Huanebango and Old Wive's Tale

My excerpt this time is from George Peele's Old Wive's Tale, written circa 1590. The braggart Huanebango has been blinded and now encounters the shrewish one of two sisters looking for husbands at a well. What interests me here is the close parody of Harvey on the one hand, and the fact that this was performed for an audience that must have had people not in on that bit of the joke. How Peele makes the joke funny for them (rather than just a recital of stage nonsense) intrigues me.

The passage:

Huan:
Phylyda phylerydos, Pamphylyda floryda flortos,
Dub dud a dub, bounce quoth the guns, with a sulpherous huffe snuffe:
Wakte with a wench, pretty peat, pretty loue, and my sweet prettie pigsnie;
Iust by thy side shall sit surnamed great Huanebango
Safe in my armes will I keepe thee, threat Mars or thunder Olympus.
Zant:
Foe, what greasie groome haue wee here? Hee looks as though hee crept out of the backeside of the well; and speakes like a Drum perisht at the West end.

Huan:
O that I might but I may not, wo to my destenie therefore;
Kisse that I claspe but I cannot, tell mee my destenie wherefore?
Zant:
Whoope nowe I haue my dreame, did you neuer heare so great a wonder as this? Three blue beanes in a blue bladder, rattle bladder rattle.
Huan:
Ile nowe set my countenance and to hir in prose, it may be this rim ram ruffe, is too rude an incounter.
Let me faire Ladie if you be at leisure, reuell with your sweetnes, and raile vppon that cowardly Coniurer, that hath cast me or congealed mee rather into an vnkinde sleepe and polluted my Carcasse.

Zantyppa:
Laugh, laugh Zantyppa, thou hast thy fortune, a foole and a husbande vnder one.

Huan:
Truely sweete heart as I seeme, about some twenty yeares, the very Aprill of mine age.

Zantyppa:
Why what a prating Asse is this?

Huanebango:
Hir Corall lippes, hir crimson chinne,
Hir siluer teeth so white within:
Hir golden locks hir rowling eye,
Hir pretty parts let them goe by:
Hey ho hath wounded me,
That I must die this day to see.
Za:
By gogs bones thou art a flouting knaue, Hir Corall lippes, hir crimson chinne: ka wilshaw.

Peele's plays are filled with performances in various meters. In the Arraignment of Paris, I read it as an imitation of Spenser's metrical variety, but it's also a deliberate performance (however limited by the lack of interest of the poems themselves). Here he gives us parodies of two types of verse: the Harveyian quantitative hexameter and a short lyric blazon in tetrameter.

I'm struck by the fact that Zantyppa repeats his verse back to him. That seems to generally be an effect of the quantitative line--cf. Nash--but why do it with the lyric? We could read her as a Kate to his Petruchio, rejecting his compliment while turning it over in her mind--after all, these two will end up married. In that case, she may well be find something she likes in the blazon--it is not above her to be convinced by a ridiculous poem. Her accusing him of "flout"ing her in this reading is an attempt to account for his tone: what does she have to do with this lyric? Her "ka wilshaw" needs glossing, but there's not much I can do from here.

Her reaction to the quantitatives is clearer: "What a great wonder is this" is explicitly negative. He sounds ridiculous, and she produces her own line of nonsense verse to testify to that. Huanebango himself worries about his forthrightness: "this rim ram ruffe, is too rude an incounter." Again, we have evidence that the quant. line sounds rustic but also Thrasonical.

I love Zantyppa's line: "Foe, what greasie groome haue wee here? Hee looks as though hee crept out of the backeside of the well; and speakes like a Drum perisht at the West end." I wish I knew what the reference meant; I'm familiar with the accounts of braggarts as being drumlike in speaking, but what happened to drums at the west end?

What are the stakes of mocking Harvey here, before the Nash-Harvey flyting (if we can trust the performance date) and well after his earlier period of reference? Does London have the sort of literary culture in which it might not be too late to mock Harvey's verses? Or is this a reflection on the verses that are about to come out for Greene? Peele is at least partially writing hexameters, at the beginnings and ends of lines. The first line scans just fine, I think, and he is careful to get the effect of anticlimax at the end of each line.

So one version of a chapter might really focus on the verse controversies surrounding Greene, trying to get a point of view from outside of the Aereopagus. The central question, I guess, is whether Harvey is a peculiar figure who is personally incompetent or whether there's a larger tradition behind him.

And the attack on the lyric is interesting, because that's certainly a miscellany-poem sound, but it's not one that seems as inherently strange to me. Do Huanebango's two poems somehow have the same type of ridiculousness? Or is their juxtaposition polemical?

Huff and Snuff appear again. I think I need to read King Cambyses; it's an important source for the title in Shakespeare's MND. In all these cases, the drama bears some relation to poetics outside of the drama; my concern is with how dramatic versions of bad poems work!

Or is that narrowing what I'm trying to do too far--is my interest more general, in how all these little bits of evidence fit together?

What can a bad poet say that a good poet cannot?
What does the evidence in bad accounts of poetry tell us about how people thought about all poetry?
Can I recuperate any "bad" poetry as poems responding to different cultural imperatives--and is there enough there to tell an alternate history of poetry, somewhat like what Norbrook is doing, with different concerns?

This doesn't feel like a thesis, yet; I'm not connecting enough to the criticism. Concern with the visual imagination is one place to go. How do I move this towards canonical texts and away from abstract questions about historical aesthetics?

15 Minutes a Day

Well, it's time to start writing towards a prospectus. Today, I've been thinking about starting my project with a few lines of Stanyhurst, and thinking about what one does when one encounters such a thing: how it engages your aesthetic impulses, the possibility of a rush to judgment, being struck by something powerful in it and wanting to read more, or a whole set of more minor reactions.

It is easy, critically, to write off this as bad poetry: overwhelmingly, that's one of my first reactions. But using the term badness is not actually analysis.

So today, at least for a bit, I want to try to recover how people actually did read a passage like Stanyhurst's. Luckily, we have, oddly, several accounts of people's experience of the poem. Let me start with Nash:

...whose heroicall poetry infired, I should say inspired with an hexameter furie, recalled to life, what euer histed Barbarisme hath been buried this hundred yeere: and reuiued by his ragged quill such carterly varietie, as no Hodge ploughman in a Country but would haue held as the extremitie of clownerie: a patterne whereof I will propound to your iudgements, as neere as I can, being part of one of his descriptions of a tempest, which is thus.

Then did he make heauens vault to rebound,
with rounce robble bobble,
Of ruffe raffe roaring,
with thwicke thwack· thurlerie bouncing.

Which strange language of the firmament, neuer subiect before to our common phrase, make vs that are not vsed to termnate heauens mouing in the accents of any voice, esteeme of their triobulare Interpreter, as of some Thrasonicall huffe snuffe: for so terrible was his stile to all milde eares, as would haue affrighted our peaceable Poets from intermedling hereafter, with that quarrelling kinde of verse, had not sweet Master France, by his excellent translation of Master Thomas Watsons sugred Amintas, animated their dulled spirits, to such high-witted indeuours.

So, we can pick out a few elements of his description, at least as interperanda:
(1) The reference to inspiration, presumably mocking, but used in a somewhat similar way to how EK speaks about inspiration in his letter
(2) The reference to barbarism, and barbarism as has not been practiced in this country for 100 years. That is, this poetry sounds Gothic, like medieval alliterative poetry, in a bad way.
(3) "carterly variety"--obviously a class complaint, but about what, exactly?
(4) "strange language of the firmament, neuer subiect before to our common phrase, make vs that are not vsed to termnate heauens mouing in the accents of any voice"--something is wrong with the onomatopoeia here: it is "not used" and "strange" and seems to be an offense against the dignity of the heavens
(5) "triobulare"--another class reference, but one that occurs largely with low-class literature, in the oed definitions, at least
(6) Thrasonicall huffe-snuffe; Thraso is a bragging soldier in Greek New Comedy; Huff and Snuff are figures from King Cambyses, used to mock braggarts.
(7) I assume the sense of "frightened" is literally the conceit that the bragging language of Stanyhurst has scared off the other peots and metaphorically that they have been warded off by his failure.

Of these, (1) is a familiar complaint about false inspiration. The class references are familiar, and I assume making a point about decorum: it seems wildly inappropriate in this period for the Aeneid to be translated in terms that literally feel low-class. Someone--wish I could remember whom--makes this claim about other Aeneid translations as well; something about the inappropriateness of Aeneas as a "fugitive". The temporal dimension associated therewith I do find interesting, because it appears sympathetic to the developments in poetics over the last century, while also holding out hope for a quantitative solution.

I'm absolutely fascinated by the use of Thraso: it tells us something new about the affective experience of the line. Peele, too, in his Old Wive's Tale, gives this sort of parody to Haunebago, the braggart soldier (check the spelling of his name), but I'll leave that passage for tomorrow.