Written in Italian, published in 1532, meant to be a rallying cry for Italy to overcome its former oppressors, a political treatise on how to best maintain power directed towards the princes and their principalities. Think the "Mirror of Princes," a genre that became popular in the medieval period, in instructing (most often through examples - thus histories like Bede's were popular for this mode) how a prince should conduct himself.
The examples were a good mix of contemporary and ancient. It rarely goes to any matter outside of either the current context or the ancient one, and I don't recall it using any biblical examples; by ancient, I mean Greece and Rome.
We know it today as a justification of rule that justifies itself by maintaining itself. Vices, in such a paradigm, are sometimes necessary for the ruler. The trick is to know when to use vices and when to use virtues, and to appear virtuous in any case. Only such practices - those of contingent virtue - can preserve a state with any likelihood. Any other actions are bound by fortune, which can shift to favor one set of actions over another depending on the circumstances. (Indeed, fortune here is much akin to "circumstance.")
There's another side that proscribes incorrect actions. A prince has to keep his people and his armies on his side. While in ancient times keeping armies on his side was sufficient (while checking their excesses), today keeping the people on his side is necessary. Most notably, don't take away their arms, arm them (to ensure their allegiance to you), don't mess with their property, and don't mess with their women. Other forms of advice have to do with relying on one's own arms - don't hire mercenary or auxiliary forces, because they have no reason to be loyal to you. Don't rely on other people too much, since overreliance implies that they can gain much more by getting power themselves. At the same time, keep aside the flatterers and solicit for some targeted advice, while being intelligent enough yourself to know what to ask, and to know what advice is sound. In other words, keep other balances of power in your favor.
(Wow, how tempting it is to fall into second person.)
There were some tantalyzing descriptions, especially in the sections on arms, when the animal comes in. It's necessary for a prince to be both like lion and fox, part force/virtue and part tricks. It's also necessary to be like a centaur, half-man (law) and half-beast (arms). This monstrous version of human nature is quite intriguing, since a lot of what Machiavelli works against is succumbing to baser vices by trumping them with well-guided, and therefore intentionally human, vices.
I'm nearly out of time, but I finally want to mention Fortune one more time. Towards the end, Machiavelli says that Fortune is like a woman. In order to be subdued, it sometimes has to be beaten and knocked about. This is very alarming to me personally, and I wonder what it does to make Fortune into, not allegorical woman (oh, there's a category that needs specification), but Machiavellian woman. The gender dynamic here is quite fraught.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
The Faerie Queene, Book 3, Cantos 1-6
Wow.
So this is the book on Chastity, ostensibly focusing on Britomart,who is held up as one of the two (after Gloriana) examples of Elizabeth. (Sorry! Belphoebe and Gloriana are the two that can be Elizabeth. It's an easy mistake to make. As I state below, Britomart's lineage does look forward to Elizabeth, implying a vertical (if not horizontal comparison.)The posited allegory, which recurs on occasion, is quite curious. One is stately power, and the other is knightly endeavor. More than that, one is stately power, and the other is the struggle of a maiden to reconcile herself to the fate of eventually finding love and starting a royal line. She hates Arthegall, her prophecied love, but cannot help but to love him, as well as the prophecied future of a royal line (which connects Brutus to Elizabeth).
In these cantos we see the fracture of the singular narrative, which had already seen a little tendency of fracturing beforehand (Book 2 Canto 3, when Braggadochio runs across Belphoebe, who cows him). Canto 1 offers the possibility of continuity, with Guyon, Arthur, the Palmer, and Britomartis meeting. Britomartis fights and defeats Guyon, who must be warned not to fight further by the Palmer. (Sometimes people lose - don't fight fate.) They ride together for some time, until they see a lady (Florimell) pursued by a foster (presumably a forester?). Arthur (and his squire Timaeus) and Guyon (and the Palmer) go off in pursuit, but Britomartis rides alone. She finds the Redcrosse Knight being defeated by six knights who serve Malecasta, the owner of a pretty castle, who scorns men who hold other lovers, or who don't see her. She defeats the men, and gains access to the castle, where after a feast and a lot of sexual tension (Malecasta crushes all over Britomartis), they go to bed. Malecasta goes to Britomartis's bed, who awakens and draws a sword on her. The six knights (representing progressive levels of lust) respond, Gardante lightly wounding B with an arrow. RCK and B go on.
In the next two cantos, we hear about Britomart's story, which largely involves her being raised in arms, stumbling across Merlin's mirror and seeing her lover in it, burning with love, being unsuccessfully cured by her nurse Glauce (including a weird and unsuccessful charm), them seeking Merlin who claims she should seek leach-craft, their insisting until he tells her the prophecy of her line to Elizabeth (including her own life), and their resolving to set out in search for him in Fairy land.
In Canto 4, we turn to Britomart riding (after complaining about her lost love in terms of a ship on a sea of sorrow), who encounters Marinell. They fight despite his warning, and she leaves him as a bloody pulp on the coast before riding off, wondering but thinking little of jewels speckled along the coast. His mother Cymoent comes, and we hear of her story and the story of the coast. Proteus had prophecied that he would have much ill of a woman, which she took to mean love. Eventually they find Marinell, and load him in their sea coach. He still has a pulse, and his wound is cleansed. They curse B, but she's immune to it. She and her nurse split, as they're pursued by Archimage and come to a crossing.
At this point, the narrative vein fractures. We turn to Timias, Arthur's squire, who has also been split from the others in a threeway division. He pursues Florimell, but gets lost in the night, and sees ghastly visions in the dark. In Canto 5, Arthur finds the Dwarf, who pursues Florimell. We learn that Florimell loves Marinell, who was charmed to not love her back. Meanwhile, T gets to the Foster, who with three others waylays the squire. He fights well, kills all three (in a scene with comparatively little blood but lots of beheading), but gradually bleeds out himself. Belphoebe comes up, tracking the blood of something she's hunting. She fins herbs for him, introduces self, and works to cure him. But he falls in love, wounded another way, and gradually succumbs to death in order to preserve her virtue. His blood dries.
In Canto 6, we learn of the origins of Belphoebe, who was conceived by Chrysogonee and sunbeams. Fearing dishonor though she knows she had none, she flees to the woods. Venus, seeking Cupid after a spat, wanders everywhere and finally to a forest where she sees Phoebe naked. Phoebe is scornful of this, but gradually softens in Venus's entreaties, and sends her nymphs to find Cupid in the woods. They find the children. One, for Phoebe, is named Belphoebe. The other, for Venus, is named Amoretta. The narrative then follows Amoretta to the garden of Adonis, where the tapestry in Canto 2 is finally completed - after Adonis died, he came here, where he lives eternally with Psyche and his child Pleasure. Old Genius keeps the door. Children are dressed by him in sin, and come in through the back door to be planted and purified (reincarnation of a sort). Amoretta is much loved, but loves only Scudamore. Then the narrative decides to turn back into Florimell.
Besides the formal shifting around, there are a few other threads. The prefaces of each canto (the first two or three stanzas) normally treat some abstract concern, much like the quatrain before summarizes the plot in an inadequate manner. In this case, most of these are either about the inadequacies of love or the passage of female valor or female ancient glory. The narrator really laments the loss of a tradition of martial women. This is especially clear in Canto 4, when he laments them in different ways depending on whether they're dead or merely lost. Canto 5 is also interesting in that it laments the kinds of love that can occur.
Blood is effusive in these passages, at least in parts, though the most intriguing place to be (besides Timaeus's wound in the thigh that opens as he fights, is closed by Belphoebe, and which opens another wound in his heart, which because he restrains himself from loving his blood gradually dries up) is with Marinell. He is left bleeding profusely, and when they find him, his blood is pretty cruddy. But they (his mother and her helpers) empty the wound of blood and then fill it with balm and nectar such as is good for mortals and gods. It's transfusion! Here again, to cure a wound that Belphoebe has caused, though this time neither knight nor mother know that it came from a man.
Happiness language has died down here, except for the strange proliferation of bowers of bliss. Venus has one!
So this is the book on Chastity, ostensibly focusing on Britomart,
In these cantos we see the fracture of the singular narrative, which had already seen a little tendency of fracturing beforehand (Book 2 Canto 3, when Braggadochio runs across Belphoebe, who cows him). Canto 1 offers the possibility of continuity, with Guyon, Arthur, the Palmer, and Britomartis meeting. Britomartis fights and defeats Guyon, who must be warned not to fight further by the Palmer. (Sometimes people lose - don't fight fate.) They ride together for some time, until they see a lady (Florimell) pursued by a foster (presumably a forester?). Arthur (and his squire Timaeus) and Guyon (and the Palmer) go off in pursuit, but Britomartis rides alone. She finds the Redcrosse Knight being defeated by six knights who serve Malecasta, the owner of a pretty castle, who scorns men who hold other lovers, or who don't see her. She defeats the men, and gains access to the castle, where after a feast and a lot of sexual tension (Malecasta crushes all over Britomartis), they go to bed. Malecasta goes to Britomartis's bed, who awakens and draws a sword on her. The six knights (representing progressive levels of lust) respond, Gardante lightly wounding B with an arrow. RCK and B go on.
In the next two cantos, we hear about Britomart's story, which largely involves her being raised in arms, stumbling across Merlin's mirror and seeing her lover in it, burning with love, being unsuccessfully cured by her nurse Glauce (including a weird and unsuccessful charm), them seeking Merlin who claims she should seek leach-craft, their insisting until he tells her the prophecy of her line to Elizabeth (including her own life), and their resolving to set out in search for him in Fairy land.
In Canto 4, we turn to Britomart riding (after complaining about her lost love in terms of a ship on a sea of sorrow), who encounters Marinell. They fight despite his warning, and she leaves him as a bloody pulp on the coast before riding off, wondering but thinking little of jewels speckled along the coast. His mother Cymoent comes, and we hear of her story and the story of the coast. Proteus had prophecied that he would have much ill of a woman, which she took to mean love. Eventually they find Marinell, and load him in their sea coach. He still has a pulse, and his wound is cleansed. They curse B, but she's immune to it. She and her nurse split, as they're pursued by Archimage and come to a crossing.
At this point, the narrative vein fractures. We turn to Timias, Arthur's squire, who has also been split from the others in a threeway division. He pursues Florimell, but gets lost in the night, and sees ghastly visions in the dark. In Canto 5, Arthur finds the Dwarf, who pursues Florimell. We learn that Florimell loves Marinell, who was charmed to not love her back. Meanwhile, T gets to the Foster, who with three others waylays the squire. He fights well, kills all three (in a scene with comparatively little blood but lots of beheading), but gradually bleeds out himself. Belphoebe comes up, tracking the blood of something she's hunting. She fins herbs for him, introduces self, and works to cure him. But he falls in love, wounded another way, and gradually succumbs to death in order to preserve her virtue. His blood dries.
In Canto 6, we learn of the origins of Belphoebe, who was conceived by Chrysogonee and sunbeams. Fearing dishonor though she knows she had none, she flees to the woods. Venus, seeking Cupid after a spat, wanders everywhere and finally to a forest where she sees Phoebe naked. Phoebe is scornful of this, but gradually softens in Venus's entreaties, and sends her nymphs to find Cupid in the woods. They find the children. One, for Phoebe, is named Belphoebe. The other, for Venus, is named Amoretta. The narrative then follows Amoretta to the garden of Adonis, where the tapestry in Canto 2 is finally completed - after Adonis died, he came here, where he lives eternally with Psyche and his child Pleasure. Old Genius keeps the door. Children are dressed by him in sin, and come in through the back door to be planted and purified (reincarnation of a sort). Amoretta is much loved, but loves only Scudamore. Then the narrative decides to turn back into Florimell.
Besides the formal shifting around, there are a few other threads. The prefaces of each canto (the first two or three stanzas) normally treat some abstract concern, much like the quatrain before summarizes the plot in an inadequate manner. In this case, most of these are either about the inadequacies of love or the passage of female valor or female ancient glory. The narrator really laments the loss of a tradition of martial women. This is especially clear in Canto 4, when he laments them in different ways depending on whether they're dead or merely lost. Canto 5 is also interesting in that it laments the kinds of love that can occur.
Blood is effusive in these passages, at least in parts, though the most intriguing place to be (besides Timaeus's wound in the thigh that opens as he fights, is closed by Belphoebe, and which opens another wound in his heart, which because he restrains himself from loving his blood gradually dries up) is with Marinell. He is left bleeding profusely, and when they find him, his blood is pretty cruddy. But they (his mother and her helpers) empty the wound of blood and then fill it with balm and nectar such as is good for mortals and gods. It's transfusion! Here again, to cure a wound that Belphoebe has caused, though this time neither knight nor mother know that it came from a man.
Happiness language has died down here, except for the strange proliferation of bowers of bliss. Venus has one!
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Faerie Queen Book 2, Cantos 7-12
This one was a doozie. Let's see.
Canto 7 - Guyon goes with Mammon into the underworld, where he's tempted by three temptations (avarice, ambition, and food/drink/rest). He resists the first two, but succumbs to the third, because it's been three days since he's eaten or slept. Poor guy.
Canto 8 - Palmer comes across Guyon's body, with an angel next to it. Pyrochles and Cymochles (with Archimago) find the body and start stripping it of arms. Arthur arrives to defend the body. Pyrochles takes Guyon's sevenfold shield (with the Faerie queen on the front) and Arthur's sword (from Archimago) called Morddure. They fight in a lengthy battle. Arthur's sword won't strike him, so P and A end up wrestling, but A wins against both. Tons of blood. Guyon awakens.
Canto 9 - Arthur asks about the Faerie Queen on Guyon's shield. They ride up and find the Castle of Temperance, held by a damsel, Alma. She represents the body, in bodily balance, complete with allegories for speaking, digesting, expelling, sensation, and thought. The castle is besieged by thousand in a rabble that move about like shades without substance. At the end, after seeing Phantasie, Judgment, and Memory, Guyon learns from a history of Britain and a history of fairy.
Canto 10 - The history of Britain and the history of fairy. It goes all the way back to the days of giants before Brutus, with mythical accounts of pre-Roman kings and placenames (like Lear). Eventually reaches the Roman conquest and Cymbeline, who ruled at the time of Christ. Then more time, Joseph of Arimathia and the Grail, and gradually the Roman recession, Vortigern/Hengist/Horsus, and finally Uther's lineage. Then it goes on to describe the creation of Elves (from Prometheus in the garden of Adonis) and Faeries, with a much shorter lineage going to Oberon and the Faerie Queen.
Canto 11 - Guyon leaves the castle with the Palmer. Arthur rides out to defend the castle. He fights the rabble's captain Maleger, who has two hags Impotence and Impatience waiting on him. He's difficult to catch, mounted on a tiger, and he fires deadly arrows (in the manner of Indians (21)). Arthur deflects the arrows, and tries to take the hags down as they gather the deflected arrows, but is nearly overcome. He gets up just in time to surprise Maleger, who very reluctantly fights. When Maleger is hewn in the chest, he doesn't bleed. Other wounds don't bleed. Arthur tries crushing Maleger to the ground, but he revives. Realizing that Maleger is connected to his mother Earth, he picks up Maleger and tosses him into the water.
Canto 12 - Guyon and the Palmer, with a boatman, journey by sea toward the Bower of Bliss. They see a number of pitfalls, including a Gulf of Greediness, the Rock of Vile Reproach, Wandering Islands, the Whirlpool of Decay, many monsters, mermaids (womanish forgeries), birds of misfortune, and the like. Upon making it to the bower, they ward off a number of animals that approach. Genius keeps an ivory gate with a soft wall (contrast with the hard and high wall of Temperance, its counter-body). He, representing lust, is easily defied. Excess is similarly dealt with, her gold cup dashed to bits. Painted flowers and the like follow, a strange and yet beautiful combination of Nature and Art. Two naked damsels writhe and ogle each other, tempting both themselves and Guyon, but the Palmer has none of it. Music pours forth from Acrasia's bower, where she and a lover (Verdant) recline. Verdant's honor has been long forgotten, his shield empty of engraving. They're seized and bound. They find out that the animals are all deformed into monsters by their lust for Acrasia (and her spells). It ends on a beratement of Grill, the pig, who must remain a pig.
Weird stuff - the body that doesn't bleed? When bleeding has been so effusive elsewhere?
Religious overtones here - Guyon mimicking the three temptations of Christ in his own journey into the underworld, and how he ends up failing on the last one.
Giants and monsters are especially predominant here, always the morally deformed other of human virtue. Yet, sometimes those that might be expected to be deformed (Acrasia's sons P and C) turn out to be fine, and just angry knights. Is this a difference of will here, where one or the other could yet choose to be otherwise, but an animal or monster has been changed essentially and can no longer choose?
Lots of language around happiness, and where one finds ultimate rest, especially in Canto 7. Worldly bliss as opposed to "another happiness." If this isn't Boethian, then I'm crazy.
Model of the mind and body (which aren't separated) as evoked in the allegory in Canto 9. Comparison of this body with the similar body in Canto 12. What gets emphasized? Exchanges of the body with the outside world, and the threefold Averroesean model of the mind, which incorporates the Imaginative capacity.
Nature and forgery, especially in the bower of bliss. Not all artifice is bad, as it lists among the feigned "leasings, tales, and lies" (IX.51.9). In that, it seems to take a similar tack that Sidney's Defense of Poetry later does, having to balance the idea that fiction is constructed with the idea that such fictions can still be instructive and potentially good.
And of course amongst all these religious allegories and philosophical ideas you have the entrappings of romance. Arthur has his sword and his horse named (MORDDURE AND SPUMADOR). You have the lesbians in the bower of bliss, or at least seeming lesbians, since there seems to be a confusion where desirability proliferates unbridled outside of heterosexual bounds. Guyon certainly likes it. >_>
Canto 7 - Guyon goes with Mammon into the underworld, where he's tempted by three temptations (avarice, ambition, and food/drink/rest). He resists the first two, but succumbs to the third, because it's been three days since he's eaten or slept. Poor guy.
Canto 8 - Palmer comes across Guyon's body, with an angel next to it. Pyrochles and Cymochles (with Archimago) find the body and start stripping it of arms. Arthur arrives to defend the body. Pyrochles takes Guyon's sevenfold shield (with the Faerie queen on the front) and Arthur's sword (from Archimago) called Morddure. They fight in a lengthy battle. Arthur's sword won't strike him, so P and A end up wrestling, but A wins against both. Tons of blood. Guyon awakens.
Canto 9 - Arthur asks about the Faerie Queen on Guyon's shield. They ride up and find the Castle of Temperance, held by a damsel, Alma. She represents the body, in bodily balance, complete with allegories for speaking, digesting, expelling, sensation, and thought. The castle is besieged by thousand in a rabble that move about like shades without substance. At the end, after seeing Phantasie, Judgment, and Memory, Guyon learns from a history of Britain and a history of fairy.
Canto 10 - The history of Britain and the history of fairy. It goes all the way back to the days of giants before Brutus, with mythical accounts of pre-Roman kings and placenames (like Lear). Eventually reaches the Roman conquest and Cymbeline, who ruled at the time of Christ. Then more time, Joseph of Arimathia and the Grail, and gradually the Roman recession, Vortigern/Hengist/Horsus, and finally Uther's lineage. Then it goes on to describe the creation of Elves (from Prometheus in the garden of Adonis) and Faeries, with a much shorter lineage going to Oberon and the Faerie Queen.
Canto 11 - Guyon leaves the castle with the Palmer. Arthur rides out to defend the castle. He fights the rabble's captain Maleger, who has two hags Impotence and Impatience waiting on him. He's difficult to catch, mounted on a tiger, and he fires deadly arrows (in the manner of Indians (21)). Arthur deflects the arrows, and tries to take the hags down as they gather the deflected arrows, but is nearly overcome. He gets up just in time to surprise Maleger, who very reluctantly fights. When Maleger is hewn in the chest, he doesn't bleed. Other wounds don't bleed. Arthur tries crushing Maleger to the ground, but he revives. Realizing that Maleger is connected to his mother Earth, he picks up Maleger and tosses him into the water.
Canto 12 - Guyon and the Palmer, with a boatman, journey by sea toward the Bower of Bliss. They see a number of pitfalls, including a Gulf of Greediness, the Rock of Vile Reproach, Wandering Islands, the Whirlpool of Decay, many monsters, mermaids (womanish forgeries), birds of misfortune, and the like. Upon making it to the bower, they ward off a number of animals that approach. Genius keeps an ivory gate with a soft wall (contrast with the hard and high wall of Temperance, its counter-body). He, representing lust, is easily defied. Excess is similarly dealt with, her gold cup dashed to bits. Painted flowers and the like follow, a strange and yet beautiful combination of Nature and Art. Two naked damsels writhe and ogle each other, tempting both themselves and Guyon, but the Palmer has none of it. Music pours forth from Acrasia's bower, where she and a lover (Verdant) recline. Verdant's honor has been long forgotten, his shield empty of engraving. They're seized and bound. They find out that the animals are all deformed into monsters by their lust for Acrasia (and her spells). It ends on a beratement of Grill, the pig, who must remain a pig.
Weird stuff - the body that doesn't bleed? When bleeding has been so effusive elsewhere?
Religious overtones here - Guyon mimicking the three temptations of Christ in his own journey into the underworld, and how he ends up failing on the last one.
Giants and monsters are especially predominant here, always the morally deformed other of human virtue. Yet, sometimes those that might be expected to be deformed (Acrasia's sons P and C) turn out to be fine, and just angry knights. Is this a difference of will here, where one or the other could yet choose to be otherwise, but an animal or monster has been changed essentially and can no longer choose?
Lots of language around happiness, and where one finds ultimate rest, especially in Canto 7. Worldly bliss as opposed to "another happiness." If this isn't Boethian, then I'm crazy.
Model of the mind and body (which aren't separated) as evoked in the allegory in Canto 9. Comparison of this body with the similar body in Canto 12. What gets emphasized? Exchanges of the body with the outside world, and the threefold Averroesean model of the mind, which incorporates the Imaginative capacity.
Nature and forgery, especially in the bower of bliss. Not all artifice is bad, as it lists among the feigned "leasings, tales, and lies" (IX.51.9). In that, it seems to take a similar tack that Sidney's Defense of Poetry later does, having to balance the idea that fiction is constructed with the idea that such fictions can still be instructive and potentially good.
And of course amongst all these religious allegories and philosophical ideas you have the entrappings of romance. Arthur has his sword and his horse named (MORDDURE AND SPUMADOR). You have the lesbians in the bower of bliss, or at least seeming lesbians, since there seems to be a confusion where desirability proliferates unbridled outside of heterosexual bounds. Guyon certainly likes it. >_>
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Faerie Queene Book 2, Cantos 1-6
I have less to say about Guyon, the knight of Temperance. He travels with a Palmer dressed in black (and who is called, sometimes, the black palmer). The tale seems to make a lot at first of Archimago seeking revenge towards the Redcrosse knight, which gets crossed with pursuing Guyon. However, he only appears occasionally, first to Braggadochio and Trompart (who stole Guyon's horse after Canto 2) where he promises to get them Arthur's sword (when Braggadochio makes excuses for not having a sword of his own), and again at the end of Canto 6, where Archimago comes at the right time to cure Pyrochles, who has been thoroughly burning on the inside after fighting Furor.
The preface has an interesting note, where the author is trying to justify the depiction of the Faerie Land through comparison to such places as Indian Peru and Virginia. As he puts it, the Faerie Land may exist because it hasn't yet been discovered, like these lands. Though, at the same time, that seems a little too much of a tricky point to make, since it is clear in other places that the temporality of the Faerie Land is in both the past and the present. Time and spatial discovery are both troublesome tropes here.
There's really not much to do with Acrasia and the Bower of Bliss yet. As with the dragon in the first book, there are occasional reminders of their existence, but nothing really present. The closest comes when, after Pyrochles fights Furor, Atin gives him up for dead and flees to warn Cymochles. (Pyrochles is the irascible passion, Cymochles the concupiscible passion.) Cymochles is lounging in the Bower of Bliss, alternately getting pleased by all the nymphs and sprites about him and feigning sleep so he can peek at them. Through him, and the example of Phaedra and the Idle Lake, we begin to see the balance of challenges against Temperance. Where in the first book the main opposition to happiness was despair against faith, devaluing the worldly life to turn either to death or a higher life, here the weight falls differently. Phaedra devalues the pursuit of worth in arms and armor in order to promote a life of decadence and pleasure. It's an entirely different way of losing sight of virtue. This time, it is really about maintaining a measure of balance between different extremes that would cloud wisdom and perception. Sometimes the extremes are wrath and idleness. We see this also in the three sisters in Canto 2, Elissa, Medina, and Perissa. They've split a castle in three, each chosen a knight they favor (Medina - Guyon, Elissa - Huddibras, Perissa - Sans loy). Elissa is too sour and ungracious. Perissa is too given to excesses in joys and choler. Medina seems to strike the sweet spot in the middle.
So there's a sweet spot. There's also the strangeness of the child, who at the start of the second Canto cannot wash its wounds of blood. The previous canto has provided an introduction of the themes of extremes through a lady who loved a knight, who was corrupted by Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss. She had his child, tried to win him back, but Acrasia poisons the knight (with yet another cup) and the lady kills herself in despair. The baby has been bathed in their blood and earth, and Guyon with the Palmer has sworn to look after them. Soon, through the second Canto, the blood that cannot be washed away (in a font that is chaste and won't touch the blood) is taken to be a sign and reminder that the Orphan should wreak his revenge. He's called Ruddymane. How this is not a temptation to some later excess, I have yet to see. Perhaps it's like Francis Bacon later explains, that there is a kind of revenge that can be justly sought, when it's in excess of the law but right is on your side. (He doesn't put it exactly that way - he's being typically aphoristic - but the sense is there.)
The preface has an interesting note, where the author is trying to justify the depiction of the Faerie Land through comparison to such places as Indian Peru and Virginia. As he puts it, the Faerie Land may exist because it hasn't yet been discovered, like these lands. Though, at the same time, that seems a little too much of a tricky point to make, since it is clear in other places that the temporality of the Faerie Land is in both the past and the present. Time and spatial discovery are both troublesome tropes here.
There's really not much to do with Acrasia and the Bower of Bliss yet. As with the dragon in the first book, there are occasional reminders of their existence, but nothing really present. The closest comes when, after Pyrochles fights Furor, Atin gives him up for dead and flees to warn Cymochles. (Pyrochles is the irascible passion, Cymochles the concupiscible passion.) Cymochles is lounging in the Bower of Bliss, alternately getting pleased by all the nymphs and sprites about him and feigning sleep so he can peek at them. Through him, and the example of Phaedra and the Idle Lake, we begin to see the balance of challenges against Temperance. Where in the first book the main opposition to happiness was despair against faith, devaluing the worldly life to turn either to death or a higher life, here the weight falls differently. Phaedra devalues the pursuit of worth in arms and armor in order to promote a life of decadence and pleasure. It's an entirely different way of losing sight of virtue. This time, it is really about maintaining a measure of balance between different extremes that would cloud wisdom and perception. Sometimes the extremes are wrath and idleness. We see this also in the three sisters in Canto 2, Elissa, Medina, and Perissa. They've split a castle in three, each chosen a knight they favor (Medina - Guyon, Elissa - Huddibras, Perissa - Sans loy). Elissa is too sour and ungracious. Perissa is too given to excesses in joys and choler. Medina seems to strike the sweet spot in the middle.
So there's a sweet spot. There's also the strangeness of the child, who at the start of the second Canto cannot wash its wounds of blood. The previous canto has provided an introduction of the themes of extremes through a lady who loved a knight, who was corrupted by Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss. She had his child, tried to win him back, but Acrasia poisons the knight (with yet another cup) and the lady kills herself in despair. The baby has been bathed in their blood and earth, and Guyon with the Palmer has sworn to look after them. Soon, through the second Canto, the blood that cannot be washed away (in a font that is chaste and won't touch the blood) is taken to be a sign and reminder that the Orphan should wreak his revenge. He's called Ruddymane. How this is not a temptation to some later excess, I have yet to see. Perhaps it's like Francis Bacon later explains, that there is a kind of revenge that can be justly sought, when it's in excess of the law but right is on your side. (He doesn't put it exactly that way - he's being typically aphoristic - but the sense is there.)
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Faerie Queene, Book 1, Cantos 7-12
Today I read the conclusion of the first book.
Crazy. Crazy good. Again, the sense of it is sometimes, or even often, adopted from medieval romances with some epic embellishment from classical sources, but the expression of it is original. It's not often that Spenser falls back on stock phrases and the like that can be traced. The language, intentionally archaic, is quite lively. I'm thinking of the one stanza where the giant is jolted out of his complacency by Duessa's voice in the same way that a gunshot would catch someone's attention (13), but the way the gunshot is described, it's very aureate. It's the stanzaic equivalent of "boomstick," and yet so very evocative and vivid.
Anyway, trends I saw. There's a fight with a giant! Another fight, attempted, with Despair. And finally a fight with the dragon. In all of these, dismemberment and bleeding are quite prominent. Blood must flow. Blood must be on the ground. Blood. Blood. Blood. The fight with despair shows blood operating on a different register. The blood is now frozen in Treuisan as he tries to describe the fate of his friend Terwin, lured to killing himself with a rusty knife by Despaire. Indeed, the malady wrought by Despaire is one that seems to lie in the blood - the Redcrosse knight's doubt lies in the "troubled bloud" that sits in his face (IX.51). This blood in the next canto gets a cure - leeches and the like by Patience (23), and the drawing of blood in particular by Remorse (27). He also gets the blood letters in the bloody book held by Fidelia, and learns further about the bloody sacrifice through Charissa and the example of the City of God, Hierusalem (55). All this is in contrast to the dragon's blood in Canto 11, which is quite effusive, potentially poisonous, and black. Ridding the kingdom of Eden of this black blood is the ultimate task for the Redcrosse knight in this book, an exterior representation of his own purification. It also represents the boundaries between species of bodies. (I can't help thinking of Titus, where Aaron never bleeds. Could they prevent his bleeding in order to prevent seeing how red his blood is as well? By keeping him intact, his blood could be, well, black? It's a big stretch.) Finally, a brief note - compare the giant and the dragon. Both are huge, both bleed a lot, and both fall like mountains. Also, there's the fear of procreation with the dragon, which as noted with the lamia monster ... unnatural procreation is common here.
As I've mentioned, the turn in Canto 10 to the spiritual hospital run by Caelia is a little odd. It's the second time we enter an extended part where the author emphasizes through allegory a spiritual lesson (Canto 4 was the house of Pride.) It preserves many of the classical spiritual divisions, as the RCK is strengthened by the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity (in contrast to the four cardinal virtues, one of which, Temperance, structures the second Book). Faith involves a direct treatment of grace, justice, and free will. Hope involves treatment in the hospital of patience, and the aid of Amendment, Penance, Remorse, and Repentence. Then Love (Charissa), who has been absent due to her birthing a child (Jesus?), is helped by Mercy in instructing him in love and well-being. This then turns to the hermitae held by Contemplation, who talks about reaching a good end, and especially the city of God. Then the Redcrosse knight is revealed as St. George, which should be no surprise to its readers, but is to the knight, who inquires about why he has English blood, if he's Elfin? (He's an orphan.)
Ah, this reminds me. Two threads, one for now, one for later. The one for later - orphanage in these stories. The one for now - happiness. When Arthur has defeated the giant and he's talking with the Redcrosse knight (Canto 8, 9), there's mention of both the sureness of bliss and the unsureness of earthly happiness. This comes to a head when Despaire, in his stanzas, brings up as well the unsureness of earthly life as a reason for ending it soon, because as he puts it, longer life only increases one's sorrows and one's sins. Against this the hospital in Canto X works. It's the discourse on happiness and ends I find intriguing here, because I don't think that people have talked about it in such terms. It's not uncommon, sure, but I'm particularly sensitive to it given the work I've already done with Boethius in Chaucer. Oh, it'd be awesome if there were a tie between it and, say, Troilus and Criseyde.
Prince Arthur is worth some mention too. He's a Prince, before the point that he becomes a queen. He pursues the Faerie Queene as his love. He's valiant, and has a shield of diamond. When he and the Redcrosse knight trade gifts, he gives a bejeweled box that has drops of a healing liquor, and receives a Bible in golden letters. Again, all of these books circulating tempt me to focus on them too, especially the easy elision between a holy and a magic book demonstrated initially with Archimago.
Una as a guide. The way women guide actions here is quite interesting, especially the way that the manner of guidance is so easygoing. She is the one who tells him where to go, because he doesn't know. She is set by him in places to spectate while the battle goes on, and there's something important about her viewpoint. I don't know exactly what, but her spectatorship is required. For honor and worship? For telling that the tale is true? For encouragement? A little of all. I've written on this before in relation to the Tale of Sir Gareth, so I'll keep an eye on it.
Otherwise, I'm keeping my eyes open. The book ends with RCK and Una married. RCK then leaves again, and Una stays in safety, which connects directly with the second book, where a captured Archimago (who tried to accuse RCK of being married to Fidessa/Duessa) escapes.
Crazy. Crazy good. Again, the sense of it is sometimes, or even often, adopted from medieval romances with some epic embellishment from classical sources, but the expression of it is original. It's not often that Spenser falls back on stock phrases and the like that can be traced. The language, intentionally archaic, is quite lively. I'm thinking of the one stanza where the giant is jolted out of his complacency by Duessa's voice in the same way that a gunshot would catch someone's attention (13), but the way the gunshot is described, it's very aureate. It's the stanzaic equivalent of "boomstick," and yet so very evocative and vivid.
Anyway, trends I saw. There's a fight with a giant! Another fight, attempted, with Despair. And finally a fight with the dragon. In all of these, dismemberment and bleeding are quite prominent. Blood must flow. Blood must be on the ground. Blood. Blood. Blood. The fight with despair shows blood operating on a different register. The blood is now frozen in Treuisan as he tries to describe the fate of his friend Terwin, lured to killing himself with a rusty knife by Despaire. Indeed, the malady wrought by Despaire is one that seems to lie in the blood - the Redcrosse knight's doubt lies in the "troubled bloud" that sits in his face (IX.51). This blood in the next canto gets a cure - leeches and the like by Patience (23), and the drawing of blood in particular by Remorse (27). He also gets the blood letters in the bloody book held by Fidelia, and learns further about the bloody sacrifice through Charissa and the example of the City of God, Hierusalem (55). All this is in contrast to the dragon's blood in Canto 11, which is quite effusive, potentially poisonous, and black. Ridding the kingdom of Eden of this black blood is the ultimate task for the Redcrosse knight in this book, an exterior representation of his own purification. It also represents the boundaries between species of bodies. (I can't help thinking of Titus, where Aaron never bleeds. Could they prevent his bleeding in order to prevent seeing how red his blood is as well? By keeping him intact, his blood could be, well, black? It's a big stretch.) Finally, a brief note - compare the giant and the dragon. Both are huge, both bleed a lot, and both fall like mountains. Also, there's the fear of procreation with the dragon, which as noted with the lamia monster ... unnatural procreation is common here.
As I've mentioned, the turn in Canto 10 to the spiritual hospital run by Caelia is a little odd. It's the second time we enter an extended part where the author emphasizes through allegory a spiritual lesson (Canto 4 was the house of Pride.) It preserves many of the classical spiritual divisions, as the RCK is strengthened by the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity (in contrast to the four cardinal virtues, one of which, Temperance, structures the second Book). Faith involves a direct treatment of grace, justice, and free will. Hope involves treatment in the hospital of patience, and the aid of Amendment, Penance, Remorse, and Repentence. Then Love (Charissa), who has been absent due to her birthing a child (Jesus?), is helped by Mercy in instructing him in love and well-being. This then turns to the hermitae held by Contemplation, who talks about reaching a good end, and especially the city of God. Then the Redcrosse knight is revealed as St. George, which should be no surprise to its readers, but is to the knight, who inquires about why he has English blood, if he's Elfin? (He's an orphan.)
Ah, this reminds me. Two threads, one for now, one for later. The one for later - orphanage in these stories. The one for now - happiness. When Arthur has defeated the giant and he's talking with the Redcrosse knight (Canto 8, 9), there's mention of both the sureness of bliss and the unsureness of earthly happiness. This comes to a head when Despaire, in his stanzas, brings up as well the unsureness of earthly life as a reason for ending it soon, because as he puts it, longer life only increases one's sorrows and one's sins. Against this the hospital in Canto X works. It's the discourse on happiness and ends I find intriguing here, because I don't think that people have talked about it in such terms. It's not uncommon, sure, but I'm particularly sensitive to it given the work I've already done with Boethius in Chaucer. Oh, it'd be awesome if there were a tie between it and, say, Troilus and Criseyde.
Prince Arthur is worth some mention too. He's a Prince, before the point that he becomes a queen. He pursues the Faerie Queene as his love. He's valiant, and has a shield of diamond. When he and the Redcrosse knight trade gifts, he gives a bejeweled box that has drops of a healing liquor, and receives a Bible in golden letters. Again, all of these books circulating tempt me to focus on them too, especially the easy elision between a holy and a magic book demonstrated initially with Archimago.
Una as a guide. The way women guide actions here is quite interesting, especially the way that the manner of guidance is so easygoing. She is the one who tells him where to go, because he doesn't know. She is set by him in places to spectate while the battle goes on, and there's something important about her viewpoint. I don't know exactly what, but her spectatorship is required. For honor and worship? For telling that the tale is true? For encouragement? A little of all. I've written on this before in relation to the Tale of Sir Gareth, so I'll keep an eye on it.
Otherwise, I'm keeping my eyes open. The book ends with RCK and Una married. RCK then leaves again, and Una stays in safety, which connects directly with the second book, where a captured Archimago (who tried to accuse RCK of being married to Fidessa/Duessa) escapes.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Fairie Queene, preface materials and Cantos I-VI
There are times when the stretch towards allegory seems sincere. There are the two Cantos (4 and 5) that are focused on Pride. Pride is a palace that looks quite gaudy and impressive. It has high but thin walls, and an insecure foundation. Once let in (and the doorkeeper Malvenu keeps no one out), one is in the court of Queen Lucifera. Vanitie keeps the court, while the other six sins (idleness, gluttony, lechery, avarice, envy, and wrath) pull her coach. Each one has a three-stanza description, their bodies mirroring their sins in much the same way they do in the Purgatorio and the Inferno. Satan rides the beam of the coach, while Slowth rests in the mire nearby. It is decadent. It is destructive. We don't see the prisoners and the corpses around this court until, at the end of the next Canto, the Redcrosse Knight flees in fear for his life. He's bleeding, but he must flee anyway, out of fear that he will become one of the downtrodden rather than the victorious. (He has just beaten Sans ioy, the brother to Sans foy (who he defeated) and Sans loy (who tries to rape Una).
Yet there are parts of the story that thus far read as unintelligible. What is Archimago doing, except being a stereotypical villain? He appears to be a true hermit and religious type, but it turns out that the book around his belt is a magic book rather than a psalter. If this book is supposed to be about faith, is Archimago (and Duessa too) supposed to represent the failure or subversion of faith while maintaining the false appearance of virtue? Facade - that seems to be the most striking note in these parts. Three times now, Archimago has appeared in disguise. First indirectly, through his sprites, he feigned Una's disgrace. Then he dresses as the Redcrosse Knight to deceive Una, only to be discovered by Sans loy (who knows Archimago). Finally, as a pilgrim, he leads Una and Satyrane into a fight with Sans loy. Coupled with the castle of Pride, and Duessa/Fidessa, there's a lot of disguises going about.
There is also the direct faithlessness of the pagans, paynims, or the Sarazins (Saracens). Nothing direct about their religion - it seems like their faithlessness is enough. Sans foy, Sans loy, and Sans ioy. The first killed at the start. The second currently fleeing after Una, with Satyrane in pursuit. The third killed (and ambiguously healed?) in Pride's court by the Redcrosse Knight. They are large, but somewhat fair in description, even if they are also prone to excesses. They sound a lot like Cohen's giants. They are a physical threat to faith, and also to virtue.
What else? Duessa's descent into the underworld to obtain healing for Sans ioy is fairly interesting (Canto 5). There are tons of descriptive details, including the sinners that are found there. All of this falls under a general strain I've seen of providing classical examples. This happens even in the dedicatory materials, but there's a constant emphasis on referring to Jove, Venus, Mars, Phoebus, and the like. I've mostly left these references out of my notes, being too lengthy and typical to really pay attention to. I think it's interesting where they appear, more than how they appear. For instance, the descent into the underworld seems to closely mirror what the Redcrosse Knight sees in the court of Pride.
Blood, of course, is on my mind. Fighters bleed frequently, and there seems to be an extra satisfaction in these cantos in telling where the blood goes to. This also ties in with monstrous procreation (Satyrane, the lamia monster). For instance, the monster with a woman's top and a snake's bottom has poisonous dugs from which a thousand little monsters suckle (Canto 1). When she is decapitated, black blood rushes forth from her head. Note, the blood doesn't disappear, but it pools on the ground. The little ones consume the blood, become overfull, and die. When the two knights fight in Canto 6, the blood falls fruitlessly to the ground, evoking its alternative uses in reproduction. When Sans ioy is killed, I believe there is reference to his blood being consumed by the ground around him. Unlike most of the romances I've read, I want to say that blood here is at least two-dimensional. It denotes violence, yes. It has humoral valences at times, yes. It also - and this is important - participates in an exchange where it must go somewhere, must come from somewhere, and must rest somewhere. When fighters bleed, it reads as more than a matter-of-fact detail. That blood is as necessary to the fighting as swords, but more than that, it's not just incidental. It's integral to fighting itself, showing it and its effects on each other and the environment around them.
Yet there are parts of the story that thus far read as unintelligible. What is Archimago doing, except being a stereotypical villain? He appears to be a true hermit and religious type, but it turns out that the book around his belt is a magic book rather than a psalter. If this book is supposed to be about faith, is Archimago (and Duessa too) supposed to represent the failure or subversion of faith while maintaining the false appearance of virtue? Facade - that seems to be the most striking note in these parts. Three times now, Archimago has appeared in disguise. First indirectly, through his sprites, he feigned Una's disgrace. Then he dresses as the Redcrosse Knight to deceive Una, only to be discovered by Sans loy (who knows Archimago). Finally, as a pilgrim, he leads Una and Satyrane into a fight with Sans loy. Coupled with the castle of Pride, and Duessa/Fidessa, there's a lot of disguises going about.
There is also the direct faithlessness of the pagans, paynims, or the Sarazins (Saracens). Nothing direct about their religion - it seems like their faithlessness is enough. Sans foy, Sans loy, and Sans ioy. The first killed at the start. The second currently fleeing after Una, with Satyrane in pursuit. The third killed (and ambiguously healed?) in Pride's court by the Redcrosse Knight. They are large, but somewhat fair in description, even if they are also prone to excesses. They sound a lot like Cohen's giants. They are a physical threat to faith, and also to virtue.
What else? Duessa's descent into the underworld to obtain healing for Sans ioy is fairly interesting (Canto 5). There are tons of descriptive details, including the sinners that are found there. All of this falls under a general strain I've seen of providing classical examples. This happens even in the dedicatory materials, but there's a constant emphasis on referring to Jove, Venus, Mars, Phoebus, and the like. I've mostly left these references out of my notes, being too lengthy and typical to really pay attention to. I think it's interesting where they appear, more than how they appear. For instance, the descent into the underworld seems to closely mirror what the Redcrosse Knight sees in the court of Pride.
Blood, of course, is on my mind. Fighters bleed frequently, and there seems to be an extra satisfaction in these cantos in telling where the blood goes to. This also ties in with monstrous procreation (Satyrane, the lamia monster). For instance, the monster with a woman's top and a snake's bottom has poisonous dugs from which a thousand little monsters suckle (Canto 1). When she is decapitated, black blood rushes forth from her head. Note, the blood doesn't disappear, but it pools on the ground. The little ones consume the blood, become overfull, and die. When the two knights fight in Canto 6, the blood falls fruitlessly to the ground, evoking its alternative uses in reproduction. When Sans ioy is killed, I believe there is reference to his blood being consumed by the ground around him. Unlike most of the romances I've read, I want to say that blood here is at least two-dimensional. It denotes violence, yes. It has humoral valences at times, yes. It also - and this is important - participates in an exchange where it must go somewhere, must come from somewhere, and must rest somewhere. When fighters bleed, it reads as more than a matter-of-fact detail. That blood is as necessary to the fighting as swords, but more than that, it's not just incidental. It's integral to fighting itself, showing it and its effects on each other and the environment around them.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, January 7, 2011
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 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.
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.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama
Traister, Barbara Howard. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984.
I only read the first chapter at present, since the other chapters focus particularly on portrayals of plays I still need to get around to reading. Anyway, just a few notes here.
The first part of the chapter discusses the philosophical lineage of magic - natural magic being often adopted by Neoplatonists, particularly in Italy. The earlier generation of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus recognized it, and three practitioners were around in the 16th century - John Dee, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and Giordano Bruno. They often insisted on the positve potential of magic, even if it had little practical application beyond summoning an angel or demon.
There is also a romantic lineage to magic. The spellcasters in the romances are mostly evil or absent, used to throw difficulties into the plot, but good ones occasionally appear. If they do though, they are usually paired with an evil caster, like Merlin-Morgan.
The author doesn't distinguish a third lineage well, but it is stated - there were village healers and the like who were around. I insist on separating the popular literary and nonliterary.
One more thing, with particular pertinence to Renaissance drama:
"The disguises, of course, are associated with role-playing; in many ways the magician is an actor. Even more, however, he is a director, a presenter of spectacular shows for the discomfort, edification, or entertainment of spectators" (24).
This might explain the seemingly random appearance of the Conjuror in The White Devil as he shows Brachiano the murders of Camillo and Isabella that he has just arranged. These are accompanied by dumbshows on stage. Thus, the conjurer turns into the director who is embodied for this scene.
I only read the first chapter at present, since the other chapters focus particularly on portrayals of plays I still need to get around to reading. Anyway, just a few notes here.
The first part of the chapter discusses the philosophical lineage of magic - natural magic being often adopted by Neoplatonists, particularly in Italy. The earlier generation of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus recognized it, and three practitioners were around in the 16th century - John Dee, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and Giordano Bruno. They often insisted on the positve potential of magic, even if it had little practical application beyond summoning an angel or demon.
There is also a romantic lineage to magic. The spellcasters in the romances are mostly evil or absent, used to throw difficulties into the plot, but good ones occasionally appear. If they do though, they are usually paired with an evil caster, like Merlin-Morgan.
The author doesn't distinguish a third lineage well, but it is stated - there were village healers and the like who were around. I insist on separating the popular literary and nonliterary.
One more thing, with particular pertinence to Renaissance drama:
"The disguises, of course, are associated with role-playing; in many ways the magician is an actor. Even more, however, he is a director, a presenter of spectacular shows for the discomfort, edification, or entertainment of spectators" (24).
This might explain the seemingly random appearance of the Conjuror in The White Devil as he shows Brachiano the murders of Camillo and Isabella that he has just arranged. These are accompanied by dumbshows on stage. Thus, the conjurer turns into the director who is embodied for this scene.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Thornton Manuscript Mishaps
So, I was searching on a popular search engine for information on the Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91, also known as the Thornton manuscript. I search "Thornton MS" and come up with Thornton, Mississippi. "Lincoln Thornton" turned up a lot of information on the 1855 debate between Abraham Lincoln and Anthony Thornton. I then found Robert Thornton's Facebook page, which is his Wikipedia page with a trawl for anyone who mentions Robert Thornton, including one woman who requests that her son Robert Thornton fix her voicemail.
Next time, I'll take the little bit of extra time to go where I know the information is.
Next time, I'll take the little bit of extra time to go where I know the information is.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Sir Isumbras
This is a rather crazy one. Again, I'll tell it as briefly as I can, and list some features that really popped out. (My notes here and elsewhere are not of a form to do a just treatment here.)
So, Isumbras is a lord and knight who is fair, doughty, and strong, and he has a similarly fair wife. One day while hunting, he comes across a bird that tells him that he has sinned in pride. It asks him whether he would rather atone while he is young, or suffer while he is old. He chooses the former, because he'll be strong enough to take it then. The bird flies away, and both his hawk and hounds scatter. Then a servant finds him to report that his holdings have burned down, but that his wife and three children are fine. Then a herdsman reports that the herds are scattered. This isn't Isumbras's best day.
He goes home to find a burnt home. His wife and kids are all naked. He gives his mantle to his wife, and his vest to his three kids to keep them clothed, and they decide to journey forth. Pretty soon a lioness takes one kid and a leopard takes a second. Then, begging food, they come across a ship in a port. The ship happens to be the sultan's, and he is intrigued that such fair complexioned people should be wandering about hungry and ill-clothed. He takes them in, and first asks for them to convert. Isumbras refuses. Then the sultan is stricken by Isumbras's wife's angelic features, and first offers to buy her with red gold. When Isumbras refuses, the Sultan forces the transaction, beats Isumbras blue, and takes the wife away. They get one last meeting, where the wife urges him to take vengeance and swears her obedience in the plot. Then they must part. To add insult to injury, an eagle flies in and takes the gold, and a unicorn takes his third child.
So Isumbras must rebuild himself as a knight. He begs food from a smithy, and the blacksmiths ask that he work for it. So he does, for seven years. At that point he is well established as a smith, and is able to make his own knightly accoutrements, including armor. He soon goes to fight in a battle against Saracens. Though he requires the help of an earl once he loses his horse, he finally triumphs over both them and the Sultan. A Christian King, happy to be thus helped, enquires after the knight and offers him payment, the very things that originally led to his pride. Isumbras refuses both, confesses only to being a smith, and soon departs there on pilgrimage. It is only after seven more years, upon reaching Jerusalem, that an angel comes to him and forgives him of his sins.
At this point, Isumbras takes the habit of a palmer and goes to the court of a rich queen to beg. She takes him in and feeds him and the most destitute at a feast, but he is unable to eat for his tears of sadness. He spends some time there being pitied and pitiable. One day, he finds his mantle and the red gold at the top of a tree in an eagle's nest. He brings them back and puts them under his bed, but the queen and a servant find it. The queen realizes this is Isumbras, and soon the two are discovered to one another. (Yay!)
They decide to marry and become queen and king, but Isumbras's efforts to convert the Saracens causes an uprising of thirty thousand that they must quell in battle. Isumbras's wife decides to fight with him, but his men demur. In the midst of battle, the fighting gets intense until three knights show up, one on a lioness, one on a leopard, and one on a unicorn. It's the three sons come back! Together, they kill 20,003 of the Saracens. (The fate of the rest is unstated.) Then each son inherits some land, and Isumbras and his wife live happily until they die, and presumably ever after.
So, Isumbras is a lord and knight who is fair, doughty, and strong, and he has a similarly fair wife. One day while hunting, he comes across a bird that tells him that he has sinned in pride. It asks him whether he would rather atone while he is young, or suffer while he is old. He chooses the former, because he'll be strong enough to take it then. The bird flies away, and both his hawk and hounds scatter. Then a servant finds him to report that his holdings have burned down, but that his wife and three children are fine. Then a herdsman reports that the herds are scattered. This isn't Isumbras's best day.
He goes home to find a burnt home. His wife and kids are all naked. He gives his mantle to his wife, and his vest to his three kids to keep them clothed, and they decide to journey forth. Pretty soon a lioness takes one kid and a leopard takes a second. Then, begging food, they come across a ship in a port. The ship happens to be the sultan's, and he is intrigued that such fair complexioned people should be wandering about hungry and ill-clothed. He takes them in, and first asks for them to convert. Isumbras refuses. Then the sultan is stricken by Isumbras's wife's angelic features, and first offers to buy her with red gold. When Isumbras refuses, the Sultan forces the transaction, beats Isumbras blue, and takes the wife away. They get one last meeting, where the wife urges him to take vengeance and swears her obedience in the plot. Then they must part. To add insult to injury, an eagle flies in and takes the gold, and a unicorn takes his third child.
So Isumbras must rebuild himself as a knight. He begs food from a smithy, and the blacksmiths ask that he work for it. So he does, for seven years. At that point he is well established as a smith, and is able to make his own knightly accoutrements, including armor. He soon goes to fight in a battle against Saracens. Though he requires the help of an earl once he loses his horse, he finally triumphs over both them and the Sultan. A Christian King, happy to be thus helped, enquires after the knight and offers him payment, the very things that originally led to his pride. Isumbras refuses both, confesses only to being a smith, and soon departs there on pilgrimage. It is only after seven more years, upon reaching Jerusalem, that an angel comes to him and forgives him of his sins.
At this point, Isumbras takes the habit of a palmer and goes to the court of a rich queen to beg. She takes him in and feeds him and the most destitute at a feast, but he is unable to eat for his tears of sadness. He spends some time there being pitied and pitiable. One day, he finds his mantle and the red gold at the top of a tree in an eagle's nest. He brings them back and puts them under his bed, but the queen and a servant find it. The queen realizes this is Isumbras, and soon the two are discovered to one another. (Yay!)
They decide to marry and become queen and king, but Isumbras's efforts to convert the Saracens causes an uprising of thirty thousand that they must quell in battle. Isumbras's wife decides to fight with him, but his men demur. In the midst of battle, the fighting gets intense until three knights show up, one on a lioness, one on a leopard, and one on a unicorn. It's the three sons come back! Together, they kill 20,003 of the Saracens. (The fate of the rest is unstated.) Then each son inherits some land, and Isumbras and his wife live happily until they die, and presumably ever after.
Athelston
This is a treat of a medieval romance, written sometime in the late 14th century. I don't really know quite what to do with it. Rather like the romance before, I'll write an impression of the story without looking at the original.
So, the story starts out with a group of four messengers who grow quite close from working with one another. They decide after some time passes to become brothers, and are able to do so in a ceremony that is often referred to as "weddynge."
One of these brothers, Athelston, wins the equivalent of the lottery and becomes king of England through some pretty odd luck. He acts the good brother and doles out some positions. To Egelond he gives the earldom of Stone, to Wymound the earldom of Dover, and to Alric the bishopric of Canterbury. For a time all goes pretty smoothly.
However, pretty soon Wymound gets jealous of the close relations between Athelstan and Egelond. They confer with one another a lot, and he's envious. So he decides to frame Egelond with treasonous plots that bring him under suspicion. So Egelond and his pregnant wife Dame Edyff are both taken into prison, even though there are concerns that she is too pregnant to travel.
Meanwhile, Athelston shows that he has gone off of his rocker by first refusing the queen's request to give Dame Edyff some relief and then kicking her and killing their own unborn child. The child gets born, a pretty, fair, white and red child. All noble, except for the small problem of being stillborn. It's quite affecting, so much so that the queen then writes to the Archbishop Alric in order to plead for intercession. The messenger here gets considerable detail devoted to him, losing his horse in the effort to ride quickly. Rather baldly, he's the true messenger in contrast to the king, a messenger who's lost his way.
So the Archbishop finds the king in prayer, and attempts to urge a trial. Athelston refuses and disinvests him. In return, Alric excommunicates the king and slams England with an interdiction. Alric then leaves, and while walking through the city, must explain to a knight why he can no longer perform his church functions. This leads to a popular upswelling that forces Athelston to listen. They reach an accord to attempt a doom, or a trial by ordeal. They heat up several (nine?) plowshares and have the earl, his wife, and their previous children traverse them. Each pass over them unscathed. The wife enters labor while walking over them, and the result is Saint Edmund!
Anyway, once they do this, the messenger is asked to deliver a message to the Earl of Dover, telling him that the traitors have been killed and urging him to come. When the Earl does, he must undergo the trial. He is revealed to be a liar, is drawn and hung, and so the tale ends.
So, the story starts out with a group of four messengers who grow quite close from working with one another. They decide after some time passes to become brothers, and are able to do so in a ceremony that is often referred to as "weddynge."
One of these brothers, Athelston, wins the equivalent of the lottery and becomes king of England through some pretty odd luck. He acts the good brother and doles out some positions. To Egelond he gives the earldom of Stone, to Wymound the earldom of Dover, and to Alric the bishopric of Canterbury. For a time all goes pretty smoothly.
However, pretty soon Wymound gets jealous of the close relations between Athelstan and Egelond. They confer with one another a lot, and he's envious. So he decides to frame Egelond with treasonous plots that bring him under suspicion. So Egelond and his pregnant wife Dame Edyff are both taken into prison, even though there are concerns that she is too pregnant to travel.
Meanwhile, Athelston shows that he has gone off of his rocker by first refusing the queen's request to give Dame Edyff some relief and then kicking her and killing their own unborn child. The child gets born, a pretty, fair, white and red child. All noble, except for the small problem of being stillborn. It's quite affecting, so much so that the queen then writes to the Archbishop Alric in order to plead for intercession. The messenger here gets considerable detail devoted to him, losing his horse in the effort to ride quickly. Rather baldly, he's the true messenger in contrast to the king, a messenger who's lost his way.
So the Archbishop finds the king in prayer, and attempts to urge a trial. Athelston refuses and disinvests him. In return, Alric excommunicates the king and slams England with an interdiction. Alric then leaves, and while walking through the city, must explain to a knight why he can no longer perform his church functions. This leads to a popular upswelling that forces Athelston to listen. They reach an accord to attempt a doom, or a trial by ordeal. They heat up several (nine?) plowshares and have the earl, his wife, and their previous children traverse them. Each pass over them unscathed. The wife enters labor while walking over them, and the result is Saint Edmund!
Anyway, once they do this, the messenger is asked to deliver a message to the Earl of Dover, telling him that the traitors have been killed and urging him to come. When the Earl does, he must undergo the trial. He is revealed to be a liar, is drawn and hung, and so the tale ends.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
An Excerpt from Thomas Culpeper, The English Physician
"THE VINE.
The Leaves of the English Vine (I do not intend to send you to the Canaries for a Medicine) being boyled make a good Lotion for sore Mouths, being boyled with Barley Meal into a Pultis, it cools Inflamations of Wounds, the droppings of the Vine when 'tis cut in the spring, which Country people call Tears, being boyled into a Syrup with Sore Mouth, Inflamations, Womens Longing, Stone, Teeth black. Sugar and taken inwardly, is excellent to stay Womens longings after every thing they see, which is a Disease many Women with Child are subject too; the Decoction of Vine Leaves in white Wine doth the like: also the Tears of the Vine drunk, two or three spoonfuls at a time, breaks the Stone in the Bladder: This is a very good Remedy, and it is discreetly done to kill a Vine to cure a Man, but the Salt of the Leaves is held to be better. The Ashes of the burnt Branches will make Teeth that are as black as a coal to be as white as snow if you do but every morning rub them with it."
I was searching for this in order to find out more about coal-black characterizations, because they often get used with other black objects to describe racial bodies. But, bonus, there's this little bit on women's longings that I would have never known otherwise. Is this about a woman craving pickles and ice cream? Sex? Everything?
Monday, October 18, 2010
A Summary of Sir Bevis of Hamtoun
I recommend that you read it if you get any glee at reading the quirky details of violence and custom that go into many medieval romances. This is one of the better ones, because it goes all through Bevis's life. It really could have stopped at several points, but it doesn't, though the author often says things like, "Well, I'll summarize here." So here's a brief, if less well-written, synopsis.
So, there once was a king of Hampton, whose wife was princess of Scotland.
She had a son named Bevis of Hampton.
The king was old, and she was young. So she soon developed a taste for her former love, the German emperor. She tells him to ambush the king and murder him. The king is set upon during a hunting trip, and though his retinue of fifteen is slaughtered, he manages to kill hundreds before he is finally subdued. O, if only he were at his full strength.
Now, before the body is cold, the two marry and have lots of sex. Bevis, all of seven years old, is now disinherited. So he goes up to his mom and calls her a filthy whore. She is scandalized, and orders her retainer Saber to kill him. Saber forbears, smears some pig’s blood on him, and calls it a day. She soon sees through this ruse, and Saber must hide the boy away, promising him a pastoral upbringing. But Bevis’s big mouth ruins it again, as he goes to visit the emperor and berate him. When he returns to Saber, Saber sends Bevis off into exile, pretending to have sold him. He ends up in the hands of the king of Armenia, Ermin, and his daughter Josian.
So Bevis gets raised and trained to fight with spear, sword, shield, and horse, as any good (Armenian?) knight does. Ermin asks Bevis to convert, which he refuses. The king respects this, but some knights don’t. Bevis slays these Saracens and nearly earns the contempt of the king, but gets off the hook. Eventually he ends up receiving Arondel, a true horse, which will only obey him.
Soon after, Bevis goes to kill a boar. There’s more violent bloodbathing in that fight. Shortly, a corrupt steward challenges the weary Bevis with lots of men, but ends up being overcome. Rather than exposing the treachery directly to the king, he presents the boar’s head first, because one discusses honor before treachery.
Anyway, soon after that there’s a challenge to Josian’s purity issued by Brademond, an assaulting king. Bevis sets him straight in war. Josian gets a liking for Bevis, but he refuses until she agrees to convert to Christianity. (It’s cool because she’s fair, and so is he.) Anyway, a chamberlain that Bevis forgave ended up betraying him by lying about Josian and Bevis hooking up to the King. Ermin sends Bevis to Brademond with a letter saying that Bevis should be condemned to death, though he doesn’t know it. Following a Judas-bear-hug, Bevis is imprisoned for seven years at the bottom of a pit, where he gets a meager amount of food (half a loaf once every two days, or something like that). Josian meanwhile gets traded off in marriage, and must preserve her chastity from King Yvor. The guy’s fairly inept; Arondel makes an ass of him when the king tries riding him. So the horse ends up in chains. Lo, the dark point of the romance.
Bevis finally escapes by luring a guard down, overcoming him with a club which he previously used to keep the evil adders and other symbols for evil away, and then calling down to the other guard and putting a knot in the rope to disrupt his descent. Then Bevis equips himself as a guard and slips out of the place after a three day fast and some help from Jesus. He has trouble getting away, but ends up praying so that he can ride his inferior steed across the water. Bevis then overcomes a Saracen giant and orders the lady of the castle to feed him, which she does. Then he swings by Jerusalem and visits the patriarch there. The patriarch urges Bevis to only marry a pure maiden – she can’t have had sex before. “Ooookay,” Bevis replies. Then he disguises himself as a pilgrim seeking alms. Josian comes out to give the alms, knows him without knowing him, and invites him in. Bevis’s disguise is discovered when they go to see the horse, and the horse responds by being calm and docile.
They hatch a plan of escape, but Bevis’s rather lame plan gets overturned by Boniface, Josian’s servant, who comes up with a plan to fake a message to a distant castle, so that King Yvor must leave to take care of it. He does, but not before leaving another king, Garcy, to watch over them. Garcy knows “nygromancy,” that is, black magic. On the other hand, Josian knows how to drug him up. He wakes up a day later from his trip, realizes they’re gone by looking into his ring, and pursues. They can’t find the escapees, so Garcy sends Ascopard the ambiguously evil giant to go take care of it. Meanwhile, while Bevis goes out to hunt for food, lions attack. Boniface is killed, and Josian is under dire threat when Bevis returns. Bevis gets batted about, but manages to take one of the three lions. Josian tries to wrestle a second one so that Bevis can slay it, but he refuses, because this would be a way for Josian to tease him once they were married. Ever the man, he takes one on. Josian again offers to hold the other, but Bevis insists that she not. Then she throws him his shield instead and calls it a day.
So then Bevis fights Ascopard, wins, and makes him his squire. They’re all baptized, including Ascopard, for whom a special font is required. Then they go off and come across a dragon that is assaulting Cologne, where Saber is now bishop. They go to attack the dragon, but Ascopard is too scared to. Bevis nearly dies here, but through pain and overuse of the virgin-bathing healing well, he manages to triumph over even the dragon’s poison. From there, they concoct a plan to take over his inheritance. Eventually, they decide to send a messenger to the emperor claiming that Bevis is some other knight that wants to fight for him against Bevis. This happens; they sail across the ocean and kill many of the Emperor’s knights by deception, and Bevis sends a second messenger to tell of the deceit. The Emperor in a rage tries to fling a dagger at the messenger, but due to the copious amounts of sex his aim is off and he hits his son instead.
While all this has been going on, Josian was left at home. She gets an offer to marry from Miles. Ascopard, who should have guarded her, was tricked into going out and was trapped in chains. So Josian marries Miles, but on the wedding night pleads modesty so that everyone will leave her alone in bed with Miles (oh, they would’ve watched). When alone, she hangs Miles from the bedrails. For this act, the townspeople decide to burn her in a barrel, but Ascopard escapes and Bevis gets there first.
After that, the climactic battle with the king of Scotland and the Emperor occurs, and both fall, the former to the giant and the latter to Bevis. Bevis begs his inheritance of the king, who grants it. Josian and Bevis marry (finally). There’s a race, where Bevis wins against cheaters who start two (out of seven) miles ahead. But the good fortune isn’t to last. A king’s son covets Arondel and tries to steal him, but the horse kicks his brains out literally. King Edgar orders Bevis to die, though the barons dissuade him from it. Bevis says, “Screw this,” and absconds with his wife, horse, and Saber’s son Terri.
Josian goes into labor in the woods, but refuses to have men about. They stray too far, and Ascopard comes across them. Ascopard has been paid off by King Yvor because he had too many money problems. His retinue take Josian and whip her with naked swords. The two children are left behind when Bevis and Terri return. They immediately realize what Ascopard has done, with no apparent evidence. The two sons are given to foster parents, Guy (after his grandfather) to a forester and Miles (after his mother’s near lover?) to a fisherman. Bevis can’t find Josian, and so settles in this kingdom where a tournament is held. Terri was intended to win the hand of the princess, but Bevis does better. He promises to marry her if Josian doesn’t show up in seven years, and if Josian does show up, the princess can marry Terri instead.
So Josian knows medicine from great teachers in Armenia. She uses her talents to make herself appear like a leper. The king sees her and sends her away. Eventually she’s rescued by Saber, whose men cut up the giant. Josian becomes a traveling minstrel to earn her way, a skill she also knew from great teachers in Armenia. Eventually she does get to Bevis – in seven years, in fact. So they’re back together, and they go and take back Armenia. Thus taken, they convert it to Christianity, kill King Yvor when he refuses to convert to Christianity, redeem the disinherited son of Saber, Robaunt, who was ruling Hampton, and then go on a farewell journey setting each son in his rightful place: Miles gets England by marrying King Edgar’s daughter, Saber gets Hampton, Terri got his Aumberthe, Guy got Armenia, and the couple return to Mombraunt, where King Yvor ruled.
The two rule in peace for a long time, twenty years, but finally Josian is about to die. Bevis goes to see his horse, which is dead in the stable. He comes back to find Josian dead, and he dies in Josian’s arms.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis
Okay, I feel more accomplished today. One whole book and the remainder of Shakespeare's Sonnets (later!) down. It was 223 pages, too, no small feat even if I suspect the type is smaller in today's books (it was published in 1964).
Overview
C.S. Lewis calls this book an introduction to medieval literature spun from his lectures. He does this by invoking (constructing?) a medieval Model of how the world worked, and then demonstrated how the authors of the medieval world (a) got the ideas and (b) used them. The first couple of chapters give a general overview of the medieval situation, followed by detailing the most important sources for medieval literature outside the Bible, Ovid, and Virgil. Then he details the medieval conception of the universe, including the Spheres, the Longaevi (fay), living creatures, reason, history, and so on. Then he closes by stating how the Model functioned, particularly in comparison to the model we have now.
Observations
1. The Model is an example of the most accessible view of medieval life that we possess. It is an intellectual view that is present even in such works as the South English Legendary. Lewis acknowledges its limits (I think in the Reservations chapter, Chapter 2). The best poets often were aware that the model could be defied, and the most common ones often didn't concern themselves with the model much at all.
Yet it is important to state the limits of the model anyhow. Lewis constructs it around the high cultured man, either of the aristocracy, the church, or the bureaucracy that was robust by the 15th century. Of course he does, since Lewis's project is a literary one, and the literary even in this period is rooted in the written tradition, which has a traceable trajectory that Lewis studies very well. I could clamor for the alternative viewpoints to be uncovered, those of the commoner, but that road is difficult and usually small in scope, delving in traces that often have little that can firmly be placed. It's like trying to find references to the Peasants' Rebellion in Chaucer. Oh, maybe that's one! That sounds like it, but maybe he's just good at describing a clamour in Troilus!
The other option is that perhaps there was not as much unity as the Model proposed. Here the criticism of late Lewis is the same as early Lewis - taking a tendency, making it into a rule, and failing to acknowledge that any exceptions could form a separate school. This isn't to blame him. I love his work, I think he gets the rule right, and he does as much with the rule as he conceivably could have. But he misses the other traditions and other lines of influence that I think are there. I don't know, for example, how the model would address the Christian mystics. Or the seemingly independent tendency in France and England around 1400 to start the querelle des femmes. Again, Lewis is excused, since he was going for a general view. I don't challenge the view, but only ask, as a career-long question, what other eddies of influence might characterize the medieval period, and why we imagine that Lewis's model is the true medieval quintessence? The first question is firmly medieval, and the second will have to take recourse in the Renaissance, to the 19th century, and beyond. That is, for example, my reason for delving into the 15th century, because something changes there (is changing?), or becomes manifest (manifests?), that leads to the rupture of the Renaissance, but which still feels continuous with what came before.
2. I love his summaries of selected materials that got adapted by the medievals. His summaries of the philosophers is particularly useful, since I doubt that I'll have recourse to return to Chalcidius, Macrobius, or Pseudo-Dionysius before my exams.
3. I should pay close attention to his discussion of the Longaevi, since this is the bit that gets at the pagan tradition from a classical angle. Perhaps the angle is more the way that they could have been explained, while the folk influences adopted the mode of the fay. Would it be too obvious to say that something magical happens here through the influence of the popular tale and the romance? This would be a second Model, or the rudiments of one.
4. On p. 142 and following, there's a discussion of maps and conceptions of geography.
5. On p. 162, Lewis lays down the distinction between the five senses and the five wits. I'd heard of the wits, and later today ran across the Shakespeare sonnet (141) that mentions them:
"But my five wits, nor my five senses can / Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee." (9-10)
The wits incline inward, and are Memory, Estimation, Imagination, Phantasy, and Common Wit. Estimation detects the practical parts of a situation (it's intentiones). Phantasy and Imagination are similar, though Phantasy is the higher faculty of the two. Imagination retains what is perceived, according to Albertus Magnus. Phantasy separates and unites it. Finally, Common Sense (Wit) is that which tells us we are sensing, and puts together the senses so that judgments and other conceptions can then be judged. It's the moderator of senses.
6. I would find 185 interesting in studying temporality, since Lewis deals with the ways of looking at time. The view then - that things were once better. I'd challenge that this was the only view, but would agree that the views are more optimistic than are often construed.
7. Look to 191 and following for an introduction to rhetoric.
8. p. 214 - I leave this, as a definition of literature: "Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims."
Overview
C.S. Lewis calls this book an introduction to medieval literature spun from his lectures. He does this by invoking (constructing?) a medieval Model of how the world worked, and then demonstrated how the authors of the medieval world (a) got the ideas and (b) used them. The first couple of chapters give a general overview of the medieval situation, followed by detailing the most important sources for medieval literature outside the Bible, Ovid, and Virgil. Then he details the medieval conception of the universe, including the Spheres, the Longaevi (fay), living creatures, reason, history, and so on. Then he closes by stating how the Model functioned, particularly in comparison to the model we have now.
Observations
1. The Model is an example of the most accessible view of medieval life that we possess. It is an intellectual view that is present even in such works as the South English Legendary. Lewis acknowledges its limits (I think in the Reservations chapter, Chapter 2). The best poets often were aware that the model could be defied, and the most common ones often didn't concern themselves with the model much at all.
Yet it is important to state the limits of the model anyhow. Lewis constructs it around the high cultured man, either of the aristocracy, the church, or the bureaucracy that was robust by the 15th century. Of course he does, since Lewis's project is a literary one, and the literary even in this period is rooted in the written tradition, which has a traceable trajectory that Lewis studies very well. I could clamor for the alternative viewpoints to be uncovered, those of the commoner, but that road is difficult and usually small in scope, delving in traces that often have little that can firmly be placed. It's like trying to find references to the Peasants' Rebellion in Chaucer. Oh, maybe that's one! That sounds like it, but maybe he's just good at describing a clamour in Troilus!
The other option is that perhaps there was not as much unity as the Model proposed. Here the criticism of late Lewis is the same as early Lewis - taking a tendency, making it into a rule, and failing to acknowledge that any exceptions could form a separate school. This isn't to blame him. I love his work, I think he gets the rule right, and he does as much with the rule as he conceivably could have. But he misses the other traditions and other lines of influence that I think are there. I don't know, for example, how the model would address the Christian mystics. Or the seemingly independent tendency in France and England around 1400 to start the querelle des femmes. Again, Lewis is excused, since he was going for a general view. I don't challenge the view, but only ask, as a career-long question, what other eddies of influence might characterize the medieval period, and why we imagine that Lewis's model is the true medieval quintessence? The first question is firmly medieval, and the second will have to take recourse in the Renaissance, to the 19th century, and beyond. That is, for example, my reason for delving into the 15th century, because something changes there (is changing?), or becomes manifest (manifests?), that leads to the rupture of the Renaissance, but which still feels continuous with what came before.
2. I love his summaries of selected materials that got adapted by the medievals. His summaries of the philosophers is particularly useful, since I doubt that I'll have recourse to return to Chalcidius, Macrobius, or Pseudo-Dionysius before my exams.
3. I should pay close attention to his discussion of the Longaevi, since this is the bit that gets at the pagan tradition from a classical angle. Perhaps the angle is more the way that they could have been explained, while the folk influences adopted the mode of the fay. Would it be too obvious to say that something magical happens here through the influence of the popular tale and the romance? This would be a second Model, or the rudiments of one.
4. On p. 142 and following, there's a discussion of maps and conceptions of geography.
5. On p. 162, Lewis lays down the distinction between the five senses and the five wits. I'd heard of the wits, and later today ran across the Shakespeare sonnet (141) that mentions them:
"But my five wits, nor my five senses can / Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee." (9-10)
The wits incline inward, and are Memory, Estimation, Imagination, Phantasy, and Common Wit. Estimation detects the practical parts of a situation (it's intentiones). Phantasy and Imagination are similar, though Phantasy is the higher faculty of the two. Imagination retains what is perceived, according to Albertus Magnus. Phantasy separates and unites it. Finally, Common Sense (Wit) is that which tells us we are sensing, and puts together the senses so that judgments and other conceptions can then be judged. It's the moderator of senses.
6. I would find 185 interesting in studying temporality, since Lewis deals with the ways of looking at time. The view then - that things were once better. I'd challenge that this was the only view, but would agree that the views are more optimistic than are often construed.
7. Look to 191 and following for an introduction to rhetoric.
8. p. 214 - I leave this, as a definition of literature: "Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims."
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Allegory of Love
Well, my summer has most definitely been a summer break. Anyhow.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love. 1936. Amazing what a memory will conjure up.
This book is a tour de force through the history of allegory, starting about as early as it could (Greek and Roman writings) and continuing through Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
There are probably three centers where the book is of key importance or interest to me. The first is in its focused study of The Romance of the Rose. Here, Lewis is best at demystifying the process of allegory. Instead of looking at it as some sort of double-step, where an extra veil is drawn on one's eyes or an extra level of interpretation is required (as with a symbol), I should read working allegory as a story that functions on two levels of action - what literally happens, and what is represented by the action. The personifications are real versions of abstract qualities. For The Romance of the Rose, the characters can be regarded as figures of the lover, figures of the loved, or figures of both. Fair Welcome is a figure of the loved, as is the castle itself, and the other people there. My interest in Fair Welcome is partially relieved and partially revitalized. It isn't significant that the lover treats with Fair Welcome as a substitute for the Rose, because Fair Welcome is a part of that loved woman. I still think there is something going on with gender assignation, but it isn't as simple as, to use a quote I've overheard, "There's something gay going on there."
Two is the interstitial period, and particularly figures like Chaucer and Langland that tend to fill the middle line of allegory, where it develops and gets adapted to other genres (like the romance), or where it is developed enough to become a mere veneer for other work (rather like the 19th century Gothic architecture as compared to its 12th century roots). One point that is laughable here - how Lewis judges poems and poetry. Besides his other humorous disparagements and praises, he frequently draws the distinction between a poet and poetry (from Shelley or Wordsworth, for instance?). I think he struggles here with a form of the intentional fallacy that would soon emerge. What is best - a poet that realizes his talents and produces the greatest art intentionally, for intended meaning is more poignant (if not more meaningful) than accidental meaning. What many poets (and non-poets, in his parlance) produce - poetry, that which can delight and excite both the intellect and its sentiments, which has rhythm, structure, and intangible ectasy. I think I could learn from him how to judge quality in writing. At the same time, I see how silly such pursuits sound now. This is a day where we demonstrate the worth of a text through more subdued means. (I realized that the spots I observed were between poems and poetry, but both differences abound. His bias in the latter case is between what qualifies a full poem structurally, and the bits that strike him as good in any work.)
He reads the poets quite well, and I'll have to return to him when I'm done with Chaucer. He also gives a brief travel through the 15th century that is more a light skip, but which may be useful for summaries when I don't want to read a 24,000 line poem once, let alone twice.
Three is The Faerie Queene. He provides a diligent allegorical reading for each book, while being careful to distinguish those elements that do not cleanly fit his allegorical reading well. For Lewis, there is an allegorical core to every book, and then the spiraling adventures that can serve as examples or exemplars of the central theme but which cannot be read in the allegorical manner - they are fantasy, or romance, without much superstructure. Mutabilitie is the core without the dressings. Lewis is also good at distinguishing between the Italian epic tradition, with works like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where Spenser borrows obviously in great volume, and the English allegorical tradition, from which Spenser borrows a less provable mood and intention.
My discussion thus far must include one other factor, the role of courtly love. He traces that through ancient writing like Ovid, through early medieval Latin texts, and to Andreas Capellanus. Helen Cooper's criticism of Lewis here is fresh in my mind, of how he hallowed Andreas's exemplification of adulterous love as a rule by which to read other books by. I think, contrary to Lewis and with Cooper, that love can (and did) happen frequently in marriage in the romantic tradition, so that FQ, with its frequent marriages and the figure of amorous marriage, isn't the glorious exceptional endpoint to courtly love's common practice. At the same time, Lewis chose his texts well, and there seem to be these two parallel discourses of love, depending on whether one is reverent of or irreverent of marriage. Certainly marriage is no necessity for love, but the lack of it is not a necessity either.
Now for my notes:
(116) - Good explanation of allegory - the two realms of action here are the inner and the outer world. If I can distinguish between the two using the significatio, I can read the allegory.
(140) - The most relevant treatment of Fair Welcome in RotR. He depicts the breakdown in allegory, where Fair Welcome is treated as a young woman by the Old Woman, rather than a young bachelor as he appears. Lewis, typically, attributes this slip to clumsiness.
(142, 222, prior) typical places where poem/poetry dichotomy occur.
(163) A still relevant critique of Chaucerian study - we look too much to the "mocking" Chaucer, and not the serious Chaucer.
(185) He reads Criseyde spot-on here. Criseyde is driven by fear from the start, and seeks above all protection. All her actions can be read in this way, including her betrayal of Troilus.This makes her out to be a sympathetic character, one who ultimately fails the test of courtly love but gains pardon in a court of human emotion.
(220) tergiversation - the act of turning one's back on another.
(233-4) Lewis can only justify studying the 15th century by looking forward, though at points he shows that medievalist glint of really liking what he reads.
(247) He uses Occam's razor to determine that the author of a poem is a woman because the speaker is. While such a process is rather generous, it lies uneasily with me, because women will frequently write narratives for men (Marie de France the first to leap to mind), and men will write in women's voices (The Earl of Surrey the first to mind this time.) I suppose, if one must use an author's gender for any purpose, it is better that it is female?
(270) - Ah, this point made me wonder about age and bad intentions and gender. That's really all I have to say - why are aged women so often the evil party?
(297) Here's where the italian epic (in reference to FQ) comes up.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love. 1936. Amazing what a memory will conjure up.
This book is a tour de force through the history of allegory, starting about as early as it could (Greek and Roman writings) and continuing through Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
There are probably three centers where the book is of key importance or interest to me. The first is in its focused study of The Romance of the Rose. Here, Lewis is best at demystifying the process of allegory. Instead of looking at it as some sort of double-step, where an extra veil is drawn on one's eyes or an extra level of interpretation is required (as with a symbol), I should read working allegory as a story that functions on two levels of action - what literally happens, and what is represented by the action. The personifications are real versions of abstract qualities. For The Romance of the Rose, the characters can be regarded as figures of the lover, figures of the loved, or figures of both. Fair Welcome is a figure of the loved, as is the castle itself, and the other people there. My interest in Fair Welcome is partially relieved and partially revitalized. It isn't significant that the lover treats with Fair Welcome as a substitute for the Rose, because Fair Welcome is a part of that loved woman. I still think there is something going on with gender assignation, but it isn't as simple as, to use a quote I've overheard, "There's something gay going on there."
Two is the interstitial period, and particularly figures like Chaucer and Langland that tend to fill the middle line of allegory, where it develops and gets adapted to other genres (like the romance), or where it is developed enough to become a mere veneer for other work (rather like the 19th century Gothic architecture as compared to its 12th century roots). One point that is laughable here - how Lewis judges poems and poetry. Besides his other humorous disparagements and praises, he frequently draws the distinction between a poet and poetry (from Shelley or Wordsworth, for instance?). I think he struggles here with a form of the intentional fallacy that would soon emerge. What is best - a poet that realizes his talents and produces the greatest art intentionally, for intended meaning is more poignant (if not more meaningful) than accidental meaning. What many poets (and non-poets, in his parlance) produce - poetry, that which can delight and excite both the intellect and its sentiments, which has rhythm, structure, and intangible ectasy. I think I could learn from him how to judge quality in writing. At the same time, I see how silly such pursuits sound now. This is a day where we demonstrate the worth of a text through more subdued means. (I realized that the spots I observed were between poems and poetry, but both differences abound. His bias in the latter case is between what qualifies a full poem structurally, and the bits that strike him as good in any work.)
He reads the poets quite well, and I'll have to return to him when I'm done with Chaucer. He also gives a brief travel through the 15th century that is more a light skip, but which may be useful for summaries when I don't want to read a 24,000 line poem once, let alone twice.
Three is The Faerie Queene. He provides a diligent allegorical reading for each book, while being careful to distinguish those elements that do not cleanly fit his allegorical reading well. For Lewis, there is an allegorical core to every book, and then the spiraling adventures that can serve as examples or exemplars of the central theme but which cannot be read in the allegorical manner - they are fantasy, or romance, without much superstructure. Mutabilitie is the core without the dressings. Lewis is also good at distinguishing between the Italian epic tradition, with works like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where Spenser borrows obviously in great volume, and the English allegorical tradition, from which Spenser borrows a less provable mood and intention.
My discussion thus far must include one other factor, the role of courtly love. He traces that through ancient writing like Ovid, through early medieval Latin texts, and to Andreas Capellanus. Helen Cooper's criticism of Lewis here is fresh in my mind, of how he hallowed Andreas's exemplification of adulterous love as a rule by which to read other books by. I think, contrary to Lewis and with Cooper, that love can (and did) happen frequently in marriage in the romantic tradition, so that FQ, with its frequent marriages and the figure of amorous marriage, isn't the glorious exceptional endpoint to courtly love's common practice. At the same time, Lewis chose his texts well, and there seem to be these two parallel discourses of love, depending on whether one is reverent of or irreverent of marriage. Certainly marriage is no necessity for love, but the lack of it is not a necessity either.
Now for my notes:
(116) - Good explanation of allegory - the two realms of action here are the inner and the outer world. If I can distinguish between the two using the significatio, I can read the allegory.
(140) - The most relevant treatment of Fair Welcome in RotR. He depicts the breakdown in allegory, where Fair Welcome is treated as a young woman by the Old Woman, rather than a young bachelor as he appears. Lewis, typically, attributes this slip to clumsiness.
(142, 222, prior) typical places where poem/poetry dichotomy occur.
(163) A still relevant critique of Chaucerian study - we look too much to the "mocking" Chaucer, and not the serious Chaucer.
(185) He reads Criseyde spot-on here. Criseyde is driven by fear from the start, and seeks above all protection. All her actions can be read in this way, including her betrayal of Troilus.This makes her out to be a sympathetic character, one who ultimately fails the test of courtly love but gains pardon in a court of human emotion.
(220) tergiversation - the act of turning one's back on another.
(233-4) Lewis can only justify studying the 15th century by looking forward, though at points he shows that medievalist glint of really liking what he reads.
(247) He uses Occam's razor to determine that the author of a poem is a woman because the speaker is. While such a process is rather generous, it lies uneasily with me, because women will frequently write narratives for men (Marie de France the first to leap to mind), and men will write in women's voices (The Earl of Surrey the first to mind this time.) I suppose, if one must use an author's gender for any purpose, it is better that it is female?
(270) - Ah, this point made me wonder about age and bad intentions and gender. That's really all I have to say - why are aged women so often the evil party?
(297) Here's where the italian epic (in reference to FQ) comes up.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Cleanness
I sometimes wonder why a lot of people treat medieval poems as structurally inferior, as if the structure just isn't there. I suppose part of it might be that a lot of it has a paratactic structure, a term that is often bandied about by my mentors and other scholars as a prime structure of oral literatures. Short, simple sentences are combined with simple conjunctions, with a larger structure that might appear to be a list of events.
Perhaps in justification, to preserve the idea that many of these works are far more enriched than the generalization might imply (since "simple" too often becomes the one-word prescription for it, when one is being generous and not using the collocation "bad"), I like searching for deeper structures, or alternately finding deep ambiguities even at the surface, to use an opposition that implies that there is a depth to explore. (Deleuze is on my mind.) This is why I play with puns often, or revert to close reading to make a point. I'm very good with these methods. It's making the large, grand claim where I could use some development.
I say these two paragraphs because my first reaction on finishing this is that it was tough to see the structure. Maybe this was due to the language. I have been reading middle english for a while now, but sometimes alliterative poetry just defeats me. I understood the bulk of it, but a few passages, and several shorter units were very difficult to make out. I chose to read on rather than spend a significant amount of time consulting different dictionaries. My edition has a helpful glossary, but there were a few times when my curiosity would have taken it way further than that.
The poem has what I would call four main parts.
1. Introduction and the Feast Parable
2. Noah
3. Abraham and Lot
4. Babylon
The basic message, to condense it in a trite sentence, is: "God likes cleanliness of body and spirit, and abhors anyone who allows themselves to become impure." Homilies are easy like that.
There are some tentative connections between this poem and the others. For example, between the third and the fourth part, the transition features a pearl, which stands for the purity and salvation that the poem is trying to communicate, and may draw on the prior poem Pearl for much of its power. The form is similar to the later poems, being an alliterative verse with four beats per line. There is no stanza form here. I can't comment much more until I've read Patience, but I expect the two to be similar.
A few things that interested me:
So much about Cleanness relies on having proper sexual relationships. Note that sex is not dismissed outright - it is proper with one's wife, in private (esp. 697-708). God taught it to people. In contrast, the men in Sodom insist on having the two angels come out, in a passage that is rather more gruesome than the Bible, if I recall correctly. Cleanness also concerns itself a lot with pride, especially in the last story, but it is interesting that the two biggest sins here seem to be that and lechery.
The word (yogh)yender as a variant to yonder. I found it quite interesting when used because it looked at first like it could be a corruption of gender, a word already in use at the time in the Latinate sense of genus, generis. The passage is at line 1617; reading it again, it clearly makes sense with yonder, a delightful misunderstanding would give this modernization: "And though the matter is murky that is marked gender..." Har. Doesn't make as much sense.
The reason it doesn't seem to at first hold together well, at least for me, is the event in the beginning, the dinner party. That combined with the emphasis on one's appearance strikes me, someone who has always learned that what's on the inside matters far more than what's on the outside, strange. I think part of the emphasis comes from class structure (oh, of course it does). The entire poem is preoccupied with the relationship between lords and servants. The word wyg(yogh) recurs many times, as do others, sometimes for Lot's servants (890s) and sometimes for the servants of the queen of Babylon (1587), just to give a few examples. If one dresses appropriately for one's position, and one's worth is reflected in the quality and station of the clothing available to her, then appearing slovenly before a lord when one could dress better is a strike against her. Then again, does this mean that peasants are worth less morally because they are unable to dress up? Perhaps the causation isn't there, but the general point remains - one unable to afford such clothes would be morally suspect as compared to the honor of a lord. So what does this poem say about those relations, and how does the emphasis on lord and servant translate here when the preoccupation with clothing is so important? What's the likely theological message? How does it converse with other theologians, whether Thomas Aquinas or Julian of Norwich?
Perhaps in justification, to preserve the idea that many of these works are far more enriched than the generalization might imply (since "simple" too often becomes the one-word prescription for it, when one is being generous and not using the collocation "bad"), I like searching for deeper structures, or alternately finding deep ambiguities even at the surface, to use an opposition that implies that there is a depth to explore. (Deleuze is on my mind.) This is why I play with puns often, or revert to close reading to make a point. I'm very good with these methods. It's making the large, grand claim where I could use some development.
I say these two paragraphs because my first reaction on finishing this is that it was tough to see the structure. Maybe this was due to the language. I have been reading middle english for a while now, but sometimes alliterative poetry just defeats me. I understood the bulk of it, but a few passages, and several shorter units were very difficult to make out. I chose to read on rather than spend a significant amount of time consulting different dictionaries. My edition has a helpful glossary, but there were a few times when my curiosity would have taken it way further than that.
The poem has what I would call four main parts.
1. Introduction and the Feast Parable
2. Noah
3. Abraham and Lot
4. Babylon
The basic message, to condense it in a trite sentence, is: "God likes cleanliness of body and spirit, and abhors anyone who allows themselves to become impure." Homilies are easy like that.
There are some tentative connections between this poem and the others. For example, between the third and the fourth part, the transition features a pearl, which stands for the purity and salvation that the poem is trying to communicate, and may draw on the prior poem Pearl for much of its power. The form is similar to the later poems, being an alliterative verse with four beats per line. There is no stanza form here. I can't comment much more until I've read Patience, but I expect the two to be similar.
A few things that interested me:
So much about Cleanness relies on having proper sexual relationships. Note that sex is not dismissed outright - it is proper with one's wife, in private (esp. 697-708). God taught it to people. In contrast, the men in Sodom insist on having the two angels come out, in a passage that is rather more gruesome than the Bible, if I recall correctly. Cleanness also concerns itself a lot with pride, especially in the last story, but it is interesting that the two biggest sins here seem to be that and lechery.
The word (yogh)yender as a variant to yonder. I found it quite interesting when used because it looked at first like it could be a corruption of gender, a word already in use at the time in the Latinate sense of genus, generis. The passage is at line 1617; reading it again, it clearly makes sense with yonder, a delightful misunderstanding would give this modernization: "And though the matter is murky that is marked gender..." Har. Doesn't make as much sense.
The reason it doesn't seem to at first hold together well, at least for me, is the event in the beginning, the dinner party. That combined with the emphasis on one's appearance strikes me, someone who has always learned that what's on the inside matters far more than what's on the outside, strange. I think part of the emphasis comes from class structure (oh, of course it does). The entire poem is preoccupied with the relationship between lords and servants. The word wyg(yogh) recurs many times, as do others, sometimes for Lot's servants (890s) and sometimes for the servants of the queen of Babylon (1587), just to give a few examples. If one dresses appropriately for one's position, and one's worth is reflected in the quality and station of the clothing available to her, then appearing slovenly before a lord when one could dress better is a strike against her. Then again, does this mean that peasants are worth less morally because they are unable to dress up? Perhaps the causation isn't there, but the general point remains - one unable to afford such clothes would be morally suspect as compared to the honor of a lord. So what does this poem say about those relations, and how does the emphasis on lord and servant translate here when the preoccupation with clothing is so important? What's the likely theological message? How does it converse with other theologians, whether Thomas Aquinas or Julian of Norwich?
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The English Romance in Time: More Thoughts
When I had initially typed it up, I lacked my notes. Now I have a few, mainly a list of points where I was particularly interested and wanted to later return.
Women and the quest
I had some disagreement with the claim that Cooper makes on page 53, in the midst of discussing the quest and pilgrimage. She dismisses the female quester: "The outside world is masculine space, where few women venture willingly. ... Apart from a few women warriors - Grisandol in the prose Merlin, the eponymous Silence, Yde in Huon of Bordeaux, Ariosto's Bradamante and Spenser's Britomart - women who find themselves in a situation analogous to the hero's quest in romance are most often victims rather than agents, compelled to leave the safety of their own homes and at other people's mercy. The lone woman at large in romance is more likely to be cast adrift in a rudderless boat than to choose to follow the call of adventure" (53). Now, Cooper has undoubtedly read more romance than me. That was a frustrating point of this book, that I didn't have the context to always be able to knowingly agree with the generalizations. Sometimes I granted it to her on faith.
But, and maybe I've read the romances that are exceptional to this, I think the opposition between agent and victim is a false one. Women are often empowered through the quest, and often undertake a line of action that can be considered a quest. I think of the frequent times that women accompany and initiate quests in Le Morte Darthur. If the space they traverse is dangerous, it is not masculine, since they often show themselves to be better at reading the landscape than the males are. Reading women's journeys as quests in fact alleviates the interpretive problems with some romances, since it allows one to recover senses of motive and development that remain lost when the assumed quester remains a man.
For example, The Weddynge of Sir Gawayne and Dame Ragnell only became fruitful for my studies when I realized that the questing figure here is as much Dame Ragnell as King Arthur. Choice isn't a qualification for questing either - neither Dame Ragnell, Arthur, nor Gawain choose the situations they find themselves in. Instead, a quest is about seeking an end that might be unknown, which promises development and worship to the successful pursuant. Ragnell seeks a reversal of the curse that renders her sexuality into a lewdness that then gets displayed in all of her features. To do this, she must find a husband that will grant her her own sexual autonomy, what women in the poem really want. The curse is perhaps a reflection of the common claim that women could not be trusted or virtuous if they were unchaste, and the related claim that no woman can be unchaste in spirit. The hag is the feared reflection of this paranoia, the representative of unrestrained sexuality improperly applied. Gawain is offered the choice of whether she should be ugly during the day or ugly at night. When her own choice is respected, her sexuality is not a cause for lewdness at all, and she is no longer subject to the misogynistic claims that her sexuality is both inevitable and dangerous. Because she is trusted with the decision by her husband, she is truthful, and her beauty shows for Gawain and for everyone at court. The quest logic forms an instantiation in this case of a querelle des femmes debate that relates indirectly to Christine de Pisan and directly to Chaucer, particularly his Wife of Bath, who tells a similar tale after a lengthy prologue that refutes many misogynistic claims. Where the Wife of Bath walks the line of sincerity and parody (though a flawed character could be right in sentiment and wrong in action), Weddynge strikes me as supporting the women's side of the debate.
That's an easy example, because the question is built right into the poem. I think that the woman's quest is often obscured because it is conflated with magic. Quests often get defined by the tools that are used in them, sword and shield and lance and horse and helm and armor and the rest. Magic also forms an important tool, though one that too easily falls into the background. Magic often gets treated as a suspected art, which is used to support or hinder a knight's quests, often without motivation outside of mischief. Think of Morgan le Fay in Malory, showing up to entrap Lancelot randomly. Lyonet is not remembered for her sagacity in guiding Gareth towards the proper way to be a knight, but for the weird magic she pulls that preserves her sister's and his chastity. When women are involved in a quest, they are often wielders of magic. If we interpret their concerns as the material for a quest though, I think that magic and enchantment combine with a more general skill, that of knowledge and sagacity in general. Reading, even reading a situation, is after all a form of magic - grammar, glamour, and grimoire all having the same root.
So, summarily, I agree with most of Cooper's arguments in the book, but she touched a sore point here. I think that women are more agents than victims in many cases, and quite often a combination of both that really renders them worthy of neither name. In some cases, I would even say that the woman quester is the one that earns the most success and renown. (Perhaps Ragnell had to die so that Gawain would remain the most renowned unattached knight.)
Saint's Life and Romance
I liked her tendency on pages like 124, in the chapter on sea voyages, of comparing legendaries and hagiographies to the romance. I don't really have anything deeper to say here, except that I think the common points between the two are far more common than is typically allowed, particularly in the motifs they tend to trade. They might be somewhat restricted in the different context, but I feel like saints' lives are set aside because we want to mark a distinction between the miraculous and the fictional that may not have been a firm boundary back then.
Women and Enchantment
Whoops, guess I returned here again after getting a lot of my fire out at first. The page I noted (160) discusses perceptions of witchcraft before shifting to a history of Morgan. I wonder why here Cooper is perfectly willing to delve into heroines and their history, but elsewhere is reluctant to conflate such heroines with the quest as an archetypal narrative function. But when I do write on enchantment, I want to return here. Best point: "Witchcraft in the Middle Ages was taken to be an act, not a state, and it was an act that was at least as likely to be performed by men as by women" (160).
Rapacious Sexuality and Antifeminism
Okay, so my notes really did follow a common trajectory. I just liked the example given by Tom a Lincoln of disruptive sexuality on 391. I also liked the example of suspicion given a little later on 398, from The Knight of Curtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell, except this time the husband's jealousy is unfounded, and ends when he makes his wife die after she eats her best friend's heart. And on that note...
One More Note: C.S. Lewis
Wow, the guy really doesn't get any favor in this book. Mainly it is his depiction of love that is at dispute, one that assumes that an affair must happen extramaritally for there to be a relationship of love. In other words, C.S. Lewis assumes that Andreas Capellanus is the normative influence int he medieval period, when that might not be the case.
Women and the quest
I had some disagreement with the claim that Cooper makes on page 53, in the midst of discussing the quest and pilgrimage. She dismisses the female quester: "The outside world is masculine space, where few women venture willingly. ... Apart from a few women warriors - Grisandol in the prose Merlin, the eponymous Silence, Yde in Huon of Bordeaux, Ariosto's Bradamante and Spenser's Britomart - women who find themselves in a situation analogous to the hero's quest in romance are most often victims rather than agents, compelled to leave the safety of their own homes and at other people's mercy. The lone woman at large in romance is more likely to be cast adrift in a rudderless boat than to choose to follow the call of adventure" (53). Now, Cooper has undoubtedly read more romance than me. That was a frustrating point of this book, that I didn't have the context to always be able to knowingly agree with the generalizations. Sometimes I granted it to her on faith.
But, and maybe I've read the romances that are exceptional to this, I think the opposition between agent and victim is a false one. Women are often empowered through the quest, and often undertake a line of action that can be considered a quest. I think of the frequent times that women accompany and initiate quests in Le Morte Darthur. If the space they traverse is dangerous, it is not masculine, since they often show themselves to be better at reading the landscape than the males are. Reading women's journeys as quests in fact alleviates the interpretive problems with some romances, since it allows one to recover senses of motive and development that remain lost when the assumed quester remains a man.
For example, The Weddynge of Sir Gawayne and Dame Ragnell only became fruitful for my studies when I realized that the questing figure here is as much Dame Ragnell as King Arthur. Choice isn't a qualification for questing either - neither Dame Ragnell, Arthur, nor Gawain choose the situations they find themselves in. Instead, a quest is about seeking an end that might be unknown, which promises development and worship to the successful pursuant. Ragnell seeks a reversal of the curse that renders her sexuality into a lewdness that then gets displayed in all of her features. To do this, she must find a husband that will grant her her own sexual autonomy, what women in the poem really want. The curse is perhaps a reflection of the common claim that women could not be trusted or virtuous if they were unchaste, and the related claim that no woman can be unchaste in spirit. The hag is the feared reflection of this paranoia, the representative of unrestrained sexuality improperly applied. Gawain is offered the choice of whether she should be ugly during the day or ugly at night. When her own choice is respected, her sexuality is not a cause for lewdness at all, and she is no longer subject to the misogynistic claims that her sexuality is both inevitable and dangerous. Because she is trusted with the decision by her husband, she is truthful, and her beauty shows for Gawain and for everyone at court. The quest logic forms an instantiation in this case of a querelle des femmes debate that relates indirectly to Christine de Pisan and directly to Chaucer, particularly his Wife of Bath, who tells a similar tale after a lengthy prologue that refutes many misogynistic claims. Where the Wife of Bath walks the line of sincerity and parody (though a flawed character could be right in sentiment and wrong in action), Weddynge strikes me as supporting the women's side of the debate.
That's an easy example, because the question is built right into the poem. I think that the woman's quest is often obscured because it is conflated with magic. Quests often get defined by the tools that are used in them, sword and shield and lance and horse and helm and armor and the rest. Magic also forms an important tool, though one that too easily falls into the background. Magic often gets treated as a suspected art, which is used to support or hinder a knight's quests, often without motivation outside of mischief. Think of Morgan le Fay in Malory, showing up to entrap Lancelot randomly. Lyonet is not remembered for her sagacity in guiding Gareth towards the proper way to be a knight, but for the weird magic she pulls that preserves her sister's and his chastity. When women are involved in a quest, they are often wielders of magic. If we interpret their concerns as the material for a quest though, I think that magic and enchantment combine with a more general skill, that of knowledge and sagacity in general. Reading, even reading a situation, is after all a form of magic - grammar, glamour, and grimoire all having the same root.
So, summarily, I agree with most of Cooper's arguments in the book, but she touched a sore point here. I think that women are more agents than victims in many cases, and quite often a combination of both that really renders them worthy of neither name. In some cases, I would even say that the woman quester is the one that earns the most success and renown. (Perhaps Ragnell had to die so that Gawain would remain the most renowned unattached knight.)
Saint's Life and Romance
I liked her tendency on pages like 124, in the chapter on sea voyages, of comparing legendaries and hagiographies to the romance. I don't really have anything deeper to say here, except that I think the common points between the two are far more common than is typically allowed, particularly in the motifs they tend to trade. They might be somewhat restricted in the different context, but I feel like saints' lives are set aside because we want to mark a distinction between the miraculous and the fictional that may not have been a firm boundary back then.
Women and Enchantment
Whoops, guess I returned here again after getting a lot of my fire out at first. The page I noted (160) discusses perceptions of witchcraft before shifting to a history of Morgan. I wonder why here Cooper is perfectly willing to delve into heroines and their history, but elsewhere is reluctant to conflate such heroines with the quest as an archetypal narrative function. But when I do write on enchantment, I want to return here. Best point: "Witchcraft in the Middle Ages was taken to be an act, not a state, and it was an act that was at least as likely to be performed by men as by women" (160).
Rapacious Sexuality and Antifeminism
Okay, so my notes really did follow a common trajectory. I just liked the example given by Tom a Lincoln of disruptive sexuality on 391. I also liked the example of suspicion given a little later on 398, from The Knight of Curtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell, except this time the husband's jealousy is unfounded, and ends when he makes his wife die after she eats her best friend's heart. And on that note...
One More Note: C.S. Lewis
Wow, the guy really doesn't get any favor in this book. Mainly it is his depiction of love that is at dispute, one that assumes that an affair must happen extramaritally for there to be a relationship of love. In other words, C.S. Lewis assumes that Andreas Capellanus is the normative influence int he medieval period, when that might not be the case.
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