much and earnest

In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem [posed in the octet] is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shift of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy.

- Paul Fussell, *Poetic Meter and Poetic Form*, chp 7

It is possible to think of scheme not as a mold of form into which meaning is poured, but rather as a sort of crucible in which trope is cooked and which then is itself consumed in the cooking.

- John Hollander, Melodious Guile, ch. 1

When reading an ancient text…we have to start somewhere, and in the end, I’m not sure that it matters much where. Should we begin with the contexts and assumptions of the ancient world and work our way towards the present situation? Should we begin with present forms of understanding and work our way back towards the ancient text’s lifeworld? Though we are accustomed to the idea that readers need to be governed by the right hermeneutic, in fact theory and method mean next to nothing in reading. [...W]e may not have as much choice [about the "tools we bring to the task of reading"] as we think we do anyway.

- Alan Jacobs, “The Genesis of Wisdom,” an essay on Leon Kass’s The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, originally in First Things, but reprinted in Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling (Eerdmans, 2004). My emphasis.

If we examine more closely our ordinary notion of reality, perhaps we should find that we do not consider real what actually happens but a certain manner of happening that is familiar to us.

- José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote (1914)

The impostor of whom we have been speaking [Simon Magus], as though his mind’s eye had been struck by a divine miraculous flash of light when earlier, in Judaea, his mischievous practices had been exposed by the apostle Peter, promptly undertook a very long journey overseas from east to west, and fled precipitately, thinking that only so could he live according to his inclinations. [...] Close on his heels, in the same reign of Claudius, the all-gracious and kindly providence of the universe brought to Rome to deal with this terrible threat to the world, the strong and great apostle, chosen for his merits to be spokesman for all the others, Peter himself. Clad in the divine armour, like a noble captain of God, he brought the precious merchandise of the spiritual light from the East to those in the West, preaching the good news of light itself and the soul-saving word, the proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven.

- The History of the Church, 2.14 (G.A. Williamson’s translation)

This may sound like an odd thing to say about a 900-page novel, but doesn’t Nicholas Nickleby end rather abruptly? I just finished listening to a fantastic production by Blackstone Audio, so the end of the last track may have seemed especially sudden to me. But beyond this factor of the medium, the story itself left (uncharacteristically for Dickens) several strands unwoven into the denouement. We never learn the particulars, for example, of the “conspiracy” for which Mr. Squeers the Schoolmaster will be tried upon his return from Australia. We know his crimes, of course, but in which of those was he found out? Nicholas promises to describe the details to the Browdies, but never mentions it in our hearing again, and neither does the narrator.

Similarly, Sir Mulberry Hawk’s vague threat about Nicholas being attacked in a day or two is never referred to again. Even after the “serious Catastrophe” of the duel between this Falstaffian villain and his onetime pupil, I expected some attempt to be made on Nicholas’s life. Hawk is too cunning and wicked to have been emptily boasting.

Another lacuna: we never meet Ms. Madeleine Bray (pardon the misspellings, if there are any in these few lines – I listened to the story in my car, and had no dramatis personae to refer to as each new character’s name was first pronounced). Of course we learn her story as mediated through the “doll Cherrybles” (Chesterton’s phrase), and we overhear the eleventh-hour conversation between herself and Nicholas about her imminent marriage to Gride. But the narrator does not open up her mind to us as he does with so many other characters. Why is this? Perhaps because she would seem too similar to Kate Nickleby (both strong-willed, humble, poor [until the last], young ladies) to warrant her own depiction. And we do know Kate.

But what a treasure of a novel: Newman Noggs, the Brothers Cherryble, Mr. Mantalini, Mr. Lillyvick (“_____, sir?”), Smike, Tim Linkinwater and the former Mrs. LaCreevy, Victor Crummles and company – even Ralph Nickleby – these are unforgettable persons. And though they deserve much more thought and writing than this, I’ve got other homework to do.

Moreover, the seemingly automatic assumption that “sophisticated” works such as Rushdie’s somehow pack a potent (if nebulous) political punch is closely related to the assumption, by now thoroughly ingrained in the discourse of Western literary studies, that complexity is by definition a good thing, a clear sign (and for that matter, a prerequisite) of “genuine” art and thorough thought.

…. But there is a certain value in clarity…

- M. Keith Booker, “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War,” Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall & Co.), 284. I’m not (yet, anyway) sympathetic with Booker’s Marxist commitments, but I was delighted to read this earlier tonight.

Here: the English Broadside Ballad Archive, no subscription required. The archive contains high-quality digital versions of the ballads collected in five volumes by Samuel Pepys. It also includes what they call “facsimile transcriptions” – digital representations of the broadsides which attempt to retain the feel of the original, while replacing the text with more legible, modern type.

Wow.

…he was just nine Years old when having got the play of Hamlet to read in his Father’s Kitchen, he read on very qu[i]etly till he came to the Ghost Scene, when he hurried up Stairs to the Shop Door that he might see folks about him. This Story he was not unwilling to tell as a Testimony to the Merits of Shakespear.

- Hester Lynch Piozzi, Dr Johnson by Mrs Thrale: The ‘Anecdotes’ of Mrs Piozzi in their Original Form (1786), ed. Richard Ingrams (London: Chatto & Windus; The Hogarth Press, 1984), 6-7.

But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world and exhibited only what he saw before him.

- Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works (1765). I take my text from W. K. Wimsatt’s Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1960)

The knowledge of ourselves no doubt ought to be most precious to us: and therein the Holy Scriptures, if not the only, are certainly the incomparable lantern in this fleshly darkness of ours. For (alas!) what is all knowledge, if in the end of this little and wearisome pilgrimage, Hell become our schoolmaster? They, therefore, are diligently to be read.

- from a letter to his friend Sir Edward Denny, dated 22 May 1580. Text  (modernized) taken from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, which I’m reading.

But if we consider that the “purest,” eighteen-line version of the poem survived only in a single manuscript, and the twenty-four or thirty-line versions of the poem were historically more important, what is the sense of editing “Ralegh” in a way that denigrates nonauthorial variants or that encourages historical erasure in the name of rescuing an authorial archetype that is allegedly prior to historical vicissitude? The “Ralegh” that emerged within the transmission and reception of a body of verse that was a mixture of authorially sanctioned work, additions and revisions to these texts, and the incorporation of texts by other writers is, finally, an authorship sign that makes sense historically in terms other than those of verifiable canon.

- Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 145-6

In calling a text a space, then, Barthes has diverged from reality and has started to write not so much an argument as a kind of fantastical poem.

- more from Carey.

…I have never understood how statements about what is valid or invalid in literary criticism can support themselves. To say that something is valid is to invoke a legal system or a set of rules, as in a game, which there is an agreed obligation to obey. But in the case of literary criticism, what is this system? Who made the rules? The readily observable reality is that critics are free to proceed as they choose, using or not using biographical material as seems to them fit, speculating or not speculating about the intention of the author. The claim that to do so is not valid can have no weight, since it can point to no accepted criteria of validity. It seems, indeed, not a statement but a wish or preference – the wish to denigrate biographical criticism as improper.

- John Carey, “Is the Author Dead? Or, the Mermaids and the Robot,” Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography, eds. Takashi Kozuka and J.R. Mulryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006: 43-54).

I want to do nothing but read this book, all day.

My wits my wealth, my learning is my lands

My gownes my goods, my bookes for buildings stand,

Arts are my acres, tongues my tenements,

Pens are my ploughs, my writings are my rents.

- a poem (partial?) transcribed in a Christ Church, Oxford manuscript anthology. Poet unknown, but the experience is common among graduate students. Found in Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, ch 1.

1. Two USB 2.0 ports

2. control, option, and command keys are extra-large.

3. F13, F14, and F15 (oh, and F16, F17, F18, and F19)

4. Delete-forward key

I recently found this comic in a 2004 Commonweal article. I think the anonymity of the saint is intentional.

I’m reading the 1559 Book of Common Prayer in a modern spelling edition (ed. John E. Booty). The Te Deum, an ancient Christian hymn, is sung during the morning prayer service. It includes these lines sung to the Trinity:

We praise thee, O God: we knowledge thee to be the Lord,

…

The Father of an infinite majesty.

Thy honorably, true, and only Son:

Also the Holy Ghost, the comforter.

The editor supplies a gloss for “comforter”: that it means “strengthener.” I might have noticed that, if I’d paid attention: “fort” is embedded in the word. But how different a sense that word carries, now.

I’m reading and writing about the Henrician “Reformation,” if Henry 8’s break from Rome (1534) and the subsequent doctrinal and liturgical innovations introduced during the latter years of his reign can be called that. For several years, two men figured large in this evangelical movement: Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury) and Thomas Cromwell (Vicegerent in Spirituals). Why did their names have to be so similar?

I’m reading Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992; 2nd ed., 2005) to establish a context for my last research project this semester: a study of the newly-protestant English Church’s first book of homilies, published in 1547 for use during the reign of (young) King Edward 6. E6’s reign was short; his Catholic half-sister Mary 1, who also ruled for short time (a mere five years, 1553-1558), would license a Catholic book of homilies (in the vernacular) to replace the Edwardian book. When Elizabeth 1 ascended (1558), the original book, slightly updated, would be re-issued, and would be in regular use until the mid- to late-17c.

Back to Duffy. This book famously advanced a new understanding of the religious climate of 15c and 16c England: that it was dominated by conservatives, who were not interested in leaving Catholicism.  In the new “Preface,” Duffy describes the Church’s response to Lollardy (or “Wycliffism”), a late 14c and early 15c movement often characterized as a kind of proto-protestantism (but which he thinks historians have over-emphasized):

Concern over Lollardy probably did form part of the prehistory of such artifacts, just as heresy in general was one contributory cause among others of the heightened concern for theological correctness which is so striking a feature of late medieval religious culture (notably in France and the Low Countries). Such concern, however, hardly constitutes evidence of a continuing panic about heresy, but rather the pearly precipitation of heightened orthodoxy round an ancient piece of heretical grit, which in most places had long since ceased to irritate directly.

Sentences like that last one make for, not just informative, but enjoyable reading.

“Adiaphora,” which I ran across in a review of Ramie Targoff’s 2001 Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. It means “things indifferent,” and in the Christian context, refers to matters of doctrine that are considered non-essential to orthodoxy.