humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,
In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking,
With FOREFINGER KISS, and brave embrace to the footward.
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Interlaced with beautiful songs and lyrics, Lodge's elegant "Rosalynd"
is among the finest works of Elizabethan prose, of intrinsic interest
in its own right and, as the source for "As You Like It," essential
reading for students of Shakespeare



<could you not discover her secret aphorisms. But, sir, our country
amours are not like your courtly fancies, nor is our wooing like your
suing, for poor shepherds never plain them till love pain them, where
the courtier's eyes is full of passions when his heart is most free
from affection. they court to discover their eloquence, we woo to ease
our sorrows. Every fair face with them must have a new fancy sealed
with a FOREFINGER KISS and a far-fetched sigh, we here love one, and
live to that one so long as life can maintain love, using few
ceremonies because we know few subtleties, and little eloquence for
that we ightly account of flattery; only faith and troth, that's
shepherds' wooing; and, sir, how like you of this?' 'So,' quoth
Saladyn, 'as I could tie myself to such a love.'>>

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The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music
By Barbara Ravelhofer

Looking at the transmission of the Italian repertoire by travelling
individuals, we find patterns of exchange going back to at least the
sixteenth century. Elizabethans such as the dancing master Gaffoyne,
the Lupos and Galliardellos, or Rocco Bonetti, who ran a fencing
school in London, may have introduced Italian fashions with a lasting
influence on the Jacobean court. Furthermore, English courtiers went
abroad. One of James's Scottish dancers had been to Padua and Venice.
(snip)
English texts of the period suggest that learning foreign dances and
etiquette was considered de rigueur. Many plays make fun of the habit
that dancers should kiss their own hand before taking that of their
lady (before and during a dance). It was considered an apish
Italianate mannerism. Gabriel Harvey condemned the habit of kissing
one's fingertips as 'Tuscanisme'. If comedy jokes can be trusted,
fashionable gentlemen had affected Italian dancing. In The Ball (1632)
Freshwater, supposedly a traveller returned from the continent, brags:

I can informe you of their dance in Italy,
Marry that very morning I lift Venice,
I had intelligence of a new device.

Given the dominance of Italian dancing at the time, and its impact on
France and Elizabethan England, we may assume an influence on the
early Stuart court. The mobility of individuals and contemporary
references to foreign customs strongly suggest that polyglot, urban
circles cultivated the Italian together with other dancing styles, and
that court masques - in particular Jacobean ones - made use of it. (pp.
35-36)

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Othello: Act 2, Scene 1

IAGO [Aside.]
167 He takes her by the palm: ay, well said,
168 whisper: with as little a web as this will I
169 ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon
170 her, do; I will gyve thee in thine own courtship.
171 You say true; 'tis so, indeed: if such tricks as
172 these strip you out of your lieutenantry, it had
173 been better you had not KISSED your three FINGERS so
174 oft, which now again you are most apt to play the
175 sir in. Very good; well kissed! an excellent
176 courtesy! 'tis so, indeed. Yet again your fingers
177 to your lips? would they were CLYSTER-pipes for your sake!

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Iago's Clyster:
Purgation, Anality, and the Civilizing Process
Ben Saunders

This essay considers Othello in relation to early modern discourses of
anality and purgation, reading certain scatological tropes as the
metaphorical indices of more pervasive and pernicious cultural
fantasies. Readers should be warned that I deploy a vulgar Anglo-Saxon
term at appropriate moments, and in my conclusion I identify the
presence of an upsetting and offensive verbal association circulating
just below the surface of the Shakespearean text. Othello's capacity
to shock and disturb audiences is an established fact of its reception
history, and a detailed critical analysis must therefore be expected
to confront ideas that are also shocking and disturbing. Though some
readers may disagree with my argument, I hope it will be apparent that
my purpose is not to indulge in gratuitous vulgarity, much less to
upset or offend, but rather to suggest some new ways of thinking about
the visceral and somatic origins of Othello's affective power.

I will begin with an aside spoken by Iago, when he reveals his plan to
turn Cassio's courteous behavior toward Desdemona into evidence of
adultery:

He takes her by the palm; ay, well said, whisper. With as little
web as this I will ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon
her, do: I will gyve thee in thine own courtesies. You say true, 'tis
so indeed. If such tricks as these strip you out of your lieutenantry,
it had been better you had not kissed your three fingers so oft, which
now again you are most apt to play the sir in. Very good, well kissed,
and excellent courtesy: 'tis so indeed! Yet again, your fingers to
your lips? would they were clyster-pipes for your sake!

(2.1.167-77)3

Iago has seen that, in a culture already inclined to foster anxious
masculinist fantasies about the promiscuous female, public conventions
of courtesy and lechery are barely a semiotic step apart. His swiftly
improvised plot to "gyve" the objects of his hatred by closing this
narrow gap wins the appalled admiration of critics who read this
moment as just one among many in which Iago displays a distinctly
artistic viciousness--here, taking what we might describe as *wicked
poetic license with an innocent social grammar*. But Cassio, by his
smiling, whispering, and repeated kissing of his own hand, does more
than provide Iago with the material to construct an artful trap; he
also sets Iago thinking in terms of lower-body functions and,
specifically, in terms of the medicinal "clyster," or enema.

What does it mean for Iago to wish Cassio's fingers into clyster-
pipes? Although most editors gloss the phrase as "enema tubes," none,
to my knowledge, has attempted to explicate Iago's precise intention
in invoking them--reasonably enough, perhaps, since the image's
affective force cannot be expressed by simple paraphrase. To make the
attempt, nonetheless: Iago seems to be suggesting that Cassio would be
slower to indulge in courteous finger-kissing gestures if his fingers
had recently been inserted into someone's anus. The implication is
therefore something like you'd cut that out if you knew what was good
for you! or you wouldn't put them in your mouth if you knew where they
had been!

But as is so often the case with Shakespeare's texts, what Iago means
is less interesting than what he says. To this extent, my attempt to
paraphrase Iago's words can only diminish the startling quality of the
figure he deploys. Note, first of all, that Iago's language
momentarily transforms Cassio's hand into a vehicle that conjoins the
anus with the mouth. Note also that Iago is seen as longing for this
transformation and conjunction ("would they were . . ."). The sight of
Desdemona and Cassio behaving in a manner that can be turned to Iago's
own purposes inspires in him a brief anal-erotic fantasy--or, more
precisely, a fantasy in which the oral and anal registers (always
connected at some level) are collapsed. So much at least seems to me
incontrovertible, but significant aspects of this anal/oral fantasy
remain vague. For example, while the mouth in question is clearly
Cassio's, we can tell neither whose anus is evoked by these clyster-
pipes nor who will administer the enema that seems to be required.

In this essay I will elaborate a hermeneutic strategy that builds on
the hints provided by Iago's attraction to verbal figures of
purgation, evacuation, and oral/anal substitution and displacement, as
witnessed in this passage. By attending to the neglected (waste)
matter of bodily purgation and regulation in this play, I hope not
only to say something about early modern anality but also to broaden
our sense of its relation to a historically emergent racist
vocabulary. In the process I will expand on the (by-now) commonplace
notion that Othello generates a good deal of its aesthetic effect, and
emotional affect, through "a black/white opposition" that is "built
into the play at every level." Assuming the centrality of a related
opposition between civilization and barbarism, which I find
reinscribed and deconstructed throughout the text, I will suggest that
the process of ideological invention whereby "civilized" man is
distinguished from his "barbaric" other emerges in Othello quite
literally from the sewer. In this account, Iago represents not only a
portrait of the villain as anal-retentive artist but also as the
Shakespearean figure who expresses the (disavowed) centrality of lower-
body functions to the production of "civilized" Christian masculinity--
and who therefore also best reveals the violent, disciplinary force
that is the (again, disavowed) foundation of that "civilizing"
process.
(snip)
"I cannot imagine any spectator leaving Othello feeling
cleansed."Edward Pechter

An excretory pr=E9cis of the plot of Othello therefore runs as follows:
Iago talks shit, pumping pestilence into Othello's ear, literally
filling Othello's head with shit, until he believes that his love
object smells like shit, and comes to feel that he has actually been
smeared with shit--shit that can be washed away only with Desdemona's
blood. Then, upon killing her, Othello discovers that he has not
removed the stain but has rather become the very substance that soils:
along with everything else he touches, Iago has turned Othello into
shit.
(snip)
To conclude by returning briefly to the "clyster-pipes" that initially
inspired my inquiry: these pipes may now look more unpleasant than
ever, though in the context of the foregoing arguments, their
invocation is perhaps less startling. For the entire text of Othello
can be read as in some sense the result of Iago's investment in
violent evacuation and purgation. Iago--who restores the "natural"
order in terms of normative homo-social and racially pure power
relations--might even see his actions as analogous to those of the
early modern physician, restoring health to what he would consider a
diseased body politic, clogged as it is with unhealthful foreign
excrements that have risen from the lower extremities, where they
belong, to positions of power and authority: "Work on, / My medicine,
work!" he cries, as the fit seizes Othello and drives him to his knees
(4.1.44-45). He hatches a plot to expunge Venetian society of
everything he associates with lower-body functions: women, people of
color, sexual desire. Iago's "monstrous birth" is no baby, then, but
rather a tremendous evacuation--the inevitable and horrific consequence
of a "diet of revenge." And the complete success of Iago's enema is
attested to when this masterful shitmonger has nothing left to say:
"Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I
never will speak word" (5.2.300-301). The clyster has done its work.
Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, and Roderigo lie dead, and Iago is . . .
empty. Silent. Purged. But Iago's sadistic drives have already exposed
the civilized impulses toward order, control, and cleanliness,
impulses that provide one linguistic matrix for modern racism, as
rooted in a series of paradoxical disavowals and denials: the
obsessive need for order that itself produces chaos; the tremendous
appetite to deny appetite; the consuming passion to be free of
passion; the excessive desire to eliminate all excess; the
overpowering lust to banish lust. Shakespeare has personified the
civilizing process in Iago, an anal-retentive proto-racist poet
devoted to the terrible logic of the purge.

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The terrible logic of the purge:


HAMLET
129 O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
130 Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
131 Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
132 His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
133 How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
134 Seem to me all the uses of this world!
135 Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
136 That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
137 Possess it merely. That it should come to this!



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Hamlet's Solid Flesh Resolved
Sidney Warhaft
ELH, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Mar., 1961), pp. 21-30

=2E..It has of course long of course been recognized - it is an ancient
commonplace - that , for whatever reason and with whatever exact
symptoms, Hamlet is suffering at the beginning of the play at least
from some form or other of melancholy. This much will surely be
granted, especially since the first time we see Hamlet everybody,
including himself, is protesting his unusual grief and misery, and
since in his second soliloquy he himself refers to his "weakness" and
his "melancholy" Yet that Hamlet in calling his flesh solid is
referring accurately and emphatically to his morbid condition has
nowhere been recognized. That is, to the Elizabethan physiologist -
and almost every educated man was that in 1600 - solidity of the flesh
must have indicated a particular unhealthy state of the body, a state
in which, to put it most generally, the blood was considered to
contain a surfeit or surplus of the earth or lowest element, and even
to tend itself to degenerate into heavy dregs or excrement.

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Decomposition:


O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

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Marcellus - "something is rotten in the state of Denmark"

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ROT:
To undergo decomposition

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decompose

1. To separate into components or basic elements.
2. To cause to rot.

v.intr.

1. To become broken down into components; disintegrate.
2. To decay; putrefy. See synonyms at decay.

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'Syren Teares': Enchantment or Infection in Shakespeare's Sonnet 119
Katherine Duncan-Jones
The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 189 (Feb.,
1997), pp. 56-60

=2E..There is yet a further possible meaning for 'Syren teares' which
has not been previously suggested. In addition to or instead of the
classical Sirens, there may be a reference to 'serene' or 'serein', 'A
light fall of moisture of fine rain after sunset in hot countries,
formerly regarded as noxious dew or mist' (OED). Though Shakespeare
does not use the work elsewhere, he was surely aware of its poetic
deployment by Sidney at a climatic moment in the famous double sestina
of Strephon and Klaius in the Arcadia, in which the two shepherds show
how in their misery everything in their landscape is turned upside-
down and day becomes night. Instead of the wholesome and refreshing
dew of morning they taste the poisonous mixture of nightfall:

Me seemes I feele the comfort of the morning
Turnde to the mortall serene of an evening...

In four of the 'Old' Arcadia Manuscripts the word is spelt 'Siren',
and in one 'Syryen', so it appears that it could easily be conflated,
both in sound and spelling, with the Homeric 'Siren'. In one of the
OED's examples of 'serene' as 'noxious dew', from the 1617 translation
of Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, the word is spelt exactly as in the 1609
Sonnets: 'When the Syren or dew falls at night, they keepe themselves
within dores till it be dried up' (Itin. i.219). Shakespeare would
also have encountered Jonson's use of the word in the climactic
seduction scene of Volpone (1605), when Celia responds to Volpone's
Catullan wooiing-song with the lines:

Some serene blast me, or dire lightning strike
This my offending face...

If the 'Syren teares' of Sonnet 119 are construed as 'serene tears',
or drops of plague-inducing moisture associated with evening, they
gain additional resonances in their larger context in the sequence.

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Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

Melanagoga, or melancholy purging medicines, are either simple or
compound, and that gently, or violently, purging UPWARD or downward.


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Nashe on Harvey
Strange Newes - 1592

needs he (note- Harvey) must cast up certain rude humours of English
hexameter verses that lay upon his stomach; a certain Nobleman stood
in his way as he was vomiting, and from top to toe he was all to
bewrayed him [sic] with Tuscanism.

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<follows: Iago talks shit, pumping pestilence into Othello's ear,
literally filling Othello's head with shit, until he believes that his
love object smells like shit, and comes to feel that he has actually
been smeared with shit--shit that can be washed away only with
Desdemona's blood. Then, upon killing her, Othello discovers that he
has not removed the stain but has rather become the very substance
that soils: along with everything else he touches, Iago has turned
Othello into shit. >> Ben Saunders

***************************************
TransForming Oxford:

Gabriel Harvey

Speculum Tuscanismi (1580)
Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,
In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking,
With FOREFINGER KISS, and brave embrace to the footward.
Large bellied Cod-pieced doublet, uncod-pieced half hose,
Straight to the dock like a shirt, and close to the britch like a
diveling.
A little Apish flat couched fast to the pate like an oyster,
French camarick ruffs, deep with a whiteness starched to the purpose.
Every one A per se A, his terms and braveries in print,
Delicate in speech, quaint in array: conceited in all points,
In Courtly guiles a passing singular odd man,
For Gallants a brave Mirror, a Primrose of Honour,
A Diamond for nonce, a fellow peerless in England.
Not the like discourser for Tongue, and head to be found out,
Not the like resolute man for great and serious affairs,
Not the like Lynx to spy out secrets and privities of States,
Eyed like to Argus, eared like to Midas, nos'd like to Naso,
Wing'd like to Mercury, fittst of a thousand for to be employ'd,
This, nay more than this, doth practice of Italy in one year.
None do I name, but some do I know, that a piece of a twelve month
Hath so perfited outly and inly both body, both soul,
That none for sense and senses half matchable with them.
A vulture's smelling, Ape's tasting, sight of an eagle,
A spider's touching, Hart's hearing, might of a Lion.
Compounds of wisdom, wit, prowess, bounty, behavior,
All gallant virtues, all qualities of body and soul.
O thrice ten hundred thousand times blessed and happy,
Blessed and happy travail, Travailer most blessed and happy.
"Tell me in good sooth, doth it not too evidently appear
that this English poet wanted but a good pattern before his eyes,
as it might be some delicate and choice elegant Poesy
of good Master Sidney's or Master Dyer's
(our very Castor and Pollux for such and many greater matters)
when this trim gear was in the matching?"

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Dennis