The Prison Writer

I was reading some Richard Lovelace today. A Royalist during the English Civil War, he ended up getting imprisoned in 1642 and again in 1648. So he has some prison poems, most famously "To Althea, From Prison." In it he contrasts these little, sad consolations (like speaking to Althea through a grate and entangling in her hair) with the liberty that something else (in the first verse, gods) cannot know. It's a simple but moving formula.

I was then looking at the criticism through the MLA International Bibliography, such as it is. Many critics consider him a prison writer, and look at those poems authored from prison most closely. I find such groupings curious and compelling as well, though I'm at a loss to explain why. Is it because the desperation that prison represents makes the literature the imprisoned produce into crystals ripe with dramatic tension, as the authors seek redemption, ennobled resistance, spiritual clarity, or unparalleled grief?

There could be a topic here, one that could bridge the medieval and Renaissance world, as well as the classical one before it, and the (pretentiously) modern one. Let me muse on its bounds.

On one end, there's Boethius. Oh, is there ever Boethius, despairing in prison, visited by Lady Philosophy and made to turn away from self-indulgent grief and towards, first, earthly eudaimonism and then spiritual eudaimonism, inclining towards reason, love, and God. His exploration is a philosophical one, and in reading Chaucer's (and to a certain degree Walter Map's) translations of Boethius, I think that late medieval English authors were able to understand the link between philosophical rigor in translation (Chaucer and Walter Map so carefully choosing the words welefulness and blisfulnesse to distinguish between fallible and infallible eudaimonism) and the eloquence that can only be released in the depths of despair (Chaucer's metrical translations ... now I forget. Are they in poetry, or does he render them into prose too? If the latter, he still does an excellent job rendering both the poetic sense and the philosophical one).

Follow that through, and you have some form of prison literature coming through many of the centuries of medieval literature. Saints' lives often provide the transition, and I would argue that anchoritic life was also a form of imprisonment (though one in which the partaker was willing, it had larger symbolic significances of death, and the larger imprisonment involved the imprisonment of the soul in the body (OMG Marvell's "A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body")). Third, there are the  characters imprisoned through story, which can include Lancelot in The Knight of the Cart, the knights in The Knight's Tale, and knights or ladies in many of the romances. Fourth, you have the authors reporting themselves to be locked up. Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell ends with an entreaty by the author, as does Le Morte Darthur. From there, many poets afterwards have been at various times imprisoned, like Surrey.

It occurs to me that there's a division here between political imprisonments, religious ones, and other kinds (if there are). Sir Thomas Malory, Marvell, Surrey, and Boethius form a line of people imprisoned due to their political stances, which are sometimes indistinguishable from their personal indiscretions (the accusation of rape against Malory, for instance). The saints' lives and the anchorites have this happen for religious reasons, with an important factor being whether (or to what extent) they were able to determine (or reinterpret) their own imprisonment. The imprisonments that happen to characters are more bewildering. Sometimes it seems like the imprisonment is merely personal or individual, geared specifically against the knight in question. Sometimes, though, as with any romance involving Saracens or Welsh or the like, it seems like there's a geopolitical reason as well, even if it's only elaborated enough to say that religious difference is an excuse to persecute the hero. Finally, it can richly reinforce the present social circumstances of a society, as occurs in many plays where a character is thrown into slavery, desirably or not.

I've long been rambling, but despite their ostensible differences, I think that writing from a form of imprisonment can be compelling way to look at literatures through 1660. I'd have to read more to fill in the gaps.

Cymbeline

A few things that struck me about Cymbeline:

The very elaborate double-plot going on, where some key figures can be offstage for acts at a time. We don't even learn of the two brothers' fates until the play is halfway over! Structurally, it's not classical at all, and I can imagine why Ben Jonson wouldn't like it. I still did though.

Imogen and her disguising as a man. It's pretty fascinating with what ease she does so, and then how the people who encounter her nearly see through it, and make much of her being a pretty youth. One even says something to the effect of, "If you were a woman, I'd keep you." *facepalm*

More humoral language, not to any great effect, except that I did notice that women have a tendency to be described as slippery only when they are really virtuous. To call someone slippery (this happens also in The Winter's Tale) seems to damn the speaker's intentions more than the one indicated.

Cloten is hilarious. He's such a fop, and doesn't realize it. His beheading is unsurprising. Also, as villains go, the queen is actually pretty masterful. But she still dies of grief with her son, which indicates that she isn't all bad.

And there's so much about people's natures manifesting themselves despite lacking any knowledge of lineage (Guiderius, Arviragus) that I really rolled my eyes. In this way, it really had a sort of fairy-tale quality to it.

Oh, and jealousy. Posthumus's bargain... he was so quickly turned into doubt once the proofs became dire enough, even when the friends around him recognized otherwise. There's something here that can also be read into The Winter's Tale and Othello. Why all the jealous husbands?

The Tempest and The Winter's Tale

Both plays are around the time 1611, The Tempest perhaps being a little later, though with the fuzziness of dates, that's only an uneducated guess.

So, topics to think about.

There's tons of magic in both of these plays; more in The Tempest, though a little at the end of The Winter's Tale too. It's unclear whether the unveiling of Hermione at the end of the play, her transformation from statue into life, occurs after she was hidden away for sixteen years, or after her actual death. I read it as the latter, a bit of flash and awe to tie things together in this fireside tale. This is also true because of the presence of the ghost, which doesn't make much sense otherwise.

There are other mentions of course. The suspicion that Perdita's garments and the like are "fairy gold," or Mamillus's inclination to tell his mother about tales of "goblins and sprites." It's clear that there's an undercurrent of romance in this play.

I would also note the use of humoral language. It doesn't have a systematic use, like the plays I wrote on last semester, but blood and (in one case at least) melancholy work with the astrological language to provide emotional indices for the characters.

Finally, I don't have much of a grasp on what Autolycus is really doing. He's a swindler, seeming to be amused that the Clown is so easily taken in.

Oh! I guess there's a lot to do with nature and artifice, including the line drawn by Polyxenes with Perdita, and the crafty art of the statue maker. Also some to do with lineages, and who gets the father's stamp. Also a lot about women's place - Paulina gets called down from speaking too loudly at a few occasions.

I haven't talked at all about The Tempest. I can see why scholars like to read the colonial tinges into it. Caliban is the loathed and self-loathing servant figure, who cannot know anything else due to the society surrounding him, first with Prospero and then with Stephano, a servant who can nonetheless pretend to be a lord. There's a lot to do with levels of servitude, how one treats servants, and the like. Caliban chooses his master poorly, but he can't be too much to blame for having fallen in love with Miranda. And we can't ignore race. Sycorax came from Algeria, and there's a lot of talk about Alonso's daughter, who was just married to the king of Tunis. Racism is rather rampant in the play; god forbid you be dark.

Prospero as author, with authority coming from his book. The related status of Ariel, since he's a little bit of a trickster, and also quite eager, and finally rather powerful. Prospero doesn't do too much magic on his own. 

And the magic itself bears some reflection, though I don't know precisely what to do with it now. It requires its practitioner to be learned. It's not inherently evil, but Prospero's renouncing of it signals that it is at least duplicitous, that it is something that he can no longer brook. Why doesn't Caliban have any magic? Levels of earthliness and spirituality are fascinating.