Public Occasions Research Articles

Sultan among Dutchmen? Royal dress at court audiences in South India, as portrayed in local works of art and Dutch embassy reports, seventeenth–eighteenth centuries

AbstractFrom the fourteenth century CE onwards, South Indian states ruled by Hindu kings were strongly influenced by politico-cultural conventions from Muslim-governed areas. This development was, for instance, manifest in the dress and titles of the rulers of the Vijayanagara empire. As has been argued, they bore the title of sultan and on public occasions they appeared in garments fashioned on Persian and Arab clothing. Both adaptations exemplified efforts to connect to the dominant Indo-Islamic world. From Vijayanagara's fragmentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new Hindu-ruled kingdoms arose. We may wonder to what extent those succeeding polities continued practices adopted from Islamic courts. With that question in mind, this article discusses royal dress at court audiences in four Vijayanagara successor states, chiefly on the basis of embassy reports of the Dutch East India Company and South Indian works of art. It appears that kings could wear a variety of clothing styles at audiences and that influences on these styles now came from multiple backgrounds, comprising diverse Islamic and other elements. Further, not all successor states followed the same dress codes, as their dynasties modified earlier conventions in different ways, depending on varying political developments.

„Díky, Ameriko!“: dramaturgická analýza Slavností svobody v „nejameričtějším“ městě Evropy

The following article aims to provide an interpretation of the annual public occasion called the “Liberation Festival” in Pilsen. The Liberation Festival serves as a celebration of the liberation of Pilsen by the U.S. army. Our paper presents a dramaturgical analysis of this occasion. More specifically, our effort is focused on two main interpretative threads. With respect to the first one (called “the production of discourse”) we analyse the processes of the (re)production of political discourse related to this public occasion. We also identify the main discourse that is typically produced or reinforced during the Liberation Festival. The second interpretative thread is called “the organizational line of the Liberation Festival”. Here, we try to provide examples and identify characteristics of the strategies and practices that can be employed by state apparatuses to present themselves as guarantors of the security of festival goers. Our findings confirm that public ceremonies (like the Liberation Festival) can fulfil the role of a medium that serves to spread actual political discourse, the veneration of actual societal normative order, and a positive portrait of state apparatuses. Our article can thus be viewed as a contribution to the debate on the reproduction of political discourse through public spectacles.

Is an Embassy Really Necessary? Israeli–Spanish Relations in the 1960s

Spanish–Israeli relations expanded across numerous fields throughout the 1960s despite the absence of formal diplomatic ties. For all practical purposes, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had a legation in Madrid during the second half of the 1960s, including at least 3 semi-official representatives operating with the full knowledge of Madrid. Clandestinely, a Mossad station worked in liaison with the local intelligence services. Absence of a full-fledged Israeli embassy did not prevent advancing bilateral ties, normalising Jewish affairs in Spain, or preventing both Powers from engaging in official and public occasions or behind the scenes. Systemic pressure, most evident in Madrid’s ascension to GATT, and the need to abide with its rules by liberalising trade with Israel did much to advance Spanish–Israeli bilateral ties in the 1960s. A strong systemic external force also brought change in their relations in the 1980s. The diplomatic breakthrough of January 1986 and establishment of full formal diplomatic relations between the Powers was largely the inevitable result of Spain’s entry into the European Economic Community.

The texted and textured construction of Irish identity in the theatrical world of Charleston, South Carolina

On the eve of the American Civil War, the Irish who had immigrated to the United States as a result of the Great Famine were in the process of constructing an Irish working-class identity in Charleston, South Carolina. A “legacy” for such construction had been created in the previous century: those who had come from Ireland then had used public displays of celebration and concomitant rhetorical devices to create the impression that they were willing and eager to assimilate. Their rituals at banquets and other public occasions “set the stage”, so to speak, for the next century's generation of immigrant Irish who also found it necessary to articulate publicly their claim to an ethnic American identity. Theatrical venues and staged performances served the Famine Irish well in this endeavour.

Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism by Sally Dwyer-McNulty (review)

Reviewed by: Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism by Sally Dwyer-McNulty Debra Campbell Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism. By Sally Dwyer-McNulty. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 272 pp. $39.95. In the Introduction to Common Threads, Sally Dwyer-McNulty explains “why clothing is important” for those who wish to study American Catholic history and culture. In so doing, she clarifies her method: “I uncover how Catholics came to rely on clothing to negotiate relations between religious authority and laity, men and women, and adults and youth, and how Catholic clothing continues to function as a battleground where Catholics work out issues of power, identity and sacredness in their everyday lives” (1). The first three historical chapters on priests, sisters, and Catholic schoolgirls share a common trajectory: diversity (a response to being Catholic in Protestant America) gradually gives way to uniformity as Catholics become more confident and powerful in American society. By the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884), when the Catholic bishops issued a mandate for a school in every parish, there were parallel mandates for uniform and identifiable clothing for priests, sisters, and schoolgirls. During the early period, from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, prescribed clothing curbed sartorial individualism and increased the hierarchy’s control over priests. Uniforms at parish and diocesan schools performed a similar function, as well as downplaying class diversity and competition at school. At elite convent schools, uniforms had a slightly different function, since they were to reflect the special status of the students and the sisters who taught them. [End Page 63] By far the most complex issues are raised in connection with sisters’ habits. Nineteenth-century sisters traveled in disguise for safety when their work took them outside convent or parish walls. At the turn of the century, when Pope Leo XIII “invited sisters to . . . ‘improve’ . . . their canonical status . . . and become officially ‘religious’” (99), sisters’ lives became much more constrained: a quasi-monastic schedule was imposed and habits were always worn. Dwyer-McNulty argues convincingly that “there was much more to gain [during this period] in wearing the habit than in laying it aside on public occasions.” The habit “ultimately freed the sisters to perform their ministry.” Moreover, “sisters came to dominate the visual landscape,” (84) and became the face of the church for generations of Catholics. Chapter 4 examines the apotheosis of Catholic clothing when the post-World War II generation of female Catholic high school students exported the lessons learned from their school uniforms to the world at large, attempting to persuade stores to provide clothing “a Catholic girl could consciously wear” (138). Chapter 5 explores the changes affecting priests, sisters, and schoolgirls in the wake of Vatican II. The sisters’ attempts to modernize their clothing (with papal support) exposed the larger issues of governance and equality that we still struggle with today. Dwyer-McNulty captures profoundly illuminating moments, such as the speech by Cardinal Suenens at St. Mary’s College (Notre Dame, IN) in 1969, when Suenens told assembled sisters to reject Vatican policy demanding that they have new habits approved by male bureaucrats at the Sacred Congregation of Religious (188). Much more than clothing was at stake. The history of Catholic clothing in America is uncharted territory, and Dwyer-McNulty does scholars and general readers a service by pacing out its boundaries and filling in some of the topography. Her narrative also shows how much remains to be done at this crucial intersection of material Christianity and Catholic Studies. Debra Campbell Colby College Copyright © 2015 American Catholic Historical Society

Charles Dickens. Modernism, Modernity ed. by Christine Huguet and Nathalie Vanfasse (review)

Christine Huguet and Nathalie Vanfasse, eds. Charles Dickens. Modernism, Modernity, 2 vols. Wimereux: Editions du Sagittaire. 2014. Pp. 1: 234; 2: 268. 40 [euro]. The two volumes entitled Charles Dickens. Modernism, Modernity, edited by Christine Huguet arid Nathalie Vanfasse represent one of the last testimonies of studies, volumes, monographs, essays, articles, conferences, mass media events and public occasions dedicated to celebrations. This collection is based on the proceedings of a conference held at Cerisy-la-Salle, in Normandy, in the summer of 2011, which testified to the presence of some of the most influential scholars and Dickensians gathered to celebrate, once again, the Inimitable. The two volumes are divided into six sections, each treating a specific aspect of modern (and Modernist) temper. Christine Huguet's and Nathalie's Vanfasse's introduction is not just a presentation of the collection and of its contributions in general terms. Rather, it is a substantial essay that aims at studying Dickens' engagement with the modernity of daily life [that] reflects the new, heightened historical consciousness which is, in many ways, a major characteristic of the age (1: 29). Through a cross-Channel critical perspective, Huguet and Vanfasse treat modernite with reference to writers and intellectuals ranging from Chauteaubriand and Theophile Gautier to Charles Baudelaire, who is the main focus of their critical analysis. The first section (Urban Modernity) opens with Michael Hollington's essay on complex relationship with Paris, specifically his visit from November 1846 to February 1847, during a period of historical and political crisis for France. Paris for Dickens was a city that needed to be read in its multi-layered nature and its its synesthetic intensity. Its Morgue, for instance, represented a place of attractive repulsion for him, which explains his mixed opinions on monumental displays such as the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace. By suggesting that Paris was the means through which Dickens re-experienced London, Hollington introduces a paradigm of experiential re-creation that, in a way, lies beneath many of the other contributions. Francesca Orestano's essay presents a more explicitly comparative reading of and Woolf's responses to London as a modern metropolis, including a minute topographic investigation of the two writers' imaginative interaction with the unreal city. Like other contributors, Orestano demonstrates that--despite a long critical tradition juxtaposing Dickens the Victorian and Woolf the Modernist-- as far as London is concerned the two writers shared a mutual interest in the readability of the city, experienced as an ever-changing metropolitan text. Juliet John's contribution is written against the grain of a rather myopic critical view of subaltern popularity due to his alleged dissatisfaction with modernity, and to his difficulty in finding an interaction between individuals and nature (if compared, for instance, to Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy). On the contrary, John demonstrates that Dickens's visibility and the visibility of place/places, especially London, in his novels contribute to what we might call [a] brand recognition (1: 100). Robert L. Patten's analysis of Little Dorr it, a novel largely written in France, inaugurates the second section of the first volume (Modernity in/ and Motion). After having pointed out the importance of the French and British formulation of copyright laws protecting translations in 1852, Patten reflects on the multiple linguistically foreign, almost Babelic, elements that characterize Little Dorrit, arguing that in this novel Dickens meditated on the present and on the future of Europe (and of Western civilization) by means of a provincial English lens (1: 130). This is one of the reasons why Little Dorrit is described as a novel about translation and transition. …

The Banquet of the Common Sense: George Chapman’s Anti-Epyllion

Scholars have read Ouids Banquet of Sence (1595) most often within George Chap-man’s corpus of poems, and have taken it as an example of Chapman’s idiosyncratic poetics. Some scholars have acknowledged the poem’s kinship with the “epyllion,” or erotic verse narrative, represented by Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis , but its relationship to this fashionable genre remains largely undefined. This essay demonstrates that Ouids Banquet directly engages the epyllion vogue, attacking the abuses of culture that Chapman found in the genre, and mimicking its stylistic faults as symptoms of these abuses. Chapman diagnoses two abuses common to English epyllia of the period: the removal of poetic narrative and performance from public occasions, and the exploiting of rhetorical education for private ends. Attention to this critique in Ouids Banquet illuminates the genre of the English epyllion and clarifies some controversial aspects of Chapman’s poetics, especially his view of the relationship between poetry and rhetoric.

A Sociolinguistic Study of English Taboo Language

In every society there are things which are believed to be not appropriate if spoken on public occasions. A large number of words are therefore taken as silly, vulgar or obscene when used in communication. These words are “taboos”. This paper investigates all the major varieties of English taboo, i.e., bodily excretions, death and disease, sex, four-letter words, privacy and discriminatory language, which are respectively defined and provided with concrete examples. Euphemistic and roundabout ways of avoiding using taboo words are offered to deal with the situations.

„Kulturálisan vagyunk magyarok, mentalitásban szerbek vagyunk szerintem, igen.” Magyarországon élő vajdasági magyar migránsok és a jugóbuli

Tanulmányunk a vajdasági magyar migránsok egyik rendezvényével, az ún. jugóbulival foglalkozik, a szervezők és résztvevők elbeszéléseinek elemzése alapján a migráció, zene és identitás nemzetközi szakirodalomban is feltárt összefüggéseire mutatunk rá. A kibocsátó országhoz kapcsolódó zene csökkentheti a migrációval járó veszteségeket, felidézheti a migránsok maguk mögött hagyott ifjúságát, világát, egyben identitást is teremthet. A jugóbulik felidézik a volt Jugoszlávia zenei és kulturális világát, ezért írásunkban szintén választ keresünk arra, hogy e rendezvény, valamint a köré szerveződő elbeszélések vajon értelmezhetőek-e az ún. jugónosztalgia mint politikai, kulturális jelenség keretein belül. A bulit vajdasági magyarok szervezik, az eredeti szándékok szerint azért, hogy a vajdasági magyar migránsok számára találkozási és szórakozási lehetőséget nyújtsanak. A zene és a táncok, a hangulat, az ízek egyszersmind a Balkán kulturális világát idézik fel. A jugóbuli a vajdasági magyarok legalábbis egy csoportja számára olyan teret hoz létre, amelyben identitásuk „déli” vagy balkáni oldalát megélhetik, megjeleníthetik, s ez egyben arra is alkalmat ad, hogy önmagukat a magyarországi magyaroktól megkülönböztessék. A jugóbuli így a szimbolikus határmegvonás tereként is értelmezhető.

New South Wales in Africa? The Convict Colonialism Debate in Imperial Germany

In 1852, the naturalist and writer Louisa Meredith observed in her book My Home in Tasmania: “I know of no place where greater order and decorum is observed by the motley crowds assembled on any public occasion than in this most shamefully slandered country: not even in an English country village can a lady walk alone with less fear of harm or insult than in this capital of Van Diemen's Land, commonly believed at home to be a pest-house, where every crime that can disgrace and degrade humanity stalks abroad with unblushing front.”Meredith's paean to life in the notorious Australian penal colony of Hobart was in stark contrast to her earlier, highly unfavourable account of colonial Sydney. It papered over the years of personal hardship she had endured in Australia, as well as avoiding mention of the racial warfare against Tasmania's Aborigines that had afforded her such a genteel European existence.Such intra-Australian complexities, however, were lost when Meredith's account was superimposed onto German debates about the desirability of penal colonies for Germany. Instead, Meredith's portrait of a cultivated city emerging from the most notorious penal colony in Australia was presented as proof that the deportation of criminals was an important dimension of the civilising mission of Europe in the extra-European world. It was also presented as a vindication of those in Germany who wished to rid Germany of its lumpen criminal class through deportation. The exact paragraph of Meredith's account cited above was quoted in German debates on deportation for almost half a century; first in 1859 by the jurist Franz von Holtzendorff, and thereafter by Friedrich Freund when advocating the establishment of a penal colony in the Preußische Jahrbücher in September 1895.

National Days of Prayer: The Churches, the State and Public Worship in Britain, 1899-1957

A terrible war had been followed by a harsh winter: trade was poor, money was scarce, and food, fuel and other essentials were in short supply. Extraordinary measures seemed necessary, so the king on the advice of his archbishop and chief minister summoned his people to observe a day of prayer to Almighty God. In every community in the kingdom large congregations attended special religious services, and in London the king and queen joined other leaders of the realm in worship at St Paul’s Cathedral. This was not an episode in medieval or early modern times. The king was George VI, the year was 1947 and the chief minister was Clement Attlee, whose government is more frequently associated with entirely secular solutions to the nation’s difficulties. God has not, so far, featured in histories of Labour governments. Nor have other national days of prayer in early twentieth-century Britain received more than incidental historical comments, even in studies of religion and the churches. As exceptional events, arranged in times of unusual strain or celebration, they have seemed tangential to investigation of longer term trends and have fallen between the concerns of different historical specialisms. Yet national days of prayer were considerable public occasions, with a significance and influence well beyond their infrequent occurrence. An understanding of these occasions of special worship explains much about the place of the churches and religion in public life in modern Britain.

FAMILY JUSTICE AND FAMILY VALUES ACCORDING TO LORD DENNING

FAMILY JUSTICE AND FAMILY VALUES ACCORDING TO LORD DENNING

Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World by Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe (review)

Reviewed by: Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World by Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe Julie Codell (bio) Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World by Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe; pp. 552. London: British Museum, 2010. $87.89 cloth. The Recent interest in Victorian material culture will be greatly enhanced by this huge, beautifully illustrated (with over five hundred illustrations, four hundred of which are in colour), and scrupulously documented study of Victorian jewellery that reflects new directions in museum and fashion studies. A mark of social status, taste, and economics, jewellery plays a complicated role in culture. Victorian protocol for wearing jewellery carried rich associations with love, mourning, and social hierarchies. Traditional studies of Victorian jewellery are rooted in archival histories of styles, revivals, and wealthy wearers. This book goes far beyond previous studies to examine the social life of jewellery and its symbolic and metaphoric meanings in social life, literature, and art. While filled with technical information, the book does not categorize jewellery by materials or techniques but by social functions and uses. It embraces all jewellery displayed at international exhibitions, museums, and shops from Europe, North America, and Asia, with a special focus on jewellery’s role in cultural exchanges between France and Britain. The book’s gorgeous reproductions and detailed commentary profoundly reflect the omnipresence of jewellery in portraiture and literary painting. The authors scoured letters, diaries, fiction, newspapers (the Times and New York Times online), as well as records of international exhibitions, global jewellery production and consumption, the domestication of exotica, and even cheap and seemingly ephemeral jewellery to reveal the fluidity of taste across social classes, from high-end wearers to those wearing imitation jewellery. All classes of jewellery were collected by the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), the Victorian measure of an object’s [End Page 218] cultural worth. The book’s themes include marketing (trade journals, distribution, new and secondhand markets); shopping, in a variety of shops; the globalization of jewellery production and consumption; and jewellery’s role in shaping national identity. The book contributes to the knowledge of jewellery in Victorian painting, a thread running throughout the volume, thus supplementing Marcia Pointon’s excellent Brilliant Effects (2010) in its detail about pre-Victorian jewellery and art. The first chapter focuses on Queen Victoria, whose love of jewellery embodies all the book’s themes. Her jewellery measured her life events, and she set the fashion through jewels worn on public occasions. She also affected fashion throughout Europe as her children married Continental monarchs and received her royal gifts of jewellery. The royal family permitted their jewels to be displayed in public. Royal ledgers listed every piece of jewellery, including those set with babies’ teeth as well as pebbles from near Balmoral. The Queen collected microphotographic miniaturized images set in jewellery, including enamelled miniatures. Purchases were meant to support native production and commerce, including Scottish, Irish, and colonial pieces—her Jenny Lind comb revived the dying tortoise-shell industry in Sheffield. Albert’s support of British design and manufacture similarly affected jewellery production. Chapter 2 focuses on the significance of jewellery as a sign of wealth and on rules for wearing jewellery, rules that cut across all social strata, a trickle-down effect thanks to the Victorian appearance of ready-made jewellery. In the 1850s, both Victoria and Empress Eugénie modernized state jewels, turning them into signs of power and nationhood. Gere and Rudoe inventory Eugenie’s private collection—objects she took with her when she fled France in 1870—as well as courtesans’ expensive jewels, which raised their social status in France and Britain. French crown jewels sold by Tiffany’s in Paris enriched the wives of American entrepreneurs. The authors describe revivals of eighteenth-century jewellery, the role of jewellery as an art form, and the level of ostentation in jewellery fashions: austere in the 1840s and ‘50s, then richly displayed later. Hair ornaments of the 1830s and ‘40s gave way to 1850s diadems and then to diamond pieces that could be dismantled and rearranged for different occasions. All these trends contributed to “a democratization...

The Significance of the Rediscovery of Arabs in the Malay World

This article explores how Arabness has been rediscovered in the Malay world—in this instance Indonesia and Malaysia and, to some extent, Singapore—from the early 1990s to the present. Arabs, mostly of Hadhrami descent, are an intimate part of local culture, given the shared faith of Islam, and yet remain a measure apart because of historical and cultural differences. They constitute significant communities in the region whose histories have been elusive if not altogether suppressed. It is against these elusive narratives that I consider the recent accentuation of Arabness—through writing in print and on the Internet, conferences, and public occasions—to be a rediscovery. The article focuses on two areas, namely, the accentuation of Arabness and the concurrent identification of Arabs as a link in what some see as a global chain of political extremism. I delve into these areas by asking the following questions: What is significant about the present assertions of Arab identity in comparison to developments more than a century earlier? How have these assertions developed in Indonesia and Malaysia, respectively? And what, if anything, is shared between the two cases that may hark back to the fluid identities of the precolonial Malay world?

Idiocy and Madness in Princely European Families

Idiocy and Madness in Princely European Families

Public occasions, Indigenous selves: three Ngarrindjeri autobiographies

The books by Doris Kartinyeri, Veronica Brodie and Dulcie Wilson, which are authentically autobiographical are discussed. The three Ngarrindjeri autobiographies are discussed with an aim to understand the biographical roots of publicly competing representations of the Ngarrindjeri heritage.

Why Did Hannah Ask for "Seed of Men"?

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) What was Hannah praying for? More specifically, how are we to explain the phrase ... in 1 Sam 1:11? In plain terms, we of course understand that Hannah was praying to have child. Our text has set this up as the basic point on which the plot of the story turns. As soon as the main characters-Elkanah and his two wives, Hannah and Peninnah-are identified, we are informed (v. 2), Peninnah had children, but Hannah did not. The setting of the story is the family's visit to Shiloh for worship and sacrifice. There is no reason to assume that the trip was made on the occasion of yearly pilgrimage festival. The phrase ..., annual (v. 21), simply refers to the sacrifice made annually by Elkanah and his family, which provided the setting of the events of vv. 3-19. Indeed, the course of the story would seem to argue against public festival. There is no one on the scene but Elkanah's family and the high priest, Eli, and the latter seems to have plenty of time on his hands. All we are told about him is that he is sitting on his priestly throne at the entrance to the shrine watching Hannah mutter to herself. This is not what we would expect the chief priest to be doing on the busiest weekend of the year. If the festival was indeed public occasion, our chapter's narrow focus is all the more evident. For our story is about one thing and one thing only: Hannah wants child. But the phrase with which she makes her request falls into little-discussed category of biblical texts: those in which the process of exegesis runs in reverse. We ordinarily must understand writer's words in order to interpret his meaning, but we sometimes find ourselves with sense of what the writer must mean, though it has not been clearly expressed. In such cases our task is to explain how the writer's unusual choice of words was indeed meant to convey the meaning that we somehow intuit. My instincts say that this category is larger than we would like to admit, and that by the nature of the beast there must be examples where what we all know it means is actually wrong. I intend to suggest here that Hannah's request is one such case. The difficulty arises because-if I may step for moment into my role as professor of Biblical Hebrew-the phrase ..., and can only mean, human offspring.1 Indeed, the medieval interpreter David Kimhi does offer as one of his comments on this phrase the suggestion that Hannah was praying for who would not resemble monkey or eunuch. But the story has provided no reason that Hannah should fear an outcome of this kind. Others of the medievals join Kimhi in further suggestion that what Hannah wanted was who would be real man-righteous (as ... are called in 1 Kgs 2:32), prominent (1 Sam 17:12), and wise (Deut 1:13). The common understanding of the phrase among modern interpreters-from Henry Preserved Smith in the ICC century ago to Jan P. Fokkelman in 1993-is that Hannah wants son.2 Bible translations too, from a man child of the KJV to seed of Robert Alter3 make the same assumption. Certainly neither this nor the hope that her would be worthy man is an absurd request, but according to the logic of the story neither of these is the request that Hannah is making. This is not to say, of course, that Hannah did not want who would grow up to be righteous, prominent, and wise. She might even, if pressed, have expressed preference for male child. Elkanah's rhetorical question, Am I not better to you than ten sons? (v. 8), could be interpreted as support for this (though it need not be).4 But this says nothing about what Hannah herself wants, and the narrator (in vv. 2 and 4) has carefully avoided framing the child's sex as the focus of the story. What Hannah wants is child, plain and simple. The careful interweaving of two chains of consecutive verbs-one describing what happened every year when Elkanah and his brood went to Shiloh, and one describing what happened on one particular occasion5-demonstrates that the action of our story begins where it does because Hannah has reached the end of her rope. …

Telling Tennant’s Story

The story of ‘relations between two races in a single field of life’ (Stanner), largely untold until the late 1960s, has now been recovered in great detail, but it has been acknowledged and absorbed only selectively. How the story has been retrieved but also contained, deflected and managed in and in respect of one Australian town, in academic, official and popular publications, in courts and tribunals, through monuments and museums, and on public occasions, is surprisingly reflective of the national experience as a whole. Some suggestions are offered as to whether and how the story could be more forthrightly accepted, in Tennant Creek and in Australia, and as to why, and to whom, it matters.

Envy, Eunoia, and Ethos in Jonson's Poems on Shakespeare and Drayton

Envy, Eunoia, and Ethos in Jonson's Poems on Shakespeare and Drayton Marlin E. Blaine In the character sketch that concludes his transcript of conversations with Ben Jonson, William Drummond of Hawthornden states that Jonson "is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and Scorner of others";1 many of Drummond's contemporaries concurred with this description. Like his conversation, Jonson's poetry contains praise of self and vituperation of others, but it also pays numerous lavish compliments to a variety of recipients—a third discursive category absent from Drummond's dichotomy. Yet the scornful character that Drummond attributes to him creates complications for some of Jonson's encomiastic verses, especially those he writes about other poets. I mean neither to restate the often-argued thesis that Jonson, motivated by jealousy and insecurity, finds a way to aggrandize himself when he purports to be praising others nor to join the chorus of critics who rebut that argument. Rather, I intend to examine the way Jonson explicitly reckons with his reputation as a scornful egotist when he sets out to laud a fellow author, a reputation that he knew could undermine his credibility as a generous praiser of the other's work.2 In rhetorical terms, Jonson struggles with the problem of ethos, that aspect of persuasion that rests on the character of the speaker. Jonson [End Page 441] had a grand reputation for talent, learning, and discriminating critical judgment, but his peevishness and egotism made him seem, to observers like Drummond, unwilling to grant other authors their due. Yet, as a leading figure in the Jacobean literary world, Jonson was often called upon to contribute commendatory verses for published books as well as to compose other forms of epideictic verse for his colleagues. As he constructs his ethos in encomiastic verses to other poets, Jonson often augments his self-representation as a critic with extraordinary attempts to create a persona that will be perceived as being motivated by good will or, in the Aristotelian terminology that I will use in this essay, eunoia. The word that Jonson habitually struggles with in this context is "envy," which in early modern English retains much of the sense of its Latin root invidia and denotes not only the resentment of others' good fortune, as it does today, but also a more general sense of malice or ill will (OED, s.v. "Envy," n. 1), including the scorn and contempt observed by Drummond. By tracing the idea of envy in Jonson's commendatory poems, we can document his awareness that his ability to praise other poets has become compromised by his own reputation; in addition, we can see that the disavowal of envy functions as a fundamental structural principle in two of Jonson's best-known encomia of other authors: his poems on William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton. The invidious character attributed to Jonson has certainly influenced criticism of the Shakespeare elegy and, more generally, criticism of Jonson's life and oeuvre. Richard S. Peterson has analyzed the scholarship on the Shakespeare elegy as marked by three competing arguments: that it offers "generous and unequivocal" praise; that its "decisive lack of sympathy" for Shakespeare's work is "thinly veiled by a respect for the public occasion"; and that it combines "generosity and reserve" in assessing Shakespeare's writing.3 The fullest account of Jonson's poetics of envy in the Shakespeare elegy is that of Roger B. Rollin, whose essay stresses Jonson's ambivalence and hence would fall into the third category. Rollin's Bloomian psychological approach stresses Jonson's "unconscious strategies for coping with envy" and explicitly subordinates rhetorical analysis to a "phenomenological perspective."4 George E. Rowe has analyzed Jonson's competitive personality in the contexts of [End Page 442] humanist modes of education, which encouraged writers to attempt to outdo other authors, and of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical world, in which a large number of talented writers inspired many ambitious authors to attempt—often hostilely—to set themselves apart from the crowd.5 (Rowe acknowledges, however, that Jonson did so more than most.) And scholars such as Russ McDonald and Ian Donaldson have written intriguingly of Jonson's...

Thoughts from Concentrated Minds: Some Verses Written before Execution

Many poets have had to face execution, and the last poetic words of several English and Scottish poets of the Early Modern era were verses written in conventional forms made more poignant by the circumstances of their composition. These private poems illuminate the characters of the poets and the way they confronted the more public occasion of execution.