Shakespearean Negotiations by Stephen Greenblatt

CITATION:
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How do Shakespeare's works acquire their compelling force?
• Answer: Artistic works that are fully committed to their cultural contingency can transfer social "stuff" from one domain to another.
• Method: [This book is more of an exposition in method than a single-minded argument.] In short, Greenblatt restores contemporary documents from "context" to comparison with Shakespeare's plays. In most cases, Greenblatt observes the way that political forces constitute their own subversion, whether in real or fictional discourses.
• Assumptions: Greenblatt adopts the Foucauldian perspective towards power and the individual, which is not entirely compatible with other methods which interest me.
• Sententiae: 
• "Despite the wooden walls and the official regulations, the boundaries between the theater and the world were not fixed, nor did they constitute a logically coherent set; rather they were a sustained collective improvisation." (14)
• "Conversely, we identify as principles of order and authority in Renaissance texts what we would, if we took them seriously, find subversive for ourselves: religious and political absolutism, aristocracy of birth, demonology, humoral psychology, and the like. That we do not find such notions subversive, that we complacently identify them as principles of aesthetic or political order, replicates the process of containment taht licensed the elements we call subversive in Renaissance texts: that is, our own values are sufficiently strong for us to contain alien forces almost effortlessly." (39)
• "The concrete individual exists only in relation to forces that pull against spontaneous singularity and that draw any given life, however peculiarly formed, toward communal norms." (75) 
• "I hasten to disclaim that Shakespeare took a lively interest in the medical discourse about sex, or that he favored one theory of generation over another... But there is no unmediated access to the body, no direct appropriation of sexuality; rather sexuality is itself a network of historically contingent figures that constitute the culture's categorical understanding of erotic experience." (86)
• "This strategy--the reinscription of evil onto the professed enemies of evil--is one of the characteristic operations of religious authority in the early modern period and has its secular analogues in more recent history when famous revolutionaries are paraded force to be tried as counter-revolutionaries." (98)
• "For Harsnett the theatrical seduction is not merely a Jesuitical strategy; it is the essence fo the church itself: Catholicism is a 'Mimic superstition.' Harsnett's response is to try to drive the Catholic church into the theater, just as during the Reformation Catholic clerical garments--the copes and albs and amices and stoles that were the glories of medieval textile crafts--were sold to the players." (112) 
• "In a move that Ben Jonson rather than Shakespeare seems to have anticipated, the theater itself comes to be emptied out in the interests of reading... Where institutions like the King's Men had been thought to generate their texts, now texts like King Lear appear to generate their institutions. The commercial contingency of the theater gives way to the philosophical necessity of literature." (127-8)
• "The aesthetic space--or more accurately, the commercial space fo the theatrical joint-stock company--is constituted by the simultaneous appropriation of and swerving from the discourse fo power. And this doubleness in effect produces two different accounts of the nature of mimetic economy. In one account, aesthetic representation is unlike all other exchanges because it takes nothing; art is pure plenitude... [T]here is another version of mimetic economy, one in which aesthetic exchanges, like all other exchanges, always involve loss, even if it is cunningly hidden; in which aesthetic value... is the very soul of scarcity." (159-160)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Admittedly, no one waits with baited breath to hear of what I think of Greenblatt. Nevertheless, I hesitate to quibble with the absolute dissolution of the individual, although I enjoy the critical license granted to me by the Foucauldian work of spotting discourses. Ultimately, that critical license may prove dangerous. The critic has the privilege of associating cultural elements--however disparate--and making the case for an episteme that is subtly--invisibly and therefore powerfully--governing all things. That is, this method runs the risk of making stone soup.
• Synthesis: The natural compliment to Greenblatt is Norbrook, though King, too, may have benefitted from some of Greenblatt's paradoxes. Whereas Greenblatt coyly observes the interplay between political and literary texts under the same episteme, King sets the arts downstream from political culture--understandable in the case of commissioned art, but dangerous at large.
• Application: Greenblatt's given me a lot to mull over, but I'm interested in the degree to which the "representative anecdote" of New Historical analysis can be substituted or complimented by large-scale statistical analysis. While population statistics don't belie the paradoxical institutions of power, they do speak to the material effect of many discourses over time.

Poetry by Henry Howard

PRIMARY SOURCE:

• "I never saw my lady lay apart"
• "The sun hath twice brought forth his tender green"
• "London! hast thou accused me"
• "Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest" 

Context

• Publication: Surrey was born eldest son of Thomas Howard and Elizabeth Stafford (daughter to Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham), entitled Earl of Surrey at age 7 when his father ascended to Duke of Norfolk upon his father's death, and raised alongside Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, from age 12. Surrey spent a year at the French court, returning for Anne Boelyn's wedding. Surrey wed Frances de Vere, daughter to the Earl of Oxford, in 1532. The Seymours conspired against Surrey at court, eventually resulting in Surrey's imprisonment in Windsor. He returned to favor, but was imprisoned in Fleet for drunken rioting, where he composed "London hast thou accused me." Despite his service in war, the Seymours won a campaign to have Surrey convicted of treason. Among other reasons, Surrey displayed the royal quarterings on his shield. Surrey's poetry circulated in manuscript long after his death, and Richard Tottel published 47 of them alongside 90 by Wyatt in the Miscellany. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars have been interested in Surrey's early adoption of the sonnet, in his Ovidianism, his erotic politics, and in his use of heraldry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the court, sonnets, songs, heraldry.

Content

• Form:
• "I never saw my lady lay apart": Iambic pentameter. Shakespearean rhyme scheme.
• "The sun hath twice brought forth his tender green": Iambic pentameter. abab
• "London! hast thou accused me": Iambic tetrameter. abab
• "Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest": Iambic pentameter. abab
• Genre:
• "I never saw my lady lay apart": Sonnet.
• "The sun hath twice brought forth his tender green": Lover's lament.
• "London! hast thou accused me": Satiric jeremiad.
• "Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest": Elegy and encomium.
• Conceit:
• "I never saw my lady lay apart": The speaker can't see his Petrarchan lover through her hairpiece.
• "The sun hath twice brought forth his tender green": A pathetic environment mourns the speaker's spurning by his lady.
• "London! hast thou accused me": The speaker hides his unruly behavior with a feigned jeremiad.
• "Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest": The speaker anatomizes Wyatt's corpse to praise his virtues.

Poetry by Thomas Carew

PRIMARY SOURCE: "An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul's, Dr. John Donne" and "To Ben Jonson" (1640)

Context

• Publication: Carew wrote throughout the 20s and 30s, and associated with the Jonson circle in the Caroline court. Carew was made gentleman of the Privy Chamber Extraordinary and Sewer in Ordinary to the King (dining planner). Carew's courtly output was mixed: he borrowed from Giordano Bruno's philosophy for Coelum Britannicum, and translated nine Psalms, despite his reputation for witty society poems and libertine ethics. Poems printed by John Dawson for Thomas Walkley in 1640. Quarto. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Carew's drawn attention as a master of late Caroline courtly poetry, a successor to Jonson and Donne, and an earlier commentor on contemporary English poetry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the court, formalism.

Content

• Form: Iambic pentameter couplets.
• Genre: 
• Elegy. 
• Ode.
• Conceit:
• The elegy begins with a lament and memento mori based on Donne's passing. The poem then praises Donne's rhetorical powers of convention and invention. Ultimately, the poem praises Donne as a priest of both Apollo and God.
• The ode begins by praising Jonson's powers as a censor to bad poetry, but then switches to praising the harmony in his lines and characters: all showing the same mind, but all different. Other poets aspire to match his craft, but he is justly greater than them.

“The Iconography of A Book of Christian Prayers (1578) Illustrated” by Samuel Chew

CITATION: Chew, Samuel C. "The Iconography of "a Book of Christian Prayers" (1578) Illustrated."Huntington Library Quarterly. 8.3 (1945): 293-305. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What do the woodcut illustrations of A Book of Christian Prayers reveal about their production?
• Answer: John Daye and his son, Richard, gradually but haphazardly replaced woodcuts in opposition to possible subjects for Catholic adoration.
• Method: Chew analyzes successive editions of A Book of Christian Prayer for subject, substitutions, order, and maintenance.
• Assumptions: Chew presumes that Daye's entire illustrative crew was Dutch or German. Chew also assumes that John Daye exercised strong control over the illustrative content under his son's purview until his death.
• Sententiae: "In the Booke of Christian Prayers of 1578 the iconographical scope has been immensely enlarged, in fact, enhanced greater than in any French Houre I have ever seen... Intelligent supervision is at work. Richard Daye (or whoever was in charge in 1578--and it was probably he) made two drastic changes in the sequence [removing the central Pieta, substituting the Maries visiting the Tomb], changes which are not without interest doctrinally and were perhaps forced upon him by authority. " (299)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Solid bibliographic work, though  underdeveloped in its conclusions.
• Synthesis: Chew's work must now be read in light of Evenden and Freeman, for further clarity on Daye's labor force, his political restrictions--which I believe were more shaped by aspiration than decree--and his working relationship with Richard.
• Application: Chew's work does not directly address any items on my list, but it does provide a cursory glance into the shop of Daye and a general window onto the religious iconography surrounding Gascoigne, Sidney, and Spenser.

Volpone by Ben Jonson

PRIMARY SOURCE: Volpone (1605/6)
Context

• Publication: Opened at the Globe in 1606 with a cast that had recently performed Othello. The original run was successful until the closing of the playhouses. Published both in the 1607 Quarto Volpone and the 1616 Folio Works. Corrections to the F are relatively minor, with the exception of Celia's reaction to the rape at the end--she is rendered desperate in Q, rational in F. Quarto printed by George Eld for Thomas Thorppe. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Volpone to understand Jonson's shifting comedic effects--from morality plays to dark social satire.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, social satire.

Content

• Form: A play in five acts. No constant verse.
• Genre: Comedy, social satire.
• Conceit: Volpone has amassed a fortune through questionable means. He works with Mosca to feign fatal illness and attract sycophants. Mosca assures Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino that they are all the favorites to be Volpone's heir--and he advises Corbaccio to disinherit his son. Volpone commits to sleep with Corvino's wife, Celia. While selling snake oil, Volpone haggles with Sir Politic and Peregrine and sees Celia. Mosca persuades Corvino to send Celia to Volpone. After a tortuous encounter with Lady Would-Be, Corvino delivers Celia to Volpone, saying that she should prove her virginity. Mosca diverts Bonario. Volpone nearly rapes Celia, but Bonario saves her. Corbaccio enters but sees Volpone as an invalid. Mosca reassures Corbaccio, then convinces Voltore to help him defraud Corbaccio, and that Bonario attacked Volpone. Voltore prosecutes Bonario and Celia, and the witnesses are Corbaccio, Corvino, and Lady Would-Be: the Lady is motivated by Mosca's promise of Volpone's inheritence. Volpone fakes his death, and sends Mosca out as his heir. The sycophants begin to rescind their stories without any further incentive, and Mosca is ready to confirm Volpone's faked death unless Volpone concede actual riches. Volpone reveals himself, and justice is served.
• Other notes: Mneumonic: Vol(pone) Mos(ca) Cor(baccio) Bo(naria) Cor(vino) Ce(lia) Wou(ld-Be)
  Volition must corrupt both co-receivers, seen woolgathering.

Cheap Print and Popular Piety by Tessa Watt

CITATION: Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Does "cheap print" reflect a popular culture, or one defined by limited access to markets, limited literacy, and Protestant propaganda?
• Answer: The cheap print market was limited by its illiteracy and remoteness to musical and godly ballads, controlled in the 17th C. by a cartel of "ballad partners." Illustrated broadsides reflect the background of woodcut illustrations in Protestant epistemologies and reveal the application of printed illustrations for popular decoration. The chapbook trade shifted in the 17th C. from polemical and religious print to news pamphlets and plays.
• Method: Watt tracks surviving copies of ephemeral literature and reconstructs trends with the aid of the Stationer's Register.
• Assumptions: 
• Watt responds to a tradition that views both the popular press and Protestantism to be monolithic, sometimes sympathetic, revolutionary forces. In turn, Watt seeks to demonstrate the multiplicity of motives, modes, and methods for the proliferation of print and Protestantism.
• Watt plays fast and loose with some established figures relating the survival rates of ephemera.
• Sententiae: 
• "[O]nly some 250 [16th C. broadsides] exist in black-letter copies... A comparison of the Registers with the surviving [ballads] shows that approximately 65% were recorded... Assuming 65% registration, and allowing for a constant output during the years for which there is no Stationers' Register (1550-7 and 1571-6), this figure represents probably 3,000 distinct ballads in the second half of the sixteenth century." (42)
• "The consolidation of copyrights to the popular ballad titles was accompanied by a new emphasis on what we would now call 'marketing strategy'. The most striking change was the institution of woodcut pictures as a standard feature.... Only one fifth of surviving sixteenth-century religious ballads are illustrated. Taking sixteenth-century collections as a whole... , no more than roughly one quarter have some kind of woodcut decoration. In the seventeenth century, the proportion of ballads with woodcuts was completely reversed. For the period 1600-40, more than five-sixths of extant religious ballads are illustrated." (78-9)
• "The fact that reading required some education as a prerequisite could be used as an argument for allowing religious illustration in print. When Archbishop Laud was charged with permitting bibles with superstitious pictures to be sold, he claimed that 'they were not to be sold to all comers, because they may be abused, and become evil; and yet might be sold to learned and discreet men, who might turn them to good.' This was a neat reversal of the view held a century earlier that pictures were 'laymen's books' especially for the unlearned and illiterate." (160)
• "How did [publishers and craftsmen] respond to restrictions in the range of acceptable images? ... one response was the use of biblical figures which were not associated with cults of devotion: generally, a shift from saints, and the central characters fo the Gospels, to Old Testament figures... A second reaction of publishers and craftsmen was to sidestep direct depictions of the most sacred by developing allegorical or emblematic themes instead... A final response to the problems surrounding religious imagery was simply avoidance." (161-162)
• "The 'ballad partners' may have avoided religious themes in their large poster-size prints, but the woodcuts they used on their ballads tell quite a different story, testifying to a continued demand for religious images." (167)
• "On the right of [Christus natus est] is the 'exlanation' of the so-called conceits: the Latin comic-strip speech bubbles. This is very much a down-market version of the emblem, where the viewer is not expected to decipher the meaning fo the animal symbols on his own, and is helpfully given a translation of the simple Latin." (176)
• "Murray Roston has commented that in biblical drama there was from the mid-sixteenth century 'a gradual move down the ladder of sanctity.' First the depiction fo central figures from the Gospels was considered irreverent, then slowly the Old Testament became sacrosanct too. The playwrights moved a rung down to the Apocrypha, and finally to the histories of Josephus." (185)
• "The Elizabethan homily against idolatry made a careful distinction between narrative pictures and static icons: 'And a process of a story, painted with the gestures and actions of many persons, and commonly the sum of the story written withal, hath another use in it, than one dumb idol or image standing by itself.'" (185)
• "Godet's Paris connection helps us to estimate the price fo his woodcuts. We have a 1598 inventory of the rue Montorgueuil woodcut designers, Denis de Mathoniere. The uniformity of style throughout these woodcuts means that we can extrapolate Godet's probably prices from this inventory, De Mathoniere's woodcut prints were valued in bulk at about 0.17d. Even with a retail mark-up of four times that amount, they would still be under 1d. each; 4d. for a series of six." (188)
• "It may be that despite their reasonable price, prints at 2d. were not as good value for humbler households as sturdier decorations like painted cloths, which would better survive the ravages of smoke from the hearth (as well as serving the practical purpose of insulation)." (189)
• "A 42-sheet series of biblical scenes would not have been affordable to the same wide audience who bought ballads. However, it may have had a greater impact if it was used by other craftsmen as a pattern book. At all levels of skill, the major source copied by painters was the printed picture. Prints were the standard medium for passing visual information and artistic themes across geographical distances. The influence of devotional woodcuts has often been used to explain the late fifteenth century 'decline' of wall painting into a style of stiff figures and harsh black outlines." (191-2)
• "With the strong black lines and stunted figures [of 'A pleasant new ballad of Tobias'], the effect of these [broadside ballad] woodcuts is not unlike that of the painted series at the White Swan." (210)
• "[T]he beginning of the seventeenth century was also a time when emblem books and emblematic engraved title-pages were gaining [sic] in popularity: the old iconographic tradition in a new form. Like the arts of memory, the emblem books built up concepts from sets of related images, and gave the sense of vision a central role in the acquisition of moral and spiritual knowledge. In the broadside tables we are not witnesing the word ousting the pictorial symbol, but rather a co-existence and tension between the two." (244)
• "The ballad publishershad access to a network of chapmen; at what point did they begin to distribute chapbooks along this network as well?" (272)
• "Even to write of Protestantism and print as 'forces' is misleading: we need to see them not as coherent and unchanging entities... but as inseperable from andconstantly modified by the cultural contexts in which they are found. ... Quarter sessions, assize and church records document local conflicts over sexual morality, ale-selling and sabbath-day festivities. However, this bias in the sources can lead us to ignore areas of culture where these conflicts were either resolved or unarticulated. In some media, such as the narrative 'stories' for walls, Bible-centered Protestantism and traditional visual piety found common ground." (325)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Persuasive. But Watt has a tendency to use established prices and figures as a starting point for speculation--specualtion that, in turn, is used as evidence towards conclusions.
• Synthesis: Obviously, Evenden and Freeman object to Watt's perspective on prices. Link to post.
  Watt's economic-sociological approach does not address the actual form of the ballad, that is, narrative lyric. While Dubrow's articulation of the lyric may be a helpful compliment, I believe that Challenges of Orpheus understates the lyric as a mode (associating character with technique) rather than as a form (a disposition towards linguistic fundamentals, namely: order, duration, and frequency). But with this knowledge, it's provocative to imagine the two texts in conference. Watt contributes to the early modern English understanding of ballad--what it meant, to whom--and Dubrow contributes to the function of lyric.
• Application: I'm most interested in applying the early modern English understanding of narrative image. A printed gesture, according to the Homily against the Peril of Idolatry, invokes the narrative mode (to borrow from Alpers). Furthermore, the narrative image is a mode--in this understanding--as opposed to a form.

What is Pastoral? by Paul Alpers

CITATION: Alpers, Paul J. What Is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What is Pastoral?
• Answer: A mode of relation between a speaker and the world, specifically, nobility supported by a pathetic environment.
• Method: Alpers avoids beginning with a definition. Alpers leads with the representative anecdote of Rene Rapin's Dissertatio dei Carmn Pastorati, then develops his idea of mode (as opposed to content-based genre). Alpers develops common connections made through pastoral conventions, signifying an argument for a common human experience. Alpers spends the second half of the book exploring speakers who share the shepherd's mode without being shepherds.
• Assumptions: Alpers acknowledges that the modern pastoral breaks from the classical tradition and the Renaissance, but he argues that the modern perspective towards convention--modernity, emphasizing innovation--can still maintain the convention in its antithesis.
• Sententiae: "[T]he pastoral speaker emerges when formal pastoral, based on Virgilian eclogues, is amalgaated with epic and drama." (223)

Overstanding

• Assessment: A clever approach to a trans-historical definition of genre (or mode, rather). Though the "representative anecdote" is ultimately bewildering, it frontloads a convenient historicism to hedge against ahistorical universalities.
• Synthesis: Alpers takes a more traditional approach than Dubrow's work on the Lyric. Unlike Challenges of Orpheus, What is Pastoral? ultimately accedes to definition, possibly because Alpers wants to think more expansively across time. Unlike Dubrow, Alpers  attempts to think across millennia.
• Application: Alpers' main innovation is a theory of pastoral mode that can be easily transported across time periods. The Renaissance, however, still maintains a clear pastoral tradition. Therefore, Alpers' work is best thought of as exemplary methodology. In my own work, I can look to Alpers for an analogy for defining image-text in the Renaissance without importing the overstated semiotic definitions.