St Thou Research Articles

Binding the Void: The Erotics of Place in <em>Antony and Cleopatra</em>

When leaves for Rome in act 1 of Shakespeare's play, Cleopatra left alone to indulge in a vision of him on his horse. She asks Charmian,Where think'st thou he Stands he, or sits he?Or does he walk? Or he on his horse?О horse, to weight of Antony!Do bravely, horse! For wot'st thou whom thou mov'st?The of this earth, armAnd burgonet of men. He's speaking now,Or murmuring Where's my serpent of old Nile?For so he calls me.(1.5.18-26)'Two things stand out in Cleopatra's daydream: first, its unmistakable eroticism, and second, its preoccupation with Antony's whereabouts. Its eroticism lies in Cleopatra's desire not simply to observe on his horse, but to become happy horse he mounts, to bear weight of Antony (1.5.20) herself.2 Cleopatra's fantasy palpably erotic- perhaps sodomi tical or submissive or bestial or idolatrous-it also manifestly placiai. She would have it that she can both be Antony's place and place him-that is, fix him in time and space (Ah, ha! You're caught! [2.5.16], she later dreams). Cleopatra's playfulness competes with her longing; it becomes clear that erotic self-indulgence contending with a compulsion to locate her lover. Her Where think'st thou he now? just one among many iterations of what we might call interrogative place deixis. At her entrance in 1.2, Cleopatra asks, Saw you my lord? and Was he not here? (1.2.79). Where he? (1.3.1) are her first words in following scene and then See he is (1.3.2). Even in her dream, Cleopatra imputes to an answering version of her recurring compulsion: Where's my serpent of old Nile? (1.5.25, emphasis mine). So compelling question of where for Cleopatra that she voices it in her fantasy of her lover's private murmurs.Of all murmurings that she could dream into mouth of her demi-Atlas (22), Cleopatra's where confirms our readiness to charge love with daunting task of anchoring or placing us in world. Often conceptualized through spatial schemas, love can create a sense of place but can also produce a profound anxiety about displacement, or what Edward Casey calls place-panic-the fear of being without a place and consequently lost in void of space. In Casey's philosophical history of place and space, he writes that the prospect of a strict void, of an utter no-place, felt to be intolerable. So intolerable, so undermining of personal or collective identity this prospect, that practices of placefixing and place-filling are in motion right away.3 The threat of a boundless, infinite void looms large for lovers whose affair constantly figured as larger than life. The language of infinity, permeability, and excess cued at every turn of Shakespeare's play, opening with image of a dotage that o'erflows measure (1.1.1-2). Perhaps this why Cleopatra concerned about boundaries from very start, when she instructs to specify precisely much (1.1.14) and then (1.1.16) he loves her. She, in turn, will set a how far to be beloved (1.1.16).4In Cleopatra's language of limits and longing for boundaries, I find evidence of play's larger investment in erotics of placiality. In this essay, I explore erotic implications of bounded place and of limitless space to show how act of placing one's lover-both metaphorically and physically, in fantasy and in reality-is a primary source of eros in and Cleopatra. I begin by exploring erotics of place, as opposed to space. A close examination of language of containment in Shakespeare's play reveals that bourn of bounded place gets its erotic charge from metaphor of sexual bondage, drawing as it does from formal and temporal features of masochism. When and Cleopatra emplace each other or become each other's place, they typically enfetter and embrace each other. …

The memory of all that

the memory of all that

Marvell and the 'Tygress Fell': A Supplementary Note

SUCH from Euphrates bank, a Tygress fell, After the Robbers, for her Whelps does yell: But sees, inrag’d, the River flow between. Frustrate Revenge, and Love, by Loss more keen, At her own Breast her useless claws does arm; She tears herself since him she cannot harm. (Andrew Marvell, ‘The last Instructions to a Painter’, ll. 623–8)1 This note provides further evidence supporting the conclusion that Marvell drew on Du Bartas in constructing his epic simile, and comments briefly on some implications of this evidence. The first-mentioned note traced Marvell's ‘Tygress fell’ to Ovid's account of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela and to Du Bartas's descriptions of Athaliah and of Zedekiah and the destruction of Jerusalem. The Fifth Day of the First Week of Du Bartas, which covers the Creation of the creatures of the sea and the air described in Genesis 1.20–23, also appears to have provided Marvell with a direct source of two elements of the simile. In a passage with the sidebar ‘Lessons for mankinde, out of the consideration of the natures of diuers creatures’, Du Bartas, I.v describes the love of parents for their children, using the example of a Lion who fights to the death in defence of his dear ‘whelps’, stolen from his den by ‘Hunters fell’: Thus doo'st thou print (O Parent of this All) In every brest of brutest Animall A kind Instinct, which makes them dread no less Their Childrens danger, then their owne decease; That so, each Kinde may last immortally, Though th’Indiuiduum pass successively. So fights a Lion, not for glory (then) But for his Deer Whelps taken from his Den By Hunters fell: He fiercely roareth out, He wounds, he kils; amid the thickest rout, He rushes-in, dread-less of Spears, and darts, Swords, shafts, and staues, though hurt in thousand parts; And, brave-resolved, till his last breath lack, Never gives-over, nor an inch gives-back: Wrath salves his wounds: and lastly (to conclude) When, over-layd with might and Multitude, He needs must dy; dying, he more bemoanes, Then his owne death, his Captiue little-Ones. (Du Bartas, I.v.837–54; bold emphasis added.)

Would'st thou be in a dream: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

This article establishes intertextual connections between Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and describes how the Puritan conversion narrative form and the pilgrim narrative play a major part in Vonnegut's canonical anti-war novel. The protagonist Billy Pilgrim is seen as a modern personification of the Protestant work ethic, a successful, wealthy and hardworking businessman. He blithely espouses white Anglo-Saxon Protestant attitudes but becomes an evangelist for his science-fiction fantasies, which appear constructed from the religious materials around him and in his past. The narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five, like Tralfamadorian time, tries to destabilize the dominant Western master narrative typified by the linearity of The Pilgrim's Progress. If Dresden is seen as an inversion of Bunyan's Celestial City then its destruction is an indictment of capitalist progress born from pilgrim and conversion narratives.

Did Lady Macbeth have a mind diseas'd'? ( a medico-legal enigma).

The character of Lady Macbeth has often been presented as evil and demonic. In this contribution, an attempt is made to show her in a somewhat different light; in doing so, some implications for forensic-psychiatric practice are suggested. 'Cann'st thou not minister to a mind diseas'd ..?' (Macbeth, to his wife's physician: V:i: 40)1

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

Voices in the Void: The Action of Grief in Proust and Herbert

Alberto Giacometti, The Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void), 1935. Washington: National Gallery of Art, Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund. Louis L. Martz Voices in the Void: The Action of Grief in Proust and Herbert My theme is dramatically represented in a famous sculpture by Giacometti known by two titles: The Invisible Object or Hands Holding the Void. The variation in title may suggest the ambiguity of the sculpture, which presents a female figure in prayer, kneeling upon a stylized prie-dieux and cupping her hands around an empty space. But is it empty for the kneeling figure? She has at her side an image thought to be some kind of bird, or perhaps a fox. But it is certainly a bird — the sacred ibis of ancient Egypt; thus the image seems to mark the female figure as a priestess. For her, perhaps, the space between her hands is filled with a spiritual presence. Or is she anxiously praying to find a presence, as in Herbert's "Deniall"? O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue To crie to thee, And then not heare it crying! all day long My heart was in my knee, But no hearing. (U. 16-20) Such a state of anguish is indeed suggested by the expression of intense grief conveyed by the sculpture's face, the kind of overwhelming anguish that Herbert expresses in "Longing": With sick and famisht eyes, With doubling knees and weary bones, To thee my cries, To thee my grones, To thee my sighs, my tears ascend: No end? (U. 1-6) 92Louis L. Martz The source of such grief is suggested by Giacometti himself, in a poem that he wrote in 1933, a year before he finished the cast for this sculpture: "I seek gropingly to grasp in the void / the invisible white thread of the marvelous."1 Grief, and especially the strife between grief and love, are set forth emphaticallyas dominant themes of The Temple in the very first poem placed upon the "Altar" of the broken heart: "The Sacrifice," with its insistent cry of Christ upon the Cross: "Was ever grief like mine?"2 "Grief" is a complex word in Herbert's day. The repetition of the word in each of the sixty-three stanzas calls forth every meaning: "a wrong or injury which is the subject of formal complaint or demand for redress"; "a bodily injury or ailment"; "a wound"; "physical pain"; "mental pain, distress, or sorrow" (OED). The refrain has two significant variations, one at the climax of Christ's torment: But, O my God, my God why leav'st thou me, The sonne, in whom thou dost delight to be? My God, my God -----Never was grief like mine. (H. 213-16) And again, in the very last line: But now I die; now all is finished. My wo, mans weal: and now I bow my head. Onely let others say, when I am dead, Never was grief like mine. (U. 217-220)3 It may be significant that this poem ends with the sixty-third stanza, for 63 (7 times 9: two "mystic numbers") was the number of the "grand climacteric" in human life, the point at which a person "was supposed to be specially liable to change in health or fortune" (OED).4 A complex change occurs in this final line, beyond the change of Christ's death. As Empson pointed out in his remarkable commentary on this poem,5 the line is more than a demand that sinners remember Christ's grief: there is also a threat, a prediction of all the grief that humankind will suffer for the sins set forth in "The Church-porch" and "The Sacrifice." And there is a further implication: Proust and Herbert93 human beings, in their grief, tend to feel singled out for suffering: "Never was grief like mine." Why do / have to suffer this pain, this sorrow, when others seem to escape? As the word "grief," in the succeedingpoems, performs itssixty-odd repetitions, in various forms, along with kindredwords such as "affliction," "tears," "groans," and "sighs," the complainer may well seem to be driven primarily by self-pity. Do we really needfive poems entitled "Affliction...

"O strong and long-liv'd death, how cam'st thou in?" Views of euthanasia from the 17th century.

Medical Journal of AustraliaVolume 159, Issue 11-12 p. 795-796 Point of Viev "O strong and long-liv'd death, how cam'st thou in?"* D D'Arcy Webling PhD, MHP, MB BS, BSc, DTM&H, D D'Arcy Webling PhD, MHP, MB BS, BSc, DTM&H PO Box 1079, Woden, ACT, 2606Search for more papers by this author D D'Arcy Webling PhD, MHP, MB BS, BSc, DTM&H, D D'Arcy Webling PhD, MHP, MB BS, BSc, DTM&H PO Box 1079, Woden, ACT, 2606Search for more papers by this author First published: 01 December 1993 https://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-5377.1993.tb141354.x Correspondence and reprints: Dr D D'Arcy Webling. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume159, Issue11-12December 1993Pages 795-796 RelatedInformation

"Whome None But Death Could Shake": An Unreported Epitaph on Shakespeare

R ECENT WORK WITH THE SHAKESPEARE FIRST FOLIOS housed the Folger Library turned up the following epitaph, which I have not been able to find reported elsewhere. The poem is not listed the indexes of first lines at the Folger, Huntington, or Beinecke libraries, not is it mentioned the First-Line Index of English Poetry 15001800 Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ed. Margaret Crum, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). I have not been able to find references to it the Shakespeare Allusion Book, ed. C. M. Ingleby, et al., 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), nor have I seen it mentioned other allusion books (such as G. E. Bentley's) or the standard biographical works. The epitaph, written brown ink a secretary hand with spurred a's, appears on the last end page of Folio no. 26 the Folger collection. It is sandwiched between two wellknown epitaphs on Shakespeare (Stay passenger why go'st thou by so fast, and Good ffriend for Jesus sake forbeare). Inside the front cover of the volume, a modern hand notes that the epitaphs are in a handwriting of the time, about 1625.'

The Hungry Fly: A Physiological Study of the Behavior Associated With Feeding

Busy, curious, thirsty fly, Drink with me, and drink as I; Freely welcome to my cup, Could'st thou sip, and sip it up; Make the most of life you may, Life is short and wears away. (William Oldys, On a Fly Drinking Out of a Cup of Ale) Scientific books rarely begin with poetry and are not usually written in a delightful philosophic manner. Hence, this zoologic text is rather special, inviting the reader to imagine how the eating habits of the blowfly ( Phormia regina ) might give insight into the ambitions and activities of other forms of life. Numerous experimental techniques are described in detail, designed to analyze the behavioral components of eating and correlate them with underlying physiologic mechanisms. Particularly interesting is the typical day of the fly, which begins with a restless, random search for food that ends with the interception of a delectable cloud of odor. Contact

RESULTS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY.

To Shakespeare's famous question: “Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?”, Eysenck (10) gave a decided negative answer. Hebb (11) has also asserted that “There is no body of fact to show that psychotherapy is valuable”. From 1954 onwards, Rogers (12) has taken up the challenge and shown that changes occur in psychotherapy which do not occur without it, and has suggested that these changes are valuable.

The Attic Orgeones

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?To what green altar, O mysterious priest,Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?An inscription from the Areopagus recently published by Meritt in Hesperia (XI, 1942, 282 ff.) has thrown new light on the structure of the type of association of which the members were called orgeones. The occasion thus presents itself to bring together what we now know about this obscure Athenian institution.