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

10/20/2008

I'm tired and it's late, so don't expect great thoughts out of this, O wise me of the future. I just know that starting now is worth any quantity of wanting to start later.

According to the OED, the modern meaning of the word "critic" appears in my period. I find that inconceivable. What's more, the word basically doesn't exist in any form (besides the medical "cretic" before that.) The critic, as such, seems to appear between 1598 and 1607, with Love's Labor's Lost a slightly earlier outlier--attributed to 1588 in the OED. (1595, according to Wikipedia.)

That's remarkable. And, it seems to be born with a completely modern sense. Biron uses it twice--once as to refer to Timon and once in apposition to "a domineering pedant." Theseus in Midsummer talks about a "satire keen and critical." Iago tries to refuse to deliver an epigram on Desdemona because he, too, is critical:

• Desdemona. What wouldst thou write of me, if thou shouldst
  praise me?

• Iago. O gentle lady, do not put me to't;
  For I am nothing, if not critical.

EEBO is even weirder--the word doesn't even appear until 1596, when it seems already to have the current meaning. I don't know what to make of this--I think what I'm worried about is that I may be on to something.

If the critic first appears as a threat in 1596, it's not obvious that that's instantly a subject position that people can /write/ from. A critic here is just a complainer, on artificial grounds. What does it mean that that word reads so easily in contemporary terms?

What does it mean that everyone started using it all of a sudden? Is it just a fad? Is there an economic explanation? Is it the end of the sonnet tradition?