Narcissus on Mount Helicon
Dennis
By Mark Simpson
According to the Greek myth Narcissus was told by the blind seer
Teiresias when he was a child that he should live to a great age if he
never knew himself. Narcissus grew up to be a beautiful young man but
proud and haughty. An embittered youth, unrequited in his love for
Narcissus, cursed him to love that which could not be obtained. One
day on Mount Helicon Narcissus caught sight of his own reflection
'endowed with all the beauty that man could desire and unawares he
began to love the image of himself which, although itself perfect
beauty, could not return his love.' Narcissus, worn out by the
futility of his love, turned into the yellow-centred flower with white
petals named after him.
The myth tells us something about the relation of modern man to his
own image. Narcissus is not seduced by his reflection in any common
pool - he glimpses and falls in love with his reflection on Mount
Helicon, the sacred mountain where Apollo, Artemis and the Muses
danced: the symbolic centre of the arts. His reflection is not one of
nature but an idealized image refracted through man's art. Thus his
image is 'endowed with all the beauty that man could desire' and he
falls in love with it. And like nineties Western man, Narcissus finds
that it is a love that 'could not be obtained'.
***********************************
De Vere:
For what more difficult, more noble, or more magnificent task has
anyone ever undertaken than our author Castiglione, who has drawn for
us the FIGURE and MODEL of a courtier, a work to which nothing can be
added, in which there is no redundant word, a portrait which we shall
recognize as that of a highest and most perfect type of man. And so,
although nature herself has made nothing perfect in every detail, yet
the MANNERS OF MEN EXCEED in dignity that with which NATURE has
endowed them; and he who surpasses others has here surpassed himself
and has even OUT-DONE NATURE, which by no one has ever been
surpassed*. Nay more: however elaborate the ceremonial, whatever the
magnificence of the court, the splendor of the courtiers, and the
multitude of spectators, he has been able to lay down principles for
the guidance of the very Monarch himself.
*************************************
Mark Simpson, con't
But this doom of Narcissus could also be read as a punishment for a
failure of identification. Having spurned the desire of one young man,
Narcissus finds himself desiring 'unawares' that which he should
identify with - his own image. Teiresias' prophecy, as is so often the
case in Greek myth, was less than helpful. He told Narcissus that he
should live to a great age if he never knew himself. In fact, it was
Narcissus' ignorance of himself that ended his life: 'unawares he
began to love the image of himself'.
**************************************
Alciato's Book of Emblems
Emblem 69
Self-love
Because your figure pleased you too much, Narcissus, it was changed
into a flower, a plant of known senselessness. Self-love is the
withering and destruction of natural power which brings and has
brought ruin to many learned men, who having thrown away the method of
the ancients seek new doctrines and pass on nothing but their own
fantasies.
http://www.mun.ca/alciato/e069.html
**************************************
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
'Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
***********************************
TO THE
SPECIAL FOUNTAIN of MANNERS,
The Court.
THou art a Bountiful and Brave Spring, and waterest all the Noble
Plants of this Island. In thee the whole Kingdom dresseth it self, and
is ambitious to use thee as her Glass. Beware then thou render Mens
Figures truly, and teach them no less to hate their Deformities, than
to love their Forms: For, to Grace, there should come Reverence; and
no
Man can call that Lovely, which is not also Venerable. It is not
Powd'ring, Perfuming, and every day smelling of the Taylor, that
converteth to a Beautiful Object: but a Mind shining through any Sute,
which needs no False Light, either of Riches or Honours, to help it.
Such shalt thou find some here, even in the Reign of C Y N T H I A, (a
C R I T E S and an A R E T E.) Now, under thy P H œ B U S, it will be
thy Province to make more: Except thou desirest to have thy Source mix
with the Spring of Self-love, and so wilt draw upon thee as welcom a
Discovery of thy Days, as was then made of her Nights.
Thy Servant, but not Slave,
BEN. JOHNSON.
***************************************
Timber, Jonson
{{Topic 67}} {{Subject: affected language}}
De verè Argutis.
I doe heare them say often: Some men are not witty; because they
are not every where witty; then which nothing is more foolish. If an
eye or a nose bee an excellent part in the face, therefore be all eye
or nose? I thinke the eye-brow, the fore-head, the cheeke, chyn, lip,
or
any part else, are as necessary, and naturall in the place. But now
no-
thing is good that is naturall: Right and naturall language seeme{{s}}
to have least of the wit in it; that which is writh'd and tortur'd, is
counted
the more exquisite. Cloath of Bodkin, or Tissue, must be imbrodered;
as if no face were faire, that were not pouldred, or painted?
No beauty to be had, but in wresting, and writhing our owne tongue?
Nothing is fashionable, till it bee *deform'd*; and this is to write
like a
Gentleman All must bee as affected, and preposterous as our Gallants
cloathes, sweet bags, and night dressings: in which you would think
our
men lay in, like Ladies: it is so curious.
*****************************************
Spenser, Faerie Queene
To Oxford:
To the right Honourable the Earle
of Oxenford, Lord high Chamberlayne of
England. &c.
REceiue most Noble Lord in gentle gree,
The vnripe fruit of an vnready wit:
Which by thy countenaunce doth craue to bee
Defended from foule Enuies poisnous bit.
Which so to doe may thee right well befit,
Sith th'antique glory of thine auncestry
Vnder a shady vele is therein writ,
And eke thine owne long liuing memory,
Succeeding them in true nobility:
And also for the LOVE, which thou doest beare
To th'HELICONIAN YMPS, and they to thee,
They vnto thee, and thou to them most deare:
DEARE as thou art UNTO THY SELFE, so LOVE
That LOVES & honours thee, *as doth behoue*.
**************************************
Love's Labour Lost
Act 1, Scene II
SCENE II. The same.
Enter DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO and MOTH
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
Boy, what sign is it when a man of great spirit
grows melancholy?
MOTH
A great sign, sir, that he will look sad.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
Why, sadness is one and the self-same thing, dear IMP.
MOTH
No, no; O Lord, sir, no.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
How canst thou part sadness and melancholy, my
tender juvenal?
MOTH
By a familiar demonstration of the working, my tough senior.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
Why tough senior? why tough senior?
MOTH
Why tender juvenal? why tender juvenal?
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
I spoke it, tender juvenal, as a congruent epitheton
appertaining to thy young days, which we may
nominate tender.
MOTH
And I, tough senior, as an appertinent title to your
old time, which we may name tough.
DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO
Pretty and apt.
MOTH
How mean you, sir? I pretty, and my saying apt? or
I apt, and my saying pretty?
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
Thou pretty, because little.
MOTH
Little pretty, because little. Wherefore apt?
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
And therefore apt, because quick.
MOTH
Speak you this in my praise, master?
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
In thy condign praise.
MOTH
I will praise an eel with the same praise.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
What, that an eel is ingenious?
MOTH
That an eel is quick.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
I do say thou art quick in answers: thou heatest my blood.
MOTH
I am answered, sir.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
I love not to be crossed.
MOTH
[Aside] He speaks the mere contrary; crosses love not him.
*************************************
Green's Groatsworth of Wit:
With thee I join YOUNG JUVENAL, that biting satirist, that lastly with
me together writ a comedy. Sweet boy, might I advise thee, be advised,
and get not many enemies by bitter words: inveigh against vain men,
for thou canst do it, no man better, no man so well; thou hast a
liberty to reprove all, and none more; for one being spoken to, all
are offended; none being blamed, no man is injured. Stop shallow water
still running, it will rage; tread on a worm, and it will turn: then
blame not scholars vexed with sharp lines, if they reprove thy too
much liberty of reproof.
And thou, no less deserving than the other two, in some things rarer,
in nothing inferior; driven (as myself) to extreme shifts, a little
have I to say to thee; and were it not an idolatrous oath, I would
swear by sweet St. George, thou art unworthy better hap, sith thou
dependest on so mean a stay. Base-minded men all three of you, if by
my misery ye be not warned; for unto none of you (like me) sought
those burs to cleave,-- those puppets, I mean,-- that speak from our
mouths,-- those antics garnished in our colours. Is it not strange
that I, to whom they all have been beholden,--is it not like that you,
to whom they all have been beholden,-- shall (were ye in that case
that I am now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not:
for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with
his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well
able to bombast out a blank-verse as the best of you: and being an
absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene
in a country. Oh, that I might entreat your rare wits to be employed
in more profitable courses, and let those apes imitate your past
excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions!
I know the best husband of you all will never prove an usurer, and the
kindest of them all will never prove a kind nurse: yet, whilst you
may, seek you better masters; for it is pity men of such rare wits
should be subject to the pleasures of such rude grooms.
***************************************
Printing The Faerie Queene in 1590
Andrew Zurcher*
When Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene went into publication for the
first time in 1590, it was the largest work of English poetry ever
seen through the press by a living author. Spenser apparently had some
experience of printing-house proofing, garnered during what appears to
have been a carefully-organized printing, by Hugh Singleton, of the
first edition of The Shepheardes Calender in 1579;1 but the pressures
of producing The Faerie Queene—so far surmounting Spenser’s earlier
verse as epic, in generic terms, towers over pastoral—must have been
immense. Although the layout of The Shepheardes Calender had been
somewhat complex, including a range of prefatory materials, a woodcut
and ‘argument’ at the head of every eclogue, and a ‘glosse or
scholion’ attached to the back of each eclogue, the sheer personal
stakes of the proper presentation of the first instalment of Spenser’s
epic made this the riskier venture. In 1579, Spenser had been a young
man, personal secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester, recently
graduated with an MA from Cambridge, and with a promising career ahead
of him; by 1590, he had been living ten years in Ireland, during which
time he had published no further poetry, had retired from the
comparative bustle of Dublin to the anonymity of Kilcolman, near Cork,
and had apparently lost most of his once-promising patronage
connections: Philip Sidney (d. 1586), Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton (back
in England from 1582), and the Earl of Leicester (d. 1588). Spenser’s
return to public notice in 1590, with the advertisement of a new
patronage connection to Walter Ralegh, and—above all—his favorable
reception by Queen Elizabeth upon presentation of a manuscript copy of
The Faerie Queene (and himself?) at court, gave him a new opportunity
to secure his status as ‘England’s arch-Poët’. It was an opportunity
that he could not afford to lose. [End Page 115]
With this in mind, the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene stands out,
from one perspective, as a landmark example of a poet experimenting
with print patronage conventions in an innovatory and ambitious way:
the volume originally contained a dedication to Queen Elizabeth, seven
commendatory poems, ten dedicatory sonnets to aristocratic patrons,
and an epistle from Spenser to Ralegh giving important context for
‘the Authors . . . whole intention in the course of this worke’; the
number of dedicatory sonnets to court and government luminaries was
later augmented to seventeen. The barrage of dedications and
commendations, alongside an open acknowledgment of the support of the
queen and the intimacy of her principal favorite, would seem a bravado
display of a poet’s achievement. From another perspective, though, the
1590 edition of The Faerie Queene almost looks like a critique, even a
burlesque, of the contemporary culture of literary patronage. The
proliferation of dedicatory sonnets, especially in the revised state,
makes any one seem superfluous (in the spirit of the motto from
‘September’ of The Shepheardes Calender: inopem me copia fecit), and
simply by its mass seems to outweigh what must have been the primary
dedication to the eponymous Gloriana, Elizabeth. In addition, all of
the prefatory material appears not at the front of the volume, but at
the back—except for the dedication to Elizabeth which was thrust,
perhaps hastily and probably disrespectfully, into the only available
space in the first gathering, the verso of the title page.
Modern scholars have often debated the poetics, politics, and
printer’s exigencies that might have led Spenser, or his publisher
William Ponsonby, or his printer John Wolfe, to lay out the prefatory
matter in this final (mostly terminal) form.2 Some readers have
supposed that Spenser had always intended his prefatory material for
placement at the back of the volume, answering the title page (and the
royal dedication) at the front of the volume in the same way a plural
body politic mirrors its single head and ruler. Others have supposed
that Spenser’s hand was forced by the unanticipated interest and
patronage of the queen, and that he had to devise a suitable format to
accommodate existing debts of patronage without insulting his royal
patron or jeopardizing the newly-awarded annuity (confirmed by patent
in January 1591 at £50 p.a.) that she had promised him.3 Still others
have suggested that the final arrangement was dictated not by Spenser,
but by Wolfe who, as an experienced printer and a very efficient and
perhaps impatient businessman, received the collection of dedicatory
materials too late to incorporate them into the opening gathering.
These interpretations [End Page 116] have been variously cumbered and
supported by the inter-dependence of the decisions taken by Spenser or
Wolfe regarding the first and last gatherings. The decision to place
the title page on the recto of the first leaf of the opening
gathering, A1, and to begin the text of the proem to Book 1 on the
recto of A2, must have coincided with the decision to relegate any
prefatory material to the back of the volume (in a full, two-sheet
gathering eventually signed Pp), as Wolfe would presumably never have
planned to insert a mis-paginated eight-leaf gathering of prefatory
materials between A1 and A2. The need to place a dedication to the
queen at the front of the volume would seem the obvious, and perhaps
the only, reason to have displaced the prefatory material, and yet
copies of the 1590 edition survived without the dedication to
Elizabeth:4 the royal dedication was inserted on A1v as a stop-press
correction to the inner forme of the outer sheet of A. Finally,
Spenser prevailed upon Wolfe to run off a single-sheet gathering, Qq,
containing seven additional dedicatory sonnets, to replace Pp6–7,
perhaps immediately upon ‘completion’ of the printing, or sometime
reasonably shortly thereafter. For a publication for which Spenser
might have been supposed to have taken especial care, the
bibliographical record seems to tell a story of accident, confusion,
and revision—a story that has amply admitted of a range of scholarly
interpretations.
But if modern observers have been interested in the way Spenser
handled, or mis-handled, his dedications in 1590, at least one
contemporary observer seems to have found the whole business
interesting, and of substantial explanatory power as a critique of the
contemporary culture of literary patronage. As I have argued
elsewhere, Thomas Nashe furnished in his 1592 satire, Pierce Penilesse
His Supplication to the Diuell, a stinging parody of the printing of
The Faerie Queene in 1590 as a publishing event.5 Nashe has many
targets in his satire, but the ad hominem invective is aimed above all
at the cause of precise Protestants (non-conforming ministers, and
their Puritan followers), their now-dead champion Robert Dudley, earl
of Leicester, and the man who had seemed to be taking up Leicester’s
old PRECISIAN clients, Walter Ralegh. Ralegh’s star had fallen
disastrously in the late spring of 1592, when his clandestine marriage
to Bess Throckmorton was advertised to the Queen and made court
gossip; by the time Nashe produced Pierce Penilesse in September 1592,
Ralegh had been committed to the Tower. Pierce’s patronage project—a
scholar’s desperate, Faustian turn to the succour of the devil—
combines Nashe’s vitriolic contempt for Ralegh with a series of
parodic emulations of Spenser’s layout of the 1590 edition of The
Faerie Queene, above all in repeated references to a collection of
dedicatory sonnets (all of them addressed to the dead) that Pierce, or
perhaps Nashe, intends to deliver to the devil, or the printer, to be
inserted ‘at the latter end’ of his supplication. In a lengthening
string of insinuations, backhanded compliments, and explicit
criticisms, Nashe and his printers Richard Jones (first edition) and
Abel Jeffes [End Page 117] (later editions) re-imagine the 1590 Faerie
Queene as a physical witness to the same fissures in print patronage
politics that eventually caused both Spenser’s disgrace, upon the
suppression of Complaints in 1591, and Ralegh’s fall from power.6
Nashe concludes Pierce Penilesse with an explicit discussion of
Spenser’s own dedicatory sonnets, in which he accuses Spenser of some
act of ‘forgetfulnes’ while himself celebrating the projected rise of
a new literary and political patron, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange.
Nashe’s sustained and often precise parody of Spenser seems to locate
the source of Spenser’s eventual disgrace and patronage fiasco of 1591
in the printing event of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. The
repeated emphasis in the early prefaces and the final epistle of
Pierce Penilesse on the sonnets Nashe intended to append to its
‘latter end’—sonnets that Nashe does not send because, he claims, he
is kept prisoner by the plague in the country—suggests that the
communications between Spenser and Wolfe broke down in 1590, and that
this might somehow have been connected to Spenser’s unusual disposal
of his prefatory material, and in turn to his later patronage
problems. Nashe’s parodic account gives us some sense of the reception
of Spenser’s volume, and the scuttlebutt that surrounded its
publication in the years after it appeared; but it is much harder to
know whether the layout of the volume reflected Spenser’s intentions
in the first place, and what those intentions might have been. The
bibliographical evidence has, to date, resisted explanation: when and
why Spenser or Wolfe decided to move the dedicatory sonnets to the
back of the volume, when and why they decided to print the title page
to the work in gathering A, when and why they added the dedication to
Elizabeth on the verso of the title page, when and why the number of
dedicatory sonnets was expanded—these related questions, the answers
to which would give us some purchase on Spenser’s intentions behind
his layout, have seemed unanswerable. Scholarly work attempting to
interpret the layout of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene has
proceeded in the absence of the very bibliographical evidence the
interpretation of which ought to provide its basis. This paper
returns, in light of Nashe’s insinuations about Spenser’s or Wolfe’s
misjudgments in 1590, to the bibliographical evidence, attempting to
provide a sounder footing on which to judge Spenser’s intentions for
the layout of his most important publication. As Nashe’s jibes
suggest, the story of the printing [End Page 118] of The Faerie Queene
in 1590 is likely more complicated, and more revealing, than
bibliographers have, to date, led us to believe.
************************************
Precisian \Pre*ci"sian\, n.
1. One who limits, or restrains. [Obs.]
2. An overprecise person; one rigidly or ceremoniously exact
in the observance of rules; a formalist; -- formerly
applied to the English Puritans.
The most dissolute cavaliers stood aghast at the
dissoluteness of the emancipated precisian.
--Macaulay.
**************************************
Dissolute \Dis"so*lute\, a. [L. dissolutus, p. p. of dissolvere:
cf. F. dissolu. See Dissolve.]
1. With nerves unstrung; weak. [Obs.] --Spenser.
2. Loosed from restraint; esp., loose in morals and conduct;
recklessly abandoned to sensual pleasures; profligate;
wanton; lewd; debauched. ``A wild and dissolute soldier.''
--Motley.
Syn: Uncurbed; unbridled; disorderly; unrestrained; reckless;
wild; wanton; vicious; lax; licentious; lewd; rakish;
debauched; profligate.
**************************************
Seneca
EPISTLE CXIV.
~CXIV+ ON STYLE AS A MIRROR OF CHARACTER
...In short, whenever you
notice that a DEGENERATE STYLE pleases the critics, you may be sure
that character also has deviated from the right standard.
Just as luxurious banquets and elaborate dress are indications of
disease in the state, similarly a lax style, if it be popular, shows
that the mind (which is the source of the word) has lost its balance.
Indeed you ought not to wonder that corrupt speech is welcomed not
merely by the more squalid mob but also by our more cultured throng;
for it is only in their dress and not in their judgments that they
differ. You may rather wonder that not only the effects of vices, but
even vices themselves, meet with approval. For it has ever been thus:
no man's ability has ever been approved without something being
pardoned. Show me any man, however famous; I can tell you what it was
that his age forgave in him, and what it was that his age purposely
overlooked. * I can show you many men whose vices have caused them no
harm, and not a few who have been even helped by these vices. Yes, I
will show you persons of the highest reputation, set up as models for
our admiration; and yet if you seek to correct their errors, you
destroy them; for vices are so intertwined with virtues that they drag
the virtues along with them.*
(SNIP)
Some individual makes these vices fashionable - some person who
controls the eloquence of the day; the rest follow his lead and
communicate the habit to each other.
*************************************
Christopher Hill describes the ELECT as setting themselves up as "an
aristocracy of the spirit" against the "carnal aristocracy" which
ruled the world...
***************************************
Hamlet does not share 'carnal aristocrat' Oxford's style:
THE ACCENT AND GAIT OF CHRISTIANS:
HAMLET'S PURITAN STYLE
R. CHRIS HASSEL, JR.
Vanderbilt University
To our frequent discomfort and his own, Hamlet often preaches
virtue and rails against vice. His most frequent targets are Ophelia,
Gertrude, and Claudius, though neither Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
Horatio nor the players are spared his moral diatribes. Hamlet even
preaches to Polonius after he kills him. It may be only coincidental
that Hamlet's dress, his "customary suits of solemn black," suggests
a
Puritan's traditionally sober garb, or that the Puritans, also like
Hamlet,
carried "tables" or diaries to remind themselves of the dictates of
conscience.
It is harder to dismiss as somehow "Puritan" Hamlet's analogous sense
of calling, his being as he says at the end of the scene with the
ghost "born to set it right." The same might be said of his later
self-
designation as "patient merit," since "merit" is, according to Martin
Van Beek "a
branded [Puritan] word insofar as it was applied to man's works."
Christopher Hill describes the elect as setting themselves up as "an
aristocracy of the spirit" against the "carnal aristocracy" which
ruled the world. In his soliloquies as well as his homilies, Hamlet
also
persistently exhibits this us-versus-them mentality as he laments both
"all the
uses of this world" and all the ills that "flesh is heir to."
Encouraged by
such parallels, this paper . First explores the ways in which
Hamlet's
outspoken, even hyperbolic, righteousness towards himself and others
echoes the
unique diction, syntax, and imagery of the represented Puritan, if
not
always the real one. Then it suggests that Hamlet's concerns about
idleness, his advice to the players, and even the complicated
political and moral ground on which he so reluctantly stands may also
be informed
by Puritan forms and pressures of the late 1500's and early 1600's.
Historians have recently encouraged and complicated this endeavor
by showing that actual Puritans were in many ways closer to the
Protestant mainstream, and even that of the sixteenth century
continental humanist, than was thought to be the case twenty years
ago. To be
sure, Peter Lake and Patrick Collinson both reveal that the
traditional us-versus-them mentality of the Puritans as well as their
sense of
special election has stood the test of this bracing revisionism.
However, Collinson, Margo Todd and Ralph Houlbrooke have shown that
the language of spiritual self-scrutiny and the assertions of moral
scrupulousness once closely associated with the Puritans is in fact
common to many Europeans of the time, Protestant and Catholic.
Marjorie McIntosh and Todd root even the general tendencies to
control misbehavior in fields much broader in time and space than
English Puritanism.5 John Bossy has revealed the obverse of this coin
by showing that the battle for the moral high ground, even on the
issue of showing charity or civility towards one's disagreeing and
often disagreeable Christian neighbors, was evenly spread across both
Protestant and Catholic camps. Recusants and church papists,
reformist
and conservative Anglicans were apparently all concerned about the
"censoriousness" and the "moral invidiousness" associated with their
parties. Nowhere is the reappraisal toward consensus more widespread
than
in considerations of the "Puritan attitude" toward theatre and the
other verbal arts. Not only have Edward Muir and Collinson argued that
both
mainstream English Protestants and continental Catholics turn out to
be involved in a late sixteenth-century anti-mimetic trend that was
once associated almost exclusively with the Puritans. In the other
direction, Margot Heinemann and Collinson have also reminded us of
Puritans like
Milton who understood theoretically if not always theatrically the
moral
usefulness of theatre, and of others who referred to details of
performance in their polemical pamphlets. Since Shakespeare and his
contemporary
dramatists leaned so heavily on the same Puritan stereotypes the
historians are currently reappraising, our new critical stance must
balance precariously between the usefulness and the limitations of the
Puritan
stereotype. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in the
consideration of its resonance in a character and a play as complex
and
contradictory as Hamlet.
Hamlet's Puritan Accent
Hamlet often expresses his moral indignation in the exaggerated
imagery
and diction of the represented Puritan, and sometimes the real one
too.
His "nasty sty" sounds especially like the cage of "unclean birds" or
the "locusts of the foul pit" Ananias uses to characterize his
morally
polluted city in The Alchemist. Hamlet also shares the imagery of the
diseased
state with The Alchemist's Tribulation Wholesome. Both Hamlet and
Ananias
use the high-profile Puritan word "scruple," though Hamlet's "craven
scruple" is characteristically more contradictory and perplexing than
Ananias's usage. Hamlet also shares Zeal-of-the-Land Busy's
chauvinistic idea in Bartholomew Fair, though of course it is not
exclusively a
Puritan idea, that "the disease of longing, it is a disease, a carnal
disease,
an appetite, incident to woman," when he says of Gertrude, "frailty,
thy
name is woman." Busy fears the devil's cozenage of this weaker vessel
with the trinkets of the fair, Hamlet with the game of "hoodmanblind"
that has lured Gertrude to Claudius, and to "Rebellious hell."
What Van Beek describes as the popular Puritan metaphor of "the spot
and corruption of sin" is also prominent enough in Hamlet for Francis
Ferguson to center his fine interpretive essay on the play's image of
the hidden impostume. Hamlet's description of his mother's soul as an
"ulcerous place / [Where] rank corruption, mining all within, /
Infects
unseen" is a particularly vivid example. According to Van Beek,
"Facepainting" is another favorite Puritan phrase and target. Hamlet
uses it
once with Ophelia and again about all women.
Jonas Barish, Eugene Waith, and "Alvin Kernan all help us hear how
often the diction and imagery of Hamlet's hortatory voice is
reinforced by a syntax and a sound also associated by the satirists
with Puritan
expressions of moral outrage. What Barish calls "devices of
repetition" are particularly prominent in this style. Sometimes, as
Waith says,
they take the form of "repeated nouns with their increments of
accumulated
modifiers." "A disease, a carnal disease," or "an idol, a very idol,
a
fierce and rank idol" are good examples from the fictive Puritan Zeal-
of-the-
Land Busy. "A lustful love, a venereous love, a concupiscencious,
bawdy, and bestial love," written by the actual Puritan moralist
Philip
Stubbes, is just as good. Hamlet's "O most pernicious woman! / O
villain,
villain, smiling, damned villain" (1.5.105-6) certainly rivals this
rhetorical
tic. Barish describes the "pyramids of verbs, adverbs or adjectives,
with
their appropriate modifiers" which intensify the moral outrage, as
with
Zeal's "troubled, very much troubled, exceedingly troubled." Anaphora
and
similar forms of cadenced parallelism, often embellished with
alliteration, also intensify their expressions of rage, as with "the
peeping of
popery," "the page of pride," or "the bells of the beast." Waith also
reminds
us of the frequent linkage of exhortation and apostrophe. Hamlet
responds
to what he perceives as the Player-Priam's showing-up of his own
lassitude with a dressing-down of Claudius rivaling Zeal's own
alliterative adjectives of outrage - "Bloody, bawdy villain." The
pejorative string
which follows, "Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless
villain," echoes the style if not the superficiality of Ananias's
"lewd,
superstitious and idolatrous breeches." Barish and Kernan agree that
the original
model of such syntax is the Bible, its purpose in preaching and
writing to assert authority. However, its caricature usually mocks the
"sham
biblicality" of "exhortation" when this style of "false biblical
feathers" becomes "oratorical in the worst sense," "set[ting] up a
trance-like
rhythm" to "lull the listener into a narcotic doze."
(snip)
A. Hamlet and the Players
Which of Shakespeare's play-loving contemporaries would have failed
to hear a kind of Puritan voice in the midst of Hamlet's admonitions
to the players, especially when he exclaims, "O reform it
altogether"?
Like the extremest reformers of several parties, Hamlet even finds
"indifferent" reform inadequate; he wants total reformation. On the
other hand, and like perhaps the more moderate reformers, Hamlet
would only outlaw those things that "would make the judicious
grieve."
Indeed, at the same time that Hamlet is advocating total reform,
Shakespeare is simultaneously defending the theatre, not only against
Puritan scrupulousness but apparently also against an increasing
antimimetic trend crossing all party lines in the late 1590's and
early
1600's. Both real and represented Puritans like Stephen Gosson and
Rabbi Busy distrust theatre because they believe that "disguise is
sinful and imitation a form of lying." Hamlet disagrees. It can "hold,
as
'twere, the mirror up to nature," "show" "the very age and body of
the
time his form and pressure." Only if this is "overdone" will the
PRECISIAN, the "judicious grieve" and "censure." Hamlet thus finds it
completely
congruous that "the accent of Christians" and "the gait of
Christians"
might be well-performed. Hamlet's nervous "not to speak profanely,"
however, or Shakespeare's, also apologizes obliquely and tongue-in-
cheek that the Puritan subset of these Christians is, sometimes
through
Hamlet himself, being represented in gait and speech, the walk and the
talk
as we might say today, in this very play. Most Puritans, many
Protestants, and some Catholics would probably have been troubled by
Hamlet's Sidneyan defense of the truth and virtue of the stage, even
though in truth it is a purist's and a puritanical
defense. Hamlet elsewhere shares aspects of their distrust, as, for
example, when he apologizes to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "Let me
comply with you in this garb, lest my extent to the players (which I
tell you must show fairly outwards) should more appear like
entertainment
than yours." Hamlet's sombre dress and his tables of conscience are
part of this outward show. So dressed, so sombre, and so often
morally
outraged, Hamlet might thus seem to be pretending simply because he
looks and sounds like the stereotype of the hypocritical Puritan.
Worse, when he welcomes the players to Denmark in the "inky cloak," he
will
in his joy appear only to have pretended to be sober and melancholy
earlier, as his mother seems already to have charged. In this lose-
lose case he must appear to be "entertaining," either playing false
grief or
playing false joy. The only way to avoid this appearance of hypocrisy
is to
dress himself falsely now, dress like the festive court, like
Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. While speaking to the players, Hamlet has also
associated his own acting with false stage gestures as well as
illusory costuming
and props. But if such gestures as "the windy suspiration of forced
breath," "the fruitful river in the eye," "the dejected 'havior of the
visage,"
indeed "all forms, moods, shapes of grief" are "actions that a man
might
play," they are also the only way to "denote" "that within which
passeth
show," an inner truth that these outer forms, what Hamlet calls "the
trappings and the suits of woe," can express only inadequately, and
may also
misrepresent. In similar terms Thomas Nashe distrusts the Puritans'
homiletic style as merely outward shows of piety and grief, "the
writhing of the face, the heaving uppe of the eyes to heaven."
Hamlet's true
woe seems both confined and defined then by the stereotype of Puritan
hypocrisy and by their criticism of the most feigning stage. He looks
suspiciously like the perpetually, ostentatiously grieved Puritan in
his own shows of grief and moral outrage. He also looks like an
actor.
Footnote:
33 Hamlet's love of the stage is not so contradictory of the English
Puritan as it might at first appear. As Heinemann says, "To see all
Puritans as automatically hostile in principle to the theatre and the
arts in general is : : : to misunderstand the depth and complexity of
the intellectual and social movements that led to the upheavals of
the
1640's" . Heinemann mentions Puritans like Milton, Pembroke, one
of Shakespeare's patrons, Leicester and Walsingham who were also
sympathetic to the theatre. Even Phillip Stubbes approved like Hamlet
of edifying moral drama, Stephen Gosson (The School of Abuse) wrote
plays, and both Heywood and Sidney, defenders of the theatre like
Hamlet, were "authors known to have had some Puritan sympathies."
The Marprelate pamphlets too "continually use theatrical jokes and
allusions and obviously assume an audience which, like the writer,
enjoys a play" (30-31). In "The Protestant Culture and the Cultural
Revolution" (46-47), Collinson observes, however, in the 1590's and
afterwards an increasing opposition to all theatre among many
Christian communities and a consequent increase in the segregation of
the
secular and the sacred in the plays themselves. See also Paul
Whitfield White,
Theatre and Reformation, Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the
Stage, and Muir 165-81, 270-72, on varied reformation attitudes
toward
theatre.
**************************************
Dennis