The tragicall history of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe

PRIMARY SOURCE: Doctor Faustus (perf. 1592-3)
Context

• Publication: A short version that Thomas Bushell published in 1604 combines Marlowe's tragic scenes "with the farcical contributions of a collaborator" (Bevington 249) Signatures: A-F⁴ (-F4); Stationer’s Register: Entered 7 January 1601. EEBO link. A longer version was published by Henslowe in 1616.
• Scholarship: Marlowe is the object of study as a freethinker, and the play is open to orthodox and subversive readings. Faustus is both a damned fool and a profoundly learned thinker: caught at the frustrating imperfections of human knowledge on questions of the gods. A humanist reading finds Faustus genuinely at a loss for will, namely, the will for repentance.
• Why I'm reading it: The canon, the history of science, Johann Fust, book history, illustration.

Content

• Form: Prologue (by Chorus), five Acts, and an Epilogue. Soliloquies in blank verse.
• Genre: Tragedy; performed by the Admiral's Men.
• Plot: Faustus dismisses the three fields of knowledge and instead summons two scholars to teach him the dark arts. He summons a demon, and despite warnings from a Good Angel and divine intercession, sells his soul to Lucifer to have the service of Mephistopheles for 24 years.
• Other notes:
• Notable characters: Faustus, who begins with a desire to do everything, but who gives up both on power and on his salvation; Wagner, who serves Faustus; Mephistopheles, who serves as intercessor between Faustus and Lucifer; the Clowns Rafe and Robin, who try to steal Faustus' power, but are tortured by Mephistopheles; the Seven Deadly Sins.
• Faustus dismisses the liberal arts as obsolete (medicine), mercenary (law), and fatalist (theology).

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)

Bevington, David M, Lars Engle, Katharine E. Maus, and Eric Rasmussen. English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Print.

Upon Appleton House by Andrew Marvell

PRIMARY SOURCE: Upon Appleton House (comp. 1651)
Context

• Publication: Miscellaneous Poems, 1681, "by his former housekeeper as support for her unsuccessful claim to be his widow and heir" (Rumrich 531) EEBO entry.
• Scholarship: Compared to "Horation Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" for political commentary on Fairfax, who refused to invade Scotland and was replaced by Cromwell.
• Why I'm reading it: Dubrow uses the country house poem to apply New Formalism to the Renaissance.

Content

• Form: Iambic tetrameter; couplets; eight-line stanzas; 97 stanzas. (Based around 8-8-8 organization.)
• Genre: Country house poem or topographical poem.
• Conceit: "The framework is a guided tour: a description of the house itself (lines 1-80), modulating into moralized history--the story of the nunnery and the attempted seduction of the Fairfax ancestor, the "blooming Virgin Thwaites"--and into false and corrupted religion (81-280). The grounds are described: the gardens (281-368), laid out in military style; the meadows (369-480), where the order of the seasons prevails; the woods (481-624), image of the retired life; the river (625-648). Finally, at evening, returning to the mode of elaborate compliment, the poet describes Mary Fairfax, the epitome of the natural scene, the microcosm of the place, and the hope for a new and better order (649-776)." (Rumrich 559)
• Other notes: 
• The play places a high value on embodied reason.
• Transcendental imagery.
• Unclear image: "I was but an invented tree" (ln. 565)
• Mneumonic from the apple trees on Rahn Rd., down Rahn, then over to John Hole on Whipp.

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)

Rumrich, John P, and Gregory Chaplin. Seventeenth-century British Poetry, 1603-1660: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.

Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance by David Norbrook

CITATION: Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Can poetry animated by an "organic society" (see FR Leavis, esp.) transcend politics?
• Answer: Critics must politicize aesthetics, and by determining the "specific ideological allegiances" of poets the critic can reconstruct authorial intention. 
• Method: New Historicism. The chapters move mostly chronologically through More, early Milton,  Sidney, Spenser, Greville, Jonson, and Milton. Norbrook's methods re-integrate these poets into their radical, prophetic tradition, and the canon--because New Critics favored private and apolitical metaphysics. Norbrook finds The Shepherdes Calender and Lycidas to have paid homage to earlier prophetic poetry.
• Assumptions: The introduction responds to both new critical and radical traditions, asking chiasmically, whether to aestheticize politics or politicize aesthetics. The chapter arrangement bases the prophetic tradition of English poetry in the Edwardian period--Mary's reign is seen to have produced a "paucity" of poetry. These poets are interpreted in terms of class consciousness, especially under patronage. Shakespeare, lastly, is viewed separate from the tradition.
• Sententiae: 

"To attempt to politicise the sphere of the aesthetic is to risk the accusation of reductionism... And a rigid antithesis between political and aesthetic spheres is itself reductive... From religious rituals to conventional sexual roles, such systems postulate particular power relations as part of the natural order... Our conventional notion of the 'political' itself involves certain assumptions about those institutions which are open to question and those which are not..." (6-7)
"Literary historians have sometimes regarded the ideals of humanism as inimical to those of the Reformation, and regarded radical Protestantism as hostile to literary culture. but it was the application of humanist methods of the exegesis to the Bible that provided the rationale for the Protestant critique of ecclesiastical tradition, for a decisive and unprecedented break with the past." (8)
"In questioning abstract systemisation, the humanists emphasized the need to set texts in their historical context; and their historical scholarship made them increasingly aware of the discrepancies between medieval and classical conceptions of human nature." (23)
"More's communism is a way of criticising the aristocratic belief that work is degrading." (28)
"Spenser... draws attention to the difficulties, and the political implications, of interpretation...  No new collection of English poems before 'The Shepheardes Calender' had provided such an array of aids to interpretation: a preface, general and particular arguments, woodcuts, and lengthy glosses." (73)
"Interpretations which tie the 'moral' eclogues down to personal allusions or to a defence fo a pure Church of England against Roman corruption fail to do justice to the work's prophetic character." (76)
"Spenser's stanza overgoes by one line the eight-line stanza favoured by Ariosto and Tasso. The self-enfolding dispersion of the rhymes reinforces the effect of self-conscious analysis rather than unreflective narrative movement, while the final alexandrine permits a further reflection before moving to the next stanza." (112)
"Spenser may have been drawing on Neoplatonic theory in which the highest kind of unity is not just a prosaic mean between extremes but a more dynamic and paradoxical kind of coincidence of opposites." (114)
"On Elizabeth's progresses this process [of poetic prophesy remaking the world] of transformation could be made actual: landscape artists would prepare the way for the queen's advent by smoothing out blemishes, adorning statues, even digging whole lakes. The transformed landscape symbolised the civility which good rule produced." (147)
"The masque form dramatised this dependence of the nobility on the monarch: all the participants had to act out a formal pattern that centered on the ruler." (180)
"But Jonson aimed to naturalise the artifice of his poetry, to give an impression of directness and colloquial energy. The verbal texture of a poem, he said, should be 'like a Table, upon which you may runne your finger without rubs, and your nayle cannot find a joynt; not horrid, rough, wrinckled, gaping, or chapt'." (186)
"The Spenserian poets tended to adopt a style which drew attention to its own artifice and thus highlighted the inability of language fully to embody transcendent truths: where Jonson's verse gives the impression that ideals can be organically embodied in existing institutions and linguistic formulations, Spenserian verse constantly confesses its inadequacy." (200)

"Rubens was a diplomat as well as an artist and used his influence with Charles and Buckingham and their advisers to try to dispose the English government better towards Spain. Buckingham's artistic tastes made him ideologically suspect... His enemies were particularly  prone to associate him with illusion because he loved spectacular masques, which lacked the lasting value of Rubens's canvases but had an immediate  if short-lived appeal. He had first brought himself to the king's favour by his skill in dancing in a masque." (224)

"[Milton] believed that an element of disorder and dissension was essential to the maintenance of liberty, that to try to achieve complete, static harmony  was to invite stagnation. When he used aesthetic analogies in his political works he modified their traditional associations. If building the reformed church was carving a statue, it was necessary to acknowledge that this task was bound to produce an element of waste matter, the sects that could not be harmonised with the main church: here Milton's emphasis was on the process, the 'struggl of contrarieties', not on the finished project." (239)

"Milton adopted a Protestantised version of the Renaissance theory that music and poetry had once been indissolubly allied, that the music of the ancients had unusual emotional power because each note was precisely adjusted in pitch and quantity to a corresponding syllable... Champions of the new 'monodic' music saw themselves as overcoming this aural 'idolatry'  and restoring the just relations between sound and sense." (244)

"Puritans had long valued music as more spiritual, less immediately sensual than the visual arts, and they especially valued the ability to harmonise sound with sense." (260)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Norbrook veers at times away from his own warning against reductionism, politically by  describing Rubens mostly as a diplomat, or formally by granting Spenser's alexandrine a universal capacity for reflection.
• Synthesis: Norbrook argues that Buckingham was controversial for selling off lower titles (223), a claim sympathetic to DiGangi. And, of course, Norbrook's new historicism is compatible with King's Tudor Royal iconography, albeit with a through-line following the prophetic tradition rather than courtly power.
• Application: Norbrook's treatment of music is infrequent, but still useful for a formalist overview of the period. 

(NB: written with reviews.)
King, John N. "Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance." Huntington Library Quarterly. 49.3 (1986): 277-280. Print.
Rudnytsky, Peter L. "Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance." Renaissance Quarterly. 40.1 (1987): 153-155. Print.

Patents, Pictures and Patronage by Elizabeth Evenden

CITATION: Evenden, Elizabeth. Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2008. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did the presentation of Day's most famous books result in his reputation as master of the trade?
• Answer: Day "saw the necessity of patronage in the Church and at court in securing the patents and... the crucial importance of patronage by proving himself the best man for the job... by proving his technical mastery of the trade... [b]y creating visually impressive books..." (178)
• Method: Evenden explains Day's business acumen through his patents, bookshops, and advertisements, and describes his courtly politicking in terms of religious conflict and prestigious illustration.
• Assumptions: Evenden has mixed assumptions about the status and format of illustrated books. She claims on 69-70 that A&M "created yet another prized monopoly" by "putting an end to what could otherwise have been an open market for printers of smaller, ephemeral martyrological works."
  But on 103, she argues that Day might hypothetically "produce pamphlets made up of various woodcuts in order to maximise the range of customers and so increase his income, as one might expect a printer to do, in order to ensure a healthy profit." There are a few discrepancies between these two accounts:
  (a) the profitability of pamphlets for Day relative to a "monopoly" on A&M, and
  (b) the role of A&M--passive or deliberate--in preventing a market for martyrological formats.
  It's unclear whether Evenden believes that early modern consumers treated large folios and pamphlets as comparable, or the degree to which Evenden believes Day was subject to the profit motive. 
• Sententiae: "Day borrowed woodcuts from Grafton on a number of occasions, particularly since Grafton, the King's Printer, owned a stock of elaborate woodcuts that emphasized the monarchical imperialism and the central position of the monarchy within the Reformation." (11)
  "... Day's connection to Stamford has appeared tenuous; especially since the only evidence, hitherto known of his printing De vera obedientia in Stamford rests upon this single comment by Foxe which, moreover, only appeared in the first edition and was never reprinted.
  "Day was [sic] in Lincolnshire at some point during the period 1553-54, for during that time he rented two acres in the village of Barholm, on land owned by William Cecil...
  "There is also typographical evidence to prove that the Michael Wood texts were printed by John Day. The roman type found in these tracts also occurs in Day's edition of John Ponet's A short catechisme from early 1553 and also in Sir Thomas Elyot's The Banket of Sapience from 1557...
  "Nevertheless no works appear bearing the Michael Wood imprint after May [1554], and even if De vera obedientia was printed in early June, it seems that the Michael Wood press remained inactive through that summer and early autumn. Why? It is likely that Day had run out of paper." (32-35)
  "Day's and Cecil's attempt to house an illicit press in England, while bold and not bereft of concrete results, nevertheless was doomed to failure." (46)
  "[Day's] production of Foxe's huge work effectively smothered any potential English competition, putting an end to what could otherwise have been an open market for printers of smaller, ephemeral martyrological works." (69)
  "It was only a matter of time before Day's demand outstripped supply... In July 1566 John Foxe made a request to Cecil that the law limiting the number of foreign workmen allowed to work for a printer to four be lifted for Day." (96)
  "Nor did [Day] simply produce pamphlets made up of various woodcuts in order to maximise the range of customers and so increase his income, as one might expect a printer to do, in order to ensure healthy profit." (103)
  "The removal of [John Day's] stock [by Richard Day and Henry Bynneman], however, became blatantly obvious when one of John Day's most notorious woodcuts, the initial C, which depicted him alongside William Cecil and John Foxe in attendance of the queen, was used in a book printed by Bynneman." (163)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Clearly I'm smitten with Evenden. She has a special talent at stringing together narratives that are both clear and revealing regarding Day, his relationship to Cecil, and to early modern print. I have nothing but praise for this eminently readable book.
• Synthesis: Naturally Evenden leans heavily on her shared research as part of Evenden & Freeman. But furthermore, Evenden offers a surprising response to Collinson's argument in an essay I have yet to read--one in King and Highley's John Foxe in His World.
• Application: Evenden presents an ambivalent pair of views, noted in "Assumptions," regarding the profit motive and status. My hypothesis is that Day refrained from re-packaging A&M for pamphlets because he wanted to preserve the status of the folio. That is, I believe, commensurate with profit-maximizing motives. Yet I struggle to imagine a test suitable to the hypothesis: there were so few contemporaneous printers as successful and prestigious as Day that it's hard to tell how an alternative strategy would have done.
  Also, Evenden repeatedly remarks on Day's replenishment-rate of paper, which leads me to wonder whether there's an absolute "speed of paper" for all non-royal stationers. If so, it's tantalizing to imagine that early modern English print can be expressed by a definite production frontier, fixed by the fixity of paper.

The Religion of the Protestants by Patrick Collinson

CITATION: Collinson, Patrick. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How can Jacobean-historiographical taxonomies of "Anglican" and "Puritan" be reformed?
• Answer: The Puritan movement was more conservative and consistent with the episcopacy, and Laudians reacted to Calvinist pressures in universities to become the main agitators of religious discourse prior to the Civil War.
• Method: Collinson focuses on the social, not theological, formation of English Protestantism. He nearly disregards high philosophy in favor of institutional practices.
• Assumptions: Collinson responds to two related streams of criticism: one which attributes the Civil War to Puritan anti-ecclesiastical tumult; another, championed by Christopher Hill, which treats the Puritans as necessary and inevitable precursors to revolutionary socialists.
• Sententiae: "So the protestant governing class progressed from the Elizabethan demand for a new religious order to the Jacobean enjoyment of such an order, already partly achieved. And when in the reign of Charles I that order appeared in danger of overthrow by a new conjunction of the forces which had never ceased to threaten it, the recation was defensive and conservative. But whether in assertion or defence, the animating spirit was not one of disobedience or ill-affection but of a profound veneration for order and a strong disposition towards obedience: the double need to objey God and his earthly representatives, and in turn to exact the obedience due from inferiors." (153)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Collinson's argument is persuasive and edifying for my Puritanical tendencies.
  Lastly, I won't lie: I had a long, hard time with this book. The evidence is too far removed from my main interests, and the argument seems far removed from present discourses. What one reviewer called "his distaste for literary organization" obfuscates the structure of Collinson's lectures.
• Synthesis: I'm having trouble conceiving how Knapp related his research to Collinson's, at least since this work focuses on the Jacobean period. But I suppose that Collinson relocates iconophilia to the insurgent Laudians--and accordingly the iconophobic culture of the Puritans could be related to the dominant ecclesiastical institutions in the Jacobean period.
• Application:It would be interesting to re-examine parodies of academics in the Jacobean period--eg, Love's Labours Lost--for an overtone of institutional cooperation with Puritans.

The Idolatrous Eye by Michael O'Connell

CITATION: O'Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Understanding

• Question: How did drama negotiate word and image during early modern debates regarding iconoclasm?
• Answer: While early modern dramatists did not directly respond to contemporary scholars, they responded to Medieval ecclesiastical debates regarding incarnation, text, and embodiment.
• Method: First, O'Connell refers to ecclesiastical restrictions on religious and secular theater alike in order to establish their common idolatrous visuality. Second,  O'Connell contextualizes logocentric early modern humanism against a tradition of embodied Christianity stretching through the early modern period. Third, O'Connell proposes the importance of dramatic bodily torture to late-medieval religious drama. Fourth, O'Connell juxtaposes dramatic bodily torture with a textualized dramatic God. Fifth and finally, O'Connell addresses Jonson and Shakespeare's image-textual epistemology in the tug-of-war between humanists and Puritans.
• Assumptions: O'Connell assumes that pre-Filioquean controversies reverberated in a meaningful way through the York cycle and into Shakespeare's plays.
• Sententiae: "What I am proposing is that the iconoclasm of the Reformation was not a mere change in the style and emphasis of the worship of Christian Europe. Rather, it emerged from tensions in the relation of image and word that inhere in the central religious doctrine of Christianity, the incarnation, the belief that God, in taking on a human form, became subject to representation as an image." (200)

Overstanding

• Assessment: O'Connell has buried the lede, which says that the incarnation of power and pain in Christ implicates the bodies and consciousnesses of the audience. This seems to extend from a passage of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, but is necessary for understanding O'Connell's treatment of iconicity, iconophobia, and iconoclasm.
• Synthesis: O'Connell's project is an interesting compliment to Knapp's, because O'Connell treats the prehistory of early modern image, whereas Knapp addresses early modern history in images.
• Application: The most interesting challenge from O'Connell is to locate how, exactly, early modern dramatists propose that their senses were embodied by players. What play-texts support an extension of Scarry's Christology?

The First Folio of Shakespeare by Peter W.M. Blayney

CITATION: Blayney, Peter W.M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Library Publications, 1991.
Understanding

• Question: How do the resources of the Folger Library reflect the origins of Shakespeare's first folio?
• Answer: Charlton Hinman contextualized the Folger's variant copies of the folio through textual collation to a time and a group of collators, and Blayney adds to that research information about the inclusion of Troilus, sales, rentals, and resales of the edition, paratexts, and reception.
• Method: Some of the bibliographic methods include: the collation of broken type (to time); collation of spelling variants (to compositors); collation of copperplate alterations (to an engraver); collation of proofsheets (to stop-press corrections); the synthesis of records of purchase and rebinding.
• Assumptions: Blayney draws extensively from Hinman's work, but accepts modifications to Hinman's description of compositors: he abandons Hinman's five-compositor account for the fullest nine-compositor account.
• Sententiae: "The printing of the Shakespeare Folio began in early 1622, perhaps at the beginning of February, when Jaggard was still working on two books that had been started in 1621. One of them--an edition of Thomas Wilson's Christian Dictionary--was almost complete... Augustine Vincent's Discoverie of Errours--was of greater importance to William Jaggard than was the First Folio." (5)
  "Like many pages in the text, [the engraved portrait on the Folio title-page] is variant. In the first few copies printed, there is so little shading on the ruff that Shakespeare's head seems to be floating in mid-air. The plate was therefore modified, most notably by shading an area of ruff below Shakespeare's left ear... It is unlikely that anyone but [engraver Martin] Droeshout would have considered those alterations necessary." (18)
  "Some booksellers, though, apparently did lend books for a fee... The most likely interpretation of the note [in Folger copy 60] is that [Thomas] Bourne lent out this folio (perhaps more than once) for an unknown sum that included a 'security deposit' of half the cost of replacing the book." (29)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Obviously Blayney knows what he's doing, and he's synthesizing a great deal of information in the Folger collection into a very concise format.
• Synthesis: Blayney's treatment of Droeshout's engraving--as something worthy of revision--conflicts slightly with the "iconic" understanding argued by Katherine Acheson. Whereas the Folio illustrated a popular personality, Acheson's books illustrated "foure-footed beastes," and therein may be the difference.
• Application: Blayney's interpretation of the notes in Folger copy 60 might be interpreted in light of the division of profits: it might be revealing to consider the proportion of the "security deposit" relative to the profits of other parties (printers' thirds, etc.).