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.