended off the Spanish Armada that had been sent to invade the country). I recall watching the meticulous 1971 British miniseries Elizabeth R, starring Glenda Jackson as the Queen, and being struck by the paradox of Elizabeth’s reign: on the one hand, she laid claim to nearly absolute power and implied that she owed allegiance to none but God, but on the other, she found herself having to remind even her basest servants of the fact almost constantly. It must have been extremely difficult for her to keep her more aristocratic subjects and ministers in line, with so many of them trading on their relationship with her and jockeying for ever greater influence in her name.

“A Letter to Sir Amyas Paulet, August 1586” and “A Letter to King James VI of Scotland, Feb. 14, 1587.)

697-98. These two letters make for an interesting story: it’s entirely clear that Elizabeth had to have Mary executed; her royal counterpart in Scotland had apparently been conspiring to replace her on the throne of England, and she had become a rallying point for Elizabeth’s enemies. The only way to deal with such a threat is to remove the person who serves as its focus and its cause. And Elizabeth did order Mary executed—she signed the warrant herself. Now in a letter to James we find her denying that she gave the order, and even professing to be shocked at the outcome of the whole affair. As the editors point out, perhaps Elizabeth was so deeply troubled by having to execute a fellow queen that she washed her hands of the deed, and placed responsibility for it on others.

“Speech to the Troops at Tilbury.”

699-700. This speech was given at a critical period in English history, with Philip II of Spain’s great fleet of warships preparing to crush Elizabeth’s forces. She shows great courage in appearing on the site of the anticipated battle to cheer the people and soldiers. By this time, Elizabeth would have been in her mid-fifties and the “cult of the virgin Queen” was well established. It’s clear that as a ruler, she was still in her prime.

“The Golden Speech,” 1601.

701-03. This speech occurs towards the end of a long and eventful reign, and sums up Elizabeth’s time and the impression she made on her contemporaries. For the most part, we remember Elizabeth the way she wanted to be known and remembered, and this fact is a testament to her skills as a “public relations” expert in an age of treacherous power politics. Without the aid of modern communications technology, Elizabeth managed to craft and maintain the image of a strong, upright sovereign whose loyalty to England and its people was beyond doubt. No doubt she made her share of mistakes as a ruler, as anyone who governs for four and a half decades would, but I don’t think her image permanently suffered for them. “All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare says, and nobody was more aware of it than Queen Elizabeth I: she knew that she needed to be more than competent, and that the people (and her counselors) must see her being supremely competent and strong in state matters. What shines through this letter is Elizabeth’s desire to be known as a populist in the truest sense of the word. But part of the speech involves a significant concession to the Parliament: it seems that Elizabeth’s granting of monopolies had been much abused by powerful grantees to the detriment of the people. This is probably not something Elizabeth would have been eager to deal with, money politics being the complicated affair that they are at all times. But Elizabeth was a wise Machiavel and seems to have known where to draw the line: she would not risk the permanent anger and dislike of her own people, so she accepted Parliament’s advice to do something about the matter.

General Notes on Sir Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry.”

Sidney was the kind of courtier of whom Baldesar Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier (1528), would have approved. Castiglione’s conduct book says that courtiers should serve as the visible symbol of their prince’s fitness to rule. If the king or queen is the “soul,” courtiers are the “body” that indicates the soul’s goodness. Courtiers behave and speak elegantly and gracefully; their manners are fine but not exaggerated; their words—and poems—are appropriate to the occasion; they make it obvious that the court is all about harmony. Sprezzatura, “easy grace of manner,” is the operative term in Castiglione’s book: the courtier must be able to do the most artful things in the most artless manner. This ideal does not amount to what we post-Romantics would call “originality.” Sidney’s own poetry is typical in that it accepts the conventions earlier poets have established. Take, for example, this sonnet from Astrophil and Stella:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win; and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe:
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”

There is nothing original about this poem—the pain-wracked lover, his unapproachable love object, his poring over the tropes and inventions of earlier authors, and his pose of “looking into the heart” to write are all conventional. Nonetheless, the sonnet makes for a virtuoso performance that must have delighted the courtly “friends of Philip” who read it. Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry” is another such performance. It is a racy, conversational piece much like the dialogues between the courtly figures in Castiglione’s book, which, incidentally, was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. Still, Sidney must have labored intensely over his excellent critical treatise. He may be laughing when he enlists Aristotle and Plato in the pragmatic task of bolstering his own status as a courtier, poet, and critic. Even so, the “Apology” is a serious reply to a serious attack on the arts. Its author has been careful enough to follow the classical model for an oration: exordium (catchy beginning), narratio (setting forth of the issue), confirmatio (exploring arguments and solutions), refutatio (dealing with counter-arguments), and peroratio (stimulating conclusion). (See the guide entitled Renaissance Rhetoric in my Wiki Resource Gallery.) Moreover, behind the studied flippancy of Sidney’s piece lies the Renaissance man’s fusion of classical humanism and Christian theology, all to mount what we might call a “literacy campaign” for narrow-minded detractors of poetry.

Sidney’s essay is a response to the condemnation of art leveled by the Puritan (radical Protestant) author Stephen Gosson in his tract “The School of Abuse.” According to him and others of like mind, poetry is the work of the devil: it is not only a waste of time but the “mother of lies,” “nurse of abuse,” and altogether worthy of being banished, just as Plato said it should be. As Sidney says, “this is indeed much, if there be much truth in it.” Sidney’s task then, is to demolish Gosson’s claims by enlisting his own peculiar version of Aristotle and Plato and, what is more, the authority of the same Bible that Puritans themselves use to denigrate poetry.

In order to undermine the old Christian insistence that all pleasure is harmful, Sidney invokes an equally powerful reading of men’s duty in light of their own fallenness. It is true, says Sidney, that the faculties of the mind have grown dim and disorderly since Adam and Eve’s first sin. The senses, the will, and the intellect or “reason” no longer work in harmony as God intended them to. Man’s “erected wit” is no longer quite a match for his “infected will.” The Puritan charge is that pleasure of any kind, and especially the kind that poetry sanctions, is apt to minister to already deranged human faculties and lead men still further astray from God. One way to oppose this notion, of course, would be to invoke the authority of Augustinian and Aquinian sign theory. Sidney himself does not quite do this, but because he pursues a line of defense analogous to it, we should introduce a basic Christian theory of the sign. (Medieval speculation about the workings of language are more complex than any brief essay could begin to deal with, but a brief explanation should prove helpful.) In The Confessions, Chapter 5, Saint Augustine says that his religious struggles were partially resolved when he heard the eloquent words of Saint Ambrose. Augustine had long been trying to dissolve the remnants of Manicheanism in his intellect when he heard this orator speak in defense of Christianity. In the passage below, Augustine explains—somewhat uneasily, perhaps—that what first caught his attention (aside from Ambrose’s kindness toward him) was not so much the matter of the man’s speech as the fineness of his words. For one trained in classical rhetoric as Augustine was, such eloquence must have been a powerful attracting force:

To Milan I came, to Ambrose the Bishop, known to the whole world as among the best of men. . . . And I listened diligently to him preaching to the people, not with that intent I ought, but, as it were, trying his eloquence, whether it answered the fame thereof, or flowed fuller or lower than was reported; and I hung on his words attentively; but of the matter I was as a careless and scornful looker-on; and I was delighted with the sweetness of his discourse, more recondite, yet in manner less winning and harmonious, than that of Faustus. Of the matter, however, there was no comparison; for the one was wandering amid Manichean delusions, the other teaching salvation most soundly. But salvation is far from sinners, such as I then stood before him; and yet was I drawing nearer by little and little, and unconsciously. // For though I took no pains to learn what he spake, but only to hear how he spake . . . yet together with the words which I would choose, came also into my mind the things which I would refuse; for I could not separate them. And while I opened my heart to admit “how eloquently he spake,” there also entered “how truly he spake”; but this by degrees. (The Confessions. Trans. Edward Pusey. London: Macmillan, 1961. 76-77.)

Saint Augustine does not say that Ambrose’s fine speaking directly converted him. Rather, he says that his eloquence set him on the path towards full conversion to Christianity. The final turn was to come later when, in a spiritual crisis, Augustine heard a voice from heaven, opened up the Scriptures, and was converted. The point for us, however, is that “mere words”—words which he was not yet able fully to understand in their spiritual dimension—had the power to lead Augustine some way towards God, towards a truth higher than any obtainable by the Manichees’ sophistical arguments. In a very practical way, then, Augustine is illustrating for us the basic Christian idea of the sign’s power: “material” words do not in themselves arrive at or constitute truth, but with God’s grace, they have the power, if we read them rightly (and sometimes, apparently, even if we don’t), to lead us upward to spiritual truth. Signs point fallen humanity beyond the fallen material world, beyond the literal events and earthly conceptions they signify. This notion is so strongly held by later Christian theologians that they insist upon paying strict attention to the Bible’s literal, material statements. In the Summa Theologica, while defending the use of metaphor in the bible, Thomas Aquinas explains the need for such close attention succinctly: “[I]t is befitting Holy Scripture to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense” (Norton Anthology of Theoryand Criticism 244; hereafter NATC). To pretend otherwise would be prideful. This is the insight that seems to underlie Christian typology, too: the notion that concrete personages and real events in the Hebrew Scriptures prefigure the life and mission of Christ.

Sidney is a graceful courtier, poet, and critic, not a philosopher or theologian, so we need not go any farther with such theories. We can see his practicality as a defender of poetry by examining one of the best known passages in his essay. In the following selection, Sidney makes far-reaching claims about the poet’s power to imitate God’s original creative act, and promptly lowers his sights to a more pragmatic argument about the poet’s ability to produce “speaking pictures” both delightful and instructive to the reader:

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [as nature], lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature . . . . so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done—neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. . . .

Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam, since our erect wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. (957, 330 NATC).

Sidney begins by asserting the mind’s power to complete nature. In itself, this claim amounts to little more than a glorification of what any Elizabethan familiar with faculty psychology would have said about human “wit.” “Imagination,” one of the five inner wits (along with the common sense, or faculty of unifying data received from the external world; the fantasy, or faculty of apprehending objects of perception present to the senses; judgment, or the faculty of apprehending the relation between two objects of thought; and memory), has the capacity to form images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. This is the faculty that can produce the wonderful images of “Demigods, Cyclopes, Furies, and such like” (957) that Sidney praises in poetry. From this relatively humble point about wit, Sidney moves to a more important one: when the poet creates a Cyrus that never was in history, he demonstrates the truth of Aristotle’s claim about poets’ ability to portray the universal in human action. Cyrus the man was an imperfect mortal, but the poet makes a universal Cyrus, an image that shapes many men’s lives. In Christian terms, we might infer that the poet grasps to some extent the principle whereby God made all that was good in Cyrus, and can repeat it, at least in his own limited way. From this claim it is not far to Sidney’s ultimate argument that the poet is divinely inspired, for “with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing . . . [nature’s] doings” (957). So inspired is this poet, claims Sidney, that his utterances almost (though not quite, obviously) put us in mind of the perfection that Adam and Eve must have known before they fell.

Immediately below this passage, however, Sidney says dismissively, “But these arguments will by few be understood, and by fewer granted” (957). This statement hardly amounts to a true dismissal—it is a rhetorical ploy designed to highlight the very thing one alleges is being passing over (as when a classical orator says, “I shall not mention my opponent’s many treasons”). Even so, Sidney’s turn of phrase is important—he is announcing that while his largest claims for the poet are true, his real aim is to advance something even the Puritans cannot deny without appearing arrogant: the idea that “Poesy therefore is . . . a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight” (958). Like Pietro Bembo in The Book of the Courtier, Sidney wants to make his audience comfortable again after having entertained a thesis too otherworldly for their sensibilities. Just as the courtiers of Urbino see no need for Bembo to argue his way from earth-bound love to the realm of pure spirit, Sidney’s own audience may have exerted its pressure on him a priori to make his case for poetry within the context of moral utility.

Most of Sidney’s argument fits very well within this moral context. Poets must excel in “feigning notable images of virtues, vices, and what else” (959). They must imitate the images of virtue that their “wit” is able to apprehend, and the result will be a “speaking picture” that delights viewers in order to move them to emulate the virtues presented. The idea behind this doctrine that we are moved to virtuous action by pleasurable images is something like this argument: virtue is self-evident; God has in fact planted in all of us the capacity to understand what virtue is. The problem is that thanks to our own willful destruction through “original sin” of the harmony between our faculties and of our relation to god and nature, we no longer want to behave virtuously. We post-lapsarians must, therefore, be treated somewhat like children who need a few lumps of sugar to sweeten what has become to us the bitter medicine of virtue.

Against the narrow-minded Puritanism of Stephen Gosson and his followers, Sidney argues that we must involve the senses and the “infected will” (957) if we are to lead a life of virtuous action. The very things that are most corrupted by the fall must be constantly and carefully exercised if imperfect humans are to keep to the path of right doing. Because the senses are apt to lead Christians astray, poets must present them with images of virtue. If they portray evil now and then, they must do so with a view toward delighting us by the spectacle of seeing it punished. The truth that Christ brought, Sidney might say, is within every human breast, but still, people must be moved to do what they know is right.

As for the craftsman best fitted to affect human passions, the poet, says Sidney, is our only choice. Historians cannot hope to succeed in convincing the fallen to reform their ways, since they are bound by the rules of the profession to portray a great number of proofs that God does not always reward virtue with earthly happiness. Likewise, the philosopher can do no more than speak to people’s clouded intellects in the cloudiest of terms; he offers merely “precepts,” the vain abstractions and word-juggling of the Medieval Schoolmen. Philosophers may teach us what virtue is, says Sidney, but they can’t inspire us to act on our knowledge. They can’t move our wills to perform good deeds. That capacity of the poet’s to move us is vital to Sidney’s whole defense of art: the aim of life is morally right action, and it seems that delightful poetry is the very best means of moving us to act rightly. The poet moderates between philosophy and history by combining both abstract precept and concrete example into one delightful, powerful image. This is the argument Sidney makes from pages 961-63 (339-42 NATC).

Before he gets halfway through his essay, Sidney has already made a good case for the pragmatic, moral value of poetry. But what about Gosson’s condemnation of poetry and the theater? Might there be something to it after all? Surely any Elizabethan audience could cite instances of plays in which blood flows freely and wicked deeds are rewarded. (Our modern reverence for Shakespeare makes us forget that Elizabethan plays contained their share of senseless violence.) Gosson’s argument is a classic example of the “contagion theory of art” that we find as early as Plato: bad art corrupts the spectator or reader. Sidney’s way of dealing with such diseases in the body of art is to argue that “man’s wit abuseth poetry” and not the other way around. (omitted in our selection, would be on 968) A man may just as easily kill his father with a sword, says Sidney, as defend his country with it. The fault, therefore, lies not in the instrument but in the agent who uses it. As for the potentially bad effects of immoral art, those occasional effects, if indeed any can be cited, only show how powerful a means of influencing people art is. The point is not to banish poetry from Christian society but rather to use it carefully and to moral ends. Besides, says Sidney, Plato banished Greek poetry for the most part because it told lies about the gods. But that isn’t much of a problem in Renaissance England—the false gods in whose name Plato banished poets have themselves given way to the Christian God. One further thought: sometimes modern critics react to crude, Gosson-like attempts to censor the arts with an equally extreme formalist claim that engaging with art has (and can have) absolutely no effect on how people conduct themselves. Sidney’s moralist argument actually does a better job of throttling Gossonism than such defensiveness: to say that art can never have much of an effect on how we live our lives is to suggest that it is little more than frivolous entertainment. Surely the best art is much more than that!

In his “Apology” Sidney tries to destroy his political and artistic enemies by playing one strain of Christianity against another. He opposes the tendency in Christian thought to claim that all pleasure is harmful with the notion that since men cannot be trusted to use their reasoning faculty in the right way, they have to be lulled into it, moved to want to know and act on their knowledge, by delightful images. The Puritans, besides their unreasonable opposition to the Queen, are so sure about the means to morality that they don’t know their place as fallen humans. They think that everything—and especially art—has to be held to strictly literal standards of truth. As Sidney sees them, Puritans are literal readers and bad Christian psychologists. The problem with the view of strict moralists like Gosson, implies Sidney, is that humans first fell by misusing their will and their senses. In their arrogant righteousness, Gosson’s partisans have forgotten that they are fallen and in need of constant correction and spiritual exercise. Their narrow-mindedness makes them lazy, and their distrust of pleasure cuts them off from the best source of virtuous teaching. It simply is not in the office of fallen humanity to be so certain about its capacity to arrive at spiritual truth by direct, rational means, whether we are speaking of art or any other human endeavor. When Puritan readers forget this fact, they become like the critic who is outraged at the mention of Aesop’s talking animals: “well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of” (968, 349 NATC). So Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry” is in part a literacy campaign for Puritans. English history suggests that his supporters did not always manage to keep the upper hand in defending poetry from Gossonite do-goodism. When the middle-class Puritans came to power under Cromwell, they went so far as to close the theaters down and, if I recall correctly, to prevent poor citizens from playing at nine-pins on Sundays. The Puritan-tending Milton’s authorship of the great defense of an English free press, “Areopagitica,” may mitigate this severity for us, but it did not prevent the beleaguered British from toppling the Cromwellians in favor of Charles II in the Restoration of 1660.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sir Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry.”

956/330-31 NATC. Sidney follows Aristotle on imitation, with nature as the source. But while other disciplines are limited by their subject matter and must work with what already is, for better or for worse, the poet’s intellect escapes such narrow ties. The poet conjures for us our Golden World beginnings; he is the “Wizard of Ought.” This emphasis on the poet’s creative power is pre-Romantic: Sidney is not saying that the poet’s mind takes on godlike powers to create an independent reality. Rather, he’s using faculty psychology to argue that the poet’s wit has a freer range than other people’s, so the poet can go beyond imitating nature. And by “wit” he refers mainly to the imagination, fantasy, and memory. Those are three of the inner wits, and their function is to process and recall sensory data. (The other two are judgment and sensus communis.) This is a much more mechanical and passive idea about imagination than we will find in Romantic poetics, where the mind is more original and creative than combinatory and receptive.

957/331 NATC. Sidney also follows Aristotle in saying that poetry gives access to universal patterns: the poet makes not a particular Cyrus but a universal Cyrus, a “speaking picture” of a virtuous king. The poet grasps the principle by which nature made the original Cyrus, so he can complete Nature’s work by recognizing the eternal Form immanent in that material Cyrus, giving us a pattern of moral conduct to imitate. Sidney says that our faculties encompass nature’s workings, and the poet’s work therefore honors God the first “maker” of the original Cyrus.

957/331 NATC. Erected Wit / Infected Will. Here is the faculty psychology behind Sidney’s defense. The point is simple: when humankind fell, the will, appetite, and reason went out of sync, so that we are constantly being pulled away from virtuous conduct by our lowest appetites. In order for virtuous behavior to reign, our will must be properly aligned with God’s plan for us. Since we are “misaligned” in these latter days, we need pleasing patterns to realign our will so that it can let reason work as it should, and action happen as it ought.

958-59/331-32 NATC. The three kinds of poet: David, philosophical poets such as Lucretius, and poets who “imitate” only “what may be and should be.” These latter are the ones we need today. Sidney says that what constitutes a poet is moral purpose—the poet imitates in order to deliver universal moral lessons. Verse form helps us remember poetry, enhancing its effect. Sidney begins making distinctions between the poet, the philosopher, and historian by reminding us of the following moral purpose: “the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” And he further describes the body as a dungeon imprisoning the mind. In sum, a medium that appeals to the senses leads us beyond the senses; this accords with Augustine and Aquinas.

959-63/334-40 NATC. Only the poet teaches in a sufficiently concrete and delightful manner. Historians remain tied to things as they really happen in an unjust world, so imitating a corrupt world’s ways may further corrupt us. Philosophers teach abstractly, and cannot move us to virtuous action. Poetry moves us to learn and to behave well, so we will put our learning to good use. Poetry mediates between abstraction and materiality, sense and understanding; it is medicine for the fallen, taking us back to first principles and possibilities, and to causal patterns.

967-68/348-51 NATC. The charges laid at poetry’s door: 1) there are better uses of time; 2) poets lie; 3) poetry is morally corruptive; 4) Plato banished poets. As for 2, the poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” Besides, people don’t take what they see on a stage or read in a fable as literally true. We know how to keep our distance from make-believe and yet take it seriously enough to profit by it morally, while truth-narratives like history may mislead us. Sidney may recognize here what Aristotle doesn’t in The Poetics: history requires invention and emplotment. Poetry, at least, doesn’t make false promises or bogus systems of abstraction. It mediates between sense and spirit for fallen humanity. As for the third charge, says Sidney, any instrument can be dangerous if misused—if it couldn’t hurt someone, it wouldn’t be worth much. So “man’s wit abuseth poetry,” and not the other way around.

Editions: Abrams, M. H. et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Package 1 (Vols. ABC) ISBN 0-393-92833-0. The selection is from Vol. B. Also: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 04, Sir Thomas Malory, Everyman

2008-02-13T09:01:00.000-08:00

Notes on Sir Thomas Malory and Everyman.

General Notes on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.

Central to the Arthurian romance cycles in France and England is the assertion of an impossibly high chivalric ideal even as that ideal is shown to be impossible by means of the various characters’ failures to live up to it. If we were reading the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we would find an essentially upbeat estimation of the chivalric order, one markedly different from Malory’s bleak portrait of it. But even in the Gawain tale (in which a magical Green Knight bursts into Arthur’s Court on Christmas day and challenges the King’s knights to strike his head off, whereupon Gawain, having met the challenge, must go through a series of trials before he reaches a Chapel where the Knight feigns willingness to chop off his head in turn), the chivalric order is understood to be an imperfect mechanism that contains and channels fallen humanity’s tendencies towards violence, rapacity, and pride—tendencies that the King and his knights, too fond of their creature comforts and their security, must not be allowed to forget. The Christian chivalric code calls for readiness to offer sacrifice, readiness to serve Saint Mary in honor of her Son’s voluntary, redemptive self-sacrifice. As in so much medieval literature, the refrain is “life is loan,” and we must remember that we are travelers passing through an alien landscape here on earth. Ultimately, even Gawain suggests that the best ideal of the age—chivalric honor and faith-keeping—must acknowledge the limitations of those responsible for upholding it. Malory’s version of the Arthurian legend is much more bitter about the shortcomings of its main actors, even as the text pays tribute to the romance cycle’s potential as a source of early national pride. King Arthur is a doomed, glorious figure, Guinevere is his matchless queen, and Sir Lancelot the most valiant of knights.

What leavens the sometimes gloomy quality of the Arthurian tales is, of course, the Christian context of forgiveness and redemption that makes at least some of the failures bearable. This context is at work in the rather mystical and ambivalent ending of the Morte D’Arthur, where the narrator reports various legends about what really happened to Arthur, in effect turning him into a principle of English continuity and a Christ-figure whose Second Coming is always possible. We can say reasonably that the feudal code of chivalry is an attempt to acknowledge the force of strong passions and of violence while at the same time delineating a civilized place (the Court) where they can be restrained and rechanneled. The psychological operation here is similar to what we can find in Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, where the playwright displays his confidence in Athenian law by admitting that its precursor and perpetual guarantor is the other kind of law—cyclical vengeance—represented by the Furies who pursue Orestes after he avenges the death of his father Agamemnon at the hands of his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. One cannot establish peace and civility without acknowledging human propensities for passion and violence. A similar insight underlies such modern cultural analyses as Freud’s last book, Civilization and Its Discontents: that author insists that aggression is innate in human beings. We will never be able to eradicate our aggressive instincts, so we had better learn how to deal with them constructively, and not suppose that repression will do anything but set the conditions for the destructive return of what has been repressed.

The provenance or historical background of the Arthurian romance cycle points towards a native Briton protest against the onslaught of the Angles and Saxons in the 400’s-500’s CE (Christian Era). By Arthur’s time—if indeed he was an actual historical figure—the British Isles had already seen an invasion by the Romans, an ongoing event that had great cultural significance even if the Romans eventually decided that the occupation was too costly and distracting to maintain. The romance tales also, however, favor the Norman descendents of William I since Arthur is said to have fought the Saxon invaders, as did the “Frenchman” William of Normandy later on. The Arthurian legends cross over to France , too, so perhaps Geoffrey of Monmouth wasn’t the only source in medieval times, quite aside from the cycle’s Welsh origins. Here are a few interesting web articles on the subject of ancient English history: English prehistory and Briton. See also Wikipedia’s entry on King Arthur.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.

439-40. It’s clear that Agravain and Mordred hold a grudge against Guinevere; that’s why they are spying on her and Lancelot in the first place, and this spying is at least as responsible for the dissension that occurs as the liaison of the two lovers. Gawain opposes Agravain and Mordred for both personal and political reasons: Lancelot has done great service to Arthur and Guinevere, and since he’s the greatest knight in the kingdom, if he falls out with Arthur, many men will follow his party. Arthur agrees, and holds Lancelot in high esteem just as Gawain does.

442. Lancelot’s insistence on going to visit Guinevere stems from a sense that it would be cowardice and a betrayal not to obey the Queen’s bidding. In this Romano-British court, it seems that Lancelot holds most strongly to the notion of personal loyalty: as the Romans who once invaded Britain used to say, “strength and honor.”

444-45. The conspirator-knights show their ill will—they simply plan to kill Lancelot, to no avail. Gawain resists Arthur’s demand to burn Guinevere at the stake, and doesn’t want any trouble with Lancelot, at least until he hears about the death of Gaheris and Gareth. It’s evident that Arthur’s realm has for some time now been in turmoil, or at least that dissension was brewing: “many knights were glad, and many were sorry of their debate.”

446-47. Arthur regrets the loss of Lancelot even more than the unfaithfulness of Guinevere. But at least he has Gawain.

448. Arthur dreams of his fall from the top of Fortune’s Wheel and his death. Like all mortals, Arthur must die. In the interval between this section and the previous one, Lancelot crossed the Channel to rule part of France , while Arthur chased him over there and Mordred, traitor that he is, has grabbed England in Arthur’s absence, so the latter must return to win back his kingdom.

449. At the truce party between Mordred and Arthur, we see how frail are human attempts to stave off disaster. An adder stings one of the knights, who draws his sword and thereby accidentally brings on an all-out battle, at the cost of thousands of lives.

450. Both Arthur and Mordred give each other their death wounds.

451. Bedivere twice betrays Arthur by failing to cast the King’s magical sword Excalibur into the waters, so that the Lady of the Lake can take back this gift from Arthur. The Christ parallel here is probably meant to be drawn: Saint Peter denied three times that he knew Jesus after he was taken by the Romans.

452-53. Malory tells us that Arthur’s passing remains shrouded in mystery: the King disappeared, saying that Morgan le Fay, the Queen of North Wales, and the Queen of the Wastelands will take him to “Avilion.” Many, according to Malory, claim that someday King Arthur will return to wage a great crusade in the Holy Land. On Arthurian terminology, an interesting resource is Arthurian A to Z. See, for example, that site’s entry on Sovereignty.

453-55. Lancelot is told in a vision that Guinevere has died; she has never set eyes on him since their parting in France. Lancelot turns penitent, wastes away, and dies, unleashing an avalanche of Christian devotion on the part of his fellow knights. Lancelot’s brother Ector casts off his armor when at last he comes upon the man’s body. Many knights went off to their respective countries to live as holy men, and some fought the Turks in the Holy Land. Malory ends the book by asking us to pray for his soul and telling us that his work was completed in the ninth year of English King Edward IV’s reign: that would be 1470, just a year before the Battle of Tewkesbury in which the Yorkist Edward finally vanquished the deposed Lancastrian King Henry VI and the Earl of Warwick (i.e. “the Kingmaker” Richard Neville), ending one stage of the Wars of the Roses that rocked England from 1455-85. Malory’s text about England ‘s glorious and yet troubled past, therefore, is aptly written just as the chivalric order of feudal England is disintegrating and a newly consolidated monarchy is coming into being. In 1485, Henry Tudor will defeat the last Plantagenet and Yorkist King Richard III, thus initiating the Tudor line that stretches on to Henry VIII and ends with the magnificent reign of Elizabeth I from 1558-1603.

Page-by-Page Notes on Everyman.

Prologue and 1-63, 63-84. God seems sorrowful at how the people he has made in his image deteriorate year after year. He feels abandoned—as Ed Schell says, there’s some genuine emotional intensity in this play, and that’s the way actors would have to stage it: bringing psychological process to life. So in this “state of mind,” God decides it’s time, once again, to put Everyman (meaning us and the individual-seeming Character, of course) in mind of death: medieval theology stresses that one should live ever mindful of death, and emphasizes this point all the more strongly because people so obviously live it up in forgetfulness. It’s been said that because we go on from one day to the next, we become used to the pattern, grow fond of our creature comforts, in love with repetition and the pursuit of our own desires. (Even the Seven Deadly Sins comes to seem like good friends, nothing threatening or ugly.) Our life seems to us to go in comfortable circles, whereas the path of spiritual progress is figured by the Church and its art as severe, narrow, linear. So this morality play is about the intense period of spiritual reawakening when we confront, with a shock and that electric buzz that runs through the body under stress, the inevitability and nearness of death. This particular play, as the editors point out, foregoes much of the clownish humor in many morality plays in order to drive home the intensity and starkness of the confrontation, the “reckoning.”

85-183. Death and Everyman converse, and the latter thinks he “owns” his life and goods and that he can buy off Death with a thousand pounds. The meeting with Death can be figured in many ways—I recall Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, in which the main character plays a game of chess with Death and must go and set his affairs in order.

205-377. Fellowship shows how people form friendships more or less based on mutual utility and “the pleasure principle.” In the end, a Christian must make his reckoning on his or her own; everybody dies alone, abandoned—except, in this play’s scheme, by the history he or she has made through moral (or immoral) acts, the significance of which acts must be realized. Your acts will either speak for you or against you, but they’ll be with you right to the end. The second part of this section only reinforces the points made in the dialogue with friendship—even Kindred abandons Everyman; Kindred has his own reckoning to make, his own path to follow.

443-44. Goods admits that material things weigh down and finally deaden the soul; by living obsesses with objects, we become objects. At 448-49, Goods also alludes to the way repetition structures the life of a person addicted to material things: after you die, it says, what you own will begin deadening somebody else’s soul.

480-82. Good Deed/s is very feeble at this point; this kind of description implies that so far, Everyman has failed to reflect upon his own personal history. That’s why he needs Knowledge to enlighten him and lead him to Confession. Everyman has done a few good things now and then, but his actions must have been more or less occasional—”random acts of kindness,” to steal a phrase from that annoying bumper sticker.

554-57. Knowledge leads Everyman to Penance. To reflect on one’s life leads to full consciousness of a pattern of sin, of spiritual error. In the medieval language of spiritual process, which revolves around a reinterpretation of monetary words, such erroneousness must be “paid for.” (As in “our Savior bought us a chance for redemption.”) Knowledge divides a person from the flesh and its imperatives, as lines 604-05 suggest.

656-68. Good Deeds is healthy now, but at this point simply advances Everyman’s learning curve; he is led to believe that Discretion or Judgment, Strength, Five-Wits, and Beauty (health and youth, the soundness of the body) will be his true friends all the way to the grave.

706-48. Everyman must go to Priesthood because the priestly order holds the keys to the Seven Sacraments: baptism, confirmation, ordination, the Eucharist, marriage, extreme unction, and penance (reconciliation, penance, confession). Even during the medieval period, there were many complaints about corruption and profit-making seeping into the Church, but it’s easy to see how powerful the institution of the Catholic Church was in the lives of ordinary people: the priests held the keys to salvation.

750-920. Even Knowledge, which has accompanied Everyman faithfully, stops at the grave, and the only thing remaining to him is his own personal history of moral acts. These, along with Everyman’s faith, are enough, as the Angel and the learned Doctor let us know. This kind of medieval morality play is one way in which artists helped combat one of the most persistent tendencies in Christian history: while Christian symbolism and ritual forms are no doubt expressions of deep spiritual needs and impulses, over time they tend to become “hollowed out,” until they’re in danger of becoming mere shortcuts or shorthand for genuine spiritual aspiration and duty. To borrow a line from John Milton, what was once vital lapses into “shows, mere shows, of seeming pure.” Everyman, with its dramatic personification of one general or universal man’s spiritual journey through life, returned its late C14 audiences to the shock of full awareness in the presence of death. Most people have from time to time felt the power of stray moments when they suddenly become aware of the simple, brutal fact that their bodies, their thoughts, and everything connected with their lives is only temporary and could be cut off at any moment. Such moments are shocking, I suppose, because they momentarily demolish the security we derive from spending most of our lives projecting our physical existence and earthly hopes into indefinite futurity. Everyman, we might say, is an extended dramatization of just such a disturbing moment, but it ends on a comforting note thanks to its rootedness in Christian doctrine.

Week 03, Geoffrey Chaucer

2008-02-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

Notes on Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of short tales of various genres. The tales were extremely popular throughout the medieval age. See also Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written in light of the plague in Florence, a different and more static motive for the participants’ trip than we see in Chaucer. His pilgrims are on their way to pay their respects at the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose refusal to go along with Henry II’s plan to limit the Catholic Church’s judicial authority cost him his life. Chaucer’s narrative frame allows for a dynamic portrayal of classes and stations. The pilgrims, ostensibly brought together for a common religious purpose, come from all three estates—the knighthood, the clergy, and the commons (working people of all types). We see not only a knights and prioresses but millers, reeves, ploughmen, parsons, friars, summoners, pardoners, cooks, and so on. Diversity is Chaucer’s watchword, and a pilgrimage brings all walks of life together even if it doesn’t nullify the class distinctions among them.

The literary fiction—namely, that everyone will arrive at the Canterbury shrine—is disrupted by the Host, Harry Bailey, who says that the trip should end at a pub, with dinner promised to the pilgrim who tells the best tale. The businessman Harry’s competitiveness undermines the purely spiritual basis we had thought would animate the pilgrimage. In terms of class relations, the lower orders upset the narrative order of the text; they change the itinerary. We end up with two contrasting frames: life as a pilgrimage and life as a contest. The ancient Pauline Christian idea that fallen humans are aliens on earth, passing as pilgrimagers through this “vale of tears” on their way to salvation or damnation, meets up with the multifarious motives of the Canterbury pilgrims, from the worldly to the pious. So much for the misconception that the Middle Ages were a time of somber reflection and spiritual unity—the era’s literature is as vivid and contradictory as Chaucer’s pilgrims.

The idea of the “pilgrimage,” of course, had been muddied by the Fourteenth Century. At base, pilgrimages were religious ceremonies. After having acknowledged one’s sins during the sacrament of confession and having admitted one’s sinfulness and dependence on God, one could go on a pilgrimage for health cures and for relatives’ souls. The greatest pilgrimage of all would be to Jerusalem—i.e. a person could participate in one of the Holy Crusades to retake the Holy Land from the Arabs. By Chaucer’s time, pilgrimages had come to be seen as holidays somewhat in the modern sense. This literary trip takes place in spring, a time of rebirth for the spirit and for the natural world. Since the weather was warmer, pilgrims felt wanderlust and curiosity, too. Often, while travelers were on their way to Rome or to the monastery of Saint James of Compostella, they lost sight of the spiritual goal and never made it to the shrine. Chaucer’s pilgrims never make it to Becket’s shrine, either—even though they should be able to see Canterbury itself.

The Prologue’s opening eighteen lines comprise a single sentence in which we can examine Chaucer’s methods. We are treated to a précis: it is spring, and people want to go on pilgrimages, especially to Canterbury. The center of the unit lies in line twelve. The when/then structure is ambiguous in its figuration of motive. The sick/seek rhyming pun binds sickness of all kinds to seeking of all kinds. Strong verbs like “holpen” (help) are prominent. What kind of help for what kind of illness? one wants to know. Notice the description of spring from lines one to eleven—here Chaucer brings out anything but spiritual motivations for the pilgrimage: physical renewal, sexual terms (piercing, bathing in licour), high-style romantic terms like Zephirus, “tender crops,” “young sun,” and so on. Then Chaucer moves to a lower style—birds (“corages” can refer both to spiritual hearts and to physical, or sexual, hearts), for example. Birds are hardly spiritual figures; they are amorous. Folks long for rebirth. Do they seek spiritual rebirth? We know it is more complicated than that. Sometimes, too, pilgrimages were undertaken to strange lands for the purpose of sightseeing. “Palmers” were professional pilgrims. In sum, the spiritual motives for pilgrimages were often at war with the lower, “self-realizing” ones, as we might call them today. Both motives might coexist among different pilgrims, and even within the very same pilgrim. Throughout The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer shows the complexity of human beings—their sexuality, competitiveness, passions, and so on all run into one another. It is hard to separate these realms from the realm of spirituality, and the fact that various feelings and motivations run together need not invalidate the spiritual dimension of Chaucer’s pilgrimage. Since when were fallen human beings pure either in action or in motive?

At line nineteen, we find the narrator’s stance. He seems wide-eyed, eager to tell us of his experience. This ruse of naiveté is how Chaucer will explore his pilgrims’ psychology. The narrator is non-judgmental, and he also wants readers to be non-judgmental, too. He draws out even his own language. The narrator disclaims responsibility for his plan of relating both high and low, but he also broaches the issue of what constitutes literary truth. What should we say of a narrator who proclaims his need to relate everything he sees and hears like a junior reporter? Chaucer is perhaps suggesting that in fiction, imaginative truth is larger than reportorial truth.

In the descriptions of the various pilgrims, we see both an impulse to idealize and the strain placed upon this impulse by human frailties. The Knight, for example, is idealized, and the terms that apply to him are straightforwardly chivalric. His son gets a more mixed treatment, while the Prioresse is described in great detail, not all of it flattering. She is not really irreligious, but neither is religion the center of her life as it should be. It seems that fine manners and courtly behavior are her central concerns. She is a courtly lady who has become a nun—a change in office that was rather common in the middle ages. When Chaucer describes a character in detail as he does the Prioresse, that is generally a sign that the character is more flawed than usual.

Strong individuation isn’t a mark of approval in Chaucer’s Christian context—it just means that you’re probably up to some things you shouldn’t be, given your station and responsibilities in life. Chaucer, that is, identifies characters by their position in the order of nature and by their roles in the community. He is inclined to individuate a character only when that character fails in his or her office and thereby lacks the wholeness and integrity demanded by the office. As so often in moral literature, the “good guys” are precisely the ones you don’t notice because they’re conforming to the just demands of their “office,” their station in life. Chaucer’s society is strongly divided into three estates and various religious and secular functions amongst them; not to uphold your office is to lose your title to respect and, at worst, even your title to humanity itself. A ruler who mistreats his people, a priest who ignores his flock, a pardoner who offers false promises of salvation for ready money, is scarcely worthy of the term “human.” The self for a medieval person was defined in terms of communal responsibilities and social relations, not in terms of the individual’s desires or goals for worldly advancement. The medieval self is a nexus of social obligations, not (as in our post-Romantic notion) the result of a process of self-conscious individuation. In a long narrative such as Chaucer’s, which aims to describe the panoply of medieval life, this way of defining the individual structures the entire fiction, determining what we see and hear, and when we see and hear it.

But Chaucer’s communalism doesn’t mean that the individual has nothing vital to do. On the contrary, his characters behave in accordance with the moral choices they have made and are making. Why, Chaucer wants to know, do people go on pilgrimages? There are various motives: tourism, piety, curiosity for the things of this world, and so on. The key choice is rather an Augustinian one: are you headed towards the City of God, or on your way towards the City of Cain? You really can’t end up in both, so you have to choose—or more accurately, you are constantly choosing your destination by the actions you take. Christian life should follow the path of legitimate desire, or charitas (charity, an outflowing desire to help one’s fellow human beings and to join with them in serving God), but as everyone knows, cupiditas is always the dark shadow on human purpose and behavior. Cupiditas is the selfish, acquisitive, sensuous kind of desire that entangles one in the world’s snares. Each earthly pilgrim or Christian soul must choose where to fix attention, and so whether to end up in the City of God or in Hell. The beauty of Chaucer’s treatment of the pilgrimage motif, I think, is that it shows how hard it is for people to make this seemingly simple choice—we spend our whole lives doing it. We shouldn’t expect from Chaucer modern “character development” of the sort to be had from a realist novel, but neither do we find two-dimensional stick figures in his characterizations. Even villains like the Pardoner or deeply flawed characters like the Prioresse and the Wife of Bath do not entirely forfeit our interest or empathy. In thinking of them Chaucer would probably have borne in mind the Vulgate Bible’s sentence “qui autem dixerit fatue reus erit gehennae ignis,” or as the King James Bible renders Jesus’ pronouncement, “whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire” (Matthew 5:22).

Notes on The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.

The Wife of Bath asserts her own experience against verbal patristic authority, opposing an alien male verbal culture. In her prologue, she makes three arguments:

lines 1-192: marriage is permissible, even though married love is generally considered sinful.

lines 193-450: she has had three good husbands.

lines 451-end: she has had three bad husbands.

The Wife points out that the Bible says Solomon had many wives. But Solomon’s marriages were disastrous; the man was an idolater who wasted his gifts on women. The Wife, like her male opponents, is a partial reader of the Scriptures. Alice refers us also to Saint Paul’s Epistle 1 Corinthians: 7. She says that Paul stressed mutuality between marriage partners. This claim is plain misrepresentation. Alice often enlists biblical authorities rather than the personal experience she keeps bringing up. As for her argument about “nature,” she can’t have children, so it doesn’t seem relevant to her particular case. The Wife does not realize that chastity is a spiritual virtue, not merely a physical one.

Her arguments early on are that her “good” marriages have allowed her to act out her philosophy. Yet, her bad husbands are the ones she seems to love most. Her marriages are all non-productive. According to Alice, the following three things constitute a marriage: (a) Unification of the heart; a corporate community. (b) Husband and wife peacefully serving God together. Desire will no longer get in the way. (c) The engendering of children. She herself does not fulfill any of these conditions. Her dominance over men almost amounts to prostitution in her first three marriages, which are not, on her own stated terms, genuinely Christian.

As for the Wife’s Tale, the question is, “what do women want?” Alice’s Tale is a “fairy tale” by genre—it is pure wish-fulfillment, just as Freud claims stories usually are. (See his 1908 essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming.”) Even in her prologue, Alice has been telling the pilgrims a fairy tale about her life. She gives them a history of her life as it ought to have been, not as it really has been.

Week 02, Bede, Dream of the Rood, Beowulf

2008-01-30T08:59:00.000-08:00

Notes on Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, “Caedmon’s Hymn” (24-27)

One recurrent pattern that Bede’s story about this early poem reminds us of is the way prophetic or poetical gifts to an individual involve anxiety, and sometimes suffering. Caedmon doesn’t suffer, but he’s a simple rustic who has been granted the gift of visionary singing—his task is to set parts of the scriptures to verse. He doesn’t understand why he should be given such a gift since he’s illiterate and not of high station in life. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Caedmon is an ordinary man transformed into a purveyor of extraordinary and prophetic messages.

Medieval literature often dramatizes the great gap between the human and the divine posited by Church theology. Post-lapsarian humanity (humanity “after the fall”) has distanced itself from God, and the relationship between words and things, words and intentions, has become deranged. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians describes the dilemma well: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:11). I think the dramatization I’ve mentioned is responsible for much of medieval literature’s continuing appeal, for its “pathos.” It seems like a simple thing—there’s a dreadful gap between us and god. But a lot can happen “in between,” so to speak: if you’ve read Dante’s Divine Comedy, you know how hard it was for the Pilgrim Dante to get hold of his once-earthly love Beatrice, who has to be reminded by other saints in the heavenly chain of command to turn towards Dante and help him find his way through “the dark wood” of mid-life spiritual travail. Beatrice, now free of earthly limitations, basks directly in God’s heavenly light (il primo amore, or primal love) that pulses through the cosmos. But Dante does not, or at least his earthly senses can’t yet feel that love and light the way Beatrice does. No wonder Beatrice seems to have left him behind. The distance between the Pilgrim and Beatrice is in part Dante’s way of dramatizing the gap between the human and the divine—a gap in feeling, understanding, and appreciating. Or consider the Pearl Poet’s dramatization of an imaginary dialogue in Pearl between a grieving father and his departed child—the child lectures him sternly at times on points of theology, rather like Dante’s Beatrice does to the Pilgrim. The poor father’s vision brings him some consolation, but for much of the poem it reminds him how far he is from his beloved daughter and from a proper appreciation of God and His inscrutable ways.

What promises to bridge the divide between humanity and God, at least over time? Well, faith does, with inspired language pointing the way. This point brings us back to Caedmon’s inspired hymning: Bede’s recounting of the old story dramatizes the gap I’ve mentioned, and acknowledges the seeming incommensurateness of the vessel God has chosen through which to speak to fallen humanity. But Caedmon’s words inspire faith nonetheless. So his is an uplifting, hopeful story, and Caedmon’s life pattern turns calmly monastic—he accepts the gift he has been given, and sings to benefit others. Charitas (charity, the quality of sharing one’s affection and gifts with others) reigns in this simple man’s actions.

Bede didn’t live beyond the 730’s CE (Christian Era), but here is a précis of early English history:

The original British tribes were conquered by Rome from the time of Julius Caesar onwards to 401 CE, when, under pressure from other parts of their empire, the Romans gave up trying to deal with the troublesome “Brits.” Then disunity caused the Celts to seek protection, and the result was the migration during the 400’s-500’s CE into England of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes Frisians, and Franks from Denmark and Germany.

Conversion to Christianity: “By the year 550 CE, the native Britons had been converted to Christianity and the religion became firmly established within their culture. Attempts by the Britons to convert the Anglo-Saxon pagans were futile. At the end of the sixth century through the successful efforts of a Christian mission led by Augustine, a representative of the Roman church, Christianity was established within the highest echelons of English society by the prompt conversion of the kings of Essex, East Anglia, Northumbria, and Kent. Sees were then established at Canterbury, Rochester, London and York. However, the four kingdoms soon relapsed into paganism, and initially, only Kent was reconverted. The evangelistic initiative then passed to the Scottish church and by the end of the seventh century, England had been reconverted.” (Source: Kim Woods, U of Texas at Arlington) Then just before 800 AD began the famous Viking invasions, which lasted until the end of the 800’s when Alfred the Great captured London from the Danes. Engla-Lande takes its beginning now as a common term.

During the 900’s (Tenth Century) we have the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms or the heptarchy (Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Wessex): “The early Anglo-Saxon society was organized around clans or tribes and was centered around a system of reciprocity called comitatus. The eoldorman expected martial service and loyalty from his thanes, and the thanes expected protection and rewards from the lord.” (Source: Kim Woods, U of Texas at Arlington, to which this account is generally indebted.)

Finally, we get the Norman Invasion of 1066. William of Normandy was a French aristocrat, and for hundreds of years thereafter, the English throne was more or less “French.” The French and English are separate but deeply interrelated kingdoms.

Notes on “Dream of the Rood” (900 AD or earlier) (page 27-29)

As with the Caedmon story in Bede, this dream vision plays on the temporal gap between the dreamer and the time of the Holy Cross or Rood. The dreamer is reminded vividly of the great spiritual significance of Christ’s Crucifixion. Ordinary wood is given voice—that’s personification, of course, a common device in medieval literature. As the poem suggests, there’s an affinity between the suffering of Christ and the pain of the natural world: “all creation wept.” Why is the poem necessary in terms of doctrine? Why the need for dream visions? Well, a recurrent pattern in the Bible, as one consequence of the Fall, is the way people only seem to learn their lesson: in truth, pride drives them on and sin-induced dullness makes them act stupidly, forgetting whatever spiritual truths they have learned. This obduracy on the part of human beings makes vivid reminders and lessons necessary—so the Cross on which Jesus was transfixed is made to testify in his favor as an instance of what the Victorian author Thomas Carlyle, although in a very different, secularized context, would call “Natural Supernaturalism”: the miracle of the ordinary, rightly understood.

What lesson does the Dreamer take away from his encounter with the speaking Cross? Clearly it’s a lesson about faith, but I will leave it for students to characterize. What interests me about the poem’s ending is how the words of the Cross lead to a vivid, dramatic image, what Sir Philip Sidney (a Renaissance critic and courtier-poet) might call a “speaking picture” with the power to inspire human beings to virtuousness. The significance of imagery is great in poetry generally, of course, but that statement is probably even more true of medieval literature, which has a tradition of powerful iconography to supplement its reliance on the written and spoken word. Many people, after all, were illiterate during the Medieval Period, and they received their doctrine either by the spoken word or through images they saw while at church, and at some points from morality and mystery plays put on by traveling actors.

Notes on Beowulf

Epic Genre. From Michael Alexander, translator of Beowulf (Penguin, 1973): a. Epics involve “inclusiveness of scope, objectivity of treatment, unity of ethos and an ‘action’ of significance.” b. “The action of an epic, like the action of a myth, should have its own logic and an intrinsic significance.”

1. Early Danish history.
2. Hrothgar builds Heorot.
3. Grendel attacks Heorot.
4. Beowulf.
5. The coastguard greets Beowulf.
6. Wulfgar greets Beowulf.
7. Hrothgar greets Beowulf.
8. Unferth challenges Beowulf; Beowulf replies.
9. Wealhtheow greets Beowulf.
10. Beowulf and Grendel fight.
11. Celebrations at Heorot; Beowulf rewarded. The story of Sigemund and the Finn episode.
12. More celebrations.
13. Grendel’s mother attacks.
14. Beowulf comes to Hrothgar’s aid.
15. Beowulf sinks into the mere, fights Grendel’s mother, and cuts off Grendel’s head.
16. Celebrations—thanks given.
17. Hrothgar prophecies and warns Beowulf.
18. Gifts and parting.
19. Home to Hygelac and Queen Hygd. Contrast—Queen Modthryth.
20. Beowulf recounts his exploits.
21. (Beowulf has changed since he was young.)
22. Gifts, land, etc.
23. Fifty years later, Beowulf is still ruling. The dragon’s treasure is stolen.
24. The thief took the dragon’s cup out of need.
25. Dragon attacks—Beowulf’s hall burns. Elegy: ubi sunt; Beowulf’s deeds at battle in which Hygelac died.
26. Beowulf salutes his companions.
27. Beowulf boasts that he will kill the dragon in single combat.
28. His companions run away.
29. Wiglaf helps Beowulf kill the dragon.
30. Wiglaf with Beowulf on his deathbed.
31. Wiglaf berates the traitors.
32. Wiglaf predicts chaos. (Older conflict between Swedes and Geats recounted.)
33. Useless treasure (paragraph 152).
34. Funeral pyre—heaven swallows the smoke.
35. Useless treasure (paragraph 158).

Composition: Set in writing around 700-750 AD in Mercia, the English Midlands, though the C10 manuscript later converts this into the commoner southwestern dialect of Old English.

Our Translation: I didn’t talk about the poetics of Beowulf, but Heaney preserves the original’s lively alliterative movement. Alliteration is a device whereby words in a poetic line are tied together closely because their initial consonant is the same. Moreover, English (old and modern) is full of strong monosyllables like “thug” and “thump.” You can see a continuing fondness for strong meter and alliterative effects even in some later poets. See, for example, the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm” poetics. It’s just strong alliterative verse, really, that foregoes regular unstressed/stressed meter to render a sense of of authentic spiritual striving. The sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” is a good example of Hopkins’ kind of poetry: notice the alliteration—fishers/fire, dragonflies/draw, etc. and the emphatic quality of the lines. Hopkins isn’t after smoothness; he is after precision of thought and strength of feeling.

As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

As for the content of Beowulf, everyone is struck by the mixing of Germanic pagan heroic values with an early medieval Christian world view. Sometimes, at least in my admittedly limited view, the contrast between these views is overemphasized—they are obviously different, but hardly mutually exclusive.

What about the contrast in values? Well, the pre-Christian Germanic beliefs don’t make much of the afterlife, and they invoke fate quite often, as if it were a random force and things just happen because they happen. A strong character will stand up against fate when it comes, but he can’t overcome it—that isn’t the point of the encounter at all. For example, we don’t consider Beowulf a failure because he dies fighting the Dragon—the text specifically says that the hero senses he is about to meet his doom. We admire his courage for going forth unselfishly to meet his fate. But the Christian preserver of the story folds in strong remarks about Providence—the idea that God has an infallible plan for everyone, and that nothing really happens at random. Thanks to Providence, the idea goes, even the greatest individual (or collective) suffering is part of a much larger pattern that ends in Christian triumph and the coming of the end time when “God shall be all in all.” Thus life has meaning beyond the getting and giving of treasure earthly and earning glory for a few generations through the epic singer’s stimulation of collective memory. In Beowulf, we shouldn’t expect the doctrine of Providence to be fleshed out beyond basic statements like “God is always in charge,” but that is sufficient to distance the poem from pre-Christian ideas about fate. On the whole, we can bring fate and Providence somewhat closer together, as I think the Beowulf poet does, by explaining that to limited, fallen human understanding, it’s always possible to misinterpret the consequences of our own errors and particular sections of God’s plan as mere accident. We are liable to call anything we can’t understand fate, as if it came from nowhere and we had nothing to do with it.

The patterns of Beowulf reinforce the need for humility on the part of even great chieftains like Hrothgar, Hygelac, and Beowulf. It isn’t necessarily that these men commit some terrible specific misdeed; rather, their error is simply to live without always minding the end that must come to them as it does to all, high or low. Pretentions of self-sufficiency and perpetuity are prideful, says Christian theology. We are responsible for what we do, but that doesn’t mean we can stand on our own without God’s blessing and assistance. This is true for individuals like Hrothgar and Beowulf, and it’s just as true for whole societies. Remember what God does to Nimrod’s builders of the Tower of Babel in Genesis? He “confounds their speech” so that they can’t even understand one another’s language anymore, much less try to rival God’s magnificence. Hrothgar explicitly accuses himself of something like this very error—believing his well-established human community centered around Heorot Hall could stand long on its own efforts. Even if his error is no more than forgetfulness of the limitations of fallen human understanding, he must pay the price. In this sense, Grendel is his monster, not a random welling up of pure metaphysical evil. And perhaps Beowulf, though a good ruler, does much the same later on with his Geats—the years roll by, and at last his people fail their test with the Dragon miserably, soon to perish in spite of his heroic efforts. The author isn’t blaming Beowulf, he’s just making a lesson of him—we must be continually reminded of our own mortality and of the ultimate futility of trying to turn earth into a permanent home. Christianity—especially in medieval times—often represents earthly life as a brief passage through a foreign territory, a “vale of tears,” a trial by adversity in preparation for the life to come. Don’t get comfortable in Heorot or anywhere else! Be mindful that we are always on our way back to God, who is our real home. And for those not even as virtuous as Beowulf, pride, ambition, disloyalty, love of gain and luxury are always threatening to unleash destruction. Their own or others’ faults will bring trouble.

We know that the economy and social system of Beowulf’s people revolves around getting treasure and distributing it generously. These are a people generous in word and deed, but reciprocity is a key concept with them, too. It may seem odd that Hrothgar should think so quickly of compensating Beowulf financially for the men he has lost in dealing with Grendel, but that’s part of the social system—not compensating him would amount to an insult. And if there’s one thing you had better not do to Beowulf, it’s “ diss” him, to borrow a modern phrase. He commands respect, and almost always gets it. Perhaps this seems like a major contrast with a more fully Christian view of human community. And there are some materialistic tendencies in Beowulf—as when the hero says, “let me see the dragon’s treasure before I die.” Still, the heroic economy isn’t really about hoarding—it’s about spending, dispensing the bounty one has gained by valor in battle. If a king doesn’t do that, he loses everybody’s allegiance, so what’s the use of being a miser? Christianity translates this imperative to share with one’s fellows into a more proper understanding of love, ( charitas or charity)—that is, helping others because you really want to and because you know it’s what God wants you to do. Charity or love is what binds together the community—not the distribution of material goods. But it would be unfair to say that the scriptor of Beowulf simply contrasts Christian charity with pagan materialism. Both cultures offer a spiritual economy of sorts, not simply a material one.

In both cultures, the isolated and the greedy hoarders of treasure are in the wrong. Grendel is the violent offspring of Cain, and his mother is motivated by vengeance. Notice that Grendel and his mother are both separated from Heorot Hall’s joys, and Grendel goes there to lord it over the regular folk. And of course the Dragon is the ultimate gold-watcher, once he happens upon that cursed treasure set in the earth down by a dying tribe. Neither in the heroic Scandinavian and Germanic culture we find in Beowulf nor in Christianity is the human community obsessed with material possessions to the exclusion of social and spiritual considerations.

Grendel is sometimes understood as primordial evil. He does seem that way at times, doesn’t he? But one must be careful with such assumptions—in Christian theology, evil has a very specific origin. It is not a vague metaphysical principle or a power that exists as a rival empire to God’s bounty. (Some religions have taken this dualistic view—consider Zoroastrianism, where Ahrimanes and Ahura-Mazda are locked in a perpetual battle between Good and Evil. Saint Augustine had to let go of his early Manichean views for the same reason—he says they accorded evil too much respect, as if it were an independent force in the universe. Because the evil turn away from God’s will, says Augustine, they lack any grounding in the authentic way of being, which has its source in God; thus, they “do not exist.”) The Beowulf writer specifically links Grendel to the story of Cain and Abel. That is a precise enough lineage to allow him to promote his theme. Here is part of Genesis Chapter 4:

004:001 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.

004:002 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

004:003 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.

004:004 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering:

004:005 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

004:006 And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?

004:007 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

004:008 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

004:009 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

004:010 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.

004:011 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand;

004:012 When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

004:013 And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear.

004:014 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.

004:015 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

004:016 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

This lineage shows us that the monsters are material representations of human frailty’s bad consequences. Bad characters are always repeating themselves, or somehow taking part in a grand self-destructive circle of behavior, speech, or interpretive strategy. Even seeming heroes like Beowulf and Hygelac unwittingly behave as if they would substitute a satisfying “recursive loop” that would frustrate the linear program of Providence, and they always fail. Grendels seem to come upon us by chance, but really the cause has to do with our attitudes and deeds. Grendel may not see his motive as anything more than stupid resentment of Heorot’s “shiny happy people holding hands,” but the Lord moves in mysterious ways, and makes the wicked outcast do his bidding in spite of himself.

And then there’s the Dragon, who only comes out to plague Beowulf’s kingdom because some poor thief stumbles on the treasure and steals a goblet. Like Grendel and his Mother, the Dragon is driven by primal needs—here it is the desire to hang on to material objects as if they were all that mattered. And who buried those objects in the first place? Why, the remnants of a race two centuries back, who themselves have long since gone the way of all flesh. The poor thief has caught up his whole group in an ancient cycle of vengeance, violence begetting violence. The cyclical and potentially everlasting blood-feud is an ancient threat—something we can find not only in the early Germans but in the Greeks and probably other cultures as well. (Read Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia on the power of cyclical revenge—the plays turn on the need to transform primal clan vengeance into civic justice, a society of laws far more than men.)

The point for the Beowulf poet is that we make ourselves subject to what seems like mere chance—monstrous visitations, rampant dragons, and so forth. The original treasure-hiders brought on the dragon, and the thief brought the dragon back into action, and Beowulf the good king had to die to set it right—even partially. But then his own retainers behaved like cowards, so the Geats will perish when word gets around. They have declared themselves easy pickings for more valorous men. Ultimately, the epic’s monsters represent the way in which evil tries to frustrate God’s plan (which is linear and ascending) by cyclical upheavals, themselves set in motion because of human baseness and stupidity; or, as in the case of better folk like Hrothgar, forgetfulness and limitations in fallen human understanding.

If this all sounds gloomy, it is. Too much can be made, again, of the contrast or clash in values between pre-Christian and Christian. Pagan gloom melds with Christian gloom of the sort found in Ecclesiastes. The Hall, filled with mirth and honor, is always shadowed by its future emptiness—all things decline with the passage of time, requiring renewal with god’s help. Humanity isn’t self-sustaining, much less self-sufficient. Indeed, the repetitive structure of Beowulf makes this point. The three great battles against Grendel, Grendel’s Mother, and the Dragon drive home the following idea: “all is vanity under the sun,” just as the preacher in Ecclesiastes says:

009:011….the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

009:012 For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

Notice that even the wergild or blood-money system (85) doesn’t settle matters for long when a feud has broken out. It seems that only God can settle the feud instantiated by Cain’s slaying of his good brother Abel. We are always liable to start it up again. For me, what makes the poem interesting isn’t that we have a Christian poet who transfigures pagan hopelessness and gloom with sunny theological certainties. Rather, I find it interesting that there are so many deeply felt affinities between the two world views, the one presumably a holdover from the oral original, and the latter a self-conscious addition to the tales that make up Beowulf.

Week 01, Introduction to English 211

2008-01-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

Welcome to E211, British Literature to 1760

Spring 2008 at California State University, Fullerton