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.

10/10/09

10/09/09

Take Wyatt and Surrey as poets. Describe their similarities and their differences.

If I had to pick a characteristic Wyatt poem, I would pick the lines he translates from Seneca, about the dangers of the court life. These are lines that Marvell--and Cowley, I believe--would later translate (I spent quite some time trying to figure out if I could detect the influence of Paradise Regained in Mavell's use of the word "pinnacle.")

I think this poem is interesting for a few reasons: first, the first-person perspective, both intellectually outside the political situation he describes and affected by it. Wyatt often in his amorous poems seems to be writing after apocalypse--his Petrarchanism comes as an externally imposed disaster, and his Stoicism comes through in his decision to be himself despite pain, or female dishonesty. It doesn't surprise me that the five-stanza poem Surrey wrote w/ the first letters of each stanza spelling his name begins in Petrarchan disarray, imagines that the speaker thinks about classical Troy, and then resolves to live, though the poem's ending claim--if that sacrifice was worth it, this one is--is far more Surreyian than Wyattalicious. Second, as I have hinted, the poem's Stoicism--Wyatt is certainly not a pure Stoic, but he shares many of their ideas, and in Farewell Love he references Senec's precepts as one reason for his change.

Wyatt's poetry weaves a thin thread of self through the compromises of being a relatively low-level courtier.


I'm exhausted, but I have to keep typing, to get my time down. I'm going to switch to outline form, for my own benefit.

Surrey:
narrative of Petrarchan paradox
logical organizational structure--WIATT poem as Sessions says is a syllogism
(Sidney and Shakespeare will compress this structure even further)
intense use of rhetorical effects
more even rhythm, and deliberate use of caesura, reversed feet
organizational structures that outline the relation of lines to each other, with lines
that are loosely connected w/o those structures
use of lists that create the sense of a unified observer behind those lists (the aesthetic approach of a patron!!)

more use of pathetic fallacy and of the landscape--Wyatt can be deeply
claustrophobic.
a slight ability to turn the English landscape into the stuff of romance--at least Chaucerian romance.
a profound ability to ventriloquize--the poems by women missing their husbands are incredible
innovative rhyme and verse forms
a more concrete vocabulary, away from the words of 15th c. chivalry
a slight discursive tendency, within his forms, in which he repeats himself with a new image

a social stake in building a new English vocabulary and poetic--many Surrey poems invite response or treat stock situations

9/10/09

I'm worried about generals, and so I'm trying to commit myself to doing more freewriting, as a way of turning all this reading that's in my head into words. I really don't know what I'm going to talk about for two hours--I feel totally devoid of ideas, even though each individual text seems weird and productive.

In an effort to get some one last thing done today I turned to the Apology for Smectymnuus and to the Reason of Church Government and looked at the passages that Springarn suggested as ltierary criticism. What struck me is that Milton, despite his deeply original and entirely synthetic mind, is either reproducing or presenting the ideas of Sidney, with a slightly different focus. Milton shares the idea that poetry should be didactic, that it should provide the apparel of truth, that it should aid listeners towards virtue, and so on. He even shares the sense--that shocked me in Alexander, but that I found in Sidney when I looked more carefully--that any moment of impropriety, even any moment in which a hero or villain is not the best that they could possibly be, is a failure of the poet.

Milton, however, takes living so as to be able to write such a poem as a goal. He, I suspect, is benefitting from a higher status of poetry--Sidney would not have done well, suggesting that his highest end was to write a divine poem. Milton is also more literal about treating Scripture as poem; his readings in the Fathers and his attention to critical debates and to the texts have left him convinced that Scripture is literally poetic.

If I had to clarify the differences between the two, I would begin from Milton's description of his amorous phase in the Apology. There he is incredibly conscious of this as a phase of his youth that he has outgrown--in general, Milton is more careful about poetry being predominantly a youthful activity, except for those inspired by God. Milton's model of what one learns from poetry is deeply idiosyncratic--following what he says in Areopagitica, as a wise man, he learns his own sort of wisdom from a bad book. Where Milton's theory is a phase theory--he finishes various things and moves past them--Sidney leaves a theoretical hole with his apostrophe to love. (I WONDER: if any lapse from perfection on the part of a character is a lapse on the part of the author, isn't Astrophil's lapse of control an admission of Sidney's lack of control. It offers us a way of reading out of the poem into biography, perhaps. I wonder how far I can push William Alexander in this generals exam... Does Stella's proposed compromise--love but not any food for desire--reflect on Sidney's sense of what a love poet has to do? Does Spenser do a better job of this in his Amoretti?)

Inspiration is the next difference. Spenser, of course, treats divinely inspired poetry as the first of his three categories of poetry, but his treatise puts both that and heathen philosophical verse in a distinct category. For Milton, on the other hand, the true poet is the Davidic poet, touched with the fire of God's Seraphim. Milton does believe that a few in all nations are given this talent--presumably, that is, non-Christians may also be inspired--but only a very few. Related to this is Milton's conception of the "poetasters": he means the "libidinous" poets and playwrights, and libidinous here largely means secular; talentless amateurs certainly aren't in his good poet category, but they are not really his concern. For Sidney, on the other hand, the difference between poet and bastard-poet has something to do with style (post horse to Helicon) and form (ballad, accentual, etc--the old ballad he talks about moving him despite being rough), and learning (in his mind a pretty good related measure is class.)

10/27

Sometime before March of 1628, Ben Jonson wrote an epigram complimenting the soon-to-be Earl of Newcastle, William Cavendish, on his horsemanship. (Footnote: one MS mentions his Viscount-ness. Clarify date.) Jonson's praise seems to have been well-targeted: later, in Antwerp during the Interregnum, Cavendish would write a book on horse training, and at the Restoration he returned as the king's horse master. [And, during the closing years of Jonson's life, Cavendish proved one of his most important patrons (sponsoring what?)]

Bringing the highest literary models to bear on his quest for patronage, Jonson compares the mounted lord to Perseus on Pegasus, to Castor on Cyllarus, and to Sir Bevis on Arundel, ultimately pronouncing:
-Nay, so your seat his beauties did endorse,
-As I began to wish myself a horse...
This is an odd sort of wish, and one that Jonson quickly spins into a clever appeal for patronage. His wish is "absolved," he says, because Cavendish's horses eat better than the Muses. He then gives the screw a further turn:
-[I] cried, away with the Caesarian bread,
-At these immortal mangers Virgil fed.
Calling to mind Virgil's alleged stint in Augustus's stables, Jonson proposes that Cavendish's patronage could replace royal patronage--not undesirable, given the financial troubles of the monarchy. Moreover, he suggests, Virgil--feeding at the manger rather than on the bread granted him by Augustus--originates a pedigree of poet-horses that culminates in him.

I will return to these issues of patronage and lineage later in the paper. For now, I want to turn to the odd couplet in which Jonson, seeing his patron ride, wishes himself the horse. We have an account, luckily, of what Cavendish looked like on horseback, from a sympathetic observer: Cavendish himself. In the opening pages of the English version of his book on horsemanship, he writes:

-"I Rid first a Spanish-Horse, called Le Superbe, of a Light-Bay, a beautiful Horse; and though Hard to be Rid, yet when he was Hitt Right, he was the Readiest Horse in the World: He went in Corvets forward, backward, sidewayes, on both Hands; made the Cross perfectly upon his Voltoes; and did Change upon his Voltoes so Just, without breaking Time, that no Musitian could keep Time better; and went Terra a Terra Perfectly."

This connection between the forms of horse-riding and those of music or verse is a Renaissance commonplace. Jonson could not have read Cavendish's passage, written many years after his death, but both he and Cavendish would be familiar with the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, by Philip Sidney--whose name, of course, means horse-lover. There, Pamela describes Mucedorus's horsemanship in similar terms: "[W]ith a kind rather of quick gesture than show of violence, you might see him come towards me beating the ground in so due time as no dancer can observe better measure....[H]e ever going so just with the horse, either forth-right or turning, that it seemed as he borrowed the horse's body so he lent the horse his mind" (CPA 2.5.247-248). The entire passage is too long to quote, but it relates horsemanship on the one hand to a graceful performativity, akin to music or dance, and on the other to a successful Platonism that is itself a sign of Mucedorus's nobility. Readers know that Mucedorus's mind does not in fact control his body as well as the man controls the horse.

Jonson may have borrowed the image of the "centaur" for the union of man and horse from this passage, though the topos is common. The epigram bears the traces of another Sidneyean source, as well. Sidney famously opens his Defence of Poetry by describing the orations of his riding master, John Pietro Pugliano. His praise of horsemanship is so convincing that "if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse." In Sidney's exordium,

10/22

For once, I'm actually writing this today, rather than in the earliest part of tomorrow. I can be proud of this, I think, even though it's always in blogging that I start trying to clean my keyboard. It inflates my statistics, a little, but it also makes my keyboard cleaner.

"I Rid first a Spanish-Horse, called Le Superbe, of a Light-Bay, a beautiful Horse; and though Hard to be Rid, yet when he was Hitt Right, he was the Readiest Horse in the World: He went in Corvets forward, backward, sidewayes, on both Hands; made the Cross perfectly upon his Voltoes; and did Change upon his Voltoes so Just, without breaking Time, that no Musitian could keep Time better; and went Terra a Terra Perfectly."
William, Duke of Newcastle , "A new method, and extraordinary invention, to dress horses, and work them according to nature as also, to perfect nature by the subtility of art, which was never found out, but by ... William Cavendishe ..."


In Underwood 53, Jonson plays an elegant compliment to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle. On horseback, the lord brings to mind Perseus, Castor, and Sir Bevis on their own respective steeds. Together, horse and man are so in unison as to seem a centaur--"Nay, so your seat his beauties did endorse/As I began to wish myself a horse."
This is an odd sort of wish, and one Jonson quickly begins to spin into a clever appeal for patronage. It is worth pausing for a moment, to think about the precise relationship that's wished for. First and foremost, this is a hierarchical relationship along every conceivable axis: a good rider not only owns the horse but masters it. [Cavendish: English King greatest horseman in world, Spanish King greatest horseman in spain]

The ideal rider guides the horse through motions beyond its intellectual capacity to understand--"all the uses of the field and race"--

10/21

I'm still excited about the fact that the word "critic" appears in the mid-1590's. I'd like to tell a story about the beginning of plays about poets, with, say, Cynthia's Revels, and perhaps even about how the development of the neutral position in the humors drama lead to the idea of a neutral critic, as well.

Such a story might take in Poetaster and "Criticus," thinking about how Jonson writes about the relationship between himself and Donne.

One tack: Jonson's Underwood 53 talks about one Renaissance sense of the relationship between artist and spectator. Horseback riding is an art that impresses its viewers with a sense of the nobility of the rider, and Jonson goes one step further and wishes to be the horse. This is natural, given his own sense of the difference in rank between himself and the lord--he wants to take his natural role in the performance.

Meanwhile, the neutral subject of the humors comedy avoids being emmeshed in the schemes of theothers..

How does this work, actually--Donne alone can judge, because Donne alone can write. How is that the same, or different than the lord?

Sidney, too, wishes himself a horse.

The reader, that is, wishes to be mastered, in a particularly graceful and physical sense.


Wishing Myself Your Horse: A change in the erotics of English poetry