humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

If (...) the motives and strategies for provoking wonder have seemed all
too clear, the ways in which English amateur poets of the 1590's put
them in to action move us into stranger land. As symbolic action, even
ritual, the use of wit to provoke wonder leaves logic behind, or obeys
a looking-glass logic. The insistence in Greek rhetoric on frustrating
the audience's expectations, like Hoskyns' desperate metaphor of
London and the tennis court, points us to the entrance of a different
world. Here not only does the ability to compare seemingly dissimilar
objects produce wonder and uncommon distinction, but the best way to
emerge as a capable member of the aristocracy is to appear
*desperately subversive*. (Biester, James, _Lyric Wonder_, p.62)

http://www.italica.rai.it/rinascimento/iconografia/ruscel01.htm

****************************************


Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position
By William Fitzgerald


My conception for this book was formed while reading and thinking
about Paul Veyne's brilliant and provocative Roman Erotic Elegy
(1988), a book that combines a new understanding of the Roman elegiac
poets with a polemic against the *modern investments in sincerity and
intensity* that have prevented us from asking about the relation
between poet and audience. Veyne has been accused, with some
justification, of flogging a dead horse, because at the time of
writing - the French edition was published in 1983 - few classicists
still thought of Roman elegy as autobiographical and sincere.
Nevertheless, the residual assumption that it is self-evident that
(and how) audiences will be interested in the intense erotic
experience of a poetic persona has prevented us from asking what kind
of taste is being addressed by this poetry. Veyne reads Roman elegy as
"a pseudoautobiographical form of poetry in which the poet is in
league with his readers at the expense of his own Ego" (44). It is the
nature of the league that interests him, a league that he situates in
relation to the peculiar, almost unreal world of Roman "irregular"
society as a whole. Veyne's description of the dialectic of author and
reader, the shifting relations of power between them, and the contract
that governs this game, is worth quoting in full:

There is a whole dialectic of author and reader here, real society
merely serving as a pretext for a SEMIOTIC GAME. Decreed to be
superior to Ego by his morality the implied reader is next discreetly
knocked down (Ego comes from high society) and humiliated (Ego
frequents alluring women) and then raised up again well above Ego,
that na=EFve creature. But who organized this game in which the implied
reader gets to see the coarse side of life before his final triumph?
It was the other Ego, the one who is his own editor. Is the reader
made a fool of? No, for he knows all this. Visiting the carnival of
books, he had gone into the palace of mirrors precisely to experience
these highs and lows and to laugh (94-95).

Roman society, deeply concerned with hierarchy and with the
maintenance of the decorum that befits one's position, but at the same
time permeated by anomalies and complexities of status, was the
obvious place for this form of entertainment to flourish. For poet and
reader, the effort of maintaining a clear sense of one's position in
the complex, labile and sometimes contradictory hierarchy of Roman
rank and prestige could be suspended, and the whole question of
hierarchy could become the premiss of an AMUSING GAME.

*************************************
The Drama of Position

************************************

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/ITALY/Tirata.html

Alan H. Nelson Home Page:
Oxford's Subsequent Reputation in Italy

Julia Cooley Altrocchi, in Shakespeare Authorship Review, 2 (Autumn,
1959), cites the following literary fantasy from Andrea Perrucci,
Dell' Arte Rappresentative Premeditata ed all'Improviso (Naples,
1699):

<the court of the Emperor Polidor of Trebizond, and attending the great
tournament celebrating his marriage to Irene, Empress of
Constantinople. Present were many great worthies, Basil, King of
Zelconda, Doralba, Princess of Dacia, Arcont, vaivode of Moldavia,
Arsileus, heir of Denmark, Isuf, pasha of Aleppo, Fatima, Sultan of
Persia, Elmond, milord of Oxford ...

The horse of Milord of Oxford is faun-colored and goes by the name of
Oltramarin (Beyond-the-Sea). Edward carried a large sword (spadone).
His color of costume is socrates. He carries for device a falcon with
a motto taken from Terence: Tendit in ardua virtus (Valor proceeds to
arduous undertakings).

In this Tirata, Milord of Oxford, amusingly enough, tilted against
Alvida, countess of Edenburg, who was mounted on a dapple grey, was
armed with a Frankish lance and was robed in lemon color. In the end,
Edward and Alvida, alas, threw one another simultaneously, both
landing face down in the dust!

Nevertheless, Emperor Polidor awarded to all the knights and amazons
gifts out of the cupboard of antiquity. To Elmond - Edward - was given
the horn of Astolf, paladin of Charlemagne, the magic horn to rout
armies - a SPEAR of sorts to SHAKE, with enchanted consequences. >>

Clearly, the image in the third paragraph of the male Edward and the
female Alvida throwing one another simultaneously and ending together
on the ground, has strongly sexual implications, as does Edward's
weapon, the spadone.

***************************************
Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position
By William Fitzgerald

(CON'T)

Veyne's characterization of what he calls the semiotic game of Roman
elegy has the great virtue of correcting the one-sided perspective
that fails to recognize the cooperation of the audience in this
enterprise. All too often, the elegiac poets, and Catullus himself,
are represented as countercultural heroes resisting straitlaced Roman
orthodoxy: the GRAVITAS, the stern morality, and the militarism of the
political elite. But from the middle of the second century B.C.E, the
frivolous distractions commonly associated with Greek culture had been
part of the life of the Roman elite, separated spatially and
temporally from the world of negotium (business) by the creation of a
private life centered on the Campanian villa. The elite simply go used
to living in two different worlds, of negotium and otium (leisure)
respectively, and adopted a dual standard of ethics. The situation was
always a bit precarious because political enemies would regularly
attack, in speeches before the Roman people, the pleasures a rival
member of the elite enjoyed in private. The pleasurable aspect of that
precariousness was explored by the poets who professed (or confessed)
to have substituted the values of otium for those of negotium. The
elegiac poets (Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid) belonged to the rank of
knights (equites), a rank from which one might choose to launch
oneself on a political career leading to the Senate or, avoiding the
struggles of ambitio, to devote oneself to otium, for which "leisure"
would be a misleading translation because it could include business
pursuits as well as various kinds of studies or artistic activities.

**************************************

Otium and Gravitas:

To the right honourable Henry Wriothesley Earl of Southampton, and
baron of Titchfield. Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend
in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world
will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a
burden. Only if your honour seem but pleased, I will account myself
highly praised and vow to take advantage of all *IDLE* hours until I
have honoured you with some *GRAVER* labour. But if the first air of
my invention prove DEFORMED I shall be sorry it had so noble a
godfather and never after hear so barren a land for fear it yield me
still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your
honour to your heart's content which I wish may always answer your own
wish, and the world's hopeful expectation. Your honours in all duty.
William Shakespeare.

**************************************

C Y N T H I A 'S
R E V E L S,

O R,
The Fountain of Self-Love.

A COMICAL SATYR.

First Acted in the Year 1600. By the then CHILDREN of QUEEN
ELIZABETH's CHAPPEL.
TO THE

SPECIAL FOUNTAIN of MANNERS,

The Court.
T
Hou art a Bountiful and Brave Spring, and waterest all the Noble
Plants of this Island. In thee the whole Kingdom dresseth it self, and
is ambitious to use thee as her Glass. Beware then thou render Mens
Figures truly, and teach them no less to hate their DEFORMITIES, than
to love their Forms: For, to Grace, there should come Reverence; and
no Man can call that Lovely, which is not also Venerable. It is not
Powd'ring, Perfuming, and every day smelling of the Taylor, that
converteth to a Beautiful Object: but a Mind shining through any Sute,
which needs no False Light, either of Riches or Honours, to help it.
Such shalt thou find some here, even in the Reign of C Y N T H I A, (a
C R I T E S and an A R E T E.) Now, under thy P H OE B U S, it will be
thy Province to make more: Except thou desirest to have thy Source mix
with the Spring of Self-love, and so wilt draw upon thee as welcom a
Discovery of thy Days, as was then made of her Nights.
Thy Servant, but not Slave,

BEN. JOHNSON.

*************************************
Puttenham:

"And in her Majesties [i.e., Queen Elizabeth's] time that now is are
sprong up another CREW OF COURTLY MAKERS Noble men and Gentlemen of
her
Majesties owne servauntes, who have written excellently well as it
would appeare if their doings could be found out and made publicke
with
the rest, of which number is first that noble Gentleman Edward Earle
of
Oxford.

**************************************


Cynthia's Revels, Jonson


Act IV, Sc. III

Phi. For sports sake, let's have some Riddles, or Propo-
ses; hough.
Pha. No faith, your Prophecies are best, the t'other are
stale.
Phi. Prophecies? we cannot all sit in at them; we shall
make a confusion. No; what call'd you that we had
in the Forenoon?
Pha. Substantives, and Adjectives. Is't not Hedon.
Phi. I, that, who begins?
Pha. I have thought; speak your Adjectives, sirs.
Phi. But do not you change then.
Pha. Not I. Who says?
Mor. Odoriferous.
Phi. Popular.
Arg. Humble.
Ana. White-liver'd.
Hed. Barbarous.
Amo. Pythagorical.
Hed. Yours, Signior.
Aso. What must I do, sir?
Amo. Give forth your Adjective, with the rest; as,
prosperous, good, fair, sweet, well. ----
Hed. Any thing, that hath not been spoken.
Aso. Yes, sir, well-spoken, shall be mine.
Pha. What? ha' you all done?
All. I.
Pha. Then the Substantive is Breeches. Why odori-
ferous Breeches, Guardian?
Mor. Odoriferous, because odoriferous; that which
contains most variety of favour, and smell, we say, is
most odoriferous: now Breeches, I presume, are inci-
dent to that variety, and therefore odoriferous Breeches.
Pha. Well, we must take it howsoever, who's next?
Philautia?
Phi. Popular.
Pha. Why popular Breeches?
Phi. Marry, that is, when they are not content to be
generally noted in Court, but will press forth on com-
mon Stages, and Brokers Stalls, to the publick view of
the World.
Pha. Good. Why humble Breeches, Argurion?
Arg. Humble, because they use to be sate upon; be-
sides, if you tie 'em not up, their Property is to fall
down, about your Heels.
Mer. She has worn the Breeches, it seems, which have
done so.
Pha. But why white-liver'd?
Ana. Why? are not their Linings white? besides when
they come in swaggering Company, and will pocket up
any thing, may they not properly be said to be white-
liver'd?
Pha. O, yes, we must not deny it. And why barba-
rous, Hedon?
Hed. Barbarous, because commonly, when you have
worn your Breeches sufficiently, you give them to your
Barber.
Amo. That's good, but how Pythagorical=BF
Phi. I, Amorphus. Why Pythagorical Breeches?
Amo. O most kindly of all, 'tis a conceit of that fortune,
Pha. How
I am bold to hug my Brain for.
Pha. How is't, exquisite Amorphus?
Amo. O, I am rapt with it, 'tis so fit, so proper,
so happy. ----
Phi. Nay do not rack us thus?
Amo. I never truly relisht my self before. Give me
your Ears. Breeches Pythagorical, by reason of their trans-
migration into several shapes.
Mor. Most rare, in sweet troth. Marry, this young
Gentleman, for his well-spoken ----
Pha. I, why well-spoken Breeches?
Aso. Well-spoken? marry, well-spoken, because ----
whatsoever they speak is well taken; and whatsoever is
well taken, is well spoken.
Mor. Excellent! believe me.
Aso. Not so Ladies, neither.
Hed. But why Breeches, now?
Pha. Breeches, quasi bear-riches; when a Gallant
bears all his Riches in his Breeches.
Amo. Most fortunately etymologiz'd.
Pha. Nay, we have another sport afore this, of A
thing done, and Who did it, &c.
Phi. I, good Phantaste let's have that: Distribute the
places.
Pha. Why, I imagine, A thing done; Hedon thinks,
Who did it: Moria, With what it was done; Anaides, Where
it was done; Argurion, When it was done; Amorphus, For
what cause it was done; you Philautia, What followed upon
the doing of it; and this Gentleman, Who would have
done it better. What? is't conceiv'd about?
All. Yes, yes.
Pha. Then speak you, Sir, Who would have done it better?
Aso. How! do's it begin at me?
Pha. Yes, Sir: This Play is called the Crab, it goes
backward.

**************************************

The witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued
Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared
sonnets among his private friends, &c. (Palladis Tamia: Wit's
Treasury)

**************************************

Following from
M.L.Stapleton, _Harmful Eloquence, Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to
Shakespeare_,University of Michigan Press, 1996

<Ovidius Naso was the giant on whose tenuous shoulders the love poets
of the Middle Ages and Renaissance loved to stand. However, our
philologists have devoted comparatively little of their scholarship to
medieval appropriations of the Amores, focusing instead on the twin
legacies of the Metamorphoses and Ars amatoria.....Yet just as Ovid
taught the West that love can have rules, and that mythology is more
palatable and easily remembered if rendered into erotic narrative
form, he also bequeathed the desultor Amoris as the classical paradigm
of the lover who narrates a sequence of poems. He taught Dante,
Petrarch and Shakespeare to build new versions of the old model, the
man who reveals, and thereby undoes, himself. I attempt to fulfill a
need by analyzing this inheritance and by tracing its transmission,
dissemination and reworking.

(snip)
Chapter 1 draws together recent scholarship on the Amores and the
relationship of this text to the erotica in general. The chapter
establishes that Ovid knew what a persona was, and it distinguishes
between the speaker in the Ars amatoria, often referred to in
criticism as magister Amoris, and the narrator of the Amores, whom I
name desultor Amoris (despite the narrator's protestations) (note -
Ovid says 'I am no circus-rider of love - a desultor was a circus-
rider that leapt from horse to horse) It provides a fairly close
reading of Ovid's text and explores his notion of a sequence. It also
explores his modes of intertextuality, especially those that would in
turn be used on him by his medieval and Renaissance successors. Just
as Ovid pays homage to (and subverts) the rhetoric of Cicero and the
poetics of Propertius, Ovid is imitated and challenged by the
troubadours, Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare.
(snip)
Chapter 6 analyzes Shakespeare as heir to Ovid and his medieval
imitators in Sonnets 127-54, with Marlowe's translation as
intermediating paradigm. Shakespeare's speaker, whom he names Will, is
a reanimation and revision of the Ovidian-Marlovian desultor Amoris. A
broader purpose of the chapter is to define, by example of Marlowe's
Elegies, a 'formative intertext': one that literally helps to form
another by its very existence. It encourages competitive imitation, or
even parodic subversion.

believe me, my conduct differs from my poetry (my life modest, my
poetry immodest), and the better part of my work is fictive, unreal:
it has permitted itself more license than its creator has enjoyed. A
book is not the index of one's soul but an honorable manifestation of
the will. (Ovid Tr 2.353-57)

Ovid may seem to grovel before Augustus for his notoriously 'duo
crimina, carmen et error' Yet he more frequently defends himself by
subtle criticism of his emperor, who, he claims, did not even read the
Ars amatoria before imposing exile. If Augustus had merely glanced at
it, Ovid assures him, he would have found nothing objectionable. Ovid
becomes bolder as he progresses to his main defence at the epicenter
of Tristia 2. Poetry differs enormously from the poet who creates it;
Ovid describes his art as immodest (iocosa') and himself as modest
('verecunda'). So his poetry is fictive, a construct created by an act
of the will, 'honesta voluntas.' However one wishes to translate that
fiendishly difficult phrase, one may infer that Ovid, in
distinguishing between himself and the voice in his erotic poetry,
explains the use of the orator's tool that we call persona, a device
meant to help charm the ear..
That Ovid uses the language of oratory to discuss his poetry is
not surprising, because he formed his poetics within the classical
rhetorical tradition, one that was simultaneously fluid and well-
defined concerning the divergence between the speaker and his speech.
For example, Plato and Aristotle disagree as they discuss the
discrepancy between an orator and the rhetorical tools he utilizes to
establish credibility. In the Gorgias, Socrates waxes polemical
against the Sophists by branding oratory as kolakeutikos or
'pandering'. It pays no regard to the welfare of its object, *but
catches fools with the bait of ephemeral pleasure and tricks them into
holding it in the highest esteem*. The dichotomy between speaker and
technique occasions Plato's virulence. To him, orators are, like
poets, liars. In the rhetoric, Aristotle advises that an orator 'must
disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not
artificially. Naturalness is persuasive, artificiality is the
contrary; for our hearers are prejudiced and think we have some design
against them, as if we were mixing their wines for them.' Aristotle
hesitates to make moral judgments, and he gives his speaker almost
unlimited license. The dichotomy between speaker and technique is
unavoidable, not evil, so a good orator simply closes the gap.
Although master and pupil disagree about the morality of this art,
they agree that an orator seeks to gain his audiences's trust by
persuasion and that he can do so most effectively by disguising
himself with speech.
Cicero is heir to both traditions, but his bent is distinctly
Aristotelian. At the end of the Orator, he reminds us that 'the truth
itself lurks in obscurity' This maxim is especially useful in oratory,
because, as the Brutus states: 'nothing has such an effect on men's
souls as ordered and ornate speech.

he who would be wise will adopt numerous guises, just as Proteus will
preserve himself in the slippery waves (Ovid, AA 1.760-61)

In Chaucer and Ovid, John M. Fyler asserts, " of all Ovid's legacies
to later medieval poetry, probably the most important is his self-
conscious, obtrusive narrator, who refuses to be a clear medium for
the poem he recites. This legacy of the narrator, especially that of
the Amores, helps medieval and Renaissance poets invent the concept of
persona for their own poetics. In their imitation and subversion of
Ovid, they reprocess and reanimate him for their own time. Yet this
medievalization of the desultor was necessarily controlled by the
availability of the Amores in the middle ages. Only then could poets
process and pass on the elegiac topoi that would develop into the
conventions of fin' Amors: ianitores, love's war, the speaker who
undercuts himself, perhaps even the idea of sequence. Essentially,
Ovid's poetry was seen as a paradigm that encouraged its own
subversion. (p. 37)

Excerpt Ch 2.

Perhaps the most significant legacy of the erotica is the persona and
the authorial notion of ironic distance from this speaker. Thanks to
Ovid, the Middle Ages understood that when a poet claims, 'I am', he
or she makes an infinite number of characters and poses possible.
Ovid's preferred speaker is the amans , or lover, who is also poeta,
possessing the godlike power to make himself, as well as his subject,
immortal. Yet this speaker tells lies as well as the truth. He is self-
critical, angst-ridden, angry, and masochistic, not just glib, worldly
and charming. As a result, the focus in the Amores and Ars is on the
speaker, not on his subject, a concept that medieval makers grasped
completely, because they knew what a persona was. ( p.57)
Shakespeare's 'dark lady' sonnets (1599 and 1609) reanimate the
desultor whom Petrarch had taken such pains to exorcise from lyric
poetry. Actually, Shakespeare's Ovidian persona in these poems, Will,
owes a great deal to Marlowe's version of this voice from antiquity,
which exists in two versions: Certaine of Ovids Elegies (ten
translations from the Amores, published in 1599), and All Ovids
Elegies ( a relatively complete rendering of Ovid's three books). The
redacted Elegies were notorious and were considered subversive enough
to be burnt by ecclesiastical order; this is probably why All Ovids
Elegies had to be published across the Channel at Middleburgh in
Holland... ( p# 135-36)

J.B Steane, who tentatively praises the Elegies as 'underread and
underrated poems.; noted deeper, thematic 'affinities' between Marlowe
and Ovid:

violence and scorn, independence and impudence, a sharp undeceived
sophistication, shrewd amatory Machiavellianism, hard brilliance and
youthful energy. (Marlowe: A Critical Study)

With the exception of 'youthful energy,' he could just as easily be
describing the dessicated Will, a reincarnation and revision of
Marlowe's naive young blade and Ovid's desultor Amoris. Although
Shakespeare excises the incidental conventions of neoteric elegy
(writing in wine on the table, groveling before the eunuch who guards
the lady's door, and fornicating with her maid), he heightens the
nasty dynamic of the relationship between the lover and lady by aging
the former and removing all sense of morality from the latter.
Shakespeare also does not emphasize the vir, or cuckolded husband of
the married dark lady. Instead, Will becomes a kind of cuckold as the
dark lady steals the 'lovely Boy' (SS 126.1) he did not dare to
touch. Futhermore, Will exhibits a type of self-loathing even more
intense than what Shakespeare found in his classical model. Unlike
Ovid's young desultor, Will knows that he is old enough to know
better. (p. 139)

Like Petrarch before him, Shakespeare finds in Ovid the paradigm of
the lover who strives for his own hurt with an inability to prevent it
that is deliciously maddening to him. But Shakespeare, unlike his
Italian predecessor (Petrarch) , has no wish to exorcise the desultor;
instead, he ages, Anglicizes and hardens him. >>(p.141)


**************************************

Neither let it be deemed too bold a comparison to balance the highest
point of man's wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right
honor to the heavenly maker of that maker, who having made man to his
own likeness, set him beyond and over all the work of that second
nature, which in nothing he shows so much as in poetry, when with the
force of a divine breath he brings things forth far surpassing her
doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first
accursed fall of Adam, since our erected wit makes us know what
perfection is, but our INFECTED WILL keeps us from reaching unto it.
(Philip Sidney, _Defense of Poetry_)

*************************************

Infected Will:


Following from Stapleton, _Harmful Eloquence_

The most significant kinship between the sonnets and All Ovids Elegies
is that both Shakespeare and Marlowe fashion speakers who feel
themselves to be enmeshed in decadent sensuality. One man is a middle-
aged version of the other. Perhaps the youthful desultor, not given to
reflection, declines into Will, a much older man who, steeping in his
'bath and healthful remedy' for venereal disease (SS 154.11), can do
nothing else but reprocess his experiences. What is exciting, keen,
new and invigorating to the desultor and once was to Will is now a
dull, blunt, weary and drowsy passion to the latter.
Old or young, both personae are afflicted with judgment that might
be described most kindly as poor. Each man finds himself becoming a
delapidated Apollo chasing a Daphne whom he wishes would turn into a
tree. "What flies, I followe, what followes me I shunne' (AOE, Marlowe
2.19.36) Pursuit does not merely humiliate the pursuer because it
wounds his vanity by illustrating his undesirability to the beloved.
It also betrays his real weakness, compulsion: (p.144)

So runst thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I thy babe chace thee a farre behind.


If the Catullan odi et amo can be applied to the desultor and Will, it
is obvious that they turn the odi on themselves, there is no amo.
Since their hearts are either idle or empty, only lust can reign
there. It is therefore not surprising that each man generally finds
himself alone, with the exception of a predictably indefatigable yet
unreliable companion:

Now when he should not jette, he boults upright,
And craves his taske, and seekes to be at fight.
Lie downe with shame, and see thou stirre no more,
Seeing thou wouldst deceive me as before (AOE 3.6.67-70)

This is probably Ovid's most graphic (and appropriate) symbol of
physical love: its instability, fickleness, and odd propensity for
making its devotees think that it is the only thing on which they may
maintain a firm grip. Marlow Anglicizes the passage into his mimetic
rising and falling couplets, disyllabic words rhyming with
monosyllabics. As one might expect, Shakespeare revises the concept
into sonnet form:

flesh staies no farther reason,
But rysing at thy name doth point out thee,
As his triumphant prize, proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poore drudge to be
To stand in thy affaires, fall by thy side.

It would appear that Shakespeare is amusing himself with some male-
oriented poetics, illustrating the idea of dialectical imitatio yet
again. He shows the reader that he has more potency than Ovid or
Marlowe, both poetically and priapically. At the same time, like the
desultor, Will is aware that he is passion's slave. He does not bother
to invoke the Ovidan 'non ego sum stultus, ut ante fui' (Am. 3.11a.
32), which Marlowe translated ' I am not as I was before, unwise' (AOE
3.10.32), because he is old enough to know that he will always be
'stultus'. Besides, potency has it downfalls, as Will, steeping in his
clap-curing bath, suggests in his final line: 'Love's fire heates
water, water cooles not love' (SS154.14)

**************************************

Gibson's "Oxfordian Insincerity":

=46rom 'Remapping Elizabethan Court Poetry', in _The Anatomy of Tudor
Literature_ - Jonathan Gibson

<different type of literature. Both the Old Arcadia and Astrophil and
Stella can be read as dramatised inquiries into the ethics of courtier
poetry. The Old Arcadia was probably started when Sidney was in
'exile' from Court following his row with Oxford. Astrophil and
Stella, on the other hand, written a few years later, seems to have
functioned as a sort of internalised escape from courtly discourse.
The Old Arcadia began life, apparently, as a fictional frame for
originally freestanding lyrics.

Responding, I think to the AMORAL OPPORTUNISM of the OXFORDIAN 'NEW
LYRICAL' POETIC (and perhaps to his own implication in it, too),
Sidney used his fictional narrative to probe with infinite delicacy
the morality of Elizabethan 'courtiership' (Bates, 1992, pp.110-33).
Astrophil and Stella takes things a stage further, innovatively
building an ethically problematic 'framing narrative' inside its
poems. Meanwhile, the Defence of Poetry provided a mimetic, ethical
theory of literature diametrically opposed to the 'utilitarian
poetics' (May, 1991, p.103) of Oxford, Ralegh, Gorges, and Watson,
criticising both Watson and Oxford's client Lyly fairly openly (Duncan-
Jones, 1991, pp.237-8) Sidney's formal innovations in Astrophil and
Stella constitute a brilliant challenge to 'Oxfordian' practice.
Sidney's stress on originality has long been taken to imply criticism
of Watson. Equally 'anti-Oxfordian', however, is his anti-Surrey' use
of an interlaced rhyme-scheme, his free enjambment and his use of
numerology as a structuring principle.>>

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The "mannes state" of Philip Sidney: pre-scripting the life of the
poet in England
Criticism, Spring, 1994 by Kevin Pask

If Molyneux's life-narrative incorporates the Arcadia into Sidney's
resume for state service, Thomas Moffet's Latin life of Sidney,
Nobilis (c. 1593), written for the young William Herbert upon his
entrance to Oxford, represents perhaps the most aggressive dismissal
of Sidney's poetry among the early life-narratives of Sidney. The
recipient, rather than the subject, of Moffet's text makes this firm
subordination of poetry possible. Heir to his father, the Earl of
Pembroke, Herbert inherited a position near the apex of the absolutist
state; Nobilis was apparently intended to provide Herbert with an
appropriate model of aristocratic service to that state in the life of
his uncle, Philip Sidney. Despite the Countess of Pembroke's extensive
patronage of letters throughout the 1590s and her participation in the
revision of the Arcadia, it was in no way considered appropriate for
her aristocratic son to style himself a poet. Herbert had little need
to seek out the courtly advancement associated with poetry although,
like his mother, he acquired the greater prestige associated with
patronage.(16) Once the sticky question of Sidney's poetry had been
suitably consigned to his youth, therefore, Sidney's heroism could
function as a model of nobility, shaping Herbert's "second self."(17)
Because of the occasion of its production, Moffet's account is much
concerned to emphasize the value of studies to its addressee, and
Sidney provides Moffet with the model of heroic, but also educated,
nobility. Nobilis, however, discusses the sonnets and the Arcadia in
the context of Sidney's adolescence, in which vernacular poetry
appears, not as an adjunct of Sidney's classical "literary studies,"
but alongside his physical, and even erotic, recreation:

[S]ince he craved to be wise rather than to be strong, he would
almost have failed in both had he not given himself over, though
unwillingly, to recreation, and mingled, by way of spice, certain
sportive arts--poetic, comic, musical--with his more serious studies.
He amused himself with them after the manner of youth, but within
limits; he was somewhat wanton, indeed, but observed a measure and
felt shame. On that account he first consigned his Stella (truly an
elegant and pleasant work) to darkness and then favored giving it to
the fire. Nay, more, he desired to smother the Arcadia (offspring of
no ill pen) at the time of its birth. (N, 73-74)

Moffet's parenthetical asides register some discomfort with the
generic requirements of aristocratic life-narrative (scruples perhaps
connected to the poetic efforts of his patroness, particularly
regarding the completion and publication of Sidney's texts) even while
he rigidly enforces those requirements upon his narrative by
conflating the contemporary story of Sidney's death-bed wish to
destroy his poetry with an even earlier repudiation of poetry.

Moffet's pronounced distaste for vernacular poetry and his promotion
of Sidney as a model of learning combine in an attempt to construct a
model of nobility which allies the aristocracy and the pedagogical
authority of the school against the perceived vices of life at court.
Moffet's pedagogical Humanism inflects his excoriation of the courtly
vices which "variously transform men into women, women into men, men
into beasts, the scrupulous and devout into sodomites and
gallants" (N, 78) and threaten a masculinity just emerging from the
"wantonness" of youth. The widening breach between Elizabeth's court
and Humanist scholars informs this hostility and its gendered terms.
Despite Sidney's overtures to Humanistic authority in the Apology, his
own poetic texts conformed to the taste of the court society. The
idealized representation of Sidney in Nobilis, however, scrupulously
avoids his status as a carpet knight in order to provide young William
Herbert with a transcendent model of aristocratic Humanism rising
above the threat of courtly emasculation.

The Apology and "Masterless Men"

Because the aristocratic domination of the Tudor state guaranteed the
pre-eminence of aristocratic life-narrative, early lives of Sidney
firmly subordinated his poetic production to that generic model.
Sidney's own texts, written from a social position Alan Sinfield terms
one of "structural confusion" in the Tudor state--a courtier with
affiliations to both the landed peerage and the Humanist-trained
administrative elite--betray an acute and anxious awareness of this
ideological and discursive domination which retained the potential to
register itself in gendered terms. Until his military death
retrospectively cast aristocratic glory upon his life, Sidney's status
remained much closer to the "sodomites and gallants" at court than any
of his life-narratives acknowledge.

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(Pierre Spriet, _Hamlet: The End of the Innocence of Language_)


"Hamlet shakes the foundation of the social contract, for to say that
words lie and that everything is just show is to declare war on
society. One must not say that reality is theatrical and that
falsehood is everywhere because coincidence between words and things
is impossible. To survive, the group must believe in words and pretend
that it trusts the show. The tragedy presents a Hamlet who does
exactly the reverse: he is mad because he thinks that the veil of
'differance' might not exist and that its existence is a disgrace. He
grows desperate and questions the basis of a social game that demands
deviation and reflection but also implies that the people remain
unaware of this deviation. The gap between words and things must
remain veiled; society exists by refusing to accept that the word
might not be the thing: it builds communication on the coincidence
that it demands between the sign and referent. Society considers
noncoincidence as a deplorable accident that does not endanger a
contract founded on the adequation between words and things and on the
conviction that reality is not a show. "

"Fortinbras takes no part in what might be called the quarrel about
signs. He does not fight with words; he does not pervert
communication. On the contrary, Hamlet is only words and show: "You
are welcome, masters," he says twice to the players. He is the only
one to greet them as masters of words - that is, of lies. What the
text calls madness in Hamlet is definitely the impossibility of
reading as one reads Fortinbras. Everything about Hamlet is enigmatic,
open to multiple readings. The transformation of Hamlet is first of
all his new nontransparency. The tragic hero is constructed in such a
way that he becomes incomprehensible; in him signs become opaque. The
play establishes Fortinbras as a character who ignores that opacity.
Contrary to Claudius and Laertes who die for it, Fortinbras does not
act. He is confirmed in innocence that he is not even aware that he is
acting. This is precisely the innocence demanded by the social
contract that affirms a strict correspondence between things and
signs, a necessary condition of communication. Hamlet refuses this
correspondence after trusting it too much. Without any transition, he
shifts from an excess of innocence to an excess of deceit; he realizes
that language exist in a state of absolute uncertainty and refuses to
live in the precariousness of relative uncertainty.
(snip)
Those who are masters of words are eventually the masters of things.
Hamlet is the provisional end of the innocence of language, followed
by the restoration of the empire of words. (Fortinbras). It is
absolutely normal - that is, cultural - that the protagonist of the
tragedy who proclaims the end of the spectacle should be strong,
powerful Fortinbras, an actor who is so good that he does not even
know that he is acting."
(snip)
"Words lie indeed, but we only have words to bring things into
existence. To exist is to speak and therefore JOIN THE GAME, but this
should not be said. We must believe that words are not just play and
spectacle but fragments of truth. As in Hamlet, ironically some of our
contemporaries pretend that they do not believe in words but they are
eventually reunited in their mystical, necessary belief in the truth
of words and signs. They too, if they want to live, must proclaim the
end of the spectacle and assume the innocence of Fortinbras that
assures the survival of the group". (Spriet)

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_Vitai Lampada_ Henry Newbolt

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night
Ten to make and the match to win
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat.
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red-
Red with the wreck of the square that broke
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks-
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

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Steven May, _The Elizabethan Courtier Poets_
The New Lyricism

During the 1570's a body of courtier verse emerged that revived the
emphasis upon love poetry as it had been introduced to the Tudor court
by Wyatt and Surrey. Upon this revitalized foundation, amorous
courtier poetics *developed without interruption to the end of the
reign and beyond*. Unlike courtier verse of the 1560's, the new
lyricism modeled itself primarily upon post-classical continental
authors, from Petrarch to the Pl?iade. Attention to the classics
remained strong, of course, but the ancients were assimilated into the
new poetics almost exclusively in the vernacular. The courtier's
immediate experience is often reflected in this poetry, although the
exact circumstances behind it cannot always be identified, nor does
this later work necessarily grow out of actual experience. From a
literary standpoint this is perhaps the most important shift away from
the trends of the 1560's. Subsequent courtier verse placed a greater
emphasis upon artifice in its treatment of occasional subjects, while
it increasingly strayed away from real events as the most respectable
inducements for writing poetry. The movement was toward fiction and
the creation of poems to be valued for their own sake, not merely for
their commemorative function. As courtier poets ventured anew into the
realms of fiction, they made possible once again the creation of a
genuine literature of the court. Progress toward a golden age of
lyricism was slow, especially with regard to form and the technical
aspects of composition, but the shift in direction occurred suddenly
during the period between roughly 1570 and 1575.

Although Dyer has been considered the premier Elizabethan courtier
poet, that is, the first to compose love lyrics there, the available
evidence confers this distinction upon the earl of Oxford. His early
datable work conforms, nevertheless, to one of the established
functions for poetry practiced by Ascham and Wilson. IN 1572, Oxford
turned out commendatory verses for a translation of Cardano's
_Comfort_, published in 1573 by his gentleman pensioner friend, Thomas
Bedingfield. This poem differs from earlier efforts of the kind not so
much because it appeared in English (as had Ascham's verses for
Blundeville's book), but because his verses are so self-consciously
poetic. The earl uses twenty-six lines to develop his formulaic
exempla: Bedingfield's good efforts are enjoyed by others just as
laborers, masons, bees, and so forth also work for the profit of
others. Oxford flaunts a COPIOUS rhetoric in this poem in contrast
with the more direct, unembellished commendatory verses of his
predecessors. His greatest innovation, however, lies in his
application of the same qualities of style to the eight poems assigned
to him in the 1576 Paradise of Dainty Devices, pieces that Oxford must
have composed before 1575.
DeVere's eight poems in the _Paradise_ create a dramatic break
with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court at
that time...The diversity of Oxford's subjects, including his varied
analyses of the lover's state, were practically as unknown to
contemporary out-of -court writer as they were to courtiers.
Oxford's birth and social standing at court in the 1570's made
him a model of aristocratic behaviour. He was, for instance, accused
of introducing Italian gloves and other such fripperies at court; his
example would have lent respectability even to so trivial a pursuit as
the writing of love poetry. Thus, while it is possible that Dyer was
writing poetry as early as the 1560's, his earliest datable verse, the
complaint sung to the queen at Woodstock in 1575, may itself have been
inspired by Oxford's work in the same vein. Dyer's first six poems in
Part II are the ones he is most likely to have composed before his
association with Philip Sidney. ...Yet even if all six (of Dyer's poems)
were written by 1575, Oxford would still emerge as the chief innovator
due to the range of his subject matter and the variety of its
execution. ...By contrast, Dyer was a specialist...Dyer's output
represents a great departure from courtier verse of the 1560's, and
several of his poems were more widely circulated and imitated than any
of Oxford's; still, the latter's experimentation provided a much
broader foundation for the development of lyric poetry at court. (pp.
52-54)

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Dennis