Dennis
2022-01-22 23:27:15 UTC
Hollow Praise: Raising an Empty Monument from Oxford’s ruin
In 1605 Francis Bacon published his “Advancement of Learning”, and it is from his discussion of the three ‘distempers’ of learning that I take much of the matter of the following posting in an effort to establish that at the heart of the authorship problem lies the ‘age old’ dichotomy of style and substance, or words and matter/things (verba and res):
THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second, contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. (Bacon)
The key word in this passage that I would like to highlight and develop in terms of the authorship dispute is the word ‘VANITY’. In particular the purported ‘vanity’ of the Earl of Oxford in both his person and his rhetorical practices, and how disparagement of the Earl corresponds to the ‘vain’ monument of hollow praise that Jonson constructs at the front of the First Folio as an empty figuration of the ‘vain’ author ‘Shake-speare’...
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Henry Craik, ed. English Prose. 1916.
Vol. II. Sixteenth Century to the Restoration
On the Vanity of Words without Matter
By Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second, contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. Martin Luther, conducted (no doubt) by an higher Providence, but in discourse of reason, finding what a province he had undertaken against the Bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the church, and finding his own solitude, being no ways aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his succours to make a party against the present time; so that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved. This by consequence did draw on a necessity of a more exquisite travail in the languages original wherein those authors did write, for the better understanding of those authors and the better advantage of pressing and applying their words. And thereof grew again a delight in their manner of style and phrase, and an admiration of that kind of writing; which was much furthered and precipitated by the enmity and opposition that the propounders of those (primitive but seeming new) opinions had against the schoolmen; who were generally of the contrary part, and whose writings were altogether in a differing style and form; taking liberty to coin and frame new terms of art to express their own sense and to avoid circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness, and (as I may call it) lawfulness of the phrase or word. And again, because the great labour then was with the people (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, Execrabilis ista turba, quæ non novit legem) [the wretched crowd that has not known the law], for the winning and persuading of them, there grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort. So that these four causes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie 1 of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the orator and Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his own books of periods and imitation and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo; Decem annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone [I have spent ten years in reading Cicero]: and the echo answered in Greek, one, Asine. Then grew the learning of the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight.
1
Here therefore is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter: whereof though I have represented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will be secundum majus et minus in all time. And how is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men’s works like the first letter of a patent or limned book; which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.
2
But yet, notwithstanding, it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution. For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of Plato also in some degree; and hereof likewise there is great use; for surely to the severe inquisition of truth, and the deep progress into philosophy, it is some hindrance; because it is too early satisfactory to the mind of man, and quencheth the desire of further search, before we come to a just period; but then if a man be to have any use of such knowledge in civil occasions, of conference, counsel, persuasion, discourse, or the like; then shall he find it prepared to his hands in those authors which write in that manner. But the excess of this is so justly contemptible, that as Hercules, when he saw the image of Adonis, Venus’s minion, in a temple, said in disdain, Nil sacri es [you are no divinity]; so there is none of Hercules’s followers in learning, that is, the more severe and laborious sort of inquirers into truth, but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness. And thus much of the first disease or distemper of learning.
3
Note 1. copie, i.e. copia, or abundant FLOW.
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VANUS –
vain, empty, vacant, void
unsubstantial
figuratively groundless, baseless, meaningless
ostentatious, boastful
deceptive, untrustworthy
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What merit lived in me that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can NOTHING WORTHY prove;
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The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Richard Halpern
Looking back somewhat sourly on the culture of the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon wrote that it was marked by
An affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement…Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning…In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight.
What concerns Bacon here is not an imbalance within literary style but the proliferation of stylistic elegance throughout all of serious discourse. Paradoxically, the very autonomy of style allows it to colonize and dominate all other discursive functions; and as if to illustrate this peril, Bacon’s own language falls temporarily under the spell of style, succumbing to a delight in the “round and clear composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses.” This sudden access of eloquence is not a return of the repressed, however, but a witty tribute to the lures of a humanist tradition from which Bacon only halfheartedly tried to extricate himself.
In assailing what one critic has called the “stylistic explosion” [Richard Lanham] of the sixteenth century, Bacon questions the values of the English literary Renaissance itself. Ciceronianism was only one small part of this movement, but more than any other it came to represent a mysterious addiction to style. Gabriel Harvey famously described his own bout with Ciceronianism in the confessional manner of a recovering alcoholic:
…..I valued words more than content, language more than thought, the one art of speaking more than the thousand subjects of knowledge; I preferred the mere style of Marcus Tully to all the postulates of philosophers and mathematicians; I believed that the bone and sinew of imitation lay in my ability to choose as many brilliant and elegant words as possible to reduce them into order, and to connect them together in a rhythmical period.
(snip)
It is no accident…that Erasmus, who reorganized the teaching of Latin around the concept of style, also wrote the first modern book of manners. De civilitate morum puerilium (1530) taught children the codes of civil behaviour as a natural complement to the achievements of “lyberall science”; social manners and literary style thus cooperated to produce a subject “well fasshyoned in soule, in body, in gesture, and in apparayle.” The cultivation of a good Latin style now appears as part of a larger process of “fashioning” subjects – a process that submits not only language but also manners, dress, and comportment to ideal of “exactness and refinement.” If it is clear that stylistic pedagogy is a form of social discipline, it is equally certain that discipline is becoming stylized. For in defining civility as “outward honesty of the body” (externum…corporis decorum), Erasmus transforms a set of social behaviours into a bodily image. The “well-fashioned” or civil subject is an aesthetic ideal that expands the concept of “style” to cover the whole range of social bearing. To produce a civil subject is to produce a “style” – of manners, dress, and discourse. And social style, like the literary style that is now a part of it, is developed not through obedience to rules but through the mimetic assimilation of models. Thus De civilitate supplements a juridical approach to manners – the prescription and proscription of behaviours – with an imaginary logic. (snip) p32
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Hebrew -Maskith – A showpiece, figure, imaginations, carved images
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Empty Figures – ‘MY Shakespeare’:
Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
MY Shakespeare, RISE! (Jonson)
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What needs MY Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones...(Milton)
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"Vain Affectations": Bacon on Ciceronianism in "The Advancement of Learning"
JUDITH RICE HENDERSON
When Francis Bacon writes that man "began to hunt more after words than matter" in The Advancement of Learning, he meant not just form and content but academic disciplines. Bacon explains that Martin Luther called for humanist educational reform to teach the laity to read and theologians and preachers to analyze Scripture. In the Strasbourg gymnasium and academy, the Protestant rector Johann Sturm went too far in substituting endless drill in the arts of discourse for other subjects. Bacon deplores Sturm's influence [my note – Harvey/Audley End speech to Oxford] on the Cambridge humanists, especially Nicholas Carr and Roger Ascham, and Ascham's celebration of the Portuguese Ciceronian Jerónimo Osorio in the Marian court. When Osorio subsequently attacked the Elizabethan religious settlement, Ascham and others dismissed his prose as Asiatic, for they had learned from the Protestant opposition to scholastic theology to identify good style with good doctrine. Bacon, seeking truth in God's Works as much as in God's Word, would place dialectic and rhetoric late in the university curriculum, contending that students who labor to perfect argument and style before they have something to say fall into "childish sophistry and ridiculous affectation."
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Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson
By Richard S. Peterson
...Men should, Crites says [Jonson-type character in Cynthia’s Revels], ”Studie…/An inward comelinesse…that may conforme them…/To Gods high figures, which they have in power: (V.iv.643-6; IV, 158), and this is the goal the poet holds out to his living subjects in the poems. The moral outline or shape Jonson produces is an ideal one, charged with a sense of potential, movement, and change, to which the subject ought actively to conform his soul or mind – or simply continue to conform it, in the most admirable cases – by his own efforts and with the poet’s educative help. What Jonson says in Timber of the poet’s effect on his readers – adapting Quintilian on the orator’s effect on his listeners (Inst. Orat. II.5.8) – ideally applies to praised subjects as well: he “makes their minds like the thing he writes” (ll. 792-3; VIII, 588). His Platonic (or Socratic) and stoic strategy in this respect is perhaps clearest in instances where the collaboration between the poet and the owner of the soul proves an unequal one. If he has occasionally praised his subjects too much, Jonson declares in his epistle to Selden (according to the rhetorical mode of laudando praecipere, “praising to teach”) It was “with purpose to have MADE them such” (Und. 14, l.22) Even more revealing is Jonson’s sharp complaint “To my Muse”:
Away, a leave me, thou thing most abhord,
That hast betray’d me to a worthlesse lord;
Made me commit most fierce idolatrie
To a great image through thy luxurie.
… … …
But I repent me: Stay. Who e’re is rais’d,
For worth he has not, He is tax’d, not prais’d.
[Epig. 65 1-4, 15-16]
This description recalls not only Sir Epicure Mammon’s “most fierce idolatrie” in wooing Dol Common, as he “talke[s] to her, all in gold” (Alchemist IV. i.25-39; V, 360), but the “great image” of gold, Nebuchadnezzar’s symbol, which he dreams about and sets up to be worshiped (Dan. 2:31-8, 3:1-15) Failing a response, the noble shape raised by Jonson becomes merely a “great image” hollow or inert at its core, and his worship of its potential, mere tribute paid to an idol – a strong contrast, as we shall see, to Jonson’s justifiable near-idolatry of the “full” and animated inner shapes that inhabit the cabinet which is Uvedale.note -
The sense of potential, of conduct as raw material from wish a shapely life of soul should be fashioned and raises like a statue, is forcefully conveyed in Jonson’s epistle to Sir Edward Sacvile (Und. 13). There the poet shows an accumulated “heape” of virtuous manners being effortfully raised to “stand” as a triumphal arch, which is then metamorphosed, as we watch, into the implied human figure of a colossus, a “wonder” of the world and a landmark (“marke”) or “note” of virtue:
‘Tis by degrees that men arrive at glad
Profit in ought; each day some little adde,
In time ‘twill be a heape; This is not true
Alone in money, but in manners too.
Yet we must more than move still, or goe on,
We must accomplish; ‘Tis the last Key-stone
That makes the Arch. The rest that there were put
Are nothing till that comes to bind and shut.
Then stands it a *triumphal marke*! Then Men
Observe the strength, the height, the why, and when,
It was erected; and still walking under
Meet some new matter to looke up and wonder!
Such Notes are virtuous men.
The parallel we have traced earlier between the need to gather in and transform in conduct as in literary activity holds true here. In describing how the individual soul fashions its heaped stock of manners into a towering form of virtue, the poet himself accumulates a generous heap of material from Plutarch (and from Hesiod, whose heap of money Plutarch has turned to a heap of virtue) and transforms the whole by adding a keystone from Seneca (Epist. 118, secs. 16-17): “one stone makes an archway – the stone which wedges the leaning sides and hold the arch together by its position in the middle. … Some things, through development, put off their former shape and are *altered into a new figure*” (quaedam processu priorem exuunt formam et in novam transeunt).
Indeed, Jonson’s works abound with “heapes.” These are admirable enough when they indicate bounty or a plentiful supply of raw material to be shaped. This in Jonson’s masque The Gypsies Metmorphos’d (1621), King James, on approaching the country house of the Duke of Buckingham, is invited to “enter here/ The house your bountie hath built, and still doth reare/ With those highe favors, and those heap’d increases: (ll. 11-13; VII, 565). And in a brief later elegy (Und. 63) Jonson consoles King Charles and his Queen for the loss of their firstborn by a reminder that “God, whose essence is so infinite, /Cannot but heape that grace, he will requite.” But on most occasions, heaps serve as symbols of inert material which is unable to stand or empty of animating, shaping spirit – the very antithesis of Jonson’s ideal. [Men stand, heaps ‘rise’?) A nameless, vicious courtier is “A parcel of Court-durt, a heape, and masse/ Of all vice hurld together” Und. 21), hardly distinguishable from the excrement in Fleet Ditch, “heap’d like a usurers masse” (“On the Famous Voyage,” Epig. 133, l.139); whole a lord fond of flatter is “follow’d with that heape/ That watch, and catch, at what they may applaud” (Und. 15, ll. 156-7). The healthy gathering instinct Jonson describes in the epistle to Sacvile is in sharp contrast to the hoarding of substance, unanimated by any generous impulse, described in the epistle to Sir Robert Wroth: “ Let that goe heape a masse of wretched wealth,/……/And brooding o’re it sit, with broades eyes,/Not doing good, scarce when he dyes: (For. 3, ll. 81-4). A house, too, lacking an indwelling owner, like a body without a soul, becomes a mere heap…(snip)
If the repugnance of the inert “heap” lies in its resistance to shaping, its lack of any inner impulse that could raise it to stand, conversely it is possible to stand and yet be hollow. Consider Jonson’s startling picture (Und.44) of the ruined form of virtue, unhoused and dispossessed, beseechingly holding up her broken “Armes” (in an evocation of a defaced antique statue combined with a deft pun on the military target of the satire, the refusal of contemporary nobility to bear arms) to the empty “moulds” which have cast her out:
I may no longer on these picture stay,
These Carkasses of honour; Taylors blocks,
Cover’d with Tissue, whose prosperitie mocks
The fate of things: whilst totter’d virtue holds
Her broken Armes up, to the EMPTIE moulds. [ll. 98-102]
Other forms, empty yet nevertheless ambulatory, are seen moving woodenly through the world of the Epigrammes. Of “English Mounsieur” (Epig. 88), with his Frenchified attire, the poet remarks: “is it some french statue? No: ‘T doth move,/ And stoupe, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove/ The new French tailors motion [puppet], monthly made, /Daily to turned in PAULS, and helpe the trade”(…)
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acervus
masculine noun
mass/heap/pile/stack; treasure, STOCK ; large quantity; cluster; funeral pile
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Casting down imaginations:
2 Corinthians
(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)
Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God
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Horace, of the Art of Poetrie
transl. Ben Jonson
If to Quintilius, you recited ought:
Hee'd say, Mend this, good friend, and this; "Tis naught.
If you denied, you had no better straine,
And twice, or thrice had 'ssayd it, still in vaine:
Hee'd bid, blot all: and to the anvile bring
Those ill-torn'd Verses, to new hammering.
Then: If your fault you rather had defend
Then change. *No word, or worke, more would he spend
In vaine, but you, and yours, YOU SHOULD LOVE STILL
Alone, without a rivall, by his will*.
A wise, and honest man will cry out shame
On ARTELESS Verse; the hard ones he will blame;
Blot out the careless, with his turned pen;
Cut off superfluous ornaments; and when
They're darke, bid cleare this: all that's doubtfull wrote
Reprove; and, what is to be changed, not:
Become an Aristarchus. And, not say,
Why should I grieve my friend, this TRIFLING WAY?
These TRIFLES into serious mischiefs lead
The man once mock'd, and SUFFERED WRONG TO TREAD.
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Quintilius/Jonson
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...
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Oldham, on Jonson
XIII.
Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious Fame,
Content on gross and coarse Applause to live,
And what the dull, and sensless Rabble give,
Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,
Nor would'st that wretched Alms receive,
The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, SORDID* NAME:
Thine was no EMPTY VAPOR, RAIS’D beneath,
And form'd of common Breath,
The false, and foolish Fire, that's whisk'd about
By popular Air, and glares a while, and then GOES OUT...
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Gabriel Harvey – Oration to undergraduates of Cambridge
Do not fall into the Scythian swamp of Hermogenes, that endless and pretentiously vain art, concerning which it is recorded that Hermogenes was so elaborately ingenious he prided himself on being able to include countless figures and other rhetorical subtleties in one and the same period. In which vain labor no few men of our time toil – men in other respects not to be despised, though unfortunately there are increasing numbers of them, especially of those whom your teacher Harvey is wont to call PHILOGRECIANS and PSEUDO-STRASSBURGERS [my note - Sturm/Strasbourg], and whom I would term pseudo-Hermogenes, alias sophist, pseudo-rhetoricians or even rhetorical chameleons: they are not so much nourished with food as saturated with wind and rhetorical hot-air. In truth, through their subtleties, *they make themselves more and more obscure until they gradually disappear in mere inanity*: they have no worse enemies than themselves.
Definition of inane (Merriam Webster)
(Entry 1 of 2)
1: lacking SIGNIFICANCE meaning, or point : SILLY inane comments
2: EMPTY, INSUBSTANTIAL
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Castigating Courtiers in Jonson’s _Cynthia’s Revels_:
Crites/Criticus/Jonson
O VANITY,
How are thy painted beauties doted on,
By LIGHT and EMPTY IDIOTS how pursu'd
With open and extended Appetite!
How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,
RAIS’D on their Toes, to catch thy AIRY FORMS,
Still turning GIDDY, till they reel like Drunkards,
That buy the merry madness of one hour,
With the long irksomness of following time!
O how despis'd and base a thing is a Man,
If he not strive t'erect his groveling Thoughts
Above the strain of Flesh! But how more cheap,
When, even his best and understanding Part,
(The crown and strength of all his Faculties)
Floats like a dead drownd Body, on the Stream
Of vulgar humour, mixt with common'st dregs?
I suffer for their Guilt now, and my Soul
(Like one that looks on ill-affected Eyes)
Is hurt with mere intention on their Follies.
Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me:
Or is't a rarity, or some new object,
That strains my strict observance to this Point?
O would it were, therein I could afford
My Spirit should draw a little neer to theirs,
To gaze on novelties: so Vice were one.
Tut, she is stale, rank, foul, and were it not
That those (that woo her) greet her with lockt Eyes,
(In spight of all the impostures, paintings, drugs,
Which her Bawd custom dawbs her Cheeks withal)
She would betray her loath'd and leprous Face,
And fright th' enamour'd dotards from themselves:
But such is the perverseness of our nature,
That if we once but fancy levity,
(How antick and ridiculous so ere
It sute with us) yet will our muffled thought
Choose rather not to see it, than avoid it:
And if we can but banish our own sense,
We act our mimick tricks with that free license,
That lust, that pleasure, that security,
As if we practis'd in a Paste-board Case,
And no one saw the motion, but the motion.
Well, check thy passion, lest it grow too lowd:
"While fools are pittied, they wax FAT and proud
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Psalm 73:7
Their eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than heart could wish; and the imaginations of their minds overflow [with follies].
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Chapman...
TO you whose depth of soule measures the height,
And all dimensions of all WORKES of WEIGHT,
REASON being ground, structure and ornament,
To all inuentions, graue and permanent,
And your cleare eyes the Spheres where REASON moues;
This Artizan, this God of RATIONALL loues
Blind Homer;
(snip)
TRUE learning hath a body absolute,
That in apparant sence it selfe can suite,
Not hid in ayrie termes as if it were
Like spirits fantastike that put men in feare,
And are but bugs form'd in their fowle conceites,
Nor made forsale glas'd with sophistique sleights;
But wrought for all times proofe, strong to bide prease,
And shiuer ignorants like Hercules,
ON THEIR OWN DUNGHILS; (...)
AN EMPTY PEN with their owne OWNE STUFF applied
CAN BLOT THEM OUT: so shall their wealth-burst wombes
Be made with emptie Penne their honours tombes.
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Milton, _Paradise Lost Book V_
But know that in the Soule
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
REASON as chief; among these FANSIE next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private Cell when Nature rests.
Oft in her absence MIMIC FANSIE wakes
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,
WILDE WORK produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Som such resemblances methinks I find
Of our last Eevnings talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad.
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave
No spot or blame behind:
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Milton, Comus (Lady to Comus)
871: Enjoy your dear wit, and gay rhetoric,
872: That hath so well been taught her DAZZLING FENCE;
873: Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.
874: Yet, should I try, the uncontrolled worth
875: Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits
876: To such a flame of sacred vehemence
877: That dumb things would be moved to sympathise,
878: And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and SHAKE,
879: Till all thy MAGIC STRUCTURES, reared so high,
880: Were SHATTERED into HEAPS o'er thy FALSE HEAD.
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...Sidney, like Seneca, belonged to a noble (although impoverished) line and lived the life of a courtier depending on the support of a monarch whose favors were fickle. The image that his contemporaries created of Sidney is in important ways like the one that Seneca had tried to create for himself, that of a man who sought “to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great” (Dedication 12.7-7). Sidney appears to have had for the curriculum at Oxford the same scorn that Seneca had expressed for its essentially Roman model: It teaches words rather than things. In a letter to his brother Robert, Sidney wrote: “So yow can speake and write Latine not barbarously I never require great study in Ciceronianisme the cheife abuse of Oxford, Qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt”* (Works, 3). Seneca likewise had condemned both the philological (Ep.88.3-4) and rhetorical (Ep.100.10) focus on words at the expense of subject: Sic ista ediscamus, ut quae fuerint verba, sint opera (Ep. 108.35). [Let us learn those things so that what have been words might become works].
* where, while they eagerly pursue words, they neglect things themselves. (note matter vs. Manner debate which had broken out among the Humanists.)
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Cynthia’s Revels, Jonson
P R O L O G U E.
F gracious silence, sweet attention,
Quick sight, and quicker apprehension,
(The lights of Judgments throne) shine any where;
Our doubtful Author hopes this is their Sphere.
And therefore opens he himself to those;
To other weaker Beams his labours close:
As loth to prostitute their Virgin strain,
To ev'ry vulgar and adult'rate Brain,
In this alone, his Muse her sweetness hath,
She shuns the print of any beaten Path;
And proves new ways to come to learned Ears:
Pied ignorance she neither loves nor, fears.
Nor hunts she after popular Applause,
Or fomy praise, that drops from common Jaws:
The Garland that she wears, their bands must twine,
Who can both censure, understand, define
What merit is: Then cast those piercing Rays,
Round as a Crown, instead of honour'd Bays,
About his Poesie; which (he knows) affords
Words, above action: MATTER, above WORDS.
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HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN: MONSTERS, METAPHORS, AND MAGIC
BY ROBERT E. STILLMAN
Hobbes's sense of his place in cultural history is key to understanding the character and the contradictions of Leviathan. Early and late in his long writing career, he represents his philosophical life as a battle against monstrous texts. De cive's "Preface to the Reader" narrates a Hobbesian myth of the fall, in which a golden age of power and authority enjoyed by sovereigns is destroyed by the "disputations" of private men. 1 To illustrate his point, Hobbes cites the classical fable of Ixion's adulterous courtship of Juno: "Offering to embrace her, he clasped a cloud; from whence the Centaurs proceeded, by nature half men, half horses, a fierce, a fighting, and unquiet generation" (2:xiii). His allegorization of the fable is Baconian both in its method -- its derivation of philosophical truths from mythology -- and in its attribution of the origins of political sedition to seditious language and seditious desires: "private men being called to councils of state, desired to prostitute justice, the only sister and wife of the supreme, to their own judgments and apprehensions; but embracing a false and empty shadow instead of it, they have begotten those hermaphrodite opinions of moral philosophers, partly right and comely, partly brutal and wild"
(snip)
Hobbes is fond of metaphors of the monstrous, and his employment of them, especially in crucial accounts of his own vocational ambitions, is recurrent and revealing. His claim to having spent a career battling the metaphorical monsters of false systems of knowledge complements his lifelong attacks, I will argue, against the monsters of metaphor. Viewed from a broad historical perspective, Hobbes's attack stands as one characteristic, albeit especially fierce, expression of hostility to metaphor on the part of the seventeenth century's new philosophers. Monsters, as marvels of nature, have their verbal counterparts in metaphors, the marvels of speech. As Paul de Man argues, within metaphors, as inside the most violent catachreses, "something monstrous lurks." 4 (The very word catachresis means an "abuse" of language.) Metaphors can appear dangerous, even monstrous, because "they are capable of inventing the most fantastic entities by dint of the positional power inherent in language. They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man with woman or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes." 5 As a consequence, de Man argues, metaphor has been "a perennial problem and, at times, a recognized source of embarrassment for philosophical discourse." 6 That embarrassment becomes especially acute during the seventeenth century because of metaphor's association with subjective imagination, passion, and the monstrous, with all that contrasts with objective judgment, reason, and the natural. As a result, the opposition between the literal and the figural underlies many of the crucial polarities of the century's discourse: the divide between truth and falsehood, natural philosophy and poetry, philosophical discourse and rhetoric, to name only a few. 7 Especially in the civil war years, a hostility to metaphor becomes acute, too, because as a monstrous rebel to linguistic law, metaphor is associated with the monstrous rebels of mob rule. To attack metaphor is to attack the monstrous mother of all seditious philosophies, and a monstrous breeder of sedition itself.
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Jonson's 'Monstrous' Encomium:
Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one TO SHOW
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
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Another archaic definition of monster found in the OED is “to exhibit” or “to point out as something remarkable.” This usage is true to the Latin origin monstrāre, meaning “to show” or “point” (“monster”).-- Brumley, Mark Elliott
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Disproportionate and Ambisinister Droeshout Engraving:
BRUMLEY, MARK ELLIOTT, Ph.D.
Declamation And Dismemberment: Rhetoric, The
Body, And Disarticulation In Four Victorian Horror Novels. (2015).
...Declamation, therefore, was originally a rhetorical training exercise that engaged students’ imaginations and asked them to adopt personas to deliver formal speeches. This training, Thomas Habinek writes, taught students to “impersonate a wide variety of characters, from slaves to gods, foreigners to Roman heroes, male and female, young and old, indiscriminately” (68).
Some of these characters and situations were disturbing, if not horrifying. In this way, rhetorical training exercises helped forge an enduring link between declamation and monstrosity.
Fully understanding this link requires readers to momentarily set aside associations of monstrosity with something frightening, freakish, unnatural, or large. The word monster has had multiple definitions throughout the years, and many of those definitions found their way into nineteenth-century culture. A forerunner of the modern word monster in the Old French of the twelfth century was mostre, which meant a “prodigy”or “marvel,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. One correspondence found in the OED is an obsolete early modern definition of monster as a verb meaning “to assume the appearance of greatness.” Here is a clear connection to declamations the act of assuming the persona or a great historical figure to deliver a formal speech. The links, however, do not end with one possible meaning. Another archaic definition of monster found in the OED is “to exhibit” or “to point out as something remarkable.” This usage is true to the Latin origin monstrāre, meaning “to show” or “point” (“monster”).
The same word is the origin for the French montrer, and the English “demonstrate” (“demonstrate”). As Michel Foucault points out in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, “monsters” are “etymologically, beings or things to be shown” (68).
Foucault refers specifically to the practice of publically exhibiting insane people, a practice that continued in England until the early nineteenth century. Foucault writes that according to a House of Commons report, “lunatics” at the hospital in Bethlehem were being exhibited on Sundays, with spectators being charged a penny. The annual revenue from the displays totaled nearly 400 pounds, indicating 96,000 visits per year (66). The insane people in these shows come closer to the modern sense of the word monster as something abnormal or deformed, something freakish. Yet another meaning for the word monster is suggested by the Latin word monēre, which means “to warn”(“monster”).
The meaning of monster as a warning is explained by Chris Baldick: “In a world created by a reasonable God, the freak or lunatic must have a purpose: to reveal visibly the results of vice, folly, and
unreason, as a warning” (10). So, both “declamation” and “monstrosity” can be construed generally as a display involving the body intended to send some sort of message. In this sense, “declamation” and “monstrosity” approximate the meaning of epideixis, the root of epideictic, whose “nearest equivalents in English are ‘display’‘show’‘demonstration’” (Carey 237).
Hawhee writes that “epidexis primarily meant a material or bodily display...,” one that “becomes manifest via discourse” (175).This link to epidexis adds another consideration, which is that no display is possible without an audience and its reaction. Hawhee cites Simon Goldhill’s point that “‘epidexis requires an audience’’” (qtd. in 175). She also states that “viewers ... are not passive recipients of the display and the knowledge it produces....” (176). Drawing on other scholarship, Hawhee writes that epideictic requires observation and judgment: “...epideictic discourse demands an active evaluation and response” (176).This is an important concept for this study, which claims that nineteenth-century horror fiction uses epideictic to produce fear in audiences by depicting characters’ encounters with monstrosities such as Frankenstein’s creature, Dracula, Edward Hyde, the Beast People, and Dorian Gray. Epideictic is evident in the characters’ negative reaction to the monstrosities, their inability to express it effectively in speech, and their transformations after the encounters.
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Fulke Greville, Chief Sidneian, Hereditary Recorder of Stratford-upon -Avon
Who worship Fame, commit Idolatry,
Make Men their God, Fortune and Time their worth,
Forme, but reforme not, meer hypocrisie,
By shadowes, onely shadowes bringing forth,
Which must, as blossomes, fade ere true fruit springs,
(Like voice, and eccho) ioyn'd; yet diuers things.
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Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England
By Mary Thomas Crane
…[It] was a deeply threatening idea that a particular kind of education (or, indeed, a prose style indicative of that education) could replace birth and wealth as criteria for access to power. It posed the greatest threat, as Lawrence Stone points out, to the aristocrats whom it disenfranchised, and until they were able, in the seventeenth century, to recast educational credentials on the basis of attendance at certain elite (and expensive) schools, they were forced to reassert an alternative training for aristocratic youth. It also threatened the humanists themselves, who saw in their own upward mobility not only potentially dangerous eminence but also a disquieting acquiescence in capitalist and republican tendencies and a palpable threat to the concepts of order and hierarchy that they promulgated. These issues surface (in the 1520s through the 1540s) in the form of preoccupation with “value,” and in discussions of what society ought to value and how “wealth” (both monetary and cultural) should be displayed and shared.
Stone has shown how the “educational revolution” effected by English humanists contributed to the “crisis of the aristocracy” in the seventeenth century. He argues that in the sixteenth century, the new ideal of “gentleman” based on education “increased the opportunities of the gentry to compete for office on more equal terms with the nobility.” There are signs, however, of ARISTOCRATIC RESISTANCE to the humanist model of counsel, and in this resistance lie the seeds of the alternative model of courtly advancement, the ITALIANATE COURTIER. According to this model, “WORTH” is manifested through the conspicuous consumption of “worthless” TRIFLES (clothes, jewelry) and participation in frivolous pastimes (hunting, dicing, dancing, composing love lyrics).
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Steven May, _The Elizabethan Courtier Poets_
The New Lyricism
During the 1570's a body of courtier verse emerged that revived the emphasis upon love poetry as it had been introduced to the Tudor court by Wyatt and Surrey. Upon this revitalized foundation, amorous courtier poetics *developed without interruption to the end of the reign and beyond*. Unlike courtier verse of the 1560's, the new lyricism modeled itself primarily upon post-classical continental authors, from Petrarch to the Pl?iade. Attention to the classics remained strong, of course, but the ancients were assimilated into the new poetics almost exclusively in the vernacular. The courtier's immediate experience is often reflected in this poetry, although the exact circumstances behind it cannot always be identified, nor does this later work necessarily grow out of actual experience. From a literary standpoint this is perhaps the most important shift away from the trends of the 1560's. Subsequent courtier verse placed a greater emphasis upon artifice in its treatment of occasional subjects, while it increasingly strayed away from real events as the most respectable inducements for writing poetry. The movement was toward fiction and the creation of poems to be valued for their own sake, not merely for their commemorative function. As courtier poets ventured anew into the realms of fiction, they made possible once again the creation of a genuine literature of the court. Progress toward a golden age of lyricism was slow, especially with regard to form and the technical aspects of composition, but the shift in direction occurred suddenly during the period between roughly 1570 and 1575.
Although Dyer has been considered the premier Elizabethan courtier poet, that is, the first to compose love lyrics there, the available evidence confers this distinction upon the earl of Oxford. His early datable work conforms, nevertheless, to one of the established functions for poetry practiced by Ascham and Wilson. IN 1572, Oxford turned out commendatory verses for a translation of Cardano's _Comfort_, published in 1573 by his gentleman pensioner friend, Thomas Bedingfield. This poem differs from earlier efforts of the kind not so much because it appeared in English (as had Ascham's verses for Blundeville's book), but because his verses are so self-consciously poetic. The earl uses twenty-six lines to develop his formulaic exempla: Bedingfield's good efforts are enjoyed by others just as laborers, masons, bees, and so forth also work for the profit of others. Oxford flaunts a COPIOUS [my note – abundantly flowing] rhetoric in this poem in contrast with the more direct, unembellished commendatory verses of his predecessors. His greatest innovation, however, lies in his application of the same qualities of style to the eight poems assigned to him in the 1576 Paradise of Dainty Devices, pieces that Oxford must have composed before 1575.
DeVere's eight poems in the _Paradise_ create a dramatic break with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court at that time...The diversity of Oxford's subjects, including his varied analyses of the lover's state, were practically as unknown to contemporary out-of -court writer as they were to courtiers.
Oxford's birth and social standing at court in the 1570's made him a model of aristocratic behaviour. He was, for instance, accused of introducing Italian gloves and other such FRIPPERIES at court; his example would have lent respectability even to so TRIVIAL a pursuit as the writing of love poetry. Thus, while it is possible that Dyer was writing poetry as early as the 1560's, his earliest datable verse, the complaint sung to the queen at Woodstock in 1575, may itself have been inspired by Oxford's work in the same vein. Dyer's first six poems in Part II are the ones he is most likely to have composed before his association with Philip Sidney. ...Yet even if all six (of Dyer's poems) were written by 1575, Oxford would still emerge as the chief innovator due to the range of his subject matter and the variety of its execution. ...By contrast, Dyer was a specialist...Dyer's output represents a great departure from courtier verse of the 1560's, and several of his poems were more widely circulated and imitated than any of Oxford's; still, the latter's experimentation provided a much broader foundation for the development of lyric poetry at court. (pp. 52-54)
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Chapman
AOf you in whom the worth of all the Graces,
Due to the mindes giftes, might EMBREW the faces
Of such as skorne them, and with tiranous eye
Contemne the sweat of vertuous industrie.
But as ill lines new fild with incke vndryed,
AN EMPTY PEN with their owne OWNE STUFF applied
CAN BLOT THEM OUT: so shall their wealth-burst wombes
Be made with emptie Penne their honours tombes.
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Vickers, Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy:
...Of the hundreds of writers who followed Quintilian and Erasmus in reiterating the greater importance of the subject-matter [note-matter over manner], let us just recall Sir Philip Sidney's letter to his younger brother Robert on 18 October,1580, advising him on his studies. 'For the method of writing Historie', Sidney tells him, 'Bodin hath written at large; you may reede him and gather out of many wordes some matter' - a fatal sign of verbosity. That was obviously a current danger for a young student, given the stylistic fashions then in vogue: 'So you can speake and write Latine not barbarously I never require great study in Ciceronianisme, the cheife abuse of Oxford, Qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt'.[who, in their application to words, neglect the things themselves.]
It is from this basis that Gabriel Harvey compared the style of Osorio's oration De gloria unfavourably with that of Cicero's De amicitia, bringing out
the difference between the redundancy of Osorius and the COPIOUSNESS of Cicero. Both men have fluent diction, to be sure; but whereas Cicero's flows without any ripples, like a smooth and quiet river, Osorio's sometimes overflows its banks, like a swollen, hurrying torrent, too impatient to be confined within the bounds set by the other.
In ascribing copia to Cicero, redundantia to Osorio, Harvey was doubtless aware that Quintilian described the latter as a vice of style (Institutio oratoria VIII.3.57; XII.10.12-19). Harvey's criticism of Osorio was reinforced in the prefatory epistle to his Ciceronianus by William Lewin, a fellow of Christ's College and perhaps Harvey's tutor, who judged it 'a little more copious and overflowing than was proper'.
Returning to Bacon's critique of Ciceronianism we can now see that it is entirely typical of Renaissance rhetorical humanism in its conceptual categories and in the judgements resulting. His characterization of Osorio - 'Then grew the flowing and watery vein of...the Portugal bishop to be in price' - might have come straight from the pages of Harvey's Ciceronianus. At all events J.W. Binns, in his recent study of 'Ciceronianism in sixteenth-century England: the Latin debate', finds that Bacon's account of 'the growth and progress of a Ciceronianism which paid more attention to style than to matter...is just and perceptive', while his 'use of the term "watery" to describe [Osorio's style] is this in the mainstream of critical thinking. In evoking this fashion of writing Bacon perhaps echoes Harvey's self-mocking description of the care for superficial qualities of style that marked his juvenile flirtation with Ciceronianism, but he goes on further in juxtaposing both the vices and virtues of style. He begins with a plain statement of the disease, in the appropriate language, when care for verba exceeds that for res. Then he enlarges this simple distinction into two unequal parts, first showing how the mimicry of Ciceronian Latin developed a self-propagating power (redundantia), proliferating before our eyes:
men began to hunt more after words than matter--more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the SWEET falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.
Those bare, unadorned symmetries in the second part of the sentence sum up pages of teaching from the rhetoric-books on the main virtues of style for which the orator should strive: 'weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement.' That is surely the definitive expression of what the distinction between res and verba really implied. Bacon's concluding antithesis, then - 'the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards COPIE than WEIGHT' - is not an attack on COPIA, tout court, but describes what happens when writers cultivate COPIA VERBORUM in separation from COPIA RERUM, resulting in that disordered condition 'when men study words and not matter'. The terms in which Bacon formulates his critique of Ciceronian imitatio are not critical of, but derive from the rhetorical tradition, from Cato to Quintilian. His dismissive flourish, comparing their enamoration with words to Pygmalion's madness in falling in love with the stature he has made, unites a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses with part of Aristotle's definition of language, and unlikely combination for a modern perhaps, but wholly typical of humanist eclecticism, where all quotations are equally useful.
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Copia – abundant FLOW
Ben Jonson: "I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand,' which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he FLOWED with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. 'Sufflaminandus erat,' as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too.
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On Shakespeare"
Milton
What needs my Shakespeare for his honour'd Bones,
The labour of an age in piled Stones,
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers FLOW,
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Raptures of Futurity: Monumentality and the Pursuit of Posterity in Early Modern Drama
Brian Patrick Chalk
I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramid’s royal PILE, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, or the countless chain of years and the ages’ flight, I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of me shall escape the death-goddess. On and on I shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time. (Horace, Ode 30, 1-8)
The pathos of the monument metaphor that Horace employs in the epigraph above normally derives from the admission that poems cannot replace people. Although texts stand in for persons, they are not equivalent to them, and therefore cannot compensate fully for the loss their absence creates. The poetic monument that Horace has built, however, deviates from this practice. The poem not only compensates for the absence of the poet, but the absence created by his loss becomes a necessary and even welcome pre-requisite for the unlimited fame that posterity will confer on him. Rather than memorializing the poet we no longer have access to, the poem preserves the “mighty part” of Horace that will escape the death-goddess,” purposely deflecting attention away from the mortal person in favour of the immortal poem. Unlike actual monuments, moreover, which are subject to the “wasting rain” and the “furious north wind,” Horace’s poem will not decay over “the countless chain of years and the ages’ flight.” The TENOR OF THE METAPHOR, in this way, OVERTAKES ITS VEHICLE by defeating time.
The point is not that the creation of poetry prolongs or sustains the life of the writer, but that *it performs the superior function of preserving and enlarging those elements of his identity that the poem contains*; the goal of the poet is not to live forever, but rather to not “altogether” died.
Continued next posting
In 1605 Francis Bacon published his “Advancement of Learning”, and it is from his discussion of the three ‘distempers’ of learning that I take much of the matter of the following posting in an effort to establish that at the heart of the authorship problem lies the ‘age old’ dichotomy of style and substance, or words and matter/things (verba and res):
THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second, contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. (Bacon)
The key word in this passage that I would like to highlight and develop in terms of the authorship dispute is the word ‘VANITY’. In particular the purported ‘vanity’ of the Earl of Oxford in both his person and his rhetorical practices, and how disparagement of the Earl corresponds to the ‘vain’ monument of hollow praise that Jonson constructs at the front of the First Folio as an empty figuration of the ‘vain’ author ‘Shake-speare’...
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Henry Craik, ed. English Prose. 1916.
Vol. II. Sixteenth Century to the Restoration
On the Vanity of Words without Matter
By Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second, contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. Martin Luther, conducted (no doubt) by an higher Providence, but in discourse of reason, finding what a province he had undertaken against the Bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the church, and finding his own solitude, being no ways aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his succours to make a party against the present time; so that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved. This by consequence did draw on a necessity of a more exquisite travail in the languages original wherein those authors did write, for the better understanding of those authors and the better advantage of pressing and applying their words. And thereof grew again a delight in their manner of style and phrase, and an admiration of that kind of writing; which was much furthered and precipitated by the enmity and opposition that the propounders of those (primitive but seeming new) opinions had against the schoolmen; who were generally of the contrary part, and whose writings were altogether in a differing style and form; taking liberty to coin and frame new terms of art to express their own sense and to avoid circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness, and (as I may call it) lawfulness of the phrase or word. And again, because the great labour then was with the people (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, Execrabilis ista turba, quæ non novit legem) [the wretched crowd that has not known the law], for the winning and persuading of them, there grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort. So that these four causes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie 1 of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the orator and Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his own books of periods and imitation and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo; Decem annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone [I have spent ten years in reading Cicero]: and the echo answered in Greek, one, Asine. Then grew the learning of the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight.
1
Here therefore is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter: whereof though I have represented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will be secundum majus et minus in all time. And how is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men’s works like the first letter of a patent or limned book; which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.
2
But yet, notwithstanding, it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution. For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of Plato also in some degree; and hereof likewise there is great use; for surely to the severe inquisition of truth, and the deep progress into philosophy, it is some hindrance; because it is too early satisfactory to the mind of man, and quencheth the desire of further search, before we come to a just period; but then if a man be to have any use of such knowledge in civil occasions, of conference, counsel, persuasion, discourse, or the like; then shall he find it prepared to his hands in those authors which write in that manner. But the excess of this is so justly contemptible, that as Hercules, when he saw the image of Adonis, Venus’s minion, in a temple, said in disdain, Nil sacri es [you are no divinity]; so there is none of Hercules’s followers in learning, that is, the more severe and laborious sort of inquirers into truth, but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness. And thus much of the first disease or distemper of learning.
3
Note 1. copie, i.e. copia, or abundant FLOW.
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VANUS –
vain, empty, vacant, void
unsubstantial
figuratively groundless, baseless, meaningless
ostentatious, boastful
deceptive, untrustworthy
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What merit lived in me that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can NOTHING WORTHY prove;
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The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Richard Halpern
Looking back somewhat sourly on the culture of the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon wrote that it was marked by
An affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement…Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning…In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight.
What concerns Bacon here is not an imbalance within literary style but the proliferation of stylistic elegance throughout all of serious discourse. Paradoxically, the very autonomy of style allows it to colonize and dominate all other discursive functions; and as if to illustrate this peril, Bacon’s own language falls temporarily under the spell of style, succumbing to a delight in the “round and clear composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses.” This sudden access of eloquence is not a return of the repressed, however, but a witty tribute to the lures of a humanist tradition from which Bacon only halfheartedly tried to extricate himself.
In assailing what one critic has called the “stylistic explosion” [Richard Lanham] of the sixteenth century, Bacon questions the values of the English literary Renaissance itself. Ciceronianism was only one small part of this movement, but more than any other it came to represent a mysterious addiction to style. Gabriel Harvey famously described his own bout with Ciceronianism in the confessional manner of a recovering alcoholic:
…..I valued words more than content, language more than thought, the one art of speaking more than the thousand subjects of knowledge; I preferred the mere style of Marcus Tully to all the postulates of philosophers and mathematicians; I believed that the bone and sinew of imitation lay in my ability to choose as many brilliant and elegant words as possible to reduce them into order, and to connect them together in a rhythmical period.
(snip)
It is no accident…that Erasmus, who reorganized the teaching of Latin around the concept of style, also wrote the first modern book of manners. De civilitate morum puerilium (1530) taught children the codes of civil behaviour as a natural complement to the achievements of “lyberall science”; social manners and literary style thus cooperated to produce a subject “well fasshyoned in soule, in body, in gesture, and in apparayle.” The cultivation of a good Latin style now appears as part of a larger process of “fashioning” subjects – a process that submits not only language but also manners, dress, and comportment to ideal of “exactness and refinement.” If it is clear that stylistic pedagogy is a form of social discipline, it is equally certain that discipline is becoming stylized. For in defining civility as “outward honesty of the body” (externum…corporis decorum), Erasmus transforms a set of social behaviours into a bodily image. The “well-fashioned” or civil subject is an aesthetic ideal that expands the concept of “style” to cover the whole range of social bearing. To produce a civil subject is to produce a “style” – of manners, dress, and discourse. And social style, like the literary style that is now a part of it, is developed not through obedience to rules but through the mimetic assimilation of models. Thus De civilitate supplements a juridical approach to manners – the prescription and proscription of behaviours – with an imaginary logic. (snip) p32
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Hebrew -Maskith – A showpiece, figure, imaginations, carved images
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Empty Figures – ‘MY Shakespeare’:
Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
MY Shakespeare, RISE! (Jonson)
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What needs MY Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones...(Milton)
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"Vain Affectations": Bacon on Ciceronianism in "The Advancement of Learning"
JUDITH RICE HENDERSON
When Francis Bacon writes that man "began to hunt more after words than matter" in The Advancement of Learning, he meant not just form and content but academic disciplines. Bacon explains that Martin Luther called for humanist educational reform to teach the laity to read and theologians and preachers to analyze Scripture. In the Strasbourg gymnasium and academy, the Protestant rector Johann Sturm went too far in substituting endless drill in the arts of discourse for other subjects. Bacon deplores Sturm's influence [my note – Harvey/Audley End speech to Oxford] on the Cambridge humanists, especially Nicholas Carr and Roger Ascham, and Ascham's celebration of the Portuguese Ciceronian Jerónimo Osorio in the Marian court. When Osorio subsequently attacked the Elizabethan religious settlement, Ascham and others dismissed his prose as Asiatic, for they had learned from the Protestant opposition to scholastic theology to identify good style with good doctrine. Bacon, seeking truth in God's Works as much as in God's Word, would place dialectic and rhetoric late in the university curriculum, contending that students who labor to perfect argument and style before they have something to say fall into "childish sophistry and ridiculous affectation."
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Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson
By Richard S. Peterson
...Men should, Crites says [Jonson-type character in Cynthia’s Revels], ”Studie…/An inward comelinesse…that may conforme them…/To Gods high figures, which they have in power: (V.iv.643-6; IV, 158), and this is the goal the poet holds out to his living subjects in the poems. The moral outline or shape Jonson produces is an ideal one, charged with a sense of potential, movement, and change, to which the subject ought actively to conform his soul or mind – or simply continue to conform it, in the most admirable cases – by his own efforts and with the poet’s educative help. What Jonson says in Timber of the poet’s effect on his readers – adapting Quintilian on the orator’s effect on his listeners (Inst. Orat. II.5.8) – ideally applies to praised subjects as well: he “makes their minds like the thing he writes” (ll. 792-3; VIII, 588). His Platonic (or Socratic) and stoic strategy in this respect is perhaps clearest in instances where the collaboration between the poet and the owner of the soul proves an unequal one. If he has occasionally praised his subjects too much, Jonson declares in his epistle to Selden (according to the rhetorical mode of laudando praecipere, “praising to teach”) It was “with purpose to have MADE them such” (Und. 14, l.22) Even more revealing is Jonson’s sharp complaint “To my Muse”:
Away, a leave me, thou thing most abhord,
That hast betray’d me to a worthlesse lord;
Made me commit most fierce idolatrie
To a great image through thy luxurie.
… … …
But I repent me: Stay. Who e’re is rais’d,
For worth he has not, He is tax’d, not prais’d.
[Epig. 65 1-4, 15-16]
This description recalls not only Sir Epicure Mammon’s “most fierce idolatrie” in wooing Dol Common, as he “talke[s] to her, all in gold” (Alchemist IV. i.25-39; V, 360), but the “great image” of gold, Nebuchadnezzar’s symbol, which he dreams about and sets up to be worshiped (Dan. 2:31-8, 3:1-15) Failing a response, the noble shape raised by Jonson becomes merely a “great image” hollow or inert at its core, and his worship of its potential, mere tribute paid to an idol – a strong contrast, as we shall see, to Jonson’s justifiable near-idolatry of the “full” and animated inner shapes that inhabit the cabinet which is Uvedale.note -
The sense of potential, of conduct as raw material from wish a shapely life of soul should be fashioned and raises like a statue, is forcefully conveyed in Jonson’s epistle to Sir Edward Sacvile (Und. 13). There the poet shows an accumulated “heape” of virtuous manners being effortfully raised to “stand” as a triumphal arch, which is then metamorphosed, as we watch, into the implied human figure of a colossus, a “wonder” of the world and a landmark (“marke”) or “note” of virtue:
‘Tis by degrees that men arrive at glad
Profit in ought; each day some little adde,
In time ‘twill be a heape; This is not true
Alone in money, but in manners too.
Yet we must more than move still, or goe on,
We must accomplish; ‘Tis the last Key-stone
That makes the Arch. The rest that there were put
Are nothing till that comes to bind and shut.
Then stands it a *triumphal marke*! Then Men
Observe the strength, the height, the why, and when,
It was erected; and still walking under
Meet some new matter to looke up and wonder!
Such Notes are virtuous men.
The parallel we have traced earlier between the need to gather in and transform in conduct as in literary activity holds true here. In describing how the individual soul fashions its heaped stock of manners into a towering form of virtue, the poet himself accumulates a generous heap of material from Plutarch (and from Hesiod, whose heap of money Plutarch has turned to a heap of virtue) and transforms the whole by adding a keystone from Seneca (Epist. 118, secs. 16-17): “one stone makes an archway – the stone which wedges the leaning sides and hold the arch together by its position in the middle. … Some things, through development, put off their former shape and are *altered into a new figure*” (quaedam processu priorem exuunt formam et in novam transeunt).
Indeed, Jonson’s works abound with “heapes.” These are admirable enough when they indicate bounty or a plentiful supply of raw material to be shaped. This in Jonson’s masque The Gypsies Metmorphos’d (1621), King James, on approaching the country house of the Duke of Buckingham, is invited to “enter here/ The house your bountie hath built, and still doth reare/ With those highe favors, and those heap’d increases: (ll. 11-13; VII, 565). And in a brief later elegy (Und. 63) Jonson consoles King Charles and his Queen for the loss of their firstborn by a reminder that “God, whose essence is so infinite, /Cannot but heape that grace, he will requite.” But on most occasions, heaps serve as symbols of inert material which is unable to stand or empty of animating, shaping spirit – the very antithesis of Jonson’s ideal. [Men stand, heaps ‘rise’?) A nameless, vicious courtier is “A parcel of Court-durt, a heape, and masse/ Of all vice hurld together” Und. 21), hardly distinguishable from the excrement in Fleet Ditch, “heap’d like a usurers masse” (“On the Famous Voyage,” Epig. 133, l.139); whole a lord fond of flatter is “follow’d with that heape/ That watch, and catch, at what they may applaud” (Und. 15, ll. 156-7). The healthy gathering instinct Jonson describes in the epistle to Sacvile is in sharp contrast to the hoarding of substance, unanimated by any generous impulse, described in the epistle to Sir Robert Wroth: “ Let that goe heape a masse of wretched wealth,/……/And brooding o’re it sit, with broades eyes,/Not doing good, scarce when he dyes: (For. 3, ll. 81-4). A house, too, lacking an indwelling owner, like a body without a soul, becomes a mere heap…(snip)
If the repugnance of the inert “heap” lies in its resistance to shaping, its lack of any inner impulse that could raise it to stand, conversely it is possible to stand and yet be hollow. Consider Jonson’s startling picture (Und.44) of the ruined form of virtue, unhoused and dispossessed, beseechingly holding up her broken “Armes” (in an evocation of a defaced antique statue combined with a deft pun on the military target of the satire, the refusal of contemporary nobility to bear arms) to the empty “moulds” which have cast her out:
I may no longer on these picture stay,
These Carkasses of honour; Taylors blocks,
Cover’d with Tissue, whose prosperitie mocks
The fate of things: whilst totter’d virtue holds
Her broken Armes up, to the EMPTIE moulds. [ll. 98-102]
Other forms, empty yet nevertheless ambulatory, are seen moving woodenly through the world of the Epigrammes. Of “English Mounsieur” (Epig. 88), with his Frenchified attire, the poet remarks: “is it some french statue? No: ‘T doth move,/ And stoupe, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove/ The new French tailors motion [puppet], monthly made, /Daily to turned in PAULS, and helpe the trade”(…)
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acervus
masculine noun
mass/heap/pile/stack; treasure, STOCK ; large quantity; cluster; funeral pile
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Casting down imaginations:
2 Corinthians
(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)
Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God
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Horace, of the Art of Poetrie
transl. Ben Jonson
If to Quintilius, you recited ought:
Hee'd say, Mend this, good friend, and this; "Tis naught.
If you denied, you had no better straine,
And twice, or thrice had 'ssayd it, still in vaine:
Hee'd bid, blot all: and to the anvile bring
Those ill-torn'd Verses, to new hammering.
Then: If your fault you rather had defend
Then change. *No word, or worke, more would he spend
In vaine, but you, and yours, YOU SHOULD LOVE STILL
Alone, without a rivall, by his will*.
A wise, and honest man will cry out shame
On ARTELESS Verse; the hard ones he will blame;
Blot out the careless, with his turned pen;
Cut off superfluous ornaments; and when
They're darke, bid cleare this: all that's doubtfull wrote
Reprove; and, what is to be changed, not:
Become an Aristarchus. And, not say,
Why should I grieve my friend, this TRIFLING WAY?
These TRIFLES into serious mischiefs lead
The man once mock'd, and SUFFERED WRONG TO TREAD.
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Quintilius/Jonson
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...
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Oldham, on Jonson
XIII.
Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious Fame,
Content on gross and coarse Applause to live,
And what the dull, and sensless Rabble give,
Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,
Nor would'st that wretched Alms receive,
The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, SORDID* NAME:
Thine was no EMPTY VAPOR, RAIS’D beneath,
And form'd of common Breath,
The false, and foolish Fire, that's whisk'd about
By popular Air, and glares a while, and then GOES OUT...
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Gabriel Harvey – Oration to undergraduates of Cambridge
Do not fall into the Scythian swamp of Hermogenes, that endless and pretentiously vain art, concerning which it is recorded that Hermogenes was so elaborately ingenious he prided himself on being able to include countless figures and other rhetorical subtleties in one and the same period. In which vain labor no few men of our time toil – men in other respects not to be despised, though unfortunately there are increasing numbers of them, especially of those whom your teacher Harvey is wont to call PHILOGRECIANS and PSEUDO-STRASSBURGERS [my note - Sturm/Strasbourg], and whom I would term pseudo-Hermogenes, alias sophist, pseudo-rhetoricians or even rhetorical chameleons: they are not so much nourished with food as saturated with wind and rhetorical hot-air. In truth, through their subtleties, *they make themselves more and more obscure until they gradually disappear in mere inanity*: they have no worse enemies than themselves.
Definition of inane (Merriam Webster)
(Entry 1 of 2)
1: lacking SIGNIFICANCE meaning, or point : SILLY inane comments
2: EMPTY, INSUBSTANTIAL
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Castigating Courtiers in Jonson’s _Cynthia’s Revels_:
Crites/Criticus/Jonson
O VANITY,
How are thy painted beauties doted on,
By LIGHT and EMPTY IDIOTS how pursu'd
With open and extended Appetite!
How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,
RAIS’D on their Toes, to catch thy AIRY FORMS,
Still turning GIDDY, till they reel like Drunkards,
That buy the merry madness of one hour,
With the long irksomness of following time!
O how despis'd and base a thing is a Man,
If he not strive t'erect his groveling Thoughts
Above the strain of Flesh! But how more cheap,
When, even his best and understanding Part,
(The crown and strength of all his Faculties)
Floats like a dead drownd Body, on the Stream
Of vulgar humour, mixt with common'st dregs?
I suffer for their Guilt now, and my Soul
(Like one that looks on ill-affected Eyes)
Is hurt with mere intention on their Follies.
Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me:
Or is't a rarity, or some new object,
That strains my strict observance to this Point?
O would it were, therein I could afford
My Spirit should draw a little neer to theirs,
To gaze on novelties: so Vice were one.
Tut, she is stale, rank, foul, and were it not
That those (that woo her) greet her with lockt Eyes,
(In spight of all the impostures, paintings, drugs,
Which her Bawd custom dawbs her Cheeks withal)
She would betray her loath'd and leprous Face,
And fright th' enamour'd dotards from themselves:
But such is the perverseness of our nature,
That if we once but fancy levity,
(How antick and ridiculous so ere
It sute with us) yet will our muffled thought
Choose rather not to see it, than avoid it:
And if we can but banish our own sense,
We act our mimick tricks with that free license,
That lust, that pleasure, that security,
As if we practis'd in a Paste-board Case,
And no one saw the motion, but the motion.
Well, check thy passion, lest it grow too lowd:
"While fools are pittied, they wax FAT and proud
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Psalm 73:7
Their eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than heart could wish; and the imaginations of their minds overflow [with follies].
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Chapman...
TO you whose depth of soule measures the height,
And all dimensions of all WORKES of WEIGHT,
REASON being ground, structure and ornament,
To all inuentions, graue and permanent,
And your cleare eyes the Spheres where REASON moues;
This Artizan, this God of RATIONALL loues
Blind Homer;
(snip)
TRUE learning hath a body absolute,
That in apparant sence it selfe can suite,
Not hid in ayrie termes as if it were
Like spirits fantastike that put men in feare,
And are but bugs form'd in their fowle conceites,
Nor made forsale glas'd with sophistique sleights;
But wrought for all times proofe, strong to bide prease,
And shiuer ignorants like Hercules,
ON THEIR OWN DUNGHILS; (...)
AN EMPTY PEN with their owne OWNE STUFF applied
CAN BLOT THEM OUT: so shall their wealth-burst wombes
Be made with emptie Penne their honours tombes.
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Milton, _Paradise Lost Book V_
But know that in the Soule
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
REASON as chief; among these FANSIE next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private Cell when Nature rests.
Oft in her absence MIMIC FANSIE wakes
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,
WILDE WORK produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Som such resemblances methinks I find
Of our last Eevnings talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad.
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave
No spot or blame behind:
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Milton, Comus (Lady to Comus)
871: Enjoy your dear wit, and gay rhetoric,
872: That hath so well been taught her DAZZLING FENCE;
873: Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.
874: Yet, should I try, the uncontrolled worth
875: Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits
876: To such a flame of sacred vehemence
877: That dumb things would be moved to sympathise,
878: And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and SHAKE,
879: Till all thy MAGIC STRUCTURES, reared so high,
880: Were SHATTERED into HEAPS o'er thy FALSE HEAD.
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...Sidney, like Seneca, belonged to a noble (although impoverished) line and lived the life of a courtier depending on the support of a monarch whose favors were fickle. The image that his contemporaries created of Sidney is in important ways like the one that Seneca had tried to create for himself, that of a man who sought “to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great” (Dedication 12.7-7). Sidney appears to have had for the curriculum at Oxford the same scorn that Seneca had expressed for its essentially Roman model: It teaches words rather than things. In a letter to his brother Robert, Sidney wrote: “So yow can speake and write Latine not barbarously I never require great study in Ciceronianisme the cheife abuse of Oxford, Qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt”* (Works, 3). Seneca likewise had condemned both the philological (Ep.88.3-4) and rhetorical (Ep.100.10) focus on words at the expense of subject: Sic ista ediscamus, ut quae fuerint verba, sint opera (Ep. 108.35). [Let us learn those things so that what have been words might become works].
* where, while they eagerly pursue words, they neglect things themselves. (note matter vs. Manner debate which had broken out among the Humanists.)
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Cynthia’s Revels, Jonson
P R O L O G U E.
F gracious silence, sweet attention,
Quick sight, and quicker apprehension,
(The lights of Judgments throne) shine any where;
Our doubtful Author hopes this is their Sphere.
And therefore opens he himself to those;
To other weaker Beams his labours close:
As loth to prostitute their Virgin strain,
To ev'ry vulgar and adult'rate Brain,
In this alone, his Muse her sweetness hath,
She shuns the print of any beaten Path;
And proves new ways to come to learned Ears:
Pied ignorance she neither loves nor, fears.
Nor hunts she after popular Applause,
Or fomy praise, that drops from common Jaws:
The Garland that she wears, their bands must twine,
Who can both censure, understand, define
What merit is: Then cast those piercing Rays,
Round as a Crown, instead of honour'd Bays,
About his Poesie; which (he knows) affords
Words, above action: MATTER, above WORDS.
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HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN: MONSTERS, METAPHORS, AND MAGIC
BY ROBERT E. STILLMAN
Hobbes's sense of his place in cultural history is key to understanding the character and the contradictions of Leviathan. Early and late in his long writing career, he represents his philosophical life as a battle against monstrous texts. De cive's "Preface to the Reader" narrates a Hobbesian myth of the fall, in which a golden age of power and authority enjoyed by sovereigns is destroyed by the "disputations" of private men. 1 To illustrate his point, Hobbes cites the classical fable of Ixion's adulterous courtship of Juno: "Offering to embrace her, he clasped a cloud; from whence the Centaurs proceeded, by nature half men, half horses, a fierce, a fighting, and unquiet generation" (2:xiii). His allegorization of the fable is Baconian both in its method -- its derivation of philosophical truths from mythology -- and in its attribution of the origins of political sedition to seditious language and seditious desires: "private men being called to councils of state, desired to prostitute justice, the only sister and wife of the supreme, to their own judgments and apprehensions; but embracing a false and empty shadow instead of it, they have begotten those hermaphrodite opinions of moral philosophers, partly right and comely, partly brutal and wild"
(snip)
Hobbes is fond of metaphors of the monstrous, and his employment of them, especially in crucial accounts of his own vocational ambitions, is recurrent and revealing. His claim to having spent a career battling the metaphorical monsters of false systems of knowledge complements his lifelong attacks, I will argue, against the monsters of metaphor. Viewed from a broad historical perspective, Hobbes's attack stands as one characteristic, albeit especially fierce, expression of hostility to metaphor on the part of the seventeenth century's new philosophers. Monsters, as marvels of nature, have their verbal counterparts in metaphors, the marvels of speech. As Paul de Man argues, within metaphors, as inside the most violent catachreses, "something monstrous lurks." 4 (The very word catachresis means an "abuse" of language.) Metaphors can appear dangerous, even monstrous, because "they are capable of inventing the most fantastic entities by dint of the positional power inherent in language. They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man with woman or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes." 5 As a consequence, de Man argues, metaphor has been "a perennial problem and, at times, a recognized source of embarrassment for philosophical discourse." 6 That embarrassment becomes especially acute during the seventeenth century because of metaphor's association with subjective imagination, passion, and the monstrous, with all that contrasts with objective judgment, reason, and the natural. As a result, the opposition between the literal and the figural underlies many of the crucial polarities of the century's discourse: the divide between truth and falsehood, natural philosophy and poetry, philosophical discourse and rhetoric, to name only a few. 7 Especially in the civil war years, a hostility to metaphor becomes acute, too, because as a monstrous rebel to linguistic law, metaphor is associated with the monstrous rebels of mob rule. To attack metaphor is to attack the monstrous mother of all seditious philosophies, and a monstrous breeder of sedition itself.
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Jonson's 'Monstrous' Encomium:
Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one TO SHOW
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
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Another archaic definition of monster found in the OED is “to exhibit” or “to point out as something remarkable.” This usage is true to the Latin origin monstrāre, meaning “to show” or “point” (“monster”).-- Brumley, Mark Elliott
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Disproportionate and Ambisinister Droeshout Engraving:
BRUMLEY, MARK ELLIOTT, Ph.D.
Declamation And Dismemberment: Rhetoric, The
Body, And Disarticulation In Four Victorian Horror Novels. (2015).
...Declamation, therefore, was originally a rhetorical training exercise that engaged students’ imaginations and asked them to adopt personas to deliver formal speeches. This training, Thomas Habinek writes, taught students to “impersonate a wide variety of characters, from slaves to gods, foreigners to Roman heroes, male and female, young and old, indiscriminately” (68).
Some of these characters and situations were disturbing, if not horrifying. In this way, rhetorical training exercises helped forge an enduring link between declamation and monstrosity.
Fully understanding this link requires readers to momentarily set aside associations of monstrosity with something frightening, freakish, unnatural, or large. The word monster has had multiple definitions throughout the years, and many of those definitions found their way into nineteenth-century culture. A forerunner of the modern word monster in the Old French of the twelfth century was mostre, which meant a “prodigy”or “marvel,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. One correspondence found in the OED is an obsolete early modern definition of monster as a verb meaning “to assume the appearance of greatness.” Here is a clear connection to declamations the act of assuming the persona or a great historical figure to deliver a formal speech. The links, however, do not end with one possible meaning. Another archaic definition of monster found in the OED is “to exhibit” or “to point out as something remarkable.” This usage is true to the Latin origin monstrāre, meaning “to show” or “point” (“monster”).
The same word is the origin for the French montrer, and the English “demonstrate” (“demonstrate”). As Michel Foucault points out in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, “monsters” are “etymologically, beings or things to be shown” (68).
Foucault refers specifically to the practice of publically exhibiting insane people, a practice that continued in England until the early nineteenth century. Foucault writes that according to a House of Commons report, “lunatics” at the hospital in Bethlehem were being exhibited on Sundays, with spectators being charged a penny. The annual revenue from the displays totaled nearly 400 pounds, indicating 96,000 visits per year (66). The insane people in these shows come closer to the modern sense of the word monster as something abnormal or deformed, something freakish. Yet another meaning for the word monster is suggested by the Latin word monēre, which means “to warn”(“monster”).
The meaning of monster as a warning is explained by Chris Baldick: “In a world created by a reasonable God, the freak or lunatic must have a purpose: to reveal visibly the results of vice, folly, and
unreason, as a warning” (10). So, both “declamation” and “monstrosity” can be construed generally as a display involving the body intended to send some sort of message. In this sense, “declamation” and “monstrosity” approximate the meaning of epideixis, the root of epideictic, whose “nearest equivalents in English are ‘display’‘show’‘demonstration’” (Carey 237).
Hawhee writes that “epidexis primarily meant a material or bodily display...,” one that “becomes manifest via discourse” (175).This link to epidexis adds another consideration, which is that no display is possible without an audience and its reaction. Hawhee cites Simon Goldhill’s point that “‘epidexis requires an audience’’” (qtd. in 175). She also states that “viewers ... are not passive recipients of the display and the knowledge it produces....” (176). Drawing on other scholarship, Hawhee writes that epideictic requires observation and judgment: “...epideictic discourse demands an active evaluation and response” (176).This is an important concept for this study, which claims that nineteenth-century horror fiction uses epideictic to produce fear in audiences by depicting characters’ encounters with monstrosities such as Frankenstein’s creature, Dracula, Edward Hyde, the Beast People, and Dorian Gray. Epideictic is evident in the characters’ negative reaction to the monstrosities, their inability to express it effectively in speech, and their transformations after the encounters.
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Fulke Greville, Chief Sidneian, Hereditary Recorder of Stratford-upon -Avon
Who worship Fame, commit Idolatry,
Make Men their God, Fortune and Time their worth,
Forme, but reforme not, meer hypocrisie,
By shadowes, onely shadowes bringing forth,
Which must, as blossomes, fade ere true fruit springs,
(Like voice, and eccho) ioyn'd; yet diuers things.
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Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England
By Mary Thomas Crane
…[It] was a deeply threatening idea that a particular kind of education (or, indeed, a prose style indicative of that education) could replace birth and wealth as criteria for access to power. It posed the greatest threat, as Lawrence Stone points out, to the aristocrats whom it disenfranchised, and until they were able, in the seventeenth century, to recast educational credentials on the basis of attendance at certain elite (and expensive) schools, they were forced to reassert an alternative training for aristocratic youth. It also threatened the humanists themselves, who saw in their own upward mobility not only potentially dangerous eminence but also a disquieting acquiescence in capitalist and republican tendencies and a palpable threat to the concepts of order and hierarchy that they promulgated. These issues surface (in the 1520s through the 1540s) in the form of preoccupation with “value,” and in discussions of what society ought to value and how “wealth” (both monetary and cultural) should be displayed and shared.
Stone has shown how the “educational revolution” effected by English humanists contributed to the “crisis of the aristocracy” in the seventeenth century. He argues that in the sixteenth century, the new ideal of “gentleman” based on education “increased the opportunities of the gentry to compete for office on more equal terms with the nobility.” There are signs, however, of ARISTOCRATIC RESISTANCE to the humanist model of counsel, and in this resistance lie the seeds of the alternative model of courtly advancement, the ITALIANATE COURTIER. According to this model, “WORTH” is manifested through the conspicuous consumption of “worthless” TRIFLES (clothes, jewelry) and participation in frivolous pastimes (hunting, dicing, dancing, composing love lyrics).
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Steven May, _The Elizabethan Courtier Poets_
The New Lyricism
During the 1570's a body of courtier verse emerged that revived the emphasis upon love poetry as it had been introduced to the Tudor court by Wyatt and Surrey. Upon this revitalized foundation, amorous courtier poetics *developed without interruption to the end of the reign and beyond*. Unlike courtier verse of the 1560's, the new lyricism modeled itself primarily upon post-classical continental authors, from Petrarch to the Pl?iade. Attention to the classics remained strong, of course, but the ancients were assimilated into the new poetics almost exclusively in the vernacular. The courtier's immediate experience is often reflected in this poetry, although the exact circumstances behind it cannot always be identified, nor does this later work necessarily grow out of actual experience. From a literary standpoint this is perhaps the most important shift away from the trends of the 1560's. Subsequent courtier verse placed a greater emphasis upon artifice in its treatment of occasional subjects, while it increasingly strayed away from real events as the most respectable inducements for writing poetry. The movement was toward fiction and the creation of poems to be valued for their own sake, not merely for their commemorative function. As courtier poets ventured anew into the realms of fiction, they made possible once again the creation of a genuine literature of the court. Progress toward a golden age of lyricism was slow, especially with regard to form and the technical aspects of composition, but the shift in direction occurred suddenly during the period between roughly 1570 and 1575.
Although Dyer has been considered the premier Elizabethan courtier poet, that is, the first to compose love lyrics there, the available evidence confers this distinction upon the earl of Oxford. His early datable work conforms, nevertheless, to one of the established functions for poetry practiced by Ascham and Wilson. IN 1572, Oxford turned out commendatory verses for a translation of Cardano's _Comfort_, published in 1573 by his gentleman pensioner friend, Thomas Bedingfield. This poem differs from earlier efforts of the kind not so much because it appeared in English (as had Ascham's verses for Blundeville's book), but because his verses are so self-consciously poetic. The earl uses twenty-six lines to develop his formulaic exempla: Bedingfield's good efforts are enjoyed by others just as laborers, masons, bees, and so forth also work for the profit of others. Oxford flaunts a COPIOUS [my note – abundantly flowing] rhetoric in this poem in contrast with the more direct, unembellished commendatory verses of his predecessors. His greatest innovation, however, lies in his application of the same qualities of style to the eight poems assigned to him in the 1576 Paradise of Dainty Devices, pieces that Oxford must have composed before 1575.
DeVere's eight poems in the _Paradise_ create a dramatic break with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court at that time...The diversity of Oxford's subjects, including his varied analyses of the lover's state, were practically as unknown to contemporary out-of -court writer as they were to courtiers.
Oxford's birth and social standing at court in the 1570's made him a model of aristocratic behaviour. He was, for instance, accused of introducing Italian gloves and other such FRIPPERIES at court; his example would have lent respectability even to so TRIVIAL a pursuit as the writing of love poetry. Thus, while it is possible that Dyer was writing poetry as early as the 1560's, his earliest datable verse, the complaint sung to the queen at Woodstock in 1575, may itself have been inspired by Oxford's work in the same vein. Dyer's first six poems in Part II are the ones he is most likely to have composed before his association with Philip Sidney. ...Yet even if all six (of Dyer's poems) were written by 1575, Oxford would still emerge as the chief innovator due to the range of his subject matter and the variety of its execution. ...By contrast, Dyer was a specialist...Dyer's output represents a great departure from courtier verse of the 1560's, and several of his poems were more widely circulated and imitated than any of Oxford's; still, the latter's experimentation provided a much broader foundation for the development of lyric poetry at court. (pp. 52-54)
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Chapman
AOf you in whom the worth of all the Graces,
Due to the mindes giftes, might EMBREW the faces
Of such as skorne them, and with tiranous eye
Contemne the sweat of vertuous industrie.
But as ill lines new fild with incke vndryed,
AN EMPTY PEN with their owne OWNE STUFF applied
CAN BLOT THEM OUT: so shall their wealth-burst wombes
Be made with emptie Penne their honours tombes.
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Vickers, Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy:
...Of the hundreds of writers who followed Quintilian and Erasmus in reiterating the greater importance of the subject-matter [note-matter over manner], let us just recall Sir Philip Sidney's letter to his younger brother Robert on 18 October,1580, advising him on his studies. 'For the method of writing Historie', Sidney tells him, 'Bodin hath written at large; you may reede him and gather out of many wordes some matter' - a fatal sign of verbosity. That was obviously a current danger for a young student, given the stylistic fashions then in vogue: 'So you can speake and write Latine not barbarously I never require great study in Ciceronianisme, the cheife abuse of Oxford, Qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt'.[who, in their application to words, neglect the things themselves.]
It is from this basis that Gabriel Harvey compared the style of Osorio's oration De gloria unfavourably with that of Cicero's De amicitia, bringing out
the difference between the redundancy of Osorius and the COPIOUSNESS of Cicero. Both men have fluent diction, to be sure; but whereas Cicero's flows without any ripples, like a smooth and quiet river, Osorio's sometimes overflows its banks, like a swollen, hurrying torrent, too impatient to be confined within the bounds set by the other.
In ascribing copia to Cicero, redundantia to Osorio, Harvey was doubtless aware that Quintilian described the latter as a vice of style (Institutio oratoria VIII.3.57; XII.10.12-19). Harvey's criticism of Osorio was reinforced in the prefatory epistle to his Ciceronianus by William Lewin, a fellow of Christ's College and perhaps Harvey's tutor, who judged it 'a little more copious and overflowing than was proper'.
Returning to Bacon's critique of Ciceronianism we can now see that it is entirely typical of Renaissance rhetorical humanism in its conceptual categories and in the judgements resulting. His characterization of Osorio - 'Then grew the flowing and watery vein of...the Portugal bishop to be in price' - might have come straight from the pages of Harvey's Ciceronianus. At all events J.W. Binns, in his recent study of 'Ciceronianism in sixteenth-century England: the Latin debate', finds that Bacon's account of 'the growth and progress of a Ciceronianism which paid more attention to style than to matter...is just and perceptive', while his 'use of the term "watery" to describe [Osorio's style] is this in the mainstream of critical thinking. In evoking this fashion of writing Bacon perhaps echoes Harvey's self-mocking description of the care for superficial qualities of style that marked his juvenile flirtation with Ciceronianism, but he goes on further in juxtaposing both the vices and virtues of style. He begins with a plain statement of the disease, in the appropriate language, when care for verba exceeds that for res. Then he enlarges this simple distinction into two unequal parts, first showing how the mimicry of Ciceronian Latin developed a self-propagating power (redundantia), proliferating before our eyes:
men began to hunt more after words than matter--more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the SWEET falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.
Those bare, unadorned symmetries in the second part of the sentence sum up pages of teaching from the rhetoric-books on the main virtues of style for which the orator should strive: 'weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement.' That is surely the definitive expression of what the distinction between res and verba really implied. Bacon's concluding antithesis, then - 'the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards COPIE than WEIGHT' - is not an attack on COPIA, tout court, but describes what happens when writers cultivate COPIA VERBORUM in separation from COPIA RERUM, resulting in that disordered condition 'when men study words and not matter'. The terms in which Bacon formulates his critique of Ciceronian imitatio are not critical of, but derive from the rhetorical tradition, from Cato to Quintilian. His dismissive flourish, comparing their enamoration with words to Pygmalion's madness in falling in love with the stature he has made, unites a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses with part of Aristotle's definition of language, and unlikely combination for a modern perhaps, but wholly typical of humanist eclecticism, where all quotations are equally useful.
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Copia – abundant FLOW
Ben Jonson: "I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand,' which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he FLOWED with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. 'Sufflaminandus erat,' as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too.
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On Shakespeare"
Milton
What needs my Shakespeare for his honour'd Bones,
The labour of an age in piled Stones,
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers FLOW,
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Raptures of Futurity: Monumentality and the Pursuit of Posterity in Early Modern Drama
Brian Patrick Chalk
I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramid’s royal PILE, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, or the countless chain of years and the ages’ flight, I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of me shall escape the death-goddess. On and on I shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time. (Horace, Ode 30, 1-8)
The pathos of the monument metaphor that Horace employs in the epigraph above normally derives from the admission that poems cannot replace people. Although texts stand in for persons, they are not equivalent to them, and therefore cannot compensate fully for the loss their absence creates. The poetic monument that Horace has built, however, deviates from this practice. The poem not only compensates for the absence of the poet, but the absence created by his loss becomes a necessary and even welcome pre-requisite for the unlimited fame that posterity will confer on him. Rather than memorializing the poet we no longer have access to, the poem preserves the “mighty part” of Horace that will escape the death-goddess,” purposely deflecting attention away from the mortal person in favour of the immortal poem. Unlike actual monuments, moreover, which are subject to the “wasting rain” and the “furious north wind,” Horace’s poem will not decay over “the countless chain of years and the ages’ flight.” The TENOR OF THE METAPHOR, in this way, OVERTAKES ITS VEHICLE by defeating time.
The point is not that the creation of poetry prolongs or sustains the life of the writer, but that *it performs the superior function of preserving and enlarging those elements of his identity that the poem contains*; the goal of the poet is not to live forever, but rather to not “altogether” died.
Continued next posting