Weekly Sonnet, No. 134
bookburn
Sonnet CXXXIV.
SO, now I have confess'd that he is thine
And I myself am mortgag'd to thy will,
Myself I 'll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still:
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, 5
For thou art covetous and he is kind;
He learn'd but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer, that putt'st forth all to use, 10
And sue a friend came debtor for my sake;
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me:
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.
1609 Quarto, old-fashioned spelling.
I34
SO now I haue confest that he is thine,
And I my selfe am morgag'd to thy will,
My selfe Ile forfeit,so that other mine,
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still:
But thou wilt not,nor he will not be free,
For thou art couetous,and he is kinde,
He learnd but suretie-like to write for me,
Vnder that bond that him as fast doth binde.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou vsurer that put'st forth all to vse,
And sue a friend,came debter for my sake,
So him I loose through my vnkinde abuse.
Him haue I lost, thou hast both him and me,
He paies the whole,and yet am I not free.
Robert Stonehouse
wrote:
>The Oxford Shakespeare: Poems. 1914.
>
>Sonnet CXXXIV.
>
>SO, now I have confess'd that he is thine
>And I myself am mortgag'd to thy will,
>Myself I 'll forfeit, so that other mine
>Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still:
>But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, 5
But you refuse, and he does not even want
to be released, /
>For thou art covetous and he is kind;
because you are greedy, and he is generous; /
>He learn'd but surety-like to write for me,
he discovered how to sign for my sake, only
in the capacity of a guarantor, /
>Under that bond that him as fast doth bind
at the foot of that instrument of debt which
binds him as tightly as it does me; /
>The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
You will have the entitlement of the bond
created by your beauty, /
>Thou usurer, that putt'st forth all to use, 10
you money-lender, who put every penny
out at interest, /
>And sue a friend came debtor for my sake;
and take legal action against a friend who
became a debtor on my account /
>So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
and therefore, by my mean misuse of his
kindness, I lose him. /
> Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me:
I have lost him, you have him and me too; /
> He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.
he pays off the whole debt and I am still
in prison. /
By quatrains:
(1) He is yours and I am yours; I'll give myself up to get him off.
(2) But you are too greedy to allow that, though he was only a
guarantor. (3) You will insist on your rights, and I have lost him
(c) and so you keep both of us.
(The metaphor is essential - I cannot strip it off and retain the
sense of the poem.)
The legal metaphor is unusually extended: from line 2 (at latest) to
line 14. Mostly Shakespeare's metaphors are done with in three lines
or less, but the occasional one goes beyond, sometimes well beyond.
The commentators refer to The Merchant of Venice, but to my mind they
understate the closeness of the legal parallel. The more eminent man
has given an undertaking for the sake of the less eminent, and the
usurer ruthlessly exacts the full entitlement against him.
I would call this the Merchant sonnet, as 129 is the Lucrece sonnet.
The earlier Dark Lady sonnets recall Love's Labour's Lost almost to
the same extent. I do not recall this happening in sonnets 1-126.
(There is one small difference. Antonio enters into a bond of his own,
to give the money to Bassanio. Here the speaker has entered into a
bond and his friend has guaranteed it.)
Line 1: 'So now I have confessed' - in the previous poem.This is the
second of a sonnet-pair.
Line 7, 'learned'. I am not happy with this word. Has he learned to
write? Or what has he learned?
'to write for me'. With 'under' in the next line, this is 'underwrite'
(unterschreiben, souscrire, sottoscrivere) meaning 'to sign at the
foot of a document'. There is no need to imagine that this speaker
(who is in some sense Shakespeare!) had to get his friend to write his
letters and poems for him. But I wonder what an anti-Stratfordian
might make of this!
Line 12: 'my unkind abuse'. I do not see that 'my unkind' can avoid
meaning that I have been unkind. (The speaker blames himself for the
situation, as Bassanio does.) Mostly, the commentators take it as
'your unkind abuse of me'.
Rita
> On Fri, 17 Jan 2003 07:10:08 -0800, "bookburn" <book...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >The Oxford Shakespeare: Poems. 1914.
> >
> >Sonnet CXXXIV.
> >
> >He learn'd but surety-like to write for me,
> he discovered how to sign for my sake, only
> in the capacity of a guarantor, /
> >Under that bond that him as fast doth bind
> at the foot of that instrument of debt which
> binds him as tightly as it does me; /
>
> Line 7, 'learned'. I am not happy with this word. Has he learned to
> write? Or what has he learned?
>
depicted through the debt-imagery, surely? Shakespeare had a
mistress, and his innocent younger friend was able to watch how a man
of the world operates. So when the chance arose for him to have a
try, he did. Shakespeare, as everywhere in this sonnet sequence, takes
the blame on himself when his friend goes astray. Or he blames the
woman. Or anybody really but sweet Master FK&T.
All this business imagery is very sexual. A pen is something you
write with and a bond is a legal document, but a pen is also phallic
and a bond is something that grips tight.
Rita
Robert Stonehouse
I know Booth makes that point, and I did not deal with it except by
saying something else. What strikes me is that the word 'pen' is
esssential to Booth's view, and that word is not in the poem. So I set
about paraphrasing the poem with no sexual innuendo at all, and except
for this word 'learned' it seems to work with no problem. Of course, I
may come unstuck with next week's poem! That is a hazard of the game.
It is a question how far we should go behind the words to find the
meaning. My Occamist approach is to go no farther than is necessary to
get a meaning. When it makes sense, then stop; if someone else can
make sense by a shorter route, then that person has it right. This is
an uncertain, wavering shot at a basic principle. There may be no more
behind it than taking warning by terrible examples. But here I think
the argument "He says 'write'; you write with a pen; therefore we have
to think around the word 'pen'" goes too far.
We are a fair way through the sonnets now (for the second time, at
that) and a thesis may be developing as follows. These sonnets are
supposed to be crammed with sexual innuendo. They are not. A few of
them (20, 129 ...) make sexual statements in reasonably plain
language. The rest are about other things.
Subject, of course, to the above-mentioned hazard!
On the subject of 'learned', I wonder if it could mean 'this was his
first time of acting as a guarantor, and here he is, caught'. It would
be fairly typical of how inexperienced people do get caught when they
sign guarantees: thinking it was a mere formality, they find to their
horror that they have imperilled everything they possess.
I am not sure how that would apply in the love-triangle. But I differ
from bookburn's commentary; I think the legal details are rather
consistent in themselves, but what is in doubt is how exactly they fit
the situation they are supposed to apply to.
KQKnave
Stonehouse) writes:
>>Sonnet CXXXIV.
>>SO, now I have confess'd that he is thine
>>And I myself am mortgag'd to thy will,
>>Myself I 'll forfeit, so that other mine
>>Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still:
>>But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, 5
>>For thou art covetous and he is kind;
>>He learn'd but surety-like to write for me,
>>Under that bond that him as fast doth bind
>>The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
>>Thou usurer, that putt'st forth all to use, 10
>>And sue a friend came debtor for my sake;
>>So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
>> Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me:
>> He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.
Some similarities in theme and diction with Barnes' sonnets
in his 1593 sequence "Parthenophil and Parthenophe":
The first two involve a rival lover, the words "forfeit"
and "covetous", the third has a similar conceit involving
words related to business and rents (compare Barnes' "tenure",
"freehold" etc. in his #20 with Shakespeare's "mortgage", and
the word "covetous" again appears in both):
Barnes 6
Him when I caught, what chains had I provided!
What fetters had I framed! What locks of Reason!
What Keys of Continence had I devised
(Impatient of the breach) 'gainst any treason!
But fair PARTHENOPHE did urge me still
To liberal pardon, for his former fault;
Which, out alas! prevailèd with my will.
Yet moved I bonds, lest he should make default:
Which willingly she seemed to undertake,
And said "As I am virgin! I will be
His bail for this offence; and if he make
Another such vagary, take of me
A pawn, for more assurance unto thee!"
"Your love to me", quoth I, "your pawn shall make!
So that, for his default, I forfeit take."
Barnes 79
Covetous eyes ! What did you late behold ?
My rival gracèd with a sun-bright smile !
Where he, with secret signs, was sweetly told
Her thoughts; with winks, which all men might beguile !
Audacious did I see him kiss that hand
Which holds the reins of my unbridled heart !
And, softly wringing it, did closely stand
Courting with love terms, and in lover's art !
Next, (with his fingers kiss) he touched her middle !
Then, saucy, (with presumption uncontrolled)
To hers, from his eyes, sent regards by riddle !
At length he kissed her cheek ! Ah me ! So bold !
To bandy with belgards in interchange.
Blind mine eyes, Envy ! that they may not range !
Barnes 20
These Eyes (thy Beauty's Tenants!) pay due tears
For occupation of mine Heart, thy Freehold,
In Tenure of Love's service! If thou behold
With what exaction it is held through fears;
And yet thy Rents, extorted daily, bears.
Thou would not, thus, consume my quiet's gold!
And yet, though covetous thou be to make
Thy beauty rich, with renting me so roughly,
And at such sums: thou never thought dost take,
But still consumes me! Then thou dost misguide all!
Spending in sport for which I wrought so toughly!
When I had felt all torture, and had tried all;
And spent my Stock, through 'strain of thy extortion;
On that I had but good hopes for my portion.
See my demolition of Monsarrat's RES paper!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/monsarr1.html
The Droeshout portrait is not unusual at all!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/shakenbake.html
Agent Jim
Rita
That pretty much rules out all double-entendre, doesn't it?
> This is
> an uncertain, wavering shot at a basic principle. There may be no more
> behind it than taking warning by terrible examples. But here I think
> the argument "He says 'write'; you write with a pen; therefore we have
> to think around the word 'pen'" goes too far.
I take your point that one can always construct absurd meanings by
interpreting the words in a way quite unsupported by the context. But
we have to decide whether, in a poem about a three-way relationship
between a man, his friend and his mistress, the superficial 'business'
meaning is probable. I don't think it is. I wouldn't expect it to be
anything other than sexual; but I would expect someone as adroit with
words as Shakespeare to take an extended metaphor about as far as it
can possibly go.
> We are a fair way through the sonnets now (for the second time, at
> that) and a thesis may be developing as follows. These sonnets are
> supposed to be crammed with sexual innuendo. They are not. A few of
> them (20, 129 ...) make sexual statements in reasonably plain
> language. The rest are about other things.
>
> Subject, of course, to the above-mentioned hazard!
>
> On the subject of 'learned', I wonder if it could mean 'this was his
> first time of acting as a guarantor, and here he is, caught'. It would
> be fairly typical of how inexperienced people do get caught when they
> sign guarantees: thinking it was a mere formality, they find to their
> horror that they have imperilled everything they possess.
I empathize with your rejection of the sort of blinkered approach
which demands every word should somehow have a sexual double-meaning
wrung out of it. I too think some interpretations are too tortuous.
But I find it very hard to believe Shakespeare was really writing a
sonnet about business transactions!
> I am not sure how that would apply in the love-triangle. But I differ
> from bookburn's commentary; I think the legal details are rather
> consistent in themselves, but what is in doubt is how exactly they fit
> the situation they are supposed to apply to.
I think they do fit a situation in which (allegedly - I still see
these sonnets as at least in part playful, fictional exercises) a
friend has become entangled in an affair with a woman he met via
Shakespeare, who was previously her lover. Rather than blame the
friend, S excuses him by this ingenious analogy. He is like someone
who at first stands on the fringes of action in which he is not
involved, and then is innocently drawn in to become a player.
Rita
Paul Crowley
> On 18 Jan 2003 13:41:32 -0800, David...@tesco.net (Rita) wrote:
> >ew...@bcs.org.uk (Robert Stonehouse) wrote in message
> >All this business imagery is very sexual. A pen is something you
> >write with and a bond is a legal document, but a pen is also phallic
> >and a bond is something that grips tight.
>
> I know Booth makes that point, and I did not deal with it except by
> saying something else. What strikes me is that the word 'pen' is
> esssential to Booth's view, and that word is not in the poem.
This sonnet (like No 133 to which it is closely linked)
is packed with sexual innuendo. Indeed, it is much
more than that -- its very subject is the act of sex.
Rita's instincts here are sound. Yours are quite
askew.
> So I set
> about paraphrasing the poem with no sexual innuendo at all, and except
> for this word 'learned' it seems to work with no problem.
". . . it seems to work with no problem . ." . . .???
How can you say such a thing? What can you
mean by 'work'?
> Of course, I
> may come unstuck with next week's poem! That is a hazard of the game.
>
> It is a question how far we should go behind the words to find the
> meaning. My Occamist approach is to go no farther than is necessary to
> get a meaning.
Do you really think that the 'meaning' you derive
justifies the poem? Have you extracted some
sense which would impel a poet to put pen to
paper?
> When it makes sense, then stop; if someone else can
> make sense by a shorter route, then that person has it right. This is
> an uncertain, wavering shot at a basic principle.
It may well be a sensible when seeking a scientific
explanation of a natural phenomenon -- which we
can assume has one (or one principal) cause not
produced by an act of conscious deliberation.
We cannot make a similar assumption about a
poem, and certainly not one by Shakespeare.
> There may be no more
> behind it than taking warning by terrible examples. But here I think
> the argument "He says 'write'; you write with a pen; therefore we have
> to think around the word 'pen'" goes too far.
>
> We are a fair way through the sonnets now (for the second time, at
> that) and a thesis may be developing as follows. These sonnets are
> supposed to be crammed with sexual innuendo. They are not.
Only a near-Victorian Puritan could maintain that.
Do you say the same about the plays?
I've been under a lot of pressure of work recently, but
I will post on Sonnets 133 and 134 shortly. You will
be appalled -- but you won't be able to show the
least thing wrong with my arguments. You may
deny my conclusions, but that would be roughly like
seeing a person complete a Times crossword puzzle
and then saying that s/he has got every solution
wrong -- and the fact that each one happens to fit the
clues is no more than a set of coincidences.
Paul.
Robert Stonehouse
>ew...@bcs.org.uk (Robert Stonehouse) wrote in message news:<3e2b008...@news.cityscape.co.uk>...
>> On 18 Jan 2003 13:41:32 -0800, David...@tesco.net (Rita) wrote:
>> >ew...@bcs.org.uk (Robert Stonehouse) wrote in message news:<3e288b5...@news.cityscape.co.uk>...
>> >> On Fri, 17 Jan 2003 07:10:08 -0800, "bookburn" <book...@yahoo.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> >The Oxford Shakespeare: Poems. 1914.
>> >> >
>> >> >Sonnet CXXXIV.
>> It is a question how far we should go behind the words to find the
>> meaning. My Occamist approach is to go no farther than is necessary to
>> get a meaning. When it makes sense, then stop; if someone else can
>> make sense by a shorter route, then that person has it right.
>
>That pretty much rules out all double-entendre, doesn't it?
Not if there is something to make us understand it as double-entendre,
some pointer, something that does not add up unless we pick up the
second meaning. That is why 'learned' worries me. But in the absence
of such a thing, yes, I rule it out. Mind, in sonnet 20 'adding one
thing to my purpose nothing' seems to me to go beyond double-entendre;
if we do not pick it up we are left, not with a single meaning, but
with no meaning at all. So I call it 'reasonably plain'. 129 is even
plainer.
>
>> This is
>> an uncertain, wavering shot at a basic principle. There may be no more
>> behind it than taking warning by terrible examples. But here I think
>> the argument "He says 'write'; you write with a pen; therefore we have
>> to think around the word 'pen'" goes too far.
>
>I take your point that one can always construct absurd meanings by
>interpreting the words in a way quite unsupported by the context. But
>we have to decide whether, in a poem about a three-way relationship
>between a man, his friend and his mistress, the superficial 'business'
>meaning is probable. I don't think it is. I wouldn't expect it to be
>anything other than sexual; but I would expect someone as adroit with
>words as Shakespeare to take an extended metaphor about as far as it
>can possibly go.
I have given a disastrously wrong impression! I completely agree that
all this legal stuff is metaphor, and that it is metaphor for a
romantic tangle that is sexual in its origin. A loves X and B loves
X, and X is playing the femme fatale and giving them both a rough
time. That is what the poem is about. But (I claim) it is about it at
that level; this is courtly love (or something close to it) and the
poem has no room for sexy innnuendo or phallic pens.
In paraphrasing, I sometimes find it possible to disentangle the
metaphors and sometimes not. This time, not, because the legal
metaphor is so extended and all-pervading, and the logic of the poem
seems to me to work pretty normally in the metaphor, but not terribly
well in the thing signified. So I paraphrased the metaphor.
...
>I empathize with your rejection of the sort of blinkered approach
>which demands every word should somehow have a sexual double-meaning
>wrung out of it. I too think some interpretations are too tortuous.
>But I find it very hard to believe Shakespeare was really writing a
>sonnet about business transactions!
I hope I have cleared that up, but without much confidence.
>
>> I am not sure how that would apply in the love-triangle. But I differ
>> from bookburn's commentary; I think the legal details are rather
>> consistent in themselves, but what is in doubt is how exactly they fit
>> the situation they are supposed to apply to.
>
>I think they do fit a situation in which (allegedly - I still see
>these sonnets as at least in part playful, fictional exercises) a
>friend has become entangled in an affair with a woman he met via
>Shakespeare, who was previously her lover. Rather than blame the
>friend, S excuses him by this ingenious analogy. He is like someone
>who at first stands on the fringes of action in which he is not
>involved, and then is innocently drawn in to become a player.
Leslie Stephen said "The ultimate aim of a poet should be to touch our
hearts by showing his own, and not to exhibit his learning, or his
fine taste, or his skill in mimicking the notes of his predecessors"
(quoted by Philip Larkin from Thomas Hardy's diary).
It seems to me (rather tentatively - this is slippery and unfamiliar
ground) that the thoughts and feelings expressed in the sonnets are
ones that Shakespeare has thought and felt. His ultimate aim is to
show them to us and touch us with them, not to exhibit his
autobiography.
The events and situations described in the sonnets are part of the
expression of his thoughts and feelings. There is no need for them to
have happened, and if they did, they may have been transformed beyond
recognition. As a playwright, it would be natural to him to express
himself by means of scenarios.
So I think it wrong to look for a story in the sonnets and very
dubious to use them for any but the simplest factual information: say,
Shakespeare knew what it was like to undertake a long journey on a
rather unsatisfactory horse.
(A third poet who thought well of Leslie Stephen was A.E. Housman: "I
go to Mr Leslie Stephen, and I am always instructed, though I may not
be charmed. I go to Mr Walter Pater, and I am always charmed, though I
may not be instructed." (I love that skewering of Pater. But then he
caps it by going back to his real subject.) "But Arnold was not merely
instructive or charming nor both together: he was what it seems to me
no-on else is: he was illuminating.")
KQKnave
Stonehouse) writes:
>The events and situations described in the sonnets are part of the
>expression of his thoughts and feelings. There is no need for them to
>have happened, and if they did, they may have been transformed beyond
>recognition. As a playwright, it would be natural to him to express
>himself by means of scenarios.
>
I don't think he's expressing himself by means of scenarios. Rather
he is expressing himself by playing off the various conceits that
are typical of the sonnet sequences that were published before his.
The use of legal terminology, the use of business terminology, the
rival lover, ideas from the zodiac, etc are just the many "notes" the
sonneteers played when composing a sequence. The unattainable,
non-sexual male love is just the unattainable perfect female of
Sidney and Daniel taken to its logical conclusion. The "dark lady"
of the sonnets is just the perfect female of other sequences
inverted. I have no doubt that Shakespeare experienced love, lust
and other emotions in his life, but the sonnets I think are primarily
a literary game.
Rita
<snip>
> I have no doubt that Shakespeare experienced love, lust
> and other emotions in his life, but the sonnets I think are primarily
> a literary game.
>
addressee, was both real and significant. It may have been part of
the game for the friend to set a theme: 'what if I betrayed you with
your mistress / went away / encouraged another poet / broke off our
friendship?' and so on, or some of it may have been prompted by real
events. I doubt the dark lady.
Rita
Rita
> >
> >I take your point that one can always construct absurd meanings by
> >interpreting the words in a way quite unsupported by the context. But
> >we have to decide whether, in a poem about a three-way relationship
> >between a man, his friend and his mistress, the superficial 'business'
> >meaning is probable. I don't think it is. I wouldn't expect it to be
> >anything other than sexual; but I would expect someone as adroit with
> >words as Shakespeare to take an extended metaphor about as far as it
> >can possibly go.
>
> I have given a disastrously wrong impression!
More probably I read your post so fast I didn't take it in. I really
thought you were saying this was a sonnet about financial prudence.
Sorry
> I completely agree that
> all this legal stuff is metaphor, and that it is metaphor for a
> romantic tangle that is sexual in its origin. A loves X and B loves
> X, and X is playing the femme fatale and giving them both a rough
> time. That is what the poem is about. But (I claim) it is about it at
> that level; this is courtly love (or something close to it) and the
> poem has no room for sexy innnuendo or phallic pens.
I'd still disagree. Despite the potential seriousness of the
situation described, the poem is laid back and seems meant to be wryly
amusing. Considering the main audience would probably be young and
male - I don't seriously believe the pretended female addressee was
meant to see this - I would also therefore expect a bit of anatomical
humour.
<snip>
> The events and situations described in the sonnets are part of the
> expression of his thoughts and feelings. There is no need for them to
> have happened, and if they did, they may have been transformed beyond
> recognition. As a playwright, it would be natural to him to express
> himself by means of scenarios.
>
> So I think it wrong to look for a story in the sonnets and very
> dubious to use them for any but the simplest factual information: say,
> Shakespeare knew what it was like to undertake a long journey on a
> rather unsatisfactory horse.
>
'With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his imaginative capacity.' Damn.
Rita
KQKnave
>> and other emotions in his life, but the sonnets I think are primarily
>> a literary game.
>>
David...@tesco.net wrote:
>I agree, with the proviso that I think the friend, the central male
>addressee, was both real and significant. It may have been part of
>the game for the friend to set a theme: 'what if I betrayed you with
>your mistress / went away / encouraged another poet / broke off our
>friendship?' and so on, or some of it may have been prompted by real
>events. I doubt the dark lady.
I don't see why they both couldn't be imaginary, or the dark lady
real and the man imaginary.
Robert Stonehouse
<sdkh...@slkjsldfsjf.com> wrote:
>"Robert Stonehouse" <ew...@bcs.org.uk> wrote in message news:3e2b008...@news.cityscape.co.uk...
>> On 18 Jan 2003 13:41:32 -0800, David...@tesco.net (Rita) wrote:
>> >ew...@bcs.org.uk (Robert Stonehouse) wrote in message
>> It is a question how far we should go behind the words to find the
>> meaning. My Occamist approach is to go no farther than is necessary to
>> get a meaning.
>
>Do you really think that the 'meaning' you derive
>justifies the poem? Have you extracted some
>sense which would impel a poet to put pen to
>paper?
The meaning that impels the poet is the expression of his thoughts and
feelings, to which the 'paraphrasable content' is merely ancillary.
Now, if I could express Shakespeare's thoughts and feelings as well as
he did, but more clearly (or how would it be an explanation?) then I
would be as good a poet as he was, which is not so. (Perhaps an
'illuminating' Matthew Arnold could have a shot?)
On the other hand, the paraphrasable content is one of the tools the
poet uses in expressing his thoughts and feelings. In these sonnets,
it seems to me the paraphrasable content is difficult and has not as a
rule been comprehensively addressed. Commentators have preferred to
address themselves to other things, sometimes with high success and
sometimes only middling.
So I set out on this less ambitious project accepting that "it is
ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the
ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way
to knowledge" (Locke, Human Understanding, Epistle to the Reader).
>
>> When it makes sense, then stop; if someone else can
>> make sense by a shorter route, then that person has it right. This is
>> an uncertain, wavering shot at a basic principle.
>
>It may well be a sensible when seeking a scientific
>explanation of a natural phenomenon -- which we
>can assume has one (or one principal) cause not
>produced by an act of conscious deliberation.
>We cannot make a similar assumption about a
>poem, and certainly not one by Shakespeare.
Occam's Razor is not a fact about the world, it is a "method for well
conducting the reason" (title of Descartes' Discourse). If we ignore
it, we are doomed to wander for ever in a limitless universe of mere
possibilities. Somehow we must get a grip on the situation, in
literature as in science. Anything else is wasted time.
>
>> There may be no more
>> behind it than taking warning by terrible examples. But here I think
>> the argument "He says 'write'; you write with a pen; therefore we have
>> to think around the word 'pen'" goes too far.
>>
>> We are a fair way through the sonnets now (for the second time, at
>> that) and a thesis may be developing as follows. These sonnets are
>> supposed to be crammed with sexual innuendo. They are not.
>
>Only a near-Victorian Puritan could maintain that.
My reasons for maintaining it are not Puritan. Indeed, William of
Ockham died in 1350 or thereabouts. But the Victorian scientists made
substantial progress, partly by applying his principle.
>Do you say the same about the plays?
I apply the same criteria. There are characters in the plays to whom
innuendo is appropriate, part of their way of thinking and talking. I
do not see the speaker of the sonnets as a natural partner for
Juliet's nurse or Pompey the bawd.
Robert Stonehouse
>In article <3e2c51f...@news.cityscape.co.uk>, ew...@bcs.org.uk (Robert
>Stonehouse) writes:
>>The events and situations described in the sonnets are part of the
>>expression of his thoughts and feelings. There is no need for them to
>>have happened, and if they did, they may have been transformed beyond
>>recognition. As a playwright, it would be natural to him to express
>>himself by means of scenarios.
>
>I don't think he's expressing himself by means of scenarios. Rather
>he is expressing himself by playing off the various conceits that
>are typical of the sonnet sequences that were published before his.
>The use of legal terminology, the use of business terminology, the
>rival lover, ideas from the zodiac, etc are just the many "notes" the
>sonneteers played when composing a sequence. The unattainable,
>non-sexual male love is just the unattainable perfect female of
>Sidney and Daniel taken to its logical conclusion. The "dark lady"
>of the sonnets is just the perfect female of other sequences
>inverted. I have no doubt that Shakespeare experienced love, lust
>and other emotions in his life, but the sonnets I think are primarily
>a literary game.
I accept that is a thing he is doing. I only say it is not the only
thing. It is not 'the ultimate aim of a poet' 'to exhibit his
learning, or his fine taste, or his skill in mimicking the notes of
his predecessors'. But there is plenty of room for all that along the
way.
Do you in fact deny what I am maintaining, that Shakespeare's
'ultimate aim' in the sonnets is 'to touch our hearts by showing his
own'? I find it hard to penetrate to that thing that he is expressing
and more or less impossible to re-express it, but I do seem to find it
going on.
KQKnave
Stonehouse) writes:
No, the ultimate aim is to create something beautiful.
>
>Do you in fact deny what I am maintaining, that Shakespeare's
>'ultimate aim' in the sonnets is 'to touch our hearts by showing his
>own'? I find it hard to penetrate to that thing that he is expressing
>and more or less impossible to re-express it, but I do seem to find it
>going on.
I think Shakespeare would scoff at the idea of "touching our hearts
by showing his own". Shakespeare makes quite clear in his plays
that the "language of love" is mere words. In the final act of Love's Labour's
Lost, the ladies finally make clear to the men that words are mere words:
LONGAVILLE. Let's part the word.
KATHARINE. No, I'll not be your half.
Take all and wean it; it may prove an ox.
LONGAVILLE. Look how you butt yourself in these sharp mocks!
Will you give horns, chaste lady? Do not so.
KATHARINE. Then die a calf, before your horns do grow.
LONGAVILLE. One word in private with you ere I die.
KATHARINE. Bleat softly, then; the butcher hears you cry. (LLL 5.2)
and Berowne realizes it too:
BEROWNE: Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief;
And by these badges understand the King.
For your fair sakes have we neglected time,
Play'd foul play with our oaths; your beauty, ladies,
Hath much deformed us, fashioning our humours
Even to the opposed end of our intents;
And what in us hath seem'd ridiculous,
As love is full of unbefitting strains,
All wanton as a child, skipping and vain;
Form'd by the eye and therefore, like the eye,
Full of strange shapes, of habits, and of forms,
Varying in subjects as the eye doth roll
o every varied object in his glance; (LLL 5.2)
and Katharine sums it all up:
KATHARINE: a twelvemonth and a day
I'll mark no words that smooth-fac'd wooers say. (LLL 5.2)
The ladies make the men wait a year to see if the love is real or
just words. As Anne Barton says in the introductory essay in
the Riverside:
"Gently, but firmly, the men are sent away to learn something that
the women have known all along: how to accomodate speech to
facts and to emotional realities, as opposed to using it as a means
of evasion, idle amusement, or unthinking cruelty."
Rita
> >> I have no doubt that Shakespeare experienced love, lust
> >> and other emotions in his life, but the sonnets I think are primarily
> >> a literary game.
> >>
>
> David...@tesco.net wrote:
>
> >I agree, with the proviso that I think the friend, the central male
> >addressee, was both real and significant. It may have been part of
> >the game for the friend to set a theme: 'what if I betrayed you with
> >your mistress / went away / encouraged another poet / broke off our
> >friendship?' and so on, or some of it may have been prompted by real
> >events. I doubt the dark lady.
>
> I don't see why they both couldn't be imaginary, or the dark lady
> real and the man imaginary.
>
Guilpin had one, and as for Dr Overall's real-life overobliging wife,
'haire she had as black as Crowe'. So I think dark and sex-mad was
the trend, like curvy blondes in the Monroe era. The only thing that
makes me hesitate to dismiss her as fashionable fantasy is the touch
about her playing the virginals.
As for the man, it's more complicated. Unlike Mrs Duncan-Jones, I
don't think Shakespeare planned to print the sonnet sequence when he
wrote it. I think these poems belonged to a more private and cultured
side of his existence, originally intended for the sort of gentlemanly
literary circle implied by Meres 'private friends'. Well, I imagine
the man as its centre. That would explain the profound gratitude he
provokes. Being socially superior he'd have more wealth and leisure
anyway, but if he loved to learn, and to share what he learnt, his
value to Shakespeare would be immense. He may have been as vital to
Shakespeare as the likes of Richard Martin or Robert Cotton or
Sergeant Hoskyns were to Jonson. Jonson said in later life, when Sir
Benet Hoskyns asked if he could become one of the 'Sons of Ben', "No,
sayd he, 'tis honour enough for me to be your Brother: I am your
father's son: 'twas he that polished me, I doe acknowledge it.'
I don't think this was idle talk, not from him. Jonson was proud of
his achievements and didn't hand credit out to others without reason.
He may have gone to Westminster, but surely that was only the
foundation of his education? He probably knew he wouldn't have
written the plays he did without the friendship of men like Hoskyns
and Cotton, giving him access both to books and intellectual society.
At their dinner tables he would meet enquiring, intelligent and
educated minds, and in their conversation find the stimulus writers
need.
This is the sort of function I imagine the friend performing for
Shakespeare. I believe in the man because he's necessary.
Rita
KQKnave
David...@tesco.net (Rita) writes:
>There were too many black-haired vamps. Nashe has one, Ralegh had one,
>Guilpin had one, and as for Dr Overall's real-life overobliging wife,
>'haire she had as black as Crowe'. So I think dark and sex-mad was
>the trend, like curvy blondes in the Monroe era.
According to the Riverside, blondes were in fashion. And did any of
these people write a sonnet sequence? In all the sequences that
I know of, with the exception of the satirical "Gullinge Sonnets",
the female in question was always placed on a pedestal, and
invariably is portrayed as a paragon. Shakespeare is inverting
the tradition by making the female someone of questionable values.
>The only thing that
>makes me hesitate to dismiss her as fashionable fantasy is the touch
>about her playing the virginals.
>
>As for the man, it's more complicated. Unlike Mrs Duncan-Jones, I
>don't think Shakespeare planned to print the sonnet sequence when he
>wrote it. I think these poems belonged to a more private and cultured
>side of his existence, originally intended for the sort of gentlemanly
>literary circle implied by Meres 'private friends'. Well, I imagine
>the man as its centre. That would explain the profound gratitude he
>provokes. Being socially superior he'd have more wealth and leisure
>anyway, but if he loved to learn, and to share what he learnt, his
>value to Shakespeare would be immense.
Why? This is just Oxfordianism transferred to a buddy, instead
of making Shakespeare a noble earl himself. Shakespeare didn't
need anything beyond Richard Field's book shop.
>He may have been as vital to
>Shakespeare as the likes of Richard Martin or Robert Cotton or
>Sergeant Hoskyns were to Jonson. Jonson said in later life, when Sir
>Benet Hoskyns asked if he could become one of the 'Sons of Ben', "No,
>sayd he, 'tis honour enough for me to be your Brother: I am your
>father's son: 'twas he that polished me, I doe acknowledge it.'
Jonson displayed his learning every chance he got, and was proud
of it. His method of absorbing and borrowing, sometimes translating
literally from, from the classics is entirely different from Shakespeare's
method.
>I don't think this was idle talk, not from him. Jonson was proud of
>his achievements and didn't hand credit out to others without reason.
>He may have gone to Westminster, but surely that was only the
>foundation of his education? He probably knew he wouldn't have
>written the plays he did without the friendship of men like Hoskyns
>and Cotton, giving him access both to books and intellectual society.
> At their dinner tables he would meet enquiring, intelligent and
>educated minds, and in their conversation find the stimulus writers
>need.
Perhaps, but Jonson's life was devoted to currying favor from
the rich. That's how he made his living. Shakespeare made his
living from the theatre.
>This is the sort of function I imagine the friend performing for
>Shakespeare. I believe in the man because he's necessary.
He's not neccessary at all. All Shakespeare had to do was place
a copy of Holinshed, or North's Plutarch, or Barnabe Barnes' or
Daniel's sonnets beside himself when he wrote. Milton and Beaumont
both commented on Shakespeare's "natural" talent, and Jonson
scoffed at his lack of learning.
Rita
> In article <441396ed.03012...@posting.google.com>,
> David...@tesco.net (Rita) writes:
>
> >There were too many black-haired vamps. Nashe has one, Ralegh had one,
> >Guilpin had one, and as for Dr Overall's real-life overobliging wife,
> >'haire she had as black as Crowe'. So I think dark and sex-mad was
> >the trend, like curvy blondes in the Monroe era.
>
> According to the Riverside, blondes were in fashion. And did any of
> these people write a sonnet sequence? In all the sequences that
> I know of, with the exception of the satirical "Gullinge Sonnets",
> the female in question was always placed on a pedestal, and
> invariably is portrayed as a paragon. Shakespeare is inverting
> the tradition by making the female someone of questionable values.
The point I was making was that Shakespeare didn't invent the
dark-lady-as-sexual-predator, nor is she exclusive to his sonnets.
She exists in other men's contemporary works, whether novellas or
epigrams or, in Ralegh's case, an alleged piece of reportage. This
increases the likelihood that she is a cultural type, not a real woman
who Shakespeare knew who just happened to have very dark hair and
eyes.
<snip>
> >
> >As for the man, it's more complicated. Unlike Mrs Duncan-Jones, I
> >don't think Shakespeare planned to print the sonnet sequence when he
> >wrote it. I think these poems belonged to a more private and cultured
> >side of his existence, originally intended for the sort of gentlemanly
> >literary circle implied by Meres 'private friends'. Well, I imagine
> >the man as its centre. That would explain the profound gratitude he
> >provokes. Being socially superior he'd have more wealth and leisure
> >anyway, but if he loved to learn, and to share what he learnt, his
> >value to Shakespeare would be immense.
>
> Why? This is just Oxfordianism transferred to a buddy, instead
> of making Shakespeare a noble earl himself.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, but if you've inferred that I
think the friend was someone from the nobility, you mistake me. As
far as I'm concerned the significant class, the social group which
contained the most interesting minds of the late 16th century, wasn't
the nobility but the gentry - the class Shakespeare was so hellbent on
joining. I was thinking of some wealthy young man who had been to
university and went on to the Inns of Court. He wouldn't be entirely
outside Shakespeare's social orbit, though he would probably connect
with higher circles. But merely being well-born and rich wouldn't cut
it. He'd have to be someone with a passion for the life of the mind,
and time and money to indulge his interests.
> Shakespeare didn't
> need anything beyond Richard Field's book shop.
Do writers not need anything but other men's books? Do they not
habitually seek out other men of similar tastes and interests?
>
> >He may have been as vital to
> >Shakespeare as the likes of Richard Martin or Robert Cotton or
> >Sergeant Hoskyns were to Jonson. Jonson said in later life, when Sir
> >Benet Hoskyns asked if he could become one of the 'Sons of Ben', "No,
> >sayd he, 'tis honour enough for me to be your Brother: I am your
> >father's son: 'twas he that polished me, I doe acknowledge it.'
>
> Jonson displayed his learning every chance he got, and was proud
> of it. His method of absorbing and borrowing, sometimes translating
> literally from, from the classics is entirely different from Shakespeare's
> method.
Irrelevant. The point I made was that Jonson here was saying he had
profited enormously, *as an artist*, from knowing John Hoskyns. As
you say, he was proud of his achievements, and if he brought himself
to admit another man had a share in helping him perfect his talent
then I see no reason to doubt him. If Jonson benefited in this way,
why wouldn't Shakespeare? What are you saying - Jonson could enrich
his mind through mixing with educated men, but Shakespeare would just
sit in a corner covered in straw, rocking to himself and reading a
book?
>
> >I don't think this was idle talk, not from him. Jonson was proud of
> >his achievements and didn't hand credit out to others without reason.
> >He may have gone to Westminster, but surely that was only the
> >foundation of his education? He probably knew he wouldn't have
> >written the plays he did without the friendship of men like Hoskyns
> >and Cotton, giving him access both to books and intellectual society.
> > At their dinner tables he would meet enquiring, intelligent and
> >educated minds, and in their conversation find the stimulus writers
> >need.
>
> Perhaps, but Jonson's life was devoted to currying favor from
> the rich. That's how he made his living. Shakespeare made his
> living from the theatre.
I don't think Jonson was servile, but that isn't the point. Do you
think Shakespeare was only capable of getting intellectual stimulus
from books? Or do you think intellectual stimulus was not to be had
from living men in London then? Or do you think it was accessed by
Jonson, and others, but somehow shunned by Shakespeare?
>
> >This is the sort of function I imagine the friend performing for
> >Shakespeare. I believe in the man because he's necessary.
>
> He's not neccessary at all. All Shakespeare had to do was place
> a copy of Holinshed, or North's Plutarch, or Barnabe Barnes' or
> Daniel's sonnets beside himself when he wrote.
That simple, eh?
> Milton and Beaumont
> both commented on Shakespeare's "natural" talent, and Jonson
> scoffed at his lack of learning.
>
He's apt to complain Shakespeare was too spontaneous and unreflective.
That's okay. Jonson was a byword for costive creativity, and also a
grouch. If you're thinking of the First Folio, though, I'd say Jonson
extolled Shakespeare's achievements while marvelling they were the
product of a man who hadn't had the best of formal educations. But in
that poem at least he's careful to grant Shakespeare the dignity of
being a serious worker at his trade, capable of 'Art'. I've forgotten
what Beaumont said. By the time John Milton gave his patronizing
opinion he could only elaborate what had become received wisdom:
sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, warbling his etc etc. Jonson
might as well not have bothered to point out a good poet's made as
well as born. You think Shakespeare made himself, entirely. I don't.
Rita
KQKnave
nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
>
>kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote in message
>news:<20030122233850...@mb-ci.aol.com>...
>> In article <441396ed.03012...@posting.google.com>,
>> David...@tesco.net (Rita) writes:
>>
>> >There were too many black-haired vamps. Nashe has one, Ralegh had one,
>> >Guilpin had one, and as for Dr Overall's real-life overobliging wife,
>> >'haire she had as black as Crowe'. So I think dark and sex-mad was
>> >the trend, like curvy blondes in the Monroe era.
>>
>> According to the Riverside, blondes were in fashion. And did any of
>> these people write a sonnet sequence? In all the sequences that
>> I know of, with the exception of the satirical "Gullinge Sonnets",
>> the female in question was always placed on a pedestal, and
>> invariably is portrayed as a paragon. Shakespeare is inverting
>> the tradition by making the female someone of questionable values.
>
>The point I was making was that Shakespeare didn't invent the
>dark-lady-as-sexual-predator, nor is she exclusive to his sonnets.
>She exists in other men's contemporary works, whether novellas or
>epigrams or, in Ralegh's case, an alleged piece of reportage. This
>increases the likelihood that she is a cultural type, not a real woman
>who Shakespeare knew who just happened to have very dark hair and
>eyes.
But even if what you say is so, I don't see how you can arbitrarily
decide that the young man was a real person and the woman was
not. There are powerful sonnets in both parts. If Shakespeare can
write a powerful sonnet about an imaginary woman, then there is
no reason he couldn't write one about an imaginary man. My feeling
is that they are both imaginary.
For companionship, sure, but not to create a work of art.
>> >He may have been as vital to
>> >Shakespeare as the likes of Richard Martin or Robert Cotton or
>> >Sergeant Hoskyns were to Jonson. Jonson said in later life, when Sir
>> >Benet Hoskyns asked if he could become one of the 'Sons of Ben', "No,
>> >sayd he, 'tis honour enough for me to be your Brother: I am your
>> >father's son: 'twas he that polished me, I doe acknowledge it.'
>>
>> Jonson displayed his learning every chance he got, and was proud
>> of it. His method of absorbing and borrowing, sometimes translating
>> literally from, from the classics is entirely different from Shakespeare's
>> method.
>
>Irrelevant. The point I made was that Jonson here was saying he had
>profited enormously, *as an artist*, from knowing John Hoskyns.
No, he said that Hoskyns polished him. And Jonson's friends were
were not literary men like Shakespeare and Fletcher, persons who
I think would be more likely to advance Jonson's art. These "Sireniacal
Gentlemen" were certainly more useful for their social connections
than for any knowledge they could impart about art. Most were
men who had taken holy orders, or were jurists or parliamentarians.
>As you say, he was proud of his achievements, and if he brought himself
>to admit another man had a share in helping him perfect his talent
>then I see no reason to doubt him.
I think the "talent" that was imparted to Jonson was a social polish,
from a superior ass-kisser, as it were.
>If Jonson benefited in this way,
>why wouldn't Shakespeare? What are you saying - Jonson could enrich
>his mind through mixing with educated men, but Shakespeare would just
>sit in a corner covered in straw, rocking to himself and reading a
>book?
No, I'm saying that both Jonson and Shakespeare created their art
from their reading. Jonson had an extroverted personality, and their
is a copious record of his relationships with important people. Their
is no such record for Shakespeare. He seems to have been a private
person.
>>
>> >I don't think this was idle talk, not from him. Jonson was proud of
>> >his achievements and didn't hand credit out to others without reason.
>> >He may have gone to Westminster, but surely that was only the
>> >foundation of his education? He probably knew he wouldn't have
>> >written the plays he did without the friendship of men like Hoskyns
>> >and Cotton, giving him access both to books and intellectual society.
>> > At their dinner tables he would meet enquiring, intelligent and
>> >educated minds, and in their conversation find the stimulus writers
>> >need.
>>
>> Perhaps, but Jonson's life was devoted to currying favor from
>> the rich. That's how he made his living. Shakespeare made his
>> living from the theatre.
>
>I don't think Jonson was servile,
What do you mean by servile? He certainly depended for his living
on patronage from the wealthy and from King James, unlike
Shakespeare, who made his living from the theatre.
>but that isn't the point. Do you
>think Shakespeare was only capable of getting intellectual stimulus
>from books? Or do you think intellectual stimulus was not to be had
>from living men in London then? Or do you think it was accessed by
>Jonson, and others, but somehow shunned by Shakespeare?
I've already pointed out above the difference between Shakespeare
and Jonson.
>> >This is the sort of function I imagine the friend performing for
>> >Shakespeare. I believe in the man because he's necessary.
>>
>> He's not neccessary at all. All Shakespeare had to do was place
>> a copy of Holinshed, or North's Plutarch, or Barnabe Barnes' or
>> Daniel's sonnets beside himself when he wrote.
>
>That simple, eh?
Pretty much. Many great writers don't even do that, they just make it all
up, with what they know already in their minds.
>> Milton and Beaumont
>> both commented on Shakespeare's "natural" talent, and Jonson
>> scoffed at his lack of learning.
>>
>He's apt to complain Shakespeare was too spontaneous and unreflective.
>That's okay. Jonson was a byword for costive creativity, and also a
>grouch. If you're thinking of the First Folio, though, I'd say Jonson
>extolled Shakespeare's achievements while marvelling they were the
>product of a man who hadn't had the best of formal educations. But in
>that poem at least he's careful to grant Shakespeare the dignity of
>being a serious worker at his trade, capable of 'Art'. I've forgotten
>what Beaumont said. By the time John Milton gave his patronizing
>opinion he could only elaborate what had become received wisdom:
>sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, warbling his etc etc. Jonson
>might as well not have bothered to point out a good poet's made as
>well as born. You think Shakespeare made himself, entirely. I don't.
I don't think he made himself entirely. He certainly needed an education
at the Stratford grammar school. He certainly must have picked up
information from various people, suggestions on a good read etc. But
that is far from saying that there was *one neccessary* person who fulfilled
this
function for him.
Rita
<snip>> >> >There were too many black-haired vamps. <snip>
> >>
> >> According to the Riverside, blondes were in fashion. <snip>
> >
> >The point I was making was that Shakespeare didn't invent the
> >dark-lady-as-sexual-predator, nor is she exclusive to his sonnets.
> decide that the young man was a real person and the woman was
> not.
not startlingly original: the presence of a young man is. Therefore I
think it more likely she is fictional and he is real.
>There are powerful sonnets in both parts.
But the bulk are to the man. He's much the more important, because, I
think, he was both the inspiration and prime audience for the
sequence.
> If Shakespeare can
> write a powerful sonnet about an imaginary woman, then there is
> no reason he couldn't write one about an imaginary man. My feeling
> is that they are both imaginary.
Okay, since I can't prove you're wrong; but my feeling is that he is
more likely to be real and she is more likely to be invention.
<snip>
> >
> >> Shakespeare didn't
> >> need anything beyond Richard Field's book shop.
> >
> >Do writers not need anything but other men's books? Do they not
> >habitually seek out other men of similar tastes and interests?
>
> For companionship, sure, but not to create a work of art.
>
I'm not a creative artist. We should ask Bob. Does the observation
and criticism of others ever feed into his work?
> >> >He may have been as vital to
> >> >Shakespeare as the likes of Richard Martin or Robert Cotton or
> >> >Sergeant Hoskyns were to Jonson. Jonson said in later life, when Sir
> >> >Benet Hoskyns asked if he could become one of the 'Sons of Ben', "No,
> >> >sayd he, 'tis honour enough for me to be your Brother: I am your
> >> >father's son: 'twas he that polished me, I doe acknowledge it.'
> >>
> >> Jonson displayed his learning every chance he got, and was proud
> >> of it. His method of absorbing and borrowing, sometimes translating
> >> literally from, from the classics is entirely different from Shakespeare's
> >> method.
> >
> >Irrelevant. The point I made was that Jonson here was saying he had
> >profited enormously, *as an artist*, from knowing John Hoskyns.
>
> No, he said that Hoskyns polished him.
????Which means??? (Hoskyns was a fine poet too according to Aubrey,
but a concealed one. After his death his son lent the ms. of his
entire works to a friend, who never returned it. End of Hoskyns'
place in Eng Lit.)
<big snip>
> I think the "talent" that was imparted to Jonson was a social polish,
> from a superior ass-kisser, as it were.
Unlikely if you remember the context in which Jonson made his remark,
which was to Hoskyns son, who had asked to be accepted as one of
Jonson's literary followers. Jonson politely refused to take the role
of literary mentor to him - he could only be his equal, his 'brother',
because of the debt Jonson felt to Hoskyns senior.
The other reason I think it's unlikely is because Jonson didn't have
much social polish.
>
> >If Jonson benefited in this way,
> >why wouldn't Shakespeare? What are you saying - Jonson could enrich
> >his mind through mixing with educated men, but Shakespeare would just
> >sit in a corner covered in straw, rocking to himself and reading a
> >book?
>
> No, I'm saying that both Jonson and Shakespeare created their art
> from their reading. Jonson had an extroverted personality, and their
> is a copious record of his relationships with important people. Their
> is no such record for Shakespeare. He seems to have been a private
> person.
There is a copious record for Jonson, but then he had 20 years more to
build it. And I will agree evidence suggests he was a more aggressive
socializer, but then as you say, he was a lone operator dependent on
court patronage for much of the time, whereas Shakespeare, once he'd
bought his share, was only dependent on his own ability to please the
audience. I think Jonson probably was obliged to keep a higher social
profile and work at his 'contacts'. Also, he was a hard drinker and
probably enjoyed dining out anyway. But I still don't think
Shakespeare would have turned his back on the chance to enter the
social circle of Donne, Brooke, Hoskyns or Martin. These were not
dull men.
<long snip mainly about Jonson, ending with me accusing Jim of saying
Shakespeare was indifferent to outside influence, and virtually 'made
himself'>
>
> I don't think he made himself entirely. He certainly needed an education
> at the Stratford grammar school. He certainly must have picked up
> information from various people, suggestions on a good read etc. But
> that is far from saying that there was *one neccessary* person who fulfilled
> this
> function for him.
We come back to the Friend. Was he imaginary? If so, end of story.
But if real, just why was he so desperately important to Shakespeare?
Why do you think he wrote so many sonnets to/about him? Money/sexual
favours/snob value? I don't think so. I think the Friend was someone
with a keen mind, a kind heart, books galore, and very interesting
friends; a gateway to a more cultured world.
Rita
KQKnave
>
>kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote in message
>news:<20030124225735...@mb-fv.aol.com>...
><snip>
>> >> In article <441396ed.03012...@posting.google.com>,
>> >> David...@tesco.net (Rita) writes:
>> >>
>> >> >There were too many black-haired vamps. <snip>
>> >>
>> >> According to the Riverside, blondes were in fashion. <snip>
>> >
>> >The point I was making was that Shakespeare didn't invent the
>> >dark-lady-as-sexual-predator, nor is she exclusive to his sonnets.
><snip>
>> But even if what you say is so, I don't see how you can arbitrarily
>> decide that the young man was a real person and the woman was
>> not.
>It's not arbitrary. The presence in sonnets of a darkhaired vamp is
>not startlingly original: the presence of a young man is. Therefore I
>think it more likely she is fictional and he is real.
>
>>There are powerful sonnets in both parts.
>
>But the bulk are to the man. He's much the more important, because, I
>think, he was both the inspiration and prime audience for the
>sequence.
But the most powerful sonnets in the "young man" part don't even
mention gender. They could easily have been written independently
of any "story" that Shakespeare contrived later. I'm thinking of
Sonnets 18, 30, 55, 73, 86 (in particular, because the rival
is also male), 87, 94, 106, 107, 110, 116. All of these sonnets
strike me as independent of gender, some like 86 and 110 appear
to me to have a woman as a more likely target.
>> If Shakespeare can
>> write a powerful sonnet about an imaginary woman, then there is
>> no reason he couldn't write one about an imaginary man. My feeling
>> is that they are both imaginary.
>
>Okay, since I can't prove you're wrong; but my feeling is that he is
>more likely to be real and she is more likely to be invention.
My feeling is that the apparent "story" that appears in both sides
was contrived by Shakespeare as an artifice that gives ironic
distance to the emotions expressed, as he does elsewhere in his
plays and poetry (see "A Lover's Complaint"), and as a fine "conceit"
in itself, parodying the sonnet sequences of other writers
>
><snip>
>> >
>> >> Shakespeare didn't
>> >> need anything beyond Richard Field's book shop.
>> >
>> >Do writers not need anything but other men's books? Do they not
>> >habitually seek out other men of similar tastes and interests?
>>
>> For companionship, sure, but not to create a work of art.
>>
>I'm not a creative artist. We should ask Bob. Does the observation
>and criticism of others ever feed into his work?
How do you define a "creative artist"? I write poems and stories
and I don't need any artistic circle. I know more about the subject
than the majority of people that I meet. William Faulkner wrote
his masterpieces in isolation, other than his editor. He wrote
"As I Lay Dying" while working nights in a power plant, utterly
alone. James Joyce had a large circle of friends, but nobody
understood what he was doing when he was writing Ulysses and
it took quite a while for that novel to be understood. Shakespeare,
like both of those writers, was far ahead of his time. A literary
circle would relieve the boredom, but accomplish nothing for him
artistically. I really believe that only mediocrities need a
circle around them, because they don't have enough ideas on
their own.
>
>> >> >He may have been as vital to
>> >> >Shakespeare as the likes of Richard Martin or Robert Cotton or
>> >> >Sergeant Hoskyns were to Jonson. Jonson said in later life, when Sir
>> >> >Benet Hoskyns asked if he could become one of the 'Sons of Ben', "No,
>> >> >sayd he, 'tis honour enough for me to be your Brother: I am your
>> >> >father's son: 'twas he that polished me, I doe acknowledge it.'
>> >>
>> >> Jonson displayed his learning every chance he got, and was proud
>> >> of it. His method of absorbing and borrowing, sometimes translating
>> >> literally from, from the classics is entirely different from
>Shakespeare's
>> >> method.
>> >
>> >Irrelevant. The point I made was that Jonson here was saying he had
>> >profited enormously, *as an artist*, from knowing John Hoskyns.
>>
>> No, he said that Hoskyns polished him.
>
>????Which means???
I defined what I thought it meant below. Social polish.
(Hoskyns was a fine poet too according to Aubrey,
>but a concealed one. After his death his son lent the ms. of his
>entire works to a friend, who never returned it. End of Hoskyns'
>place in Eng Lit.)
My friend's second cousin has a girlfriend who has a friend who
thinks I'm a genius.
>
>> I think the "talent" that was imparted to Jonson was a social polish,
>> from a superior ass-kisser, as it were.
>
>Unlikely if you remember the context in which Jonson made his remark,
>which was to Hoskyns son, who had asked to be accepted as one of
>Jonson's literary followers.
Why does that make it unlikely? Jonson is basically saying that
Hoskyn was a dear friend.
>Jonson politely refused to take the role
>of literary mentor to him - he could only be his equal, his 'brother',
>because of the debt Jonson felt to Hoskyns senior.
But you don't know what the debt was.
>The other reason I think it's unlikely is because Jonson didn't have
>much social polish.
That's an astounding statement to make, since he obviously made a great
many friends in very high circles, including King James.
>>
>> >If Jonson benefited in this way,
>> >why wouldn't Shakespeare? What are you saying - Jonson could enrich
>> >his mind through mixing with educated men, but Shakespeare would just
>> >sit in a corner covered in straw, rocking to himself and reading a
>> >book?
>>
>> No, I'm saying that both Jonson and Shakespeare created their art
>> from their reading. Jonson had an extroverted personality, and their
>> is a copious record of his relationships with important people. Their
>> is no such record for Shakespeare. He seems to have been a private
>> person.
>
>There is a copious record for Jonson, but then he had 20 years more to
>build it. And I will agree evidence suggests he was a more aggressive
>socializer, but then as you say, he was a lone operator dependent on
>court patronage for much of the time, whereas Shakespeare, once he'd
>bought his share, was only dependent on his own ability to please the
>audience. I think Jonson probably was obliged to keep a higher social
>profile and work at his 'contacts'. Also, he was a hard drinker and
>probably enjoyed dining out anyway. But I still don't think
>Shakespeare would have turned his back on the chance to enter the
>social circle of Donne, Brooke, Hoskyns or Martin. These were not
>dull men.
Why not? Lot's of people feel more comfortable alone, or with one
friend at a time. Particularly so with creative artists, who don't
want some group influencing them or pressuring them to produce certain
things.
><long snip mainly about Jonson, ending with me accusing Jim of saying
>Shakespeare was indifferent to outside influence, and virtually 'made
>himself'>
>>
>> I don't think he made himself entirely. He certainly needed an education
>> at the Stratford grammar school. He certainly must have picked up
>> information from various people, suggestions on a good read etc. But
>> that is far from saying that there was *one neccessary* person who
>fulfilled
>> this
>> function for him.
>
>We come back to the Friend. Was he imaginary? If so, end of story.
>But if real, just why was he so desperately important to Shakespeare?
>Why do you think he wrote so many sonnets to/about him? Money/sexual
>favours/snob value? I don't think so. I think the Friend was someone
>with a keen mind, a kind heart, books galore, and very interesting
>friends; a gateway to a more cultured world.
I don't think he did write many sonnets about *him*. Only about a
dozen or so mention the male gender or imply it, that's about
10% of the total. I think he was writing about the nature of love,
and writing about the form of the sonnet sequence himself. Something
similar in role of gender in love occurs in Twelfth Night. There the
young men are portrayed as dillettante fops. If the young man was so
important, why doesn't he appear elsewhere in Shakespeare? He's not
in V&A, not in Lucrece, I don't see anything like him in the plays.
I do see quite a bit of irony in his stance on love though.
Rita
> >
> >But the bulk are to the man. He's much the more important, because, I
> >think, he was both the inspiration and prime audience for the
> >sequence.
>
> But the most powerful sonnets in the "young man" part don't even
> mention gender. They could easily have been written independently
> of any "story" that Shakespeare contrived later. I'm thinking of
> Sonnets 18, 30, 55, 73, 86 (in particular, because the rival
> is also male), 87, 94, 106, 107, 110, 116. All of these sonnets
> strike me as independent of gender, some like 86 and 110 appear
> to me to have a woman as a more likely target.
I think that only works if you cookie-cutter them out from the
surrounding sonnets. Take 110: yes it could be either-gender, or even
more probably to a woman, if read alone. But 111 develops the theme
begun in 110: and since 111 is obviously to a man ('god in love') then
it follows that 110 must be to the same man - however improbable it
seems to us that one man would address another as 'my rose'. And the
male rival isn't, as in the Barnes sonnet you quoted, a sexual rival.
It's always another poet. The relationship keeps coming back to
patron-and-poet.
> My feeling is that the apparent "story" that appears in both sides
> was contrived by Shakespeare as an artifice that gives ironic
> distance to the emotions expressed, as he does elsewhere in his
> plays and poetry (see "A Lover's Complaint"), and as a fine "conceit"
> in itself, parodying the sonnet sequences of other writers
>
I'm not sure how you envisage he wrote these sonnets. To a
preconceived plan, and all at the one time? Or to different people,
off and on, at different times, and then arranged them into a kind of
narrative later? And to what end was he writing them? If it was for
publication, why did they circulate among his 'private friends' years
before they finally got into print at a time sonnets were becoming old
hat? But if it wasn't for publication, you have a very busy
playwright devoting time and energy to a very long sonnet-sequence
intended just to amuse...who? Burbage, Heminges and Condell?
> ><snip>
> >> >
> >> >> Shakespeare didn't
> >> >> need anything beyond Richard Field's book shop.
> >> >
> >> >Do writers not need anything but other men's books? Do they not
> >> >habitually seek out other men of similar tastes and interests?
> >>
> >> For companionship, sure, but not to create a work of art.
> >>
> >I'm not a creative artist. We should ask Bob. Does the observation
> >and criticism of others ever feed into his work?
>
> How do you define a "creative artist"? I write poems and stories
> and I don't need any artistic circle. I know more about the subject
> than the majority of people that I meet. William Faulkner wrote
> his masterpieces in isolation, other than his editor. He wrote
> "As I Lay Dying" while working nights in a power plant, utterly
> alone. James Joyce had a large circle of friends, but nobody
> understood what he was doing when he was writing Ulysses and
> it took quite a while for that novel to be understood. Shakespeare,
> like both of those writers, was far ahead of his time. A literary
> circle would relieve the boredom, but accomplish nothing for him
> artistically. I really believe that only mediocrities need a
> circle around them, because they don't have enough ideas on
> their own.
You should have seen the big Picasso/Matisse exhibition on at the Tate
last summer. Those two were leapfrogging each other for most of their
careers. Come on - why do writers, painters and musicians gravitate
together? Why do some cities at particular times become forcing-beds
for certain art forms, where they develop at an extraordinary rate?
Why did so many writers in the '20s head for Paris, and why are they
in New York now? Why can't they stay in Smallville and write their
masterpieces in their bedrooms?
>
<snip>
> >> >The point I made was that Jonson here was saying he had
> >> >profited enormously, *as an artist*, from knowing John Hoskyns.
> >>
> >> No, he said that Hoskyns polished him.
> >
> >????Which means???
>
> I defined what I thought it meant below. Social polish.
> >
> >> I think the "talent" that was imparted to Jonson was a social polish,
> >> from a superior ass-kisser, as it were.
> >
> >Unlikely if you remember the context in which Jonson made his remark,
> >which was to Hoskyns son, who had asked to be accepted as one of
> >Jonson's literary followers.
>
> Why does that make it unlikely? Jonson is basically saying that
> Hoskyn was a dear friend.
He is not. He is saying Hoskyns Snr did something for him, 'polished'
him. First you claim that means Hoskyns taught him which fork to use:
now you say it can be paraphrased to mean 'he was a dear friend to
me'.
>
> >Jonson politely refused to take the role
> >of literary mentor to him - he could only be his equal, his 'brother',
> >because of the debt Jonson felt to Hoskyns senior.
>
> But you don't know what the debt was.
I do. You do. The context makes it obvious. 'Will you take me as
your literary follower Mr Jonson? ' 'No sir, I cannot accept you as
my follower in the art of writing but only my equal, because of the
debt I owe your father.' 'What debt was that sir?'
1)'He taught me not to eat peas with a knife'
2)'He loaned me ten pounds when I was broke'
3)'He showed me how to be a better writer.'
Choose which you think follows most naturally.
>
> >The other reason I think it's unlikely is because Jonson didn't have
> >much social polish.
>
> That's an astounding statement to make, since he obviously made a great
> many friends in very high circles, including King James.
Well - I don't think King James was *that* intimate a friend, Jim.
Jonson had too combative a nature to be a polished courtier. I don't
deny he knew enough not to gob on the floor.
>
<snip>
> > But I still don't think
> >Shakespeare would have turned his back on the chance to enter the
> >social circle of Donne, Brooke, Hoskyns or Martin. These were not
> >dull men.
>
> Why not? Lot's of people feel more comfortable alone, or with one
> friend at a time. Particularly so with creative artists, who don't
> want some group influencing them or pressuring them to produce certain
> things.
<snip>
> >
> >We come back to the Friend. Was he imaginary? If so, end of story.
> >But if real, just why was he so desperately important to Shakespeare?
> >Why do you think he wrote so many sonnets to/about him? Money/sexual
> >favours/snob value? I don't think so. I think the Friend was someone
> >with a keen mind, a kind heart, books galore, and very interesting
> >friends; a gateway to a more cultured world.
>
> I don't think he did write many sonnets about *him*. Only about a
> dozen or so mention the male gender or imply it, that's about
> 10% of the total.
See above.
> I think he was writing about the nature of love,
> and writing about the form of the sonnet sequence himself. Something
> similar in role of gender in love occurs in Twelfth Night. There the
> young men are portrayed as dillettante fops. If the young man was so
> important, why doesn't he appear elsewhere in Shakespeare? He's not
> in V&A, not in Lucrece, I don't see anything like him in the plays.
> I do see quite a bit of irony in his stance on love though.
>
I could argue he is in V&A, since there's an obvious parallel between
the inexperienced male virgin pressured by the passionate Venus and
the youngster in Sonnet 41. But I don't think that, to be honest.
And I never expect the plays to be biographical. I see the friend as
a kind of patron, though that implies the relationship was primarily
financial, which I don't think it was. He may have helped out
moneywise from time to time, he may have had some influence, some
social clout that he could use to promote Shakespeare's interests.
Maybe he was one of the 'divers of worship' who spoke up for
Shakespeare when he was attacked in 'Groatsworth'. But essentially I
think he was a sounding-board, a reliable source of feedback,
enthusiastic, encouraging, full of insights. I was going to say
'critic', but that suggests technical advice, which I don't think
Shakespeare needed: or at least, not from an amateur.
Rita
KQKnave
>> Why does that make it unlikely? Jonson is basically saying that
>> Hoskyn was a dear friend.
>
>He is not. He is saying Hoskyns Snr did something for him, 'polished'
>him. First you claim that means Hoskyns taught him which fork to use:
>now you say it can be paraphrased to mean 'he was a dear friend to
>me'.
>>
>> >Jonson politely refused to take the role
>> >of literary mentor to him - he could only be his equal, his 'brother',
>> >because of the debt Jonson felt to Hoskyns senior.
>>
>> But you don't know what the debt was.
>
>I do. You do. The context makes it obvious. 'Will you take me as
>your literary follower Mr Jonson? ' 'No sir, I cannot accept you as
>my follower in the art of writing but only my equal, because of the
>debt I owe your father.' 'What debt was that sir?'
>1)'He taught me not to eat peas with a knife'
>2)'He loaned me ten pounds when I was broke'
>3)'He showed me how to be a better writer.'
>
4) "He showed me how to raise hell, and he his head was chopped off
for it, so I dare not associate myself with him too closely".
(See my other post).
KQKnave
>> That's an astounding statement to make, since he obviously made a great
>> many friends in very high circles, including King James.
>
>Well - I don't think King James was *that* intimate a friend, Jim.
>Jonson had too combative a nature to be a polished courtier. I don't
>deny he knew enough not to gob on the floor.
Well, all I can tell you is that you could read Riggs' biography of Jonson
to see. For example:
"Not long after Buckingham received his Earldom, Jonson delivered at
the King's dinner table "A Grace Extempore," blessing "Buckingham
the fortunate"; the King promptly rewarded him, according to Aubrey,
with a gift of one hundred pounds." ("Ben Jonson - A Life", p250)
KQKnave
>> I think he was writing about the nature of love,
>> and writing about the form of the sonnet sequence himself. Something
>> similar in role of gender in love occurs in Twelfth Night. There the
>> young men are portrayed as dillettante fops. If the young man was so
>> important, why doesn't he appear elsewhere in Shakespeare? He's not
>> in V&A, not in Lucrece, I don't see anything like him in the plays.
>> I do see quite a bit of irony in his stance on love though.
>>
>I could argue he is in V&A, since there's an obvious parallel between
>the inexperienced male virgin pressured by the passionate Venus and
>the youngster in Sonnet 41.
Given that Shakespeare married an older woman, the young man
in V&A is most probably himself.
>But I don't think that, to be honest.
>And I never expect the plays to be biographical. I see the friend as
>a kind of patron, though that implies the relationship was primarily
>financial, which I don't think it was. He may have helped out
>moneywise from time to time, he may have had some influence, some
>social clout that he could use to promote Shakespeare's interests.
>Maybe he was one of the 'divers of worship' who spoke up for
>Shakespeare when he was attacked in 'Groatsworth'. But essentially I
>think he was a sounding-board, a reliable source of feedback,
>enthusiastic, encouraging, full of insights. I was going to say
>'critic', but that suggests technical advice, which I don't think
>Shakespeare needed: or at least, not from an amateur.
From a younger man? Come on. Shakespeare talks about the
young man's beauty, not his cultural feedback.
The following quote is from C. S. Lewis in "English Literature
in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama", p503-504
"Shakespeare, and indeed Shakespeare's age, did nothing
by halves. If he had intended in these sonnets to be the
poet of pederasty, I think he would have left us in no doubt;
the lovely paidika', attended by a whole train of mythological
perversities, would have blazed across the pages. The
incessant demand that the Man should marry and found a
family would seem to be inconsistent (or so I suppose-it is
a question for psychologists) with a real homosexual passion.
It is not even very obviously consistent with normal friendship.
It is indeed hard to think of any real situation in which it would
be natural. What man in the whole world, except a father
or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets
married? Thus, the emotion expressed in the Sonnets refuses
to fit into our pigeonholes."
KQKnave
>> How do you define a "creative artist"? I write poems and stories
>> and I don't need any artistic circle. I know more about the subject
>> than the majority of people that I meet. William Faulkner wrote
>> his masterpieces in isolation, other than his editor. He wrote
>> "As I Lay Dying" while working nights in a power plant, utterly
>> alone. James Joyce had a large circle of friends, but nobody
>> understood what he was doing when he was writing Ulysses and
>> it took quite a while for that novel to be understood. Shakespeare,
>> like both of those writers, was far ahead of his time. A literary
>> circle would relieve the boredom, but accomplish nothing for him
>> artistically. I really believe that only mediocrities need a
>> circle around them, because they don't have enough ideas on
>> their own.
>
>You should have seen the big Picasso/Matisse exhibition on at the Tate
>last summer. Those two were leapfrogging each other for most of their
>careers. Come on - why do writers, painters and musicians gravitate
>together?
The mediocrities do. Who did Van Gogh gravitate with? Could he
even stand anybody else other than his brother? Why did Marcel
Proust divorce himself from the so-called "cultured" society that
he frequented, and live in a cork-lined room to write a masterpiece
that skewered those same pretentious people? You seem to be
confused. The wealthy aristocrats or gentry were not "sophisticated"
in the artistic sense. They were dilettantes, vulgar, and, in the case
of Jonson's Cambridge buddies, downright dangerous. They would
certainly be less boring for a young writer to hang around with than
most of his hometown chums, but they weren't going to do a thing
for his art.
And where in the sonnets do we get any sense that the young
man had some kind of learning to impart to Shakespeare? The
sonnets are about someone young and physically beautiful.
Where is the connection?
>Why do some cities at particular times become forcing-beds
>for certain art forms, where they develop at an extraordinary rate?
>Why did so many writers in the '20s head for Paris, and why are they
>in New York now? Why can't they stay in Smallville and write their
>masterpieces in their bedrooms?
What great writers are in New York now? John Updike lives in
"Smallville" (Georgetown, MA), Martin Amis lives in England,
Don Delillo lives (or lived) in New York because he's from the area.
Why did so many writers *leave* Paris? Why didn't Hemingway
stay there forever? He went there in the first place because he
was young and ignorant and thought it was the "cool", bohemian
thing to do, and ended up finding out that he had to have peace and
quiet to write alone, using his imagination.
KQKnave
>
>kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote in message
>news:<20030125142444...@mb-cf.aol.com>...
>> In article <c69e1804.03012...@posting.google.com>,
>> nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
>> <snip>
>> >
>> >But the bulk are to the man. He's much the more important, because, I
>> >think, he was both the inspiration and prime audience for the
>> >sequence.
>>
>> But the most powerful sonnets in the "young man" part don't even
>> mention gender. They could easily have been written independently
>> of any "story" that Shakespeare contrived later. I'm thinking of
>> Sonnets 18, 30, 55, 73, 86 (in particular, because the rival
>> is also male), 87, 94, 106, 107, 110, 116. All of these sonnets
>> strike me as independent of gender, some like 86 and 110 appear
>> to me to have a woman as a more likely target.
><snip>
>I think that only works if you cookie-cutter them out from the
>surrounding sonnets. Take 110: yes it could be either-gender, or even
>more probably to a woman, if read alone. But 111 develops the theme
>begun in 110: and since 111 is obviously to a man ('god in love') then
>it follows that 110 must be to the same man - however improbable it
>seems to us that one man would address another as 'my rose'.
You've got this mixed up, as I did. The "god in love" is in 110, not
111.
The point was that the powerful sonnets in the sequence don't even
involve a man, and in fact 90% of the sonnets in the first section don't
involve a man explicitly. You don't need a reverse cookie cutter, you
take a group of sonnets written over the years and add a few to change
the gender.
And the
>male rival isn't, as in the Barnes sonnet you quoted, a sexual rival.
>It's always another poet. The relationship keeps coming back to
>patron-and-poet.
There is nothing about patronage in these sonnets. Just one or two
poets writing verse proclaiming the virtues of the beloved.
>
>> My feeling is that the apparent "story" that appears in both sides
>> was contrived by Shakespeare as an artifice that gives ironic
>> distance to the emotions expressed, as he does elsewhere in his
>> plays and poetry (see "A Lover's Complaint"), and as a fine "conceit"
>> in itself, parodying the sonnet sequences of other writers
>>
>I'm not sure how you envisage he wrote these sonnets. To a
>preconceived plan, and all at the one time? Or to different people,
>off and on, at different times, and then arranged them into a kind of
>narrative later?
He wrote them over a period of many years and arranged them
into a narrative later. That he wrote them over a period of years
is not a knew idea. Hieatt and Foster in independent rare word
studies found the same thing. Look at the sonnets that were
published in "A Passionate Pilgrim". They are sonnets 138
and 144, from the "dark lady" section. In addition, they are
inferior versions, probably earlier drafts. This tells me that
he was working initially on a more conventional sequence,
but decided to make it more interesting as he went along,
and revised continually over the years as he did so.
> And to what end was he writing them? If it was for
>publication, why did they circulate among his 'private friends' years
>before they finally got into print at a time sonnets were becoming old
>hat? But if it wasn't for publication, you have a very busy
>playwright devoting time and energy to a very long sonnet-sequence
>intended just to amuse...who? Burbage, Heminges and Condell?
Why does any artist create any work of art? You're really just
another materialist like the Oxfordians: you think there has
to be some practical purpose to everything, some biography
behind the work. How about this for a reason: to create the finest
sonnet sequence in the language, with the most "deep brain'd"
conceits and the loveliest turns of phrase that anyone has
ever written.
KQKnave
>> Hoskyn was a dear friend.
>
>He is not. He is saying Hoskyns Snr did something for him, 'polished'
>him. First you claim that means Hoskyns taught him which fork to use:
>now you say it can be paraphrased to mean 'he was a dear friend to
>me'.
Actually, Hoskyn neither polished him nor served as a master of arts
for him. Apparently they were simply buddies who enjoyed the same
dissolute lifestyle. Hoskyn ended up in the Tower, Jonson narrowly
escaped the same fate. Here is what David Riggs says in his
biography of Jonson (pp56-7):
"Jonson later dedicated *Every Man Out of His Humour* to the Inns
of Court, noting that "when I wrote this poeme, I had friendship with
divers in your societies; who, as they were great names in learning,
so they were no less Examples of living. Of them, and then (that
I say no more) it was not despis'd."...Hoskins and Martin appear
to have been especially close to Jonson during these years. Hoskin's
son Bennet told John Aubrey that he had asked "Mr Jonson to
adopt him for his sonne": "no said he I dare not, 'tis honour enough
for me to be your Brother, I was your Father's son; and t'was He
that polished me." When Jonson was threatened with prosecution
in 1601, Richard Martin, to whom he dedicated another of his
early comedies, came to his rescue.
The men who "polish'd" Jonson and furnished him with "examples
of living" had a proclivitiy for reckless raillery and abuse. Philip
Finkelpearl aptly characterizes both Hoskins and Martin as "troublemakers,
more or less serious disciplinary problems, and not merely as youths."
Like many of their fellow students, they shared in a "group tendency
toward physical abuse and the untimely exhibition of wit." Martin
twice led gangs of students from the Middle Temple into the
neighboring streets, where they "broke the ordinance by making
outcries, forcibly breaking open chambers in the night and levying
money as the Lord of Misrule's rent." After being expelled and
reinstated, Martin took a leading role in the Templar's infamous
Christmas Revels of 1597-98. His mockery of John Davies on that
occasion was apparently so vicious that Davies attacked him with
a wooden club shortly thereafter - a crime for which Davies was, in
turn, expelled and imprisoned. Hoskins, Jonson's adoptive "father"
and another key figure in the revels of 1597-98, had been forced to
resign his fellowship at Cambridge after a "bitterly satyrical"
commencement address there. Both men prided themselves on
their raillery and saw no reason to apologize for it. Jonson's
friend Benjamin Rudyerd admiringly remarked of Martin that "fortune
never tempted him to temper his own wit or manhood." When
Hoskins public mockery of King James I finally landed him in
the Tower of London (Martin narrowly escaped the same fate), he
was unrepentant to the last and wrote to his wife Benedicta, "for
my part I had rather dy with witt than live without it." When Dekker
dared him to "sweare not to bumbast out a new Play, with the olde
lynings of Jestes, stolne from the Temples Revels," he was calling
attention to an affinity that Jonson himself later acknowledged."
So the meaning of Jonson's "I dare not" becomes more apparent,
since it would associate him too closely with one whose head
was chopped off for (evidently) sedition. And Dekker challenges him
*not* to write a play based on his adventures with his buddies.
Why would a fellow artist tell him to do that if artistic development
was so dependent on the opinions and help of his friends, as you
seem to think?
BCD
"KQKnave" <kqk...@aol.comcrashed> wrote in message
news:20030125222557...@mb-fh.aol.com...
> [...]
> The following quote is from C. S. Lewis in "English Literature
> in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama", p503-504
>
> incessant demand that the Man should marry and found a
> family would seem to be inconsistent (or so I suppose-it is
> a question for psychologists) with a real homosexual passion.
> It is not even very obviously consistent with normal friendship.
> It is indeed hard to think of any real situation in which it would
> be natural. What man in the whole world, except a father
> or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets
***Hm. Perhaps I'm the odd one out here; but I don't find it at all
incomprehensible that a man who cared deeply for another would wish on him
the sort of continuance which he thinks progeny would provide. It's
whimsical, yes, to a considerable degree; how often do children really
replicate their parents? But--other than attempting to bestow "immortality"
through Art--how else to encourage a sort of continuance beyond the normal
life-span? It sounds to me as if C.S. Lewis isn't allowing for there to
exist a man-to-man sort of glorified friendship which is neither homosexual
nor what he calls "normal friendship" (I suppose we need to find out just
what "normal friendship" encompassed in C.S. Lewis' own life experience). I
wouldn't say that it would be odd for a man who finds marriage pleasurable
to care enough to wish same on a "normal friend." Far from it. I've found
that happy husbands can indeed be quite self-contentedly tedious in urging
marriage, even to new acquaintances.
Best Wishes,
--BCD
Web Site: http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor
Visit unknown Los Angeles: http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor/socal1.html
Rita
[Reprise: We started arguing about the benefits of friendships between
professional writers and intellectually-inclined gentlemen in early
17th c. London. I quoted an anecdote in Aubrey in which Jonson
acknowledges his debt to John Hoskyns, serjeant-at-law, claiming he
'polished' him. We're now trying to determine the character of
Hoskyns and other gentlemen with whom Jonson was familiar, such as
Richard Martin. Why would anyone have wanted to know these men?]
> In article <c69e1804.03012...@posting.google.com>,
> nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
> >He (Jonson) is saying Hoskyns Snr did something for him, 'polished'
> >him. First you claim that means Hoskyns taught him which fork to use:
> >now you say it can be paraphrased to mean 'he was a dear friend to
> >me'.
>
> Actually, Hoskyn neither polished him nor served as a master of arts
> for him.
What's your basis for denying a statement from a good historical
source? Aubrey isn't always reliable but in this case he tells us it
was Hoskyns' own son who quoted Jonson saying that Hoskyns Snr. had
'polished' him. So are you questioning Aubrey, or Hoskyns Jnr, or
Jonson when you claim Hoskyns did not 'polish' him?
> Apparently they were simply buddies who enjoyed the same
> dissolute lifestyle. Hoskyn ended up in the Tower, Jonson narrowly
> escaped the same fate.
Completely wrong. Hoskyns certainly went to the Tower but didn't 'end
up' there. While an MP he spoke out boldly in Parliament against
James' policy of favouring his Scottish followers: 'He made a
Comparison of a Conduit, whereinto water came, and ran-out afarre-off.
Now, said he, this pipe reaches as far as Edinborough.' For this
Hoskyns was sent to the Tower. There he became friendly with Ralegh
and 'was Sir Walter's Aristarchus, to review and polish Sir Walter's
stile'. (So it wasn't just Jonson he polished, you see.) After his
release he rose higher in his legal career and ended as a Welsh judge,
although he began life as an academic. Aubrey says:'His conversation
was exceeding pleasant, and would make verses on the Roade, where he
was the best Company in the world. He was a great master of the Latin
and Greke languages...' Hoskyns was not some noisy drunk. He was a
noted public figure, though with a sardonic edge to his wit: 'Was wont
to say that all those that came to London were either Carrion or
Crowes.'
> Here is what David Riggs says in his
> biography of Jonson (pp56-7):
> "Jonson later dedicated *Every Man Out of His Humour* to the Inns
> of Court, noting that "when I wrote this poeme, I had friendship with
> divers in your societies; who, as they were great names in learning,
> so they were no less Examples of living. Of them, and then (that
> I say no more) it was not despis'd."...Hoskins and Martin appear
> to have been especially close to Jonson during these years. Hoskin's
> son Bennet told John Aubrey that he had asked "Mr Jonson to
> adopt him for his sonne": "no said he I dare not, 'tis honour enough
> for me to be your Brother, I was your Father's son; and t'was He
> that polished me." When Jonson was threatened with prosecution
> in 1601, Richard Martin, to whom he dedicated another of his
> early comedies, came to his rescue.
Cheers, Jim, this is great. You're making my case for me.
> The men who "polish'd" Jonson and furnished him with "examples
> of living" had a proclivitiy for reckless raillery and abuse.
I'd say they had a proclivity for saying what they thought and
challenging the system at a time when that wasn't very safe.
> Philip
> Finkelpearl aptly characterizes both Hoskins and Martin as "troublemakers,
> more or less serious disciplinary problems, and not merely as youths."
True. Oh, how true. We know Hoskyns told off James in Parliament, and
how naughty was that? But Martin was even better. He kicked off his
career in Elizabeth's last parliament by jeering at a more senior man
who supported the Queen's demand for more money ('Serjeant Hele that
...yesterday so much flattered his prince'); made fun of longwinded
MPs who fulminated uselessly against French pirates ('I wish that
those who first propounded this matter to the House had also laid down
some project, though never so small, of remedy'); argued against
punishing recusants twice over ('I can never agree in conscience to
consent to a double remedy for one offence'). And he attacked
monopolies in the most stirring terms: '..what shall become of us,
from whom the fruits of our own soil and the commodities of our
labour...shall be taken from us by warrant of supreme authority, which
the poor subject dare not gainsay?' Good point! Sock it to 'em,
Richard!
But the cream was still to come. On December 8th, Martin - only 30
and a mere maiden MP - humiliated Master Robert Cecil on a point of
order. Yes! He actually stuffed the Queen's own Secretary, Burley's
little boy, future Earl of Salisbury, sire of a princely line that is
still hanging on in the House of Lords to this very day! It was a
trivial matter, but Cecil was so livid he wanted Martin disciplined.
Didn't happen.
> Like many of their fellow students, they shared in a "group tendency
> toward physical abuse and the untimely exhibition of wit." Martin
> twice led gangs of students from the Middle Temple into the
> neighboring streets, where they "broke the ordinance by making
> outcries, forcibly breaking open chambers in the night and levying
> money as the Lord of Misrule's rent." After being expelled and
> reinstated, Martin took a leading role in the Templar's infamous
> Christmas Revels of 1597-98.
Martin took a leading role in the Revels, period. According to Hotson,
Martin was the principal figure in the Revels till he died at age 48,
when his friend Hugh Holland memorialized him as 'Princeps amorum,
principum nec non amor'-'The Prince of Loves' (his Revels title)'and
also the love of princes.' The 'love of princes' bit was justified
because, despite Martin's independent attitude, James admired him:'K.
James was much delighted with his facetiousness, and had so great
respect for him, that he commended him to the citizens of London to be
their recorder.' But by that time he'd already been Lent-reader at the
Middle Temple, so it wasn't just the King he'd impressed. He'd
outgrown his wild youth and his stock had risen among his
fellow-lawyers.
> His mockery of John Davies on that
> occasion was apparently so vicious that Davies attacked him with
> a wooden club shortly thereafter - a crime for which Davies was, in
> turn, expelled and imprisoned.
I've read Finkelpearl on this and I agree with his speculation that
the quarrel between Martin and Davies - previously close friends -
probably was sparked by Martin allowing the Revels of 1597/8 to be
used to ridicule and defame Davies. This was cruel. But Davies,
though talented, was also a bit of a social-climbing creep. It may
not be entirely to Martin's discredit that he tired of him.
> Hoskins, Jonson's adoptive "father"
> and another key figure in the revels of 1597-98, had been forced to
> resign his fellowship at Cambridge after a "bitterly satyrical"
> commencement address there. Both men prided themselves on
> their raillery and saw no reason to apologize for it.
And I don't see why they should apologize. They spoke up about things
they didn't like, even if the person doing the things they didn't like
was Queen Elizabeth, King James, or Master Secretary Cecil. Good on
'em.
> Jonson's
> friend Benjamin Rudyerd admiringly remarked of Martin that "fortune
> never tempted him to temper his own wit or manhood."
So Rudyerd didn't think Martin brown-nosed his way into royal favour?
Good. Rudyerd I think left the account of the Revels which Finkelpearl
used to show it had been a public ambush of Davies. (Also, according
to Aubrey, Rudyerd and Hoskyns were friends too, but once fought a
duel 'but they were afterwards friends again.')
> When
> Hoskins public mockery of King James I finally landed him in
> the Tower of London (Martin narrowly escaped the same fate), he
> was unrepentant to the last and wrote to his wife Benedicta, "for
> my part I had rather dy with witt than live without it." When Dekker
> dared him
- 'him' meaning Jonson, obviously -
> to "sweare not to bumbast out a new Play, with the olde
> lynings of Jestes, stolne from the Temples Revels," he was calling
> attention to an affinity that Jonson himself later acknowledged."
>
> So the meaning of Jonson's "I dare not" becomes more apparent,
> since it would associate him too closely with one whose head
> was chopped off for (evidently) sedition.
You're misinterpreting because you haven't had chance to investigate
Hoskyns well enough yet. He died in bed aged 72, respected, honoured,
and joking bravely to the last, says Aubrey. Not everybody who went to
the Tower got the chop, you know.
> And Dekker challenges him
> *not* to write a play based on his adventures with his buddies.
> Why would a fellow artist tell him to do that if artistic development
> was so dependent on the opinions and help of his friends, as you
> seem to think?
>
Dekker was implying Jonson's smart friends at the Inns of Court were
virtually writing his work for him. It amounts to 'You wouldn't be
able to write a funny play if you couldn't steal jokes you heard first
at the Revels.' Not true of course, Jonson was a great writer of
comedy. But obviously friendly with the cleverer gentlemen of the
Inns of Court.
Rita
Paul Crowley
> And where in the sonnets do we get any sense that the young
> man had some kind of learning to impart to Shakespeare?
The 'Young Man' must have been able to
appreciate the subtleties of the punning and
the complexities of the verse. (Otherwise there
would have been little point in the poet going to
all that trouble.) That puts 'him' far ahead of,
say, all modern academics.
Sonnet 38
How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O, give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
Sonnet 39
O, how thy worth with manners may I sing,
When thou art all the better part of me?
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
And what is 't but mine own when I praise thee?
Sonnet 78
1. So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse,
2. And found such fair assistance in my verse
3. As every <it>Alien</it> pen hath got my use
4. And under thee their poesy disperse
5. Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing
6. And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
7. Have added feathers to the learned's wing
8. And given grace a double Majesty.
9. Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
10. Whose influence is thine, and born of thee:
11. In others' works thou dost but mend the style,
12. And Arts with thy sweet graces graced be;
13. But thou art all my art, and dost advance
14. As high as learning, my rude ignorance
Sonnet 96
5. As on the finger of a throned Queen,
6. The basest Jewel will be well esteem'd;
7. So are those errors that in thee are seen,
8. To truths translated, and for true things deem'd.
9. How many Lambs might the stern Wolf betray,
10. If like a Lamb he could his looks translate.
11. How many gazers mightst thou lead away,
12. If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state?
Paul.
Paul Crowley
> And the
> >male rival isn't, as in the Barnes sonnet you quoted, a sexual rival.
> >It's always another poet. The relationship keeps coming back to
> >patron-and-poet.
>
> There is nothing about patronage in these sonnets. Just one or two
> poets writing verse proclaiming the virtues of the beloved.
Why would rival _Elizabethan_ poets compete
-- in published verses -- for the love of a MAN?
(Bog-standard Stratfordian inanity / insanity
though it may be.)
Sonnet 26
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously with fair aspect
And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving,
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
Till then not show my head where thou mayst prove me.
Sonnet 78
1. So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse,
2. And found such fair assistance in my verse
3. As every <it>Alien</it> pen hath got my use
4. And under thee their poesy disperse
5. Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing
6. And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
7. Have added feathers to the learned's wing
8. And given grace a double Majesty.
9. Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
10. Whose influence is thine, and born of thee:
11. In others' works thou dost but mend the style,
12. And Arts with thy sweet graces graced be;
13. But thou art all my art, and dost advance
14. As high as learning, my rude ignorance
Paul.
Gary Kosinsky
>"KQKnave" <kqk...@aol.comcrashed> wrote in message
>news:20030125222557...@mb-fh.aol.com...
>> [...]
>> The following quote is from C. S. Lewis in "English Literature
>> in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama", p503-504
>>
>> " [...] The
>> incessant demand that the Man should marry and found a
>> family would seem to be inconsistent (or so I suppose-it is
>> a question for psychologists) with a real homosexual passion.
>> It is not even very obviously consistent with normal friendship.
>> It is indeed hard to think of any real situation in which it would
>> be natural. What man in the whole world, except a father
>> or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets
>> married? [...]
>
>***Hm. Perhaps I'm the odd one out here; but I don't find it at all
>incomprehensible that a man who cared deeply for another would wish on him
>the sort of continuance which he thinks progeny would provide.
And I think the point of the first seventeen sonnets is not
actually to encourage the young man to marry at all, but rather is a
means of complimenting the young man on his beauty. The poet is
saying the young man should ensure his beauty lives on after him in
the form of his children. The poet could just as easily have written
seventeen sonnets suggesting the young man preserve his beauty by
having his portrait painted. Would we then say the poet was actually
extolling the merits of painting?
- Gary Kosinsky
KQKnave
>> " [...] The
>> incessant demand that the Man should marry and found a
>> family would seem to be inconsistent (or so I suppose-it is
>> a question for psychologists) with a real homosexual passion.
>> It is not even very obviously consistent with normal friendship.
>> It is indeed hard to think of any real situation in which it would
>> be natural. What man in the whole world, except a father
>> or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets
>> married? [...]
>
>***Hm. Perhaps I'm the odd one out here; but I don't find it at all
>incomprehensible that a man who cared deeply for another would wish on him
>the sort of continuance which he thinks progeny would provide.
Do you think this is the sort of thing that would inspire a sonnet
sequence is the point.
KQKnave
>kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote in message
>news:<20030125222600...@mb-fh.aol.com>...
>
>[Reprise: We started arguing about the benefits of friendships between
>professional writers and intellectually-inclined gentlemen in early
>17th c. London. I quoted an anecdote in Aubrey in which Jonson
>acknowledges his debt to John Hoskyns, serjeant-at-law, claiming he
>'polished' him. We're now trying to determine the character of
>Hoskyns and other gentlemen with whom Jonson was familiar, such as
>Richard Martin. Why would anyone have wanted to know these men?]
>
>> In article <c69e1804.03012...@posting.google.com>,
>> nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
>
>> >He (Jonson) is saying Hoskyns Snr did something for him, 'polished'
>> >him. First you claim that means Hoskyns taught him which fork to use:
>> >now you say it can be paraphrased to mean 'he was a dear friend to
>> >me'.
>>
>> Actually, Hoskyn neither polished him nor served as a master of arts
>> for him.
>
>What's your basis for denying a statement from a good historical
>source? Aubrey isn't always reliable but in this case he tells us it
>was Hoskyns' own son who quoted Jonson saying that Hoskyns Snr. had
>'polished' him. So are you questioning Aubrey, or Hoskyns Jnr, or
>Jonson when you claim Hoskyns did not 'polish' him?
I'm claiming that Jonson was being polite to Hoskins' son.
>
>> Apparently they were simply buddies who enjoyed the same
>> dissolute lifestyle. Hoskyn ended up in the Tower, Jonson narrowly
>> escaped the same fate.
>
>Completely wrong. Hoskyns certainly went to the Tower but didn't 'end
>up' there. While an MP he spoke out boldly in Parliament against
>James' policy of favouring his Scottish followers: 'He made a
>Comparison of a Conduit, whereinto water came, and ran-out afarre-off.
> Now, said he, this pipe reaches as far as Edinborough.' For this
>Hoskyns was sent to the Tower. There he became friendly with Ralegh
>and 'was Sir Walter's Aristarchus, to review and polish Sir Walter's
>stile'. (So it wasn't just Jonson he polished, you see.)
"Stile" of what?
>After his
>release he rose higher in his legal career and ended as a Welsh judge,
>although he began life as an academic. Aubrey says:'His conversation
>was exceeding pleasant, and would make verses on the Roade, where he
>was the best Company in the world. He was a great master of the Latin
>and Greke languages...' Hoskyns was not some noisy drunk. He was a
>noted public figure, though with a sardonic edge to his wit: 'Was wont
>to say that all those that came to London were either Carrion or
>Crowes.'
Well, your opinion of Hoskins differs from that of Riggs and Finkelpearl.
>
>> Here is what David Riggs says in his
>> biography of Jonson (pp56-7):
>> "Jonson later dedicated *Every Man Out of His Humour* to the Inns
>> of Court, noting that "when I wrote this poeme, I had friendship with
>> divers in your societies; who, as they were great names in learning,
>> so they were no less Examples of living. Of them, and then (that
>> I say no more) it was not despis'd."...Hoskins and Martin appear
>> to have been especially close to Jonson during these years. Hoskin's
>> son Bennet told John Aubrey that he had asked "Mr Jonson to
>> adopt him for his sonne": "no said he I dare not, 'tis honour enough
>> for me to be your Brother, I was your Father's son; and t'was He
>> that polished me." When Jonson was threatened with prosecution
>> in 1601, Richard Martin, to whom he dedicated another of his
>> early comedies, came to his rescue.
>
>Cheers, Jim, this is great. You're making my case for me.
How is that? We all know that Jonson had friends. You are saying
that these friends are *neccessary* for him *as an artist*, by extension
all artists need friends like that, and that therefore the "young man"
in the sonnets was "neccessary" to Shakespeare and therefore
must be real, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that
the young man wasn't anything other than a pretty face with
good social graces who was younger than Shakespeare and
who Shakespeare wished would get married and have children,
*if* he was real to begin with.
What does any of this have to do with the issue at hand? How
were any of these men "neccessary" to Jonson's art?
It doesn't matter if he had his head chopped off. It certainly sounds like
it from Riggs book. What really matters is what kind of person Hoskins was
(was he in good with the establishment or not) when Jonson made the comment.
>
>> And Dekker challenges him
>> *not* to write a play based on his adventures with his buddies.
>> Why would a fellow artist tell him to do that if artistic development
>> was so dependent on the opinions and help of his friends, as you
>> seem to think?
>>
>Dekker was implying Jonson's smart friends at the Inns of Court were
>virtually writing his work for him. It amounts to 'You wouldn't be
>able to write a funny play if you couldn't steal jokes you heard first
>at the Revels.' Not true of course, Jonson was a great writer of
>comedy. But obviously friendly with the cleverer gentlemen of the
>Inns of Court.
Obviously. But were they "neccessary" for his *art*?
KQKnave
writes:
>>***Hm. Perhaps I'm the odd one out here; but I don't find it at all
>>incomprehensible that a man who cared deeply for another would wish on him
>>the sort of continuance which he thinks progeny would provide.
>
> And I think the point of the first seventeen sonnets is not
>actually to encourage the young man to marry at all, but rather is a
>means of complimenting the young man on his beauty. The poet is
>saying the young man should ensure his beauty lives on after him in
>the form of his children. The poet could just as easily have written
>seventeen sonnets suggesting the young man preserve his beauty by
>having his portrait painted. Would we then say the poet was actually
>extolling the merits of painting?
In any event, the sonnets don't have anything to do with the "young man"
being "neccessary" to Shakespeare's art, in the sense that he
provided Shakespeare with the learning and "polish" supposedly
neccessary to be an artist.
Peter Krynicki
He was originally going to go back to Italy to try to become a writer,
but at the suggestion of Sherwood Anderson, he changed his mind and
went to Paris with his first wife. Anderson's argument was that Paris
at that time was the center of all of the great artistic movements and
artists, and that Hemingway would do better to look up Silvia Beach
and Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein rather than go to Italy. I doubt
that the idea of Bohemianism ever entered his mind at this time.
As to why he left.....Partly he left his first wife who remained in
Paris. Partly he left Paris because he had learned all of what Paris
and its various movements were going to offer him and he had become
famous enough by 1928 to go on to other places. When he left Paris he
didn't have a particular place in mind as to where he would actually
settle down. He was on his way to Cuba when he was detained in Key
West, and liked the city so much that he decided to stay. After
several months, his second wife, Pauline, found the house on Whiteheas
Street, bought it, and began renovations. But as in Paris, and as it
would be when he lived in Cuba later, Hemingway had to have a quite
place to write. In Key West he had the room over the carriage house
renovated into a writing room where he could work undisturbed. When he
left Pauline for hs thrid wife, he als left Paris.
And as to imagination, certainly Hemingway was creative, but by the
time he lived in Key West he had accumulated a librabry of approx
7,200 volumes. Many of the details for the books and stories he wrote
were taken from these books; works of fixtion and non, but also guide
books from various counrties, Baedekers, reference books, etc.
hth
Pjk
John W. Kennedy
In his own "The Four Loves", he uses the word to denote a fairly rare
and intense bonding, normally between two people of -- well, to make it
clear in this context, I'll say of uncomplementary sexuality, though he
says simply the same sex -- usually triggered when one says, "You do? I
thought I was the only one who ever thought [or felt] that!". As he
remarks, if the two are sexually compatible and uncommitted, it will
usually transform itself into romantic love very quickly. But, where it
does not, it always remains a relationship _between_ two people, _about_
something (or things) outside. (In Lewis's personal case, usually
literature.) It is never _about_ the parties themselves. And that is
where Lewis's notion of Friendship starkly diverges from the "fair
youth" sonnets. There is never a hint that the poet and the fair youth
are linked by a common love of Chaucer's poems, or Giulio Romano's
sculpture, or Cicero's periods. The poet is fascinated by the fair
youth in his ineffable selfhood.
I should add to this that Lewis (who went to a British public school,
and formed his impressions of the subject there) thought homosexuality
rather stupid and boring.
I confess that, given what I have seen in Plato, I can _imagine_ that a
homosexual passion _might_ exhibit in such a plea as the poet makes to
the fair youth. But I, like Lewis, am thoroughly straight, and freely
confess that the entire subject leaves me in a fog.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly;
the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Man Who Was Thursday"
Tom Reedy
> In article <c69e1804.03012...@posting.google.com>,
> nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
>
> >> How do you define a "creative artist"? I write poems and stories
> >> and I don't need any artistic circle. I know more about the subject
> >> than the majority of people that I meet. William Faulkner wrote
> >> his masterpieces in isolation, other than his editor. He wrote
> >> "As I Lay Dying" while working nights in a power plant, utterly
> >> alone. James Joyce had a large circle of friends, but nobody
> >> understood what he was doing when he was writing Ulysses and
> >> it took quite a while for that novel to be understood. Shakespeare,
> >> like both of those writers, was far ahead of his time.
Faulkner was not so far ahead of his time that he didn't want to sell (look
up the
story of why he put the corncob scene in *Sanctuary*). Shakespeare was not
so far ahead of his time that he was out of touch with contemporary tastes.
His plays--those that were produced--were popular in his lifetime.
A literary
> >> circle would relieve the boredom, but accomplish nothing for him
> >> artistically. I really believe that only mediocrities need a
> >> circle around them, because they don't have enough ideas on
> >> their own.
> >
> >You should have seen the big Picasso/Matisse exhibition on at the Tate
> >last summer. Those two were leapfrogging each other for most of their
> >careers. Come on - why do writers, painters and musicians gravitate
> >together?
>
> The mediocrities do.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway were mediocrities?
> Who did Van Gogh gravitate with?
Gauguin?
Could he
> even stand anybody else other than his brother? Why did Marcel
> Proust divorce himself from the so-called "cultured" society that
> he frequented,
Because he was a neurotic mama's boy?
> and live in a cork-lined room
Because he thought that would relieve his asthma?
to write a masterpiece
> that skewered those same pretentious people? You seem to be
> confused. The wealthy aristocrats or gentry were not "sophisticated"
> in the artistic sense.
Why did they patronize so many artists?
> They were dilettantes, vulgar,
Not as sensitive as the lower classes, no doubt.
and, in the case
> of Jonson's Cambridge buddies, downright dangerous.
Careless people with too much time on their hands are always dangerous.
They would
> certainly be less boring for a young writer to hang around with than
> most of his hometown chums, but they weren't going to do a thing
> for his art.
>
> And where in the sonnets do we get any sense that the young
> man had some kind of learning to impart to Shakespeare? The
> sonnets are about someone young and physically beautiful.
> Where is the connection?
>
> >Why do some cities at particular times become forcing-beds
> >for certain art forms, where they develop at an extraordinary rate?
> >Why did so many writers in the '20s head for Paris, and why are they
> >in New York now? Why can't they stay in Smallville and write their
> >masterpieces in their bedrooms?
>
> What great writers are in New York now?
I'm sure there are one or two.
> John Updike lives in
> "Smallville" (Georgetown, MA), Martin Amis lives in England,
Close to his best friend, the mediocrity Salman Rushdie.
> Don Delillo lives (or lived) in New York because he's from the area.
> Why did so many writers *leave* Paris? Why didn't Hemingway
> stay there forever? He went there in the first place because he
> was young and ignorant and thought it was the "cool", bohemian
> thing to do,
He went there to meet Gertrude Stein.
> and ended up finding out that he had to have peace and
> quiet to write alone,
He also ended up meeting Scott Fitzgerald, who helped him sign with
Scribner's and
also helped edit his first novel.
> using his imagination.
*The Sun Also Rises*--his best book, IMO--was almost autobiographical.
It seems that you have almost as romantic an idea of creative artists as
some
antiStrats do.
My experience is that it's hard to generalize about creativity and its
origins.
TR
BCD
"KQKnave" <kqk...@aol.comcrashed> wrote in message
>
> Do you think this is the sort of thing that would inspire a sonnet
> sequence is the point.
***Trying to second-guess inspiration is not very fruitful, as who knows
what might happen to inspire an artist; and, if we happen to guess it
correctly (and who aside from the artist himself could verify that), how are
we to know how widely our guess can be applied? But yes, for what it's
worth, I think that caring deeply and wishing continuance could well inspire
such a sonnet sequence; and I think that one man caring deeply and
non-sexually for another man, and wishing continuance for him, could well
inspire such a sonnet sequence. The Crowleys of the world will say, "Show
another example of such a thing!"; but there don't have to be two for there
to be one.
KQKnave
Reedy" <reed...@earthlink.net> writes:
>
>"KQKnave" <kqk...@aol.comcrashed> wrote in message
>news:20030125222558...@mb-fh.aol.com...
>> In article <c69e1804.03012...@posting.google.com>,
>> nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
>>
>> >> How do you define a "creative artist"? I write poems and stories
>> >> and I don't need any artistic circle. I know more about the subject
>> >> than the majority of people that I meet. William Faulkner wrote
>> >> his masterpieces in isolation, other than his editor. He wrote
>> >> "As I Lay Dying" while working nights in a power plant, utterly
>> >> alone. James Joyce had a large circle of friends, but nobody
>> >> understood what he was doing when he was writing Ulysses and
>> >> it took quite a while for that novel to be understood. Shakespeare,
>> >> like both of those writers, was far ahead of his time.
>
>Faulkner was not so far ahead of his time that he didn't want to sell (look
>up the
>story of why he put the corncob scene in *Sanctuary*). Shakespeare was not
>so far ahead of his time that he was out of touch with contemporary tastes.
>His plays--those that were produced--were popular in his lifetime.
Shakespeare's plays were entertaining on one level, great poetry on another.
I wonder how many in his audience could appreciate the poetry. His
poems were for another audience, and we are talking about the sonnets.
Faulkner's *Sanctuary* is a serious work, as serious as anything he
wrote. There are lots of apocryphal stories about the corn cob, but
the events in that novel were sensational *for the time*, just as *Ulysses*
was. Frederich Karl, in his biography of Faulkner, dismisses the money
angle, saying "In point of fact, Faulkner rarely gave accurate answers
for why he did this or that; perhaps only in the 1955 interview with Jean
Stein did he come close. *Sanctuary* came out of the deepest reaches of
Faulkner's own hidden body of treasures, out of his sanctuary, and its
daring testing-out of morality and sensibility was part of the same
boldness which made possible *Sound* and *As I Lay Dying*."
For example, in one interview Faulkner said (concerning *Sanctuary*) that
he "invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about
three weeks." In fact, he composed a first draft between January and
May of 1929, and worked out a final version about a year and a half later.
This was one of those periods in an author's life when a great deal of fine
work is produced all in a relatively short period of time. At the same time
he was working on *Sanctuary*, Faulkner was writing *As I Lay Dying*,
some of his best short stories, including *A Rose for Emily*, and revising
*Flags in the Dust* and *The Sound and the Fury*.
But the issue here is not commercialism, but whether or not an
"artistic milieu" is neccessary for an artist. Faulkner's own experience
with this was in New Orleans. Here's what Karl says about Faulkner's
time there:
"New Orleans was the "Paris of the South." Only New York's Greenwich
Village could rival it. This world was not something Faulkner stuck with -
by early July [after arriving in NO in January], he and Spratling sailed
for Europe. And once he found his voice, he avoided anything that smacked
of an artistic milieu, in New Orleans or anywhere else. Ultimately, he
saw himself as an isolated artist, a priest of the word and imagination,
marginal even when famous and sought after. But for this brief time,
his association with others like him was extremely important for
building his confidence in himself and his values. We notice how
rapidly his output increased, and how he pushed himself into
different genres."
So the basic function that such a place serves is as a place to
gain confidence, I suspect by seeing that most of the so-called
"artists" aren't really doing anything but spending their daddy's
money, and that, yes, indeed, you are at least as talented as
these people. Faulkner skewered these "artistic" types in
his novel, *Mosquitoes".
> A literary
>> >> circle would relieve the boredom, but accomplish nothing for him
>> >> artistically. I really believe that only mediocrities need a
>> >> circle around them, because they don't have enough ideas on
>> >> their own.
>> >
>> >You should have seen the big Picasso/Matisse exhibition on at the Tate
>> >last summer. Those two were leapfrogging each other for most of their
>> >careers. Come on - why do writers, painters and musicians gravitate
>> >together?
>>
>> The mediocrities do.
>
>Fitzgerald and Hemingway were mediocrities?
Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not mediocrities. But when they first
traveled to to Paris they did so out of youthful ignorance, thinking that
that was what they were supposed to do.
>
>> Who did Van Gogh gravitate with?
>
>Gauguin?
Van Gogh in fact learned quite a bit about *technique* from other, older
painters (not young beautiful men, as the "young man" in the sonnets
is portrayed.). But technique is not artistry. I'll just supply a few quotes
from
the Encylopedia Britannica on this one:
"Van Gogh worked for Goupil in London from 1873 to May 1875 and in Paris
from that date until April 1876. Daily contact with works of art aroused his
artistic sensibility, and he soon formed a taste for Rembrandt, Frans Hals,
and other Dutch masters, although his preference was for two contemporary
French painters, Jean-François Millet and Camille Corot, whose influence
was to last throughout his life."
Notice that it was *works* of art that aroused his artistic sensibility, not
his "artistic milieu".
"In 1883 the urge to be alone with nature and with peasants took him to
Drenthe,
an isolated part of the northern Netherlands frequented by Mauve and other
Dutch artists, where he spent three months before returning home, which was
then at Nuenen, another village in the Brabant. He remained at Nuenen during
most of 1884 and 1885, and during these years his art grew bolder and more
assured."
"The revelation of Rubens's mode of direct notation and of his ability to
express a
mood by a combination of colours proved decisive in the development of van
Gogh's
style. Simultaneously, van Gogh discovered Japanese prints and Impressionist
painting.
All these sources influenced him more than the academic principles taught at
the
Antwerp Academy, where he was enrolled. His refusal to follow the academy's
dictates
led to disputes, and after three months he left precipitately in 1886 to join
Theo in Paris."
Notice again, it is *works* of art that are most important. Similarly, it was
Faulkner's
own reading that stimulated him, not the two semesters he spent at Ol' Miss, or
the so-called "artistic milieu" that he rejected in New Orleans.
>
>Could he
>> even stand anybody else other than his brother? Why did Marcel
>> Proust divorce himself from the so-called "cultured" society that
>> he frequented,
>
>Because he was a neurotic mama's boy?
If he was a neurotic mama's boy (and I don't have much doubt that
he was, at least to some degree), how did that prevent him from
spending nearly the first 20 years of his adult life from cultivating
"society"?
>
>> and live in a cork-lined room
>
>Because he thought that would relieve his asthma?
>
>to write a masterpiece
>> that skewered those same pretentious people? You seem to be
>> confused. The wealthy aristocrats or gentry were not "sophisticated"
>> in the artistic sense.
>
>Why did they patronize so many artists?
They patronized artists for the same reason that middle class
and upper class housewifes go to museums. Because they
think they are supposed to.
>
>> They were dilettantes, vulgar,
>
>Not as sensitive as the lower classes, no doubt.
The lower classes are not the point. The individual artist
and some supposed "need" to have wealthy patrons for
their artistic development are the issues.
>
>and, in the case
>> of Jonson's Cambridge buddies, downright dangerous.
>
>Careless people with too much time on their hands are always dangerous.
>
>They would
>> certainly be less boring for a young writer to hang around with than
>> most of his hometown chums, but they weren't going to do a thing
>> for his art.
>>
>> And where in the sonnets do we get any sense that the young
>> man had some kind of learning to impart to Shakespeare? The
>> sonnets are about someone young and physically beautiful.
>> Where is the connection?
>>
>> >Why do some cities at particular times become forcing-beds
>> >for certain art forms, where they develop at an extraordinary rate?
>> >Why did so many writers in the '20s head for Paris, and why are they
>> >in New York now? Why can't they stay in Smallville and write their
>> >masterpieces in their bedrooms?
>>
>> What great writers are in New York now?
>
>I'm sure there are one or two.
>
>> John Updike lives in
>> "Smallville" (Georgetown, MA), Martin Amis lives in England,
>
>Close to his best friend, the mediocrity Salman Rushdie.
Rushdie could actually be a mediocrity, I don't know, because
I haven't read much of his work. He appears to be enormously pretentious,
from what little I have read.
>
>> Don Delillo lives (or lived) in New York because he's from the area.
>> Why did so many writers *leave* Paris? Why didn't Hemingway
>> stay there forever? He went there in the first place because he
>> was young and ignorant and thought it was the "cool", bohemian
>> thing to do,
>
>He went there to meet Gertrude Stein.
And why would you want to meet Gertrude Stein? Do established
writers commonly want to meet each other, or avoid each other?
A young man wants to meet his heroine. What has Stein done
for literature? She was famous, a young man wants to meet
a famous person. So what?
>
>> and ended up finding out that he had to have peace and
>> quiet to write alone,
>
>He also ended up meeting Scott Fitzgerald, who helped him sign with
>Scribner's and
>also helped edit his first novel.
Practical help, not artistic help. How does this situation fit in
with the beautiful young man of the sonnets?
>> using his imagination.
>
>*The Sun Also Rises*--his best book, IMO--was almost autobiographical.
You're contradicting yourself here. Above you didn't believe that Hemingway
was a mediocrity. Now you are saying *Sun* is his best book. I haven't read
all of Hemingway's work, but if that is his best work, he is definitely a
mediocrity. Hemingway's greatness lies in his mastery of the short story.
>It seems that you have almost as romantic an idea of creative artists as
>some antiStrats do.
>
>My experience is that it's hard to generalize about creativity and its
origins.
My experience is that for writers, it's pretty much the same. A youthful
period of searching, the main inspiration is from other works of literary art,
and the acts of creation are carried out alone. Too bad for all those people
who pay for MFA programs, but that's the way it is. Not that the MFA
programs won't help them with connections in the literary world, but
it's not going to make you an artist.
KQKnave
peter_k...@MSN.COM (Peter Krynicki) writes:
>In Key West he had the room over the carriage house
>renovated into a writing room where he could work undisturbed.
Yes, thank you.
>When he
>left Pauline for hs thrid wife, he als left Paris.
>
>And as to imagination, certainly Hemingway was creative, but by the
>time he lived in Key West he had accumulated a librabry of approx
>7,200 volumes. Many of the details for the books and stories he wrote
>were taken from these books; works of fixtion and non, but also guide
>books from various counrties, Baedekers, reference books, etc.
He didn't need any travel books to write "The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber".
Why is it a big surprise that writer has a library? Don't most writers
become writers after being inspired by their reading? Or are we
supposed to deduce that Shakespeare couldn't have been Shakespeare
because we don't know anything about his library?
KQKnave
>
>"KQKnave" <kqk...@aol.comcrashed> wrote in message
>news:20030126200024...@mb-fh.aol.com...
>>
>> Do you think this is the sort of thing that would inspire a sonnet
>> sequence is the point.
>
>***Trying to second-guess inspiration is not very fruitful, as who knows
>what might happen to inspire an artist; and, if we happen to guess it
>correctly (and who aside from the artist himself could verify that), how are
>we to know how widely our guess can be applied? But yes, for what it's
>worth, I think that caring deeply and wishing continuance could well inspire
>such a sonnet sequence; and I think that one man caring deeply and
>non-sexually for another man, and wishing continuance for him, could well
>inspire such a sonnet sequence. The Crowleys of the world will say, "Show
>another example of such a thing!"; but there don't have to be two for there
>to be one.
>
That's right, anything's possible. But given the literary precedence for most
of the sonnets individually, and given the fact that a set of sonnets to a
woman
of questionable values was included, it seems more likely to me that
they are a primarily a literary excercise. Why would you publish such a set
of sonnets together? Oh, I know, now comes the argument that the
sonnets were published without Shakespeare's permission, despite the
complete lack of evidence that that is so, the "mysterious" Mr. "W.H."
is somehow involved etc.
Paul Crowley
>
> "KQKnave" <kqk...@aol.comcrashed> wrote in message
> news:20030126200024...@mb-fh.aol.com...
[snippage restored]
>>>> " [...] The
>>>> incessant demand that the Man should marry and found a
>>>> family would seem to be inconsistent (or so I suppose-it is
>>>> a question for psychologists) with a real homosexual passion.
>>>> It is not even very obviously consistent with normal friendship.
>>>> It is indeed hard to think of any real situation in which it would
>>>> be natural. What man in the whole world, except a father
>>>> or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets
>>>> married? [...]
>>>
>>>***Hm. Perhaps I'm the odd one out here; but I don't find it at all
>>>incomprehensible that a man who cared deeply for another would wish on him
>>>the sort of continuance which he thinks progeny would provide.
> > Do you think this is the sort of thing that would inspire a sonnet
> > sequence is the point.
> But yes, for what it's
> worth, I think that caring deeply and wishing continuance could well inspire
> such a sonnet sequence; and I think that one man caring deeply and
> non-sexually for another man, and wishing continuance for him, could well
> inspire such a sonnet sequence. The Crowleys of the world will say, "Show
> another example of such a thing!"; but there don't have to be two for there
> to be one.
So you are free to invent whatever absurdity you
fancy? You cannot find a single poem (nor
expression in prose) along the lines you imply
should be common. What was remarkable
about the Stratman -- in this respect?
Answer:- nothing.
What was remarkable about the 'Fair Youth'?
Answer:- nothing.
When the proposed 'solution' to a problem
incorporates the words: "Nothing like this
appears to have happened before or since
in the history of humanity -- neither in real
life nor in fiction" . . . . you know that the
theorist is lost in some fantasy-land.
Paul.
BCD
"KQKnave" <kqk...@aol.comcrashed> wrote in message
> That's right, anything's possible. But given the literary precedence for
most
> of the sonnets individually, and given the fact that a set of sonnets to a
> woman
> of questionable values was included, it seems more likely to me that
> they are a primarily a literary excercise.
***Actually, with a downgrading of "primarily" to "partially," I would tend
to agree with you. My guess is that the basic situation--poet fond in one
way of lad, poet fond in another way of dark lady, lad and dark lady "find
each other"--happened, and that Shakespeare, with that efficient mining of
reality which writers practice, gor'd his own thoughts (selling cheap what
is most dear), and touched up reality to serve the Muse with a set of poems,
playing with tradition and playing with non-tradition simultaneously. But
this is just guessin'; meantime, however, it rings true to me.
> Why would you publish such a set of sonnets together?
***Writers, in my experience, have an urge to publish just about everything
they bother to write. Why, God help me, would I "publish" my poetic trash
(at
http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor/poems.html )? It's just part of the
creative process to "share."
***But if the "together" is the focus of your question, I suppose that he
found some aesthetic enhancement to the whole by publishing them that way.
Whether that comes across to us or not is another question.
> Oh, I know, now comes the argument
***Not from me.
> that the
> sonnets were published without Shakespeare's permission, despite the
> complete lack of evidence that that is so, the "mysterious" Mr. "W.H."
> is somehow involved etc.
***I'm sure that, even if they were published without Shakespeare's
permission, a part of Shakespeare wasn't at all displeased that the poems
were being circulated. Having readers under any circumstance gives one's
work a precious fulfilling reality.
Tom Reedy
Well, I got here in the middle, and it seemed that you expanded from a
specific poem to making generalities, and I think I'm probably as good at
making half-baked generalities as most people, so I chimed in,
> Faulkner's *Sanctuary* is a serious work, as serious as anything he
> wrote. There are lots of apocryphal stories about the corn cob, but
> the events in that novel were sensational *for the time*, just as
*Ulysses*
> was. Frederich Karl, in his biography of Faulkner, dismisses the money
> angle, saying "In point of fact, Faulkner rarely gave accurate answers
> for why he did this or that; perhaps only in the 1955 interview with Jean
> Stein did he come close.
That's probably an accurate description of Faulkner's interview policy. But
then you're left with trying to pick and choose what you think is true,
which is probably what he knew would happen. Probably all of what he said
was true at some level or another.
> *Sanctuary* came out of the deepest reaches of
> Faulkner's own hidden body of treasures, out of his sanctuary, and its
> daring testing-out of morality and sensibility was part of the same
> boldness which made possible *Sound* and *As I Lay Dying*."
Sounds just like a critic.
> For example, in one interview Faulkner said (concerning *Sanctuary*) that
> he "invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about
> three weeks." In fact, he composed a first draft between January and
> May of 1929, and worked out a final version about a year and a half later.
> This was one of those periods in an author's life when a great deal of
fine
> work is produced all in a relatively short period of time. At the same
time
> he was working on *Sanctuary*, Faulkner was writing *As I Lay Dying*,
> some of his best short stories, including *A Rose for Emily*, and revising
> *Flags in the Dust* and *The Sound and the Fury*.
>
> But the issue here is not commercialism, but whether or not an
> "artistic milieu" is neccessary for an artist.
I doubt that Shakespeare could have done what he did without the "milieu" --
artistic and otherwise -- that he lived in.
Faulkner's own experience
> with this was in New Orleans. Here's what Karl says about Faulkner's
> time there:
>
> "New Orleans was the "Paris of the South." Only New York's Greenwich
> Village could rival it. This world was not something Faulkner stuck with -
> by early July [after arriving in NO in January], he and Spratling sailed
> for Europe. And once he found his voice, he avoided anything that smacked
> of an artistic milieu, in New Orleans or anywhere else. Ultimately, he
> saw himself as an isolated artist, a priest of the word and imagination,
> marginal even when famous and sought after. But for this brief time,
> his association with others like him was extremely important for
> building his confidence in himself and his values. We notice how
> rapidly his output increased, and how he pushed himself into
> different genres."
>
> So the basic function that such a place serves is as a place to
> gain confidence, I suspect by seeing that most of the so-called
> "artists" aren't really doing anything but spending their daddy's
> money, and that, yes, indeed, you are at least as talented as
> these people.
So would Faulkner have been Faulkner without this experience?
> Faulkner skewered these "artistic" types in
> his novel, *Mosquitoes".
As all real artistic types do, of course!
You seem to think (correct me if I'm wrong) that mediocrities have no
artistic worth. How do you know that all these mediocrities aren't necessary
to produce geniuses? Who are you going to get to write TV shows, if not
mediocrities?
> > A literary
> >> >> circle would relieve the boredom, but accomplish nothing for him
> >> >> artistically. I really believe that only mediocrities need a
> >> >> circle around them, because they don't have enough ideas on
> >> >> their own.
> >> >
> >> >You should have seen the big Picasso/Matisse exhibition on at the Tate
> >> >last summer. Those two were leapfrogging each other for most of their
> >> >careers. Come on - why do writers, painters and musicians gravitate
> >> >together?
> >>
> >> The mediocrities do.
> >
> >Fitzgerald and Hemingway were mediocrities?
>
> Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not mediocrities. But when they first
> traveled to to Paris they did so out of youthful ignorance, thinking that
> that was what they were supposed to do.
They did it to get material -- experience.
> >
> >> Who did Van Gogh gravitate with?
> >
> >Gauguin?
>
> Van Gogh in fact learned quite a bit about *technique* from other, older
> painters (not young beautiful men, as the "young man" in the sonnets
> is portrayed.). But technique is not artistry.
He would have been hard pressed to become an artist without it. Artistry is
impossible without technique.
> I'll just supply a few quotes
> from
> the Encylopedia Britannica on this one:
>
> "Van Gogh worked for Goupil in London from 1873 to May 1875 and in Paris
> from that date until April 1876. Daily contact with works of art aroused
his
> artistic sensibility, and he soon formed a taste for Rembrandt, Frans
Hals,
> and other Dutch masters, although his preference was for two contemporary
> French painters, Jean-Franēois Millet and Camille Corot, whose influence
> was to last throughout his life."
>
> Notice that it was *works* of art that aroused his artistic sensibility,
not
> his "artistic milieu".
"Vincent found some encouragement from Anton Mauve (1838-88), his cousin by
marriage. Mauve had established himself as a successful artist, and from his
home in The Hague, supplied Vincent with his first set of watercolours--thus
giving Vincent his initial introduction to working in colours. Vincent was a
great admirer of Mauve's works and was deeply grateful for any instruction
that Mauve was able to provide."
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/bio.htm
Grepped from the same site:
"Still, the importance of Vincent's time in Paris is clear. Theo, as an art
dealer, had many contacts and Vincent would become familiar with the
ground-breaking artists in Paris at that time."
. . . .
"Vincent van Gogh moved to Arles in early 1888 propelled by a number of
reasons. Weary of the frenetic energy of Paris and the long months of
winter, Van Gogh sought the warm sun of Provence. Another motivation was
Vincent's dream of establishing a kind of artists' commune in Arles where
his comrades in Paris would seek refuge and where they would work together
and support each other toward a common goal."
. . . .
"Van Gogh is often perceived today as an irritable and solitary figure. But
he really did enjoy the company of people and did his best during these
months to make friends--both for companionship and also to pose as much
valued models. Although deeply lonely at times, Vincent did make friends
with Paul-Eugčne Milliet and another Zouave soldier and painted their
portraits. Vincent never lost hope in the prospect of establishing the
artists' commune and began a campaign to encourage Paul Gauguin to join him
in the south."
. . . .
"Malnourished and overworked, Van Gogh's health declined early October, but
he was heartened upon receiving confirmation that Gauguin would join him in
the south. Vincent worked hard to prepare the Yellow House in order to make
Gauguin feel welcome. Gauguin arrived in Arles by train early on 23 October.
"The next two months would be pivotal, and disastrous, for both Vincent van
Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Initially Van Gogh and Gauguin got on well together,
painting on the outskirts of Arles, discussing their art and differing
techniques. As the weeks passed, however, the weather deteriorated and the
pair found themselves compelled to stay indoors more and more frequently."
Similarly, it was
> Faulkner's
> own reading that stimulated him, not the two semesters he spent at Ol'
Miss, or
> the so-called "artistic milieu" that he rejected in New Orleans.
>
> >
> >Could he
> >> even stand anybody else other than his brother? Why did Marcel
> >> Proust divorce himself from the so-called "cultured" society that
> >> he frequented,
> >
> >Because he was a neurotic mama's boy?
>
> If he was a neurotic mama's boy (and I don't have much doubt that
> he was, at least to some degree), how did that prevent him from
> spending nearly the first 20 years of his adult life from cultivating
> "society"?
>
> >
> >> and live in a cork-lined room
> >
> >Because he thought that would relieve his asthma?
> >
> >to write a masterpiece
> >> that skewered those same pretentious people? You seem to be
> >> confused. The wealthy aristocrats or gentry were not "sophisticated"
> >> in the artistic sense.
> >
> >Why did they patronize so many artists?
>
> They patronized artists for the same reason that middle class
> and upper class housewifes go to museums. Because they
> think they are supposed to.
You are much more of a cynic than I am. I'm of the opinion that most people
who go to museums do because they enjoy it. Pretentious people are
everywhere, that's true (even on hlas--think of that!), but my experience is
that most people don't care that much what other people think about them.
There's no culture police keeping tabs.
> >
> >> They were dilettantes, vulgar,
> >
> >Not as sensitive as the lower classes, no doubt.
>
> The lower classes are not the point. The individual artist
> and some supposed "need" to have wealthy patrons for
> their artistic development are the issues.
Artists certainly need to eat, and historically that need has been taken
care of by patronage from others. It has only been in comparatively recent
times that artists have been able to support themselves by other means and
still have the energy to create, a situation attributable mainly to modern
economic systems that exist in such countries as the United States.
> >
> >and, in the case
> >> of Jonson's Cambridge buddies, downright dangerous.
> >
> >Careless people with too much time on their hands are always dangerous.
> >
> >They would
> >> certainly be less boring for a young writer to hang around with than
> >> most of his hometown chums, but they weren't going to do a thing
> >> for his art.
> >>
> >> And where in the sonnets do we get any sense that the young
> >> man had some kind of learning to impart to Shakespeare? The
> >> sonnets are about someone young and physically beautiful.
> >> Where is the connection?
> >>
> >> >Why do some cities at particular times become forcing-beds
> >> >for certain art forms, where they develop at an extraordinary rate?
> >> >Why did so many writers in the '20s head for Paris, and why are they
> >> >in New York now? Why can't they stay in Smallville and write their
> >> >masterpieces in their bedrooms?
> >>
> >> What great writers are in New York now?
> >
> >I'm sure there are one or two.
> >
> >> John Updike lives in
> >> "Smallville" (Georgetown, MA), Martin Amis lives in England,
> >
> >Close to his best friend, the mediocrity Salman Rushdie.
>
> Rushdie could actually be a mediocrity, I don't know, because
> I haven't read much of his work.
I like some of his stuff; some of it I don't.
> He appears to be enormously pretentious,
> from what little I have read.
Good thing there's no pretentious people on hlas, huh?
> >
> >> Don Delillo lives (or lived) in New York because he's from the area.
> >> Why did so many writers *leave* Paris? Why didn't Hemingway
> >> stay there forever? He went there in the first place because he
> >> was young and ignorant and thought it was the "cool", bohemian
> >> thing to do,
> >
> >He went there to meet Gertrude Stein.
>
> And why would you want to meet Gertrude Stein? Do established
> writers commonly want to meet each other, or avoid each other?
I would vote for "meet."
> A young man wants to meet his heroine. What has Stein done
> for literature? She was famous, a young man wants to meet
> a famous person. So what?
I take it you're not that familiar with Hemingway's time in Paris?
> >> and ended up finding out that he had to have peace and
> >> quiet to write alone,
> >
> >He also ended up meeting Scott Fitzgerald, who helped him sign with
> >Scribner's and
> >also helped edit his first novel.
>
> Practical help, not artistic help.
How do you separate the practical from the artistic when it comes to
writing? Fitzgerald certainly helped Hemingway artistically, help which
Hemingway later tried to minimize.
> How does this situation fit in
> with the beautiful young man of the sonnets?
>
> >> using his imagination.
> >
> >*The Sun Also Rises*--his best book, IMO--was almost autobiographical.
>
> You're contradicting yourself here. Above you didn't believe that
Hemingway
> was a mediocrity. Now you are saying *Sun* is his best book. I haven't
read
> all of Hemingway's work, but if that is his best work,
I didn't say it was his best work.
he is definitely a
> mediocrity.
I don't know of any mediocrities that can write that well.
> Hemingway's greatness lies in his mastery of the short story.
I agree, but he wrote some pretty good books, also. That you don't seem to
think so just shows there's no accounting for taste.
>
> >It seems that you have almost as romantic an idea of creative artists as
> >some antiStrats do.
> >
> >My experience is that it's hard to generalize about creativity and its
> origins.
>
> My experience is that for writers, it's pretty much the same. A youthful
> period of searching, the main inspiration is from other works of literary
art,
> and the acts of creation are carried out alone.
I don't think that's debatable. *Of course* writing is carried out alone!
> Too bad for all those people
> who pay for MFA programs, but that's the way it is.
Good writers have come out of MFA programs. But the main value of MFA
programs is to give jobs to writers.
Not that the MFA
> programs won't help them with connections in the literary world, but
> it's not going to make you an artist.
Nothing makes you an artist but the doing.
This whole conversation is probably a complete waste of time, being
comprised of supportable but unproveable declarations about generalities.
TR
KQKnave
Reedy" <reed...@earthlink.net> writes:
I'm just going to respond to a little of this, since
>You are much more of a cynic than I am. I'm of the opinion that most people
>who go to museums do because they enjoy it. Pretentious people are
>everywhere, that's true (even on hlas--think of that!), but my experience is
>that most people don't care that much what other people think about them.
>There's no culture police keeping tabs.
But there are, everywhere. Everywhere there is pressure to conform, to
watch tv with the rest of them rather than sit in your room and read
Shakespeare, to talk about the latest tv show at work so you can
"belong", to brag about how much money you spent on vacation
rather than talk about what you saw. I once brought up at work the
subject of the New York Metropolitan Museaum exhibit I saw on
photography, but before I could get two sentences out the person
involved blurted out "We have a yearly subscription!". Nothing
about the subject, nothing about what they saw there recently,
just the fact that they *own* something. Most people don't notice
the pressure to conform because they are too busy conforming.
>> >> They were dilettantes, vulgar,
>> >
>> >Not as sensitive as the lower classes, no doubt.
>>
>> The lower classes are not the point. The individual artist
>> and some supposed "need" to have wealthy patrons for
>> their artistic development are the issues.
>
>Artists certainly need to eat, and historically that need has been taken
>care of by patronage from others. It has only been in comparatively recent
>times that artists have been able to support themselves by other means and
>still have the energy to create, a situation attributable mainly to modern
>economic systems that exist in such countries as the United States.
I don't have any doubt that there are practical benefits to meeting people
who can help you in your field. But this discussion (with Rita) began with her
statement that the young man of the sonnets must be real because
he was "neccessary " to Shakespeare. I don't see how any form of
patronage could have inspired the sonnets that we have. Perhaps if
the subject of the sonnets were an older man who helped Shakespeare
I could believe it. But the two cases for which we know Shakespeare
was involved in patronage (V&A and Lucrece) produced something
quite different.
I would vote for "meet" as well, if a young writer is involved who
wants to make connections. "Not meet" if they are older artists
in competition with one another.
>> A young man wants to meet his heroine. What has Stein done
>> for literature? She was famous, a young man wants to meet
>> a famous person. So what?
>
>I take it you're not that familiar with Hemingway's time in Paris?
I've read "A Moveable Feast", although it was more than twenty
years ago. My memories are of good times and fun dinner parties,
interspersed with Hemingway trying to find a quiet place to write.
>> >> and ended up finding out that he had to have peace and
>> >> quiet to write alone,
>> >
>> >He also ended up meeting Scott Fitzgerald, who helped him sign with
>> >Scribner's and
>> >also helped edit his first novel.
>>
>> Practical help, not artistic help.
>
>How do you separate the practical from the artistic when it comes to
>writing? Fitzgerald certainly helped Hemingway artistically, help which
>Hemingway later tried to minimize.
And Ezra Pound helped Eliot. But that's the reverse of the situation
in the sonnets (older helping younger, where if Rita is correct, the younger
man helped the older man artistically).
Tom Reedy
> In article <PYmZ9.7256$d66.6...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>, "Tom
> Reedy" <reed...@earthlink.net> writes:
>
> I'm just going to respond to a little of this, since
>
> >You are much more of a cynic than I am. I'm of the opinion that most
people
> >who go to museums do because they enjoy it. Pretentious people are
> >everywhere, that's true (even on hlas--think of that!), but my experience
is
> >that most people don't care that much what other people think about them.
> >There's no culture police keeping tabs.
>
> But there are, everywhere. Everywhere there is pressure to conform, to
> watch tv with the rest of them rather than sit in your room and read
> Shakespeare, to talk about the latest tv show at work so you can
> "belong", to brag about how much money you spent on vacation
> rather than talk about what you saw. I once brought up at work the
> subject of the New York Metropolitan Museaum exhibit I saw on
> photography, but before I could get two sentences out the person
> involved blurted out "We have a yearly subscription!". Nothing
> about the subject, nothing about what they saw there recently,
> just the fact that they *own* something. Most people don't notice
> the pressure to conform because they are too busy conforming.
The difference in our outlook could be because I live in Texas and you live
in New York, but I think it's probably more likely that you are making
generalizations based on too few specific interactions.
TR
Peter Krynicki
.
>
> He didn't need any travel books to write "The Short Happy Life of
> Francis Macomber".
>
> Why is it a big surprise that writer has a library? Don't most writers
> become writers after being inspired by their reading? Or are we
> supposed to deduce that Shakespeare couldn't have been Shakespeare
> because we don't know anything about his library?
>
>
I was probably unclear or didn't write enough. The assumption a lot of
people make is that many of Hemingway's works are basically
autobiographical. But they are surprised to learn that Hemingway
hadn't been at any of the places, nor seen any of the events, that are
described in A Farewell to Arms. (Except for being in Italy, itself)
And yet there are histories of the Great War that suggest that the
best description of the retreat from Caporetto is in this book. Where
did Hemingway get the information to describe the retreat, the
landscape, even the weather so accurately? Not, in this case, from his
imagination.
hth
Pjk
Rita
Jim, sorry I fell silent on this. Something very odd was happening
with the net when I tried to post a reply, and my server kept
disconnecting. I know the argument has moved on without me, but
still...
> In article <c69e1804.03012...@posting.google.com>,
> nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
> >
> >[Reprise: We started arguing about the benefits of friendships between
> >professional writers and intellectually-inclined gentlemen in early
> >17th c. London. I quoted an anecdote in Aubrey in which Jonson
> >acknowledges his debt to John Hoskyns, serjeant-at-law, claiming he
> >'polished' him. We're now trying to determine the character of
> >Hoskyns and other gentlemen with whom Jonson was familiar, such as
> >Richard Martin. Why would anyone have wanted to know these men?]
(I posted this on Hoskyns, to show he was a man of parts.)
> >While an MP he spoke out boldly in Parliament against
> >James' policy of favouring his Scottish followers: 'He made a
> >Comparison of a Conduit, whereinto water came, and ran-out afarre-off.
> > Now, said he, this pipe reaches as far as Edinborough.' For this
> >Hoskyns was sent to the Tower. There he became friendly with Ralegh
> >and 'was Sir Walter's Aristarchus, to review and polish Sir Walter's
> >stile'. (So it wasn't just Jonson he polished, you see.)
>
> "Stile" of what?
Now you're just being stubborn. Hoskyns either polished the style of
the work Ralegh wrote in the Tower, the 'History of the World'; or he
polished a small wooden appliance useful for crossing farm gates,
which Sir Walter, for reasons unknown, took with him to prison. Which
do you think?
Hoskyns must have acted as a kind of critic-cum-editor, that's the
only way he could have 'polished' Sir Walter Ralegh's style.
Therefore, when Jonson said Hoskyns 'polished' him he meant something
similar: Hoskyns listened to his work and gave him good critical
feedback, made suggestions that Jonson found useful, gave him the kind
of perceptive comment writers need, possibly suggested new ideas or
avenues of thought.
>
>
> Well, your opinion of Hoskins differs from that of Riggs and Finkelpearl.
Why should I care for that, if I can back up my opinion with
historical evidence?
> >
> >> Here is what David Riggs says in his
> >> biography of Jonson (pp56-7):
> >> "Jonson later dedicated *Every Man Out of His Humour* to the Inns
> >> of Court, noting that "when I wrote this poeme, I had friendship with
> >> divers in your societies; who, as they were great names in learning,
> >> so they were no less Examples of living. Of them, and then (that
> >> I say no more) it was not despis'd."...Hoskins and Martin appear
> >> to have been especially close to Jonson during these years. Hoskin's
> >> son Bennet told John Aubrey that he had asked "Mr Jonson to
> >> adopt him for his sonne": "no said he I dare not, 'tis honour enough
> >> for me to be your Brother, I was your Father's son; and t'was He
> >> that polished me." When Jonson was threatened with prosecution
> >> in 1601, Richard Martin, to whom he dedicated another of his
> >> early comedies, came to his rescue.
> >
> >Cheers, Jim, this is great. You're making my case for me.
>
> How is that? We all know that Jonson had friends.
Yes. But we're debating what kind of friends they were and what they
did for him, and why he claimed one had 'polished' him. You found a
bit of evidence of wildness in youth and leapt to the false conclusion
that Martin and Hoskyns were drunken ne'er-do-wells. In fact they
were successful, intelligent, characterful men with a habit of
thinking for themselves and saying what they thought. Hoskyns had a
good academic background, was particularly well-read in the classics,
and no less a stylist than Sir Walter Ralegh was content to take his
advice on literary matters. If you bring yourself to acknowledge
that, you may make the deduction that any unbiased mind would make
when reading that Jonson claimed Hoskyns had 'polished' him: he had
improved his mind and helped him be a better poet.
> You are saying
> that these friends are *neccessary* for him *as an artist*,
What do you mean, *I* am saying that? *Jonson* said that. He said
Hoskyns, in particular, had been essential to him in perfecting his
art. That doesn't mean that without Hoskyns and others like him
Jonson would never have written a line. Jonson owed his talent to
no-one else; but he also believed in 'art', in sweating blood to
refine it, and he says that Hoskyns helped him enormously in that
task. The quote you give above suggests Jonson also valued the
opinions of various other Inns of Court men who were 'great in
learning'. Is it running too far ahead of the evidence then, to say
that Jonson felt the value of an informed critical audience, and that
without their company he might not have developed his talent as he
did?
> by extension
> all artists need friends like that,
Most artists, I think, benefit from friends like that. They aren't
always lucky enough to get them.
> and that therefore the "young man"
> in the sonnets was "neccessary" to Shakespeare and therefore
> must be real,
I think Shakespeare would have been desperately grateful for
friendship like that. He would have been a great writer anyway. But
when I read sonnet after sonnet pouring out his profuse *gratitude* to
some young man, I have to account for this intense feeling somehow. I
can't easily attribute it to the obvious source, sexual attraction,
and not just because Shakespeare flatly denies it's that in Sonnet 20.
It's because, however he praises his friend's beauty, it seems
disembodied, unerotic. Where is there anything in all the sonnets to
compare with Marlowe's wonderfully sensuous description of Leander?
'His body was as straight as Circe's wand;
Jove might have sipped out nectar from his hand.
Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpast
The white of Pelops's shoulder: I could tell ye,
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly;
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path with many a curious dint
That runs along his back...'
There's nothing in the sonnets to compare with this - especially the
last two and a half lines, when we're suddenly brought so close to
Leander's gorgeous backbone we practically have to blink.
> even though there is no evidence whatsoever that
> the young man wasn't anything other than a pretty face with
> good social graces who was younger than Shakespeare and
> who Shakespeare wished would get married and have children,
> *if* he was real to begin with.
If that was all the sonnets say, I probably wouldn't believe he was
real. But he's more:
'Return, forgetful Muse, and straight redeem
In gentle numbers time so idly spent;
*Sing to the ear which doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.*'
That's what I think the Friend did; he esteemed Shakespeare's verses,
he gave him his subject, and inspired him to write with greater skill.
Maybe he just did it by looking good, but I think there was more to
him. Actually, I want to believe that. I'd think more highly of
Shakespeare if the Friend really was a lot more than just a pretty
face.
Rita
KQKnave
>> >While an MP he spoke out boldly in Parliament against
>> >James' policy of favouring his Scottish followers: 'He made a
>> >Comparison of a Conduit, whereinto water came, and ran-out afarre-off.
>> > Now, said he, this pipe reaches as far as Edinborough.' For this
>> >Hoskyns was sent to the Tower. There he became friendly with Ralegh
>> >and 'was Sir Walter's Aristarchus, to review and polish Sir Walter's
>> >stile'. (So it wasn't just Jonson he polished, you see.)
>>
>> "Stile" of what?
>
>Now you're just being stubborn. Hoskyns either polished the style of
>the work Ralegh wrote in the Tower, the 'History of the World'; or he
>polished a small wooden appliance useful for crossing farm gates,
>which Sir Walter, for reasons unknown, took with him to prison. Which
>do you think?
You are being a bit obtuse here. There is no way to tell from the context
of either this statement or Jonson's statement to Hoskyns' son exactly
what was being polished. Was it artistic work? Was it legal writing?
Was it oratory? Was it poetic art? It's only if we know a little bit
more can we know what Jonson meant by what he said to Hoskyns'
son (see below).
>
>Hoskyns must have acted as a kind of critic-cum-editor, that's the
>only way he could have 'polished' Sir Walter Ralegh's style.
Oratory.
>Therefore, when Jonson said Hoskyns 'polished' him he meant something
>similar: Hoskyns listened to his work and gave him good critical
>feedback, made suggestions that Jonson found useful, gave him the kind
>of perceptive comment writers need, possibly suggested new ideas or
>avenues of thought.
You have no way of knowing that. Jonson did not merely write, he
was an orator, and Hoskyns can show him or urge him to things
like conciseness and precision without ever applying it to fiction.
Those claims are not substantiated by the quotes you quoted.
>
>> You are saying
>> that these friends are *neccessary* for him *as an artist*,
>
>What do you mean, *I* am saying that? *Jonson* said that.
No, Jonson said Hoskyns *polished* him.
Look, you started this discussion by claiming that the "young man"
of the sonnets was *neccessary* to Shakespeare as an artist, and
therefore the "young man" must be real. You tried to back this
up by pointing out that Jonson had teachers. Everyone has
teachers. No one can teach someone to be an artist, period. It's
not possible. One can show a person technique, point him to
examples, etc. but that's it. Nowhere have I seen Jonson claim
that someone made him into an artist. He has acknowledged his
debt of learning to many, such as Camden, but learning is not
*art*. Jonson, like Shakespeare ( remember Beaumont? "..I would..
let slip (If I had any in me) scholarship, and from all learning keep
these lines as clear as Shakespeare's best are...") wrote his
best work when he discarded learning (for example, his poem,
"On My First Son"), otherwise he produced things like the turgid
classics-quote collection *Sejanus*.
He said
>Hoskyns, in particular, had been essential to him in perfecting his
>art.
No, he didn't. He said that Hoskyns *polished* him.
>That doesn't mean that without Hoskyns and others like him
>Jonson would never have written a line. Jonson owed his talent to
>no-one else; but he also believed in 'art', in sweating blood to
>refine it, and he says that Hoskyns helped him enormously in that
>task.
No, he says Hoskyns *polished* him.
>The quote you give above suggests Jonson also valued the
>opinions of various other Inns of Court men who were 'great in
>learning'. Is it running too far ahead of the evidence then, to say
>that Jonson felt the value of an informed critical audience, and that
>without their company he might not have developed his talent as he
>did?
Yes, it is running too far ahead. Jonson was too concerned with learning,
wanted to hob-nob with the learned, impress the learned, get commissions
from the learned, and it hobbled his art.
Here is the poem in its entirety:
Where art thou Muse that thou forget'st so long,
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?
Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,
In gentle numbers time so idly spent,
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
Rise resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey,
If time have any wrinkle graven there,
If any, be a satire to decay,
And make time's spoils despised everywhere.
Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,
So thou prevent'st his scythe, and crooked knife.
You've confuse Shakespeare's Muse with the young man.
> Maybe he just did it by looking good, but I think there was more to
>him. Actually, I want to believe that. I'd think more highly of
>Shakespeare if the Friend really was a lot more than just a pretty
>face.
Would you think more of Shakespeare if the "young man" were
entirely fictional, just a literary game? I do, I think it's a brilliant
conceit.
Jonson quoted Hoskyns nearly verbatim in a long section in his
"Discoveries". I pasted it in below. Also at the end I've put
Jonson's poem "On My First Son", and I'll let people decide how
much Hoskyns had to do with Jonson's *art*:
http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04/dscv10.txt
The conceits of the mind are pictures of things, and the
tongue is the interpreter of those pictures. The order of God's
creatures in themselves is not only admirable and glorious, but
eloquent: then he who could apprehend the consequence of things in
their truth, and utter his apprehensions as truly, were the best
writer or speaker. Therefore Cicero said much, when he said, Dicere
recte nemo potest, nisi qui prudenter intelligit. {124a} The shame
of speaking unskilfully were small if the tongue only thereby were
disgraced; but as the image of a king in his seal ill-represented is
not so much a blemish to the wax, or the signet that sealed it, as
to the prince it representeth, so disordered speech is not so much
injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and
incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed.
Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jar;
nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous; nor his
elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance breaks itself into
fragments and uncertainties. Were it not a dishonour to a mighty
prince, to have the majesty of his embassage spoiled by a careless
ambassador? and is it not as great an indignity, that an excellent
conceit and capacity, by the indiligence of an idle tongue, should
be disgraced? Negligent speech doth not only discredit the person
of the speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and
judgment; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter and
substance. If it be so then in words, which fly and escape censure,
and where one good phrase begs pardon for many incongruities and
faults, how shall he then be thought wise whose penning is thin and
shallow? how shall you look for wit from him whose leisure and head,
assisted with the examination of his eyes, yield you no life or
sharpness in his writing?
De stylo epistolari.--Inventio.--In writing there is to be regarded
the invention and the fashion. For the invention, that ariseth upon
your business, whereof there can be no rules of more certainty, or
precepts of better direction given, than conjecture can lay down
from the several occasions of men's particular lives and vocations:
but sometimes men make baseness of kindness: As "I could not
satisfy myself till I had discharged my remembrance, and charged my
letters with commendation to you;" or, "My business is no other than
to testify my love to you, and to put you in mind of my willingness
to do you all kind offices;" or, "Sir, have you leisure to descend
to the remembering of that assurance you have long possessed in your
servant, and upon your next opportunity make him happy with some
commands from you?" or the like; that go a-begging for some meaning,
and labour to be delivered of the great burden of nothing. When you
have invented, and that your business be matter, and not bare form,
or mere ceremony, but some earnest, then are you to proceed to the
ordering of it, and digesting the parts, which is had out of two
circumstances. One is the understanding of the persons to whom you
are to write; the other is the coherence of your sentence; for men's
capacity to weigh what will be apprehended with greatest attention
or leisure; what next regarded and longed for especially, and what
last will leave satisfaction, and (as it were) the sweetest memorial
and belief of all that is passed in his understanding whom you write
to. For the consequence of sentences, you must be sure that every
clause do give the cue one to the other, and be bespoken ere it
come. So much for invention and order.
Modus.--1. Brevitas.--Now for fashion: it consists in four things,
which are qualities of your style. The first is brevity; for they
must not be treatises or discourses (your letters) except it be to
learned men. And even among them there is a kind of thrift and
saving of words. Therefore you are to examine the clearest passages
of your understanding, and through them to convey the sweetest and
most significant words you can devise, that you may the easier teach
them the readiest way to another man's apprehension, and open their
meaning fully, roundly, and distinctly, so as the reader may not
think a second view cast away upon your letter. And though respect
be a part following this, yet now here, and still I must remember
it, if you write to a man, whose estate and sense, as senses, you
are familiar with, you may the bolder (to set a task to his brain)
venture on a knot. But if to your superior, you are bound to
measure him in three farther points: first, with interest in him;
secondly, his capacity in your letters; thirdly, his leisure to
peruse them. For your interest or favour with him, you are to be
the shorter or longer, more familiar or submiss, as he will afford
you time. For his capacity, you are to be quicker and fuller of
those reaches and glances of wit or learning, as he is able to
entertain them. For his leisure, you are commanded to the greater
briefness, as his place is of greater discharges and cares. But
with your betters, you are not to put riddles of wit, by being too
scarce of words; not to cause the trouble of making breviates by
writing too riotous and wastingly. Brevity is attained in matter by
avoiding idle compliments, prefaces, protestations, parentheses,
superfluous circuit of figures and digressions: in the composition,
by omitting conjunctions [not only, but also; both the one and the
other, whereby it cometh to pass] and such like idle particles, that
have no great business in a serious letter but breaking of
sentences, as oftentimes a short journey is made long by unnessary
baits.
Quintilian.--But, as Quintilian saith, there is a briefness of the
parts sometimes that makes the whole long: "As I came to the
stairs, I took a pair of oars, they launched out, rowed apace, I
landed at the court gate, I paid my fare, went up to the presence,
asked for my lord, I was admitted." All this is but, "I went to the
court and spake with my lord." This is the fault of some Latin
writers within these last hundred years of my reading, and perhaps
Seneca may be appeached of it; I accuse him not.
2. Perspicuitas.--The next property of epistolary style is
perspicuity, and is oftentimes by affectation of some wit ill angled
for, or ostentation of some hidden terms of art. Few words they
darken speech, and so do too many; as well too much light hurteth
the eyes, as too little; and a long bill of chancery confounds the
understanding as much as the shortest note; therefore, let not your
letters be penned like English statutes, and this is obtained.
These vices are eschewed by pondering your business well and
distinctly concerning yourself, which is much furthered by uttering
your thoughts, and letting them as well come forth to the light and
judgment of your own outward senses as to the censure of other men's
ears; for that is the reason why many good scholars speak but
fumblingly; like a rich man, that for want of particular note and
difference can bring you no certain ware readily out of his shop.
Hence it is that talkative shallow men do often content the hearers
more than the wise. But this may find a speedier redress in
writing, where all comes under the last examination of the eyes.
First, mind it well, then pen it, then examine it, then amend it,
and you may be in the better hope of doing reasonably well. Under
this virtue may come plainness, which is not to be curious in the
order as to answer a letter, as if you were to answer to
interrogatories. As to the first, first; and to the second,
secondly, &c. but both in method to use (as ladies do in their
attire) a diligent kind of negligence, and their sportive freedom;
though with some men you are not to jest, or practise tricks; yet
the delivery of the most important things may be carried with such a
grace, as that it may yield a pleasure to the conceit of the reader.
There must be store, though no excess of terms; as if you are to
name store, sometimes you may call it choice, sometimes plenty,
sometimes copiousness, or variety; but ever so, that the word which
comes in lieu have not such difference of meaning as that it may put
the sense of the first in hazard to be mistaken. You are not to
cast a ring for the perfumed terms of the time, as accommodation,
complement, spirit &c., but use them properly in their place, as
others.
3. Vigor--There followeth life and quickness, which is the strength
and sinews, as it were, of your penning by pretty sayings,
similitudes, and conceits; allusions from known history, or other
common-place, such as are in the Courtier, and the second book of
Cicero De Oratore.
4. Discretio.--The last is, respect to discern what fits yourself,
him to whom you write, and that which you handle, which is a quality
fit to conclude the rest, because it doth include all. And that
must proceed from ripeness of judgment, which, as one truly saith,
is gotten by four means, God, nature, diligence, and conversation.
Serve the first well, and the rest will serve you.
XLV On My First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy,
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, I could lose all father, now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's, and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age!
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
Rita
> In article <c69e1804.03012...@posting.google.com>,
> nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
>
> >> >While an MP he spoke out boldly in Parliament against
> >> >James' policy of favouring his Scottish followers: 'He made a
> >> >Comparison of a Conduit, whereinto water came, and ran-out afarre-off.
> >> > Now, said he, this pipe reaches as far as Edinborough.' For this
> >> >Hoskyns was sent to the Tower. There he became friendly with Ralegh
> >> >and 'was Sir Walter's Aristarchus, to review and polish Sir Walter's
> >> >stile'. (So it wasn't just Jonson he polished, you see.)
> >>
> >> "Stile" of what?
> >
> >Now you're just being stubborn. Hoskyns either polished the style of
> >the work Ralegh wrote in the Tower, the 'History of the World'; or he
> >polished a small wooden appliance useful for crossing farm gates,
> >which Sir Walter, for reasons unknown, took with him to prison. Which
> >do you think?
>
> You are being a bit obtuse here.
No I'm not, I'm being sarcastic because you're refusing to concede an
obvious point.
> There is no way to tell from the context
> of either this statement or Jonson's statement to Hoskyns' son exactly
> what was being polished. Was it artistic work? Was it legal writing?
> Was it oratory? Was it poetic art? It's only if we know a little bit
> more can we know what Jonson meant by what he said to Hoskyns'
> son (see below).
Okay, round the mulberry bush again...
Ralegh wrote a book in the Tower, the 'History of the World'. Aubrey
states in his notes on Ralegh in prison ''He there (besides compiling
his History of the World') studied Chymistry... Serjeant Hoskins (the
Poet) was a prisoner there too: he was Sir Walter's Aristarchus.'
Aristarchus was a famous Homeric critic.
Aubrey repeats the same story in his notes on the life of Hoskyns:
'..his acquaintance were all the Witts then about the Towne; e.g. Sir
Walter Raleigh (who was his Fellow-prisoner in the Towere, where he
was Sir Walter's Aristarchus to review and polish Sir Walter's stile.'
What is there about that last statement that you find at so hard to
follow? What is murky about 'to review and polish Sir Walter's
stile'?
Here is Hoskyns' entry in the Concise Dictionary of National
Biography:
HOSKINS, John (1566-1638), lawyer and wit ; of Westminster, Winchester
and New College, Oxford; Fellow of New College, 1586; M.A., 1592; when
M.P. for Hereford, committed to the Tower, 1614, for reflections on
Scottish favourites; serjeant-at-law, 1623; Welsh judge; said to have
revised Ralegh's 'History of the World' and Ben Jonson's poems;
intimate with Camden, Donne and Selden; gave information to Aubrey
About the context of Jonson's remark to Hoskyns' son, Benet. 'Sir
Benet told me' (writes Aubrey)'that one time desiring Mr Johnson to
adopt him for his sonne' - (i.e. asking Jonson to become his literary
mentor) - 'No, said he, I dare not; tis honour enough for me to be
your Brother : I was your Father's sonne, and 'twas he that polished
me'.
The fact that Sir Benet Hoskyns was asking Jonson to become his
literary mentor gives us some clue as to the function Hoskyns senior
performed for Ben Jonson: literary mentor.
Rita
Rita
<snip>
> Look, you started this discussion by claiming that the "young man"
> of the sonnets was *neccessary* to Shakespeare as an artist, and
> therefore the "young man" must be real. You tried to back this
> up by pointing out that Jonson had teachers.
Don't change what I said. We're not talking 'teachers'. We're
talking intelligent, informed minds - wits - of whom Hoskyns was
clearly one, and the probable impact friendly relationships with such
men would have on a very talented writer. If he only sat round a
table with them and joined in a discussion he would still be imbibing
new information, new viewpoints. Sometimes the input was more than
that. You've got Aubrey recording Jonson's acknowledgement of his debt
to Hoskyns. However you twist it, if Jonson said Hoskyns 'polished'
him he meant his advice helped him become a better poet. Trying to
interpret the words any other way is silly.
> Everyone has
> teachers. No one can teach someone to be an artist, period. It's
> not possible. One can show a person technique, point him to
> examples, etc. but that's it.
You can give him your opinion of his verse, give him feedback when he
reads his work to you, suggest books to him he may not have read,
discuss the work of other writers and dissect why their work is
good/bad, talk to him about ideas which fascinate you, stimulate his
mind, point out weaknesses in his style. Polish him.
> Nowhere have I seen Jonson claim
> that someone made him into an artist. He has acknowledged his
> debt of learning to many, such as Camden, but learning is not
> *art*.
To Jonson 'art' was not the same as talent; 'art' was effort,
analysis, self-criticism and, apparently, the criticism of men like
John Hoskyns. But you're still denying what Jonson said. He didn't
say 'Hoskyns taught me', or 'I can never repay my debt to his
learning.' He said 'polished' me - refined, improved.
Rita
Rita
<snip>
Rita wrote:
>
> >Is it running too far ahead of the evidence then, to say
> >that Jonson felt the value of an informed critical audience, and that
> >without their company he might not have developed his talent as he
> >did?
>
> Yes, it is running too far ahead. Jonson was too concerned with learning,
> wanted to hob-nob with the learned, impress the learned, get commissions
> from the learned, and it hobbled his art.
You're not actually denying that what I said happened did happen, are
you? You're just saying okay, it happened but had negative
consequences ( and that's in your opinion, not mine). You caricature
Jonson as some snobbish know-all. If he'd only wanted to hang with the
'learned' he'd have been an academic. He was interested in ideas, and
he valued the friendship of men like Selden, Cotton, Donne, Hoskyns
and Martin because they were men of ideas.
>
> >> by extension
> >> all artists need friends like that,
> >
> >Most artists, I think, benefit from friends like that. They aren't
> >always lucky enough to get them.
> >
> >> and that therefore the "young man"
> >> in the sonnets was "neccessary" to Shakespeare and therefore
> >> must be real,
> >
<snip>
No. Shakespeare is rebuking his Muse (i.e. himself) for wasting time
and effort on unworthy subjects. (Possibly means his plays.) Instead
he should be singing 'to the ear that doth thy lays esteem / And gives
thy pen both skill and argument.'
Since Shakespeare so often claims his friend is both his inspiration
and best subject, it isn't hard to work out whose ears he feels he
should be singing into - the ears of the one who values his verse.
You could argue that when he claims his love gives his pen 'skill'
it's merely a way of saying 'you inspire me so much I automatically
write better.' But you could also understand it as saying that the
friend has some responsibility for that skill; even if he does no more
than pass admiring comments on Shakespeare's better lines.
>
> > Maybe he just did it by looking good, but I think there was more to
> >him. Actually, I want to believe that. I'd think more highly of
> >Shakespeare if the Friend really was a lot more than just a pretty
> >face.
>
> Would you think more of Shakespeare if the "young man" were
> entirely fictional, just a literary game? I do, I think it's a brilliant
> conceit.
I think it's too long a sequence for a conceit. Shakespeare had to
invest time writing this lengthy cycle during years when he had his
hands full. Someone 'esteemed' these sonnets, and I think expected
them, and that's why they kept coming.
> Jonson quoted Hoskyns nearly verbatim in a long section in his
> "Discoveries". I pasted it in below. Also at the end I've put
> Jonson's poem "On My First Son", and I'll let people decide how
> much Hoskyns had to do with Jonson's *art*:
<snip>
>
Jim, why not let Jonson decide? Because you know what his decision
was, and you don't like it.
Rita
KQKnave
>kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote in message
>news:<20030128204222...@mb-ms.aol.com>...
><snip>
>> Look, you started this discussion by claiming that the "young man"
>> of the sonnets was *neccessary* to Shakespeare as an artist, and
>> therefore the "young man" must be real. You tried to back this
>> up by pointing out that Jonson had teachers.
>
>Don't change what I said. We're not talking 'teachers'. We're
>talking intelligent, informed minds - wits - of whom Hoskyns was
>clearly one, and the probable impact friendly relationships with such
>men would have on a very talented writer. If he only sat round a
>table with them and joined in a discussion he would still be imbibing
>new information, new viewpoints. Sometimes the input was more than
>that. You've got Aubrey recording Jonson's acknowledgement of his debt
>to Hoskyns. However you twist it, if Jonson said Hoskyns 'polished'
>him he meant his advice helped him become a better poet. Trying to
>interpret the words any other way is silly.
Interpreting the words the way you want to is silly. Read what Hoskyn's
wrote, as Jonson transcribed into his *Discoveries*, then tell me what
that had to do with Jonson's poetic art and his other great achievement,
the writing of comedic plays.
>> Everyone has
>> teachers. No one can teach someone to be an artist, period. It's
>> not possible. One can show a person technique, point him to
>> examples, etc. but that's it.
>
>You can give him your opinion of his verse, give him feedback when he
>reads his work to you, suggest books to him he may not have read,
>discuss the work of other writers and dissect why their work is
>good/bad, talk to him about ideas which fascinate you, stimulate his
>mind, point out weaknesses in his style. Polish him.
>
>> Nowhere have I seen Jonson claim
>> that someone made him into an artist. He has acknowledged his
>> debt of learning to many, such as Camden, but learning is not
>> *art*.
>
>To Jonson 'art' was not the same as talent; 'art' was effort,
>analysis, self-criticism and, apparently, the criticism of men like
>John Hoskyns.
Where does Jonson say this? He says that " a good poet's made
as well as born" of Shakespeare, but in the context of that poem
(the tribute to Shakespeare in the First Folio) he is saying that
a good poet must work hard to craft his lines, and Shakespeare
did so.
The fact is, Jonson's best work came about when he left behind
his learning and the arbitrary notions of such men as Hoskyns.
>But you're still denying what Jonson said. He didn't
>say 'Hoskyns taught me', or 'I can never repay my debt to his
>learning.' He said 'polished' me - refined, improved.
And perhaps Jonson needed such refinement or improvement in
his writing. You haven't proven that he did, you just assume it.
But again, how does any of this mean that the "young man" of the
sonnets was "neccessary" to Shakespeare? How could a younger man
perform such a function for an older man? Where is the evidence
in the sonnets themselves that he performed this function?
You've avoided these questions, and your interpretation of
sonnet 100 is strained to say the least:
>> Here is the poem in its entirety:
>>
>> Where art thou Muse that thou forget'st so long,
>> To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
>> Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
>> Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?
>> Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,
>> In gentle numbers time so idly spent,
>> Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,
>> And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
>> Rise resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey,
>> If time have any wrinkle graven there,
>> If any, be a satire to decay,
>> And make time's spoils despised everywhere.
>> Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,
>> So thou prevent'st his scythe, and crooked knife.
>>
>> You've confuse Shakespeare's Muse with the young man.
>
>No. Shakespeare is rebuking his Muse (i.e. himself) for wasting time
>and effort on unworthy subjects. (Possibly means his plays.) Instead
>he should be singing 'to the ear that doth thy lays esteem / And gives
>thy pen both skill and argument.'
And "the ear" is Shakespeare's ear, not the ear of the young man.
Why would a muse inspire a subject of the verse and not the writer
of the verse? That makes no sense at all. Shakespeare is asking
his muse to give him inspiration so that the young man can live
forever in his verse.
>Since Shakespeare so often claims his friend is both his inspiration
>and best subject, it isn't hard to work out whose ears he feels he
>should be singing into - the ears of the one who values his verse.
>You could argue that when he claims his love gives his pen 'skill'
>it's merely a way of saying 'you inspire me so much I automatically
>write better.' But you could also understand it as saying that the
>friend has some responsibility for that skill; even if he does no more
>than pass admiring comments on Shakespeare's better lines.
This interpretation of sonnet 100 is completely wrong. But I'm not
going to continue arguing the issue.
KQKnave
You have no way of knowing that. Hoskyns son wanted admittance
to a group of men with common interests, including writing. You have
no idea if Benet wanted Johnson to be his "literary mentor".
KQKnave
>> Would you think more of Shakespeare if the "young man" were
>> entirely fictional, just a literary game? I do, I think it's a brilliant
>> conceit.
>
>I think it's too long a sequence for a conceit. Shakespeare had to
>invest time writing this lengthy cycle during years when he had his
>hands full. Someone 'esteemed' these sonnets, and I think expected
>them, and that's why they kept coming.
I think that's nonsense. Now you're telling us that artists can't create
just for the sake of creation, someone else has to be there to
receive the artwork. Why did Joyce write "Ulysses" and invest so
much time into it? Because someone wanted it? Joyce created it
because that's what artists do.
>
>> Jonson quoted Hoskyns nearly verbatim in a long section in his
>> "Discoveries". I pasted it in below. Also at the end I've put
>> Jonson's poem "On My First Son", and I'll let people decide how
>> much Hoskyns had to do with Jonson's *art*:
><snip>
>>
>Jim, why not let Jonson decide? Because you know what his decision
>was, and you don't like it.
I have no idea what you're talking about, and I'm going to drop the
subject here, because we're not going anywhere.
Paul Crowley
> In article <c69e1804.03012...@posting.google.com>,
> nash...@postmaster.co.uk (Rita) writes:
>
> >> Would you think more of Shakespeare if the "young man" were
> >> entirely fictional, just a literary game? I do, I think it's a brilliant
> >> conceit.
> >
> >I think it's too long a sequence for a conceit. Shakespeare had to
> >invest time writing this lengthy cycle during years when he had his
> >hands full. Someone 'esteemed' these sonnets, and I think expected
> >them, and that's why they kept coming.
>
> I think that's nonsense. Now you're telling us that artists can't create
> just for the sake of creation,
That is true. Although, perhaps someone as
great as, say, Grumman, might write one
small poem that he never wanted, nor expected,
anyone else to read -- purely for the sake of its
creation. But it would be a very exceptional case.
> someone else has to be there to receive the artwork.
Yes. Can you think of any work of art created
with no audience in mind (not even God)?
> Why did Joyce write "Ulysses" and invest so
> much time into it? Because someone wanted it? Joyce created it
> because that's what artists do.
Utter rubbish. He wanted it published, going
to much trouble to see that it was. You can
see that he wrote it for an audience from the
manner in which it was written. The same
applies to all works of art -- they signify a
relationship between the artist and his/her
audience.
Paul.