WANT MY BABY?
Art Neuendorffer
The Comedy of Errors Act 1, Scene 1
DUKE SOLINUS: Hapless AEgeon, whom the fates have mark'd
[T]o bear the extremity of dire mishap!
[N]ow, trust me, were it not against our laws,
[A]gainst my crown, my oath, my dignity,
[W]hich princes, would they, may not disannul,
[My] soul would sue as advocate for thee.
[B]ut, though thou art adjudged to the death
[A]nd passed sentence may not be recall'd
[B]ut to our honour's great disparagement,
[Y]et I will favour thee in what I can.
------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen & Cynthia Neuendorffer gave birth to [BABY]
Teresa Rose Neuendorffer: 4:23 pm, January 11, 2005
weighing 7 lbs 12 ounces, and a leggy 20 inches.
------------------------------------------------------------------
<<Titania, the largest moon of Uranus, was discovered
on January 11, 1787 by William Herschel using
20 foot long reflecting telescope
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Titania-(moon)
All of the moons of Uranus are named for characters from
Shakespeare or Alexander Pope. Titania was named after
Titania, the Queen of the Faeries in A Midsummer Night's Dream.>>
------------------------------------------------------------
A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 3, Scene 1
Titania: [O]ut of this wood do not desire to go:
[T]-hou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
[I] am a spirit of no common rate;
[T]-he summer still doth tend upon my state;
[An]-d I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
[I]-'ll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
[A]-nd they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Titania-(moon)
A major surface feature is a huge canyon that is in the same class
as the Valles Marineris on Mars or Ithaca Chasma on Saturn's moon
Tethys and dwarfs the scale of the Grand Canyon on Earth.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Grand Canyon National Monument, established
by Presidential Proclamation, January 11, 1908
------------------------------------------------------------
'Minions of Cynthia': Robert Graves and the Elizabethans
http://www.quarto.iinet.net.au/writing_6.html
© Roger Bourke 1999
<<TOWARDS the end of 1927, Robert Graves received a visit from the
Australian writer Jack Lindsay. Lindsay, who was running a small private
press in London, asked Graves if he would write the introduction to a
collection the Fanfrolico Press intended to publish of versions of the
anonymous seventeenth-century English popular ballad 'Tom o' Bedlam's
Song'. Lindsay, who remembered the afternoon largely from the inability
of Graves's companion Laura Riding to cook even a simple meal of
corn-on-the-cob, writes in his autobiography that Graves agreed with
enthusiasm, adding that he 'already had ideas' about the ballad.
Graves's essay duly appeared at the end of the year as the foreword to
Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite Verses of the XVI and XVIIth Centuries. Graves
also edited the ballad from a transcript provided by Lindsay from a
manuscript of 1614, and concluded his essay on a dramatic note by
suggesting that this text of 'Tom o'Bedlam's Song' was nothing less
than an unattributed work of Shakespeare's - a lost song from King Lear
(1604-5). Whatever its provenance, the ballad occupied a privileged
place in Graves's poetic thinking for many years thereafter. We know,
from the letter quoted in Chapter 1, that he came to regard it as 'the
most "purely poetic" of all anonymous English compositions' and as a
'perfect compendium' of moon-goddess worship. Graves writes of the
ballad in The White Goddess: 'Anonymous English balladists constantly
celebrate the Goddess's beauty and terrible power. Tom o' Bedlam's
Song is directly inspired by her' (p. 433). The following year, when
Graves reprinted his Loving Mad Tom essay in the first collection
of his writings on poetry, The Common Asphodel, he returned
to the ballad in the introduction to the title essay:
The poetic education given in the modern English literature class is
meagre and wholly unpractical: it does not include a course in
primitive religion, without a grounding in which such poems as
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Ancient Mariner and Tom o' Bedlam's
Song yield only a small part of their sense ...
'Tom o' Bedlam's Song' can be regarded, through the high opinion
Graves held of its literary merit and the associations with 'primitive
religion' it evoked in his mind, as a quintessential White Goddess poem.
The ballad itself is one of a group of anonymous compositions that
appear in seventeenth-century manuscripts and popular anthologies that
reflect the Elizabethan and Jacobean fascination with madness, often
expressing a manic poetic energy and a savage kind of poignancy. The
ballads are written in the persona of the Bedlam beggar or Abraham-man -
the same 'Poor Tom' character Edgar assumes in King Lear (hence Graves's
identification of the ballad with the play) - or his female counterpart,
Bess of Bedlam. They naturally reflect popular contemporary notions of
the causes of insanity - lovesickness, drunkenness, the influence of the
moon - and they share also a common stock of classical imagery, based
mainly on bawdy, knockabout parodies of the myths of Venus-Mars-Vulcan
and Diana-Actaeon-Endymion. Of the surviving examples, as Graves points
out, 'Tom o' Bedlam's Song' is easily the most accomplished technically,
both in its metrical control and in the sophistication of its wordplay,
which revolves around a word rich in associations for the poets of the
period: 'horn'.
But is 'Tom o' Bedlam's Song' a 'perfect compendium' of moon-goddess
worship? The ballad does contain references to planetary deities:
Apollo, Venus, Mars, & the moon. But it seems to lack not just a sense
of religious invocation, but references to religious ritual of any
kind. With the exception of the memorable line 'The Moon's my constant
mistress', which can be read simply as a statement of the folk-belief
that lunatics are ruled by the moon, precisely which elements of pagan
goddess worship Graves sees in the ballad are not at all obvious. Does
he regard popular superstition about the moon in seventeenth-century
England as a survival of primitive religious ritual? Quite possibly,
but, unfortunately, he does not elucidate. However, Graves's basic
premise - that the poetry of moon-goddess worship was being written
during the English Renaissance - is incontestably correct. There
exists a substantial body, a sub-genre, of English poetry from the
period that deals explicity with precisely this theme. Yet curiously,
Graves refers to these poems only obliquely in The White Goddess.
The English Renaissance moon-poetry that Graves seems so unaccountably
to overlook was generated by the cult of Queen Elizabeth I as goddess of
the moon. This cult eulogised Elizabeth under various names - Cynthia,
Diana, Belphoebe - and was instituted by Sir Walter Ralegh during his
period as the ageing Queen's favourite in the 1580s. What Ralegh the
courtier-poet began as a personal and private mode of celebration,
his friend Edmund Spenser introduced to the Elizabethan public, and
the figure of the moon goddess became during the 1590s the most popular
of all the symbols employed by the poets and painters who allegorised
the Virgin Queen. Ralegh wrote more than twenty 'poems to Cynthia',
mostly unpublished during his own lifetime, culminating in the XIth
and last Book of the Ocean to Cynthia (1593-94?). Only a few of these
poems employ lunar imagery directly; those that do fuse the figures
of Elizabeth, the classical goddess Diana-Cynthia (Mount Cynthus was
the legendary birthplace of Diana), and the moon into a single image.
At times, the language is plainly that of religious invocation,
as in the sonnet:
Prais'd be Diana's fair and harmless light,
Prais'd be the dews wherewith she moists the ground;
Prais'd be her beams, the glory of the night,
Prais'd be her power, by which all powers abound.
Ralegh's cult of Queen Elizabeth as Diana-Cynthia-the moon extended
beyond the written word. Several artists portrayed the Queen as the
virgin huntress Diana, complete with bow, arrows and hunting dogs, and
Ralegh himself appears in a well-known portrait of 1588 in an elaborate
costume of silver doublet and black cloak decorated with silver rays
and pearls. The object of this black-and-silver cult, the moon,
is shown in the top left-hand corner of the painting.
Edmund Spenser adopted Ralegh's 'excellent conceit' of Elizabeth as moon
goddess and popularised the cult in his Faerie Queene (1590-96), in
which the Queen appears allegorised as Gloriana and Belphoebe. In the
letter to Ralegh that accompanied the first three books of the Faerie
Queene, Spenser makes clear that he is following his friend's example:
In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my
particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our
soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet in some
places els, I do otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two
persons, the one a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other a most
vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I do
expresse in Belphoebe, fashioning her name according to your owne
excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phoebe and Cynthia being
both names of Diana.)
Spenser employs lunar imagery extensively in the Faerie Queene. He links
it especially with the female knight Britomart, the central character of
Book III, who is likened to 'faire Cynthia' - the moon - appearing from
behind a cloud when she reveals her face by lifting the visor of her
helmet (III.i.). Later in the poem, when Britomart visits the temple of
the Egyptian goddess Isis, the priests wear '... Mitres shaped like the
Moone / To shew that Isis doth the Moone portend' (V.vii.). In the
later 'Mutabilitie Cantos' (c. 1598), the goddess of the moon appears
in person, in her heavenly aspect as Cynthia and in her earthly guise
as Diana, as a central figure in both the major and minor narratives.
A notable feature of Spenser's use of lunar imagery is that it is almost
invariably associated with feminine beauty and benevolence. Cynthia is
always 'faire', Isis represents 'That part of Justice which is Equity',
and the extended lunar image that recurs in the Faerie Queene
is that of a light that guides the lost and weary traveller.
George Chapman was among the last of the major Elizabethan poets to take
up the moon-goddess theme in his heavily allegorical The Shadow of Night
(1594). This poem, which Frances Yates describes as 'the quintessence
of the Cynthian cult', is in two parts: a hymn to the night ('Hymnus
in Noctem') and a hymn to Cynthia, or the moon ('Hymnus in Cynthiam').
Towards the end of the first part, Chapman describes the moon rising
in magical splendour from the blackness of the night in a way that
seems to combine classical allusion, the imagery of a Renaissance
processional triumph, and verbal echoes of the biblical Song of Songs:
See now ascends, the glorious Bride of Brides,
Nuptials, and triumphs, glittring by her sides,
Iuno and Hymen do her traine adorne,
Ten thousand torches round about them borne:
....
... with a brase of siluer Hynds,
In Iuorie chariot, swifter than the winds,
Is great Hyperions horned daughter drawne
Enchantresse-like, deckt in disparent lawne,
Cirkled with charmes, and incantations ...
Not all the Elizabethan poets who adopted the imagery of the
moon-goddess cult achieve the impassioned melancholy of a Ralegh
or the dense allusiveness of a Chapman. In the hands of a lesser
poet such as Richard Barnfield, an imitator of Spenser,
the allegory becomes formulaic and banal:
Thus, sacred Virgin, Muse of chastitie,
This difference is betwixt the Moone and thee:
Shee shines by Night; but thou by Day dost shine:
Shee monthly changeth; thou dost nere decline:
And as the Sunne, to her, doth lend his light,
So hee, by thee, is onely made so bright ...
If a poem such as this represents the public, officially sanctioned
aspect of lunar symbolism for the Elizabethans, the same iconography may
well have held a deeper spiritual meaning for a persecuted minority of
the Queen's subjects. In Roman Catholic emblem books of the period, the
moon symbolises the Virgin Mary: 'Now what may this Moon denote and
signify to us, but the glorious Queene of Heaven?' the Jesuit Henry
Hawkins writes in his 'Discourse of the Moon' in the emblem book
Partheneia Sacra. Such a clear association between lunar symbolism and
the cult of the Virgin in Roman Catholic devotional literature of the
English Renaissance is highly suggestive. Not only does it impart a
deeper, explicitly religious - and a potentially politically subversive
- Christian dimension to the literary usages of lunar imagery in the
period, it finds a strange and surprising echo in the poetry of Sir
Walter Ralegh, who, in one of the most moving of his poems to Cynthia,
'As you came from the holy land of Walsingham', links the cults
of the Protestant Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mary.
Yet Graves makes no reference to Ralegh's poetry in The White Goddess.
This is puzzling, especially given the fact that Ralegh's 'As you came
from the holy land' is an adaptation of the traditional ballad 'Holy
Land of Walsingham', which Graves quotes alongside 'Tom o' Bedlam's
Song' as an example of poetry that is 'directly inspired' by the White
Goddess (p. 434). What makes the omission yet more remarkable is that
Ralegh's adaptation is among the fullest extant versions of the ballad
and must, one may suppose, have been familiar to Graves, who published
an anthology of traditional English ballads in the 1920s. As for
Spenser, Graves makes two passing references to the poet's View of the
Present State of Ireland, but only one to his poetry: 'Spenser's White
Goddess is the Arthurian "Lady of the Lake" ...' (p. 439: a reference
here to the enchantress Nimue, who appears as a very minor character
in Book II of the Faerie Queene). Of Chapman and The Shadow of Night,
Graves makes no mention at all. However, while he may not discuss
actual examples of the poetry of the cult of Elizabeth as moon
goddess, Graves does briefly acknowledge its existence:
Queen Elizabeth ... was popularly regarded as a sort of deity: poets
not only made her their Muse but gave her titles - Phoebe, Virginia,
Gloriana - which identified her with the Moon-goddess, and
the extraordinary hold that she gained on the affections of
her subjects was largely due to this cult. (p. 406)
Shakespeare 'knew and feared' the White Goddess,
Graves tells us. But, he goes on:
One must not be misled by the extraordinary mythographic jumble
in his Midsummer Night's Dream, where Theseus appears as a witty
Elizabethan gallant ... and, most monstrous of all, the Wild Ass
Set-Dionysus and the star-diademed Queen of Heaven as ass-eared
Bottom and tinselled Titania. (p. 426)
In his apparent insistence on reading A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)
as a religio-mythic drama shrunk like a mystery play to the level of
popular entertainment, Graves seems oddly insensitive to the fact that
this play, more than any other of Shakespeare's, is literally saturated
with the imagery of the moon and its goddess, Diana-Cynthia. It is a
commonplace that the influence and presence of the moon are to be felt
throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream, from Theseus's opening lines to
Puck's closing speech. The word 'moon' occurs twenty-eight times - more
than three times more often than in any other of Shakespeare's plays.
Moreover, the play's lunar imagery operates at every dramatic level -
from the cosmic (Diana, goddess of chastity) to the comic (Moonshine
and his lantern). Shakespeare, too, Frances Yates has shown,
assimilates the imagery of the cult of Elizabeth into his play:
Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal, throned by the west,
And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon;
And the imperial votress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy free.
II.i.157-64
The 'fair vestal, throned by the west' is Elizabeth, represented here
as Vestal Virgin and the central figure in a Petrarchan 'triumph of
chastity'. The theme of chastity seems to have exercised Shakespeare's
imagination a great deal since it reappears so often in his drama both
during and after the lifetime of the Virgin Queen herself. Oberon's
description of the 'defeat of Cupid' from a A Midsummer Night's Dream is
echoed, for example, in a corresponding 'defeat of Venus' described by
the goddess Ceres in the wedding masque of The Tempest (1611). It is no
surprise, therefore, that Diana, goddess of chastity, should be the most
prominent classicial goddess in Shakespeare's plays. Two of his heroines
are votaries of the goddess, and 'Celestial Dian, goddess argentine'
presides over the action of Pericles (1608). All told, the goddess
is named more than forty times in the plays - twice as often
as her nearest rival, Venus, goddess of love.
However, not all Shakespeare's allusions to the moon-goddess cult of
the 1590s are as conventional and eulogistic as Oberon's speech from
A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Henry IV Part I (1597), the dramatist
gives its symbolism a surprising and subversive comic twist when,
apropos the attractions of a life of crime, Falstaff says to Prince Hal:
Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are
squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty:
let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the
moon; and let men say, we be men of good government, being governed
as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon,
under whose countenance we steal.
Why does Graves ignore, or so casually dismiss, the poetry of the cult
of Elizabeth in The White Goddess? We know that he cannot simply have
been unaware of it. A possible answer, I suggest, lies in a combination
of two factors. First, by relying on anonymous compositions such as
'Tom o' Bedlam's Song', Graves can successfully evade the issue of
source-criticism in order to attribute supposed traces of moon-goddess
worship in a traditional English ballad to a presumed underground
'tradition'. In the case of major poets such as Shakespeare, Spenser
and Chapman, scholarship has identified their literary sources, whether
they be Ovid's Metamorphoses (Shakespeare) or a Renaissance mythological
dictionary such as Natali Conti's Mythologiae (Chapman). The second, and
perhaps the decisive factor is that for Graves the White Goddess is not
the regal and chaste figure of Elizabeth-Diana who - despite Ralegh's
complaints of her cruelty - is essentially benign. Graves's White
Goddess is the darker side of the moon. And it is significant that,
after dismissing A Midsummer Night's Dream in a sentence, he should
turn to Shakespeare's more 'sincere' portrayal of the White Goddess as
Hecate, goddess of the witches in Macbeth, the 'magnificent and wanton'
Cleopatra, and the 'damn'd witch' Sycorax of The Tempest (p. 426).
In questioning Graves's interpretation of 'Tom o' Bedlam's Song' and
looking beyond the ballad for evidence of 'primitive moon-worship' in
the poetry of the same period, a curious irony emerges. For not only was
such poetry being written by English poets, the corpus of verse that can
quite legitimately be described as moon-goddess poetry is actually much
larger than Graves himself would apparently have us believe. While other
poems - Ralegh's 'Prais'd be Diana's fair and harmless light', Chapman's
'Hymnus in Cynthiam' - may have stronger claims than 'Tom o' Bedlam's
Song' to be Graves's 'perfect compendium' of moon-goddess worship, the
connection he makes between the religious rituals of pagan antiquity
and English Renaissance poetry is actually far less fanciful than it
may appear. Indeed, it could be argued that the poetry of the cult of
Queen Elizabeth - the poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh, Edmund Spenser and
George Chapman - constitutes an unwritten chapter of The White Goddess.
It was one of Graves's own White Goddess-inspired writers, the
19th-century English rural labourer-poet John Clare, who made a
similar observation about Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets.
Clare noted in his journal in 1824:
I never take up Johnsons lives but I regret his beginning at the wrong
end first & leaving out those beautiful minstrels of Elizabeth - had
he forgot that there had been such poets as Spenser Drayton Suckling
&c &c but it was the booksellers judgment that employd his pen & we
know by experience that most of their judgments lie in their pockets
- so the Poets of Elizabeth are still left in cobwebs & mystery.>>
(Forthcoming: Gravesiana: The Journal of the Robert Graves Society)
--------------------------------------------------------------
"The OX hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain"
-Titania, AMND, II, i
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www2.crecon.com/agent33/alter.page?FONTSIZE=5&BGCOLOR=&TEXTCOL...
<<the Queen of the Fairies is Titania, whose name represents the
pre-Olympian god-race of the Titans. In particular, she is the Moon
Goddess Diana. Their king, Oberon, however, had an historical base,
being inspired by an ancestor of Shakespeare's colleague Edward de Vere,
17th Earl of Oxford. He was a founding member of Elizabeth Tudor's
16th-century Court Poetry and Magic Syndicate - along with Francis
Bacon, John Dee, Edmund Spenser and others of the Rosicrucian
"underground stream" who aided and guided much of Shakespeare's work.
Edward de Vere was, at that time, Lord Chancellor of England - as
had been many generations of his forebears, including Albrey, the
12th-century Prince of Anjou & Guisnes, whose titular name, Albe-Righ,
meant Elf King. What the Syndicate knew full well, despite their
loyalty to Elizabeth, was that the House of Tudor had no prior right
to the English throne, having simply taken it, by might of the sword,
from the preceding House of Plantagenet.
That apart, the Plantagenets themselves were a junior branch of the
House of Anjou, whose senior branch was the House of Vere. Indeed,
in 1861, the noted royal historian Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay
described the Veres as "the longest & most illustrious line of nobles
that England has ever seen". Their ancestry was jointly PICTISH and
MEROVINGIAN, descending from the ancient Grail House of Scythia.
Here was a true kingly line of the Elven Race, and it was for this
reason that OBERON (a variant of AUBREY/Albrey, the historical
Elf King) became Shakespeare's King of the Fairies. Such was
the translatory nature of all Rosicrucian symbology, whether
portrayed in stories, artwork, watermarks or the Tarot.
Some time earlier, in 1408, Edward de Vere's ancestor, Richard (Lord
Chamberlain and 11th Earl of Oxford), had been invested as a Knight
of the Garter by King Henry IV at Windsor Castle. Also invested at
the same time was King Sigismund of Hungary, who had revived the
ancient Egyptian Order of the DRAGON - within which Richard de Vere
held the hereditary distinction of Lord DRACONIS.>>
- Sir Laurence Gardner Nexus Magazine,(August-September 1999)
-------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Art Neuendorffer
The Comedy of Errors Act 1, Scene 1
DUKE SOLINUS: Hapless AEgeon, whom the fates have mark'd
[T]o bear the extremity of dire mishap!
[N]ow, trust me, were it not against our laws,
[A]gainst my crown, my oath, my dignity,
[W]hich princes, would they, may not disannul,
[My] soul would sue as advocate for thee.
[B]ut, though thou art adjudged to the death
[A]nd passed sentence may not be recall'd
[B]ut to our honour's great disparagement,
[Y]et I will favour thee in what I can.
------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen & Cynthia Neuendorffer gave birth to [BABY]
Teresa Rose Neuendorffer: 4:23 pm, January 11, 2005
weighing 7 lbs 12 ounces, and a leggy 20 inches.
-------------------------------------------------------------
<<Titania, the largest moon of Uranus, was discovered
on January 11, 1787 by William Herschel using
20 foot long reflecting telescope
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Titania-(moon)
All of the moons of Uranus are named for characters from
Shakespeare or Alexander Pope. Titania was named after
Titania, the Queen of the Faeries in A Midsummer Night's Dream.>>
------------------------------------------------------------
A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 3, Scene 1
Titania: [O]ut of this wood do not desire to go:
[T]hou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
[I] am a spirit of no common rate;
[T]he summer still doth tend upon my state;
[An]d I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
[I]'ll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
[A]nd they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Titania-(moon)
A major surface feature is a huge canyon that is in the same class
as the Valles Marineris on Mars or Ithaca Chasma on Saturn's moon
Tethys... and dwarfs the scale of the Grand Canyon on Earth.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Grand Canyon National Monument, established
by Presidential Proclamation, January 11, 1908
Chamberlain & 11th Earl of Oxford), had been invested as a Knight
of the Garter by King Henry IV at Windsor Castle. Also invested
at the same time was King Sigismund of Hungary, who had revived
the ancient Egyptian Order of the DRAGON - within which Richard
de Vere held the hereditary distinction of Lord DRACONIS.>>
- Sir Laurence Gardner Nexus Magazine,(August-September 1999)
------------------------------------------------------------
'Minions of Cynthia': Robert Graves and the Elizabethans
http://www.quarto.iinet.net.au/writing_6.html
© Roger Bourke 1999
<<TOWARDS the end of 1927, Robert Graves received a visit from the
Australian writer Jack Lindsay. Lindsay, who was running a small private
press in London, asked Graves if he would write the introduction to a
collection the Fanfrolico Press intended to publish of versions of the
anonymous seventeenth-century English popular ballad 'Tom o' Bedlam's
Song'. Lindsay, who remembered the afternoon largely from the inability
of Graves's companion Laura Riding to cook even a simple meal of
corn-on-the-cob, writes in his autobiography that Graves agreed with
enthusiasm, adding that he 'already had ideas' about the ballad.
Graves's essay duly appeared at the end of the year as the foreword to
Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite Verses of the XVI and XVIIth Centuries. Graves
also edited the ballad from a transcript provided by Lindsay from a
manuscript of 1614, and concluded his essay on a dramatic note by
suggesting that this text of 'Tom o'Bedlam's Song' was nothing less
than an unattributed work of Shakespeare's - a lost song from King Lear
(1604-5). Whatever its provenance, the ballad occupied a privileged
place in Graves's poetic thinking for many years thereafter. We know,
from the letter quoted in Chapter 1, that he came to regard it as 'the
most "purely poetic" of all anonymous English compositions' and as a
'perfect compendium' of moon-goddess worSHIP. Graves writes of the
worSHIP? The ballad does contain references to planetary deities:
Apollo, Venus, Mars, & the moon. But it seems to lack not just a sense
of religious invocation, but references to religious ritual of any
kind. With the exception of the memorable line 'The Moon's my constant
mistress', which can be read simply as a statement of the folk-belief
that lunatics are ruled by the moon, precisely which elements of pagan
goddess worSHIP Graves sees in the ballad are not at all obvious. Does
he regard popular superstition about the moon in seventeenth-century
England as a survival of primitive religious ritual? Quite possibly,
but, unfortunately, he does not elucidate. However, Graves's basic
premise - that the poetry of moon-goddess worSHIP was being written
worSHIP in a traditional English ballad to a presumed underground
'tradition'. In the case of major poets such as Shakespeare, Spenser
and Chapman, scholarSHIP has identified their literary sources, whether
they be Ovid's Metamorphoses (Shakespeare) or a Renaissance mythological
dictionary such as Natali Conti's Mythologiae (Chapman). The second, and
perhaps the decisive factor is that for Graves the White Goddess is not
the regal and chaste figure of Elizabeth-Diana who - despite Ralegh's
complaints of her cruelty - is essentially benign. Graves's White
Goddess is the darker side of the moon. And it is significant that,
after dismissing A Midsummer Night's Dream in a sentence, he should
turn to Shakespeare's more 'sincere' portrayal of the White Goddess as
Hecate, goddess of the witches in Macbeth, the 'magnificent and wanton'
Cleopatra, and the 'damn'd witch' Sycorax of The Tempest (p. 426).
In questioning Graves's interpretation of 'Tom o' Bedlam's Song' and
looking beyond the ballad for evidence of 'primitive moon-worSHIP' in
the poetry of the same period, a curious irony emerges. For not only was
such poetry being written by English poets, the corpus of verse that can
quite legitimately be described as moon-goddess poetry is actually much
larger than Graves himself would apparently have us believe. While other
poems - Ralegh's 'Prais'd be Diana's fair and harmless light', Chapman's
'Hymnus in Cynthiam' - may have stronger claims than 'Tom o' Bedlam's
Song' to be Graves's 'perfect compendium' of moon-goddess worSHIP, the
connection he makes between the religious rituals of pagan antiquity
and English Renaissance poetry is actually far less fanciful than it
may appear. Indeed, it could be argued that the poetry of the cult of
Queen Elizabeth - the poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh, Edmund Spenser and
George Chapman - constitutes an unwritten chapter of The White Goddess.
It was one of Graves's own White Goddess-inspired writers, the
19th-century English rural labourer-poet John Clare, who made a
similar observation about Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets.
Clare noted in his journal in 1824:
I never take up Johnsons lives but I regret his beginning at the wrong
end first & leaving out those beautiful minstrels of Elizabeth - had
he forgot that there had been such poets as Spenser Drayton Suckling
&c &c but it was the booksellers judgment that employd his pen & we
know by experience that most of their judgments lie in their pockets
- so the Poets of Elizabeth are still left in cobwebs & mystery.>>
(Forthcoming: Gravesiana: The Journal of the Robert Graves Society)
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Art Neuendorffer