Dennis
2023-10-19 14:55:37 UTC
Sublime Shakespeare Outrageous Oxford
————————————
Colin Burrow
Imitating Authors
...On the Sublime begins Ch.2 with the question which is so foundational to the rhetorical tradition: whether art (techne) or nature produces the sublime style. Longinus’s answer to that question is to emphasize the role played by natural power: he argues that hypsos or sublimity requires an extreme form of natural talent, which he denotes by the word megalophue (2.1), or greatness of nature, and which requires both art and nature.
(Snip)
Burrow (con’t)
When Longinus moves on to discuss imitatio it is as though he is deliberately seeking to remove from it all traces of the traditionally ‘Greek’’ method of teaching through precepts. He begins with a light allusion to the metaphor of the path: one road (hodos) to the sublime, he says, is imitation and emulation (mimesis Kai zelosis, Sublime,13.2). That road leads, not to Rome (...) but to the inspired centre of Greek religion, the Pythian Oracle at Delphi. It is possible to be inspired by an earlier author, Longinus declares, as the Pythian princess ‘becomes impregnated with the divine power and is at one inspired to utter oracles; so, too, from the natural genius of those old writers (apo tes ton archaion megalophuias) there flows into the hearts of their admirers as it were an emanation from those holy mouths’ (Sublime, 13.2).
This priestly description of imitation as a kind of inspired birth develops Longinus’s earlier assertion that the true sublime elevates its readers and makes them believe that they themselves had created it (...). (Sublime, 13.2) the keyword here is gennesasa: the creation of the sublime is a kind of birth, which spreads by inspiration from author to reader, and which is *implicitly ungovernable by principle or rule*.
——————————————-
On Shakespeare. 1630
BY JOHN MILTON
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
———————————-
Haterius ‘Full of the Ben Jonson, on Shakespeare (~Timber)
‘I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov’d the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d: Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it had beene so too. Many times hee fell into those things, could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him; Caesar, thou dost me wrong. Hee replyed: Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause: and such like; which were ridiculous. But hee redeemed his vices, with his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned.’[1]
*******************************************
Haterius - Full of the God
flow'd with that facility - Shakespeare "Profluens/Superfluens"
Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality
James L Butrica, PhD
...Next we turn to Haterius himself, and what Seneca was trying to convey about him; this requires that we put him into two contexts, the historical and the literary.
By combining notices in the historian Tacitus (who puts his death in the year that we call 26 CE) and Jerome (who reports from Eusebius that he was nearly ninety at the time) we can put Haterius' birth in the range of 64-62 BCE; for a part of 5 BCE he served as one of Rome's two chief magistrates, having been appointed a consul suffectus ("substitute consul") by Augustus. His reputation was well established in his own day but (as Tacitus noted) did not last long beyond it. Seneca the Younger (nephew of Seneca the Elder) discusses him briefly at Epistule morales 40.10. The text is unfortunately corrupt, but Seneca was clearly contrasting two very different orators, Publius Vinicius, who plucked his words one by one as if dictating rather than talking, and Haterius, whose style he characterizes as cursus, or "running"; Seneca says that he wants a "sane man" to have nothing to do with Haterius' manner, for he "never hesitated, never left off, would begin only once, would stop only once." That impetuous, unhesitant forward rush was noticed by the emperor Augustus, who is quoted approvingly by Seneca the Elder as saying that Haterius noster sufflaminandus est, "Our friend Haterius needs to have a brake applied." In his obituary notice at Annals 4.61, Tacitus says that Haterius impetu magis quam cura uigebat, that is, excelled in his forward drive - IMPETUS is here a synonym of cursus - rather than any careful attention to detail, and sums up his distinctive characteristic as canorum illud et PROFLUENS, "that sonorousness and volubility," where PROFLUENS (lit. "flowing forth") again suggests his sheer momentum. Seneca the Elder, quoting him at Controversiae 1.6.12, likewise refers to "the usual cursus of his oratory" (quo solebat cursu orationis). At Suasoriae 3.7, Seneca relates an anecdote in which Haterius is one of several orators described by Gallio as Plena deo, "full of the god" (but with a feminine form of the adjective "full," generally taken as an allusion to Virgil's description of the inspired Sybil of Cumae in Book 6 of his Aeneid, though Virgil does not use the actual phrase). Thus, even without the specific reference in Seneca the Elder that is being discusses here, an image emerges of an orator easily carried away and lacking a sense of just when to stop.
Note - Seneca says he did not so much currere "run" as decurrere "run downward".
—————————————
Continence:
The concept of 'proper limits' is bound up with the classical ideal of decorum (propriety in manners and conduct). Quintilian writes that ‘'A good man (vir bonus) will see that everything he says is consistent with his dignity and the respectability of his character (dignitate ac verecundia); for we pay too dear for the laugh we raise if it is at the cost of our own integrity
(probitatis)'
Jonson paraphrases this passage at the close of his epigram
"To My Book” (probitas – integrity,honesty, uprightness):
————————————-
Holding/Restraining/Ruling Shakespeare's Quill:
From To the Deceased Author of these Poems (William Cartwright)
by Jasper Mayne
...And as thy Wit was like a Spring, so all
The soft streams of it we may Chrystall call:
No cloud of Fancie, no mysterious stroke,
No Verse like those which antient Sybils spoke;
No Oracle of Language, to amaze
The Reader with a dark, or Midnight Phrase,
Stands in thy Writings, which are all pure Day,
A cleer, bright Sunchine, and the mist away.
That which Thou wrot'st was sense, and that sense good,
Things not first written, and then understood:
Or if sometimes thy Fancy soar'd so high
As to seem lost to the unlearned Eye,
'Twas but like generous Falcons, when high flown,
Which mount to make the Quarrey more their own.
For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee Ben Johnson still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle.
——————————————-
(Billy Budd/Beauty - noble foundling)
Vere/Truth
'Yes, Billy Budd was a foundling, a presumable by-blow, and, evidently, no ignoble one. Noble descent was as evident in him as in a blood horse.' (Melville, _Billy Budd_)
********************************
Melvillian Sublime:
1850: "Hawthorne and His Mosses" by Herman Melville
"Would that all excellent BOOKS were FOUNDLINGS, without father or
mother, that so it might be we could glorify them, without including
their ostensible authors."
“I know not what would be the right name to put on the title-page
of an excellent book, but this I feel, that the names of all fine
authors are fictitious ones, far more than that of Junius,-- simply
standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding SPIRIT of all
BEAUTY, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius. Purely imaginative
as this fancy may appear, it nevertheless seems to receive some
warranty from the fact, that on a personal interview no great author
has ever come up to the idea of his reader. But that dust of which our
bodies are composed, how can it fitly express the nobler intelligences
among us?”
***********************************
Phoenix and the Turtle - sublime poetry
Truth and Beauty buried be
————————————————-
Melville’s Sublime uneventfulness. Toward a phenomenology of the Sublime – Ruud Welten
The sublime is something strange, beyond our imagination, uncanny even. The term is of great importance to Herman Melville. Moby Dick, the whale, is sublime because of its terrifying existence. This chapter investigates the consequences of a phenomenology of the sublime as a prime condition for consciousness itself. Sublimity is not a property of objects, but of subjective experience alone. Philosophic language and poetic language presume that subjectivity is overwhelmed by the experience of the sublime. As one tries to describe, it radically exceeds its parameters.
————————————
Catherine Maxwell, Female Sublime.
What this poem [Milton's sonnet on Shakespeare] seems to be rehearsing is the sublime. Shakespeare’s admirers, stupefied by the effect of his language to ‘wonder and astonishment’, are like those wrought upon by a sublime spectacle. Astonishment says Burke is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree. Shakespeare’s verse is a pleasurable petrification, a stimulating paralysis. Readers, the poem suggests, remain arrested at that stage of the sublime in which they are exhilarated – dizzy and reeling under the bombardment of its mixed images and multiple dislocations. However, Milton’s poem reproduces this scene of petrification in order to break out of it. The mental spin induced by lines 13-14 mimes the dizzying effect produced by Shakespeare’s verse, *but the cool control and detachment with which Milton describes the Sahekspearian sublime suggests assimilation – the poet has absorbed it and has moved beyond it to a new creativity*. Moreover, the poem is itself monumentalising and thus substitutive – it saves the potentially stricken Milton from the paralysis of perpetual witness by offering itself as epitaph. Yet this is no simple act of submission.
* An example itself of highly ingenious ‘conceiving’, the poem not only reproduces the effect of Shakespeare’s language but it rivals it.* By writing in a sublime manner about the way the sublime arrests writing, and by appropriating the precursor as ‘my Shakespeare’, the poem masters the experience that might otherwise leave the imagination subject. p.50
(snip)
The key figures and ideas which Milton uses in this poem to express the power of a sublime precursor and the effects of his legacy are ones which will recur in different form in Shelley’s poetry. Paralysis, petrification, impress or inscription are some of the means by which we will recognize the disfigurative mark of the sublime, while defensive evasion through forms of proxy or shielding shows us ways of protecting oneself against total constriction.
****************************************
Oxford/Shakespeare/Comus (ungodly sublime)
Milton, John: Comus
118: COMUS enters, with a charming-rod in one hand, his glass in the
119: other: with him a rout of monsters, headed like sundry sorts of
120: wild
121: beasts, but otherwise like men and women, their apparel
122: glistering.
123: They come in making a riotous and unruly noise, with torches in
124: their hands.
125:
126:
127: COMUS. The star that bids the shepherd fold
128: Now the top of heaven doth hold;
129: And the gilded car of day
130: His glowing axle doth allay
131: In the steep Atlantic stream;
132: And the slope sun his upward beam
133: Shoots against the dusky pole,
134: Pacing toward the other goal
135: Of his chamber in the east.
136: Meanwhile, welcome joy and feast,
137: Midnight shout and revelry,
138: Tipsy dance and jollity.
139: Braid your locks with rosy twine,
140: Dropping odours, dropping wine.
141: Rigour now is gone to bed;
142: And Advice with scrupulous head,
143: Strict Age, and sour Severity,
144: With their grave saws, in slumber lie.
145: We, that are of purer fire,
146: Imitate the starry quire,
147: Who, in their nightly watchful spheres,
148: Lead in swift round the months and years.
149: The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,
150: Now to the moon in wavering morrice move;
151: And on the tawny sands and shelves
152: Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.
153: By dimpled brook and fountain-brim,
154: The wood-nymphs, decked with daisies trim,
155: Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:
156: What hath night to do with sleep?
157: Night hath better sweets to prove;
158: Venus now wakes, and wakens Love.
159: Come, let us our rights begin;
160: 'T is only daylight that makes sin,
161: Which these dun shades will ne'er report.
162: Hail, goddess of nocturnal sport,
163: Dark-veiled Cotytto, to whom the secret flame
164: Of midnight torches burns! mysterious dame,
165: That ne'er art called but when the dragon womb
166: Of Stygian darkness spets her thickest gloom,
167: And makes one blot of all the air!
168: Stay thy cloudy ebon chair,
169: Wherein thou ridest with Hecat', and befriend
170: Us thy vowed priests, till utmost end
171: Of all thy dues be done, and none left out,
172: Ere the blabbing eastern scout,
173: The nice Morn on the Indian steep,
174: From her cabined loop-hole peep,
175: And to the tell-tale Sun descry
176: Our concealed solemnity.
178: In a LIGHT FANTASTIC round.
179:
180: The Measure.
181:
182: Break off, break off! I feel the different pace
183: Of some chaste footing near about this ground.
184: Run to your shrouds within these brakes and trees;
185: Our number may affright. Some virgin sure
186: (For so I can distinguish by mine art)
187: Benighted in these woods! Now to my charms,
188: And to my wily trains: I shall ere long
189: Be well stocked with as fair a herd as grazed
190: About my mother Circe. Thus I hurl
191: My dazzling spells into the spongy air,
192: Of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion,
193: And give it false presentments, lest the place
194: And my quaint habits breed astonishment,
195: And put the damsel to suspicious flight;
196: Which must not be, for that's against my course.
197: I, under fair pretence of friendly ends,
198: And well-placed words of glozing courtesy,
199: Baited with reasons not unplausible,
200: Wind me into the easy-hearted man,
201: And hug him into snares. When once her eye
202: Hath met the virtue of this magic dust,
203: I shall appear some harmless villager
204: Whom thrift keeps up about his country gear.
205: But here she comes; I fairly step aside,
206: And hearken, if I may her business hear.
207:
208: The LADY enters.
209:
210: LADY. This way the noise was, if mine ear be true,
211: My best guide now. Methought it was the sound
212: Of riot and ill-managed merriment,
213: Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe
214: Stirs up among the loose unlettered hinds,
215: When, for their teeming flocks and granges full,
216: In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan,
217: And thank the gods amiss. I should be loth
218: To meet the rudeness and swilled insolence
219: Of such late wassailers; yet, oh! where else
220: Shall I inform my unacquainted feet
221: In the blind mazes of this tangled wood?
**********************************
From the Ode to Oxford in John Southern’s Pandora, The Music of the Beauty of his Mistress Diana.(1584)
Epode
No, no, the high singer is he
Alone that in the end must be
Made proud with a garland like this,
And not every riming novice
That writes with small wit and much pain,
And the (God’s know) idiot in vain,
For it’s not the way to Parnasse,
Nor it will neither come to pass
If it be not in some wise fiction
And of an INGENIOUS INVENTION,
And INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVAIL,
For it alone must win the laurel,
And only the poet well born
Must be he that goes to Parnassus,
And not these companies of asses
That have brought verse almost to scorn.
————————————
Colin Burrow
Imitating Authors
...On the Sublime begins Ch.2 with the question which is so foundational to the rhetorical tradition: whether art (techne) or nature produces the sublime style. Longinus’s answer to that question is to emphasize the role played by natural power: he argues that hypsos or sublimity requires an extreme form of natural talent, which he denotes by the word megalophue (2.1), or greatness of nature, and which requires both art and nature.
(Snip)
Burrow (con’t)
When Longinus moves on to discuss imitatio it is as though he is deliberately seeking to remove from it all traces of the traditionally ‘Greek’’ method of teaching through precepts. He begins with a light allusion to the metaphor of the path: one road (hodos) to the sublime, he says, is imitation and emulation (mimesis Kai zelosis, Sublime,13.2). That road leads, not to Rome (...) but to the inspired centre of Greek religion, the Pythian Oracle at Delphi. It is possible to be inspired by an earlier author, Longinus declares, as the Pythian princess ‘becomes impregnated with the divine power and is at one inspired to utter oracles; so, too, from the natural genius of those old writers (apo tes ton archaion megalophuias) there flows into the hearts of their admirers as it were an emanation from those holy mouths’ (Sublime, 13.2).
This priestly description of imitation as a kind of inspired birth develops Longinus’s earlier assertion that the true sublime elevates its readers and makes them believe that they themselves had created it (...). (Sublime, 13.2) the keyword here is gennesasa: the creation of the sublime is a kind of birth, which spreads by inspiration from author to reader, and which is *implicitly ungovernable by principle or rule*.
——————————————-
On Shakespeare. 1630
BY JOHN MILTON
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
———————————-
Haterius ‘Full of the Ben Jonson, on Shakespeare (~Timber)
‘I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov’d the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d: Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it had beene so too. Many times hee fell into those things, could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him; Caesar, thou dost me wrong. Hee replyed: Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause: and such like; which were ridiculous. But hee redeemed his vices, with his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned.’[1]
*******************************************
Haterius - Full of the God
flow'd with that facility - Shakespeare "Profluens/Superfluens"
Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality
James L Butrica, PhD
...Next we turn to Haterius himself, and what Seneca was trying to convey about him; this requires that we put him into two contexts, the historical and the literary.
By combining notices in the historian Tacitus (who puts his death in the year that we call 26 CE) and Jerome (who reports from Eusebius that he was nearly ninety at the time) we can put Haterius' birth in the range of 64-62 BCE; for a part of 5 BCE he served as one of Rome's two chief magistrates, having been appointed a consul suffectus ("substitute consul") by Augustus. His reputation was well established in his own day but (as Tacitus noted) did not last long beyond it. Seneca the Younger (nephew of Seneca the Elder) discusses him briefly at Epistule morales 40.10. The text is unfortunately corrupt, but Seneca was clearly contrasting two very different orators, Publius Vinicius, who plucked his words one by one as if dictating rather than talking, and Haterius, whose style he characterizes as cursus, or "running"; Seneca says that he wants a "sane man" to have nothing to do with Haterius' manner, for he "never hesitated, never left off, would begin only once, would stop only once." That impetuous, unhesitant forward rush was noticed by the emperor Augustus, who is quoted approvingly by Seneca the Elder as saying that Haterius noster sufflaminandus est, "Our friend Haterius needs to have a brake applied." In his obituary notice at Annals 4.61, Tacitus says that Haterius impetu magis quam cura uigebat, that is, excelled in his forward drive - IMPETUS is here a synonym of cursus - rather than any careful attention to detail, and sums up his distinctive characteristic as canorum illud et PROFLUENS, "that sonorousness and volubility," where PROFLUENS (lit. "flowing forth") again suggests his sheer momentum. Seneca the Elder, quoting him at Controversiae 1.6.12, likewise refers to "the usual cursus of his oratory" (quo solebat cursu orationis). At Suasoriae 3.7, Seneca relates an anecdote in which Haterius is one of several orators described by Gallio as Plena deo, "full of the god" (but with a feminine form of the adjective "full," generally taken as an allusion to Virgil's description of the inspired Sybil of Cumae in Book 6 of his Aeneid, though Virgil does not use the actual phrase). Thus, even without the specific reference in Seneca the Elder that is being discusses here, an image emerges of an orator easily carried away and lacking a sense of just when to stop.
Note - Seneca says he did not so much currere "run" as decurrere "run downward".
—————————————
Continence:
The concept of 'proper limits' is bound up with the classical ideal of decorum (propriety in manners and conduct). Quintilian writes that ‘'A good man (vir bonus) will see that everything he says is consistent with his dignity and the respectability of his character (dignitate ac verecundia); for we pay too dear for the laugh we raise if it is at the cost of our own integrity
(probitatis)'
Jonson paraphrases this passage at the close of his epigram
"To My Book” (probitas – integrity,honesty, uprightness):
————————————-
Holding/Restraining/Ruling Shakespeare's Quill:
From To the Deceased Author of these Poems (William Cartwright)
by Jasper Mayne
...And as thy Wit was like a Spring, so all
The soft streams of it we may Chrystall call:
No cloud of Fancie, no mysterious stroke,
No Verse like those which antient Sybils spoke;
No Oracle of Language, to amaze
The Reader with a dark, or Midnight Phrase,
Stands in thy Writings, which are all pure Day,
A cleer, bright Sunchine, and the mist away.
That which Thou wrot'st was sense, and that sense good,
Things not first written, and then understood:
Or if sometimes thy Fancy soar'd so high
As to seem lost to the unlearned Eye,
'Twas but like generous Falcons, when high flown,
Which mount to make the Quarrey more their own.
For thou to Nature had'st joyn'd Art, and skill.
In Thee Ben Johnson still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle.
——————————————-
(Billy Budd/Beauty - noble foundling)
Vere/Truth
'Yes, Billy Budd was a foundling, a presumable by-blow, and, evidently, no ignoble one. Noble descent was as evident in him as in a blood horse.' (Melville, _Billy Budd_)
********************************
Melvillian Sublime:
1850: "Hawthorne and His Mosses" by Herman Melville
"Would that all excellent BOOKS were FOUNDLINGS, without father or
mother, that so it might be we could glorify them, without including
their ostensible authors."
“I know not what would be the right name to put on the title-page
of an excellent book, but this I feel, that the names of all fine
authors are fictitious ones, far more than that of Junius,-- simply
standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding SPIRIT of all
BEAUTY, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius. Purely imaginative
as this fancy may appear, it nevertheless seems to receive some
warranty from the fact, that on a personal interview no great author
has ever come up to the idea of his reader. But that dust of which our
bodies are composed, how can it fitly express the nobler intelligences
among us?”
***********************************
Phoenix and the Turtle - sublime poetry
Truth and Beauty buried be
————————————————-
Melville’s Sublime uneventfulness. Toward a phenomenology of the Sublime – Ruud Welten
The sublime is something strange, beyond our imagination, uncanny even. The term is of great importance to Herman Melville. Moby Dick, the whale, is sublime because of its terrifying existence. This chapter investigates the consequences of a phenomenology of the sublime as a prime condition for consciousness itself. Sublimity is not a property of objects, but of subjective experience alone. Philosophic language and poetic language presume that subjectivity is overwhelmed by the experience of the sublime. As one tries to describe, it radically exceeds its parameters.
————————————
Catherine Maxwell, Female Sublime.
What this poem [Milton's sonnet on Shakespeare] seems to be rehearsing is the sublime. Shakespeare’s admirers, stupefied by the effect of his language to ‘wonder and astonishment’, are like those wrought upon by a sublime spectacle. Astonishment says Burke is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree. Shakespeare’s verse is a pleasurable petrification, a stimulating paralysis. Readers, the poem suggests, remain arrested at that stage of the sublime in which they are exhilarated – dizzy and reeling under the bombardment of its mixed images and multiple dislocations. However, Milton’s poem reproduces this scene of petrification in order to break out of it. The mental spin induced by lines 13-14 mimes the dizzying effect produced by Shakespeare’s verse, *but the cool control and detachment with which Milton describes the Sahekspearian sublime suggests assimilation – the poet has absorbed it and has moved beyond it to a new creativity*. Moreover, the poem is itself monumentalising and thus substitutive – it saves the potentially stricken Milton from the paralysis of perpetual witness by offering itself as epitaph. Yet this is no simple act of submission.
* An example itself of highly ingenious ‘conceiving’, the poem not only reproduces the effect of Shakespeare’s language but it rivals it.* By writing in a sublime manner about the way the sublime arrests writing, and by appropriating the precursor as ‘my Shakespeare’, the poem masters the experience that might otherwise leave the imagination subject. p.50
(snip)
The key figures and ideas which Milton uses in this poem to express the power of a sublime precursor and the effects of his legacy are ones which will recur in different form in Shelley’s poetry. Paralysis, petrification, impress or inscription are some of the means by which we will recognize the disfigurative mark of the sublime, while defensive evasion through forms of proxy or shielding shows us ways of protecting oneself against total constriction.
****************************************
Oxford/Shakespeare/Comus (ungodly sublime)
Milton, John: Comus
118: COMUS enters, with a charming-rod in one hand, his glass in the
119: other: with him a rout of monsters, headed like sundry sorts of
120: wild
121: beasts, but otherwise like men and women, their apparel
122: glistering.
123: They come in making a riotous and unruly noise, with torches in
124: their hands.
125:
126:
127: COMUS. The star that bids the shepherd fold
128: Now the top of heaven doth hold;
129: And the gilded car of day
130: His glowing axle doth allay
131: In the steep Atlantic stream;
132: And the slope sun his upward beam
133: Shoots against the dusky pole,
134: Pacing toward the other goal
135: Of his chamber in the east.
136: Meanwhile, welcome joy and feast,
137: Midnight shout and revelry,
138: Tipsy dance and jollity.
139: Braid your locks with rosy twine,
140: Dropping odours, dropping wine.
141: Rigour now is gone to bed;
142: And Advice with scrupulous head,
143: Strict Age, and sour Severity,
144: With their grave saws, in slumber lie.
145: We, that are of purer fire,
146: Imitate the starry quire,
147: Who, in their nightly watchful spheres,
148: Lead in swift round the months and years.
149: The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,
150: Now to the moon in wavering morrice move;
151: And on the tawny sands and shelves
152: Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.
153: By dimpled brook and fountain-brim,
154: The wood-nymphs, decked with daisies trim,
155: Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:
156: What hath night to do with sleep?
157: Night hath better sweets to prove;
158: Venus now wakes, and wakens Love.
159: Come, let us our rights begin;
160: 'T is only daylight that makes sin,
161: Which these dun shades will ne'er report.
162: Hail, goddess of nocturnal sport,
163: Dark-veiled Cotytto, to whom the secret flame
164: Of midnight torches burns! mysterious dame,
165: That ne'er art called but when the dragon womb
166: Of Stygian darkness spets her thickest gloom,
167: And makes one blot of all the air!
168: Stay thy cloudy ebon chair,
169: Wherein thou ridest with Hecat', and befriend
170: Us thy vowed priests, till utmost end
171: Of all thy dues be done, and none left out,
172: Ere the blabbing eastern scout,
173: The nice Morn on the Indian steep,
174: From her cabined loop-hole peep,
175: And to the tell-tale Sun descry
176: Our concealed solemnity.
178: In a LIGHT FANTASTIC round.
179:
180: The Measure.
181:
182: Break off, break off! I feel the different pace
183: Of some chaste footing near about this ground.
184: Run to your shrouds within these brakes and trees;
185: Our number may affright. Some virgin sure
186: (For so I can distinguish by mine art)
187: Benighted in these woods! Now to my charms,
188: And to my wily trains: I shall ere long
189: Be well stocked with as fair a herd as grazed
190: About my mother Circe. Thus I hurl
191: My dazzling spells into the spongy air,
192: Of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion,
193: And give it false presentments, lest the place
194: And my quaint habits breed astonishment,
195: And put the damsel to suspicious flight;
196: Which must not be, for that's against my course.
197: I, under fair pretence of friendly ends,
198: And well-placed words of glozing courtesy,
199: Baited with reasons not unplausible,
200: Wind me into the easy-hearted man,
201: And hug him into snares. When once her eye
202: Hath met the virtue of this magic dust,
203: I shall appear some harmless villager
204: Whom thrift keeps up about his country gear.
205: But here she comes; I fairly step aside,
206: And hearken, if I may her business hear.
207:
208: The LADY enters.
209:
210: LADY. This way the noise was, if mine ear be true,
211: My best guide now. Methought it was the sound
212: Of riot and ill-managed merriment,
213: Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe
214: Stirs up among the loose unlettered hinds,
215: When, for their teeming flocks and granges full,
216: In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan,
217: And thank the gods amiss. I should be loth
218: To meet the rudeness and swilled insolence
219: Of such late wassailers; yet, oh! where else
220: Shall I inform my unacquainted feet
221: In the blind mazes of this tangled wood?
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From the Ode to Oxford in John Southern’s Pandora, The Music of the Beauty of his Mistress Diana.(1584)
Epode
No, no, the high singer is he
Alone that in the end must be
Made proud with a garland like this,
And not every riming novice
That writes with small wit and much pain,
And the (God’s know) idiot in vain,
For it’s not the way to Parnasse,
Nor it will neither come to pass
If it be not in some wise fiction
And of an INGENIOUS INVENTION,
And INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVAIL,
For it alone must win the laurel,
And only the poet well born
Must be he that goes to Parnassus,
And not these companies of asses
That have brought verse almost to scorn.