Elizabethan Poet Research Articles

Richard Linche: The Fountain of Elizabethan Fiction

Abstract: This essay represents the first scholarly assessment of the complete works of the Elizabethan poet and translator Richard Linche (fl. 1596–1601). Linche was interested in classical mythology, sonnet writing, and prose translation. He was also concerned with the burning literary questions of the 1590s and early seventeenth century. This article analyzes Linche’s sonnet sequence Diella (1596) and his love poem The Love of Dom Diego and Gynevra (1596), highlighting Linche’s use of ancient mythology as an ideal vehicle for exploring personal passion in contemporary poetry. It then turns to Linche’s English translation of the Italian mythographer Vincenzo Cartari, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (1599) , to illustrate how Linche deals with mythology as an inspiration for literature. Linche identifies myth as an appealing source for contemporary writing while displaying discomfort with some of its sexual content. Finally, this article discusses Linche’s An Historical Treatise of the Travels of Noah into Europe (1601), placing the work in the larger picture of his literary career and suggesting that it was a euhemeristic response to his earlier explorations of myth. In contrast to Linche’s earlier works, The Travels offers a de-personalized and desexualized approach to myth. By providing the first detailed critical assessment of Richard Linche’s oeuvre, this essay reveals an Elizabethan writer who was interested in what inspires fiction, particularly in the complicated moral issues surrounding the sensuality of classical mythology and the role of eroticism in contemporary poetry.

Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell

Reviewed by: Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell Frank Swannack Trudell, Scott A., Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 272; R.R.P. £63.00; ISBN 9780198834663. Recent scholarship has focused on the disparity between what early modern texts signified at the time of composition and postmodern critical assumptions. These studies counter theoretical thinking that considers a progressive literary history at the expense of early modern innovation. Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England discovers critical oversights through privileging 'a bibliographic fantasy' (p. 210). The book reveals how the modern notion of multimedia is already prevalent in early modern England, as poets and playwrights combine music, song, poetry, and theatrical bodies to startling, often puzzling, effect. Trudell challenges critical thinking that regards early modern texts as preserving a rigid historical literary imagination. His book examines how early modern poets and playwrights not only considered different forms of communication, but also the lingering emotional effects of their work on their audience. Thus Trudell finds fresh insights in Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (1595). His argument highlights Sidney's practical approach to music. Trudell even speculates that Sidney may have been a musician himself, as Sidney conceived poetry by embracing all forms of musical composition and performance beyond a bibliographic circle. The appearance of songs in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Trudell asserts, indicates Sidney's notion of poetry that is not simply [End Page 265] to be read. With the emergence of printed songbooks, Trudell also entertains the intriguing notion of Sidney's poetry being experienced 'in domestic settings across England' (p. 29). He suggests the possibility of illiterate households enjoying Sidney's poetry through music and song. Another overlooked aspect of early modern life is the teaching of drama in English grammar schools. Trudell surmises that because Sidney was a student at Shrewsbury School, he would have been made aware of drama from a young age. The Elizabethan poet even performed in Accession Day tilts. The crux of Trudell's argument is how dramatic performance is ensconced in Sidney's poetic imagination to become fused with literary endeavours. Within the theatre, Trudell tackles pederasty surrounding boy actor-singers. His first important point is to differentiate early modern pederasty from the modern psychological disorder of pedophilia. Rather than being an aberration, pederasty refers to an established practice of eroticizing women, servants, and children. It is a practice, Trudell argues, the theatre uses to capture audiences in pederasty fantasies. The mediation of poetry through a boy's singing and sexualized body objectifies them, conversely, as monstrous receptacles encouraging abuse. Trudell also unearths a musical pederasty in Shakespeare's plays. With Twelfth Night, Trudell implies that the play's music functions like bawdy 'muzak'. Its miscellaneous frivolities create tension by often impinging on the play's action. Trudell's thesis finds a rich source in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The eroticized infantile musical fairies provide historical detail on how childhood could last into an actor's twenties. While contemporary media theory, particularly how information encodes messages deciphered by modern communication systems, is already present through how the disembodied changeling transmits sexual fantasies. A similar analysis of Hamlet's Ophelia leads Trudell to reconsider her mysterious feminized madness as an effervescing multimedia presence. In a fascinating discussion, Trudell asserts that her melancholic songs are derived from the popular anonymous ballad tradition. Her transformative singing and subsequent drowning combine the environment, the sexual violence of Ovid's Orpheus in the Metamorphoses, and music's lingering aftertaste to communicate emotive meaning. Finally, Trudell charts John Milton's love–hate relationship with song. Although present in Milton's work, singers haunt his texts as subdued voices. Ironically, Trudell also identifies Milton's removal from printed songbooks in the late seventeenth century. Milton's conspicuous absence from the period's musical community inspires Trudell's investigation of songbooks featuring the music of Milton's collaborator Henry Lawes. Trudell uncovers 'intriguing echoes' of Milton's A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637 and 1645) in Lawes's songbooks and in three editions...

Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spencer (1711–1790) ed. by Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hatfield

Reviewed by: Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spencer (1711–1790) ed. by Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hatfield David Fleming Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spencer (1711–1790), ed. Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hatfield. Oxford: Legenda Books, 2017. Pp. 284. $99. At a glance the title might suggest that this edited collection of letters is from the great Elizabethan poet and writer Edmund Spenser, but the eagle eyed will notice the dates point to an eighteenth-century figure, Spenser’s great-great grandson and namesake, a poor scion of a middling protestant landed family attempting to maintain his genteel status. Presented are 117 of his letters written between 1732 and 1762 to members of the Price family, his kinsmen who formerly resided in Ireland but were living in good circumstances in Wales during this period. The letters are not entirely new to Irish scholars; Toby Barnard used them extensively to provide an example of an Irish protestant struggling to make his way in the world (Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents,1641–1770, 2004). Their publication in this format gives them a wider audience and scope for further exploration. The editors’ introduction combs the correspondence for meaning, and in most cases [End Page 73] their efforts are solid and convincing. However, there are a few occasions when too much is made of a word or phrase. For example, it is suggested that the valedictory sign off at the end of most letters, which usually took the form of “your most obliged humble servant” or variations thereof, indicated or emphasized a “social” or class distinction. However, such epistolary phrases were the customary way of signing off letters among family members and the literate more generally. The contemporaneous letters of Katherine Conolly to her sister are evidence of this. The Spencer letters do demonstrate in content, as the editors highlight, the deferential relationship that subsisted between Spencer and his extended and better circumstanced relatives. The editors are both scholars of English literature, and their disciplinary norms are much in evidence in the way the letters are presented. They are interested in how the letters can be “read” for meaning, which leads them to identify different “Edmund Spencers.” Occasionally they go too far. One example, which relates to “patriotism,” may suffice. On July 19, 1755 Spencer informed Alice Price of political machinations in the small borough of Innistiogue, County Kilkenny, where a battle for control was being fought between two proprietorial families, one described by Spencer as the “court party” and the other the patriot, implied from the phrase “our Patriot borough.” The editors conclude that Spencer subscribed to the emerging patriot ideology that would find its fullest expression in Ireland in the 1770s and 1780s, when the Irish parliament gained legislative independence and other concessions from Britain. Indeed, this reading may well hold true, but use of the term “patriot” was fluid and often abused and may simply reflect the political dynamic of the 1750s, when national political divisions influenced the local dimension and amplified existing rivalries. The leaders of both local parties had aligned themselves to opposing parliamentary forces, and as Spencer was agent for one of them, he no doubt felt bound to follow his political direction. Thus, it may be too much of a leap to say that Spencer was a patriot in the context of what would happen in the 1770s and 1780s. Of more interest is the fact that Spencer, as a tax collector, was not influenced by superiors in the Revenue to take a different line in 1755. In the same vein, the editors discuss Spencer’s loyalty to the Hanoverian establishment, which is a fair question given he corresponded with individuals who had connections with Jacobites. The lack of loyal expressions or references in the letters prompted a doubt in the editors’ minds whether he fully subscribed to the Hanoverian establishment. But not every letter had to express loyalty, nor was it a significant topic of epistolary conversation even among the most loyal of subjects. Indeed, everything in Spencer’s letters, including his reporting of the Scottish rebellion in 1745 and the French invasion scares thereafter, all point in...

Espials (Xtofer Marlowe in London)

Abstract Niall McDevitt and Simon King’s joint Poetopography/Walkative explorations of Christopher Marlowe’s life and death in London prove the starting point for McDevitt’s retelling of the Marlowe myth and its astonishing relevance to the major issues of today. Two sites in particular – the Dutch Church in Broadgate where an anti-immigrant verse diatribe signed ‘Tamburlaine’ was pinned to the door on 5 May 1593, and Deptford Strand where Marlowe was murdered on 30 May 1593 and where the inquest took place two days later – prove especially mind-boggling. Many Marlovians believe there was a cover-up; and the tragic loss of one of the most brilliant poets in English literature still festers. The terrain cries for redress. A Los Angeles parallelogram is erected with the help of occasional allusions to Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective Philip Marlowe, named after the Elizabethan poets Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe. King chose the novel Farewell My Lovely as bibliomantic aid, the title of which seemed suitably elegiac, and which also furnished a succinct phrase to describe the general methodology of this book: leg art. We are all Marlowes, literary gumshoes.

Marlowe’s Creativity in A.A.Anikst’s Works on Literary and Art Criticism

Objectives: To analyze the Soviet Shakespearean scholar A.A. Anikst’s ideas about dramaturgic art of the English Elizabethan poet, Shakespeare’s predecessor, Christopher Marlowe. Methods: The methodological base of the research is based on fundamental works of classics of the Russian literary and art criticism Alexander and Alexey N. Veselovskys, V.M. Zhirmunsky, M.P. Alekseyev, Yu. D. Levin, researches in the sphere of history and theory of the Russian literary translation and Russian translated belletristic literature (A.V. Fedorov, E.G. Etkind), Russian-English literary and historical and cultural relations (G.N.Boyadzhiyev, L.E.Pinsky), history of the English literature (N.I. Storozhenko, M.M. Morozov, A.A. Smirnov, A.T. Parfyonov, R.M. Samarin). In the course of the analysis cultural and historical, comparative and historical, and biographic research methods were used. Findings: A.A. Anikst, who devoted his works to the study of Shakespeare’s creativity and theatre of his era, realized that without understanding peculiarities of art perception of the world in works of his predecessors it was impossible to estimate dramaturgic art of Elizabethan time as the unique phenomenon in the world literature and theatre history, and Shakespeare as the most considerable playwright of this era. The scientist noted the significant influence of Christopher Marlowe on the subsequent development of the English drama – improvement of an art form of drama, namely, creation of the drama action design with distinct internal unity and development of a plot around the personality of the main character, development of the concept of tragic, introduction of true poetry into drama art. Nevertheless, A.A. Anikst was not inclined to idealize Marlowe’s creative activity, noted his inability to create an image of the positive character, tendency to deliberate pomposity of monologues, bringing manifestation of individualism to extreme forms, anti-Semitic elements. A.A. Anikst paid attention to those works of Marlowe, which did not draw much attention of researchers, – “Dido, Queen of Carthage” and “The Massacre at Paris”, found the facts of Elizabethan playwrights’ cooperation and mutual influence in their creative activity. Novelty: The research of A.A. Anikst’s works on literary and art criticism showed the importance of the author’s contribution to the evolution of the Russian study of Shakespeare, in particular, the study of creativity of Shakespeare’s predecessors – Ch. Marlowe, R. Greene, T. Kid, J. Lyly, R. Peel, Th. Nash.

“With a glance of dark meaning”; or, Bloodstained Allegories in Spenser and Hawthorne

Over and over again, there was the idea of woman, acting the part of a revengeful mischief towards man. It was, indeed, very singular to see how the artist's imagination seemed to run on these stories of bloodshed, in which woman's hand was crimsoned by the stain; and how, too,--in one form or another, grotesque or sternly sad,--she failed not to bring out the moral, that woman must strike through her own heart to reach a human life, whatever were the motive that impelled her. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun And the blood has its strange omniscience. D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature It has long been acknowledged that Hawthorne was a close and careful reader of Spenser. (1) He often wrote about reading his treasured copy of The Faerie Queene; he and his wife read cantos of the poem out to their children at bedtime; his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, adapted the first book of the poem for children; and his daughter was named Una after the heroine of Book I (Miller 49, 56, 409-10, passim-, Peabody; Hosington and Anne Shaver 289). According to Gary Scharnhorst, Hawthorne was the anonymous reviewer of the first American edition of Spenser's Poetical Works in the Boston Post in 1839 (668). It is thus hard to imagine another nineteenth-century writer--and there are many, given Spenser's importance for writers of Gothic fiction, poetry, and romance--who was more obviously influenced by the greatest Elizabethan poet. (2) Despite this, the ways in which Spenser has shaped Hawthorne's literary imagination have not often been fully explored, and Gregory Staley is a rare exception in acknowledging that Hawthornes debt to Ovid in his work is an Ovid "re-modelled by Spenser" (137). This is assuredly due, at least in part, to an over-compartmentalization of academic writing which has served to isolate scholars and critics in their distinct fields or time periods. Yet the relative lack of scholarship on the Spenser-Hawthorne relationship may also be due to a tradition of reading Hawthorne in terms of the development of Puritan allegory, especially in terms of John Bunyan, rather than more ambiguous and amorphous writers such as Spenser. Henry James, for one, ascribes Hawthorne's "metaphysical moods" to his reading of both Bunyan and Spenser, those two "masters of allegory," together in a single breath. As James writes: Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination.... It has produced assuredly some first-rate works; and Hawthorne in his younger years had been a great reader and devotee of Bunyan and Spenser, the great masters of allegory. But it is apt to spoil two good things--a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible feeble writing that has been inflicted upon the world. (366) Despite James's characterization, we should be careful to put Spenser and Bunyan uncritically together, as the two instantiate different literary and philosophical investments in their use of allegory. Although he acknowledges Hawthorne's first-rate works, for James, the influence of the two allegorists ultimately leads less to Hawthorne's richly allusive prose textures, marked by studied ambiguities of phrase and rhetoric, image and characterization--things Hawthorne found in Spenser, and which James would seemingly otherwise appreciate--than to James's opinion of allegory as one of the "lighter exercises of the imagination." What is more, Hawthorne's allegorical method notoriously combines not only Spenserian and Bunyanesque conceits (like the Valley of the Shadow of Death in "The Celestial Railroad"), but also unique features from New England Puritan typology, elements drawn from the historical "romance," as well as new understandings of symbol and allegory developed in Romantic poetics. …

A Queen in a “Purple Robe”: Henry Constable’s Poetic Tribute to Mary, Queen of Scots

The religious sonnets that the Elizabethan poet and courtier Henry Constable wrote in exile, which reveal strong post-Tridentine and continental influences, have been edited and assessed as they survive in manuscript in the British Library (Harley MS 7553)> thought to be the only witness. The rediscovery of another manuscript containing the Spiritual Sonnets, held at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, throws light on the hitherto obscure history of their production and reception. It also adds four new sonnets to the canon of Constable's poetry, three of which are addressed to Mary, Queen of Scots. This article looks at the rediscovered sonnets as pieces that fit in larger martyrological narrative constructed around the figure of the executed queen; in addition, it brings to the fore Constable's personal anxieties as an exiled Englishman who hoped to return home under the rule of more tolerant king. ********** THE Elizabethan poet Henry Constable (1562-1613) is best known for his secular sonnets, which found their way into different manuscript miscellanies and two printed editions and earned him considerable reputation among his contemporaries. (1) In 1621 he was described by Edmund Bolton as a great Master in English Tongue whose Delivery of Conceit was unparalleled. (2) However, his literary prestige suffered on account of his religion. Later critics and scholars considered Constable traitor of sorts based on Thomas Birch's portrayal of the poet as zealous Roman Catholic, which became critical commonplace and influenced the reception of his works from the early eighteenth century on. (3) Thomas Park, the first modern editor of Constable, printed not only the secular sonnets but also later group of works that had gone largely unnoticed and became known as the Spiritual Sonnets. (4) The shift from amatory and courtly sonnets to Catholic ones revealing strong post-Tridentine influences is consistent with the evolution of man who started out as steadfast Protestant with promising career as diplomat and converted to the Roman church around 1590. (5) In i960, Joan Grundy included these later sonnets in her book The Poems of Henry Constable, using as her copy-text the only manuscript known to that date, BL Harley MS 7553 (henceforth HA), miscellaneous volume whose provenance remains obscure. (6) In the last few decades, as result of the turn to religion in early modern English studies, Constable's Spiritual Sonnets have been reassessed by scholars interested in the poetry written by converts as illustrating the way in which the sonnet form was adapted to religious concerns. (7) The rediscovery of another manuscript containing the Spiritual Sonnets, held at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, under the call mark Select Books 85 (henceforth BE), throws new light on the hitherto obscure history of production and reception of these sonnets. Besides presenting more complex arrangement of the sequence and number of textual variants, BE adds four new sonnets to the canon of Constable's poetry, three of which are addressed to Mary, Queen of Scots. (8) These raise questions concerning the poet's embrace of the Catholic martyrological tradition, his rejection of Queen Elizabeth as sovereign, and the extent of his renunciation of worldly concerns as he sought to reingratiate himself with Mary's son, the heir presumptive to the throne. They embody narrative shift in collection that, in the better-known Harley manuscript, is concerned exclusively with doctrinal and devotional matters and offers but fragmented view of Constable's experience as an exiled convert who longed to be welcomed back home. (9) A close reading of Constable's Spiritual Sonnets as the carefully crafted sequence surviving in BE provides better understanding of the situation of people tom between their newfound faith and service to their country and underscores Michael Questier's notion of loyalism as myth, that is, constraining belief that Catholic converts were either traitors or patriots. …

The Poet Glorifies his Poetry: AL-Mutanabbi and Shakespeare as a Model

This paper aims at studying the aspects of and the reasons behind the poet glorifying his poetry and, consequently, himself. The two examples chosen here are Al-Muttanabi, the famous Abbasid poet and Shakespeare, the Elizabethan poet. The researchers discuss the common features that distinguish the poetry of both poets especially in relation to the theme of glorification of poetry. This comparative study has chosen examples from Al-Mutanabbi's poetry (the Diwan; the collection of his poems) and Shakespeare's sonnets (18-126). The researchers have found out that the two poets glorify their poetry while praising an outstanding powerful character in order to make profit or gain a social status or a governmental position. Ironically speaking, they end up hinting at the fact that their poetic lines are immortal and only through their panegyric poetry the concerned patron is immortalized.

Thomas Watson, Shadow Poet Of Edmund Spenser

ALTHOUGH scholars consider Thomas Watson (1556?–92) a minor Elizabethan poet, who, in about a dozen years, published ten books, six in Latin and four in English,1 his contemporaries extolled him as a major writer. Gabriel Harvey in Four Letters and Certain Sonnets (1592) commended Richard Stanihurst, Abraham Fraunce, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and Watson for ‘enriching, and polishing their native Tongue’. George Peele in The Honour of the Garter (1593) placed Watson in heaven ‘For his sweete Poesie’. In Cephalus and Procris (1595), Thomas Edwards ranked Watson with Spenser, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare as the writers who have enhanced Elizabeth’s reign. Finally, in Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), Nashe praised Watson as a poet who ‘hath … few … equalls in England’.2 This litany of praise is so markedly different from modern critical evaluation of Watson that it raises the question of whether his acclaim resulted solely from a myopic contemporary perspective or whether another unacknowledged factor was also involved. C. S. Lewis aptly observed that ‘One of the uses of Watson’s work is to show that … between supreme and mediocre poetry, there can be a clear likeness’.3 I would maintain that it is Watson’s ‘likeness’ to Spenser that helped to elevate his literary standing among his contemporaries.

The Rude Poet Presents Himself: Breton, Spenser, and Bad Poetry

This essay explores how Elizabethan poets transform conventional gestures of self-deprecation to negotiate the competing demands of rhetoric, the classics, social status, and ethics. To concede (or at least defer) the question of evaluation opens up space for experiment, for what Breton and Spenser both refer to as newness. Because the terms of such self-criticism blur distinctions between shortcomings of style and of substance, they become a vocabulary for close-reading poetry’s action in the world. Thus Spenser uses terms like “rude,” “baseness,” “rough,” and “dischorde” to wrestle with style but also poetic identity and purpose: tracing relationships among his archaic diction and colloquial forms, his interpretive difficulty, his plainspoken didacticism, and his sense of the value of poetry.1

"When Blood Is Their Argument": Shakespeare on War, Freedom, and the Nature of Man

When Blood Is Their Argument: Shakespeare on War, Freedom, and Nature of Man Greenblatt, Stephen. 2010. Shakespeare's Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $24.00 hc. $14.00 sc. xi + 144 pp.Pugliatti, Paola. 2010. Shakespeare and Just War Tradition. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate. $99.95 hc. x + 249 pp.Stewart, Stanley. 2010. Shakespeare and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. $125.00 hc. $39.95 sc. xvii + 225 pp.Suffering remains foreign to knowledge.Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970)More than a golden age topic, freedom from war, as opposed to freedom to wage it or freedom of action within it, understandably remains a grossly neglected topic in our war-filled times. In view of our current state of terror and multiple wars, we can take modest consolation from Shakespeare, our great forebearer in literature, in whose works warfare or strife-even in love-seem to characterize very nature of human (and divine) interactions. But what did Shakespeare think about war? Did he think mankind by nature bellicose, with the blast of war forever blowing not only in our ears but in our hearts (Henry V 3.1.5)? And what of alternate view of humanity that emerges for a moment in militant speech by Henry V just quoted, when he is rallying English troops to breech in France, recommending that they disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage? (emphasis added). Of course, to ask how Shakespeare thought 'about' a topic misleads, for he never stood outside impersonating fictions to offer a philosophical defense of art in own time, with its multiple wars declared and undeclared (against Spain, Irish, and Amerindians). Even if he had followed recent literary precedent and expressed a defense of art, as Sir Philip Sidney had in a formal treatise, Edmund Spenser in a letter, and Sir John Harrington in a preface, views he may have proposed would not necessarily have been fully supported by evidence of own literary works-as scholars of Sidney, Spenser, and Harrington can attest regarding polysemantic work of these Elizabethan poets. Thus, in order to grapple with how Shakespeare considered war, a question so urgently connected in time with tenets of religion and natural law on an international scale, we have to delineate and interpret pattern created in complex veil of imaginings. Yet, from perspective of 'inside' Shakespeare's works, we face a difficult prospect of translation if we acknowledge that actions do work of precepts, as Stanley Stewart remarks, summarizing Agnes Heller's approach to interpretation of plays as performance (Stewart 2010, 8). The authors of these three books attempt to help us chart a course towards something like man as a thinker 'behind' or 'inside' works, to let prepositions collide for a moment, as it were. In assessing these scholars' efforts to converge on Shakespeare, question now is what do we see?Specifically, to take up Stanley Stewart's book first, what have philosophers seen in or of Shakespeare? Stewart means in a normative sense; that is, as practiced by philosophers in universities and catalogued by librarians in section. After reading Stewart's useful study, one cannot help but feel confronted by that preposition 'behind,' which my prose attempted to leave behind a moment ago, and language-game it confronts us with. This is because time and again Stewart's chosen philosophers, from Herder to Nietzsche and beyond, in agile summaries of their views of Shakespeare appear to find their own image behind works of bard-or, I should say, an insight gleaned from Shakespeare proves anticipatory of their own views. Stewart sees this kind of confirming or fashioning of oneself out of Shakespeare as a common occurrence among even today's formal philosophers. This is why one must be alert to not only semantic force of propositions but also to prepositions, and Stewart specifies that his book is about Shakespeare in philosophy (21, emphasis added); that is, about references made to Shakespeare, sustained or incidental, in writings of philosophers. …

Shakespeare, Sex, and Love (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare, Sex, and Love Elizabeth Klett (bio) Stanley Wells. Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 304. $27.95. Stanley Wells is one of the few Shakespeare scholars, on either side of the Atlantic, to have attained anything like a popular readership for his books outside of the academy. Shakespeare, Sex, and Love is the most recent entry in a body of work that includes Shakespeare for All Time (2002) and Shakespeare and Co. (2006). Wells's goal with this new book is no small undertaking: he aims to provide a wide survey of attitudes toward love, lust, and sexual practices within Shakespeare's life, times, and works. He begins by noting the purging of sexuality in Shakespeare's plays by past generations of editors and directors, which has been balanced by an interest (particularly in recent years) in digging beneath the surface of the texts to find sexual meanings not immediately apparent. Wells explores the intriguing dialectic between negation and augmentation of sexuality primarily through a focus on the vexed relationship between love and lust, "the spiritual and the earthly" (7). Throughout this elegantly written study, Wells mediates between popular criticism and academic scholarship, between bolstering Shakespearean authority and contextualizing the plays by examining shared authorship and performance choices, and finally between when a reading is "gratuitous" or "pornographic" and when it is "true" to the text. The book is divided into two parts: in the first, "Life and Times," Wells delves into the sexual mores and practices of Shakespeare's times, with a particular focus on the scanty facts of Shakespeare's own life; in the second, "Plays and Poems," he provides readings of nearly all the works in the canon. In the introduction Wells critiques other works on the same topic for not encompassing the scope of the subject of sexuality. The historical sections in part 1 are generally more interesting than the textual analyses in part 2, primarily because the book as a whole sacrifices original close readings to breadth of coverage. Some of Wells's most persuasive points relate to homosexual practices and poetics; for example, in his analysis of Troilus and Cressida in part 2, he points out the homophobia of critics like Jan Kott who (assuming the role occupied by Thersites within the text) have used derogatory language to describe the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Even more effectively, in the second chapter of part 1, he expands Mary Bly's assertion that there was a "self-aware homoerotic community in early modern London" by claiming that certain late sixteenth-century writers "were aware of a body of readers specially attracted by homoerotic literature, and that they attempted to satisfy those readers' tastes" (50–51). Wells focuses on Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield (the only Elizabethan poet other than Shakespeare to address sonnets to a male), and Michael Drayton, who he argues formed "a group of poets with linked interests in homoerotic subject matter for poetry, and there are clear signs of direct influence and aesthetic fellowship among them" (57). [End Page 134] Part of Wells's point in theorizing a "homoerotic community" among these three poets is to separate Shakespeare and his work from this fellowship, with the implication that Shakespeare is superior. There is latent bardolatry in Wells's approach (although I suspect he would never use this term) that shows up throughout the book as a whole, marking it as popular, rather than wholly scholarly. Extravagant praises of Shakespeare are made mostly in passing, such as when he describes the plays as "whole and perfect" (122) and says of Romeo and Juliet, "Shakespeare deploys his mastery of language to differentiate character with virtuosic skill" (167). Other cues that Wells wrote the book primarily for a popular audiences (despite the fact that it was published by Oxford) include his accessible, almost breezy writing style, which employs contractions, the occasional colloquialism, and eschews jargon. He also plays down academic scholarship, sometimes omitting scholars' names within the body of the text and keeping the footnotes minimal. The title itself, with its three keywords guaranteed to appeal to a wide range of audiences, combined with the handsomely produced volume that...

Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet

This is a reassessment of the life and work of Philip Sidney, Elizabethan poet and an archetypal Renaissance man. Putting aside the idealized posthumous image of Sidney as polished courtier, romantic lover and Protestant soldier, the author has used original documents to construct the more individual but sometimes less pleasant image of a hot-tempered, difficult young man whose religious and political allegiance was often as much the product of opportunism as conviction. After a brilliant and privileged childhood and education, Sidney, uncomfortable at the court of Elizabeth I, shunned the life of a courtier and preferred to write. He died aged 31 in the Netherlands.

Henry Constable’s Sonnets to Arbella Stuart

Although the Elizabethan poet and courtier Henry Constable is best known for his sonnet-sequence Diana (1592), he also wrote a series of sonnets addressed to noble personages that appear only in one manuscript (Victoria and Albert Museum, MS Dyce 44). Three of these lyrics are dedicated to Lady Arbella Stuart – cousin-german to James VI of Scotland–, who was considered a candidate to Elizabeth’s succession for a long time. Two of the sonnets were probably written on the occasion of Constable and Arbella’s meeting at court in 1588, and praise the thirteen-year old lady for her numerous virtues; the other one seems to have been written later on, as a conclusion to the whole book, implying that Constable at a certain moment presented it to Arbella in search for patronage and political protection. At a time when the succession seemed imminent, Constable’s allegiance to the Earl of Essex, who befriended Arbella and yet sent messages to James to assure him of his circle’s support, raises the question of the true motivation of these sonnets. This paper will analyze these particular works in a political context rife with courtly intrigue.

Blood, barbarism, and belly laughs: Shakespeare's Titus and Ovid's Philomela

Elizabethan poets and playwrights had a remarkably open view of literary borrowing. They reasoned that since ideas belonged to no one man, it was perfectly natural to manipulate others' narratives ...

Henry Gurney, A Norfolk Farmer, Reads Spenser and Others

From the leaves of Bodleian Library MS. Tanner 175 emerges a detailed portrait of a heretofore unknown and unstudied Elizabethan poet, critic, and bibliophile, Henry Gurney. From his seat at the manor of Great Ellingham, Norfolk, Gurney dispatched printed books and manuscripts to the most extensive coterie of named individuals identified to date in the Tudor and early-Stuart period. During the last decade of Queen Elizabeth’s reign Gurney entered in the Tanner manuscript an inventory of his library as well as copies of more than 600 of his own poems. In several of these he explained in detail the poetic by which he judged good and bad poetry. He also transcribed his verse “censures” of more than a score of books he borrowed from the members of his circle. Among these works are titles by some of the age’s most important writers including John Foxe, Robert Southwell, Richard Hakluyt, and two works by Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene and “Mother Hubberds Tale.”

« Thou didst Medusa see, / And should thy selfe, a moving marble bee » : Les statues de Méduse dans quelques poèmes élisabéthains

In the English Renaissance, the myth of Medusa is endowed with a variety of moral, theological and literary readings which are intricately superimposed. With her snaky locks and petrifying look, Medusa takes on the shape of a monstrous beauty and spreads terror and evil around her. At the sight of this stunning yet repulsive woman, humans are petrified into statues. Conversely, in Petrarch’s poems, she appears as a cold, insensitive mistress who never responds to the call of the poet, who is thus translated into a lifeless block. Faced with this overwhelming literary tradition, the Elizabethan poet is either mesmerized by Medusa’s power and trapped in a stereotyped style, or become a new Perseus who, thanks to the reflection of his polished style, strives to fight against set literary codes. Ultimately, these new Medusas are overpowered by their own reflections and end up like statues.

Ambition, rank, and poetry in 1590s England

John Huntington uncovers a form of subtle social protest encoded in the writings of aspiring Elizabethan poets. He argues that these writers, while recognizing that their very survival depended on the favor of wealthy patrons, nonetheless invested their poetry with a new social vision that challenged a nobility of blood and proposed a nobility of learning instead. Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England focuses on the early work of George Chapman and on the writings of others who shared his social agenda and his non-privileged status, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser as well as neglected writers such as Matthew Roydon and Aemilia Lanyer. Rather than placing poetry in the service of traditional social purposes - pleasing a patron, wooing a woman, displaying one's courtly skill, teaching morality - these writers held up poetry as important for its own sake: an idea taken for granted in much modern aesthetics.Through slippery, double-edged language and imagery, Chapman and other poor poets tried to speak to those of their own station without attracting the attention of the powerful people served by the status quo. By means of this precarious enterprise, poetry became a declaration of cultural presence and the poet constructed his or her own social importance apart from, and sometimes in opposition to, the established hierarchies. Huntington's astute close readings of obscure and confusing passages demonstrate how the trappings of pedantic moralism conceal Chapman's deeper meaning. Teasing out undercurrents of anger and subversion, Huntington shows how Chapman and his contemporaries, by questioning the nature and purposes of poetry, initiate a line of inquiry that leads finally to a rethinking of the established social hierarchy, its values, and its basis.

Benefiting from the Book: The Oxford Edition of Samuel Daniel

It was Samuel Daniel himself, in his mid-forties, who declared that man is a tree whose fruit ripens late.[1] This, we should recall, is from a writer who, despite the encouragement and practical assistance of royal and aristocratic patrons, friends, and readers, never quite ripened fully enough to complete his most ambitious projects, the epic poem, The Civil Wars, and his history, written in prose, of medieval English kings.[2] Perhaps there is a warning in this for Daniel's modern editors, five of whom since the last war (in Oxford, Cambridge, London, Cornell, and New York) have given up (or barely started) the task of preparing a full scale scholarly edition of the poems and plays. One editor lost his books, working papers, and collations, indeed everything in a terrible house fire, while another received such a cool response from the reviewers of the one major Daniel volume he did manage to finish that neither he nor his publisher could summon the necessary conviction to press on. Yet another editor, although he drew together the best private collection of Daniel's early editions and established sound principles for the shape and detail needed in the modern scholarly edition, first lost his sight in one eye and then lost the energy and commitment to the duller (but, he acknowledged) essential bibliographical tasks to be undertaken for this edition (among them, collation for stop-press corrections, and page-by-page examination of the hundreds of Daniel books that have survived). Only stubbornness and pride (to be personal for a moment) and an enduring sense (as the late John Buxton, the last of these editors, put it) that Samuel Daniel really is the last major Elizabethan poet still to be edited, have saved me, several times over, from the same decision to give up editing his work. The one thing I am not prepared to lose, I suppose, is face. In truth, very large editorial projects like this one do need collaboration and different forms of expertise to get them finished, or at least to get them finished in a lifetime. I am relieved to say, however, that the Oxford edition is now well advanced in every area. The progress report that follows will be of interest, I hope, especially to those people who have helped me to reach this last, if not quite final stage of the work.[3] The history of editing and not editing Daniel begins much earlier than the twentieth century. In April 1856, for example, the barrister, scholar, and editor William Hazlitt the younger (1811-93), the son of William Hazlitt the poet and critic, wrote a short letter from his home in Chelsea to Mr John Morris of Belvedere in the City of Bath: Sir, Having in contemplation a new edition of the Plays & Poems of Samuel Daniel, & having been informed that about a year since, a selection from Daniel's writings was published at Bath under your superintendence, I am induced to take the liberty of inquiring whether you are at present aware of any quarter, in which a copy of your edition could be procured, as I am very desirous of looking over it. Morris's was a limited edition, so he could not or perhaps would not send Hazlitt the copy he was fishing for. A few days later, though, Hazlitt did write him a polite thank you note, and he added, just a little grandly, 'I have in my possession a copy of the edition of 1718, which formerly belonged to my fathers' [sic] very old friend Charles Lamb. It has MSS notes by himself & by S T Coleridge & I doubt not that I shall find it useful. Should you be acquainted with any farther facts touching the works or personal history of S.D. you wd perhaps not object to communicate them to me.'[4] There is no sign that Hazlitt ever got anything of interest from John Morris, and he certainly did not produce any edition of Daniel, but his copy of the anonymous two-volume edition, The Poetical Works of Mr Samuel Daniel (1718), which was Charles Lamb's copy with Coleridge's notes, has fortunately survived in the Houghton Library at Harvard. …

Heine's Aristophanes: Compromise Formations and the Ambivalence of Carnival

IN ONE OF HIS numerous working notes, collected and published posthumously in 1869 as Aphorismen und Fragmente, Heinrich Heine remarked upon the correspondence between life and poetry in the culture of the ancient Greeks, a correspondence which, in Heine's opinion, accounted for the Greeks having produced no writers as great as those of modern Europe, wo das Leben oft den Gegensatz der Poesie bildet. Shakespeares grosse Zeh, Heine goes on, enthalt mehr Poesie als alle griechischen Poeten (mit Ausnahme des Aristophanes) (7: 423) (where life often opposes itself to poetry. Shakespeare's big toe contains more poetry than all the Greek poets [with the exception of Aristophanes]).' This paper is dedicated neither to upholding nor to refuting Heine's remarkable proposition, but rather to suggesting what may allow the classical Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes to hold his ground against the Elizabethan poet, at least in the standoff staged by this nineteenth-century cultural critic. For if Aristophanes manages to escape the charge of drab mimesis Heine levels at the rest of the classical canon, it is clearly in part because his measured grotesquery is as singular and inimitable, in its limited way, as the irregular and capricious style fashioned by Shakespeare. But Aristophanes' ascendancy in this historical period is perhaps also due to his specific methods of satire and allegory, his ways of discovering the comic in the tragic and vice versa, which seemed to be particularly in tune with the political undecidabilities and cryptic style of modernism's various forerunners. During a century of European ferment and counterrevolution, one which saw turns of the literary wheel through romanticism, idealism, and back to a revitalized realism, the comic