6/5/08

Reading the Deloney yesterday was interesting, because it seemed to me to promote a different model of political efficacy than is tradaitionall y(in the last twenty years) associated with Shakespeare's plays. If on the one hand, Jack Cade and Talus (from Spenser) are figures of a bad sort of redistribution, and I guess we could add the revolting plebians in Coriolanus, Deloney's shoemaker made good seems to be effective at redistribution without the same problems. IT's a patronage model, of course, and he does refuse to take on the title of knight. His ants vs. butterflies moment seems to be a real moment of political engagement that does work. Wolsley doesn't fall, but he does get put into his place. Just like Wolsley's debates with Will Sommers in the same text.

Ultimately that's not really interesting to me, though. There has to be another way of reading these texts--for style? for form?--that gets past their uncanonicalness.

I'm going to like the canon less and less. I guess there's also the broad canon, which includes Jonson and some Dekker, and so on, but so much of this literature seems worthwhile. I guess I'm okay with Pound's theory that if it's any good, someone will always bring it out of disrepute.


Not sure what to say about satire. Reading Juvenal, Horace and Persius is definitely my next step here--it was really great going back to Marston from Juvenal, even informaly. In his "It is hard not to write satire" he takes away all the versions Juvenal has of claims against competing poets and declarations of poetic skill. Perhaps because he's not writing in a vacuum? Perhaps ebcause that's the kind of thing that gets you called out? Perhaps because he's not convinced that he could write other forms--"It is hard not to write satire" takes on a different meaning when it means that satire is blocking you from other writing projects.

It occurred to me that what's very unsurprising in to me in Marston--wardship, the decline of the yeomanry, etc-- perhaps I should say some of the very unsurprising things in Marston--is perhaps the most viable part for him and his contemporaries. Yes, the criticism of wardship had become conventional, but it's the sort of conventional that is so because it resonates--think voter fraud in the United States.

That seems like such a misplaced pity to me, by the way--the poor ward doesn't get to be rich. The real poor can be ignored, however. Marston at least--as Shakespeare does, with Orlando who is kinda a ward--makes it about education as well as wealth. I'm not supposed to be allowed to go back and fix typos, but I need to because they're bugging me.

Berger on Pico I'm not sure of. The idea of criticising the man for failing to accomplish what the tradition would